The email came to my work address.
Dear Deputy Edison,
Per our recent conversation, I am sending you something to look at.
Best,
Peter Franchette
Two PDFs attached.
First, a scanned snapshot, the oversaturated palette of old Kodachrome. A young woman stood outside a house, smiling and clutching a baby to her chest. She wore mint-green slacks; a sleeveless blouse, paler green, called attention to rail-thin upper arms. The outfit set off the olive of her complexion, a crescent of paler skin peeking through at her waist, hemline riding up as she bent back for better leverage.
Her hair was tied up with a kerchief. Black flyaways jutted like television aerials.
The smile was wry. Stretched a bit wide: She’d been holding the pose for too long while the photographer fiddled with the focus. Urging through her teeth.
Hurry up, please.
But she wanted to look happy. She knew she ought to be. A familiar expression, one I saw every day. On my wife; and sometimes in the mirror.
The infant was wrapped in a blanket, its face hidden. You might mistake it for a pillow, if not for a chubby leg protruding and ending in a tiny foot sheathed in a yellow bootie.
The blanket was white, not electric blue.
Franchette had also scanned the photo’s reverse. Dated in ink: 5-10-69.
The second PDF was the opening pages of a newspaper I’d never heard of, the Berkeley Trip. “Newspaper” is a generous description. Top left, pinholes and a reddish dent commemorated a rusty staple. The nameplate was hand-drawn, puffy letters and a goofy character with his eyes spinning in their sockets. The text was typewritten and crowded and smudged. Date of issue, March 16–20, 1970. You didn’t need it to know what era had given rise to the Trip. The headlines sufficed.
Charlie Manson’s Great Big Hassle
Slumlord Fuckers!
The Wilting of the American Cock
Pseudonyms made up the bylines. Mike Rotch, Cheez Louise, Derrière Payne.
At the bottom, Peter Franchette—or someone—had circled an article.
Nuke Prof Gets Roasted
BY PUTTA HURTON
Hot time in Berkeley Town!
Last Friday the thirteenth’s four-alarmer up on Vista Linda Way in them thar hills was one hell of a far-out scene. Flames were jumping higher than yer gramma barefoot on a camp stove. (cont’d 2)
I scrolled down.
It wasn’t just anybody’s domicile getting the infernal treatment, but none other than that inhabited (or shall we say infested?) by Notorious Sonuvabitch Warmonger Gene Franchette. In case you have your head lodged someplace sans sunshine, that be the selfsame Professor Franchette responsible for making sure that when we finally do get around to dropping the Bomb on Hanoi, we damn well get em all.
Gee but it’s poetic, ain’t it, to imagine ol’ Gene watching the smoke twirl into the sky?
At first blush, not much linked the photo to the article, other than the time period.
Franchette was counting on me to find the connection.
Piquing my curiosity. Testing me at the same time.
What had Nwodo told him about me?
You should talk to him, though, get his story. It’s actually pretty interesting.
She was right. I was curious.
I reexamined the snapshot, shifting my attention from the woman in the foreground to the house. Pink concrete walkway, flanked by mod geometric topiaries. Brown shingle exterior, a shallow porch overhung by an American flag. Nailed to the railing, four blurry numerals: 1028.
Vista Linda Way turned out to be a short road amid the steep and twisting neighborhood at the western foot of Tilden Regional Park. Google Street View showed a low wooden fence, topped by a cloud of overgrowth that obscured the façade of 1028.
I opened a real estate website. The transaction history described 1028 Vista Linda Way as a two-bedroom, two-bath, sixteen-hundred-square-foot home built in 1947. It had last changed hands in 2006 for $1.265 million. Kitchens and baths fully updated.
I clicked through the photo gallery, trying to match the exteriors to the house in the snapshot. Topiaries chopped down. A porch, but different design and no flag. Brown shingles replaced by clean white siding.
Proof of a bad fire?
Or just a routine renovation?
Or they were totally different houses.
“You guys looking to move?”
I craned around in my chair.
Moffett stood behind me, gnawing an apple. “I thought you had a sweet deal.”
“Doesn’t hurt to know what’s out there,” I said.
He winked, ripped off a chunk, and lumbered to his desk.
—
PICTURE A GROWN man, six-foot-three, unshaven, shuffling up the sidewalk in sweatpants and slippers with holes, eyelids at half-mast, humming tunelessly to himself.
That’s a guy to avoid. Wide berth. Cross the street.
Now strap a baby to that guy’s chest.
Now that guy is a goddamn American hero.
He’s Father of the Year.
“Aww. How old?”
“Fifteen and a ha—about four months.”
“Aww. So cute.”
With a smile, the woman who’d stopped to look charged up the hill, ponytail flouncing.
I looked down at Charlotte, zipped inside my hoodie, her head bent back and pink lips blossomed in a pout. “You’re better than a puppy.”
She slept on, and I resumed walking, leaning into the slope, keeping time against her bottom. Marin is one of the steepest streets in the city, and one block along I was already breathing hard.
The thought had been exercise, fresh air, vitamin D.
The slippers were unintentional. I’d left the house in them.
At the intersection with Euclid I passed a stop sign to which someone had added a sticker, red background and square white lettering, so that the message became—
By the time I reached Vista Linda Way, my quads burned and my back ached and I could feel Charlotte squirming against my sweat-soaked shirt.
“Sorry, little lady.”
I tugged down the zipper and took in the view. Fog cascaded downhill, twining through the California redwoods that rose from backyards, faceless sentinels presiding over the restless sprawl of Berkeley, Albany, Richmond. I marveled that a person could own one of those trees; own one of those backyards, and this panorama.
Over the water, white traceries knit together into a turgid gray mass that enshrouded Treasure Island and threatened to crush like an anvil the few boats battling through chop. The Golden Gate was nearly erased, only the peaks of its towers and shifting orange slashes visible.
Vista Linda indeed. It justified the million-dollar price tags. Compared with farther west, the homes here were older, shabbier, with cramped or nonexistent front yards and carports instead of garages. Running out for diapers would take effort.
Quiet, though. I could hear Charlotte’s breathing; feel its lacy flutter on my throat.
I negotiated a buckling sidewalk blocked by garbage cans and parked cars, two wheels up on the curb to accommodate the narrowness of the road. Gasping winter sun stirred eddies of warmth that broke the chill before vanishing.
The overgrowth outside 1028 had since been pruned back. I compared it with the snapshot Franchette had sent me.
“What do we think?” I asked. “Same house?”
Charlotte had no opinion. I rotated ninety degrees to show her the front door.
“I think it might be.”
I unlatched the gate, mounted the porch, and rang the bell. Nobody home.
Had I been there on official business I would’ve left my card.
Today I was a regular guy, taking his daughter for a walk.
Exiting the gate I heard a startled oh. A woman in pajamas stood at the mouth of the adjacent driveway, poised to take in her trash can. Gray-haired, with soft, guileless cheeks, she drew tight her bathrobe, assessing me and the danger I presented.
Deranged hair? Check.
Mismatched clothing? Check.
Baby?
Baby.
She relaxed. “Good morning.”
“Morning. I had a question for the homeowner. Any sense of when they’re usually around?”
“It’s unoccupied at the moment,” she said. “What’s your question?”
“History, I guess you’d call it. I was reading about a fire that took place here a while back. I was wondering if this was the right spot.”
She nodded. “It is.”
“You know the one I mean?”
“I do. I was fifteen at the time.”
“Were you living next door when it happened?”
“All my life.” She indicated her own house. “It was my parents’, then.”
I held up the snapshot. “Mind having a look at this?”
She came over and took it from me. “That’s Bev.”
“Bev…Franchette?”
“Poor woman. She had it hard.”
“Because of the fire?”
No answer. She stared at the photo, thrust it back.
“I have no idea what became of her,” she said.
A strange thing to volunteer. “Do you happen to know the baby’s name?”
“Sorry, I can’t stay out here, it’s freezing.”
“May I ask your name?”
She hurried inside, forgetting her trash can at the curb.
I moved it to the bottom of the pitched driveway for her. Charlotte woke up and began to mewl. From my hoodie pocket I took a bottle of formula, feeding her as I hiked back down to the car. All hail the Father of the Year.
—
THE NEIGHBOR’S NAME was Diane Olsen. She was sixty-five years old, divorced, with a daughter in San Francisco. Handful of prior addresses around Berkeley; she’d resided at 1024 Vista Linda Way since the midnineties. I assumed she’d spoken loosely, rather than lied, when she said she’d been there all her life. Maybe that was how it had felt to move back into her childhood home—as though she’d never gone anywhere or made any meaningful progress. Maybe she’d returned after the end of her marriage or to care for an aging parent.
She had no criminal record.
Neither did Bev, Gene, or Peter Franchette.
The Electronic Death Registration System came up blank for Bev and Gene or any Franchette. That didn’t rule out much: Our search permissions are limited to Alameda County. I can’t even check neighboring counties, let alone out of state. It’s a major source of frustration. You have to get on the phone and pray someone accommodating picks up.
A death notice for Beverly Franchette appeared in the online edition of the Albuquerque Journal, May 1, 2014. Time and location of the funeral. No obituary.
Gene Franchette, on the other hand, presented a different challenge: thousands upon thousands of hits to sort through, the bulk of them academic citations. He’d spent his career at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico. No mention of Berkeley. An in-house lab newsletter celebrated his retirement in 2009, noting his contributions to the fields of high-energy physics and optics. The final paragraph quoted him as saying that he would continue to come into the office twice a week. They’ll have to carry me out in a pine box.
I pulled a current address in an Albuquerque suburb.
It appeared that he was still alive, at the age of ninety-eight.
I called Peter Franchette.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll bite.”
He laughed. “Thank you.”
If he owed thanks to anyone, it was Diane Olsen. Her weird reaction had nudged me from curious to intrigued.
“We need to set a few ground rules. First, you can’t offer me money.”
“Yes. I got that.”
“My job takes priority. I can’t use county resources, either.” Bit of a fudge on my part. I already had. You’d be hard-pressed to find a cop who hasn’t, at one time or another, checked up on a daughter’s or niece’s new boyfriend. But I had to set boundaries going forward, for his sake and for mine.
“I understand,” he said.
“And you understand that that makes me not much better off than you, vis-à-vis access. A private investigator can probably get more.”
“I told you, I’ve tried that. I’ve come to realize there are more important qualities.”
“Such as?”
“Giving a damn.”
“No guarantees there, either.”
“You called,” Peter Franchette said. “That’s good enough for me.”
