The Bomb Maker's Son

by Robert Rotstein

  “It’s a question a son should ask,” she says. “And for the record, I think he’s innocent.”

  “Based on what?”

  She reaches over and covers my hand with hers. “Believe your father is innocent, Parker. If not for him, then for you. And for Emily.”

  I won’t do it for him or for me. I might do it for Emily.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Belinda Hayes was, during her days in the Holzner-O’Brien Gang, an imperial fuck-up and a profligate. The one time she tried to plant an explosive device to cause property damage to a bank in Venice Beach, California, she buried the bomb so deep that the blast only kicked up some sand. She worked as a stripper and a prostitute. Although she used her earnings to help finance radical causes, her brazen drug abuse and promiscuity drew unwelcome attention to the collective. Unlike her comrades, she didn’t try to escape when the police identified the Holzner-O’Brien Gang as the perpetrators of the Playa Delta bombing. Instead, she remained paralyzed in her filthy apartment, where the FBI found her cowering under a Murphy bed.

  When I ask Moses Dworsky to join me at my meeting with Hayes later that afternoon, he says, “I would rather not be in her presence. You know that she and I were not fond of each other.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  He wrinkles his long nose in distaste. “It would not be a productive session. I skewered her on cross-examination. If I attend, she will not be forthcoming. In fact, she would be utterly hostile.”

  “What do you mean you skewered Hayes? She was your witness.”

  “She was going to be the prosecution’s witness, but they decided not to call her because of her gross mental instability. I decided to call her to the stand at the eleventh hour because I felt I might need a Hail Mary. I actually cross-examined her as an adverse witness because she was so favorably disposed to Holzner. She tended to want to protect him. Or maybe she feared him.”

  “But you got her to say what you wanted?”

  He nods. I’m fascinated by the way his earlobes shimmy with every shake or bob of his head. It’s almost as if he subconsciously uses his unfortunate physiognomy to distract and disarm.

  “Come to the meeting with me,” I say. “Your history with her will help. We can play good cop, bad cop.”

  “Lovely can accompany you.”

  “She’s got an emergency motion on something else she’s working on.”

  He mumbles something indecipherable and says, “Give Eleanor the address, and I will think about it.”

  “Don’t just think about it. I need you there.” I want to see the dynamic between Dworsky and Hayes, to see how she might react to stress on the witness stand. I want to see Militant Moe in action.

  Several hours later, at about four in the afternoon, I drive solo to the foothills above Lakeview Terrace in the north quadrant of the San Fernando Valley. Down below is a neighborhood consisting of small wood-and-stucco homes built in the 1950s and of grungy light-industrial and commercial businesses. Up in the hills are shanties, a trailer park, and old, ranch-style homes with stables. Lakeview Terrace is one of the few places in Los Angeles where equestrians with modest resources can afford to stable their horses.

  I park at the bottom of a gravel-and-dirt driveway and wait for Moses Dworsky. When he doesn’t show up after fifteen minutes, I drive up a steep hill to a one-story box house with copper-wood and white-aluminum-siding walls and a flat composition roof. The landscaping consists of concrete and scrub brush. There’s a rusted lawn chair and a sooty Weber barbecue on the front porch. The windows have bars, painted white to match the siding.

  I knock on the screen door. Hayes opens it, wearing a tattered blue T-shirt touting the “Kale and Saffron Vegan Restaurant.” Her black tights are so threadbare that her skin is visible in places. Her silver-gray hair, which frames a round, surprisingly wrinkle-free face, falls down her back 1960s style. She’s undoubtedly added some pounds since her days as an exotic dancer. But she’s still shapely, an earth mother whose huge breasts are unencumbered by a bra. Her green eyes greet me as if I’m the bearer of joyous tidings rather than a corporate suit here to resurrect what should be the darkest period of her life.

  “Come on in, sweetie,” she says.

  When I thank her for agreeing to talk to me, she says, “God is good.”

  I’m still trying to decipher this non sequitur as I follow her into a living room not much larger than a walk-in closet, into which she’s managed to cram a massive burgundy Naugahyde sofa, two almost-matching crimson wingback chairs serving as storage areas for old fashion magazines, and an end table so scored and chipped that the dark-stained surface is speckled white. On the faux-fireplace mantle are a Buddha sculpture, a stained-glass image of a Greek-Orthodox Jesus holding the bible, a menorah, an aluminum Ganesh, and a lighted votive candle that fills the room with the heavy odor of patchouli.

  She sits down on the sofa and pats the cushion next to her. It’s unprofessionally close, but because of the magazines on the chairs, there’s nowhere else to sit.

  “So you’re Ian’s son,” she says. “Who’s your mother?”

  She posed the question so abruptly that I answer, “Harriet Stern.” Only after the words come out do I wonder which of us is the expert interrogator.

  She rolls her eyes upward, as though the memory of my mother is a spirit trapped in the cottage-cheese ceiling. “Ian fucked a lot of girls, me included. We all fucked each other, all of us. It was all part of the revolution we made. But he loved that evil cunt, Rachel.”

  I don’t know what’s more jarring, her vulgarity, her free-associative personal revelations, or her hatred for Rachel O’Brien. Only the last is relevant to why I’m here.

  “You didn’t like Rachel, but the news reports say you sided with her at her trial, that you testified that she backed out of the conspiracy to bomb the VA.”

  “Damn straight I did. She was right there in court, not twenty feet away, staring at me with those witch’s eyes, laying a curse on me. Ian was long gone, so what did it matter if I dumped on him? Besides, even if I testified against him, he wouldn’t have done to me what Rachel would have if I had crossed her. Ian was always spiritual, always forgiving. Not Rachel.”

  “She was dangerous?”

  “She was a . . . What do you call those poisonous snakes?”

  “Vipers?”

  “No, Ian once called her a Queen Cobra. Fearsome and poisonous.”

  “You perjured yourself because you were afraid?”

  “Sweetie, there’s no such thing as perjury in a fascist kangaroo court. Besides, that lawyer of hers, Dworsky the Elephant Man or whatever, beat the shit out of me, got me to say what he wanted me to, because even with Rachel sitting there I hated to accuse Ian. But yeah, I was scared shitless.”

  “Are you telling me Rachel bombed the VA?”

  “She could’ve done it for sure. I don’t know. I don’t know. Rachel thought I was a fuck-up. They left me out of the operation.” She makes it sound like a painful memory of youth, like not getting asked to the high-school prom.

  I have only to ask a general question to get her to launch into a rambling narrative about how the Weather Underground expelled her for promiscuity, but that was okay with her, because the Holzner-O’Brien Gang accepted her and didn’t care about what she wore or that she made money for the collective by turning tricks. Even better, the group, in theory, was much more willing to use violence as a means of fomenting revolution. The gang made a pilgrimage to San Francisco to protest the arrest of two members of the Symbionese Liberation Army for killing the Oakland, California, superintendent of schools. On the trip up from Los Angeles, a fellow traveler drove the van while Holzner, O’Brien, Sedgwick, Hayes, and four others dropped acid and had a six-hour orgy in the back. “Everybody fucked everybody—boys and girls, girls and girls, boys and boys. It was great!” She boasts about her most publicized mistake, the abortive bombing attempt on the Venice Beach Community Bank, which was evidently p
roviding the construction financing for a luxury hotel that would’ve displaced some low-income tenants in a housing project. She dressed up like a Santa Monica housewife and carried the bomb in a Gucci handbag. “It was like foreplay,” she says. “Better.” Her only regret was she blew up sand, not the building.

  “And then there was Ian,” she says, her eyes misty-moist like a moony schoolgirl. “He could hypnotize you with his words, his look, his touch. No one was like him. No one had his passion. He was a fantastic fuck. You look like him.”

  So Belinda Hayes is just another cultist, worshipping at the church of Ian Holzner. He might as well have been an elder in the Church of the Sanctified Assembly.

  She places her hand on my knee. “Sure I can’t get you something to drink, sweetie? Maybe some white wine?”

  I decline again.

  “I’ll have some.” She comes back with a glass in one hand and the bottle in the other, fills the glass to the brim, sets the bottle on the coffee table, and takes a sip. When she sits down, she narrows the distance between us. “Where were we, sweetie?”

  I discreetly try to create more space because I don’t want to antagonize her. She’s giving me some good information. But I can’t manage to move away in these tight quarters.

  “You told me about the bank bombing,” I say. “Tell me about the other attacks.”

  “They were covert guerrilla operations,” she says indignantly.

  “Tell me about the other covert operations.”

  She goes on to describe other bombings the group committed over the succeeding months. Each time, Holzner insisted that someone call in a warning. There were no injuries. Hayes’s account helps one of my defense theories—the Playa Delta bombing didn’t fit the gang’s pattern.

  “Could anyone else in the group besides Holzner have built a bomb?” I ask.

  “Not me.”

  “I mean, the others. Rachel, for example. Or Charles Sedgwick.”

  “No way when I was there. But I was expelled just before Thanksgiving, so . . .”

  “Why?”

  She gulps down the wine and fills her glass again. “Rachel didn’t like me. I wasn’t a very good guerilla soldier, I guess. And I think she was jealous. She didn’t love Ian. That bitch couldn’t love anyone, but she was jealous of anyone else who wanted him. And I did love him. So did all the women and some of the men. But I gave the best blow jobs. Ian said so. Anyway, when Rachel tells me I’m out of the group, she goes . . .” And here, she sucks in her cheeks and makes herself resemble the O’Brien I’ve seen in photos, the girl with the thin face, slightly receding chin, wild and fiery eyes. “She goes, ‘If you ever truly become committed, perhaps you can find another group, maybe one that you’ll love more. Che Guevara said revolutionaries should swim among the masses like fish in the sea. If you’re serious, you can do that. But not with us.’” Hayes says this in a rapid-fire cadence and gesticulates wildly, as if O’Brien were a fast-talking carnival huckster. “Anyway, I went to Ian, begged him to let me stay, but he wouldn’t. He would’ve let me stay, I’m sure of it, but that fucking bitch Rachel . . .”

  “Their decision probably saved you from spending your life in prison. Or worse.”

  “You don’t get it, do you, sweetie? Ian would say back then that there was tinder in the air, a sense that the world could burst into flames at the smallest spark. I wanted to help set that fire. The Playa Delta bombing proved that the government was vulnerable, a paper tiger. Rachel and Ian didn’t do me a favor, they stole my chance to be part of history. The loss has haunted me all my life.”

  The woman is a psychopath. I force her insanity, her misguided callousness out of my mind. “Tell me about Charles Sedgwick,” I say. “You said he couldn’t build the bomb, but could he have planted it?”

  She laughs and bends forward, her face close to mine. Her hand lands on my knee again. “Poor Charlie should’ve gotten his PhD and taught philosophy in college. That’s all he did, philosophize. He liked to read Marx and Mao and Marcuse, write this revolutionary poetry no one could understand. He tried to do what Rachel and Ian wanted, but the one time he tried to plant a bomb—it was in a restroom at the Treasury Building in Washington, DC—he literally pissed his pants as he walked up the steps carrying the briefcase. Rachel screamed at him because she paid seventy-five bucks for the suit he was wearing and he soiled it. The collective was always broke. Rachel didn’t want to spend the money to have the suit dry-cleaned.”

  “Why couldn’t he have built the bomb? He was a smart guy.”

  “No fucking way. Charlie was so freaked out after those Weathermen blew themselves up in Greenwich Village that he’d shake when he was in the same room with the explosives. No, Charlie was the Minister of Information, but that’s it.”

  “Tell me about the collective’s political ideology.”

  “Hasn’t Ian told you about all that shit?”

  He hasn’t, but I don’t want her to know it. “I’d like to hear it from you.”

  She takes a sip of wine at the same time she shrugs with the shoulder of the free hand. “I didn’t pay much attention to that. Didn’t really understand it. I just wanted to blow up the whole fucking world.”

  I ask her about other, less prominent members of the collective, people who seemed to flit in and out of the organization but haven’t been implicated in the bombing. She says that they were mostly hangers-on who disappeared once Holzner and O’Brien branded them bourgeois or sell-outs or weaklings for not buying into the group’s violent tactics.

  “Did you ever meet Ian’s brother, Jerry?”

  She ponders this for a moment. “Yeah. I met him. It was right before they kicked me out. I don’t remember for sure, but I think I fucked Jerry. Yeah, I did. When Ian found out about it he got really pissed at me.” Her face droops in an epiphanous frown. “Do you think that’s why Ian let Rachel exile me from the collective?”

  You’d think the question couldn’t be anything but rhetorical, but she’s waiting with an expectant look.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” I say.

  She almost lunges forward and grabs my arm. She smells of Chardonnay and cheap freesia-scented perfume. “Will you ask Ian if that’s why he didn’t overrule Rachel? He could’ve overruled her, you know.”

  I half nod, a noncommittal gesture that I’m sure she’ll take as assent.

  My next question comes from instinct, not intellect. “Do you remember anyone named Alicia Bowers?”

  Another lifting of her eyes, another appeal to the Lords of the Dappled Ceiling. “That doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “She supposedly had a crush on Ian. Much younger.”

  She laughs. “That could describe a hundred girls. All of whom Ian probably fucked.”

  I ask her to tell me about the plan to bomb the Playa Delta VA. She assumed it was going to be like all the other bombings, that they’d call in a warning and that they’d destroy some property. But then Sedgwick, of all people, suggested that they might want to escalate their revolutionary activities, and O’Brien jumped on it. Of course, Belinda thought it was great to kill the fascist pigs. Holzner seemed to be on board with it.

  “Did you ever hear Holzner object to targeting humans at Playa Delta?”

  She starts to shake her head, but then says, “One week, two weeks, three weeks before they kicked me out, I don’t know, I was really strung out at the time, I heard Ian and Rachel arguing in the bedroom. I thought it was about sex or something. Rachel liked it rough and Ian was a gentle type. But then he yelled ‘I won’t do it, I know people who work there.’ That’s it. I don’t know for sure if they were talking about Playa Delta, but . . .”

  I only need to prove reasonable doubt to win acquittal. Belinda Hayes might have given me that. She’s a crass, unstable woman—a typical witness in a criminal case.

  “Would you be willing to testify to what you just said? To help Ian?”

  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “What about what I sa
id at the last trial? Couldn’t they arrest me for perjury?”

  “You don’t have to worry about perjury. Tell the truth, which was that you were afraid of O’Brien. She was intimidating, a violent person.”

  “Yeah, but what if she comes back?”

  “We’ve been looking for her, and so has the US Attorney. They want her more than we do. Not even the US government can find her. Rachel O’Brien has disappeared off the face of the earth. Besides, she’s in her sixties, and this is two thousand fourteen. What could she possibly do to you? Please, Belinda. Ian’s future depends on it.”

  “Sure, sweetie,” she finally says. “I shouldn’t have dumped on Ian at Rachel’s trial. I was disloyal and a coward. Charlie was loyal.”

  “And he’s the only one who got a life sentence.”

  “He did the right thing. ‘Revolutionary purity,’ he called it. I guess Charlie was braver than I gave him credit for.” She laughs. “I’m probably the first person ever to call Charlie brave.”

  I tell her what she should expect as the trial date approaches and thank her for her time. Then I get up to leave.

  “Are we done so soon, sweetie?” She slides a bit closer and rests her hand on my thigh. With the other, she brushes her hair away from the back of her neck and tosses her head, a coquettish gesture that might’ve worked when she was younger but not anymore.

  I slowly begin to stand, trying not to offend my newfound star witness.

  “I can make you feel good,” she says, standing with me and pressing her body against mine. “Just ask your father. He’ll definitely remember.” When my body tenses in protest, she says, “Hey, sweetie, indulge me. I always wanted to do a father and a son.”

  I’m about to pull away when a knock on the door saves me from the need to reject her.

  “Moses Dworsky here,” the voice says in a megaphonic bellow. “Apologies for my late arrival.”

  I know he doesn’t want to be here, but I didn’t figure he’d use passive aggression to avoid it. The man makes his own rules, but at the moment I’m grateful for his tardiness.