He looked sheepish all of a sudden.
“That’s the second thing I wanted to apologize for.” He took a long breath and let it out. “The guy who followed you to the airport? That was my doing. My brother was still really agitated when I took him home from Marsh’s office. I never know what Harlan might work himself up to do. Just to be careful, I asked a friend of mine-”
“Orel Swensen?”
He nodded. “You drove right past the Swensen dairy farm to get on the freeway. I called Orel, told him what you were driving-I saw your rental car parked by the diner-and asked him to watch for you and make sure you got safely to the airport. I’m sorry he scared you. He told me that he might have followed too close. When the sheriff called-”
“I bet it was Orel’s turn to be scared,” I said.
He laughed softly. “Orel’s a good guy, but he and the sheriff have had a few run-ins. I called and explained and the sheriff understood. He’s had more than a few run-ins with my brother.”
“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “I do have an active imagination.”
“Where Harlan is concerned, my imagination comes from experience.”
He took an envelope from his jacket pocket and offered it to me. “Marsh Bensen dropped this by last night, asked me to give it to you today. It’s a proof for the front page of this morning’s Gazetteer. He’s awfully proud of it.”
I took a single sheet of paper out of the envelope and unfolded it. The big color photo above the fold of a deeply shadowed, spooky stairwell was too dark an exposure for my film’s purposes, but it made a wonderfully evocative lead for a story about murder; it did not take much to imagine a corpse hanging there. The caption in bold was: THE SCENE OF THE CRIME. And below it, “The body of the Hon. Park Holloway was found on Friday hanging from the ceiling above this stairwell.” The article that followed was well written and succinct, impressive.
“I’ll call Marsh later,” I said, folding the page again and putting it back into the envelope. “Thank you for this.”
I found him studying me. I held up the envelope and asked him, “Are you okay with Marsh’s story?”
“I am. We are. Marsh brought it over and showed it to us last night so that we would be prepared when the paper came out this morning. When the initial shock of seeing that picture wore off, I thought Marsh did a good job. We knew that Dad’s death would be on his front page this week-I gave Marsh a statement for the article-but that picture was a surprise.”
“He told you where he got it?”
Trey smiled. “He didn’t really need to, you know. Everyone in town except Mom and me saw you on TV last night and knows you talked to Marsh when you were in town Monday. The picture didn’t come from TV, so where else would he get it?”
“How did your brother take it?”
He smiled gamely, raised a shoulder. “There was a lot of language.”
The door opened and Guido came in trailing his crew, two longtime friends and colleagues, cameraman Paul Savoie and soundman Craig Hendricks; a second cameraman I had never met before, and a general purpose technician, along with Guido’s new intern, a very attractive young woman who carried a clipboard as if it were a fashion accessory.
“We’re all packed up,” Guido announced. “Ready to head back to the barn, unless there’s something else.”
“You had lunch?” I asked.
“We did.”
“Guido, I want you to meet Trey Holloway.”
The name piqued Guido’s interest. He shook Trey’s hand.
“Has Maggie talked you into speaking with her on camera?”
“I was just getting to that,” I said.
Guido and I exchanged glances. He nodded toward his crew and tapped his watch. I asked him, “When can we go up to Gilstrap?”
“Sunday, Monday,” he said. “We can pick up a crew at the local affiliate.”
I asked Trey, “Can you be available to talk with me on Sunday or Monday?”
Like most people, Trey’s first reaction to the prospect of showing up on camera was to do a little personal inventory: hair, clothes, general appearance. Later, people worry about saying the wrong thing and sounding foolish.
“You’ll look great,” I said. “And you won’t need to wear a suit.”
“That’s good.” He tugged at his tie. “You won’t often catch me in a suit except at weddings and funerals. Just promise that if I put my foot in my mouth too badly or start to bawl that you’ll edit it out.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
We set up a time on Sunday afternoon and a place, the high school baseball diamond, and said good-bye to Guido and his crew.
“I should go, too,” Trey said. “I have a plane to catch.”
I asked him where he was parked, and said I would walk with him so we could talk over some of the topics I wanted to discuss with him on Sunday. He didn’t quail at any area I ventured into. Like his mother, he seemed eager to talk.
“When I first heard you were making a film about my dad,” he said as we started across campus, “it bothered me to think about a stranger rooting around in our family attic, as it were. My mother and I had a conversation about it after you interviewed her. She really wants the film done, and she wants our side to be told.”
“Your side as opposed to whose?”
“The official version of the Family Holloway,” he said. “My mother believes it’s time to stop protecting Dad, because protecting his damn image never did us anything but harm. And maybe it was his lies that got him killed.”
“Lies about what?” I asked.
“Who Dad was. Who we were. We lived the life Parker Holloway, Junior wanted people to believe we led. And we covered for him. As Mom said, we still cover for him.”
When we came abreast of the administration building he quickly averted his eyes as if he could not look at the place where his father died. Instead, he kept his focus on the sidewalk ahead of us.
“After work on Monday I went by the house to check on Harlan,” he said. “My mom was crying. I thought it was because my brother was having a snit about taking his meds, but that wasn’t it. She told me that she was furious with herself for not telling you the truth, that she was still protecting my father, reading from the old script.”
“In what way?”
“For one thing,” he said, “Mom told you the old lie about the reason she brought my brother and me back to Gilstrap when my father was in Congress.”
“She told me that Gilstrap was a better place to raise kids than Washington.”
“No offense to Gilstrap, but she loved D.C. One of the reasons she married Dad in the first place was because she knew he would get her out of Gilstrap.”
“Why did you leave, then?”
“Dad sent us away. Buried us to save his public façade.”
“Would you explain that?”
“My little brother was always a handful, just a really hyper kind of kid. Not a bad kid, but not the sort of boy Dad thought his son should be. Harlan won’t mind me telling you this: he got kicked out of middle school for smoking dope-kid stuff. From there, his drug use escalated. When he was fourteen he was picked up in a narco raid.
“Dad had political ambitions beyond Congress and having a kid with a drug problem would get in his way. He kept saying that Jeb Bush would have been a presidential contender if he been able to manage his kids better, if that gives you an idea where Dad thought he was headed.
“There’s too much press in D.C. so it’s impossible to cover up the messes congressional kids get into. Dad knew that the people of Gilstrap would protect their own. So we got sent down from the majors.”
“And your mother assumed responsibility for that decision.”
“Dad gave her a script and she stuck to it,” he said with a grim smile. “Dad’s constituents don’t think much of Washington, so when Mom said she preferred to raise her boys in the bosom of the community she grew up in, people ate it up; my brother and I were already teenagers, nearly grown already. Dad talked about the hardship of being separated from his family, but that was pure Park Holloway bullshit.”