The Bomb Maker's Son

by Robert Rotstein

  Hayes puts two hands on my chest and shoves me away in disgust. “What the hell is this? You brought Rachel’s lawyer to my home?”

  “He’s a private investigator now. Working for me. For Ian.”

  She shakes her head in disbelief and stomps over to the door, her huge breasts swaying aggressively under her T-shirt. I follow. She flings the door open and cowers as if a huge, menacing giant has just parked himself on her doorstep.

  Which describes Dworsky at the moment. He’s looming over her on the other side of the screen with arms crossed, and his frown makes it seem as if his nose will touch his chin. Forty feet away is Eleanor Dworsky, leaning against an old Ford Taurus. When she sees me, she waves and calls out, “Hey, Parker, make it snappy. I want to get Moses home. We have guests coming over.”

  “Get the hell out,” Hayes says, pushing me so hard and so unexpectedly that I almost trip and fall into the screen. “I told you, I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Belinda, I’m sorry, I should’ve mentioned that Moses is working for me.”

  “Did you ask her about JB?” Moses asks.

  I didn’t. How could I have forgotten that? “Belinda, have you ever heard of someone who uses the initials JB?”

  “Get out, motherfucker!” she screeches like a profane fairy-tale crone.

  I mumble a thank you and an “I’ll be in touch,” to which she replies, “No you won’t,” and slams the door.

  Dworsky looks down at me and shrugs his already-hunched shoulders. “I warned you. She does not like me. You should have brought Lovely if you needed backup. Now, what, may I ask, did I miss?”

  I recount my conversation with Hayes, how she could shed reasonable doubt about Ian’s guilt. He nods. Finally, Eleanor, who all this time has been leaning against the car, calls out, “Move it, Moishe. We need to get home.”

  He spreads his arms, palms raised as if in benediction. “My dear wife is the only one allowed to call me Moishe since my mother passed away. It is the Yiddish version of Moses, you know. But I leave you with these words: you did well with that recalcitrant, unstable woman. The trick will be to convince her that I am not her enemy.” He gives a quarter bow, lumbers to the Ford, and gets into the passenger seat. Eleanor, who’s already climbed behind the wheel and started the engine, gives me a cursory wave and drives away, kicking up dust from the road as if she were a hot-rod racer jumping the starting lights.

  I take a look back at the house and see Belinda Hayes peering out at me from between the drapes. When she sees me looking, she pulls them together hard. Seconds later, the lock on the front door clicks shut with a final rebuke.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I walk into The Barrista the next morning, greet the staff, and freeze. Mariko Heim is sitting at a back table, drinking coffee—my back table. She appears to be alone, but the place is crowded, and I’m sure her enforcers are scattered incognito at neighboring tables. Someone in Heim’s position doesn’t travel without muscle. She’s wearing her brown sunglasses with the opaque lenses. When a barista passes, she surprises me by ordering a second cup of coffee. It’s a venial sin for a true believer like her to consume caffeine.

  I walk over to her. “Please leave my store, Ms. Heim.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Stern,” she says, and as an afterthought forces out the word, “Please.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be afraid of the First Apostate or in awe of him.”

  My body folds down into the seat across from her. As a young teenager, I defied Bradley Kelly, the Sanctified Assembly’s founder, and was branded a heretic, the Assembly’s First Apostate. Except that afterward, the Assembly denied my existence as part of the cover-up of the abuse that I and many other children had suffered. I can’t believe Heim has breached the titanium curtain of secrecy surrounding the First Apostate.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  “You’re surprised I know you’re the First Apostate? If that’s the case, I’m sure you’ll be surprised that I want to talk to you about Ascending Sodality.”

  If her reference to the First Apostate made my legs shake, her reference to Ascending Sodality leaves me dumbstruck. I don’t like to think about the vile practice that, to this day, could land many of the original Sanctified Assembly founders in jail, possibly including my own mother.

  “Oh, don’t be so surprised,” Heim says. “Most successful institutions have dirty secrets. Just like a human being, the Church of the Sanctified Assembly is a living organism susceptible to cellular contamination. The key to an organization’s long-term survival is curing itself of disease. As a member of a new generation of Assembly devotees, I feel it’s my duty to help cleanse the Assembly of contamination. That involves purging the organization of those who engaged in depraved practices.”

  “If that were true, your divine prophet would be your first target.”

  “Whoever or whatever the flesh-and-blood man was, his soul has transcended the human being. His spirit is pure. It matters not what the Prophet or the Divine Son or the Bearer of God’s Law did in life. It’s what He means in death. That’s what redemption is all about.”

  “So you think the rotten fruit can germinate a pristine seedling? How progressive of you.” Romulo brings me an espresso. I thank him, but I don’t take my eyes off Heim, who through her dark lenses is looking . . . somewhere.

  “We can assist each other,” Heim says. “Information for information.”

  “What information can I possibly give you?”

  “I want to know the names of everyone who was involved in the practice of Ascending Sodality. And I want to know whether Harriet Stern practiced it.”

  How disrespectful. She didn’t refer to Harriet as Quiana. “You want me to implicate my own mother in criminal activity?”

  “It’s no secret that you and she don’t see eye to eye, shall we say. Have I understated it well enough?”

  Heim doesn’t give a damn about cleansing her Assembly. She wants to depose my mother.

  “I also want to know about Harriet Stern’s relationship with Ian Holzner,” she says. “The unsullied Assembly elders have a right to know why Stern is consorting with a murderer.”

  “My client isn’t guilty, and my mother has nothing to do with him,” I say, a lawyer’s knee-jerk attempt to state his position for the record, odd because I don’t owe this woman an explanation about anything. “But if I’ve got it right, you want me to provide information about both my mother and my father, as if I’m a brainwashed child in some totalitarian state giving up his parents for the greater good. Out of curiosity, what would I get out of doing something like that?”

  “Just to be clear, I’m not interested in Holzner, but only your mother’s relationship with him.”

  “She has no relationship with him. Hasn’t for forty years.” I don’t expect her to believe it, but I have to say the words nevertheless.

  “As for what you can get out of it, I know you’re looking for witnesses. Well, one in particular—Rachel O’Brien.”

  “How could you possibly help me find O’Brien?”

  “The Assembly has the ability to locate people even the government can’t find. Or doesn’t want to find.” As she speaks, she keeps her head down, as if I’m some kind of ghastly creature she can’t bear to look at.

  “You’ve got it all wrong. The best thing that can happen to my case is for Rachel O’Brien not to show up at the trial.”

  “True. But you need to know whether she’s going to appear as a surprise witness. That way, you can prepare for that possibility.”

  “I’ll take my chances. I’ve been told I’m a good cross-examiner, and I’ll use those skills if O’Brien does pop up. Meanwhile, let her stay missing.”

  She touches the coffee cup to her lips without sipping and says, “We might be able to influence whether she shows up or not.”

  “Unlike you and your cult, I don’t intimidate witnesses.”

  She
jerks her head up to look at me for the first time, and although I can’t see her eyes, the suddenness of the action proves she’s rattled. “I wasn’t implying that we would intimidate anyone.”

  “Sure you weren’t.” I stand and walk toward the entrance. She’s virtually succeeded in chasing me out of my own store.

  “Stern!” she calls after me, and as I walk away I notice a couple of men at a table near the entrance about get up from their chairs, but they stay seated, and I don’t have to look behind me to know that Heim commanded them to back off—for now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At five-thirty in the morning on January 8, 1976, a little more than three weeks after the Playa Delta bombing, four agents working in the clandestine COINTELPRO unit burst into Jerry Holzner’s motel apartment, rousted him out of bed, and demanded that he tell them where his brother, Ian, was. When Jerry said he didn’t know, the agents interrogated him for two hours, at the end of which they accused him of conspiring to bomb the Playa Delta VA. When he stuck by his story, they slapped his face, twisted his arm, broke two fingers, and pummeled his torso with closed fists. When that didn’t work, they dragged him out of his bedroom, lifted him up, and dangled him by ankles from the balcony of his third-story apartment. Only then did Jerry give up the address of the West LA apartment where the Holzner-O’Brien Gang was living. Whereupon the federal agents got a warrant citing third-party-witness Jerry’s “cooperation.” They searched the gang’s apartment, where they found bomb-making equipment similar to that used at the Playa Delta VA, along with a hand-drawn map of the Veterans Administration.

  Ian’s fingerprints were found on the bomb parts. When I ask him why, he tells me that he touched all the explosives—he was the bomb maker, after all—and that the material the FBI found in the apartment obviously wasn’t used for the Playa Delta killings, which had occurred several weeks earlier. He claims he didn’t know about the map, which, he says, judging by the handwriting, must’ve been prepared by Charles Sedgwick. Sedgwick refused to cooperate in his own defense and so said nothing about the map or anything else. According to newspaper reports, Rachel O’Brien testified at her trial that Holzner drew the map. Belinda Hayes testified that she didn’t know who drew it, but Holzner had drawn many of the maps of targets.

  Three weeks ago, Lovely Diamond drafted a motion to suppress the fingerprint evidence, the map, and any adverse testimony from Hayes. In opposition, the US Attorney admits that COINTELPRO tortured Jerry Holzner but argues that it makes no difference to the admissibility of the evidence because while the rogue agents might’ve violated Jerry Holzner’s constitutional rights, they didn’t violate Ian’s rights. This is because the feds had a valid warrant to search Ian’s place. So even though the evidence is the “fruit of the poisonous tree,” as the case law describes it, Ian can’t complain because his rights weren’t impaired. Except that Lovely has crafted a legal argument that just might appeal to a maverick judge like Carlton Gibson.

  The night before the hearing, I’m sitting at the desk in my bedroom, mapping out my presentation to the judge on Lovely’s motion to suppress. Three hard knocks on the wall startle me. Holzner barges in and sits on the edge of my bed. His hands are folded in his lap, and his eyes are docile with paternal concern. I swivel in my chair to face him.

  Before he appeared in my life, I would’ve traded my legal career and my actor’s residuals to have my father living in my home, to get to know him, to delineate my family history, to confirm that in the grand river of humanity I’m something more than an existential droplet randomly spewed into the atmosphere. Now that he’s here, I don’t want to ask about him or my grandparents or my extended family. It would feel like a lawyer’s interrogation rather than a son’s curiosity. Most of the time, we behave like aloof post-college roommates who have nothing in common.

  “So there’s really no way I can come down to court tomorrow morning?” he asks.

  “We went over it. It’s a legal argument, so your presence isn’t required.”

  “I can help you.”

  “Help me like you did last time by showing your disrespect for the judge, your contempt for the entire judicial process? Help me by refusing to take off your shackles so you look like the murderous terrorist everyone thinks you are?”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I’m your lawyer. I’m paid not to think about your guilt or innocence. Except I’m not being paid.”

  “I get it. You’re a man of principle. Good for you. I mean I can help you with your fear.”

  “How can you possibly help my stage fright?”

  “Let’s just say a father’s presence can have a calming effect on a child.”

  “I’m forty years old, not a child. You tried to turn the hearing into a circus. That’s hardly calming. I managed to get through it because I took prescription drugs, not because you were there.” And because Lovely was there, and I didn’t want to let her down.

  “Maybe so. But how about listening to me right now?”

  “I’d rather you tell me how to find Rachel O’Brien and your brother, Jerry.”

  “I know fear, Parker. I lived with it every day for almost forty years. Afraid I’d run into someone who recognized me from the old days, afraid that the person in the next restaurant booth was FBI, afraid that Jenny and Dylan and Emily would discover who I really was. Fear consumed me. No, that’s wrong, it desiccated my soul from the inside out, so I thought I was alive when, in truth, Ian Holzner died the moment he went on the run. As for Marty Lansing, he never existed—not in this shell of a body. Reddick was right. Stealing a dead infant’s identity was shameful. So much of what I’ve done has been shameful.”

  I wonder if that includes murder.

  “How can you help me, Ian?” By this, I mean, How can I help you?

  “By teaching you how to embrace the fear.”

  “You learned to overcome the fear when you became a fugitive?”

  “I learned to embrace it when I decided to build bombs. You have to realize that fear keeps you sharp.”

  “A little bit of fear keeps you sharp. A lot paralyzes you.”

  “Listen to me. When you walk into the courtroom, behave like an emergency-room doctor performing triage. Focus on eliminating the real threat, whatever that might be. Single-mindedness makes you forget the trivial. When I was assembling explosive devices, I couldn’t worry about the cops bursting in or an FBI rat infiltrating the group. I had to make sure I didn’t cross a wire and blow myself up.”

  “What’s that got to do with my glossophobia?”

  “Don’t be so centered on self. Rely on—”

  “Narcissism runs in the family.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You and Harriet are the most—”

  “Rely on Moses Dworsky. He—”

  “Dworsky postures, second-guesses, and works only when he feels like it. I only tolerate it because I need his office space.”

  “Then Lovely Diamond. She’s in love with you.”

  “You might be right, but she won’t have me.”

  He reaches his hand out as if to place it on my shoulder, but he must see my muscles tense, because he hesitates and gives two fatherly pats to the air. “What I’m trying to say is that if you have the love of others, you’re less afraid. That’s how I got through it, mostly—Jenny and Dylan and Emily. It’s a double gift. Your loved ones make you feel protected, and you don’t want to let them down, so you fight for them despite the fear.”

  “I’ll take your advice to heart. Truly. But now I have to get back to work.”

  “I know that I sound naïve,” he says, standing up. “White-bread, Orange County conservative. But I learned after so many years in hiding that the simplest, most sentimental ideas can be the best.” The man sounds like an omniscient father in one of those old-fashioned TV sitcoms. After the polemics and the radical tracts and the bombs, the change in attitude is almost bizarre. Which causes me to feel that he’s insincere, that h
e’s engaging in some sort of diversionary tactic. To divert me from what?

  “Focus, friends, and love, Parker. They’re what’ll defeat your fear.”

  On a cool, dry morning in November—the kind of day that during the twentieth century drew millions from the inclement parts of America to Southern California—I’m going to ask Carlton Gibson to exclude key evidence against Ian Holzner. Since JB’s bombing of the courthouse, security has tightened. The line of attorneys and spectators trying to get inside extends down the exterior steps and onto the sidewalk. I arrive quite early, but with this crowd I might be late for the hearing. I wend my way to the front and ask the marshal in charge whether I can jump the line. He refuses my request. He knows who I am and undoubtedly blames me for this mess. Once I reach the magnetometer twenty minutes later, the marshals order me to remove my shoes and belt. After I pass through the metal detector, they insist on patting me down.

  Lovely greets me in the second-floor foyer, and we take the escalators to the courtroom. Before we go inside, she says, “Do you need me to go over the relevant cases with you once more?”

  “Nope.”

  “I could argue the case if you aren’t up to it. You know, if you’re feeling shaky?”

  “The meds are working fine, thank you.” The truth is, I didn’t take the antianxiety medication this morning. It’s not that I’m taking Holzner’s advice about overcoming fear—I simply forgot.

  “The meds make you logy,” Lovely says. “I prepared an oral argument just in case.”

  My sharp look of incredulity quiets her.

  We walk down the corridor to a courtroom that’s filled with media reps and curious onlookers, just as it was for the bail hearing several months ago. Mariko Heim has showed up again, her enforcers flanking her. Lou Frantz is sitting in the last row on my side of the courtroom. I haven’t consulted him about the case at all. I let Lovely do that. He nods and smiles slightly without showing his teeth. Sitting next to him is his old nemesis, Moses Dworsky, whom I asked to come. Like so many over-the-hill enemies do, they’re chatting amiably. I was hoping Jerry Holzner would show up again, but he hasn’t. Was there ever an Uncle Jerry, or did I make him up?