Totally Killer

by Greg Olear

  At that moment, I doubted my own sanity. I became lightheaded, like I was in a nightmare, but there was no waking up.

  “Well, they obviously gave her bad information, a wrong name.” I fell to my knees, clasping my hands together as if in prayer. “I’m just a pawn, Elliott. Can’t you see? I’m a pawn in the chess game.”

  “Take the plea, Todd. I’m begging you.”

  “What about her job? Somebody at Braithwaite Ross has to know something. One of the senior editors died recently. Walter Bledsoe. And Taylor was convinced that Nathan Ross knew all about it, that he commissioned Bledsoe’s hit.”

  Gross didn’t say anything at first. He waited for me to calm down and sit back down. Then he said, in a softer tone of voice, “None of it checks out. Walter Bledsoe did die recently—his obit was in the Times, actually—but he was seventy-one and in poor health. Variety of heart problems. Taylor was never a full editor, as you suggest. She was Angela Del Giudice’s editorial assistant, making sixteen-five a year, according to her pay stubs. Also, Del Giudice is just an editor, not the editorial director. That job is held by someone named Lou Dravillas. Nathan Ross is the publisher; that’s the only thing you got right. When I questioned him about Quid Pro Quo—yes, I really did go there and speak with him—he laughed and said it sounded like the plot of one of his books.”

  “Well of course he’d deny it.”

  “Take the plea,” he said. “I implore you. I beseech you. I beg you. Take the plea.”

  Each statement Gross rattled off in his calm, hypnotic voice was a nail in my coffin. I was walled up, shut in, a claustrophobe suffocating. I was down to my last breath. There was but one straw left to grasp at—the only person besides me who Taylor confided in.

  “Kim Winter,” I said. “Were you able to get in touch with Kim Winter?”

  “Yes. Yes, we were.” Gross offered me a cigarette. For some reason—maybe because it was a Vantage Light, the same brand my father smoked—I took it. He lit it for me, then fired up one of his own. “Occupational hazard. I can’t seem to quit these things. But everyone has vices, right?”

  “What did she say, Elliott?”

  He took a long drag, then let it out slowly. The smoke punctuated a mournful sigh. “Kim Winter was an exotic dancer at a strip club called Sugar Walls.”

  “So what? Strippers aren’t reliable witnesses?”

  “She was a stripper. We located her in a Dade County correctional facility.”

  “Prostitution?”

  “Extortion. She tried to blackmail the owner of the club. But that’s moot, because she refused to testify on your behalf. Even when I offered to cut her sentence down. She said, ‘Whoever killed Taylor belongs in jail.’ She was adamant.”

  We sat there for three or four minutes, smoking, listening to the lights buzzing overhead. Down the hall, someone was screaming. It was as quiet as jail gets.

  His cigarette was smoked to the filter. He smashed it out in the plastic ashtray. The overt symbolism of this gesture made my heart sink.

  “Take the plea, Todd.”

  I took the plea.

  I was sentenced to nineteen years, but I was told not to fixate on that number.

  “In three years, you’re up for parole,” Elliott Gross assured me. “Just keep to yourself and you’ll be fine.”

  Up the river I went, to the Downstate Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near Poughkeepsie, figuring that in about a thousand days, I’d be a free man. Unfortunately, Gross’s promises of clemency proved optimistic. Parole boards don’t like it when pretty, young white girls have their pretty, young white faces blown off. Good behavior and all, my application was denied in 1995, in 1998, in 2001, and again in 2006.

  By then, I had lost most of my illusions. I traded them in for a poorly rendered tribal tattoo around my left bicep.

  You’ll be curious about my time doing time—I know I would be, if I were in the comfy slippers that are Your Shoes—but my experiences at Downstate constitute a memoir of their own, and will not, for considerations of space, be dealt with here. I will say that the popular perception of prison is, thankfully, overblown. Oz is bullshit. The tedium, the loneliness, the stir-craziness were worse than any unpleasantness visited upon me by the other inmates. Mostly I was left alone; I was there for murder, after all, which has a certain cachet—a street cred, if you will—inside. Which was just as well. Pretty much everyone there had the IQ of a pastrami sandwich; prison, for me, was a Sartre play.

  For the first year, that is. Until I met Walter Maddox.

  Other inmates found Jesus in jail, or Allah. Me, I found Maddox. The guy was a revelation.

  Maddox showed up in late February of 1993, a few weeks after my father died. He was a scrawny guy, his face grizzled and lined, like a carving of a cigar-store Indian, with a ridiculous walrus moustache that only a relief pitcher could pull off. Nevertheless, no one fucked with him. People seemed to be afraid of him, probably because he was something of a wing nut. Maddox was down with alternative history, the unvarnished truth of past events that is derisively called conspiracy theory. He’d be forever making some or other outrageous claim: the Sphinx was more than ten thousand years old, older than human civilization by far, and was the work of a master alien race that still ruled the earth. The proximity of the Roswell UFO crash (July 1947) to the formation of the CIA (September 1947) was not a coincidence. FDR knew all about Pearl Harbor, and LBJ, the Gulf of Tonkin.

  We both worked at the prison library, so we’d spend a lot of time together, and Maddox never seemed to run out of off-the-wall pronouncements: L. Ron Hubbard was a CIA operative. The Church of Scientology was established to secretly test people’s innate facilities for remote viewing. Tom Cruise was the greatest living remote viewer. The Mormons were collecting genealogical data for the purposes of a neo-eugenics movement, in which ethnic cleansing would rule the day. Darwin’s theory of evolution was horseshit. The Federal Reserve Bank was owned by the Rockefellers and other private moneyed interests. Every cent of income taxes collected in the country went to finance those interests. Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy were assassinated because, and only because, they tried to liberate the U.S. economy from the iron fist of central banks. Booth and Oswald were patsies. And on and on and on.

  “None of this is secret,” Maddox would insist, after every wild proclamation. “The truth is out there. Anybody can find it—all you have to do is shut off the fucking television and seek it out.”

  At first, I treated his outlandish comments with the skepticism conventional wisdom demanded. I assumed he had a few screws loose; it was a Poughkeepsie jail, after all, not Vassar. I only listened to him because, kook though he was, he was also interesting and smart, and he seemed to gravitate toward me. I never thought to ask how he had acquired his secret knowledge—probably because I never took him seriously. (So total is the establishment’s control of historical narrative, so relentless is its suppression of the truth, that even a victim of conspiracy like me didn’t see the light.) Maddox was a diversion, my own personal TV show, and that’s all. He was the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and A&E, all rolled into one commercial-free superstation. As long as he kept on entertaining me, making the time go faster, I didn’t think to ask why he never talked about his personal life, or where he grew up, or how old he was, even.

  So it went on, as the months turned to years, until one day, in March of 1995, he told me something that completely changed my perception of him. My Road to Damascus was the sidewalk to the basketball courts.

  We were in the yard, watching a group of heavily tattooed inmates play hoop. Maddox looked agitated, which was unusual. He generally had this serene persona, like a hero in a kung fu movie. Being in jail didn’t seem to bother him in the least. Not that day. That day, you could tell, there was something gnawing at him.

  “Do you know anybody who lives in Tokyo, Todd?”

  This was out of left field, but so was most of what came out of his mouth.
“No. Why?”

  “Chatter,” Maddox said. “Big chatter. There’s gonna be an attack on the mass transit system tomorrow. Poison gas. Lots of collateral damage.”

  I didn’t believe this, of course, but I let him talk. It was that or play basketball, and while I was tall, I sucked at hoop.

  “It’s a coup,” Maddox continued. “Japan is a prelim, an opening act. If it succeeds there, they’ll open in New York.”

  “They?”

  “The New World Order. Although they’ll blame it on Islamic terrorists. No one will know the truth.”

  “What if it fails?”

  “They’ll find some two-bit doomsday cult to play patsy.” He grabbed hold of the chain-link fence with both hands and shook it. “Something has to rattle the cage, bring back the thirst for blood. The sheep are complacent.”

  “So,” I quipped, “when did they change your medication?”

  Judging by the glower, he didn’t find my remark the least bit funny. “If you know anybody who lives in Tokyo, have them call in sick tomorrow.”

  “Whatever you say, Nostradamus.”

  “Fuck you, Lander.” Maddox balled his hands into fists. His face went red. It was the first time I’d seen him get angry—and everybody gets angry in prison. Immediately I felt like a big jerk.

  “Sorry,” I said. “That was out of line. But seriously, how do you know that? And don’t say you read it in some book.”

  There was a long silence. We watched one of the inmates, a six-seven guy called Ron-Ron, burst free of his defender and dunk. The netless rim rattled relentlessly.

  “Did you ever wonder,” Maddox asked, “why they offered you a plea bargain?”

  During the previous two years, I’d told him my entire story a thousand times, just as I’ve laid it out in these pages, sparing no detail. That’s what you do in prison, other than smoke (I took up Taylor’s old habit and Taylor’s old brand) and read dirty magazines—you discuss your crime. While he always listened with patient interest, he’d never offered any insight, until now. I sprang to attention.

  “Trials,” I said, “cost a lot of money.”

  Maddox ran his fingers through his moustache and nodded. If not for the orange jumpsuit, he would have looked professorial. “Trials also bring a lot of publicity. Especially a high-profile case like yours. No, I think they offered a plea because they didn’t want your case to see the light of day. I think they wanted you—they needed you—to admit your guilt. I think if you took the stand, and swore, under oath, that Quid Pro Quo was true…”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “The assistant DA said he could prove my story was bullshit.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That you’re the fall guy,” Maddox said. “That you’re Jack Ruby without the tittie bar or the dogs.”

  I knew that I had been set up, but the extent of the collusion had not occurred to me. If I was thinking about anything at that time, it was about Taylor, not about Quid Pro Quo. “How do you figure?”

  “Let me count the ways,” Maddox said. “Where to begin? Okay: You mentioned that Asher had a file marked Russell Trust Association. Russell Trust is the legal name of the Skull and Bones Society. You know, at Yale. President Bush is a Bonesman. So are a number of other prominent people.”

  “Asher Krug,” I said. “And Nathan Ross.”

  “Exactly. The Little Check hit happened at the Yale Club, so there’s obviously a Yale/Skull and Bones connection to Quid Pro Quo.”

  “But Lydia Murtomaki went to Georgetown.”

  “To the School of Foreign Service. She graduated in ’68, you said, if I remember correctly. You know who else graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1968?”

  I did not have at my disposal an alumni database of a school I did not attend.

  “William Jefferson Clinton,” Maddox said. “Slick Willie himself. Clinton was mentored there by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who was actually a DIA operative and a Grover.”

  I was starting to get lost. “A Grover? As opposed to an Oscar the Grouch, you mean?”

  Maddox ignored my joke (and rightly so). “You also alluded to a statue of an owl in the lobby,” he said. “There’s a similar statue at the Bohemian Grove.”

  “The what?”

  “Oh, for fuck sake. Don’t you know anything?”

  The Bohemian Grove, he explained, was a redoubt in the hills of northern California, where the real powers that be met each year to drink, carouse, and establish world policy. Membership included politicians, CEOs, and éminences grises of every stripe with sufficient dough and influence.

  “So, we’re talking about a covert operation,” Maddox said, counting on his fingers as he spoke, “with ties to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Skull and Bones Society, the Grovers, the Carlyle Group, Dick Cheney, Lee Atwater, Osama Bin Laden…”

  “Wait…who?”

  I had asked simply to clarify—even after the first WTC bombing, no one knew Bin Laden from Ben Hogan—but Maddox took my question as a challenge.

  “Your friend met a really tall Arab there, right? Bin Laden is almost seven feet tall. That must have been him.”

  There aren’t many well-heeled Arabs as how’s-the-weather-up-there as Ron-Ron, I had to admit.

  “Bin Laden,” Maddox continued, again counting off, “Mossad…”

  I didn’t know at the time that Mossad was Israel’s state intelligence department, but I played along. “Really? Mossad?”

  “What kind of a name is Krug, anyway?” Maddox asked.

  I wasn’t sure he wanted an answer, but I gave him one. “German.”

  “Bullshit. Asher’s one of the Twelve Tribes. You don’t name someone Asher unless you’re Jewish. Dollars to doughnuts he’s Israeli. His parents were probably kibbutzniks. Settled there with Ben-Gurion in ’48.”

  (Years later, I would locate Asher’s birth chart, from Taylor’s visit with the astrologer. Its precise natal information would confirm Maddox’s suspicion. Unless he had lied to Taylor, which was possible, Asher was born in Tel Aviv.)

  “So he’s Jewish,” I said. “So what?”

  I was half-expecting him to claim that a clandestine cabal of Jews, spearheaded by the Rothschilds, ran the world, and that the Holocaust was a hoax intended to hush up the truth—in which case I’d write him off as a raving lunatic. My tolerance for crack-pottery only ran so far. But Maddox didn’t go there.

  “His nationality is relevant only because it establishes a Mossad connection,” he said. “Or should I say, another Mossad connection. Robert Maxwell was a kidon operation, everyone knows that. And your friend Taylor did the job, so…”

  Only then did I put Asher’s Canary Islands jaunt and Maxwell’s mysterious death together. The wool over my eyes was thick and clingy.

  On November 5, 1991, Robert Maxwell, the British publishing magnate, fell to his death from the deck of his yacht. Said yacht was sailing around the Canary Islands at the time. For three days, CNN—the 24–7 cable news network that had made its name in ’91 during the (first) Gulf War; Fox wasn’t even a full-fledged network yet, let alone the Republican propaganda machine it would become—covered the story with a ferocity usually reserved for prepubescent Cuban refugees, even though most Americans had never heard of Robert Maxwell.

  I had heard of him, as had Jason Hanson. Maxwell’s media holdings included, among other things, the Mirror newspaper group, and, by extension, API, my shady former place of employ. At the time, of course, Maxwell’s death was presumed accidental by Bernard Shaw and Company. But was it? Maxwell matched the description of Little Check—his eyebrows were black caterpillars. Asher was in the Canary Islands that weekend. Could they have whisked him to New York from his yacht—as he himself suggested—killed him, and whisked him right back? A logistical headache, to be sure, but hardly impossible.

  According to Maddox, Maxwell was a Mossad o
perative gone bad. His death was not accidental—he’d been injected with a lethal nerve agent and dumped overboard. Successive autopsies proved only that Maxwell hadn’t drowned—but the case is no longer under investigation. Buried in state in Jerusalem, in accordance with Jewish custom, his body (unlike that of our Zachary Taylor, which was dug up in 1991 to determine if Old Rough ’n’ Ready had been poisoned or died of bad gas, as was originally thought) can never be exhumed. Officially, his death remains, as of this writing, a mystery.

  But Maddox knew better. Robert Maxwell was born Jan Hoch in what was, in 1923, Czechoslovakia. Jan Hoch, please note; the same first name as Taylor’s pink slip. According to Maddox, Maxwell’s Mossad code name, a nod to his tall physical stature (who says spies don’t have a sense of humor?) and the land of his birth, was—mirabile dictu—Little Czech. Obviously Taylor had never seen it written and spelled it in her diary phonetically.

  “There’s still some things I’m not clear on,” I said, after all of this had sunk in.

  “That’s an understatement,” Maddox said with a grin. “Shoot.”

  “Why would anyone pay money to kill Donna Green? She was the head of the photo library; they couldn’t just lay her off or something?”

  “She was black, and she was in her forties—that’s two protected classes under Title VII right there. She’d been at the job for years, and her performance, while lackluster, was not abysmal. You know how hard it is to fire someone like that? If you don’t think management wouldn’t consider killing employees they couldn’t otherwise get rid of, then you obviously haven’t worked in human resources.” Maddox ran his fingers through his moustache. “You still look confused.”

  “Why would Averell Ross hire Quid Pro Quo?” I asked. “I mean, he’s a baby boomer, right? If the idea is out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new, wouldn’t it make more sense for a middle manager—someone like Angela Del Giudice—to contract the pink slip?”

  “You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said.” Maddox shook his head, his disapproval palpable. “The people who actually run this country, who control the media, who control the school system, who control the fucking House of Representatives—those are not people that get taken out. Those are the people who take out everyone else, dig? The people who have a seat on the shuttle when the planet blows up. Averell Ross is one of those people. Same with the honchos at the Mirror Group. Setting aside the fact that she couldn’t afford it and would have no way of knowing about it, if Angela Del Giudice went to Quid Pro Quo and asked Lydia Murtomaki to pink-slip Averell Ross, man, she wouldn’t leave the building alive. Killing your boss is the American dream, Todd, but that’s all that it is—a dream.”