Golden Gate (eBook)

Chapter Two

1944

FRIDAY, MARCH 10

1

When I was a kid—before they took my dad away, in 1931—we used to play ball on a patchy field next to the municipal dump. Home plate was across the road from the three-mile-long Berkeley Pier, where trucks and autos would line up for the ferry to San Francisco. I always looked out for the cars with New York plates, weather-beaten and mud-crusted because they’d been on the road for weeks. These were people who had crossed the country on the Lincoln Highway.

The Lincoln Highway was the first coast-to-coast road in America. It started at the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street in Times Square, New York, and from there intrepid motorists in their Fords and Studebakers would set out on the three-thousand-mile journey to San Francisco, guided by rough maps and by red, white, and blue signposts along the way. The highway—really a series of interconnected country byways—traversed the nation in the shortest possible route, avoiding big cities like Chicago or Denver in favor of smaller towns like Fort Wayne and Cedar Rapids, Omaha and Cheyenne. People had to get out of their cars when they came to streams or river crossings, so they could wade in first to make sure the water wasn’t too deep. They also had to bring camping gear: in the deserts of Wyoming and Utah and Nevada, they’d likely pass more than a night or two without a roof over their heads. My dad used to say that someday he’d take us all on the Lincoln Highway, in the opposite direction, to see New York City and the Statue of Liberty. Never happened.

Before there were any bridges crossing the San Francisco Bay, the Lincoln Highway ended in the reclaimed marshland of the lower East Bay, passing by what must have been some of the unsightliest spots of the entire journey, like industrial Richmond or the swampy lowlands of El Cerrito, where I grew up in a tenement house across the street from a tannery and a slaughterhouse. Soaring San Francisco lay just across the water, but it might as well have been a universe away.

I used to watch the overdressed Easterners get out of their cars to stretch their legs, grimacing at the heavy odor of the cracking plant and the stink of fish. Sometimes they’d point at the shoeless, shirtless brown-skinned little boys casting their poor fishing lines into the water. I could tell they felt like they were in a foreign country. English wasn’t prominent down by the pier. In fact, few white people lived in the East Bay lowlands. Instead there were Italians and Greeks and Portuguese (on their way to being white), Chinese and Japanese, Mexicans and Blacks, all poor, all living in their own separate enclaves, all dreaming dreams of a better life.

Often the Easterners, on discovering that the next ferry wasn’t leaving for a few hours, would get back in their cars, pull out from the ferry line, and tool around a bit. If they headed off toward Oakland, they would probably have seen Miseryville, where, in the wake of the Crash, hundreds of homeless men were living in surplus concrete sewer pipes, one man each to a six-foot section of pipe, subsisting on produce discarded by local vegetable wholesalers boiled into a communal stew, larded with lint or sawdust to make it more filling.

Sometimes I felt like a foreigner too. But not at the pier; it was when I took the Key train that ascended the Berkeley Hills, which I did whenever I could, that I felt like a stranger. The train took people to the white neighborhoods dotted with middle-class homes and small shopping streets, past the university with its famous campanile, climbing up and up until the air smelled of sage and eucalyptus with hints of honey and mint and sweet oleander. High up in the hills, the train came to its terminus at the foot of the splendid, many-winged Claremont Hotel. The Claremont was the largest hotel on the West Coast, and its entire exterior—not only walls and shutters, but tower and gables and even the roof—was painted dazzling white, so that the structure seemed to float cloud-like in the fresh and fragrant air, an alabaster palace in the sky.

The Crash of 1929 hadn’t been an equal opportunity wrecking ball. Like the Spanish flu epidemic only ten years earlier, it hit those on the lower rungs incalculably harder than those at the top. At the bottom, millions went hungry; children scavenged garbage cans for potato peelings, fresh meat trimmings, or other lucky finds to contribute to a family dinner that might otherwise consist of ketchup sandwiches or a single loaf of bread and a can of beans; during rough spells siblings took daily turns eating; countless families were put out on the street, unable to make rent or pay their mortgage; within a few years after the Crash, half of all Black Americans were unemployed. But at the top, it was a different story. While a few gaudy fortunes were lost, for the most part those with a million in the bank before the Crash still had it after.

For them the Depression was a time of lavish spending. Maybe even more lavish than before, if only to distract themselves from the general unpleasantness out on the street—the panhandlers, the homeless, the mass labor protests. In the wake of the worst financial collapse in the nation’s history, the California rich spent like there was no tomorrow. They threw ever more extravagant parties. They dined on Russian caviar and Hungarian goose liver. And they packed into luxurious hotels like the shimmering white Claremont, hobnobbing with Barrymore and Garbo, dancing to Count Basie’s orchestra and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.

When I was a boy, I wouldn’t have dared set foot in the Claremont Hotel. The first time I went inside I was already a cop—not a detective yet, just a patrolman—called in because some rich kid had walked out on a massive bill. After I found the kid and made him pay up, I became something of a regular. I learned a ton at the Claremont Hotel. I learned how the rich drink their cocktails, how they sit—a rich man on a sofa or armchair always crosses his legs—what they say by way of small talk, how they smoke. I guess for me it was like finishing school.

And now, by complete accident, I happened to be at the Claremont again on the night Walter Wilkinson was murdered twice.

2

The maître d’, Julie, with his affected French condescension—the condescension was real enough, it was the French part that was fake—glided over to my table and asked me quietly if I could “assist” with a “matter” in one of the guest rooms. I knew Julie wouldn’t interrupt a customer in the middle of a drink if it wasn’t important, so I told the young woman I was with I’d be right back and followed him.

Julie handed me off to the Claremont’s night manager—a young sallow-faced guy I didn’t know—who lacked the maître d’s aplomb and instead looked like he was so nervous he was going to throw up.

“It’s Walter Wilkinson,” he whispered to me while we were waiting for an elevator. “Do you know who that is?”

“How could I not know who Wilkinson is?” I asked him back. “What about him?”

The elevator door opened, and the manager put his finger to his lips, meaning he didn’t want to talk in front of Pounds, the elevator operator. Pounds and I said hello.

Everybody knew Wilkinson was in town. An industrialist who’d made a fortune in Midwestern power and light, Wilkinson had come in second to FDR for president in 1940. Some people said he was going to beat him for sure this time. They were dreaming.

“Shots were fired in his room a half hour ago,” whispered the manager as we hurried down a long corridor on the sixth floor. He was so nervous his mouth kept moving even when he wasn’t talking. “He hasn’t answered his door since.”

“Who says shots were fired?” I asked.

“Guests. Three different guests. They heard the shots and called down to the front desk.”

We stopped at room 602, and the manager gave a tentative knock at the door. “Mr. Wilkinson? Are you there, Mr. Wilkinson?”

No one answered. The manager turned to me in despair.

“Open the door,” I said to him.

“I can’t. Mr. Wilkinson left specific instructions not to disturb him under any circumstances. If something’s happened to him, it will be a calamity.”

I took it he wasn’t expressing a political opinion. He meant a calamity for the hotel—or maybe for him personally. “I’ll tell you what’ll be a calamity,” I said. “The man bleeds to death in his room because you’re so solicitous of his privacy. Open the goddamn door.”

The manager nodded, swallowed hard, and used a skeleton key to open the door.

Walter Wilkinson was sitting on the edge of his bed, motionless but unhurt. He was dressed for a formal dinner: black three-piece suit, bowtie, shoes polished to a high shine, hair impeccable, but his face was as white as his cuffs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so ashen. He didn’t speak; he didn’t even look at us. I could smell his expensive cologne—Penhaligon’s. The bed he was sitting on was nicely made, and the room showed no signs of disturbance—except for a bullet hole in a wall near a standing lamp.

“Please pardon the intrusion, Mr. Wilkinson,” said the manager abjectly. “The detective ordered me to. Thank heavens you’re all right. We thought...