It wasn’t hard to find Spencer Addams. He was living over on the West Side in a tract house on Badger Road. As Noah and I drove out to meet him, Noah filled me in.
‘I saw him perform when I was at law school. He was admired for his summations and for daring moves such as putting a defendant on the stand, something a defense attorney rarely does. He was the kind of lawyer who liked taking on a hopeless cause, then exceeding expectations by pulling a victory out of thin air. That’s what he did in the Decoite murder case, which made him famous. When my buddies heard he was going to deliver a summation, a bunch of us hurried over to the county courthouse to observe. The courtroom was jammed. We were lucky to get seats. When word went out that Addams was going to sum up, members of the criminal defense bar made a point of sitting in.
‘He was good that day, incredibly persuasive. It was like watching an artist teach a master class. Words poured out of him like honey, grabbing and holding the jurors’ attention. Some believed he mesmerized juries, won verdicts by employing diabolical powers of persuasion. In my view, he simply out-lawyered prosecutors and won his cases on the merits. There was a twinkle in his eye that day when he scanned the courtroom and noticed us. Recognizing us as law students, I think he started playing as much to us as to the jurors. Like he was saying “Hey guys, this is how it’s done!”’
I was surprised when we pulled up in front of the house. It didn’t look like the home of a famous barrister. Badger Road was full of potholes. The neighborhood was rundown. The property looked poorly kept, the siding peeling, the yard choked with weeds.
An unsmiling middle-aged woman with high cheekbones answered the door.
‘I’m Carol Addams,’ she said. ‘You’re here to see my dad.’
She led us through the house and then out the rear door to a patch of dry brown grass where Spencer Addams reclined in a plastic strap chair.
‘Pardon me for not standing. I’ve got arthritis,’ he said. He showed us a toothy grin. Although his face was marked by red lines and liver spots, there was something leonine about the man. He had piercing blue eyes, and long white hair woven into a pigtail in back. His voice was strong, despite his ruined face. He had, I thought, the deep compelling voice of a radio announcer.
‘I live over there.’ He gestured toward a decrepit mobile home mounted on cinder blocks across the dried-up lawn. ‘Carol lets me park it here so long as I stay out of her way.’ He turned to her. ‘Ain’t that right, darlin’?’
Carol sucked in her cheeks, turned and strode back into her house.
‘We get along fine,’ Addams assured us. ‘As you may have gathered, I’ve seen better days. Used to live in a lovely view apartment on Keller Ridge. That was back in my salad years. If you’re wondering how I’ve sunk to this debased state, I can’t rightly explain it, except to say I spent too much on alcohol and women, made bad investments, forgot to file taxes – all the above. But you didn’t come out here to hear my sob story. Not that I have one. I’m perfectly happy the way things are. I’m eighty-three, and I’ve been waiting a long, long time for someone to come around and ask me about the Schechtner matter.’ He gazed into my eyes and then into Noah’s. ‘That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Noah said.
‘Good, ’cause I got a story to tell and papers to back it up. It was a dirty business, that Schechtner thing, but then the Cobbs always played in the muck. I had a hunch someday someone’d come around asking how they happened to run my clients out of town.’
He was ready to tell us all about that ‘dirty business,’ but first he wanted us to tell him why we were interested. I told him most of it, and when he heard how Jase and I had flown out to New Mexico to see Liz Schechtner, he decided we were for real and deserved to hear what he had to tell.
The Schechtners got his name from the Public Defender’s Office. An attorney there knew he despised wealthy people like the Cobbs. Spencer visited the Schechtners in jail, heard their story, was certain they’d been set up and that Walter Loetz was lying. The judge set bail so high that the Schechtners couldn’t possibly raise it. That too made Spencer suspicious. His first step was to go into A Caring Place on Locust Street. He observed that there was no satanic material there except for the hastily spray-painted 666 on the living-room wall. As for the ‘erotic murals’ in the so-called attic ‘orgy room,’ he observed that they were not at all orgiastic and photographed them to show in court. Most important, he retrieved Ted Schechtner’s case file on Courtney Cobb stuffed with notes on all the terrible and terrifying things she’d confided.
‘That file was devastating. Soon as I read it, I knew I had them by their hairs. There were things in there that the Cobbs would never want known. So I had a little chat with their attorney, a dude name of Silver who dressed like a dandy. When I showed him a little bit of what I had, his mouth puckered like he’d been sucking on a lemon.
‘“This is grave,” he said. I liked that word. To me it meant I had stuff that, if exposed in open court, would follow his clients to their graves. I offered him a deal. Since A Caring Place was properly licensed, and there’d been no holding Courtney and her friend against their will, all criminal charges against the Schechtners were to be dropped and they were to be immediately released. I demanded complete exoneration, and a payment for damages to their names and reputations. Silver asked what sort of figure I had in mind. Quarter mil, I told him. He said that was too much, Horace Cobb would never pay it. It was extortion, pure and simple, he said. I knew he was bluffing, knew Cobb would pay. I told him so, and that he’d probably end up paying a helluva lot more if I got annoyed and into a real extortive mood. I told him this was very likely if I didn’t get the quarter mil, and that he’d best get back to me by the end of the day; otherwise, I’d start feeding what I had to a Times-Dispatch reporter and then it would be too late to squeeze the ugly ooze back into the proverbial tube.
‘He reappeared in my office at five p.m., panting and looking worried. He had a cashier’s check for two hundred fifty thousand made out to my trustee account. But before he’d turn it over, he had some demands of his own. First, the Schechtners were to close up their practice and move out of state. Second, I was to turn over all their documents concerning Courtney Cobb. And, third, they were to sign a binding non-disclosure agreement he’d drawn up, regarding anything they knew or had heard regarding Courtney and her family, with severe financial penalties should they ever reveal any of it to anyone at any time.
‘I read the agreement. I’ll give Silver this much – it was well drawn. But I didn’t like the requirement that the Schechtners pull up stakes. I told him that was not contemplated when I gave him my figure. He said he understood, and for that reason had a second check for seventy-five grand to cover their relocation expenses. I told him I’d speak to my clients and get back to him the following day. I remember the way he snickered, like he thought now he had the upper hand. “I’ll give you till noon,” he said.
‘So, OK, it was a decent deal. The Schechtners didn’t like it much, didn’t like the notion of selling out the Cobb girl, but they understood they’d made a huge mistake not telling her parents where she was, and, worse, not passing on what Courtney had told Ted, which, being criminal, they were obliged to report to law enforcement. I pointed out that, far as I could tell, Courtney had been moved out of state and thus would likely be unavailable to testify, that basically there was nothing they could do to help her now, and that no matter what destruction they might wreak upon the Cobbs, that wouldn’t get them out of the considerable trouble they were in. I looked around the jail attorney’s conference room. It was pretty bleak. “No one wants you to sell anyone out,” I told them, “but time’s come to think about yourselves.”
‘They agreed to take the deal. I called Silver, told him to get them released. We’d meet again in my office at the end of the day where I would hand him the signed NDAs plus Ted Schechtner’s notes in exchange for the two cashier’s checks. He sounded relieved, and, frankly, so was I. It was a nasty business, but I’d served my clients’ interests and felt pretty good about that.’ He paused. ‘And yet … I was so appalled by what I’d read in Ted’s notes that I decided to photocopy them and keep them in my files just in case. In case of what, you’re wondering.’ He grinned. ‘Well …’
‘In case one day someone came around asking why the charges against the Schechtners were so suddenly dismissed,’ I said.
Addams nodded. ‘And now … here you are! Two of you, no less! And, yeah, I still have those old photocopies. I cleaned out most of my papers when I closed my practice. Spent days shredding documents. But there were some things I couldn’t bring myself to shred – among them Ted’s notes. Wanna see ’em?’ He grinned. ‘Sure you do!’
Ted Schechtner’s notes were worse than devastating. They were sickening. They were also disjointed. But fortunately they were dated and arranged in sequence. Although the photocopies were on eight-by-ten sheets, the notes themselves came in a variety of sizes. Some were scrawled on small notepad paper, others were neatly handwritten on lined punch-holed stock, as if for inclusion in a three-ring binder, and still others were neatly typed. Based on the chaotic way he took notes on their sessions, Dr Ted came off as a hurried and harried scribe. I guessed he’d scribbled down his thoughts and notes as Courtney’s words poured out of her.
Among his own notes were pithy phrases: ‘deeply troubled,’ ‘heart goes out to her,’ ‘poor little rich girl!!!,’ ‘her voice so low I can barely make out her words.’
He wrote: ‘serious abuse,’ ‘thinks no one cares,’ ‘for sure they know but they can’t face the truth.’
He noted: ‘so brave in the face of so much evil,’ ‘smiles when most anguished. When I ask why, she says “I don’t feel so bad when I smile.”’ ‘Says: “they hated me because I didn’t fit in, didn’t meet their expectations.”’ ‘Says: “I was different, strange, always drawing pictures. People said I acted weird.”’
And then perhaps the most poignant of all: ‘She questions whether she imagined everything, whether it was, as her parents insisted, another of her weird distortions of reality.’
Ted leaves little doubt about what that ‘everything’ was. Her brothers sexually assaulted her. She tells Ted it started back when she was thirteen. Jack did it first. He came to her and, to groom her, said he needed her help, told her he had these urges because he was a boy and begged her to help him obtain relief. Would she please touch him in certain places? He came on sweet and vulnerable. He was her big brother, so of course she was willing to help him out.
She was intensely curious about these ‘urges,’ also amused by what he asked her to do and by his reactions when she did it. She knew about male genitalia and the role they played in reproduction, but she was surprised and amazed how when she touched Jack’s organ, it would ‘miraculously change shape.’
Afterwards Jack would thank her. He’d tell her how grateful he was for her understanding, and how embarrassing it was for him to plead for help. He also slyly suggested that if she let him touch her in certain places, he could make her feel good too.
For a while she demurred, but then one night told him she was willing to let him try. And so he did. The first time it didn’t excite her much, but, yes, she admitted to Dr Ted, it was fun, and after a while that kind of intimate touching excited her quite a lot. She relished the fact that what they were doing was forbidden. There was a special excitement that came from breaking rules and crossing lines. Jack was pleased by her willingness to play. He was also excited by their transgressions. He told her it was a ‘fun game’ they were playing, and he was happy that she liked their game. He gave her little gifts to reward her for playing it – new charms for her charm bracelet, an antique scarab ring – and caresses, ‘very sweet caresses,’ that aroused her and made her feel loved.
This went on for over a year, then Jack introduced Kevin to their game.
They were her big brothers. They claimed they loved her. They told her that, being boys, they had their needs. Since she was their ‘bestie,’ their ‘favorite girl in the whole world,’ surely she’d want to help her loving brothers deal with their corporeal desires.
At first she helped Kevin the same way she helped Jack, and sometimes the three of them would lie together, she in the middle, her brothers on either side, and she would touch them both at the same time and the game became a contest as to which of the boys would spurt first.
Kevin was usually the winner, and the winner, they’d agreed, should receive a reward. There were different kinds of rewards. Usually, these consisted of her giving the winner additional satisfaction with her mouth. She didn’t mind that. In fact, she kind of liked rewarding victorious Kevin in front of defeated Jack, because it made Jack jealous.
Things progressed. Would she like to try having sex? It would be good practice for all three of them. She’d be experienced when she started dating, and the boys she went out with would appreciate that.
It took considerable persuasion to convince her. They both kept asking, very nicely too, and finally she thought she owed it to herself to find out what it felt like. The first few times it hurt. When she’d told them so, they stopped and kissed her and said how sorry they were, how they never meant to hurt her, but sometimes they got so excited they couldn’t help themselves. They hoped she understood.
Things changed after a while. One night they both came into her room and after Jack went into her, Kevin turned her over and thrust his thing into her rear. She didn’t like that at all. She screamed and told him to stop. Kevin giggled and kept going. ‘Sorry, too late, can’t stop now,’ he hissed into her ear. ‘Gotta see it through.’
Kevin was so much bigger and stronger that she had no choice but to submit. Afterwards she showed them her anger. She told them both to get out of her room and not to come back because she wasn’t going to let them touch her anymore.
Still, she admitted to Dr Ted, there was something interesting and intense about feeling so helpless, conquered and used. After a while she began to miss their attentions, and so agreed to resume the game. But with new rules. No hurting. No calling her names as Kevin liked to do when he went inside her – names like ‘bitch’ and ‘whore.’ They said OK, no more of that. They promised to make it sweet, like it was at the beginning, make it lovely for all three of them. And wasn’t it fun, Jack asked her, that they were doing this, playing like this, and no one else in the whole wide world knew, and never would? This was their secret, their compact, their private game.
Jack always tried to make it fun. Kevin didn’t bother. She gathered he didn’t care if it was enjoyable for her as long as it was for him. At times he could be pretty nasty. He’d always had a mean streak. One time when the boys were lying on either side of her after sex, he asked Jack which of her holes Jack liked the best. Jack said he preferred her pussy. Kevin said it was more fun for him to fuck her in the ass because of the way that made her squeal. And, of course, they equally enjoyed thrusting themselves into her mouth. They agreed in future to divide her body up. Jack would insert his thing into her front and Kevin would stick his into her butt. Then they turned to her. What about her needs? What did she like best? She had no answer. ‘I don’t really like any of it,’ she finally said. They laughed.
She was sixteen when she first tried to tell her mother.
Her mom cut her off, waved her hands in front of her face. ‘Nonsense! I don’t want to hear it. Your brothers are wonderful boys.’ Her dad got really mad at her. ‘Keep spouting that kind of filth and I’ll send you away. Want to go to the insane asylum, Court?’ She told him she didn’t. ‘Then stop your damn whining,’ he said.
They must have confronted the boys because that night they came into her room, angry. ‘This is our private business,’ Jack said. ‘It’s just between the three of us. So stop tattling and keep your trap shut.’ Then they forced her to suck them both off.
They fucked her in all three places. A few times they fucked her at the same time. She tried to enjoy it. They said that’s what she should do. ‘It’s supposed to be fun,’ Jack insisted. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a game.’ Kevin told Jack he didn’t give a shit whether she liked it or not. He was going to do what he wanted and he promised she’d be sorry if she ever tattled on them again.
This went on for a year, until Jack graduated from Richmond and went away to boarding school. The year alone with Kevin was the worst. He took to deliberately hurting her, pinching, slapping, squeezing her neck with his hands until she was on the verge of passing out. He explained that this was a new variation on their game, a variation he’d heard about and wanted to try. He told her he liked making her cry and liked it too when she tried not to. He liked seeing how long she could hold out, how far he could go before she broke down and wept. Always in the end, he promised her, ‘You will cry because I won’t stop until you do.’
It got to the point that Kevin told her he didn’t enjoying fucking her unless she resisted and tried to fight him off. Her struggling, he told her, turned him on. Her resistance became a requirement.
She thought about killing herself. She would take the bus downtown, go to the Cobb Industries building, take the elevator up to her dad’s office, tell him everything in great detail, then jump out the window right in front of him.
Then he’d have to believe her. Then he’d be sorry he hadn’t listened. Then they’d all be sorry … at least for a while anyway.
She decided to try to enjoy what Kevin was doing to her. For a while that seemed to work. She admitted to Ted she sometimes liked being held down and forced. Kevin was thrilled when he discovered this. ‘Yeah!’ he said, ‘I heard you bitches like it rough. Wow! Turns out to be true!’
When Jack came back on spring break, Kevin told him what he’d found out about her. ‘Turns out little sis is a pain-lover.’ Jack said he wasn’t surprised. ‘We trained you good, didn’t we, Court?’ She refused to answer, turned away and wept.
The next year Kevin joined Jack at St Paul’s. When they both came home on Thanksgiving break, they told her how horny they were. ‘Been looking forward to getting back in the saddle all fall,’ Kevin said.
The incidents piled up. The abuse became increasingly depraved. One time, Miss Scott, the gym teacher at Ashley-Burnett, saw her dressing in the locker-room and asked her about some bruises on her thighs. Courtney turned beet-red and covered up. ‘They’re nothing,’ she said. Miss Scott told her to finish getting dressed and come to her office. There Miss Scott asked her if there was anything she wanted to talk about. She said the bruises looked like Courtney may have been abused. Courtney said she’d just been ‘messing around with a boy,’ and it was none of Coach’s business. Then she ran out.
The school called her parents. They confronted her when she got home. ‘What’s this about messing around with some boy?’ her father demanded. ‘Who’ve you been seeing?’ She told them she hadn’t been seeing anyone, that Jack and Kevin had been abusing her. They said that wasn’t possible, the boys were away at school. Before she could explain that the bruises were two weeks old, that they’d hurt her during break, they accused her of being delusional. Her dad told her that if she kept saying stuff like that, he’d send her to a hospital where they’d put her in a straitjacket and give her shock treatments, and maybe that would finally straighten out her sick, evil mind.
It was difficult for me to keep reading Ted’s notes. The narrative was disjointed. The abuse he described became monotonous. By recounting incident upon incident, it occurred to me that he’d been trying to build a case. This fit with Jase’s and my suspicions, after we talked with Dr Liz in Abiquiú, that Ted had a plan to use his knowledge of Courtney’s pain to extort money from the Cobbs.
Sometimes, Courtney told him, she reveled in what her brothers were doing to her and other times she despised it. She twice seriously considered suicide, even going so far as to stockpile pills.
She went to see her paternal grandmother with whom she’d always felt close. Grandma Flo, as they all called her, listened intently as Courtney tried to tell her what had been going on. She softened the story out of consideration for Grandma Flo, and also to spare herself embarrassment. She spoke very softly and shyly. She could barely bring herself to describe the abuse. When she was finished, Grandma Flo gazed at her lovingly. ‘You always were a troubled child,’ she finally said. ‘You were always different. And so creative! Your drawing talent is just amazing. But these things you’re telling me – I just can’t believe them, dear. I know and love your brothers as much as I know and love you. I’m very sorry to tell you this, but what you’re saying just doesn’t seem possible.’
She dreaded when Jack and Kevin came home from school and from vacations. She was immensely relieved when her parents permitted her to spend the summer at Red Raven art camp. Not only did this get her out of the house, but she met someone there she really liked. Penny Dawson, she told Ted, was the best friend she’d ever had. She’d told Penny some of what had been going on, and Penny confided her own troubles at home. The best part of these exchanges was that each believed the other, and the similarity of their experiences proved to Courtney that the horrors she’d endured were not unique.
That autumn, while taking after-school art class, they made plans to run away. Penny said she knew a place where they could go. She told Courtney about Dr Ted and the house called A Caring Place in East Calista that he and his wife ran for runaway kids. And so they ran for it. Courtney began therapy with Dr Ted, and he kept notes on everything she told him.
In a final set of typed notes Ted wrote up his diagnosis and proposed prescription for Courtney’s recovery:
Patient suffers the after effects of repeated traumatic vicious sexual abuse by her two older brothers. Patient displays certain anti-social tendencies consistent with a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome, including selective mutism, but is also a high-functioning visual artist of considerable talent. She should be encouraged to employ her talent to express her anguish and thereby work it through. This plus 2X per week psychotherapy will hopefully in time relieve much of her pain. Prognosis uncertain. Full recovery may not be possible. As adulthood is imminent, patient should be encouraged to stay as far away as possible from her family. It is a wonder, considering so much inflicted abuse, that she is able to function at all. Without her art, it is questionable whether she can have a productive happy life.
Ted further describes how he tried to coax Courtney to draw the horrific scenes she’d described to him. When she resisted, he suggested that she devise her own art project, something that could lucidly express her feelings of anguish and betrayal. That’s when she and Penny asked him to panel all four walls of the attic, including the windows, and then let them loose on the walls with brushes and paint. ‘We have a plan,’ they told him. Because he liked the gleam in their eyes when they said this, he gave their project his blessing. And thus the Locust Street Murals were born.
Noah and I didn’t talk much on the drive back to the city. We were still absorbing, each in our own way, what we’d read that afternoon. It felt strange sitting in the car beside my loving brother after reading about the terrifying brothers-on-sister abuse Courtney had endured.
Noah must have been thinking the same thing. At one point he turned to me.
‘We could never have done such things.’
‘Never in a thousand years,’ I agreed.
The sky was darkening as we neared Calista. Sirens were wailing and smoke from summer fires seeped into the car. Noah turned to me again.
‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Horrified, heartbroken, sickened, depressed. How ’bout you?’
‘Same. I know a tavern near here. I think we can both use a stiff drink.’
We went in, ordered. I peered at Noah. ‘You look angry,’ I told him. ‘What’re you thinking?’
‘So much corruption! And the things people do within families – I know I shouldn’t be surprised.’
I asked him what it was about the Cobb brothers that made him so detest them.
‘Didn’t we just read how detestable they are?’
‘I mean, before we read Ted’s notes. In your office, you told us you relished the opportunity to take them down. What’s that about?’
‘First, their politics. They’re the worst kind of right-wing hypocrites. They talk a good game about being libertarians and go heavy on free will, “ethical self-interest” and the rest of the Ayn Rand crap. At the same time, they’re major polluters. They’ve polluted the hell out of Watomi Lake, and if they had their way, they’d dump their industrial poison into the Calista River. Their smokestacks spew out noxious fumes. They’ve racked up hundreds of environmental infractions, been sued dozens of times. They fight back, counter-sue, dig up dirt on their enemies. They’ll spend whatever it takes to keep doing what they’re doing, all in the name of dynamic egoism, laissez-faire capitalism and their Darwinian economic survival-of-the-fittest beliefs. CI may be the biggest privately owned polluter in the country. If it was a public company, they’d never get away with it. Meantime, they finance academics who deny we’re in the midst of climate change. I could go on. And then there’s the personal stuff …’
‘Such as?’
‘Stuff consistent with what they did to Courtney. Rumors of sex parties with underage girls. I’ve heard tales like that for years. Then I hear people say, “How could that be possible? They’re great humanists. Look at all the money they’ve donated to the museum. They fund free summer theater and dance performances. They paid for that new wing at the Calista Institute of Music. Maybe they have a few peccadilloes, but don’t we all have our urges, our shames, our non-conforming desires? Surely such things can’t annul all the good they do.” You know the rap.’
He shook his head. ‘Nate Silver could have told me about the Schechtner deal. So why’d he suggest I contact Spencer Addams? He had to know that if I found him, I’d get the story. He may even have guessed that Spencer had copies of Ted’s notes.’
‘Maybe he was sincerely trying to help you.’
Noah shrugged. ‘Or frustrate me. I doubt a judge would allow Ted’s notes to be read in court. Ted’s dead and can’t be cross-examined. The Cobbs’ lawyers would designate them as “scurrilous hearsay.” And even if Courtney’s willing to come back and testify (a huge if), they’ll attack her as a delusional schizophrenic. After what we read this afternoon, I’d truly love to go to war against the Cobbs. But Ted’s notes aren’t enough. I’m pretty sure Nate knew that when he suggested I look up Spencer. Probably didn’t like the way I came on to him and didn’t like that I turned down his invitation to play golf. So he decided to have some fun with me.’
‘Is that really a lawyer’s idea of fun? Strikes me as pathetic.’
‘Yeah,’ Noah agreed, ‘and the worst part is that to guys like Nate something as awful as this is just a game.’
Noah was wrapped up in the legal aspects, while I was concerned by the huge emotional damage Courtney’s brothers and parents had inflicted on her. I’d always felt, and Jase did too, that there was a secret history behind the murals, an engine that drove their creation. Now I knew what that dark energy was. The murals were about cold, two-faced people who refused to listen to Courtney and were incapable of understanding her pain. They were images of the resistance she’d met when she’d tried to tell her story. I thought her dolls were about the same thing: two-faced figures, genitals swelling beneath their garments, faces ravaged by being cut up and then sewn back together, the tears and stitches marking them for their malice, moral corruption and hypocrisy. As Penny Dawson told Joan, the murals were the girls’ vision of hell.
We sat in the tavern in silence, lost in our respective thoughts.
‘So what do you think?’ Noah finally asked.
‘Don’t know. What about you?’
‘I think it’s urgent we find out what Courtney wants. Where her head is at and what, if anything, we can do for her.’
‘Maybe we should just leave it alone.’
‘I know you, Hannah. I don’t believe for a second that’s what you want.’
He was right, of course. It was too late to stop. We’d come this far. There was no turning back.