• Bill Crews
• Bridgett Finn

Walker edged out of bed, careful not to wake Bridgett, who was arranged in her usual manner — a light cotton blanket wrapped closely around her body and over her head like a hood. Only her mouth and nose were visible. She had adopted this mummification technique as a kid to keep the monsters at bay after watching a rerun of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Standing beside the bed, surprised at how loose he felt, Walker tried to remember if there were any construction materials between him and the door. It was hard to keep track of the unfinished home-improvement projects. He didn’t want to trip over a table saw or a pile of 2x4’s.

They lived just off of Alcatraz Avenue in North Oakland. The neighborhood had progressed from a well-kept district to a drug zone to an uneasy mixture of menacing decay and gentrification over the past sixty years. In the early Eighties, a few hardy souls (translation: mostly gay couples) started restoring houses. Some of the larger homes were fully refurbished to their earlier splendor, but they might share the block with an abandoned firetrap, an ugly modernist apartment from the Sixties, or a public housing eyesore with a hardpacked dirt “lawn” that doubled as a parking lot.

Bridgett had grown up in San Francisco, so this was sort of like an inferior version of home for her, albeit with sunnier weather. It was the first time Walker had ever lived full-time outside of Arkansas, Louisiana, or Texas. When they bought their ramshackle, two-story fixer-upper in 1987, four months after they arrived in town, it was the worst house on one of the uglier blocks in the neighborhood. Bridgett’s parents, from their lavish perch on Russian Hill, had urged them to purchase a house as an investment.
They were in love but had decided against getting married. If you were committed to each other, what was the point of a state-sanctioned contract? The mortgage broker disagreed. They didn’t make much money and had no savings. Matrimony would improve their credit rating. So they got married on a Tuesday at the Oakland City Hall. Walker was ten minutes late because an interview ran long. It was one of those moments where seemingly fundamental beliefs, forged in late-night conversations in college dorm rooms, are jettisoned in the heat of financial reality.

Numbers became a vital part of their lives. The house was listed at $159,000. They bid $155,000, which was more than enough because there were no other offers. They could only scrape together a 10 percent down payment, with a lot of help from Bridgett’s folks. Walker was 26. Bridgett was 28. They were married and owned a house in the Bay Area. They felt like adults.

None of this was elaborately planned. It just sort of happened when Bridgett, as she described it, lucked into a job at St. Millicent’s College, an obscure academic outpost in the Oakland Hills with a reputation for militant feminism and a hazy affiliation with the Episcopalian Church. Although men had reluctantly been admitted in the early sixties, they were a distinct minority and Womyn’s Studies was the most popular major. It was all supposed to be a short diversion. They’d fix up the house, sell it for a profit, and move on to something better. Soon.

“You’re doing this the right way,” said their real estate agent, a pert woman in her forties who lived in upscale Piedmont and drove a Saab. She kept calling the neighborhood “AlcaTel” — a combination of Alcatraz and Telegraph Avenues. Walker never heard another person besides their real estate agent use this geographic designation. Well, except for the nearby Alcatel liquor store. “AlcaTel is going to take off and you’re getting in on the ground floor,” she promised.

It was an unfortunate phrase because the ground floor itself proved problematic when Walker put his foot through a weak spot in the living room’s “rustic Douglas Fir” subfloor. That was just the start of the apparently never-ending home repairs that followed. The neighborhood, however, didn’t hold up its end of the bargain; it seemed to stagnate from the day they bought their house. The army of young, urban pioneers expected to conquer AlcaTel with checkbooks, power drills, and knowledge gleaned from episodes of This Old House on PBS went missing. Some of the nicer, single-family houses even converted back to rental property when the owners wearied of getting asked for change or, on occasion, being relieved of their wallets at gunpoint on their after-dinner strolls.

Walker was getting cold in his T-shirt and boxers as he ran down the inventory of projects in his head. He decided the path to the door was probably clear. He quietly wrapped his own blanket around him and took baby steps toward the door. Once he made it downstairs, he immediately looked out the front window to check on the car. He hated parking it on the street, but the driveway was filled with bricks for the patio they had planned to finish two weeks, or maybe it was two months, earlier. The Volvo was still there, but it had picked up some dust from the parking lot. He could rinse it off when the sun came up. It was 4:30.

The Colonel didn’t take long to invade Walker’s thoughts. He thought about seeing a therapist, but the paper’s health insurance didn’t cover it. Walker had heard that your parents determine the contours of your mental landscape, but he considered the Colonel his psychological cartographer. He was sure that if he replayed what happened enough times, it would free him from something, enlighten him somehow.

Still wrapped in his light blue blanket, he bent at the waist to test his hamstring again. When all was well, he could reach down and touch his toes with his legs straight. This time, he could barely form a 90-degree angle, his body mimicking an upside-down letter L, before his leg began to tingle and tighten. Still, satisfied by his relative progress, he scuffed over to the built-in bookshelf in the living room, careful to avoid the hole in the floor and the stack of bathroom tiles in the corner. He knew the exact location of the two hardbacks he wanted. He pulled them from the crowded shelf and walked over to the couch, pushed a stack of newspapers and magazines onto the floor, and carefully sat down, like an elderly man taking a seat in a crowded movie theater.

“Sherlock’s Book Mine” was stamped in red on the inside cover of each book. Walker spent a lot of time there when he was growing up in Fayetteville, combing the aisles and sitting in the old chairs scattered about the place. Numerous blind corners meant that he could find a spot around a bend and rarely see another customer. By the time he reached junior high, Walker fantasized about making out with various girls from school in the store’s assorted dark corners. Sex and books: two of his primary interests combined.

Walker had figured that if anyone knew something about the Colonel’s alleged literary exploits, it would the bookstore owners — Ben Sherlock and Tom Shelton. Sherlock, as everyone called him, had grown up in the store, which occupied a three-story brick building at the edge of downtown. Since Ben was known as Sherlock, the regulars referred to Tom as Holmes.

By the time Walker discovered it, the Book Mine was widely known. The huge store was filled with small rooms, comfortable chairs, and some of the less-expensive Persian carpets the two owners collected. A narrow balcony hung over the main floor, with books shelved to the ceiling.

When Walker stepped into the bookstore on a fall afternoon in 1978, Sherlock and Holmes were behind an imposing wooden checkout counter that doubled as a security barrier closing off the rare book section.

“If it isn’t Walker Percy Hanlon,” Holmes said when he looked up. He had sold Walker an old copy of “The Moviegoer” and a biography of Walker Percy in preparation for Brighton’s class earlier in the year, and he’d given him the new middle name the same day. “What can we do for you?”

“I’m trying to track down a book by someone who used a pseudonym, but I only know their real name. Well, I think it’s their real name. I only know the name they’re using now.”

“What’s the alleged, possibly fake name he’s using now?” Holmes asked.

“Charles Brighton.”

Sherlock and Holmes looked at each other.

“You know him?” Walker asked, excited but nervous his inquiries might somehow get back to the Colonel.

“We know of him,” Sherlock said. “We heard someone named Charles Brighton had been hired to teach at St. James about ten years ago. We recognized the name.”

“Is he famous?” Walker asked. “Or did he used to be famous?”

“Not quite, although a few critics figured he would be some day,” Holmes said. “He wrote two novels that caused a brief stir, then he disappeared completely.

“If he got good reviews, why’d he disappear?” Walker asked.

“Walker, good reviews don’t get you famous, good sales do,” Sherlock said. “And his books didn’t sell. It’s depressing, but even someone with his talent can drop off the map. Although he certainly could have landed a publisher if he had another book finished.”

Holmes added, “We’ve been waiting for someone to come in and ask for his books. You’re the first. He’s done a great job of keeping a low profile.”

“Did you ever hear about him killing somebody?” Walker blurted out.

“Where’d you hear that?” Sherlock asked. “Is that the rumor at the high school?”

“Well, sort of, there’s a lot of rumors. I’ve heard he slept with a college girl and then killed her boyfriend. Or the other way around.”

“The other way around? Did he kill her before he slept with her?”

“Sherlock, control yourself,” Holmes said. “You’re liable to start a whole new rumor before Walker here leaves the shop.”

“No, he may have slept with a boy and then killed the guy’s girlfriend,” Walker tried to explain, getting confused himself and realizing he was giving more information than he was getting.

“Now you’re talkin’,” Sherlock said. “What else?”

“All right now,” Holmes said, giving Sherlock a look. “Mr. Hanlon, we have two copies of Brighton’s books in the general fiction section. Look under the name Layton Anderson. Because you’re such a good customer...”

“He’s more of a good reader than a good customer,” Sherlock cut in, smiling at Walker.

“Yes, he does read more than he buys, but we understand he’s on a limited budget.”

Coming Thursday, July 8:

Installment 12: The Colonel revealed