I paused and looked around the crowded restaurant, watching the way everyone seemed to be having such a good time.
“I also drank because I felt sorry for myself, and because, to tell you the truth, I did not much care if I lived or died. I suppose I was already dead and just didn't know it yet.”
Marissa touched the side of my face with her hand. For a long time she did not say anything.
“What made you finally stop?”she asked presently. “How did you find the strength?”
“I don't know. Maybe it was instinct, a sense of survival— maybe it was because I knew Jennifer would have blamed herself for what was happening to me. I had a friend who had been in AA for years. He knew about Jennifer and what had happened. He tried to get me to go, but I was not going to talk about any of this with anybody, certainly not with people I didn't know. He found me one time—after I really tied one on—stayed with me until I was sober, and made me promise that next time I felt like having a drink I'd call him instead. I called him a lot.”
“But you didn't quit. You put a limit on yourself, instead. I thought—”
“I wasn't going to call myself an alcoholic; I wasn't going to go around reciting the twelve steps like a child repeating the ten commandments; I didn't really believe that the only alternative to getting drunk was not to drink at all. Flynn—that's his name: Howard Flynn—was too smart to try to talk me into it. Instead he made me promise that I'd never have more than two.”
It was inexplicable, the effect Marissa produced with that look of hers. Staring into her eyes was like staring at my own conscience.
“He went with me one day to the hospital. He sat there with me while I told Jennifer what I had done, why I thought I had been doing it, and the promise I had made. Crazy, isn't it? She did not hear anything I said, but in another way I thought she knew; I thought she knew before I ever told her. Howard knew that I would try to keep any promise I made him; but he also knew I'd die before I broke a promise I made to her.”
That was all I was going to say, but then I added something I had not, at least consciously, thought before.
“Howard was wrong. I can imagine doing it again—trying to lose myself in a bottle—but so far, at least, I've kept my word.”
I was starting to feel the effects of everything that had happened, a kind of delayed reaction. The energy seemed to flow out of me. I felt tired, more tired than I had felt in a very long time.
“You need to get to bed,”said Marissa with sympathy, but also worry, in her voice. “But I don't think you should stay at the hotel anymore. Your first instinct was right: You should have gone to Bobby's.”
I started to object, but she stopped me with a look.
“You didn't want your cousin to think you were afraid?”she asked, gently mocking me with her eyes.
Outside the restaurant, Marissa took my arm and we started to walk up the block toward the hotel. We passed in front of the open door of a bar, and above the noisy laughter heard the wailing smoky sound of a saxophone. All the shops were still busy as shrewd-eyed merchants leaned over counters and pointed out various, never to be repeated, bargains. Weary, dull-eyed tourists and overweight women hanging on to their young children picked through piles of sweatshirts and T-shirts, bright-colored caps and cheap plastic mugs; pencils, pennants, and postcards; all of them bearing the name San Francisco or a picture of Coit Tower or the Golden Gate or one of the half dozen other things that had come to symbolize the city. We crossed the street to the hotel and at the corner Marissa stopped and tugged on my sleeve and told me again she did not think it was safe.
“I'm parked just up the street. Get what you need out of your room. I'll meet you in front of the hotel. I'm going to take you to Bobby's.”
Before I could object, she added, “I'll feel better if you do it.”
I threw a few things in my overnight bag and grabbed my briefcase. I was in the lobby before I remembered that in my hurry I had not thought to check for phone messages. I stopped at the desk and was told that Albert Craven had called. I thanked the clerk and turned away.
“You also had two visitors.”
I looked back. “Visitors?”
“Two gentlemen came by, about an hour ago. They said they were reporters.”
“Did they leave their names?”
The clerk shook his head. “They said they would try later.”
I stepped close. “Do you remember what they looked like?”
“In their forties, I think. I'm sorry, but we were fairly busy at the time.”
“Did you see them leave?”
“I assume they must have left,”he replied as he glanced over my shoulder to another guest who had a question.
Reporters called all the time, trying to get me to say something about the case, but none of them had ever just shown up at the hotel.
Marissa was waiting outside, the engine running.
“Are you all right?”she asked as she pulled away from the curb.
“Yes, I'm fine.”
“You don't think they were reporters?”asked Marissa when I told her what had happened.
“I don't know. But I don't think they were assassins, either. If they were coming after me, why would they let the hotel clerk get a good look at them?”
When we got onto the Bay Bridge, Marissa called Bobby on her cell phone.
“No answer,”she said with the phone still at her ear. “Maybe he's out.”Then she smiled. “Hello. This is Marissa. I'm bringing your cousin over. He needs a place to stay tonight. I offered,”she said with a quiet laugh, her eyes straight ahead, “but I think he's a little shy.”
With a mirthful, teasing look, Marissa handed me the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”
“It isn't true, Bobby. She didn't offer,”I said, looking at her while she pretended to concentrate on the road. “The truth is, I asked her, but she turned me down. Look, I hope you don't mind,”I said, becoming serious, “but there's been a little problem. I'll explain when I get there. Marissa doesn't think I should stay at the hotel, and she might be right.”
Bobby said he was glad I was coming and renewed the invitation to stay as long as I liked. “The longer, the better,”was the way he put it.
Marissa knew her way; though, as she explained, she had not been to Bobby's house since his wife died.
“I used to come out here once in a while to see her.”
“How did Bobby handle it when she died?”
I am not quite sure why I asked her that. Perhaps because I was not any longer quite so confident that my cousin had always done everything better than I could have done. It was, I suppose, inevitable that the more I got to know him, the more I would find that, like everyone else, he had made mistakes and done things of which he was not particularly proud. No one who lives beyond his boyhood years finds himself without something he regrets having done or having said, no one who still has a conscience.
Marissa did not reply until we left the freeway and drove past the golf course on our way into the Orinda hills. Then she said something about Bobby that surprised me.
“Bobby has never talked about it, at least with me. Frankly, I'd be surprised if he ever talked about it with anyone. He doesn't talk about personal things. He never has. He's always been kind of a lost soul.”
Marissa steered the car through one twisting turn after another, but the driving had become automatic, instinctive. Her eyes were on the road, but she was seeing something else.
“Things didn't turn out for Bobby the way he thought they would. Or maybe he didn't think about how things were going to turn out until it was too late and there was nothing he could do about them. There are people like that, you know,”said Marissa, glancing at me for just a second to see if I understood. “They just go along with things, day by day—accept whatever comes along. It doesn't mean they don't become successful people, at least in terms of what the world thinks is success; but it doesn't mean that much to them. My father was like that. Maybe that's the reason I always liked Bobby so much: They were a lot alike. I think they both knew before they got out of college that nothing in their lives would ever be that good again. My father played football at Yale in the years right after the war. He was the captain of the team that won the Ivy League championship his senior year. He had a very successful career on Wall Street. He made what most people would consider a fortune, but I think he spent his whole life looking back, wishing he could do it all over again. I think Bobby is like that. He's cheerful, charming, but underneath it all he doesn't care very much about anything, except getting through it—getting through his life—the best way he can.”
Bobby had turned on the outside lights. When he heard the car in the driveway, he opened the front door.
“Why don't you come in?”Bobby asked Marissa as he took the bag from my hand.
“I should go,”she replied, looking at me.
Bobby said good night to her and turned toward the door.
I started to follow him, then changed my mind. Marissa was just looking over her shoulder, ready to back out of the drive. Laughing, I rapped on the window. She rolled it down and looked up at me, waiting. I bent down and kissed her gently on the mouth.
“Thanks—for everything,”I whispered.
I let her go and stepped back. She tossed her head and laughed.
“Tell Bobby,”she said as the laughter faded into the night, “that I'm becoming rather fond of his cousin.”
I started to say something, but the words came out in an awkward stammer that made her laugh again.
“Better go,”she said, rather pleased that she had managed to turn me into a tongue-tied fool.
Bobby began to tease me as soon as he shut the door. “I think she's after you.”
I insisted we were just good friends; he insisted I was lying through my teeth.
“I could hear it in her voice. She may not have asked you to stay at her place, but if you had suggested it, she wouldn't have said no. Trust me,”said Bobby with a confident look. “I know her.”
“What does that mean?”I asked, a little annoyed at what I thought he might be suggesting.
“Not what you're thinking,”he said as he took the bag out of my hand and led me down the hallway toward the guest room. He put the bag down on the bed and pointed toward the door to the bathroom so I would know where it was.
“Come on,”he said, “let's get a beer.”
We sat at the kitchen table, drinking out of two bottles. The tan cotton robe Bobby was wearing fell open over his leg, exposing the jagged scar that ran three-quarters of the way around his kneecap. It was the injury that had ended his football career and, if Marissa was right, marked the moment when he began to think of his life as something that was for the most part already behind him.
“Marissa has been with a lot of men, but not that way,”explained Bobby as he put down the bottle. “She's never been with anyone very long. All I can tell you is I've never seen her look at anyone the way I saw her looking at you, just now when you were getting out of the car.
“She'd be good for you,”he remarked as he lifted the bottle back to his mouth. “You should have somebody in your life,”he added after he had taken a drink.
He looked at me for a moment to let me know he meant it; then he asked me what had happened and why Marissa did not seem to think it was safe for me in the city. I told him everything: how I first met Andrei Bogdonovitch; how he had twice approached me on the street; what he had said to me about Fullerton and the danger the two of us were supposedly in; how I had not believed a word of what he said until the explosion seemed to prove it. We talked for hours, or rather I talked and Bobby listened, late into the night, until I could not talk anymore.
T
he next day, and the day after that, I went on with voir dire the way I always had, asking one question after another, trying to convince each juror in turn that I was someone he or she could trust. They were the same questions I had asked before, questions about how the jurors lived and what they believed, and always whether they would insist on proof beyond a reasonable doubt before they thought about voting to convict; the only difference was that under the baleful eye of Judge Thompson I asked them more quickly and tried not to cover the same ground twice.
When court convened Friday morning, the day by which we had been ordered to finish jury selection, we were right on schedule. An hour after we began, both sides, the prosecution and the defense, exercised the last peremptory challenges we each had left. Unless there was a challenge for cause, that is to say unless there was a clear case of bias, the next person called to the box would be the twelfth and last juror needed. There was only one question I wanted to ask, and as I very well knew, it was perhaps the strangest question any juror had ever been asked.
“Tell me, Mr. DeWitt, who do you think killed John F. Kennedy?”
The district attorney shot out of his chair. “Objection!”he cried. “This is an outrage! That question has no relevance to anything: not the qualifications of the juror, not the charge in the case, not to anything conceivably connected to the case!”
If Clarence Haliburton had been someone he liked, or even someone he could tolerate, Thompson would have told me to move on to something else and that would have been the end of it. But he hated Haliburton, hated him so much he could not bear to do anything that might help him until he was convinced he had no other choice.
“It is a rather unusual question, Mr. Antonelli,”observed Thompson with a perplexed frown.
“Really?”I replied as if I had not thought there was anything unusual about it at all. “Well, perhaps it was. Let me try to rephrase it.”
I smiled at the juror. He was in his mid-thirties with greasy black hair plastered to his scalp. An enormous belly protruded from under a tight-fitting faded red short-sleeved shirt.
“Let me ask the question this way: Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or do you think he was part of a conspiracy?”
Haliburton threw up his hands. “Your honor! This is … well, I don't know what this is!”
It was plain from the look on Thompson's face that he did not know what it was, either. But he still was not ready to tell me to stop.