Which was a big help!
“The way things are I can’t even divorce him,” Judy sighed. “Even though Mickey’s ‘missing’ he still exists as a legal entity for another six or seven years, but I can’t divorce him because I can’t actually serve the papers on him.”
Catch-22!
That was a marvellous title for a book…
Sabrina had a copy of Joseph Heller’s pre-war bestseller and although Judy had not read it — she had had no interest or taste for reading war books before the October War and less now — her friend had read long sections of it aloud and was fond of quoting what she called ‘Yossarian think’ every time another general or admiral came on the TV or the radio whining about the latest defence cuts.
In reflective moments Judy wondered how many thousands of women, and men too, were in her situation? The divorce law and the ‘missing persons’ assumptions within the judicial system remained what it had been before the war; and yet in the meantime the whole World had been turned upside down.
One was tempted to ask what the Federal Government had actually been doing in the last thirteen months except ringing its collective hands!
“Don’t you just love lawyers!” Sabrina empathised with a theatrical flourish.
Chapter 17
Lieutenant Walter Brenckmann had been stowing his gear ahead of his departure for New England when the news had arrived of the shooting in Oakland. About an hour later he had been informed that since he was currently unassigned, having formally handed over his operational responsibilities to his Gold crew counterpart, and having received his orders to ship off the Blue crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, he was to take charge of the administration of SUBRON Fifteen’s ‘response’ to the tragic death of the Squadron’s commanding officer and his wife.
That response was ostensibly limited to one of ascertaining the family’s wishes as to the disposal of the body and the treatment of Admiral Braithwaite’s personal effects on Navy property, and reporting back to the Executive Officer of SUBRON Fifteen; which was a problem because he was currently at sea carrying out an operational fitness certification exercise onboard the newest addition to the Squadron, the Lafayette class boat USS Alexander Hamilton (SSBN-617), his duties in turn having devolved to the next most senior officer in the Squadron, Commander Troy Simms of the USS Sam Houston (SSBN-619).
Commander Simms had told Walter that he ‘would deal with the brass and the Navy Department, you just concentrate on finding out what happened to Admiral Braithwaite and keeping his family happy.’ Which suited Walter Brenckmann just fine and confirmed his previous opinion of Troy Simms as a good officer and as ‘the regular guy’ everybody who had ever had anything to do with him had said he was.
The first part of his remit was relatively straightforward; the Navy insisted on a burial with full military ceremony and honours, that went without saying, but the feelings of the Admiral’s wife’s family were to be given due respect, and ideally, the circumstances of the apparently ‘senseless killings’ needed to be resolved for ‘the record’.
It was this second part of his remit that was problematic.
He had spoken over the telephone to Mrs Braithwaite’s next of kin, his younger sister a cultured, patient, tearful, very understanding woman who lived in Virginia, and to Mrs Braithwaite’s attorney, a piece of work who operated out of a high rise in Los Angeles just off Hollywood Boulevard. This individual had spent half-an-hour telling Walter what rights the Navy did, or rather, did not have in determining the form, timing, or general ‘militarization’ of the interment. Fortunately, the wills of the deceased couple were explicit about being buried together, specifying Episcopalian funeral services and their mutual contentment to accept whatever honour the United States Navy wanted to bestow upon one of its most accomplished sons. Moreover, from Walter Brenckmann’s perspective — much to his relief — the Navy side of things was a strictly by the book exercise. Tradition and convoluted written regulations covered every conceivable aspect of the form of the funeral and its surrounding ceremonial. Moreover, the Alameda Naval Air Station Chaplain and the diocese of Oakland were already on the case; his one big outstanding problem was that the Oakland Police Department was also very much on the case of the Sequoyah Road shootings.
Honestly and truly, Walter Brenckmann could not begin to imagine how the detectives he had thus far encountered found their way to work each morning. ‘Dull-witted’, ‘thick-eared’, and ‘stupid’ were much over-used words and descriptions in pulp detective fiction but the officers he had thus far had to deal with were the living embodiment of their B-movie stereotypes. These guys probably had trouble remembering where they lived!
It was for this reason that he had taken the unusual step of formally requesting to speak to the only witness to the murders, a twenty-one year old understandably traumatised waitress who had been on her way to start her late afternoon shift at the Sequoyah Country Club on the afternoon of the killings. There was no way he was prepared to submit a report to the Navy Department for Commander Simms’s signature unless he had acquired at least the outline of a coherent account of what had probably transpired on Sequoyah Avenue.
The Oakland PD had tried to block this meeting. However, Walter Brenckmann was nothing if not resourceful, and very stubborn, he had requested the US Navy’s Liaison Officer at the Governor’s Office in Sacramento for his ‘advice’ as to how to proceed, in the ‘interests of avoiding a Navy-Oakland PD incident’, and this had suddenly opened previously locked doors faster than he had imagined possible.
Walter had been astonished to receive a telephone call three hours later from one of the Governor’s female staffers informing him that the arrangements had been made for him to meet the witness to the shooting. Furthermore, a car would be sent for him to take him to the ‘safe house’ where the young woman was currently being protected by ‘Federal Agents’.
Waiting for the submariner in the back seat of the 1959 Cadillac at the gate to the base was a grim-faced blond whom he guessed was three or four years his junior. There were two FBI men in the front seats. They could only be FBI men because they were dressed in dark suits, white shirts and wearing Homburgs on an unseasonably warm winter morning bathed in glorious sunshine.
“I am Miranda Sullivan,” the woman explained flatly. “We spoke on the phone, Lieutenant Brenckmann. Agent Miller is driving us this morning; Agent Christie will brief you on developments during the journey.”