Celebrity, p.66
Celebrity, page 66
Sister Crystal watched the sketch artist create a drenched and dripping girl, in the arms of a huge youth. He flipped to a clean page and drew the same girl, surrounded by three young men, advancing on her. She wanted to tell the artist that he had it wrong but she was diverted by the voices. They had come again. The voices swarmed over her like exploring hands. They seemed to strip her nude. They fluttered across her breasts and made them harden. They slithered about her body. “You’re beautiful,” whispered one of the voices. “So beautiful … You’n me are gonna love each other.…”
“And?” demanded Otto Leo harshly.
“That’s about it,” answered Kleber, his eyes in his lap.
“How do you know Mr. Luther had sex?”
“Because I saw him.”
“You watched?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are a Peeping Tom? A voyeur?”
“Objection!” Sledge disliked the sleazy turn of the tale.
“Sustained. Mr. Leo, you are on very thin ice.”
“Come on, Mr. Cantrell. You’ve always given your fans better stories than that. This one doesn’t even have an ending.”
“Until now.”
“This isn’t over yet,” snapped Leo. “Not by a long shot. You’ve left quite a bit out—and edited the rest. Isn’t it true that you and Mack Crawford in fact choked this young woman to death?”
“No,” said Kleber, slowly becoming aware of how his story was about to be twisted. He felt panic. Mack was dead. Now it was his word against a man of God. It was the testimony of a writer—a foolish writer who had settled a libel suit rather than defend himself, a professional carp who belittled the down-home values of probably everybody in the jury box, a tarnished brass celebrity in battle against a preacher who breathed life into the dead and who sat in shocked silence with the cross of Calvary glittering from his breast. The odds were ominous.
“Isn’t it also true that you—the leader of the Three Princes—that you suggested throwing this young woman’s ravaged, lifeless body into the Brazos River?”
“That’s absurd,” fumbled Kleber, shooting a Get-Me-Out-of-This signal over to Calvin Sledge, who was on his feet, trying to form a sputtering objection while Sandy Double frantically dumped folders out of the case file, searching for the yellowed AP clipping that told the truth of the storming midnight.
In the tumult, Otto Leo squeezed one final question. “And what was this unfortunate young woman’s name?”
It was at this moment that a great fork of lighting split the Texas heavens and screamed to earth, striking a power transmitter on the north side of the city and causing the lights in the courtroom to fade into a yellowish deathly gray. Judge Mustardseed banged an end to the day. The Chosen rose to prophesy damnation for sinners in general and Kleber Cantrell in particular. And it was during this fateful coalescence that Sister Crystal stood on the front row to answer Otto Leo’s final inquiry.
“Laurie,” she said, clearly and sweetly. “Laurie is my name.” Then, withdrawing the blade hidden in the folds of the morning news, Laurel Jo Killman, eyes fully open to the perception of truth for the first moment in a quarter of a century, rushed into the arena of justice and plunged cheap steel into the heart of the man who had stolen her life.
The last thing The Chosen presumably saw, the image that danced in the dying light, the final vision for Thomas Jeremiah Luther, was the ring on the finger of the madwoman. It took three bailiffs to tackle the assassin, pin her down, extricate the knife from a hand on whose wedding finger rested a pale green cameo, an old crone smiling, with a very long nose.
BOOK SEVEN
SHORT TAKES
Chapter Thirty-one
APXXXCCC112370 BREAK BULLETIN BULLETIN BREAK BREAK
Fort Worth, TX—Dec. 24, 1975—The Chosen stabbed …
BREAK BREAK APXXL 1333334480 FWTX—Dec. 24, 4:59 p.m.
A woman reportedly rushed out of the spectator section in the murder trial of The Chosen and stabbed him in the heart.…
BULLETIN
URGENT
FORT WORTH, TX. Dec. 24, 1975 5:17 p.m. BREAK BREAK
Controversial religious leader The Chosen was stabbed late this afternoon by a woman, believed to be a fanatic spectator at his murder trial. The 42-year-old defendant, born Thomas Jeremiah Luther, has been on trial since September for the murder of actor Mack Crawford.… BREAK BREAK BREAK
FORT WORTH, TX. Dec. 24, 1975 7:01 p.m. CST
The Chosen dead. Petersmith Hospital admitting clerk reporting him
DOA … 6:50 p.m. CST …
BREAK BREAK SUPERSEDE ALL BULLETINS
URGENT
The Chosen not dead. Repeat not dead. Petersmith Hospital emer gency room spokesman reports 42-year-old religious leader in “grave condition.” Rushed into surgery …
AP, Mar. 16, 1976, Fort Worth, TX: Laurel Jo Killman, 42 was transferred by court order today to the Texas State Hospita division for the criminally insane at Rusk. During a brief hearing Miss Killman sang hymns and testified that she plunged a kitchen knife into the heart of religious leader Thomas Jeremiah Luther, The Chosen, “on orders of Jehovah.”
Miss Killman had been for the last five years an employee an the City of Miracles. Prior to that, she had spent her entire adult life as a patient at the Rusk mental institution having first entered the hospital’s custody as an anmesia victim at the age of 17. An official of the hospital, Dr. Morgan Stein, told the court today that it was a “bad judgment call” to have released her in the first place. Dr. Stein testified Miss Killman suffered and still suffers from dementia and acute schizophrenia. It is considered unlikely that she will ever be found fit for trial in the stabbing of Rev. Luther.
From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Oct. 3, 1977, page 32:
FORMER PROSECUTOR DIES
Calvin Sledge, 43, died today of heart failure at his mobile home outside Decatur. Well known as the prosecutor of The Chosen in the celebrated murder trial of 1975, Mr. Sledge resigned from office and ran for the U. S. Senate. He was 20th in a field of 36 in the primary. His memoir on the murder trial, Justice Denied, was published last year to sharply critical reviews. He is survived by his wife, Marge, and three daughters.
From TV Guide, April 3, 1978:
BEST BET: Verdict of Time (CBS, 3 hours). World Premiere Movie: Based on defense attorney Otto Leo’s best-selling memoir of The Chosen’s murder trial, this is an innovative docu-drama that speculates on what would have happened if the aborted case had reached a jury verdict. As Leo tells it, the jury was split eight-four for acquittal at the time The Chosen was stabbed.
April 4, 1980
P.O. Box 61
Brandon, Vermont
Mrs. Clifford Casey
3221 Braeslane
Houston, TX
Dear Judy:
Word of Case’s death just reached me and I am devastated. I possess no words to tell you how much I respected and loved that man.
Now I am guilty because I didn’t write Case all of our news. Maybe by telling you, he will get a drop copy—wherever he is.
Ceil Shannon and I got married six months ago. We finally made it legal. And in the nick of time. Our son was born in February, a splendid, fat, demanding, rusty-haired man-child named McKenzie Casey Cantrell. Already we’re calling him Case. Maybe he’ll be a writer. He loves to chew on pencils.
We live on an old farm at the end of a road that is on no known map. Compared to us, J. D. Salinger is a gadabout and Greta Garbo is a public spectacle.
Some days I try to write—but it goes very slow. I seem to have lost the touch. What the hell, nothing I wrote ever did anybody much good anyway.
But there are times when I would give one half my royalties just to have Clifford Casey stand over my typewriter and yank out the copy and yell, “Short takes, kid!”
I’ll miss him. And try to carry on.
Love for all seasons—
Kleber.
Five Christmas Eves after the events in the Fort Worth courtroom, a stranger stood in deep snow atop a small hill bunched with pine thickets and naked tangles of wild grapevines. He wiped the frost off his high-powered binoculars and fixed them on the eighteenth-century carriage house, its white Vermont marble façade melting into the mantle of winter. The house was well hidden, shielded by a forest of silvery birch. It was the last enclave at the end of a lonely private road. No vehicle could approach without being seen or heard.
From previous surveillance, the stranger had observed the embrace of sophisticated security systems. This was the new factor in the condition of celebrity: famous people bought hideaways in the backcountry and then violated the rural landscape with elaborate fortifications of burglar alarms and electronic geegaws. Kleber Cantrell had fenced in every exterior inch of his twenty-seven-acre homestead with a nine-foot-high chain link fence that was electrified at random surprise intervals. Within that was a thick, pioneer-built rock fence. The grounds adjacent to the main house were patrolled by a pair of lean and always agitated German shepherds, Scripps and Howard. Across the front porch stretched vertical white bars that made the residents inside prisoners in a cage. Talk in the village had it that Cantrell was installing laser beams to sweep the immediate one hundred feet in all directions. The Prince of Power had barricaded himself, en famille, in a melancholy electronic fortress. This was his new shield, necessary to shut out the world from which he was in emotional and physical retreat.
The violator, who wore a gray and yellow ski mask that covered his face and protected it against the blasting Vermont winds, affixed a 300-mm. lens onto his Nikon and, bringing the fine old house into focus, snapped half a roll of pictures. He worked hurriedly because the thick, heavy snow was starting again. For this he was grateful. Perhaps the storm would make his scheme more plausible. He was apprehensive, in fact scared over what he was about to do. But he had waited a long time and planned and now, on Christmas Eve 1980, he would give it a try.
Ceil Shannon Cantrell brewed a cup of herb tea and carried it into the leathery, book-lined study where her husband was, by custom, dozing in his recliner. His glasses had slid down his nose, giving him the air of a lazy scholar. Ceil tapped his shoulder and passed the aromatic, steaming mug beneath his mustache.
“Wake up, Scrooge,” she said. “It’s Christmas Eve.”
“I am awake,” he lied, yawning, startled, the way people do when needled out of the depths of an embarrassing nap. “Where’s Case?”
“Asleep beside the tree. He tuckered himself out playing with the wrapping paper. Come on. Pull yourself together. I’m going to give you a present.”
“Not till tomorrow morning.”
“Well, this is a special one.” Ceil hesitated. “It requires some work.” She glided her hands under Kleber’s armpits, pulled him up from his chair, and pushed him toward the living room. The house was a triumph; it looked and smelled like an Early American picture-book Christmas. It cried out for magazine photography. Bayberry and spice candles were lit, nestled in bunches of pungent, fresh-cut pine and fir. From the kitchen seeped aromas of gingerbread men with red-hots for buttons, mincemeat pies, butter cookies in the shapes of stars and crescents, a noble goose roasting and browning with oyster and truffle stuffing, freshly mashed cranberry relish. Beside the bay window, the ten-foot fir that Kleber had hewn—it took him a whole day to make the chain saw work—was listing portside and malnourished in the middle. But Ceil’s lavishly made ornaments made it festive. All in all, an extraordinary amount of work had gone into preparing a Christmas that would be celebrated by two people and their one-year-old baby boy. But, then, her “projects” were what kept Ceil reasonably sane. Else long ago she would have abandoned her vintage lover and recent husband and hurried back to Manhattan, where, more often than not, she dearly wished to be.
Ever since the siege of Cowtown, Ceil had been concocting schemes to fill the lonely hours. She accepted Kleber’s desire for total seclusion and, at first, was enthusiastic over finding just the right safe house in New England. That filled a year of cloak-and-dagger shopping, sending out trusted emissaries as scouts, then using assumed names and legal artifices to purchase the hideaway. Another year was occupied in “fixing it up,” no modest task because Kleber was wary of local craftsmen and laborers coming onto his property. His paranoia was full fever. Ceil purchased a shelf of “How To” books and the pair became reasonably accomplished in simple plumbing and storm window installation. After that they lived as eccentric hermits, munching their own produce although Ceil sardonically pointed out that the first season of gentleperson farming cost thirty-four dollars for each hard, green tomato and seventy-two dollars per cantaloupe. They fed legions of moles, hare, and deer.
Occasionally an old, trusted friend from publishing or show business was permitted into the sanctuary, and each summer Kleber’s two children from previous marriages visited. His son, an aspiring news photographer attending the University of Texas, enjoyed journalism shop talk and Kleber warmed to tale telling and encouragement. The lad, however, regarded his father as a public monument. When their reunions faded into uncomfortable silences, Ceil hurriedly cooked up picnics and outings. Kleber’s daughter, ten, was enamored of the theater and found rapport with her stepmother. But both children were clearly nervous at having to visit their father inside walls.
There were entire months when no other human being pierced their isolation. This was some tedious play. Two months’ dress rehearsal while hidden on a lake in Fort Worth had been exciting and stimulating. But a repeat performance that was promising to drag out a lifetime at a dead end in Vermont was shredding Ceil’s patience and resourcefulness.
Perhaps if Kleber had been writing, she would have been content to act as handmaiden to creativity. But mostly what he did was thicken his ass in his easy chair, fret about security, read history books (as if he felt more at home in the distant past), and make notes about a proposed biography of some goddamned Indian chief named Quanah Parker. He threw away unopened whatever smacked of fan mail or missiles from the curious, rarely glanced at the local paper, permitted no television, and listened to radio only for weather reports and classical music. When Ceil tuned in the news, she did it so surreptitiously she felt like Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis.
Her pregnancy had been unexpected and, considering her age, alarming. Past forty-five, Ceil assumed her reproductive capacities were eroded, even though the mirror reflected back the same willowy body with no extra pounds added since college and coppery hair that required no chemicals to hide the few intruding strands of silver. But when she missed two menstrual periods, she figured it was change-of-life time. Furious with the realities of the clock, Ceil flew into New York on a concocted errand and there learned the startling truth. Immediately she decided on an abortion—she would not even trouble Kleber with the gynecological necessities. But while in the waiting room, she became overwhelmed by back copies of Parents’ Magazine, by several radiant mothers-to-be sitting around in big-bellied sisterhood and joyous communion, by the enticement of a role the actress in her had given up on ever playing. Bolting out without canceling, Ceil hurried home to Kleber. That night, over dinner, she asked if he wanted more raspberry tarte, to which he said no, asked if he wanted more café filtre, to which he said no, asked if he wanted a pony of warmed brandy, to which he said no, asked if he wanted a baby, to which he did not respond. Ten minutes later, Kleber burst out of his study, where he was supposedly reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s section on American Indians.
“Hey,” he demanded. “What was all that about?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were just fooling around, huh?”
“About what?”
“About a baby.”
“Not really.”
“You’re serious?”
Ceil nodded, perversely happy.
“We’re too old to start a family.”
“It’s already started. I’m looking forward to having somebody to talk to.”
“We talk all the time.”
“We talk very little. And we talk about everything except us.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, here’s the evening news bulletin. Ceil Shannon Cantrell announced today that she is pregnant, that she is very happy about it, that she is also quite scared, that her doctor says she is strong and healthy, and that she is going to carry this child full term.”
Which she did, without difficulty. Kleber got interested in the new “project,” prepared himself to be present in the delivery room but grew uneasy at the last minute and was feeling faint outside when McKenzie Casey Cantrell arrived. The baby’s appearance in the house provided Ceil a busy year of infatuated love but gave Kleber cause to suffer from deeper concern. Convinced that his son was a target for kidnappers and cuckoos, Kleber strengthened the security systems of his home. Ceil protested this was being overly sensitive. She was having trouble remembering all of the combinations, digits, and abort codes necessary to go in and out the front door. In almost four years of residence, nothing untoward had happened, nothing more than an occasional tourist or journalism student who found the isolated country lane and pushed the buzzer at the front gate. The horrendous alarms shooed them away. The villagers were only too glad to leave the celebrated couple alone. In this corner of Vermont, privacy is the most cultivated crop.
Ceil had hoped that the baby would mark a new beginning for its father. But she erred. Kleber still awoke in the middle of a given night, his body torn by dry sobs and shudders. In the darkness, he often curled against his wife like a child worried over being abandoned. Obviously, Ceil knew, he had never taken the fourth step that Samantha Reiker had mentioned, i.e. “working out” his participation in the night of violence. A thousand times she had tried to persuade him to talk about the events, better still write out all the pain and horror. But his dictum was that he would never speak of Mack and T.J., not ever again. He was the prisoner of guilt. He felt that he was somehow responsible for Mack’s murder. Thus did he turn down a blank-check advance from his book publisher, magazine offers that arrived as regularly as new moons, a tour of the lecture circuit at $15,000 per appearance, choosing instead to craft a book on a long dead Comanche chief from 1,800 miles away. Hardly eyewitness reportage. The few pages he had shared with Ceil were not impressive, even though she awarded him luxurious praise. He was writing dry and cold; his words reflected his life. One night Ceil endured one of Kleber’s 3 a.m. emotional assaults, coaxed him back to sleep, and then dealt with her own anxieties until sunrise. Long ago she had fallen in love with a vivacious man of power and purpose. Their love had been nourished by partings. Now he was still and moored. On certain days she even wished for a nice little war that would catch his fancy. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan, Ceil tried to make it sound as journalistically alluring as the sack of Carthage.
