The Simeon Chamber Read Free Page B

dark cavern at the end of the tunnel. He shifted the light of the candle toward the opening and stared in wonderment at the sight that met his eyes. It was an image to be fused in his mind for eternity, for an instant later the first shock wave struck. A xxxiii thousand yards of cubic earth rained down from above—
    burying Earl Huber forever beneath a tortured and twisted landscape.
    THE SIMEON CHAMBER 1
    1
    SAN FRANCISCO, 1975
    The ancients long ago learned that the essence of a lie is to be found in its deception, not its words. It was an axiom the subtleties of which Samuel J. Bogardus was soon to comprehend.
    But at that moment he carried on an animated monologue in the private chambers of his brain, a conversation that periodically slipped past the confines of his lips in the form of half-mumbled epithets.
    Bogardus was angry with himself or, perhaps more correctly, with his aging mother. Angie Bogardus was relentless. It was not that he was busy. He had settled a case only two days before and thus had avoided the anxiety and drudgery of an eight-day trial. It was more the irritation of dealing with Angie’s “referrals,” as she called them—
    doddering friends from one or another of her social clubs or charities, all with special problems, none of which were ever susceptible to legal treatment or solution.
    This time it came under the rubric of an adoption case, a field of law about which Sam knew little and cared less. To his repeated chagrin Bogardus had learned years before that his skills of advocacy, honed during more than a decade of active trial work, were to no avail when matched against the dogged persistence of his mother. It was a contest he had long ago conceded, for Angie wielded the double-edged sword of authority and guilt with the guile of a samurai. Before Sam could hang up the phone he had committed himself to talking to his mother’s friend. To Angie it was the same as taking the case.
    The sun’s rays found their way down through the canyons of the Financial District, warming the street against the light breezes off the Pacific. The balmy days of early fall blessed the city when the searing heat of California’s Central Valley faded and favored San Francisco by leaving the fog out over the ocean.
    And while any longtime resident of the city could tell you that San Francisco weather was fickle, on this day at least, the place basked under crystal-clear skies in seventy-five-degree temperatures.
    Bogardus walked the few blocks from his 3
    apartment on Bush Street to the cable car, rode part of the way to Broadway and then boarded a bus from Broadway to his law office on the Embarcadero.
    He was not an overly attractive man, though women were somehow drawn to him. The chiseled features on his face were dominated by an angular jaw and placid green eyes that danced with a roguish charm as he spoke. A shade under six feet tall, with a lean frame and thinning, curly brown hair, he moved at thirty-nine with the grace and self-confidence of a man who, while not wealthy, had attained a modicum of independence.
    But it had not always been so. Samuel Bogardus was born to working class parents and had learned the adversities of life at a young age.
    Sam’s father, Joseph, had been a farmer in the hills above Colma and Daly City before the postwar housing boom. He suffered the fate of virtually all of the small ranchers and farmers in the doomed regions south of San Francisco. Joseph Bogardus had watched in bitter resignation as one after another of his leased farms were devoured for new subdivisions and commercial development. In the mid-fifties his last ranch became an island surrounded on all sides by tract homes. When the owner of the land, a crusty Greek farmer, refused to sell, the money men merely reached deeper into their pockets, turned their largess on the city fathers and the ranch was taken by eminent domain for the construction of a school. For ten years Sam watched as his father wandered