“She's about as pleasant as the Honorable James L. Thompson,”I said with a laugh. I sank against the back of the booth and with a grim smile shook my head. “What a piece of work he is.”
Bobby never went to court, not to try a case of his own. He was intrigued, and he wanted to know what had happened while, with everyone else who had come to watch, he had been forced to sit, waiting, while something presumably important was being discussed in the rarefied language of legal scholars debating a fine point of law.
“In chambers?”I asked, laughing at the way we all imagine that the things we did not hear were always so much more interesting than the things we did. “Nothing much. Thompson told me I was crazy and told Haliburton he was a fool. You can't really blame him for thinking that about me. That question I asked about Kennedy …”
“Couldn't you feel the effect it had?”asked Bobby eagerly. He bent toward me. “Everyone just sort of tensed, all their attention on you, waiting to see what would happen next.”
“I almost didn't do it,”I confessed. “I planned to do it; I thought I had to do it; but it was like one of those things that seems like such a great idea at two o'clock in the morning, when you're all alone. You wake up the next morning, all the dull prosaic facts of everyday life staring you right in the face, and it doesn't sound anything like as good as it did late at night, when you imagined things were so much different than what they really are.”
“And without those late-night thoughts, the day wouldn't be worth much, would it?”asked Bobby with the knowing glance of someone who had spent some late nights of his own. “It worked,”he insisted. “It made everyone wonder how likely it could be that someone like Fullerton could have been killed in—the phrase you kept using—'a random act of violence.' ”
The dour-faced waitress brought an iced tea for Bobby and a cup of coffee for me and dropped the check on the table.
“And the next thing everyone is going to start wondering is why I don't have any evidence to prove that it wasn't,”I replied, brooding as I sipped on the coffee.
“Do you know how I first thought about asking that question? When you reminded me of one of the things you taught me when we were kids, something you said you learned from our grandfather: That you never start a fight; but when someone starts one with you, especially when they're bigger than you are, you have to throw the first punch; because, if you don't, you may never get the chance to throw one at all. I had to ask that question, because it was my only chance to get that thought in front of the jury—my only chance to let them know that what happened to Fullerton was not just any murder. But there was another reason, and it had nothing to do with the case—or maybe it had everything to do with it. If Bogdonovitch was right—if he was killed because of what he knew about Fullerton, and if they think they have to kill me for the same reason—then I thought that maybe they'd have second thoughts about doing something that would make people wonder if I wasn't right after all: that it was an assassination and that there was a conspiracy to cover it up. So you could say I asked the question more out of cowardice, more because of how scared I was about what might happen to me, than because of what I thought might help the defense.”
Raising his chin, Bobby gave me a skeptical look. “And is that the reason you subpoenaed the governor—cowardice?”
“No, stupidity. I did not know what else to do. I could not subpoena the president, and I had to do something. I have to have a witness I can use to show the jury just how much a threat Fullerton really was. The truth is, I don't have a case. I don't have any evidence about anything, except motive. Everyone from the president down seemed to have a motive to want Fullerton out of the way. With Fullerton dead, the president won't have a fight for the nomination and the governor isn't facing sure defeat in November.”
“And Ariella Goldman has a chance to become governor,”added Bobby.
“That would not explain Bogdonovitch's death,”I rejoined.
“But you don't know for sure why he was killed. All you know is what he told you, and you did not believe him—remember? What if you were right—what if he made the whole thing up? What if he invented that story about Jeremy Fullerton and the money? And even if that part was true, how do you know anyone else ever found out about it? Andrei Bogdonovitch could have been killed by anyone—not just some White House assassin. Think of all the people he must have harmed during all the years he was with the KGB. Don't you think some of them might have wanted revenge? And if a government was involved, why not the Russian government? Perhaps they did not want one of their former spies telling what some of the new Russian democrats were doing when they were all still communists.”
I paid the check. We left the restaurant and started walking to where he had left his car.
“You haven't forgotten about tomorrow, have you?”asked Bobby when we reached the entrance to the parking garage.
I had not forgotten but found myself wishing that I were going to be doing something else than spending the afternoon on Albert Craven's boat circling the bay.
“By the way,”he said as he handed his ticket to the parking attendant, “who was that striking-looking woman talking to Jamaal Washington?”
“You don't know her? She's Jamaal's mother—Albert Craven's friend, the one he has known for years.”
Bobby just shrugged his shoulders.
“Albert has a lot of old friends. But that woman? No, I've never seen her before in my life.”
A
lbert Craven was waiting on the dock when Marissa and I arrived. I could not help but smile and hoped I would not laugh. Every time I had seen him before he had been wearing a dark suit, a silk shirt, an obviously expensive but understated tie, and soft, gleaming Italian shoes. Dressed like that, he had the look of a self-made man of wealth and influence, a man who could afford anything he wanted and had the taste to know what he did not need. I had not realized how much of the way I thought of him had depended on what he wore.
He was dressed in a dark blue polo shirt, which, though it was not yet quite noon, clung to him like a second sweat-soaked skin, and a pair of white shorts that exposed two knobby knees and two pale white spindly legs. With his smallish head, sloping shoulders, and sagging waistline, Craven looked like an aging old man, tottering out for a weekend walk.
Bobby was already there, standing behind the wheel, talking to Laura, a young woman he had been seeing for a while. She had short brown hair and a dark tan that made her eyes seem dark as well. She moved quietly and, when we were introduced, smiled and did not say anything at all. I knew I was going to like her when I watched her talk to Marissa and saw the way her eyes kept coming back to Bobby.
Craven collapsed in a canvas deck chair, mopping his brow, as Bobby took us out of the marina and, gradually increasing speed, out into the bay.
“You really put a subpoena on the governor?”asked Craven, blinking his eyes against the salt spray. “I heard it on the news yesterday, but I still couldn't quite believe it.”Suddenly he brightened. “How do you like my boat?”he asked eagerly. “I used to want to have a sailboat—sail 'round the world, that sort of thing—but I couldn't. I get seasick. Wouldn't you know it? Anyway, I got this instead. I go out on the bay once in a while— when it's nice and calm the way it is today. Other times I just sit in it at the marina and feel the water rolling under it. It's a nice feeling, really quite soothing.”
Craven's eyes grew distant. He tilted his head back to feel the wind against his face.
“I was extremely sad to hear what happened to Andrei Bog-donovitch. Poor man. I liked him, you know,”said Craven firmly as he bent forward in his chair and looked directly at me. “The police don't seem to have any idea who killed him or why. I suppose he must have had a lot of enemies.”
Bobby was at the wheel, just out of earshot. Marissa and Bobby's friend, Laura, had gone below. There was something I had to know and this might be my only chance to ask.
“Who is Mary Washington?”
Craven tried to give me a blank look, as if he did not understand what I meant.
“You told me she was an old friend, a good friend,”I said, bending close. “Someone you wanted to help.”
“She is,”he said. He hesitated, waiting to see if that would be enough or if I was going to insist on being told something more.
“Then why hasn't she come to see me? Why wouldn't she even return a phone call? She came to court yesterday. It was the first time I had ever laid eyes on her, but even then she couldn't talk to me. I'm trying to defend her son, for God's sake, and she can't be bothered to see me?”
“Don't be too hard on her,”he replied. “She's a little different than most people.”
He started to say something more, but Marissa came up from the galley. Holding on to a metal handle with one hand, she clutched her tan floppy hat with the other.
“Can you go any faster?”she shouted gleefully, daring Bobby to show her what the boat could do.
The stern fell lower in the water as Bobby gave it more power. A long wake, like a double furrow turned up by a plow, blew out behind us. Opening the throttle all the way, Bobby put the boat into a quarter turn and then pulled back, forcing a long rolling motion that Marissa seemed to love. Albert Craven closed his eyes and groaned.
As he slowed down, Bobby, with Laura standing next to him, looked back over his shoulder and pointed toward the shore at a long promenade of stucco homes. Painted pink, yellow, blue, green, and white, they were built tight together, wall to wall, curving along the street that edged along the bay.
“Can you recognize your house from here?”shouted Bobby to Craven.
“Of course,”replied Craven without bothering to look.
“Everything looks different when you're out here,”added Bobby.
Reducing speed, we moved closer to shore and crawled past the abandoned piers of Fort Mason, watching the Saturday crowds swarm between the shops and settle into the lines starting to form outside the restaurants.
“You really did that?”asked Craven as he tapped me on the shoulder. “Subpoenaed the governor?”
“I called his office for a week. No one returned my calls. It's an old rule, Albert: If they won't talk to you in private, they can talk to you in court.”
Snapping open a hard leather case, Craven removed a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses and slid them carefully onto the tender bridge of his reddened nose.
“It's a little different with the governor, don't you think?”
Bobby had taken us away from the shoreline of the city. We were moving faster now, the wind rising all around us. I had to shout my reply.
“You'd think so.”
Craven leaned closer and turned his ear toward me. “I beg your pardon?”
“You'd think so,”I yelled.
He did not try to say anything more; he just nodded to indicate that he had heard and settled back into the deck chair.
A dull, thudding sound reverberated through the hull as the boat crashed across the crest of one wave and then the next. We passed under the Bay Bridge, and through the steel grillwork high above I could see tiny cars moving along like the playthings of a child, and I remembered what Bobby had told me about what our grandfather had told him. I felt a strange, wistful smile cross over my mouth.
“Long way to fall,”I said out loud, though no one, not even Albert Craven, who was sitting right next to me, could hear.
We passed under the bridge, circled around Yerba Buena Island, and then, on the eastern side, passed back under it again and ran parallel to the tan flat-roofed buildings along the lowlying shore of Treasure Island. Out beyond the island we hit rough water. The bow rose high in the air and then came smashing down, over and over again, wave after wave washing over us, drenching us in cold salt water. Mesmerized by the cruel monotonous rhythm of the sea, I gazed at the milky green color of the bay, wondering what it must have been like when there was nothing else here, nothing but the wind and the water and the open sky and the lonely vacant hills.
Bobby turned north, away from the Golden Gate, and headed toward Angel Island, less than half a mile at its closest point from the Sausalito shore. The island broke the current that flowed from the Pacific and the boat slipped through the water on an even keel. Marissa stood up and shook her head, laughing at the way the water sprayed all around her. She disappeared into the galley and then, a moment later, rubbing her face with a thick fluffy towel, came back up just long enough to throw me one I could use myself. A few moments later, she was back again, the towel draped around her neck, with a dark green bottle and some empty glasses.
“Ready for lunch?”she asked as she began to hand everyone a glass.
Bobby had slowed the engine and turned toward shore. Twenty yards from a cement pier, he dropped the engine into neutral and let it idle. The dwindling wake of a boat that was vanishing into the distance slapped gently against the hull. Ahead of us, even closer to the shore, a half dozen kayaks, their double-bladed oars flashing, raced furiously against each other. At the edge of the muddy shore, a young Hispanic woman was briskly handing sandwiches to three shirtless eager-eyed children.
Rising up behind them, looming so large that the eye could not take it in all at once, was one of the bleakest buildings I had ever seen. You could scarcely look at it without a shudder. It stood there, an enormous four-story complex, a kind of perverse tribute to the soulless efficiencies of nineteenth century industrial architecture, each blackened yellow brick speaking the same depressing story a million times over.
“I didn't know that was there,”remarked Marissa as she handed a glass to Craven and then handed two glasses to me. “Hold them for me, will you?”she asked as she went below.
I had put my feet up and slipped down until my head was leaning against the side of the seat. Taking off my dark glasses, I turned my face to the sun and listened to the laughter of the children playing onshore. The rough pounding rhythms of the crossing had taken away the tension that had built up inside me, and I was left alone with the things I could feel: the warm sun on my face as the fading wind rippled over my skin; the easy rolling motion of the boat; the sound of my own breath, drawn in from the clean salt air.