Finding Darlene at Gregory’s apartment that morning had neatly resolved one matter and promptly opened another can of worms. While the ‘Darlene question’ remained unaddressed there was no question of Miranda and Dwayne’s ‘friendship’ morphing into something else. In an odd sort of way that was ideal for each of them; they were both sorting out their lives and at the threshold of building new careers. Dwayne was no longer a failed session musician — he had an awesome baritone voice — or just a courier running the gauntlet of the recently dismantled nationwide FBI picket on behalf of Dr King’s organisation in Atlanta. These days he was Dr King’s representative with the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, and his ‘voice’ a fixture on the California Civil Rights Forum with a direct line into the Office of the Governor in Sacramento. Likewise, Miranda having plumbed the depths — by the night of the October War she was a drugged up groupie living with a man twice her age who did not remember her name half the time — had with her Aunt and Uncle’s help got herself clean, gone back to college, and worked as an intern in Uncle Harvey’s law practice before joining the Governor’s staff. Not only was she on the payroll of the Office of the Governor of California, she had met the Vice President and been given the job of setting up and facilitating the California Civil Rights Forum. A lot of people in Miranda and Dwayne’s position would have been pretty dammed smug about their rehabilitation; but that simply was not them. They were on a journey and they both understood that they had only just started out.
That afternoon the fog burned off and the breeze blowing in through the Golden Gate slackened to a whisper. The couple walked a while and then jumped onto a crowded trolley down to the bay where they sat on a wall and stared out at Alcatraz Island.
The old prison out in San Francisco Bay had been scheduled for closure last year but there were rumours that Alcatraz had been turned into a secret military base, or a special prison for the worst of the worst, or even some kind of scientific ‘testing station’. Nobody was allowed to sail within one hundred yards of the island and small patrol boats mounting fifty-calibre machine guns policed the cold iron grey waters which swept around its rocky shores. Supply launches plied between Alameda and Alcatraz every day, morning and afternoon and at night the lighthouse lamps burned as brightly as before. Alcatraz had always been a name that evoked myths and legends and nothing had changed.
“You’re still worrying about the Feds asking you to set up Johnny?” The big man asked, unable to tiptoe around the subject any longer.
Miranda sighed.
She had told Dwayne about ‘the situation’ she had been put in by the two FBI special agents had called at the Capitol Building in Sacramento a week ago. It transpired that the FBI had wanted to ‘interview’ her for some days but that her boss, Governor Brown’s Chief-of-Staff had refused point blank to co-operate without involving the office of the California State Attorney General Stanley Mosk, an old friend of her Uncle Harvey. It had been a peculiar interview; the two FBI men on their very best behaviour with Stanley Mosk sitting beside Miranda like an overly protective and very hungry guard dog.
Miranda had only known Mosk slightly before her Uncle, Harvey Fleischer, had co-opted him into prising Dwayne from the FBI’s hands in December but since the CCRF was mooted his office had followed her progress with huge interest and she had spoken to him on several occasions. In retrospect she ought to have realized that he would be all over the project and that his enthusiastic support would have been a big — possibly the key — enabling factor in the Governor’s decision to give it his unqualified imprimatur.
The fifty-one year old Texan-born son of a family of Reform Jews Stanley Mosk was in his second term as the state’s Attorney General had had proven, time and again, that he was extremely exercised about the civil rights of every man, woman and child in California regardless of their skin color, nationality, ethnicity or religion. Stanley Mosk was the man who taken the Professional Golfers’ Association of America to court to force that apparently untouchable bastion of white middle class privilege to rewrite its regulations discriminating against golfers from ethnic and racial minorities. He was also the man who had founded the California Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division, the legal resources and muscle of which now underpinned practically all the activities of the CCRF.
That meeting with the FBI had been awful.
‘Might we clarify the nature of your former relationship with a Mister John Arnold Seiffert. The gentleman would be forty-nine years of age. Height about five feet eight inches. Hair color brown. Eyes green. His profession is listed by the IRS as theatrical agent and promoter?”
It had taken this single mildly spoken, apologetic opening inquiry to bring Stanley Mosk raging to Miranda’s defense before she could utter a single word.
He had prepared a waiver stating that she was co-operating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in good faith under the express condition that no formal record would be kept of the interview. Furthermore, nothing she said would be considered as having been said under oath; and that anything she said which might later give rise to any inquiry that might at some future date have any bearing on any criminal investigation would be deemed inadmissible in any court in California. Actually, the waiver had been four pages long and she had not begun to understand the half of what it contained.
The FBI men had signed without demur.
And she had spilled the beans on John Arnold ‘Johnny’ Seiffert.
Miranda sighed again.
She had confessed to her part in getting Sam Brenckmann exiled to Washington State at the time of the October War. She had confirmed that Dwayne and Sam had never met even though they had both worked for Johnny in the fall of 1962 as session musicians.
“Sam’s in a lot of trouble and the FBI think Johnny has something to do with it,” Miranda informed her companion, her thoughts returning to the present with a jolt.
“Trouble?”
“There was a fire at The Troubadour club on Santa Monica Boulevard while he was on stage. People got killed. They say the club owner shot a couple of bikers — killed one — and that Sam was an accessory. He’s been in jail in San Bernardino County the last month. I know I haven’t seen him or talked to him since September sixty-two but I still feel like it’s all my fault.”
“That ain’t right,” the man objected gently. “Sam Brenckmann’s a big boy. He could have refused to go up to Washington State with those rednecks Johnny set him up with. You and Sam had a bust up. That doesn’t make what’s happened your fault. And there ain’t no way you should feel guilty about what happens to Johnny. That guy’s earned whatever he’s got coming to him!”
Miranda cheered up a little, forced a smile.
“Why, Mister John,” she exclaimed half-heartedly in her best southern imitation drawl, “that hardly sounds like Christian charity!”
The big man vented a bellow of laughter.
“Why, Miss Miranda,” he retorted, “the Lord is merciful but he is just also!”
“You just made that up?”
Dwayne nodded contritely.
“I surely did,” he confessed.
Miranda shuffled a little closer to the man on the wall.
“Would you think I was being pushy or forward,” she inquired, needing not to talk, “if we could not talk for a while and I asked you to put your arm around my shoulder, Dwayne?”
It felt good to be protected, safe from all ill.
Miranda shut her eyes and rested her head on the big man’s rock solid, strangely pillow soft shoulder.