I found myself wondering about the reasons behind this public apology and ultimate rejiggering of his political beliefs. It came as a surprise that I was beginning to have empathy for the man whom I’d started out hating as much as my daughter did.
What intrigued me about his movement in the alt-right world of race-baiting was that there was no group I could find that he identified with — beyond the nebulous concept of whiteness that he used as a template for history. He was happy to include Black people, for instance, in the American polity as long as each individual had only a 60 percent share of a single vote. And if a Black or brown person proved that they were as good as white by passing his test, then Quiller had no problem with allowing them to be equal.
I could see why Aja hated him. The arrogance left a bad taste.
And Aja was right about his obsession, not only with whiteness but also with being a man. Even white women had to take the voting rights equivalency test.
He was forty-eight years old, a staunch supporter of animal rights, a vegetarian who ate shellfish now and then, and an extraordinarily prolific writer. Alfred did not sleep much — two hours every night with a one-hour nap sometime in the day. He had written and self-published a fifty-eight-volume collection concerning his political beliefs. This collection was titled Testimony. He claimed that it was his proof of the superiority of certain groups within a species.
Testimony had gone out of print four years before and there were precious few editions available.
Two years before Roger hired me, Quiller left the country under a cloud of suspicion from the federal government. It seemed as if, through his space cannon research, he’d come across a plan that some nut had to shoot bombs into space that would be hidden from foreign tracking. Somehow this doomsday construction would be useful when the Chinese or the Russians tried to invade Faneuil Hall.
A document detailing this plan had made it to Space Cannon headquarters and from there it may have been delivered to the Russians. It was clear that Quiller had seen the documents but less so that he distributed them.
At any rate, the forty percenter left the U.S. and made his way to and through those nations that did not have extradition treaties with America.
When I executed a search for the name Curt Holiday I came up with a murder investigation in Togo. Quiller was named as a person of interest (however you say that in Togolese) in the murder of Holiday in Quiller’s waterfront apartment. Holiday had been shot six times. After the slaying, Quiller flew to Cape Verde. A week later a Togolese representative was invited to question Quiller. After this interrogation the charges were dropped.
The State Department was not happy that one of its citizens could be murdered and forgotten so easily and issued an international warrant for Quiller’s arrest. Sometime after that Quiller moved to Little Peach in Belarus.
The best word I can use to describe my research is sordid. Quiller’s mother, Visalia Rill, put him up for adoption at the age of four. She said that his father was a one-night stand and that the only thing she knew about him was that his name was Quiller. Her son, she said, had been an unruly child from the moment he could sit up straight.
The articles I read about the boy Alfred said nothing about his behavior, but it might say something that he was never adopted.
Years later when Visalia realized how successful her son had become, she tried to get in touch with him. She was living six miles deep on the wrong side of the tracks in Gary, Indiana, and hoped that he would take her in.
He did not, and after seven months of trying to have a personal audience with her son, she ate poison and died.
I tried to understand what it would feel like to be Mr. Quiller. It seemed that all he had to rely on was his mind. He couldn’t trust anybody and nobody loved him enough to include him in their lives. His mother neglected him and when he returned the treatment she committed suicide.
The phone rang while I was considering the subject of my investigation. I could tell by the light that it was an interoffice call.
“Yes, honey,” I said using the speaker mode.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean to get on you so bad.”
“You don’t have to apologize. I’m proud of you being so passionate about us. And you’re right — this guy’s a piece of work.”
“That’s not you.”
“No. But I have to make sure that I don’t end up supporting his crazy agenda.”
We talked for a while about my research and how I felt about it.
After that I asked, “Anything else?”
“Uh-huh. Mom’s on line two.”
6
“Hey, Monica,” I said on the exhalation of a breath that felt as if it had been drawn almost two decades before.
“Hi, King,” she said.
The utterance of the word King was a relic of our long and tumultuous relationship. When we were still married she would sometimes call me King when I’d come home from a long day of being a cop. Back then my middle name meant that I was going to get lucky if I could keep my eyes open.
“So, uh, what’s up?” I asked.
“I was reading the Daily News today about Lillian Lawler. I don’t know why but I didn’t know that you were involved with that case.”
I was trying to get a bead on the topic of our discussion. Monica did not like me, much less care about what I did. When I went to Rikers the first time, she refused to pay my bail. That because an overzealous investigator showed her a picture of me and a woman in flagrante delicto. Now that we were divorced and she was married to a very successful investment banker, she still bled me for whatever she was legally entitled to. She once even tried to botch a case I was on by warning the man I had been hired to follow.
“I just had a small part in the investigation,” I said. “Ms. Lawler hired me when the prosecutor and the police said that there were no other suspects being considered.”
“That’s not what it looks like to me. There was a picture of you standing behind her and the article said that a private detective uncovered the evidence that... what did it say? That a private detective came up with the evidence that torpedoed the state’s case.”
Lawler was a New York blueblood who married a nouveau riche nobody named Constantine Psomas — aka the can man. Psomas had made it rich selling canned goods online to individuals and groups throughout South America and Africa. Lillian’s family owned supermarkets all over the United States and so the two met and, sadly for both of them, married.
Constantine was a dog, though not in the Darwinian sense. He played fast and loose with other women and Lillian’s inherited fortune. When she filed divorce papers he penned a tell-all memoir about the sleazy secrets of the Lawler clan. When she hired another detective to scrutinize his business and tax history, that man, John Merrill, was murdered in the supposed commission of a mugging.
Six weeks later, Lillian says that she came downstairs in their Sutton Place mansion to find a bloody Constantine lying within the vestibule between the outside door and the entrance to the house. His throat was cut and his eyes were gouged out.
The prosecutor, a lovely woman named Paloma Alvarez, had a bug up her ass for Lillian. I think the prosecutor’s antipathy was due to the fact that Lawler made no secret of the fact that she considered herself superior to the hoi polloi that crowded the streets of our fair city. Alvarez felt that she and her brethren were treated as less than and therefore Lillian must have murdered her Greek husband.