AGENT: Do you remember one of them named Ogden Salsbury?
MR. BARGER: No.
AGENT: His mother lived next door to you. She had a lot of
lovers. One of them, a man named Parker, raped the boy.
Homosexual rape.
MR. BARGER: Come to think of it, I do remember him. Ogden. Yeah. He came to the house at a bad time.
AGENT: A bad time? How’s that?
MR. BARGER: It was all girls then.
AGENT: All girls?
MR. BARGER: Carrie was on a kick. She wouldn’t take in any but little girls. Maybe she thought she could control them better than she could a bunch of boys. So this Ogden and I were the only men in the house for about two or three years.
AGENT: And that was bad for him?
MR. BARGER: The older girls knew what had happened to him. They used to tease him something fierce. He couldn’t take it. He’d blow up every time. Start yelling and screaming at them. Of course that was what they wanted, so they just teased him some more. When this Ogden used to let the girls get his goat, I’d take him aside and talk to him-almost father to son. I used to tell him not to pay them any mind. I used to tell him that they were just women and that women were good for only two things. Fucking and cooking. That was my attitude before I met my second wife. Anyway, I think I must have been a great help to that boy. A great help . . . Do you know they won’t let you fuck in this nursing home?
The other report that Dawson found especially interesting was an interview with Laud Richardson, a first-level clerk in the Pentagon’s Bureau of Security Clearance Investigations. A Harrison-Bodrei agent had offered Richardson five hundred dollars to pull Salsbury’s army security file, study it, and report its contents.
Again, Dawson had bracketed the most relevant passages with a red pen.
RICHARDSON: Whatever research he’s doing must be damned important. They’ve spent a lot of money covering for the sonofabitch over the past ten years. And the Pentagon just doesn’t do that unless it expects to be repaid in spades some day.
AGENT: Covering for him? How?
RICHARDSON: He likes to mark up prostitutes.
AGENT: Mark them up?
RICHARDSON: Mostly with his fists.
AGENT: How often does this happen?
RICHARDSON: Once or twice a year.
AGENT: How often does he see prostitutes?
RICHARDSON: He goes whoring the first weekend of every other month. Regular as you please. Like he’s a robot or something. You could set your watch by his need. Usually, he goes into Manhattan, makes the rounds of the leisure and health spas, phones a couple of call girls and has them up to his hotel room. Now and then one of them comes along with the kind of look that sets him off, and he beats the shit out of her.
AGENT: What look is that?
RICHARDSON: Usually blond, but not always. Usually pale, but not always. But she is always small. Five one or five two. A hundred pounds. And delicate. Very delicate features.
AGENT: Why would a girl like that set him off?
RICHARDSON: The Pentagon tried to force him into psychoanalysis. He went to one session and refused to go the second time. He did tell the psychiatrist that these frenzies of his were generated by more than the girls’ appearance. They have to be delicate.-but not just in a physical sense. They have to seem emotionally vulnerable to him before be gets the urge to pound them senseless.
AGENT: In other words if he thinks the woman is his equal or his superior, she’s safe. But if be feels that he can dominate her-
RICHARDSON: Then she’d better have her Blue Cross paid in full.
AGENT: He hasn’t killed any of these women, has he?
RICHARDSON: Not yet. But he’s come close a couple of times.
AGENT: You said someone in the Pentagon covers up for him.
RICHARDSON: Usually someone from our bureau.
AGENT: How?
RICHARDSON: By paying the girl’s hospital bills and giving her a lump sum. The size of the pay-off depends on the extent of her injuries.