Fifteen
3:30 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
The three memos about Roland Madison are drafted. Randi Brooks, sitting on the couch in Rena’s office, reads them on her laptop. Rena reads the printouts at his desk.
The personal background profile, written by Lupsa, has woven in Jobe’s notes from Stanford. The legal profile—Rena can see Brooks’s fingerprints on it—is even better, erudite and insightful, signaling potential flash points in Madison’s legal philosophy and offering initial defenses.
The attack memo by Jon Robinson and Maureen Conner, though, is the most interesting. “Professor Madison’s judicial philosophy is a mix of sixties Berkeley campus radicalism masked in New Age California rhetoric,” it reads, reminding people in one sentence that the guy went to Berkeley, is a professor, and is from California—code words for elitist, academic, lefty, and out there.
“For all his discussion about a third way,” the attack memo says, “Madison is no real friend to conservatives.” And the proof is his criticism of the core conservative legal concept of strict constructionism—the idea that judges should go no further than reading the text of the constitution and applying the facts of a case to that original intent. Madison dismisses the theory as “a political argument, not a serious legal one.” His attitude about this vital legal doctrine “is both arrogant and dangerous,” the memo says.
When you add it all together, it concludes, Madison’s thinking “is based on the misguided, discredited, and repudiated legal detour” the Court took during the latter half of the twentieth century.
“Legal detour.” Nice phrase.
“Madison’s ideas call for an activist, overreaching judiciary.”
Attack memos are a way of imagining how your worst enemies will come at you. They’re fun to write, like a pan of a terrible movie. They’re also the most important documents you produce.
Rena and Brooks insist they be done well.
What was it that Lily Tomlin once said about Washington? “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”
Rena looks up from the attack memo at Brooks. His own cynicism is nagging at him. He’d better tell her soon what has been bothering him. Most investigations go wrong because people lose sight of something they thought about at the beginning and then let go in the sweep of other details. The neglected early suspect. The doubt that you never got around to checking. It’s what you forget that will bite you.
“Randi, there is one thing to talk about. You brought it up yourself when you first saw Madison’s name. You said he was ‘nothing but trouble’ because he has no natural constituency.”
“Okay.” She makes a point of closing her laptop, then leans back on the sofa to listen.
“Something like that has worried me from the start,” he says, “before we even saw Madison’s name. When Nash invited me to the White House and not you and told me how he wanted to change the country with an unusual choice.”
“What are you worried about?” She crosses her arms and gives him a serious look.
“If the president actually picks Madison, you think it’s possible he might want the nomination to implode? The Right gets a win. Then Nash can pick someone more liberal. That we’re being set up?”
“That’s pretty paranoid, Peter,” she says, uncrossing her arms and leaning forward. “Why do you think that?”
“There are so many long shots in one plan. The extraordinary jurist idea. That he would ask people outside the White House to run it—especially us since we don’t belong to either party. It’s like he wants to keep his distance. Then Madison himself, not just someone unusual, but a guy with such a long paper trail there are a lot of things grab on to if you want pull him down.”
Brooks has a habit, when she concentrates on something, of pursing her lips and tilting her head up slightly and focusing her eyes just ahead, as if the idea were floating physically in the room in front of her.
“Maybe this town is so screwed up,” Rena adds, “the only way Nash thinks he can get a liberal on the Court is to give the other party a pound of flesh.”
“Madison’s the pound of flesh? And us?” she asks.
“Yeah. We’re part of the sacrificial stew.”
“You make Washington sound like cannibal town. And Nash pretty cynical.”
“Henry Kissinger said just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not after you.”
“Is that who we’re aspiring to be now, Peter? Kissinger Associates?” After leaving government, the controversial secretary of state assembled many of his advisors into a consulting firm that made millions advising foreign governments.
“No, I’m just saying we should think through the paranoid scenario. On that score, Kissinger isn’t wrong.”
“Is Nash that devious?” she says. “I don’t know. I need to ponder that.”
At 5:00 p.m. the memos are copyedited and ready for the White House. Rena calls Spencer Carr. “Hand-deliver them, someone from your staff. Sealed envelope,” the chief of staff says. “Have them call my office before they come. I will get them clearance. They come directly to me.”
Should he have his assistant O’Brien do it? Too new, he thinks. He asks Stephanie Hampton, the longtime receptionist, whom they had used for confidential matters before and he knew would get it done.
At 6:00 Rena slips out of the office and walks the mile down M Street to his apartment in the West End. A few years ago, that walk would have taken him from a bustling commercial district to a quiet neighborhood. Now the bustling doesn’t end.
Rena needs to clear his head. The sleeplessness of the last few nights is catching up to him. He could use a run.
On the stoop outside he stretches his calves and starts out toward the river. At the Kennedy Center, he gets on the path that runs along Potomac and heads in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. He crosses the over the Memorial Bridge and runs toward Arlington and the cemetery.
He began running in the army, after he decided he’d had enough soccer. He looks forward to it, but he doesn’t crave it. He likes that it keeps him fit. But more than that, he enjoys that he disconnects—no cell phone, no email. Just his body and mind until the ritual—from first stiff steps, to the shower afterward—is complete.
An hour later, he is home. He drinks water thirstily, takes a long shower—cool, then cold—and shaves again, dresses, and picks up his cell phone. There is a text message. It says “WH: Jordan Lyman” and contains a phone number. He doesn’t recognize the name.
“May I help you?” a male voice says at the end of the line.
“Jordan Lyman, please. Peter Rena calling.”
“Thank you. We will call you back.” The tone is polite and officious at the same time. Rena guesses ex-military.
Twenty minutes pass before his cell rings back.
“Peter,” the voice says at the other end of the line.
“Mr. President.”
“I read your memos.”
Why, Rena wonders, is the president of the United States calling him back personally about a preliminary background memo?
“A brilliant man, then, your vetting suggests, if an unusual one.”
“Apparently, sir.”
“You called your review preliminary. How long till it’s not preliminary?”
It’s a man’s life, Rena thinks. The Los Angeles Times sent two people to live in Little Rock for eighteen months in 1991 to scrub Bill Clinton. Took them a year to unearth his draft notice, the one Clinton said he never got.
“Another week would tell us more.”
“Can we assume,” the president asks, “that anything that took you longer to dig up will be harder for others to find, too?”
“It doesn’t work that way, sir.” There is a randomness to investigating. “Someone might stumble across something the first day that we might not find for weeks.”
“The power of chance?”
“The older I get the more I believe in
it.”
“You say if I’m serious you need to question Madison face-to-face to see how he reacts?”
Rena calls this the Watching. It is something on which he always insists.
“Yes.”
“Then I think you need to get yourself to California.”
Sixteen
Friday, April 17, Slightly before dawn
San Francisco
Damn truck drives like a washing machine.
Thumping and bumping.
He pulls the beat-up blue Chevy pickup off the 101 northbound onto a small dirt access road that moves out past where Candlestick Park once stood. The predawn light peeks over the Bay to the east, streaking the horizon with slashes of apricot and scarlet. The left headlight is askew, its beam crossing into the path of the right. A cross-eyed Chevy with a shit engine.
He navigates the pickup toward the fishing spot along the bay where the rocks stick out.
He stole the truck thirty minutes earlier on a side street near the Cow Palace, the old arena where the Warriors once played basketball after they came west from Philadelphia. Before they moved to freakin’ Oakland. Now the old arena is a place for pet shows, coin conventions, and an annual tattoo expo. The high-class stuff long ago moved downtown. South San Francisco is just a place people drive by.
Good place to die, he thinks.
He wasn’t positive the guy would be here, but for about half the Friday mornings in the last two months at daybreak he had been, with his fold-up canvas chair, his radio, cooler, and gear. Guy couldn’t sleep no more, probably. Too old. Too many memories.
A stupid man becoming more stupid as he gets older. Wasting time at dry fishing holes, catching nothing, listening to the traffic whoosh by on the Bayshore Freeway.
You should be in church, old man, paying for your sins. You can pay me instead. And someday you and me can discuss it in hell.
He pulls up to the far end of the dirt road a little past where most people usually park. So when the guy sees the truck, he won’t think someone’s fishing near his favorite spot.
He sets up, pole in the water, and waits awhile. Seems like hours. What if he actually caught a fish? That’d be pretty damn funny.
He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t do anything. No DNA.
Sometime soon he hears a car drive up and the engine turn off, a door open and close, a trunk slam.
He waits a few minutes more and wanders up toward the parking area to look and sees the old Buick LeSabre.
Navy blue. Cop blue. Guy has no imagination.
He takes a deep breath in and lets it out.
It’s gonna be today, he thinks. With the sun rising.
“Shit,” he hears himself say under his breath.
He picks up his rod and returns to the spot where he can see the guy’s old Buick.
He waits a few more minutes. Then he heads down the rocks to the water and starts to make his way along the shore, stepping carefully so as not to slip, toward the figure now settled in at a small point jutting out into the bay.
Calvin P. Smith.
SFPD detective, second class. Retired.
Smith is wearing one of those padded olive green coats with the furry hood. The hood is down, not over his head, fortunately. Not that it should matter that much. But it might.
The other good news is he is sitting. He’s in one of those folding canvas chairs you get at Target for less than ten bucks. It’s low and, at Smith’s age, getting out of it would be hard. Probably need both hands to push on the arms to get up.
Smith has two poles into the water, both propped up on little stands you can buy to hold them in place. He has a cooler set out, and he’s sipping a can of Coors.
Breakfast of champions.
Smith glances at him from a distance of about thirty yards, then back out at the water.
It is cold here, even in summer. That’s good. Means the gloves don’t look out of place.
He is close now, fifteen yards. Then ten.
“Mornin’.”
Smith doesn’t look up. Takes another pull on his Coors.
“I think this hole is played out. Ain’t got nothing here for a couple seasons. I think I ain’t gonna come no more.”
Smith still doesn’t look at him.
Mean cuss. The worst kind. The kind you can’t talk to. Who thinks if you didn’t do this crime, you did another.
“You catch anything?”
As he says it, he puts his rod down and leans over a little more and puts his hand around a rock he figures is large enough. Smith still isn’t looking. He straightens up, standing sideways, so the rock is behind his body now.
“Hey, you remember a kid nicknamed Peanut?”
Smith turns just a little, as if the name registers only vaguely.
The rock comes down on the older man’s left temple before Smith utters a word.
He can feel a crush of bone and hear a sloshing sound.
There is no blood, not at first, but Smith’s mouth has opened as if he were going to say something.
“Well, this is for Peanut, man.”
The guy is leaning slightly now, tilting away from him. That makes the temple a little harder to reach squarely. So he brings the second blow down on the top of the man’s head, just slightly toward the front.
Blood is flowing now from Smith’s ear below the left temple. Mouth slack.
One more blow to the temple. There is no crush sound, and it feels softer this time.
Smith falls out of the folding chair, and it topples over with him. Smith is lying sideways, the bloody temple facing up, and one of Smith’s legs is caught in the chair.
He feels something on his shoe. Smith has grabbed his shoelaces with his left hand and clenched.
He has dropped the rock.
Where the hell is it? Damn it.
He sees the rock, with a little bit of blood and hair on it, and picks it back up. He thinks of crushing Smith’s fingers, but then he remembers that will mean hitting himself in the shoe.
He brings the rock down on Smith’s elbow. Smith’s body rolls.
“Fuck you,” Smith’s bloody mass of a head manages to say, the “you” coming out garbled, sounding more like “uh.”
He only vaguely sees the gun.
Somehow, this piece of puke with his head caved in has managed to pull it out of his coat or somewhere and get it into his right hand. But he can’t seem to aim it properly.
Smith’s eyes aren’t even fixed on him. It’s as if Smith is reacting from memory.
He smashes the rock on Smith’s right wrist holding the gun.
Then without thinking about it he sees himself hitting Smith on the head again. Then again.
The old cop’s head has opened now, revealing a mixed red, clear, and white mass inside. It looks like bloody cottage cheese.
The gun is still in Smith’s hand, but the arm has stopped moving.
“No, fuck you,” he says to the body.
He realizes he is crying.
Shit. SHIT!
Did it drip down, the tears?
Will there be DNA?
Smith’s beer has toppled over, but it’s still half-full. He takes the can and pours it all around where he’s been standing. Then he opens the cooler. There are two more Coors inside. He takes one, opens it, and pours that all around, too.
His heart is pounding. He hasn’t noticed it before. He drops the beer can, standing there, panting.
Time to move. If you’re seen standing here, someone will wonder what you are looking at. He begins to head back toward the truck. Slowly. As calmly as he can. Make anyone who might see him now think nothing out of the ordinary is going on.
For an instant he wonders about the fishing lines. Why would he do that? Why would he care if a fish had struck?
When he gets back to the dirt road, he drags his feet to make sure he doesn’t leave footprints that give away his shoe size.
Truck fires right up.
He turns around and drives back up
the dirt road to the access road toward the freeway. He looks out toward the office buildings near where Candlestick used to be. Any lights on? They couldn’t see the rocks, but they might be able to see a pickup. Not that it would matter.
In ten minutes he will ditch his fishing rod that he had touched the night before without gloves in the first dumpster he can find. Five minutes after that he will ditch the truck, put the overalls in the grocery bag he brought, get on the bus, and later burn the clothes in the furnace at the building where his aunt lives.
What about his shoes? Smith grabbed them.
He sees the old shithead hanging on to them. What was in the old guy’s mind? Did anything register? Or was he fighting like some animal by just instinct? He sees that hand on his shoe, and the gun. And the skull open, with the brains pouring out.
Then he realizes he has driven too far. He has gone an extra exit, past the place where he had meant to ditch the pickup, the one without surveillance cameras and near a dumpster. Should he go back?
No, get rid of the truck. The cameras on the freeway will spot you if you go back and forth.
He pulls off at Cesar Chavez Street and turns right toward the bay. He parks the truck on the street near nothing in particular. He grabs the fishing rod out of the back and walks away.
He looks for an alley, or somewhere where there might be a dumpster and where there won’t be surveillance cameras.
He finds one eight blocks away. He writhes out of the overalls with the blood on them and stuffs them into the grocery bag.
He imagines Smith’s dead eyes following him, the way a picture’s eyes follow you around the room.
Stop thinking.
He picks up the grocery bag and the fishing rod and looks for a dumpster. He wants to lose the fishing rod. In a few more blocks he finds one. Maybe he should have thrown it into the bay?
Once he has dumped the rod, he picks up the grocery bag full of the bloody overalls and looks for a bus stop. No, he should walk farther. Give himself more distance.
Walk all the way back if you have to.
Shining City Page 8