The Bomb Maker's Son

by Robert Rotstein

  Hilton lives in a small, two-bedroom A-frame that must have been built in the 1920s. He answers the door, and when he sees me, he grunts. It’s not a cold call—he agreed to meet with me—but he repeats exactly what he told me on the phone. “I can’t help you. I don’t want to help you. Your client is guilty.”

  In his seventies, he’s a tall, elegant man with ashen hair, an ashen complexion, and an ashen disposition. When I reiterate that I’d like to speak with him, he invites me in and offers me tea. The house is immaculate. Books and magazines are neatly organized in a large bookcase that occupies an entire wall. There are family pictures on the mantle—Hilton with a wife, daughter, and son at various ages, and then in later years, Hilton with a daughter, grandchildren, and no wife. There are also official documents—diplomas from the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt Law School and a picture of Hilton shaking hands with President Lyndon B. Johnson.

  He goes to the kitchen and minutes later returns with two mugs of tea. As soon as I take my first sip, he says, “Stay and drink as long as you want. But let’s keep the conversation short. It’s true Elie Roudebusch and I disagree about whose voices were on that tape. I don’t think O’Brien or Holzner were part of that conversation. But that doesn’t help you. Because whoever was on that tape wanted to prevent the bombing, as I interpreted it. They were frightened, not brazen, not calculated. I think Holzner and O’Brien did exactly what they were charged with, and these fellow travelers got scared but couldn’t prevent it.”

  “What about Charles Sedgwick?”

  “Oh, Chicken Charlie was definitely on that tape. That’s one of the injustices of this whole sorry saga. In my opinion Sedgwick wanted to prevent the bombing and is the only one who spent his life in prison. Whether Holzner has the lethal poison injected into his veins or not, he’s escaped justice. I’m sorry to say that, because I know he’s more than a client, though he obviously wasn’t father of the year.”

  “But he is my father,” I say almost without volition. “And he was a terrific father to his other children.”

  “And you want to save his life. I can understand that. Apologies for my bluntness, which some call callousness. It’s who I am.”

  “If you’re so vehement, why hasn’t the US Attorney called you as a witness?”

  He straightens his long legs and crosses them at the ankle, wincing from what’s probably an arthritic knee or hip. “I don’t like what the Bureau did back then. I hated what happened to Jerry Holzner. It’s a black mark on this country that should be prominently featured in history books but that’s been buried in the slag of time and deceit. I don’t like practices that continue to this day. I don’t agree with Elias about what’s on that tape—he was a good, honest cop, by the way, just mellower than I am—and that would make for conflict. I’ve always thought O’Brien might’ve been the moving force behind the group. Holzner was more charismatic, a good front man, but I heard a lot of those tapes. O’Brien was soulless, if you ask me. Holzner was conflicted. His megalomania came from ego, a young person’s reaction to adoring followers. O’Brien’s megalomania was sociopathic.”

  I ask for some examples.

  “Holzner had a love for his family, especially his father and brother. Jerry was older in years but acted more like the younger brother, always trying to emulate Ian. But Ian kept him away.”

  “Could Jerry have—?”

  “Been involved in the bombing? Who knows? As I said, he wanted to be like his brother.”

  “You said O’Brien was different?”

  “No soul. She cut her family off at the knees. She’d mock their liberalism, their upper-middle-class values. On one recording, she calmly proclaimed that she’d kill her parents herself if it would advance the cause of the revolution. It wasn’t hyperbole, in my opinion. Which, along with the different speech patterns, is why I do not believe the woman on the tape is O’Brien. That woman was scared. Rachel O’Brien didn’t know fear.”

  “And yet she wasn’t convicted of the Playa Delta murders.”

  “She was a wonderful actress and had that son of a bitch Moses Dworsky as a lawyer. He was as brilliant as he was despicable.”

  “Dworsky was just doing his job.”

  “He was not just doing his job. He’s a true believer and that’s dangerous in an attorney.”

  “Is it? I think passion—”

  “Are you a true believer, Mr. Stern? I’m not talking about the facts of a particular case. Do you believe in something so strongly that it colors every move you make in a courtroom in every case?”

  Though I don’t say it to Hilton, my answer is no. The most effective lawyers are anything but true believers. You have to be malleable to take a side that you disagree with, have to let go of firmly held beliefs, even have to make odious arguments, all based on the premise that a democratic system of justice requires it. You can’t be the kind of true believer that Ralph Hilton is describing.

  “Do you know that he’s my private investigator?”

  “Of course. I’m following this trial closely, hoping justice will finally prevail. I don’t know how you got under the covers with that man.”

  “He’s changed his political views after 9/11. He voted Republican.”

  He lifts his teacup with one hand and gives a scoffing wave with the other. “There’s an adage about leopards and spots, Mr. Stern. I’d advise you to look it up. But never mind all that. Since Dworsky is working for you, why don’t you have a copy of the tape recording in question?”

  For a moment I mistake the confusion in his voice and his slightly slack jaw for nascent senility until I see the intense clarity in his eyes. He’s a man who enjoys games and secrets.

  “Why would Dworsky have a copy of that recording, Mr. Hilton?”

  “He was given a copy of the tape for the O’Brien trial.”

  Upon learning this information, I thank him and end the interview. As soon as he shuts the door behind me, I take out my cell phone and punch in Moses Dworsky’s number. It’s raining hard now. I open my umbrella and make a dash for my rental car, a fire-engine-red Mazda 6 that shines through the gloom, but my clothes are wet before I get inside. The call rolls over to Dworsky’s voice mail after one ring, meaning that the phone is off. Still, after I leave a message for him to call me right away, I retry his number twice more and then send him a text, though he’s such a Luddite that I doubt he even knows about text messaging.

  I try the office and reach Eleanor Dworsky. “What do you mean, where is he? He’s away on business for you.”

  “What business?”

  “How the hell would I know? You would know, not me.” She promises to have Moses call me if she hears from him and hangs up before I can say, “Thank you.”

  Then I call Lovely Diamond. Her phone, too, immediately rolls over to voice mail. Again, I leave multiple messages.

  I sit at the curb in the rental car. The rain pounds on the metallic roof, the sound like corn kernels popping in a microwave. I can’t fathom Moses Dworsky’s objective. He’s helped our case by locating background witnesses, setting up the meeting with Charles Sedgwick, and providing an office and staff (if you can call Eleanor staff). And yet, intentionally or not, he cost us the chance to win the motion to exclude evidence because the FBI tortured Jerry Holzner, and he’s possibly withheld relevant and potentially useful information. Is Dworsky’s goal to look cooperative while sabotaging us? Ian keeps insisting that even after forty years, even after helping O’Brien avoid a murder conviction by blaming Holzner, Dworsky is fair-minded. Either my father is a fool or he knows something about Dworsky that I don’t.

  I check my text messages one last time and look for new e-mails just in case. I’m about to start the engine when my phone rings. I’m hoping it’s Moses, but it’s Lovely.

  “Do you know where Moses Dworsky is?” I ask. “Hilton said Moses knows about that recording and once had a copy in his possession.”

  “Parker—”

  “Eleanor says he
’s doing something for me, but I don’t know what he’s talking about. Do you—”

  “Parker, just listen!” she shouts.

  I listen.

  She takes two heavy breaths and says, “Dworsky went to visit Charles Sedgwick in prison. Did you tell him to go see Sedgwick?”

  “Of course not. But it’s not a bad idea. He’s the only one whom Sedgwick might talk to.”

  “Omigod, Parker, he posed as Sedgwick’s attorney, got in the same room with him, and stabbed him to death.”

  “How would he get a knife past prison security?” It’s not the logical first question, but sometimes shock makes you jump five steps ahead.

  “It was a prison shiv that he must’ve gotten inside. The whole thing had to be planned in advance. He convinced the prison officials that he was Sedgwick’s lawyer. He showed them his old bar card from ninety-one, and they just let him meet with Sedgwick alone.”

  So Moses Dworsky just murdered the only identifiable person who could testify to what was on that recording and who could maybe, just maybe, exonerate Ian Holzner, which means that Dworsky’s objective has been to sabotage our case, and Holzner was a fool for trusting him. But there’s another, more troubling explanation. What if Sedgwick was finally going to verify that Holzner was on that recording, that Holzner truly committed the crime? What if Dworsky killed Sedgwick at Ian Holzner’s request in a last-ditch attempt to avoid a conviction?

  “Where are they holding him?” I ask. “Has he revealed anything?”

  “He’s dead, Parker. After he killed Sedgwick, he attacked the prison guard. He was a powerful man. He wrestled the gun away from the first guard, and another guard shot him. It was suicide by cop.”

  I don’t say anything. What’s there to say?

  “There’s more, Parker. Before Moses was shot, he shouted, ‘This is for Ian!’”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Four hours after Dworsky murdered Sedgwick, Judge Gibson’s chambers received this:

  Subject: Communiqué #3

  To: Judge Carlton Fascist Gibson

  From: JB

  The brave Charlie Sedgwick and the steadfast Moses Dworsky belong to the ages, martyrs to the cause. Moses knew what had to be done; Charlie understood why it had to be done. Moses and Charlie died by fire, like true revolutionaries.

  Free Ian!

  ~JB

  I make the motion for a mistrial on the grounds that the news of Dworsky’s crime has gone viral, the publicity destroying whatever evenhandedness the jurors had left.

  “This means nada, Mr. Stern,” the judge says. “Nada. The jury has been instructed not to read the newspapers or watch the news on TV or read it on the Internet. That’s sufficient. So we’re going to move on. Anyway, Dworsky belonged to your side, and I’m not going to let you take advantage of your investigator’s crime.” He shakes his head. “First Ilan Goldsmith, now this. Bad things happen to witnesses when you’re involved, Mr. Stern.”

  For the last day or so, Holzner has mostly stayed in his bedroom. His melancholy stupor borders on catatonia. In an effort to get him to talk, I gather . . . well, I gather the “family”—Emily, Lovely, and my mother. It’s all I can do to get him to come out of his bedroom and sit on the living room sofa. We’re all seated across from him, but I’m the chief inquisitor.

  “Once and for all, did you have anything to do with this?” I ask.

  “He wouldn’t,” Emily says.

  “I didn’t ask you,” I say, and she recoils because it’s the first time that I’ve spoken harshly to her. “Dworsky was your guy from the beginning, Ian, even after Lovely began having doubts about him when he antagonized Judge Gibson in court that day. I want to know if you’ve orchestrated all this, just like Marilee Reddick and the FBI believe.”

  He’s been sitting with his head down, but now he looks up at me and shakes his head. I realize that before this happened I saw something oddly noble in his enigmatic statements, in his refusal to do anything to save his life, in the undercurrent of radicalism that still seemed to inform his every move. At this moment, he seems shattered, and I feel a combination of sadness and betrayal. Is this the disillusionment children feel when they finally recognize their parents’ flaws? Is this horrible murder case the way I experience the arc of father-son relationship, warped and twisted into some perverse joke?

  “I’m risking a lot to be here,” Harriet says. “I think Heim and her people are following me. I can’t keep coming here. So listen to what I have to say.”

  Here it comes—her inevitable defense of Ian Holzner.

  “I want you to tell the truth, Ian,” she says. “The whole truth. I’m sick of the whole thing.”

  He forces himself to stand, and when he rises, Harriet does, too.

  He looks at me. “The truth is I was wrong about Moses Dworsky. There’s nothing more to it.”

  “So you brought this man into the case without really knowing who he was?” Lovely says. “You trusted your life to him? Hard to believe. Everyone is going to say you’ve been working with him for years, planning your comeback. That you’re the leader of the Harpers Ferry Liberation Front that Ilan Goldsmith was talking about.”

  “You want to call me a fool for trusting him?” he says. “You’re right. But if you’re calling me a liar, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ian, what are you hiding?” I ask.

  He crosses his arms in front of him and shakes his head.

  I appeal to my mother.

  “Tell Parker the truth,” she says.

  He tilts his chin up slightly as if he’s about to say something but stays mum. He wearily shuffles over and kisses Emily on the cheek, and to my shock kisses Harriet on the lips. As he passes me, he tentatively extends his hand out to pat my arm, but thinks better of it, then walks into the bedroom and shuts the door. The only sounds in the room come from Emily and Harriet, soprano and alto weeping in counterpoint.

  In the space of two days, the medical examiner autopsies Dworsky’s body and releases the remains to Eleanor, who has him cremated without ceremony—not that anyone would’ve attended. The surprise is that Dworsky had pancreatic cancer, with a few months to live. He hid it well. I thought the stooped posture and the ashen pallor and the occasional wincing were the results of aging.

  The trial resumes on Monday, and during the weekend we’re still working out of Dworsky’s office.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Lovely says. “I know it’s a silly thing to say, but there’s evil in here.”

  The statement surprises me, because she doesn’t scare easily and because she’s an observant Jew who’s not big on mysticism. I’m pretty much a nonbeliever—my time embroiled in the Sanctified Assembly has made me treat the spiritual with skepticism—but I reply, “I know what you mean.”

  We sit, not in our makeshift offices, but in the conference room, neither of us wanting to be alone. After about a half hour, Lovely glances up from her computer and considers me for a while. She leans over, softly kisses me on the lips, and says, “I love you, Parker Stern.”

  The words lift me through the next dismal hours as I try to craft some defense for Ian Holzner. Then I stand, go to the reception area, thumb through Eleanor Dworsky’s old-fashioned Rolodex, and find the number. I dial from the office phone.

  Brandon Soloway’s “Hello” sounds sullen—he’s always sullen—but now he’s got a reason. When I identify myself and ask to speak with Eleanor, he says, “She’s not talking to anybody. I’ll give her your, what do you call them, condolences.”

  “Yes, please tell her how sorry I am. But I’d also like to ask her if Moses kept other files about the Rachel O’Brien case. Something he didn’t share with us.”

  “My mom just lost her husband and found out he was a psycho murderer and you’re worried about your case? You’re pathetic, man.”

  “Brandon, I didn’t mean to—”

  “My mom blames Holzner for this. She thinks he convinced Moses to kill S
edgwick to shut him up for good. We knew about Moses’s cancer, he didn’t have long to go, but now his legacy is fucked up forever. Do you know what that’s done to my mom?”

  “I’m just doing my job.”

  “That’s what all scumbag lawyers say. Well, your job sucks, man. Moses was a lawyer, and he was an asshole. You’re an asshole.” He hangs up the phone.

  So imagine my surprise when, three hours later, the office door opens and Brandon Soloway walks in carrying three old boxes bearing a Bekins logo. He sets them on the table, mumbles, “My mom told me to bring these to you,” and walks out.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The missing transcripts from Rachel O’Brien’s trial are in the boxes. So is the December 17, 1975, tape recording. It’s the old reel-to-reel kind that won’t work even on the obsolete audiocassette player that I found in Dworsky’s desk. Lovely calls the Frantz Law Office’s crack IT woman and takes the tape back to see if they can make sense out of it.

  After she leaves, I spend hours skimming the O’Brien trial transcripts. The transcript of Gladdie Giddens’s testimony is missing. Too bad. I’d welcome the chance to impeach her at our trial with her prior sworn statement. I do locate Belinda Hayes’s testimony, and, just as she told me, Dworsky browbeat her into exonerating O’Brien and implicating Holzner, despite the best efforts of the prosecutor and the judge to rein Moses in.

  In the first trial, both Hilton and Roudebusch testified, and both expressed their belief that Holzner was the bomber. The testimony and evidence in these documents implicate Holzner at every turn. In his closing argument, Dworsky said over and over that Ian Holzner and others unknown, but not Rachel O’Brien, bombed the Playa Delta VA. Would this man later commit murder at Holzner’s behest?