by Bruce Wagner
After the prisoner was led away, the judge asked if Ruth and Harry Weiner—their names had been written down for him at the preliminary meeting—were in court. They eagerly stood, or it should be said that Ruth eagerly stood, followed by her less spry mate. The judge asked if they knew the accused.
“He is my son,” said Ruth, voice quavering. An expensive attorney on each side held her steady. She cleared her throat and said again, “Your Honor, he is my son!”
That afternoon, Epitacio drove them to Twin Towers. Visitors waited to see loved ones, but it had been so arranged that the elderly couple would be spared the queue. Harry peered through the tinted glass of the Silver Seraph at the men with tattooed foreheads loitering across the street from jail, and remarked how they looked like prisoners themselves. He puzzled over them while Ruth remained silent. The skin of her chest was stretched so taut she feared it might split open at any moment, like papyrus—with each inhalation, her caged lungs shook as if invaded by moths.
Neither remembered much of the half hour or so that passed from the time they stepped from car to visitors’ room.
There was a metal grille between them, and he was shackled.
He sat down and they all blinked at each other.
Harry was the first to speak. “Son?”
Sitting opposite the enormous stranger, the retired baker had a momentary doubt; but then the roots of his boy, so to speak, grew toward him as in time-lapse photography—tiny green buds rapidly bloomed, stems thickened and curled themselves about the elder’s ankles, tugging him closer.
“Marcus …” said Ruth, hand rushing to mouth, unable to conceal her emotions. She was certain as only a mother could be. “Do you know who we are?”
He nodded solemnly.
Ruth suppressed another outburst.
Most of the men on the seventh floor were sedated and Marcus was no exception. But thanks to his remarkable constitution and the intervention of private shrinks, he’d managed to elude the zombified look worn by most of his cell mates.
“You,” he said, rather diffidently, “are the people from the Red Lands.”
“Redlands?” said Harry, with great enthusiasm. “Redlands, yes! Still the same house! Though the bakery’s gone—we sold it.”
“Harry!” chastised Ruth, not wishing her son to be overrun by extraneous detail—particularly that of loss, in any way, shape or form. “We ate some of your jam … you made the jam, didn’t you? The pomegranates—”
He looked them in the eye and smiled—the seed-stained smile of their precocious boy, who at Toulouse’s age could play the cello with thick, agile fingers; who took the bus to the Vagabond near MacArthur Park to see the entire oeuvre of Buñuel; who dragged them to the Huntington’s Japanese moon bridge—and exhibitions of branchy intricacies perpetrated by William Morris & Company.
“Yes!” he said, and laughed, not the laugh of a madman but of a man come home. “Yes, I made the jam. Didja like it?”
“Oh yes!” they said in chorus. It was marvelous! Better than they’d ever had! Much better than your mother’s! Always had been—
They laughed some more, and then his tremendous body undulated as he sobbed.
Not being able to reach out to him was for Ruth a fine torment. “We’re here now, Marcus!” she said. “We’re here!”
“She’s right—listen to her. You’re home now, son!”
Marcus dried his eyes, having calmed a bit after a look from one of the guards. “I don’t know you—or, suffer me, barely do—or much of what has happened for such a long time … I know that you are from the Red Lands—”
“Redlands,” corrected Harry enthusiastically, until Ruth kicked his foot.
“—that you are from the Redlands, and have been kind enough to see me … I do remember you—but there are so many memories that I don’t know what’s real and what’s conjured. I was at Oxford, no?” he asked, with faint English affectation. “But at another time than Rossetti and my friends?”
“Yes! Yes! You were at Oxford!” cried Ruth.
“You see? Things are coming back!” exulted Harry.
“The medicine will help you.”
“The medicine!” said Harry.
The keeper indicated that their time together had ended.
“We’ll see you through,” said his father.
Ruth was without words, squinting at him as he stood because she could not bear to see her boy in chains.
He smiled as they led him away, turning at the last moment to shout, “Bon appétit!”
We chose to ignore a certain gentleman who attended the arraignment (a few rows behind the Weiners) because, well, parents take precedence.
That “silhouette” was none other than Gilles Mott, whom the reader already knows to be the current owner of an establishment once held in highest esteem by that grandest of dames, Bluey Twisselmann Trotter, an establishment now prominent on her shit list. For when the erstwhile Topsy abandoned ship so did the old woman, eventually finding succor at Montana Avenue’s Le Marmiton. Fortunately for Gilles, the two establishments were not in any direct competition.
The baker and his wife were contacted by Detective Dowling on the Sunday following Marcus’s arrest, the latter occurring scant days after the remarkable sighting of Amaryllis at Saint-Cloud. Without much embroidery, he informed them of the charges being brought; but the real purpose of the call was to apprise the couple of the girl’s dire straits. Lani told him she was already aware of the AWOL, having learned about it the hard way when arriving at MacLaren for a scheduled visit. And, no, Amaryllis hadn’t been in touch.
The detective and the Motts weren’t exactly strangers. After the MacLaren psychologist told her of his interview with Amaryllis, the feisty CASA had taken the liberty of dropping by Rampart unannounced to introduce herself (she had of course accompanied the child there once before; as far as Lani was concerned, she and the detective were practically colleagues). She told him all about her husband’s long-term relationship with the suspect, and naturally Samson wanted to hear more, for until then his only real character witness had been the execrable signboard beggar. So he took them to lunch at the Pantry. There, both husband and wife reiterated the peculiar history, including their last, rather strained encounter—how incensed the man had been that they’d “turned the girl over.” Lani was a little surprised that none of this information had been conveyed, because the Motts had dutifully spoken to a policeman after William’s tirade regarding the child. (Though her instincts told her he wasn’t a predator, her role as CASA still demanded that she let such developments be known through official channels; she was sworn to the court, and so legally bound.) The detective merely said that sometimes “things fall through the cracks.”
Now, starved for information, Lani and Gilles swamped him with questions about the imprisonment. Between the two of them, they felt oddly responsible for the woes that had befallen that unforgettable Victorian gent.
It may be recalled that after William had made a fuss about their handling of the girl, Lani had been overcome by remorse. She had, in her own mind, self-righteously passed the “social” buck—she, Lani Mott, who was capable of ruining a Sunday brunch with a strident serenade against the L.A. Times or the corruption of the MTA or the soul-killing hypocrisy of the child welfare system or what have you. Yet what did she have to show for her coffeehouse activism? She’d become a volunteer at children’s court (her friends never heard the end of it) but had spent a year saying no: no to advocating for this child and no to advocating for that … and then, as fate would have it, came her big chance—an orphan dropped at their very door, a discarded little being—and what had she done? Obediantly called the hotline, strictly by the CASA book … the useless right thing. She may as well have phoned the SPCA and had the child picked up in a perforated metal box. Lani Mott had barely gotten her hands dirty. And everything she had done for the girl since (none of which seemed enough) was to atone for that moment at Frenchie’s when William—cr
azy, stinky, delusional William—had delivered a moral coup d’état.
Husband Gilles had his own cross to bear, for he had been the one to have strong suspicions that William was a molester or child aggravator or whatever; and too, that day at the Pantry, had blindly accepted the detective’s assertion of the vagrant’s involvement in the murder of Ms. Kornfeld. When Samson called that Sunday after the arrest and Gilles broached the touchy subject of an “inappropriate relationship with the girl,” the detective tersely said that as a result of his interview with the child herself, “nothing like that was on the table.” (“I told you so,” interjected his wife.) He wouldn’t elaborate, but Gilles got the sense it wasn’t the type of situation—not that Gilles had claims of knowing anything about the machinations of the law or its enforcers—where the charges of rape and homicide eclipsed or took precedence over a middling one of, say, child-bothering, thus rendering the issue moot; instead, the baker inferred from Samson’s tone that such an accusation was bogus and insupportable and had no basis in fact. Suddenly, Gilles felt like a snitch—as if he had perversely betrayed his original instincts, and done a good man a great wrong.
That night, after each took long, reflective soaking baths, the baker and his wife split an Ambien and fell into troubled sleep.
Lest our chronicle lean too heavily upon the travails of a certain child of nail-bitten hand, a child who has already had her goodly share of sorrow, a quick and painless exegesis of that hapless girl’s travels will here be provided, though more painless for some than for others.
Needless to say, upon her fleeing the Boar’s Head attic, things didn’t go any better. Amaryllis, venerable and nearly Blessed, fell in with a coven of runaway skeevs who favored Promenade benches by day and the debris-strewn husk of a condemned mental-health center by night. Their style in clothing ran to Goth, but a strain neither Morris nor Ruskin would recognize. She spent two fun-filled nights in Skeevy Hollow before being chased down by policemen, one of whose legs was bitten so hard that she had to be concussed into releasing her jaws—and got a hairline fracture for her trouble. Convalescence occurred in the lockdown unit of a psychiatric hospital in Alhambra. Once she emerged from the torpor of head trauma, the fiercely combative girl was given enough meds to become a bona-fide member of Mrs. Woolery’s tribe; she peed and bled (for menses had come) with the best of them.
Inside of a week, news of her reappearance had in its own excruciatingly random, slipshod way devolved to the stalwart Lani Mott, she of the special-advocates’ office berthed just inside the lobby of children’s court. Mrs. Mott convened with her supervisor, and a stratagem was devised. It was agreed that a visit to the Alhambra hospital must be paid and the child’s physical and mental state assessed, in view to finding a suitable placement—if not a private home (which seemed an impossible goal), then, say, a ranch-like environment for wayward children—perhaps even one out of state. Lani put her boss to work, then got her briefcase in order.
She packed a blue wallet of special business cards with the CASA “heart” logo and made sure to carry a copy of the signed notice from the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles Juvenile Court identifying her as the child’s Guardian Ad Litem of record.
When she saw Amaryllis, she was sickened. The girl drooled and could barely keep her head up. There were deep scratches on the insides of her arms. “Did you make these?” asked Lani over and over. She couldn’t figure out whether the poor thing was nodding or shaking her head. “Amaryllis, do you know who I am?” Finally, Lani abandoned the interview and told a nurse that she wished to speak with the doctor.
After waiting more than forty minutes, she asked again and was confronted by a different attendant.
“What is it you want?”
“I’ve already told the woman.”
“What woman.”
“A nurse. I didn’t get her name.”
“Well I’m the one in charge. So you better talk to me.”
She took a breath, and girded herself for battle. “I would like to speak with the prescribing physician.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“He isn’t here. Who are you again?”
“I am an officer of the court.”
“An officer of—”
“Of the court. I would like to speak to Amaryllis Kornfeld’s psychiatrist and I would like to speak to him now. If he is in this building and you’re not telling me that, then you are potentially in a world of trouble.”
“Don’t you threaten me. May I see some I.D.?”
Lani handed her the court order and her driver’s license.
“Do you work with that detective?”
“What detective is that?” Lani asked.
“The one who came to see her. Well, obviously you don’t,” she said disdainfully, “because otherwise you would know what I’m talking about. Just wait here please.”
The nurse walked off with the documents, but Lani stopped her and said the driver’s license would have to stay.
Lani assumed the bitch had been talking about Detective Dowling, and tried not to get angry at him for having left her in the dark. Though someone might have at least phoned the CASA office; he was probably just overwhelmed, like everybody else. But these were matters of life or death, and it would have been nice to have gotten a call.
Some moments later, the nurse returned Lani’s papers and told her the doctor would see her, but only for a moment, as he was “about to lead group.”
The psychiatrist then appeared. He was around fifty and looked as if he’d been napping. He wore tennis shoes, Dockers and a faded madras sport shirt.
“I’m Dr. Fishman. What can I do for you?”
“Dr. Fishman, I’m Lani Mott. I just met with one of your patients, Amaryllis Kornfeld—”
“Are you a relative?”
“No, I am not. And she looked like hell. What have you been giving her?”
The psychiatrist actually laughed in her face. She felt a mote of his spittle cool on her cheek but made no move to acknowledge it.
“That’s confidential information. If you’re not a relative, I can’t even talk to you.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right. That’s a state law.”
“Are you going to tell me about the law?”
“Listen, I don’t know who you are, but—”
“The nurse didn’t tell you?”
“If you’re not a relative, you’re wasting your time. Even if you were a relative, there is certain information I can’t even legally share with a parent.”
“Let me tell you something about the law, all right, Doctor? Are you listening? I am a Court Appointed Special Advocate! Do you think I’m playing a game here? You may be playing a game, but I’m too old for that. You’ve never run into someone like me, have you? Now, I’m not accusing you of anything, Doctor, but that girl could barely speak! She was drooling, OK? Now, I want to know what she’s on and the reason she’s on it, OK?”
“When she was admitted,” he said, like a child about to tear the wing off a bug, “she was dysphoric and circumlocutory. Do you know what that means, Miss—”
“It’s Mrs. And I’m not here for a DSM symposium. I need you to tell me some things, Doctor. You can tell me now or you can tell me in the morning, when a marshal comes down to make an official demand. The judge will want to know why you were uncooperative—do you really want to be under that kind of scrutiny? Maybe you’d like to read this.” She thrust the order at him while reciting from memory. “ ‘WIC section 106: Upon presentation of this order, the CASA shall be permitted to inspect and copy any records of any agency, hospital, school, organization, division or department of the state, physician and surgeon, nurse, other health care provider, psychologist, psychiatrist [italics hers], police department or mental health clinic relating to the child in the above matter without the consent of the child or the child’s parent.’ Do you
think they could have made it any clearer, Dr. Fishbein?”
“Fishman,” he said with a dyspeptic grin, while giving the papers a cursory glance. “I’ll have to go find the records.”
“I’ll need a copy.”
“If I can find them, I’ll make you one.”
“We’ll do this however you’d like.”
“Is this 60 Minutes?” He smirked again, but less convincingly.
“Joke all you like, Doctor. But if I don’t leave with a copy of those records, it won’t be a joke, I assure you. I hope for your sake they reflect a full physical examination of that child before she was given whatever drugs you so ‘confidentially’ prescribed. I hope for your sake you didn’t phone those drugs in from a steakhouse. And I hope when I come back tomorrow, she’s in better shape than she’s in now.”
“I’ll need half an hour.”
“Good. Because half an hour’s all I’ve got.”
Twenty minutes later, back in the Volvo with records in hand, Lani’s body shook uncontrollably. She called Gilles on her purple Nokia and gave a mighty war whoop when he answered—then chattered like a fool all the way home. She told him she felt like Erin Brockovich.
They went to a neighborhood cucina to celebrate her empowerment. After a few drinks, she solemnly confessed her shame at having once abdicated her responsibilities to the girl, and how the jailed man, whom she considered the child’s real caretaker, had been correct in upbraiding her and that she had grown to admire and respect him immeasurably for that. There are consequences to our actions, she kept saying. There are repercussions … Emboldened by alcohol, she passionately suggested that William, for whatever reason, was being railroaded—and her husband was glad to see her back in good form and good rant, diatribing against injustices wrought upon innocents, spinning Chomskyesque conspiracies of politics and the media. He loved her more than ever.
Quiet and introspective until now, Gilles spoke up. Slowly swirling the wine in his glass, he said he had failed to give his friend the benefit of the doubt regarding any “untoward activities” with the girl—and for that, he felt bad. But something else was troubling him that he was compelled to share. Gilles said that after their Sunday call he had spoken with the detective again, who had told him that an ascot belonging to William—identified as such by Amaryllis herself—had been found stuffed in the victim’s throat. How to explain?
