The Bomb Maker's Son

by Robert Rotstein

  We break for lunch, but instead of eating, Frantz, Diamond, and I meet with Holzner in a conference room. Frantz and Diamond are trying to convince him to testify in his own defense. If this were an ordinary trial, they’d do everything in their power to keep him off the stand. Shackled rabble-rousers in prison garb who flout the system don’t make good witnesses. But we’re so far behind that they’re desperate.

  Except Ian won’t agree.

  “I’m not going to participate in this trial,” he says. “It’s a kangaroo court without authority.”

  “You sound like Sedgwick,” Lovely says, and not kindly.

  When that doesn’t work, Frantz puts his hand on Holzner’s shoulder and says, “I’ve been through this many times, Ian. You can turn this around. You’re a persuasive man, you didn’t do this, and if you can convince the jury that you’re innocent—no, if you can just raise reasonable doubt about your guilt—you can survive to fight another day.”

  Holzner nods, raises an arm—he’s not shackled now—and firmly removes Frantz’s hand. “Parker’s my lawyer, not you. So, get out of my face.”

  Frantz gets up and stomps out of the room.

  “Does that mean I’m not your lawyer, either?” Lovely says.

  “You are. At Parker’s sufferance. He’s the boss with the power to hire and fire.”

  “I’m sure that Parker thinks you should testify,” she says. “Any lawyer would. It’s the only way to save your life. Tell him, Parker.”

  “I think Parker finally understands,” Holzner says.

  I didn’t until that moment, not really. But I do now. “It doesn’t matter if I agree or disagree. Ian won’t take the stand.”

  “Why not,” she asks.

  “Ian isn’t going to testify because he knows the truth about the bombing. And he doesn’t want to lie under oath.”

  “Is that what’s going on, Ian?” Lovely asks.

  His lack of a response confirms that it’s true. There isn’t any comfort in that, though, because the truth might be that he committed the crime.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  As Lovely and I are walking back to the courtroom, Emily Lansing stops me near the elevators and asks to speak with me alone.

  Lovely motions toward the stairwell door. “Go in there,” she says. “It’s one of the most private places in the building. I don’t know why, but everyone takes the elevator or escalator.”

  We go inside the door and stand on the landing. The late Harmon Cherry used to say that the courthouse stairwell was haunted by the ghosts of those whom the law treated unjustly. Will Ian Holzner’s spirit dwell here someday?

  “Save him, Parker,” Emily says. “Save our father.”

  “I can’t lie to you. It’s not good.”

  “If those jurors don’t find him innocent, I’ll . . .” She pauses. “What can a girl like me do? I think I finally understand why our father did what he did when he wasn’t much older than me. He did something about injustice, took a stand. And people followed him.”

  “He committed senseless acts of violence.”

  “Maybe the bombings really did help people in the end.”

  “I don’t believe that. And even if that were true, it wouldn’t make it right.”

  She shuts her eyes, trying to compose herself. “I just get so mad sometimes.”

  “We all do. But there are ways to fight back that don’t involve violence.”

  She looks at me skeptically. “Just save him, Parker. Save us both.” She abruptly turns and walks out of the stairwell, leaving me with the spirits of those whom justice abandoned.

  I take a moment to focus on the impossible task at hand. I have no more witnesses to call, no more evidence to present. Ian Holzner’s life now depends on my ability to do the miraculous—convince the jurors to ignore the evidence and find that the government has failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. I do the morbid mathematical calculation. If Holzner is sentenced to death, it’ll take from ten to fifteen years to exhaust the appeals and the habeas-corpus process. By that time, he’ll be seventy-five or eighty years old, and maybe he’ll have already died in prison—not exactly on his own terms, but not at the hands of the government.

  I walk out of the stairwell and across the elevator bank, and when I round the corner, I feel a hand on my shoulder. At first I think it’s Emily, but I turn to see an older woman dressed in a gray business suit and red blouse. Only when she takes a step back do I recognize her as Carol Diaz, Holzner’s childhood friend and principal of Playa Delta High School.

  “Thanks for coming down to support Ian,” I say. “And for the help with those old photos.”

  “Parker, can we speak privately?”

  “Ms. Diaz, I—”

  “It’s Carol.”

  “I have to get to the courtroom. The US Attorney will be starting her closing argument.”

  “You cannot walk into that room without listening to what I have to say. I think I can save Ian’s life.”

  When I enter the courtroom twenty minutes later, a scowling Judge Gibson is on the bench. The jury is in the box. Ian Holzner is in his seat. Lovely Diamond and Lou Frantz are at counsel table with their heads down.

  “You’re very late, Mr. Stern,” the judge says. “Thirty seconds longer, and I was going to force your colleagues to proceed without you. Do you have another witness? Your colleagues don’t seem to know.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I say. “The defense calls Carol Diaz.”

  Diaz, who’s been standing by the door, walks resolutely down the aisle, her gait almost militaristic.

  “Don’t do this, Carol,” a stunned Holzner says as she passes.

  When she doesn’t acknowledge him, he bolts out of his chair so suddenly that two of the marshals rush over, but he brushes by them and whispers in my ear, “Don’t let her do it, Parker.”

  “Sit down and be quiet,” I say. “It’s her choice. You’re not calling the shots anymore.”

  He starts to argue, but I nod to the marshals, who escort him back to his seat. It’s a relief that he goes quietly. In light of what’s about to happen, I was afraid he’d react violently.

  Reddick objects that Diaz wasn’t on our witness list, but that objection is overruled when I tell the judge that Diaz approached me for the first time twenty minutes ago.

  “Please raise your right hand,” the clerk says.

  Diaz complies.

  “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God?”

  “I do.”

  “You may be seated.”

  “State your full name for the record,” I say.

  “Carol Sue Diaz.”

  Diaz sits with her hands folded in her lap. Many witnesses swivel in their chair at first, a way to stave off nervousness, but she doesn’t waver. I’m the one who’s jittery, but not from stage fright.

  I start with questions about her background, which palliate my anxiety somewhat. That doesn’t mean the answers about who she is aren’t vital to her testimony—they show how much she has to lose.

  “Ms. Diaz, do you know the defendant, Ian Holzner?”

  “Yes. We grew up together in Playa Delta, California. I’ve known Ian since we were in kindergarten.”

  I lead her through their childhood years and into 1967, their senior year of high school, when Holzner became radicalized.

  “What was your relationship with him after he became political?”

  “We jointly led a campus protest against the war. June of nineteen sixty-seven was very early for this. About fifty students took over the senior lawn.”

  “Did the high-school protest turn violent?”

  “Yes, for high school. We broke a window in the principal’s office.”

  “Who were we?”

  “Actually, there wasn’t a ‘we.’ I broke the window.”

  “You and I met several months ago in your office, and you told me that it was Ian Holzner who broke the window, didn�
��t you?”

  “That’s right. I lied to you. I’ve been lying about that incident for years. Ian took the blame back then, and I let him even though I was the culprit.”

  “Do you know why he did that?”

  “My parents were really strict, and my father—even when I was a senior in high school, my father would hit me if I did something wrong. My grades weren’t as good as Ian’s. If I got suspended, I’d get a beating and might not graduate. Ian didn’t want that. When he was fourteen, he actually shoved my father away from me. My father took a swing at Ian, but Ian dodged the punch and laughed it off. By sixteen, Ian was so strong from gymnastics and other sports that my father avoided him. Anyway, Ian could afford to get in trouble, even get accused of vandalism. His parents—especially his mother—doted on him. He was a brilliant student and star athlete, maybe going to the Olympics. So I let him take the fall.”

  “When we met, you also told me that you cut off all contact with Ian Holzner after his freshman year at Berkeley. Was that true?”

  “It was both true and not true. I told you I saw Ian only once after that, which was true. I stayed in LA and he went to college up north. But we communicated, first by telephone and then by letters, until he went underground and we had to break off all contact because the FBI and the police were after him.”

  “When was that?”

  “Early nineteen seventy-one.”

  “What were your views on what Ian was doing? The bombings.”

  “I . . . I had no problem with them. At the time I thought, if Ian Holzner is doing it, it must be the right thing.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because I respected and loved him—not romantically, but like a brother. He was my protector. I figured that he was protecting the oppressed people just like he’d protected me.” She turns toward the jury. “I know it’s no excuse, but we were just kids.”

  Reddick stands up and, in an uncharacteristically whiny voice, says, “Objection. Where’s this going?”

  “I’m about to get there, Your Honor,” I say.

  “Pronto, Mr. Stern,” the judge says.

  “Ms. Diaz, where were you on the afternoon of December seventeenth, nineteen seventy-five, at the time the Playa Delta VA was bombed?”

  “In my apartment in Playa Delta, California.”

  “Was anyone else with you?”

  “Yes. Ian Holzner.”

  Judge Gibson’s switchblade eyes dare someone to make a sound.

  “Anyone else?”

  “No. Just Ian and me.”

  “How long had he been at your place?”

  “Three hours, maybe.”

  “Was there anything unusual about his visit?”

  “Absolutely. I hadn’t seen him in four, almost five years. He just showed up at my door.”

  “What did you and he talk about?”

  “He said he was done with activism, that things had gotten too crazy with the violence, that he had a son now and didn’t want the kid to have a criminal for a father.”

  “Objection,” Reddick says. “Move to strike the witness’s testimony as hearsay.”

  “It’s a statement of Mr. Holzner’s then-existing state of mind,” I say. “His plans. A clear exception to the hearsay rule.”

  “Overruled,” Judge Gibson says. “But Mr. Stern, if I want elucidation from you on the law, I’ll ask for it. I’ve been a federal judge for over forty years and know what I’m doing.”

  “Tell us more about the conversation, Ms. Diaz,” I say.

  “I asked who the mother was, but he wouldn’t tell me because he didn’t want to jeopardize her safety. He thought the FBI would harass her and the kid if they found out that he was the father. He was real vague about what he’d been doing, which was understandable, because he didn’t want to get me involved.”

  “What happened next?”

  “He said he was going to get the kid and the girl and move up to Northern California. Mendocino County, where it’s green and quiet and peaceful. Change his name and hope that the FBI never found out about him. We just talked, you know. And then the bomb exploded.”

  “The bomb at the Playa Delta VA?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far away was your apartment from the Playa Delta Veterans Administration?”

  “About four blocks. I was a new teacher, so I wanted to be near school, and the VA and the high school weren’t that far from each other. When I heard the blast, I thought the country was under attack by the Soviet Union, because it didn’t feel like an earthquake. An earthquake had never been that loud.”

  “Did Mr. Holzner say anything when the bomb exploded?”

  “Objection,” Reddick says. “Hearsay.”

  “Mr. Stern, I will hear you on this one. Approach.”

  “No need to approach, Your Honor. It will come under the excited utterance exception.”

  “It better, Mr. Stern. Overruled. You may answer the question, Ms. Diaz.”

  Diaz shakes her head slightly as if still disbelieving what happened back then. “Ian looked out the window. I did, too. We couldn’t see anything, but Ian whispered, ‘It’s impossible.’ And it was like he wasn’t speaking those words to me, like he was in shock. Then he screamed. I’d never heard Ian scream, not when he fractured his arm doing a back flip as a kid and wouldn’t cry in front of us. But now he was sobbing. He kept repeating, ‘It’s impossible, it’s impossible!’”

  Silence is like a gas: formless, capable of indefinite expansion, sometimes toxic, sometimes stable, sometimes inert—and sometimes, like the silence in this courtroom, volatile. I say, “No further questions,” because I’m not about to furnish the igniting spark, and I hope that Marilee Reddick won’t do so. All Reddick has to do to avoid the conflagration is follow the old saw that a lawyer shouldn’t ask a why question on cross-examination.

  It’s not to be.

  “How convenient that you show up at the last minute and try to rescue your friend,” Reddick scoffs. “Why didn’t you tell this to the FBI in nineteen seventy-five, when Holzner was charged? Why didn’t you come forward during the trials of Charles Sedgwick or Belinda Hayes or Rachel O’Brien? Why, Ms. Diaz, didn’t you at least come forward when Holzner turned himself in?” She’s so agitated that droplets of saliva spew from her lips as she speaks.

  “I didn’t because I was afraid,” Diaz says.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Of being arrested. You see, I was the one who helped Ian escape. I hid him in my apartment, and then I drove him to a women’s commune in Scottsdale, Arizona, that sheltered him. I was active in the women’s underground railroad until nineteen seventy-seven. I’ve come forward now because I won’t sit by another second and watch Ian sacrifice himself for me. He’s an innocent man. I saw his face, I heard him sob. He had no idea that there was a bomb at the VA.”

  Lovely exhales a “Holy crap.” Lou Frantz lets out a noncommittal grunt. I glance back at Holzner, who’s resting his head in his shackled hands. When he looks up, he shakes his head at me in reproach. There are tears in his eyes.

  Over the din coming from the gallery, Judge Gibson hollers, “Silencio! Everyone be quiet! Especially you, Ms. Diaz. Do not say another world. Marshals, get the jury out of here pronto!”

  When the jurors are out of the courtroom, the judge says, “Mr. Stern, before you called this witness, did you advise her that this testimony could incriminate her as an accessory to murder? That there is no statute of limitations on that?”

  “I’ll answer that, Judge,” Diaz says. “That’s exactly what Parker told me. Which he didn’t have to, because I consulted a lawyer years ago and knew the risks already. That’s exactly why I didn’t come forward until now.”

  “I would advise you to consult a lawyer before we go any further,” the judge says.

  “I want to finish my testimony,” Diaz says. “It’s the truth. Ian didn’t murder anyone.”

  Judge Gibson takes off his reading glasses, bows his h
ead, and pinches his nose hard. “Okay, Ms. Diaz. It’s your funeral. Marshal, get the jury back in here.”

  When the jury is seated again, Reddick conducts a scorched-earth cross-examination, forcing Diaz to tell the story of how she let Holzner hide in her apartment for three weeks while she arranged with her contacts to find a place to protect him, and how she drove him to the Arizona desert in her Volkswagen van. Over and over, Diaz is forced to admit that she knew that Holzner was charged with murder, knew that he was a fugitive from justice, knew that helping him escape was a crime. The cross is intended less, it seems, to attack Diaz’s testimony than to put her behind bars. Marilee Reddick has always been a vindictive shit.

  When Reddick finishes, I tell the judge I have no further questions. He excuses the jury again, and as soon as the jurors are out of the room, a marshal approaches Diaz and informs her that she’s under arrest as an accessory to murder. He actually puts her in handcuffs.

  “This is bullshit,” Holzner calls out. “You government pigs haven’t changed a bit since nineteen seventy-five.”

  The judge says, “Ms. Diaz, this is unfortunate. But you made your own decision. I suggest you get a lawyer.”

  “I’m Ms. Diaz’s attorney,” Lou Frantz says in a voice that can probably be heard three floors up. “This is a travesty, a miscarriage of justice. Don’t worry, Ms. Diaz, I’ll have you out in an hour.”

  The marshals escort Diaz out of the courtroom to the accompaniment of Louis Frantz’s taunting.

  “We’re in recess,” the judge says.

  Holzner comes over to me and says, “Why did you do it? I didn’t want that. I never wanted that.”

  Emily Lansing suddenly appears. “It doesn’t matter what you want, Dad. Parker’s doing want we want. He’s trying to save your life.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  On this morning, Ian Holzner, surrounded by a phalanx of marshals’ vehicles, drives with me to court. The media reporters on the courthouse steps seem almost festive, as if a man’s last chance to avoid the death penalty is a spectator sport. Holzner pauses for a moment, but I drag him away before he can launch into another polemic.