Blacklist Page 10

  “No, he wasn’t that kind of cop.”

  “So what kind of cop was he?” Patrick asks.

  How far do I go in this honesty thing? “Hey, guys, gimme a break—isn’t that enough for one day?”

  They let it go at that. I’m glad they did, because if I was going to be totally honest I’d have to admit that the man in the tower actually was the second man I’d killed.

  * * *

  I’m the second generation in my family to go into law enforcement. If you count my stepfather, which I’d rather not. I was named after my father, Brian McKenna, Sr., who was a third-grade schoolteacher; he died in the Argonne Forest during World War I when I was five and my sister, Kathleen, was three. I remember him as a kind, loving man. Kathleen hardly remembers him at all. My mother, the former Kitty Flaherty, remarried a couple of years later to Declan Collins. He was a big, beefy bruiser, full of smiles when he was courting my mother, but the smiles ended after we became a so-called family. We lived in an old firetrap apartment house on the south side of Chicago. Everyone made noise in that tenement, but the loud and frequent screams were from our place. Nobody ever came to help us. They were all scared to even knock on the door and ask what’s going on. Because in addition to being a vicious drunk, Declan Collins was a Chicago police detective.

  When he went on the warpath, it always started the same way. We could be at the kitchen table, he’d already had a couple of drinks, and he’d say, “Pass the gravy, Brian McKenna!” He spat my last name as if it was filth. To him it was. A reminder of my real father. Declan had wanted to adopt me and Kathleen and change our names from McKenna to Collins. Mom agreed to the adoption, but refused to alter our last names. She wanted to keep my father’s memory alive. That was the last argument she ever won with Declan. We all paid dearly for it.

  So back to the gravy. Hearing the hate in his voice would cause my hand to quiver. I’d spill some gravy on the tablecloth, he’d scream at my clumsiness, mom would defend me while mopping up, Declan would be off into his rant: “Sure, the lad’s purrrfect, ain’t he now? Like his dear departed handsome father, a genius schoolteacher that one was, who could scarce make a living, but better than me, o’ course, you all think you’re better than me; I’m nothin’ but a hardworking slob keepin’ the bunch of ya alive!”

  By then he’d be breaking dishes, shoving me, slapping mom, Kathleen would be crying, which Declan despised, so he’d grab her by the arm and fling her across the room like a Raggedy Ann doll. Mom would run to her, Declan would go after Mom, and I would move fast as I could to get between them. Pleading and begging never worked, but jumping around like a crazy person and throwing things at him and biting always did. I’d get him to focus his rage on me. I took lumps, but better me than Mom or Kathleen.

  As the drunken attacks on us escalated, I was usually so scared I felt like I was going to vomit. Sound in my ears was blurry. Everything looked like it was magnified and moving too fast. Often I’d wet my pants. Then he’d mock me and slam me extra hard. The thing is, I could run, but I couldn’t hide. Not in an apartment that small. If I eluded him it made him even angrier.

  Declan never hit any of us in the face. There were no swollen lips or black eyes the morning after—the only marks were on my chest and back and ribs and stomach. He once told me that when he was interrogating suspects he did far worse. Guess I was supposed to feel lucky. He was most handy with his leather belt, using the buckle part when teaching me a real lesson, though the lesson was never clear. In junior high when we had to strip for gym, some of the teachers would notice the welts and bruises. If they asked me about it, I’d mumble something about walking into a door or slipping on the stairs. They’d drop it. They didn’t want to get involved.

  Why didn’t anyone want to get involved? That was my huge question during those years. Children and their mother were being beaten. People knew that. It was against the law. Was there no one to protect us? How could they all just ignore it? I dreamed of a defender like the Lone Ranger riding to our rescue. Putting an end to our torment. But no one ever came.

  So that’s why even as a kid I’d wanted to be in law enforcement. I’d be the one. The supercop who would fight the brutes. Bring bad people to justice. I’d cut stories out of the Tribune about the brave exploits of hero cops. Especially Chicago’s own Eliot Ness, leader of the incorruptible “Untouchables,” the man who had vowed to bring down “Scarface” Al Capone.

  Eventually I had so many clippings about Eliot Ness that I started a scrapbook. I’d paste them in when Declan wasn’t around and hide it under my mattress. During one of our brawls, I crawled under the bed to get away from him, but he heaved the mattress onto the floor to get at me and discovered the scrapbook.

  “What is this shit?” he bellowed. “Eliot Fuckin Ness! That prissy, blue-nosed, no-balls faggot! You like him? He your idea of a great man?” Declan had me by the neck and was shaking me hard. “Wanna be a faggot like Ness?” Felt like my head was going to fly off. “Say it, you’re a little pansy fairy fag. Say it!”

  He wouldn’t stop until I repeated the words, and then he let go of me and tore the scrapbook into pieces and dropped them down the trash chute.

  As I got older, he got drunker and meaner. When he chased me around it was more of a stagger. When he caught me, to prevent me from slipping away, he came up with a new idea—manacling me to the living room radiator with his handcuffs. So I wasn’t a moving target while he administered punishment. Then, exhausted by his exertion and his liquor, he’d usually black out and fall onto the couch or into bed. Mom would sneak the key to the handcuffs out of his pants and free me.

  One night, I was eleven, Declan hooked me up tight and beat me until I was unconscious. To celebrate his victory he dragged Mom and Kathleen to the candy store for ice cream sodas. And that was the first winter night it was cold enough for the building superintendent to send up steam. I woke and my wrist was on fire. The heat from the radiator pipes had inflamed the steel handcuffs. I shrieked. Tugged at the red-hot manacles. Caught! About to shriek again, though knowing that would not bring help. But I suddenly had an inspiration and at the top of my lungs, I screeched “Fire!”

  That mobilized a neighbor, who called the Fire Department. When they arrived, I sobbed uncontrollably as they sawed me loose and put ointment on my wrist. I heard them say I had third degree burns. Squad car cops were there by then, too, gathering details. I thought, “Saved at last! Declan’s finally gonna get his!” But when my family walked in, Declan flashed his detective’s badge, conferred with the cops, and they agreed this was just a domestic disturbance and went away. Nothing changed after that, except during the winter months Declan was careful to handcuff me to the heavy legs of the dining room table.

  So life went on. Until Halloween a year later.

  * * *

  At twelve, I was too old for trick or treating, but Kathleen was ten and really wanted to go. Mom made me go with her, “You know a girl’s not safe alone on these streets at night, what with all the drunks and hooligans.” Kath dressed up in her Halloween witch’s costume and I put on a Lone Ranger mask and we went knocking on doors in the neighborhood.

  There was snow on the ground, and after Kathleen collected a full bag of Tootsie Rolls and Baby Ruths we trudged toward home. An icy wind was blowing. On a dark, deserted street about two blocks from our tenement we saw a man lying facedown in the slush. We turned him over.

  “It’s Dad!” Kathleen whispered.

  Passed out along the route home he took from his favorite speakeasy. We stood there and looked down at him, Declan’s eyes flickering but unfocused, drool running from his open mouth.

  “We’ve gotta get him up,” she said. “Take him home.”

  We’d had experience at home picking him up off the floor from a drunken stupor. And he always came awake swinging haymakers at whoever was helping him.

  “I got a better idea,” I said, thinking of the fantasy I’d been nurturing for so long. I kicked him as hard a
s I could in the slats. He didn’t moan. Just lay there. I was crying. So I gave him the boot again, then turned to Kathleen, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Your turn!” I shouted. “Go on, you’ll never get a chance like this again!”

  “I can’t!” she wailed. “It’s a sin to kick a man when he’s down!”

  “Not him! Do it! You know you want to! Do it!”

  “No, Brian. No!” she sobbed. “I just can’t!”

  “Okay, sis,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Just leave him here?” She was awed by the idea.

  “Pretend we came down another street and didn’t see him. Coulda happened that way.”

  “But—”

  “The sooner he wakes up, the sooner he comes home—and the sooner it’s bad for us again.”

  So we walked away and left him there, Kathleen and I holding hands. She looked back a couple of times. I didn’t. Not even once.

  When we got home, Kathleen sorted her candy while Mom made hot chocolate for all of us, then we went to sleep. Without a hint to Mom as to what we’d seen on the street. Declan hadn’t come back yet, but that was often his way. He’d come crashing in later. But this time he wasn’t there in the morning. Kathleen kept darting glances at me. I read them: should we tell Mom? I’d shake my head, then after breakfast we got a phone call from Provident Hospital. Detective Collins had been found on the pavement and brought there. He was in a coma, being treated for hypothermia and pneumonia.

  Mom wanted us to go with her to visit him. I refused—if he was in a coma, why bother? Kathleen went. When they returned Kathleen looked real shaky. We went up on the roof to be alone and I asked her, how’d it go?

  “We walked into the ward and he was hooked up to all these tubes and gadgets but his eyes were open. I got scared, ’cuz he seemed to be looking right at me—but when Mom pushed me closer I could see his eyes were totally blank. So Mom and me sat next to him. She talked to him as if he could hear. I don’t think he could.”

  He died the next morning. Mom asked me to attend the funeral. I did. Not for him. For her. Some of the officers he served with spoke about what a great guy and a great cop he was. I kept my thoughts to myself.

  * * *

  There was a small police pension, and my mother got a job as a secretary in the bursar’s office at the University of Chicago, where she and my real father had first met, when he was studying to be a teacher and she was a server in the school cafeteria. With Declan gone, money was still tight, but our lives were so much better. Kathleen and I never discussed what happened on that Halloween night. Not until years later. It was our secret.

  My senior year in high school, Mom told me there were funds for me to go to college where she worked. She helped me fill out an application—my grades were very good, and I was a high school track star, so she could arrange for a partial sports scholarship. What really made it possible were the proceeds from an insurance policy paid out on Declan’s death. And the money was for Kathleen’s education as well.

  “Declan would have wanted that,” Mom said.

  It was a surprise, because he never showed any interest in my going to college and, as for Kathleen, he always said, “Educating a girl is pissing away time and money.” Later on, Kathleen graduated from Berkeley Law with honors and became one of the first female public defenders in Los Angeles.

  I’d gone to Michigan Law and came back to be an assistant DA in Chicago. Part of the law-enforcement community. Putting away bad guys. But being a prosecutor involved too much politics. I wanted to make a real difference. Only mostly I was convicting poor slobs who had no connections and working with too many cops who mangled the truth, even on the witness stand, to win what they believed was a righteous case. That wasn’t justice.

  So a pal in the DA’s office suggested I try the FBI. The idea pressed a button for me. As a kid I’d cut school to go to the Loop and see Jimmy Cagney three times in G-Men, guys keeping America safe with a fedora and a submachine gun. From my first day in the training program it was a perfect fit. Later, working briefly as an intern in J. Edgar Hoover’s office confirmed my aspirations: there was great power in the Bureau and great things to be done for the nation.

  Years after that, when I was en route to a Bureau assignment in L.A., I stopped off in Chicago to visit my mother. That’s when she confided to me that there had been no insurance policy.

  “The money that put you kids through colleges, I found it.”

  “What do you mean—found it?”

  “In a metal box hidden away. On a shelf in our bedroom closet. Behind a loose board in the wall. All in cash.”

  The legacy from my stepfather, the crooked Chicago cop. His share of shakedown money. Corruption stashed in the closet. I was horrified.

  “Don’t be angry at me for not telling you sooner. I was scared you and Kathleen would never have used the money and gotten an education—and that money didn’t pay back a tenth of what he took away from your lives.”

  But even with the “insurance” money, it had been a battle to get through. Kathleen had slaved away as a waitress all through college and I worked as a night watchman during the school year and as a construction laborer during summers. Now all Kathleen and I had strived for felt tarnished.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe sometimes from evil comes good.” And I hugged my mother. At least the three of us had survived.

  After I got settled in L.A., I told Kathleen about our “scholarship fund.” She flared up something fierce. “That rotten bastard,” she cried, reliving the abuse that the three of us had suffered—realizing that even in death Declan Collins had managed to get us one more time. Our dark secret linked us even closer.

  CHAPTER

  14

  DAVID

  It’s hot and sticky inside the jungle. Outside Soundstage 18 on the Panorama lot it’s a comfortable seventy-two degrees. Inside it’s Green Hell, a private world of stifling heat and humidity created at the autocratic behest of Leo Vardian.

  No one, except those with duties that require their presence, is allowed inside. Closed Set. Guards posted vigilantly at the few entrance doors. Within these walls of the largest stage on the Panorama lot the jungles of Kenya have been meticulously re-created.

  Air conditioners normally run full blast to offset the intense heat generated by the huge arc lights needed to shoot an “outdoor” set indoors. But Leo has forbidden use of air conditioners at any time. Authentic vegetation imported by the ton from Kenya is kept moist by a sprinkler system that keeps all us humans constantly moist, too. No windows on a soundstage and the ventilation isn’t great to begin with, so the place has gotten to smell rank. Leo basks in the discomfort. “I don’t want the actors to act like they’re in the jungle,” he has decreed, “I want them to be in the jungle.”

  My job is to be within shouting distance of Leo. Usually I’m within arm’s reach, but he shouts anyway. Like now. “David, get me the chop-top!”

  I race off. Once I leave the brightly lit section where the next scene is being prepared, I have to be wary of tripping over the python-like power cables that snake across the floor, plus hopscotching the man-made creeks that are part of our jungle, not to mention skidding through the sand and mud we’ve brought in here to play with. But I’m sure-footed, and I’ve made this run so many times that I reach the prop man’s assembly area in record time. “He wants the chop-top!” The prop man pivots and hands it to me as if we’re in a relay race, and I’m off again.

  The title of the movie is Against the Wind. It’s Leo’s original screenplay about the bloody Mau Mau uprising. Charlton Heston plays a British army officer who befriended a young Kenyan boy. The boy grows up to become Sidney Poitier, leader of the Mau Mau. Heston’s job is to hunt him down and kill him. Ernest Borgnine, as a Boer mercenary, is Heston’s top non-com.

  I’m slogging my way back when I pass one of the exit doors. It opens and a young studio guide in a blazer with the Panorama logo stitched on his breast po
cket leads three men and a woman inside. They look like Midwesterners, one man is carrying a Panama hat and the woman is wearing white gloves. Boy, are they ever in the wrong place.

  “I’m sorry,” I politely inform the guide, “this is a closed set.” I’ve been made personally responsible by Leo for anyone penetrating our security.

  “It’s okay,” the tour guide assures me. “I told the guard outside, these are personal guests of Mr. Mark Gunderson.”

  I repeat firmly. “Sorry. Closed set. No visitors.”

  The tour guide appraises me. I don’t look all that impressive in my muddy work boots and sweat-stained Sorbonne T-shirt. He decides to show off for the personages he has in tow. “Please step aside, I have my instructions.”

  From across the soundstage I hear Leo bellowing over the bullhorn, “Day-vidddd!” No more time to waste. “Get the hell out of here!” I yell. For emphasis I lift the chop-top up into view.

  It’s an expensive replica of the head of Herbert Lom, one of the featured actors, who has been decapitated by the Mau Mau. Made of sculpted latex, woven hair, it’s smeared with prop blood and looks real. I’m holding it by the hair and I shake it at the tourists, like a grotesque Halloween lantern. The woman covers her mouth in horror with her white-gloved hand and the tour guide propels them all out the door.

  When I turn, I see Leo standing there. “Now that’s what I call good old-fashioned Hollywood hospitality,” he says with his hint of a smile.

  He grabs the chop-top from me and goes to place it in the spot he wants it to be for the shot. Then he yells to Heston and Borgnine. “Let’s go to work, boys.”

  * * *

  For me it’s not work. It’s endlessly fascinating. I’m involved in my favorite activity, making a movie, this time with a big budget and top-drawer talent to talk to and learn from. But Leo rules by terror on the set. A monumental shit who knows precisely what he wants and tramples anyone who gets in his way. Temporarily misplacing a prop, forgetting one word of the script on camera, or spoiling a take by coughing are all causes for public humiliation. I only occasionally get lacerated in front of the crew. Hardly any of them ever heard of Teddy, so to them I’m not Teddy’s Boy. They seem to think of me as Leo’s Boy. Which makes me queasy.