Maybe Kevin hadn't intentionally blown him off, after all. Maybe he hadn't had a choice. He stared at the poster – that was Kevin, all right. The boy was in some deep shit.
Back in his apartment, Wes took a hot shower, put on a pair of heavy flannel pajamas and – congratulating himself for his self-control – drank down two large glasses of tabasco-spiked Clamato juice without any vodka. Then poured himself a third.
He was in what he referred to as his living salon, waiting for Morpheus to call him, drinking his Clamato juice, absently petting Bart behind the ears, across his neck. He hated to admit it, but the damn dog gave him a great deal of comfort.
Part of him didn't really want to hear from Kevin. Probably the boy had just been out tying one on, got confused, then figured out what he was going to do all by himself. That was probably it.
But, as of late last night, he was still at large. What if he was not only in trouble but really did need him? Wes looked again at the poster he had brought up with him – there wasn't any doubt Kevin was in big trouble. The only question was whether or not he deserved to be. Wes was reserving judgment, but the fact remained that Kevin's call yesterday wasn't just some youthful confusion, some drunken delusion. The poster was real enough, scary enough. And the young man clearly was under the impression that he might need his services, that Wes might be able to help him…
Well, now…
Wes drank some juice and thought that if that were the case it was a whole different can of worms, wasn't it? Because the little whispering voice inside him had been nagging for weeks now – since the semester had ended in June – that he didn't care all that much about getting a doctorate in history. That had mostly been something to fill up the time while he tried to chart a new direction after his wife's, Lydia 's, departure and his best friend's, Mark Dooher's, betrayal.
Wes and Lydia had been sweethearts when they'd been young, then partners-going-on-strangers through the child-rearing years. And then, after Michelle had moved out, the silences in the big house had lengthened and deepened into trenches that neither of them could easily have crossed even if they had wanted to. And it turned out that they hadn't.
He had been a lawyer for so long, going to court, hanging around the Hall of Justice, occasionally chasing the ambulance, while she had been a mom, a PTA person, then a real-estate broker who had started her own company. In the end there wasn't anything much to talk about. He had put on twenty pounds, she had lost almost thirty. She saw her life as beginning a new phase – exciting, challenging, filled with freedom. And Wes…?
While all this was going on with his wife Lydia, Wes had been consumed with something else altogether removed from his domestic life… the trial of his best friend Mark Dooher, who had been charged with murdering his wife. Wes was Dooher's attorney, and it had been the trial of his life.
He leaned back on the couch. Why the hell wasn't sleep coming? He didn't want to think about this now. Not ever, in fact. Maybe he would go and pour in a shot or two of vodka, take the edge off.
But he didn't move.
The truth was, after everything had shaken down, Wes was left with the bereft conviction that he had lived his life and it just hadn't panned out all that well. The child-rearing years were behind him, and he felt he hadn't been much of a dad, hadn't spent enough time on the personal stuff, and now the kids were gone and he didn't know them and they didn't care to know him and he didn't blame them.
And the law – the god he had worshipped and served for all of his adult life – the law had proved to be a sham.
When Lyd had said she wanted to leave him, what had shocked him the most was that after twenty-seven years he had felt only a mild regret that he'd spent so much time in the charade if the only place it had taken them was to here.
But it was the nature of his best friend Mark Dooher's betrayal that had shaken his faith to its foundations. And he had gradually come to realize that he had just stopped caring. The natural skepticism that he had cultivated as a protective device for working with venal and dishonest clients had turned to a profound cynicism about humanity in general.
It was why he had started to drink and why he kept at it so religiously. To keep himself numb. To keep things on the surface. You move fast enough on thin ice and it won't crack. But he also felt himself slipping further and further out, away from everyone else, away from any sense that anything had meaning.
It was why he'd taken and kept and continued to care for Bart. It was also why he was suddenly so ambivalent about what might well be a stark reality – Kevin Shea could be counting on his legal help.
Potentially, another line to the raft. But also another opportunity to hope, and he was not inclined to listen to its knock, especially where the law was involved. The law – the once sacred beautiful law…
No. He couldn't let himself be drawn back to it. He wasn't going to try to help Kevin Shea or anybody else. Maybe he'd refer him – that was as far as he'd go. He wasn't going to open himself up to getting betrayed again. If that happened, he held no illusions – it would destroy his soul, if he had one, and then there would be nothing at all left to save.
He stood up. A little vodka – tasteless, odorless, colorless – would hit the spot after all, thank you. Hold the Clamato.
A telephone seemed to be ringing somewhere. Underwater. Which proved it was a dream. He didn't have to acknowledge it, do anything. Just roll over and it would stop.
He knew he couldn't have been asleep more than an hour, and for a change of pace he'd made it into his actual bed, under the comforter, before he'd crashed. Pulled down the blinds. It was dark as night in his bedroom, warm and secure. He wasn't moving and that was that. He needed at least six more hours before he could face the day.
He turned over, pulling the comforter over his head. Two more rings. Three. Then silence again.
See? A dream.
33
At seven-forty in the morning the mayor of San Francisco, Conrad Aiken, stood looking out over yet another tent city, this one in the Civic Center Park, directly below where he stood partially hidden behind the flags of the United States and of California on the ceremonial balcony area over the magnificently carved double-doorways of City Hall.
As had been the case for the past day and a half, he was having trouble assimilating the information before him. Here he was, the executive in charge of the billion-dollar-plus budget of one of the world's most well-loved and beautiful cities, the destination of thousands of tourists every year, one of the convention capitals of the country, a mecca for gourmets, a center of liberalism and the arts, with the sixth greatest opera house in the world, a haven for the have-nots, homeless and homosexuals of the rest of the country, and he felt as though it had all fallen to pieces around him in a matter of hours.
Through the thin morning fog smoke from cooking fires was rising in wisps over the tents. In his mind's eye it recalled the image he had seen in photographs since his childhood – San Francisco struggling to rise from the ashes of the Great Quake of 1906, until today the city's darkest hour. Before, the image had always struck him as hopeful – the citizens pulling together to rebuild their lives and homes – but today, looking down over the tents, hearing the thrum of boom boxes, the sporadic voices raised in frustration or anger, the reality was anything but hopeful.
Aiken was meeting with the eleven members of the Board of Supervisors in fifteen minutes and he had no idea what he was going to tell them. Worse, in spite of his best efforts with selected staffers whom he had cultivated as moles, he had no real sense of what they might recommend to him. Experience told him that whatever they came up with was unlikely to be productive, although it would vastly increase his workload, undermine his authority and dilute whatever substantive efforts that might be called for and even already in the works.
He'd put the Board off all day yesterday, hoping the situation would somehow blow over quickly, but with the assassination the previous night of the city's district attorney, Chris
Locke, which had sparked a new wave of nocturnal riots, there was no longer any pretending that this was going to go away.
Donald, Aiken's administrative assistant – a tall, well-groomed single man of thirty-five – appeared at his elbow. They both stood unmoving for a full minute. 'If you'd like an opinion…' Donald ventured.
Aiken, still lost in his thoughts, nodded. Donald was an asset – ears always to the ground, open lines of communication with everyone at City Hall and blessed with a keen sense of politics, positioning, strategy. 'I'll take anything you can give me.'
Donald was holding a folder that Aiken hadn't noticed. Now he opened it and handed the poster of Kevin Shea to his boss. Aiken had seen it a hundred times. He was sick to death of it, but he'd listen to Donald. He looked over and up at him, thinking not for the first time that Donald would be the perfect assistant if he weren't so damn tall.
'Okay? What about it?'
'I spent all day yesterday walking these hallowed halls, and my sense is that if you don't immediately take charge of the meeting this morning with the simplest possible message you are going to have an unqualified political disaster.'
Aiken had come to this same conclusion on his own. The members of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco were elected in city-wide, non-district elections. No one person represented any geographical area – a Nob Hill or a Hunters Point or Castro Street. In effect each member of the Board represented – embodied – an agenda. Aiken's experience was that this tended to make consensus very difficult on many issues.
Further exacerbating the problem with the Supes – as they were called when not referred to as the Stupes – was their salary structure. The San Francisco charter provided that each supervisor made twenty-four thousand dollars per year. (Which meant that their own clerks and secretaries made twice what they did.) In other words, anyone who needed to work to make a living could not be a supervisor.
So many individuals – including Conrad Aiken – had come to hold the view that the members of the Board were for the most part abysmally ignorant of the rudiments of the workplace. This failing was often combined with a disdain for compromise, an almost sublime disregard for reality, at least as Aiken knew it.
What the Supes did have, in general, was time, personal financial security that insured isolation and sycophancy – and opinions. Positions. Attitudes. Ideas. Yes, these all were present in spades, clubs, diamonds and, mostly, hearts. Ideas abounded on the Board. And, although they had no executive power, they could recommend action to be taken by the mayor. Police action, for example. Or declaring Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to be a Sister City to San Francisco. Or holding off on freeway reconstruction after an earthquake until an environmental impact report could be prepared on the danger such reconstruction would pose to the indigenous frog population of the China Basin.
The mayor didn't have to take any of their recommendations, but if he chose to ignore them he did so at his political peril. Somewhere among these dilettantish positions – white, Hispanic, gay, Oriental, African-American, feminist – there resided an absolute majority, and that is what it took to get elected mayor.
Aiken took the poster from his aide. 'And this is going to help me take charge, Donald?'
'I think Senator Wager was right yesterday about this. When she was here.'
' I remember, Donald. With what exactly?'
'And especially now, with Chris Locke's death. I think what we've got to do is go in there and up the ante. Every one of the Supes is going to be pushing in his or her own direction. There are a thousand cameras in the chamber already – everybody's going to want to make a speech, decry the violence, pass their own resolution… well, you know.'
Aiken knew. 'So what's this about upping the ante?'
'March right in there, take the podium and admit that we – all of us, the whole city – have obviously and for too long been ignoring the racial tension that has been here among us. We've been hiding our heads in the sand. Especially here at City Hall.'
Aiken smiled grimly. 'Well, that's true enough.'
'No, listen. There is a point here. We have been negligent – ignoring the truth that inequality still exists here, that there is justified rage out there in the streets among the regular citizens, especially among the black community. It is obvious that we are – all of us – to blame for the deaths both of Arthur Wade and now of Chris Locke. We have a debt – we have a debt to repay.'
'Donald, this is getting a little thick.'
'True, but when the silver-tongued devil speaks…' A look of conspiracy.
'By that you mean, of course, my own self…'
Donald nodded. 'This is only the general idea, sir. In your words, it will not come out heavyhanded.'
The mayor was accustomed to the flattery, but he thought Donald was probably correct – he knew he did have a gift for oratory. And one thing the Board was usually receptive to was an appeal to their collective liberal guilt. If he started by telling them how they'd all caused this problem themselves, or contributed to it, he just might be able to get something past them. 'All right,' he said, 'what's the rest of the general idea?'
'That before we consider any of the Board's proposals, before we do anything else, we must take immediate measures to integrate the alienated black community back into the mainstream of decision-making and public life. To reach out to them. Something symbolic.'
'Symbolic is always good,' Aiken said.
'So to demonstrate our commitment, to show that our first priority is to bring the city back together…'
'We hand up Kevin Shea.'
Donald nodded: 'He's guilty. Look at the pictures. We offer, say, a half-million dollars, which is cheap indeed if it stops the rampage.'
Aiken ran a hand under his tired eyes, over the port-wine stain. 'I don't want Chief Rigby to think I'm pointing the finger at him, Donald. For not having arrested Shea yet. They're doing all they can.'
'No one's saying they're not, sir. You can even make the point overtly. But we need – you need – the gesture, the assurance to the black community that the city is trying, that we're all in it together. It might even – all by itself – throw some oil on the waters for a while.'
It was all right, Aiken thought, because it could work. And it was justified. A rare combination. 'In other words,' he said, 'the order of business this morning is to rally the Board around this reward, around apprehending Kevin Shea, make a resolution to that effect
'You lead them there, sir.'
'And then walk out?'
Donald gave it a moment, then nodded. 'Essentially. Yes.'
Aiken, too, bobbed his head. 'I like it,' he said. 'Let's go make it fly.'
When the door closed after Aiken had left the room to go to the Supervisors' Chamber, Donald sat at his desk for a very long five minutes, timing it. Often, Aiken would rush out, get halfway to wherever he was going, then turn around and burst back into the office, grabbing whatever it was he'd forgotten, giving a last minute directive that he had overlooked.
But since Aiken was only heading to the opposite side of City Hall – a one-minute walk – Donald thought that if he were going to return it would be almost immediately. Still, Donald was cautious by nature. It was wise to give yourself twice the time you needed. What if the mayor got stopped by the media out in the hallway and then remembered something and ran back in here? One couldn't be too careful.
That thought in mind, Donald got up from his desk, walked the long internal panelled corridor to the reception area, then out through the public door, number 100, that admitted the public into the mayor's outer office.
There was no one in the hallway. Donald walked over to the balcony overlooking the vast rotunda – across the way, in the opposite hallway, he saw the edges of a crowd trying to see inside the Supervisors' Chamber. Something – he imagined Aiken's arrival there – had set off the crowd.
Satisfied, he turned and made his way through the office. At his desk he removed a white piece of paper fro
m his wallet. It was blank except for seven numbers – no name attached.
At the receiving end a pleasant female voice asked him to leave his message.
After identifying himself, Donald told the machine that the mayor was in fact going ahead with the alternative they had discussed, and Donald predicted that the Board would pass the resolution within the next few hours.
When he hung up his hands were unsteady. Well, what did he expect? He had never done anything like that before – naturally it made him nervous. But the funny thing was that it was probably actually helping Conrad Aiken. It was a good idea.
Still, he did feel a small sense of betrayal. It bothered him, as though he had somehow switched loyalties. But after this catastrophe, and it hadn't even played out yet, Aiken was no certainty for reelection in five months and then what was Donald going to do if he didn't watch out for himself?
He had to broaden his base, make himself valuable to other people who might need his help. He had no doubt now – after this call – that Loretta Wager would remember him if he called on her. He wouldn't have to say it – she would know that she owed him. And she would deliver. That was how it worked, and the senator well knew it. He'd heard. Mutual acquaintances.
34
Senator Wager's daughter, Elaine, had finally slept – soundly and long, waking up a little after dawn. Out through her living-room window, under the cloud cover, there was considerably less smoke than there had been the day before. She allowed herself a moment's optimism – things might be getting better, the city's wounds would heal after all.
Then she had opened the newspaper…
In one of the oversized men's T-shirts she used as a nightgown she was sitting on the hardwood floor just inside her door, where she had been when she saw the headline and her legs had gone. She remembered reaching out to the wall for support and then deciding she was just going to have to sit down. She must have lost control of her bladder, the floor under her was wet. She was sucking her index finger. Time must have passed.
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