The Simeon Chamber (30 page)

Fletcher held the receiver pressed tightly to his ear. “Yes, I want you to stay 373

with them and no, we can’t pick ‘em up.

Bogardus is not a fugitive, at least not yet. There’s nothing we could hold him on at this point, and he’d probably sue the hell out of the city if we tried. Do you have any idea who the woman is?”

Fletcher listened and wrote the name “Jennifer Davies” on a note pad on his desk.

“I’ll check up on her and see what shows up, but Davies is a common name and they may have trouble getting a make. Jack, listen to me. Don’t let ‘em out of your sight. I don’t care how many times they go up to the castle, stay with ‘em.”

He slammed the receiver into the cradle of the phone. “Damn it.”

“What’s wrong, Lieutenant?” The desk sergeant had just walked into the room with a file folder for Fletcher’s In basket.

“Jorgensen led us right to Bogardus.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“The problem is Bogardus is leading us in circles. So far the city’s paid almost a hundred and fifty bucks for tickets to tour San Simeon for two of its finest.”

“What?”

“Bogardus and his entourage have been up and down the hill at San Simeon like mountain goats.

So far they’ve visited the main floor, the gardens, the two guest houses and most of the upper floors of the castle.”

“A vacation?” The sergeant raised his eyebrows.

“Hardly,” said Fletcher. “They’re looking for something.” Fletcher pieced together the bits of information he’d gotten from Jeannette Lamonge the day before at the hospital. He scanned the notes he’d taken during her interrogation. The girl finally calmed down enough to talk, but she hadn’t been as helpful as he’d hoped. Her uncle had gotten to her and convinced her to tone down her story, Fletcher was sure of it.

Still, she did tell him that the chauffeur whose body they had scraped off the sidewalk in front of the shop had been in the store on the day Paterson was murdered. She also revealed that Paterson had come into the shop asking about some parchments. Fletcher’s knowledge of Francis Drake was vague at best. Beyond what little he could remember from high school history, he 375

associated the name with one of the city’s finer hotels.

Now Bogardus was busy exploring Hearst Castle, a veritable museum of priceless paintings and other treasures. No. It wasn’t drugs that he was dealing with. Unless he missed his bet, Fletcher was now certain that Bogardus was hip-deep in some art scam.

He looked up at the sergeant. “Listen, can you give me a hand?”

“Sure.”

“I want you to run a C.I. and I. check on two people. Here’s the first.” He handed the sergeant the note paper with Jennifer’s name on it. “I think it’s a dead end without a set of her prints, but try anyway. The other name is Arthur Symington.” He spelled the last name. “Give me everything you can on both of ‘em.”

“Who are they?”

“I have no idea who the girl is. As for the guy, Mayhew only got bits and pieces.

According to the state police Symington was a private art consultant at the castle until yesterday when somebody stabbed him to death.”

“Was Bogardus involved?”

“We don’t know. But it is strange that wherever Bogardus and his pals go dead bodies seem to turn up.” Fletcher wrinkled his forehead.

“Then see if you can find a set of prints for Bogardus. Try Motor Vehicles. If they don’t have a good set try the State Department, passports. He looks to me like the kind who has traveled abroad. If you find a set send them to the state police and see if they can get a match-up on anything relating to the Symington stabbing. We may nail him yet.”

Fletcher fumbled with the papers on his desk. “Where’s the address for that house in Daly City —the place Jorgensen was holed up in after we released him?”

The sergeant reached into the pile on the desk, retrieved a small slip of paper and handed it to Fletcher.

He looked at the address written on the slip and the name printed above it. “Angie Bogardus?” He looked questioningly at the sergeant.

“Yeah, the lawyer’s old lady.”

Fletcher wrinkled his eyebrows and folded the slip of paper into his shirt pocket. 377

“Listen, if anybody calls I’ll be out of the office for a few hours. If something hot breaks down the coast you can reach me on the radio.”

Fletcher grabbed his coat and headed for the elevator.

The Medici might have considered the room magnificent. As far as Sam was concerned it was twentieth-century Hearst garish. A soft light filtered through the rose-colored windows of the Gothic Study. It was Hearst’s private office, the nerve center of his publishing empire when he was in residence at San Simeon.

Four large leaded-glass chandeliers hung from the barrel-vaulted arches that supported the ceiling.

The arches were covered with delicate murals of biblical and mythical scenes painted by one of the hundreds of artisans employed in the construction of the castle. The room was furnished with dark baroque pieces. A polished conference table with high relief carvings covering its serpentine legs stood in the center of the room. From a distance, the legs of the heavy table appeared as ropes of carved wood curving toward the floor. The table was surrounded by ten high-backed armchairs, each with tapestry-upholstered backs and seats. Parchment pages from monastic songbooks dating to the Middle Ages formed the lampshades for several floor lamps, and an immense ornate Flemish candlestick graced the drop-leaf table directly in front of them. Like most of the grand house, the ambience of the room was a mixture of Renaissance Europe and 1930’s Americana. Hearst thought nothing of topping a fifteenth-century table with an Art Deco lamp and shade—a mixture of the elegant past and the practical present.

But Bogardus had no difficulty focusing his attention. His gaze was fixed on the heavy, dark wood book cabinets that lined the walls of the study below the windows. There, compressed between each of the massive curved arches, behind the metal filigree of the cabinet doors, were hundreds of volumes from Hearst’s private collection. Sam’s heart sank. What better place to hide the journal, he thought.

He raised his eyes and looked at the guide who’d paused for a moment in her monologue to allow the group to look about the room.

“How many books are there in this 9

room?” asked Sam. His tone was that of an itinerant tourist.

The guide, a middle-aged woman, looked at him and smiled. “Approximately seventy-five hundred. We’re not sure precisely because we’ve never had the opportunity to catalogue them. And there are no insurance records. Mr. Hearst never bothered to insure any of the books. They’re all irreplaceable.”

“Imagine that.” Sam gazed about the room, the fatuous grin of a tourist plastered on his face.

“And the room downstairs, the main library.

How many books are there?”

“We estimate another five thousand, mostly first editions, but again we haven’t catalogued any of them.”

Jennifer leaned toward him and whispered. “Do you think this is it, the Simeon chamber?”

“Beats the hell out of me. It was Hearst’s playroom.” This was the fourth trip up the hill for the three of them that day. After the first two trips Nick and Jennifer realized that Sam had no solid information as to the precise location of the journal; his only clue was the two words uttered by Arthur Symington before he died. The trio had managed to dodge the army of state and local police roaming over the grounds after Symington’s death. Sam remembered with some anxiety the fact that he’d left his business card with the guide and used his real name in signing the registration book in the trailer that served as the guide center.

“So this is where the father of modern journalism held court. Bet that carpet’s well-stained with the droppings of editors summoned in here for a lesson in yellow journalism.” Nick pushed his way between Jennifer and Sam. The guide shot him a scornful glance then turned on her heels, putting distance between herself and the bearded offender.

“This could be a slight problem,” said Sam.

“Listen to him,” Nick mumbled to himself. “Excuse me if I appear to be the potentate of pessimism, but I would call twelve thousand volumes locked behind filigreed cabinets in a house with a security system that would shame the Denver Mint more than a
slight
problem.

Unless of course you think the three of us can do the job during the daytime—maybe between tours.”

Bogardus suddenly knew he had raced up a blind alley, and like a tomcat after a 1

female in heat he had driven Jennifer and Nick before him.

Collectively he was sure that they had walked at least twenty miles that day, most of it up and down spiraling concrete staircases from the twin bell towers of the main house to the esplanade and back up again. He’d pushed the three of them harder than a drill sergeant. And now it had all come down to this. Without Symington to lead them to the right shelf to put their fingers on the precise volume they would never be able to find Drake’s journal.

He lingered as the tour party headed for the stairwell. Reluctantly, he took one last look at the great room and followed along behind, down the stairs.

The three of them sat in glum silence two seats behind the bus driver as the heavy motor began to drone in low gear down the steep road.

A child sat with his father directly ahead of them, chattering incessantly as the bus moved past the chainlink gate and onto Hearst Corporation land for the ride to the public assembly area fifteen hundred feet below on the flat plain near the highway.

As they rounded a sharp horseshoe curve the child pointed from the window and asked, “What’s that?” His father, who looked exhausted, ignored the latest in what had become a perpetual stream of questions. In a vacant trance Sam gazed from the window at the object of the boy’s fascination. His eyes fixed on the rusted metal bars as Symington’s dying message echoed in his mind. Without explanation the words took on the clarity of crystal, transformed by some mystical force in the synapse of the brain.

There by the side of the road, embedded under the pergola of Orchard Hill, rested the concrete-and-metal enclosures of Hearst’s private zoo.

Sam rummaged through the aisles of the souvenir shop at the bottom of the hill until he found what he wanted. Nick and Jennifer were swept along in his wake. Bogardus pulled a book from the shelf, donned his glasses and rapidly thumbed the pages. He found what he was looking for in less than a minute.

“Here it is. Webster’s Dictionary defines the word as follows—`of, relating to, 383

or resembling monkeys or apes.`”

“What are you talking about?” asked Jennifer.

“I’m talking about the `Simian Chamber.` Don’t you see? Whoever made that pencil scrawl on the parchments spelled worse than I do. He wrote `Simeon C.` on the page and like fools we accepted it. But the word was `simian`—with an i-a-not.”

Nick looked at him with a gaze he normally reserved for the dimwitted.

Sam rushed down the aisle away from his two companions, overtaken by the frenetic search for another volume. In a few seconds he found what he was looking for, a rack of books dedicated to Hearst and his castle, placed for the benefit of tourists near the shop entrance. He pulled one large volume from the rack, turned several pages, paused and began to read:

“`During its time the Hearst zoo was the largest privately owned collection of wild and rare animals assembled in a single location. In it were represented more than one hundred species of domestic and wild beasts. Included were members of the cat family, including cheetahs, lions, leopards, panthers and the California mountain lion. Particularly prized`”—Sam slowed his pace as if to emphasize the words—”`were Hearst’s collection of primates, sacred monkeys from Japan and India, orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas. When it was abandoned in the late 1930’s, most of the inhabitants of the zoo were presented to various West Coast cities for their public zoos.`”

He looked up from the page. “That’s it. The `simian chamber` is a damned monkey cage—probably in the labyrinth of tunnels and service areas behind the zoo.”

“Don’t you think you’re reaching just a little?” It was clever, but Nick was skeptical.

“Not at all. Think about it. The place was ideal. Nobody ever visited it except handpicked employees, all of whom were on the dole with the committee. No guest was going to want to walk down to look at an empty zoo. Without knowing it, by closing his zoo Hearst presented the committee with the perfect hiding place. And unless I miss my bet, that’s where the journal is.”

“What difference does it make?” Jennifer’s voice was tinged with a tone of finality. “You can’t go up there.” 5

“Why not?”

“There’s three reasons I can think of off the bat.”

“Like what?”

“Trespass, burglary and grand theft—which one do you want?”

“What—to poke around in an abandoned zoo—

to look for a book that Hearst didn’t even know he had, that’s been lost to history for nearly three hundred years? It’s up there, I know it.”

He looked at Jennifer and dropped his voice an octave. “I have no idea what it is that you haven’t told me. But ask yourself one question. What have we got to lose, either of us? You may have lost a father. I have already lost a good friend.”

By now Jennifer recognized the word for the euphemism it was. His partner had been much more than a friend to Bogardus. A fire burned deep in his soul, a blaze that found expression in his eyes whenever anyone mentioned the name of Susan Paterson. Before she could say anything Bogardus spoke her thoughts. “You’re right, before I’m finished I have to deal with whoever killed her. And I suspect you’re going to have to wrestle with your own demon, whatever it is. But that’s going to happen whether we find the journal or not. So we may as well find it.”

She wasn’t sure if it was in the logic of his argument or the appeal in his eyes, but there was something persuasive in what he said. There was nothing either of them could do to change what had already happened. But at least for a brief time, temporarily, they could immerse their pain in a distracting balm, they could lose themselves in a search for the journal.