The Murals

by William Bayer

  ‘I pretended I didn’t know what was going on,’ Cindy told us. ‘I saw Loetz but didn’t acknowledge him. He and two officers went storming up the stairs. About a minute later I heard screaming from the attic. Meantime Doctor Ted was freaking out. “You can’t just bust in here! Get out!” He and Doctor Liz were handcuffed and taken outside. A woman came in to talk to us. She said she was from CPS. She told us there was a bus outside waiting to take us away. She told us the house was being shut down, but not to worry. We’d be processed, taken care of, placed in good foster care homes.

  ‘A few minutes later, aboard the bus, I caught a glimpse of Pam and Jen as Loetz led them down the porch stairs. Both were handcuffed. Jen was emoting, but Pam looked like she was ready to collapse. Loetz placed them in separate cars, each with one of the civilian couples. Mr Silver and another man (I think he was Courtney’s father) stood together watching. Then we were bused out. I never saw Pam or Jen again. I found out later that the docs were in a heap of trouble, that the cops had taken seriously what I’d said about a satanic cult and orgy room. Then I heard they were let off, left town, moved out west. The only person I saw again was Mr Silver. He kept his word, set up a trust for me, and when I was accepted at Mount Holyoke, where, it turned out, Courtney’s mother had gone to college, all my tuition bills were paid and I received an additional two hundred a month to cover personal expenses.’

  Cindy sat back. ‘So, yes, I was the informant. Am I proud of that? Of course not! Am I ashamed? Only for one thing – that what I’d done may have ruined the Schechtners’ lives. Fifteen or so years ago, after I bought this gallery from Lane Easton, I checked on the house on Locust, found it was in arrears for unpaid taxes, and that it was coming up at a city auction of abandoned properties. Jeff Meyers set up a dummy company and we placed a bid. I was the only bidder. Even though I got it cheap, Jeff thought I was crazy investing in a worthless property. I didn’t care, I wanted it, and I wasn’t interested in his opinion. After I bought it, I had it properly boarded up. I pay the taxes on it, and I pay Oscar at the observatory to keep an eye on it for me.’

  ‘Did you ever go inside?’

  ‘Just one time right after I bought it. Never went in again. Yes, I did go up to the attic, saw the murals, was impressed, but I certainly didn’t see them as masterpieces. I found them threatening and belligerent, part and parcel of the whole crazy nightmare. I recall wondering about what must have been going through those girls’ heads to have created pictures like that. I had seen enough of them to know they were both damaged, but it was only after I saw their murals that I realized how severely.’ She paused. ‘You ask why I haven’t removed them. I guess because I think they’re where they belong. They were made to fit the walls of that room. Also, there’s something kind of amazing about coming up the ladder through the trap door and having them surround you as you emerge. You say they’re powerful. I think the way you discovered them may explain that power. Frankly, I don’t think they’d work very well on my gallery walls.

  ‘After that one visit, I had the power turned off. No point in paying for gas and electricity. I remember going downstairs, sitting on that battered old couch and crying my eyes out. It was nostalgia for the months I spent there and the care I’d received. It truly was a “Caring Place.” Also guilt for the harm I’d done, because that last day and night between my calling the cops and the raid was probably the worst day of my life.’

  ‘Did you go into foster care?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I moved back in with my mom. She stopped drinking, got rid of my stepfather and things were better at home. I finished high school, went on to college, got married, divorced, and now I have this gallery. All of which can be traced back to the afternoon I met up with Captain Loetz.’

  ‘What about the Schechtners?’ Jason asked. ‘You went to a lot of trouble to acquire their house. Did you ever find out what happened to them?’

  Cindy nodded. ‘I hired a private detective. He tracked them down. Turns out they moved to Albuquerque. Soon as I got their address, I phoned, then went out there for a visit. It’s a sad story. They tried to start again as therapists, but even though the charges here were dropped, seems those words “satanic cult” followed them out west. No one would touch them. As Doctor Liz told me, “We were stigmatized.” She finally got a job running a house for indigent seniors for which, being a trained psychotherapist, she was way over-qualified. According to her, Doctor Ted never recovered. He began drinking heavily, they split up, and he moved up to Taos where he worked as a clerk in a feed store. A few years ago she wrote me that he’d passed away. She took the blame for what happened. “We had no right to take in those girls and not report it. From what Courtney and Penny told us, both family environments were awful. Still, their parents were entitled to know they were safe. We could have applied to become their guardians ad litem. We intended to do that, but hesitated because Courtney’s family was so powerful. We made a huge mistake and we paid heavily for it.” Just so you know, every month I send her a check to help her out with expenses.’

  ‘Did you ever tell her you were the informer?’ I asked.

  Cindy hung her head. ‘I didn’t have the heart,’ she said.

  Or the courage.

  So there it was: the backstory, at least Cindy’s part of it. It was clear Loetz had lied to Joan, that he and Silver had cooked up a tale so they could mount a raid and snatch out Courtney Cobb. The whole thing was about her. Everyone else was, as Joan put it, ‘collateral damage.’ Loetz’s warrant application was based on false responses to leading questions. Loetz had taken advantage of a teenage girl’s envy and greed, then falsely sworn out a warrant application.

  Later, when Jase and I talked it over, we agreed we couldn’t blame Cindy for what she’d done. Loetz, it seemed to us, was the villain of the piece. We also agreed that since we’d given Cindy our word that what she told us would be off the record, we had no choice but to honor our pledge. We’d recount her story to Joan on ‘background only.’ Later, we hoped, Joan would be able to interview her and get her story direct.

  We were moved by her tale. Acquiring the house and helping out Dr Liz struck us as her way of doing penance. She knew she couldn’t take back what she’d done. Her visits to the house, sitting in her car outside, reliving her emotions – that had become her atonement.

  She seemed relaxed after her confession, relieved to have told us a story that was so painful to remember and recount. Jase thanked her for her honesty. It was clear she appreciated that. The slick gallerist, who’d earlier dangled the possibility of exhibitions, now struck me as a human being in pain.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she finally asked, after fixing herself a third drink.

  ‘I’d like to see the murals again,’ Jase said, ‘and I’d like Hannah to see them with me. Also my partner, Tally. Maybe we’re wrong, maybe they’re not masterpieces, but there’s something very compelling about them. I’d like to go in with battery-powered lamps and study them up close, re-photograph them in better light and see if I still feel as I did when I first stumbled upon them.’

  ‘I’ll arrange it,’ Cindy said. ‘Oscar has a key to the front door. But I won’t go in with you.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I can ever go in there again.’

  Tally Vaughan

  I want to say something about Jason, why I like him, work with him and respect him. It goes back to the first day of his photojournalism class. There were ten of us, cameras around our necks, expecting to hear him talk about equipment and technique. Instead, he said he wanted to start the course discussing ‘the journalist’s dilemma.’

  ‘You see something happening, it’s really bad, and maybe you can do something about it. So do you stand back and document it, or do you intervene?’ he asked. ‘In my view, there’s no dilemma. You’re there, you get involved. Sometimes documentation is the best way to go. Acting as a witness is an important form of involvement. Sometimes if you try to intervene, you risk being kille
d. You have to be acutely aware of your surroundings so you can weigh the odds and make a split-second decision.

  ‘Here’s an example from my own career. I was embedded in Iraq with a platoon of US Marines, with them as they swept through a village. Everyone was on edge. Shots were coming from nearby buildings. Four of them burst into a house from which shots had been fired from an upper floor. I went in with them. In a dark corner there was a family crouching in fear – old lady, young mother, two very young kids. One of the marines was trigger-happy. He saw those people, fired at them, slaughtered them before my eyes. I was shooting images fast, bang-bang-bang, almost as fast as he was firing bullets. Realizing his mistake, he was shocked by what he’d done. Also furious. His buddies tried to calm him. “It’s war. Shit happens,” one of them told him.

  ‘OK, I have photographic evidence of a war crime and the guys know it. The sergeant asked me nicely to please erase the images and spare the shooter a court martial. I told him I couldn’t do that. He got mad, got right into my face, informed me I had to do it. “That’s an order!” he said. He and his men were armed. I wasn’t. As they crowded me, the threat was clear. Marines kill people. That’s their job. One of them just killed four innocents before my eyes.’

  He stopped, let his story sink in, then went around the room asking each of us to put ourselves in that situation, and say what he or she would have done. We talked about it the full hour, got deeper and deeper into it. Jase just let us talk. Each of us had an opinion. There was a consensus among some that survival was the most important thing, that you could erase the images and live to shoot another day. Or you could give eye-witness testimony in a court martial trial even without the images. I remember saying that you could pretend to erase the images, though I admitted that would be risky. Finally, when class was nearly over, we sat there waiting for him to tell us what he’d done.

  ‘I stood my ground in a non-confrontational way,’ he told us, ‘mumbled something about discussing the matter later after everyone had cooled down, then turned and exited the house. If they were going to shoot me, they were going to have to shoot me in the back. Obviously, they didn’t. It was a calculated risk.

  ‘Here’s the thing – the kid who shot the family wasn’t a homicidal maniac. He was a scared nineteen-year-old who’d have to live with what he did the rest of his life. Moreover, my images didn’t say anything that hadn’t already been said thousands of times. So I decided to keep them, but not release them or send them on to my agency. After I made that decision, I informed the sergeant, who accepted what I told him at face value. “I hope you get that kid some help,” I said. He promised he would, and I heard later that he reported the incident and the kid was psyched-out of the corps.

  ‘You do what you have to do,’ Jase told us. ‘Your camera can be more powerful than a machine gun. We’re not bystanders. We’re not artists who work coolly from a distance. We’re witnesses. We go in close. We get involved. Our presence makes us part of the event. And as participants we do what we can to help people, especially when there’s something we can actually do. Yes, we’re conflict photographers, but first of all we’re human beings. You see a war crime, you try to stop it. You don’t just let it happen because it’ll make a great shot that’ll maybe win you a big prize. It’s like you’re in a hurry to get to the airport, you’re running late, but a car hits the center strip, there’s an accident and somebody’s bleeding on the pavement. Do you keep going so as not to miss your flight, or do you stop and try to help? Think about that as you go out into the city with your cameras. I believe your gut will tell you if and when to step in. So what’s the lesson? I believe that in many ways photojournalism is a test of character. Someone with poor character can take a great shot, capture a great moment. But so can someone with fine character, with compassion in his heart. Up to you to decide what kind of photographer you want to be.’

  Whew! I never got over that first class. With that discussion, he set up the course. We took lots of pictures, put our work up for critique, everyone offering notes on everyone else’s stuff. When Jase gave his critiques, he didn’t comment much about lighting, framing, exposures, any of the technical stuff. He was looking for compassion, whether our eyes were connected to our hearts. So when he asked me to work on Leavings in what would amount to a secondary role, but with the understanding we’d equally share credit and revenue … well, how could I refuse? The man had a lot to teach and I was eager to continue to learn from him. And then when he found the murals and we started to concentrate on that, I have to say that even though the work didn’t involve my taking pictures, I think it was the best professional experience of my life.

  We went into the Locust Street house on a Sunday morning: me, Jason, Hannah and Joan. Old Oscar unlocked the front door for us, but didn’t join us inside. We all wore headband lamps. Jase and I carried large battery-powered lights.

  We didn’t spend much time downstairs. The set-up there was just as he’d described: communal dining table, battered couch, dinner bell in the kitchen, huge 666 spray-painted on the living-room wall. We briefly checked out the subdivided bedrooms on the second and third floors: the bunk beds, shared bathrooms, and the roomy sitting-room/bedroom/bath suite which Jason said was likely where the Schechtners had lived.

  I could feel Jason’s tension as he pulled down the attic ladder. I was keyed up myself. I only knew the murals from photographs. Had Jase overstated their power or was I about to see something extraordinary?

  I could tell Hannah was nervous, too. She took hold of my hand. Joan stayed cool. That was her thing. She pretended to be the dispassionate observer, but the more I got to know her, the more clearly I saw she wasn’t. She’s ambitious in the same way I imagine Jase was in his photojournalist days. She was eager to latch on to a great story and had high hopes that this could be the one. She felt as strongly as any of us that the story of the murals was important, no matter how it finally played out.

  ‘This is it,’ she whispered, as Jason started up the ladder.

  He overheard her, turned. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘Wait till I get in there, then you guys come up slowly one at a time.’ With that, he ascended to the attic.

  I’d been working for two weeks at his computer on a first cut of Leavings, with his model of the murals room set up on the table beside his desk. I thought I knew the murals pretty well, had internalized them along with everything he and Hannah had to say about them. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for their impact as I climbed the ladder. The figures on the walls were familiar, but as I stepped into the room, looking at them first from floor level, then rising slowly until I was standing before them face to face, eyes to eyes, I felt I was seeing them anew. They were as I remembered them, but endowed with uncanny force, perhaps because the figures were life-size and the room was small. I remember feeling overwhelmed as I turned to face each of the walls. I felt the figures pressing in on me, their eyes confronting mine.

  ‘I feel a little drunk,’ Hannah whispered.

  Jason turned to Joan. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I feel like I’m being judged by them,’ she said.

  ‘Tally?’

  I told him they reminded me of a crowd of boys standing around me at middle school when I was in a schoolyard fight with another kid.

  ‘Like an audience?’ Jason asked.

  ‘The kind of mean audience that enjoys watching a fight.’

  ‘They make me feel naked,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Yeah, I think that’s part of it,’ Jason agreed. ‘They’re watching, judging, and they seem to relish the fact that they’re intimidating us.’

  ‘I think everyone who sees them will have their own reaction,’ Joan said. ‘You were right about the menace. There’s something coldly curious in their faces. I’m feeling very uncomfortable. I want to turn away.’ She turned. ‘But I can’t. They’re surrounding us. There’s no escaping them, no avoiding their eyes.’

  We stood in silence for a while.

  ‘I�
�m feeling better now,’ Hannah finally said. ‘I guess I’m getting used to being in the middle of another person’s nightmare. These murals are very disturbing. I can’t imagine anyone dismissing them.’

  ‘Cindy said she found them a little primitive.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Hannah said. ‘Just like it doesn’t matter when you look at a so-called work of primitive African art. The power here doesn’t derive from painterly skill. It’s about how these murals make you feel.’

  We set up the lights so Jason could re-photograph them. I told him I didn’t think that was necessary, that his first set of images had captured them well. He said he wanted to do it anyway.

  ‘They’ll look different under strong light. And photographing them again will help me see them better. I want to document the hell out of them … just in case something happens to them.’

  We spent about an hour in the room, then packed up our gear.

  ‘Anyone want to stay?’ Jason asked.

  We shook our heads.

  ‘We may not be able to come up here again, so let’s all take a good long look before we go.’

  I don’t remember how much longer we spent up there. Maybe just a couple of minutes. Then we descended in silence, waited while Jason pushed up the ladder, then went down to the first floor and out the door where Oscar was waiting on the stoop.

  ‘Get your fill?’ he asked.

  Jason nodded. ‘Thanks, Oscar.’ When he tried to hand Oscar a hundred-dollar bill, the old man shook his head.

  ‘Not necessary,’ he said. ‘Ms Broderick took care of me. She’s good that way. A very fine lady.’

  At Hannah’s suggestion, the four of us went to Café K on Lucinda Road. We took a table outside, ordered espressos and pastries, and discussed our next step.

  Café K’s a cool place named for Franz Kafka. There’s a huge poster of him on the wall inside. It has an aura of mid-European angst, and the house-baked sweets are named after Kafka titles: The Amerika, The Trial, The Castle and, Hannah’s favorite, The Metamorphosis – a gooey mixture of chocolate fudge and caramel atop a round of strudel.