skin.
I turned around and glared at her.
She laughed and drove off.
24
MANY OF BAKERSFIELD’S public buildings were constructed after the summer of 1952, when two severe earthquakes struck within a month of each other, changing the look of the town, making it seem younger than it is. Although the older buildings haven’t all disappeared from Bakersfield, the city apparently got used to the idea of changing its look every so often, for Truxtun Avenue is a mix of architectural styles that range over a hundred years — by California standards, a respectable length of time.
On Truxtun at Q Street, next to the Kern Island Canal, the Beale Memorial Library is one of the more contemporary structures in the civic center area: a library of light and open spaces.
The local history collection for Kern County is housed in one corner of the building, enclosed in a room of its own. The materials there are noncirculating; a reference librarian is there to help, but she’s also stationed near the door, not far from a sign-in sheet.
The room has slightly different hours from those of the rest of the library and had just opened for the day, so I was the first one to sign in. I entered my name and wrote only “Las Piernas” under the address heading. For “area of interest,” I put “Bakersfield history” and left it at that.
The librarian gave me a smile as I walked back into the section of the stacks that housed information on the city of Bakersfield. I saw a couple of other people walk in, a middle-aged woman in a floral-print dress and an elderly man who was hunched over, walking with the help of a cane. Each browsed in other rows.
The section I was in covered a wide range of subjects, including stagecoach lines, railroads, ranching, mining, and oil. High school yearbooks and local magazines were on these shelves. Someday, I decided, I’d come back and look up Frank’s senior picture. That thought led to another temptation, to look up Diana’s high school photos. The lady in the floral dress turned down my aisle and seemed to be waiting for me to move along. It served to remind me that there was no time now for high school yearbooks.
The city annuals were lined up together. I discovered the one I was looking for and pulled it out. I took it to one of the round wooden tables that are lined up in front of the librarian’s desk and began to look through it.
The woman patron left. But her perfume seemed to linger. After a moment I realized that I hadn’t smelled any perfume in the aisle. The heavy scent was coming from the table behind me. It was the elderly gentleman; he has apparently doused himself in some sort of after-shave. I turned to look at him; he was bent over the book, his face close to the page, humming to himself as he read — no particular tune, just humming. I turned away and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.
I pulled out a pen and my notebook from my purse and opened the annual; I soon found the section I was looking for. It was two pages long. One page was devoted to the chief of police, half taken up with his portrait and half with a message from him; the latter was pretty standard rah-rah fare. On the page opposite were the ubiquitous K-9 unit photo, crime lab photo, and patrol car (with door decal in the foreground) photo. You could see similar photos in city PR publications just about everywhere; if the city had been working with a bigger budget that year, no doubt it would have included photos of a mounted police unit riding palominos in a parade and a couple of schoolkids smiling up at a public safety puppet show. They had, of course, sprung for the equally ubiquitous put- everyone-in-their-dress-blues-and-line-them-upon-the-front-steps police department photo.
It was this last that I was most interested in.
The good news was that the photo was in color and the men were all standing with their hats off — tucked into their arms military style, but off. The bad news was that the photo was taken from too great a distance — I’d have trouble getting a very close look at any of them.
“Pardon me,” a low, gravelly voice said. I turned to see the old man standing beside me, leaning on his cane. “Perhaps you could make use of this.” He reached into one pocket of his too large suit coat and pulled out a large red handkerchief. He wheezed a little laugh and said, “Oh no, ho! Not that.” He sniffed and reached again and this time produced a magnifier. He set it on the table next to me. “At my age, it’s impossible to get by without one,” he rasped, chuckling and putting away the handkerchief.
“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll only need it for a moment.”
“As long as you like, honey. As long as you like.”
He picked up his book and cane and shuffled back toward the stacks. That, I thought, was what I liked about people out here — their courtesy and friendliness.
Using the old man’s magnifier, I went to work looking over the group photo. I could not resist going to Frank’s photo first. Standing at the end of a row, young and smiling, but not so very different from the Frank I knew now. His posture was no longer so ramrod straight, and over the years his eyes had come to reflect more wisdom, if not cynicism. But the photo made me feel his absence more acutely, and I quickly moved to scan the other faces.
Many were familiar to me; I had met them when I worked the night shift crime beat. But the next one I studied was of a man I often wished I’d met — Brian Harriman. I stared at his image for a long time, just to make sure I wasn’t trying to see something that wasn’t there. When I thought of the picture on the mantel in Bea’s home, I realized that I should have known what to expect. In that photo, taken when Frank graduated from the academy, Brian had a little gray in his hair. He was far from completely gray then, and now, looking at this photo, I could see that he was still a long way from it two years later. He wasn’t the man Bret had described in the fax.
Some of Cecilia’s doubts about Brian must have bothered me more than I had acknowledged to myself, for I felt a sudden relief that could have no other origin than dispelling those doubts.
I found Bear Bradshaw next. Unmistakably gray. The same was true of Gus Matthews and Nathan Cook. I started making a more orderly search of the photo then. There were not all that many older officers. I found two others.
The next feature to consider was height. I knew Frank was six four, his father a little shorter. I put my notebook next to Frank’s photo, marked on the paper the distance from the top of Frank’s head to the step where he stood. Now I had a rough scale and held it up to the photos of Bear and Cookie and Gus. Not easy to judge, but they were all nearly the same height as Frank, Bear being the shortest. The other two silver-haired cops were shorter than Bear, but were they too short to fit Bret’s description? In Bret’s memory the cop had been bigger than Julian — but it was the memory of a terrified child seeing his father attacked.
I wrote down the names of the two older cops, men I hadn’t met when I’d worked in Bakersfield. The caption gave only initials for their first names.
M. Beecham and Q. Wilson.
