by R. G. Belsky
Inside, the church was filled with VIP mourners. The mayor. The governor. Several congressmen and a senator. Some recognizable celebrities, too. There was no Laurie Bateman, of course. We’d done a story the previous night about how her lawyer had petitioned the court to allow her out of jail to attend her husband’s funeral. Now that would have been a spectacle, huh? But the request was denied by the court.
I made my way to the section set aside for the media to sit. There was no burial. Hollister, according to his last wishes, had been cremated. So this man who had been such a powerful presence in the world didn’t even exist anymore. At least, not in a physical sense. Charles Hollister was gone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All that was left was the mystery surrounding his death.
In the front of the church, I saw a man I recognized from pictures I’d seen as Hollister’s son, Charles Jr. Next to him was a woman that someone told me was his sister, Elaine. I wanted to talk to both of them, but it obviously would have to wait until the service was over. I knew their mother was dead, but I wondered if Hollister’s previous ex-wife might be there. I found out later that she lived on the West Coast and didn’t make the cross-country trip. Made sense, I guess. Their marriage had been a long time ago and ended badly. Like all Hollister’s marriages had.
During the ceremony, there was a procession of speakers who gave us eulogies about what a wonderful person Charles Hollister had been. Bert Stovall was one of the speakers. He talked about meeting Hollister in Vietnam when they were young and their long friendship and business partnership since then—as he’d related to me that day in his office. Most of the others said wonderful things about Hollister too. The kind of things you always hear at a funeral about a person who had died. I thought about all the things I’d learned about Hollister in the past few days—and what a cruel and greedy person he had been. It was as if they were talking about someone else.
At one point, Charles Jr. went up to deliver his eulogy. But this one was a lot different from the others. For one thing, he sounded disjointed—his words rambling. He looked kind of out of it too as he spoke. I wondered if he’d been drinking. Well, his father had just died a horrible death. I guess you had to cut a guy a little slack when that happened.
He told stories about growing up as the son of Charles Hollister. Nothing personal or emotional or loving though. Made you wonder what their relationship was actually like. But then it got even stranger. He began to attack Laurie Bateman in the middle of his eulogy.
“This woman—this horrible woman—coerced my father into marrying her. She convinced him to make her the prime beneficiary of his estate. And then, when he realized what an evil person she truly was and told her he was rewriting his will, she murdered him before he could do that. The only solace I have is that she’s sitting in a jail cell right now, and I hope she rots away the rest of her miserable life in prison.”
It was wildly inappropriate. But he continued to go on like that for a few minutes until the minister in charge of the service gently took him by the arm, led him from the podium and back to his seat. I noticed that when he sat down, he did not look at his sister. She didn’t look at him either. She stared straight ahead. The two of them clearly did not have a close brother-sister relationship.
When the service was over and people started filing out, I positioned myself outside on the street so I would be able to talk to Charles Jr. I wanted to talk to the sister as well, but Charles was my priority. He seemed like a powder keg waiting to explode. I wanted to be the one to light the fuse on this guy.
It took a while before he made his way out, but I was ready. Standing between him and the car waiting to take him away. I stepped in front of him as he was reaching for the handle on the car door.
“Charles, my name is Clare Carlson, and I’m with Channel 10 News. I’m sorry about your father, and I know this is a difficult time for you. But I’d like to talk with you about it.”
I handed him my card. He looked at me with a glazed expression on his face. I was pretty sure he was drunk now, even though it was barely eleven a.m. Maybe he wanted to get an early start on the day. Or else he was still coming down from a long night of drinking.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of other people about your father. I’d like to hear from you. We could set something up at a time that’s convenient for you and—”
“I told you, I have nothing to say to you.”
“Why don’t you want to talk?”
“Just leave me alone.”
“What do you have to hide, Charles?” I blurted out.
The glazed look disappeared now. It was replaced by one of anger. The same kind of anger I’d seen when he was talking about Laurie Bateman during the service.
“Get out of my way!” he yelled, pushing past me to get to his car. He pushed so hard that he knocked me to the ground. Lying there on my back, I could see video crews recording the whole bizarre scene. My God, I’d come here today to cover this story. Now I was becoming part of the story.
“You goddamned bitch!” Charles Hollister Jr. screamed at me as I got to my feet. “You’re like that other bitch that married my father. All you women are bitches. Every one of you. I don’t need any of you in my life.”
Then someone grabbed him and put him into the waiting car. Once he was there, the car quickly pulled away into traffic.
“Well, that was quite a scene,” I heard a voice say from behind me.
I turned around. There was a woman watching it all. Elaine Hollister. Charles’ sister.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said to her. “I didn’t mean for anything like that to happen. I only wanted to talk to him.”
“It was Charles’ fault, not yours. Things like that always happen with him.”
“Clare Carlson of Channel 10 News,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Listen, I’m sorry about your father. My condolences.”
She shook my hand and nodded.
“How come you didn’t leave in the same car with your brother?” I asked her.
“We generally go our separate ways,” she said. There seemed to be a touch of sarcasm in her voice. I wanted to find out more about that relationship. I wasn’t sure why I cared, but it seemed like it might be relevant. And, of course, I wanted to hear more about Elaine Hollister’s relationship with her father. And why she’d apparently been estranged from him all these years.
“Could we go somewhere and talk for a while?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to talk with anyone in the media about all this. I’ll be a lot nicer about it than my brother, I promise. But the answer is still no.”
“We could just get coffee for a few minutes.”
“No, I’ve got to be going.”
“I’ll even buy the coffee. How can you turn down an offer like that?”
Elaine Hollister smiled. “You are persistent, aren’t you?”
“It’s one of my most endearing qualities.”
CHAPTER 17
WE WENT TO a coffee shop and sat in a corner table by the window. The street outside was filled with people walking by carrying Christmas packages. On the corner was a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit trying to get donations for the homeless. The guy’s beard and outfit were shabby and he looked as though he could be one of the homeless himself. I’d dropped a dollar in his pot as we walked by, figuring it would get to someone who needed it one way or the other.
“Are you in New York just for the funeral?” I asked her once we sat down.
“That’s right.”
“Where do you live?”
“Oh, I’ve lived in a lot of places. London. Rome. Even spent a few years in the Far East in Tokyo and then Bangkok. But for the last few years I’ve been living in Paris. I run a shelter for battered women there. I finance it, I run it, I work with the women myself.”
“That sounds like important work. It must be rewarding for you.”
; “I figure I should make sure something good comes out of my father’s money.”
“Have you talked yet with Charles about what will happen to the company now that your father is gone? Especially if Laurie Bateman is convicted of murder and can’t claim any of the inheritance …”
“I have not talked to Charles. I don’t want to talk to Charles. If I wanted to talk to Charles, I wouldn’t have moved out of the country and be living in Paris, would I?”
The anger with which she said it surprised me. I think it even surprised her the way it came out.
“You don’t like your brother much, do you?”
“Charles isn’t an easy person to like.”
“Do you have any relationship with him at all?”
“As little as possible.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s complicated. Let’s just say there’s a lot of history between Charles and me. Not good history, I’m afraid.”
I remembered the story Bert Stovall had told me about Elaine as a little girl and the doll she loved so much that had its head ripped off. How she loved that doll and cried when it was gone. How everyone was sure that Charles destroyed the doll out of anger and jealousy over her getting so much attention from their father.
I asked her about that now, but she just laughed.
“Oh, I’m not still upset about something that happened when I was four years old. Believe me, there’ve been a lot worse incidents between me and Charles since he destroyed my damn doll.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, it’s a long story.”
I took a sip of my coffee. “I’ve got plenty of time.”
Outside, the guy in the shabby Santa suit had packed up and gone home for the day. His place was taken by a guy holding a cardboard sign saying he needed $88 to get home to Florida. Probably a prime business location.
“When I was twenty-two years old, I graduated magna cum laude from Princeton,” she said slowly. “I won a Rhodes Scholarship to study in England for a year. It was a tremendous honor. I came home to tell my father. I thought he’d be as happy and proud as I was. But he wasn’t. He was more concerned about Charles than he was proud of me.
“You see, Charles had been turned down for admission to Princeton. His grades weren’t good enough to get in. And the admissions interview had not gone well. In fact, it was so bad that the Princeton admissions office wrote a memo that said ‘Definitely should never be allowed to come to Princeton.’ Even my father’s money and influence weren’t enough to get Charles into Princeton.
“After I graduated and got the Rhodes Scholarship, there was a party at my parents’ house. Maybe a hundred people were there. All of them important and rich and powerful. My father humiliated Charles in front of them. Talked about my graduating magna cum laude and about my winning the Rhodes Scholarship and about all my other achievements at Princeton. Then he compared all this to Charles. Complained bitterly about how his son couldn’t even get in the front door of Princeton. It wasn’t like he was proud of me. He used everything I did as a weapon—a weapon to show his displeasure with Charles in front of all those people. I was embarrassed, of course. But Charles … Charles got madder and madder. I could see the look of pure anger on his face. He couldn’t be mad at his father, of course. He wasn’t man enough to do that. So Charles directed all of his anger at me.
“That night, after everyone was asleep, Charles burst into my room. He was yelling how much he hated me. How I’d ruined his life. Then he hit me. I fought back. That enraged him even more. He hit me again and again. By the time he was finished, I was bloodied and unconscious and badly injured.
“I never did get to study in London on that Rhodes Scholarship. I spent the next few months in the hospital. Getting extensive plastic surgery. Learning to walk again. That’s how badly I was injured. But that wasn’t even the most painful part. It was the damage that had been done to me inside that hurt the most.
“You see, when I was in the hospital right after the attack, my father came to see me. He told me that I was never to tell anyone what Charles did. If I did, he would cut me off without a cent. He said I should just tell people I’d been clumsy and fallen down the stairs in the dark. He said Charles was his only son and the future for the Hollister empire. He said he’d pay any price to protect him. Even if that meant losing his daughter. He didn’t say it that way exactly, of course. But that was the meaning.
“And so that’s what happened. When I got better, I moved as far away from all of them as I could. I still take my father’s money. Most of it goes to various charities and humanitarian causes I’m involved in. Like the battered women’s shelter. Doing that makes me feel better.”
I wasn’t sure at first why she’d told such a personal story to a journalist like me. And a journalist she’d only met a few minutes earlier. But then I realized it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was something she wanted to unburden herself of after she lost her father and her encounter with Charles at the funeral. I happened to be the one she was with right now.
“What did you think of your stepmother, Laurie Bateman?”
“I didn’t know her very well. My father had moved on with his life once he married her. I was in the past. So I had no relationship with her at all other than what I read and heard in the media about the two of them. Of course, I never believed all the lovey-dovey happy marriage stuff they kept talking about. But that’s only because I knew my father. I figured behind the scenes the marriage was probably as bad as the one he had with my mother. And his wife before that, too.”
“What was your relationship like with your father at the end? When was the last time you talked to him?”
“A week or so ago before his death. He called me. I was surprised because he hadn’t done that in a long time. But he even talked about coming to Paris to visit me. Looking back on it now, he seemed to be reaching out to me. More than he ever had in years. He talked about wanting to get closer to me again during that last conversation. He definitely seemed different. Nicer. Kinder. And well … more like a father. I wondered what had changed him. I figured I’d find out when he came to see me in Paris. But now I guess I’ll never know …”
The waitress came by and refilled our cups. We sat there talking for another fifteen minutes or so. I asked her if I could interview her on camera talking about her father. She said no. She said she didn’t want to do anything publicly as a member of the Hollister family. She wanted to fade back into the background and be left alone.
I liked Elaine Hollister. She seemed like a good person. Maybe too good for the Hollister family, from everything I’d heard. I took out a Channel 10 business card with my office number on it. I wrote my home number on it.
“Call me if you ever want to talk more,” I said.
“You mean about my father?”
“About anything.”
She smiled and put the card in her pocket.
“Maybe I will.”
After we split up, I decided to walk for a while. The city was alive with that special feeling it gets around Christmas time. I wanted to be a part of it. The street was crowded with people coming out of stores, but few of them were rude or obnoxious. Everyone seemed cheery and filled with Christmas spirit. Not like a normal day in New York.
I walked downtown to Fifth Avenue. Past Central Park, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Tiffany’s. I window-shopped at Tiffany’s for a bit, dreaming about finding one of the baubles there under my tree on Christmas morning. Fat chance. No one was going to put a $10,000 bracelet under my tree.
After that, I walked down to Rockefeller Center. That’s where New York truly feels like Christmas. There’s an eighty-foot Christmas tree, people ice skating on the rink, and holiday decorations hanging from all the lampposts. Not far away, people filed in and out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. If you don’t feel the Christmas spirit there, you might as well just give up and say “Bah, humbug.”
I was on my way to the subway station when I saw a car—a
dark blue sedan—driving slowly on the street behind me. Nothing unusual there, except I thought I had seen the same car before when I was on my way to the coffee shop. Hell, there were a lot of dark blue sedans in New York City.
I kept walking toward the subway station. The car was still there. There was a newsstand outside, and I spent a minute or two at it buying a package of mints. When I was finished, I turned around one more time. Nothing now. The blue sedan was gone.
I shrugged and headed down the steps for the subway.
CHAPTER 18
EVERYWHERE YOU LOOKED, the city was practically bursting with holiday spirit now. Especially among the people working in my building—who all had visions of Christmas tips dancing in their heads.
The next morning when I left for work, my super held my front door open, tipped his hat, and gave me a cheery “good morning, ma’am.” I knew right away something was up. The last time he’d spoken to me was in August, when I’d come back from the shore lugging three heavy suitcases and asked for a little help. He told me he was much too busy. What he was busy doing was devouring a two-foot-long Italian submarine sandwich, so I suggested what he could do with it. Our relationship had gone downhill since then.
Now though, with December 25 approaching, we were fast friends. Pals. The Christmas spirit, it’s wonderful. Same thing with the mailman. As a special holiday feature, he didn’t mix up any of my neighbor’s mail with mine like he usually did or jam stuff in my mailbox so I couldn’t get it out. Service with a smile all the way.
Outside, it was not exactly a White Christmas yet. It was more of a wet Christmas. An icy cold rain was pouring down, the sky was dark, and the wind bitter. Some Christmas season. It was the kind of day when even Santa Claus would take one look, unhook the reindeer, and crawl back into bed.
