“What are you getting at?” Jules asked.
“It’s that I’ve never sensed a feeling of … shame in you.”
“Shame?”
“Or guilt or remorse. I must say, not ever.”
“Shame about what? Guilt about what? About the fact that my development company went broke? Should I feel shame about hard economic times? I tried, didn’t I? I risked my capital. What do you want from me?”
“I wasn’t talking about that, son,” Harold Temple said, and then his left leg started to shake. This had been happening a lot, a trembling of his limbs that he couldn’t control.
“What then?”
“There are … terms for people who don’t have empathy, who don’t understand how their actions can hurt other people.”
“Other people? What other people?”
“Your wife. Your child.”
With a trace of a sneer: “Ex-wife, the bitch.”
“She’s the mother of your child.”
“I see my child. I see Sally every chance I get,” Jules said. “I’d send checks if I had any money!”
Harold Temple knew it was a lie, but he continued: “I worry that there’s not a complete person inside you. You haven’t outgrown a certain … incompleteness.”
“I see,” Jules said, looking past his father at the portrait of his grandfather on the wall. “What crimes am I guilty of? What have I done that’s so terrible?”
“Call it a certain … moral insensitivity,” the older man said, in great distress. “You haven’t been involved in criminal activity, thank god, but …”
“You think I’m capable of it. That I’ll disgrace you.”
“Jules, I’ve heard stories about the investors in your development company. Your actions bordered on criminal fraud.”
“They lost, I lost, we all lost. Sour grapes, hard times. What else, Dad? Let’s get all my faults out on your desk so we don’t miss anything.”
“This isn’t easy for me, son.”
“For me this is a picnic, right? All this psychobabble.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere, Jules,” his father said, “so I might as well tell you that I’ve had my will rewritten. When I die you’re getting an allowance of two thousand dollars a month for five years. And that’s it.”
“And the house?”
“No house, no property of any kind, no insurance. No more than two thousand a month for five years. You won’t starve, but you’ll have to get off your butt and make something of yourself.”
“And where does the balance of your estate go?”
“To various charities.”
Jules put the glass on his father’s desk, then turned and headed for the door of the study. But he paused and said, “Thanks, Dad. Thanks for giving me everything, and then taking it away. You’ve been swell. And please don’t tell me it’s for my own good.”
“I wouldn’t tell you that, Jules,” Harold Temple said. “Not anymore.”
“Maybe I should just move out now,” Jules said, and was shocked when his father replied, “That might be a good idea. Get out on your own and start scratching like everyone else has to do.”
That evening Harold Temple wrote his son a check for $5,000. He called it “seed money.” And that was that.
Jules packed his things and left the next morning, moving in with Margie, a divorced cocktail waitress he’d been dating. She said he could stay until he got on his feet. It was while living with her, after he’d grown desperate, that Jules Temple again became an entrepreneur.
The idea came to him when he was baby-sitting for Margie, who had the late shift at a nightclub in downtown San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. He’d spent night after miserable night in front of the TV, drinking the cheap Scotch that Margie bought at discount outlets. Margie’s seven-year-old daughter, Cynthia, had been begging him to play dolls with her when it happened: the idea!
He’d heard of the pedophile’s motto: “Eight is too late.” Cynthia was only seven, but she looked even younger. She was very pretty, but not a terribly bright child, not nearly as bright as Jules’s own daughter had been at that age. Cynthia was a lot like her mother, he thought.
The next day Jules was in several adult magazine and book shops in downtown San Diego looking for chickenhawk and pedophile publications. When he got back to the apartment, he studied many photos of naked children in provocative poses. Then he homed in on the ads in those publications to learn how they were set up.
Later that evening when Margie was at work, Jules suggested to Cynthia that they play “movie star.”
“You have to promise me that you won’t tell Mommy,” he said. “Cross your heart. It’s our secret.”
“Okay,” the child said, and obeyed her director’s instruction to the letter.
Jules did her makeup as best he could, using Margie’s cosmetics. He believed that scant clothing would be more titillating than nudity, so he posed her in panties and ballet slippers, trying to imitate the young models. Essentially, he wanted a seven-year-old Madonna.
Jules knew that he didn’t dare have more than one photo session because Cynthia might accidentally spill the beans. By the time that Cynthia had informed her mother of Jules’s “movie star” game, Margie had already kicked him out for making long-distance calls, lots of long-distance calls all over the country that he said were “just business.” Margie never understood that his business intimately concerned her daughter.
Jules had bought ad space in three pedophile publications. His ad included a photo of the child and listed a post office box in downtown San Diego. Within two weeks, more than sixty pedophiles had responded in letters directed to “Samantha’s Uncle.”
Almost all the pedophiles used post office boxes of their own, or general delivery, and within days each would receive glossy photos of the little girl. Along with the photos was a typed letter:
Dear Sir,
My name is Samantha. I am six years old and have been taught many things that will please you. If you would like to meet me and learn what I can do, please call my Uncle Desmond any time between 10:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. PST.
Love,
Samantha
Jules Temple went to the trouble of switching his answering service every two months during a year in which letters were exchanged with pedophiles as far away as Alaska. He ultimately received more than two hundred phone calls, and decided that nearly half of them were worth tape-recording surreptitiously.
During the pedophile’s recorded conversations with “Uncle Desmond,” Jules would usually manage to solicit a callback number, and surprisingly, the caller often gave his true name and address when asking for more photos, this after long and lascivious conversations with Uncle Desmond about Samantha.
Shortly thereafter, selected “Friends of Samantha” would receive a small parcel from Uncle Desmond which they would excitedly open, only to find an audiotape rather than more photos. On the audiotape would be the caller’s own voice recorded during his lewd conversation with Uncle Desmond wherein he’d negotiated terms for the use of Samantha. The conversations included specific questions and answers about all the things Uncle Desmond had taught the little girl. There wasn’t a caller who wasn’t stunned to hear how explicit his own excited phone call had been.
At the end of the tape would be a message from Uncle Desmond that varied slightly, depending upon how much Jules had been able to learn during his conversation and correspondence with the pedophile, and how much Jules sensed the pedophile was worth. The message was:
Hi (using the caller’s name). I have several more copies of this tape which I am considering sending to your local police department, as well as to the FBI and to your local newspaper. I might even include a copy to your closest relative. I think you know who I mean, don’t you? I shudder to think what your family and friends will say when they hear your own voice telling me what you want Samantha to do to you and how much you are willing to pay for it.