Corrupt practices, p.29
Corrupt Practices, page 29
By anointing Harriet Stern Quiana Gottschalk—an absurd bastardization of Hawaiian and German meaning celestial servant of God—Bradley Kelly saved her life. In the months after they got together, she soaked up his pop-religious doctrine. She came to believe that he truly purged her cells of contaminants—drugs, pride, depression, lust. The trade-off: she provided not only the business acumen that he sorely needed to build his nascent church, but also the obscene millions that the studios paid me to star in their movies. Together, they were crafty enough to evade the Coogan Act, which was supposed to protect my money. They found a loophole that let them get a court order to invest money in my future. They diverted that money to Kelly’s embryonic Assembly. He rewarded her by appointing her an Assembly elder, which allowed her to realize her life-long dream of becoming someone important. He needed her organizational and business skills. Once a wild social butterfly, she withdrew into the Assembly’s cocoon, a kind of reverse metamorphosis. Even the upper echelon of the Assembly rarely saw her. She became a divine shadow, which gave her a powerful mystique.
The car makes a sharp turn and lurches to a stop. I hear muffled voices and then the metallic scrape of an electronic gate opening. We’re at a security checkpoint. I still remember the barrier after more than twenty years—an imposing wrought-iron fence topped with razor wire that destroyed any illusion of stateliness. I reach for the blindfold. The man sitting next to me grabs my arm. I lower my hand.
The car creeps forward, the tires making a crunching sound on what I remember is a graveled private road. We drive another few minutes up a steep hill. I hear the car door open. The man next to me takes my arm.
“Come with me,” he says. “Watch your head.” He puts his hand on the crown of my head as though I’m an arrestee exiting a police car and guides me under the doorframe.
“Walk slowly,” he says, keeping hold of my arm. “Don’t stumble.”
I stop for a moment and stretch my body. I smell eucalyptus trees and salt air, beautiful fragrances individually, but in combination enough to send a chill through my body.
“I know where we are,” I say, in a show of false bravado. “We’re at Bradley Kelly’s compound up above the Pacific Coast Highway. Near the Ventura County line. I told you this blindfold’s a joke.”
“We have to go up some stairs,” he says.
We ascend seven steps. A door opens. My minder guides me inside the house. But instead of leading me forward to where I remember the staircase, he takes my shoulders and spins me a quarter turn to the right, and suddenly I feel disoriented. The illusion that I have even a modicum of control evaporates, and my legs begin to quiver. I strain to remember—am I facing a wall or a closet or the entrance to another room? There’s a loud rumble, and without warning the man gives me a half-shove forward, and my toe catches on something, and I stagger, but before I go to the ground, he grabs me and holds me up, wrenching my shoulder in the process.
“My apologies, sir,” he says. But I’m sure the push was payback for taunting him with my knowledge of Kelly, knowledge that a Philistine like me shouldn’t have.
He’s taken me into an elevator that didn’t exist twenty years ago. The doors close. We ascend so slowly that it doesn’t feel like we’re moving at all. At last, the doors slide open. He leads me out of the elevator and down what I take to be a hallway. We make a right turn and walk another ten steps. He pulls off my blindfold.
“Wait here,” he says, and leaves before I can turn and look at him.
It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the light. When they do, my heart ripples. They blindfolded me not to hide the location of the residence, but to make sure that the first thing I saw was this room.
They’ve converted the space into an elegant library with a parquet floor and red-oak paneled walls. They’ve installed modern recessed lights in the high ceiling. The curtained windows have an unobstructed view of the ocean. The walls are divided into alcoves that house bookshelves. There are two dark-stained double doors at the far end and a smaller door behind me. There’s a long leather sofa on one side of the room and a walnut desk on the other. In the middle of the wall across from me is a massive oil painting in a gold frame. Kelly is shown on one knee with his arms outstretched. His luminous face is bathed in the radiance of the Fount. His alternate universe has elm trees and babbling brooks and maidenhair ferns and palisades and blue-winged angels.
I expect them to let me stew for a while, but the door swings open almost immediately. She strides into the room, swinging her arms purposefully—in the old days, her signature grand entrance. Over the past two days, I’ve tried to imagine my mother at fifty-seven. I’ve pictured a wrinkled grandmother, a surgically altered Barbie doll, a hideous crone scarred by wickedness, a fleshy earth mother, and any number of other permutations of Harriet Stern twenty-three years after I last saw her. She looks nothing like I imagined, precisely because she’s unmistakably the same woman. The aging process hasn’t passed her by, of course. She’s dressed in a cream silk blouse and dark pants, stylish and tasteful. She never dressed tastefully when I was a kid. Though she’s still slender, the lines of her body are softer, fleshier. She appears shorter than I remember, but that makes sense because I grew three inches after I left. She still has light brown hair—out of a bottle now—which she wears pulled back in a tight bun. She’s plucked her eyebrows and filled them in with pencil or maybe tattoos. Her face has become more angular, verging on severe, which accentuates her curved nose, but also gives her a reserved, almost regal bearing unimaginable in the mother I used to know.
She comes over and stands a foot away from me, as if we’re a normal mother and son greeting each other at the start of our weekly visit. I reflexively step back. I don’t feel a twinge of filial affection or guilt or regret. I spent my reserves of those emotions when I visited Erica Hatfield. She turns and walks over to the leather sofa and sits, then pats the space next to her. Is this an act, an attempt to disarm or unsettle me? I pull up a chair from the desk and sit across from her.
“Tell me, Parky,” she says in her still familiar fluty voice. “What is this mess?”
“The Assembly has hurt people very close to me. But I’m sure you know all about that.”
“True adherents do not harm anyone. The Fount promotes peace and tolerance for all people. You were taught that when you were a child. You’re here because of our lawsuit.”
“I’m here because Harmon Cherry, Richard Baxter, and Deanna Poulos. All dead because someone inside your church killed them.”
“Would you like something to drink, Parky? Some tea? Or water?” Her composure astonishes me. She waits a moment for my reply, but I can only gape at her. She shrugs daintily. “I think I’ll have some tea.” She goes over to the desk, pulls open a drawer filled with bags of exotic teas, drops one into her cup, and pours steaming water from a ceramic kettle. She sits back down, balancing the cup and saucer on her knees. “Harmon Cherry was a friend of the Assembly. His suicide was a tragedy. We could have helped him.”
“Rich Baxter told me that Harmon was murdered.”
“Rich Baxter was a thief and a drug addict. He took millions of dollars destined for good works and killed himself when he was found out. I don’t know anything about this third person . . . Diana?”
“Deanna. Shot to death. Am I next on the list?”
She sighs. “Do you know why we hired Harmon?”
I, too, can play the game of answering a question with a question. “Who’s this we you’re talking about, Harriet? Who’s this clandestine hierarchy who leads your church? Back at the firm, there was just McCarthy and the faceless drones who worked for him. Now I know there’s still you. Who are the others?”
“In accordance with the words of the Celestial Fount, we’re everywhere and nowhere. We’re material and incorporeal, of the flesh and of the spirit, woven into the fabric of society with invisible thread. We’ll show ourselves only on that glorious vernal night when the Sanctified Founder translates back from the Sixth Level Universe, when the word of the Fount burns with heavenly fire across the starry sky, turning night into day. McCarthy and the others are but earthly clarions trumpeting the Fount’s word. You were taught this, Parky.”
When I see her fervent expression, I feel a familiar heaviness in my limbs. After so many years, I somehow forgot that it isn’t an act, that she really believes this stuff. “In answer to your question, you hired Harmon Cherry as your lawyer because there was no one better.”
“It’s true the Harmon was the best. But we sent . . . I had McCarthy send the business to Macklin & Cherry because you were there.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You couldn’t have thought it a coincidence.”
It never occurred to me that it was anything but.
She smiles indulgently. “Oh, Parky. You did think it was a coincidence. How incredibly naïve of you. And yet at the same time strangely narcissistic, as though the twin lights of fate and destiny shine only on you. No, we hired Macklin & Cherry because you were there. I wanted you to work on our matters. If you’d advocated for us, truly understood our beliefs, maybe we wouldn’t have seemed so bad to you after all. Maybe you would’ve finally seen the light. Maybe you’d have returned to the fold someday.”
“I would’ve quit the firm before I touched any of that work.”
“You were a rising star at the law firm. You’ve always been a star. Then you strayed, and you lost it all. You’ve shut your eyes like a frightened four-year-old who believes that if he doesn’t see the truth, the truth no longer exists.”
A sickening thought occurs to me. “Did Harmon know I’m your son?”
“Of course not. He didn’t know that I existed. No one knows that I exist except a select few in the Assembly.” She smiles. “I’ve become a mythical character, you know.”
My smile mocks hers. “So have I. The First Apostate. You should’ve seen McCarthy’s face when I used those words at his deposition. Traces of the truth have survived no matter how hard you’ve tried to suppress it, right Harriet?”
Her expression hardens, and her eyes blaze with threat.
I shake my head in disgust. “How were Rich and Harmon killed? Who killed Deanna?”
“Harmon and Rich killed themselves. I have no idea what happened to your other friend.”
“Prove it to me, Harriet.”
She takes a sip of tea. “I’d prefer it if you called me—”
“You know I won’t call you Quiana. And I can’t believe you’d ask me to call you Mom.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear there was a tinge of hurt in her eyes. I couldn’t care less.
“What is it that you want?”
“Three things. First, I want a copy of Harmon Cherry’s notes.”
She shakes her head as though she doesn’t understand.
“Rich found some notes that Harmon prepared just before he died. They have something to do with the embezzlement scheme. Lou Frantz claims they don’t exist, but I think they do and that you’re hiding them.”
“We have no such notes.”
“Come on, Harriet. Rich said—”
“He was a liar. If something like that existed don’t you think we’d want to know about it? They do not exist.”
As a child, I developed an uncanny ability to detect her lies. It was a matter of self-preservation. Now, she seems to be telling the truth. Have the years dulled my ability to gauge her credibility?
“What are your other requests?” she asks.
“Let’s be accurate. They’re demands, not requests. I want you to tell me why the Assembly paid Lake Knolls’s chief of staff half a million dollars last year. And I want you to spread the word that Rich Baxter was murdered so your members won’t shun Monica Baxter and her son.”
The muscles of her neck tighten, in years past the sign of an impending explosion. She puts her cup and saucer down so hard that they nearly shatter. “Why would I share information with you, our sworn enemy? Someone who even as we speak is our antagonist in a court trial? Why would I ignore the truth and my own religious convictions by exposing the flock to contamination from the family of a suicide?”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll go public.”
She studies my face for a moment. Her chin drops when she realizes what I mean. She bolts up from the sofa and goes to the window, standing with her back turned. Then she spins around and walks back, coming within inches of my face. “You know what happens when you detonate a nuclear device? You not only destroy your target, you destroy everything, even the things that you hold dear. You destroy yourself. You’ve never been prepared to do that.”
“Things have changed. Namely, Deanna Poulos. Richard Baxter. Harmon Cherry. There’s also the hatchet job that McCarthy did on my law student, Lovely Diamond.”
“Your law student? You mean your girlfriend, don’t you? She’s quite the little whore.”
“You think she’s a whore? Talk about the pot calling the kettle—”
She slaps my face hard. I revel in the sting. She’s afraid of me.
When I was a child, this room wasn’t a library. The windows weren’t bright and airy like now, but closed off by blackout curtains and iron security bars. The soundproof walls were covered with crimson drapes. There was a powerful stereo system with ceiling and wall speakers constantly pumping out the smooth jazz that Kelly liked. The lights were on dimmers, and during the “celebrations,” as Kelly called them, they would be turned down low. One of the attendants would light candles and burn incense. All these years later, I still can’t stand the smell of patchouli. In the middle of the room was a vast bed, far bigger than a king, at least eleven feet wide and fifteen feet long. Kelly bragged about how he’d imported it from England. He called it a super-Caesar bed, fitting because he fancied himself to be more powerful than a Roman emperor. The emperors couldn’t flit between universes.
I started participating in the sacrament called Ascending Sodality when I was thirteen, according to the original tenets of the Assembly, set forth in the secret Chronicles of the Celestial Fountain: When a young person reaches his or her fourteenth year, the parents shall deliver that young person up to the Elders, willingly and with love, the male to the female Elder, the female to the male Elder. And the youthful initiates shall cleave to the Elders, who shall teach them connubial love, and they shall be married to the Elders and the Elders shall be married to them in the eyes of the Assembly.
The Assembly was becoming a new, hip underground religion, one that appealed to the wealthy because it didn’t make them feel selfish and callous. Wealth was a sign of purity and heavenly grace. The most fervent believers, a group of twenty-two trusted insiders and their families, came to the compound to engage in Ascending Sodality.
Maybe the events of that evening happened because that morning, the increasingly volatile Kelly had engaged in a screaming match with my mother over some trivial decision she’d made without consulting him. Maybe they occurred because I was a fifteen-year-old who’d spent my entire life being the center of attention, who’d been a big star while Kelly struggled to land supporting roles. Probably he did it because he thought he could.
I hadn’t been scheduled to participate in a celestial celebration that night, so I was surprised that they summoned me to the room. As usual, I simultaneously felt arousal, apprehension, and disgust. Despite Kelly’s brainwashing, I knew innately that what I was doing—what they were doing to me—was twisted. Afterward, I’d feel a malaise, like the first vague symptom of a festering illness.
I knocked and went inside. The incense in the air felt heavier than usual. I took several breaths through my mouth so I could avoid the smell, but the smoke singed my lungs. Kelly stood in the middle of the room, fully clothed. Lying on the bed naked was a woman I knew as Greta, a wealthy downtown art dealer who had a son about my age. Greta was more attractive than most of the women—a brunette with a broad Slavic face, full sensuous lips, and aggressive, stony eyes, the darkest brown I’d ever seen. Most of the other women who practiced Ascending Sodality couldn’t hide their embarrassment or trepidation, no matter how often they’d had sex with children. Greta had no such inhibitions. She truly enjoyed young boys.
Kelly always watched these sessions, but never participated. He called himself a steward of celestial love. After a while, I got used to his presence. You can get used to almost anything when it means you get to feel good.
Kelly ordered me to undress. When I finished, Greta stood up, took my hand, and led me to the bed.
“It’s a great honor,” Greta whispered. Her face was glowing with rapture, like that of a true believer who’s just recognized the image of the Blessed Virgin in a water stain.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“He’s bestowing a great honor upon you. He’s the celestial messenger. I offered him my son, but he picked you.”
I still didn’t get it, but before I could ask her what she meant she batted her eyelashes, a gesture so melodramatic I expected a director to yell “cut.” She leaned over and took me into her mouth. She sucked on me for a while and then pulled away.
“Fuck me now,” she said. The rawness of her tone startled me. In the past, spoken words had to stay romantic and tender—exalted, Kelly would say. Ascending Sodality wasn’t supposed to be dirty or profane. I expected Kelly to chastise her for the language, but he didn’t. I hesitated.
“Put your cock inside me,” she said insistently.
Another aberration—no foreplay. We boys had been taught gentleness, kisses, caresses. I hesitated and then reached for the basket of condoms that were kept on the nightstand. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and Kelly made safe sex a sacrament.
“Never mind that,” Kelly said from somewhere behind me.
