The Bomb Maker's Son

by Robert Rotstein

  The judge points a finger at the jury box. “You others. What’s the truth?”

  No one volunteers. The courtroom sounds like a hornets’ nest before an assault on an intruder. I glance at Lovely, who’s smiling gleefully. It’s not an acquittal, but it’s a victory, a chance to start over.

  “We’re in recess,” Judge Gibson says. “Members of the jury, you have gravely disappointed me. You’re going to be sequestered in a hotel until I sort this out. Call your relatives and tell them to pack a bag for you. Please leave this courtroom now.”

  As they file out, Joey looks at us and raises a fist in solidarity. At this moment, I love the guy.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  At six o’clock on a chilly, moon-and-lamp-lit LA evening, I arrive back at my condominium. I’ve spent the day in court. I’d hoped that Judge Gibson would’ve entered judgment of acquittal immediately, or at least declared a mistrial, but he ordered us to brief the issues while he conducts an investigation into Joey’s allegations. He’s not convinced that it isn’t Joey who’s engaged in misconduct, which would mean that an alternate juror, who would probably vote with the majority, would replace our single supporter. We wasted hours wrangling over briefing schedules for a Rule 29 motion seeking a judgment of acquittal or the alternative, a motion for a mistrial.

  I pull into my underground garage, and as I get out of the rented Lexus, a large figure emerges from the darkness. I shrink back inside, lock the door, and start the engine. There’s a tapping at my window, and I look up to see the man who lately calls himself Zorro Snowden. Except he’s dressed not in his costume but in khakis and a short-sleeve dress shirt, like a courier for a law-firm messenger service. He’s carrying an overstuffed manila folder under his arm, undoubtedly the garbled recording that Brandon Soloway delivered to me. I again ask a question that might never be answered: why did Rachel O’Brien give me that tape? Whatever the reason, what’s on the recording will undoubtedly hurt Ian Holzner.

  “Were you successful?” I ask.

  “Listen and you be the judge. Inside the envelope along with the original recording there is a flash drive. The audio file on it is encrypted. The password is DonDiego59. The Ds are in capital letters.”

  “I appreciate the help. Please pass it on.”

  “It wasn’t an easy project. Of course, there can be no hint of involvement on our part. We did the science and technology. But we won’t be part of the legal proceeding. We know that might cause you grief if you choose to use the tape as evidence, but we cannot become involved.”

  “So I’ve always assumed.”

  “Mr. Stern, it’s not pleasant listening. Good-bye, sir.” This time when he leaves, there’s no bow, no flourish, just a transparent attempt to look restrained as he tries to get the hell out of my parking garage as quickly as possible.

  I want to listen to the recording by myself first, so I get out of the car and go around to sit in the passenger seat. I power up my laptop, open the manila folder, and dig past the old audiotape for the flash drive. Once the drive is slotted in the USB port and recognized as an external device, I double-click on the file and enter the password. The audio player launches, and the recording starts. There’s silence for the first five, six, seven seconds, and then there’s static, followed by the ring of an old-fashioned telephone. Another two rings, and a man answers, and that simple word, “Hello,” is intelligible. I’m less excited about learning the truth than resigned to it.

  When I hear the muffled voice of a woman say, “Oh my god, Charlie, there’s a bomb at the Playa Delta VA!” I immediately pause the recording. Part of me wishes that the voice had stayed muffled forever. Another part realizes that this was inevitable. I take three deep breaths, and with a shaky hand, use the mouse to resume playback.

  The trudge up the stairs to my condo unit is painful, taxing to my sore knees and my stiff back and my muddled brain. The burden of the briefcase—no, the burden of what’s in the briefcase—has my arm trembling.

  I open the door to find Ian and Emily in the living room, sitting next to each other and drinking hot tea. Emily is speaking to him quietly, and he’s continually shaking his head. Holzner doesn’t acknowledge me, just takes a sip of tea and stares at the coffee table. When Emily sees me, she looks up and says, “Parker, please make him listen?”

  “Emily, you’ll have to excuse us,” I say. “I have to talk to Ian alone.”

  She looks as if she’s going to protest, but when she reads my face, she says, “I’ll go in the other room.”

  “No. You have to leave the apartment.”

  “He’s my father, too.”

  “True, but he’s not your client. Go.”

  She scrutinizes my face again and nods. “I’ll go talk to that cute marshal, Stevie. Let me know when you’re done.”

  Holzner takes another sip of tea, and this time glances up.

  I don’t know why, but as Emily passes by me I put my arms around her and kiss her on the top of her head. I’ve never done that before. It hits me that Lovely Diamond’s father, Ed, kisses his daughter that way. When Emily is out the door, I sit across from Holzner, retrieve my laptop, set it on the table, and wake it up. All this time, Holzner keeps his head down.

  At last, the home screen comes up. I launch the audio file. When Holzner hears the first words on the recording, his body quavers so violently that he sloshes tea all over the table, fortunately missing the computer’s keyboard.

  “Shut if off!” he says.

  I hit the pause button and then rewind back to the beginning. “We’re going to listen to this together,” I say. “And then you’re going to tell me all of it. It’s time.”

  The sleeve of his cotton shirt—the cotton shirt that I’ve loaned him—is drenched with tea.

  “Oh, god, did you burn yourself?” I ask.

  “It was lukewarm.” He dabs at his sleeve with a paper napkin that can’t possibly dry him off. “Play the damn thing if you’re going to play it. Then I’ll tell you what happened, and we’ll decide what you’re going to do.”

  Sedgwick: Hello?

  Woman: Oh my god, Charlie, there’s a bomb at the Playa Delta VA! Oh my god, I thought . . . Oh my god. Rachel did it. She put the bomb there. [Sobbing]

  Sedgwick: Alicia? Chill out.

  Alicia: Oh fuck, Charlie, what did I do? What did I do? Oh fuck.

  Sedgwick: Calm down, Alicia. What do you mean Rachel’s put the bomb—?

  Alicia: She said she planted it in the restroom at the VA. I don’t know what [inaudible].

  Sedgwick: That’s [inaudible]. Ian shit-canned the operation. Keep calm and don’t worry. It’s bullshit. You know how Rachel always [inaudible]. So just calm the fuck down.

  Alicia: It’s not bullshit. She [inaudible]. In the restroom.

  Jerry Holzner [in the background]: What’s wrong, Charlie. What’s wong, Chollie?

  Sedgwick: It’s Alicia with some bullshit [inaudible].

  Jerry Holzner: [Inaudible]

  Sedgwick: Chill out, Alicia. Rachel can’t build a fucking bomb.

  Alicia: I did it, god damn it.

  Sedgwick: Did what?

  Alicia: I built the fucking bomb. She told me [inaudible]. I thought he fucking [inaudible]. The bitch told me [inaudible].

  Sedgwick: [inaudible] [phone muffled] . . . Ian.

  Jerry Holzner: [inaudible]

  Sedgwick: The restroom?

  Alicia: Yeah, yeah. Second floor. Oh fuck, Charlie. I never thought . . . I’ve got a son, Charlie. They’ll take my baby away. Oh my God. [Hysterical sobbing]

  Sedgwick: Just calm down. Ian will handle it.

  With a surprisingly steady hand, I use the mouse to stop the recording.

  “So it’s true,” I say. “I’m the son of the Playa Delta Bomber. The cops just have the wrong parent.”

  “Parker, it’s not what you think.”

  “You’re not seriously going to tell me that Alicia Bowers isn’t my mother, are you? I’d know that voice an
ywhere.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say,” he says. “It’s your turn to listen to me. Then you have a decision to make. The hardest of your life.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  “Sometimes kids with messed up parents do everything to seem normal,” Holzner says. “Roles become reversed—the child becomes the parent.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Yeah, it’s ironic that Alicia took care of her father, your grandfather. Pete Bowers was at the Battle of the Bulge during World War Two. He was one of about a hundred and fifty American soldiers captured by the Germans at a town in Belgium called Malmedy. The German SS opened fire on the prisoners and murdered eighty-four of the POWs. Pete Bowers was one of the survivors. I’m sure he considered it bad luck that he lived. Your grandmother was an alcoholic and heroin addict who got together with Pete because he handed over his veteran’s benefits. She abandoned her husband and daughter before they moved into our neighborhood, where they lived in a one-room cheap motel that had a refrigerator and a hot plate. So now Pete was grieving for the loss of his wife—I say wife, but I don’t even know if they were married.”

  “My grandmother. What was her name?”

  “I . . .”

  “It’s a stupid question.”

  “It’s exactly what you should be asking. I’m not sure I ever knew. I think you can understand why Alicia—it’s been hard for me to call her Harriet—never told you anything.”

  “I don’t understand any of this. Except that my mother is a murderer.”

  “Don’t, Parker. Let me finish first.” It’s a command, but there’s a gentleness in his tone that I’ve never heard before. Or maybe it’s simply that I haven’t recognized it. Maybe that’s what Emily hears, what my brother, Dylan, heard.

  “She was a sweet, quiet kid with no one to protect her, no one to teach her how to be a person, much less a girl or a woman,” he says. “But somehow she managed. She was brilliant. Much smarter than I am. Do you know that, Parker?”

  “Truthfully, I never thought about it. Your mother’s IQ isn’t very important when you’re trying to avoid getting screamed at or slapped in the face or embarrassed that she’s going to have sex with every male on a movie set who could advance my career.”

  He recoils, as if I’ve slapped him in the face, but like a child playing one parent against the other, I push forward. “You didn’t know that about her, did you, Ian?”

  “She needed someone on her side,” he says. “I was that person, I guess. I stopped the kids from teasing her about her Goodwill clothes, about her hand-me-down shoes, about Pete riding around the city on that rusty bicycle and talking to himself and ranting about the demons that were after him. Do you know those asshole kids called her Boogie Bowers? To her face? She never reacted. When she got older, I stopped the creeps from touching her. I was stupid, because I should’ve known she’d fall in love with me. I laughed it off, thought it was a crush that would pass—she was like my little sister, for god’s sake—but it didn’t go away. The more I denied her, the more determined she got.”

  “That’s Harriet.”

  “When people started to listen to my speeches against the war, when I became somebody—or, thought I was somebody—Alicia showed up, still infatuated. No, that’s not fair, it was truly love. She wanted to be part of what I was doing, to be part of the revolutionary vanguard. I don’t think she got any of it. Don’t get me wrong, she understood the theory, but I think her acceptance of it was just a way to get close to me. Jesus, I sound like the arrogant bastard I was. Anyway, I told her to go away, said radical politics wasn’t for her, that she was destined for better things.” He places his hand on his forehead, almost slaps it like a cartoon character experiencing a light-bulb moment. “Jesus, why couldn’t I see that if I was warning Alicia away from what I was doing, it must have been the wrong thing to do? If I truly, deep down had believed it was right, I would’ve welcomed her into it. How could I . . . ?” He gazes past me like an old man with fading vision who can’t understand how his strong, youthful eyes didn’t see the obvious.

  “Alicia would not give up,” he says. “Rachel O’Brien encouraged her. Alicia was jealous because Rachel and I were—I thought I was in love. That gave Rachel power over Alicia, because the unrequited suitor always wants to please the rival. Rachel kept telling me I should just . . . make love to Alicia and get it over with, that I was acting bourgeois with my middle-America gentlemanly attitude toward her. I thought Rachel was simply taunting Alicia and mocking me. She was a smart ass, always taunting other people.”

  That was true even in O’Brien’s later years, because that’s why she had Brandon bring me the tape recording—to taunt me, to let me know that my own mother was responsible for the deaths of four people. She waited until the only person whom she saw as a threat, Charles Sedgwick, was dead. She never thought Jerry would talk—and he didn’t, until his last-ditch attempt to tell me the truth. She knew Ian wouldn’t tell. And once I heard the tape, I’d have to choose between my parents. Whatever I decided would destroy them both.

  “But I can’t lay it on O’Brien,” Holzner says. “Alicia finally convinced me that she truly believed in what I was doing. You know how? She reminded me of how the army had abandoned her father, how he drank Thunderbird that he got from Sam’s Liquor and pedaled this old bicycle calling out, ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ You never knew if he meant Alicia or his wife. Alicia talked a perfect game, said she hated the government for what it did to her father, for what it had done to the boys in Vietnam. She talked about the rampant racism in this country. So I let her in. I think I was keeping her close so I wouldn’t totally lose Playa Delta—even as I ranted against such middle-class attachments.” He closes his eyes and whispers. “I . . . I taught Alicia how to make bombs.”

  I briefly wonder if I’m playing one of Poniard’s nightmarish video games, in which Ian Holzner, Rachel O’Brien, Brandon Soloway, Moses Dworsky, and Belinda Hayes are the shadowy avatars who shoot bullets and sling deadly revelations directly at my heart, in which my own mother is the evil Boss of Bosses. A look at Holzner’s pallid face drives home that it’s all too real.

  His words keep spewing out. He taught her because he never thought she could learn, but he soon found himself marveling at her facility and bravery. The shared danger was infused with eroticism, all the more so because they were the only ones with the courage and skill to do it. He finally did what she’d wanted him to do for years and slept with her. When she revealed that she was pregnant with me, he begged her to abort, but she wouldn’t destroy a part of him. She vowed never to build a bomb again.

  But she did build a bomb again.

  He and O’Brien had planned to escalate their revolutionary activities, to do what the Weather Underground failed to do after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion: assassinate the fascist enemies of the masses. They were going to target the Playa Delta VA precisely because it was in Holzner’s hometown.

  “My brother, Jerry, heard about it from Charlie,” he says. “I think it was Charlie’s way of trying to stop it without looking like a counterrevolutionary. And oh, did Jerry come at me. He told me to look at myself in the mirror, and I’d see that I had become as bad as the people I was fighting—worse. I listened to him. He really was my big brother. After I did that, I called it off. I made the mistake of telling Rachel O’Brien that I was a father now, and that the fact that I had a son—the fact that I had you, Parker—had changed me. I thought she’d scoff or go ballistic, even become violent, but she just nodded and said she respected my opinion. I should’ve known by that reaction what she was going to do.” He inhales deeply. “My brother wasn’t a stupid man. People thought he was, but he wasn’t at all. Wisdom comes in many forms, but Jerry had it. I want you to know that about him.”

  “I know that.”

  “I didn’t even get to see him again. I thought I’d at least get to say good-bye.” I expect tears from him, but there are none. Th
ere’s still something case-hardened about Ian Holzner.

  “In early November nineteen seventy-five, I left the collective and went into hiding, as much from O’Brien as from the FBI. I hid from everyone. If I wasn’t findable, O’Brien couldn’t have her bomb. But I also abandoned Alicia and you. She was living in a two-bedroom apartment with six other people, working as a waitress in the MGM Studios commissary while I watched you, and then I was gone. Rachel struck like the queen cobra she was. She told Alicia that I’d gone into hiding because the pigs had turned up the heat. She said she had a message from me, that I wanted Alicia to build a bomb to be used to show the cops the power and ability we had to inflict damage. That we could kill if we wanted but chose not to. So the bomb would have to contain ball bearings and nails. Supposedly, the bomb was going to explode in the park at two in the morning when no one was around. And, as always, there would be a warning. Your mother refused at first, but Rachel told her that if she didn’t comply, I’d consider it a betrayal of our love, that I’d never see her or you again. Alicia was twenty years old with the gullibility of an eager-to-please nine-year-old. She believed Rachel’s bullshit.” He pauses and inhales deeply several times, like a runner between wind sprints trying to catch his breath.

  “How do you know this if you weren’t there?” I ask.

  I’m surprised that he seems surprised by the question. “Alicia told me.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “She wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “She’d lie to anyone.”

  “Not to me. Never.”

  Although my mother has built a life on thumbing her nose at the truth, I believe him. I’ve seen how she behaves around him.

  “Rachel made it her business to tell Alicia what the bomb was really for—on the morning of the bombing,” Holzner says. “More cruel taunting. She told Alicia it’s what I wanted. She knew Alicia would never call the cops on me. So Alicia called Charlie. As it turned out, the FBI was listening in, but this particular recording got garbled, so they didn’t know about the bomb. Anyway, I went to the VA that morning to try to find the bomb and get rid of it.”