The Simeon Chamber (7 page)

Sam turned the page and perused the attached inventory. Halfway down the list his eyes came to an abrupt stop. He peered at 59

the words in disbelief. Four page document stamped “The Jade House, Old Chinatown Lane, San Francisco, California.”

Bogardus sat for a long time staring at the page. His eyes isolated the entry. Why would the parchments sent to Jennifer Davies’s mother thirty years before suddenly be mailed to her daughter with a note that James Spencer was alive? More importantly, where had the parchments been all these years since the war?

He returned his attention to the file and found a list of exhibits and a large brown envelope clipped to the back page of the file folder itself. Sam opened the flap on the envelope and pulled out several yellowing photos. One was a picture of the blimp with its ground crew assembled in front of the huge airship. The figures were too small to discern any facial features. There were news photographs of the crash site and pictures of the blimp as it drifted over the city and finally a head-and-shoulder photograph of a man in a blue naval uniform and white service cap. Sam turned the photo over and on the back on a typed label was the name “Chief Petty Officer Raymond Slade.” Sam turned the photo over and studied the face in the picture.

He looked in the envelope but there were no more photographs. He checked the list of documents and exhibits in the file. Item 37 read “Photograph of Lt. James Spencer.” But the photograph wasn’t in the file.

Sam took some paper clips from a container on the counter and clipped the deposition of the man on the beach, the picture of Slade and the two letters to Dorothy Spencer with the inventory identifying the parchments and then rang for the clerk.

A young enlisted man appeared at the counter.

“I have some documents I’d like to have copied.

Also, I can’t seem to find one of the photographs identified on the exhibits list in the file.”

The clerk took the file and looked at the list and then through the photos in the envelope. “i don’t know what could have happened to it, sir. I suppose it’s possible someone could have removed it along the way.” The clerk continued

to rummage through the papers clipped in the folder. “Most of these files have been sitting in a warehouse for years, and there’s no telling who may have looked at them or had possession of ‘em over that time.”

“Are there any other files on this case?”

“No, this is it, sir. I think the lieutenant probably told you, another gentleman asked for the same file last week.

He was quite insistent that he see everything and we turned the place upside down to make sure that nothing else existed.”

“Do you know if the other man asked to copy any of the documents?”

“No, I don’t think he did. I would have done the copying if he had.”

“I don’t suppose that I could get a picture of James Spencer from any other navy files.”

“Not likely. Most of the personnel records from the last war would have been carted off to central warehouses in the Midwest a good ten years ago. Those that weren’t essential for military or veterans’ benefit programs would have been destroyed.”

Sam continued to paw through the file while the enlisted man disappeared to make the copies.

Three minutes later Bogardus collected his copies and headed for the parking lot.

Pausing at the car he casually turned to check the entrance to the administration building. The absence of any marine guards scurrying down the stairs behind him confirmed his theory. Someone had lifted the photograph of James Spencer and the navy had never missed it. Nor had they learned their lesson. Undoing two lower buttons on his dress shirt, Bogardus slipped the fingers of his right hand into the shirt and removed the navy file photograph of Raymond Slade. He studied it for several seconds, then placed it in the file folder with the copied materials. Xeroxed copies of black-and-white photos just didn’t cut it.

A half hour later Sam was back in the city. It was nearly four in the afternoon when he arrived at the office. A note was taped to the back of his chair, an invitation from Pat to meet her for dinner. Sam had no illusions; he knew she wanted to discuss business.

There was also a telephone message from Angie. The note under the name told him to “Call before leaving the office.”

He dialed his mother’s number and after a single ring he heard the familiar high-pitched voice.

“Hello, Mom.”

“Oh Sam, I’m glad you called.” He had to pull the phone away from his head to prevent damage to his eardrum. Angie possessed a piercing voice, particularly when she was excited or agitated, which as she grew older seemed to be nearly all the time. “I want you to come over to dinner tonight. I have a pot roast in the oven, potatoes, carrots—your favorite.” She spoke in a rapid staccato. “I haven’t had a chance to sit and talk with you in such a long time, I thought that perhaps we could …”

“Mom, I can’t make it tonight.”

“… just visit like we used to. Remember how it was before you went off to law school, before you met that girl? We had such wonderful times, just the two of us.” The elevated pitch of her voice matched her euphoric spirits. As always when Angie asked for something, her mind had already eliminated the possibility of a negative reply.

“What time will you be here?”

“I can’t come tonight, Mom.”

“Well, sure you can.”

“I can’t. I have another commitment.”

There was a brief pause before she spoke.

“You have to go out with her again, I suppose?”

Sam needed no clarification. Angie’s use of the pronoun had become synonymous with Pat.

“I have a business meeting.” There was no sense opening old wounds. Angie had vented her spleen on Pat since law school. He thought the hostility had ended when he moved out of Pat’s apartment, but the bile had stopped flowing only for a brief period.

“I’d much rather be there,” he lied. “But I’m afraid I have to sit and talk with some boring people about business over a table in a crowded restaurant.”

“Tables, yes. You know I was wondering—that old table down in the basement. You know the one that sits by the furnace? I think that it could be finished and I could use it up here in the living room.

What do you think?”

She wasn’t going to get away with it, not this time. In recent months it had become her 65

favorite ploy. Change the subject quickly and lure him into some other area. Before she was finished she would set a time for dinner and hang up.

“We were talking about dinner, Mom.

Remember, I said I couldn’t make it.”

“Oh yes? Meals are such difficult times for me these days. You know it’s very hard to cook for one person. I never realized that before.”

“Yes, Mom, I know. Maybe we can get together over the weekend. I’ll give you a call. All right?”

“Well, what about the roast?”

“Freeze it. We’ll make sandwiches.

I’ll give you a call later in the week.

Bye, Mom.”

Sam turned his attention to a stack of papers on his desk. He quickly proofed three letters typed earlier in the day by Carol and signed each, returned several calls and then dictated a letter on tape to Jennifer Davies, asking her to call the office for another appointment. He delivered verbal instructions to Carol on the tape, asking her to order a certified copy of Jennifer Davies’s birth certificate and to inquire as to the procedure for obtaining any records of adoption.

Putting down the microcassette dictator Sam spun around in his chair to the credenza behind his desk and grabbed the San Francisco phone directory. He looked up the name George Johnson. There were four listed. None showed an address on Olstead Street. Maybe he was unlisted. He reached for the Thomas Brothers map book for San Francisco and looked up Olstead Street. It didn’t exist; nor, he assumed, did George Johnson.

It is an uncomfortable feeling for a lawyer when a client’s story begins to unravel, when words don’t conform to the documents in files or inconsistencies begin to creep in. Bogardus had experienced it many times during his years with the public defender, when his clients were an assortment of drug pushers, prostitutes and other habitual losers. Now it was all coming back. He could excuse the missing photograph of James Spencer in the navy files, she could know nothing about that, and George Johnson, the man who didn’t exist. But the letter to Jennifer’s mother and its cryptic reference to the parchments. It didn’t wash. Why would parchments forwarded 67

to the mother thirty years before suddenly be mailed to the daughter with a note that James Spencer was alive?

Sam straightened up a few papers on his desk, grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He walked slowly down the stairs and out under the arched doorway leading from the pier entrance, his thoughts mired in unanswered questions concerning the parchments and the identity of the man calling himself George Johnson. He didn’t notice the black limousine across the Embarcadero in the parking lot beyond the abandoned railroad tracks. As he boarded the bus for the ride up Broadway, the large dark car pulled out of the parking lot and followed the bus up the street.

Nick Jorgensen wasted no time in tracking down Jasper Holmes on campus to show him the parchments from the Davies case. Holmes was an eccentric Englishman on a one-year sabbatical with the English literature department. After getting a glimpse of the documents, he insisted that Nick bring the parchments to his apartment that evening where the two of them could study them more thoroughly after dinner. Holmes was considered a foremost expert on Elizabethan prose, having published a two-volume translation of the official papers of Elizabeth Tudor.

Nick jumped at the invitation, and by seven that evening the two had the papers spread out across the large dining table and a smaller card table, examining every letter with magnifying glasses, Nick writing and making notes as Holmes deciphered the script. Jasper kept tripping over piles of books that he had taken from the table and laid on the floor to make room for the large pieces of parchment. His wife, Molly, worked in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner. She was a matronly woman who was used to her husband sticking his nose in some book till all hours of the night.

Holmes mumbled in a low monotone as he examined the parchments with an oversized magnifying glass under the bright glare of a desk lamp he had brought from the study.

“Gothic cursive script. I would say fifteenth, maybe sixteenth century,” said Holmes. “The trick”—he paused in mid-sentence to focus the light of the desk lamp directly over the page—”is to know the common stumbling blocks, to train the eye

to appreciate a range of visual distinctions with which we are unfamiliar today.” Without looking up at Nick, Holmes pushed one of the parchments to the other side of the table, stretching across with a ruler pointed to a single word on the page. “See that?”

he looked at Nick. “It’s spelled three different ways just in the four pages we have here.”

“What do you think?” asked Nick. “a sloppy forgery?”

“Not likely. An amateur forger would have at least taken care to conform all the spellings. If these are a fraud they were done by someone who knew what he was doing. The fact is that the writings of Elizabethan England bridged a period between the medieval and modern. There were virtually no common rules of punctuation, spelling or grammar.

If it sounded right it was right,” said Holmes.

“No, the author either understood the grammatical chaos of the times and took pains to mimic it or …”

Holmes took a considered pause and straightened up, arching his back.

“Or what?” asked Nick.

“Or the man who wrote these wore short baggy pants, tight stockings—and has been fertilizing the seabed with his bones for the better part of four centuries.”

“You mean they’re authentic?”

“I can’t say that with certainty. I’m no documents expert, but the style and prose sound like Drake. The man had what the Spaniards could only characterize as a morbid wit. He could never be satisfied with a simple entry in his log. His correspondence to the queen was usually filled with barbs about the Spanish, whom he genuinely hated. Here, look at this passage.” Holmes pointed to a spot on one of the parchments. “The writer describes an eagle of gold with an emerald clutched in its talon, apparently part of the booty they took from a Spanish merchantman. He says, `We relieved the overwrought friar of his responsibility for the bird.` That is precisely how Sir Francis might tell the world that he and his band robbed some poor cleric. All I can say with certainty is that the tone of the writing is on the mark from my earlier readings.”

Unsure how much he should reveal to Holmes and without thinking Nick asked, “Do you know anything about Drake’s journal?”

Jasper Holmes looked up, arching an eyebrow. And as if a signal had suddenly been tripped, the Englishman’s eyes narrowed and he stared motionless at Nick. “My God! Do you have any idea of the value of these pages if they’re part of the journal?” There was an instantaneous pause, and then as if a light had suddenly flashed on in his head, Jasper said: “You have the rest of it don’t you—the journal? You can tell me. Your secret would be safe with me.” The words carried all the assurance of a thimblerigger at a county fair.

Nick wished he could recall the question, but the damage was done. Holmes knew more about Drake and his travels than Nick realized, and now he had planted the seed of curiosity. He would have to kill it before it could germinate.

Nick laughed. “Jasper, I don’t have a damn thing other than what you see here on the table, and that was given to a friend who is naive in the extreme by a woman who purchased the pages at some tourist trap in Chinatown.”

A look of incomprehension clouded the expression on the Englishman’s face. Nick moved quickly to maintain the momentum and turned over the pages of parchment until he located the one bearing the stamp of the Jade House on Old Chinatown Lane. He pointed to the stamp on the back of the page and looked up apprehensively, uncertain whether Holmes had accepted the explanation. Sam would kill him if the Englishman leaked word of a new Drake find on the academic grapevine. It would be embarrassing if the documents were bogus, but worse—