5 Great Reads by Jim Perkins

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CAMELOT DOWN BERKELEY 1969
DECEMBER 1997

 Paul Morrison hunched his shoulders against the cold winter rain and ran into the lobby of Berkeley’s Claremont Hotel to attend the retirement party for his old California Highway Patrol buddy Warren Mooney.

Though not overly tall, Paul stood slightly stoop-shouldered so that he did not look all of the six-foot-two that he actually was. His once curly black hair had thinned considerably. He’d gained some weight – doubted he could get back into his old uniforms - and he didn’t shave everyday any more like he had when he was on the Patrol. He thought maybe he should have shaved for this special occasion, but decided if anyone would understand Warren would.

The hotel glittered with bright Christmas-season decorations. The lobby featured royal-blue carpeting, a long mahogany reception/check-in desk, several beautifully covered arm chairs, overhead chandeliers, and a huge, meticulously decorated Christmas tree.  The hotel had originally been built as a 19th Century castle for the bride of a prospector who struck it rich, and it looked like a castle to Paul’s mind – not like the Camelot castle, but close enough.  In 1915, the prospector’s castle was reborn as a grand hotel.

Paul fleetingly thought of the time he and Christie Yeager had spent the night there.

A throng of holiday celebrants was milling around in the lobby when Paul arrived and he was so distracted by taking the decorations in and greeting people he almost stumbled over the body lying on the floor.  What the heck?! Were Warren and his other CHP buddies playing some kind of macabre joke on him? Paul had encountered a lot of bodies in his short time with the Highway Patrol, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the woman sprawled out on the floor was nothing more than a plastic blow-up doll.

Then a female in the lobby throng screamed, “She’s not breathing!”        

Paul realized he was looking at a real person; a real live person. At least she didn’t appear to be dead. She didn’t seem to have that “expired” aura about her yet; the look he had seen many times that would have said her soul had left her body.

 “Somebody do something!” a bystander cried.     

The prone female was a mature woman, pretty, but like Paul himself, no longer a young age. She vaguely reminded him of someone he knew, but who that was did not come immediately to mind. She was wearing a short black knit dress that revealed a pair of very nice legs - round and soft - and her skin tone was still healthy looking in spite of the fact she was a mature woman. 

Her breasts swelled under the bodice of the dress. Her silver blonde hair cascaded down past her shoulders, which seemed unusual for a woman her age. She was wearing bright red nail polish.

Nobody else seemed to be springing into immediate action so Paul did although it had been many years since his initial CPR training. He sighed and kneeled by the woman prepared to try to save her life.  If this was a joke he’d go along and humor the people making fun of him. Better to be made fun of than standing around watching the woman die.

“Thirty years ago I learned how to do this and never once have used it,” he thought. “Now, after all that time, here’s somebody who actually needs it.”

Paul bent over the woman’s face to ascertain if she actually had stopped breathing. Then he felt for a pulse at her carotid artery. He couldn’t feel a pulse, but he’d never been very good at feeling for a pulse anyway. He yelled, “Hey! Hey!”  Receiving no response, he pressed his mouth against the woman’s mouth and blew breath into her lungs.

“We don’t do it that way anymore, dude,” a young guy who looked like a cop reminded him. “If she passed out from drinking she could puke in your face.”

 “You just push on her chest now,” someone else said.

Then Paul thought he heard one of five young guys standing in a semi-circle around him say, “And boy what a chest!”

Indeed, he noticed as he placed his hands on the woman’s chest in the prescribed manner, taking care not to touch her breasts any more than was absolutely necessary, that she did have a nice rack – as the expression went.

“Hey! That looks like Christie Valentine. She used to be a big time TV weather woman,” someone said.

“That’s Christie all right,” someone sounding like Warren said.

Paul looked up momentarily to see his old pal Warren standing above him and grinning widely.

“Hey buddy,” Warren said.

Christie Valentine?

Paul scrutinized the woman’s face as he continued to press on her chest. Of course her last name hadn’t been Valentine when he’d been “involved” with her; it had been Yeager in those days.

Fifteen compressions a minute - was that right? Was Christies’ life in his hands now, after all those years when he’d once let her slip away?

His involvement with Christie began the summer of 1968. Even though their relationship didn’t survive very long he couldn’t help thinking it might have gone on way longer had it not been for all the turmoil in the world - especially the turmoil that engulfed the campus of the University of California, Berkeley – and Christie’s desire to report the news. Paul’s life changed forever after Berkeley.

DEATH IN THE GALLATIN VALLEY 

Thirty years after a woman’s father commits suicide because he is suspected of the brutal murders of her mother and brother, the woman who is a successful defense lawyer in Seattle, WA. buys a silver bracelet on eBay with an inscription that reads, “Frogs don’t drink up all the water in the ponds they live in.”

Because of the inscription, the woman recognizes the silver bracelet as one that belonged to her father, a ditch rider in the fertile farmlands of Montana’s Gallatin Valley. Why wasn’t the bracelet given to her after her family members’ deaths? How did someone else get hold of the bracelet to sell it on eBay? The woman had always questioned whether her father was capable of murder. Would the silver bracelet lead to any other conclusion?

THE WINE RED ROAD

When is a burning vehicle at the bottom of a ravine not a traffic accident but an attempt to cover up a murder? When the vehicle involved has been pushed into the ravine and the crispy critter who was the driver of the vehicle is discovered to have a gunshot hole in her head. And why are officers of the California Highway Patrol prime suspects in the murder? Only a jilted wife really knows the answer. 

WHERE ONCE WAS PEACE

A young man’s peaceful world is shattered by personal loss and the killing fields of the Vietnam War. He struggles mightily to overcome the brutal and awful finality of people dying all around him, waging a war within himself to forgive and forget so he can find peace once again. 

THE RED JACKET

An action adventure tale about a young man's fight for survival in a raging Oregon river during the "Pineapple Express" flooding of 1964.  
Sixteen-year old Francis Forsyth has struggled for more than a year to overcome a near fatal illness and now, just when it looks like he might be able to pursue his dream of becoming a major-league baseball player, of falling in love, and of  living happily ever after, the McKenzie River, his overbearing mother, his drunken stepfather, and his family and friends all seem to be plotting against him. 

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