Red Light (33 page)

It
gave her a queasy feeling to sit this close to the ocean that had once almost
killed her and her son. That had been a stupid accident, really, absolutely her
fault, something she'd never do again. She hadn’t been sane those first few
months after Tim was born. Somehow, the sea had forgiven her and offered her
another chance.

Sitting
over the ocean and watching it through glass was safe. It was confined. Or
maybe
she
was. She told herself that being this close to it was like
getting back on the horse that threw you. She looked down: The bullet that
killed Aubrey Whittaker was out there somewhere, launched from the service
automatic belonging to Mike McNally. A waitress brought her coffee and Merci
stirred in plenty of milk and sugar.

Colin
Byrne's research began with a few brief articles about street level police
corruption—excessive force, cops stealing impounded drugs and money, cops on
the take from prostitution rings. A three-part investigative series on the cops
and the De Anza Hotel pretty much fizzled out: Plenty of law enforcement
officers admitted to going there to socialize but none, of course, knew
anything about prostitution.

Byrne
had followed a handful of other cops into the more interesting world of 1969
politics. He'd focused on a small group of law-enforcement officers—five Santa
Ana P.D. and three sheriff's deputies—who were vocally right wing, in favor of
organizing volunteer police departments in the neighborhoods, and openly
critical of police and sheriff management.

The
sheriff's deputies were familiar to her: Beck Rainer, Pat McNally, Art Rymers.
The Santa Ana cops were just names; she'd never heard of them before.

She
tracked all eight of the officers into the John Birch Society. They were all
members. Most of them were members from the early sixties to the end of the
decade but only a few of them were still active by 1972.

In
the February 1967 JBS Chapter 231 newsletter, Beck Rainer wrote:

In the face of the
worldwide communist conspiracy, constant vigilance doesn't just make sense—it
is mandatory if we are to maintain a free society. Part of Lenin's design to
overthrow America is to accomplish it FROM THE INSIDE. Our schools, churches
and neighborhoods must be kept as safe havens for learning, worship and lawful
assembly. When they are corrupted by drug addicts who are forced to steal for
their next fix, petty criminals with no respect for the law and
"hippie" protesters who dance to every tune played back in Moscow, it
is time for us to ACT. America will not fall like overripe fruit into the hands
of communism if we are strong in the streets, strong in the schools, strong in
the churches. I'm asking every one of you Society members to make an extra
effort to inform your neighbors and your friends—those well-meaning men and
women who are so susceptible to communist propaganda. Get them to your chapter
meetings, show them some of the films that inspired you to join the Society,
and most of all—GIVE THEM A COPY OF
THE BLUE BOOK.
Robert Welch's book
is still the strongest weapon we have! Thank You!

Merci wondered how such a
passage qualified Beck Rainer as a bad cop, aside from a little extra zeal.

The Los Angeles
Times
had printed several letters to the editor over the summer of 1969.
They were complaints from citizens concerned about "squadrons" of
"Nazi-like police motorcycles" parked on driveways in their
neighborhoods, apparently during "Birch Society propaganda meetings."

A
Times
editorial warned of "vigilantism" and "misplaced patriotism"
and said that "volunteer police departments are not the answer crime and
the perceived communist threat."

She followed Rainer's
story in the papers: He accused Sheriff Owen of "poor leadership" and
"lax discipline" in a 1969 interview. He got himself on the ballot in
the 1970 special election to elect a new sheriff after Owen's retirement in
late 1969. But he failed to gain the support of Interim Sheriff Vance Putnam
and couldn't sway the department rank and file, even though many Orange County
conservatives stood behind him. He lost a narrow election to Chuck
Brighton—Putnam's designated successor—in June of 1970. A disappointed Rainer
vowed to run again. He was also one of sixty-five sworn deputies whose picture
was supplied by Bill Owen for examination by Jesse Acuna. Merci scanned down
the list, recognizing Rymers, Thornton and Pat McNally. Acuna had failed to
identify any of them as the men in the white Mercedes, who approached him that
day with an offer for his property and a threat

A small article
printed in late 1978 profiled a successful private security company, Patriot
Protective Services, run by ex-sheriff captain Beck Rainer. Rainer liked to
employ law-enforcement and ex-law-enforcement officers in his company,
"because they happen to what they're doing." Merci looked at him in
the picture: curly ' winning smile, hard eyes.

Colin Byrne had
thoughtfully penciled in the current address and phone number for Patriot
Protective.

Pat McNally was
quoted often in the papers, and wrote often Birch Society newsletter. He was
flamboyant and caustic. He called Supervisor Ralph Meeks a "lib with a
checking account full of public money." He said Richard Nixon had
"become a puppet of the communist conspiracy by sending American troops
to die in Vietnam." He said, "Hanoi should be bombed level and if the
Russians squeak, Moscow should be flattened next." McNally wrote a
petition to allow members of volunteer police departments to carry firearms,
running contrary to the opinions of Sheriff Bill Owen. Owen said he wouldn't
endorse such a thing "no matter how many trigger-happy John Birchers
signed it."

McNally wrote a long
and passionate letter to the editor of the
Register,
saying that it was
ludicrous for the Sheriff Department to supply personnel photographs of sworn
deputies to a biased, angry and bitter old man who claimed, "without
evidence and without reason, that he'd been baited and beaten by Mexican-hating
cops."

McNally's last
appearance in the file was a 1989
Times
article looking back on the
Jesse Acuna beating. McNally was a lieutenant by then, in administration. He
said that the old passions of 1969 seemed "unwarranted" now, two
decades later, and that "the world was just a different place back then.
Cooler heads prevailed."

Cooler heads, thought
Merci. Is that what they had? She turned to Byrne's index in the back and ran
her finger down the list of players.

No
KQ.

Jim
O'Brien was listed, one page only.

Her
heart sped up when she saw
Rayborn, Clark—pages 81,88,119.

Her father was
mentioned in the Birch Society Chapter 231 newsletter as a new member,
recruited by O'Brien. The date was January 24, 1967. In a newsletter published
six months later, Clark wrote an article about gun control, arguing that
Hitler's first step in enslaving the Jews was to remove their right to keep and
bear arms. "Big Government," he wrote, "would like to do the
same to you. Without weapons, the citizen is helpless against the criminal as
well as the political master."

The
last reference to her father was from a community newspaper in Buena Park,
where Clark made a commencement speech at the high school in 1970. The speech
dealt with "our nation of laws" and called for the graduating seniors
to "change our republic from within the law, not beyond it." The
reporter said the address was stirring. Clark was booed and called a pig by
some students. Merci pictured her mild-mannered father up at the podium, trying
connect with three hundred teenagers who thought they had just become adults.
It must have been hard for him to reveal his principles for people who just
wanted to get out of the football stadium, get high and celebrate.

It
wasn't until she got to the back of the Birch Society newsletter that Merci hit
pay dirt. The May 1969 meeting of Chapter 231 was held in the home of Pat
McNally, where American involvement in the United Nations was the topic of
discussion. Among the member attendees listed were Clark Rayborn and Jim
O'Brien. The speaker was Birch Society Section Leader Beck Rainer.

And among the eleven
visiting guests was Patti Bailey.

• • •

Beck Rainer's Patriot
Protective Services was headquartered in a quiet business park in the city of
Orange. PPS had the third floor. There was big reception room, some young guys
filling out applications. A huge American flag was framed behind glass on one
wall, along with so framed documents—Declaration of Independence, Preamble to
the Constitution, Gettysburg Address, part of a speech by Teddy Roosevelt. And some big nature photographs with patriotic sayings under them—Grand Canyon,
Half Dome, a stand of redwoods with sunlight spraying through.

Over
the phone, Rainer had agreed to meet with Merci on short notice, and when she
got there he was ready. He was a tall, slender man with big hands and arms a
little too long for his sleeves. Corduroy pants, plaid shirt, an argyle pattern
of wrinkles in the back of his neck, stooped like a man used to stooping. He
ambled down a quiet carpe hallway and let Merci walk ahead of him into his
office. No secret; no receptionist. He had a bank of telephones on his desk and
a big radio dispatch console, like the ones they had at county.

"How's
your dad?"

"Mom
died about two years ago. He took it hard."

"Marcella
was lovely. Too young for that."

"Fifty-six."

"My
wife's healthy. I feel blessed."

There
were framed posters of Porsches on the walls, and a few photographs of Rainer
with Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush. A USC diploma. A John Birch
Society award. More pictures: Rainer in uniform as a Trojan basketball player;
Rainer in uniform as a sheriff's captain; Rainer with his wife and children;
Rainer on horseback somewhere dark and green with pines a hundred feet high.
Through a big window Merci could see that the rain had stopped. She looked out
over the Orange County suburbs huddled beneath the gray sky, drenched and
dripping, the colors rich and full.

"What kind of
security do you do?"

"Every
kind. Private residences—patrol, alarm systems, response. Some bodyguarding.
Some industrial and plant work. The high-tech companies keep us busy. Lately,
we've been getting a lot of the new guarded developments that are popping up
all over. Everybody wants a guard gate and a courtesy patrol. We're up to three
hundred employees."

"Still like to
hire ex-cops?"

Rainer smiled, half
pleasant, half carnivorous. "Sure, you interested?"

"Not yet."

"Some
of it's interesting. The high-tech manufacturers have to be careful. Mostly
employees ripping them off. The rest of it's pretty routine. That means we're
doing our job, if it's routine."

Merci
told him about drawing the Bailey unsolved, told him about the cassette
recording and date book, about Bailey's evidence against Meeks on the Jesse
Acuna beating, about Bailey's blackmail of Meeks and probably Owen, and who
knew who else.

"Wow,"
he said flatly, "that takes me back. How'd you get the tape and date
book?"

"I can't tell
you."

He raised his
eyebrows and nodded.

Merci
continued. "And I can't figure out what Patti Bailey was doing at a JBS
meeting three months before she was murdered."

"Now that's news
to me. Which one?"

"May,
sixty-nine. Pat McNally's house. You spoke about the United Nations. And Patti
Bailey was a guest. I got that from the chapter newsletter. Chapter two
thirty-one—the one with all the cops in it."

"Oh, I remember two
thirty-one, all right. They'd meet and you'd have twenty black-and-white Harley
Electra-Glides on the front lawn. Scared the daylights out of the neighbors,
except the kids. They loved those big bikes. The teenagers thought we were
pigs. But the kids s liked us."

Merci said nothing.
She remembered—very dimly and dreamily---suburban lawn filled with bright cop
Harleys glistening in the even sun. A JBS event? Probably. Her house? Pat
McNally's? Who knew'

Rainer looked at her,
gathering his thoughts. He sat upright now, stoop gone, his eyes steady on her.
"I'm surprised I don't remember meeting her. I got nervous before
speeches, tended to block the world out while I got ready."

She searched for the
chink in Rainer's calm armor, but she found none. No tic, no looking away or
blinking, no brazen eye-lock, looked like he was remembering.

"That's
understandable. What I don't understand is what a hooker doing at a Birch
Society meeting to start with. That's a jarring combination if there ever was
one."

"What's
the old saying—politics and strange bedfellows?"

"There's
no mention of murder in that saying."

"No.
Or blackmail."

She waited for Rainer
to take his nostalgia down a notch, to come a little cleaner with her. She had
the feeling she was being stroked. She hated being stroked.

"Let me try
this, Mr. Rainer—I don't understand
how
Patti Bailey got there. She's in
tight with Meeks and Owen. You right-wingers were banging hard on both those
men. So, what's Bailey doing? Was she with the Birchers, keeping her eyes and
ears open for Meeks and Owen"; with Meeks and Owen, keeping her eyes open
for you guys?"