Act of Deceit hd-1

by Steven Gore

  Only too late did Brother Melvin come to understand that the purpose of Reenactment Therapy wasn’t to get past the trauma, but to get accustomed to it.

  O n the flight back, Donnally figured out the kind of Reenactment Therapy he wanted to engage in: his hands around the throat of William Sherwyn.

  Chapter 46

  “T hat’s absurd,” William Sherwyn said to Donnally, standing on the landing of the doctor’s Spanish Colonial in the Berkeley hills. “Completely absurd.”

  Sherwyn’s hand still gripped the front door. He glanced past Donnally toward downtown San Francisco across the sunlit bay. He then locked his eyes on Donnally’s and said, “And I’m not going to risk a lawsuit talking about someone who may, or may not, have been a patient of mine.”

  “Have it your way, but Charles Brown’s lawyer is filing a motion to withdraw his plea, and it’s all going to come out.”

  “There’s no ‘it,’ other than the disturbed fantasies of a troubled man.” Sherwyn smiled. “Did you ask this hypothetical patient where these so-called parties were? Who attended them? What about names? Did he have names?”

  “He was a confused thirteen-year-old kid.”

  “And now he’s a confused adult.”

  Sherwyn looked skyward and tapped his chin.

  Donnally had the sense that the doctor was picturing himself framed by the mansion, his authority buttressed by its fortresslike solidity.

  “Let me see who your witnesses would be.” Sherwyn looked at Donnally again. “There’s the bipolar Mr. Brown. There’s Trudy who lost touch with reality sometime in the 1970s and who treated Anna like a lost dog she took in, rather than as a human being with a family who might have been anguished by her disappearance. It never even crossed dear Trudy’s mind that Anna might have been a kidnap victim. And there is, of course, the delusional Melvin.” He grinned. “I would pay to watch those three testify.”

  “They’re not the only ones.”

  “New Sky? The ones who hid murderers, who conspired with Trudy, and who became drug dealers when their so-called dream died?”

  “You were part of that dream for a while, until they threw you out for molesting a boy.”

  Sherwyn laughed. “Not only did that not happen, but everyone in New Sky knew it didn’t happen. I was thrown out because they discovered what I was really doing there, observational research for my dissertation on counterculture sexuality.” Sherwyn pointed inside his house. “You want to read it? I can loan you a copy.”

  “The way I heard the story, it was participant research.”

  “Let me guess, from somebody like Sonny the ex-con? The drugged-up dope fiend who saw the world through the windowpane of LSD and the brown haze of heroin.”

  Donnally felt the fragile web of Brown’s and Melvin’s half memories tear apart under Sherwyn’s practiced hand, but the threads remained attached to something real, and Donnally fought back with that.

  “I wouldn’t be standing here if that’s all I had,” Donnally said. “Anna left a diary.”

  Sherwyn made his rabbit face for a moment, as if searching for an answer to a cross-examiner’s unanticipated question.

  One finally came: “The diary of a little girl written in the midst of the New Sky fantasy world is hardly evidence.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s the diary of a schoolteacher that ended on the day she was murdered.”

  Sherwyn laughed again. “And the last entry says, ‘Today I will be murdered by Father Phil McGrath.’ ”

  Donnally shook his head.

  Sherwyn threw up his arms. “Is that what this is about? You’re trying to say I killed her?” He jabbed a forefinger at Donnally’s chest. “You’re an idiot. Father Phil had the motive, not me. Anna couldn’t do anything to me. She’d lose her house and her mother would go to jail for harboring Artie and Robert, and maybe even as an accessory to the murder of that cop in Berkeley. She was the first one to yell, ‘Right on,’ when they said, ‘Let’s kill the pig.’ And then she went out and bought them guns. She was no different than those naive Symbionese Liberation Army women for whom blood in the gutter was merely an abstraction.”

  That was it, Donnally thought. It had to be Sherwyn. Had to be. He hadn’t argued back by giving reasons that he didn’t do it, but only for why Trudy would never turn him in. And Donnally understood why Trudy had kept her silence about who had killed Anna: to save herself. A tug by detectives on any of the threads that tied their lives together would have led to her arrest.

  Donnally felt nauseated. Every time he peeled back a layer of Trudy’s self-deception, she became more and more disgusting.

  “You know,” Sherwyn continued, “this story of yours doesn’t work all that well as evidence. Perhaps you should turn it into a screenplay and give it to your father. He seems to have the same tenuous relationship with truth that you do.”

  With that, Sherwyn stepped back and closed the door in Donnally’s face.

  Donnally reached into his pocket and turned off his tape recorder as he walked down the steps, but he was already replaying it in his head. No one so far had known who his father was. All any of them knew was that he was an ex-cop who flipped pancakes in a Mount Shasta cafe. Not even the press had bothered to investigate his background.

  But Sherwyn had.

  Sherwyn knew that Donnally would become his enemy long before Donnally did, which meant that Sherwyn had something to fear.

  Donnally paused at the bottom step and looked back up at the house.

  Sherwyn had inadvertently respun the web, no matter how tenuous it might be.

  Chapter 47

  D onnally considered making a U-turn and heading back to the Burbank Airport for a return flight to San Francisco when he saw his father’s porcelain white Bentley parked in the circular driveway of the Hollywood estate. But a wave from Julia arriving for her evening shift drew him in. It had been a call from her about his mother’s weakening condition that had brought him there.

  Julia looked at him with a cocked head and raised eyebrows as if to say she knew what he had been thinking.

  He parked behind his father’s car, then followed her up the front steps into the marble-floored foyer.

  “Your father told me yesterday that he wanted to speak with you when you arrived.” Julia pointed toward the stairway leading to the screening room. “He’s probably down there.”

  It had been twenty years since his father had summoned him downstairs. He’d gone then because his mother was already in there, an object of both of their affection. Now, he suspected, she would be the subject.

  Even back then, when his father was merely famous and long before he was referred to as the Legendary Don Harlan, the screening room seemed to Donnally like a shrine his father had created to worship himself: Oscars and Golden Globes and Directors Guild awards lined up on shelves like religious icons. Low lighting like a chapel that forced visitors to lower their voices to a whisper when they entered, as though they had arrived in the presence of a divine mystery.

  “Was it an invitation?” Donnally asked Julia.

  “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  D on Harlan looked back from where he sat in the first of the four rows of the theater as Donnally entered. The soft lights glowing from above had never made him seem more Hollywood, more statuesque, more artificial than he did at that moment.

  At the same time, the room seemed hollow. The shelves were mostly bare. Donnally wondered whether the awards that had now sanctified him as a legend had outgrown the space and he’d moved the Church of Don Harlan to larger quarters.

  In one motion he waved Donnally over and pointed at the seat next to him.

  “I thought you were doing a reshoot in Vietnam,” Donnally said in full voice as he sat down.

  “Belize.”

  “Belize?”

  “It was a jungle scene and Americans can’t distinguish one from another.” His father grinned. “So I’ve been shooting in Latin America.”<
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  “Your investors will be pleased.”

  “Not with this one. It’s not what they thought they were buying.” He pressed a button on the console before him, and the lights went down. “Let me show you a little.”

  “I’d really just like to check on Mother and then try to make the last flight back,” Donnally said, leaning forward in the deep seat to rise. “I’m kind of in the middle of something up there.”

  “Humor your old man for a few minutes.”

  Donnally let an exhale be his answer and settled back.

  Moments later he felt a surge of anger as he watched a fade-in to the pseudo-documentary beginning. He pushed himself to his feet and jabbed his finger at the grainy black and white image of the 1968 Saigon press briefing in which Captain Donald Harlan had blamed the North Vietnamese for the murder of the Buddhist monks.

  “I don’t have time for this bullshit.”

  His father answered, not from next to him, but from the screen. A voice-over:

  The following is a story none of us had the courage to tell when it would’ve made a difference. None of the names have been changed to protect the guilty. None of the places have been changed to conceal the evidence… May God have mercy on our souls.

  Donnally felt his body slump. He reached for the armrests and lowered himself back down into the seat.

  H is father had slipped out sometime during the ninety-minute film. Donnally found him sitting alone at the kitchen table.

  “What happened?” Donnally asked.

  Donnally heard his voice, but his mind and heart were still filled with the final image on the screen, a frozen shot of the actor who had played his brother, his body lying in the grass outside the Vietnamese village where he had been killed.

  “I realized that it was time to stop hiding behind the art,” his father said, “and just tell the truth.”

  “That’s not what I ever expected to hear from you. Even Janie has been trying to convince me that one was the means to the other.”

  His father’s face reddened. Donnally knew why. It was his asking Janie to play the part of a prostitute.

  “Sorry about that,” his father said. “I keep playing the provocateur even when I don’t want to anymore.”

  Donnally leaned back against the edge of the granite-topped island, wondering whether Janie had been right, that his father had been moving toward this moment and that Donnally hadn’t been able to see it.

  But the change, whether in himself or in his father or in both of them, was too sudden and he wasn’t prepared for that kind of conversation, so he focused on the film itself.

  “I think that’s the first Vietnam War movie ever made about the Vietnamese,” Donnally said.

  “I thought it was time to raise the question of who we were fighting, why we were fighting them, and who we became while we were doing it. Understanding those things might have kept us out of Iraq.”

  Donnally felt his body tense, but he tried not to show it. The question for him wasn’t about Vietnam or Iraq, it was about who his father was when he’d lied to the world and deceived his own son into sacrificing himself for a cause that his father knew, even back then, could only be defended through lies.

  “It looks to me,” Donnally said, “like your answer was that we were fighting a fantasy of our own construction.”

  His father nodded, then leaned forward in his chair and folded his forearms on the table. He looked down at his hands for a long moment, and then back up at Donnally.

  “I watched Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima about a dozen times until I figured out why no one ever made a film like that about the Vietnamese peasants we were fighting. And the reason was guilt: It’s easier to tell a story from the point of view of an enemy who attacks you than of someone you’ve wronged. That’s when it hit me why all of my other war films were about us, and not about them.”

  His father took in a deep breath.

  “And that’s why I always made American soldiers and veterans out to be psychotic or psychically wounded or berserk supermen.” He spread his hands and shrugged. “What else can they be when no one wants to admit that the people we wanted to save were also our enemies, and that they didn’t want to be saved, at least by us.”

  His father paused and bit his lower lip. Finally he said, “It started out as idealism, but somehow it got corrupted-or we corrupted it-and we blinded ourselves to what we were doing.” He sighed. “Finally, our lies became more real to us than the truth.”

  Donnally gazed at his father, seeing lines in his face and darkness under his eyes he’d never noticed before. He realized that his father had always appeared in his mind fixed at age fifty, prematurely gray and well-tanned. In fact, he’d become a pale old man with yellowing hair.

  Donnally pointed at an aged-brown envelope on the table. “What’s that?”

  “It’s the letter your mother and I received from Donnie’s commanding officer after he died.”

  His father picked it up and handed it to Donnally.

  “I’ve read it once a month for the last forty years.”

  Donnally’s hands shook when he reached the section describing his brother’s final firefight. The euphemism “he engaged the enemy on all sides” gouged into him, reopening the wound.

  He pointed at the paragraph and looked up at his father.

  “They made him into a hero when what happened was that he was ambushed,” his father said, “set up by villagers anguished by the napalming of their children and the torching of their homes. It took me all of these years to let myself understand what really happened. And when I did, I realized why you became a cop. It’s the same reason you were unwilling to let Charles Brown plead no contest to a manslaughter.”

  “You’ve been following that?”

  “Every step. And it proved to me that you’ve always had the courage that I never had: to refuse to accommodate yourself to a convenient fiction.”

  His father stretched his arms out on the table, his palms open, turned upward, a gesture that seemed to Donnally to be a surrender to an elemental, existential exhaustion.

  “I realized in making this movie that, in the end, my art has been basically juvenile, even when it claimed to be in the service of truth. I should’ve been more like you. Fuck the allegory and just say what is.”

  His father fell silent, his breathing labored, then he said, “I know this doesn’t make up for everything… for me, for the way I’ve been…” He shrugged. “For the way I am.”

  Donnally didn’t respond. They both knew what he was saying was true and that he wasn’t expecting forgiveness.

  His father glanced toward the floors above and said, “Maybe you should go sit with your mother for a while.”

  Chapter 48

  “T his is pointless.” Brother Melvin said as Donnally drove his truck through the same intersection near the San Francisco Airport for the fifth time that afternoon. “I’m just getting confused.”

  Donnally felt like an archeologist of Melvin’s memory, trying to reconstruct the past from fragments buried by time and by shame. It was the longest of long shots that Melvin would remember the route Sherwyn had taken on that night twenty-five years earlier, but it was the only path left that might lead to Sherwyn’s exposure.

  Melvin was certain that Sherwyn had gotten off the freeway and merged onto a wide commercial street. The wing and taillights of airplanes taking off had sparkled behind them. They turned right-or was it left?-along another busy street, then left-or was it right?-into a residential neighborhood.

  It was a big house. A mansion. Spanish Colonial. Three stories. Stucco. Melvin was sure of that. Salmon-colored, at least back then, with a long driveway, or it seemed so to a scared kid facing the unknown in the distance.

  Even after their repeated failures to find the house, Donnally didn’t want to give up, for he was running out of angles.

  Sherwyn had anticipated the pretext call from Melvin that Donnally had staged the day before in an
attempt to trick him into making an admission. Sherwyn expressed the false doubt that he was even talking to Melvin, claimed client confidentiality, refused to meet in person, and hung up.

  It was, just like Sherwyn’s background investigation of Donnally and his choice of the word “tenuous,” a confession that only Donnally could hear and no court would accept.

  Melvin pointed toward the evening fog rolling in from the Pacific and obscuring the western hills.

  “It’ll be dark pretty soon anyway,” Melvin said.

  “You willing to stay over and give it a try tomorrow?”

  Donnally watched Melvin gaze at an airplane taking off, heading north.

  “You can’t keep running,” Donnally said.

  “It’s less running than hiding,” Melvin said. “I didn’t realize until after we talked in Vancouver that prayer is a phenomenal form of repression, and I’ve spent the last decade praying like my sanity depended on it, which it did. I didn’t understand until now why so many priests become alcoholics. It’s prayer in a bottle.”

  Melvin paused in thought for a moment, and then returned his eyes to the road ahead.

  “It was weird watching Father Phil and Sherwyn drink together. They sometimes acted like giddy children who’d broken into their parents’ liquor cabinet.”

  “They were both alcoholics?” Donnally asked, turning toward the freeway on-ramp.

  “As far as I could tell, but only Father Phil looked the part. His face had that windburned look and his eyes were always watery. Sherwyn was different. It didn’t show. I think that alcohol was part of their seduction routine and they knew their parts, drunk or sober.” Melvin emitted a disgusted laugh. “You should’ve seen those teenage boys standing around at the beginning of the parties with their glasses of Chardonnay, acting all sophisticated. And the men waiting for them to get drunk. Not leering. That would be too crude. Just waiting. Sweating with anticipation.