Of the strange things that have gone down in our lives, watching the cinematic butchering of a girl on-screen with a man whose wife and unborn child had just been murdered has to rank up there with the strangest. It had gotten back to him somehow that we'd planned to either shelve or destroy the film without completing on account of the murders. Maybe it was his grieving process or maybe it was some sort of protective instinct for threatened art, but he requested a screening of what we had finished, specifically asking for the 'money' reels.

"Why does she say... what is it? I do not understand..."

As she's being apportioned amongst the dinner guests, she mouths the words 'Forgive them for they know not what they've done.'

"She's carrying a plague. These people will die of dementia on account and they will unable to repent their sins."

He asked something about how they knew her blood type would be acceptable for the people getting her kidneys. We told him that we showed 'guiding hands' in the backgrounds of scenes. He asked a couple technical question about the operation scene and asked how she couldn't move yet still feel and react to pain. We told him about a phenomenon we sometimes experience where we'll wake up while our better half is still sleeping. Her brain somehow paralyzes our side during dreams and we often spend several minutes trying to speak or move an appendage to no avail. If that wasn't strange enough, this only seems to happens to us. If our better half is roused from slumber, we're awakened too. Go figure.

While the last reel of footage was shown we sat wordlessly in the screening room with only the sounds of the projector rewinding and its operator putting things in order. After maybe a half an hour he found the inertia to rise from his chair. Thanking us for our time, he asked if we could send him a copy of the completed work - whether we chose to release it or not.

We were still in meetings at Ryerson International mulling over the idea of writing the whole thing off as 'unreleasable' when Jenny, there as Eddie's proxy, got a call from a fact checker for Albert Towley's column.

"No... I was sitting in coach... I know... but I'd changed seats... I dunno... spur of the moment... maybe I just wanted to have control over something... why do you ask?"

Not getting an answer she hung up the phone with a sigh, "Should be interesting to find out what evil deed I've done this time."

"Having has the limelight shone upon me for no particular reason other than I happened to be doing something others had taken a passing fancy to, I've long ago resigned myself to never responding to negative press about myself, especially if I know I'm in the right. Indeed I would've been content to let Albert vent his outrage if only to see if people still cared about the mistreatment of our fighting men. However, for Mister Towley to imply that one of the nicest people I've met in this town somehow deserved her fate is more than I can stomach. Let me set the record straight."

"I was called to Los Angeles on account of a family emergency, I normally fly my own aircraft but was in no condition to do so that day so I flew commercial, obtaining a ticket from my cousin's travel service. Being a project engineer by trade, I prefer to fly first class to be able to catch up on paperwork during the trip. While waiting for my flight I struck up a conversation with a young soldier shipping out for his tour of duty. I knew I wasn't going to working on this trip and he happened going in the same direction. I figured he would get more fun out of a first class ticket so I offered to trade for his coach seat and he accepted. End of story."

"It would seem that I'd forgotten that two of my friends would be joining me at a latter stop along the route and were already en route to their airport when I was changing planes and was able to get to a telephone. They arrived to find that I had changed seats and naturally asked to join me and reported getting hostile treatment from the stewardess they'd dealt with. Given Mister Towley's penchant for blindly accepting hot tips from service industry informants, I can only presume that she had reported their actions and in what passes for fact checking at his desk, saw my name on the manifest and having confirmed what he wanted to know, ran with the story he saw fit to print."

"Obviously due diligence is not Mister Towley's strong suit - it's not even his birthday suit, - but even the most feeble-minded amongst the fourth estate might have the presence of mind to wonder what a PFC on a government ticket was doing sipping champagne and eating filet mignon with the swells up front. Even if it turned out he'd bought the ticket himself you still would've had a nice little human interest piece in an age where concern for our fellow man seems sorely lacking."

As a post script she asked that the stewardess in question not be fired since she has no proof she even said anything and that she didn't want to be the kind of person who gets their kicks from terrorizing 'the help'. She'd seen enough of those people in Glen Cove to despise that sort of thing.

It wasn't till labor day that Jenny finally conceded that Eddie wouldn't be going anywhere so she served notice with the Fuller company that she wouldn't be available for the foreseeable future. Not wanting to lose her they replied that they would pick up any and all expenses required to move him east whenever he was capable of being moved. In the meantime Jenny started the ball rolling on her license with the California Architects Board while Cheryl managed to land a couple clients for their fledgling practice. With their patio in need of total reconstruction her neighbors decided to give the hacienda a complete makeover but since most of their insurance money was going to rebuilding the patio there was be little money for demolition and reconstruction of the house.

Cheryl managed to solve that problem by arranging the sale of all the antique fixtures from Spanish tile roof and wrought iron balconies down to hand carved front door while Jenny came up with quasi-Prairie School design requiring no internal demolition to go with the stripped down exterior and newly redesigned patio. They'd managed to save money there with a more conventionally shaped rectangular pool, limited earth moving and the liberal use of redwood decking.

Their other going project was for a small shopping center that included a burnt out apartment building in the 'Olde English' style, a single storey shop of no distinction and an unbuilt lot where a franchise for the McDonald's burger chain was slated to go. McDonalds was in the process of shifting their focus on takeout meals in favor of a sit down restaurant and had come up with a standardized design her client didn't really care much for. Being a latin fellow he felt it lacked 'pizzazz' and wanted something more like the other burger joints that still mated with the rest of the shopping center.

Starting with the apartments, the gabled attic storey removed, and the building stripped to its structural steel and a three storey 'slipcover added on top of the single storey base doubling the floor area of each new storey. With the base already extended to the lot lines much of the main avenue frontage was cut away to delineate the service tower to the apartment floors and wrapped in redwood paneling. The adjacent store's arched truss roof was replaced with slimmer box girder design to allow the creation of a sun deck for the apartments. A redwood vertical element matching the service core design was added to the far end to hide the stairs up to the deck.

The McDonalds franchise was going to have a drive-thru window that required it to be structurally independent from the rest of the center to allow for car traffic. repeating the vertical element for the entry vestibule an asymmetrical 'golden arch' was stretched across the drive-thru passage from the main building to the other end of the restaurant with a straight redwood beam further emphasizing the connection to the rest of 'Archway Plaza'. To show some fealty to the corporate design, the prescribed mansard roof was turned upside down and slashed at a jaunty angle that looked like an inverted tennis visor. Instead of the dark brown shingled 'company' roof, industrial metal screening painted 'hamburger gray' was used between the 'french fry' light array. The wall supports were styled after the triangular beams of the 'Frosty Bar' model the Bachmann company made for Lionel train sets.

The design required approval from the home office that in the end was not forthcoming. By this time their client was so enamored with the design he sold his franchise rights to someone in the valley. With a cousin from New York that was looking to break into the pizza business and with LA being a wide open town, it was decided to turn the space into a pizzeria with the only change to the design being the addition of stylized 'toppings' to the now mozzerella-colored metal grating.

In mid October, on our thirtieth birthday to be exact, Jenny was called by an aircraft broker to meet him at a storage facility out in the Mojave desert to look over a 'beast' that had recently came on to the market for an incredible knock down price. The livery and registration had been crudely spray painted over but we could tell from the window stripe that it was a Delta Convair 880. It was in fact the one we'd just flown. With the coming of jumbo jets, Delta had decided to ease out their 880 fleet and since this one had damage inside the tail fin, it was to be the first to go.

She gave a cursory looking over and told the man she'd be back with her investors and on the Eighteenth she returned with Bitsey and Brenda in to give it a more thorough going over. To all of our surprise the seats, kitchen equipment and closet partitions had been removed since the time of our previous visit on account of the airline wanting to replace broken items on the planes they were keeping and figured we'd want to customize the interior anyway. The Johns were still and they did repair the tail damage so the plane was otherwise in flying order.

"I suppose," Brenda mused, "at the price they're asking, we could buy our own seat and still have enough to put away for the increased operating costs..."

"I think... you've made a sale," Jenny concluded. "But tell Delta we're gonna want that lounge back and first dibs on any tourist seats they're not using. Don't hafta be perfect, just something we can throw a slipcover on. I was thinking maybe a straight ninety configuration with a chaperone's lounge up front. That way I can have a work space on cross-country flights. Oh yeah... I'll hafta check with the gruesome twosome... but I think we're going to want to paint this baby school bus yellow. You know a paint shop that does jetliners?"

As we watched them tow what Brenda was calling the 'Memphis Belle' into a hanger for detailing, we couldn't help thinking that with that wierd-looking hump on her back, she had the 'schlubby' look of an old Jew. Needless to say, we loved her all the more on account. No plane ever had a more affectionate pair of owners, at least none willing to camp out in their new baby while refurbishing her for service like Bitsey and Brenda were. The first thing they didn't do was paint her school bus yellow preferring white hull a two tones of blue green stripes in a scheme that looked more private jet than an airliner. To symbolize the new focus of their company they also opted to rename the firm 'Van Der Plaat Airtours' on account of Bitsey's last name having ritzier connotations than Miss Schülberg's and because Bitsey lost the coin toss.

It took a week to round up a flight crew for the trip to Oklahoma City so our dad's people could have a look-see and to hash out the final configuration with a local aircraft outfitter. Delta had given us most of the lounge back but hung on to the seat cushions and safety belts so it was a fun ride over. With Petroco footing the bill for the interior work, Jenny's 'straight ninety' was out in favor of an arrangement of seventy-eight first-class style seats with the four closest to the lounge facing rearward for airborne meetings. On class tours those would be marketed as 'chaperone seating'. The club lounge was to remain with modifications to accommodate a pair of Murphy beds and privacy curtains for overnight flights. With the reduced passenger load, an extra set of fuel tanks could be installed for greater range.

It would seem the fates were determined that Jenny wouldn't be able to join us. Eddie's condition had cone from bad to bizarre when surgery to relieve pressure on his spine revealed a chunk of shrapnel that everyone assumed was service related. He had no recollection of getting any souvenirs of his army days, however Lori seemed to remember a time he'd been blown down a flight of steps by stage pyrotechnics fifteen years ago. He hadn't been wearing a shirt at the time so nobody thought to look deeper into the cuts and bruises he'd gotten on account.

Removing it seemed to do the trick on his stagnating medical condition and it sure got his short arm saluting one and all at the slightest provocation. It had been the one limb he and Jenny had been concerned about losing the use and with much of his pain gone, no handshake ever felt better.

His release, the weekend before Thanksgiving coincided with the completion of modifications to the 'Memphis Belle' so at least their exodus would be undertaken in the plush comfort of leather seats with Eddie's stretcher fitting neatly inside one of the meeting alcoves while Jenny and Arianna kept company with him in a leather couch up front in the lounge. Incidentally one of the few recommendations of her that were followed was the suggestion that the seat patterns alternate every fifth row to make it easier to keep count and find ones way out in case of an accident. Half the seats were done in a solid seafoam green while the other half had this funky zebraskin pattern.

As Jenny returned to her pattern of work and home - she'd set up housekeeping at her mother's parents' place for that winter - we returned to LA to finish editing that damned movie of ours and to relay important documents between her and Cheryl who on top of everything else, was adding security improvements to the Ryerson-Platt house against the day they might return. Among other things this would involve replacing all the corrugated vinyl wall panels with heavy gauge corrugated steel painted blue-green to match the old color. Lori returned to Lawson manor to help Doris with Electric Valve business while Niké, who had an 'Educational Sciences' degree, was given a job as head of J P & C's training department though she was really signed on to look after Arianna while her parents tried to figure out where she would be sent to school.

"I don't really see any other way to make this work."

Walter and Stanford stood before a table with a property map of the block across the street from his bank. The Fifty-fourth Street Congregation was looking to replace their aging facilities and the two of them were trying to figure out how a office building can be designed to share the same Lexington Avenue frontage without looking like Jenny's skyscraper project.

"Y'know... I'd asked one of the new interns to come up with a design base on the deacon's request and even he said put the damned thing on stilts. I guess that leaves me sunk."

"You couldn't just buy it from her?"

"Don't think I hadn't thought of that. Even sent her a check. Sent the pieces back with a note saying I could do what I wanted with the notebook but that it was not for sale."

"It would be like publishing a manuscript that you'd just found somewhere. It's just not done."

"You mean like that diary they found in some attic that got turned into a play?"

"Very funny."

"Look... how many Greek temples and Rococo villas have you boys copied all these years? How many times can you do the same glass box those Lever brothers put up back in 'Fifty-two? Oh, it's done all the time. Anyway it's not like you couldn't leak the thing to some architectural magazine. If she complains, you could always blame some underling and if she doesn't... well you've done your due diligence..."

All right... But if she pulls a Howard Rourke and blows the damned thing up before completion, I still expect my commission."

If he'd hoped to get a rise out of Jennifer, he'd managed to pick the week she and Eddie had taken off to look over the Electric Valve company's operations in Puerto Rico - at least that's what they were telling Uncle Sam. It had been one of those winters so brutal that everyone was running articles about the coming Ice Age and the winds over Albany could shiver a penguin. Her plant visit proved educational in that tape recorders were indeed the company's salvation and the sunny climate had made their branch plant one of the more coveted assignments of the Lawson group. Current talk was that they were looking to build a retirement community for their Philadelphia people in a few years and wanted to pay for it by selling lots to the general public. Jenny was asked if she could work up some sort of master plan to show to investors.

"Y'know... my cousin has a tour company... with their own jetliner... Having an exclusive destination would go a long way towards building a steady client base. Anyway... why confine yourself to pensioners on a fixed income? A hotel by the beach... marina for the boaties, condos for the swingin' singles and lots for people with families looking to build a second home. Maybe a little shopping center so we can make that much more money..."

Basically Amityville with a golf course. Her dad would like that.

Her grandfather Philip's dream of mass produced housing still had some life in the new generation as Jenny had suggested they look into buying up the old Lustron plans so she could modify them with a more up to date cladding. Stained redwood was the 'in' thing these days so why not glue a veneer of the stuff onto metal panels? It'd look and feel better than metal siding alone and with enough preservatives, nearly as long lasting.

Owing to Jenny's desire to see Indians paddling a birch bark canoe down the Grand Canal we all agreed to attend the Italian premiere coming up in May with maybe an Oklahoma City premiere - if we get an American distributor. We still had mixed feeling about promoting this. On the flight home we stopped at Orlando, Florida for refueling and to catch the launch of NASA's third moonshot. Even from the airport it was an amazing thing to see and hear. With our tanks topped off we returned with Jenny to New York not even caring to ask what the mission number was. After Apollo eleven, frankly we'd lost track. Most of America did.

It was maybe a quarter after three in the morning when we were awakened by the sound of a car pulling into the driveway next door, its occupants getting out and knocking loudly on the DeFeo's front door. Coming to the window we could make out uniforms and a police style cruiser with Grumman Security painted on the side. We threw some clothes as lights went on in the bedroom above them. A few minutes later a none-too-happy Poppa DeFeo opened the door like someone not all that surprised to be getting rousted by the fuzz.

"Sorry to get you up so early in the morning Mister Platt but we're looking for your daughter Jennifer..."

"Name's DeFeo... don't have a girl named... Oh wait, you must mean the people who lived here before us... Yeah they moved out maybe five years ago... Who's lookin' for her?"

"Grumman security... we need to talk to her..."

"Her boat's moored out back... but hey, you guys got a warrant?"

"It's not that kind of talk..."

Face of a man wondering what two cops could want with the lady out back.

"I think they're serious, Jenn... they got me up out of a sound sleep."

"Okay... what do you need me to do?"

Aside with asking her to come down to the plant, they asked if she still had any of the research data collected for that story of hers, namely the blueprints and technical manuals of the Command and Service Modules she'd obtained from North American, Rockwell and Chrysler. They also asked if she might have any recordings of the BBC radio version on hand.

"I think I have the tapes back in LA but the DeFeos have all the research materials. Gave 'em to their kids. You'll hafta ask them..."

Poppa DeFeo had no objections so he, Jenny and the security men marched back to the house to round up whatever they could find. She had pretty thorough in her research and the four of them emerged with thick books under their arms. They were tossed in the trunk with the assurance they'd be returned while Jenny hopped into the back with the assurance that we'd take care of work and the family. We exchanged looks with Poppa DeFeo as their car backed out into the street and aimed itself for Merrick Road and the Grumman plant beyond.

"If anyone else calls... we'll be out back."

She got back around lunchtime to report that indeed there had been an electrical malfunction cause by what sounded like an oxygen tank failure sometime after ten. As of when she left the crew was still alive and hunkered down in the Lunar Module. She noted that just about everyone at Grumman had come in on their own initiative as soon as word had gotten out. They had been especially interested in her procedure for adapting Command Module carbon dioxide scrubbers to the unit on the lunar module as sure enough nobody thought to make the designs compatible. They had wanted a copy of the BBC broadcast to see if anyone could build a unit based on oral instructions.

"I didn't have the script on hand but I knew who to talk to at the Beebs so we ended up calling London and asking someone over there to see if they'd saved a recording and if they did could they play the section we needed over the phone? They did and they did."

"Y'know I'd even managed to get the name of the Command Module... Odyssey? At least for the Italian production. It was Challenger and Endeavour for the radio play but the Italians... they wanted something more... classical. Sure wish I'd thought of Aquarius for the LEM, instead of going with Ulysses. Now that woulda put the Young Turks over at ParaNorma in a retrograde freak."

The Fuller people were in a freak of their own when Jenny called to check in with them. That story of hers hadn't gone unnoticed and they'd been getting calls at the home office all morning on account. Not only that but their man in Albany just phoned in to say that a half dozen news crews had camped out by the gate not to mention that the doorman at her apartment had to give the brush to another half dozen more.

He also suggested that, "If I was you, I'd cast off in that little sailboat of yours and head out into the bay while the whole thing blows over."

She reported for duty around two, spent the afternoon giving interviews and flew home around four-thirty. She spent the rest of the evening at the Grumman plant with Wesley before rolling in around a quarter to midnight. By six-thirty the next morning she was up and at 'em for another daily double. By the end of the week she looked as shagged out as the Apollo XIII crew did coming out of their space capsule. Still, Eddie couldn't help observing they'd been having some of the best sex ever and that if it wasn't for The Pill, Arianna would've had a kid brother or sister on account.

Life was returning to what passed for normal in the Ryerson-Platt household. Through osmosis Eddie had learned enough about Jenny's line of work to be of some use to her and was able to lighten some of the paperwork load. By mid-summer the both of them had become sick and tired of staring down at 'those goddamned little swastikas' that had once been a charming little anachronism in the bathroom of that Albany apartment. They were more than relieved the day the Fuller company's new owners informed her that her services were no longer required. Her dad still had pending work on the site but they only had a use for her maybe once or twice a week at most.

Ironically enough it was Eddie's company that would keep them in New York for the next couple of years. They had judged that the Black youth market had been under served and had planned on at least a half dozen productions on location in Harlem by up and coming talent in need of an 'elder statesman' to show their nose on set every so often. In the meantime they wanted Jenny to look over a few old scripts that had been gathering dust to see if any could be cut to fit the new market.

"Three times he was called forth and three times he refused and on the fourth refusal The State laid the hammer down upon him but he still refused and on the next day they seized his title and banded his hands with chains of iron but they have not taken his honor and they cannot break his spirit..."

The story was built around the core concept of waking up in the middle of a flight to find your fellow passengers had dropped dead and you alone had to figure out how to land the plane. The original script called for a slow failure in the pressurization system, ideally one that would delay the automatic release of the oxygen masks. Jenny found that a simple mistaken switch setting in the cockpit would accomplish the same thing and wouldn't require a lot of exposition. To make things more interesting, she'd discovered that the cautions and warnings associated with that mistaken setting was just confusing enough for a flight crew to have succumbed to hypoxia before they'd figured out their error.

"When in doubt, go with the stupidest mistake you could possibly come up with."

The role Mister Ali was to play was that of a Caribbean marine biologist working in an underwater laboratory with the daughter of the American Vice President - hence the Air Force Two title. To highlight a quirk in the constitution it was noted that he had been appointed to the office on account of the current president whose Secret Service code name was 'Butterfingers' had managed to accidentally kill the previous second in command.

The opening act was to involve the two of them observing the hunting practices of hammerhead sharks and this is where Ali had to back out. The scene required extensive dive training that he wasn't sure he'd have the time for. He was also unsure about the fact that the two characters would be spending an awful long time together - including a nekkid shower scene - without the payoff of even a peck on the cheek. Jenny's had given the idea some thought but had reasoned that the audience would so expect a salacious 'black on white' love scene, the film would have more integrity by not showing one. Besides that, she didn't like the implication that an educated professionals couldn't keep their hormones in check around members of the opposite sex.

So what happens when we actually put this script on film? Jenny not only put in a nekkid love scene, she starred in it. We'd needed an actress that looked reasonably attractive on screen with both diving skills and and the ability to fly a chartered Convair 880 painted in Air Force Two livery. She qualified on all counts and at thirty-two figured it was now or never to sow her wild acting oats.

The movie starts with a solemn narration about the Air Force One and Two terminology then dissolves to an image of an unknown shape that reveals itself to be a hammerhead shark on the prowl for his dinner. He spots a flounder but it quickly buries itself in the sand. Undeterred, he circles around like a beachcomber with a metal detector until he tracks down his prey, flicks it out from its hiding place and gobbles it up.

Cut to an amazed couple in scuba gear holding a marine camera and a clipboard. They swim back to an undersea laboratory that incidentally was only made available towards the end of the shooting schedule, where they excitedly discuss their find while changing out of their suits. They carry their talk to the shower but are interrupted by a message from their support ship above inquiring on the success of their observations. A diving bell is sent down to bring them and their film topside.

Meanwhile a pair of helicopters approach the support vessel from a distance. As they hover above the ship we see that they are Navy birds. A bosun's chair carrying a dark suited man is let down as 'Nick & Nora' are about to be hustled from the diving bell to a decompression chamber. He identifies himself as a Secret Service agent who has come to collect 'Nora' as her dad is about to be sworn in as acting president. It seems that 'Butterfingers', playing with a toy battleship, managed to gun himself down by firing a pipe cleaner into his chest with his last words before passing out, "I didn't know the thing was loaded."

Unfortunately they're committed to a long stay in their decompression chamber so a pair of flight suits are requisitioned and they are brought back to shore looking like a pair of astronauts. Cut to Air Force Two as it's being readied for takeoff. Some maintenance is being done that involve switching the cabin air system to manual control with a passing reminder that it be turned back to automatic. The reminder is ignored as a sleepy Nick and Nora are brought aboard still in pressure suits along with her dad, his staff and Secret Service personnel. Another cut to the control panel reveals the dial is still set to manual as Air Force Two takes off.

Nick and Nora sleep in blissful ignorance as oxygen masks unexpectedly drop. Thinking it's just another problem with the plane - it had done this a couple times before - everyone ignores them till people start getting sleepy with the last Secret Service man standing putting an oxygen mask over the sleeping Vice President before passing out.

Through trial and error they manage to shut off the autopilot, gain control of the plane, bring it down to a safer altitude and put it back on autopilot while they debate whether to take off their helmets so they can call for help. For all they knew the air could've been poisoned. They leave the cockpit for another look at their fellow passengers. They find that her dad still asleep but with his seat pulled back so they figure the air is okay and doff their helmets and gloves. They find some weak pulses but nobody else seems to be rousing.

Meanwhile the Air Force has scrambled fighter jets to investigate Air Force Two sudden change in altitude. Pulling up to the nose the pilots are horrified to find noone in the cockpit and no signs of life further aft save for oxygen masks dangling in the cabin. They retreat to firing distance and await further orders. On the ground they're trying to figure out what to do and more importantly who exactly would be in charge of giving the order to shoot down a plane carrying the Vice President of the United States.

Nick and Nora hadn't seen the fighters as they were busy trying to wake somebody. Giving up, they return to the flight deck and try to figure out where they are. They try the radio but can't figure out how to pick anyone up. Nora remembers something and dashes back into the cabin to retrieve the transistor radio she's left onboard the last time she'd flown Air Force Two. They manage to tune a station just as the DJ is giving out the station's phone number. Using the plane's radiotelephone, they dial it and wouldn't you know, they're the fifth caller and have won a pair of Lady Desdemona and the Aquanetters tickets!

Nora calmly asks if they could pick up the tickets and could they have the phone number of the nearest airport? She calls the airport and calmly appraises them of their situation politely asking if there was someone who could talk them in. She hands the phone to Nick and he relays their instructions as she works the controls while the shadowing fighters report their movements. They manage to land but Nora is slow on the brakes so they overshoot the runway and cross a major freeway before coming to a stop at that radio station's parking lot. They call the station to tell them they're here for the tickets. Looking out his window, the DJ closes the film by replying...

"You know... the station would've been more than happy to mail you the tickets..."

LAX was used for the landing scenes up to the point where Air Force Two overshoots the runway, after that we used that Mojave Desert field, paving a small section of freeway and building the radio station out of scaffolding and lightweight acrylic panels. The field also provided us with a jet fighter cockpit we could 'blue screen' for dialog sequences. The dramatic 'war room' was in fact, a rented hotel ballroom where the ceiling lights were dimmed and the scene uplit by footlights hidden under the banquet table. The distant background 'war computer' was merely a couple sheets of foam board painted black and trimmed with plastic 'chrome' with holiday 'blinkenlights' mounted in rows. We were especially proud of that.

Jenny was especially proud of the note from Ali saying, 'I told ya so!'

Air Force Two was reasonably well liked by critics and returned a profit but being a mid-priced film with limited advertising and distribution never achieved any sort of buzz. The South was still unwilling to support an interracial couple on screen and the Black youth market was looking for harder stuff. Still, Jenny got to plug the thing on Carson, who loved it as did the Panorama critic who praised it to the skies. The Harlem films proved more profitable though it seems the only writing contribution from Jenny was a scene where an activist slashes the brake lines of the rich white slumlord's Cadillac. Unfortunately his plan backfires when car thieves waylay the slumlord's wife and take the car. Speeding off, they lose control and unable to stop, plow into a schoolyard. We never bothered to see the finished product so we couldn't say if it ever got filmed but given the morality lesson involved, we suspect not. As we said the Black youth market was into harder stuff.

On the whole Jenny was bored by the 'Blaxploitation' genre given that most of them stank just as badly as the stuff made for Whitey. She did enjoy 'Shaft Goes to Africa' and 'Hell Up In Harlem', the former for its over the top plot and its location in Ethiopia, the latter for the scene where Black Muslims hold a hospital at gunpoint while 'Black Caesar' is treated for the wounds that supposedly killed him in the previous picture. We still remember her excitement at a screening up at N'eddie's beach house. Avi had started selling video cassette recorders and she'd bought the first one.

"Yeah baby... brandish those guns!"

The J P & C was also developing a video training program as they shifted their focus from construction planning to maintenance and inspection services. The Interstate Highway system was well on its way towards completion and the 'big projects' the company had been used to working on were only trickling out of the pipeline these days and they were being held up by so-called environmentalists. The railroads were contracting almost as fast as they were losing customers, with the government forced to combine passenger rail services across the county into something called 'Amtrak'. Thanks to the war in Viet Nam and on poverty there was little money left to build anything useful. Even 'urban renewal' was a fading concept. As the Seventies dragged on we noticed that the encyclopedia yearbooks Jan and Jen would buy between new set purchases started replacing their entries on the subject with ones on historic preservation.

Oddly enough, one of J P & C's first big inspection jobs was on behalf of the Riverbay Tenants Association. According to them, the complex had been badly built and poorly run. Not only that, but the management board had defaulted on the mortgage and skipped out of town. The State had taken over and announced an increase in maintenance fees. Talk was of a rent strike and the Association asked the company to provide them with an 'unbiased' inspection report. Naturally Jenny had to recuse herself from direct participation. Besides the obvious conflict of interest issue was the fact that she felt Cheryl had more construction supervision experience and would be better able to sort builder's defects from poor design. She'd also managed to sweet-talk 'doughnut boy' Will Caulfield into letting her poke around the Drake and Van De Lay offices after hours.

You'd think the thirty-five high rise towers, seven townhouse clusters, half dozen schools, fifteen churches and the various office, shopping, recreation and utility buildings that made up Riverbay were a sneeze away from being rubble from all the defects she'd been able to catalog. Most were the usual sorts of construction goofs expected when you've built over fifteen thousand residential units in one sitting. The more serious problems were on account of complex being built on marshland where the problem of subsidence hadn't been properly addressed by Drake or Van De Lay. The towers had been built on deep pilings and weren't in any danger. However, their utility connections had been laid in shallow trenches that were slowly pulling away from the towers. More frightening were long fissures in the lobby walls and stairwells that had opened up as the ground floors, unattached as they were to their building's skeleton, molded themselves to the sinking terrain.

One of the first trial stories we did was a piece on a clever bunch of artists that managed to sneak a full bathroom and kitchen set into their building under the watchful eye of code enforcement which was cracking down on people setting up housekeeping in an industrial zone. They set the stuff up in the ground floor as an 'installation piece' and some time later moved them upstairs leaving a giant 'Sold' card in their vacated spot. The loft district was turning into a scene so we hauled our own set of comfort appliances to a far corner of our studio.

"Honestly officer we're setting up a TV studio and need the Magic Chef and Norge for the break room... and the other equipment is for the dressing room."

Unlike '60 Minutes', the obvious precedent for our proposed format, we had a certain set of restrictions based on N'eddie's desire that individual stories have 'repeat value' and be relevant beyond the narrow interest of being a current event. Cover a trial so people can see what the process looks like and not necessarily because the crime was in the news. For the pilot episode we did stories like how people buy a crap car for the winter to save wear and tear on their 'good' car. We did a video reprise of our old portrait of the Platt family as well as an version of 'Goodbye Rachel Olsen' edited down to fifteen minutes. We even let ourselves be followed around in a piece called 'Two Heads Are Better Than One'. It was only supposed to something to show to buyers but it actually aired in a later 'issue'.

We also had our our crew cover the leadup to the Riverbay 'rent strike' including Jenny and Cheryl's site visits, their meetings with the tenants association and testimony on their behalf. For TV Panorama, Jenny gave a demonstration on the effects of ground subsidence complete with a scale model apartment block and its ground connections set in waterlogged soil. Opening a valve on the Perspex holding tank to drain the water and the lobbies, the plumbing trenches and sidewalks puled away from the tower for all to see.

We actually managed to get Heather into the Drake and Van De Lay offices for their side of the controversy. Walter didn't have much to say except that ordinarily he wasn't a vindictive man but he was going to get even with Jenny if it was the last thing he did.

He was also lucky that Jenny had been too busy learning from his mistakes as she worked on more detailed planning of the 'Lawson Cove' project. It too was to be built in reclaimed land so Jenny designed each building with the structural unity of a ship's hull, even the ones that would be built on pilings. She also designed a considerable amount of flexibility in the connections to the different units. Jenny also took some lessons in his successes as well. Only twenty percent of the Riverbay complex had buildings on it but his earlier projects in Manhattan, while keeping to his 'towers-in-a park' concept, had been far denser.

If water acreage was factored in, Lawson Cove would come out a little larger than Riverbay, yet even with half the projected unit density, Jenny achieved a ground coverage of a little over fifty percent with her buildings. Admittedly most of those buildings were single storey houses but there was a multistory hotel and clusters of six storey condominium 'villas' not to mention another unique feature she'd come up with. She had judged the development as being too far out of the way from the local medical facilities so her plans called for a medical clinic that could be expanded into a overnight stay hospital and Jenny being Jenny decided that since hospital were essentially hotels for sick people, why not go all the way and make the Lawson Cove medical center a 'destination' in and of itself? For the same price as you'd pay on the mainland you'd get hotel service and your family could enjoy themselves while you were taken care of.

Other design touches of hers was the interspersal of staff housing amongst the development so that no area was completely uninhabited throughout the year. She'd kept houses almost Levittown close but avoided the wide suburban streets on account of what she'd seen when we stayed at Heather's parent's vacation place in this upstate resort called Lake Luzerne. Cabins and houses were packed in pretty tight amongst the old growth trees and the access roads were only two lanes wide with not much of a shoulder yet it didn't feel like you were being hemmed in. It was more like the friendly intimacy of a campfire gathering.

The houses were of the standard Lustron design modified to include a wraparound deck and overhanging rafters and that vertical redwood paneling design. The three bedroom units were to be marketed to families whilst the two bedroom one were meant for seniors. Again to keep any area from being a 'dead zone' she set the ratio of family to senior housing so that even in areas like the golf courses, village shopping district, recreation center, beaches and playgrounds where houses were clustered for the needs of seniors or families there were still a few units of the other kind. She didn't want people to feel like they were in some sort of 'ghetto'.

Nineteen seventy-four began with sadness as the last in a string of deaths amongst Jenny's 'second string' friends in what the Platt children would later refer to as the 'Ides of March tragedies' on account of them all happening within a fortnight of the Ides of March. The first of these occurred in late February of 'Seventy-two' in of all places, an island off the coast of Iceland. The fishing town of Vestmannaeyjar was being menaced by a volcanic eruption and the J P & C had sponsored a scientific team being led by the senior Wilfred Sykes and some of his colleagues from the Tuskeegee institute. Wanting to see a real live volcano we tagged along as did Jenny and her friend EsmÈralda, who'd briefly lived on the island as a child.

"There's the house where I grew up in," she said pointing to a hapless dwelling about to be devoured by a steaming wall of black lava, "and... there it goes..."

An ancient swell of nostalgia hit her and before we could stop her she'd lit off for the house and race inside and up the stairs to her old bedroom. Chasing after her, we caught up to find her feverishly trying to unscrew the door knob with a pocket knife. With the sounds of a rocks smacking against the groaning wall we warned her 'that fire glacier's gettin' awful close Ezz!', but she kept going until her work was finally reward and we all made it back outside with her prize to look back as the roof caved in where we'd been standing.

In the meantime Jenny had been escorting Wil senior as he tried to find a safe pathway to the crater's rim. They were approaching from a upwind position and during the conversation she said something about hoping he'd be able to 'get the steppin' if the wind changed. He made some cryptic remarks about wondering if he'd have the guts to throw himself into the crater if he knew he was dying for a last intense experience before passing. They'd manage to get to a point where he could see into the crater when the air got eerily still. Fearing a shift in wind direction, Jenny suggested they beat a hasty retreat which they did. They got maybe a hundred paces with Mister Sykes stopped declaring that this was as far as he was going and settled to the ground.

The next death in the sequence was that of Sheriff Misener's wife who passed the next year at the end of that March. She'd never really recovered from her stomach problems and had largely been bedridden for the last five years and in pain for the last year but it was still hard on the sheriff as they'd still held out hope that Scott would turn up somewhere. His only comfort was that if he was gone at least she'll be able to find him 'on the other side'.

Barbara's husband was the one who managed to get get taken out on the Fifteenth,. He had asked Jenny to come up to the mountain retreat so she could look over some minor repair and maintenance items that had cropped up, which she did. On the drive back to Pittsburgh a reckless driver clipped his vehicle. Jenny, long used to rear-engined cars, wasn't able to recover from the spin and wrapped his Oldsmobile coupe around a tree. She walked away with seemingly minor cuts and bruises but he had been killed instantly.

While looking for a phone to call for help she spotted the death car half pulled into a driveway and the driver and his buddies cussing about the rapidly emptying tanks of moonshine they'd been hauling. According to police records she then 'proceeded to deliver a savage beating to the three plaintiffs with a fury not seen in these parts since the 'Ninety-three miners strikes' adding that when one of them drew a sawed off shotgun on her she, 'merely tore it from his grasp and used it to further club the three of them, delivering blows so hard the weapon had discharged its rounds in the shear terror of her wrath'.

She spent the weekend in county while they waited to see if she would be facing homicide charges only to let her go when the local sheriff pointed out an old law meant to protect shop and home owners stating that during the commission of a crime, the criminal or criminals involved weren't entitled to legal protection. They had been hauling 'shine' and had killed a war hero in the process and one of them being the son of the local district attorney doesn't help their case any. Not in an election year when his primary opponent was throwing charges of cronyism around. Jenny had been a model prisoner, barely uttering a word during the ordeal. It was on the final walk to the gate when she spooked the prison matron by asking.

"I didn't want to say anything... but it's kind of been bugging me for the last couple days... Where am I... how the hell did I get here... and why are there bees buzzing around in my head?"

Barbara managed to find some comfort in the assistance Sheriff Misener offered in going through the grieving process as he helped her with the settling of her husband's estate. Thirty years with someone aren't easily forgotten but finding another who knows what you're going through goes a long way towards easing the loss. The good sheriff would spend most of his days off that spring in Pittsburgh or at the retreat and when the summer season required his attention back home, Barbara could be seen returning feminine civility to what had degenerated into an off campus bachelor flat over the last decade. By labor day he was asking us what 'tadpoling' was.

We had spent little time out on the island on account of our work with TV Panorama but did get to follow around one of the oil men working for Petroco as he made his rounds servicing the 'grasshopper' pumps that dotted the Oklahoma landscape. One of the big issues in our area was the fact that just when inflation was eating into the meager profits of our fellow ranchers the government, intent on spurring new development, decided to enact price controls on the one commodity that was keeping family farms on a paying basis. If you had a well in the ground you could only sell at a fixed price but if you drilled a well in a 'undeveloped field' you could charge what the market will bear. Naturally this meant that anyone with 'old oil' had no real incentive to increase production so the energy shortage was made that much worse on account.

We Sooners were old hands at getting around silly little things like price controls with schemes that'd put Al Capone's rum runners to shame. For example, if you had a friend in the local hall of records you could have all the paperwork indicating a well on your property 'go missing', file for new drilling permits and you were the lucky owner of 'new oil' well. This was highly illegal but you were only out the cost of the bribe and not even that if your 'friend' was loyal kinfolk. Since we'd only developed a small corner of our ranch but had a reasonably good idea what was on the rest of the land, we could stay legal by swapping undeveloped land with our next door neighbors. Sure we had to pay for the new divot but with prices quadruple what we could get for 'old oil,' we were still money ahead. Officially we'd shut down and capped our 'old oil' pumps for the duration but just about everyone else in the Petroco family found various schemes to combine new and old well production and still get that 'new oil' price for as much as they could get away with.

Disaster movies were the big thing this summer and Ryerson International had a beaut called 'Oak Air One Three Nine' in production that arose from Van Der Plaat Airtours' shopping for a new jetliner a couple years before in anticipation of the Lawson Cove development. Jenny had wanted the Lockheed 'Tri-Star' as did Bitsey's mum on account of it using British engines but there had been a production backlog that meant the choice was narrowed down to the DC-10 or a Boeing 747. With most of their capital tied up in the Cove project, buying or leasing a 747 proved just a little too much out of their price range so Jenny was sent around the airlines to look over their DC 10 operations. What she found was that everyone had adopted an engine maintenance procedure out of expedience that was unapproved by McDonnell Douglas.

On the surface it didn't seem like a big issue, instead of opening the nacelle covers to replace an engine they removed the whole pod, but Jenny had come across a pod still partially attached to the wing and lashed to a forklift that'd been left alone while the crew was out to lunch.

"If that forklift springs a leak, your guys just had a million dollar lunch break," she warned as she explained that they would now have to inspect the hard-to-get-at wing mounts for cracking every time they changed engines. "Wouldn't take much for an engine to rattle off on account and if it did so on take off you'll end up digging your own grave with the tailfin."

As part of her buying rounds she was shown one company's new flight simulator and at her request a flight crew was put through that scenario and weren't they surprised to find their usual 'engine out' procedure had worsened the problem. They had been told an engine was going to fail but Jenny also reasoned that the detaching engine might take out hydraulic lines but she didn't tell them that beforehand. The plane was still theoretically flyable on the copilot's side but the stall warning system, which only worked on the pilot's side, had been disabled along with the left side wing slats and flaps. With the engines throttled back after getting airborne, the left wing went into a stall they didn't know to correct.

Needless to say that company sent a directive down to its maintenance crew forbidding the easy engine change procedure. Jenny was still concerned enough about the temptation to decide to recommend waiting out the production delay. At any rate, Delta Air Lines was purchasing Tri-Stars so they could lease one of theirs in the meantime.

Since they missed that turn, they end up flying into Soviet airspace and fighter jets are sent up to investigate. It's never a good sign when fellow pilots looks up at your plane and cross themselves on account of the damage they see. They guide the crippled plane to a military base with two very long runways. Of course the runway they've committed with had emergency equipment waiting on it but they clear in the nick of time for the expensive fiery crash effect the movie's budget allowed for. Cut to the flight deck where it looks like the crew had fallen asleep with their arms up till the hands of rescuers from the top of the screen reveal the cockpit had been rolled upside down.

Before the landing, the crew had joked that at least if they did wipe out on Russian soil it wouldn't be plastered all over television. In the military hospital they watch a fiery plane crash on TV and joke that they'd hate to be those poor sons of bitches, to which the base commander replies that they were those poor sons of bitches. When asked of the casualties, they're told that while there were serious injuries and some might not make it, everyone managed to get out alive. The movie ends with a toast by the fighter pilots to their comrades of the air.

With the spirit of détente in the air, the message of cooperation looked to be a winner so the release was scheduled to coincide with next year's launch of the Apollo-Soyuz docking mission. In the meantime the Ryerson family managed to get an invitation to Moscow to discuss the possibility of making a motion picture there. As she had a project of her own about to commence, Jenny asked for and was given a tour of one of their housing projects. After sharing her experiences with Riverbay's ground subsidence problems she inquired whether it made much sense to have workers putting together the prefabricated panels of a high-rise apartment block with such a short building season when they could just as easily stack fully assembled modules assembled in a factory, adding that with the Soviet economic plan, they could put more people to work that way.

She had crafted some pretty wry comments on the differences between the US and Russia, opining that it'd be difficult to classify us as a purely capitalistic nation on account of the New Society programs but that the Russians should have heeded their own advice in regards to implementing their own economic system. Referring to the old saying about stealing a salami, she observed that the people would've gladly voted in aspects of socialism slice by slice as they're doing all over Western Europe and to some degree in the US, but still balk at having to swallow the whole salami in one big gulp.

She did stick up for the good old USA when asked about the oppression of racial minorities by stating that for all the problems of race relations we've had all our solutions have come about as a result of the very system people were condemning.

"How long do you suppose slavery would've have lasted if there had never been anyone around to say that all men were created equal? We have a pretty robust system in our country. Right now they're getting ready to tell our president to get the steppin' and when they do, you can bet he won't need the Army to show him the door. We've gone through a lot of turmoil in the last few years, but the rule of law still counts for something back home..."

International lawlessness touched on the Van der Plaat side of the family when Elizabeth's attempt to get over her dislike of the sea was thwarted when the crew of the France mutinied and held their ship hostage on account of plans by the French Line to end their passenger line service. She and Jenny had intended to take the next return voyage upon delivering Arianna to the English boarding school she was to attend that year. The vagabond lifestyle of her parents had gotten 'tiresome' and she wanted some degree of regularity in her life. Not one to be deterred, they booked passage on the Queen Elizabeth 2. They sailed in the comfort of a luxury suite but Elizabeth was just as miserable as she had been during that wartime voyage to the states.

As much as she loathed her voyage, Elizabeth was still able to see the potential for growth in the cruise market and at the next Lawson Cove project meeting she broached the idea of obtaining a small cruise ship once the project got going. The idea had been considered but rejected on account of cabotage laws requiring an intermediate visit to a foreign port for a foreign flag vessel and an American flagged ship was economically out of the question. They would need to do a lot of dredging to accommodate even a small cruise liner and at any rate, with the marina facilities already being planned, anyone who wanted to sail in would already have a billet. Jenny did remind them that they were going to need clean fill from somewhere and having a deepwater anchorage couldn't hurt them in the long run adding that her grandfather's old ship would make for an excellent candidate for rebuilding as an excursion vessel.

The MV Dorothea currently occupied itself in delivering the equipment needed for an on site concrete plant to Lawson Cove as well as the old South Shore club, which was to serve another tour as a crew accommodation barge before being permanently installed as a 'Fifties nostalgia café'. You know you're getting old when they start selling your childhood memories back to you. Still, we remember them as happy days and were glad to see them coming back, if only in idealized form.

"Friday night at the fights again?"

"Yup..."

"What'd he do this time?"

"If you buy his story... he got robbed by some spooks on the way to the bank."

"What was the haul?"

"Something like twenty large give or take... Fifteen hundred in cash, rest in checks..."

"Hopefully... those checks'll turn up safe. Y'know it costs money to stop payment on those. Real pain in the ass..."

We stopped talking as a figure in denim banged his way out the patio door, yelled obscenities at his old man and with house keys a-janglin', stormed off for the village saloon.

"Last summer... when we took Arianna up north to do some camping... she was all upset that we were using that pop-up trailer. Some other kid had a Winnebego... and all the sudden we were the Joad family. I explained to her that the whole point of trailer camping was so we could enjoy the great outdoors and still have a place to pee... anything more we might as well stay in a hotel."

"Kid's a regular Mildred Pierce..."

"Oh I don't know... She's not real good at making friends... so if some kid starts bragging about something she doesn't have, she kinda feels inadequate... even if it's something cheap."

"She's gonna love English boarding school life..."

"Yeah... well they do have a charming way of putting little snots in their place."

With dredging and filling underway at Lawson Cove, the next couple weeks were spent finalizing the planned hotel designs with the idea that now was the time to field any objections. The rise of nostalgia had buzzed around Jenny's mind like a bee in your car and she'd put together some sketches and a model of a 'classically styled' resort hotel to go with or replace the 'Brasilia-style' hotel that was the current centerpiece design. She claimed to have based it on the Gideon Putnam hotel up in Saratoga but the layout looked more like that hotel we'd passed going into Schenectady only sized for modern hotel room proportions and faced with pale blue stucco.

It was reasonably well received for a last minute design and it was thought that it'd give the resort some class but she might want to figure out how to work more balconies into it without spoiling the old world looks. The next two weeks of meetings were devoted to picking out a build site that wouldn't look like a 'missing tooth' as it looked to be a while before they could justify building a second hotel. In the end a tennis court was shifted around to serve as a place holder. On the drive back to Amityville, the bees in Jenny's head started bouncing around with the thought that a lot of the 'Baby Boom' parents were getting close to retirement age. Some moved to Florida and never came back but some still kept residences in town for the summer. Others stayed all year but with energy prices going up might want a smaller place during the winter.

"I was thinking... put face brick and Georgian details on this... we'd have a classy little residential hotel for the part timers.... Y'know they've yet to build anything where the old South Shore used to be... You think a six storey building would look too out of place?"

"Parking'd be a hassle..."

"I was thinking we could dig down to the just above the water table... and we could put the tennis courts on top... maybe with some trellis work to hide the cars... kinda like something in Glen Cove or Southampton..."

"Oughta look great on a postcard. Funny how lame places look on postcards these days..."

"You still collect those things? I meant to get you some this year... but you know how busy I've been... hey wasn't that Ron Junior?"

"He looks like he needs a drink real fast... old man musta really let him have it... we wanna go someplace to eat? Them Philly steaks go right through us..."

"I kinda wanted to have a look at the old South Shore lot... Tell you what. Why don't we order a pizza, go have a quick look and be back by the time it's done... Sounds like a plan?"

"Whadya suppose they're up to?"

"Dunno... Jenny saw one of the neighbor kids going the other way..."

"A tad late in the season for that kinda running around," opined Jenny in the snippy voice of a long dead old town biddie from the nether regions of her childhood memories. That got a laugh from Janice and they started riffing on old timey words like 'phosphate sodies', 'al-u-minium Zeppelins', 'rotogravure supplements' or Jenny's favorite, 'anti-vivisectionist rallies' always preceding them with the angry phrase 'These kids these days... with their'.

After an hour we broke company with Jan and the kids in the hopes of getting back to the house before the beer washed through. Turning onto Ireland we had a long block to puzzle over the blinkenlight show coming from our driveway. We could see Sheriff Misener's car along with an ambulance and the county meat wagon parked around the DeFeo's cars as a Suffolk county detective hovered around the threshold of their front door. The rest of the house was lit up like Times Square.

"Shit... Looks like we'll be parking in the street tonight."

Getting a little tighter in a car that steers like the Queen Mary, we did the best we could to pull up and back into the space in front of our house as our bladder sloshed around. Jenny pawed at the glove box trying to feel for the latch.

"We better sober up quick kids... might hafta call this one in. You still keep a camera in here?"

We popped the latch ourselves and pointed to the East German 'Praktica' Jenny gave us for our birthday. She'd picked it up in Moscow so it had that extra bit of novelty value.

Dreading the answer we asked, "How many do you think he got?"

"Hard to say... if this just happened maybe the old man..."

Seeing the coroner's assistant pull two or three body bags out of the truck and sling them over his shoulder Jenny quickly amended her speculative statement, "No... he got 'em all. Betcha a dollar he tells 'em the Mob did it..."

"Never said he was the brightest bulb in the set. You're comin' out my way..."

The Coroner's van had pretty much blocked off the side door but we still walked over to it, mainly out of principle but we did want to get a quick glance at the mayhem next door before calling it in to N'eddie. We were threading our way through the needle of space between the van and our step rails when somebody poked their head around the corner to ask what we doing. We just jangled our keys to indicate we lived here and didn't appreciate having our driveway blocked off. Jenny made the call to N'eddie while we took care of other business.

Needing to sober up and get in good with the new neighbors Jenny started a pot of coffee while she rooted around for some rolls of film. For some reason they're always in a different place from where we remembered putting them and usually we end up finding them in the icebox. Jenny found some in the fridge and was unboxing them for us when Sheriff Misener came around and rapped on the kitchen door. He must've thought we were going to shoot pictures into the house from our attic room because he asked us to stick by him for a while under the pretext of asking if we'd heard anything unusual during the previous evening say around three in the morning maybe. Jenny said something about waking up to what she thought were gunshots only to find she'd fallen asleep while some war movie was playing on the TV.

He moved us to around the back of the house, where we could hear 'little' Ron talking to one of the local sergeants in the kitchen. A minute later herded us into the dining room where everyone had been gathered. One of the kids had left their school books on the table with one of them open to problem. Theirs problems are over with now. Jenny had been a lot friendlier with the DeFeos than we'd been - always gave us the impression that they didn't like Jewish people - and had been in the house more often then we had so Sheriff Misener was questioning her about what they ought to be looking around for. She told him that Ron had at least one rifle of his own, looked like a Marlin and she'd run into him at the rifle range a couple years ago.

"They had paper head targets up and I was doing my usual neck shots... You know where you take out the muscles so the head flops over and your victim slowly suffocates? He'd been giving Avi the business over those statues on the lawn... musta thought I was sending him a message... said something about if we ever got into a tussle would I please just finish the job..."

The crime scene photographer wandered in complaining about his camera. He didn't think it was advancing the film all the way and feared he was going to have a roll full of double exposures. He was told by somebody to just get another camera but this was the only one he'd brought and they wanted to be able to move the bodies 'sometime this century'.

We finished up in time to be allowed a quick run through the house before they sealed it off for the evening. They weren't letting press in the house but let us take some shots on account of us saying something about wanting to test our work before returning the camera. You've seen one blood soaked bed you've pretty much seen 'em all but it's still pretty galling to see where people had been killed. Taking a cue from Jenny's staged crime scene photographs, we shot the few pictures we took using just the light from one of the officer's flashlight. With fast black and white film, the tiny spot of light looked like an accusation as we photographed an incomplete puzzle in the little girl's room, or the wheelchair parked by one of the younger boys' bed. Up in the attic we took a couple of Jenny standing by her old bedroom door. After taking a shot of dishes in the sink and those schoolbooks on the table, we were done for the night.

Knowing Sheriff Misener, things were just beginning for Ron if he thought his mobsters-got-his family story had any credibility. Officially, he was being taken in under protective custody so if he was read his rights that was just a formality while they picked apart his story. Playing the easy going local constable type, the good Sheriff would say that he could certainly understand why you'd want to bump off your old man; he'd seen plenty of people he'd given serious thought to applying 'street justice' to himself. He could even understand bumping off you mom; he'd seen plenty of kids he'd figured would grow up to be the Norman Bates of Long Island. He could even taking out your whole family. If you had your reasons the best thing to do was fess up now and take your chances with a jury because the longer you dragged it out the harder it was gonna be on you.

If the perp stuck to his guns he'd go on about how he may appear to be a small town cop in some hick suburb but he had a keen mind and liked a challenge, He'd tell the hump that his story was the most pathetically lame one he'd ever been subjected to, that they already had evidence to refute it and that he was deeply insulted that you didn't even try in your effort to put one over on him. He'd give his suspect another chance before he handed him off to the Suffolk county boy who, he assured were not nearly as sympathetic as he was. The 'Suffolk county boys' eventually wore down Ron's story to the point where he was admitting that he'd been forced to do some of the killing before finally coming clean about having done the family by himself. There was more activity around the house as police divers searched the pool and creek for the rifle and the clothes he'd been wearing at the time of the killings but things began to quiet down by mid December.

Jenny and Jamie were helping the Mis'ess DeFeo's brother as they went through the house to take out personal items, clear out the food pantries and get the place ready for winter since it looked to be a while before they could put the place up for sale. As they worked into the mess left behind by 'Number One Son', the cheery topic of legal succession was batted around - if 'Big Ron' had been killed first, his property would've passed automatically to Louise and unless 'Little Ron' manages to get off, everything would go to her next of kin. That seemed to satisfy Jenny who'd just had explain to Arianna why those kids she liked from the house next door won't be coming aboard the boat to play any more.

"Y'know... This coulda been dealt with... he didn't hafta go kill his whole family over what... Fifteen hundred and some lousy checks?"

"It was eighteen hundred..."

"Fine eighteen hundred... if that was all the money you guys had in the world that'd be one thing... but the dealership wasn't going anywhere. Coulda written that off easy... Just off the top of my head... you could find some burnt out old wreck... tow it to the lot and claim some hoodlums went through in the middle of the night or something. There's your eighteen hundred right there. Y'know there's probably enough abandoned cars in the city... if you worked through the weekend... hell, you coulda made up the checks too!"

"Yeah... Well... It's like the man says... water under the bridge... Not to change the subject but how come none of you guys drive an American car? I mean c'mon..."

"I dunno... I've been a boatie so long... I've just gotten used to rear-engined driving. Anyway, it's not like Detroit's been making a lot of amphibious cars lately. Had a 'Forty-seven DeSoto..."

"So what's with the Jap truck?"

"That's got a rotary engine," Jamie explained. "Don't need a lot of truck and it's new technology... If it makes you feel any better, the Company fleet vehicles are American made. Kids around here love 'em because we got the same trucks as the one they use on that 'Emergency' show..."

To Mister Brigante's dismay, little green foreign-looking job rolled to a stop in the driveway and its occupants struggled to pull themselves out. The driver we recognized as Doug Montelli but we couldn't place the girl next to him till she turned to retrieve a couple boxes of pizza from the back seat. It had been maybe ten years, but even with the long hair we recognized her as little Leela.

"Et tu, Bruté? I just got through tellin' these people the importance of supporting the American auto industry... and what does my oldest paesono show up in?"

"Hey... It's a Fiat... It's Italian... I'm Italian..."

"You're an American... you should support your country..."

"Oh... quit givin' Dougie the business," Leela growled. "If people hafta buy something because they're supposed to... might as well be living in Russia."

The point was well taken and lunch was brought to the kitchenette so we could have one last look at Janice's balcony landscape. In a couple of years, Jenny noted, we might be able to see a similar landscape for real. Phase one of Lawson Cove was finally getting underway.

"We just opened a sales office at the Ryerson Plant in Philadelphia. They actually built a little cul de-sac on the roof and hauled up a couple of the model homes. A real live Siedlung am Fabrik!"

"You think it's a good idea to build in this economy? Things are starting to look pretty grim."

"Best time in the world if you time it right. We can get construction workers ready enough and by the time the economy picks up we should have our product on the market before everyone else does. The first batch of retirees actually lucked out in that they'd cashed in their life savings right before the market started going south!"

"This 'energy crisis' thing still has everyone spooked. All the sudden people want compacts."

"Detroit better start moving or we're gonna lose another industry... already losing electronics..."

"Oh really... Who's the architect?"

"That firm you used to work at... Drake and Van De Lay... You should see the model. A real beaut... Kinda looks like something an Italian would design."

"Well how do you like that... old man Drake actually has some imagination left in him..."