The Simeon Chamber by Steve Martini Page A

those records in the last week.”
    “Oh?” said Sam. “Who was the first?”
    “A gentleman who was in here a few days ago. We don’t get requests for case files that old very often. The man seemed to know exactly what he was looking for. He had the whole nine yards on the case when he walked in, even the file number. Otherwise we’d still be looking.”
    “Do you have a name, anything?”
    The officer looked quizzically at Sam.
    “On the other man I mean, any name?”
    “Oh, let me look.”
    The officer moved to the counter and looked 53
    at a large journal that lay open facing the other direction. He turned it around, flipped one page and ran his finger down the column. “Here it is, Mr. George Johnson, 1420
    Olstead Street, San Francisco, California.”
    Sam opened his briefcase, took out a note pad and entered the name of George Johnson and the address from the book.
    “Would you like to see the file?” asked the officer. “I think it’s still in the reading room. We haven’t had a chance to refile it in archives yet.”
    Sam followed the officer down a well-lit corridor and into a room with another counter and several library tables surrounded by chairs.
    The officer went behind the counter and rummaged through a stack of files on a metal cart.
    “Yes, here it is.” The file was not voluminous, only one single manila folder, legal length and no more than an inch thick, a product of the period before commercial copying machines and word processors, when hearings and trials took days not months to complete.
    “Here, if you’ll sign this card I’ll take your business card and have the clerk at the front counter enter the information in our log. You can take the file to a table and if you need any copying just ring the bell on the counter and a clerk will assist you.
    Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Bogardus?”
    “No, I don’t think so. It’ll just take me a few minutes.” Sam was actually surprised. Having heard the horror stories about the military, he’d expected a raft of red tape and delays. Instead he had everything he could ask for, all wrapped up in an attitude of professional courtesy that was unheard of at the county courthouse, where he knew most of the clerks by their first names.
    He sat at the table, opened the file and began flipping through the papers. There were a number of statements from eyewitnesses who had seen the blimp hit the beach by the Great Highway, and statements from others who had watched it drift aimlessly over the city before coming to rest on Bellevue Avenue.
    Sam scanned the statements quickly, looking for some key, some piece of information that might help him find a thread that could lead to Jennifer Davies’s father. But there was nothing unusual.
     
    The typed record of the formal hearings before the board of inquiry was fixed by a metal fastener to the back cover of the file folder. It took Sam twenty minutes to canvass the double-spaced transcript. The document contained a bland account of the events leading up to the crash, from flight preparations early in the morning of August 16, 1942, to the mopping up of the destroyed airship several days later. In its findings the board concluded that the two crew members, Lieutenant James Spencer and Chief Petty Officer Raymond Slade, were lost at sea during a routine antisubmarine patrol at an unknown location off the Pacific coast near San Francisco, California. The cause of the accident—”Unknown.” The board seemed particularly puzzled by the fact that the normal three-man flight crew had been pared to two members on the day of the accident. For some unexplained reason Slade had instructed the flight engineer to step out of the craft just seconds before it lifted off the runway. The engineer would no doubt spend the balance of his life wondering why he had been spared, thought Bogardus. Slade and Spencer knew something that day. But what?
    The file contained a number of yellowed news clippings,