The Bomb Maker's Son (12 page)

“For the students, not for people who need file space. Everything was in hard copy back then.”

“Do you have any idea where Bowers is?”

“None.”

I ask a few more questions, but when it’s clear that I’ve exhausted her knowledge, I thank her and get up to leave.

“Do you think you can get him off?” she asks.

“Do you think he deserves to get off?”

She swivels her chair and, with her back to me, gazes out the window, the same one my father broke so many years ago.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

After I leave the high school, I cold-call Barney Kinsella, another current Playa Delta resident who appears on Moses Dworsky’s list of potential witnesses. Kinsella is a retired electrical engineer whose beer-bottle bifocals are his most distinctive characteristic. He met Holzner when they were in elementary school and was in the science club with Holzner from the eighth to the eleventh grades. He tells me that Holzner was brilliant and generally a nice guy, especially for a popular, athletic teenager. While most people in Ian’s position shunned nerds like Kinsella, Ian almost flaunted their friendship. But after their junior year, Ian became “political,” stopped participating in extracurricular science activities, and treated anyone not vehemently opposed to the Vietnam War with undisguised contempt. Kinsella finishes with a disturbing story. When Holzner was twelve, he somehow got ahold of nitric and sulfuric acid, combined them with cotton balls to make gun cotton, all with the intention of blowing up Kinsella’s tabby cat, Marmalade. Kinsella claims to have shooed the cat away before the explosive went off.

So now I’m the spawn of a psychopath.

After finishing with Kinsella, I drive half a mile south into an area of the city known as Playa Crest, low-lying foothills where the city’s wealthier families live. At the top is Santa Theresa Manor, which Dworsky’s notes describe as “a skilled nursing facility for the care of elders.” I pull up to the complex of Mediterranean-style buildings made of stucco walls and adobe-tile roofs. Jacaranda and palm trees shade the parking lot. The west-facing second-story rooms provide an unobstructed view of the ocean. I hope beauty and tranquility truly do comfort the old and infirm.

I’m here to see Gladdie Giddens, a victim of the explosion at the Playa Delta Veterans Administration and one of the key witnesses implicating Holzner as the perpetrator. I can’t bring myself to open the car door. I didn’t go to law school to cold-call octogenarian bombing victims and try to shake their testimony. I finally force myself to get out of the car and walk over to the main office.

A floral fragrance predominates, but there’s a suggestion of disinfectant and institutional processed food in the air. No matter how nice these eldercare facilities seem, you can never quite escape that smell. I introduce myself to the woman at the front desk—Sister Mary Eunice, she tells me. She looks to be about my age. I thought nuns under fifty no longer wore habits, but I guess I’m wrong. The ash-blond hair visible under her wimple is parted in the middle. She’s wearing tortoiseshell glasses that magnify her green eyes.

When I tell her why I’m here, she knits her eyebrows so tightly that the cloth on her headpiece quivers. She shrugs in a kind of disdainful resignation. I expect her to ask me to leave, but she invites me to have a seat and walks down a hall. While I wait, I read a glossy brochure that makes the grounds look both brighter and drearier than they really are. The facility is run by the Carmelite Sisters of the Sacred Heart, who provide temporary and long-term nursing care. I’ve never been one for religious institutions—not after my mother forced me into the clutches of her church when I was a kid—but at least this is what religion is supposed to do. The Sanctified Assembly runs some nursing homes as well, but they’re propaganda centers as much as care facilities. The Assembly promises that through cleansing of the nuclei of the cells through devotion to the what it calls the Celestial Fount, seniors and the infirm will be cured of congestive heart failure, emphysema, Alzheimer’s, and scores of other afflictions of old age. The false promises attract converts, earn contributions, and turn a huge profit by gouging the families of the residents.

Five minutes later, Sister Mary Eunice returns and says, “She won’t see you. She wants you to know that she told everything to the FBI and testified at the trial of Rachel O’Brien.”

“That’s one reason why I want to speak with her. The transcript of the O’Brien trial has been lost. So I don’t really have her version.”

“Gladdie Giddens is very frail physically. More importantly, she does not want to help Ian Holzner.”

“I just want to hear her story.”

Although I didn’t think she would, she goes back to Giddens’s room. When she comes back, a young woman in a white nurse’s uniform and an old woman in a walker are following her. Gladdie Giddens is hunched over into a tight, tired C. She couldn’t be more than four feet ten. Her hair, the strands like fraying threads, is colored a dowdy brown. I’m never certain whether elderly women make themselves look older or younger by dying their hair. Giddens is moving with surprising speed, though she seems to be almost dragging her left leg. She has a section of a newspaper under her arm. I stand, but before reaching me, Giddens and the nurse turn left and go inside a room. Sister Mary Eunice beckons me over with a not-so-kind wave of her arm.

When I reach her, she says, “She’ll tell you her story. But she won’t answer any questions. So don’t try to ask any, don’t do anything to upset her. As I said, she’s eighty-eight years old and fragile.”

Inside the small conference room, I find Giddens sitting at the head of the table. The chair’s synthetic cushions and curved hardwood arms seem to have consumed her. Her skin is more droopy than wrinkled, and though her eyelids are hooded and thin with age, the brown eyes themselves are pellucid and resolute. I didn’t think the nuns would leave this ancient woman alone with someone they consider a predatory lawyer, but when the nurse and Sister Mary Eunice suddenly walk out, Giddens doesn’t flinch. Rather, it’s I who experience a quiver of anxiety.

“So you’re that boy’s attorney,” Giddens says in a voice so soft that I have to strain to hear. Despite her lack of strength, the timbre of her voice is almost youthful—no old-lady cackle. Like so many her age who immigrated to Los Angeles, she has a light southwestern twang. She holds up the newspaper. “They have a picture of you in here. You’ve lived quite a life for a young man.”

“Not so young.”

She doesn’t come close to smiling.

“Ms. Giddens, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’d just like to ask you a few—”

“Please let me say my piece, sir. Why, I’ve been waiting forty years to say my piece to Ian Holzner, and I will do that if the good Lord blesses me and I survive long enough to testify at his trial and see him in court. But right now, since I can’t get at him, you’re the next best thing. That’s why I’m willing to tell you my story, but no more. I told it all before, but you say the transcript is lost, so . . . If that’s not okay with you, I’ll call Sister Margaret Mary to take me back.”

“Of course it’s ok. I’ll appreciate hearing anything you can tell me.”

She takes two shallow, labored breaths. “I don’t want to talk about the bombing. Not now. My friends died and my leg was shattered forever. But I blame myself because I could’ve stopped it. Earlier that morning, I was visiting the ladies’ room. I passed by a young man coming from the opposite direction. Dressed in a T-shirt, cap, and military camouflage pants. The hat was pulled down real low. Told him that he had the wrong floor, that this was the second floor, he was probably looking for the third. He didn’t belong there. He must have just planted the bomb. I should’ve called security, the FBI, somebody. It was him, Ian Holzner. I recognized his picture in the paper when I woke up in the hospital. He was one of the prime suspects, face all over the papers. I should’ve recognized him right away. He and my son, Mark, were in the same grade in school. He even visited my house a few times when the boys were teenagers.”

This scrap of information is more detail than Lovely and I have found in the arrest records and the indictment. I’d very much like to interrogate her gently and ask why she didn’t recognize Holzner until she saw his picture in the newspaper while she was hospitalized, probe into whether her injury affected her perceptions, determine whether the FBI improperly influenced her to identify Holzner by showing her his photo in the paper. I’m sure Moses Dworsky didn’t do that at O’Brien’s trial—he wanted to lay the blame on Holzner, so he was aligned with the prosecution on that issue. Sure, I can ask these questions on cross-examination if she’s a witness at Holzner’s trial, but that won’t get me what I want, which is to shake her resolve now, to make her doubt her own memory. Socrates formulated an entire body of philosophy by asking questions. That’s probably why Gladdie Giddens won’t let me ask her anything—questions are weapons. Still, there’s one thing maybe she’ll answer.

“I know you said you wouldn’t answer questions, but I was wondering if I could have the address and phone number of your son.”

“No, sir, you cannot,” she says, and when her bird-bony shoulders droop, she looks even more frail and diminutive. “Mark passed last year. The lung cancer. A smoker, and he could never give it up. You know the sad part? He was a doctor. An internist. Couldn’t kick the habit, much as he tried.” Her head begins to shake slightly, a rhythmic, palsied movement rather than a voluntary action. “My son was sixty-eight years old, an old man. But not so old in this day and age, and a young man—no, a child to his mother. Please excuse me, young man. I’m tired, and I’ve said my piece.”

I get up to leave, but before I do, I ask, “Was it your son, Mark, who was in Ian’s class at school?”

“Yes, like I just said not thirty seconds ago.”

“Then I don’t understand something, ma’am. Ian Holzner is sixty-five. That’s four years younger than Mark, so how could they be in the same grade? Are you sure your son’s friend wasn’t Ian’s older brother, Jerry? Mark and Jerry would’ve been about the same age.”

Her eyes narrow in momentary confusion, and the constant shaking of her head gets worse, but then she
voluntarily
shakes it. “I told you no questions.”

“Ms. Giddens, it’s very important that we get to the truth.”

“I will not answer questions.” If she were younger, the words would’ve come out in a shout, but her lungs and vocal cords are much too old to accomplish anything other than a feeble whoosh of air. “You’ll only try to confuse me with them, as you’re doing now. I know what I saw. I know who planted that bomb. Please call the sisters. I’m very weary.” The palsied movement of her head has become irregular, a combination nod and shake.

I’m not going to push this fragile old woman any further. She is, after all, a victim. I go to the door, call the nuns in, and thank Giddens for talking to me. As I’m about to leave, she holds up the newspaper. “Let me ask you a question. It says in here that you’re Ian Holzner’s son. Ezekiel 18:19–20 says, ‘The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father.’ I do hope for your sake that’s true.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I get in my car and drive southwest toward my condo in Marina del Rey, past two miles of strip malls and apartment houses and then through the undeveloped wetlands, the last in Los Angeles County. Western ragweed, sedges, plantain, and saltbush grow in a brackish swamp bordering the irrigation canal people still call a creek. In a flash, the square stucco-and-wood apartment houses reappear, and then the area becomes commercial—warehouses, machine shops, paint stores, taco stands, and a pastry shop with a huge rolled-steel and gunite doughnut on the roof. I drive into my neighborhood, with the contrived maritime and Polynesian street names—Bali, Mindanao, Fiji, Panay, Palawan—more reminiscent of those old Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road pictures my mother used to love than of the South Seas. No matter how high the housing prices, Marina Del Rey remains not the thriving, upscale beach resort that the city parents intended but a flimsy Hollywood replica of a marina. As I drive down Admiralty Way back to my home, to the place where my “father” resides, I wonder if my own existence has been nothing but a replica of a life. As a child, I was an actor. As an adult, I chose a profession that requires me to take on a role depending on which side is the first to shell out a retainer. Today, in the next town over, I finally dug up a fossil-trace of my family history. I wish I could rebury that fact under the loam of time.

As I pull into my underground garage, I wave to the US Marshals guarding the condominium complex. Their shifts must seem like eternal damnation—what could be more hellish than sitting in a parked car and watching to make sure a sixty-five-year-old man wearing an electronic ankle bracelet doesn’t make a run for it? Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe, after the courthouse bombing, they want to make sure no one tries to spring Holzner or tries to harm him.

There are two more marshals in the courtyard. I wonder whether they need permission from the homeowners association to stay here, whether technically they’re trespassing, until one of them approaches and says, “Your neighbors aren’t happy with you, counselor. They say they didn’t pay a million dollars to live in the same building as a terrorist. It could get a little tense for you. Our office has stationed us here to defuse the situation.”

I guess I’m the one who should’ve asked the association’s permission before I told Judge Gibson that Holzner could serve his house arrest in my condo.

I start toward the stairs, but he says, “Tell your visitor she better show some courtesy to a federal law officer. We’re just trying to keep everybody safe here.” He abruptly turns away and raises a hand to his ear. Someone’s talking into his earphone.

I take the stairs two at a time and open the door to my unit. Holzner is sitting on the love seat in my living room. He’s wearing one of my T-shirts and a pair of my blue jeans. He’s reclining, and his legs are crossed as if he’s a guest on an afternoon TV talk show. In the wicker chair opposite him is my mother.