The Good Father (23 page)

But if murder is not an act of aggression, what is it? And where does it come from? If it is not an act of passion, at a time in a young man’s life when he is consumed by passions, then what is it? My son was a boy with no history of aggression, a peaceful child, a pacifist.

When I made this argument to Ellen, she reminded me of the Spider Incident. It happened when Danny was thirteen and still living with her, two years before he came to live with me. One day Ellen called to say she had found a jar full of dead spiders in Danny’s room.

“What kind of spiders?” I asked.

“I don’t know the kind,” she said, “but there are a lot of them, and, honestly, I almost threw up when I saw it. You know how I feel about spiders.”

I told her she was being dramatic. Maybe it was a science project for school.

“Then why hide them in the closet?” she asked.

I told her I’d been to her house. She lived near the state park and there were a lot of spiders. Maybe Danny had developed a fear of them as a child, and this was his way of conquering that fear. Besides, I said, we didn’t know that he’d killed the spiders. Maybe he collected dead ones.

“Because there are tons of dead spiders just lying around,” she said.

Ellen told me that when she’d asked Danny about it he’d gotten angry. He accused her of spying on him, of going through his things. I told her it all sounded like perfectly normal teenage behavior.

We hung up the phone and I promptly forgot that the whole conversation had taken place. The following year when Danny came to stay with us, I remember Alex found a spider in his room. He wanted to kill it, but Danny stopped him. He trapped the spider in a glass and brought it outside and set it free.

Thinking about both incidents now I wondered—what did it mean? I had spent the last three months trying to compile the evidence, to add up all the moments from Danny’s childhood that could provide a diagnosis, a definitive answer as to who he was and why he did the things he did, and yet in life everything is open to interpretation. We see the past through the prism of our perception. When a man is indicted for a
crime you review his life looking for patterns. Incidents that may have been meaningless before suddenly loom large.
Look. He killed spiders. That must have been an early-warning sign
. But at the end of the day, isn’t a story about a boy who kills spiders balanced out by a story about the same boy saving spiders?

I tried to picture my son at thirteen systematically exterminating insects, tracking them to their webs and capturing them in a jar. I tried to imagine him watching as the oxygen in the jar slowly ran out. What thoughts would go through his head in that moment, watching the spider’s hunt for an exit become increasingly frantic, then slow, then stop altogether?

The scene felt invented when I imagined it, like something out of a movie, the junior serial killer with his starter prey. Ultimately, it was a pill my body just wouldn’t take.

I have looked into my son’s eyes throughout the course of his life and never once have I seen a freak, a sociopath, or a murderer.

No. I was convinced that the answer to this mystery did not lie in Danny’s lineage or his childhood. It was out there on the open road. Somewhere between New York and Los Angeles. Somewhere in the cornfields and mountain ranges of the middle of the country.

Murray found a last known address for Frederick Cobb that put him in Eagle Rock, twenty minutes north of Los Angeles. The address turned out to be a homeless shelter. Since riding that westbound freight train with my son a year ago, Cobb had popped up sporadically in various parts of the state. He sought medical care from a veterans’ hospital in Santa Rosa. He applied for unemployment benefits in Riverside. There was a second citation for vagrancy in Santa Monica, followed by an arrest for public drunkenness. Cobb appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be the classic homeless veteran, unable to form real relationships or put down roots.

Murray drove city streets to Glendale Boulevard, then jumped on Route 2 heading east. It was just after morning rush hour and the roads heading away from the city were mostly empty. Daniel’s arraignment hearing was scheduled for four o’clock that afternoon, so whatever investigation we conducted would have to be quick. When I woke Fran that morning to tell her I was going she just shook her head. It was clear now that nothing she’d said to me the night before had sunk in. I was Don Quixote chasing windmills. Trying not to wake the kids, I promised I’d be back in a few hours, but I could tell she wouldn’t be holding her breath.

“I’m a little worried about my marriage,” I told Murray as he drove.

“I’m a little worried about your marriage, too,” he said.

“Thanks. That’s sweet.”

“No, seriously. I’ve seen a lot of unhappy women in my life, and she has the look.”

We sat in silence, watching the road for a minute. I worried that
events were conspiring, forcing me to make a choice between my firstborn son and my new family. It was a choice I couldn’t begin to fathom how to make. Where was the middle ground? Was it really true that to be a good father to Danny I had to abandon Alex and Wally as I had abandoned Daniel? And yet didn’t I owe it to my firstborn son to see this through? And shouldn’t my new family understand and support that choice? Didn’t being a good parent to Danny make me a better man, and thus a better husband and father to my other boys?

“My second wife,” said Murray, “used to text the word ‘disappointed’ to me so often, that if you typed the letter ‘D’ into her phone the word would automatically fill itself in.”

I rolled down my window to let in the wind. Somewhere a fire was burning, and the smell of smoke filled the car. Fran would wait a few weeks, wouldn’t she? She would grumble. She might even threaten to leave me, but she wouldn’t really go. Would she?

I looked at the stack of paper Murray had handed me this morning when he picked me up. A private investigator he used on divorce cases had run the standard document check on Frederick Cobb—credit report, military records, various state and federal databases—and, as we drove, I studied the facts of Cobb’s life. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1985. A high-school graduate who went to state college on a football scholarship, until his knee blew out and he was cut from the team. Three months later he dropped out. The file said Cobb had floated for a year, working minimum-wage jobs around Lexington. There was an arrest for marijuana possession and another for driving under the influence, but both were dismissed. In the file was an application for a marriage license filed at the Lexington Civil Court by Frederick Cobb and Marilyn Duncan. But though the application had been filed, it appeared that no formal license was ever recorded. So the ceremony either never took place or went unrecorded. But the certificate remained, evidence of at least a fleeting desire on Cobb’s part to grow up and settle down, and at the same time proof that he hadn’t. What happened? Who was this Marilyn Duncan and what had kept her from landing her man?

Maybe the engagement was the by-product of an unwanted pregnancy, a pregnancy that either terminated itself or was terminated in a moment of teenage clarity or lover’s revenge. Or maybe Cobb had simply gotten cold feet and left his bride-to-be standing at the altar.

What was clear was that six weeks after applying for a marriage license, Cobb joined the army. Elements of his service record were classified, but it looked like he had gone through Special Forces training at Fort Hood. His record showed that he was sharpshooter qualified, scoring thirty-five on his marksmanship exam, and that he was deployed to Afghanistan in early 2003. There, Cobb served as a sniper for eight years, rising from private first class to a staff sergeant.

Those were the facts, and there were three that struck me as critically important. First, that Cobb had Special Forces training. Second, that he had served as a sniper. And third, that parts of his service record were classified.

Could it really be a coincidence that this man happened to find himself riding the same freight train as my son?

In 2008, halfway through his third tour of duty, Cobb’s Humvee hit a roadside bomb. Everyone in the vehicle was killed except Cobb, who lost three fingers and the hearing in his left ear. He also suffered damage to his peripheral vestibular system that resulted in recurring feelings of vertigo. It was this chronic dizziness that ultimately forced Cobb out of the military.

“So what do we know?” said Murray, after I filled him in. “We know Danny was arrested on May 20 of this year outside Sacramento, California, when he was discovered inside a boxcar on a freight train at a switching station. We know that there were two other men in the car with him. Both were army vets, Hoopler and Cobb. Cobb has Special Forces training. Hoopler—we’re pulling his service records. We should know more by the end of the week. One fact that stands out, though, is that Marvin Hoopler has connections to KBR, the arms manufacturer. The guy owns a speedboat. What’s a guy like that doing stowing away on a freight train with a homeless vet and a twenty-year-old kid from Connecticut? Speaking of which, our records of Danny’s activity in the week prior to the arrest are fuzzy. We know he spent time in Sacramento and would end up in Los Angeles a week later, but the fact that we’re missing information about that particular week seems suspect. Did Danny meet Cobb and Hoopler on the train? Or did they get on that train together?”

“And,” I said, “what connection, if any, did they have after the arrest? Can we find any evidence that puts Hoopler or Cobb in Los Angeles the week of Seagram’s murder?”

Murray changed lanes to get around a pickup truck that appeared to be carrying half a house.

“Are you—we should be writing this down,” he said.

I found a pen, made some notes. The file noted that Cobb had returned to the States in 2011 with an honorable discharge. He spent six weeks at home in Lexington, probably hoping to pick up his life where he left off. But apparently that proved to be impossible, and in February 2012, he hit the road. Information became sparse after that, but Murray’s private investigator turned up the address for a homeless shelter where it appeared Cobb had been living for the last few weeks.

We found the shelter on a quiet tree-lined street next to an Episcopal church. Men with blank-eyed stares huddled by the door. They wore the standard uniform of the homeless—layers of baggy clothing weighed down with dirt. To a man, they looked away when we got out of the car, some shuffling into the street in a “casual” attempt to evade the two men who might be cops. Instead of a badge, however, Murray held up a hundred-dollar bill.

“Frederick Cobb?” he said. Silence. The desire for money apparently was no match for the impulse to remain uninvolved in the affairs of others.

Inside, we found a social worker behind a cloudy sheet of Plexiglas. Murray introduced himself and said he was looking for one of her customers.

“We call them clients,” she said.

Murray told her he was a class action attorney who represented Cobb in a civil suit. The suit had settled recently and Cobb was owed a large sum of money. The lie came out easily, casually, his eyes never leaving hers. The social worker shrugged, neither impressed nor suspicious, and consulted an invisible list somewhere below the lip of the Plexiglas.

“Not here,” she said. When pressed if Cobb had left any kind of forwarding address, the social worker turned to an old desktop computer. She hunted and pecked, as if the whole idea of technology was inconvenient to her. Minutes passed. Murray and I exchanged a look. We had three hours before we had to get back in the car and drive south. Two if we wanted to get to the courthouse with any kind of breathing room.

“Section 8 housing,” she said. “Over on Powell.”

She wrote an address on a piece of paper, slipped it through a slot in the plastic. Murray thanked her and we hurried out to the car.

It cost us a hundred dollars to get the manager of Cobb’s apartment complex to confirm that Cobb lived there, and another two hundred to have him let us into Cobb’s place. He was the kind of skinny man who spied on women in the next apartment through a peephole.

“He’s five days late on the rent,” the manager told us. “Two more days I’m putting his crap in the trash.”

“Does he work?” asked Murray. “Cobb? Does he go out a lot?”

“Do I look like his social secretary? Most of these douche bags, you know, the state puts ’em up, but they get used to living on the street. They don’t know what to do with a home, where they don’t have to shit in a bush with one eye on their stuff.”

The building was about ten years old, built to convey a sense of optimism in the face of poverty. This meant that despite its location and hangdog infrastructure, the building had been painted with bright primary colors. Colors that had faded down to a ghostly hue, like a Donald Duck costume left too long in the sun.

Cobb’s apartment was small and nondescript. There was a mattress on the floor and three hard-back chairs, but no table. Boxes of junk lined the walls, clothes stuffed in trash bags. It smelled like the trunk of a serial killer’s car.

“If he comes home while you’re in here,” said the manager, “I’d think about going out a window.”

“Thank you,” said Murray. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

The manager closed the door behind him when he left. Murray and I studied the decor. It was a studio apartment with a small kitchenette. There were piles of newspapers lying around, and, strangely, several copies of
Parenting
magazine. I knelt and started sorting through the boxes and trash bags. Murray went into the kitchenette.

“I dated a schizophrenic girl once,” he said. “Her place looked a lot like this. The bathroom was full of crosses. She even had one hidden in the toilet tank. And there were like a hundred stuffed animals on the windowsill that used to watch us fuck.”

“How long did you date?”

“About three weeks,” he said. “She seemed nice, a little nutty. She was
a philosophy major at NYU. Then one night I come to pick her up and she’d cut all her hair off, and was calling herself Sally. Her name was Jean. She’d eaten a bowl of pills with milk, like cereal. So I drove her to the emergency room where they sedated her. Locked her in the mental ward. I visited a couple of times, then changed my phone number. I mean, what’s the etiquette on a thing like that? We weren’t married. She was just a girl I banged sometimes who kept crosses in the toilet.”