by Steven Gore
Landon hung up the phone. Ultimately, he recognized, it was to his brother he owed what he didn’t owe to chance. As a corporate lawyer, it was Brandon’s connections that funded his campaigns and later supplied the money he deposited into the political action committees of the Senate leadership to buy himself a seat on the Judiciary Committee.
As much as he had despised it, at Yale they were known as Machiavelli and the Prince. Brandon: dark hair, peering eyes, diminutive face, expert debater. Landon: tall, fair-skinned, strong-jawed. A leader, not an arguer. That they could be brothers had unnerved their classmates, just as it had the families on Nob Hill where they’d grown up. The dissimilarity had always powered an undercurrent of whispering that tugged at them as they walked to their table in the dining room of their parents’ country club or swam in the pool. But, fortunately, age, like erosion, had smoothed the stark edges of their contours and softened the contrast.
The phone beeped again. This time it was his driver. Landon rose, and then glanced down at the Supreme Court building across the street. It seemed at this moment like a fist with two fingers missing, mangled and powerless—
But not for long.
As he walked down the hallway toward the elevator, he wondered what the president’s reaction would be when he heard the two names. How would a president who had always fled to the center because he’d lacked the courage of his convictions adjust to this reminder that he owed his presidency to contributors who were finally demanding that they receive what they’d been paying for over all these years.
Chapter 3
The sun cresting the East Bay hills blinded Gage as the bridge exit into San Francisco looped back toward the waterfront. He descended into the shade of the office towers and condo complexes that had reshaped the shoreline in the quarter century since he had converted the hundred-year-old warehouse into his firm’s offices. A minute later, he emerged near the four-lane Embarcadero, its palm-bordered trolley line giving the boulevard the unnatural and uncomfortable appearance of having been harvested from the San Diego harbor and grafted onto San Francisco Bay.
Gage paused at an intersection as a still-groggy runner crossed against the light, then drove south past a scattering of piers and restaurants, and slipped into an alley. He parked along the back wall of his building and walked around to the front, where he spotted his surveillance chief sitting on the concrete steps, staring across the street toward the water.
“Thanks for calling Socorro,” Viz said as Gage approached. “Your and Faith’s condolences meant a lot to her.”
Hector McBride had been nicknamed by Gage for his godlike ability to catalogue the covert lives of his targets and to condense and evaporate like an omniscient cloud. Despite standing a couple of inches taller than Gage’s six foot two, it sometimes seemed the ex-DEA agent could disappear into the sliver of a midday shadow.
But not today. Today his despair surrounded him like a physical presence.
Gage examined Viz’s drawn face, and then sat down beside him.
“The problem was Charlie,” Gage said, “not your sister.”
Viz shrugged. “Still . . .”
“How’s she holding up?”
“It’s kind of like he died twice. When he first got shot, the doctors said he wasn’t going to make it, so she got herself ready. Kind of steeled herself, then she got blindsided.”
“Have they figured out what caused his death?” Gage asked.
“A seizure, maybe a heart attack. They’re doing an autopsy this morning.” Viz glanced up at the hazy sky, then out at the commuter traffic inching toward downtown through a humid alloy of fog and smog. “Maybe yesterday’s heat had something to do with it.”
Viz leaned forward, knees spread, forearms resting on his thighs, rotating his gray Stetson between his hands, fingers working their way along the inside of the sweatband and his thumb along the brim.
“I’d appreciate you and Faith coming to the funeral. For Socorro’s sake. It’s going to be pretty lonely. Charlie didn’t have any real friends, and his parents aren’t well enough to travel from Florida.”
“We can even come back to the house afterward, if you think it would help.”
Viz nodded, then lowered his head, his unfocused eyes oblivious to his rotating hat.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“About what?”
“About dying too soon—” Viz caught himself, flustered, eyes pained. His own words reminding him of the death of Gage’s father three months earlier. “Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”
Gage’s mind pushed past the final memory of his father at the moment of his death to their last conversation a day earlier. Sitting by his bedside at the family’s southern Arizona ranch, holding his hand as they gazed out the adobe-framed windows at the desert. His father, a family physician, had laughed about being paid in Yaqui corn, Apache chickens, and Mexican tamales in the years after World War II, cried about friends he’d lost in combat when he was young and to disease as he got older, and wondered aloud about the changes the world would see after he was gone.
“My dad told me his only regret was that he wouldn’t live long enough to see how everything turned out,” Gage said.
Viz pulled away and looked over at him. “But nobody ever . . .”
Gage nodded. “I think that’s why he had a little smile on his face when he said it.”
“But there’s a difference between your father and Charlie.” Viz’s voice rose, more in frustration than in argument. “A big difference.” He set down his hat on the step next to him, as if preparing to plead Palmer’s case. “Your dad’s life had a kind of completeness. Charlie’s was unfinished, and he didn’t have a chance to make things right.”
“He had lots of chances,” Gage said, “he just never took them.”
They both knew it was worse than that, for the lens through which Palmer had chosen to view others’ lives had filtered those chances out.
Even more, Palmer’s kind of life made his the kind of death that brought all his acts and deceits into the present, and into the space between the two of them sitting on these steps.
Palmer had spent his career as part of an underworld of lawyers and private investigators—as clandestine as a secret society and as public as a Hollywood celebrity trial—that exploited victims’ shames and terrors and forced them to choose silence over justice.
In the years after he’d left the San Francisco Police Department, Palmer had been the surreptitious hand that had tipped the scales in countless child custody hearings and divorce battles, in sexual harassment complaints, even in disputes over movie rights and royalties. He’d been an expert in the art of leverage, in discovering the embarrassing lapse, the plagiarized high school term paper, the drunken confession on a defunct social networking site, the juvenile petty theft from Victoria’s Secret, the videotaped ménage à cinq in a college dorm, the used condom in a Las Vegas hotel room, or the empty bottle of Prozac in an aging star’s garbage.
He’d also been an expert at avoiding exposure; for those furious enough to expose him also had the most to lose.
And sitting there next to Viz, with him so desperate to redeem the unredeemable, it was unimaginable to Gage that Palmer had found the courage in his final moments to crawl out of the darkness and into a light that would transform his entombed past into a living legacy.
“It’s just hard to live with mixed feelings about dead people,” Viz said. “He did a lot of bad stuff as a cop and an investigator, but he was also a brother-in-law who tried to do good for his kids.” He sighed. “The truth is I’m not sure they have a clue about who he really was.”
Viz turned toward Gage and spread his hands.
“But how could they? All they ever saw were movie stars and politicians calling him, begging for his help. And it wasn’t like he could ever go to career day at their school and describe what he really did for a living.”
“What about Socorro? You think she understands?”
“I’m not sure she’s ever seen past what she thought she saw on their first date.” Viz shook his head and blew out a breath. “And I hope she never does.”
They sat in silence listening to an airplane banking over the city and heading east, the engine roar fading until it merged with the rumble of traffic and the growl of container ships powering across the bay toward the Port of Oakland.
Gage glanced in the direction of the Palmer’s Victorian mansion on Russian Hill, beyond the concrete and steel of the financial district and the brick-lined alleys of Chinatown, his mind’s eye seeing it standing among oaks and weeping willows.
“Charlie called me a couple of times after he got home from the hospital,” Gage said. “I was on the road until that final one.”
“That’s what I heard from Socorro. It shocked the hell out of me. I always figured you’d be the last on his list. It’s not like you two were ever friends. But then I started thinking maybe he got desperate, frustrated because SFPD hadn’t found out who shot him.”
Gage shook his head. “I don’t think that was it. Spike Pacheco told me Charlie didn’t seem to care whether or not the guy got caught. He hardly even looked at the photo spreads Spike showed him. It’s not SFPD’s fault the case dead-ended.”
Viz peered over at Gage. “Dead-ended how? On the back burner or off the stove altogether?”
“It’s a matter of diminishing returns. There was nothing more Spike could do without Charlie’s cooperation.”
“Were you going to help him, whatever it was?”
Gage pointed over his shoulder toward the lobby and the reception station. “If Tansy had her way.”
Viz smiled. “I’ll bet she’s still trying to save him.”
“Saving a dead man would be a helluva trick.”
“I don’t know, boss,” Viz said. “They say Yaquis can do things other humans can’t.”
Gage took in a long breath, then exhaled. “Not this time.”
“How about at least playing the childhood friend card to get Spike to jump-start the investigation? Big guy like you, little guy like him, must’ve been a dozen times you saved his ass when you were growing up together. You’ve got to have something in the bank.”
“There’s nothing more to go on. The leads have dried up.”
“What about the new ones?”
Gage turned toward Viz. “Did Charlie tell your sister something Spike doesn’t know about?”
“No.” Viz half smiled and then wrapped his hope inside a prediction. “The new ones you’re gonna come up with.”
“You playing the sister card?”
“When it comes to Charlie, that’s the only one I’ve got.”
One of Gage’s other investigators walked up the steps. She paused to squeeze Viz’s shoulder and express her condolences, then continued into the building.
Gage angled his thumb toward the entrance. “You want some coffee?”
“I better.” Viz picked up his hat. “It was a long night. Socorro couldn’t sleep, so I stayed up with her.”
They rose and walked through the double glass doors. Muffled sounds of printers and copiers and a dozen telephone conversations flowed from the hallways beyond. With clients scattered across the world’s twenty-four time zones, Gage’s office operated on a 6 A.M. to midnight schedule, with investigators working overlapping shifts. Toxic spills in India or industrial sabotage in Dubai or securities frauds in London weren’t limited to between nine and five, Pacific time.
Viz paused at the vacant reception desk. “Where’s Tansy?”
“Moki had an early doctor’s appointment.”
Viz’s face darkened as he looked down at the empty chair. “It’s heartbreaking. I don’t know how she does it. I’ve never understood why she didn’t send him back to the reservation. I mean it’s not like he’ll even know she’s not around.”
“You wouldn’t let other people take care of Socorro if something happened to her.” Gage pointed at Viz’s chest. “You’re a lot more like Tansy than you let on.”
Viz spread his arms. “Actually, I’m about two and a half Tansys.”
“How’s that? You gain a few pounds?”
“No. I think she lost a few.”
Viz inspected Tansy’s blotter calendar on which she kept track of the locations of the investigators as they traveled. The boxes for the first two weeks in September were marked with a code for Gage’s name.
“I didn’t think to ask about your trip,” Viz said, looking back at Gage. “You find the guy who stole the fiber-optic design?”
“In Zurich. Thanks for asking, but I know you’ve got more important things on your mind.” Gage glanced at the calendar. “You need some time off?”
“Just a day or so. Funeral stuff. Their kids are coming up from UCLA tomorrow and they’ll stay close by her. I’m not much for sitting around.”
“Since when? That’s how you spend most of your life. It’s part of your job description. I know. I wrote it myself.”
“Well . . .” Viz shrugged. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
Gage led Viz down the hallway to the kitchen and poured them both mugs of coffee.
“You think Socorro will want me to look into the shooting?” Gage asked, handing one to Viz.
“I don’t know. She’s not the sort of person who’s going to let her life turn on whether the guy gets caught. She knows how twisted people get who live for revenge.” Viz paused, and his eyes went vacant. Then he looked back at Gage. “But still, there’s got to be a lot of uncertainty. And it’s hard to live with a mystery, especially since whoever it was killed him in the end.”
Chapter 4
An hour after he’d left the president, Landon Meyer was still light-headed with a kind of breathlessness he hadn’t felt since his college rugby days when the world condensed into exhilarating, time-freezing moments. His hands vibrated as he raised the highball glass of bourbon from his desk to his lips.
He’d steeled himself as he was escorted into the Oval Office. President William Duncan sat in an elbowed mahogany armchair. Chief of staff Stuart Sheridan stood by a window facing the Rose Garden. Duncan only stood long enough to shake Landon’s hand and to direct him to the couch.
It had never struck Landon more clearly than at that moment that if Brandon was his Machiavelli, then Sheridan was the president’s. Except Duncan and Sheridan could have been twins separated at birth. Duncan had been raised in a coal-mining town and wore the weathered face of struggle, while Sheridan had summered in the Hamptons, a childhood of ease. Both were in their late sixties, hair dusted with gray, faces keen and self-satisfied despite the historic reversal of roles in the Su-preme Court nomination process that was moments away.
“I think we should skip the niceties,” President Duncan said, “and start at the bottom line.” He offered a thin smile. “We can make nice later, if necessary.”
“I’ve given this a great deal of consideration, Mr. President—”
Duncan raised his palm. “Skip that part.”
Landon felt himself redden as if he was receiving a dressing-down in front of his classmates.
“Mr. President—”
“The names, man. Just the names.”
Landon gave him the names.
Duncan and Sheridan glanced at each other, then both grinned at Landon.
The president spoke first. “Let’s just call them Starsky and Hutch until we’re ready to release it to the press.”
Landon leaned forward in his chair.
“That’s it? No argument about you not wanting to waste political capital pushing through these nominations? Looking for a middle ground with the Democrats so you won’t get pilloried like last time? A black? A woman? An Hispanic?”
Duncan shook his head. “Lame ducks don’t need a middle ground—and this is about my legacy.” He rose. “I’m not blaming you personally, but for almost seven years Congress has been an evenly divided logjam. My so-calle
d legislative agenda was stillborn. I could’ve spent my presidency fishing or clearing brush on a Texas ranch and it wouldn’t have made much difference. Other than a tiny bit of tort reform and a few defense spending bills, I’ve accomplished nothing.” He spread his arms wide. “Nothing on abortion. Nothing on debt. Nothing on Social Security. Nothing on Alaska drilling. Nothing on nuclear power.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Landon said. “What about economic—”
“Diddly-squat. Extending NAFTA was diddly-squat, even less than diddly-squat—and the jury is still out about whether it helped us or hurt us.”
Sheridan approached them and then sat down and interjected himself into the conversation.
“The lesson since the days of Earl Warren,” Sheridan said, “is that if you can’t win in Congress, drive your agenda through the Court.” He clenched his fist. “Just when the Democrats think they’ve won, we’ll crush them.”
Duncan grabbed the conversation back.
“I’m willing to let my presidency rise and fall on whether we—you—can push Starsky and Hutch through the Senate. Let Newsweek call mine a failed presidency. I want to give history something different to write about: how my domination of the Court controlled the country for a hundred years after I was dead.”
Landon glanced over at Sheridan, expecting a Sieg heil salute.
“Starsky and Hutch are young enough to serve forty years each.” Duncan smiled again and threw up his hands. “Shoot, man, that’s almost half a century right there, and it’ll take another half century for anyone to undo what they accomplish.”
“But they’re only two. I’m not sure you’ll get another opportunity to make an appointment, so we’ll only have a majority for—”
“Twenty years is long enough to cast the die. Think of what Earl Warren did. The country still hasn’t recovered from that disaster. We’ll have a super majority: Starsky, Hutch, Robins, Ardino, Thompson, and Sunseri. Even if one gets weak-kneed, the rest can deliver—and nothing is off-limits.”