“Anyway, it was the last week of school and just before graduation,” she says. “And a couple of weeks before LA police attacked protesters at the Century Plaza Hotel, where President Johnson was staying. Ian was at that rally, too. The moment he broke that window, I stopped being his friend.”
“You had nothing to do with it?” It’s not a question designed to get in her good graces, but sometimes you just can’t help asking the follow-up.
“I tried to stop him.” She hesitates and tilts her head to the side, a soft, maternal expression on her face. Or at least I think it’s maternal, since Harriet Stern never looked at me like that. “You look like him, you know. Or how he used to look. You’re a little taller.”
“He’s much leaner than I am.”
“He wasn’t skinny then, not in high school. He was built like you, because of the gymnastics.”
“You mentioned antiwar activities in high school. I thought he became radicalized in college. Before that he was the straight arrow, the engineer/athlete.”
“Yeah, the high-school counselors did a good job of keeping that myth alive. Ian was the school’s golden boy. He was a great athlete, a top scholar, and a leader all rolled into a handsome boy. The school administration wasn’t going to let him blow his chance for a scholarship and Olympic fame. They not only wanted him to succeed; they wanted to use him as a living commercial for Playa Delta High. Ian going to the Olympics would’ve put the school on the map, given it recognition that only Beverly Hills High, and maybe Culver High, had in the area. Scholastic politics weren’t as bad as they are now, where schools measure their worth entirely by where their graduates go to college or how prominent their alumni become. But Ian was the star of stars, so even back then, he was a commodity for good old Playa High.”
“What changed him?”
She simultaneously smiles and shakes her head, as if I’m a dense pupil who hasn’t done his homework. “The Vietnam War suddenly changed him. It changed all of us.”
“The war didn’t change everyone.”
“Let me finish. How old are you?”
“The big four-oh last birthday.”
“You couldn’t possibly understand. It was over before you were born. Everyone’s assumptions changed forever—about the government, about the country, about their role models, about their parents, about morality. The Vietnam War changed the world for your generation and the one after it.”
“As I started to say, the war didn’t radicalize every teenager. Ian Holzner was in the small minority.”
“That’s true. But it was personal with Ian. He became rabidly antiwar when Jerry got drafted and was sent to Da Nang.”
“What do you know about Holzner’s college days?”
“Ian’s or Jerry’s? Because Jerry only went to community college for a semester.”
“Ian’s.”
“Absolutely nothing. I told you, after high school we were no longer friends. I didn’t go to Berkeley because I didn’t have the grades. I went to Cal State Northridge. I saw Ian only once after high school, when he came back for summer break after freshman year. I was working at the Foster’s Freeze. It was an ice cream chain, now long gone. And he came by for a burger and a chocolate malt. That’s what he’d always ordered when he was a kid. That was probably the only thing that hadn’t changed about him. I took a break, but we weren’t talking for two minutes before he started spouting that insane radical rhetoric. It was the summer of sixty-eight, the worst time in the country, the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the resulting riots, the Chicago cops’ attack on protestors at the Democratic Convention. Ian was enraged at the world. Ranting, raving. It was scary, actually, because he screamed at me for being too passive. I cut my break short, said good-bye, and never saw him again. Except on the news, of course. Then and now.”
“What was he like as a kid?”
She sits back in contemplation and nods again. For a moment I feel as if I’ve been called to the principal’s office. “You’re asking as his son, not his attorney?”
“Assume I am.”
She arches her left eyebrow, a singular feat of muscle control because that brow goes quite high and the other doesn’t move a bit. “You are all lawyer, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll assume you’re asking as Ian’s son.” She shakes her head. “The news said he had another son who died in Afghanistan. Sad. And it’s ironic that Ian ended up living an ordinary, sedate life. Anyway, I lived two doors down on Ridgeway Road. We went to kindergarten together, rode our bikes, played ball in the street. His father was a kind man, but rarely said a word. An ex-acrobat who worked for the post office. Died too young of prostate cancer. Very tolerant of his children’s foibles. But Ian was his mother’s favorite, with his intelligence and athleticism. The opposite from what usually happens, because Jerry was their biological kid and Ian was adopted. I once heard their mother say that there must have been a mix-up, that Ian must’ve been the one who sprung from her loins—she used those words—and that Jerry was just dropped on the doorstep by mistake, so what could they do but take him in? Cruel. Probably one of the reasons Jerry was such a hood. A ‘ho-dad,’ we called him back in the day. An obsolete word from an obsolete era. But in a Southern California city so close to the ocean, the tough guys were ho-dads, the popular kids surfers, and the rest of us just nonentities.”
“I ran into Jerry in court yesterday,” I say. “He lives up in the Bay Area. He told me that Ian protected him.”
“The way I remember it, people needed protection from Jerry. He was four years older, so I don’t know how Ian could’ve done that.”
“Maybe Jerry was referring to what happened after he came back from the war?”
“Could be. Like so many of them, Jerry wasn’t the same. Shell-shocked, they called it back then. Post-traumatic stress disorder these days. Kind of a cliché now, but it wasn’t back then. Anyway, when I was a kid I was afraid of Jerry. Not only was he a thug, but he seemed creepy. Nothing I could put my finger on, but as a female . . .” She folds her arms over her chest and shivers as if she were still that young girl.
“I was wondering who else Ian hung out with.”
I run through a list of names that I got from Dworsky, but she assures me that all of them, three of whom are dead, broke off with Holzner by sophomore year of college. None were very political. They were mostly Ian’s science friends or fellow jocks who all led unremarkable lives as far as Diaz knows.
She does have information on one person, a girl named Alicia Bowers.
“She was this little girl who lived down the block,” Diaz says. “Five, six years younger than Ian and me, a shy, unremarkable little kid who by the time she was twelve had a crush on Ian and followed him around like a puppy dog. Just because he was friendly toward her, I think. Ian probably kept her from being bullied. Most of the kids her age teased her mercilessly and some did worse. There was only the father, a World War Two vet who was shell-shocked himself, and on welfare. People said he was a drunk, but I think maybe he was schizophrenic and no one realized it. Or maybe it was physical, maybe he actually suffered a head wound. They say people aren’t as nice these days, that the culture has lost the ability to be kind, but today people are far more forgiving of a person like Pete Bowers than they were back then. Anyway, Pete and Alicia lived in a seedy motel at the end of our block. Their neighbors were Sam’s Liquor Store and Helen’s Toy Palace. The dad would ride this old one-speed bike without fenders around the neighborhood, babbling and waving at pedestrians. Alicia seemed like the classic wallflower who survived by shrinking from the heat. I left the neighborhood, but my father said that she’d walk to high school every day and wave at him when she passed our house without looking up. She never got into trouble, as far as I know. But then I heard years later from a guy who also lived on Ridgeway Road that he saw her at an antiwar rally on the UCLA campus where Holzner was speaking. She was up on the platform with him, cheering, raising her fist in the Black Power salute, shouting for
peace and revolution, dancing around like she was tripping on LSD. He said he tried to talk with her, but she left with Ian and his people before he could get there. I can’t believe I still remember that. Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher, and kids surprise me all the time. But it was so strange.”
“When was that?”
“It would’ve been nineteen seventy-two, seventy-three. Alicia was still a teenager. But she’s the only person I know from Playa Delta who supposedly had contact with him after he became an icon of the radical left. If it’s true.” She raises an index finger, gets out of her chair, and goes to a cabinet across the room, where she leafs through some files and comes up with a document.
“The nineteen seventy-three yearbook,” she says. “Alicia Bowers’s senior year.” She flips the pages, stops, purses her lips, and hands me the book. There is no picture of Bowers, only her name and a silhouette and the words Had better things to do.
“It was worth a shot,” she says.
“An earlier yearbook?”
“This is the earliest I have. Inherited them. I think they tossed a lot of old ones out in the eighties. Nostalgia wasn’t what it is now.”
“I thought that’s what year books were all about.”
“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 testif
y 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.
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