Chapter One
The stairway leading to my walk-up office on Geary sometimes attracts the homeless, but this was the first squatter I had ever seen in the lotus position. Drawing nearer, I recognized Josh Needleman. It had been five years since I had seen or talked with him. I called his name softly and he opened his eyes. They were as dark as I remembered them, maybe a shade less brooding than Rasputin’s. He rose with a yogi’s grace, which probably explained a few years of his disappearance. Josh didn’t bother with the conventional handshake, or inquiries about how I had been doing, just acted as if I should have been expecting him. Naturally, he didn’t have an appointment. As I remembered, Josh had never been much for appointments. He once told me he never wanted to be a “prisoner of time.” By his appearance, it hadn’t taken him captive yet.
He was wearing homespun, still apparently believing it wrong to use any leather or animal product for clothing. Josh had once told me that it was not one of “man’s higher purposes” to enslave and kill animals. His major quandary, I think, was trying to find what all man’s higher purposes are. But, in the course of a sentence or two, I learned that he hadn’t yet achieved sainthood. He was still human enough. He wanted revenge.
“We have made a vow,” Josh told me, “to find Christopher Shepard’s murderer, and exact justice upon those who killed him. This is a sacred pledge, one to which we have bound ourselves.”
Christopher Shepard, better known as the Green Man, had thought that planting trees could solve the ills of the world, could cure pollution, end global warming, and help give new life to a tired planet. For twenty years the Green Man had quite literally worked at the grass-roots level, getting down on his hands and knees to plant seeds and seedlings in the earth. A month ago, he himself had been planted in the ground.
Shepard’s death had brought more notoriety to Sequoia Summer than three months of active protesting. The summer-long gathering had attracted a small army of mostly young, mostly irreverent protesters to Humboldt County. In an effort to stop old-growth deforestation, the activists had linked arms against bulldozers and defied chain saws by tree sitting. David with a monkey wrench against Goliath.
Shepard was found dead in the middle of a controversial primeval forest he called home, a branch through his skull. One of his favorite quotations had been “He that loves the tree loves the branch.” The proverb took on a new, and perverse, meaning in his death.
The death had been ruled accidental, the result of a limb that had fallen from one of the towering redwoods. No landscape is without its inherent dangers. Around the redwood forest are visible reminders of its hazards. When limbs fall several hundred feet they frequently embed themselves deep in the forest floor. To the uninitiated, these limbs are often mistaken for trees. Over the years the local folk have had reason to give them a name: widow-makers.
Some creative journalists had suggested that Shepard’s body was found in a Christ-like pose, supported by the wood. It wasn’t like that, but none of the environmentalists had asked for retractions. What they wanted was an investigation. In Humboldt County, “cover-up” was being shouted almost as loudly as “timber.”
I had grieved over the Green Man’s death but hadn’t paid much mind to those who claimed a murder had been committed. These days it’s rare for a well-known person to die without an accompanying conspiracy theory, and usually a TV movie of the week. I had followed the controversy, but I hadn’t expected it to show up on my doorstep. Josh’s talk of vows and pledging and binding sounded right out of the Middle Ages.
“Who,” I asked, “is ‘we’?”
“The Committee for Justice,” he said.
“That doesn’t tell me much.”
“The Committee for Justice,” Josh said carefully, “is a collective.”
I waited patiently. He finally produced. “A collective,” he proudly said, “made up of Sequoia Summer campers and members of EverGreen.”
I might have told Josh his pride was misplaced. EverGreen wasn’t exactly the Junior League. Members described themselves as rebels with a green cause, but others weren’t so charitable. Eco-thugs, they said. Mainstream conservation groups were less than enamored with EverGreen’s tactics and treated the organization as a pariah. EverGreeners didn’t lead nature walks or circulate petitions to save the auk. They advocated ecodefense and justified their tactics by saying that everything they did – including monkey wrenching, tree spiking, sabotaging heavy equipment, and undertaking disinformation campaigns – was for the protection of Mother Earth. One national magazine had described their membership as “postpubescent Girl and Boy Scouts gone anarchic.” The EverGreeners didn’t sell cookies door to door. But if you hd a hankering for smoke bombs, they could deliver faster than Domino’s.
“I told them about you,” Josh said. “I vouched for you.”
Some endorsements you can live without. I had met Josh in a birding class seven years ago. He had been enrolled but only flirting with the idea of being an undergraduate at Berkeley. Even then, Josh’s outside interests were more important to him than academics. The ornithology course was one of those Saturday University of California extension classes that attract a lot of older couples looking to share a new hobby. Odd men out find each other, and that’s how Josh and I had hooked up.
Over time, I became his sounding board. We continued to see each other after out class was concluded, bird watching being the centerpiece of our relationship. Josh was better at birding than I, could make identifications more surely and quickly. He knew not to chatter out in the field, and he was more at ease there, less tense and vitriolic than elsewhere. But when the binoculars went down, his rigid rectitude and anger always returned. Josh railed against those who had eliminated our wetlands and eradicated the open spaces, the villains who had left the world fit only for “man, rats, ice plant, and pigeons.”
I envied Josh his youthful passions, which is another way of saying I thought him naïve. Sometimes I argued with him, but mostly I listened. I suppose he took my silence as consent; in most cases it was. But then, as now, I wasn’t of the opinion that two wrongs make a right, or that seeking compromise is necessarily wrong. Josh had drawn lines and wasn’t about to make any quarter with his many enemies, which seemed to include most of San Francisco, if not the world. I had figured he would ultimately mature and realize that everything isn’t black and white, but it seemed he now saw only black and green. He had disappeared five years ago without bothering to tell me where he was going. I had assumed he would turn up sometime. Today was my lucky day.
“Why did you have to vouch for me?”
“We needed someone we could trust,” he said. “Someone not in bed with the lumber barons and their political machine. We know they murdered him. It shouldn’t be hard for you to prove that.”
My mental alarm always goes off when anyone tells me how easy a job is going to be. Normally, you want to run away from cases like that. The rule of thumb in most murder investigations – and Shepard’s death hadn’t even been ruled a murder – is that if you don’t have a pretty good idea who the killer is in the first forty-eight hours, the odds are it will ever be solved. I tried to tell this to Josh, but he wasn’t inclined to listen.
“The murder hadn’t been solved,” he said, “because those in power don’t want it solved.”
The Green Man had died in River Grove, a three thousand acre stand of old growth. River Grove was a rallying cry for both lumber interests and conservationists and offered almost as much middle ground as abortion. The land was owned by Trans-Mississippi, one of the largest lumber companies in the country. Trans-Miss contended they had a right to “conduct business as usual” on their own property, while the environmentalists were convinced that any business that pursued the “murder of national treasures” was both immoral and illegal. The Green Man had arrived in the middle of the controversy and promptly made his home in the contested forest. Living in a hollowed redwood tree, he had become a notorious and much publicized squatter of River Grove.
Christopher Shepard was usually described as a modern day Johnny Appleseed, but his pasture far surpassed John Chapman’s. From Harlem, New York, to Haarlem, the Netherlands, the Green Man had planted trees. He visited every continent except Antarctica and in his wake left a trail of green. Every day was Arbor Day for him. In his lifetime he had planted more than two million trees. He often said nothing would ever interrupt his life’s work, but he forgot that trees are not the only things sometimes cut down in their prime.
“What evidence do you have that the Green Man was murdered?”
Josh shook his head, acted as if he was disappointed by my questions. “Doesn’t a head full of wood make you suspicious?”
I refrained from telling him I encountered those every day. “The way he died was not unprecedented, I understand.”
“Neither is the rape of the ancient woods. The lumber companies are happy now because they’ve gotten just what they wanted: a cozy death.”
“Whereas you’d prefer a martyr,” I said.
For just a moment, I caught that look in his eyes, the one that made me feel unclean, and unenlightened, that spoke of my inferior sensibilities. And maybe, just maybe, threatened me. But the look changed, just as Josh’s spiel did.
“Are we supposed to let them get away with murder, Stuart? They do every day, you know. They cut down history. They kill living monuments, trees that were around before Christ, and Socrates, and Buddha, and Aristotle, and Mohammed, trees that predate the major religions and philosophies of this world. Those are the real martyrs, every prehistoric tree that is struck down. They kill these ancient beings, some as big, and every inch as sacred, as the Statue of Liberty. I’d like to bring them to trial for those murders, but they’ve rigged the laws. I’m told, though, that flesh-and blood murder still isn’t allowed. You aren’t supposed to be able to fell what’s human and get away with it.”
“That’s right,” I said pointedly. “No one is supposed to profit from murder.”
He was a fanatic, but he wasn’t stupid. He caught my double meaning and momentarily looked abashed. “Yes,” he said, “we want to stop those saws permanently, and maybe we see this as our opportunity to do just that, but most of all what we want is justice. They should have to pay for what they have done. And, if they do, the Green Man will not have died in vain.”
I preferred a bellicose Josh to one who was sanctimonious. In pursuit of a cause, thinking tends to get colored. But, green flags notwithstanding, I was interested in the case. There was still the matter of proceeding on something other than suspicion and hearsay, though.
“Without violins,” I said, “offer me some reasonable evidence that he was murdered.”
Josh reached into his shirt and pulled out a rolled-up piece of paper. He removed a rubber band, solemnly unfurled the paper, then silently handed it to me. It was a wanted poster, not exactly the type you see in a post office, but one more closely resembling those that had come out of the Wild West. The Green Man’s was the featured portrait. An and below him, in large print, were the words WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE!
“Not long after Christopher arrived,” Josh said, “we found these plastered all around the county.”
“There’s no bounty offered,” I said.
“None was offered on the spotted owl posters either,” he said, “but some of the owls turned up dead anyway, nailed in public places.”
I had heard about those posters, and the response to them. The owl impalings harkened back to older times. Hundreds of years ago farmers used to nail birds to their barns. The displays were believed to ward off storms. Maybe that same fearful mind-set had come to the fore again, the desire to stave off storms of change. The possibility of the northern spotted owl being granted protected species status threatened Pacific Northwest logging interests. The presence of the Green Man might have similarly threatened them.
“What else do you have?”
“They’ve rewritten the dirty tricks manual,” Josh said. “They’ve circulated incendiary communiqués supposedly written by us, letters on Sequoia Summer letterhead detailing plans to abolish the timber industry in its entirety and declaring a need for a complete ban on all logging. They’ve also been big on creating violent images.”
He reached into his shirt for more paperwork and handed it to me. The general them was environmentalists getting spiked or chain-sawed. Most of the victims were being violated in their anal regions. The majority of the cartoon renderings were crude, but a few of the sketches looked capable, almost professional.
“You think the cartoons incited someone to murder?”
“What you call cartoons, I call hate and pornography. And, yes, I think it’s quite possible.”
“Beyond indignation, what do you have?”
His lips tightened. With an effort, Josh restrained his anger. “I have the names of those responsible for circulating the posters, and I know where they work.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “They work for a lumber company.”
By the expression on his face, it appeared that even saying the words pained him. “Trans-Mississippi,” he spat.
I didn’t immediately respond, allowing myself the luxury of a few seconds of thought. The Green Man’s death had considerably shortened my twentieth-century hero list. You’d think with over 5 billion potential applicants, I would have been able to scare up a few more names, but this hadn’t been the best century for heroes. We’ve been pulling the pedestals down faster than we can erect them. I wonder if one day historians will notice the paucity of human statues erected during this time.
I pictured the Green Man in my mind’s eye. His mop of hair had generously been described by some as a Prince Valiant cut, but it was apparent his stylist was a kitchen bowl. He was often portrayed with his crooked smile, which announced his friendliness and hinted at some touch of mischief. Most symbolic were his trademark bare feet, extremities photographed more than any Madison Avenue model’s. Shoeless he never yielded to the elements but walked through the snow and the cold across earth and hard rock. Shoeless, he was now making his way through the Valley of Death. He had said he remained unshod “so as to not to lose contact with Mother Earth.” Now she had him in her embrace. His death didn’t seem fair; death never does. But murder is the most unfair death of all. I wondered if there was anything to Josh’s claims.
“We don’t have much money,” said Josh, “but we were able to scrape up an eight-hundred-and-twenty-two-dollar retainer for you.”
It was madness to consider taking the case. The week before I had turned down an investigation in Palo Alto, claiming it was too far out of the City. Palo Alto is all of thirty miles south. Humboldt County is over two hundred windy miles north of San Francisco. It was away from familiar territory and resources, and the money probably wouldn’t even cover expenses. I’d likely be placing myself between a rock and hard place – no, worse, between a forest and a chain saw.
“We already have your cabin ready,” Josh said, “fully stocked with provisions.”
Probably a shed, I thought, with tofu.
“I know a place,” Josh said softly, “where spotted owls have been seen. I can show you where a marbled murrelet nested.”
Threatened species. Ones I didn’t have on my life list. Birds that need the ecosystems of old-growth forest to maintain their existence. But, more than the birds even, I could feel the call of the redwood forest, of the towering giants.
“I’ll drive up there today,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll take the case. I’m just going to ask a few questions and do a little looking around.”
Josh nodded. He didn’t look surprised, didn’t even give me the satisfaction of saying, “Timb8
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