TWELVE

When I talked to Freeman on the phone the next day, he was skeptical of my theory that Freddy was a terrorist of some kind. He reported that his skip trace had turned up plenty of Freddy Saavedras, but none of them matched our Freddy’s description, confirming the name was an alias.

“Why do you think my idea that Freddy’s a terrorist is crazy?” I asked.

I heard the flick of his cigarette lighter, followed by a quick inhale and slow exhale. I pictured smoke rings. “I wouldn’t say crazy,” he said, “but definitely old school.”

“Old school?”

“Blowing up buildings went out with bell bottoms and love beads. Last time I heard about something like that in LA was back in ’69 when a bunch of Brown Berets tried to burn down the Biltmore when Ronald Reagan was giving a speech.”

“The Brown Berets? That takes me back. I never heard about that incident.”

“You don’t know about the Biltmore Six? They got railroaded into jail.” He puffed away on his cigarette. “You think this Freddy is an agent of the revolution? What revolution would that be?”

“Maybe a radical gay group that no one’s heard of until now.”

“Don’t bomb throwers like to take credit for the bombs?”

“Maybe they’re waiting for the right moment,” I suggested.

“Which would be when?”

I remembered the headline in the Times about the new poll showing the quarantine initiative gaining ground.

“Election day, after the voters decide to quarantine at least a quarter of the gay male population. How hard would it be to turn that anger into violent action? I’d be tempted myself.”

“Not worth it,” Freeman cautioned. “You can’t fight the system from a jail cell unless you’re Doctor King, and he wasn’t doing the kind of time in Birmingham you’d get if you start blowing things up.” A long, final nicotine exhale. “Anyway, bombing churches before the votes are cast ain’t no way to make friends and influence people.”

“The point of a revolutionary action isn’t to win friends; it’s to precipitate the revolution,” I said, paraphrasing a half-remembered college lecture in a class on twentieth-century revolutionary movements. “If you want to radicalize gay people, you need the quarantine initiative to pass.”

Freedman chuckled sardonically. “You’re really in love with this theory of yours. You really think Freddy’s some kind of gay Maoist?”

“I don’t know, Freeman,” I said, with some asperity. “What I do know is that I need a defense, and the best one I have is to deflect moral responsibility for the bombing from Theo to Freddy. Unless you have a better idea, start checking terrorist databases, and see if anything or anyone pops up.”

“Sure,” he said, “but you’ve got your ear to the ground in the gay community. You might ask around yourself while I’m at it.”

“Good idea.”

“Look, Henry,” he said. “Not to burst your bubble, but there’s another angle here. What do you know about the victim? Did he have any secrets that made him a target?”

“Daniel Herron? Why do you ask?”

“I looked at the follow-up reports from the bomb squad,” he said. “The bomb planted in the building where he died was twice as powerful as the bomb planted at the entrance. What does that mean to you?”

I thought about what Theo had told me, that he believed Freddy had always intended to kill someone. “The bomber wanted to make sure that if someone was in the building, he wouldn’t come out of it alive. But no one knew Herron was there.”

“His wife told the cops he counseled people on Thursday night, and if she knew, other people had to know. The people he counseled, for example.”

“That’s true,” I said. ‘Herron’s secrets? He has a gay son who’s HIV positive from a woman who wasn’t his wife.”

“How do you know that? It sure wasn’t in his obit.”

I told him how I’d first met Daniel Herron and pointed out that the absence of any mention in the obit of his son suggested another woman. “Of course,” I said, “I’m only assuming the boy is gay. He could be straight and hemophiliac.”

“Or a junkie. You don’t think that’s provocative?” Freeman said. “Evangelical with a secret gay son?”

“I’d say more hypocritical than provocative. But I don’t see how it’s the kind of secret that would’ve gotten him blown up.”

“Don’t make assumptions,” he said. “Let me look into Pastor Herron’s history. Maybe we find a connection between him and Saavedra.”

“Okay, but your idea that Herron was targeted isn’t inconsistent with Freddy being a terrorist. You said yourself he could’ve known Herron would be in his office. Maybe he got that tip from an infiltrator in the church.”

“You have someone in mind?”

I remembered the security guard Theo said had accosted them when they’d gone to scout the church. A security guard, perfect cover for a spy. I told Freeman about it and suggested he track down the guy.

••••

I ate lunch at my desk while I triaged my cases to clear as much time as possible to devote to Theo. The office was closed at lunch. My new full-time secretary, Emma Austin, locked the door from the reception room to the outside corridor from noon to one. At one, I stepped outside my office and saw she hadn’t yet returned so I unlocked the door myself. I opened it and found a woman standing in the hall, evidently waiting to be let in. That wasn’t unusual. I often came back to potential clients standing patiently at the door or pacing around the hall in agitation.

This woman, however, didn’t look like a potential client. For one thing, she was white. Most of my clients weren’t. There was also something antiquated in the way she was put together— a lilac blazer and matching calf-length skirt, white blouse, low heels, stockings, big purse, helmet hair— as if she’d stepped out of a woman’s clothing catalogue circa 1958, again not the kind of client who made her way to my office. On the other hand, her lipstick was smudged at the corners and her makeup spotty, as if it had been applied with a hasty or an unsteady hand. Also, from the heavy whiff of mouthwash that didn’t quite cover the booze on her breath, I could tell she’d been drinking.

With wary, watery eyes, she asked, “Mr. Rios?”

“Yes, I’m Henry Rios, and you are—”

“Mrs. Daniel Herron.”

••••

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Herron?”

She sat across from me, her big handbag in her lap, looking as if she was as dumbfounded to find herself in my office as I was to have her here. My question seemed to focus her.

“You’re defending the man who killed my husband.”

Her words were confrontational, but her tone was merely  inquisitive.

“The man accused of killing your husband,” I said, emphasizing accused.

She looked surprised. “Oh, you don’t think he did it?”

“I can’t discuss that with you.”

She folded her hands on her bag and we sat in silence. I was about to politely ask her to leave when she blurted out, “Someone helped him.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your . . . client. Someone helped him kill Daniel.”

“Who helped him?” I asked.

“Someone in the church.”

“You’re saying someone in your church conspired with my client to kill your husband?”

She nodded vigorously. “Yes.”

“Was it a man named Freddy Saavedra?”

She looked at me blankly. “Who?”

I showed her the photograph of Freddy and Theo taken at the demonstration. I tapped Freddy’s image. “This man.”

She peered at the photo intently, then reached into her bag and fumbled with its contents before extracting a thick manila folder. She dumped its contents on my desk: a sheaf of typed pages and a stack of eight-by-ten photographs. She tore through the pictures, examining each one briefly before she stopped at one, appraised it carefully, and slid it toward me. I held it up: it was a photograph of Freddy Saavedra arguing with a meter maid who looked like she was about to write him a ticket.

“What is this?”

“I hired a private investigator to follow my husband. He took this photograph at the airport where Daniel was getting on a plane to San Francisco.” She handed over the rest of the photographs. “There’s another picture of this man somewhere in the pile. Here’s the report.”

“Do you know this man?” I asked, tapping Saavedra’s image again.

“No,” she replied firmly. “I’ve never seen him before, and I don’t know why the investigator took his picture, but if you think he was involved . . .” She trailed off into vagueness.

There was definitely something off about Mrs. Daniel Herron. “What makes you think someone at the church had a hand in your husband’s death?”

“They’re trying to throw me out of my own home!” she exclaimed.

I realized she hadn’t just been drinking; she was drunk. Very drunk but, in the way of hard-core alcoholics, able to semi-function even with an amount of liquor in her system that would have knocked out a normal person. She might even have been in a blackout.

“Who are you talking about?” I asked patiently.

“The Overseers. Well, some of them. Bob Metzger. He’s the ringleader.”

“The ringleader in your husband’s death?”

“They wanted to get rid of him, but it takes a unanimous vote; my father made sure of that, oh, how they regretted it but, you see, that’s how it was, so they killed him,” she babbled.

“Let me see if I understand you,” I said. “A dissident group on the governing board was so determined to remove your husband as pastor that they plotted to kill him?”

Her watery eyes brightened for a second. “That’s right.”

“And you’re angry because you’ve been asked to leave your house?”

“They claim it belongs to the church, but my father built the house. The church, too.” She leaned toward me, giving me a blast of Scope mixed with Smirnoff. “It’s outrageous! I’m his daughter. I have rights . . . don’t I? Legal rights. To the house? You’re a lawyer. Don’t I have rights?”

“I’m not that kind of lawyer, Mrs. Herron. Your fight with the church is a civil matter.” I switched topics to cut off another rant. “Why were you having your husband followed?”

“I thought he was having an affair.”

“Was he?”

She grimaced. “No. He had a son by another woman, long before we met and were married. In San Francisco. He’d go there to see them.”

The final pieces of Herron’s secret life fell into place for me. His son was the child of a woman he’d met in San Francisco in his youth.

“Your husband,” I said. “When did he live in San Francisco?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” she snapped, then, abruptly, as drunks do, fell into a reverie. “Dan was a hippie. That’s what he told me once. Before he converted, he had long hair and lived in abandoned houses and took drugs and met— Gwen. She’s a nice woman. She’s Black! That was a shock. Daddy wouldn’t have approved. I suppose that’s why he kept her a secret while Daddy was alive and then after he died, Dan didn’t want me to know. I wanted to hate her, but— he should have married her. She would have given him the family he wanted.” She took a soiled handkerchief from her purse and dabbed her eyes. “You see I can’t have children, and Dan— well, I understand now— he needed that family. That boy. He’s sick, you know. AIDS. Dan asked Schultz to help get Wyatt some kind of medication and told him it was for his nephew. Daniel doesn’t have a nephew. Marie Schultz called me and told me she was sorry her husband couldn’t help. That bitch! That’s when I hired the investigator.”

“What did you do when you found out about the boy and his mother?”

“I didn’t know what to do, so I went to Bob. Uncle Bob,” she said sardonically. “That’s what I called him when I was a little girl. He was my father’s best friend. He said he would take care of it.”

“You think the way he took care of it was to have your husband killed? Is that how Christians handle their disputes these days?”

“You’re mocking me.”

“I’m trying to understand why you believe this man— Metzger?— would have taken such a drastic action to eliminate your husband.”

“They thought he was too soft.”

“Soft? Your husband.”

“Not enough of a hater,” she said. “Not enough of a man. You see, it’s not just a church. It’s a kingdom. They wanted a different king, and there was only one way to replace him. Like Shakespeare, you see. One of those plays where powerful nobles plot to get rid of a weak king.”

We were again descending into alcoholic gibberish, so I redirected the conversation to more solid ground.

“Why come to me? Why not go to the police?”

“I can’t go to the police. They. . . .” she trailed off. “I was arrested.”

“For what?”

“Drunk driving,” she said in a flat voice.

“Recently?”

She nodded. “The police wouldn’t believe me. Do you?” she asked, despairingly.

This was one sad woman. “Mrs. Herron, I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sure you loved your husband very much.”

“No, Mr. Rios. I did not love my husband. I hardly knew my husband. I was my father’s only child. He had me marry Daniel so Daniel could inherit the church when he died. Now that Daniel is gone, they’re throwing me away. You take the report and the photographs. Use them against Bob. I thought he was my friend until he told me I would have to leave my house. The scandal will destroy the church.”

“This is all about revenge for you.”

She stood up slowly, smoothed her skirt, and adjusted her blazer. “‘The Lord is a God who avenges,’” she quoted. “‘O God who avenges, shine forth. Rise up, Lord of the earth. Pay back to the proud what they deserve.’”

••••

She left in a gust of booze and indignation. I could have dismissed what she’d said as a drunken rant by a vindictive woman— and most of it was— but she had given me two valuable pieces of information. The photograph of Freddy taken by her investigator and what she’d told me about Daniel Herron’s pre-come-to-Jesus life as a hippie in late ’60s San Francisco. A place and time of revolutionary ferment.

Maybe I was right that a terrorist group was behind Herron’s death but wrong about its identity. Not a secret gay network, but an older one that had nothing to do with gay rights. Maybe Herron had been mixed up with a violent, radical group like the Weathermen who’d claimed credit for twenty-five bombings of government facilities back in the day. Some members of that group had never been caught, were still on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Could he have been one of them and have known the whereabouts of others? Was he going to rat them out now that he’d gone straight? Or had the feds tracked him down and squeezed him to rat out the rest? Was that why he was killed? Was Freddy Saavedra the avenging angel of whatever was left of a revolution that Dan Herron had been about to betray?

I shuffled through the stack of photos Mrs. Herron had left behind, looking for the second one of Freddy Saavedra she said was among them. There it was: Saavedra standing near the gate where Herron was boarding a plane. So Freddy had been following Herron, but when I read the investigator’s report, there was no mention of Freddy by any name or a description of the photographs where he was pictured. I picked up the phone.

“Vidor Investigations.”

“Freeman, it’s Rios. Do you know a PI named Bruce Lindell?”

“Sure. Most of his work is for insurance companies. He takes pictures of guys who said they were injured on the job, cutting down trees or running marathons. Why the interest?”

I gave him a summary of my meeting with Mrs. Herron and the photos of Saavedra she’d passed along to me.

“The thing is,” I concluded, “Lindell’s report doesn’t say anything about why he took those pictures. Could you arrange a meeting with him?”

“I’ll call him as soon as we hang up.”

“You may be right that the answer to Herron’s death is in his past, not Freddy’s.”

“Told you so,” he replied.

••••

The following morning, I picked Freeman up at his office and we drove to our meeting with Bruce Lindell while Freeman sketched out what he’d learned so far about Daniel Herron’s early life. It was pretty white bread until he went off to college at San Francisco state in 1965 and dropped out the following year. After that, nothing. The Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out generation hadn’t left much of a paper trail, not even a driver’s license in Dan Herron’s case. His had expired in 1966 and wasn’t renewed until 1972 when presumably he was doing God’s work and God required a car. Six missing years. The only thing I knew for certain about them was that at some point he got his girlfriend pregnant. Otherwise, he could have been anywhere, doing anything. Selling dope, traveling the world in sandals and a headband, or building bombs in the attic of a San Francisco Victorian to blow up the local selective service depot.

Freeman played devil’s advocate.

“If he was a white boy revolutionary,” he said, “and did some damage back then, the government would be looking for him, not his comrades.”

“Unless,” I said, “they were underground, and he knew where they were and was about to snitch.”

“After all these years? Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the feds caught up with him and he cut a deal. Maybe he heard old comrades were about to start blowing up things again and he wanted to stop them now that he’s reformed.”

Freeman lit a cigarette. We both rolled down our windows.

“I ain’t heard of any federal building going up in smoke lately. You?”

“Maybe it was still in the planning stages.”

“A lot of maybes,” he muttered. “Anyway, this Saavedra, he’s a young dude. This sixties stuff would be ancient history to him.”

“He could be second-generation,” I said.

He laughed. “I think you call those people yuppies.”

Miffed, I growled, “Let’s see what Lindell has to say, okay?”

••••

Bruce Lindell was a sharp-featured man in a nicely cut suit who had the partner’s office in the mid-Wilshire high-rise that housed his agency. He examined the photos of Saavedra I’d given him, looked up, and asked, “Where did you get these?”

“Your client gave them to me,” I replied. “Daniel Herron’s wife.”

“Jessica,” he said. “Why?”

“I’m afraid that’s privileged.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Is she suing me?”

“No, nothing like that. She gave me the photos and your report because she thought they might have some bearing on one of my cases.”

He glanced at Freeman, sitting beside me, smirked and said, “You know how you’re talking to a lawyer? He opens his mouth and a snake crawls out.”

“He’s on the level,” Freeman said. “I’m working on the case.”

“The church bombing,” Lindell said flatly.

“How did you—” I began, then shot a look at my investigator. “Freeman?”

 “Don’t get your panties in a knot, Mr. Rios. Freeman’s not my source. I read the papers. I know who you are.” He tapped the photos. “So, Jessica Herron gives the file about her husband’s secret life to the lawyer defending the guy who’s accused of killing him.” He pushed an ashtray across his desk to Freeman who’d just lit up a cigarette. “And you want to know about the guy in the picture. You think he’s involved in the bombing? I know, I know, you can’t say but when this is all over, Freeman, you’re going to buy me a steak and tell me the whole story.”

“You still like the New York cut at Dan Tana’s?” Freeman asked.

“Twenty ounces of grass-fed heaven,” Lindell replied.

“The photo,” I reminded him.

“I don’t know his name, Rios, but I can tell you this. He’s a cop.”