‘Nice folks,’ she said, when she came back in. ‘They bought good ones. Not bad for a Thursday morning. I’ll paint more this weekend.’
As we settled back on the couch, I asked her about Courtney’s issues.
‘I know this is sensitive, and you may not want to answer,’ I said, ‘but I have to ask. What can you tell me about Courtney’s problems with her family? And your own issues too, if you don’t mind talking about them?’
She screwed up her features. ‘I was physically and emotionally abused,’ she said. ‘My mom was an alcoholic. She took out all her frustrations on me, berating me and slapping me around. I doubt my father knew. She never did it when he was in the house. After I ran away, seems Mom felt remorse. When the cops raided A Caring House, they thought they were raiding a cult. They turned me over to this couple who’d worked at Synanon, who took me to their farm in New York State for so-called deprogramming. I kept telling them I hadn’t been programmed, that the Schechtners hadn’t been running a cult. But they were so into the cult concept that they didn’t believe me.
‘Think about that, the irony of it. I was taken from a refuge they claimed was a cult and planted smack-dab in the middle of a real one. Because that’s what CIRS was. They had this horrible process they called “The Game” when everyone attacked you till you broke down and wept. Then they got all lovey-dovey and group-hugged you and wiped away your tears. After I played, or rather, suffered the Game, I persuaded Libby (she ran the place) to let me call home. When I got my dad on the line, I begged him to rescue me. I guess he heard the anguish in my voice, because the next day he drove all the way from Calista to the farm. On the way back he told me that Mom had started going to AA, that she felt terrible about the things she’d said and done to me, and she’d promised to turn over a new leaf. Seems my running off had really shaken her up.
‘Anyway, I went back to high school, finished up, then applied to art schools. I chose SFAI because it was the farthest from home. After that, I only came back to Calista for quick visits. When Dad retired, he and Mom wanted to move down to Florida. They hated the Keys, thank God! They ended up in Sarasota. Occasionally, I go up there to see them. They never come down here. They like my watercolors, so when I visit, I always bring one as a gift. I’ve never shown them my personal work, ’cause I know they wouldn’t get it.’
She was open, and her story made sense, but I noted that she avoided my question about Courtney’s family. Also, whatever had gone on between her and her mother didn’t seem like enough to cause her to run away. I asked her about that. She nodded as she tried to explain it. She’d had a boyfriend at school, they’d broken up – an experience she’d found devastating. She’d been depressed, but when she got to Red Raven that summer, things started looking up.
‘Meeting Court was hugely important. We recognized one another right away. Kindred spirits. Turns out her home life was way worse than mine. We had these fantasies – we’d run away, take refuge at Doctor Ted’s halfway house, then, once we both turned eighteen, move to Paris and start a new life there together as artists. Court was an heiress. She was due to come into money on her eighteenth birthday and a fortune on her twenty-first. We’d live on that, set ourselves up in a wonderful sky-lit studio. All we had to do was stay quiet and safe until we reached legal age.’
‘Were you in love?’ I asked.
She smiled. ‘I guess so. Not physically, but our relationship was intense. Kids at Red Raven complained to the counselors, said we were cliquish. When they asked if we were lesbos, we’d gaze at each other longingly and giggle. Believe me, being gay was no big deal at Red Raven. About half the kids were into it. Frankly, I think if I’d given Court any encouragement, we might have experimented with that. But that wasn’t my scene. It wasn’t erotic attraction that bound us. We had a powerful emotional bond that had to do with seeing ourselves as serious artists superior to all the dilettante kids at camp.’
‘Liz Schechtner told us you were going to apply to become liberated minors.’
‘I remember that. But we were close enough to eighteen that it didn’t make sense. Not for me at least. Maybe for Court because for her there was money at stake.’
‘So what were her family issues?’
‘Pretty bad,’ Penny said. ‘A lot more serious than mine.’
‘Like what?’
She shook her head, signaling she didn’t want to go into it.
‘Let’s just say bad,’ she said. ‘The worst part was that when she tried to talk about it, no one in her family believed her. They treated her like she was crazy. In a way, I guess she was. But I believed her, and so did Doctor Ted. That’s why he took us in without informing her folks. He felt protective toward us, especially Court. But then the Cobbs found out where we were, the cops burst in, separated us, those people took us away, and I never saw her or heard from her again.’
‘And the people on the walls?’
‘They were the others, the disbelievers, the ones who refused to face the truth of what was happening before their eyes.’ She paused. ‘They were our demons. We turned that little room into our own special hell.’
‘What about the little girl with the dog?’
She smiled. ‘I painted her. My portrait of Court. She drew all the other faces, and together we painted them in. I filled in her drawings and painted the bodies. And then I drew and painted that little girl.’
‘Looking so wide-eyed and innocent.’
‘Which is just how I wanted her to look,’ Penny said.
Hannah Sachs
It wasn’t hard to find Spencer Addams. He was living over on the West Side in a tract house on Badger Road. As Noah and I drove out to meet him, Noah filled me in.
‘I saw him perform when I was at law school. He was admired for his summations and for daring moves such as putting a defendant on the stand, something a defense attorney rarely does. He was the kind of lawyer who liked taking on a hopeless cause, then exceeding expectations by pulling a victory out of thin air. That’s what he did in the Decoite murder case, which made him famous. When my buddies heard he was going to deliver a summation, a bunch of us hurried over to the county courthouse to observe. The courtroom was jammed. We were lucky to get seats. When word went out that Addams was going to sum up, members of the criminal defense bar made a point of sitting in.
‘He was good that day, incredibly persuasive. It was like watching an artist teach a master class. Words poured out of him like honey, grabbing and holding the jurors’ attention. Some believed he mesmerized juries, won verdicts by employing diabolical powers of persuasion. In my view, he simply out-lawyered prosecutors and won his cases on the merits. There was a twinkle in his eye that day when he scanned the courtroom and noticed us. Recognizing us as law students, I think he started playing as much to us as to the jurors. Like he was saying “Hey guys, this is how it’s done!”’
I was surprised when we pulled up in front of the house. It didn’t look like the home of a famous barrister. Badger Road was full of potholes. The neighborhood was rundown. The property looked poorly kept, the siding peeling, the yard choked with weeds.
An unsmiling middle-aged woman with high cheekbones answered the door.
‘I’m Carol Addams,’ she said. ‘You’re here to see my dad.’
She led us through the house and then out the rear door to a patch of dry brown grass where Spencer Addams reclined in a plastic strap chair.
‘Pardon me for not standing. I’ve got arthritis,’ he said. He showed us a toothy grin. Although his face was marked by red lines and liver spots, there was something leonine about the man. He had piercing blue eyes, and long white hair woven into a pigtail in back. His voice was strong, despite his ruined face. He had, I thought, the deep compelling voice of a radio announcer.
‘I live over there.’ He gestured toward a decrepit mobile home mounted on cinder blocks across the dried-up lawn. ‘Carol lets me park it here so long as I stay out of her way.’ He turned to her. ‘Ain’t
that right, darlin’?’
Carol sucked in her cheeks, turned and strode back into her house.
‘We get along fine,’ Addams assured us. ‘As you may have gathered, I’ve seen better days. Used to live in a lovely view apartment on Keller Ridge. That was back in my salad years. If you’re wondering how I’ve sunk to this debased state, I can’t rightly explain it, except to say I spent too much on alcohol and women, made bad investments, forgot to file taxes – all the above. But you didn’t come out here to hear my sob story. Not that I have one. I’m perfectly happy the way things are. I’m eighty-three, and I’ve been waiting a long, long time for someone to come around and ask me about the Schechtner matter.’ He gazed into my eyes and then into Noah’s. ‘That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Noah said.
‘Good, ’cause I got a story to tell and papers to back it up. It was a dirty business, that Schechtner thing, but then the Cobbs always played in the muck. I had a hunch someday someone’d come around asking how they happened to run my clients out of town.’
He was ready to tell us all about that ‘dirty business,’ but first he wanted us to tell him why we were interested. I told him most of it, and when he heard how Jase and I had flown out to New Mexico to see Liz Schechtner, he decided we were for real and deserved to hear what he had to tell.
The Schechtners got his name from the Public Defender’s Office. An attorney there knew he despised wealthy people like the Cobbs. Spencer visited the Schechtners in jail, heard their story, was certain they’d been set up and that Walter Loetz was lying. The judge set bail so high that the Schechtners couldn’t possibly raise it. That too made Spencer suspicious. His first step was to go into A Caring Place on Locust Street. He observed that there was no satanic material there except for the hastily spray-painted 666 on the living-room wall. As for the ‘erotic murals’ in the so-called attic ‘orgy room,’ he observed that they were not at all orgiastic and photographed them to show in court. Most important, he retrieved Ted Schechtner’s case file on Courtney Cobb stuffed with notes on all the terrible and terrifying things she’d confided.
‘That file was devastating. Soon as I read it, I knew I had them by their hairs. There were things in there that the Cobbs would never want known. So I had a little chat with their attorney, a dude name of Silver who dressed like a dandy. When I showed him a little bit of what I had, his mouth puckered like he’d been sucking on a lemon.
‘“This is grave,” he said. I liked that word. To me it meant I had stuff that, if exposed in open court, would follow his clients to their graves. I offered him a deal. Since A Caring Place was properly licensed, and there’d been no holding Courtney and her friend against their will, all criminal charges against the Schechtners were to be dropped and they were to be immediately released. I demanded complete exoneration, and a payment for damages to their names and reputations. Silver asked what sort of figure I had in mind. Quarter mil, I told him. He said that was too much, Horace Cobb would never pay it. It was extortion, pure and simple, he said. I knew he was bluffing, knew Cobb would pay. I told him so, and that he’d probably end up paying a helluva lot more if I got annoyed and into a real extortive mood. I told him this was very likely if I didn’t get the quarter mil, and that he’d best get back to me by the end of the day; otherwise, I’d start feeding what I had to a Times-Dispatch reporter and then it would be too late to squeeze the ugly ooze back into the proverbial tube.
‘He reappeared in my office at five p.m., panting and looking worried. He had a cashier’s check for two hundred fifty thousand made out to my trustee account. But before he’d turn it over, he had some demands of his own. First, the Schechtners were to close up their practice and move out of state. Second, I was to turn over all their documents concerning Courtney Cobb. And, third, they were to sign a binding non-disclosure agreement he’d drawn up, regarding anything they knew or had heard regarding Courtney and her family, with severe financial penalties should they ever reveal any of it to anyone at any time.
‘I read the agreement. I’ll give Silver this much – it was well drawn. But I didn’t like the requirement that the Schechtners pull up stakes. I told him that was not contemplated when I gave him my figure. He said he understood, and for that reason had a second check for seventy-five grand to cover their relocation expenses. I told him I’d speak to my clients and get back to him the following day. I remember the way he snickered, like he thought now he had the upper hand. “I’ll give you till noon,” he said.
‘So, OK, it was a decent deal. The Schechtners didn’t like it much, didn’t like the notion of selling out the Cobb girl, but they understood they’d made a huge mistake not telling her parents where she was, and, worse, not passing on what Courtney had told Ted, which, being criminal, they were obliged to report to law enforcement. I pointed out that, far as I could tell, Courtney had been moved out of state and thus would likely be unavailable to testify, that basically there was nothing they could do to help her now, and that no matter what destruction they might wreak upon the Cobbs, that wouldn’t get them out of the considerable trouble they were in. I looked around the jail attorney’s conference room. It was pretty bleak. “No one wants you to sell anyone out,” I told them, “but time’s come to think about yourselves.”
‘They agreed to take the deal. I called Silver, told him to get them released. We’d meet again in my office at the end of the day where I would hand him the signed NDAs plus Ted Schechtner’s notes in exchange for the two cashier’s checks. He sounded relieved, and, frankly, so was I. It was a nasty business, but I’d served my clients’ interests and felt pretty good about that.’ He paused. ‘And yet … I was so appalled by what I’d read in Ted’s notes that I decided to photocopy them and keep them in my files just in case. In case of what, you’re wondering.’ He grinned. ‘Well …’
‘In case one day someone came around asking why the charges against the Schechtners were so suddenly dismissed,’ I said.
Addams nodded. ‘And now … here you are! Two of you, no less! And, yeah, I still have those old photocopies. I cleaned out most of my papers when I closed my practice. Spent days shredding documents. But there were some things I couldn’t bring myself to shred – among them Ted’s notes. Wanna see ’em?’ He grinned. ‘Sure you do!’
Ted Schechtner’s notes were worse than devastating. They were sickening. They were also disjointed. But fortunately they were dated and arranged in sequence. Although the photocopies were on eight-by-ten sheets, the notes themselves came in a variety of sizes. Some were scrawled on small notepad paper, others were neatly handwritten on lined punch-holed stock, as if for inclusion in a three-ring binder, and still others were neatly typed. Based on the chaotic way he took notes on their sessions, Dr Ted came off as a hurried and harried scribe. I guessed he’d scribbled down his thoughts and notes as Courtney’s words poured out of her.
Among his own notes were pithy phrases: ‘deeply troubled,’ ‘heart goes out to her,’ ‘poor little rich girl!!!,’ ‘her voice so low I can barely make out her words.’
He wrote: ‘serious abuse,’ ‘thinks no one cares,’ ‘for sure they know but they can’t face the truth.’
He noted: ‘so brave in the face of so much evil,’ ‘smiles when most anguished. When I ask why, she says “I don’t feel so bad when I smile.”’ ‘Says: “they hated me because I didn’t fit in, didn’t meet their expectations.”’ ‘Says: “I was different, strange, always drawing pictures. People said I acted weird.”’
And then perhaps the most poignant of all: ‘She questions whether she imagined everything, whether it was, as her parents insisted, another of her weird distortions of reality.’
Ted leaves little doubt about what that ‘everything’ was. Her brothers sexually assaulted her. She tells Ted it started back when she was thirteen. Jack did it first. He came to her and, to groom her, said he needed her help, told her he had these urges because he was a boy and begged her to help him obt
ain relief. Would she please touch him in certain places? He came on sweet and vulnerable. He was her big brother, so of course she was willing to help him out.
She was intensely curious about these ‘urges,’ also amused by what he asked her to do and by his reactions when she did it. She knew about male genitalia and the role they played in reproduction, but she was surprised and amazed how when she touched Jack’s organ, it would ‘miraculously change shape.’
Afterwards Jack would thank her. He’d tell her how grateful he was for her understanding, and how embarrassing it was for him to plead for help. He also slyly suggested that if she let him touch her in certain places, he could make her feel good too.
For a while she demurred, but then one night told him she was willing to let him try. And so he did. The first time it didn’t excite her much, but, yes, she admitted to Dr Ted, it was fun, and after a while that kind of intimate touching excited her quite a lot. She relished the fact that what they were doing was forbidden. There was a special excitement that came from breaking rules and crossing lines. Jack was pleased by her willingness to play. He was also excited by their transgressions. He told her it was a ‘fun game’ they were playing, and he was happy that she liked their game. He gave her little gifts to reward her for playing it – new charms for her charm bracelet, an antique scarab ring – and caresses, ‘very sweet caresses,’ that aroused her and made her feel loved.
This went on for over a year, then Jack introduced Kevin to their game.
They were her big brothers. They claimed they loved her. They told her that, being boys, they had their needs. Since she was their ‘bestie,’ their ‘favorite girl in the whole world,’ surely she’d want to help her loving brothers deal with their corporeal desires.
At first she helped Kevin the same way she helped Jack, and sometimes the three of them would lie together, she in the middle, her brothers on either side, and she would touch them both at the same time and the game became a contest as to which of the boys would spurt first.
The Murals Page 21
