One day the World would know his name.
He planned to be famous for all time.
Chapter 42
Miranda Sullivan was horrified by Sam Brenckmann’s appearance when he shuffled into the dirty interview room supported by two hulking warders. His right eye was black, blue and closed and there was a bandage, several days old around his throat. The knuckles of both his hands, manacled before him, were bruised and grazed and his breathless, halting gait shouted to her that he had been savagely beaten. He very nearly fell off the chair the warders dumped him in on the opposite side of the table to his two visitors.
A quietness fell on the room.
“Take off my client’s hand cuffs,” Vincent Meredith asked softly.
“Can’t do that,” grunted the fatter of the two over-muscled guards.
Sam stared dazedly at Miranda as if he hardly recognized her. Or more likely, was trying to figure out what she was doing here.
“Yes, you can,” she hissed, shaking with outrage.
“Miss Sullivan,” Vincent Meredith retorted, “is from the Governor of California’s Office in Sacramento. She is here at the specific order of the Attorney General of California, Mister Stanley Mosk to ascertain that the California Institute for Men has been meticulous in observing its duty of care to Mister Brenckmann and to the other men in its custody.”
Neither of the turnkeys knew what this meant.
“Mister Brenckmann has obviously been mistreated while in the custody of this institution. What are your names, ranks and social security numbers, gentlemen?”
“We don’t have to tell you a goddam thing!”
The attorney made great play of opening his notebook, taking the top off his ballpoint pen and pausing for thought before he started writing.
“Um. That will be news to the State Attorney General. Shall I tell Mr Mosk or do you want to go up to Sacramento to tell him yourselves?”
He focussed on Sam for the first time, but said nothing.
Then he looked back at the two lurking guards.
“Please leave us in private. You guys already need a lawyer, you just haven’t worked it out for yourself yet. However, since that attorney won’t be me, I have no intention of allowing you to eavesdrop on the confidential conversation I am about to have with my client.” He glanced to Miranda. “These guys won’t tell us their names so we’ll have to pick them out from mug shots or at an ID parade later, Miss Sullivan. Take a good look at their ugly lugs.”
The bigger guard scowled and with a jangling of keys released Sam Brenckmann’s chained wrists before he, and his leaden-footed colleague, stomped grumpily out of the interview room.
It was all Miranda could do not to throw her arms around her former boyfriend as the door closed behind the two warders.
“You should see the other guy,” Sam quipped, forcing a smile. “Trouble was he had half-a-dozen friends and they were all bigger than me. Se la vie,” he groaned.
Miranda had been in San Diego when she got the call to meet Vincent Meredith outside the burned out ruin of The Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard. She and Dwayne John had been meeting with groups of Latinos and Hispanics, proselytizing and recruiting for the California Civil Rights Forum. Now that she had fully ‘worked’ herself into her new role every event she organised or community meeting she gate crashed made her feel that tiny little bit less comfortable in her lily white middle class skin.
Dwayne had done most of the driving on this trip because she had been attempting to work up a series of briefing documents for the Governor and a number of draft ‘position papers’ to put before the CCRF. If the new body became a simple builder of bricks for a great wall of complaint, or no more than a noisy vent for a hundred years of pent up angst it was going to achieve nothing. The CCRF undeniably had a function as a pressure release valve but that was not what she, in her heart, really believed it was for. The CCRF needed to be heard by the people who mattered and the people who mattered were masters of blocking out heckling and unfocused protest; powerful men — and most of the influential people in the world were still men — learned very early on in their careers how to tune out inconvenient background noise.
She and Dwayne were a good team; he understood where she was coming from and it did no harm at all for him to occasionally ‘drop’ the name of Dr Martin Luther King into conversations that were threatening to turn overly terse. Dwayne had met the great man several times, he had prayed with him, he had sat ten feet away from him as he preached at the Ebenezer Chapel in Atlanta. He had also once attempted to put his overlarge frame between Dr King and an angry bottle and stone throwing mob; but nothing had earned him more kudos than the admission that he had spent much of 1963 playing fast and loose with the FBI acting as one of Dr King’s ‘hares’. That he had eventually been tracked down and unjustly arrested merely added extra spice to those adventures. Moreover, his connections with Dr King and his role within the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, his presence by Miranda’s side gave her an instant credibility of a kind she could not have bought for love or money.
They were not yet lovers.
For one thing even in enlightened California they invariably had to stay in different motels or hotels; for another she suspected the man had no intention of ‘carrying on’ with any woman outside wedlock because that was not the man he was now.
Miranda looked at Sam Brenckmann and felt the tears trickling down her cheeks.
This was all her fault!
She had almost got him killed in the North West on the night of the war. But for her mendacity he would never have been within a thousand miles of Bellingham; and everything would be different.
“I should have said sorry a long time ago,” she blurted.
“For what?” Sam inquired amiably.
“Everything!”
“Nobody put a gun to my head to make me go on that tour Johnny Seiffert booked before the war,” he reminded her, shrugging painfully. “I was already blacklisted in the Bay Area, remember. I can’t remember why. Something to do with not buying my hash from Johnny. Heck, it’s a long time ago now. You look really good with your hair that way…”
While Vincent Meredith was intrigued by the exchange; he was not so intrigued as to be unaware that the clock was ticking. He dug into his jacket pocket and produced a chalky colored pill the size of a dime coin.
“Chew this and swallow it fast,” he directed.
Sam viewed him quizzically.
Miranda was nodding anxiously.
“Just do it, Sam.”
Sam leaned forward and took the pill between his cracked lips.
He crunched it between his teeth, careful to avoid working it between those molars that felt sore and wobbly.
He swallowed and pulled a face at the bitter after taste in his mouth.
“In a few seconds you will start foaming at the mouth, you will feel nauseous, you will be violently sick and you will pass out,” Vincent explained matter-of-factly.
Sam had just swallowed the sour bile generated by chomping on the pill.
“Now,” the attorney said quietly, turning to Miranda, “would be a good time for you to start screaming, Miss Sullivan.”
Chapter 43
“Reggie!” Loretta O’Connell screeched up the broad, polished stairs to the first floor of the newly completed, specially designed house set back fifty yards from the road. “Reggie! There’s two guys here who say they’re from the goddammed IRS!”