Dance Around the Treasure Box: A Novel Based on Conversations Between Fred and Others

By Brigitta Gisella Geltrich-Ludgate

Dance Around the Treasure Box is a novel, which was written at the end of the Vietnam War years and rewritten in 2013-2014. It focuses on the ups and downs of a Vietnam War hero, Fred, readjusting to the United States, finding a job in the Greater Los Angeles area, taking care of his free-spirited wife, and then facing an unexpected child. Even though the novel has some flashbacks, it mostly deals with a short period of time, a couple of months or so, and focuses on conversations with Fred or about Fred.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499057218

Brigitta Gisella Geltrich-Ludgate

Brigitta Gisella Geltrich-Ludgate was born in Kitale of the British East African colony, today’s Kenya, and was raised until school age on a farm with the name Kalua-Estates. She received her basic education in various European countries as well as in a boarding school in Lucerne, Switzerland. Even though Lucerne is in the German Swiss, the school conducted all its classes and communications in French. Her BA and MA degrees were earned at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her Ph.D. studies were completed at the University of California Berkeley and the University of California Los Angeles. She holds an AA degree in creative writing from the Palmer Writer School, at-tended several years of memoire writing through the Monterey Peninsula College, where she had the opportunity to share her writings with fellow students, most of them outstanding writers, and bought several courses in creative writing from The Great Courses. As professor in academia, she has numerous academic as well as creative writings presented at national conferences and published in academic journals as well as in local papers. She is the author of twenty-four books, with two volumes of memoires in the final stages and a novel about a father and son moving to Alaska almost completed.

Book preview

PERSONAGES

Fred Brockney: a Los Angeles Police Department undercover detective

Peggy Davey Brockney: Fred Brockney’s wife

Gina Brockney: Fred and Peggy Brockney’s daughter

Mary Brockney: Fred’s mother

Sandy Brockney: Fred’s father

Mark: a husky Santa Monica Beach lifeguard

Hillary: a dance partner of Peggy

Cynthia Pracker: a gynecologist in West Hollywood

Larry Brooks: a police car rookie

Jerry Ward: Fred’s immediate superior at the police station house

Lieutenant Daniel Franks: lieutenant of the narcotics and homicide divisions

Bob Miller: a police detective

Erwin Baker: a police sergeant

Sam: a policeman keeping watch at the site of the damaged house

Hank Spellman: Fred’s friend at the police station

Tom Jackson: senior lawyer of the Jackson-Stephens law firm

Larry Stephens: junior lawyer of the Jackson-Stephens law firm

Ludmilla: general secretary at the Jackson-Stephens law firm

Debby Meyers: a secretary of Peggy Brockney

Ben Lockart: Fred’s lawyer

Syd Travers: a pharmacist

Pete Fryor: Syd Travers’ young assistant

Bill: Syd Travers’ assistant

D. F. Smith: Syd Travers’ Malibu narcotics’ counterpart

Herb: D. F. Smith’s assistant

CHAPTER ONE

Peggy Is Coming Back

Sonny, Sandy said on the phone, just wanted to let you know Peggy is back.

Peggy? Where?

In LA.

In LA?

Yes. And get this, Sonny, she’s the junior member of Jackson-Stephens.

Your lawyer’s firm?

Yeah.

I’ll take it, she’ll come over.

She knows the place.

Yeah. She must have come to a decision.

It’s about time, wouldn’t you say so?

Knowing, Peggy…

She had over four years.

Four years and ten months.

Yes, four years and ten months.

I’ll bring Gina over, just in case.

Do that. You can leave her with us till things blow over. Mary would love to look after her. For that matter, so would I.

Fred Brockney hung up. He rubbed his chin. It was mechanical. He did that when he was thinking. His long legs moved by themselves as he crossed the floor to the side door of his beach house. Outside stretched the Santa Monica Beach, almost golden yellow in the morning sun. He did not see the sand, nor did he see the early bathers and sun worshippers, who regularly came here and knew him. They wanted to stake out the best place before the tourists came. They greeted him. It was equally mechanical. He did not see them. Finally, he stopped at a nearby rather dilapidated lifeguard stand in dire need of being repaired, at least being painted. A burly lifeguard, all biceps, had taken up a seat on top of the stand; a curvy, well-tanned brunette sat to his side. Fred looked up at the lifeguard. Now, there was a figure anybody could be jealous of. Even Fred. Fred had a good figure himself, always fit. He had to be fit. He was a lawman and steadily on the run after someone, climbing up and down the many hills around Los Angeles, jumping from one boat to another and from the helicopter into the bay, not to forget hurdling out of the biplane on its flight from San Pedro to Catalina Island. But his figure was nothing compared to the muscles the lifeguard enjoyed to flex under that well-tanned skin, soaked in all that sun-tan lotion.

Mark was the Tarzan of the beach, without trees and vines from which to swing, just a single lifeguard stand and steep ladders, which he took with much more grace in a hurry after a voluptuous blonde than Tarzan ever did along a vine after a jungle invader. Mark had no vine on which to swing, no rope of any kind. The only rope he had was the tiny one that hung around his neck, with the whistle on its end. Mark got the greatest enjoyment out of blowing that whistle. It gave him authority. It gave him power. He mostly blew it at skimpily dressed female bathers to draw their attention to him. He was in control of the beach and over whatever the bathers were going to do in the waters. He was going to watch them. They had to do what pleased him.

Mark, said Fred with his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, where is Gina?

She’s with the Sand Castle Set, said Mark, momentarily lifting his dreamy blue eyes from the curves of the girl next to him. His white teeth sparkled as he broadened his smile. His hand moved out into a wide swing, pointing somewhere in the near distance from the lifeguard stand, where the silhouette of a Ramada stand was visible.

Is that what they have graduated to?

Yeah, from yesterday’s sand-cake bakers to today’s sand-castle makers. Gina sang a little tune at their graduation yesterday morning.

She did what?

She sang.

I didn’t know she could sing.

Mark laughed and then turned his attention back to the heaving chest of the brunette that slowly moved under the skimpy, lacy bikini top. Fred smiled and took his foot off the ladder. He turned toward where Mark moments ago had pointed. There was a temporary Ramada stand erected with a stretch of colorful nylon spanned over its top. A group of small children played in the shade of the Ramada stand underneath the colorful nylon. Fred looked at the children. All of them were busily playing in the sand, some clumsily trying to create castles at varying degrees of perfection. Fred smiled. Most of the castles reminded him of lopsided clumps of moist sand, something like the cakes he used to bake, first in the sand and then later, in his house.

/~/

The beach community of about eleven houses and a couple of insignificant huts and three mobile-home trailers was not much, especially nothing as pretentious as the beach club a few hundred yards south that catered to the more elite homes of Santa Monica. The beach community consisted of average people, working at various jobs in the greater Los Angeles area. They were only a handful of people, but they had fought for years to get supervised playground areas for their young children. They had gone to the Santa Monica city hall and had written their congressman, but to no avail. The more they had fought for supervised play areas, the less came of it. The men and women of the eleven houses, the couple of huts, and the three trailers had then come together and had formed their own committee, and after much disagreement and much argumentation, they finally had agreed to chipping in each of them a certain amount of money, those with children somewhat more—it was only a flat one-hundred dollars per month for Fred, with one child. He could afford it, even on a policeman’s salary. The Ramada stand was set up, built by the locals themselves from barnacle-covered logs brought down from Oregon or from even further north that had washed against the coast of Southern California. Finally, the city let them have one of their almost unusable lifeguard stand—an old one—defunct for its purpose to stand with others along the many-mile-long beach fronting the Los Angeles area and its many suburban areas, north and south. The rest of the money went to paying the salary for Mark and his occasional replacement and the lifeguard whistles each of them wore, as well as for the two girls from UCLA (the University of California Los Angeles) who in concurrence with a work-study program, came every morning, five days a week, to the Ramada stand to supervise the children in two groups: those just out of diapers and up to five were in the sand-cake baker group, while those over five until school age were in the castle-maker set. Those no longer interested in playing in the sand, were under Mark’s supervision, who would have preferred adolescent girls and young women to anyone else. This was a temporary arrangement, only for the summer months this year. But with summer along this part of the beach often lasting from May to December, the children were going to be taken care of for quite a while, giving their parents some time to be free of them to pursue their hobbies or proceed to their jobs.

/~/

You’re stepping on my castle, said a boy to Fred.

Fred looked down to his feet. It was just another clump of wet sand he stood on. He would have loved to show the boy how to build a sand castle. Had he not carried away the master sand-castle-builder title two years in a row when he was only six and seven? He could build a sand castle like the best of them. Almost as well as Sandy, his father, built sand castles. Sandy was the best sand-castle builder, ever. Maybe that was how he got his name, Sandy the Sand-Castle builder. Mary, Fred’s mother, always said it was because of his hair. Sandy’s hair had the color of the Santa Monica sand, golden with a tinge of brown. He did not look like a Fred at all, even though he was Fred’s father and both carried the same first name.

When Fred was born, Sandy refused to be called Frederick Senior or Frederick Brockney the First. He preferred Sandy and this name stuck, and nobody ever asked if Sandy had another name. Fred, the son, had dark hair. Dark curly hair and hazel-green eyes like his mother. He was a Fred. At least in his baby books, he looked like a Fred. Nobody thought about calling him anything else but Fred.

/~/

An almost five-year-old girl, with a golden-brown ponytail bopping and a deep tan underneath the wisps of hair that fell around her face, looked up. She looked straight up at Fred’s eyes and smiled. The worry signs on his face, which had not left since Sandy’s call earlier that day about Peggy’s return to Los Angeles, had disappeared. He smiled at the child.

Gina, he said, kneeling down next to her.

Gina brushed a wisp of hair out of her face. Some of the sand from her hands was left and trickled out of the hair back onto the sand pile in front of her. Her eyes were large as she looked at him.

I’m building a castle for you, Daddy, she said, putting her arms around his neck. The sand from her hands seeped down his neck and along the back of his sweatshirt. His back started to itch, and Fred reached for the spot with the hand that was not holding the child.

That’s nice, he said, scratching. You think there will be enough room inside your castle for my legs?

Gina moved out of the embrace and seriously summed up the situation. She measured him well, every inch from his head to his toes, all six feet and three inches, and somewhat more when he was not slouching. He always felt guilty being taller than most anybody else. Gina shook her head vigorously. The ponytail bounced from one side to the other.

Let’s go to Grandpa and Grandma, he said, getting up.

Okay.

Gina started to brush the sand off her clothes before rubbing her hands clean. Fred took the tiny hands and cleaned them even more. Then he brushed her clothes off somewhat more and walked with her toward the steps that led to an overpass to the bluff behind the beach.

/~/

Sandy and Mary Brockney lived on top of the bluff in an old cottage. It was in walking distance from the beach and the Ramada stand and not much farther from Fred’s beach house near the parking lot. There was a footbridge from the bluff to the Santa Monica Beach, passing over the Pacific Coast Highway, with a couple of sets of stairs on the beach side and some more steps on the bluff side. The bluff house overlooked the entire Santa Monica Beach and farther as far as the haze allowed it, and over wide stretches of the Pacific Ocean. Sandy was a retired sea captain—an old salt as such—who had dropped out of college in younger days and foreswore university education forever in order to travel the wide open seas. So had been his desire. But he traveled only one of the oceans, the Pacific Ocean, in sloops up and down the coast from Mexico to Alaska and back again, hauling freight of any sort that needed hauling by sea. One could say he was an expert in hauling freight on the Pacific Ocean. When he grew older, he concentrated on managing a fishing fleet, doing much of its fishing himself and supplying the ever-increasing restaurant demands of fresh fish in the greater Los Angeles area, from Malibu to San Pedro. The money he had earned over the years, he had invested first in a private sloop, which became his home and on which he took Mary, his wife, with him everywhere and then Fred—while Fred was small. Then he thought to invest more wisely, in Los Angeles real estate along the coast, including the bluff house, and in the coastal hills. He invested while the investing was good and he made money. He was wealthy now, a rather wealthy man. Nobody would have ever thought that by looking at him and at the old bluff house. He was still the old salt who had dropped anchor for the last time some ten years ago and had settled in the old but beautiful bluff house, with its living room overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The scene from there extended for miles up and down the coast. Sandy felt like being behind the helm of his ships and he commanded the Pacific Ocean well every night from his living room, sitting there like a captain in his easy chair by the wide picture window, sailing out into the golden sunset.

It was a safe ship to command, the old bluff house, one could say. Until recently, that is. Of late, the annual rains that came to the Los Angeles bay early in the year began to tear at the bluff and the damage grew larger with time and was now encroaching Sandy’s property dangerously closer. Some of the beach property around his piece of land had been lost over the years. Farther up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, whole stretches of summer homes, cottages, and residential areas of Hollywood’s elite had been battered by wind and rain and the sea and then torn down by the powerful onslaught of breakers that gnawed on the various bluffs. There was no more thought of rebuilding because the Pacific Ocean was reclaiming what once had been its own. Sandy watched, looking with worried eyes toward the bluff in the back of his house growing less and less in volume, and the land between his terrace and the drop off to the Pacific Coast Highway below growing alarmingly narrower—so much narrower that he had gone to measure it daily with a yardstick. In two years, three the most, the land from the terrace to the drop-off area would be gone, no matter how much tarpaulin Sandy lay down on it and down the bluff to keep the land from sliding away. It would inevitably slide and then the house would go with the slide. The hill in front of the terrace of the old Laughton mansion up the winding crest road had already disappeared, tearing along with it the massive mansion. Only crumbled-up logs and splintered glass remained, lying there everywhere. Last year, there still had been some land between the terrace and the cliff of Sandy’s home. This year, some of the land behind the terrace had started to disappear. It appeared to be only the terrace that still remained. Sandy felt a sense of alarm.

You’re worrying too much, Mary, Sandy’s wife, kept saying. She had said so repeatedly. What did she know? She was not the one who repeatedly has gone to measure the land with the yardstick after every rain and found it a couple of inches if not a foot shorter than it was before the rain had come, pelting mercilessly down on the land. There were only twenty feet left. Mary was not good at measuring anything. To her, the land looked just as wide as it had looked when they purchased the land and the bluff house over thirty years ago.

At best, Mary was a bluff woman. She was a beach woman. She