Television cameras were like sunlight and water to the mayor. He stood straighter, and his eyes and facial muscles assumed the look his underlings called “resolute.” He seemed to drink power from the microphones.
At this moment he was giving the reporters a somber procession, a portrait of the city’s wise leader walking the scene to survey the damage. The camera operators took in the sight and transmitted it to their studios, and the reporters spoke in reverent tones, knowing the mayor would be out again soon to give them the chance to question him, to ask him respectfully how the people of the city should feel about today’s developments. They knew he was as aware as they were of the need to get the interview transmitted in time to make the early evening news, so they trusted him.
As soon as the entourage had traveled down on the escalator to the platform, the chief checked to be sure the newspeople were too far behind to hear. Then he said to the mayor: “I’m sorry to get into this right now, Mr. Mayor, but we’re on an emergency footing. We’ve lost two officers, an engineer, and three civilians. You’ll recall that when we let Dick Stahl resign, we made an agreement with the police commission to approve a contract with his security company to let us use him as a civilian consultant to the Bomb Squad.”
“I remember the idea, but I never signed off on it,” the mayor said.
“After what happened today, I’m convinced we ought to make a move on this now.”
The mayor got to the bottom of the escalator and waited while the chief and Deputy Ogden glided down. “You’re telling me that having Stahl on the payroll would have prevented this? Would he have put on a bomb suit and gone down there to defuse the bomb himself?”
“I don’t know what he would have done, sir, and that’s exactly the point. He knows the best ways to approach an explosive device, and we don’t have anybody else who knows it as well. We know he personally defused three very large and complicated devices during his few weeks as commander, at least a couple of them so big that there was no point in wearing a bomb suit.”
The mayor’s expression became brooding and resentful. “How do you know he hasn’t been setting these bombs himself and then taking them apart? He would know just how to do it because he put them together. I’m not the first one to wonder about that, either. At least two of the reporters up there have said as much.”
The chief was frustrated, and his voice turned hard. “He’s been cleared of any suspicion. Homicide Special found that there was no chance he did any of these crimes. None. Zero.”
Deputy Chief Ogden said, “He wasn’t even in the country the day the fourteen men were killed. He was in Mexico. I was in his office and saw him arrive from there the day after it happened.”
The chief said, “He’s got alibis for every bomb. He was in front of the TV cameras defusing a bomb when—”
“What about Gloria Hedlund? What was he doing when she blew up?”
“He was at the station, from the time of the press conference until seven, with other police officers present while he cleared his office. And then he was with Sergeant Hines all night until morning, when Captain Almanzo woke him.”
“She’s Stahl’s girlfriend, for Christ’s sake. And she had reason to hate Gloria too. You call that an alibi?”
“She’s a sergeant on the police force. And she’s also a victim of the bomber with severe injuries.”
“I don’t believe having Richard Stahl inside our government and giving his advice to our police would have done anything to prevent this.”
“We just lost a bomb technician supervisor with twenty-two years of experience. He wasn’t good enough to outsmart this bomber. Stahl has done it repeatedly. We have the best explosives expert in the West still willing to help us. We’d be foolish not to take his help.”
“I’ll do better than that,” said the mayor. “Call the FBI again and ask them for their very best man to be assigned here on temporary duty. We’ll pay his salary and expenses, and he can be in charge of all bomb-related activity. We’ll give him all the support he wants.” The mayor shrugged. “Problem solved.”
As the mayor moved ahead, Deputy Chief Ogden said to the chief: “Mind if I go back up for a minute?”
“No,” said the chief. “Calling Stahl?”
“Yes. I think I should tell him.”
“Right. But let him know we’re going to keep trying.”
39
Steve and Debbie Garrick drove into the parking lot beside the picnic area in Fern Dell at 12:15 p.m. on Saturday. They were in their Suburban, and when all the seats were installed and the kids were strapped in, they could carry both of them, six of the boys from the baseball team, their equipment, and the picnic supplies. Haley and Ron Steiner had the rest in their van, and they would be along in a few minutes.
They had been practicing all morning at a field in Griffith Park, and now they were all hungry. Debbie tugged at the big cooler of food she had made before dawn and pulled it toward the back door. Then she tapped it on top so the boys knew she wanted it out. As the two Morales boys and Henry Cooper lifted it, she watched her son, Dennis, try to help. He wasn’t as strong as those boys, but at least he had the alertness and hustle to get in on the work.
Debbie stifled the feelings that surfaced unexpectedly. She had been a star softball player in high school and college, and later she played in a women’s hardball league for three years. She had gotten used to keeping to herself the fact she was so much better at baseball than her husband, Steve, and now their son too. But that didn’t mean she’d forgotten.
The problem she faced had been being a woman. She had fallen in love with Steve at the age of twenty-four, and in a year Steve had passed the bar exam. He wanted to marry her, but she knew if she married him she would have to drop out of the league. She couldn’t be his wife and travel with a baseball team. Her team had played in a championship series in Venezuela the previous season, and there were signs that they were good enough to keep competing at a high level. But baseball was a game, and being Steve’s wife was a future. She tried various methods of putting him off. She told him she was perfectly happy to keep having sex with him regularly while she was home without getting married, and would even live with him for the entire off-season. She made an argument that this would probably be the future pattern for most male-female relationships. But he was a good lawyer. He lined up all his arguments and then marched them past her in review — children, house, financial security, shared risks and rewards, and the near certainty that if they remained single, one of them would meet someone else and move on.
She still had a better arm than Steve, and she was fairly sure she could still outrun him, maybe even by a larger margin than she could at twenty-six, because of her jogging and taking care of the kids every day. When she and Steve were coaching the baseball team she always took the secondary role. Steve would instruct and give pep talks and she would demonstrate. She pitched batting practice, popped fly balls into the outfield for the fielders to drop, and hit grounders for the infielders to bobble.
Her life had not been a disappointment. It was just that her hands still longed for the feel of the horsehide in the precise diameter of the regulation ball. She loved the smell of the glove leather, the grass, and the exact shade of reddish dust in the infield. None of those things had anything to do with Steve.
She was in her mid-thirties now and would have been at the end of her career, probably already a step slower toward first base. And women’s baseball had not grown into the sensation everyone used to assure each other it would be by now.