Still, whomever or whatever he was, today was the third time someone on the security staff had been forced to remove him from the park for attempted vandalism. Eric caught him using a common spoon he’d somehow managed to slip through the gate to try to pluck a piece of yellow glass from its concrete setting in one of the tower walls.
“That’s her,” the guy in the jacket said with some excitement, as Eric and his supervisor, Melvin Barnes, escorted him out to the sidewalk. It was the same thing Eric had heard him say the last two times.
“You need to let it go, Pops,” Melvin said when they got the guy outside. “Next time we call the cops. Understand?”
The man in the green jacket didn’t seem to understand at all, but he walked away without an argument.
“What the hell is his story?” Eric asked Melvin after they’d gone back inside the park.
Melvin smiled. “Nobody. Go back to work.”
“Hold up. You act like you know the guy. Tell me.”
“Forget it. Curiosity kills. You ever heard that?”
“Come on, Melvin. Who is he?”
From the pain on his face, Eric could tell it wasn’t a story he wanted to tell. But Melvin sighed and told it anyway.
Seven years earlier, another guard at the Towers had his curiosity piqued by a regular visitor to the park. A young man named Darrel McNeil was the visitor, and Jimmy Dutton, the guard, found him fascinating. Darrel was somewhere in his midtwenties but had the mind of an eight-year-old. He usually came alone, but every now and then his older brother Greg would either join him or drop him off and pick him up later. Darrel was a favorite of the park’s personnel, sweet and funny as hell, but nobody paid much attention to Greg. He was a nonentity, more polite and warm than a clothing store mannequin, but only by the slightest margin.
The two brothers lived with an invalid mother in Baldwin Hills, up in the heights where Black people with real money lorded over those with less. The mother was the widow of a man who’d made a fortune in insurance but had died too young to spend it, the victim of a fatal stroke at the tender age of forty-four. Darrel and Greg were Carol and Thomas McNeil’s only children.
Their mother loved both her sons desperately, but she doted on Darrel. He was her baby, and a baby with special needs at that, so she gave him the lion’s share of her attention and affection. But Greg did not go without; far from it. He was given everything his brother had and more. All Carol McNeil asked of him was that he be both a father and a brother to Darrel at all times. Carol McNeil had been confined to her bed since her weight had ballooned to over three hundred pounds and diabetes had taken both her legs above the knee. Greg had been twelve and Darrel only nine, and the boys’ father passed away just two years later, so Greg had to pick up the parental slack his mother couldn’t provide his little brother. Help dress and feed Darrel, watch him and protect him, teach him how to take care of himself in all the limited ways he was capable. It was a full-time job, and it only became more so as the boys grew into manhood.
But Greg never seemed to mind. He met all his brother’s needs dutifully and efficiently; no complaints, no hesitation. A casual observer would have taken Greg for a loving, if emotionally distant, sibling. He was all things to Darrel. But the role he filled most was that of escort. Everywhere Darrel wanted to go, Greg was obliged to either lead or follow. The park. The movies. Children’s theater plays and the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park.
And the Watts Towers.
Darrel developed a particular obsession with the Watts Towers. He loved stories about knights and dragons and kings and castles, and to Darrel, the Towers were the closest thing to a real-world castle he had ever seen. Darrel was also a collector, a hunter-gatherer of random objects of little value that he considered great treasure: buttons, bottle caps, board game tokens. Anything colorful and shiny captured his attention like nothing else, so the rainbow surface of the Towers and the walls that surrounded them, pebbled with thousands of pieces of glass and tile, were tailor-made to dazzle him.
In the beginning, Darrel sometimes visited the Towers twice in the same week, a fanny pack of his favorite baubles cinched to his waist and his older brother in tow. But as they’d grown older, Greg’s tolerance for monotony would only allow for a schedule that had he and Darrel appearing at the park twice a month. Even that would have been too much for most people, after years of visiting the Towers enough times to draw each spire from memory, but Greg’s silent resilience to Darrel’s eccentricities seemed to have no bounds.
What no one knew, until the curious security guard Jimmy Dutton discovered it years later, was that Greg was simply biding his time. His greatest quality was not devotion at all, but patience. What his mother and others mistook for imperturbability was in fact cold calculation. From the age of eight, Greg understood the simple math of his moneyed existence, the wealth he stood to gain as Thomas and Carol McNeil’s oldest and most self-sufficient son, if he could just wait long enough to inherit his father’s fortune. So he set himself up to do exactly that, in the best way he knew how: by playing the perfect child to his parents and loving sibling to his brother.
Finally, three weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Greg’s long-game gamble paid off: Carol McNeil died.
Almost overnight, Greg became the beneficiary of the family fortune, Darrel’s legal guardian, and the trustee of the irrevocable trust Darrel’s mother had set up for him. There was no one to contest their mother’s will and no grounds to base a case against Greg even if there had been.
In short order, he was living the life of a free man of independent means he had always dreamed of. He dropped out of school, shedding any pretense of requiring employable skills anytime in the near future, and began to enjoy himself and his parents’ money. He developed an appreciation for expensive cars and women who loved to gamble. Greg was no ladies’ man, never had been, but he learned to date and date well, only driving the Porsche or the Corvette out to Vegas alone if that was his preference. Sometimes he came back with the same woman and sometimes he came back with a new one; in either case, he usually returned to Los Angeles a poorer man than he had been at the start.
As the months, then years, went by, two things happened that took Greg completely by surprise.
The first was the realization of how little he wanted things to change between himself and Darrel. He knew he loved his little brother on some level — what kind of monster wouldn’t? — but he hadn’t counted on loving him to the extent that he would still want him around even after their mother’s passing. All those years of faithfully shadowing the boy around like a Siamese twin, it seemed, had left him with more affection for Darrel than resentment. In portraying his little brother’s great protector, he had unwittingly become his great protector, so that now he had no desire to ship Darrel off to some assisted-living facility somewhere and forget about him, as he had always thought he would the moment the opportunity presented itself. Instead, by choice, he maintained much the same life with his brother they had always shared; the only difference now was the price tag of the car Greg drove to take his brother to the park, or to the movies, or — where else? — the Watts Towers.
The second surprising thing Greg discovered after his mother died, and which proved much more alarming than the first, was how fast he was able to burn through the $1.4 million he’d inherited. Within two years, he had whittled that figure down to the point that Annette Thomas — his accountant and financial advisor — was strongly recommending that he slow down, go back to school, and start thinking about working for a living. Of course, Greg just thought Thomas was being an alarmist, but she soon enough proved to be prophetic. The numbers she eventually showed him didn’t lie: Greg was staring down the barrel of impending insolvency.