The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  “Could I see that one?” he asked, pointing to a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic. It was compact and matte black.

  The woman opened the case with a key and slid the gun off its pedestal. She put a gray chamois on the glass counter and laid the pistol on top of it.

  “Compact forty caliber,” she said. “Very reliable. Good stopping power. It’s a polymer frame with a stainless barrel.”

  He touched it with his fingers, slid his thumb under the body, and then the gun was in his hand. It felt light, the polymer just rough enough to give the gun a feeling of grip.

  “How many bullets in the clip?” he asked.

  “Eleven,” she said.

  Standing there, holding the Smith & Wesson, he thought of Bonnie Kirkland. He thought of the Mexicans and the knife in his boot. Iowa seemed like a movie he had watched on a plane. He lifted the pistol and aimed down the sight at one of the targets. He tried to figure out what it meant that every time he had held a gun it had been handed to him by a woman. Could that be just coincidence?

  “I also have a Glock compact and a Ruger,” she said. “Like I said, there’s a special on the Glocks right now.”

  He stared down the barrel of the gun. The target he was aiming at contained two figures, the silhouette of a man hiding behind the cartoon outline of a woman. The man was a criminal. The woman was his hostage. He stared down the barrel, moving the gun back and forth imperceptibly between the two figures. Criminal, victim. Criminal, victim. He thought about what the cartoon woman had done in her life to bring her here, to this place, to this endless crisis.

  “Looks like love,” the woman said.

  It was meant to be a joke, but he didn’t so much catch the words as hear her tone. It implied that another few moments without responding and she would begin to wonder about him. He turned to face her, lowering the gun toward the floor.

  “Do you think I could shoot it?” he asked.

  The woman smiled, sensing a sale. She asked him which target he wanted. He pointed to the hostage crisis, and she unfolded a stepladder and took it down.

  Now, in the library, he thought of the gun in its hiding place in his room at the frat house. He wasn’t brave enough yet to carry it around with him, to walk the streets with a .40-caliber pistol pressed into his spine, but he was getting there. He had taken it to the park the other day, a short walk, fifteen minutes tops, feeling the polymer grip rub against his skin. It felt like an erection, the fevered, insistent wood of a thirteen-year-old boy who has just discovered the meat between his legs, but doesn’t know how to use it yet.

  Holding the Russian novelists, talking to the girl in the white pants, he smiled. He had a secret, and the secret was power. Wolf or sheep? The answer was becoming clear. The girl smiled, brushed the hair from her face.

  “I’ve seen you in here,” she said. “The last few weeks. Except you’re usually in American History.”

  He felt a great heat run through him. She had noticed him.

  “I’m taking a trip,” he told her. “I started in New York.”

  “Wow. I always wanted to go to New York. I’m from San Antonio.”

  “I spent some time in Iowa,” he said. “I like Texas, though. It seems important somehow. Like a place where big things happen.”

  “That’s what we like to think,” she said. “But personally, I wish I’d lived in Moscow at the turn of the century. The twentieth century. Or St. Petersburg. Before the Revolution. All those passionate Russians, the long winters, the big hats.”

  “You have big hats here, too,” he said.

  She laughed. “It’s true.”

  “I think it’s normal,” he said, “to want to be from someplace else. To glamorize another time. I think everybody feels like their lives would be better if they were someone else.”

  She studied him.

  “What kind of trip?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you in school? Did you run away from home?” He didn’t know how to describe it, what to say. When she looked at him, he felt like a tape measure respooling back into its case, disappearing by inches.

  “I find it interesting,” he said, “that the word for journey is the same word you use to describe a fall.”

  He smiled to show her it was a joke. She smiled back. In her eyes he could see something click.

  “I’m Natalie,” she said, holding out her hand.

  “Carter,” he told her. “Carter Allen Cash.”

  Spring came early to the American West. That’s what the locals said anyway, in the streets and shops of Colorado Springs. They clucked their tongues and talked about global warming. Some nodded their heads in a southerly direction and talked about how it was all “their” doing. The “them” in this case being the military men of NORAD, whose bunker lurked deep in the heart of Cheyenne Mountain just outside town. The Allen family had become residents of Colorado Springs in January, blowing into town with the brunt of winter. We had left the East Coast in the dark of the night just after New Year’s, detaching like an iceberg and drifting west. After the privileged, urbane lives we’d enjoyed in the wealthy suburbs of New York City, it was strange to find ourselves in the tumbleweed sprawl of the work-boot West, surrounded by cowboy iconography and strip malls.

  Gone were the local bagel shops with their overstuffed Sunday papers and house-smoked fish. Gone were the hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants with their thin-crust pizza, Thai noodles, and Szechuan takeout. We said goodbye to sophisticated French cuisine and the regional menus of southern Italy. Now we lived in a region of chain restaurants and barbecue huts, where Italian food meant a fried, breaded chop smothered in cheese, and Chinese food was served with frozen peas and carrots. Ordering “a large” here meant something different than it did back east, as was evidenced by the bucket of ice tea the waitress brought me that first day at Applebee’s. These details were startling, not just because it felt as if we had moved to a different region of the country but because it felt as if we had relocated to another country entirely. A country of obese women and men with mustaches. A country of cheap cars, snowmobiles, and Jet Skis. In short, Walmart country. For the first few weeks the boys mocked everyone they saw, mimicking their accents in low-slung Sling Blade voices. Their mother and I scolded them for it. In the past I might have shown similar prejudice, but my experiences of the last year had humbled me. As backward as I may have thought some of the characters we encountered, none of them were parent to an infamous murderer.

  We tried to settle in, getting used to a new house, a new climate, a new life. The kids started public school, climbing onto a bright yellow school bus, book bags stuffed with oversized geometry and history textbooks. Three days a week I drove a used Jeep Cherokee an hour north to the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, where I had accepted a position as a guest lecturer. Despite my recent notoriety, the president of the medical school jumped at the opportunity to bring me on staff. We agreed it would be part-time at first, but with an eye toward making me a full professor and head of the rheumatology department by the end of the year.

  The drive to school took me from the rust-colored flatland of southern Colorado, through the foothills of the Rockies, and into the smoggy valley surrounding Denver. It was my first real experience with the emptiness of western states. To harbor this much land undeveloped—miles of scrub grass and rolling hillocks stretched out as far as the eye could see—seemed criminal. Every day I thought of the hungry millions crammed into third world cities. We had more space in this country than we could ever use; deep canyons and impossible mountain ranges, remote riverside acreage and volcanic lake beds. I was used to the narrow, cluttered highways of the East, where in the span of eight hours you could drive from New York to Maine, passing through four states. But here, in the massive sprawl of the West, eight hours wouldn’t even get you across the state.

  Of us all, Fran seemed the least affected by the move. She continued her virtual assistant work, uninterrupted. T
hat was the benefit of being virtual. To her clients she was just a voice on the phone, an e-mail address. It mattered not whether she was in Connecticut or Calcutta.

  We had moved to Colorado Springs two months to the day after Danny was sentenced to death in a Los Angeles courtroom. In the weeks before, his attorneys had fought to get his guilty plea thrown out. They’d filed motions and briefs, had appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but in the end, the judges were unmoved.

  It didn’t seem to matter that Frederick Cobb’s autopsy had shown fourteen separate stab wounds, that a former Special Forces operative who’d been arrested riding a freight train with my son a month before the assassination had been murdered in cold blood just weeks after. The details of Cobb’s last day were sketchy at best. He may or may not have bought a lottery ticket from a 7-Eleven in Glendale. We know that, at some point, in the early evening he had eaten a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. His stomach was full of half-digested French fries. Somewhere around ten that night, Cobb found himself in a culvert under an overpass, where he was stabbed repeatedly, with defensive wounds to both hands. The police quickly assessed it as a transient murder, possibly drug related, and made little effort to solve the case, despite a considerable amount of pressure from Daniel’s legal team. To the police, Cobb was just another army vet who had come back from the war and fallen on hard times.

  Murray and I had taken what we knew to every newspaper and magazine we could think of, but other than a small article in The Sacramento Bee about Cobb’s “coincidental connection” to Daniel, the press was unresponsive.

  Marvin Hoopler, the other veteran from the train, proved impossible to locate. After he was arrested with Daniel and Cobb last May, Hoopler seemed to have disappeared without a trace. His past turned out to be just as hard to analyze. The government rejected numerous Freedom of Information Act requests for Hoopler’s service record, saying it was classified. I took their letters and put them in the file. No detail was too small, no idea too preposterous not to catalog. A presidential candidate had been assassinated. We had a dead veteran who’d been a sniper in Special Forces, and another, service record unknown, who had vanished into the abyss, and my son, a college dropout with no history of violence.

  When I wrote the facts on a piece of paper I found I couldn’t make them fit together. They were like a man with a limp stumbling into an emergency room. The initial exam reveals a deep gash in the calf that requires seventeen stitches, but rather than treat the wound, the doctor on call diagnoses the problem as neurological. Looking at Cobb’s autopsy photos and the letters from the army denying our requests for Hoopler’s service record, I couldn’t help but see the truth as a wound no one wanted to acknowledge.

  My son had confessed to murder, and there were three possible explanations. The first was that he was, in fact, guilty. That he had, of his own free will, smuggled a handgun into Royce Hall and, standing a few feet from the stage, fired two bullets into another human being. The second was that he had shot Seagram as part of a larger conspiracy, in which Cobb and Hoopler were involved. And the third, which I had to admit seemed far less likely, was that he truly was a patsy, that he had been a bystander to the assassination, that Cobb or Hoopler had been the trigger man and had somehow planted the gun on Daniel after the shots were fired.

  So putting aside the third option for the moment, the question became either (1) why had my son allowed himself to become involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Senator Seagram, or (2) why had he, of his own free will, pulled the trigger, a lone gunman standing in a crowd, expressing his dysfunction with a gun?

  On November 6, three days after Daniel’s guilty plea was formally accepted, the Republicans won the presidential election by a narrow but decisive margin. Seagram’s death had left a void in the Democratic leadership that a dozen candidates had rushed to fill. They had succeeded only in cluttering the landscape. Meanwhile, the Republicans had used the assassination as a wedge, calling for tougher antiterrorism laws. They had spun themselves as the party that would stop at nothing to protect the country, and though they did not win by a landslide, they had received enough electoral votes to announce that they’d been given a mandate by the American people.

  Two weeks later, on November 17, after a short sentencing phase, my son Daniel Allen was sentenced to death. Both his mother and I had testified on his behalf, taking the stand to beg for his life. It was a moment beyond description. We had done everything in our power to prove to the jury that Danny was a warm and thoughtful human being. We had shown pictures and told stories, had shared our brightest memories, our hearts sickened by love and regret. Ellen wept so much during the hearing that the court had to break three times so she could finish her statement. There are no words to convey the feeling you have as a parent as you plead for the life of your child. No words to describe the unmoved expressions of the jury, the judgment and cold detachment in the eyes of the prosecutor. There are no words to describe the feeling that comes over you when the judge announces his verdict, when he tells a crowded courtroom, and a national audience, that he is ordering the death of your son. It is a deep, sucking blackness. Another form of death. And that is all I’m going to say about that.

  The next day Daniel was shipped to the country’s only supermax federal penitentiary, in Florence, Colorado, known as ADX Florence, or ADMAX. There my son was placed in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day, locked in a seven by twelve cell, behind a steel door with a grate. His furniture was made out of poured concrete, his desk, his stool, his bed. There was a toilet on one wall that shut off if plugged, a shower that ran on a timer to prevent flooding, and a sink without a drain trap. Some prisoners had polished-steel mirrors bolted to the wall, but not my son. Nor was he allowed a radio or television. Instead he had a long narrow window, just four inches high, through which he could see only the sky. This was to prevent him from knowing his specific location within the complex. Communication with the outside world was strictly forbidden. The single hour per day he was allowed out of his cell was spent wandering by himself in a secure outdoor yard, under the watchful eye of armed guards.

  ADMAX had opened in 1994 on the outskirts of Florence, Colorado. It was two hours north of the New Mexico border, two hours south of Denver. The prison covers thirty-seven acres and has four hundred and ninety beds. Its inhabitants are considered to be the worst of the worst—terrorists, rapists, murderers. Many had killed fellow prisoners in other correctional facilities. Others had murdered or attempted to murder prison personnel in other prisons. Many, like my son, were famous. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was housed at ADMAX. As was Terry Nichols, the surviving Oklahoma City bomber. Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged “twentieth hijacker” on 9/11, was there, as was “shoe bomber” Richard Colvin Reid. Andrew Fastow, former CFO of Enron, was serving time at ADMAX, as was Robert Hanssen, the FBI’s most famous double agent. It was a prison full of legendary men, which was the kind of creature the world believed my son to be, a Cyclops, a Minotaur, a monster of mythic proportions.

  In the months since his sentencing, I had taken my investigation underground. Daniel’s arrest and trial had devoured our lives. My family was exhausted, my wife’s patience at an end. Daniel had confessed, Fran told me in no uncertain terms. It was time to move on. So two weeks after Daniel’s sentencing, I went to the box store and bought two dozen cardboard boxes. As the kids watched, I emptied our lives of every trace of the investigation. In the past year I’d amassed an exhaustive collection of biographies of men who had assassinated other men—Oswald, Booth, Burr—their histories imagined from every angle. The pages were dog-eared, text highlighted and underlined, the margins filled with handwritten notes.

  I had collected stacks of research on the places my son had visited—geographical data, climate charts, anything that might contextualize his crime. In ten minutes I could find you a list of Iowa City mayors stretching back to the city’s inception. I could hand you a highlighted map of California rail travel, includ
ing timetables and discontinued routes. My file cabinet was filled with newspaper and magazine articles, computer printouts, blogs, and transcripts of telephone conversations. There were blueprints of Royce Hall and lists of gun dealerships in the greater Los Angeles area. Based on witness lists I had compiled biographical data on more than two hundred people who had stood in Royce Hall the day Senator Seagram was assassinated: pictures, résumés, educational histories.

  I packed this material away, even as I found myself unable to move on. The case had become my obsession, my addiction, and like a drug or gambling habit I knew it must now be hidden from the people around me. So I filled a banker’s box with documents about Hoopler and Cobb: birth certificates, military and work histories.

  I took the case I had built and boxed it up. My family watched as I carried the boxes to my car. I told them I was taking it all to the dump, but instead I drove to a storage facility and rented a locker. I would lead two lives now. On the surface I would be Paul Allen, the man who had surrendered to the inevitable, who was trying to put the past behind him. But underneath, I would continue to dig, reasoning that if I succeeded in proving Danny’s innocence, if I could manage to commute his sentence and save his life, then my family would forgive me. Even Daniel.

  In this way I became two people.

  At Fran’s urging we put the Connecticut house on the market. It was time to accept that our old lives, the community we had built, the schools our children went to, the neighbors, the friends were gone. We were pariahs now, shunned in supermarkets, heckled at PTA meetings. The community that had once embraced us now went out of its way to show us we were not wanted.

  Last summer I had taken a leave of absence from Columbia to concentrate on Daniel’s case. This January, when I called Alvin Heidecker, the school’s president, to say I wouldn’t be returning, he seemed relieved. Alvin and I had been friends for years, but he was a practical man, who understood that my presence on the faculty was a detriment, not just academically but also in terms of fund-raising. Many of the school’s biggest donors were staunch Democrats, who could not be expected to bequeath millions to the school that employed the father of the man who had murdered their hero.