Special Topics in Calamity Physics (71 page)

For the next three or four years, The Nightwatchmen did just that; silently, they restructured, educated and recruited. "Membership tripled not only in America, but internationally," reported a Dutch theorist who ran a Web site called "De Echte Waarheid," "The Real Truth." They supposedly formed a tangled web, a mysterious network with Graeey poised at the center surrounded by other "thinkers," as they were called, and spangling the outside of this maze, countless ancillary members—the majority never meeting Graeey or even each other.

"No one knows what most members were up to," wrote Randy on www.goodrebels.net.

I
had an inkling. Charlie Quick in
Prisoners of War: Why Democracy Won't Stick in South America
(1971) (a regular on Dad's syllabus), wrote of a necessary period of "gestation," when it was beneficial for a potential freedom fighter to do nothing but "learn everything about his enemy—including what he has for breakfast, his brand of aftershave, the number of hairs on his left big toe." Perhaps that's what each member had been assigned to do, collect (with the precision and patience of collecting butterfly specimens, even the rare, shy species) personal information on the men Graeey deemed their targets. Hannah had shown this level of detail when discussing the Harvey family at Hyacinth Terrace; she'd known the Civil War story about his house, Moorgate, and intimate particulars about people she'd never met, probably never even
seen.
Maybe Gracey was like Gordon Gekko ("You stop sending me information and you start getting me some.") and each of the ancillary members were Bud Foxes ("He had lunch at La Cirque with a group of well-dressed heavyset bean counters.").

(After scribbling these speculations in my CASE NOTES, I read on.)

During this particular period, the group also abandoned the too-obvious, too-unproductive Group Meeting—in March 1974, police had come close to raiding one of their gatherings in an abandoned Braintree, Massachusetts, warehouse —in favor of more covert, well-disguised meetings, private "one on ones." According to www.livingoffthegrid.net/gracey, these encounters typically began "at a roadside diner, truck stop or local dive bar and continued in a Holiday Inn or some other cheap motel—the intention being that the meeting would look to observers like a random pick-up, a one-night-stand," and hence, "totally unremarkable." (Obviously, I wanted to jump for joy when I read this, but I made myself stay focused, reading on.)

According to www.historytheydonttellyou.net/nachtlich, in early 1978, whispers of a renewed, silent presence of The Nightwatchmen began to surface again, when MFG Holdings CEO Peter Fitzwilliam died in an electrical fire at his fifty-acre Connecticut estate. Fitzwilliam had been in clandestine merger talks with Sav-Mart, the discount retailer. In the aftermath of his death, the negotiations fell apart and by October 1980, MFG (whose manufacturing sweatshops in Indonesia were deemed by Global Humanitarian Watch "some of the most atrocious in the world") had filed for bankruptcy. Their stock had gone to zero.

In 1982, Gracey's radicals—now purportedly going by the name
Nie Schlafend
were again discussed throughout countless left-wing and Conspiracy Theory journals
(Liberal Man,
and something called
Mind Control Quarterly)
when the four Senior Managers, directly responsible for the design and distribution of the Ford Pinto, ended up dead within a three-month period. Two died from sudden cardiac arrest (one, Howie McFarlin, was a health nut and exercise freak), another from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and the last, Mitchell Cantino, drowned in his own swimming pool. Cantino's autopsy revealed his blood-alcohol level to be .25 and a large dose of a Methaqualone was found in his system, a sedative prescribed by his doctor for sleeplessness and anxiety. He'd been in the process of divorcing his wife of twenty-two years, and she told police he'd confessed he'd been dating another woman for six months.

"Said her name was Catherine and that he was madly in love. I never saw her but I know she was a blonde. When I went to the house to pick up some of my clothes, I found blond hair in my comb," Cantino's ex-wife informed police (see www.angelfire.com/save-ferris8os/pinto).

Police ruled the drowning an accident. There was no evidence "Catherine," or any other person, had been present at Cantino's house on the night of his death.

It was during this period, 1983-1987, that Catherine Baker—or at the very least, her myth—began to materialize. She was referred to on countless Web sites as the Death's Head Hawkmoth, or
Die Motte,
as she was called on an anarchist site out of Hamburg (see www.anarchieeine.de). (Apparently everyone in the group had a nickname. Gracey was Nero. Others [none of them ever identified with an actual person and widely disputed] were Bull's-Eye, Mohave, Socrates and Franklin.) Dad and Littleton barely mentioned The Moth in their essays; she appeared as a postscript in Littleton's piece and Dad only mentioned her toward the end, when discussing the "power of the freedom fairy tale, when men and women fighting injustice are assigned attributes of movie stars and comic book heroes." I could only assume this slight was because while Gracey's identity was real, both documented and validated —he was Turkish in origin, had undergone hip surgery following an unknown accident, leaving his right leg a half-inch shorter than his left-Catherine Baker's life was cast with more hairpin curves, loopholes, murk and Muddy Footprints Leading Nowhere than the plot of a film noir.

Some claimed (www.geocities.com/revolooshonlaydees) she'd never
technically
been linked to The Nightwatchmen, and the fact that the town of the last confirmed George Gracey sighting and the location of her own brutal crime happened within two hours (and twenty-three miles) of each other, was simply a coincidence and, subsequently, an overeager conclusion of "extremist ties" by the FBI.

There was no way of knowing for certain if, on September 19, 1987, the blonde spotted with Gracey in a Lord's Drugstore parking lot in Ariel, Texas, was the
same
blonde pulled over by a State Trooper on a deserted road off Highway 18 outside Vallarmo. Fifty-four-year-old Trooper Baldwin Sullins, following the 1968 blue Mercury Cougar onto the shoulder of the road, radioed headquarters to say he was on a routine stop for an extinguished taillight. And yet, something unusual about the woman must have made him ask her to step out of the vehicle (according to www.copkillers.com/cbaker87, he'd asked to see the inside of her trunk, where Gracey was hiding), and as she climbed from the driver's seat wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt, she pulled out an RG .22 handgun, commonly called a Saturday Night Special or Junk Gun, and shot him twice in the face.

(I'd hoped Ada Harvey had been embellishing that particular detail; I'd wanted the Unintentional Tugged Trigger, the Slipped My Mind Safety Off, but sadly, it seemed Ada was not prone to ornamentation.)

Trooper Sullins had called in the Mercury Cougar's license plate tags before he'd left his police car, and the car was registered to one Mr. Owen Tackle of Los Ebanos, Texas. It soon came to light Tackle had put the car up for sale at Reece's Cars-for-Less in Ariel three months prior, and a tall blonde, who gave her name as Catherine Baker, had purchased the car the day before, paying in cash. Seconds before the shooting, a Lincoln Continental happened to drive by, and it was that driver's testimony—Shirley Lavina, age 53—that led to the police sketch of Catherine Baker, the only certified portrait of her in existence.

(A grainy posting of the composite is featured on www.american outlaws.net/deathmoth and Ada Harvey was right; it looked nothing like Hannah Schneider. In fact, it could very well have been a rendering of June Bug Phyllis Mixer's Standard Poodle.)

There were hundreds of other details to read about
Die Motte
(according to www.members.aol/smokefilledrooms/moth, she looked like Betty Page, while www.ironcurtain.net claimed people mistook her for Kim Basinger) and it was these details —not to mention the startling reappearance of "Lord's Drugstore" (where Hannah had said
Jade
had been stopped by police at the end of her phony road trip)—that made me wonder if I might faint from sheer incredulity. But I forced myself to press on with an unyielding countenance and bearing, much like old British pinch-faced spinster, Mary Kings-ley (1862-1900), the first female explorer, who without batting an eyelash traveled up the crocodile-ridden Ogooué River in Gabon to study cannibalism and polygamy.

While some sources contended Catherine Baker was British and French in origin (even Ecuadorian; according to www.amigosdaliberdade.br her twin had died from stomach cancer due to the Oxico-contaminated water, prompting her to join the group), the resounding, and least refuted idea, was that she was the same thirteen-year-old Catherine Baker who'd been reported missing by her parents in New York City the summer of 1973. She was also "almost certainly" the "unidentified dark-haired child, a girl between thirteen and fourteen years of age" who'd been spotted with Gracey in Berkeley, November of that same year, a month after the Houston bombing.

According to www.wherearetheyn0w.com/felns/cb3, the parents of the mislaid Catherine Baker had been stratospherically wealthy. Her father was a Lariott, a descendant of Edwards P. Lariott, the American capitalist and oil tycoon, once the second richest man in the United States (and archenemy of John D. Rockefeller) and it was her rebellious spirit, a disenchantment with her home life and a childish infatuation with Gracey (who some estimated she'd met in New York, early in 1973) that had motivated her to escape her life of "capitalist privilege and excess," never to return to it again.

Naturally, to me, this rarefied upbringing looked infinitely more at home around the bare and bony shoulders of Hannah Schneider than Sergeant Detective Harper's contention that she'd been an orphan, raised at the Horizon House in New Jersey—a difference between a mink stole and a Member's Only. If Ada Harvey was to be believed (and thus far, there was no reason not to), Fayonette Harper's mistake was that she'd investigated the life of Hannah Schneider the Missing Person, the orphan whose identity Catherine Baker had apparently absconded with (the overcoat she'd donned and blithely strolled out of the store with, without paying). And yet, frustratingly, I couldn't confirm Ada's conjecture as fact or fiction; searching for "Hannah Schneider" and "Missing Person" yielded not a single result, which I initially found strange until I remembered what Hannah herself had said that night at her house:
"Runaways,
orphans, they're kidnapped, killed—whatever the reason, they vanish from public record. They leave behind nothing but a name, and even that's
forgotten in the end."

It had happened to the person whose name she'd taken.

As I read the first startling details about Catherine Baker's life (www .greatcommierevolt.net/women/baker was particularly well researched, replete with bibliography and links to Additional Reading), I started sprinting like an Errand Boy all the way back to that conversation with her, when I was alone at her house, retrieving her every word, expression and gesture, and when I dumped that splintered cargo at my feet (something "night," police officer, The Gone), I turned around and sprinted back for more.

Hannah had claimed it was the truth about the Bluebloods, when in fact, it was her own past she'd narrated between all those cigarettes and sighs. She'd assigned each of them a portion of her own history, neatly sewing it into them using an invisible appliqué stitch, garnishing it with a few erroneous, baroque details ("prostitute, junkie," "blackouts") in order to floor me, make it look so astonishing, it had to be real.

It'd been
her
father, not Jade's,
"from oil money, so he had the blood and suffering of thousands on his hands."
And it had been
she
who'd run away from home, from New York to San Francisco, and those six days of travel had "changed the course of her life." When she was thirteen, she, not Leulah, had absconded with a Turkish man ("handsome and passionate," she'd called him) and she, not Milton, had wanted something to believe in, something to keep her afloat. She joined, not a "street gang," but "something
night"—
The Nightwatchmen.

She'd cut out the police officer killing from her own past and tacked it onto Nigel's parents as if dressing paper dolls.

"Life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming"
she'd said broodingly (so broodingly, I should have known she could only be talking about herself, a tenet of Dad's Life Story principle: "People will always reserve The Brood, The Glower and The Heathcliff-Styled Mope, for their
own
Story, never someone else's —call it the narcissism that leaks out of Western culture like oil from an Edsel.").

"Some people pull the trigger"
Hannah had said (a palpable glower on her face),
"and it all explodes in front of you. Other people run away"

Leading criminologist Matthew Namode wrote in
Chokes Alone
(1999) that individuals who suffer a serious trauma—a child who'd lost a parent, a man who'd committed a single brutal crime —"may often, subconsciously or no, obsess over a lone word or image that may be directly traced back to the incident" (p. 249). "They repeat it when they're nervous, or idly doodle it in the margins of a piece of paper, write it on a windowsill or in the dust along a shelf, often a word so obscure it may be impossible for outsiders to discover the shattering ordeal at its root" (p. 250). In Hannah's case, it
wasn't
obscure: Leulah saw the word Hannah had unknowingly scribbled all over the notepad by the telephone, but in Hannah's haste to hide the paper from her, Leulah had misread it. Perhaps it had not said, "Valerio," but
"Vallarmo"
the Texan town where Hannah had killed a man.