Skyline Hall.
Skyline Hall in Sacramento.
When on a job, assassins sometimes pepper their conversations with nuggets from their real lives, their real backgrounds, to add sincerity, a touch of authenticity to whatever cover they’re using to get in close to a target. This tactic has its strengths, usually gaining a mark’s confidence to be exploited. But this tactic also has its shortcomings, like when it is employed on someone who isn’t a target at the time, someone who remembers, someone who might become an enemy.
Skyline Hall in Sacramento.
Hap Blowenfeld told me a story the first time I met him as we loaded beer crates into the back of his truck, a story so I would bond with him, a story about how he had killed a kid with his bare hands over the theft of his father’s wallet and had been sent to Skyline Hall in Sacramento, California, a Juvey Center like Waxham.
If this story is true, if Hap had been at that Juvey center, then there might be some record of what his real name is, of where his father lives, of a living relative, of a way to get to him.
CHAPTER 15
THERE are two ways to get information you aren’t supposed to have. One is to sneak in and steal it. The other is to force someone to give it to you.
Skyline Hall for Boys is on the outskirts of Sacramento, on a deserted stretch of highway, away from any major roads. It looks like a high school with razor wire, a place built a long time ago with zero funding for repairs.
I case it for a day and mark the shift changes. Like with Richard Levine’s security force, I know the best time to strike will be when the front desk is at its most chaotic, when tired government employees are handing the keys to the asylum over to bored government employees just getting started on another shitty day in juvenile hell.
I head up to the front doors and make my way to a chubby receptionist who is literally watching the clock.
“May I help you?” she asks without shifting her eyes to me.
“Yes. Hi. I’m with State Senator Vespucci’s office. Can you point me to the records room?”
Now her eyes move from the clock to examine my face. She is pissed. I have arrived looking like work at the end of a long shift. Her face tightens until her mouth disappears into a thin line.
“What’s this regarding?”
“It’s pertaining to research for funding grants.”
“No one told me.”
“Well, there was a fax sent a few days ago.”
She casts her eyes to an empty back office where an old fax machine sits on a shelf, then back at me, trying to decide if she wants to heave her considerable bulk out of her desk chair with only ten minutes left in her shift.
Finally, she sighs and gets up.
She moves inside the office and heads to the fax machine, looks around for some stray papers, but doesn’t find any.
“Well, listen here. I don’t know anything about no . . .” She stops in the middle of her sentence, because I have come up behind her silently and now stand with a gun pressed against her rib cage. Outside that office, there is a little commotion as the new shift of workers enters, but inside, where we are, it is quiet.
Under her breath, she manages, “Oh, lordy . . .”
“What’s your name?”
She whispers, “Roberta.”
“Roberta, you have a decision to make. We live in a world where we have choices and for good or bad, there are consequences to those choices. Now you’re going to have to make one.”
“Don’t, mister . . .”
“Choice one is you do exactly what I tell you to do and no one in this building dies. Not Lawrence the janitor, not Bill the counseling rep, not you, Roberta. And not those cute little grandkids whose pictures I saw taped to your desk.”
“Oh, lordy . . .”
“Choice two is you raise your voice, you cause a stink, you draw attention to me or yourself, and I go on a killing spree the likes of which Sacramento has never seen. Nod your head if you understand.”
She nods her head, her eyes never leaving mine, her face red, stinging, like someone slapped her across the cheeks.
“Good. Then no one is going to get shot today.”
I lower the gun so she’ll know she’s given the right answer, made progress.
“Okay, Roberta, now you’re going to lead me to the records room. When we’re in there, you’re going to point me to the files covering the five-year period from 1984 to 1989. Can you do that for me, Roberta?”
She nods again, and then mechanically, robotically, she leads me out of the office and down a side corridor. No one looks at us, no one greets us, no one asks us what we’re doing. It’s just another Tuesday in a place where no one cares.
WE spend just over an hour in the records room, undisturbed. Roberta has dropped her guard and is helping me dig through the materials, showing me booking photos of each child. Thankfully, they’ve been catalogued by offenses, so I narrow the field to the most serious felonies, and I can skip over all the faces except the white ones, which makes the task even quicker. Still, there was an abundance of teenagers committing felonies back in the heyday of West Coast gang violence, so the job is arduous.
Just when my patience is wearing thin and I think maybe Hap got the details right but changed the geography, I find the right picture staring back at me.
Younger, with more hair and less confidence, a teenage Hap Blowenfeld glares out from a black and white photograph with an expression of faux defiance. The name on the file is Evan Feldman. It has an address for his father in Arcadia. It seems the only detail Hap changed was his name, and even that isn’t too far of a stretch.
“That’s it, then?” asks Roberta.
“That’s it.”
“You gonna let me go, now?”
“How old are your grandkids, Roberta?”
Her eyes flash a little, like she has gotten comfortable with me and now regrets it. Softly, she whispers, “The boy is five. The girl, three.”
“Well, if you want the boy to see six and the girl to see four, you forget you ever saw me and you don’t mention this to anyone.”
“No, sir, I wouldn’t.”
“If you do, some men might try to arrest me, but they won’t. Some others might try to kill me, but they won’t. And I’ll know it was you who told someone about today, Roberta. And then I’ll come back to Sacramento. And let me tell you something as sure as I’m standing before you, I don’t want to come back to Sacramento.”
“You won’t have no reason to.” A tear spills down her cheek but her voice doesn’t crack.
“I know I won’t. I’m gonna take this.”
I pick up Hap’s juvenile file and head out the door. I’m sure it will be a long time before Roberta gathers the strength to leave the room.
ARCADIA is a town of urban sprawl gone wrong. It’s buildings, buildings, buildings and concrete and asphalt and sewers and shit as far as the eye can see, all surrounding a horse track improperly named
