Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(55)
Isaac and I both went to the courthouse in Catskill for Sammy’s sentencing. For some reason, I kept thinking my father might appear. Part of me wished that he knew what was happening with Sammy, although I know Sammy would not have wanted him to. He hates my father—who was more like a distant uncle to him than a real father—and I could tell, as he stood there in Isaac’s too-big suit coat, shoulders bent before the judge, that Sammy was scared. He, too, had failed at life outside the shtetl and he would never want my father to see him fallen this low. I knew the feeling and it broke my heart.
I wrote him a letter every few days. He wrote me back only once. Nobody called me when he was in the infirmary. And nobody called when he stabbed the black man.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
REBEKAH
I leave Kaitlyn around 5:00 P.M. and drive south toward the New Paltz address from the library, my heart beating in my teeth. A sister in New Paltz. It has to be Aviva, right?
Saul doesn’t answer his phone when I call, so I leave a message: “I think I might have found her! I talked to somebody who said Sam had a sister in New Paltz. And there was a New Paltz address on the backgrounder the library gave me. I’m going there now! Call me!”
The evening sky is the color of Orange Crush as I turn onto West Pine Street. Number 781 is a two-story yellow house with a driveway leading to a small shed in the back. I pull in and turn off the engine. Breathe in. Breathe out. The house is dark. A wind chime trills in one of the trees in the yard. Someone has draped a kind of black netting over bushes along the front of the house, protecting them from winter, I assume. It does not appear that anyone is home, but I knock anyway. I knock again. The curtains are drawn in the two first-floor windows. The street is quiet, a few lights on in the nearby houses, but almost no one out walking, which means no one to get suspicious if I sneak around the side yard. Which I do. There are still patches of snow on the lawn and ice in the corners of the small deck attached to the back of the house. I climb up three steps to a door with a window, cup my hands around my face, and look into the kitchen. I can’t make out much beyond the lines of the counters and a glowing clock on the microwave. There are papers and magnets on the refrigerator but I can’t tell what they say. Does she live here? I try the door, but it’s locked. What would I have done if it wasn’t? Walk in and crawl in her bed? Wait for Mommy to come home?
I go back to Saul’s car and turn on the engine. She is bound to be home soon. After about ten minutes, Nechemaya calls.
“Pessie’s neighbors do not wish to be in the newspaper. They are concerned that whoever did this might target them.”
“Okay,” I say. “But I don’t know if my editor is going to let me stay on the story if no one from the community is willing to go on the record.”
“I understand,” he says. “I am doing what I can.”
I pull out my notebook and open my laptop to transcribe what Kaitlyn told me. I’ve already missed the deadline for tomorrow’s paper, so I decide not to e-mail Larry with my new information about Pessie coming to Sam’s welcome home party. Instead, I click into an open Wi-Fi network (gotta love a college town) and Google “Conrad Hall.” The first few results are contact listings that refer me to the property in Greenville, but at the bottom of the page a 2011 article from the Albany Times-Union pops up.
MAN WITH TIES TO HATE GROUP QUESTIONED IN TROY DOUBLE HOMICIDE
By Marisol Lopez
An ex-con with ties to a right-wing hate group was questioned in relation to the murders of Quantrell Hamilton and Michael Wilkins, police sources say.
Conrad “Connie” Hall, 56, was questioned and released Thursday.
Hamilton and Wilkins were shot execution-style in their Troy apartment on February 19. Police suspect that the murders were drug-related.
Hall has a long criminal history, including a nine-year prison term for manslaughter. He was arrested in January 2009 with members of the so-called Greene Freemen at a demonstration on the day of President Obama’s inauguration. Hall and about 20 protesters, some carrying firearms, attempted to enter the Capitol building. Charges against him were later dropped.
The Greene Freemen are listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch as a white nationalist group.
Neighbors told the Times-Union that Hamilton and Wilkins had recently moved into the Troy apartment and were believed to be using it as a holding place for guns and drugs.
A woman who answered the phone at Hall’s residence refused to comment on the case.
I copy and paste the article’s URL into an e-mail and send it to Larry, along with a note:
The guy Pessie used to be engaged to is/was in a relationship with Conrad Hall’s son Ryan. Do you know what happened with this homicide? Anyone ever caught? Thoughts?
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Web site lists more than forty New York-based organizations that they consider to be “hate groups,” including the Radical White Persons Party and the Suffolk County Aryans. The Nation of Islam makes the list, too. The Greene Freemen—who the SPLC identify as both white nationalist and Aryan Nations—don’t appear to have their own Web site, so I click on a link for the Rochester-based Caucasian Caucus and am redirected to a no-frills Web site called The Protected. The banner at the top of the site reads, in flashing red letters: WE ARE THE WHITE MINORITY! PROTECTED BY GOD! SWORN TO FIGHT FOR OUR RACE! Below the banner are dozens of discussion threads, beginning with “Introduction to the Protected,” then “Rules of the Board,” then “News Links,” “International,” “Money,” “Self-Defense,” “Strategy,” “Events”; there are even threads for “Poetry,” “White Singles,” and “Ladies.” I click into “Strategy” and see that there are more than two hundred pages of discussions with thousands of views. I scroll down and click on a thread called “The Problem with Jews.” The post is written by a user named John March. He starts by telling readers that although they might think Jews are just harmless white people in funny hats, they are actually responsible for the destruction of the white race and “civilized” society more than any other group—“even niggers.” He goes on. Jews are parasites who suck the life out of whatever country they are in, and then move on when there is nothing left. They are also sexual perverts who encourage pornography, masturbation, bestiality, and all manner of ugly stuff to keep the white race weak and distracted from their evil ways. He goes on and on, linking to various speeches and videos, several by David Duke, and then turns to “History,” tracing the origins of modern Jews’ use of sexual perversion as a weapon to Freud. Finally, he takes on “The Holocaust Myth.” I click out, disgusted. Obviously, it’s not a surprise to me that neo-Nazis and white supremacists exist; I mean, I’m from Florida. I’ve seen plenty of trucks flying Confederate flags, and I’ve spent at least a couple weekend afternoons half-watching cable news documentaries about Aryan prison gangs. I saw American History X like everybody else. What I didn’t understand, though, and what this Web site proves, is how much thought, how much imagination, these people put into building their ugly theories and alternative histories. It’s not posturing. It’s not just provocation. It’s f*cking serious. John March is an articulate writer. He doesn’t sound unhinged or particularly angry. In fact, the post reads like an above-average academic paper—he even embedded images of newspaper articles from during World War II. Someone predisposed to hating Jews would find much to bolster their beliefs in this post. And someone who had been the victim of sexual abuse by a Jew—someone like Sam—might find an easy excuse to think that what happened to him was part of some larger, ongoing conspiracy. As if the poor kid’s mind hadn’t been f*cked with enough.