The Do-Re-Mi Read online

  “I killed him.”

  The deputy leaned backward and gaped. “Come again.”

  A sob came from behind me, from Ava. The deputy made a half-turn and called to the jailer, who was at a desk scraping corrosion off a flashlight. “Spence, come here on the double.” Spence hustled our way. “Where did you leave him?” the deputy asked.

  I handed him Pop’s car keys. “The green one opens the trunk.” Spence led me down the hall toward the cages. Though I heard Ava sob again, I didn’t turn or look over my shoulder. I wanted to see her crying no more than I wanted her to see the despair that was squeezing the life out of me.

  I said to the jailer, “The car belongs to Tom Hickey. He's in the hospital, in Eureka. Please keep it somewhere safe for him.”

  Twenty-six

  ALVARO had dodged a brush fire, bloodhounds, and airplanes but never traveled more than ten or so miles from Evergreen until, after two days up and down the foothills and into the Trinity Wilderness, before dawn Saturday morning he had returned to the outskirts of Evergreen to finish the job one of Phil Ochs’ amigos had paid him for. Keeping Phil alive.

  Ochs had told this amigo he was spooked of the jamboree, outdoors in firearm and redneck country. When the amigo heard a decorated soldier who was Phil’s friend would be there, he and my brother made a deal.

  In July, Alvaro went to a party, danced and drank with a girl who ran with the Cossacks. She didn’t know details, only that a Cossack had gotten paid by somebody to whack the commie songwriter.

  So Alvaro studied the terrain, learned from Big Dan where the stage would be set up, and calculated where a Cossack sniper’s best position would be. And when the sniper I believe was Hound Dog lowered the sights on his rifle, Alvaro sighted his 30.06, waited a couple beats, and fired into the dirt at Hound Dog’s feet.

  As the biker got off his wild shot, he wheeled and ran, so did Alvaro. Through the woods close to the river, he crossed the creeks called Jim Beam and Old Crow, all six or eight miles to Roy Van Dyke’s A-frame.

  Sunday afternoon, while Roy confessed to us, Alvaro was hiding out at the migrant camp across the highway and over a hill from the airport. After we left, Pastor Bob followed the Van Dykes’ neighbor, Pedro Marti Sr., who drove Roy’s Dodge, which he had stashed behind his cabin, to the migrant camp. He gave the truck to a Mexican mechanic with instructions to strip it and use or sell the parts. And he delivered a note to my brother.

  The note asked X to meet Roy and his cupids that night after dark five hundred paces along Grizzly Creek north of Highway 36.

  Alvaro guided them over a pass through the Trinity Wilderness, where little Ophelia turned her ankle. The men took turns carrying her. In a village called Wildwood, they arranged with a farm worker to drive them in the camper bed of his pickup across the Sacramento Valley. He dropped them near Mill Creek. They climbed into the Sierra Nevada and reached the Pacific Crest Trail, along which serious adventurers hike from Canada to Mexico and some campesinos trek a thousand miles before descending into the Central Valley where they can make a few dollars an hour, enough to support their family back home.

  Through September, my brother and his troop lived like bears, on fish and berries. Roy got bit by a rattler while deflecting its attention from Ophelia. Oedipus came down with a rash like hives.

  South of Mount Whitney, where the mountains were dry and the lakes cesspools compared to those they left behind, Roy traded sinsemilla to campers for dried fruit and nuts and powdered eggs that sustained them until they crossed the Mexican border.

  POP had a broken collarbone and internal bleeding. He would stay in the hospital at least three weeks. A lawyer named Ramos gave me the diagnosis when he came to introduce himself and say Paul McNees had hired him to represent me.

  “Why should McNees pay for me?” I asked.

  “I guess that’s his business, not ours,” Ramos said. “He sure didn’t tell me.”

  I hoped Ava had put him up to it. More likely, I thought, McNees was paying off the killer of his daughter Lola’s rotten boyfriend and meth provider.

  I told Ramos everything. He suggested I might go free if I bent the truth, claimed Vic had ordered me at gunpoint to follow him into the forest with my Cadillac, since the trunk was big enough to carry a mountain of poached marijuana. If that were the case, Ramos mused out loud, “It could be that Vic meant to steal the car. Could be he tried to shoot you with the pistol he kept in a holster strapped to his Harley, but which has gone missing. But you moved faster and popped him with the tire iron. That could be.”

  “Plead guilty,” I said.

  The day of the hearing, Ramos said, “That biker gang packed up and split.”

  “Who chased them out?” I asked. “The law or the hippies? Or did they just give up?”

  Ramos shook his head. “They’re gone all the same.”

  THE marshal who came from Eureka and drove me to my hearing looked too old to be employed. All the way, he talked about fly fishing the Klamath River. Besides the marshal, the judge, and the prosecutor, only Ramos and I attended the hearing.

  The charge was voluntary manslaughter. I let Ramos do the talking. Both he and the prosecutor failed to mention that Vic was already down and half dead when I bashed him with the tire iron. The judge went out for coffee or something and returned to deliver a sentence of three to six years. Ramos convinced him that a guy as educated as me could best pay my debt to society on a road crew and tutoring illiterate felons in a certain program he knew.

  BEFORE I got sent to the Siskiyou Honor Camp near Yreka, Steph the waitress visited. She said Paul McNees had talked Ava and her sister into a trip to Hawaii. He was paying the bill. Nobody knew when or if they would return.

  Twenty-seven

  IN fall, along 1-5 in the shadow of Mount Shasta, we repaired potholes, pouring, raking, and tamping hot tar. Evenings I tutored. I didn’t sleep well, only a few hours each night before I woke and brooded, often trying to understand how my life would proceed from here on.

  I couldn’t imagine a future. A convicted felon can’t practice law. And my passion for music had cooled as I saw I had no gift for composing. After all I had experienced in Evergreen, if I had a gift, songs should’ve come to me. They didn’t.

  I tried to make some kind of peace with the killing I’d done, like Alvaro and other veterans of a war they suspected was futile and perhaps wicked but they fought anyway. But few or none of those veterans had mashed a tiny fallen man with a tire iron.

  That Pop gunned down Danny Katoulis and went on to become a far more than decent man gave me some hope. But he had Mama to help him.

  I had nobody. Not Pop or Alvaro. Their highest motive was justice. They couldn’t forgive me because they never blamed me. They blamed Little Vic. Mama would’ve blamed Vic and me both and forgiven us both.

  Forgiveness had to come from someone like Mama who could see my evil heart and love me anyway. Mama could forgive anybody because she knew we all are part God, part devil. Like God is love, the devil is pride. And pride had turned Vic and me into killers.

  FOR all of us who hadn’t tried to flee or assaulted any guards or fellow prisoners, Thanksgiving was a holiday. A Calvary church from Mount Shasta brought us turkeys, yams, biscuits, and canned creamed corn.

  But what made me almost glad to be alive was, we got to eat with our families. Because the mess hall wouldn’t hold everybody, we ate outside in an icy wind, on frozen benches with our feet in snow.

  I saw Pop at the gate. But when they let him enter, he didn’t hustle over to me like he had every weekly visit before. He loitered just inside, chatting with other visitors, while a woman all bundled in a ski cap and full length down coat walked toward me. Until she came so close I could see her frosty breath, I didn’t even dare to hope she could be Ava.

  She wore no makeup but her lips and cheeks were rosier than ever. Her hair was braided. She looked a few years older than she had three months ago. She was too tan for a hippie girl in winter.
And she looked so happy I stood waiting for her to announce her engagement to some Honolulu surfing legend or brain surgeon.

  “I asked your dad where Alvaro is,” she said. “He told me to ask you.”

  So we sat on the frozen bench and I told her the story of my brother’s journey. I told her Alvaro wrote me a letter most every day and that he phoned Pop often and promised he would come home as soon as he helped the Van Dykes get settled.

  “Where are they going to settle?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t say. Pop doesn’t ask.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Clifford, I love you, and your family. Do you think I would turn in your brother?”

  “Maybe you’d turn in Roy. He killed your boyfriend.”

  “You’re my only boyfriend,” she said. And though she had read the rules that forbade prisoners and guests from making any physical contact, her hand crept and folded over mine.

  “Maybe Costa Rica,” I mumbled. My heart swelled. But I looked around and saw three to six more years. Then my heart broke open.

  Ava let me weep on her breast, even after a guard shouted at us. He was a decent guy. When I waved at him, he turned and walked away.

  THE END of The Do-Re-Mi, but hardly the end of the story.

  Next you will want to read The Vagabond Virgins and learn what becomes of the all these mysterious Hickeys.

  A Request from Hickey & McGee:

  We certainly hope you have enjoyed The Do-Re-Mi. If so, please write a few words about the book and post your review somewhere online.

  The Hickey Family Crime Novels

  THE BIGGEST LIAR IN LOS ANGELES: (L.A. 1926) Unless a famous evangelist will take agnostic Tom Hickey into her confidence, he may never learn if the Ku Klux Klan lynched his friend. San Diego Book Awards Best Mystery.

  THE GOOD KNOW NOTHING: (L.A., Tucson, and McCloud, CA. 1936) Author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, an outlaw who may be the Sundance Kid, and publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst stand between Tom and the truth about the disappearance of his father. Los Angeles Book Festival Best Mystery Award.

  THE VENUS DEAL: (San Diego, Mount Shasta, Denver, Tijuana, 1942) A gifted jazz singer leaves her job at a San Diego nightclub to avenge the sexual crimes of a spiritualist guru. To stop her, Tom needs to find and contend with a mob hitman.

  THE LOUD ADIOS: (San Diego, Tijuana, 1943) While serving as an M.P. at the Tijuana border, Tom encounters Nazis plotting to make Baja California a German colony. Soon enough he realizes the only way to stop them requires him to raise his own army. PWA Best First P.I. Novel

  THE ANGEL GANG: (Lake Tahoe, San Diego, L.A., 1950) An L.A. mob’s beef against Tom results in the kidnap of pregnant Wendy Hickey. Tom alone can’t rescue her, but if he can enlist the help of the Las Vegas mob as well as angels, in whom Wendy steadfastly believes, maybe …

  THE DO-RE-MI: (Rural Northern California, 1971) The Hickey’s adopted son Alvaro, a musician booked at a folk festival, flees from a murder accusation. His brother Clifford’s best chance of proving him innocent requires the help of hippies and Jesus freaks. Shamus Best Novel finalist.

  THE VAGABOND VIRGINS: (San Diego, Rural Baja California, 1979) A heavenly apparition appears in Baja California rallying the faithful to overthrow the corrupt Mexican government. Alvaro Hickey joins her crusade.

  MIDHEAVEN: (Lake Tahoe, 1974): Jodi McGee, whom readers will meet again in The Very Least and yet again in the Answer to Everything, tells the haunting story of her treacherous eighteenth year and the battle between her devotion to God and her love for a teacher. An Ernest Hemingway Award Best First Novel finalist.

  THE VERY LEAST: (San Diego, Tijuana, Lake Tahoe, 1985): A dear friend of Clifford Hickey's cousin Bo crosses the border on the run from a charge of molesting children in a church nursery school. After journalist Clifford offers to help Bo clear her friend, he infuriates gangsters, politicians, and tycoons on both sides of the border. And what's more, he meets and falls for Jodi McGee.

  THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING: (San Diego, Tijuana, Lake Tahoe, 1990): Attorney Alvaro Hickey plays a role in the murder of a Tijuana cartel sicario then becomes the alleged murderer’s lawyer. The cartel, which has lately massacred an entire family, now targets another whole family, the Hickey-McGees.

  About Ken Kuhlken

  Some of his favorites are early mornings, the desert in spring, kind and honest people, baseball, golf, martial arts, and other sports played by those who don’t take themselves too seriously, most kids, and films he and his Zoë can enjoy together. He reads classic novels, philosophy, theology, and excellent mysteries and thrillers. He often recommends Ross Macdonald, Patricia Highsmith, John Lescroart, Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, Ruth Rendell, and John LeCarre. He is also a fan of Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving. Please follow him on BookBub to see his recommendations and reviews.

  He has long been the author of novels, stories, poems, magazine features, and essays. Lots of honors have come his way, including acclimation from the National Endowment for the Arts; Poets, Essayists and Novelists; Private Eye Writers of America; and San Diego and Los Angeles Book Awards.

  Though he advocates beer on you tube, he actually prefers red wine, and Scotch now and then.

  To reach him, go to kenkuhlken.net or join him at:

  Less is More, a more or less monthly newsletter

  Facebook

  Twitter

  Goodreads

  and please follow Ken on BookBub