Over the ensuing decades, after my retirement and a subsequent career as a P.I. specializing in criminal cases, I had begun to make a breakthrough into the mystery of my father. Slowly, gradually, since his return to the United States in 1991 after a forty-year absence, I had established the beginnings of a relationship with him. I was almost fifty and he was eighty-four.
I believe my change of career had helped us in some ways. I knew that he had on occasion worried about my personal safety. But now I was no longer the metropolitan homicide detective waiting for the midnight callout to a Hollywood murder. No more six o'clock news interviews with the L.A. press reporters who wanted to be assured that 'an arrest is imminent.' Those glory days were behind me now. I liked retirement. I liked my new work as a P.I. I liked the fairness of it all. It had been twenty-four years for the prosecution and almost fourteen years for the defense. A recent major victory for an innocent client was still reverberating through my psyche. My life was moving toward a natural homeostatic balance. And now, seeing my face reflected in the airplane window at 35,000 feet against a cloudscape so thick you were sure you could walk on it, that balance was upset and all I could feel was a hole where the past had been. I kept picturing my father over the years: the young 1920s crime reporter, the bohemian artist, the silky-voiced radio announcer, the meticulous surgeon, the austere but dominating psychiatrist, and finally the entrepreneurial marketing genius who had moved to Asia in 1950, abandoning all of us.
My father and I couldn't have been more different. My job as a street detective in the Hollywood Homicide Division had taught me how to size up and read a person's character. I was good at it, and most of the time I was right about people. I made lots of mistakes about other things in life, but rarely was I wrong about people. My judgment was intuitive and accurate, partly developed, partly inherent.
Where Dad was rock, I was water. My father was clinical, almost bloodless in his dealings with people. If he was intuitive, it was so far below the surface you wouldn't even know it was there. He was a hard and cold individual with a huge ego whose demeanor bordered on the tyrannical. 'King George,' friends called him in jest, but it was true. Perhaps his demeanor was the result of his many years of living in the Orient, in Manila, where there are just two classes — the very rich and the very poor. But I think not. I think it was always there, always a part of him. He was a man I had not liked even when he telephoned me out of the blue with what he said could be the offer of a lifetime.
In 1973, he had asked me to come to Manila and take a look at his business. He had said, 'Come over and take a look at what I have built in Asia. Come over and consider the possibility of working for me, Steven.' By then he had built market research offices in Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore, and his offer was tempting. I was single again and, at thirty-two, with no children, I was free to remake my life. Visions of exotically beautiful women, along with palatial living quarters, danced like sugarplum fairies in my head at night. So I took six weeks' leave of absence from my work at Hollywood Homicide. I wanted to get as clear a picture of the operation as possible.
By then I had been promoted to detective. It would have been a huge decision if I had chosen to leave LAPD and give up my pension when I was already halfway around the track. Here I would not be my usual impulsive self. Not on something so important that it would affect the rest of my life. So I took a leave to explore my father's world and a life that was waiting for me if I chose to embrace it.
The six weeks in the Orient were totally indulgent. This boss's son was spoiled rotten and catered to beyond his dreams. But beneath the excitement, the fun, and the entertainment of it all, I knew it could not be. I simply could not work for such a man. His oversized business cards with his near-imperial title said it all: 'Doctor George Hill Hodel, Director General.' He was a control freak, and I would not subordinate myself to him. I felt like a player in a big-stakes poker game, holding only a pair of sevens and knowing there was a much stronger hand in the game. I folded.
But by the 1990s, all that had changed. He was no longer the megalomaniac of old. He became the prodigal father returning to his native soil, changed and reformed. Now at eighty-three, his fires still burned strong, but not with the white heat of twenty-five years earlier. He was different now, settled into a final long-term marriage with June, whom he had married in 1969. With her encouragement he had exchanged much of his robber-baron lifestyle for a slower, more comfortable existence, more in keeping with his advancing years. By the time he returned to the United States from his expatriate years in Asia, he was more forgiving and accepting. And so was I.
Our attempts at a new relationship were gradual, tentative, and laborious at first, typically expressed through faxes and notes. It was the start of communications between us that would grow stronger as the trust built. As the years followed I would make increasingly regular trips to visit Dad and June in San Francisco, and they, in turn, would make occasional trips north to Bellingham to visit me and to explore the beauty of the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound.
For the first time in our adult lives together, quality father-and-son time would go beyond the formalities of a business meeting and take on the aspect of something social and even human. Now our gatherings would even contain some laughter, and I would be permitted brief glimpses at the man who had always walked through life behind an iron mask. It would only be a peek, though, and the occasions were rare, but it was enough. I could see that my father, after so many years of being a stranger to his son, was beginning to mellow. I had made a breakthrough with him. Though he still felt awkward and uncomfortable talking about feelings and things of the heart, I knew I could finally begin to broach some personal and honest topics with him so as to touch on what to me was the only truly important thing in life as far as I was concerned — communication and relationships. But it was too little too late.
Just a week before my father's passing, I was concerned about his health. I had heard nothing by fax from him or June for quite a while. I'd invited them to come up during the summer, stay with me for a week or so, and we could make the short drive to Vancouver, Canada, for sightseeing and day trips.
Sensing that his health was failing or something else was amiss, I faxed them and asked him directly about his physical condition. On May 9, 1999,I received the following fax:
May 9, 1999
Dear Steve:
Thanks for your fax of yesterday May 8. Your photos also arrived yesterday and are great depictions of your beautiful new home, and we do wish that we could see it with you.
There is a reason why you haven't heard much from us for the past few months. We certainly miss seeing you for prolonged periods such as this.
The fact of the matter is that I have been going through a particularly difficult situation in regard to my overall health. We have not wanted to expose to you or to anyone else the full extent of my present debility and overall weakness and general helplessness. This would be humiliating, and could leave a much tarnished image in your minds.
I am now wheelchair-bound, and cannot get around without a great deal of help from June, plus the wheelchair and rolling walker. On the rare occasions when I must go out to see a doctor we also need the help of a hired limo with a strongly built driver.
None of this comes as an actual surprise to me. The overall clinical picture is just about what we would
