The End of the Dream (21 page)

“Do you mean something with computers? “ she asked, not sure that he wasn’t teasing her. “Something like that.” He didn’t say any more. Marge Violette never dreamed that he might be involved in robbing banks. She assumed Scott was doing some kind of computer scammaybe going into some escrow account with billions of dollars for a few days, earning interest, and switching back to his own account.

He didn’t say anything that alluded to that kind of fraud, though. A long time later, she said, “I never thought that Scott was going in the front door of banks to get the money! “ She still saw the Scott who had stolen bananas and marijuana plants. He had always been mischievous and he loved to break rules, but he was never truly crooked. He was treating her and her sons so wonderfully. He was a nice man.

Marge’s boys came running back, they had spent their $20 bills.

Over Marge’s protests, Scott handed out three more. The kids stared at him in awe but they took the money and ran back to the video games.

Scott liked the kids, and he invited Marge to bring them out to his place on Overhulse Road. While they visited, he was the perfect host.

He asked only that the boys take their shoes off before they went into the gray house, he said he and Steve had sanded the floors and they hadn’t had a chance to varnish them yet.

Marge found the house charming and cozy. Steve was putting the finishing touches to marble counters in the kitchen, and the bathroom was practically a showplace. She was impressed. One thing bothered her, though. During her visit, Steve and Scott talked so much about gambling.
 
They both seemed to be obsessed with it. Scott led them to the treehouse. Marge’s sons looked up into the treetops, as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune. This was a playground that any little boy would wish for.

They climbed up, awe struck, and then Scott showed them how to slide down the pole to the ground. He went first, balancing them on his shoulders, so that his body would keep them from falling.

It was as if he hadn’t aged at all. He was Peter Pan, frozen in time, still full of adventure and derring-do. He was the fourth “boy” playing in the treehouse, as he urged Marge to let them all slide down the pole.
 
“They can do it, “ he soothe Marge. “Let them try.” And, indeed, they could. Scott told Marge that while he enjoyed having her boys around, he never planned to be a father. “This is no world to bring a child into, “ he said bleakly. Her sons used a camcorder to capture the treehouse to show their friends and Marge talked more with Scott. He seemed very concerned about her, and she had to admit it felt good to have a man show such compassion. She was going through a rough divorce, and Scott said that he wanted to give her enough money so that she could hire a good divorce attorney. Smiling, she shook her head. That wasn’t necessary “I’ve read my divorce papers very carefully and I know I can use our joint bank account to pay for my lawyer, “ she told him. “I’ve already found a good one.” And then Scott surprised her with another generous offer. “You can live in the gray house, “ he said. “You can all move up here.”

“Steve’s there, “ she demurred. “I wouldn’t want to put him out.

“
 
“I need a nice respectable family living there. The price is right, “ Scott urged. “We’ll work it this way. You can give me a check for $1,000 every month, and then I’ll give you back $900 in cash.” Why on earth would Scott want to rent a newly refurbished house for $100 a month? He wasn’t coming on to her it wasn’t that.

Nor was he offering her charity. (Later, Marge realized that Scott needed to have some nice honest income to show.

His income from rent would go into his bank and show $12,000 a year.

And her TWA salary would be easily traceable and explainable. ) As warm as he was, Marge saw that there was something secretive about Scott. On the one hand, he was so open and loving. On the other, he simply shut down. When she started to stroll around his property by herself, he caught up with her and warned her not to go into any of the outbuilding snot even the shed that housed the washer and dryer. “Why not? “ she asked, puzzled. “Well, some have power and others don’t.

“ That didn’t make much sense, but she didn’t press him. And she didn’t so much as look into the barn or any of the various buildings.

Marge did see his income tax forms lying out on his desk. “I snuck a peek, “ she admitted. “At first, I thought he had listed his income at $200,000, but then I saw it was only $20,000. It said his occupation was odd jobs’ and it was part-time, “ she said. “But he lived as if he made $200,000.” Marge Violette Mullins didn’t take Scott up on his offer to move into the gray house, as tempting as it was. There was something chilling about it.

“I didn’t really know what he was doing, what he was involved in, “ she explained. “But I knew in my heart that sooner or later, he would have my boys working for him, and something in me knew that would be disastrous.” Scott didn’t seem upset or resentful when Marge turned down his offer. When she and her sons left after a week’s visit, she wondered if she would ever see Scott again. She returned to her world, saw her divorce through, and, in the autumn, moved to the Midwest.

Steve Meyers stayed on at the gray house, and, in February 1993, Scott left again for Europe. He didn’t need Marge’s buddy ticket. He had enough money to go around the world several times if he chose. On this trip, he was away for three months. Back in Olympia, there was a woman in Scott’s life, just as he had told Marge. Her name was Maren* and she was a cool and lovely blond, the mother of a small son. She was one of the many women over the course of his life who genuinely cared about Scott and one of many who had no idea at all about who he really was. As much fun as he was, as tender as he could be in private moments, he kept her at an emotional arm’s length. There were moments when he would just shut down, his face closed and somehow melancholy.

But, of course, Scott was not faithful to Maren. Nor to any woman. He had another girlfriend in Switzerland whom he had met on a previous European jaunt. His friends called her “Swiss Cheese.” She was a rather plain, bright woman who was much more than a lover to Scott, she was a banker. Through her, Scott had access to Swiss bank accounts.

She would even become one of the many female travelers who visited at his treehouse in the woods. Scott met women all over the world, some of them were only fleeting romances, and others stayed in his life.

Some were, quite simply, prostitutes. Although he had never lacked for willing women who were thrilled to have sex with him, he maintained a network of contacts with prostitutes around the world.

Once, he had tried to convince Kevin that any man needed the experience of paying for sex from time to time, but Kevin couldn’t understand his reasoning. Scott came home to Olympia in late spring, just as Steve Meyers left for Europe. Steve visited his brother, Randy, and then traveled through Greece and to Prague.

He didn’t go to Italy, he had nothing there any longer. It would have been too difficult emotionally to see where his first real studio had been, where his daughter was born. The studio and his daughter were both lost to him. Despite the murky life that had captured him, Scott still welcomed his old friends. They gave his life a sense of normalcy, even though those who knew him best noted that he never really met their eyes. Everything was the same and yet nothing was the same, being with Scott in Olympia could be an edgy thing. They all laughed and drank more than they had before. At the Bud Bay Cafe, they sat on the deck during endless sunlit afternoons and long into lavender/peach-tinged evenings as the sun went down. Scott was often with Maren, and he posed with her as she wore a white-lace dress and a big white straw hat that only a beautiful woman could carry off. He wore the same clothes that the “take over” bank robber had worn, a pale T-shirt under a sports coat and his ubiquitous Converse sneakers. Now, Scott was more careful than ever to avoid the appearance of wealth, knowing full well that a new car and new clothes might alert someone watching. He drove his old white van. He could have easily paid off the mortgage on the property on Overhulse Road, but he deliberately made his payments month after month as any normal working stiff would.

His exterior remodeling was done at a measured paceso that no attention would be drawn to the place.

(He didn’t know that some of the patrons at Bud Bay had concluded he must be a drug dealer to tip the way he did. They were right but long after the fact. ) Even as the gray house improved, parts of the treehouse began to fall away. Once he’d built it, Scott rarely took care of anything, leaving wood and rope and things to rot in the wind and rain of Washington State while he body surfed on some golden beach halfway around the world, or, if he was in residence, he stayed inside and watched videos as the winter storms pounded the treehouse. I Paradoxically, Scott treasured certain items of no particular monetary worth, the Norman Rockwell address book that he carried with him for years, a painting of Kevin’s that he had rescued from the trash barrel once, blurred photographs. And some things didn’t matter. The guitar that had been Scott’s in Hawaii had followed him all over America and it was the “official treehouse guitar, “ but only because Kevin had boxed it up a long time ago and sent it from Hawaii to the Scurlocks in Reston. One night, Mark Biggins had been a little drunk and stepped on it, snapping the neck. Kevin got it fixed, thinking it had to mean a lot to Scott after all the years he’d played “Blackbird” on it. It didn’t, Scott never even remembered who had broken it and who had fixed it. Mark could play that guitar. He could sing the lyrics to a thousand songs, and he had a beautiful voice. Whenever he felt down, Kevin had tried to remind him that he had his voice and his remarkable memory for lyrics.
 
“You could walk in anywhere and people would be glad to hear you sing, “ Kevin told him. “You’re the piano man.

You’re the guitar man.” Mark was sweeping the barn once when Kevin told him that. He had been surprised and pleased. “You mean that?

You really think I could? “

“Absolutely. No question about it, “ Kevin said. “I honor you for that.
 
You’ve got all of Dylan in your head you’ve got all those lyrics. That’s something very few people have.” But Scott had always discouraged that kind of conversation.

“Kevin, cut it out, “ he’d said, annoyed. “Mark hasn’t got any life purpose other than to work for me. That’s the way it’s going to be.

Don’t fill his head full of that shit.” That tableau stayed forever in Kevin’s memory. In an instant, Mark had changed. He’d looked down at the ground and started sweeping. Kevin had been shocked and furious.

Probably for the first time in his life, he had wanted to hit Scott for the way he treated Mark. That wasn’t necessary.
 
Now, in the summer of 1993, Mark was long gone, and Kevin wasn’t sure where he was.

Scott had a group of about a dozen people whom he spent time with.

Kevin and Mark weren’t even in the inner circle any longer, although Steve was. Kevin wasn’t resentful of that he was glad Steve had found some place to be. Steve and Scott did some mountain climbing that summer. Steve’s Achilles tendon had healed completely, and they were both in remarkably good shape for two men who drank as much as they did.
 
Staying in prime shape was an obsession with Scott. He would not allow himself to go to sleep drunk, he ran it off jogging until his head cleared. A woman Steve had met in Prague in the spring came to visit. He took her to Las Vegas and then to the Grand Canyon. They were gone for a month, but Scott stayed home, summer was the best time in the treehouse.
 
There was no rain to leak through, the whole place smelled of cedar, and the decks were abloom with planters and cut flowers that Ellen had brought down. Steve and Scott finished the inside of the gray house, and Scott asked Kevin to paint the outside.

It was a putdown for Kevinlike asking a surgeon to carve a turkey and he didn’t really want to, that wasn’t his kind of painting. But Scott kept asking him and eventually, he agreed to do it, and he did a great job using a paint sprayer. Still, when Scott came to inspect the job, he pointed out flecks of paint on a bush near the front door. Kevin’s grin faded as Scott began to berate him in front of Ellen, belittling him for being a lousy painter. It was like the time he’d humbled Mark for the way he swept the barn floor. Kevin might have taken Scott’s abuse if it had been just the two of them. But he would not allow Scott to do that to him in front of Ellen. Of all the women who came to Scott’s place, Ellen was the one Scott respected the most. Kevin wondered if Scott had had him paint the house just so he could have this moment. Kevin shouted at Scott angrily, and Scott backed down, surprised. But then Scott turned around and he was smiling.

It was all over. Still, it was another crack in their broken friendship.
 
One day in the fall of 1993, Kevin was batting tennis balls with Steve and Scott at the Evergreen campus. It was a beautiful day and they were together, but they weren’t truly together. An invisible fence had gone up. Their dreams were eroding. Steve wasn’t working at his sculpture, and Kevin’s studio was gone too although he was still painting at Ellen’s place. Kevin felt like an interloper between his own brother and the man who had been his best friend. Out loud, Kevin said, “I wish we could have the old magic days again when we were all free and creative.” For him, it was far more than an idle wish, it was more a prayer.
 
Neither Steve or Scott commented. They continued to hit the tennis ball back and forth. And then the ball disappeared somewhere in the space between them. Each of them thought one of the others was playing a joke.
 
But the ball was simply gone.

Kevin walked up to the net, looking for it, and so did Scott and Steve.

It wasn’t on the ground or on the sidelines.

After ten minutes of searching, Kevin gianced at his racquet.

The ball was there, wedged tightly in an impossible spot, the triangle where his racket handle met the strings. He had neither felt nor seen the ball catch itself there. “In that moment, “ he remembered, “I knew something beyond whatever power I might have was in effect. Something was rolling too fast down the hill and nothing I could do would stop it.
 
We were never going to get the magic back again.” Down through the years, turf wars, jealousies, and proprietary interests have been part of the politics of law-enforcement agencies. It is a tense arena where men and women risk their lives as a part of their jobs, and their difficult cases become part of them. They see things that no one should ever have to see, and they are witnesses to pain and tragedy and pointless sacrifice, to perversions and unimaginable, unconscionable greed. Because they care so much, they sometimes become obsessed.