Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Rena wonders which of these men two days ago wanted Madison, other than Burke. And Nash. He has no idea.

  If any of them dislike Madison because he isn’t liberal enough, they could not be as critical now. The war protestor story, and the attempt to tar Madison with it, make him something of a liberal symbol. That would not be true if the Vietnam story had come out as a small detail in his biography in the first place.

  That, Rena thinks, is politics. Context changing meaning, like a photograph conveying something different as the frame widens to reveal who else is in the picture.

  “So we proceed?” Carr asks the group.

  No one answers.

  “Then it’s agreed,” the chief of staff says.

  The president rises and, wordlessly, vanishes through the door by which he came.

  Forty-one

  Friday, June 19, 3:14 P.M.

  San Francisco

  Walt Smolonsky checks the two entrances again. Still nothing.

  The guy is late.

  Not so late that he’s worrying about a no-show. But late enough that he feels a rush of anxiety about whether the day will be a bust. It’s almost 3:30 on Friday afternoon, and he is running out of time.

  He’s been in San Francisco for the better part of two days. He’s interviewed almost a dozen people—cops, DAs, former DAs, defense attorneys—and he hasn’t learned much about Alan Martell that Wiley’s file hasn’t already told him. So you see one more guy, check one more file. Maybe the next one will break something open—like another cruise through the clues of a crossword that’s got you stumped.

  Martell didn’t seem like a bad guy. Someone who knew how to keep it simple. Kind of guy people relied on more than they admitted.

  It isn’t clear why Martell pulled up stakes for D.C., but the marriage didn’t survive. He and his wife both stayed east. Maybe the children were settled.

  None of it tells him what he’s after—whether there is anything about Martell or his murder that might complicate Madison’s nomination.

  Part of the problem is he can’t level with people about what he’s looking for. The last thing he needs is the legal and law enforcement communities here wondering why Washington people are looking into a connection between the two. “White House Probing Link Between High Court Nominee and Murdered Lawyer.” It would take exactly twenty seconds for that to get picked up by the scream-o-sphere online.

  So you try hiding questions about Martell inside a supposedly general inquiry about Madison, like hiding the nut in the shell game. The flaw in this ruse is the timing. It doesn’t make sense for the White House to be asking general questions about Madison this late—on the eve of his hearings.

  The only excuse is the close call on Madison over Vietnam. The judge seems to have survived it—for now. But it makes sense the White House might want some double scrubbing on the man now, even last minute.

  The guy he’s waiting for is a former San Francisco assistant district attorney named Creighton Ashe, a partner at one of the firms out here that handle Silicon Valley work, intellectual property, patents, and the rest. Corporations fighting other corporations. Money about money.

  He sees someone heading his way looking straight at him. He gets close, his eyes searching against the description. “Mr. Smolonsky?” The man extends a hand and professional smile. Smolonsky stands.

  “Creighton Ashe?”

  “Please, Tate.”

  Smolo runs through the preliminaries—working for the White House, checking last-minute facts on Madison. Due diligence, blah, blah, blah.

  “What kind of judge was Madison?”

  “Superb. But he was at Superior Court less than two years. He was parked, so to speak, on his way to better things. Yet even in those few months he showed flashes of brilliance.”

  “People resent that? That he was just parked, I mean, on his way up?”

  “No. He was already a famous legal scholar. Hell, he was a professor of mine at Harvard.”

  Smolonsky nods sympathetically.

  “Look, you really should talk to his clerks. Frankly, I’m surprised you’re doing this now. You say you’re working with the White House? Wasn’t he vetted thoroughly before being nominated?”

  “We’re just anticipating some specific testimony now that we have the witness list for the hearings next week. It’s pro forma, really.”

  “Why? Is someone testifying about his tenure as a Superior Court judge?” Ashe asks.

  Ashe is sharp. Smolonsky doesn’t want to give him any more time than necessary to become suspicious. “I’ve been talking to a bunch of folks from the DA’s office.” He takes a long pull on his coffee, to break the flow of questions. He lets a little dribble on his chin and makes a show of using napkins to dab the mess. Make him doubt me, Smolo thinks, and take his mind off Madison.

  “Um, hey, did you know, by the way, that guy who was murdered the other day in Washington? Alan Martell, the former assistant DA?” He hopes it sounds like a digression.

  Ashe’s expression stiffens. “Terrible,” he says.

  “Yes. That was Rollie’s, uh Judge Madison’s, reaction, too. They had cases together?”

  “We all did. It’s a small community at Superior. The city and county of San Francisco are not that big.”

  “Same in D.C.,” Smolonsky says. “I was a police officer there, a long time ago.”

  Ashe nods, registering that into his assessment of Smolonsky.

  “You knew Martell?”

  “Of course.”

  “Nice guy?”

  “Sure,” Ashe says, noncommittally.

  “Why’d he leave?”

  “Most do, eventually. The DA’s office is good training, but it’s not a good living.”

  “Martell a good lawyer?”

  “He was fine,” Ashe says in the clipped diction of someone being deposed.

  “If I were still a cop, I’d wonder if there was anyone who would want to kill him.”

  Ashe doesn’t respond. Smolo hasn’t asked a question. More deposition training.

  “Any theories?”

  “I haven’t seen Alan in years.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “What does that have to do with Judge Madison?”

  “Nothing. Old reflexes is all. I worked homicide. Even now, someone gets murdered, you get curious.”

  Ashe looks at Smolonsky with growing disapproval, which is fine. If you want to hide something in your questioning, distract the guy by making him dislike you.

  “Back to Judge Madison. Any controversial cases that could bite us in the ass?”

  “You mean did Judge Madison have any controversial cases in Superior Court?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

  Ashe leans back, relaxing again. “I wouldn’t say so. It’s not a place where you often encounter knotty constitutional issues.”

  “You miss it, the DA’s office?”

  Ashe smiles distantly. “Do you know how much money an assistant DA makes?”

  “More than policemen.”

  “The average partner working for a firm like mine makes six times an assistant DA,” Ashe says. “Maybe eight. And a rainmaker can make half again more than that.”

  “You didn’t tell me whether you missed it.”

  “I don’t miss living in an apartment, worrying about paying off my law school loans, and wondering if my kids could ever go to college.”

  “But.”

  Ashe looks like he wished he hadn’t brought it up.

  “You know what I do, Tate?” Smolo says. “I help sports teams find out whether their athletes are criminals and wife beaters before they sign them to huge contracts, or whether CEOs dress up like little girls and demand to be spanked by prostitutes.”

  “Yes, well, corporations will pay millions to fight over things that don’t matter even to the lawyers doing the work. But we won’t pay for lawyers to prosecute criminals to protect us from evil. There are two legal systems in this countr
y. One is lucrative, works well, and uses up precious resources. The other is what we call the justice system.”

  In a minute, Ashe is heading back to his office upstairs. Smolonsky feels himself tiring. It’s closing time in Washington for the week, and he still has nada.

  A weird vibe, though, from Ashe just now about Martell, not dissimilar to ones he had sensed in snippets from others, or is he just imagining it because he wants to?

  Smolonsky checks his watch. Rena will expect him to work through the weekend, but it’s hard to be motivated. This is a butt-covering exercise.

  Who’s left on his list of old Martell contacts to track down?

  Next up is a lawyer named Rochelle Navatsky. She’d been in the public defender’s office when Madison was at Superior Court. Case went to trial. Murder.

  Smolonsky opens his laptop. Maybe she’s still in the office or he can get a home number and see her tomorrow, Saturday.

  The public defender’s office doesn’t list her. She’s probably moved on. Check Martindale.com, the listing of attorneys. It’s better for private practice than government lawyers and not perfectly up to date. But you never know.

  Nothing. Maybe she’s left the city. Google? It says she’s with a law firm now in Oakland. But the firm’s website doesn’t list her.

  What about the archives of the local legal newspaper? There’s usually one in a big town. He sets the search parameters for the last year. Maybe there’s something from a trial she had in front of Madison. He sees nothing.

  But there’s an obit.

  Navatsky has died? Then the headline registers and Smolonsky’s hands go cold.

  Not just died. Murdered. Three months ago.

  “Peter,” Smolo says when Rena picks up. “We’ve got another problem.”

  Forty-two

  7:04 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  Rena needs to find Wiley.

  Half an hour from now he’s supposed to join the Madisons and Brooks to celebrate the completion of murder boards. Confirmation hearings begin Monday.

  He calls Brooks.

  “I’m going to be late. You should pick up the Madisons. I’ll meet you there.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

  As brilliant as his partner is, she sometimes is too open with people, Rena thinks. She might not manage to wait for Rena before telling Madison. Rena wants be there when they tell him another lawyer in a case he presided over has been murdered. He wants to see Madison’s face.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Wiley isn’t answering her cell, email, or text. The woman who can track down anything about anyone knows how to get off the grid. Finally she calls.

  “Meet me at the office in ten minutes.”

  He tries to plumb what he can from the Web about Rochelle Navatsky and Alan Martell while waiting. He doesn’t get far. In between, he mulls who in his office may have become an enemy—or a fool. Who might have talked to someone who knew Josh Albin—the source of Albin’s knowledge about Madison’s war protests at Berkeley and their silence about it? Who in his office had either knowingly or unknowingly become part of the little man’s network of spies? One of the young lawyers who work for Brooks? One of his ex-military colleagues he had brought in? Who might be a secret believer in Albin’s agenda? Or secretly dissatisfied with Rena’s? Or did Rena and Brooks no longer have an agenda—other than new clients? Had they become what their critics said about them?

  He had taken steps to check on everyone in the firm—an outside, covert play. Not even Brooks knew. Her own movements had to be monitored, in case she had accidentally been part of the leak. Rena had called on old friend, Carter White, a mentor from army investigation days. Cart was not from politics, not from Washington. He was discreet in a way that almost no one in political Washington could fathom. Rena had no idea what the man would find. It might unravel his whole life. And Rena didn’t have time to think about it.

  He hears the front door unlock, the sound of footsteps upstairs, and Wiley appears in his door.

  “I owe you for this,” he tells her.

  “Friday I have folk dancing at the Y.”

  In five minutes, she has the case records and cross-references Martell and Navatsky. They had twenty-one cases together over the years. Seven before Edmund R. Madison during his short tenure at Superior Court. Three went to trial. The others pled out before trial.

  “Print everything you can about those cases. And the others in front of Madison, too. And put whatever links you have in the protected file on the server.”

  He calls Smolonsky back in California. “Find whoever you can who might know about Navatsky and Martell, whether they knew each other, whether they were friends. Tell them you’re a private investigator looking into Martell’s murder. So no doubling back on anyone you have already talked to.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “The three cases we care most about are the ones that went to trial. Two drug cases. And a murder,” Rena says, looking over what Wiley has unearthed so far and put in front of him. She is tapping away on her magic investigative machine looking for more, the black and gold chain on her reading glasses dancing as she types.

  One of the drug cases was major, a defendant named Randall Fulmer, who sounds like he was a member of some crew in town that controlled crack in a part of the city. The murder trial involved a defendant named Robert Walsh Johnson, a high school kid. He was convicted of murdering a girl from school.

  “Okay, but it’s Friday night,” Smolonsky says.

  “And the hearings start Monday,” Rena says coolly. “Walt, you’ve done great work. But it’s just the start.”

  “I get it.”

  Rena’s late. He navigates his ancient Camaro toward Georgetown and onto Canal Road toward the restaurant, a place called the Old Angler’s Inn, outside the city.

  Does he really imagine these murders are linked? He cannot assume anything. Isn’t that what James Nash went to him for? No surprises.

  Rena has always had a love-hate relationship with hunches. Intuition is the unconscious mind seeing things before the conscious mind does. His father had called it “the little voice.” His soccer coach called it “unconscious anticipation.” The key is to be alive to the inferential mind but not fall in love with your hypotheses. If the facts begin to disprove them, you have to move on. That is the mistake bad or lazy investigators usually make. They “like” someone, a theory of who done it, and never see anything else.

  Is he in love with a hunch that Madison isn’t telling him something? So two people who know each other and know Madison are both murdered. They happen three thousand miles apart. Maybe he is overreacting.

  His little voice tells him something else. Madison knowing one person who’d been murdered is a tragedy. Two is a coincidence. And coincidences are rarely that.

  Madison had implied he barely remembered Martell. In fact they had had more than a dozen cases in eighteen months. Madison is holding something back. What could it be they don’t already know? Or is Rena—because he suspects Madison isn’t telling him something—turning this into a witch hunt about the judge?

  The Old Angler’s Inn in Potomac, Maryland, sits next to a tiny waterway called the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. The C&O had been the brainstorm of George Washington, who feared the young American nation wouldn’t survive unless the new states in the East were linked economically with the Ohio Territories in the West. The general imagined the canal, running alongside the Potomac River for almost two hundred miles, as that link. An almost impossible engineering feat, it wasn’t finished for two generations after Washington’s death. But he had been right about the economics. The canal operated for almost two hundred years.

  Old Anger’s Inn was built during the Civil War, midway through the canal’s history, as a way station for passengers. The restaurant, a favorite of Rena’s, features a magnificent bar, a garden, dark wood and fireplaces, and an upstai
rs dining room, the walls and floor bent with a century and a half of settling, otherwise unchanged. Before Smolonsky’s call, it had seemed a good place to celebrate.

  Brooks and the Madisons, already seated, are having wine. There is an empty glass for him. Everyone is laughing.

  Madison stands. Vic smiles a secret, welcoming smile—and Rena feels a great weight suddenly, as if something were pressing down on his heart. He is so focused on her father, he hasn’t thought about her feelings. And what he is about to do will hurt her.

  “Now we can toast properly,” Brooks says after they resettle. She fills his glass. “To the honorable Judge Edmund Roland Madison, who killed in his final murder board today.

  “And if I may,” she adds before taking a drink, “I would like to read an email from Richard Attinger, the former deputy attorney general, who sat in today for the final session.” She looks down at her phone and reads the email: “‘Judge Madison was brilliant today. Superbly prepared. Charming. The single greatest performance I have seen in a mock hearing for any post.’”

  Vic looks proudly at her father, eyes moistening, daughterly and maternal. Madison bows his head sheepishly, pleased, gracious, embarrassed.

  “You all right?” Vic asks Rena.

  He sips the wine, but the taste, or maybe it’s his mood, is bitter. He isn’t sure how to start.

  “Remember the first meal we had together?” Brooks says. “At the place up on the mountain.”

  “Alice’s,” Vic says.

  “Where there is no one named Alice,” Brooks says.

  “Just as I’m sure there are no old anglers here,” Vic says.

  “To misnomers,” Madison says, raising his glass in another toast.

  “To justice,” Vic says to her father. Then she looks at Rena. His silence leaves her quizzical.

  He takes another drink. When the food comes, he can barely taste it.

  When the dinner plates are removed, he can contain himself no longer.

  “Judge, I need to speak to you. May we go outside?”