“He ended up like Gatsby, too,”she said with a strange detachment, as if she were describing someone she had not seen for years. “Murdered, and no one really cares why. Oh, they all came to the funeral, and they all said all the right things; but they were glad he was gone. He was an outsider; he didn't belong; and he was going to take something away that belonged to them: their power, and much more than their power—their sense of their own importance, their sense of who they were. One of them killed him. I'm sure of it.”
She looked out the window, then glanced back as if there were something more she wanted to say. Instead, she just shook her head.
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”I asked tentatively. “Anything your husband might have said?”
She became quite still, and very quiet.
“A few weeks before he was killed,”she said presently, “Jeremy had a private meeting at the White House with the president, just the two of them, late at night. The president told Jeremy that if he beat Augustus Marshall, if he became governor, and then tried to run against him for the nomination, Jeremy would never survive. Jeremy joked that he thought the president meant that he would not survive politically, but that there had been something about the way he said it that left him a little unsure.”
I was watching her as closely as I could, trying to figure out what she really knew and what she simply wanted to believe. No one wants to accept a meaningless death. No matter how famous, no one remembers the victim of a random act of violence the same way they do someone who dies for their country or is murdered because powerful people are afraid of what he might do.
“Strange, the way things happen,”said Mrs. Fullerton. “No one could beat Jeremy. That was why the president was so worried. Jeremy was so far ahead of the governor that some people—the ones who like to get quoted in the papers—were starting to say that the only way Augustus Marshall could get reelected was to do the same thing he had done the first time he won a statewide election.”
I was not from California and I had no idea what she meant.
“Hope that his opponent died,”she explained. “Years ago, Augustus Marshall ran for attorney general in the Republican primary. He was running against the Republican incumbent, who was enormously popular, and he was not given any chance at all. Then, a few weeks before the primary, the attorney general had a heart attack and died.”
I lowered my eyes and tried to think of a decent way to excuse myself. Meredith Fullerton knew no more about the death of her husband than I did. Glancing at my watch, I got to my feet.
“It's getting late. I've taken enough of your time.”
She turned toward me, a slender, sympathetic smile on her mouth.
“You're right, Mr. Antonelli. I don't know who killed my husband. I can't help you in that way. But I do know a few things you might find helpful.”
For an instant, I caught in her eyes a glimpse of the lonely desperation of a woman who does not know what to do. Then it was gone, hidden behind the elegant manner of a woman for whom the worst sin was to inflict her own suffering on someone else.
“I think I need a cup of coffee,”she said as she began to walk across the room. “Why don't you have one with me?”
I followed her into a long, narrow kitchen and took one of the two chairs at a small round table next to the only window.
With one hand on the corner of the stainless steel stove and one foot locked behind the other, Meredith Fullerton, lost in thoughts of her own, waited for the kettle to boil. When it began finally to steam, she carefully measured two spoonfuls of instant coffee into one of the two mugs she had taken down from a cupboard above the sink. Then, glancing over at me to make sure she was right, she put one spoonful in the other.
She sat down across from me, holding her cup in both hands. The warmth of it seemed to give her some comfort. With her eyes closed, she took several slow breaths.
“You should talk to Robert Zimmerman—Jeremy's administrative assistant,”she said after she sipped tentatively on her coffee. “I'm afraid I never liked him very much, but he was devoted to Jeremy. He came to see me day before yesterday. He'd come out for the funeral, of course, but then had gone back to Washington. He called last Saturday and asked if he could come out to see me. I thought he was coming to talk about what we should do about Jeremy's Senate papers, but it wasn't that at all. He wanted to talk about the campaign.”
Confused, I put down my cup. “Campaign?”
“Jeremy's campaign for governor. I hadn't thought about it at all, not since the night Jeremy was killed. Good God, that was the last thing I would have thought about!”A rueful smile started onto her lips. “But of course that's all that some people had been thinking about. In politics—and perhaps not just in politics—that's all anyone's death really means: what it does to someone else's chances.”
Narrowing her eyes, she sipped some more on her coffee. “You remember that famous old phrase: 'The king is dead, long live the king'? Well, Jeremy is dead, so Augustus Marshall can still have his own dream about becoming president; the president can still dream about a second term; and someone else can dream about running for governor and—who knows?—something else as well.”
With each word she seemed to become more tense. Peering intently into my eyes, she asked, “Can you guess who that is going to be, Mr. Antonelli? Can you guess who is going to take my husband's place as the candidate for governor against Augustus Marshall?”
“No, I'm sorry,”I said, fumbling for an answer.
“Do you know who Lawrence Goldman is?”
“He's going to run for governor?”
“No, Mr. Antonelli,”she said, a disdainful expression on her face. “He's not going to run—his daughter is.”
“The one who worked for your husband?”
“That's right: the one who worked for my husband. Ariella Goldman is about to become the Democratic candidate for governor. The politicians who run the state party will make the decision this weekend, but it's just a formality: It's already done. They've been working on it from the very beginning—the day after Jeremy was murdered. Robert Zimmerman told me all about it. Ariella called him on Sunday—the day after the murder—and told him she thought they should keep the campaign together. She told him she had already talked to Toby Hart, who was running the campaign, and that Hart had agreed. She told him Jeremy would have wanted them to keep fighting for the things he stood for.”
Meredith Fullerton stared out the window. Lights were beginning to flicker around the long arc of the bay as the first stars began to appear high in the darkening sky.
“Robert Zimmerman knew then that something was going on. What was she doing, asking Toby Hart to stay on? She wasn't running the campaign: She was a speechwriter.”
Mrs. Fullerton looked back around at me. “But of course she was a lot more than that, wasn't she? She was Lawrence Goldman's daughter. Robert understood: The Goldmans—father and daughter—were taking over. But even then it never occurred to him that Ariella might become the candidate or that her father might use all his influence and however much money it took to make his daughter the next governor and—who knows?—the next president.”
She stared down into her cup for a moment, smiling to herself.
“You don't believe that's possible, do you, Mr. Antonelli?”she asked, as she looked up. “With enough money, you can buy almost anything.”
She still had not told me anything that could prove that any of the powerful people who had had something to gain by the death of her husband had had anything to do with his murder. The eager willingness of Lawrence Goldman and his daughter to take advantage of a death was perhaps unseemly but no more damning and, from the point of view of the young man I was defending, no more helpful than the private relief both the governor and the president may have felt at the elimination of a formidable competitor.
“What happened that night?”I asked as I put down my cup. “You were with your husband at the dinner at the Fairmont and then, later, at a gathering at Lawrence Goldman's apartment, weren't you?”
She got up and went over to the stove. “Would you like another cup?”she asked as she turned on the burner.
I shook my head by way of reply. “Why weren't you with him later on—when he went to his car?”
Staring at the kettle, she tapped her fingernails against the hard metal surface of the stainless steel range. “After the dinner, I came back here.”She looked up. “I couldn't stand Lawrence Goldman,”she explained.
Turning back to the kettle, she began to tap her foot on the white tile floor. The water in the kettle was still warm and did not take long to boil.
“I didn't like Lawrence Goldman,”she said evenly, stirring two teaspoons of instant coffee into the cup of hot water. “Watching the way everyone fawned over him made my skin crawl. It's amazing how little self-respect some people have in the presence of someone with money.”
Holding the cup just below her mouth, she sat down and blew on the scalding black liquid until it was cool enough to drink.
“I heard about what happened there that night, with Lawrence Goldman's daughter,”I said as gently as I could.
She took another sip, then put down the cup and smiled.
“Yes. Strange that even now I feel compelled to lie about it. That was stupid of me. I apologize. Yes, it's true: Ariella Goldman was sleeping with my husband. Jeremy was always sleeping with someone. You must have heard that about him, Mr. Antonelli.”
I started to deny it, but she shook her head emphatically.
“No, Mr. Antonelli, don't. But you can't judge him too harshly.”She started to blink her eyes, trying to keep herself under control. “That's the way he was,”she said, almost defiantly. “Or the way he became.”Her chest heaved up and her hand shot to her eyes. “I'm sorry,”she mumbled as she got to her feet. Pulling the sleeve of her dress around her hand, she used it to wipe her eyes.
“I thought I couldn't cry anymore,”she said, trying to smile through the tears. “But, God, now that he is gone I wish they would just leave him alone.”
I stood up and touched her gently on the shoulder. “Is there anything I can do?”
If she heard me, she ignored me.
“I told him he had to stop it. I knew there had been other women. But I told him he had to stop with her,”she said, growing more agitated. “She was using him; and what was even worse—why it had to stop—Jeremy was using her. I don't mean what you think. He was using her—letting her think she was using him—so he could get to her father. Jeremy was obsessed. He wanted Lawrence Goldman, and the way to get to him was through his daughter; and he knew, you see, that she thought she could advance her own career—get what she wanted—by using him.”
“Did he tell you this?”I asked without thinking.
“I knew Jeremy,”she replied. “I knew what he was capable of doing. I didn't want him involved with those people, not like that, not that close. You have to keep people like that at a distance.”
She stopped long enough to take a deep breath.
“Do you know why that happened that night—why I made a fool of myself in front of Jeremy and all those other people?”
She stared hard at me, as if she herself could still not quite believe what she was about to tell me.
“Because she's pregnant and had started a rumor that Jeremy was the father!”
It did not seem to make any sense. Why would a woman, pregnant by a married man, confide that fact to anyone other than someone she could trust to take her secret to the grave?
Meredith Fullerton wrapped her arms around herself, like someone trying to hold all her emotions in check. She lowered her eyes and for a long time gazed down at the floor. A shiver seemed to pass through her, and then, abruptly, the trembling stopped. A strange smile full of hard-earned wisdom passed over her troubled mouth.
“We don't live in Nathaniel Hawthorne's America, Mr. Antonelli,”she said, lifting her head. “Women who commit adultery don't wear a scarlet letter. Ariella did not have to be pregnant if she didn't want to. She decided to have the baby because she thought if everyone knew she was carrying Jeremy's child, he would do—not the honorable thing; after all, he's a married man—but what most of these people would think was the smart thing to do. Don't you see, Mr. Antonelli: If you want to be president, a divorce is manageable; having a child out of wedlock is not quite so easy to handle. I don't know whether she intended to get pregnant, but she was perfectly willing to use it to get what she wanted once she was. She wanted Jeremy, Mr. Antonelli, because she wanted power; and now that Jeremy is gone, she finds out she can have the power on her own. But she's still pregnant, and enough people know it that she can't do anything about it. Ariella will have the baby, Mr. Antonelli—she doesn't have any choice—and they'll tell the world that Jeremy was the father and that if he hadn't been murdered he would have married the mother. By the time the Goldmans are through, everyone will think they were married all along and that with Jeremy's death Ariella became a pregnant widow.”
Sliding past me, Meredith Fullerton sat down at the table and watched the night descend on the bay.
“What a strange irony,”she said in a voice now heavy with fatigue. “ To think that it should end like this, with someone trying to take advantage of Jeremy's death by telling the world Jeremy is the father of her child.”
She watched out the window and for a while said nothing more. When she finally looked back at me, she smiled.
“Jeremy was not the father. Jeremy could not have children. Jeremy was sterile, Mr. Antonelli.”
She lifted the cup of what was now lukewarm coffee to her lips. When she had finished, she turned again toward the window and the lights that twinkled in the darkness along the shore, just beyond the Golden Gate.
“We were living over there. We'd been married just a little more than a year. That's when we found out. That's when everything started to happen. Jeremy couldn't have what he had wanted more than anything, and it drove him crazy. He had always been ambitious; now he became reckless. He couldn't have children; he couldn't reproduce himself; and so he came to think of himself as unique, someone who wasn't like other people, someone indestructible, someone who because he couldn't leave anyone behind had to do something so that he would never be forgotten. Do you understand me, Mr. Antonelli? Jeremy wanted it all, because otherwise he didn't think he'd have anything.