The Bomb Maker's Son (11 page)

“Emily is my
half
sister,” I say curtly. That’s an attorney’s rote reaction—parse the language, debate the merits, shift the focus from reality to rhetoric. It’s a great way to avoid dealing with real life.

Lovely, a lawyer herself, is about to argue back, but I hold up my hand.

“My sister is a sweet kid,” I say. “Her world has been shattered, and she’s trying to fit some of the pieces back together. She can’t do it. At best, all she can try to do is ignore the broken pieces. Whatever, it makes me want to win—not for Ian, but for her.”

Lovely reaches over and caresses my cheek.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Playa Delta, California, has its own municipal government and police force and school system, but it’s surrounded on all sides by the city of Los Angeles—a small town engulfed by a megalopolis. According to Lovely’s research, the town had a population of about twenty-four thousand in 1975 and has a population of about twenty-four thousand today. One movie studio or another has headquartered there since the twenties. I did four of my own movies there. What’s changed is that forty years ago, the city was mostly lower-middle and working class, a landlocked bedroom community of greater Los Angeles. Today, it’s become trendy, home to ritzy private schools and upscale restaurants.

The first place that Moses Dworsky has sent me is Playa Delta’s one public high school. Despite the city’s resurgence, the campus seems a bit ramshackle. Much of the school grounds have been paved over and used for bungalow-style buildings. There’s a separate building with a modernist circular design, a brick and glass façade, and flying buttresses. The auditorium was probably a semiprecious architectural jewel once, but now there are cracks in the brick and graffiti on the walls. A sign identifies the structure as the Carl Sandburg Auditorium, though I doubt Sandburg ever set foot in Playa Delta, California.

I park my Lexus in the visitors’ parking lot, pass through security, and find my way to the administrative offices. A few nervous students sit with heads bowed, obviously waiting to meet their school’s chief disciplinarian. I approach a young man working at reception, identify myself, and ask to see Carol Diaz, the school principal. When he asks if I have an appointment, I lean close and say, “No, but tell her my name is Parker Stern. I represent a man named Ian Holzner.”

The kid obviously knows Holzner’s name, might even recognize me now, because he falls back in his chair, and his elliptical eyes morph into circles of surprise. Rather than speaking into an intercom or sending a computer message, he stands and jogs down the corridor. Not long after, he returns, accompanied by a tall, broad-shouldered woman with short-cropped gray hair and green, narrowly set eyes that give her a predator’s aspect.

“How dare you intrude on the school day,” Diaz says. “How dare you intrude at all. Please leave, or I’ll call security.”

“I understand that you and Ian Holzner were childhood friends,” I say. “That you and he led a protest senior year that shut your high school down for three days. Supposedly you and he . . .” I say the words loudly enough for some of her students to hear and don’t finish the sentence so as to give Diaz a choice. Maybe no one would’ve cared about the principal’s old friendship with an alleged terrorist before Holzner turned himself in, but now everyone will care. Moses Dworsky is thorough, I’ve discovered. How did he manage to unearth this information about her?

“Okay, okay,” she says, holding up her hands without relaxing her scowl. “Come back to my office. But I only have ten minutes.”

“I just have a couple of questions.”

“Lawyers never just have a couple of questions.”

“You’re probably right. So look at me as Holzner’s son, and not as his attorney if that makes it easier to talk to me.”

She smiles slightly, proof that I’ve disarmed her a jot. She ushers me into her surprisingly spacious corner office. One window faces a flower garden; the other overlooks the main quad, allowing her to keep watch over her dominion.

“Ian Holzner
was
my friend as a kid,” she says, naïvely believing that she can preempt my questioning by talking first. People often try that. All it does is make the lawyer think of more questions. “And yes, we led a strike against the war, and yes, someone threw a trash can through the principal’s window.” She gestures to the main quad. “Broke this very one. It was a long time ago. June nineteen sixty-seven. No one in administration mentioned it when I was hired as a teacher back in seventy-seven. It doesn’t matter anymore, because I’m retiring when the school year is over.”

But I can see from her tired, resigned expression that it
does
matter to her that people might discover that she and the Playa Delta Bomber committed an act of vandalism, no matter how juvenile. She’s been a teacher at this school for almost as long as I’ve been alive, and the principal for two decades.

“Anyway, it was the last week of school and just before graduation,” she says. “And a couple of weeks before LA police attacked protesters at the Century Plaza Hotel, where President Johnson was staying. Ian was at that rally, too. The moment he broke that window, I stopped being his friend.”

“You had nothing to do with it?” It’s not a question designed to get in her good graces, but sometimes you just can’t help asking the follow-up.

“I tried to stop him.” She hesitates and tilts her head to the side, a soft, maternal expression on her face. Or at least I think it’s maternal, since Harriet Stern never looked at me like that. “You look like him, you know. Or how he used to look. You’re a little taller.”

“He’s much leaner than I am.”

“He wasn’t skinny then, not in high school. He was built like you, because of the gymnastics.”

“You mentioned antiwar activities in high school. I thought he became radicalized in college. Before that he was the straight arrow, the engineer/athlete.”

“Yeah, the high-school counselors did a good job of keeping that myth alive. Ian was the school’s golden boy. He was a great athlete, a top scholar, and a leader all rolled into a handsome boy. The school administration wasn’t going to let him blow his chance for a scholarship and Olympic fame. They not only wanted him to succeed; they wanted to use him as a living commercial for Playa Delta High. Ian going to the Olympics would’ve put the school on the map, given it recognition that only Beverly Hills High, and maybe Culver High, had in the area. Scholastic politics weren’t as bad as they are now, where schools measure their worth entirely by where their graduates go to college or how prominent their alumni become. But Ian was the star of stars, so even back then, he was a commodity for good old Playa High.”

“What changed him?”

She simultaneously smiles and shakes her head, as if I’m a dense pupil who hasn’t done his homework. “The Vietnam War suddenly changed him. It changed all of us.”

“The war didn’t change everyone.”

“Let me finish. How old are you?”

“The big four-oh last birthday.”

“You couldn’t possibly understand. It was over before you were born. Everyone’s assumptions changed forever—about the government, about the country, about their role models, about their parents, about morality. The Vietnam War changed the world for your generation and the one after it.”

“As I started to say, the war didn’t radicalize every teenager. Ian Holzner was in the small minority.”

“That’s true. But it was personal with Ian. He became rabidly antiwar when Jerry got drafted and was sent to Da Nang.”

“What do you know about Holzner’s college days?”

“Ian’s or Jerry’s? Because Jerry only went to community college for a semester.”

“Ian’s.”

“Absolutely nothing. I told you, after high school we were no longer friends. I didn’t go to Berkeley because I didn’t have the grades. I went to Cal State Northridge. I saw Ian only once after high school, when he came back for summer break after freshman year. I was working at the Foster’s Freeze. It was an ice cream chain, now long gone. And he came by for a burger and a chocolate malt. That’s what he’d always ordered when he was a kid. That was probably the only thing that hadn’t changed about him. I took a break, but we weren’t talking for two minutes before he started spouting that insane radical rhetoric. It was the summer of sixty-eight, the worst time in the country, the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the resulting riots, the Chicago cops’ attack on protestors at the Democratic Convention. Ian was enraged at the world. Ranting, raving. It was scary, actually, because he screamed at me for being too passive. I cut my break short, said good-bye, and never saw him again. Except on the news, of course. Then and now.”

“What was he like as a kid?”

She sits back in contemplation and nods again. For a moment I feel as if I’ve been called to the principal’s office. “You’re asking as his son, not his attorney?”

“Assume I am.”

She arches her left eyebrow, a singular feat of muscle control because that brow goes quite high and the other doesn’t move a bit. “You are all lawyer, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll
assume
you’re asking as Ian’s son.” She shakes her head. “The news said he had another son who died in Afghanistan. Sad. And it’s ironic that Ian ended up living an ordinary, sedate life. Anyway, I lived two doors down on Ridgeway Road. We went to kindergarten together, rode our bikes, played ball in the street. His father was a kind man, but rarely said a word. An ex-acrobat who worked for the post office. Died too young of prostate cancer. Very tolerant of his children’s foibles. But Ian was his mother’s favorite, with his intelligence and athleticism. The opposite from what usually happens, because Jerry was their biological kid and Ian was adopted. I once heard their mother say that there must have been a mix-up, that Ian must’ve been the one who sprung from her loins—she used those words—and that Jerry was just dropped on the doorstep by mistake, so what could they do but take him in? Cruel. Probably one of the reasons Jerry was such a hood. A ‘ho-dad,’ we called him back in the day. An obsolete word from an obsolete era. But in a Southern California city so close to the ocean, the tough guys were ho-dads, the popular kids surfers, and the rest of us just nonentities.”

“I ran into Jerry in court yesterday,” I say. “He lives up in the Bay Area. He told me that Ian protected him.”

“The way I remember it, people needed protection from Jerry. He was four years older, so I don’t know how Ian could’ve done that.”

“Maybe Jerry was referring to what happened after he came back from the war?”

“Could be. Like so many of them, Jerry wasn’t the same.
Shell-shocked
, they called it back then.
Post-traumatic stress disorder
these days. Kind of a cliché now, but it wasn’t back then. Anyway, when I was a kid I was afraid of Jerry. Not only was he a thug, but he seemed creepy. Nothing I could put my finger on, but as a female . . .” She folds her arms over her chest and shivers as if she were still that young girl.

“I was wondering who else Ian hung out with.”

I run through a list of names that I got from Dworsky, but she assures me that all of them, three of whom are dead, broke off with Holzner by sophomore year of college. None were very political. They were mostly Ian’s science friends or fellow jocks who all led unremarkable lives as far as Diaz knows.

She does have information on one person, a girl named Alicia Bowers.

“She was this little girl who lived down the block,” Diaz says. “Five, six years younger than Ian and me, a shy, unremarkable little kid who by the time she was twelve had a crush on Ian and followed him around like a puppy dog. Just because he was friendly toward her, I think. Ian probably kept her from being bullied. Most of the kids her age teased her mercilessly and some did worse. There was only the father, a World War Two vet who was shell-shocked himself, and on welfare. People said he was a drunk, but I think maybe he was schizophrenic and no one realized it. Or maybe it was physical, maybe he actually suffered a head wound. They say people aren’t as nice these days, that the culture has lost the ability to be kind, but today people are far more forgiving of a person like Pete Bowers than they were back then. Anyway, Pete and Alicia lived in a seedy motel at the end of our block. Their neighbors were Sam’s Liquor Store and Helen’s Toy Palace. The dad would ride this old one-speed bike without fenders around the neighborhood, babbling and waving at pedestrians. Alicia seemed like the classic wallflower who survived by shrinking from the heat. I left the neighborhood, but my father said that she’d walk to high school every day and wave at him when she passed our house without looking up. She never got into trouble, as far as I know. But then I heard years later from a guy who also lived on Ridgeway Road that he saw her at an antiwar rally on the UCLA campus where Holzner was speaking. She was up on the platform with him, cheering, raising her fist in the Black Power salute, shouting for peace and revolution, dancing around like she was tripping on LSD. He said he tried to talk with her, but she left with Ian and his people before he could get there. I can’t believe I still remember that. Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher, and kids surprise me all the time. But it was so strange.”

“When was that?”

“It would’ve been nineteen seventy-two, seventy-three. Alicia was still a teenager. But she’s the only person I know from Playa Delta who supposedly had contact with him after he became an icon of the radical left. If it’s true.” She raises an index finger, gets out of her chair, and goes to a cabinet across the room, where she leafs through some files and comes up with a document.

“The nineteen seventy-three yearbook,” she says. “Alicia Bowers’s senior year.” She flips the pages, stops, purses her lips, and hands me the book. There is no picture of Bowers, only her name and a silhouette and the words
Had better things to do
.

“It was worth a shot,” she says.

“An earlier yearbook?”

“This is the earliest I have. Inherited them. I think they tossed a lot of old ones out in the eighties. Nostalgia wasn’t what it is now.”

“I thought that’s what year books were all about.”