by R. G. Belsky
“By the fifth year of our marriage, I wasn’t even able to leave the house. I refused to go to the store or go out to eat or even walk out to get the paper or the mail. At the end, I covered the windows, locked the door, and sat there in the dark struggling with my undefinable demons.
“It was tough on Charles. He tried to help me for as long as he could. But, in the end, I think he needed to get away from me for his own sanity. I was eventually committed to an institution, and I didn’t even realize our divorce had gone through until later. But I never blamed Charles. I blamed myself for why our marriage failed. I told him that the day he was here.”
I asked her what Hollister had talked about with her—and if he explained why he had come to see her.
“He talked about a lot of things,” she said slowly. “Almost like he came to me for professional advice. But I can’t discuss much of it. Even though he’s dead now. Patient-doctor confidentially, I guess I’d call it. Even though I wasn’t really his doctor. So maybe just respect for his privacy. But I can tell you a few things. Mostly, I’d say Charles was here searching for answers.”
“Answers about what?”
“His life.”
“Something in his life now? His marriage to Laurie Bateman?”
“His entire life. All the way back to when he was a young man.”
“Give me an example.”
“Well, he talked a lot about Vietnam. That time he spent there seemed to have a dramatic impact on his life. More than I realized when I was married to him. Maybe even more of an impact than he realized back then. But now he said he thought about Vietnam a lot. He seemed to have a lot of regrets about what he did in Vietnam.”
She said that Hollister also seemed to have a lot of regrets about his children. That his son, Charles, had not turned out to be the man he’d hoped for in a son. And that his daughter, Elaine, and he no longer had a relationship.
“He didn’t tell me what happened with him and the two of them. But he seemed sad about it. He always wanted children when we were together, but all my issues kept getting in the way of that. I knew having a family—having children to carry on for him when he got older—was important to him. I’m sorry the way it worked out.”
“Did you ever know Karen Hollister, the mother of the children?”
“No, they met after our divorce. Charles was faithful to me while we were together. At least as far as I know. She died, right?”
“Yes, a few years ago.”
“And then he married Laurie Bateman.”
“Did that surprise you?”
“Nothing surprised me about Charles after everything he accomplished in his life. He was rich, he was powerful, he was famous. So I guess it made sense for him to acquire a trophy wife. Like Laurie Bateman. Just like another one of his oil wells or big companies.”
“Did he talk about Laurie at all when he was here?”
“No, he never mentioned her. I thought that was a bit strange. I assumed that things weren’t going well in their marriage. But he never brought her up at all. Mostly kept talking about us and a lot of other things from the old days. He kept saying he was looking for answers about his past. I was never sure exactly what answers he was looking for. Or why he had come to see me because it had been so long since we were married. But then he said he went back to talk to the woman before me too so …
At first, I didn’t understand what she was talking about.
“What woman?” I asked.
“Janice Novak.”
It hit me then. Janice Novak was the woman I’d read about in the Hollister background file who he’d been married to briefly after he got back from Vietnam. They ran off to Las Vegas to get hitched, then had the marriage annulled the next day. They must have barely known each other. Why did Charles Hollister go back looking for her in those last days of his life?
Susan Daily shook her head sadly.
“I hope Charles found out the answers he was looking for before he died,” she said.
“Me too.”
I didn’t tell her though that I was beginning to suspect one of those answers might have been what got him killed.
CHAPTER 44
JANICE NOVAK LIVED in Atlanta. Her husband was a lawyer and a lobbyist there for the Georgia State Legislature. I found all this out about her pretty quickly after I left Susan Daily’s office, along with an address and a phone number in Georgia.
I called the number and asked Janice Novak if she’d be willing to meet with me to talk about Charles Hollister for the TV report I was doing.
It was a long way to go for a single interview, especially one I didn’t need to do for the Laurie Bateman story. But that’s the thing about being a reporter. You never really know what you need—or don’t need—on a story until you track down all of the information. And I was curious.
So once Janice Novak agreed to talk with me, I booked a flight to Atlanta.
Even after all these years, she was still an attractive woman. Gray hair by now, but striking features and well-proportioned body that looked like she spent a lot of time in the gym to keep it that way. Damn, all of Hollister’s ex-wives looked good. He must have had good taste in picking women, ultimately landing the prize of Laurie Bateman. At least he was lucky as far as the looks were concerned.
“Yes, I was married to Charles,” she said to me as we sat on the patio of her house in Atlanta. “Briefly. Very briefly back in 1975. Less than twenty-four hours later, we had the marriage annulled. We were young then and obviously didn’t think it through very well.”
She took out a picture and showed it to me. It was a wedding picture, taken at a chapel in Las Vegas where’d said her vows with Hollister, she said. She had long, straight dark brown hair then and was wearing a T-shirt that said “Impeach Gerald Ford.” He had on a pair of shorts with no top and was wearing sandals.
“They gave us this picture along with the vows.” She smiled.
“I guess the wedding wasn’t formal, huh?”
“All they cared about was that you gave them the $25 for the ceremony.”
“And what about the annulment afterward?”
“That cost us another $25 to undo the vows.”
“No picture that time, I guess,” I said with a smile.
She smiled back. She seemed like a nice lady. Not the kind of person who would wind up with a man like Charles Hollister, no matter how young she was.
“Had you known Hollister long?” I asked.
“I met him less than twenty-four hours before.”
“Wait a minute … you met him twenty-four hours earlier, you were married to him for only twenty-four hours, and then you went your separate ways? How did that happen?”
She explained how she’d met him at a party in Santa Monica in 1975. She’d been attending school at USC and it was a party thrown by one of the guys in a fraternity there. Hollister had told people that night how he’d just gotten out of the Army after serving in Vietnam and was eager to have fun.
“I was anti-war, and outspoken about the Vietnam War—as you might expect. When he told me he’d just come back from Vietnam and the Army, I called him a ‘baby killer.’ He called me a ‘left-wing peacenik.’ We argued about it for a while and then we jumped into bed together.
“There were a lot of drugs at the party. Drugs were everywhere back then in the seventies. We smoked a lot of weed and took a bunch of pills. Somewhere along the line, we met someone who told us about a guy who lived out in the desert and had amazing grass for sale.
“We got in my car and drove out there to try and find him. We did, and it was great grass, that’s for sure. We got really, really high and we had sex—mind-blowing sex, like I’d never experienced before. I lost count how many times we made love that night. All I remember is that we decided it would be a great idea to get married right then. Crazy, huh? But that’s what we did.
“The next day we came down off our drug high and realized what we’d done. I had big plans for the future, and
so did he. I wanted to go into the Peace Corps and save the world back then. He was talking about a company he planned to start. And so, we annulled the marriage and both of us went our separate ways. Just like two ships passing in the night.”
She told me she hadn’t gotten married for a long time after that, then was with her first real husband for only a few years—until she met the man she was with today. She told me about their children; how they’d just had their first grandchild the year before and were looking forward to more; and about how they planned to travel around the world in a few more years once her husband retired.
She never got around to joining the Peace Corps. Instead, she’d become a schoolteacher. But she still dreamed about saving the world and making it a better place.
“I guess I’ve always been an idealist at heart,” she said. “A romantic, too. That’s why I did what I did that time with Charles Hollister. It seemed … romantic. Look—and this is totally off the record, just between you and me—I love my husband very much, but I’ve never forgotten about that short time I spent with Charles. The passion, the intensity, the feeling that he and I were the only two people in the world at that point. When I was a young woman with the whole world ahead of me …”
She shook her head sadly.
“Maybe that’s why I cared so much when I heard about his death. Even after all this time, I felt bad. Bad for him, of course. But I think I really felt bad for myself. It brought back all those memories. Memories of what might have been—but never was …”
“Were you surprised when you saw how rich and successful he became?”
“Of course, I was. I never thought he would wind up like that. That wasn’t the Charles Hollister I knew. But then I guess I never really knew him at all. We never had the time.”
“Did you ever try to contact him after you got the annulment?”
“No, why would I? I never saw him again until a few weeks ago. When he came to see me here.”
Of course. Just like he’d shown up unexpectedly to see his ex-wife and Laurie Bateman’s mother.
“I couldn’t believe it when I opened my door. Charles Hollister was standing there, after all these years. He never told me exactly why he came to see me. Just said he was getting old. He didn’t know how much longer he had to live, and he wanted to ‘clean the slate’ before he died. That was the expression he used: ‘clean the slate.’ I remember that clearly.”
I asked Novak what they talked about. She said the party where they met, the drug-and sex-filled drive out into the desert, the crazy marriage, and the rest. He seemed sad when he talked about that time, she told me. She said the memories made her sad too.
“We had the whole world in front of us then, Charles and me,” she said when I asked her to explain her feelings. “I was so passionate against things like war and politicians like Nixon and Ford. He kept talking about Vietnam the whole time, which made sense, I guess, because he had been risking his life in that crazy war. We talked so much about Vietnam during that brief period we were together. Vietnam. Now hardly anyone even remembers Vietnam. But it was all we cared about back in those days.”
Vietnam.
Wherever I turned in this story, the Vietnam conversation kept coming up.
There was something bothering me though about what she’d told me.
“You said earlier that all this—you meeting him, the quickie annulment, and the rest—happened in 1975?”
“Yes.”
“Not 1973?”
“No. I was still in high school in 1973. I remember clearly that it was 1975. Nixon had been forced out of office the previous year, and now we had Gerald Ford for another year until the ’76 election. That’s why I was wearing the ‘Impeach Gerald Ford’ T-shirt. I desperately didn’t want to live in this country for another year under Ford, because I knew he had been appointed by Nixon. It definitely had to be ’75. That makes sense, right?”
It did except for one thing.
Hollister had been discharged from the Army following a year in Vietnam in 1973.
Why would he tell Janice Novak in 1975 that he had just gotten back from Vietnam and been discharged from the Army then?
And what was he doing during those two missing years?
CHAPTER 45
“I NEED YOU to do something for me,” I said to Maggie on the phone after I left Janice Novak.
“I’m a little busy right here at the moment, Clare.”
“Doing what?”
“Your job.”
“Oh, right …”
I told her I wanted another crew to meet up with me in Atlanta to film me interviewing Novak. “It’s not directly related to Laurie Bateman, but its fantastic background stuff about Hollister. I think it will fit in well with what I’m doing.”
I then asked Maggie—and this was the most important thing to me right now—to confirm information about Charles Hollister’s military background with the Army during the Vietnam War. Mainly, I said, I wanted to get a specific date for when he left Vietnam.
There was no response from Maggie. I had a feeling she was mad at me, and it wasn’t only that I’d left her with all sorts of extra work to do. It turned out I was right.
“When were you going to tell us, Clare?” she asked.
“Tell you what?’
“That you’re up for a new job in LA.”
Uh-oh.
I’d hoped to keep that a secret until I nailed it down.
I should have known better.
“How did you find out?” I asked her.
“This is a newsroom filled with journalists. We hear gossip. We gossip ourselves a lot. I just never expected the gossip to be about you. You’re supposed to be our leader. And you’re leaving us.”
“Nothing’s definite yet. They haven’t even made me a formal offer yet. At some point soon, I’m going to have to make a difficult decision. When that time comes, and I do that, you’ll be one of the first people I tell, Maggie. I promise you that.”
That seemed to placate her a bit.
“Just for the record,” she said, “and since I have to do all this work for you, what’s so interesting about Charles Hollister’s Vietnam service?”
“The facts I know about it aren’t consistent.”
I told her about my conversation with Janice Novak and her insistence that she met Hollister when he was first coming back from Vietnam in 1975.
“All the U.S. troops—or most of them anyway—were pulled out of Vietnam at the beginning of 1973. Hollister was supposed to be one of them.”
“So you want to know why he would have been coming back from Vietnam two years later in 1975?”
“Yes.”
“But why is that important?”
“Because that’s the same time when Laurie Bateman left Vietnam with her mother and came to the U.S. as a baby.”
I heard a gasp from her on the other end of the line. I definitely had her attention now.
“Jeez, Clare … are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“There never was any connection in Vietnam between Hollister and Laurie Bateman or her family, but now there could be. Laurie was a newborn baby, and Vietnam was about to be overrun by the Communists. I found out that Laurie’s mother was connected to U.S. servicemen—she even slept with them to help get her and her family out of the country during the evacuation. What if one of the men she slept with back then was Charles Hollister?”
“Which means Laurie could have been …”
“Hollister’s own daughter.”
“My God, do you think that’s possible?”
“It’s a theory,” I said.
There were a lot of problems with the theory. It wasn’t even a theory. Just speculation on my part. Pretty far-fetched, of course. I mean why would Charles Hollister marry her if she was his own daughter? Apart from all the obvious answers, the scandal—if ever discovered—could have destroyed him and his businesses in the public eye. And, for that matter, why would Laurie Batem
an marry a man she knew to be her father?
Well, there was a possible answer: What if they—or at least one of them—never knew? And found out just recently. Maybe by Charles Hollister. He’d been looking into his past for some reason, trying to make sense of his life—as he told his ex-wives. What if one of the secrets he discovered was that he had fathered a daughter in Vietnam? And that daughter was now his wife? That could have triggered a lot of repercussions if it turned out to be true. Maybe even murder.
But this was all speculation.
Unsubstantiated speculation.
And pointless speculation, as it turned out.
Because the facts Maggie came up with didn’t support it at all.
I found that out when she called with what she knew about Charles Hollister and Vietnam.
“Everything in the military record conforms with the original story about him. He arrived in Vietnam in April of 1972, was stationed in Saigon for nearly a year, working as an intelligence analyst at MACV headquarters. He was discharged from the Army at Fort Lewis, Washington, in early 1973 following the pullout of U.S. combat troops from South Vietnam. That’s it. End of story.”
So where did that leave me?
All I had was this woman’s story—her insistence, for whatever it was worth—that Hollister had told her he’d just returned from Vietnam and gotten out of the Army in 1975.
Maybe she got mixed up with the dates and the year after all this time.
“There is one more thing, Clare.”
“What?”
“I did check the Nevada Bureau of Statistics. They keep marriage records that go back a long time. It took a bit of digging, but I finally talked to someone who looked up Charles Hollister and Janice Novak. Found out they did get married—and then had the marriage annulled. All within a twenty-four-hour period. Same as she told you. And guess what year that happened in.”
“1975?” I asked.
“1975,” she repeated. “There’s something else. I did a background check to see what else I could find out about Hollister at that time. I found the Army drafted him in 1972, discharged from the military in 1973, the marriage in 1975, and his first efforts to launch his business career by incorporating a computer company here in New York after that in 1976. All that activity is pretty well chronicled in official records. So we know a lot about what he was doing back then. Except I can’t find anything from his Army discharge in ’73 until he pops up marrying the Novak woman in ’75. There’s two missing years there, Clare. It’s as if Hollister just disappeared off the face of the earth from 1973 to 1975.”