Shades of Eva (40 page)

Sometimes you can endure the anger, and
sometimes you can’t. Last night, I couldn’t. The dollar amount Ully
had put on my mother’s body for Fred’s last visit was twenty
dollars. Twenty fucking dollars! For twenty dollars, Fred could
have one more rendezvous with Ully’s little sister. And that was
the night, Ully said, that Fred came back to the edge of the ravine
carrying a toolbox.

Amelia said Ully was on his way
—in a
bad way—to do two things: to locate Elmer’s grave, and to right
Mom’s record, as in correct it.

Righting Mom’s record meant a legal
confession. That meant police. Ully was to going to have to admit
to authorities to what he knew, and to what he did: to allowing
Fred Levantle to sexually assault my mother on multiple occasions,
and in profiting from that allowance, and to being at the Asylum
the night when baby Elmer was taken.

In the latter instance, he was to tell
police what he had told Amelia: that Fred returned after assaulting
my mother, returned carrying a toolbox, a toolbox that he and Fred
buried somewhere in the ravines out back. He was also to point that
location out to me.

He told Amelia he hadn’t thought anything
was in the toolbox that night. HE didn’t hear any crying. Fred
didn’t say there was anything inside the toolbox. Amelia went over
this in some detail with Ully, so I believed in his ignorance, at
least so far as that night was concerned. In fact, Ully still
wasn’t 100-percent sure there was ever anything—or anyone—in the
toolbox they buried. Fred had said something about fingerprints
being on it, or blood, and that it needed to be hidden, but nothing
about any baby or about any assault. So they buried it
underground.

But after hearing his sister’s story the
next day, Ully had told Amelia that he came to suspect that what
they had buried was not just a toolbox with a couple fingerprints
on it. He suspected it was likely the remains of Eva’s firstborn
son. He confessed to his silence, and he tried to explain it by
saying he was scared.

And we believed him.

My first question for Amelia
was, of
course: would police order an excavation of the site? And if so,
why was I there posing as a security guard to do just that—to
exhume Elmer and given him a proper burial?

Amelia told me I was there because if we
waited for police to do what needed doing, we’d be waiting a long
time. The truth was: Ully wasn’t sure what, if anything, was in the
toolbox. It was circumstantial at best.

To Amelia, however, it was straight forward.
But based on Ully’s ambiguity, police weren’t going to move too
fast to order an excavation. Even if Ully said he was sure that
Elmer was buried somewhere in the ravines, which wasn’t the truth,
there’d be delays. The Institution had to evaluate Ully’s
competence. Authorities would have to assess his motivation. They’d
look to his bank accounts, and notice he was about $1.2 million shy
of what he had the previous day, and a head injury ahead. They’d
suspect foul play, and we couldn’t wait for all that.

If they, by chance, worked quickly to verify
the confession, given a baby had been abducted, and they did find
something there like skeletal remains, the process for ordering up
a DNA analysis on those remains was likely to take weeks. This was
all unacceptable to Amelia; either alternative meant delays in
which we simply could not suffer.

The question remained, if we were to locate
the toolbox ourselves, and by chance discover a body therein, how
would we verify the identity of the skeleton? I was quite sure
Amelia didn’t have a DNA analysis credential to her credit, and I
certainly didn’t. However, Amelia said she had a contact down in
Indianapolis to handle the forensics I had earlier seemed so
insistent that we procure. She said that if we found the remains,
that by the end of the day we’d have the results. Six hours, she
said—not six weeks!

Amelia just simply didn’t let grass grow
under her feet.

Amelia had already said that Dad had
renounced his claim of being Elmer’s father. Therefore, there was
no reason to use my father’s DNA as a control. Amelia wanted to do
something called a siblingship test—assuming that we find Elmer’s
remains—that is, compare Elmer’s DNA to mine to establish whether
or not we were half-brothers, or whole. This would definitely
establish Elmer as my mother’s child, my brother, and either
substantiate my father’s claim of having fathered Elmer in 1953, or
nullify it once and for all.

With Ben’s DNA—presumably—we could compare
portions of Elmer’s sample—so I was told—to Ben’s to establish
whether or not there was some relationship there. If Ben was the
father, we’d have to reconsider what we were doing. If Ben’s
brother was the father, we had the forensic proof of rape Amelia
needed.

In either case, once Ully informed
authorities of the truth of his and Fred’s little scheme, my time
with Ben was about up. Once police contacted him, told him about
Ully’s confessions and began inquiring about Fred once again, he’d
likely want to talk to Ully. He’d likely want to talk to me. I’d
given him shades of Eva, and Ben didn’t seem to be a man who liked
shades of people. He wanted to see them in their true light.

Ben would have no choice but to tell police
about these shades—about his suspicions. Police would want to talk
to me. Ben would give them the number I’d given him; police would
call me. But by then, Amelia believed, we’d have what we needed and
we’d be long gone.

This meant I needed to work quickly, because
if Ully did have a change of heart, or a lapse in intellectual
judgment, and if, by chance, it dawned on Anna Norris who, exactly
I was, then I’d be exposed. Ully would recant his confessions. He’d
cry coercion and blackmail. There’d be no finding Elmer, or
righting of Mom’s record. There’d be no penalties imposed, no $1.2
million to do anything good with, and there’d be no recapturing of
Emily’s art. He’d have little to fear at that point, as Amelia and
I would be exposed—our faces front page news—and he could invest a
good portion of the money he just rescued into a new troupe of
bodyguards.

I had to trust in Amelia’s powers of
persuasion, and I had to trust that Ully would do as he was told. I
had to trust that Anna wouldn’t recognize me, just as Amelia had
asked me to. I had to trust, and that was a hard thing for a loner
like me to do.

Regarding the money, Amelia
told me
she had opened an account in the Cayman Islands under the alias,
Emily Wilson. $1.2 million was to be transferred from my uncle’s
estate to the Cayman account that morning. It was the exact figure
I’d given Amelia.

Amelia wasn’t too concerned with Ully
turning tables on us. She said he had been given some incentives to
cooperate. First, we were not taking him for $10-million; we were
taking him for about ten-percent of that. Second, his stay at
Coastal State was going to be three days—what Amelia called a
three-day pass—as opposed to an indefinite committal, whereby Ully
would likely be spending the rest of his days sucking his meals
through a straw and shitting them out in a diaper, troupe of
bodyguards or not.

Lastly, what Ully was there to confess to
was not to rape—but to conspiracy—and that would likely command a
lesser penalty—another monetary fine, and perhaps some community
service. He hadn’t killed Elmer. We never believed that he had. And
he didn’t know what was in the toolbox. He was a minor at
seventeen, and he was scared. After all, there was a statute of
limitations on rape, and conspiracy, and he was cooperating—even if
it was by way of persuasion and about 40 years too late. Police
might even be appreciative.

Amelia and I reasoned that if worse came to
worse, if the police ever got involved and started pointing a
finger at me, that my time with Ben would have had some value. Ben
would have a brief history to refer to: the history of a troubled
young alcoholic from River Bluff. Troubled would become part of my
defense should things go south and for some reason I was captured.
Any infiltration I’d be accused of, or fraud, by Ben or by Ully, or
by the Institution for that matter, would be mitigated by two
circumstances: first, by my own troubled past and addictive
personality, as attested to in therapy; and second, I had become a
pawn to the homicidal handiwork of Emily Wilson—Amelia’s latest
alias—who was bent on using me to extort my uncle out of $1.2
million, and to find Ben’s brother, and to rob the Institution out
of a cache of patient art.

If it came down to it, I was to tell police
I’d been approached by a stranger calling herself Emily Bond, who
said she was working with a friend to find my mother’s rapist. I’d
tell them I was being forced into helping them locate Elmer’s
remains and extort my uncle out of a million dollars; that I was
bribed with promises these assailants probably had no earthly
intention of keeping. I could use my alcoholism as an excuse, and
my affiliation with the matter as the reason I’d been coerced into
all of this in the first place.

Sitting back looking at it from the grounds
that morning with a few benzos flowing through my veins, Amelia’s
plan was nothing short of genius. The whole thing seemed to be
coming together, even though we hadn’t a clue as to where Fred
Levantle—or my brother—or where any art gallery was. It was a
pretty crafty ruse, but there was something gnawing at me…something
abstract. That something was Amelia’s reputation.

If I got captured, Amelia was offering a
sacrifice to me by painting me as the victim. All I had to do was
to protect her real name.

When I expressed my concern, however, at
this scenario, she said that her aliases were in place, so not to
worry about her freedom. She said that if the reverse occurred, and
she was captured, she’d tell police she was working for someone
else, too—someone named Emily Wilson. She’d tell police that we—the
each of us—were mere pawns in this Emily’s game. We’d be held for
questioning and released on our own recognizance. And then we’d be
gone.

As far as Amelia’s reputation was concerned,
Amelia said she didn’t give a damn about it. If police believed us,
fine. But if not, she really didn’t care. She wanted Elmer found,
my mother’s record corrected, and her aunt’s art. That was all she
wanted, which was a God-awful lot to ask for.

I, however, cared about her reputation.
Seemingly overnight I was concerned with abstractions like
reputations. The money, and dare I say my own freedom, weren’t
particularly mattering to me anymore.

***

I
flashed the entrance guard Chet’s identification. The gateman
checked a list, checked my ID, stared at my Ray Bans as if he were
looking for his reflection in them, then said, “Go ahead. Isaac’s
waiting for you, Chester.” He gestured to a tall, African-American
gentleman a few yards away and then tapped a button that lifted a
red-and white forearm hovering over the narrow road before me.

Isaac Flout had been a security guard at
Coastal State since 1970. He was instructed to give me a tour of
the grounds and a proper orientation to our work. Isaac did wonder
about my sunglasses.

I told him I got migraine headaches and
suffered from photosensitivity, thus the glasses, which he seemed
to accept.

“Lentes del sol,” Isaac said.

“Lentes del sol.”

He commented on the leather driving gloves I
wore, too. He said they reminded him of an old television serial
called Chips, where two motorcycle officers patrolled the
California highways.

“Ponch and John,” I said, referring the
show’s lead characters. I remembered them. I laughed and told him
to call me Ponch if he wanted to. John seemed a little too boring
for my taste.

Isaac pointed out the ambulance entrance at
the main hospital, the chapel, the old juvenile center (now
abandoned), and the Sax Rehab halfway house. It was all review,
except this time I got to go inside these places.

The halfway house, where my father had
stayed shortly after Meryl died, where my mother once roomed when
it was called by a different name, had ten beds. It resembled a
bed-and-breakfast. The rooms were quaintly furnished. It had a
resplendent charm, reminiscent of some other era.

Isaac pointed out where the heating plant,
laundry facility, and sewage disposal plants used to be. Isaac had
apparently read Dr. Podjen’s book. His tales were Dr. Podjen’s
tales, but unlike stories on white paper, Isaac’s tales, ones told
in the very setting where they occurred, made the Asylum come to
life. He talked of criminals held captive there, and their deeds,
everything from treason to torture. He talked of wards and
particular rooms—seclusions he called them—rooms believed to be
haunted, places where people had been killed, stabbed, raped or had
committed suicide. He talked about floors that had been condemned,
the asbestos scare of the eighties and the months it took to abate
it, all with a passion of a man who never seemed to tire of
recounting such tales.

I could tell he was very fond of this
place.

I listened with an insatiable ear, tossing
Isaac question after question, feeding his passion like I was
feeding a friendship. Something told me I’d need an ally in Isaac
in the coming days, and I was correct. I did what people do who
want to make friends—I made his interests my interests. I made
Isaac’s affinity for the Asylum my affinity.

I’d pulled my writing tablet
and pen
from a pocket and began making a map of the place to further
demonstrate that interest. Isaac commented on the crude drawing,
and I told him it was for details, and left it at that. He gave me
a strange look, nodded somewhat approvingly, and then gestured us
onward.

We continued around Kern Circle toward the
rear of the grounds.