“Do they think I’ll be paralysed?” Gretchen asked softly.
Dan contemplated a bare-faced lie.
No, she deserved so much better than that.
Only the truth would suffice.
“They don’t know,” he admitted with a lump rising in his throat and moisture welling in his eyes. “They say it’s too early to tell. They say we may not know for weeks or even months.”
Chapter 32
Ed Pearl, the 26 year old owner of the Ash Grove club — really a big coffee house with a stage — viewed Vincent Meredith with easy going caution and handed back his business card. He yawned, rubbed sleep from his eyes with the heels of his hands and tried to come to terms with the new day.
“This is kind of early in the day for me, Mr Meredith. The club was open until after three this morning.”
“I apologise, Mr Pearl. I’m happy to come back later in the day…”
The younger man grinned and waved to a nearby table.
On stage a skinny teenage kid was tuning an electric guitar and running cables.
“Take a seat, Mr Meredith. I need a coffee. How about you?”
A little later the two men sized each other up across the top of their cups.
Vincent Meredith had heard that Ed Pearl was a regular guy with none of the attitude of the other club owners. He was a musician who had set up the club — implausibly — simply because he loved the music he staged. By all accounts that ‘music’ was extraordinarily varied and eclectic. The name of the club was from an old English folk song of the same name but one night Ed Pearl would put on Johnny Cash or Phil Ochs, another night old Delta bluesmen; country, folk, protest, rockabilly and bluesy soul was all just music, each genre as respected and honoured as any other.
“I represent Sam Brenckmann,” the lawyer re-iterated. He would never have got past the front door of the club if he had not mentioned Sam’s name up front.
“Sam’s the man,” Ed Pearl replied. “That was bad shit over at The Troubadour the other week. The word on the street is that the LAPD put Sam and Doug in the frame?”
The kid on stage had started playing bluesy riffs, oblivious to a man sweeping up in front of the stage and the two men chatting fifteen feet away. The kid stopped playing, picked up another electric guitar and began picking, re-tuning.
“That’s the way it looks,” Vincent Meredith agreed, belatedly recognising that he was pushing at an open door. Mistakenly, he had anticipated dealing with Ed Pearl would be like pushing a square wheeled cart up a hill. “I’m trying to get a handle on Doug Weston. Why would somebody torch The Troubadour like that?”
The LA Fire Brigade were unhappy that the cops did not seem to be taking the arson attack on The Troubadour seriously; this Vincent knew because one of the LAFB investigators had been so unhappy he had let him have sight of a copy of the preliminary report on the incident.
“Doug Weston?” Ed Pearl smiled. He was a sallow skinned man of no more than average height, not the sort to stand out in a crowd and modest with it. In the five years the Ash Grove had been running he had acquired a reputation for supporting local and national good causes and for providing a platform to any group seeking to promote the civil rights agenda. “Doug can be a real tool,” he declared with wry resignation. “Doug picks fights with people he doesn’t need or want to be picking fights with, and he gets possessive with his ‘residents’. That’s fine when we’re talking about guys like Sam Brenckmann, Sam can be a tough guy when he needs to be, he can stand up for himself and he knows exactly where Doug’s coming from. Don’t get me wrong. Doug’s a good guy, he’s given a lot of people their first real break and he’s got better contacts than I have with the A and R people from Columbia and the other big record companies. He’s more a wannabee promoter than me. Me, I just want to fill up the club and listen to the music but it’s all just business to Doug. Like I said, don’t get me wrong, Doug loves the music, some of it anyway, but the main thing for him is the business.”
Vincent Meredith absorbed this.
“The way I hear it Doug upsets a lot of people?”
“Yeah, I heard he was having a lot of trouble with Johnny Seiffert.”
The lawyer raised an eyebrow.
“Johnny Seiffert? Should I know that name?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Johnny operates out of San Francisco. He was Sam Brenckmann’s agent before the war. They say he was ‘bumping’ Sam’s girlfriend, Miranda, and that’s how Sam got sent on tour with a bunch of redneck no-hopers and ended up in Bellingham on the night of the war.”
Vincent Meredith had known Sabrina Henschal, the woman who was pay rolling his ‘private investigations’ for many years; bless her, although she had many fine qualities she was not the kind of woman a man could always trust to give him all the dope in advance. Unique example of her gender that she was she was information was a thing she tended to scatter-gun in all directions.
“Miranda?”
“Miranda Sullivan. Her folks used to be movie stars,” Ed Pearl explained, a little amused he was having to tell the attorney any of this. “She latched onto Sam because she thought he was the next Pat Boone but Sam ain’t never going to be that, not even when he’s famous.”
Vincent Meredith sighed.
“Well, he’s never going to be famous if he ends up doing ninety-nine years in San Quentin.”
“Is it looking that bad?”
“The LAPD have got him in the frame for the murder of a biker just after the fire at The Troubadour.”
In the background the kid on stage was on his feet, bowed over his guitar.
He began to chunter into a bluesy rumbling number.
“LAPD? You mean Reggie O’Connell?”
The older man said nothing, suspecting the club owner badly wanted to tell him everything that he wanted to hear.
“Doug Weston said to me that he was rousted by a couple of mean looking bikers working for Johnny Seiffert last month. They were waiting outside The Troubadour for Sam Brenckmann but Doug saw them coming and had them covered with a twenty gauge shotgun by the time the cops answered his call. Johnny reckoned he still ‘owned’ Sam. That’s shit of course. Johnny never paid Sam for the tour last year up in the North East.” Ed Pearl was frowning. “Is it true the cops cuffed Sam’s girlfriend the night of the fire and she had her baby in the back of an LAPD cruiser?”
Vincent Meredith nodded.
No matter how against the grain it went sometimes even an attorney at law had to be honest with a man.
“The cops who took Judy and Sabrina to the hospital got into a fight with the others who turned over Gretsky’s that night.”
Ed Pearl’s brusque, angry nod confirmed that he knew all about Gretsky’s, Sabrina Henschal, and Sam and Judy. Sabrina had said the owner of the Ash Grove was ‘one of us’. Meredith did not often trust what a client said so he had needed to confirm Sabrina’s judgement for himself.
“The fight was about the two youngest cops drawing the line at arresting a heavily pregnant woman and turning over a house full of women and kids just so ‘the Captain can wear thousand dollar suits’. When Reggie O’Connell’s boys got to The Troubadour they prevented Sam and Doug Weston trying to stop one of the bikers bleeding to death, beat up on them and drove them off. I don’t think the bikers Doug Weston shot got any medical treatment. Sam caught half-a-dozen buckshot pellets and the cops refused to treat his wounds for several hours until the National Guard turned up.”