“What I never knew until Albert Craven explained it to me is how he does it all with other people's money. It's really quite an enviable talent: using other people's money to support your own reputation for generosity. And the worst part,”added Marissa, her mouth curled down in a look of amused disdain, “is that there really isn't a whole lot anyone can do about it.”
She noticed immediately the confusion in my eyes.
“Lawrence,”she explained, “is very persuasive.”Her eyes opened wide and her mouth pulled back into a whimsical smile. “A lawyer might think of it as extortion. Lawrence controls so much of the commercial real estate in the city that some people think he owns half of San Francisco. And of course Lawrence does nothing to discourage that impression. It's really quite ingenious, the way he operates. Other people have more money, and there are—at least one would like to think there are—public officials with more power; but none of those with more money have as much influence, and no one who holds public office will make as much in their lifetime as Lawrence makes in a week. Albert Craven thinks he's one of the most dishonest men he's ever known.”
Her chin tilted up and then, slowly, came down again.
“A lot of people think that; not many of them would ever say it. It's not the kind of thing Lawrence would ever forget. Lawrence, you see, has managed to create a world in which everyone thinks that incurring his displeasure is the only unforgivable sin.”
She stopped and for a while sipped on her Chardonnay. She had taken off the red silk scarf and each time she tossed her head, which she often did when she was caught up in something she was trying to describe, her hair flew back over her shoulder. I could not imagine her with anything other than long black hair. It was part of the slightly unconventional look that set her apart, made her different in a way that made you wonder how different she really was and how much of it was a game she played in which she was the mystery everyone wants to solve.
She put down the glass and gave me one of those wide-eyed stares that taunt you with the vague suggestion that nothing has been decided and anything might still be possible, an unspoken invitation to see what happens.
“You should have a conversation with Lawrence sometime,”she suggested, her eyes bright and shiny. “It's always the same. His voice never changes: always soft, unhurried, so quiet it forces you to concentrate on everything he says. And then, when you talk to him, he listens to what you say as if it were not only the most interesting, but also the most serious thing he has heard in a very long time. He watches you with those pale blue eyes of his, hooded like the face of some wise and benevolent monk; watches you with friendly curiosity. He bends his head forward, at just a slight angle. Like this,”she said, laughing as she lowered her forehead and gave her neck a slight twist. “He bends his head like he's about to ask a question. Then, when you're at the end of what you have to say, he nods once, smiles once, and then, for just a moment, his eyes still on you, there is a complete silence, as if he wants to be sure, absolutely sure, that there's nothing more you want to say that he might inadvertently interrupt.”
She took another drink and picked at her lunch. A moment later, she looked up.
“He talks to you in that same unhurried voice, explaining in the same reasonable way the same request he's been making for years now: 'I've promised to raise two million for the new wing of the hospital,' he'll say. 'And I'd like it very much if I could count on you for a hundred thousand of it.' Or two hundred thousand, or five hundred thousand—whatever he thinks you should pay. And no one ever says no, because everyone knows that they would never again be given the chance to say yes. Because, you see, only those who say yes can be sure they're still part of things, still part of the select circle permitted to do business with Lawrence Goldman, without whom there might not be any business at all.”
I had no particular interest in the peculiar machinations of Lawrence Goldman, no matter how ingenious, or insidious, they may have been; but she was so easy to listen to that I had almost forgotten why I had asked her about him in the first place.
“Bobby was there, at the Goldmans' apartment, that night—”
“So was I.”
“And he told me that—”
“He told you about Jeremy Fullerton's wife and what she said to Ariella? What a scandal that was. Everyone knew they were having an affair… . You don't think that had anything to do with his death?”
“Do you?”
A sly grin slid across her mouth as she searched my eyes. “Are you going to be a lawyer now? Are you going to cross-examine me?”
I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. “Sorry. Habit. I don't know enough to think anything. All I know is what Bobby told me. And yes, I wonder whether Fullerton's wife might have been angry enough to do something more than just exchange words with the woman her husband was sleeping with.”
Marissa became serious. “If Meredith Fullerton was going to kill her husband for sleeping with other women, she would have done it a long time ago. No,”she said emphatically, and rather sadly, “there's no chance in the world she could have done it. She loved him too much.”
“You know her?”
“Yes, I know her,”she said as she took a bite and then put down the fork. “A long time ago, when Jeremy was first running for Congress. I knew her then, not very well, but I knew her. And I liked her. I still like her. And believe me, she loved Jeremy.”
Tilting her head to the side, Marissa gazed at me with what seemed like a question in her eyes.
“What?”I asked.
“Oh, nothing,”she replied. “It's hard to explain to a man, and it seems stupid to say it. But every woman was in love with Jeremy.”
I laughed. “Were you?”
She looked at me again, and there was still a question in her eyes; and though I did not know what it was, I knew it was somehow different from the one that had been there before.
“I think I could have been,”she replied, trying to be honest. “In a certain place, at a certain time.”
“Like that boy you knew in college?”
“There were things they had in common,”she said after she had thought about it.
I looked at her and waited. She bit her lip and then her eyes opened wide as if she had found the exact phrase for which she had been searching.
“You thought they were poets,”she said softly, “and you worried they might be frauds.”
The question in her eyes—whatever it had been—vanished. She forced a smile.
“I said that every woman was in love with Jeremy Fullerton, but I'm not sure it's really true. I'm not sure that Ariella was in love with him at all. I'm not sure she's capable of being in love with anyone.”
Reaching across the table, she patted my hand.
“You should have been there. If you had just seen them all there together—Lawrence, his daughter, Jeremy—you would understand everything.”
She had a gift for description, and, listening to her describe what happened that night, I could almost see Ariella Goldman, wearing a long black dress with her hair pulled up, a pair of diamond earrings dangling next to the smooth white skin of her neck, standing there with cool, lucid eyes, measuring with each movement of her slender hands the few graceful words she bestowed on each of her father's guests.
“And every time someone asked about her mother, Lawrence would explain in that same unchanging, unhurried voice that 'Amanda wanted to be here, but she's down at the ranch getting everything ready, and she just couldn't get back.' ”
Everyone understood. Whether it was the two-story Nob Hill apartment, or the two-hundred acre Sonoma Valley vineyard, or the three-thousand-acre ranch in the mountains above Santa Barbara with the long view of the Pacific, or the fifteen-thousand-square-foot hideaway tucked into twelve secluded acres down the Peninsula in Woodside, surrounded by what had become some of the most expensive real estate in the world, they were always moving from one house to the next, getting the next place ready almost before they had settled into the one where they had just arrived. It was a way of life that could rather easily become a convenient pretext for living apart. In the case of Lawrence and Amanda Goldman, one of them seemed always to be just one house ahead of the other.
“Odd, when you think of how they met,”Marissa remarked as she pushed her plate aside.
Signaling the waiter, I ordered more wine.
“I shouldn't,”protested Marissa mildly.
“It's only a second glass. Why is it odd because of the way they met? By the way, how old is he, anyway?”
She had to think about it. “Mid-seventies, I suppose,”she said presently. “Hard to tell, really. Lawrence has that look men get who are well taken care of: snow-white hair and a reddish tan face. He could be seventy; he could be eighty; he could be older. When they have that look, you can only be sure of three things: They're rich, they're old, and they could live another twenty years or be dead tomorrow morning.”
The waiter set new wineglasses in front of us both.
“That sounds a little like Albert Craven,”I said, peering over the glass as I lifted it to my mouth.
She tossed her head and then laughed when she caught me watching the way her hair sailed back over her shoulder.
“No, that isn't Albert at all.”
Still laughing, she narrowed her eyes and tried to concentrate.
“Albert isn't … sleek. That's it! Sleek. Old men without any lines in their faces, all very smooth, very—how shall I say?— rounded, contoured, like someone took a statue while the surface was still soft and rubbed out all the rough edges. You know what I mean: old men with faces as smooth as a baby's bottom.”
Across the deck, through the windows, the animated faces of the crowd inside the restaurant lent a sort of shared solitude to our own conversation, a sense that what we had to say was private and strictly between ourselves. I wondered for a moment what someone sitting inside would have thought had they looked out and seen the way we were leaning toward each other across the table, looking for all the world as if we wanted nothing so much as to be left alone. I guessed that even the waiter, who after all had heard her voice, must have thought I was madly in love with her.
“Why are you smiling?”she asked, laughing again at me with her eyes.
“Nothing,”I halfway lied. “I was just thinking about the way we think about things because of the way they look— Lawrence Goldman's face, for example. Now tell me, how did they meet and why does it make the way they live now seem so odd?”
The story of how Lawrence Goldman met his wife, and what happened when they did, was one of those astonishing tales that have been whispered so many times and in so many places that it becomes the kind of legend everyone believes even when, or perhaps especially when, they are almost certain it cannot possibly be true. It was the kind of story everyone wants to believe, because it tells everyone what they want to hear. Some thought it meant that even the powerful would do anything for love; others thought it only proved that the rich did what they wanted and never gave a damn about whom it might hurt.
They met at a party given by Lawrence Goldman and the woman to whom he was then married in honor of someone called Richard McBryde, a new vice president recently hired away from a large developer in the East. Lawrence Goldman was then forty-six years old and had been married for exactly half his life. His two sons were still in college. Richard McBryde was in his early thirties, and his wife, Amanda, was only twenty-four. From the moment he first saw her, Goldman could not take his eyes off her. There were sixteen people gathered around the perfectly decorated dining room table, but all through dinner he talked only to her. When dessert was served, he got up from his chair and with a strange, troubled look in his eyes announced he had to leave.
“I just remembered,”he said as he put his napkin down on the table. “I have to go to Los Angeles for a few days.”Then, for just a moment, he stared down at the table as if there were something he was trying to decide. When he raised his eyes he looked directly at Amanda McBryde. “Why don't you come with me?”
There are those who later claimed it was not even a question; that it was more like a decision he had made for both of them, a decision she had somehow authorized him to make. That was the sort of judgment that could be made after the fact. At the time, no one could do anything but watch with open-eyed amazement as Amanda McBryde rose from her chair and, without so much as a glance at her husband, left the room with a man she had met for the first time barely two hours before.
Like every story told often enough to become something of a legend, there were serious differences of opinion about where this had all happened. In some accounts, the dinner had been held in Goldman's lavishly furnished apartment in San Francisco; in other versions, it had taken place at the Tuscan-style villa that had just been constructed in the middle of his Sonoma vineyard. There were even those who claimed that Lawrence Goldman and the young wife of his most recent employee had not flown off to Los Angeles or anywhere else that night; that they had instead walked into the palm-lined darkness of the cool California night, driven away from the white stucco Santa Barbara mansion with the red tile roof and the private beach, and stopped at the first motel they found on the highway that stretched south along the Pacific shore.
Everyone thought they knew what had happened, but the only thing anyone would ever know for sure is that nine months later two divorces had been arranged with ruthless efficiency; a marriage was announced after the fact; and, with as little public notice as possible, the only child of Lawrence and Amanda Goldman drew the first breath of what was certain to be an interesting life.
A
s soon as I agreed to represent Jamaal Washington, I waived on his behalf the requirement that he be arraigned at once on the murder indictment returned by the grand jury. Instead of in a hospital room where he was recovering from the surgery that had removed the bullet that had passed dangerously close to his spine, I wanted his first appearance to be where everyone, especially the press, would see that he did not look anything like what they imagined he did. Now, two weeks later, I was finally in court, waiting to make my first formal appearance in a case the whole country was watching.