Текст книги "Chain of Fools "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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"Was there physical abuse? No. Can you term what I just described as psychological abuse? Maybe. Although, if it is, the legislatures had better not make it a felony without first spending billions of dollars on more prison cells. From what I've observed, as a style of parenting it comes dangerously close to being the norm in this country. Not that the current Congress is about to outlaw it, of course. Among the traditional family values cherished by the religious right, emotional abuse is surely high up in their pantheon, if their own biographies are any guide."

I said, "Your overall assessment of family life in America, Janet, seems to me unduly bleak. Anyway, you and Eric both turned out emotionally healthy. That must have come from somewhere in the Osborne family."

A wistful smile. "I guess so. They say every child experiences the same family differently. Eric's and my peculiarities—and our interests—were much more in tune with Mom's and Dad's than Chester's were, or June's. Even our both turning out gay seemed to fit in with

the Osborne tradition of defiant rugged individualism. On the other hand, June, the social-climbing ditz, was never appreciated for who she was. And of course as Chester's tendencies toward violence surfaced, that didn't particularly endear him or add to his opportunities in the family dynamic."

"And you think it's possible that what Chester experienced as psychological abuse in your parents' home was so traumatic that he passed it on in his own home as physical abuse?"

She said, "I'm afraid so."

I asked Janet if I'd heard correctly the day before when I thought she said that Chester had "disowned" Craig—meaning presumably that their disaffection was so complete that they no longer had any contact with each other at all.

"That's the impression I have," she said. "It's certainly the impression Chester leaves on those rare occasions when anybody dares mention Craig's name in Chester's presence."

I said, "Then why would Chester have visited Craig at Attica twice in the last twelve weeks?"

She stared hard. "He did? Chester visited Craig in prison?"

I nodded. "It's important to my source, a good guy who wants to keep his job, that you don't repeat this."

"All right." I could all but hear the wheels whirring inside her head.

To protect the Attica warden's informant, I did not repeat the—possibly unreliable—hearsay evidence of Craig telling the prison snitch that there was more to Eric Osborne's death than the investigators knew and that at least one homicide had been commited by a member of the family other than Craig. But I did say: "With his criminal history and criminal connections—and now with these unexplained visits from his suddenly not-so-alienated father—Craig at least bears looking into. I may drive out there and interview him myself."

She still looked dumbfounded. "Well... I just don't know what to think."

"If somehow Tidy is unable to serve on the Herald board of directors," I said, "and Craig can't do it on account of being locked up, who's next in line to move on to the board? Anybody helpful to the good-chain cause?"

"It would be Tidy's brother, Tacker Puderbaugh. But he's no factor, believe me, Don. Tacker has no interest whatever in the Herald. He's

already got enough money from his trust fund from Grandmother Watson's estate to meet his minimal needs—a bathing suit and a supply of surfboard wax, as I understand it. And anyway, Tacker was ten thousand miles from Edensburg, the last I knew. He spent one semester at the University of Hawaii in 1990, then started drifting southwestward, and he just kept on drifting."

"Do you have his current address?"

"I can get it from—Tidy would be the best bet. If I asked June, she'd be suspicious."

"I think we need to confirm that Tacker is in fact halfway around the world and uninvolved in the struggle here. Any financial interest he might have in the Herald's disposition would be indirect—through June—but real enough. After Tidy and Tacker, who's next in line for a board seat?"

"That's it as far as the family is concerned. None of us were big followers of the Holy Scriptures, and the Osbornes don't seem to have gone forth and multiplied at a rate anywhere near the world average. The company by-laws state that if no direct descendant of Daniel Lincoln Osborne is able or willing to serve on the Herald's board, the existing board can fill a vacancy with a nonfamily member of the board's choosing. The board as it's now constituted, of course, would pick somebody who's pro-Griscomb. But that's all academic, isn't it? Tidy is in good health, as far as I know, and it's unlikely he'll meet a violent end in the grillroom at the country club. Even if Tidy got one, a puncture wound from the toothpick in a BLT is rarely fatal."

When I'd entered her office twenty minutes earlier, Janet had shut off the ringer on her office phone and activated her voice mail. The voice-mail light had been blinking for several minutes, and now a tiny woman with a pixie cut whom I recognized from the newsroom stuck her head in Janet's open door and said, "Sorry to interrupt, but Dale wants you to call her at your mother's house. She said to tell you that your Mom is okay, but there is some kind of urgent situation."

"What kind? Is June out there with a lawyer?"

"No, she didn't mention that It has something to do with Dan. He had a close call this morning, Dale said."

"Oh, hell, that nails it," Janet said. She snatched up the phone with one hand and her handbag with the other.

14

It was exactly like Karen Silkwood," Arlene Thurber said, as she accepted the joint Dan passed to her and took a deep toke. Then she offered the reefer around the Osborne back porch where six of us were seated. One by one, Timmy, Dale, Janet, and I shook our heads no thanks. Elsie the housekeeper was upstairs helping Ruth Osborne clean out a closet; just as well.

"It was sooo weird," Arlene went on in a voice that was faster than slo-mo but not quite normal speed, either "I mean, it was just yesterday I was saying that all this crazy shit that's going down—I mean Eric getting killed and that Jet Ski attack—that all that shit sounds exactly like Karen Silkwood. I said that yesterday, and then—holy smokes!– what happens? Somebody tries to run Dan and me off the road and take us out, just like Kerr-McGhee did to Karen Silkwood! Can you believe this crazy shit?"

Dale said, "We can believe it."

Arlene had just described how she and Dan had been driving early that morning on a rural county road. At a spot where the road ran along a woodsy hillside, a large pickup truck had sped up behind them and repeatedly banged into the rear of Dan's Range Rover. It was obvious, Arlene said, that the truck was trying to force their car off the right shoulder down a steep embankment. Constantly in danger of losing control, Dan was able to keep the vehicle on the road for a half mile before he veered too far into the oncoming traffic lane, did lose control, and ran off the left side of the road and along a ditch.

The car ended up nose down in the basin next to a drainage culvert. Dan and Arlene had been wearing seat belts and were unhurt,

but the Range Rover was badly damaged, probably totaled, Dan thought. The pickup truck had then sped on up the rural road. Ten minutes later, a man on his way home from an early-morning trout-fishing excursion came along and drove Dan and Arlene to a main-road gas station, where they phoned the State Police. Two officers soon arrived and took them back to the crash site, questioned them there, and then brought them back into town. A tow truck had been dispatched for the wrecked Range Rover.

I said, "Did you mention to the cops our ideas about a possible connection between Eric's murder and the Jet Ski attacks and now this?"

"I certainly did," Arlene said, her voice full of mellow outrage. Dan sat slumped in a wicker chair, his head back and his eyes squeezed shut. "Dan thought maybe we should cool it," Arlene went on, "on account of where we'd just been when the attack happened. But I thought no, we don't have to mention that, but we can still be up front about this other bad shit. I mean, how else can the cops help us if we don't share our thoughts and feelings with them?" Arlene nudged Dan, who opened his eyes and accepted the smoldering joint from her. Timmy had on a mild huff-huff look, but he kept his lip buttoned. Dale must have noticed this, for at one point she did accept one toke, exhaling grandiosely in Timmy's direction.

Janet said, "So, where had you two been when the attack happened? Not burglarizing hunting cabins, I hope."

"Don't be absurd," Dan said disgustedly.

"I'm only asking because Arlene said you couldn't tell it to the police. Any suggestion that you were involved in something illegal this morning is not ridiculous at all, Dan."

"We'd just been out to see our dealer," Arlene said good-naturedly, waggling her eyebrows and indicating the reefer. "We had two ounces of sensi buds stashed under the backseat. The way the cops would have acted if they'd found it—you'd think we were criminals or something. Anyway, we left the whole stash in a tree near where we crashed. We'll have to go out there later and pick up the sensi before some animal gets at it."

I said, "Were you able to get a look at the truck and driver? I realize your focus was on the road in front of you and trying to stay on it."

"That's right, it was," Dan said sarcastically. "Taking notes somehow slipped our minds."

"The truck was red," Arlene said. "That much I can remember. Dan had his eyes glued to the road, naturally, but I looked back a couple times, and the truck had a black grill with horizontal bars. I couldn't see the driver because the truck was right on top of us, and our back window is low, and he was too high up. And then when we ran off the road we were bouncing all over the place, and by the time we got stopped, the truck had gone around a bend. But I do remember that it was big and it was red."

"Like the pickup somebody saw speeding away from the lake yesterday with the Jet Ski in the back," Janet said, and we all nodded gravely and considered this data.

Dale asked, "Who knew you'd be out on that road early this morning, Arlene?"

"Just Liver," Arlene said.

When she seemed to have nothing to add to that, Timmy said, "Your marijuana dealer's name is Liver?"

"Liver Livingston. His real name is Samuel. He told us his family used to have a railroad or a canal or something, but now he says they all sell dope."

Dale said, "Was he nicknamed Liver because he loves life, or after the organ?"

Arlene made a "beats me" face, but Dan said, "I once heard his nickname came from his favorite food. In any case, I doubt that Liver would appreciate our sitting around discussing him in connection with somebody trying to kill Arlene and me. In fairness to Liver, let's just try to leave him out of this." Arlene relit the joint while Dan held it with a roach clip he'd pulled out of the pocket of his work shirt.

I said, "Are you telling us, Dan, that if somebody asked Liver for a schedule of when you might be traveling the isolated road out to his place, he'd have refused to provide it?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you. Yes."

"You have every reason to trust him, and no reason not to?"

"Liver Livingston and I," Dan said solemnly, "have been friends for more than twenty years. Not just friends—brothers. We've worked in the cane fields of Cuba together. We went to the mountains of

Nicaragua together. We are companeros Does that answer your question?"

I said, "I can understand why you trust Liver. But the man is in what I think you'll concede is an iffy line of work. Rightly or wrongly, Liver's trade is a criminal enterprise in the state of New York. People who do what he does make enemies. Even if you accept the idea that there's no chance he would ever have set you up, isn't it possible that another dealer might be attempting to muscle in on Liver's territory by scaring away his customers?"

Arlene blurted out, "What an asshole that would be!"

Dan seemed to roll this idea around in his head for some seconds, as if he was interested in the sound of it but couldn't quite bring himself to endorse the theory. Finally, he said, "No, I would seriously doubt that. Liver is a small-time guy whose gross is peanuts. He takes in enough to get by—it's just Liver and Patsy and their old dog out there– and he sees himself predominantly as a good citizen providing a public service. Who could possibly want to use violence to take over an operation like that?"

I caught Timmy's eye—I guessed we were both wondering what Liver's dog's name might be—and then I looked at Dan and said, "Given what's happened to you and Janet lately—and to Eric in May– I share your opinion that the incident today had nothing to do with Liver. What it looks an awful lot like is another episode in a plot to alter the Herald board of directors' vote on September eighth. But to be sure, I wish you'd get in touch with Liver, Dan, and describe your close call today and ask him if anything like it has happened to any of his other customers. Ask him too whether he's heard anything like what happened to you and Arlene happening to other people who travel that road."

Dan sniffed and said, "Oh, sure. I'll call him. Why not? Since you and Janet are running the Osbornes' family affairs now, I guess I'd better just do as I'm told."

Janet slapped the wicker table next to her and barked, "Damn it, Dan, that is so unfair—"

But Dale was holding up a traffic-cop hand and saying, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute."

Janet shut her mouth and sat back stewing while Dale went on to make the case that we were all in this together, and ultimately our best

interests and highest goals were the same: staying alive and saving the Herald. Dale argued that she and Timmy once had had "an ugly run-in with grim consequences for American society," and that since they were managing to get along despite the "moral chasm" that separated them, the rest of us could damn well find a way to get along too.

"What did you two guys fight over?" Arlene asked Dale and Timmy. "I'm surprised. You're both such nice people."

Timmy said, "Good question, Arlene."

"I'll fill you in later, Arlene," Dale said. "Right now we need to concentrate on what happened to you and Dan today, and on how we're going to make sure nothing else like it happens to any of us. Don't you agree, Don?"

I said I agreed, and everybody else nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Dale looked at Dan and Arlene, who were attempting to get one last ignition out of their reefer, and said, "I think you two ought to consider staying here in the house with us until this thing is over and we can be sure all of us are safe from whoever's been trying to knock off Osbornes. There's plenty of room, we can ask the cops to keep an eye on this place, and if anybody shows up and tries anything here on the premises—well, Don's got a gun, Janet told me, that Timmy brought back from Albany last night."

Arlene screamed. Everybody else jumped, and when they'd collected themselves, I said, "It's a precaution. I've had the NRA firearms safety course—and the United States Army's—and there's no need to be concerned."

Dan said, "I've spent some time around people who found themselves in a position where it was necessary for them to carry weapons, and I understand that this is sometimes unfortunately the case. So if you want to arm yourself, Strachey, and turn this house into a fortified position, that's up to you and Janet. But I can't see that anybody is going to be stupid enough to come after a member of the Osborne family right here in Edensburg. Arlene and I will be safe enough in our apartment. And while I can see the point in keeping an eye on Mom, I think you're in danger of overreacting quite badly otherwise. For what little my opinion is worth, of course."

Arlene gawked at him and said, "Speak for yourself, Dan. I'm scared shitless. I think we should all stay here together where we can take

care of each other and share our thoughts and concerns. And, hey, it could even be fun. Corn is in, and we could get some ears and make a big batch of corn chowder. Brownies too. Come on, Dan, let's do it. Don't be such a big drag."

Dan looked directly into Arlene's face and said coldly, "I am not staying here overnight. We've all got more important matters on our minds than some goddamn corn roast."

Arlene sneered and snapped, "Asshole!" Then she shrugged and said, "Well, I'm staying."

"That's up to you," Dan said sourly, but he made no move to depart without Arlene.

While I had them all in one place—and to help get our unruly little band focused on the big picture—I summed up my investigation as it had progressed over the previous thirty-six hours. I described my encounter with June and Parson Bates; my conversation with Ruth Osborne in which she revealed Chester's warning that "somebody else might have to get hurt" to keep the Heraldfrom being sold to Griscomb; my visit with Chester, during which he threatened me with legal action for spreading slurs against the Osbornes, and he threatened to have Ruth Osborne declared legally incompetent and removed from the Her-aldboard of directors; my meeting with Bill Stankie, where he cast new doubt on the supposed guilt of Gordon Grubb in Eric's murder, and at the same time revealed that Chester had twice visited Craig in prison (again I left out Craig's remarks to the snitch concerning Eric's murder); and my meeting with Chester and Stu Torkildson, where Tor-kildson kept referring to my suspicions of a conspiracy to commit murder when I had not mentioned these suspicions to either Torkildson or Chester Osborne at all.

As I laid out my findings, everyone on the porch listened with great interest, even Dan. He seemed at several points to be breathing heavily and erratically—particularly when I mentioned Chester's visits to Craig in prison. And as I concluded my remarks, Dan got up quickly and made for the first-floor bathroom just down the hall from the porch.

I was about to ask Arlene why Dan vomited every time the subject of an Osborne violent conspiracy came up, but just then the front doorbell rang and seconds later June was inside the house with a deputy sheriff.

15

How did we ever get mixed up in this?" Timmy said morosely.

I said, "Let me think."

He was laid out on the four-poster in June's old room, and I was at the desk nearby updating my notes. Lunch was to be served in another ten minutes. June had departed an hour earlier, after watching her mother be served with an order to appear for a court proceeding the following Monday, four days away. June and Chester contended that Ruth Osborne was mentally incapable of carrying out her duties as a Herald Corporation board member, and Mrs. Osborne would be expected to demonstrate that she was of sound mind. When she accepted the papers, Mrs. Osborne had looked at her daughter and asked pleasantly, "Are you wearing your retainer, June?"

Timmy said, "My foot is hot and it itches."

"Sorry."

"I don't mean to whine. I realize there are people in this house with bigger problems than a broken foot."

"Go ahead and whine. I would."

"No, you wouldn't. Anyway, we've got enough whiners in this house. What a jerk Dan Osborne is. And Janet is perfectly rational except when she and Dan are in the same room together. Then both of them sound like a couple of twelve-year-olds."

"Dan can bring that out in anybody," I said. "But it's not his pomposity that's the most interest to me. It's his sensitive stomach. Every time the subject of an Osborne family conspiracy to commit murder comes up, Dan heaves."

"I couldn't help noticing that too. Bui; you don't suspect Dan of killing Eric, do you? Why would he?"

"Right. Why would he?"

"I can't think of any reason having to do with the sale of the Herald, " Timmy said. "Or any other reason, either."

"According to Janet, the Osborne household harbored more than the average amount of emotional deprivation when she and her brothers and sister were growing up. Emotional deprivation led to emotional warfare, and emotional warfare sometimes leads to physical violence. Still, fratricide is extreme and extremely rare, I know. So, no. I don't have any real reason at this point to suspect Dan. But I do plan on gleaning his whereabouts on the afternoon Eric was murdered. And I'd sure like to find out why Dan vomits at the mention of his brother's death. Is it the shock and terrible loss that hits him hard all over again? Is he squeamish? Or does he have some guilty knowledge of the event?"

"Why don't you just ask him?"

"I'm considering doing that, Timothy. I need to get him alone first. I also need to come up with a sufficiently delicate way of phrasing my interrogatory. It won't do to ask, 'Why does mention of your brother's bludgeoning make you puke your guts out, Dan?' "

"That sounds good enough to me, Don. Euphemisms for vomiting are for kindergarten teachers to use, and euphemisms for murder are for heads of state. Just ask him directly, is my advice. Dan's a grownup."

"He's a grown-up, but he's also a grown-up who acts like he's got some guilty secret that's eating away at his insides. When I confront Dan, I don't want him to clam up even tighter than he is now, and I don't want him to bolt."

"He's highly indignant over being stuck here, he says, but he's not making any move to leave either. I wonder if he wants you to find out something important he knows. Maybe he's trying to work up the courage to tell you something, and it's when he gets close to saying it that he throws up."

"Possibly."

"On the other hand, maybe Dan is simply scared to death he's going to be attacked and killed, and that makes him heave. Having somebody try to run your car over a cliff is bound to unsettle your break-

fast. I know I'm nervous about all this, and I'm not even on the Herald's board. Here we are, like Chinese Gordon at Khartoum, the Mahdi's turbaned hordes out there just beyond the perimeter tightening the noose, getting ready to come charging in for the coup de grace. It is frightening."

"That's a little overly vivid, Timothy. But I get your point."

"And then there's Dale," he said, throwing his arms back in a gesture of despair. The pom-poms on June's snowy white bedspread trembled.

"Aren't you glad she's on our side?" I said.

"I'll say. I'd hate to have her across the Nile in Omdurman sharpening her panga."

"I like her," I said, "and I thinkyou would too, Timothy, if she hadn't somehow confused you with Jesse Helms or Richard Speck or whoever it is, and treats you accordingly. She's prickly and blunt in ways you'd find refreshing if you weren't the one getting prickled and pum-meled. And Dale can obviously spot a phony a mile away."

He writhed. "Yeah, a phony like me."

"Oh, you're obviously much worse than a mere phony. You said yesterday she was starting to seem dimly familiar. Still no luck placing her?"

"Nah. There is something about that head of hair and the face under it—I've seen them both before somewhere, I'm more and more certain. But hard as I try, I cannot remember where."

"Peace Corps? Was she in your India group?"

"No, that I'd remember. Anyway, she's ten years too young."

"You didn't have a falling out in 1969 over competing poultry de-beaking techniques in Andhra Pradesh?"

"I have a feeling I've run into Dale more recently than that. I think it had something to do with work—something at the Assembly. It'll come to me soon, I think. Whatever it is, there must be some misunderstanding. I can't imagine that Dale and I would have been on opposite sides of anything very important. I mean, could we have?"

"It seems unlikely. Yet she referred today to a 'moral chasm' between the two of you And she said you had done something with 'grim consequences for American society.' Whatever it was, it was plainly a big deal to Dale."

Timmy twisted on the bed again, in obvious mental pain. I went over

and climbed on June's bed beside him. I placed my mouth close to Timmy's ear and whispered, "Dale has apparently become convinced– and a woman as smart as she is has to have her reasons—that you are actually G. Gordon Liddy, Timothy. It must be your excellent posture, if not something awful you once did, that has led her to confuse the two of you. To her, this is a turn-off. But not to me. I'm excited. Come to me, Gordo. Hold yourself above my flame."

He smiled weakly, but that's as far as his ardor rose. Timmy had been irritated with Dale earlier, and then angry. But now he was haunted. I hadn't been crazy about it when his mind had been full of Skeeter, and now it was time for me to be patient and indulgent while his mind was full of Dale. Luckily, I had plenty to occupy my mind too—a distinguished New York State family whose members apparently were trying to kill one another off for reasons of ideology and/or cash.

16

With fewer than ninety-six hours to go before Monday's court hearing, the pressure was on. Ruth Osborne's mental state was unpredictable; we knew she might show up and argue eloquently on her own behalf that she was as sane as a NASA flight commander, or she might stare vacantly at the judge for half an hour and then remark on the resemblance of a mole on the side of his neck to the star Sigma Octantis.

After a tense lunch where no one but Arlene had much to say– hoisting a sandaled foot onto the edge of the table, she explained to us what each of her Tibetan toe rings signified—I tried to lure Dan aside for a private talk. But he said he and Arlene had to leave immediately to deal with car insurance matters and to rent a "vehicle" until they could buy a new one. They also needed, he said, to drive out to the scene of that morning's car crack-up and retrieve their stash of "buds." Dan did agree to spend the night at the Osborne house, and when I said I'd like to speak with him privately later in the day, he got a queasy look and said sure, maybe, if he had a chance, he'd see.

Both Janet and Bill Stankie had spoken with the Edensburg chief of police, and he agreed to have a patrol car cruise Maple Street periodically during the day and to watch the house from sunset to sunrise. The chief also offered to provide an escort for Dan and Arlene as they went about their errands, but they said no thanks.

After lunch, I went into Tom Osborne's study, cleared a space on the library table, and worked the phone for an hour. Janet had obtained from Tidy an address in Papeete for his brother, Tacker. A Los Angeles investigative agency I'd done business with on a number of

occasions had South Pacific contacts, I knew, and the agency agreed, for a fee, to track down Tacker Puderbaugh and establish his whereabouts, currently and on May 15.

I called another contact, a business reporter for The New York Times with whom I'd had a brief, hectic affair of between forty-eight and seventy-two hours in the early seventies and been friends with since then. He told me Crewes-InfoCom had a reputation for being stingy and mean, but he'd never heard of them using violent tactics. Its bullying, in acquisitions and as an employer, stayed within the law, as far as the Times reporter knew. But he said he'd ask around and get back to me. Harry Griscomb, the owner of the "good chain," had a reputation in media business circles, I was told, for excellent journalism and "unattractive" profit margins. What was "unattractive"? I asked. "Ten percent instead of twenty or thirty," was the reply.

Then I made several calls to the New York State Department of Correctional Services. After forty minutes in and out of telecommunications computer limbo—"Press forty-one to descend from the Purgatoria to the Inferno"—I reached the appropriate office at Attica State Correctional Facility and was able to set up a meeting for the next morning at ten o'clock with Craig Osborne.

Dan and Arlene were off on their car-related errands, and Janet went back to work at the Herald. With Timmy and Dale to watch over Ruth Osborne, and a cop car patrolling the neighborhood, I had the rest of the afternoon to roam Edensburg.

The town was, if not an idyllic Rockwellian piece of small-city Americana, still reasonably healthy for the unstable age it had survived into. The (so far) locally owned canoe manufacturing company that had been Edensburg's economic mainstay for over one hundred years had not moved its factory to low-wage, long-hour Ciudad Juarez or Kuala Lumpur; in fact, Janet had told me, the company was doing reasonably well, having diversified into the production of fiberglass bodies for Jet Skis, ORVs, and light-truck bumpers. Tourism brought seasonal work into the area too in summer and during the ski season. Even the Herald would have been making a go of it, had it not been for Stu Torkildson's Spruce Haven debacle.

Edensburg's Main Street had only a few vacant storefronts. The four-story department store had been carved up into smaller businesses—

a comic book store, Betty Lou's Hairport, a New Agey place called Crystals n' Constellations, among them—and J. J. Newberry's looked as if it was still going strong despite the competition from the Kmart at the edge of town. A battle to keep Wal-Mart out of the county was hard-fought and ongoing, Janet said. The Gem Theater on Main Street had been triplexed, but at least it was still open. It was showing one film that had the word "fatal" in the title, one with "deadly," and one with "mortal."

I had a town map and an Edensburg phone book with me and had no trouble locating Dick Puderbaugh's fuel-oil distributership. I thought he might be willing to talk with me in a general way about the Os-bornes' intrafamily feuding over the future of the Herald and I'd pick up an odd, useful nugget on the family dynamics, particularly the propensity among some Osbornes for violence. But as soon as I introduced myself, Puderbaugh, a whey-faced little man with what looked like a rodent insignia on the left breast of his golf shirt, turned hostile.