The Bomb Maker's Son (15 page)

I only need to prove reasonable doubt to win acquittal. Belinda Hayes might have given me that. She’s a crass, unstable woman—a typical witness in a criminal case.

“Would you be willing to testify to what you just said? To help Ian?”

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “What about what I said at the last trial? Couldn’t they arrest me for perjury?”

“You don’t have to worry about perjury. Tell the truth, which was that you were afraid of O’Brien. She was intimidating, a violent person.”

“Yeah, but what if she comes back?”

“We’ve been looking for her, and so has the US Attorney. They want her more than we do. Not even the US government can find her. Rachel O’Brien has disappeared off the face of the earth. Besides, she’s in her sixties, and this is two thousand fourteen. What could she possibly do to you? Please, Belinda. Ian’s future depends on it.”

“Sure, sweetie,” she finally says. “I shouldn’t have dumped on Ian at Rachel’s trial. I was disloyal and a coward. Charlie was loyal.”

“And he’s the only one who got a life sentence.”

“He did the right thing. ‘Revolutionary purity,’ he called it. I guess Charlie was braver than I gave him credit for.” She laughs. “I’m probably the first person ever to call Charlie brave.”

I tell her what she should expect as the trial date approaches and thank her for her time. Then I get up to leave.

“Are we done so soon, sweetie?” She slides a bit closer and rests her hand on my thigh. With the other, she brushes her hair away from the back of her neck and tosses her head, a coquettish gesture that might’ve worked when she was younger but not anymore.

I slowly begin to stand, trying not to offend my newfound star witness.

“I can make you feel good,” she says, standing with me and pressing her body against mine. “Just ask your father. He’ll definitely remember.” When my body tenses in protest, she says, “Hey, sweetie, indulge me. I always wanted to do a father and a son.”

I’m about to pull away when a knock on the door saves me from the need to reject her.

“Moses Dworsky here,” the voice says in a megaphonic bellow. “Apologies for my late arrival.”

I know he doesn’t want to be here, but I didn’t figure he’d use passive aggression to avoid it. The man makes his own rules, but at the moment I’m grateful for his tardiness.

Hayes puts two hands on my chest and shoves me away in disgust. “What the hell is this? You brought Rachel’s lawyer to my home?”

“He’s a private investigator now. Working for me. For Ian.”

She shakes her head in disbelief and stomps over to the door, her huge breasts swaying aggressively under her T-shirt. I follow. She flings the door open and cowers as if a huge, menacing giant has just parked himself on her doorstep.

Which describes Dworsky at the moment. He’s looming over her on the other side of the screen with arms crossed, and his frown makes it seem as if his nose will touch his chin. Forty feet away is Eleanor Dworsky, leaning against an old Ford Taurus. When she sees me, she waves and calls out, “Hey, Parker, make it snappy. I want to get Moses home. We have guests coming over.”

“Get the hell out,” Hayes says, pushing me so hard and so unexpectedly that I almost trip and fall into the screen. “I told you, I have nothing to say to you.”

“Belinda, I’m sorry, I should’ve mentioned that Moses is working for me.”

“Did you ask her about JB?” Moses asks.

I didn’t. How could I have forgotten that? “Belinda, have you ever heard of someone who uses the initials
JB
?”

“Get out, motherfucker!” she screeches like a profane fairy-tale crone.

I mumble a thank you and an “I’ll be in touch,” to which she replies, “No you won’t,” and slams the door.

Dworsky looks down at me and shrugs his already-hunched shoulders. “I warned you. She does not like me. You should have brought Lovely if you needed backup. Now, what, may I ask, did I miss?”

I recount my conversation with Hayes, how she could shed reasonable doubt about Ian’s guilt. He nods. Finally, Eleanor, who all this time has been leaning against the car, calls out, “Move it, Moishe. We need to get home.”

He spreads his arms, palms raised as if in benediction. “My dear wife is the only one allowed to call me
Moishe
since my mother passed away. It is the Yiddish version of Moses, you know. But I leave you with these words: you did well with that recalcitrant, unstable woman. The trick will be to convince her that I am not her enemy.” He gives a quarter bow, lumbers to the Ford, and gets into the passenger seat. Eleanor, who’s already climbed behind the wheel and started the engine, gives me a cursory wave and drives away, kicking up dust from the road as if she were a hot-rod racer jumping the starting lights.

I take a look back at the house and see Belinda Hayes peering out at me from between the drapes. When she sees me looking, she pulls them together hard. Seconds later, the lock on the front door clicks shut with a final rebuke.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I walk into The Barrista the next morning, greet the staff, and freeze. Mariko Heim is sitting at a back table, drinking coffee—
my
back table. She appears to be alone, but the place is crowded, and I’m sure her enforcers are scattered incognito at neighboring tables. Someone in Heim’s position doesn’t travel without muscle. She’s wearing her brown sunglasses with the opaque lenses. When a barista passes, she surprises me by ordering a second cup of coffee. It’s a venial sin for a true believer like her to consume caffeine.

I walk over to her. “Please leave my store, Ms. Heim.”

“Sit down, Mr. Stern,” she says, and as an afterthought forces out the word, “Please.”

“That won’t happen.”

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to be afraid of the First Apostate or in awe of him.”

My body folds down into the seat across from her. As a young teenager, I defied Bradley Kelly, the Sanctified Assembly’s founder, and was branded a heretic, the Assembly’s
First Apostate
. Except that afterward, the Assembly denied my existence as part of the cover-up of the abuse that I and many other children had suffered. I can’t believe Heim has breached the titanium curtain of secrecy surrounding the First Apostate.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“You’re surprised I know you’re the First Apostate? If that’s the case, I’m sure you’ll be surprised that I want to talk to you about Ascending Sodality.”

If her reference to the First Apostate made my legs shake, her reference to Ascending Sodality leaves me dumbstruck. I don’t like to think about the vile practice that, to this day, could land many of the original Sanctified Assembly founders in jail, possibly including my own mother.

“Oh, don’t be so surprised,” Heim says. “Most successful institutions have dirty secrets. Just like a human being, the Church of the Sanctified Assembly is a living organism susceptible to cellular contamination. The key to an organization’s long-term survival is curing itself of disease. As a member of a new generation of Assembly devotees, I feel it’s my duty to help cleanse the Assembly of contamination. That involves purging the organization of those who engaged in depraved practices.”

“If that were true, your divine prophet would be your first target.”

“Whoever or whatever the flesh-and-blood man was, his soul has transcended the human being. His spirit is pure. It matters not what the Prophet or the Divine Son or the Bearer of God’s Law did in life. It’s what He means in death. That’s what redemption is all about.”

“So you think the rotten fruit can germinate a pristine seedling? How progressive of you.” Romulo brings me an espresso. I thank him, but I don’t take my eyes off Heim, who through her dark lenses is looking . . . somewhere.

“We can assist each other,” Heim says. “Information for information.”

“What information can I possibly give you?”

“I want to know the names of everyone who was involved in the practice of Ascending Sodality. And I want to know whether Harriet Stern practiced it.”

How disrespectful. She didn’t refer to Harriet as
Quiana.
“You want me to implicate my own mother in criminal activity?”

“It’s no secret that you and she don’t see eye to eye, shall we say. Have I understated it well enough?”

Heim doesn’t give a damn about cleansing her Assembly. She wants to depose my mother.

“I also want to know about Harriet Stern’s relationship with Ian Holzner,” she says. “The unsullied Assembly elders have a right to know why Stern is consorting with a murderer.”

“My client isn’t guilty, and my mother has nothing to do with him,” I say, a lawyer’s knee-jerk attempt to state his position for the record, odd because I don’t owe this woman an explanation about anything. “But if I’ve got it right, you want me to provide information about both my mother and my father, as if I’m a brainwashed child in some totalitarian state giving up his parents for the greater good. Out of curiosity, what would I get out of doing something like that?”

“Just to be clear, I’m not interested in Holzner, but only your mother’s relationship with him.”

“She has no relationship with him. Hasn’t for forty years.” I don’t expect her to believe it, but I have to say the words nevertheless.

“As for what you can get out of it, I know you’re looking for witnesses. Well, one in particular—Rachel O’Brien.”

“How could you possibly help me find O’Brien?”

“The Assembly has the ability to locate people even the government can’t find. Or doesn’t want to find.” As she speaks, she keeps her head down, as if I’m some kind of ghastly creature she can’t bear to look at.

“You’ve got it all wrong. The best thing that can happen to my case is for Rachel O’Brien
not
to show up at the trial.”

“True. But you need to know whether she’s going to appear as a surprise witness. That way, you can prepare for that possibility.”

“I’ll take my chances. I’ve been told I’m a good cross-examiner, and I’ll use those skills if O’Brien does pop up. Meanwhile, let her stay missing.”

She touches the coffee cup to her lips without sipping and says, “We might be able to influence whether she shows up or not.”

“Unlike you and your cult, I don’t intimidate witnesses.”

She jerks her head up to look at me for the first time, and although I can’t see her eyes, the suddenness of the action proves she’s rattled. “I wasn’t implying that we would intimidate anyone.”

“Sure you weren’t.” I stand and walk toward the entrance. She’s virtually succeeded in chasing me out of my own store.

“Stern!” she calls after me, and as I walk away I notice a couple of men at a table near the entrance about get up from their chairs, but they stay seated, and I don’t have to look behind me to know that Heim commanded them to back off—for now.

CHAPTER TWENTY

At five-thirty in the morning on January 8, 1976, a little more than three weeks after the Playa Delta bombing, four agents working in the clandestine COINTELPRO unit burst into Jerry Holzner’s motel apartment, rousted him out of bed, and demanded that he tell them where his brother, Ian, was. When Jerry said he didn’t know, the agents interrogated him for two hours, at the end of which they accused him of conspiring to bomb the Playa Delta VA. When he stuck by his story, they slapped his face, twisted his arm, broke two fingers, and pummeled his torso with closed fists. When that didn’t work, they dragged him out of his bedroom, lifted him up, and dangled him by ankles from the balcony of his third-story apartment. Only then did Jerry give up the address of the West LA apartment where the Holzner-O’Brien Gang was living. Whereupon the federal agents got a warrant citing third-party-witness Jerry’s “cooperation.” They searched the gang’s apartment, where they found bomb-making equipment similar to that used at the Playa Delta VA, along with a hand-drawn map of the Veterans Administration.

Ian’s fingerprints were found on the bomb parts. When I ask him why, he tells me that he touched all the explosives—he was the bomb maker, after all—and that the material the FBI found in the apartment obviously wasn’t used for the Playa Delta killings, which had occurred several weeks earlier. He claims he didn’t know about the map, which, he says, judging by the handwriting, must’ve been prepared by Charles Sedgwick. Sedgwick refused to cooperate in his own defense and so said nothing about the map or anything else. According to newspaper reports, Rachel O’Brien testified at her trial that Holzner drew the map. Belinda Hayes testified that she didn’t know who drew it, but Holzner had drawn many of the maps of targets.

Three weeks ago, Lovely Diamond drafted a motion to suppress the fingerprint evidence, the map, and any adverse testimony from Hayes. In opposition, the US Attorney admits that COINTELPRO tortured Jerry Holzner but argues that it makes no difference to the admissibility of the evidence because while the rogue agents might’ve violated
Jerry
Holzner’s constitutional rights, they didn’t violate
Ian’s
rights. This is because the feds had a valid warrant to search Ian’s place. So even though the evidence is the “fruit of the poisonous tree,” as the case law describes it, Ian can’t complain because his rights weren’t impaired. Except that Lovely has crafted a legal argument that just might appeal to a maverick judge like Carlton Gibson.

The night before the hearing, I’m sitting at the desk in my bedroom, mapping out my presentation to the judge on Lovely’s motion to suppress. Three hard knocks on the wall startle me. Holzner barges in and sits on the edge of my bed. His hands are folded in his lap, and his eyes are docile with paternal concern. I swivel in my chair to face him.

Before he appeared in my life, I would’ve traded my legal career and my actor’s residuals to have my father living in my home, to get to know him, to delineate my family history, to confirm that in the grand river of humanity I’m something more than an existential droplet randomly spewed into the atmosphere. Now that he’s here, I don’t want to ask about him or my grandparents or my extended family. It would feel like a lawyer’s interrogation rather than a son’s curiosity. Most of the time, we behave like aloof post-college roommates who have nothing in common.