Free From Berkeley with Love by Hamilton Waymire

From Berkeley with Love
By Hamilton Waymire
    Nineteen eighty-nine was a year of turmoil. The Loma Prieta quake shook the Bay Area, the Berlin Wall crumbled, and the demise of Kricken & Associates forced me to set up my own agency.
    I got myself a fancy two-room suite in a high-rise building on MacArthur Boulevard, not far from John Wayne Airport. An attorney’s practice to the left and a tax consultant’s to the right set off my office between them. The embossed sign on the outer door said in gilded letters: Benson Keirstad, Investigations . My savings would pay the rent for maybe three months, if I didn’t eat, but I wasn’t too worried, having snatched old man Kricken’s client list before anyone else could get their dirty hands on it. In the late morning of my third day of self-employment, I was busy making solicitation calls when I heard the bell jingle in the waiting room.
    Linda Cramer and Ron Mayer looked like the quintessential Orange County couple—well-to-do, stylish, arrogant, and in a constant state of bickering. At first I silently cursed her for wearing such an offensive perfume. Then I realized the scent was his.
    “What can I do for you?” I asked, looking from one to the other.
    “I’m the one who wants to hire you, Mr. Keirstad,” said the woman. Her voluminous blonde mane framed a no-nonsense face, complete with black horn-rimmed glasses. The mid-length skirt displayed a pair of slender legs to great advantage. Had it not been for the lines around her mouth, she might have passed for thirty.
    I turned to her. “Certainly. What’s the trouble?”
    “We’re being blackmailed,” she said. “Twenty-some years ago, we belonged to a small commune of free spirits, up in Berkeley. The times were very different then. We experimented a lot—drugs, sex, you name it.”
    “I never did drugs,” Mayer interjected.
    “Yeah, right,” she snapped. “Anyway, this guy Steven Wainer took photographs. Now he’s threatening us with the pictures.”
    “What kind of pictures?”
    “Of an intimate nature. Outré enough to compromise our positions.” She pressed her lips together as if to signal her reluctance to go into details.
    “How much does he want?”
    “Fifty grand from me, fifty from him.” She motioned to Mayer with her head.
    I remarked that it seemed unlikely for Wainer to run separate accounts for a couple.
    “Oh, we’re not together,” Linda said quickly. “Just old acquaintances. We all sort of lost touch in the seventies as the appeal of flower-power wore off, you know. Ron and I only ran into each other about a year ago. We didn’t even know we both lived in Orange County.”
    Our conversation revealed that the situation was somewhat worse for her than for him. Linda was dean of humanities at a private liberal arts college and a leading figure among Orange County Republicans. She didn’t say it in so many words, but it appeared that she had ambitions to move up to Sacramento. Mayer worked as a physician at the Newport Coast Medical Center, directing the emergency department. He didn’t think Wainer’s photos would necessarily threaten his career, although they certainly wouldn’t help him either.
    “So what do you want me to do?” I asked.
    “ I want you to find the S-O-B and get the photos from him,” Linda said. “Ron thinks we should pay him off.” She scoffed at her companion.
    Mayer shrugged. “Fifty thousand isn’t such a big deal for either of us. I just thought it was less risky than sending a private dick after him.”
    After an aggravated sigh, Linda pointed out to him—surely not for the first time—that blackmailers never quit.
    He lifted his hands, palms up. “All right, all right. I’m here with you, so calm down.”
    I asked if they knew Wainer’s whereabouts, but all they could tell me was that the letters had been mailed in Ventura. Neither Linda nor Ron had heard from him in over twenty years.
    “Can I see the letters?”
    “I burnt mine,” said