“No!” The young woman with the lazy, southern drawl spat angrily. “Me! He never kidnapped me and he sure as Hell didn’t have to rape me! I was only twenty when I came out here with Dwayne. We knew we couldn’t ever have any life back in Jackson. There was nothing for us in Alabama. We couldn’t even hold hands on the street and my folks said they’d throw me out and disown me if I ever saw him again. So we ran away. We like, eloped, except we never did the marrying thing. We reckoned that out here on the West Coast things wouldn’t be great but at least we wouldn’t get our house burned down if we moved in together. If anybody had found out Dwayne had laid a finger on me back in Jackson he’d have been lynched. Anyway, so we ran away. But then Dwayne got in with that,” she was going to say something profoundly un-Christian, thought better of it, “man, Johnny Seiffert, and being a backing singer on a couple of records sort of turned Dwayne’s head, and things just got out of hand.” She glared at Miranda. A moment later she stabbed a pointing, accusative finger at the taller woman. “And then that bitch took Dwayne away from me!”
Walter scratched his head.
This was surreal in a way that the night of the war onboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt had never been. Methodically shooting off the boat’s Polaris A2 missiles at intervals of two to three minutes had seemed like a bizarre peacetime exercise. All those megatons of death bursting from the Theodore Roosevelt’s silos with a whoosh of compressed air, breaking the surface, blasting skywards at ever increasing velocities, all of that had been so clinical, disconnected with Armageddon. Afterwards, the boat had run deep, nobody had talked overmuch. What was there to say?
“I did no such thing!” Miranda protested hopelessly, her voice a shrill, angry hiss. “I didn’t take Dwayne away from you! He couldn’t wait to fuck me stupid! Besides, I was completely out of my head! We all were! I haven’t seen him since that night. I didn’t even know what his name was until just now. After you found us together that night Johnny threw us both out onto the street at gun point!”
Walter was beyond head scratching now.
“Okay…”
The women looked daggers at him for his temerity in intruding into their personal space.
The Navy man was not to be put off so easily.
“This fellow Dwayne John,” he inquired doggedly, “does he have anything at all to do with what happened to Rear Admiral Braithwaite and his wife on Sequoyah Road earlier this week?”
The women stopped looking daggers at him; instead they looked at him with pitying patience as if he was the village idiot.
“Of course not!” They chorused before they let their brains process the question he had just asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Darlene Lefebure said, without confidence.
Walter had much preferred ‘of course not’ to that answer.
He made a determined effort to sound like an officer and a gentleman: “Well, perhaps, if you told me what you saw the other day, Miss Lefebure.”
A somewhat strained normality briefly asserted itself.
“I work at the Sequoyah Country Club but the bus that runs from Mountain Boulevard to Skyline Boulevard doesn’t detour onto Sequoyah Road, so I have to get off at the Keller Avenue intersection and walk the rest of the way to the clubhouse.”
“You are a waitress, I gather?”
Darlene Lefebure nodded, crossed her arms across her breasts as if she was cold.
“I’ve worked there the last six months. The money’s not great but it’s steady, you know?”
“Were you early, late or about on time on Monday afternoon?”
“I was late. I clean house for an old lady over on in Eastmont most mornings and on Monday she wanted to talk. She’s getting old and her kids don’t come round often.”
“So you were late. How late?”
“Ten minutes. I was hurrying, out of breath when I saw the car, a big black Chrysler, pull off the road. I was coming around the corner from Keller Avenue. Maybe seventy or eighty yards away.”
“What did you see, Miss Lefebure?”
“I saw this tall guy in uniform get out for the driver’s door. He walked round to the trunk. I thought maybe the car had a flat and he was getting something out of the trunk, but…”
“In your own time,” the man assured the young woman. Darlene Lefebure was curvy, plain, her face freckled, a complete contrast to Miranda Sullivan’s leggy, slender beauty. She was self-conscious, unnerved by the attention, eager to reach out and grab any hand which promised a scintilla of support and friendship.
“I didn’t really believe it when he shut the trunk and he was suddenly pointing a shot gun, one of those pump action ones, at the back windows of the Chrysler. He just started firing, on and on and on. And then he stopped, reloaded and walked around the side of the car and fired some more.”
The Oakland PD report estimated as many as a dozen shots had been fired — 20 gauge — into the car. Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite had been killed by a shot to the back of his head. It was likely that his wife, Dolores, had still been alive when the assassin walked around to the side of the Chrysler to riddle both passengers with a second fusillade.
“Did the gunman see you, Miss Lefebure?”
The woman nodded jerkily.
“But he didn’t fire at you?”
“I ran into the woods. That’s where the Oakland PD found me a while later.”
“How close did you get to the Chrysler, Miss Lefebure?”
“Maybe twenty-five, thirty yards. I kept on walking, it was like I was in a dream, only I was so frightened… I wet myself…”
“Quite natural,” Walter assured her gently, seeing the tears welling in the young woman’s eyes. “How soon after the murders did the FBI bring you here?” The question was thrown into the mix, a casual afterthought that was anything but casual in its intent.
“That night. A couple of Special Agents came into the room the second time the Oakland PD guys interviewed me.”
“Special Agents?”
“All the Feds dress the same,” Darlene Lefebure explained patiently.
“The dark jackets and white shirts,” Walter half-smiled and the woman reciprocated in kind.
“Yeah, and they had that look they give people.”
Nobody at Alameda had even known that Rear Admiral Braithwaite was missing until the next day. He had failed to return to the base that afternoon for a routine meeting — which should have started the alarm bells ringing — but the senior officer of the station, the executive officer of the USS Hunley had deputised for him in the absence at sea of SUBRON Fifteen’s second-in-command and his own captain. That afternoon the Hunley’s commanding officer had been attending a conference with contractors at Mare Island.
The news of a shooting near the Sequoyah Country Club had been on the news on Monday night but there had been no details, no mention of a senior US Navy officer and his wife having been the victims. In fact there had been a news blackout on the details for nearly thirty-six hours; yet he FBI had turned up within a few hours of the killing?
Walter decided the sooner he handed this one off to the US Navy’s Special Investigation Branch the better; in fact he was beginning to ask himself why SIB were not all over this already? Of course, the way things had been lately, for all he knew the entire SIB division of the Navy Department had been abolished or ‘mothballed’ along with two-thirds of the surface fleet and seven of the ten biggest aircraft carriers ever built. From where he and his comrades in SUBRON Fifteen had sat the defence policy of the United States of America seemed to have been condensed down to a strategy of ‘mess with us and Strategic Air Command and the Polaris Fleet will turn your country into rubble’. If the October War had taught the movers and shakers in Washington DC anything, it was that the age of conventional, non-nuclear warfare was over. If that was the case; who needed big grey surface ships, fighter-bombers, armoured divisions or all those expensive military bases and naval dockyards?