California Girl

39

THREE DAYS LATER I was guest of honor at the Sheriff’s Department press conference. They wanted someone accountable and no longer with the department. I was perfect.

Cory Bonnett and a public defender sat stage right at a table behind the podium. District Attorney Rick Doss and I sat stage left. A big county seal on the wall behind us and a roomful of reporters and cameras and tape recorders in front.

Sheriff Walt Wallen took the mike. Tall and slow-moving, wears glasses to read. Was a senior at Garden Grove High School when we brought Bonnett across the border in the trunk of his own car.

Wallen played it like the pro he is. Said we got fooled by a cold-blooded killer. Nobody’s perfect, not even us. Put a little sympathy into his voice. All that wasted time for Mr. Bonnett. County had worked up a voluntary onetime $75,000 restitution to help Mr. Bonnett get back on his feet. Wouldn’t go higher because the County wasn’t at fault.

Bonnett himself looked healthy and dazed. Was always a big man but plenty of prison food and endless hours on the iron pile had made him heavy with muscle. Blond hair long again. A Vandyke like the young men are wearing now. A blue aloha shirt with surfboards printed on it. Arms thick and freckled and dusted with hair that shone gold in the light. Eyes small and blue. Same IQ as me, I thought. One hundred twenty-six. Wondered why that always bothered me. Bonnett was fifty-eight. Twenty-two when we took him down for a crime he didn’t commit.

When the sheriff was done the DA said a few words.

Then Bonnett limped to the podium and bent the mike up to his height.

“I told you thirty-six years ago I didn’t do it and nobody would believe me.”

His voice shook. A murder trial and conviction and thirty-four years in the big house, but a press conference was making him nervous.

“My lawyer wouldn’t let me get up there and say so. The cops had all this evidence that somebody put in my garage in Laguna. You ruined a big part of my life. It’s great to be getting out. But thanks for nothing. Fuck off and die.”

The reporters exploded with questions but Bonnett made the back door in a stiff-legged trot. Blond hair trailing and aloha shirt rippling surfboards through the air. A deputy let him out.

When I got to the podium for questions it was a mud bath. The Stoltz story had been broken the day before but details of the frame were few. So the reporters wanted to know if I’d planted evidence. I said no. Then they went to inexperience, job stress, and a gung-ho first-year detective’s mistakes. I said maybe. They kept wanting to know if I’d ever doubted Bonnett’s guilt. I said no. How I’d felt when I learned I was wrong. I said surprised. How I felt about taking away thirty-six years of a man’s life. I said all the evidence we had pointed directly at him and the jury deliberated for one hour and fifty-two minutes. They wanted to know if my family’s friendship with Stoltz gave him an advantage. I said no, what gave Stoltz an advantage was fury, desperation, and luck. I gave a full law enforcement performance. I didn’t apologize. I’d bleed over this the rest of my life but wasn’t going to share it with anybody. Except for Katy. Maybe my brothers. You know-save the worst for the people you care about most.

AFTER THE PRESS conference I went down to David’s chapel in Laguna. He was up on a ladder washing the windows. It’s a converted house on Woodland, out in the canyon. Dodge City. Where Bonnett and Leary and Fowler and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love were experiencing all their psychedelic fun back in nineteen sixty-eight. Janelle, too. The neighborhood is still funky and genuine. Surfboards leaning on fences. Unfinished oil paintings on easels in the shade. Little plastic swimming pools so the kids can beat the heat.

“Doesn’t look like a safe place for an old man,” I said.

“The Lord will knock me off when He wants to.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

“Press conference go well?” David asked.

“Not bad.”

We sat in the cool of the chapel. Side by side in folding chairs.

The Canyon Chapel of God isn’t anything like the Grove used to be. Just a gutted three-bedroom canyon cottage. Good windows. Kitchen still there because refreshments are important. Bathroom in back. The rest just one open room. Shiny ash floors. No pews. There are stacks of folding chairs against the rear wall, and when you come in to worship you take one. Put it back when the service is over. Nothing fancy for the preacher. A podium like at the news conference. Instead of a county seal there’s a clear acrylic cross on the wall behind that lights up sky blue when you turn it on.

“Good you let Bonnett go,” said David. “Interesting that Andy’s dislike of Stoltz led him to the truth. Maybe I could build a sermon around that idea.”

“He’s going to write a book about it.”

“Be a fat one,” said David.

“He’s got more energy than a two-peckered goat.”

“You’re in a house of God, Nick.”

“Sorry, David. How are you?”

“Fine. Fine. Thanks for asking.”

Within a year of David’s coming-out confession sermon in October of sixty-eight he sold the Grove Drive-In Chapel of God. Darren Whitbrend and a consortium of investors forked over almost a million five. David sold the land, the buildings, the name, everything. Took his family around the world. They lived in Jerusalem for a year. Dar es Salaam a year. Quito, Ecuador, until Barbara had a seizure and they came back to San Francisco for surgery. Brain tumor the size of a golf ball but benign. Doing fine.

David bought a building in Newport and started a new church but it never caught on. Struggled for a few years. Most of the congregation was Laguna gays so David sold the Newport site and bought this cottage here in the canyon. Had a hundred in his congregation before you knew it. Then the eighties and over half of them died of AIDS. Fifty-three. Church helped pay for treatment and hospice and lawyers and burials. Close to bankrupted it. David doing funerals for guys he knew. Two in a week once. Called me that week and said he wasn’t sure if he could preach anymore.

Things turned around and now he’s up to almost two hundred. Barbara stuck with him. She travels a lot without him. They’ve always had an understanding though I’m not sure exactly how it works. Their kids are grown and fine. Whitbrend’s doing okay for himself over at the Grove from what I hear. Haven’t set foot in there since David left. Turned out Adrian Stalling was stabbed to death by a jealous lover that night at the Boom Boom Bungalow. The killer looked enough like Howard Langton you could mistake him in a lineup. The witness took two weeks to come forward because he was afraid. Trying to keep the same secret David and Howard were trying to keep.

David got the disease, too. They say it’s under control but he’s been losing weight the last few months. Ears look bigger. Makes me worry.

“Really,” he said. “I’m fine.”

I watched dust specks rise in a shaft of sunlight. “I was thinking you’d say a prayer for me.”

David leaned back and examined me. “You’ve never asked for that before. Even when you were dying.”

“Ask God to forgive me for what I did to Cory Bonnett. I could have done better.”

“It’s better if it comes from you.”

“I’ve said a thousand of them. I want one from you.”

“Well. Let’s pray, Nick.”

LOBDELL DIED ten years ago. He was seventy-nine, retired up in Lake Arrowhead. Hung around with a bunch of old cops who had places up there. Fish the lake, tell lies. I’d go up a couple of times a year to see him and Shirley. We’d always end up talking Baja. How I puffed the cigarette and said “tequila” for Mexican customs. Waved at the U.S. guys and didn’t wake up until we hit the hospital. Kevin went off at eighteen, knocked around the country some. Became a park ranger in Yellowstone, married a Montana girl, and made Lucky a granddad.

My father went next. Heart attack in the garage while he was repairing a leaf blower. Eighty-four. After the death of Clay and the paving over of the orange groves that had needed him, Max replaced enjoyment with busy-ness. Just wanted to be useful. Never saw that the people who loved him wanted his company, not his know-how. Silenced him when the Soviet Union fell apart. He’d liked fighting the enemy much more than winning. Nobody left to tangle with. We’d had a nice hour the week before he died. Katy and Mom in the kitchen. Dad in the blue recliner and me in the white recliner with the news on low. Can’t remember what we talked about but it was pleasant.

Mom made ninety and died last year. She’d finally gotten past Clay somehow. Accommodated it. Saw his name on the memorial wall in Washington and something inside her let go. Better after that, found things to do away from Dad. Learned to swim at the Y in Santa Ana and did it almost every day. Group of ladies got tight. Volunteer work at St. Joseph ’s. Wrote a long history of the Beckers, from Germany and Ireland and England to the pepper fields of Anaheim. Hours of research and it came out well. Bound in leather. Spent her last two years with David and Barbara. The grandkids drove her around. Pool in the backyard and they found her at the bottom of it on a hot summer day. Embolism.

KATY AND I are doing just fine. Willie is a newscaster for KNX radio up in L.A. Put that strong voice of his to good use. Katherine sells newspaper advertising and raised three kids. Stevie is offense coach at Tustin High School. Took Howard’s old job. I go to all the games. Sometimes I’ll drive out to catch a practice, see how the team is looking. Listen to Stevie bellow at the players. Put that strong voice to good use, too, I can tell you. Our little Paul died a few hours after he was born. I wasn’t sure Katy and I would make it through that. There’s no sadness like it.

I still stay up late but don’t drink as much. Quit that after Baja. Walk the neighborhood with Katy in the evening. Prowl the house after she’s asleep. No good reason. Once a cop, always on duty. Mostly just sit and read and think. Sometimes go to the garage and pull open the Odd Box and touch the things I’ve collected. Still there, all of it. From the Mercury launch rock to the switchblade with the white handle to Charlie Manson’s guitar pick. Andy about flipped that day in sixty-nine when he realized who the little folksinger was. Gave me the guitar pick for a birthday present. The night before they let Bonnett out I held the slat I’d ripped off the packinghouse floor. Nails still in it. Funny smell. Hard to imagine it had taken thirty-six years to cancel that case. Sometimes I touch the tiny cap they’d put on little Paul’s head when he was born. Light blue. Girls got pink. Something wrong with his heart. Maybe the air freshener I used. Maybe what I did with Sharon. I don’t know.

I miss being young. I miss being young and strong. Young and fast. Young and in love. Nothing like it. Old love is good, too. But you get the feeling that the world mainly just wants you out of the way.

A COUPLE of days ago I went down to a surfing break called Rockpile in Laguna. Heard Cory Bonnett was there in the evenings. Andy told me this. One evening they surfed and Andy got Bonnet telling stories. Andy will do anything to hear a good story, even hang out with the guy who killed his brother. Lynette and one of Bonnett’s girlfriends came down later and they hit a Laguna restaurant and drank late. Andy says the women were on Bonnett like you wouldn’t believe. Innocent studmuffin, soulful blue eyes, his girl murdered, all that.

I sat on a flat rock at low tide and watched him ride the waves. He had a stiff leg from the gunshot. Gave him a jerky kind of motion getting onto the board. Once he was up he couldn’t really bend it too well so he stood up tall. Made him look casual in the big waves. Plus he was a pretty huge guy. People got right out of his way.

I went back to Rockpile again yesterday. Had worked on my speech half the night before but still wasn’t sure what to say.

Bonnett surfed until it was almost dark. Last guy out. I sat on the same rock and watched the sky go from blue to orange to indigo. Catalina black on the horizon. He finally came in. Limped south toward the hotel. Board under one arm, backpack over the other shoulder.

I caught up with him. He turned and stopped and looked down at me. Had me by four inches and sixty or eighty pounds. And thirty-six years of rage.

“I’m sorry it happened,” I said. “I got fooled.”

“That’s all?”

“We didn’t plant anything. I wanted you to know that.”

“All that little prick Stoltz?”

“All.”

“And now I’m supposed to what?” asked Bonnett.

“Up to you. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Give me back thirty-six years.”

“Would if I could.”

“Then just get out of my sight.”

I walked north to the Giggle Crack. Watched the water surge in and shoot up. Some kids out on it, barefoot on the sharp rocks, leaning forward to see in. I ran them off and heard something about “old fart, mind your own business.”

My own business.

Farther up the beach I did something I’d always wanted to do. Shucked off everything but my boxers and wedding ring and waded in. Cold. Fell in face first and let the waves pull me out and push me in. Flipped onto my back and watched the stars glide back and forth. Imagined one of those crate labels with the pretty girl and the orange blowing in the Tustin wind. Don’t know why. Everything connects. Closed my eyes for a second and remembered that blackness at the hospital. How it could have gone on forever and almost did.

Sometimes at night I’ll start to fall asleep and catch myself. Jerk away from that big black forever. I want to stay on this side of it.

So I opened my eyes again and felt my hands on the sand below me, my body sliding toward the beach. Stood up and shook off and hustled over to my things. Old man in his underpants on a public beach. Not a pretty sight but you only get one life, two at the most.

Got to live a little.