St. John's Bread Babula, William
St. John and his two intrepid partners get caught up in a tangle of missing children’s cases after he and Mickey rescue a baby about to be kidnapped in a public park. Mickey tries to tell him that he needs the “bread” to pay for his brand new Victorian stately home which houses him and their detective agency, but this case comes with a higher price tag than any of them are willing to pay.
Featured in Romantic Times, Mystery Section
1
Mickey and I were down in the natural sunken bowl where the tennis courts were located in Lafayette Park. It was a warm Saturday in March of another drought year in California but I was happy to be outside and moving around again. She was hitting practice balls to my forehand so I wouldn’t have to run around too much and I was trying with little success and some pain to return them when we heard screams coming from street level above us. They were high and piercing but just clear enough for us to make out what the female voice was screaming about.
"My baby! My baby! Help! Somebody help me!" The screams reverberated around us in the bowl, filling the air with her fear and panic. "Please! Somebody!" The pitch went up at least another octave.
With her racquet still in her hand, Mickey, clad in her pink and white tennis dress, instantly vaulted over the net and rushed off the court. I propped my racquet up against the net and struggled along behind her, still recovering from the trauma of a bullet wound that had put me in the hospital exactly a month before.
When I made it up the dozen wooden steps sunk in the side of a hill and got to the upper level I saw Mickey chasing down a short and stocky man in a Giants baseball cap, tank top, and shorts, who was running with a baby in his arms. Charging behind the man but fading fast was the distraught woman, still screaming. From the playground in the distance, other mothers and children watched the bizarre footrace towards the park exit in horror. They looked like they were frozen in time and space, figures in a color photo, shocked into permanent immobility.
I dragged along, trying to catch my breath, while Mickey, her short blond hair moving slightly in the wind, picked up speed across the grass. She had a good angle on the man but I wondered if she would risk a flying tackle that might injure the infant.
Still holding her racquet, without hesitation, she hit him with a tackle worthy of a 49er defensive back. So much for any doubt on her part. The man, the baby still in a blanket, and Mickey in her short pink and white outfit went down in a heap on the grass. Arms and legs tangled and then Mickey’s bare arms and legs swung and kicked free. In a deft move she landed her dark blue tennis panties squarely on the guy’s back.
As he tried to get up with Mickey straddling him, the man let the baby go to concentrate on this much larger and stronger problem. But no way was Michelle "Mickey" Farabaugh, ex-cop and one of my two partners in our San Francisco P.I. agency, going to let the would-be kidnapper escape. As he struggled to one knee, Mickey hit him in the back of the neck with the edge of her Head racquet. His cap flew off, exposing a bald crown as he went down flat on the grass.
The mother caught up to them and picked up the crying baby and cradled it in her arms, rocking it gently back and forth to soothe it.
When I finally got to the scene Mickey still had the kidnapper safely pinned down. He seemed barely conscious after the blow from the racquet. My partner was doing a fine job without my help.
"Call 911," Mickey said, finding something for me, the walking wounded, to do.
I turned to the mother, a pretty young woman in an aqua sweater and tight blue jeans. She had long brown hair and large dark eyes, and was wearing very little makeup. She was probing the infant’s arms and legs, feeling for injuries. I, the ever observant P.I., noticing the baby’s blue outfit, asked, "Is he okay?"
"Nothing seems broken. He’s just scared."
Lucky for Mickey and the detective agency I thought. All we needed was some kind of child endangerment suit. With more lawyers per capita than any other city except Washington, D.C., there wouldn’t be any problem finding a hungry attorney here more than willing to take the case. As a former attorney myself, before I had come to my senses, I knew what I was talking about.
The baby was quieting down, a good sign for us.
I went over to the playground where the other mothers were still in shock, but the kids had all seemingly forgotten about the strange scene of a few minutes before. The children were back on everything from the swings to the seesaw to the monkey bars. It reminded me of the way a herd of hunted animals would react after one of their number was cut down by a predator. They were safe. For now.
I told the women everything was going to be okay, but they just stared at me blankly. I guess an out-of-breath guy bringing up the rear wasn’t their idea of an action hero.
I found a pay phone by the playground rest rooms and called the emergency number and explained the situation. I gave the time and place information the woman on the line asked for and then I went back to Mickey, the mother, the baby, and the captured kidnapper to wait for the police.
The man was coming around and starting to squirm under Mickey’s weight. Mickey hit our bad guy on the head once again with the frame of her racquet.
"Nice forehand," I said, admiring her stroke.
"But he’s still moving." She cracked him one more time but now with a solid two-handed backhand.
He cursed all the crazy bitches in the world as he passed out of this one again.
"I’m working on that backhand," she said, as if explaining the whack on the head to him.
"I don’t think he can hear you and I hope you didn’t bend the frame," I said.
"If I did, it was worth it."
The mother, who was holding the infant up against her chest, kept thanking us. Then she added, "Who are you, anyway?"
I pulled out my card and explained that Mickey was my tennis partner.
"And a P.I.," she added.
The woman looked at the card and read aloud, "Jeremiah St. John, P.I."
Yes. Another marvelous rescue for the Jeremiah St. John Detective Agency, named eponomously after me. And a rescue that ended up getting us publicity on a grand scale in the Sunday San Francisco newspapers—which as it turned out wasn’t necessarily such a good thing.
The guy moved.
Mickey hit the man’s bald head one more two-fisted backhand.
"Don’t move."
The guy, either knocked out or tired of being a hairless tennis ball, didn’t move. Not until we heard the sirens. But by then the match was over for him.
First Mickey and I talked to a uniformed cop, giving him our statements, while another one, a young black woman, talked to the people on the playground, and while two detectives talked to the suspect in the back of a squad car. Then we talked to the detectives, two very young guys with short haircuts in matching neatly-pressed blue suits, Oxford blue button-down shirts, and red and blue striped ties. They were two city c
ops among many that I didn’t know.
Then we talked to the reporters, who must have picked up the scent of a story somewhere—probably on the police scanners that newsrooms monitored, or from a call from someone who spotted the police action and called a radio station for the fifty-dollar news-breaking reward. In any case, they were out in force, including one sound truck from the networks and one from a local news channel.
One reporter remembered a missing teenager case that we recently handled. The Finding of Vanessa Sable, I called it. It had been given only back page human interest attention at the time. But now it all came together for the media. For them the spin was that we were The Agency That Saves Children. Of all ages and sizes.
So they wanted to do a story on our agency and kids.
"No," I said. "That’s not what we usually do."
"Yes," Mickey insisted.
"That’s one against one," I noted.
"I have the Chief’s proxy," she insisted, a smile in her green eyes as well as on her lips.
The Chief, Chief Moses Tamiami, a six-foot-seven and some three hundred pound Seminole, former consultant to Indian Bingo games, former Las Vegas casino bouncer, former alligator wrestler in the Florida Everglades, was the third partner in the agency. I doubted the validity of the proxy, but Mickey insisted, and she was always too beautiful and charming to resist.
So despite my misgivings, Mickey got her way and the media got our story and we would have to wait and see the exact spin they put on it.
As we walked slowly back to the courts she said, "Now that you’ve bought the Victorian, we need money for the mortgage. The publicity will help with business." She swung her racquet with both hands in a practice backhand stroke.
The Victorian was the Stick-Eastlake style building on Octavia Street, only a few blocks away from Lafayette Park, that housed the agency on the first floor, and me in the apartment on the second floor. When I had been recovering from my bullet wound I’d spent some time setting up the financing to buy the place. Sure we could have used some more business, and some more money but I wasn’t sure this was the right way to go about it.
"I don’t know. Missing children are not good cases. They’re depressing and usually failures," I said as we walked down the dozen steps into the bowl.
"I don’t believe that."
"It’s also hard to charge the parents very much."
"That I believe. Especially for you."
Mickey acted like a hard-hearted bottom liner. But not all the time. I changed the subject.
"How’s the racquet," I asked as I searched around for mine.
"The frame seems fine," she said as she looked along it as if she were sighting a rifle.
"That’s more than I can say about mine." I looked at the spot where I had left my racquet. Only there was no racquet there. "Do you believe that someone ripped off my two hundred dollar wide-bodied racquet while we were up there with the cops and reporters?"
She looked at me funny. "You paid two hundred bucks for a racquet?"
"It’s one hundred percent graphite," I muttered.
"Of course. That explains it." She looked at me like I was one of those suckers born every minute.
We walked around the court but it wasn’t like the racquet was something so small you could miss it. No. It was gone. And there was no one on the other courts to hassle as either a thief or a witness.
"Damn. It doesn’t pay to be a good Samaritan," I shouted.
"Next time we chase a bad guy take your racquet with you."
"Especially if I don’t have a gun," I said as I kicked an optic yellow Wilson tennis ball across the court.
"You can get a good workout on your strokes on his head," Mickey said.
"I noticed."
Mickey twirled the racquet in her hand. "Take it as a good excuse to get a new two hundred dollar racquet. Or maybe they can sell you one for three hundred dollars this time."
"Well it was almost a year old," I said about my stolen one. Then I added, "And I can charge it to the agency weapons account."
Mickey the bookkeeper said, "I think not."
"You used it like a cop’s night stick," I noted, as I took one last look around the court.
"I’ll ask the Chief if he thinks that’s a reasonable expenditure," she concluded.
Like most people, I preferred not to upset Chief Moses if I could avoid it. Even though he was mainly a Teddy Bear he could easily turn into a grizzly.
"I’ll charge it to my own American Express card," I concluded.
"Smart boy."
With only one racquet between us we didn’t have much choice about what to do. I collected the tennis balls and we started to pack up our gear. I noticed Mickey was digging in her tennis bag, looking like she had lost something.
"What’s wrong?" I asked.
"I can’t believe this. Somebody ripped off my clean underwear! It was a brand new bra and underpants! I was going to shower and change after we played!"
A year ago I would have offered to buy her some new intimate items in a rainbow of colors from Victoria’s Secret. That was then. But the pain of the recent loss of a woman—a girl really—I had loved was still with me like the pain of my bullet wound. I kept quiet because I could not forget Olivia Shimoda. Ollie. Ollie the young and beautiful Asian girl with cascading black hair, dark eyes, and perfect unmadeup skin. Ollie. Ollie. Dead.
"Weirdo! Pervert!" Mickey yelled to no one.
And no one answered.
"Somebody will think you’re yelling at me," I complained.
She looked at me and said, "Take it as a compliment."
"Not that long ago I would have."
We finished packing up and walked back down the Octavia Street hill in silence, minus one racquet and one set of women’s underwear, to our office in the classic Victorian. Which for better or worse we now owned.
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