“That’s Seth Roberts. He was in Huntsville and Raiford in Florida. The guy you spat on, the one with the matches, spent nine years in the Nevada state prison for suffocating his common-law wife. I’m going to show you two more photos. The purpose is not to disturb you or to satisfy any desire for revenge that you might have. The purpose is to make sure the men in the second set of photos are the ones who handcuffed you and poured gasoline inside your car. Maybe your father will object to me showing you these pictures, but that’s the way it is.”
“Please show me the photos, Mr. Jenks,” she said.
“It’s Detective Jenks.”
The photos were eight-by-tens. The two bodies in them were naked and curled up inside a ditch. The hands had been cut off. The gunshot wounds were in the ear, the mouth, and the forehead.
“I recognize the man who handcuffed me,” she said. “I don’t know about the other one.”
“That’s Seth Roberts.”
“Who killed them?” she asked.
“Vick Atlas said he was going to square things for you?” Jenks said.
“He didn’t use those words.”
“But he was going to get even for you?”
“That’s what he said.”
Jenks put the photos away. “How you feeling?”
“Guess,” she replied.
“You’re a brave girl,” he said.
“Do you believe Vick Atlas killed those men?”
“He’s twenty-one years old. He looks forty. His old man is a sociopath. If I had a son like Vick, I’d have my genitalia surgically removed and buried in concrete.” Jenks shook his head and rubbed his palms on his knees. “I don’t know who killed them.”
“What are you not telling us?” I asked.
“Vick Atlas doesn’t decide who dies and who lives. His father gives the orders. If the old man has somebody tagged, it’s about money. This isn’t about money.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“I don’t. If I had to guess, I’d say Vick Atlas created a setup where he’d be your savior, Miss Epstein. Then somebody else got involved.”
“Who?” I said.
“Somebody with no conscience at all,” he said. “Have you seen a woman named Cisco Napolitano around recently?”
THAT AFTERNOON I DID something I would not have dared think about a few months before. I called the information officer at the Houston Police Department and told him I was a reporter for the Houston Press doing a feature on several outstanding members of the department.
“He was with the OSS, right?” I said. “That’s something else, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but you ought to talk to him about that,” the officer said.
“That’s okay. I have most of what I need. I forgot the number of years he was in law enforcement in California. Or was it Nevada?”
“It was Nevada. Five years, I think. Check with him. What’s your name again?”
“Franklin W. Dixon,” I replied.
“Who?”
I COULD SEE MY mother slipping away by the day, maybe even the hour, convinced that her public humiliation of Mr. Krauser had caused his suicide. The western sky could be strung with evening clouds that looked like flamingo wings; rain might patter on her caladiums and hibiscus and hydrangeas and roses and fill the air with a smell out of The Arabian Nights, the book that probably saved her sanity as a child. But no matter how grand a place the world might be, my mother’s eyes had the hollow expression of someone staring into a crypt. My father and I took her out for Mexican food at Felix’s, and as I looked at the misery in her face, I knew that voices no one else heard were speaking to her and soon our family doctor would have her back in electroshock, a rubber gag in her mouth, her wrists strapped to a table.
At that moment in the middle of the restaurant, I made a decision to lie or do whatever else was necessary to keep her from descending into the madness that the Hollands carried in their genes and the scientific world further empowered in its own hothouse of quackery and ignorance.
“I talked to one of the detectives who investigated Mr. Krauser’s death, Mother,” I said. “The detective says Mr. Krauser may have been abducted and thrown from the roof of the building.”
She ate with small bites, her gaze fixed on nothing. I waited for her to speak. My words seemed to have had no effect. Then she looked at me, her eyes empty, focused on a spot next to my face. “Why would they do that?”
“Maybe Mr. Krauser was mixed up with people who send homeless boys to indoctrination camps,” I said.
“He did that?” she said.
“No one is sure,” I said.
My mother took another bite, chewing slowly. My father watched her as he would someone walking a wire high above a canyon. The only time my father ever drank in front of my mother was when the three of us were at a restaurant, as though a geographical armistice had been declared between the forces of his addiction and my mother’s intolerance. Tonight he had not ordered a beer with his dinner. It was the first time I had ever seen him not do so, and I suspected it had not been easy.
“Listen to Aaron,” he said. “I think he knows what he’s talking about.”
She stopped eating and placed her fork and knife in an X on her plate.
“Are you not hungry?” he said.
“I shouldn’t have eaten a sandwich this afternoon,” she said. “Do they have a dessert menu here? I can’t remember. What’s the name of that dessert made with ice cream and cinnamon and mint leaves?”
“It’s called ice cream with cinnamon and spearmint leaves,” he said.
“I’d love to have that now. Yes, something that’s cold and sweet with a taste of mint in it. When I was a little girl, we used to make hand-crank ice cream on the porch, up on the Guadalupe. It was wonderful to eat ice cream on the porch on a summer evening. We should go up there for a weekend sometime.”
“I think that’s a fine idea,” my father said. “What do you think, Aaron?”
Maybe there was some truth to my lie about Mr. Krauser’s death. Or maybe a lie can bring mercy and grace upon us when virtue cannot. I didn’t want to research the question. My mother seemed happy. It was a rare moment in what had been the declining arc in an afflicted person’s life.
Chapter
20
THE NEXT NIGHT my father drove up to the Heights to introduce himself to Mr. Epstein. Mr. Epstein had told me he was not a Communist “now.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. To me communism seemed like such a ridiculous system that no rational person could respect or fear it. By the same token, I didn’t think anyone who had bought in to such a joyless mind-set could have the ability to rid himself of it.
My father did not ask me to go with him. I hated to think about the political collision he might have with Mr. Epstein. My father returned home in under an hour and went into his small study and resumed work on his book about his family, his fountain pen moving across a fresh sheet of paper, a Lucky Strike burning in the ashtray by his forearm. I knew he was among the horde of men in tattered gray and butter-brown uniforms advancing up a slope in sweltering July heat at a place called Cemetery Hill.
I pulled up a chair behind him. He didn’t look up from his work. “Everything go okay?” I finally said.
“Hi, Aaron,” he replied. “You gave me a start. I thought you might be a Yankee sharpshooter.”
“Was Mr. Epstein home?”
“Yes, he was definitely there.”
I waited for him to continue. But he didn’t. “That doesn’t sound too good,” I said.
“Mr. Epstein is a cradle-to-the-grave ideologue. A leftist but nonetheless an ideologue.”
“What’s an ideologue?”
“Someone who brings religious passion to a political abstraction only cretins could think up,” he said. “When you meet one, flee his presence at all costs. He’ll incinerate half the planet to save the other half and never understand his own motivations.”
“What are his motivations??
??
“Control, power, penis envy, addiction to breast-feeding, the fact that most of them are born ugly, God only knows. In one night, ten men like Mr. Epstein could have New York City in flames.”
I glanced over his shoulder at the ink drying on his manuscript page. “Are you still working on Pickett’s charge?”
“In part, but there’s another story about the charge that not many people know of. After the slopes were littered with Confederate wounded and dead, the federals tamped their muskets on the ground and chanted, ‘Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg’ as a taunt for the pasting they took going up Marye’s Heights.”
I wasn’t sure what his point was. He anticipated my question. “There’s no glory in any of this. Nothing good comes out of war. It only breeds more hatred and suffering and killing. Freeborn Negroes, man, woman, and child, were taken from their homes in Chambersburg and sent to the auction block in Richmond. Louisiana outfits participated in it, too. Robert Lee witnessed the terrorizing of the town and did nothing to stop it. The kidnapping and selling of Negroes was no different than the behavior of Nazis. That’s where ideology leads us, Aaron.”
I had never heard him speak this way. I went into the kitchen and made coffee for both of us and went back into his study and drank it with him and watched him work.
THE FIRST CALL to the River Oaks police station concerning Clint Harrelson’s property came at 10:33 P.M. The neighbor who called refused to give her name but said, “The jungle music coming out of that house is destroying my sleep and rupturing my eardrums and upsetting my husband, who happens to be stone deaf. Would you kindly do something about it?” The second, third, and fourth calls came from neighbors who heard shouting and then gunfire and saw from their balconies or through the bamboo at the back of the house the bizarre denouement of Clint Harrelson, anthropologist, oilman, rice producer, and apparent Aryan supremacist.
A song was blaring from the high-fidelity speakers in the game room. The pounding drums, the thumping bass chords exploding out of the piano, the peal of the clarinet and the wailing of the horns and the driving four-four backbeat were an assault on the sensibilities of the neighborhood. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, the surface dimpled with rain rings. The glass door on the game room slid back violently, then Clint Harrelson burst outside, barefoot and in boxer shorts, his skin as sickly as a toadstool. He began running and slipping along the side of the pool, looking back over his shoulder like a man caught inside the pop of a flashbulb. A figure in a hooded windbreaker stepped out of the game room and aimed a semi-automatic with two hands. The first shot tore through an umbrella and smacked against the brick wall at the rear of the estate. The second one punched through the back of Harrelson’s knee and kicked his leg from under him. The shell casings bounced on the concrete.
Harrelson had fallen across a canvas recliner. He gripped his knee as though trying to pull it to his chest. His fingers were shiny with blood, his mouth wide with rictus, his pain clearly beyond sound or words. “Why are you doing this?” he managed. “Please. We can turn this around. This will be no good for you or anyone else. Listen to reason. We have alternatives if you’ll only listen.”
The figure in the hooded windbreaker walked toward him. Harrelson tried to run again, grabbing pieces of pool furniture, dragging one leg as though it were boneless. The next shots exited his chest and stomach and throat. He fell headlong into the pool, his arms floating at his sides. He sank halfway to the bottom, red smoke funneling from his wounds, then rose to the surface and remained still, his hair pasted on his scalp, the blue water rippling across his back.
The shooter walked the length of the patio and onto the grass and through a cluster of camellia bushes into the darkness, closing the gate, shaking it to make sure it was snug. At first none of the eyewitnesses could move. Later all of them said they felt time had stopped, that in the aftermath of the shooting, they felt trapped inside a slow-motion film and traumatized by the fate visited on poor Mr. Harrelson. They gathered on a common porch in their bathrobes and drank straight whiskey poured by the owner of the house and shared their bewilderment. By the next day, their lawyers indicated that their clients could not swear to the accuracy of their earlier statements because of the previous night’s inclement weather. They also asked that names not be released to the press and that authorities contact the attorneys if they needed any more information.
In the morning the pool was drained and the tile and concrete scrubbed with lye and the filters cleaned with disinfectant by Mexican workers. Aside from the remains that lay on a slab in the county morgue, all the earthly fluids and chemical signatures of Clint Harrelson were hosed with the pine needles into the sewage system.
THE STORY GOT a banner front-page headline in all three of the city’s newspapers. The Houston Press ran a photo of Grady arriving at the funeral home in dark glasses and a white suit, a black carnation in the lapel, his jaw set, his hands balled at his sides like a New York gangster barely suppressing his sorrow and anger. The cutline referred to him as a former honor student, football quarterback, and marine. Behind him in the photo was Vick Atlas.
The story stated that Grady was sailboating when he received news of his father’s death. After I read the story, I drove to Valerie’s house. I was sure we were all going to be dragged into the investigation. I had become as cynical as Saber about the legal system, and not without reason. As soon as I got to Valerie’s, she told me Merton Jenks had already questioned her father.
“Why?” I said.
“Jenks thinks he might have done it,” she said.
There was a beat when I avoided her eyes. “Your father wouldn’t really do something like that, would he?” I said.
It wasn’t an honest question. I knew better. Mr. Epstein was not one to sneak through life on side streets. I hoped Valerie had an alibi for him. I didn’t want to think of him as a man who could commit murder.
“What is the difference between somebody ‘really’ doing something, as opposed to simply doing it?” she said.
“What people say and what they do aren’t always the same thing,” I replied.
“I know he wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man,” she said.
“That’s it? Armed people are okay?”
“In Yugoslavia he saw the SS hang civilians with wire on the village square while their families were forced to watch.”
Valerie could create images that were like a rubber band snapping inside your head.
“But he was home with you when Mr. Harrelson was killed, right?” I said.
“No, he wasn’t. He was returning from Beaumont. Jenks asked if you were with me when Mr. Harrelson was killed.”
“Why me?”
“He wanted to know if you really had spells.”
Jenks was a master at messing up people’s heads. “So anything you said would indict me? If I didn’t have spells, I was a liar. If I did have them, I could be guilty of anything and everything.”
“Something like that.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That anything you told him was the truth. That he needed to get his fat ass out of my house.”
“You said that to Jenks?”
She smacked her gum and didn’t answer. How much can you love one girl?
JENKS WAS AT my house that afternoon. I knew he was coming, and by this time I knew his mission was no longer about me or my mother and father or Clint Harrelson’s murder or Krauser’s suicide or the death of the Mexican prostitute named Wanda Estevan or Saber’s vandalizing of Krauser’s house or his boosting Grady’s convertible or the torching of Loren Nichols’s customized heap or the terrorizing of Valerie by the two ex-convicts who ended up naked in a ditch with their hands stubbed off at the wrists. Detective Jenks didn’t have an agenda; he was at war on a global scale. He was right out of medieval mythology, the Templar knight who slept in his armor and gave tribute to God while loading the heads of decapitated Saracens into a catapult and flin
ging them back into their own lines.
I sat with him at the redwood table in the backyard with all my pets in attendance. It was strange how they seemed to know when I needed them. Major lay spread out with all fours in the shade, his belly and dong pressed into the grass. Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy sat on the tabletop, which they had crosshatched with seat smears since they were kittens. Jenks was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and kept lifting his forearms from the redwood and wiping them without realizing the source of the gelatinous material on his skin. “Is that a mulberry tree back there?”
“I think it is.”
He wiped at his forearm again, his face a question mark. “When are your folks due home?”
“Hard to say. They’re at the grocery. My mother doesn’t drive, so my father has to take her.”
“Does your father believe in home protection?”
“Yes, sir, that’s fair to say.”
“What kind of firearm does he keep?”
“He’s never been big on firearms.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I thought it was.”
“You should have been a baseball pitcher,” he said. “Did you ever see a pitcher pull on the brim of his cap or fix his belt just before the windup? That’s what you make me think of.”
“I put Vaseline on baseballs?”
“I can come back with a warrant. Or somebody a lot less sympathetic can.”
“You asked Valerie if I was lying about my spells.”
“Yes, I did. Do you think you’re capable of killing someone like Clint Harrelson while you’re in one of them?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t,” he said.
“Can you say that again?”
“I can smell a killer. Men can kill other men, but that doesn’t make them killers. A killer comes out of the womb with a stink on him that never goes away.”
“Then why are you here?”