Blood Games (45 page)

Neal said that he didn’t know where James was, but he knew that he hadn’t left Raleigh. He had talked to James by telephone just that day. James wanted money to get out of town, and Neal told him he would see what he could do. James was supposed to call him at work again in a few days about the money.

The officers questioned Neal until three-thirty Saturday morning, and when they had finished, they did not arrest him, as he had expected. To arrest him would be premature. News of an arrest would tip off James and Chris, and the officers might never again see either of them. They needed Neal’s help and cooperation to make certain that everybody involved was brought to justice.

Their first objective was to find James. After arresting him, they would pick up Chris. Only then would Neal be charged.

Before taking Neal back to his apartment, Young and Taylor arranged to pick him up on Sunday morning to take him to Washington and have him retrace the route he had taken on the murder night and identify all the landmarks. They warned him to say nothing to anybody about talking with them. If James or Chris found out, he could be in danger.

Despite his promise not to tell anybody about his confession, Neal knew that there was one person he had to tell: his mother. He caught a ride home with a friend from Caswell County Saturday. He got out at the convenience mart in Milton, just down the street from Carolyn Thomas’s house, where Kenyatta was spending the summer with her grandmother while working at a department store in nearby Danville.

Neal and Kenyatta still were seeing each other. He had taken her to the senior prom at the School of Science and Math in May. When she stopped in Raleigh on her way back from a graduation trip to the beach only a week earlier, she visited Neal’s apartment, bought James a cheeseburger, and spent the night with Neal at an inexpensive motel.

In her first week on her summer job, she had come down with chicken pox, and Neal had promised to come to see her. When he didn’t show up as promised, she wrote it off as being typically Neal.

Now he called, finding her at a friend’s house, apologizing for not coming because the police had interviewed him for twelve hours, he claimed. She met him at her grandmother’s big gray house on the hilltop. He had flowers, jewelry, and a sheepish grin for her. He looked drained, and she knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. He was extremely nervous. They sat in the living room to talk, while her grandmother busied herself in the back of the house. Within minutes, Kenyatta had pulled the whole story out of him.

“That night you told me you’d done acid, was that the night?” she asked.

“Yeah, but you’d best forget that,” he said.

“He wanted me to say I didn’t remember anything about it,” she said later. “I said, ‘I am not lying for you, Neal. I’m not going to jail for you.’”

Kenyatta was stunned nearly to disbelief by the story Neal had told her. “I was in shock,” she said later. “I kept saying, ‘Why would you do something so stupid?’ I felt sorry for him. He was really scared. He was crying.”

Neal still had hope that he might not have to go to prison, that he might get probation for cooperating, but Kenyatta thought that was being unrealistic. This was murder.
Murder.
And Neal Henderson, of all people, a genius, a person she expected to become an innovative scientist or a brilliant professor, the man she had once wanted to marry, was involved in it. How could a person so smart be so stupid? It was simply beyond her comprehension.

Yet she could not abandon Neal. “I felt like he’d been pulled into this,” she said later. The real blame, she felt, lay with her scummy cousin, James, and that scuzball, Chris. Her support would go to Neal.

Neal felt relief after telling Kenyatta, but the worst was yet to come: telling his mother. Later, he said it was the hardest thing he ever went through, worse even than the ordeal his conscience had been putting him through since the murder.

“She knew something was wrong. I told her I was in pretty big trouble this time. She was distraught when I told her what it was. She kept saying she just couldn’t believe this was happening. Every other sentence, I was saying, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.’”

38

On the day Bart walked away from house arrest, he later said, he called two friends whom he would identify only by first names, Bill* and Tim.* They came to fetch him, and all three spent the night camped by a lake on university land used for agricultural research not far from the main campus. They shot BB guns and slingshots, got drunk, smoked pot, and slept on the ground in sleeping bags.

The next two days he spent at his friends’ apartment in Raleigh’s southern suburbs, watching TV and listening to the stereo. That proved boring, however, and he got his friends to bring him back to the campus.

He lurked on campus that day until he saw Hank going to work and called him over to get a feel for the situation

“It’s ten times as bad as it’s ever been,” Hank told him. “Man, you better not be hanging around here.”

It was not only because Bart didn’t have money that he didn’t flee, he later said. Indeed, he was thinking of going to Myrtle Beach to join hordes of other college-age young people in a summer job serving the annual throngs of vacationers. More than anything, he said, his decision to stay was not a decision at all, only a lackadaisical attitude.

Although he knew that the SBI and the Washington police were trying to connect him to the Von Stein murder, he was confident that they had no evidence against him and couldn’t arrest him. Sure, Christy Newsom and the Raleigh police were after him, but even if they caught him for breaking house arrest, he figured the worst that could happen would be having to spend six or eight months in jail.

He was confident that they would not catch him, however. In the past year he had grown so expert at eluding the authorities that it was almost like a game, one at which he had decided he was more masterful than they.

“To be perfectly honest,” he said later, “I got a real kick out of it. It was fun. I had this job painting houses, the most boring job in the world, which I couldn’t do anymore because of them. All of a sudden, this great adventure just fell into my life. I was this desperado, on the lam. I got a great thrill out of it. I was playing cat and mouse with the police, skateboarding right under their noses.”

Soon after he returned to campus, Bart later claimed, he went into the Burger King at Mission Valley Shopping Center on Western Boulevard—the BK Lounge, he and his friends called it—where he encountered a casual acquaintance, a girl he had met at a keg party one night. Her name was Angela, but he didn’t know her last name. She was a student at State but now was co-oping, working between studies at the nearby Research Triangle.

“What’s up?” she said, as he later told the story.

“Police are after me,” Bart said with a smile.

“What’s this about?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I don’t have any place.”

“Well, if you need someplace to hide out, you can stay at my place. My roommate’s gone for the summer.”

Her apartment was in the same complex where Bart had lived when he first moved off campus. She gave him a key, and he fetched his suitcase and a plastic laundry bag full of clothes from hiding and moved in that night.

The days that followed, he said later, were “like a whole string of Saturdays off.” His hiding out was done mostly in the open, much of it spent sprawled reading under trees in out-of-the-way campus spots or by various apartment complex swimming pools. He spent a lot of time in the campus library. He even checked out
Moby Dick
because of an incident from high school.

When he was supposed to have read the book and reported on it in Weldon Slayton’s class, he had read the Classics Comics version instead. Slayton had been immediately aware of it and had chastised him. “You’re not getting away with something,” he told Bart, “you’re missing something.” Now Bart finished the book as a tribute to Slayton and realized that his teacher had been right. He enjoyed it immensely.

He even began writing himself, keeping a diary of sorts in a spiral-bound notebook that he kept in his backpack. His first entry was on Thursday, June 8, two days after he broke house arrest.

There are times when I wonder if there is any hope for mankind, and then I slap myself for being so silly; of course, there’s no hope for mankind.

If you assume that 1/3 of all the people in the world give a damn, and 1/3 of the people know they are contributing to the downfall of society, then what are the other 1/3 doing?

I would assume they are sitting on their butts not giving a damn and waiting to be influenced by somebody with a motive for swaying the masses, ulterior or otherwise.

If a small group of wealthy individuals with enough cash to cover their asses want to do something, they can do just about anything. Look at Exxon, after doing nearly irreparable damage to 520 miles of coastline they blamed the captain (it was his fault) and told the government and public that they would take care of it

This don’t-worry-be-happy attitude was exactly what the public wanted to hear. After 3 months nobody really cared that much, it was old news. Exxon, one of the largest corporations in the world, managed to get out of their basic responsibility by selectively influencing the 1/3 of society who don’t give a damn. As for the government, whoever said that government wasn’t big business was a total loon. Ask Ollie North; he became a millionaire and a hero by selling Stinger missiles to Iranian fanatics. Ignorant bedouin camel jockeys with high tech weaponry is a tactical mistake of the caliber of the Maginot line. After, say, 5 years of arms dealing, the Ayatollah would’ve been another Col. Khadafy.

North came out of the whole fiasco smelling like roses, even better than Reagan. That’s the problem with the American public; the 1/3 that don’t give a damn are easily swayed by appearances and aren’t bothered by facts.

Thus, I deem society doomed because eventually the 2/3s that are getting pissed on will become pissed off.

I plan to try my hand at fiction, I think I may have a knack for it.

By the following day, his mood had grown melancholy, his writing more personal.

I have nothing now. No money, no material wealth, no civil rights. I do have a few good friends and the clothes on my back, and even though that’s enough to keep me alive it’s not enough to keep me happy.

It has been a long time since I was happy. I don’t remember the last time I was. For too long merely being satisfied with my existence was enough for me, but being satisfied isn’t being happy.

There were times when I was happy and not satisfied and vice versa, but it has been a long time since I’ve had both. That is what I want now.

I’m sitting on top of some type of transformer on the intramural field, watching late middle-aged men run around the track. I guess they must be feeling fairly mortal to put themselves through this in the middle of June.

At the time Bart was writing those words, unbeknownst to him, his friend Neal already had told John Crone that he wanted to talk and was waiting to tell a story that would bring drastic change to Bart’s life.

By the following day, while Neal was in Milton at Bart’s grandmother’s house, telling his shocking story to Kenyatta, Bart’s writing had grown introspective and morose.

I’m sitting on the top level of the parking deck next to Reynolds Coliseum. Earlier this year, most of the slabs of concrete on the south side of the building’s top (where I’m sitting) fell off 4 stories to the pavement below. N.C. State is an engineering and agricultural school and they can’t even build a building right.

The humidity is so high that you can see what looks like a fog up under the street lamps.

The Smothers Bros, are playing Reynolds tonight; judging by the turnout, they aren’t making much money.

I remember the very first time I came to N.C. State on a high school field trip. It was open house and I must have been in the 9th grade. That would’ve been in ’82.

Back then, when “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was a fairly recent movie, I thought a lot differently about the university than I do now. Back then, it was all so new and amazing and big. Now it’s small and tiresome.

It’s taken almost 3 whole years, but its gotten old quick. If I had not led my life so foolishly, the things I could have now would stagger the mind. I mean it. The procrastination did me in, in the end.

I love my family now more than ever. I think that I can tell my dad I love him now, I could never have done this before. We never got along well, mostly because he never encouraged me to work hard, only to punish me if I failed. And though he has done more for me than anyone else, ever, I am more saddened and grieved to think that nearly all he has done for me has now come to naught.

My father grows older each year, I think he’s 46, and my deepest, most sincere wish, is to make him happy in his old age.