The Hanging

Chapter 20

“Maggie, honey?”

I knew the voice on the telephone, Zev Prosky, Eunice Stillwell’s public defender.

“What’s up, Zev? Did your prize client suddenly become lucid?”

“Not in this lifetime,” he said. “And not in the next. No, honey, I’m just giving you a heads-up about a phone call I had this noon. A kid called, said he was from the college paper and wanted to write a feature story about Ronald Miller-your little buddy, Sly. He said Sly got some sort of award and there will be a big ceremony.”

“What did he want from you?” I did not like what I was thinking.

“He wanted the scoop on Eunice. I invoked attorney-client privilege and told him to take a hike, but what I’m wondering about is how he made the connection between Ronald Miller and Eunice Stillwell. You can find all sorts of information out there on the Internet nowadays, and there is plenty about Eunice’s trial, but there is no reference to Sly in any of the court filings. I kept his name out intentionally. The boy went through enough in his life, he doesn’t need an albatross like Eunice hanging around his neck, not when he was a little guy and not now when he’s doing so well.”

“Did the caller give you his name?”

“No, that’s the thing. I hit Redial, but the phone number went back to the Anacapa College switchboard.”

“Could have been anybody with access to a campus phone.” I thanked him, called the campus switchboard and asked to be put through to the newspaper advisor; I had never met the man. After identifying myself, I asked him if anyone was assigned to write a story about Sly. The answer I got didn’t make me happy. I walked over to the student gallery, hunting my quarry.

Sly was still wearing his new suit, looking sharp and enjoying the moment, explaining the sculpture to Uncle Max. Because classes had been canceled for the day in honor of Holloway’s memorial, Sly’s work crew was taking a day off from work, too, but several of them were there, just hanging out with Sly. As soon as Lew was ready to lock up the gallery, they were all going out for burgers, Max included, and probably picking up the check. As hungry as I was, I declined the invitation to join them. There was someone in the room I needed to speak with.

Preston Nguyen, who went to the gallery every day to shoot footage of the progress on the sculpture’s assembly, was hovering around the edges of the conversation when I walked in. His eyes lit up when he saw me, his new boss, and he walked over to meet me as soon as I entered the room.

“Hey, Miss M,” he said. “When do we start?”

“Would you step outside with me for just a minute, Preston?”

We walked through the patio toward the quad.

“I’d forgotten you’re taking journalism,” I said.

Happy, proud of himself, full of himself, he said, “I’m writing features this semester for the newspaper.”

“So I hear.” We stopped outside my door. “Doing some deep background research?”

“Yeah, the article is going to be amazing, blow the lid off this place when people see it.”

“Blow the lid off this place, or destroy a person?”

His smile fell. Defensive now, he said, “I’m writing an exposé.”

“Exposé? So, is it a corrupt person you’re exposing, or a corrupt situation?”

“Corrupt? No. I mean, not corrupt. But it’s interesting.”

“Juicy. Lurid.”

“Absolutely. This could be my tornado, Miss M.”

“You need to tread carefully, my friend. Journalists report on tornadoes, they don’t create them.”

He furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand.”

“Zev Prosky called me a few minutes ago.”

His eyes grew wide.

“He told me you were asking about a client of his.”

“How did he know it was me?” he asked, visibly shaken.

“Ethical journalists leave their names and their affiliations. Was there a particular reason you didn’t identify yourself?”

“No. I don’t know. But how did he know it was me?”

“I don’t know if Mr. Prosky is any smarter than you are, Preston. But he has a hell of a lot more experience than you do. It took him one phone call.”

“But why did he call you?”

“He thought you might have malicious intentions,” I said, watching him grow more upset.

“Preston, how did you even find Sly’s mother’s name?”

“It’s on his birth certificate.”

“Dear God.” I had to look away from him. “I don’t want to know what possessed you to look for his birth certificate.”

“You know, I mean, it was interesting. Lew was talking the other day about the guy who lost the competition to Sly, saying this other guy wouldn’t even have been a contender if his mother didn’t have this big art gallery. And Sly said something about not having a mother. I thought that was interesting.”

“So, you found out who she is, and where she is?”

He held up his hands. “It is interesting.”

“What else did you find interesting?”

“The guy who lost out. I went and asked him how he felt about losing.”

“You talked to Frank Weidermeyer?”

“Sure.”

“How did you locate him?”

“He hangs out at this coffeehouse in Ventura. A lot of the art crowd hangs there. I know this girl who knows him-he used to go here-and she took me up there to meet him.”

“There aren’t very many people who know that Sly’s mother is incarcerated for murder. Did you happen to mention that to Frank Weidermeyer?”

“I might have.”

I cocked my head, looked at him, tried to read something there. Youth, yes. But guile? Hard to say.

After an uncomfortable moment he amended his answer: “I mean, yes.”

“Did you see the graffiti on the gallery doors yesterday?”

He nodded, he had.

“Did you know that someone, maybe the guy with the paint can, shot me yesterday?”

Defensive, he said, “But it was only a pellet gun.”

“Only…?” I didn’t quite know what to say for a moment; how many people knew it was a pellet gun? I wanted to pop him across the side of his head to see if it rattled.

“Miss M?”

I took a breath and waited for him to get wherever he was headed.

“This isn’t going to, you know…”

“You might be too busy for a while to accept that internship,” I said, answering the question I thought he could not bring himself to ask.

“Busy doing what?”

“Studying the libel laws. You should focus on the language about malicious intent. While you’re at it, you might take a look at conspiracy to commit a felony.”

The kid looked horrified.

I said, “The police chief found the cap to the spray paint can. Great set of fingerprints; those cans are tough to open. If those aren’t your prints-”

“They aren’t, they aren’t.” His voice squeaked. “I promise you, they aren’t.”

“I was going to say, don’t count on the owner of those prints not to talk about who fed him information and who stood watch for him while he defaced public property. This community does not tolerate vandalism.”

“But I didn’t do-”

“I think that what you should be worried about, then, is what you knew. And when you knew it.”

I walked away and left him. I was so angry, it was the only safe thing for me to do. When I strode off I had no plan about going anywhere in particular, I was just getting away from that kid’s well-earned meltdown. Muscle memory took over, I guess; when I looked up I found myself outside my classroom, and found Trey Holloway standing beside the door, apparently waiting for me. When he saw me, he walked to meet me, but hesitated, deterred no doubt by the fierceness of my expression.

I could see Trey’s resemblance to his father, the even features, the deep brown eyes. But the son was better-looking, more approachable than the father. More like his mother.

“Ma’am?” Tentatively, Trey offered his hand. “I was told I might find you here.”

“Hello, Trey,” I said, offering my hand in response.

“I wanted to apologize to you,” he said. “On two accounts. I’m sorry about the way my brother spoke to you the other day. In the best of circumstances he’s a loose cannon, but since Dad passed away, he’s been out of control.”

“I am sorry for your loss,” I said, unlocking the studio door and holding it for him to enter. “I hope your brother is all right.”

His smile was full of heartache. He said, “With Harlan, all right is a relative description. We got him back on his medication Monday night. Takes a while for the drugs to kick in, but we hope he’ll be calm enough by Saturday to come to Dad’s funeral in Gilstrap.”

I wondered who won the coin toss for the privilege of holding the service, the Methodist church of Park Holloway’s family or the Lutheran church his children attended. Something suddenly struck Trey as funny-his face brightened with a wide grin and he seemed to struggle against laughing aloud. He managed to maintain his composure, but he was still smiling when his focus came back to me.

“What?” I said.

“My dad was a major klutz. No athletic ability whatsoever. So he gets a two-funeral send off, and both of them are held in gyms.”

“The gym was the only indoor space on this campus that was big enough,” I said.

“Same with Gilstrap. No matter how folks might have felt about Dad, no one in town will miss his funeral,” he said. “We’re holding it in the high school gym.”

Sudden tears came to his eyes and the smile faded; grief pushes all emotions to the surface and leaves you helpless to their whims.

Giving himself time to recover control, he slipped off his suit coat, folded it over his arm, and loosened his tie. He said, “I don’t know how my dad wore this rig every day of his life.”

We went into the classroom and took seats at student work stations.

“My mom told me you’re making a film about Dad,” he said, draping his jacket over the back of his chair. “Were you planning to come up for the services?”

“No. After Monday, I think I would just be a distraction if I did.”

“I thought you might want to film it. I saw your cameras at the service this noon.”

“We’re getting the news feed from your local network affiliate station. I don’t need to put myself in the frame.”

He was clearly not disappointed that I wouldn’t be there.

“Trey, because of something that happened on Monday after that dust-up with your brother in the Gazetteer office, I think I need to know just how loose a cannon Harlan is.”

He looked sheepish all of a sudden.

“That’s the second thing I wanted to apologize for.” He took a long breath and let it out. “The guy who followed you to the airport? That was my doing. My brother was still really agitated when I took him home from Marsh’s office. I never know what Harlan might work himself up to do. Just to be careful, I asked a friend of mine-”

“Orel Swensen?”

He nodded. “You drove right past the Swensen dairy farm to get on the freeway. I called Orel, told him what you were driving-I saw your rental car parked by the diner-and asked him to watch for you and make sure you got safely to the airport. I’m sorry he scared you. He told me that he might have followed too close. When the sheriff called-”

“I bet it was Orel’s turn to be scared,” I said.

He laughed softly. “Orel’s a good guy, but he and the sheriff have had a few run-ins. I called and explained and the sheriff understood. He’s had more than a few run-ins with my brother.”

“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “I do have an active imagination.”

“Where Harlan is concerned, my imagination comes from experience.”

He took an envelope from his jacket pocket and offered it to me. “Marsh Bensen dropped this by last night, asked me to give it to you today. It’s a proof for the front page of this morning’s Gazetteer. He’s awfully proud of it.”

I took a single sheet of paper out of the envelope and unfolded it. The big color photo above the fold of a deeply shadowed, spooky stairwell was too dark an exposure for my film’s purposes, but it made a wonderfully evocative lead for a story about murder; it did not take much to imagine a corpse hanging there. The caption in bold was: THE SCENE OF THE CRIME. And below it, “The body of the Hon. Park Holloway was found on Friday hanging from the ceiling above this stairwell.” The article that followed was well written and succinct, impressive.

“I’ll call Marsh later,” I said, folding the page again and putting it back into the envelope. “Thank you for this.”

I found him studying me. I held up the envelope and asked him, “Are you okay with Marsh’s story?”

“I am. We are. Marsh brought it over and showed it to us last night so that we would be prepared when the paper came out this morning. When the initial shock of seeing that picture wore off, I thought Marsh did a good job. We knew that Dad’s death would be on his front page this week-I gave Marsh a statement for the article-but that picture was a surprise.”

“He told you where he got it?”

Trey smiled. “He didn’t really need to, you know. Everyone in town except Mom and me saw you on TV last night and knows you talked to Marsh when you were in town Monday. The picture didn’t come from TV, so where else would he get it?”

“How did your brother take it?”

He smiled gamely, raised a shoulder. “There was a lot of language.”

The door opened and Guido came in trailing his crew, two longtime friends and colleagues, cameraman Paul Savoie and soundman Craig Hendricks; a second cameraman I had never met before, and a general purpose technician, along with Guido’s new intern, a very attractive young woman who carried a clipboard as if it were a fashion accessory.

“We’re all packed up,” Guido announced. “Ready to head back to the barn, unless there’s something else.”

“You had lunch?” I asked.

“We did.”

“Guido, I want you to meet Trey Holloway.”

The name piqued Guido’s interest. He shook Trey’s hand.

“Has Maggie talked you into speaking with her on camera?”

“I was just getting to that,” I said.

Guido and I exchanged glances. He nodded toward his crew and tapped his watch. I asked him, “When can we go up to Gilstrap?”

“Sunday, Monday,” he said. “We can pick up a crew at the local affiliate.”

I asked Trey, “Can you be available to talk with me on Sunday or Monday?”

Like most people, Trey’s first reaction to the prospect of showing up on camera was to do a little personal inventory: hair, clothes, general appearance. Later, people worry about saying the wrong thing and sounding foolish.

“You’ll look great,” I said. “And you won’t need to wear a suit.”

“That’s good.” He tugged at his tie. “You won’t often catch me in a suit except at weddings and funerals. Just promise that if I put my foot in my mouth too badly or start to bawl that you’ll edit it out.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

We set up a time on Sunday afternoon and a place, the high school baseball diamond, and said good-bye to Guido and his crew.

“I should go, too,” Trey said. “I have a plane to catch.”

I asked him where he was parked, and said I would walk with him so we could talk over some of the topics I wanted to discuss with him on Sunday. He didn’t quail at any area I ventured into. Like his mother, he seemed eager to talk.

“When I first heard you were making a film about my dad,” he said as we started across campus, “it bothered me to think about a stranger rooting around in our family attic, as it were. My mother and I had a conversation about it after you interviewed her. She really wants the film done, and she wants our side to be told.”

“Your side as opposed to whose?”

“The official version of the Family Holloway,” he said. “My mother believes it’s time to stop protecting Dad, because protecting his damn image never did us anything but harm. And maybe it was his lies that got him killed.”

“Lies about what?” I asked.

“Who Dad was. Who we were. We lived the life Parker Holloway, Junior wanted people to believe we led. And we covered for him. As Mom said, we still cover for him.”

When we came abreast of the administration building he quickly averted his eyes as if he could not look at the place where his father died. Instead, he kept his focus on the sidewalk ahead of us.

“After work on Monday I went by the house to check on Harlan,” he said. “My mom was crying. I thought it was because my brother was having a snit about taking his meds, but that wasn’t it. She told me that she was furious with herself for not telling you the truth, that she was still protecting my father, reading from the old script.”

“In what way?”

“For one thing,” he said, “Mom told you the old lie about the reason she brought my brother and me back to Gilstrap when my father was in Congress.”

“She told me that Gilstrap was a better place to raise kids than Washington.”

“No offense to Gilstrap, but she loved D.C. One of the reasons she married Dad in the first place was because she knew he would get her out of Gilstrap.”

“Why did you leave, then?”

“Dad sent us away. Buried us to save his public façade.”

“Would you explain that?”

“My little brother was always a handful, just a really hyper kind of kid. Not a bad kid, but not the sort of boy Dad thought his son should be. Harlan won’t mind me telling you this: he got kicked out of middle school for smoking dope-kid stuff. From there, his drug use escalated. When he was fourteen he was picked up in a narco raid.

“Dad had political ambitions beyond Congress and having a kid with a drug problem would get in his way. He kept saying that Jeb Bush would have been a presidential contender if he been able to manage his kids better, if that gives you an idea where Dad thought he was headed.

“There’s too much press in D.C. so it’s impossible to cover up the messes congressional kids get into. Dad knew that the people of Gilstrap would protect their own. So we got sent down from the majors.”

“And your mother assumed responsibility for that decision.”

“Dad gave her a script and she stuck to it,” he said with a grim smile. “Dad’s constituents don’t think much of Washington, so when Mom said she preferred to raise her boys in the bosom of the community she grew up in, people ate it up; my brother and I were already teenagers, nearly grown already. Dad talked about the hardship of being separated from his family, but that was pure Park Holloway bullshit.”

“You don’t think he missed you?”

“I know he didn’t. And to tell you the truth, though I loved him because he was my father, we were better off without him around. Less stress.”

“Then he suddenly dropped out of politics altogether,” I said. “Do you have any idea why?”

Trey thought about the question for a moment.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “But something happened. That year that he resigned, he had come home from Washington in the spring to gear up for fall elections. He’d always loved campaigning, but it was like something or someone had popped his balloon, you know. All the joy was gone. He could hardly get himself out of bed in the morning. Walked out on a big town hall meeting once, said he didn’t feel well, but he wasn’t sick.”

“Any idea what was on his mind?”

“I know he’d had a falling out with his old friend Hiram Chin. Dr. Chin always came and helped Dad with campaign strategy and fund-raising in California, but that year he didn’t.”

“What was the issue?”

“I was certainly not included in that information loop. But whatever it was, it knocked the foundations out from under my father.”

“Your father and Hiram Chin did become friends again.”

“After the accident,” he said. He needed no prompting to explain about the accident.

“That spring we’re talking about, Dad and my brother took a drive up toward Yosemite,” he said. “Harlan was just a couple of weeks out of rehab but he had already relapsed. He should have gone right back in, but the insurance only covered him for twenty-eight days in any two-month period, so he had to wait for his eligibility to kick back in. I’m sure Dad thought that some fresh air and a good talking-to would set Harlan straight. Mom was just happy to see Dad taking the initiative about something-anything-again, and getting out of the house.”

His hands balled into fists. “The car went off a mountain road and down a ravine.”

“Were they injured?”

“Dad had a seat belt on and came away with a broken collarbone and cuts and bruises. But Harlan, who never buckled up, was thrown clear. He broke both legs and had some head trauma. He doesn’t remember any of it. He was in a coma for a while, and when he woke up, he didn’t even know his name.”

“Why did the car leave the road?”

“Dad told the Highway Patrol that Harlan was driving and he probably fell asleep; he tested positive for pot. It’s a miracle that they survived. If a Forestry Service rescue crew hadn’t noticed the broken safety rail on the road right after they went over and gone looking, they might not have been found in that ravine until the next brush fire. You couldn’t see the car from the road.”

“Could Harlan have driven off the road intentionally?”

My question took him aback for a moment.

“I told you we always covered for Dad,” he said. “The truth is, Dad was driving that day, not Harlan. Mom knew right away that he had lied to the rescue team and the Highway Patrol; he would never let Harlan drive him anywhere, much less a mountain road. Yes, it was intentional, but Dad did it. When Mom confronted him, he said he wanted to take both of them out of the picture, release her and me from our burden.”

“But he wore his seat belt…”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

Hiram Chin’s question at the Malibu reception had new meaning for me. He wondered if his old friend had tried-a second time-to take his life.

“In typical Dad fashion, it was his fault but he came out pretty much unscathed; Harlan was in the hospital for a month. He still walks with a limp and has seizures, and of course, he came out of the hospital addicted to painkillers. He’s now legally disabled, a dependent.”

“Caring for him must be difficult for you and your mother.”

He smiled gently as he shook his head. “Every now and then the old Harlan manages to show through. He was always a funny kid, a great jokester. In some ways, he was the uninhibited kid I wished I could be. No, we’re okay. Except…”

I waited for him to decide whether he wanted to finish the statement. After a moment he looked up with a sad smile on his face.

“Except for health insurance. As soon as Harlan exceeded his lifetime limit on the policy my parents took out for him when he aged off Dad’s congressional coverage, he was shown the door by the insurance company, and no other insurer would touch him. Dad has been covering my brother’s medical costs since then. Now I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”

I let the last echo of those words fade before I asked, “Hiram Chin and your father reconciled after the accident?”

“Yeah.” He seemed to shake himself. “Dad got some consulting work through Dr. Chin. Traveled quite a bit, spent some time in Asia advising on someone’s art collection, a passion of his.”

“How did he come to work at Anacapa College?”

“Dr. Chin again. He recommended Dad to someone he knew on the executive search committee here.”

“With your father’s experience and credentials, I would expect him to aim at a major university.”

“Maybe this place suited him. I don’t think he wanted to work all that hard.” He held up his hands. “I doubt he’d work anywhere, frankly, except that, as my dad’s legally disabled dependant, Harlan was covered by the college’s group health plan. Until Dad died.”

I asked him if he knew Francis Weidermeyer, and he said he did, an acquaintance of his father. The two families had taken a trip together to China, Japan, and other parts of Asia when he was a teenager.

“So you know his son.”

“Son? As far as I know, he only has daughters. Three of them.”