Camelot Down Berkeley 1969

CHAPTER I

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 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?