“It was Jeremy's secret, his and mine. In a way, it destroyed us both. I loved him more than my own life, and I knew he loved me, too. We couldn't have a child, and after that, nothing was ever the same—for either one of us. And now, after everything else, I may have to tell everyone what we never told anyone, just to stop the Goldmans from telling any more lies.”
“Your husband wouldn't have … ?”
“Told her he was sterile? No, she doesn't know. But of course in one respect it doesn't really matter, does it? Jeremy isn't the father, and that means someone else is.”
She stood up and, with the same gracious look with which she had first greeted me, thanked me for coming to see her. She walked me out to the front door but, before she opened it, tried to warn me.
“Be careful, Mr. Antonelli. Whoever killed Jeremy is capable of anything. I'm sure they're not the least bit happy that there is going to be a trial.”
As she opened the door, she glanced toward the elevator, then looked back at me.
“Have you considered the possibility that the police weren't shooting to stop that young boy, but to kill him? There would not have been a trial then, would there? Everyone would just have assumed that the boy must have done it.”
S
tarting early the next morning, and without stopping for lunch, I worked my way through police reports, forensic reports, the notes of the pathologist, and the voluminous series of press clippings that summarized Jeremy Fullerton's well-publicized political career. With a pencil in hand, I forced myself through the burdensome prose of the official reports, stopping at the end of each page to jot down a word, a phrase, something that would remind me of what I thought I might need to remember. I was forever making lists.
When I turned to the faded chronicle of Fullerton's career, I put down the pencil and cradled the bulky scrapbook in my lap. This was not the first time I had read through the collection of press clippings that formed the fragmentary biography of a life led in full view of the public. I read it now, however, with a different understanding of what Jeremy Fullerton had really been like, and I saw something I had not seen before when I examined all those confident photographs of the victorious candidate standing next to his adoring wife in a long succession of election nights in which nothing seemed to change except the clothes they were wearing and the faces of the friends and supporters gathered around them.
As I glanced through the pictures of the last election, I could almost feel the excitement, almost hear the frenzied sensuous shouting of the crowd. And there was Jeremy Fullerton, unbeaten and, it appeared, unbeatable, smiling back at them with a grace and charm that made ambition seem a duty, knowing all the time that while he might one day become the most powerful man in the world, he would never have a child of his own.
Closing the scrapbook, I wondered whether Meredith Fullerton had been right that her husband would never have told anyone about his sterility. I scribbled a note to myself asking what Fullerton would have done had he lived and been told directly by Ariella Goldman that she was pregnant and that he was the father of her child. Another thought came to me, and underneath I scrawled:
Then who is the father?
I went back to the beginning and started again. The district attorney, after all his posturing with the judge, had done what he was supposed to do and given me everything I had asked for about the police. It was not what I had hoped. I had been counting on finding something in the past history of the two officers that would point to at least the possibility of official misconduct; something that would allow the inference that the gun that had been used to kill Jeremy Fullerton, the gun that had been found inches from Jamaal Washington's outstretched hand, had been put there by the police. Marcus Joyner, however, had been on the police force for twenty-three years and had never been involved in a disciplinary proceeding. His partner, Gretchen O'Leary, had not been a police officer long enough to get in any kind of trouble. She had graduated from the academy less than six months before the incident. The night it happened was only her third night on patrol with Joyner.
Late in the afternoon, just as I was ready to throw up my hands in despair, my cousin stuck his head inside the door to my temporary office and asked if I wanted to go out for a drink.
We went around the corner to a place where everyone seemed to know Bobby by name, and sat at a tall table next to the wall across from the bar. The waiter, a gaunt-faced man in his sixties, bent close enough to hear our order under the constant din that rose up from the narrow, high-ceilinged room. We were in the heart of the financial district at the end of the day and all around us were middle-aged men in expensive suits and understated ties, exchanging the latest news and the newest rumors, some of them there for only one drink before they headed home, others there to drink their way into the evening and perhaps far beyond.
“If this cop—Joyner—has such an unblemished record,”Bobby asked, “what's he doing in a patrol car after twenty-three years? Why isn't he a detective or something?”
I didn't know about Marcus Joyner, but I knew something about the police.
“Some cops won't play the kind of games you have to play to get ahead,”I explained. “And some of them really like being on the street. Besides that, Joyner is black, and maybe, twenty-three years ago when he first started out, it wasn't that easy to move up.”
The waiter brought our drinks. Before I could reach for my wallet, Bobby laid a twenty on the table.
“So what you have,”he said with a grin as he sipped on a Manhattan, “is an honest cop who likes his work and a young virgin barely out of the convent.”
I waited while the scotch I was drinking burned its way down the back of my throat.
“No,”I replied, returning his grin with one of my own. “They have the honest cop and the virgin. I've got the black kid with the murder weapon found right next to his hand after he got shot by the police for fleeing the scene of the crime; the black kid, by the way, as I just read in a report, who turns out to have a juvenile record for assault.”
Bobby turned down the corners of his mouth and lifted his eyebrows, teasing me, and at the same time daring me; the way he used to do when we were kids and he could get me to try just about anything once I thought it was something he had already done.
“The D.A. doesn't have a chance, does he?”
“Wouldn't think so,”I agreed. I took another drink and let out a long, slow sigh. “The kid didn't do it. I'm sure of it.”
Bobby did not shrink from the consequences. “Then the cops must have planted the gun.”
There had to be another explanation, one that did not require proof of misconduct on the part of the police. I had been struggling with it all day long, and I thought I had the answer.
“It could have happened just the way the police said it did. He could have had the gun in his hand. The kid was scared, and don't forget, he was shot. Just because he says he didn't touch the gun doesn't mean he didn't.”
In my mind I was watching it happen as I tried to describe what I saw.
“He hears someone coming. He knows someone is out there. It could be whoever killed Fullerton. He could have picked up the gun without thinking about it when he bolted out of the car, running for his life. He's running away; he has the gun; the cops think he did it; they see him, and they see the gun. He stops, or he hesitates, or he looks over his shoulder— and he still has that gun in his hand. They think he's going to shoot; they think he's going to shoot them; they fire first.”
Everything I had read in the police reports, everything Jamaal Washington had told me, was starting to come together.
“He said he didn't hear any warning before they shot him, but maybe he just doesn't remember.”
Bobby was looking at me, waiting for what I was going to tell him next, but that was all I had to tell, and I knew it was not nearly enough. I started to laugh.
“It's not very convincing, is it? Even if that is what happened, they still have him there: in the car, with the gun, running away.”
I told Bobby what Mrs. Fullerton had said about how certain she was that someone else was responsible for her husband's death. I almost told him what she had said about Ariella Goldman's pregnancy and why Jeremy Fullerton could not possibly have been the father. Bobby was my cousin and I trusted him completely, but it was not my secret to share.
Bobby finished off his drink. “Though none of them would ever admit it, there are a lot of people glad he's dead.”Pushing the empty glass to the side, he leaned forward. “I know somebody who can tell you a lot about him, somebody who knew him most of his political life. You want to meet him? Leonard Levine. I went to college with him; now he's a congressman and one of the most powerful members of the House Ways and Means Committee. When I first knew him he was just a skinny kid with a bad complexion still wearing braces on his teeth.”
Bobby laughed and we got up from the table and he put his arm around my shoulder and laughed some more. We made our way through the tangled crowd around the bar and out the door.
“Let me tell you about Lenny,”he said. “When I was playing football at Cal, everyone wanted to be my friend. Every fraternity wanted me to pledge. Lenny lived in a dorm. And while I and all my so-called good friends were going to parties and having what we thought was such a great time,”he went on with a rueful grin, “Lenny was over at the library, studying his ass off. And while I was telling myself how hard I worked at football practice, going to college on an athletic scholarship, Lenny was putting himself through school. That's how I knew him: He was one of the guys who helped do the laundry for the football team and then handed out clean stuff to us each day before practice. You think any of us said a decent word to him? We thought we were the center of the universe. We thought life ended—that you just sort of retired and basked in all the glory—the day after the last game you played in college. You tell me who was smarter,”he said, shaking his head as we trudged up the street, “us or the kid who was handing out the jock straps?”
Bobby tossed his head in that carefree way of his as we walked along, moving quickly and easily among the other pedestrians as I struggled to keep up. “Of course, Lenny doesn't seem to remember it quite that way. He talks like we were all great friends back then,”said Bobby, looking at me over his shoulder as he moved on ahead. “He calls me at least three times a year just to tell me about all the great memories he has of when we were at Cal together. Then he asks me for money.”Bobby shook his head and laughed again. “He's always running for reelection. He never stops.”
The next morning, Bobby made the call he promised he would make, and the congressman agreed to meet us for dinner the following Saturday night. He wanted to meet in Chinatown.
A lot about San Francisco had changed, but once you passed through the red and green Oriental gate on Grant Street, everything you remembered was just the way it had been. Along the narrow, crowded streets of Chinatown, you still heard the discordant sounds of different languages jarring against each other in the cool night air. Waiters and shopkeepers still spoke a soft, gentle English with their customers and then talked to each other in a torrent of high-pitched unintelligible noise. Huddled together on the street corner, a gaggle of old women glanced at Bobby and me with suspicious eyes and then lowered their voices as they babbled along in a tongue of which I knew not even a single word.
When we arrived at the restaurant, Leonard Levine was shaking hands with a short, smooth-faced Chinese man with slick black hair. His other hand rested casually on his shoulder.
“Bobby,”the congressman said as soon as he saw us, “let me introduce you to an old friend of mine, Herbert Wong.”
With a polite smile, Wong shook hands first with Bobby and then, as Bobby made the introduction, with me.
“Any friend of the congressman is always welcome here,”he said.
Before we could say anything by way of a reply, he shouted over his shoulder something in Chinese. Out of nowhere, a white-coated waiter appeared and waited obediently.
“Enjoy your dinner,”said Wong, watching as the waiter, with a courteous bow, led his three guests into the dining room.
We sat on a deep red leather bench seat at a table in the back corner that gave us both the privacy to talk and an unobstructed view of the already crowded restaurant.
“Herbert owns the place,”explained Levine. He carefully unfolded the linen napkin next to the empty plate in front of him and spread it over his lap. “Herbert owns a lot of places.”
Levine placed his elbows on the tablecloth and laced his fingers together. Through half-lowered eyelids, he searched the room with the systematic gaze of an inveterate observer. The corners of his large, brooding mouth pulled back while the nostrils of his aquiline nose flared briefly.
“I like this place,”said Levine, his eyes still moving methodically around the room. “Most of the people who come here, live here—in Chinatown. This is part of my district.”For the first time, he turned to Bobby. “Did you know that?”
Leonard Levine was dressed in a light tweed sports jacket, tan slacks, a white shirt with French cuffs, and a pair of tasseled loafers. Long gray hair fell over his ears and curled up along the back of his neck. His face was weathered and his forehead deeply lined. The skin on the back of his hands was slightly mottled and heavily veined. If I had not known that he and Bobby had been in college together, I would have guessed him to be at least ten years older.
“How could I not know that?”I heard Bobby say as I felt the hard leather give against my weight. “I've paid for half your elections.”
Levine was used to the give and take. He started to answer but instead suddenly got to his feet and stretched his hand across the table. An attractive middle-aged woman with intelligent eyes had come up to the table and I had not even noticed.
“I just wanted to thank you in person, Congressman Levine,”said the woman, smiling. “We'll never forget what you did for us—all of us.”