The Tower

by J L Bryan

  “Me, too.” I took a deep breath, trying to clear my head of dark, sad images of dead parents and their abandoned children. I was identifying just a little too deeply with that. Maybe we could change the subject. “What were you saying about the writer?”

  “Who?”

  “Jackie Duperre? The old hippie?”

  “Oh! Yeah, it sounds like he might be in jail. So that'll be easy to find.”

  “In jail for what?”

  “Vandalism. Multiple counts.” She held up an image of construction vehicles—bulldozers, a dump truck, an excavator—spraypainted with hundreds of large pastel flowers. “Apparently he was protesting about some trees getting cut down. The paper said it wasn't his first offense. Far, far...far from it. He was charged with criminal destruction of property. Sentenced to sixteen months.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “I'll work on it...there must be some way to find a prisoner...” Stacey focused on her tablet.

  I grabbed my own and pulled up the bookmarked web page with the old music reviews, which had been collected from The Great Horned Owl, and other underground papers of the era, with names like Omaha Kaleidoscope and San Francisco Oracle. The reviews by R. Jackie Duperre heaped praise on bands I'd never heard of—The Electric Prunes, Candy & the Kisses. The reviews went off into rambles lambasting “corporate SYSTEM rock” and praising “organic PEOPLE music that rises from THE STREETS.”

  “He likes the caps lock key,” I told Stacey. “Or he did fifty years ago, anyway.”

  And that was how Stacey and I ended up going to jail that day.

  Chapter Eleven

  We barely made it before visiting hours ended at three.

  Jackie Duperre looked confused as the guard led him into the visitors' area, and even more confused when he was directed to sit down with us. As in his arrest picture, he was long-haired and bearded, all of it gray. He could have been one of Thurmond Pennefort's wizard figures, except he wore a prison jumpsuit instead of enchanted robes. He was a little shorter than me. His eyes darted around suspiciously.

  “You sure you ladies are here to see me?” he asked, looking us over.

  “Are you the same R. Jackie Duperre who used to write for The Great Horned Owl?” I asked.

  “The...” He broke into a smile, revealing some missing teeth. “How'd you hear about that? The Owl was out of print long before you two were born. The powers that be made sure of that. They couldn't have an instrument of truth playing high and loud at the center of a system of lies, now, could they?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “We're graduate students in history, and we're researching the 1969 bombing of the Pennefort Building.”

  “Oh, sure.” He took his seat. “Well, that was a real bad day for all of us. It gave them a pretext to really crack down. The Owl's office got raided by the cops, then burned down by Pennefort thugs. Lots of places burned along The Strip in the months after the bomb, lots of mysterious arson that the police never seemed too interested in investigating, you understand? They crushed us so hard and so fast, I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI was behind it somehow. Or the CIA. Maybe NASA. They have an agenda you don't even know about.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Did you know the bomber? Elton Roberts?”

  “Exactly!” Duperre pointed at me. “That's exactly what I'm talking about. The New Front. See, most of us were all about nonviolence, about change through ideas, about civil disobedience, sure, but you can't use violence. Violence is what feeds the system. The New Front was pouring gasoline on the fire. You want to bring the system down, you gotta starve it, not feed it, you know?”

  I nodded along. “You're saying Elton Roberts was associated with the New Front?”

  “He was the New Front, at least in this town. He was their missionary, come down to set up shop, to export their twisted narrative of progress through destruction. While we were all about progress through creation, baby. That was our way. Make love, not war.”

  “Did Elton ever write for the Great Horned Owl?” I asked.

  Duperre gaped at me a minute, then turned to Stacey, as if she were clearly the more reasonable of us. “Has this chick heard a single word I've breathed here? Did Elton write for the Owl? Did Nixon write for The Nation? No! We were about nonviolence, like I said.”

  “But it sounds like you knew Elton Roberts.”

  “Oh, yeah, he was around, like I said. Spreading his message of blood, his false prophecy of peace through violence. Trying to recruit kids around the strip for the New Front.”

  “Was he successful?”

  “He had a few followers, lotta the younger kids. Fourteen, fifteen, looking for windows to smash, you know. And then the Falcon, of course. That was when she turned, when she got together with him. She started down that dark path.”

  “Do you mean Pink Falcon?” I asked, glancing at my notebook.

  “Yeah, that's her. She got big-eyed for Roberts, but I don't know if his feelings for her were real, or if he just saw her as a way in. He wanted a big target, you know, and of course she had the keys to that particular kingdom.”

  “What kingdom?” I asked.

  “The Pennefort palace, baby. They were as tied into the military-industrial-advertising-real-estate-eco-exploitation industry as anybody. It's all connected. You see what I mean? They tore down forests and gardens and poor people's homes to build those giant concrete shopping monstrosities. They were poster children for exploitative capitalism, man, and supporting Palmer Madden was just a way of trying to keep the vultures on top and justice on the bottom.”

  “So...if I'm hearing you correctly, this Pink Falcon person helped Elton get into the skyscraper and plant the bomb?”

  “That's right. After Elton Roberts corrupted her mind.” Duperre touched his temple with his index finger. “Think Charles Manson. Think Patty Hearst, man. Some people have these kind of mind-tentacles, and they can reach out and twist the souls of others. That's what he did to her. He's twenty-three, a college dropout...Falcon's seventeen, eighteen, a rich private-school kid out for destruction...Like Bonnie and Clyde, you know, but less successful.”

  “And why did...Pink Falcon...have access to the building?”

  “Why did....Is she kidding me?” Again, he looked to Stacey, shaking his head as if he couldn't believe what I was saying, yet somehow expected Stacey to be right on his wavelength. “Y'all come all the way down here asking about the bomb and Elton Roberts, and you don't even know...” He snorted and shook his head.

  “What is it we don't know?”

  “Pink Falcon couldn't write under her own name, or that would've brought the hammer down fast. She was trying to escape who she was, trying to find a new sense of self running down there around The Strip. I guess we all were. But she didn't, not really. When the heat did come down, she didn't get rounded up and arrested with us. She retreated. She went back to being what she was supposed to be, and we never really saw her again.”

  “I'm sorry, I don't really follow,” I said.

  “Pink Falcon was Millie Pennefort,” he said. “Rebel teenage daughter of the powerful patrician family. Out for a good time, out for trouble, and then she gets in over her head. Hides behind daddy's lawyers while the rest of us twist in the wind and get beaten down by pigs.” He cast a look of disgust at an obese, bored-looking prison guard.

  “So Millie was involved in the bombing?” I thought of the elderly unconscious woman on life support on the building's seventeenth floor. “Of her own family's building?”

  “Yeah. A symbol of wealth, power, and elitism. But, like I said, most of us weren't into the violent stuff. Elton Roberts was a fringe character in our world. Nobody really took him seriously until Falcon started going with him. Then, of course, he goes and blows himself up, proving once and for all that he wasn't the dark brooding genius he pretended to be. Just a stupid kid like the rest of us.”

  “I didn't see any mention of Millie's connection to the bomber in the newspapers,” I
said.

  He laughed. “You wouldn't. The Pennefort family's political allies and cronies kept her role out of the light. Couldn't tarnish the family brand, you see. Or, Heaven forbid, let some spoiled rich kid suffer the consequences of her own actions. No, everybody in charge was really happy to pin the whole thing on some rootless outsider from up north. Pink Falcon went into some kind of psychiatric care, then stayed cloistered up in that tower ever since. I don't know if she ever goes out in public.”

  “I don't get the impression she does,” I said, not mentioning that the woman had been unconscious for more than a year. It wasn't my place to reveal family medical issues. “Did you know her well?”

  “The girl I knew is long gone. The world we lived in is long gone, as far as that goes. You can't walk the Strip today, can't hear the music, see the kids out in the streets, dreaming and living out our dreams. Now it's a canyon of corporate high-rises, office buildings, condominiums, overpriced work-space and sleep-space for the worker drones in their suits and their biz-cas khaki uniforms. Now there's no place for...” He trailed off, staring into space.

  “Mr. Duperre?” I asked, after a minute. I didn't want to be rude, but we only had a few minutes of visiting time left. “Is there anything else you can tell us about Elton Roberts? Or Millie Pennefort?”

  “Huh?” He looked back at us, blinking. “Oh, you should talk to A. Truthteller. He's the one with all the Owl records and the old papers. Now, Gary Brekowski was the one actually investigating them, but of course he's not around anymore.”

  “Investigating who?”

  “Pennefort Development. You see, there was intimidation, there were threats...and firebombs. They wanted to push people out of the poor neighborhoods, make room for progress, as they understood it. You can't have massive corporate developments until you clear out the native species. That might just happen to include humans who don't want to leave—and to whom you don't want to pay top dollar for their land, you see? Brekowski, he was covering that story for the Owl. The aggressive side of the family that liked to present themselves as such public benefactors. Oh, it was sordid. No wonder the Owl got put out of business.”

  “The Owl was covering some of the Pennefort's shady business doings?” Stacey raised her eyebrows.

  “The Owl covered all the dirty underbelly stuff. Everything the legit papers should have been covering and would have been covering if they were anything but establishment mouthpieces. Corruption, pollution, deceit, man, there was just no shortage of it. We were canoeing on a river of lies, trying to find the shore. But at least we believed there was a shore. These days, the lies are an ocean, and there's no land in sight. And we're still paddling the same stupid little canoe, and it's falling apart under us, man. And we lost the paddle somewhere back there, and the map...People used to worry about Big Brother watching, and now they pay for it out of their own pockets—hell, they carry Big Brother right there in their pockets, and they know it, and they're cool with it, they do it with big smiles on their faces. They all want to be hooked into the system.”

  “Time!” a guard called out. Duperre nodded and stood.

  “Anyway, there's no telling where it might have led,” Duperre said. “But Brekowski died in the bomb, and the raids pretty well shut down the Owl.”

  “You're saying the Owl reporter investigating the Pennefort family business also died in the bomb at the Pennefort Building?” I asked, struggling to catch up. “The same bomb that killed Albert Pennefort?”

  “Elton Roberts used a heck of a lot of dynamite.” Duperre nodded.

  “Can you tell us how to get in touch with A. Truthteller?” I asked, rising to my feet as slowly as I could. “His real name? Phone number? Is he still in Atlanta?”

  “Oh, he's here. Just a mind-control drone of the big machine now. Stamping 'Made in the U.S.A.' on the brains of the impressionable youth.”

  “Huh?” Stacey asked.

  “He's a schoolteacher. Some people try to change the system from within, man, but that's how the system draws you in, makes you one of them...” He shook his head as a beefy, shaven-headed guard approached with an annoyed look on his face.

  “Time!” the guard barked again, taking Duperre by the arm.

  “Please,” I said. “A name. Anything.”

  “Isaiah Halberson,” he said. And he gave us an address. “But don't be surprised if he doesn't help. He's a suit-and-tie man now. No time for old friends.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Duperre,” I said, as the guard escorted him away.

  “Come back anytime,” Duperre replied. “I'll be here all year.”

  Stacey and I returned to the van, and soon headed back into the city; the prison was about an hour south of it.

  “Interesting stuff,” Stacey said. “But do you think he's reliable? He seems a little...trippy?”

  “We'll know a lot more when we get in touch with A. Truthteller,” I said. “The people involved with the Horned Owl seem to know more about the bombing than anyone else we've spoken with.”

  “I'm totally lost,” Stacey said. “I can't even keep all these names straight.”

  “Run it by me,” I said, handing her my notebook. “For both of us.”

  “Okay...” She chewed her lip and squinted. “Your handwriting looks like the rantings of a deranged chicken.”

  “I know.”

  “So Elton Roberts comes into town in '68 or '69 and recruits some impressionable young hippie teens to his cause. One of them is Millie Pennefort, who's been out slumming around in hippie-land, which was a strip of Peachtree Street from Tenth to Fourteenth Street...basically Atlanta's answer to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. He uses her to gain access to the tower. Her father died in the bombing—you think that was intentional? She wanted to kill her own father?”

  “The police thought the timing of the bomb was an accident,” I reminded her. “That's what they said in the newspapers of the day. The New Front wasn't known for kamikaze missions; usually they blew up empty offices. We don't know exactly when he meant for it to go off. Maybe he had murderous intent this time, though; maybe he meant for it to explode during the press conference that was supposed to happen later in the day. He was rigging it under the stage where the mayoral candidate was going to give his speech, in the lobby of the Pennefort Building. That politician might have been the real target, and he wasn't even there when the bomb exploded.”

  “Do you think the bomb was some kind of elaborate plot to kill the journalist guy? The one investigating the Penneforts?”

  “I doubt Albert Pennefort was planning anything that could put him in danger of getting blasted apart by dynamite. But who knows, at this point? There are also plenty of mysterious deaths before the day of the bomb, going back more than a hundred years. We have a long way to go on this case.”

  “And a lot of possible ghosts in that tower, it sounds like,” Stacey said.

  “Let's try to focus on the two that have been bothering our client.”

  As we returned downtown, I drove past the Pennefort Building and continued on up Peachtree, to the area that had once been known as The Strip. Buildings thirty stories high lined the street on each side, packed in close together like mountain ranges flanking a traffic-clogged river. Where there wasn't a high-rise, there was a high-rise under construction, or an adjoining parking garage. There was no trace of the hippie haven indicated by old newspaper pictures, no rundown houses or little shopping strips with hand-painted signs. Everything here looked massive, sleek, and expensive.

  “I doubt we're going to find any clues left out this way,” I said. “Everything from the past has been knocked down and built over.”

  “What about lunch? Any chance of finding that out this way?” Stacey asked.

  “Good idea,” I said, noticing a sizable empty spot in my own stomach. We'd been running around so much that we'd forgotten to eat. “You find us something.”

  She did: a place called Vgë Cafe, which offered kosher Vegan fare and se
emed almost too cool for me. It was tucked into an indoor shopping mall at the base of one of the high-rise buildings, which stretched up twenty or thirty stories above us.

  I balanced out the morning's sugar indulgence with a big salad, which fortunately came loaded with fresh avocado and tomato. Stacey had tacos full of yam and peppers and pico de gallo. I felt better already.

  We returned to the Pennefort Building by late afternoon to catch up on some sleep before the night's observation. Since I'd been grabbed by a ghost, Stacey and I shared a room taking turns in case it came back. We dozed with a camera recording the area where the ghost had passed through the room. We kept our flashlights and iPods nearby, ready to blast the ghost with white light and sacred music if it tried to get aggressive again.

  I'm used to sleeping during the day, but this apartment did not come with blackout curtains like I had at home. Bright late-afternoon sunlight slanted in through the blinds.

  I kept my eyes closed and did my best to relax. The ghosts in this building were active, and I would need to be on my toes and ready to deal with them.

  I wondered just how many there were, roaming up and down the floors of the old tower. And I wondered if any of them were responsible for the strange deaths of the family members over the years.

  It took a long time to fall asleep. I kept expecting a cold hand to reach up, maybe from below the bed, and close over my own, holding it in place like she'd done to me at the wall. I wondered whether she'd been grabbing me with the intent to hurt me, to drag me over to the other side with her...or maybe it had been more like a drowning person, desperately grabbing onto me for help before sinking into the depths below.

  Chapter Twelve

  On the monitors, Amberly led the Pennefort family in a half-hearted effort to decorate the apartment for Christmas. It wasn't their real home, and unloading the plastic elves and reindeer from the boxes in the dining room just seemed to rub in that harsh reality instead of alleviate it.

  I hated spying uselessly on their private moments, so I only glanced over occasionally. The cameras were recording, anyway, in case a ghost hopped out to harass them. The ghosts had never come out when the family was together, anyway; they'd each reported being chased or ambushed when they were alone, with no witnesses. That's how ghosts tend to operate, at least the negative ones who want to feed on the living—like predators, they wait in the shadows until a prey animal is alone and vulnerable. Divide and conquer, and so on.