The Hanging Read online

  Dutch was correct, it was story hour at the town’s library. A couple dozen little kids sat on a rug in a semi-circle around the feet of a woman seated on a low chair reading with great expressiveness from a picture book. She was attractive, blond, maybe sixty—Karen? I decided to wait outside until the kids came out.

  The day was already warm, temperature moving into the eighties. I found a bench in the shade near the bandstand and used the time to catch up on messages.

  Max hadn’t called. He had gone into his meeting with Lana and the network goons at eight and now it was after ten. Contract negotiations can drag on for months, but Max and Lana already had a template to work from, the contract that the network had not signed in December, and there was a certain immediacy to the project’s topic. I was hoping for a quick resolution.

  Fergie had sent a lengthy file titled “Holloway’s Naughty List.” I opened it to see what she had found; not much. Several bread-and-butter campaign violation charges were filed against Holloway when he was in Congress, generally for using campaign funds for personal expenses. There were also some ethics charges that had to do with voting on bills that favored his campaign donors, but none of those charges got all the way to the hearing stage, and there were no formal reprimands, ever.

  I closed the file, thinking that some people always seem to float to the top of trouble, like cream, and called Fergie.

  “Nothing more substantial about Holloway?” I asked her.

  “Not really. I went through the archives of all the newspapers I could find from Holloway’s congressional district and searched for any scandal, skulduggery, innuendo, or rumor that might attach to him.

  “There were complaints about his votes on federal water distribution, but water allocation in California is always a hot political topic, especially in farm regions like his district, and there is no way to make everyone happy. And some garlic growers in Gilroy were upset that he sponsored a bill that made it easier for China to export garlic. Except for that, the guy squeaks,” she said, clearly disappointed she hadn’t unearthed some real dirt.

  Apologetically, she said, “He’s either a saint or he has good people shielding him.”

  “Someone was angry enough to kill him, so let’s assume the latter,” I said. “Did you put together a bio for me?”

  “Yeah, but it’s still pretty sketchy.”

  Fergie had found obituaries for his parents, Lettie and Parker Efrem Holloway, Sr., raisin grape farmers, the salt of the earth. He had two sons, as Viv told me. One had been a stand-out baseball player in high school—Trey, I guessed—but there was no mention of the other one, Harlan, except in captions under a series of official family portraits. The only potential wrinkle was suggested by the disappearance of the wife from the family portraits. They divorced, so what?

  Fergie told me she was currently working her way through the Congressional Record, searching for any mention of Holloway. I asked her to leave that for later and to focus on any footprints Holloway made after he left Congress, focusing on his connection to the art market, if any. Buoyed by the prospect of a regular income stream, she was only too happy to get at it.

  I also asked her to add Hiram Chin, Clarice Snow, her gallery, and her son Frank Weidermeyer, AKA Franz von Wilde, to the investigation list.

  “With luck you’ll find some cross-pollination,” I told her.

  I asked if she had spoken with Jack Flaherty, a good friend who worked in the research department at the network.

  “I talked with Jack briefly after I talked to you on Friday,” Fergie said. “We discussed strategy, but he said he would be gone over the weekend so he wouldn’t be able to get into the network archives until today. He should be in by now; I’ll call him.”

  “Wait until we hear that the contracts have been signed,” I told her. “If something goes wrong, his involvement at this point could lead to something messy and expensive.”

  There were two messages from Kate, so I called her next.

  She told me that Hiram Chin was still insisting that a campus memorial service for Holloway be held on Wednesday, day after tomorrow. The coroner had started the autopsy first thing this morning, should be finished by early afternoon, and would release the body to Holloway’s family—those two sons—as soon as they made delivery arrangements with a mortuary. The sons were apparently eager to hold the memorial sooner rather than later because there would be services over the weekend in Gilstrap. Because she was chair of the Academic Senate, Hiram expected Kate to work with him on the arrangements. None of this had anything to do with me; Kate was just venting.

  I asked her, “Any idea when we can schedule Sly’s event?”

  “A week from Friday,” she said. “That would be a postponement of only one week.”

  Jean-Paul had called just to say hello, so I called him back. We talked about nothing and everything for about ten minutes. He asked about my weekend plans. He had some official functions to attend and wanted to know if I would accompany him. I turned down an invitation to the Philharmonic on Thursday night because I taught an early film workshop Friday morning. He suggested offering his tickets to Mom and an escort. I thought of Max right away, and told him I would ask them.

  An untidy queue of youngsters, each carrying a muslin bag imprinted READ WITH ME! that was heavy with books, emerged from the library with several adults to herd them along. From the gaps in their front teeth I guessed their ages to be seven or eight, second graders, maybe. I waited for the last of them to file out the big doors before I rose to go inside.

  The woman I had seen reading was behind the circulation desk checking in a tottering stack of children’s books, probably the books they had checked out on their last visit. She looked up and smiled at me.

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning,” I said. “Is Karen Holloway in?”

  She studied me hard, brows furrowed, before she said, “I am Karen Holloway.”

  I reached a hand toward her. “I’m—”

  “Maggie MacGowen,” she said. “Good heavens. You are Maggie MacGowen, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your program was the only reason I ever watched TV on Monday nights. We’ve shown several of your old PBS films on community nights and had good discussions about the issues. Whatever brings you...” She set aside the book in her hands as her face fell. “Oh. Park.”

  “Park,” I said.

  “Dear God.”

  I told her we were still negotiating with the network, but that even without their backing I wanted to make a film about her former husband.

  “It’s still in the development stage,” I said. “I don’t know the direction it will go, except that it will not be a crime report.”’

  “But you will talk about his death.”

  “Yes. Before he died I was thinking about making the film as an independent. But the manner of his death brought the network aboard.”

  “I saw in the paper that you found him. Do you know, was he shot?”

  The image of his bashed-in skull flashed behind my eyes: gunshot? I didn’t think so, but I’m no expert. I said, “The coroner hasn’t announced an official cause of death yet.”

  “I don’t mean to be morbid, but would you tell me about what you saw?”

  Briefly, I did, with no embellishments.

  She nodded, gazing off into the ether somewhere. After a moment, she said, “Thank you.”

  “Mrs. Holloway, I would like to talk to you on the record.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked, gaze drifting back to me.

  “On camera.”

  “Oh.” Her hand automatically went to the feature she was most worried about having filmed, in her case the looseness below her chin. “When?”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  While she thought that over, I waited. After glancing at the wall clock, she said, “The Senior Center shows a movie before lunch on Monday, so after the schoolkids leave, it’s usually pretty quiet here un
til the seniors come in for their computer class at one. After that, of course, the older schoolkids are in for Homework Camp. So, if you’ll give me a minute to floof up a bit, now is a good time.”

  When she saw my surprise—I had intended to come back later with a film crew—she said, “If we don’t do it now, I’ll get cold feet and say no. And I think I really want to talk about Park.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  I had a good camcorder in my bag, as always, and an extra battery pack. I had planned to use it only to shoot footage of Holloway’s home town and his family’s farm, but a conversation with his ex-wife was a bonus.

  While Karen Holloway “floofed” I walked around the library testing light levels in various locations, looking for a good place to set up. I found a green overstuffed club chair in the community room and wrestled it into position facing the front windows, with shelves of books as the background and a large whiteboard positioned to bounce reflected light from the windows onto her face. A stool with a stack of books on top served in lieu of a tripod to steady the camera. It was a jury-rigged setup, but I had filmed under worse conditions.

  When Karen came back, hair brushed, new powder on her nose and fresh blush on her cheeks—she was very pretty in an English-country-garden sort of way—I positioned her in the chair, took some test footage, ran it back, adjusted the light bounce from the whiteboard, added a desk lamp as a key light behind her head, took another look, and smiled. The slant of the light picked up the blue in her eyes and created a shadow below her chin, the key light set her apart from the background. Because the camcorder had less than great sound pickup, I clipped a mic that fed into a thumb-size digital recorder to the placket of her cardigan, slipped the recorder itself into her pocket, and taped a separate sound recording that my partner, Guido, might need to do some magic with to sync with the film.

  When we were settled in, with the camera set so that she had to turn her head just slightly to the right, toward the mic, to look at me, I asked her to tell me about Park Holloway.

  After a few nervous minutes, she seemed to forget about the camera and spoke with an easy confidence, grateful, I thought, to have the opportunity to tell her part of Park Holloway’s story.

  “Park and I started dating in high school. I was the head cheerleader and he was the absolute class nerd: valedictorian, president of the chess and debate clubs, our delegate to the Future Farmers of America convention in Sacramento, or as he referred to the capital, ‘Sack a’ tomatoes.’ I was crazy about him. God, what a sense of humor.

  “Somewhere, he got the idea he needed to go to Harvard. Around here, the really bright kids go to Stanford or Cal. But Park knew he was going to Harvard; he had to show me on a map where it was. He got the FFA scholarship and a National Merit scholarship, and by God, he went to Harvard.”

  With an abashed lift of her shoulder, she said, “I got a B.A. in Elementary Education from Sac State. Happy with a B-average. Park graduated summa cum laude.”

  She told me they got married the summer after they graduated. They made a bargain: she would go with him back to Massachusetts and get a teaching job to support them while he finished graduate school. When he finished, he would find a job and she would get a master’s in school administration or library science, and they would start a family.

  “But the best-laid plans, huh?” she said with a soft smile. “When Park was working on his dissertation about Chinese trade, we went to live in China. It was wonderful. China was just emerging into western commerce, and it was so exciting to be there at the beginning. The Chinese people are so enterprising—if you ever want to write a treatise on adaptation for survival, talk to the people of China—I still marvel.”

  She paused, seemed to think something over before she spoke. “Now, this just may not sound politically correct, and I know there are two sides to the issue, but I’ll say it anyway.”

  Looking directly at the camera, she said, “Park and I were in Murano, the glassmakers’ island near Venice, Italy. The staff of the glassware shops would not let Chinese people with cameras enter their shops. I was outraged, and said so to Park. But he said it was just smart business to bar them. He said the Chinese would take pictures of the beautiful handmade glassware—a single wineglass will cost hundreds of dollars—go home and find a way to produce it for under twenty bucks, then flood the market. And I’ll be darned if on my last visit to Chinatown in San Francisco there weren’t shops full of ‘Murano’ glass, but at prices too cheap to be the real thing.”

  After Holloway completed his dissertation, he received a fellowship from the London School of Economics to continue his research, and they went back to China, she told me.

  Some of the businesses that Holloway had worked with during his research formed an agricultural trade consortium. They hired him to represent their interests in Washington, so the young Holloways set up housekeeping near the Capitol.

  “I enjoyed Washington at first; there were so many young couples like us. But I rarely saw Park—back and forth to China, meetings all over the world; I was at home with two babies.

  “So when the congressman from our home district died suddenly and Park was asked to fill the position until the next election, I encouraged him to accept. I thought we’d see more of him. But I was wrong; we saw him less.”

  She said that something happened to Park when he entered politics. His drive and intellectual curiosity morphed into raw ambition.

  “The egos in Washington,” Karen said with disdain. “I found them all unbearable. I didn’t want to raise my children in that environment, so I brought them home.”

  I asked her, “When does Hiram Chin enter the picture?”

  “Hiram?” The question seemed to surprise her. “The two of them worked on a Smithsonian committee together and just hit it off right away. Hiram had that cosmopolitan polish that Park, raised on a farm, wished would rub off on him. It’s interesting; Hiram was as fascinated by European culture as Park was with Chinese culture. Intellectually, they were about evenly matched. They became great friends, got involved in all sorts of interesting projects together.”

  “Both of them left substantial positions,” I said, “Park in Congress and Hiram in academia. They both disappeared quietly into a two-year college in the outer suburbs of Los Angeles. What happened?”

  Karen shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t know. Park and I were already divorced when that happened, and I hadn’t seen Hiram for years. But of course I’ve thought about it, and I can’t come up with an answer that makes sense. Maybe they just got tired.”

  “While your husband was in office, he was charged with misuse of campaign funds more than once.”

  “We aren’t rich people,” she said, shrugging off the issue as inconsequential. “We don’t have rich parents. A congressman’s salary is pretty modest when you consider all that’s required of them. We were keeping residences on two coasts and travelling back and forth and entertaining, keeping up appearances. Sometimes that was just financially impossible, especially during campaigns. From time to time, Park let his better-heeled constituents cover some costs.”

  I asked her if she knew Clarice Snow or someone named Weidermeyer.

  After a pause, she began to nod. “Clarice Snow, no, but Weidermeyer—I met him and his wife a couple of times. Big formal events. Businessman of some kind, probably involved in Asian trade. Why?”

  “Is Mrs. Weidermeyer Asian?”

  The question made her smile. “Definitely not. Very Main Line Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr girl. Her lower jaw never seemed to move when she spoke.”

  Not Clarice Snow, then, I thought. An interesting puzzle: who was young Frankie Weidermeyer’s father? Not my puzzle to solve, but an interesting one just the same.

  Karen declined to speak on camera about her children. She had worked very hard to keep them out of the public eye when their father was in Congress, and intended to continue doing so. Instead, she talked about growing up in a close-knit farm communi
ty.

  “Of course, everyone knows your business,” she said with a laugh. “But your business usually doesn’t get spread beyond the town limits. The people of Gilstrap protected my children’s privacy.”

  After about an hour, she glanced at her watch and said she really needed to get back to work. The books on the circulation desk weren’t going to reshelve themselves and she needed to clear the desk before her seniors came in. They always checked out several books each and she would need the counter space.

  I thanked her, and together we put the chair and the whiteboard and the components of my ad hoc camera stand back where they belonged. I gave her my card and asked her to call me if she thought of anything more she wanted to say.

  “Before you go,” she said, taking her mobile phone out of her pocket. “May I get you on camera? No one will believe me when I tell them you were here if I don’t.”

  I put my head close to hers and smiled as she held the phone at arm’s length and snapped a picture of the two of us. With colored lights from the flash still dancing in my eyes, I walked back out into the spring sunshine.

  It was nearly noon when I left the library and I wanted to be on the 3:00 flight out of Sacramento. That would get me back to Burbank by 4:00 and home an hour after that, depending on traffic. For the film, we would need background footage of Central High School and Holloway’s late parents’ farmhouse and other local landmarks, but Guido and a crew would take care of that later. When we had a production schedule, I would set up interviews with people who had grown up with Holloway, and fly back up with a crew.

  The local weekly newspaper, the Gilstrap Gazetteer, was just down the street and across the town square. Their archives could be helpful. So, I decided that the best use of the time I had left would be to see what they had to offer.

  A man standing inside the newspaper office watched me through the glass front door as I approached across the town square. When I reached the office, he held the door open for me.

  “I wondered if you were going to stop by,” he said, offering his hand as he studied me. He was in his early thirties I guessed, slender, blond, rumpled.