The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  “I’d like to see my son’s chart,” I said.

  Tolan spoke to one of the Secret Service agents. He told me to raise my arms. I was patted down and then wanded. I handed over my cell phone and pager, my wallet and keys, belt and shoelaces. They didn’t want me passing anything to my son he might use to harm himself or escape. When they were done, Tolan approached accompanied by an older man in a white lab coat.

  “This is Dr. Coppola,” he said.

  I offered my hand. Coppola thought for a moment before shaking it.

  “I read your article on fibromyalgia last year,” he told me.

  I nodded. He handed me Danny’s chart.

  “Your son presented with a bullet wound to the left thigh. The bullet was lodged next to the femur, close to his femoral artery. He also had multiple contusions to his face and arms, obtained I assume from the police’s efforts to subdue him.”

  I felt anger, but I let it go.

  “Bleeding?” I asked.

  “Minimal,” said Dr. Coppola. “I was able to remove the bullet and sew up the wound using only a local. We’ll watch him for infection, but in my opinion he should be walking around in a few days.”

  I felt relief. And then panic. With his physical condition taken care of, the worries became less practical.

  “Who shot him?” I wanted to know.

  “We don’t know for sure,” said Tolan. “No law enforcement officer on the scene reports firing their weapon. The early reports we’re hearing is that in the struggle, Danny’s gun went off and the bullet struck him in the leg.”

  Danny’s gun. The words sounded ridiculous. My son hated guns. He hated hunters. He had been a vegetarian for two years in high school.

  “So you’re saying he shot himself,” I said.

  “Right now that’s our theory.”

  Convenient, I thought.

  “Has he asked for a lawyer?” I said.

  “As far as I know,” said Tolan, “your son hasn’t said a word since his arrest.”

  I looked at their faces. I could see it in their eyes. They all thought he had done it. He was a monster, and I, as his father, was at best a sad, pathetic man, and at worst a parent guilty of almost criminal negligence. Monsters don’t just become monsters, after all. They are forged in a laboratory of abuse and neglect. And who else is to blame but the parents? Even Tolan, who had shown the most sympathy, was careful not to stand too close.

  “I want to see him,” I said.

  Tolan spoke to a Secret Service agent. And then, at 4:37 on the morning of June 17, I was taken to see my son.

  The day after Robert Kennedy was killed, conspiracy theories about his murder started to bubble up like toxic oil from the ground. His brother Jack had been shot four years earlier and allegations had been flying for months about multiple shooters, railroad hoboes, and Cuban hit squads. Just two months before the RFK shooting, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated by a sniper with a Remington Gamemaster 760 as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. James Earl Ray had been captured, but no one was convinced he had acted alone.

  It was in this climate that the news of RFK’s assassination emerged. Even though he had been killed in a crowded kitchen with dozens of witnesses, even though the event, though not filmed, had been captured on audiotape, no one could believe that this solitary, diminutive Arab had killed America’s golden boy. Kennedy was a figure of controversy, after all. He had waged a long and public war with J. Edgar Hoover, the notorious head of the FBI. He had spent his years as U.S. attorney general under his brother’s presidency prosecuting the Italian Mafia. He was a marked man. He had enemies. This much was clear.

  Questions arose quickly. The gun taken off Sirhan Sirhan was capable of firing eight shots, but some witnesses swore there were at least ten shots fired. Then there was the location of the wounds. Kennedy had been shot twice in the back, at a spot just under his right shoulder blade. Both shots originated from a low angle, the bullets traveling upward. The third wound was to the back of the head, the bullet entering just under his right ear and penetrating up through his brain. Witnesses all put Sirhan Sirhan in front of Kennedy. How then had he managed to shoot him in the back?

  Then there was “the girl in the polka-dot dress.” Several witnesses had claimed to see her and a man exiting the hotel moments after Kennedy was shot. Sandra Serrano, a campaign worker who was sitting on a fire escape outside the Ambassador Hotel, recalls a girl in a polka-dot dress running out of the hotel yelling, “We shot him!” Serrano said the girl was with two men.

  Vincent DiPierro, a waiter at the Ambassador Hotel, recalls seeing a girl in a polka-dot dress next to Sirhan Sirhan prior to the shooting.

  Melvin S. Hall, a cabdriver, claimed to have picked up a girl and two men outside the hotel moments after the shooting.

  Booker Griffin, a campaign organizer, described seeing a tall man and a girl in the kitchen prior to the shooting.

  The list goes on. What does it mean? In medicine we are taught to create a differential diagnosis, a laundry list of possible causes for the symptoms with which the patient presents. We are taught to organize a patient’s history: his chief complaint, associated symptoms, past medical history, relevant social data, past and current therapies. These criteria help us diagnose illness, but every symptom a patient presents with is not necessarily connected to his underlying illness. Sometimes they are peripheral. The doctor’s job is to review all the data and determine which symptoms are relevant and which are irrelevant.

  A kitchen full of people, men and women alike. A girl in a polka-dot dress. She leaves the hotel with two men. Witnesses hear her yell, “We shot him!” But it’s possible that instead she said, “They shot him!”

  Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner, examined Kennedy just hours after the shooting. He removed one intact bullet and several fragments from Kennedy’s body. Three forensic pathologists from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and two city coroners witnessed the autopsy. In his report, Noguchi wrote that the shot that killed RFK “had entered through the mastoid bone, an inch behind the right ear and had traveled upward to sever the branches of the superior cerebral artery.” The largest fragment of that bullet lodged in the brain stem.

  A second shot entered through Kennedy’s armpit and exited through his upper chest at a fifty-nine-degree angle. The coroner wrote that Kennedy’s arm must have been raised at the time.

  A third shot penetrated one and a half inches below the previous one. It came to rest in Kennedy’s neck near the sixth cervical. This is the bullet that was found intact.

  A fourth bullet hole was found in Kennedy’s jacket.

  The shot that killed Kennedy—the one that entered the back of his neck, fragmenting upon impact and lodging in his brain stem—was fired so close that it left thick powder burns on the skin. Noguchi estimated that the shot was fired at a range no more distant than one and a half inches. But Sirhan Sirhan stood at least a foot and a half in front of Kennedy.

  Eight shots fired. Three hit Kennedy. The gunman stands in front of him. He is shot in the back. How is this possible? Perhaps the first shot missed him and he turned to escape. The subsequent shots hit him in the back. What is the symptom? What is the disease?

  Conspiracy theorists are quick to mention Thane Eugene Cesar, who was hired at the last minute to be Kennedy’s bodyguard. He was a man in a uniform with a gun holstered at his side, reported to have been leading Kennedy by his right arm at the time of the shooting. He is known to have owned a .22-caliber pistol. Was he carrying it the night of the assassination? Did he draw this pistol after Sirhan started shooting and shoot Kennedy from below three times? If this is the case, then who was Cesar really working for?

  The case against Cesar is pure speculation, and he, of course, denies having any involvement in Kennedy’s death. But the coincidences are provocative, and start the gears of an analytical mind spinning.

  A patient presents with a seizure disorder. His blood pressure is
low. He has been having headaches recently, and his right foot is swollen. As a doctor you must decide: Are these all symptoms of the condition causing the seizure? What if you learn the patient has gout? This explains the swelling but not the seizures. Discount the swelling, reexamine the remaining symptoms. The key to a successful diagnosis is to find the pattern in a sea of camouflaging factors.

  A girl in a polka-dot dress. A security guard hired at the last minute. An eight-shot pistol. An audiotape that seems to have recorded at least ten shots. What is relevant? What is irrelevant? To make the proper diagnosis you must put aside your own prejudices. You do not, after all, fit the symptoms to the condition. You fit the condition to the symptoms. Your own beliefs are not an issue. Your ego. It is a question of science. Of fact.

  This is how I was trained to think. To diagnose an illness, a doctor creates a clinical decision tree. Arrows branch from the patient’s major symptom to his other symptoms, his lab results, and family history. Is there a fever or not? Have other family members suffered similar symptoms? Ultimately following the branches to the end should result in the correct diagnosis and the proper therapy. In reality flesh-and-blood decision making relies on pattern recognition. With enough experience a doctor learns to recognize diseases. He relies on instincts. From the moment a patient walks in, the doctor is already considering a diagnosis, and then as questions are answered and test results received, that diagnosis is refined. These types of doctoring shortcuts are called “heuristics.”

  But shortcuts can be dangerous. This is why diagnostics is such a tricky game. If you are too literal, you might not make the imaginative leap needed to find the underlying disease. But if you are too intuitive, you might discount important criteria.

  A patient presents with a deadly illness. It is a determined and canny hider. Undiagnosed, the patient will die. He has already been hospitalized. His health is failing. As a specialist, I must review the data—blood tests, X-rays, MRIs. There will be dead ends, scientific misdirects. New symptoms will appear making old diagnoses instantly impossible. As his doctor I cannot give up. The harder the disease is to diagnose, the harder I must work, the more creative I must become.

  This is how a good doctor becomes great.

  This is how I will discover the truth of what happened.

  Danny was handcuffed to the bed. This was the first thing I noticed. The cuffs slid along the metal rails of the bed with the sound of a shower curtain being drawn. Open, closed. Open, closed. He was sitting up, his eyes raised to the ceiling-mounted television. His face was bruised. There were scratches on his cheek, and the skin around his left eye was starting to darken. The white button-down shirt he wore was torn and speckled with blood. He was watching the Weather Channel, as if it possibly mattered what the weather was anywhere in the world. As if he was a regular Joe who wanted to check his morning commute. But Danny’s outdoor days were over. Soon he would be a creature of small rooms, of cold, unforgiving surfaces—metal and concrete—spaces that were easy to clean, to squeegee free of blood and shit and piss. The only weather he experienced would be internal—great storms of remorse or anger moving across his central plains.

  There was a Secret Service agent sitting by the bed. When David Tolan led me into the room, the agent stood. “Ten minutes,” he said, walking past us.

  I stepped into the room. Tolan, remaining in the hall, closed the door behind me. For the first time in months I was alone with my son.

  My mouth was dry. I thought of Danny’s birth. Six pounds, ten ounces, big blue eyes. I pushed this away. They were cheap thoughts, easy tears. Now was not the time for heartbreak. This was a rescue mission.

  “I’m trying to get you a lawyer,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. On TV a perky weatherman with a spray-on tan told us what the week held in store for Cincinnati and the surrounding region.

  “I’m going to see your mother after I leave here,” I said. The blinds were closed, the fluorescents flattening every shadow. I had stood in a thousand hospital rooms talking to a thousand patients. But this time I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

  He shifted on the bed, the cuffs rattling against metal rails.

  “This is the only channel I could find where they weren’t showing it over and over,” he said.

  I nodded. It. Showing it. As if the thing he was accused of doing was an inconvenience ruining his prime-time viewing experience.

  “A public event,” I said. “Hundreds of students with cameras, reporters, cameramen from local and national media outlets. There will be new footage for months, photographs.”

  On TV the weatherman said, “High winds in the Plains states, possible funnel clouds.”

  “Do you think you could get me another blanket?” he said. I tried to meet his eyes, to find some connection, but he kept his eyes glued to the screen, as if somehow the weather held the key to understanding his predicament.

  In a closet I found a thin cotton throw. I put it over him. I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t language to address a tragedy of this size. It was an event so big as to block out the sun. New words needed inventing, new idioms and phrases. And yet I should just ask him. Straight-out. He would tell me the truth, wouldn’t he? I was his father. But I couldn’t. Part of me didn’t want to know.

  “Have you eaten anything?” I asked.

  He shook his head. I went to the sink and washed my hands thoroughly. I dried them on a paper towel, then crossed to him and checked the bandage on his leg. It was something concrete to do. An act of medical routine I hoped would ground me, take the race out of my heartbeat.

  “The wound looks good,” I told him. “Just a few stitches. You might not even have a scar.”

  He smiled without teeth.

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “I’ll probably need a few scars where I’m going. Scars and a sock full of pennies.”

  He was a skinny kid, average height, handsome. What did convicts in prison movies call the pretty ones? A chicken.

  “They told me you spent some time in Austin,” I said.

  “I went all over,” he said after a moment. “The mountains, the desert. It really is an amazing country.”

  You loved the landscape so you shot a politician, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. There was no room for sarcasm in this place. Besides, he was innocent. I would will it to be true.

  “Danny,” I said.

  “It’s Carter now,” he said.

  “I don’t know that person,” I said. “But I know Daniel Allen. I know my son. I know he’s not a man who could do a thing like this. Shoot someone. I know that. I know it. Just tell me what happened. A man stands next to you. He pulls a gun. He fires a few shots. You wrestle the gun away from him just as the cameras turn. Things like that happen all the time.”

  Did they? Even as I said it, it sounded crazy. We lived in a world of instant images. A shot was fired and the gunman was captured on film. Where was the room for error?

  We shared a moment of silence. Tomorrow would be a hot day in Oklahoma and parts of the Southwest. Rainstorms were expected in Portland, Oregon.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” I said. “You have been arrested for the murder of a senator. He was going to be president. Now is the time to talk about it, to bang the table and shout you didn’t do it.” He watched the weatherman.

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  I sat carefully on the edge of the bed. Between us I felt the weight of so much history. I was the father who had divorced his mother when he was seven. I was the absent dad, the one who had missed birthday phone calls, who had forgotten to send presents. I was the weekend dad, the summer-vacation dad. I was the hypocrite who said Don’t do drugs, who told him not to get too serious about the girls of his youth, to play the field before he got married. I was the kind of dad you talk about in therapy. What did he owe me? Why should I expect a straight answer?

  “We don’t have time,” I
said. “Ten minutes. You heard him. Give me something. Something I can tell your mother. Something I can tell the kids. Say you didn’t do this and I will fight to my dying breath to get you off.”

  He turned to look at me. His left eye was half shut. There were flecks of dried blood under his nose.

  “What if I did do it?” he said. “Would you still fight?”

  I heard the words, but my brain was slow to distinguish them. What if I did do it? It was as if he had asked What if the sun were made of ice? Or What if rain fell up instead of down? Was such a thing possible—a universe in which my son could commit murder?

  No. It seemed clear that this was a test. He was testing the unconditional nature of my love, looking to affirm once and for all that I was his father, constant, unyielding. We had been close once and had lost touch, and he was testing me to see if I was still his father.

  “Yes,” I said, “of course. You’re my son.”

  He thought about this. I could see from his face that he wasn’t sure he believed me. Then he laid his head back against the pillow and closed his eyes.

  “I’m tired,” he said again.

  I tried to take his hand, but he jerked it away from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He didn’t speak. I reached out to touch his face.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  The door opened. Tolan stood there with two Secret Service agents. Their expressions said it all. It was time. I thought about fighting, about grabbing my son and refusing to let go. Send me to prison, I thought. Let me take his place. I will do the time. It’s my fault.

  I looked at Danny. His eyes were open and he was staring at the agents in their suits, handguns holstered at their sides. Then he looked at me, and shrugged.