The Sequel Read online

  “We never went to church growing up.” Anna added.

  “No. Never,” Stoddard agreed.

  “Wouldn’t have been a bad idea,” Beth said cryptically and with an edge.

  “What about the countryside reference? Was there a vacation home?”

  “Not one that we ever went to. We didn’t see dad much for the last two years of his life,” Stoddard said darkly. “I think he was embarrassed about having a family.”

  Anna countered, “No, he was going through hell. Writer’s block, the pressure to do a sequel, the cancer. He didn’t want us to see him miserable.”

  Stoddard frowned. “Bullshit. It was that he was having affairs and didn’t want his girlfriends to know about us.”

  “All anybody had to do was read the book jacket to know he had children,” Anna snapped.

  The meeting was going even worse than Lowell had anticipated. “Do you have any letters, records from back then?”

  Anna looked at her brother and grimaced. “He had quite a lot of our family’s things.”

  Stoddard said sourly, “How was I supposed to know anybody’d come calling about a sequel?”

  “You threw it all out?” Lowell asked in a whisper.

  “Bad memories,” the man muttered. Then his face softened and he looked at the lawyer. “As long as you’re here, Frederick, tell me: When’s the next royalty check coming in?”

  The following day, Lowell traveled to Southampton on Long Island to visit with Preston Malone.

  Malone was, in a way, similar to Edward Goodwin. Although he’d written—and continued to write—essays and articles on literature, he’d penned only one full-length book in his life: Edward Goodwin: Cedar Hills Road and the Essential American Experience.

  The exhaustive tome had won a Pulitzer and had at one point been required reading in many a college lit course. In recent years, though, Malone had become a bit of a caricature, growing more and more obsessed with Goodwin and Cedar Hills. While the biography was piercingly objective, later articles were less so. He took up the standard of championing the author to an audience that had moved on. Kinder critics called him Quixotic. Less kind—usually bloggers—called him names like “Goodwin’s pimp.”

  The taxi dropped Lowell off at Malone’s modern gray beach house, which was nowhere near a beach. The bearded, balding writer, weighing close to three hundred pounds, greeted him the way a scientist happily identifies a new bug; Lowell was a minor genus but nonetheless part of the Goodwin mythos too.

  “Come in, come in, Frederick! Can I call you Frederick? I’m Preston.”

  They stepped into the large living room. And Lowell braked to a stop. He’d expected, given the writer’s interest in Goodwin, that he’d find memorabilia. He hadn’t expected a shrine.

  There was no other way to describe it. Goodwin had been well photographed during his life and Malone must have had at least one copy of every snap ever taken. On one wall were bookshelves devoted to all of the American editions of the book, on another, the foreign. Movie posters hung from other walls: English language as well as Italian, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Advertisements for the book and the films sat on easels. Framed autographs and glass cases of pens and accessories like shoelaces and garments bedeviled tables and shelves.

  “Frederick! Look at this, look! Oh, this is quite something. I know you’re going to get a chill down your spine.” Malone snatched up a small box, inside of which something rattled. Lowell reluctantly walked closer to the madly grinning writer as he reverently opened it.

  My God, were they Goodwin’s baby teeth? Fingernails?

  No, thank goodness. Cuff links.

  “He wore these in the famous picture. You know the one I mean, of course.” He pointed to the Richard Avedon portrait.

  “Impressive.”

  “Now, now…” He snapped the lid closed and sat, gesturing Lowell to do the same. In a whisper: “You’ve found some reference to it?”

  The Sequel to the Book.

  He explained about the letter and showed the biographer a copy.

  Malone nodded. “Connecticut. Sure.” As if he were an ace student rattling off answers to a professor’s question in class, he ran unhesitatingly through a half-dozen names of women who could have been the client described in the letter. Some of these Goodwin was with before his wife died, he explained, some after. Malone twisted his head sideways and looked pensive. “Katrina Tomlison, I’ll bet. She was beautiful. Articulate. A little crazy, true. Made him recite passages of the book so she could have an orgasm.”

  Lowell steered matters back to his mission. “The clues are idyllic countryside and a house of God. Any ideas?”

  “God, God…” This perplexed Malone. “Edward had issues. His brain made him an Emersonian Transcendentalist; his heart couldn’t quite slough off the Catholicism of his youth.”

  Lowell said, “Even if not religious, though, is it possible that he might have found comfort in a country church or graveyard?”

  “That’s more likely.”

  “And it would be in the countryside. Any thoughts about that?”

  “Edward was more comfortable in an urban setting,” Malone said in a prim tone, as if Goodwin were alive and present and expected the biographer to defend his reputation as a man who hated hiking and camping. “I don’t know any reference in his correspondence to spending time in the country.”

  “The letter was dated in March of ’67,” Lowell said. “Where was Goodwin then?”

  Without needing to consult any of the many file cabinets in the living room and den, Malone said sourly, “The last two years of his life were my biggest challenge—and those were the ones that I was most interested in. He’d grown very reclusive. Mysterious. Officially his address was Chicago. He was a widower then and the children were living in the city with their grandparents. Edward was away for much of the time, though. A lot of it Pittsburgh.”

  Not exactly idyllic countryside.

  Malone continued, “But I’m pretty sure he traveled elsewhere. I tried to find where but…I couldn’t.” His eyes were downcast, as if apologizing to his team for losing a game by striking out.

  Lowell wanted to clap him on the back and tell him, “It’s all right.” He looked at the dozens of file cabinets. “Any documentation from March of that year?”

  Malone now scooted off and returned with a slim file, neatly labeled 3/67. “There’s this.” He lifted out a single piece of yellowing paper.

  Lowell’s heart began thudding. What would it show? An address? A safe-deposit box number?

  It was a receipt for coffee and a cheese sandwich.

  Lowell sat back. “That’s it?”

  “Afraid so.”

  The top of the receipt bore only the words, in scripty type, “The Hudson House.”

  No city, no state, no phone number.

  “I tried to track it down but didn’t have any luck.”

  Lowell said, “So aside from the idyllic countryside and the house of God, the only thing we know for sure is that he was, at least part of the time, in Pittsburgh the last two years of his life.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was he doing there?” Lowell asked.

  “Oh, he was hanging out with a murderer.”

  Back in the city, at his desk, Frederick Lowell flipped open the Malone biography—the author had insisted he take one with him, suitably inscribed. He read the chapters describing Goodwin’s connection to Pittsburgh.

  Goodwin had been a crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune but took time off in 1965 to write an account of a horrific murder in Pennsylvania.

  Jon Everett Coe came from an affluent and well-educated family in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, his father a physician, his mother a principal of an exclusive private school. A troublesome child from a very young age, Coe excelled academically through his first year in college, then began suffering increasingly severe breaks with reality, threatening neighbors, his parents and his younger siblings, act
ing incoherently. Finally he snapped altogether and, in 1962, was arrested and convicted for murdering his mother.

  At trial it was revealed that Mary Coe, embarrassed about her son’s condition, relentlessly pushed him to become “normal,” pressuring him into treatments and to return to school. The woman was known to be strident and demanding of all her children but didn’t seem to realize that Jon could not be handled with conventional discipline—until it was too late.

  By the time that Edward Goodwin became aware of the case, Coe was on death row at Statesville Prison outside of Pittsburgh. Goodwin was curious to know how such a troubled individual could be found sane and executed. The answer seemed to be, as the prosecutor pointed out, that when he was not in a delusional or fugal phase, Coe was remarkably thoughtful, articulate, and insightful. He wrote his own appeals, which judges praised for their clear reasoning. He sketched and painted excellent landscapes and portraits, and he wrote reams of poetry, some of which was published and critically well received. Goodwin felt it was patently unfair that a man who committed a crime in the midst of a psychotic episode receive the death penalty, and he wanted to use this injustice as the theme of his book.

  It seemed that in 1966 and ‘67 Goodwin was splitting his time between Chicago and Pittsburg, interviewing Coe. This was an astonishingly productive time. He not only spent hundreds of hours researching the nonfiction but he wrote Cedar Hills and, apparently, much of the novel’s sequel then too. Though he complained from time to time in his letters to his editor about writer’s block, he also commented occasionally that, thanks to his “muse,” he’d made good progress in his writing.

  This was all very interesting, but Lowell had learned nothing that moved him closer to his goal of finding Anderson’s Hope.

  Jon Coe was, of course, long gone, executed in September of ‘67. But Coe’s last surviving family member, his younger brother, was alive. Samuel Coe, a physician like his father, was still living in Bucks County. He was a psychiatrist and Lowell wondered if he’d gone into the profession because of his brother’s condition.

  Lowell called Samuel Coe and explained his mission regarding the sequel, then delicately inquired as to whether the man would mind a few questions about the time leading up to his brother’s execution.

  “No, not really. I don’t talk to reporters but if you have a connection with Edward Goodwin, I’m happy to help.”

  “Did you ever meet him? Goodwin?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” the psychiatrist said. “My sister and I were young then, just teenagers, and our father wouldn’t let us speak to reporters. I know Dad talked to Goodwin a few times but I have no idea about what.”

  Nor had the doctor heard any talk about sequels to Cedar Hills Road.

  Lowell then asked if the “idyllic countryside” in the letter might be Bucks County, where the murder had occurred, but again Dr. Coe couldn’t provide insights other than to confirm that if any place was idyllic it was that portion of Pennsylvania.

  Not surprisingly the doctor could not provide insights either into any “house of God” where Goodwin had spent time.

  Lowell then asked, “Any chance you have any correspondence between Jon and Goodwin?”

  “No, we tried to get back my brother’s effects and the contents of his cell after they executed him but the prison said it had all been disposed of. Frankly, I didn’t want it anyway. I was very conflicted about Jon, as you can imagine.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about Goodwin?”

  “Yes, a little, when he wasn’t delusional. Nothing about Cedar Hills, though. Mostly he told me about how Goodwin was a friend. He treated my brother like a decent person. They’d talk for hours and hours. He taught Jon how to type, so he could write his own appeals for court. He got permission from the prison to lend my brother his typewriter.” The man paused. “I still remember the night of the execution. I was the last person Jon called. Goodwin had passed away by then and Jon said that when the book about the murder and trial was published and they made a movie, I was supposed to make sure the director did right by Goodwin.”

  Samuel Coe gave a sad laugh. “Of course, most death row movies are about lawyers or journalists saving innocent prisoners at the last minute. I couldn’t very well tell Jon that Hollywood probably wouldn’t be interested in a story where the prisoner dismembered his mother’s body and wrote poetry in her blood on the wall while waiting for the police to show up.”

  The call to Samuel Coe hadn’t been productive. But it did give Frederick Lowell another idea.

  When production of the film of Cedar Hills Road began, in the fall of ‘66, Edward Goodwin had gone out to Hollywood briefly to meet the stars and the director and some executives at Cantor Brothers Studios. It was solely a social visit. He didn’t work on the script—a screenwriter cannot, as Goodwin apparently did with some frequency, wait for a muse to inspire him. Scripts are written on demand, under tight deadlines.

  According to Malone’s biography, he hit it off well with everyone in LA and even dined with Elizabeth Taylor and William Holden.

  Lowell called a lawyer he knew at a mega-entertainment company, one of whose smaller divisions was all that remained of the once-regal Cantor Brothers. He put Lowell in touch with the head of the division, Cantor Classics, which still produced a few independent films a year and retained all the rights to the filmed version of Cedar Hills Road.

  Ira Lepke sounded as if he were seventeen years old and said, “ah ah ah” a lot, as thoughts flew from his mind like batter from a Mix Master. Lowell suspected, though, that the scattered verbal skills didn’t hurt his ability to take home a million or two a year in producer’s fees.

  “Ah ah ah, that’s one of our righteous solids, Cedar Hills is.”

  Solids.

  Lowell was both amused and irritated by the ease with which Hollywood coined words.

  “Cedar made the studio some major rev. I’m speaking, ah ah ah, dirigibles of money.”

  That couldn’t be an expression.

  Lepke continued, “Aside from Elizabeth and Bill and Karl, casting cost us nothing. Sets were on the back lot and location shots were in Indiana. It was a phenom, you know. Beyond great.”

  “One of the best movies of the twentieth century, you ask me.”

  A pause. Lepke said, “No, I meant the budget structure, front-and back-end payment sits. It’s legend. I mean, pure legend.”

  “So’s the movie.”

  Lepke said, “I’ve heard.”

  Which explained a lot.

  “I know it was before your time—” As in a generation before. “—but I’m trying to track down any information on the sequel to the book. Is there anybody with the studio who was around then?”

  “When?”

  “In the sixties.”

  A laugh. “Are you kidding? There isn’t anybody who was with the studio in the nineties. Hold on. I’ll IMDB it. Hold on, hold on.…Ah ah ah, reading the credits, scanning, scanning…Nope. Most of ’em’re dead. Maybe you could track down a few through the guilds. If you don’t mind old folks’ homes. But, believe me, I really doubt anybody in the cast or crew could help. Nobody’d remember Goodwin.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He was just the writer.” Then Lepke grew coy. “Say, Franklin?”

  “Frederick.”

  “Did we have an option on the sequel?”

  “No. The deal with Cantor Brothers was for Cedar Hills only. No sequel.”

  Lepke snapped, “Jesus, what f’ing-pardon-my-French shyster negotiated that against us?”

  “My father.”

  “Ah ah ah, sorry. Well, good for him.”

  Lowell thanked him for his help.

  “Oh, Frank? I mean, Frederick?”

  “Yes?”

  “You find the sequel, gimme a call. Keep us in mind, OK? Shia and Tatum were circling just last week. Looking for props that’ll let ’em do an art turn. This could be just the thing. You’ve got my digits. Ah ah ah, gimme
a call.”

  That night, Frederick Lowell trudged home from the subway in a sour mood.

  He picked up a sandwich for dinner and continued on to his building.

  His apartment was modest. It was Second Avenue Upper East, not Fifth Avenue Upper East, and there is, of course, a matter-antimatter difference between the two. On the third floor of a walk-up brownstone, the two-bedroom place was small and dark most of the time, though in the summer it was illuminated by a stunning blast of morning light; the nearby mirrored Trump monolith efficiently reflected sun for a few minutes not long after dawn. Lowell shared the place with a mouse or two—or rather generations of them, since he’d first heard their skittles and huffs ten years ago. He took no measures to discourage them, other than to protect his staples.

  The pipes were noisy, the traffic too, the neighbors odd.

  Still, he loved it because it had that one quality that was unusual in the city: It was comforting, containing pictures of his late wife, his children and their children, souvenirs they’d collected on their travels, furniture from the home of his youth in Connecticut, framed letters from clients, most of whom he also counted as his friends.

  And books, thousands of books.

  Comfort.

  Tonight, though, as he sat before the small fireplace in his green leather chair, Lowell sighed and waited for the dour mood to dissipate.

  No such luck.

  He’d changed from his suit into slacks and a starched pale yellow shirt that he might have worn to his office if he ever wore pastels on the job. He sat with a sherry and looked over the letter from the Ridgefield attorney once more.

  No clues as to Hudson House. No clues as to idyllic countryside. No clues as to houses of God. No hard evidence of Anderson’s Hope at all.

  On a whim he rose, walked to a bookshelf, and pulled down a copy of Cedar Hills Road. He began reading and was instantly captivated by the easy prose, the brilliant expressions and figures of speech that seemed to come so easily to Goodwin. There were dozens of passages that made you think: My God, I’ve felt that way all my life but I’ve never been able to put the sentiment into words. He feels what I feel.