The Bomb Maker's Son (37 page)

“Alicia would not give up,” he says. “Rachel O’Brien encouraged her. Alicia was jealous because Rachel and I were—I thought
I
was in love. That gave Rachel power over Alicia, because the unrequited suitor always wants to please the rival. Rachel kept telling me I should just . . . make love to Alicia and get it over with, that I was acting bourgeois with my middle-America gentlemanly attitude toward her. I thought Rachel was simply taunting Alicia and mocking me. She was a smart ass, always taunting other people.”

That was true even in O’Brien’s later years, because that’s why she had Brandon bring me the tape recording—to taunt me, to let me know that my own mother was responsible for the deaths of four people. She waited until the only person whom she saw as a threat, Charles Sedgwick, was dead. She never thought Jerry would talk—and he didn’t, until his last-ditch attempt to tell me the truth. She knew Ian wouldn’t tell. And once I heard the tape, I’d have to choose between my parents. Whatever I decided would destroy them both.

“But I can’t lay it on O’Brien,” Holzner says. “Alicia finally convinced me that she truly believed in what I was doing. You know how? She reminded me of how the army had abandoned her father, how he drank Thunderbird that he got from Sam’s Liquor and pedaled this old bicycle calling out, ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ You never knew if he meant Alicia or his wife. Alicia talked a perfect game, said she hated the government for what it did to her father, for what it had done to the boys in Vietnam. She talked about the rampant racism in this country. So I let her in. I think I was keeping her close so I wouldn’t totally lose Playa Delta—even as I ranted against such middle-class attachments.” He closes his eyes and whispers. “I . . . I taught Alicia how to make bombs.”

I briefly wonder if I’m playing one of Poniard’s nightmarish video games, in which Ian Holzner, Rachel O’Brien, Brandon Soloway, Moses Dworsky, and Belinda Hayes are the shadowy avatars who shoot bullets and sling deadly revelations directly at my heart, in which my own mother is the evil Boss of Bosses. A look at Holzner’s pallid face drives home that it’s all too real.

His words keep spewing out. He taught her because he never thought she could learn, but he soon found himself marveling at her facility and bravery. The shared danger was infused with eroticism, all the more so because they were the only ones with the courage and skill to do it. He finally did what she’d wanted him to do for years and slept with her. When she revealed that she was pregnant with me, he begged her to abort, but she wouldn’t destroy a part of him. She vowed never to build a bomb again.

But she did build a bomb again.

He and O’Brien had planned to escalate their revolutionary activities, to do what the Weather Underground failed to do after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion: assassinate the fascist enemies of the masses. They were going to target the Playa Delta VA precisely because it
was
in Holzner’s hometown.

“My brother, Jerry, heard about it from Charlie,” he says. “I think it was Charlie’s way of trying to stop it without looking like a counterrevolutionary. And oh, did Jerry come at me. He told me to look at myself in the mirror, and I’d see that I had become as bad as the people I was fighting—worse. I listened to him. He really was my big brother. After I did that, I called it off. I made the mistake of telling Rachel O’Brien that I was a father now, and that the fact that I had a son—the fact that I had you, Parker—had changed me. I thought she’d scoff or go ballistic, even become violent, but she just nodded and said she respected my opinion. I should’ve known by that reaction what she was going to do.” He inhales deeply. “My brother wasn’t a stupid man. People thought he was, but he wasn’t at all. Wisdom comes in many forms, but Jerry had it. I want you to know that about him.”

“I know that.”

“I didn’t even get to see him again. I thought I’d at least get to say good-bye.” I expect tears from him, but there are none. There’s still something case-hardened about Ian Holzner.

“In early November nineteen seventy-five, I left the collective and went into hiding, as much from O’Brien as from the FBI. I hid from everyone. If I wasn’t findable, O’Brien couldn’t have her bomb. But I also abandoned Alicia and you. She was living in a two-bedroom apartment with six other people, working as a waitress in the MGM Studios commissary while I watched you, and then I was gone. Rachel struck like the queen cobra she was. She told Alicia that I’d gone into hiding because the pigs had turned up the heat. She said she had a message from me, that I wanted Alicia to build a bomb to be used to show the cops the power and ability we had to inflict damage. That we could kill if we wanted but chose not to. So the bomb would have to contain ball bearings and nails. Supposedly, the bomb was going to explode in the park at two in the morning when no one was around. And, as always, there would be a warning. Your mother refused at first, but Rachel told her that if she didn’t comply, I’d consider it a betrayal of our love, that I’d never see her or you again. Alicia was twenty years old with the gullibility of an eager-to-please nine-year-old. She believed Rachel’s bullshit.” He pauses and inhales deeply several times, like a runner between wind sprints trying to catch his breath.

“How do you know this if you weren’t there?” I ask.

I’m surprised that he seems surprised by the question. “Alicia told me.”

“And you believed her?”

“She wouldn’t lie to me.”

“She’d lie to anyone.”

“Not to me. Never.”

Although my mother has built a life on thumbing her nose at the truth, I believe him. I’ve seen how she behaves around him.

“Rachel made it her business to tell Alicia what the bomb was really for—on the morning of the bombing,” Holzner says. “More cruel taunting. She told Alicia it’s what
I
wanted. She knew Alicia would never call the cops on me. So Alicia called Charlie. As it turned out, the FBI was listening in, but this particular recording got garbled, so they didn’t know about the bomb. Anyway, I went to the VA that morning to try to find the bomb and get rid of it.”

“So it really
was
you whom Gladdie Giddens saw that morning.”

He nods.

Contrary to what many believe, we lawyers like to be on the side of justice. If we attack an argument, an adversary, a third-party witness—especially a third-party witness—we hope the assault is merited. Discovering that I unjustly maligned an innocent person in a public forum, in this case a frail old woman, causes shame to grip my intestines and squeeze hard.

“Why in god’s name didn’t you disarm the damned bomb?” I ask. “Or call in a warning?”

“What happened, Parker, is that I fucked up again. I looked for the bomb in the women’s restroom. That had always been Rachel’s MO. She’d dress up like a young housewife, or a clerical worker, or a buttoned-down lawyer and leave the bomb in the women’s restroom. So I went to VA and slipped into the ladies’ room. There wasn’t anything there. I searched and searched and had to hide in a stall when some women came in. I figured it was some hoax or misunderstanding, that Jerry and Charlie had gotten it wrong, that Rachel made it up because she was pissed and wanted to freak Alicia out. What I didn’t realize is that Rachel put the bomb in the
men’s
restroom. She’d never done that before. Why didn’t I think to check the men’s room?”

I’m sure he’s asked himself that question ten thousand times.

“The earring that the cops found at the scene,” I say. “My mother’s.”

“Either she dropped it when she was assembling the bomb and it caught in the pipe, or O’Brien planted it.”

I try to think back whether my mother was ever fingerprinted. Despite all the drinking and drugs and violent tantrums on movie sets, I don’t think so. Since the time she helped found the Church of the Sanctified Assembly, she’s been as deep underground as Holzner.

“Why would you take the blame for her?” I ask. “She built an antipersonnel weapon to be used in the commission of a felony.”

“Because Alicia wasn’t responsible. Because she needed to be free to care for you.”

“And what a great job she did.”

“You turned out fine. Besides, what did it matter? The feds were after me anyway and would never have believed the story. We would’ve both gone to prison. What would’ve become of you?”

I stop myself from replying that I wish I’d had the chance to find out, but Holzner seems to divine my thoughts anyway. “I’m truly sorry about all of this, Parker.”

In the ensuing silence—not true silence, but an ongoing conversation devoid of words—I think, well, at least I’ve finally learned the truth about my parents.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “After you left, she did everything she could to draw attention to herself. Putting me in show business, sleeping around, making a spectacle of herself. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I told her to hide in plain sight,” he says. “Create a new persona and be brazen about it. Besides, she always wanted to be somebody important. When that bomb exploded, when I left her, she was a victim, too. No longer Alicia Bowers.”

I could lash out at Holzner for defending my mother, for mentioning her in the same breath as those who died in the explosion, but all I can think of is my grandfather Peter Bowers pedaling around the town on his bicycle spouting gibberish. That sweet girl Alicia must have wondered what he’d been like before the fall—just as I now wonder about her.

“Why hire me as your lawyer?” I ask. “Wouldn’t I be the last person you’d want?”

“You’re the only attorney I could’ve hired. I hoped you’d find a way to defend me against these charges without learning the truth. But since you have learned the truth, you’re the only lawyer in the world who has a reason to keep it to yourself.”

“The jury—or some impartial jury—has to hear this tape, hear your explanation. After that, justice will be done.”

“There’s no justice to be done, Parker. That’s what so many people don’t understand. Sometimes there is no just resolution.”

“Okay, we’ll wait it out to see what Gibson does with the jury-misconduct issue. He has to declare a mistrial. We’ll win the second time around.”

As if these words were some kind of final punctuation mark for our conversation, he stands up and stretches. “Please go get Emily. I want to tell her good night.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Bombs—the concussive force of a perfectly timed explosion, the piercing payload of carpenter’s nails and ball bearings, the shrieks of fear, the cries of agony, the yelps of submission, the silence of death. Then I awaken to Emily’s shout.

“Parker, wake up! Parker!”

Emily is pounding on my door so hard that she’ll wake the neighbors, too.

I get up and let her in. In her baby-blue sweats and without makeup, she looks like a child.

“Dad’s missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve looked everywhere.”

“He must be in the—”

“No, no, he’s not in the bathroom. Or in his bedroom or in the living room or outside on the balcony or in the kitchen. He’s not anywhere.”

I’m out of my room and down the hall in an instant, as if Emily could somehow fail to notice her father in a small bedroom. His bed is made, a meticulous job, as if he was an infantry recruit trying to impress the drill sergeant. Everything else is in its place. I’m about to check the closet and under the bed—why would he be under the bed?—when I see it. I’m reminded of the trial testimony about how as a kid Holzner took magic lessons—part of Reddick’s
spoiled-brat
defense. The media joked about his forty-year disappearing act. Secretary Cracknamara, the obsessive-compulsive card shuffler, told me Ian Holzner was quite a magician himself. I didn’t take him literally, but I should have. On the dresser is his ankle monitor. It’s not severed, not obviously damaged in any way. There are no marshals at my door. I think back to the night I met Holzner, when he somehow broke into my locked condominium unit without causing damage and later vaulted over the balcony when Mariko Heim showed up.

Ian Holzner has fled, once again a fugitive from injustice.

Emily and I descend the stairs, nodding to the marshal who still thinks he’s guarding against Holzner’s escape. I walk up to him and say, “During the night, Ian Holzner escaped. His ankle monitor is on the dresser.”

He looks at me as if I’m playing a practical joke, and then, when he understands that I’m serious, begins talking frantically into his radio. Emily and I start to walk away.

“Where are you going?” he shouts. “Stay right here.”

“I’m going to court. I have to let the judge know what’s going on.”

“You can’t leave the premises.”

“I certainly can. I’m the defendant’s lawyer. And in case you didn’t realize it, I posted his bond. I stand to lose millions by this. I’m going to court, and Ms. Lansing is coming with me.”

The wind from off the ocean is gelid, cutting through my gray, woolen suit. It’s one of those rare days in LA that come around maybe once every three years when I wish I owned an overcoat. In my briefcase I’m carrying the original tape recording of Alicia Bowers’s phone call, along with the flash drive containing the file that makes the conversation intelligible.