That was the problem. I had not been concentrating enough on what I was doing. Whether it was the distractions—Bobby, Marissa—that normally did not exist; or—though I did not want to admit it—the threat of death or something worse if I persisted in doing everything I could to win, there was something I was still missing, a piece of the puzzle I still had not found. I knew it was there, right in front of my eyes, and I still did not see it.
At the end of the game, as we filed out of the stadium, Bobby nodded toward an area under the stands where a crowd had started to form. It was the home team locker room.
“They used to stand around and wait for me like that,”he said, a glint of nostalgia in his eyes. “We stood around inside, celebrating when we won, talking to reporters about the way we had done it. We didn't have any doubts about anything: who we were, what we were. You'd peel off your uniform, take off your cleats, get out of your pads—throw it all on the floor near your locker and, tearing the tape off your ankles, walk naked into the showers. You'd stay there for a long time, the water pounding off your back, laughing about the game, bragging a little about what you'd done. Then you'd get dressed in a clean shirt and a nice pressed pair of pants and your best brown loafers and go outside into the crowd, where your girlfriend—the prettiest girl in school—was waiting, and everything was just the way it was supposed to be, and it never once entered your head that things were ever going to be any different. You were young, and you were going to be young forever, and everything would always take care of itself. We'd walk away from the stadium, shiny with our own earned wisdom, covered already with the nostalgia of our own autumn glory. And so we'd go on to one party and another, a slowly dying chorus of approval, and never give a thought to who was still back in that dingy, dirty locker room, picking up our things, cleaning up after us.”
We were out of the stadium, moving with the scattering crowd down the middle of a university street. Bobby turned his head just far enough to catch my eye.
“I meant what I told Lenny: He had the better deal. I hope he believed me.”
For a few minutes we walked in silence in the yellow and orange bittersweet light of the late afternoon, lost in our own thoughts of vanished youth and things we wished we could change and knew we never could.
“Albert has started a fund to endow a chair in Lenny's name at the law school. I think that's a good thing, don't you?”
A
ugustus Marshall had begun to testify before I reached the doors to the courtroom. Surrounded by reporters, the governor was standing at the far end of the corridor, his tanned face flushed with color under the hot glare of the television lights. If the questions I heard were any indication, the media was treating his appearance more like a campaign stop than as part of a trial. They asked about the latest polls showing that he and Ariella Goldman were running head and head. Relaxed and confident, he insisted he was not worried; and, though anyone who had thought about it might have wondered at the apparent inconsistency, he claimed he had known all along that it was going to be a close race.
Pushing herself forward, a young woman with a handheld microphone demanded to know how much of his challenger's recent rise in the polls was due to the revelations, made during her testimony as a witness for the prosecution, that she was pregnant with Jeremy Fullerton's child. Marshall became distant and reserved.
“I've been asked that question before, and I'm going to give you the same answer,”said the governor firmly. “I'm not interested in, nor am I going to comment on, the private lives of other people. I will only say this: I think it's very unfortunate that some lawyers seem to think that the only way they can defend their clients is by trying to attack the integrity and the credibility of people who quite obviously had nothing whatever to do with the crime in question.”
I knew little about politics, but I knew right away that Marshall was as shrewd as they come. He had been hurt by what Ariella Goldman had done—upstaged while she became the object of public sympathy—but he had immediately understood that the worst thing he could do was to raise questions about the morality of what she had done. There were others who would eventually do that. He could not attack her with advantage, so he made her in a curious way indebted to him for his support. He would not condone her adulterous affair, but he would defend her from the cheap tricks and intrusive questions of some unprincipled lawyer willing to do anything to win.
“Why were you subpoenaed to be a witness for the defense?”shouted another reporter.
The countenance of Augustus Marshall, one minute so solemn and austere, became suddenly cheerful and almost jovial. The left side of his mouth pulled back as a wry grin formed on his lips. His eyes moved in the direction from which the question had come.
“You'd have to ask the defense attorney …”said the governor, hesitating as if trying to remember the name.
“Antonelli,”someone yelled out.
“Yes,”said Marshall, and then lapsed into a silence that let everyone know he did not think the name worth repeating or the man to whom it referred worth remembering.
“Perhaps the defense attorney,”he went on, “could tell you.
I'm afraid I have no idea at all. I don't know anything about what happened the night Senator Fullerton was murdered.”
The expression on the governor's face once more turned grave. “All I know is that this was a great tragedy. Jeremy Fullerton and I were of course political rivals; but we were also good friends. There are few people in public life that have contributed more and have had more to offer. His death is a very great loss for us all,”he said with a sincerity so well practiced he had perhaps come to believe it himself.
In the presence of the governor, Judge Thompson lost his nerve. Normally a strict disciplinarian, ready to enforce with removal any breach of conduct by the crowd, the judge now without protest permitted reporters to pack close to the bar, kneeling behind it like parishioners waiting to take communion.
Impeccably dressed and meticulously groomed, Augustus Marshall, sixty years old and as trim and fit as the best-conditioned man fifteen years his junior, sat on the witness stand surveying, and probably counting, the faces turned toward him. There was something highly efficient and well measured about him; a certain precision that was reflected in the way he looked and the way he moved. Thinning black hair, graying at the temples, swept back from a high-domed forehead; jet-black eyes, alert, active, intense, peered out from behind an expensive pair of steel-rimmed glasses. He had on a double-breasted dark blue suit and a crisp white shirt with French cuffs. A gold pin pulled both sides of his collar tightly together under the double knot of a muted paisley tie. His black shoes were freshly polished, but there was a single, barely detectable scuff mark on the front of the left one. I wondered if earlier that morning he had for some reason tried in anger to kick open a door.
Standing at the side of the counsel table closest to the jury box, I glanced at a single piece of paper as if I were engaged in a last-minute review of a typewritten list of questions I intended to ask. When I looked up, ready to begin, Marshall wore the expression of someone who knew he had the advantage. He was used to people afraid of making a mistake in the limited time he was willing to give them.
“How long have you been governor?”
As soon as Marshall had been sworn, he had taken a moment to smile at each juror. Before I had finished asking the question, he was looking at them again, bending forward at the waist, his elbows on the arms of the witness chair, trying to get as close to them as he possibly could.
“I'm in the last year of my first term,”said Marshall with a modest grin. “Four years this coming January.”
“And before that you were the state attorney general?”
He could not keep his eyes off them. I was standing right in front of him and I don't think he saw me at all, not once he had started to concentrate all his energy on making those twelve jurors—those twelve voters—believe whatever he was going to tell them.
“Yes, I was privileged to hold that office as well.”
“When you ran for governor four years ago, you were elected by a fairly substantial margin—is that correct?”
He left the jury and turned toward me, but only to look past me to the hundreds of people jammed into the courtroom.
“Yes,”replied the governor in the subdued, respectful tone of a grateful servant. “It was a very gratifying victory,”he added with a narrow smile that managed to be both humble and benevolent.
“Though it was not quite as large as the margin of victory in your second election as attorney general, was it?”I asked rather sharply. “As a matter of fact, it was a full nine points less, wasn't it?”
He stared at me, bristling. Then he remembered where he was and how many others were watching, and how many of those would later report everything he said to the public at large. He became once more earnest and amiable. Cocking his head to the side, he flashed a bashful grin.
“Every election is different.”
I took a step toward the jury box, raised my head, and gave him a searching look. He smiled.
“It would be hard to find an election more different than that first election—the election for your party's nomination— the first time you ran for attorney general, wouldn't it?”
The district attorney had risen from his chair. He stood there, his head bowed and his hands folded together in front of him, like a respectful petitioner politely waiting his turn, until I finished.
“Your honor,”said Haliburton, “I don't see that this line of questioning has any relevance to the issue before us, and—”
I waved my hand as if none of this mattered in the slightest to me.
“If the governor would prefer not to answer my questions, if there's something he would rather not talk about—”
“No,”said Marshall, exchanging a glance with the district attorney. “I'll be glad to answer anything you care to ask.”
Thompson looked at Haliburton to see what he wanted to do, but the district attorney, with ambitions of his own, was not about to contradict someone who could either help or hurt him later on.
“No objection,”said Haliburton, almost apologizing for the interruption.
Marshall knew what I had asked but, because he did not want to give it any more importance than he had to, pretended he did not.
“Let me repeat the question.”Then, engaging in a pretense of my own, I changed my mind. “No, let me ask you something entirely different. Next to being governor, isn't attorney general the most important office in the state?”
“I wouldn't disagree with that.”
“And so you held the second most powerful office before you became a candidate for the most important office, correct?”
“Yes, that's a fair way of putting it.”
He was watching me carefully now, a little puzzled by where I might be going with these seemingly innocuous questions.
“And what office did you hold before you ran for the second most important office?”
He turned toward the jury again. “I had never held office before. I had not been involved in politics at all. I only became involved because a number of people convinced me that politics was too important to be left in the hands of the politicians.”
“There was one person in particular who convinced you to become a candidate for the Republican nomination, wasn't there?”
He gave me a blank look and did not answer.
“Surely you haven't forgotten Hiram Green, who once held the same position you do now.”
He was just about to say that of course he had not forgotten. I did not give him the chance.
“That first campaign of yours—you were running against an incumbent, weren't you? Wasn't Arthur Sieman the attorney general then, and wasn't Arthur Sieman a Republican?”
“Yes, that's correct: He was.”
“And wasn't Arthur Sieman by all accounts the single most popular public official in the state—more popular than the governor at the time or either of the two United States senators?”
“Yes, he was popular, but—”
“So the reason that former Governor Green wanted you to run wasn't because he thought you would be a stronger candidate against the Democrats?”
Nothing is a greater threat to the belief that others have of your strength than to be reminded of your former weakness. Marshall tried to bluff his way through it with the kind of ambiguous response that no doubt worked when he was questioned by reporters and had not sworn under oath to tell the truth. He insisted that it had happened years ago—more than a dozen years ago, to be precise—and that he could not speak about what, if any, political calculations might have been made by any of the people who had decided to support him. In politics, he explained with a certain regret, the last election is ancient history after six months; and the next election, even if it is still four years off, is just around the corner. I almost laughed.
“The real reason Hiram Green asked you to run is because Arthur Sieman had betrayed him and he wanted to embarrass him. He did not think you had any chance to win, did he?”I asked, taking a step toward him. “In fact, he told you to your face you wouldn't win. He told you if you got twenty or twenty-five percent of the vote, you'd have done everything he and his conservative friends wanted. He wanted to embarrass Sieman. That was the reason he wanted you to run; that was the reason he raised millions of dollars for your campaign—wasn't it, Governor Marshall?”
Haliburton was on his feet. Without taking his eyes off me, Marshall motioned for him to sit down.
“In politics, as in life altogether, there are as many motives as there are people to have them.”
“But the motive that drove Hiram Green was the desire for revenge, wasn't it?”
He just looked at me and waited.
“Arthur Sieman betrayed Hiram Green—or so at least Hiram Green believed—correct?”I asked rapidly.
“I suppose that's true,”Marshall reluctantly agreed.
“No, you don't suppose that's true. This isn't some rally on the steps of the capitol; this isn't some press conference in the hallway of the courthouse. This is a court of law, and this is a murder trial, and you're a witness sworn to tell the truth. Now, did Hiram Green believe Arthur Sieman had betrayed him?”