by Michael Nava
He stared at me with his dark eyes as if I’d spoken in a language that he didn’t speak, which, in a way, I had.
“I didn’t mean to kill that man.”
“You built and planted the bombs that did.”
With a firm shake of his head, he said, “Freddy made the bombs. He told me where to put them. He told me there wasn’t going to be anyone in the church. All I did was do what he said.”
“Why would Freddy want to blow up a church?”
“He hates those fucking so-called Christians who want to lock us up. We— –he— had to take the war to them.”
“I was at the community meeting where you attacked the woman priest and got in a fight with a guy who said he was a Christian. Are you sure it was Freddy who hates Christians?”
“Okay, it’s both of us,” he replied defiantly. “But the bombing was his idea.”
“Did you plant the bombs?”
“He told me to.”
“Did he force you to help him?”
“I . . .” He faltered. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if he forced you?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “It’s complicated.”
“Explain it, we have time.”
“I love Freddy,” he said. “I would do anything for him. And yeah, I hate the Christians. They say God hates fags and people believe them and we die. I had all this anger! Freddy did, too. He said we have to make them suffer the way we suffer, and it’s not going to happen by waving signs and chanting slogans. He said we have to take the war to them. I thought it was all just talk but he was serious. I let him talk me into helping him, but I never meant to hurt anyone. We both thought the church would be deserted. That man’s death was an accident.”
“Where is Freddy now?”
He shook his head. “Mexico, I think. We were supposed to go there until things cooled down. I was waiting for him at a motel, but I started detoxing and was going crazy being there by myself. That’s when I came here, to Becca’s.” He grasped the arm of his chair. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. If I didn’t mean it, is it still murder?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “Everyone who participated in the bombing— the person who planned it, the person who made the bombs, and the person who planted them— is guilty of murder, and the use of an explosive automatically makes the murder punishable by death.”
“What? I’m going to be executed?”
“That’s up to the DA. It’s not automatic, and he’s required to consider mitigating factors.”
“What are those?”
“Reasons not to execute a person,” I said. “Age, for example. The law figures if you’re young you might be rehabilitated. That works in your favor unless you have a long record. Do you?”
“I was busted for possession of coke, but I got diversion, and I was arrested at that demonstration at the Chinese Theater.”
“No arrests or convictions for any kind of violent crime?”
“I’m not violent.”
Except you just admitted that you helped blow up a church, I thought, but didn’t say. Theo’s capacity for dealing with reality seemed pretty limited at the moment. No need to overwhelm him.
“No prior record for violence is good. If, like you say, Freddy was the mastermind and you were following his instructions and you believed the church would be deserted, that might also count in your favor.”
“Fuck,” he wheezed. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here checking boxes to decide if I live or die.”
He was teetering at the edge of hysteria.
“Let’s take a break,” I said. “You want a glass of water?”
He nodded, still stunned. I went into the cheerful little kitchen, poured two glasses of water from the tap and went back into the living room where I handed him one. He finished it in a single long swallow.
“You have family, Theo? People who can help support you through this?”
He rolled the empty glass between his hands. “My stepdad kicked me out of the house when I was sixteen for being gay. I talk to my ma sometimes, but I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Friends?” I suggested.
“You watch porn?” he asked me. “Rent videos?”
“No,” I said.
He made a derisive little noise in the back of his throat. “Figures.” His eyes washed over me. “You seem pretty straight for a fag. I was a porn star. Worked for all the big studios. Drove around West Hollywood in my yellow Jeep Wrangler with the top down and the stereo blasting. Everyone knew who I was, and I had a million friends.” He got up, went into the kitchen, and I heard the tap running. He stood at the doorway and sipped from his glass. “Then I tested positive, and it turns out I didn’t have any friends at all. Except Josh. And Freddy.” He sat down. “Can you save my life?”
“We need evidence besides your say-so that Freddy was behind the bombing.”
“He bought all the stuff for the bombs,” Theo replied. “I mean, I wouldn’t have known what we needed or how to put them together. We bought some of it at that big Home Depot on Sunset. Pipes and wires and stuff. He packed the pipes with some kind of black powder. I think he said it was gunpowder, but I don’t know where he got it. Does that help?”
“Yes. Anything else?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t think now.”
“I want you to write down everything you remember in the days that led up to and following the bombing in as much detail as you can.”
“I’m not much of a writer,” he said. He finished his water.
The drama, the tension had gone out of the room and it was just the two of us talking calmly, as if we were making banal conversation and not decisions that would potentially end with Theo on death row.
“I want to call the DA and negotiate your surrender, okay?”
“What do I have to do?”
“You need to prepare yourself for jail. I can get you into isolation, but it’s still going to be a cell. Once you’re in custody, remember the first, last and only rule: you don’t talk to anyone, not the cops, the prosecutors, the press, or another inmate unless I’m with you.”
In a resigned voice, as if he already knew the answer, he asked, “Will I ever get out?”
“My immediate goal is to keep you off death row,” I replied. “After that, we’ll see.”
TEN
Everything about the woman who opened the door was practical— her tan slacks and blue blouse, efficient short hair, solid, stocky body— but a deep, feminine grace drew together her strong features. Her light brown eyes, even as they assessed the stranger before her, were doubtful but not unfriendly.
She was lighter-skinned in the flesh than she’d appeared in the photographs, but her Blackness still shocked Jessica because it represented a side of Daniel that remained fundamentally ungraspable to her. Jessica was not an overt racist like her Georgia-born father, and racial mixing had never seemed to her the abomination it did to him but only because it wasn’t something she’d ever had to consider. Other than Caleb Cowell and his family, there were no Black people in her world, and she had no reason to think about them. Now, confronted with her husband’s Black lover, the mother of his only child, she felt disoriented, speechless.
“Hello,” the woman said. “May I help you?”
She managed to say, “I’m Jessica Herron. Daniel’s wife.”
Now it was Gwen who stared speechlessly at the woman on her doorstep. She cleared her throat and said, “Come in, Mrs. Herron.”
••••
Gwen offered tea, a diversion, Jess thought, to give them both time to absorb each other’s presence. While she pottered in the kitchen, Jessica paced the cluttered, comfortable living room. A bay window framed the backs of the adjoining Victorians with long, complicated staircases leading down from the upper flats to small gardens just visible from where she stood. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected but the quiet, pleasantly furnished room and shrill pip
ing of a tea kettle in the kitchen— the ordinariness of her surroundings— calmed her apprehensions. Yet, as she ran her hand over the back of a wing chair, she thought, Daniel might have sat here, and a strange discomfort came over her, as if her presence violated, not Gwen’s, but Daniel’s privacy. This was his real life, she realized sadly, and I have no right to be here.
Her sense of having stumbled into a stranger’s life grew as she studied the framed photographs on the mantel of the gas fireplace. Many were of the boy— Wyatt— taken from the time he was a toddler to his teens. Gwen was in some while in others were what she assumed were members of Gwen’s family, solid, comfortable-looking Black men and women and children. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. In a photograph half-hidden among the others Wyatt was wedged between a smiling Gwen and a beaming Daniel in a high school graduation cap and gown. She lifted it from the mantel. Here was the conclusive evidence of paternity in the color of the boy’s eyes, the curve of his nose, the shape of his face— all identical to his father’s. As if discovering Daniel’s secret life all over again, the photo left her nearly breathless with shock, then anger and then, to her surprise, a complicated sadness. Daniel’s death had ended not only his life with her, but his life with them, his family.
Gwen came in with the tea things and set them down on the coffee table.
“That was Wyatt’s graduation from Lowell,” she said about the photograph in Jessica’s hand.
Jess replaced it on the mantel. “He’s a handsome boy. How is he? I understand he was— is ill?”
“Please, sit, have some tea.” When they had arranged themselves in facing chairs, Gwen asked, “How did you know about Wyatt? Did Daniel tell you?”
Her voice was calm and candid, but she busied herself with the tea things nervously.
Jessica accepted the cup of tea Gwen had poured into a lovely, gold-rimmed china teacup— the cups she imagined Gwen brought out for guests.
“No, he never told me about you,” she replied. “I hired a private investigator to follow him because I thought he was having an affair. He found you.”
Gwen picked up her own cup. “Did he know you knew about us?”
She shook her head. “I never told him.”
Gwen put her cup down, the tea untouched, and said, “Daniel and I were not having an affair. We were kids when we first met— not much older than Wyatt is now— and whatever we had was over a long time ago.”
“But he kept in touch with you,” Jessica said.
She shook her head. “No, after I told him I was pregnant we went our separate ways, and I didn’t see him for another six years. Dan was in town for work and he looked me up. I suppose he was curious about me, the way you’re curious about how people you knew when you were young turned out. He thought I’d had an abortion, so he certainly didn’t expect to meet his son.” She sighed. “Maybe I should have put him off, but I thought he deserved to know about Wyatt, and once Dan met him he wanted to be in his life. He was his father; it wouldn’t have been right to shut him out, and Wyatt loved him, loved having a dad. So, you see Mrs. Herron, it was Wyatt he came to see, not me.”
“Did Wyatt always know Daniel was his father?”
“Not at first,” Gwen replied. With a slight smile, she said, “Neither one of us knew how to explain the situation to a six-year-old. He was just mom’s old friend, but when Wyatt was nine, Dan took him out for ice cream, and he told me Wyatt looked at him and asked, ‘Are you my dad?’”
Jessica, imagining the scene, could not suppress her own smile. “Why on earth would he ask that?”
“He has Dan’s eyes. No one else in our family has blue eyes,” Gwen replied. “One of Wyatt’s cousins told him your daddy’s a white man. Wyatt put two and two together. He’s a very intelligent boy.”
“He must be,” she said.
“Daniel admitted he was Wyatt’s dad. He said Wyatt just nodded and kept eating his ice cream. Later on, he was angry.”
“Who was angry?”
“Wyatt didn’t understand why he couldn’t visit his father in Los Angeles,” Gwen said. “He thought Dan was ashamed of him because he was Black. When we told him that wasn’t the reason, he was even more confused. Frankly, so was I. I didn’t understand why Dan was keeping Wyatt a secret. I confronted him, and he said it was to protect you.”
“Me?” she said, startled.
“Dan said you were unable to have children, and knowing about Wyatt would have been very distressing to you.”
“He told you about me?” Jessica said, bile rising in her throat.
“I cornered him,” Gwen said, apologetically. “As soon as he said it, I was sorry I’d forced him to.”
Jessica looked at the cup, tiny fragments of tea leaves settling at the bottom. Weren’t tea leaves supposed to predict the future? What future was left for her?
“Did you tell your son about me?”
“All he knew was that his father was married,” Gwen said softly.
“I suppose in his mind I turned into the wicked stepmother,” Jessica said, “who kept his father away from him.”
Gwen sipped her tea and set down the cup. “Wyatt’s used to all kinds of families. Families with two parents, one parent, two dads, two moms. His favorite cousin is being raised by her grandmother, and some of his friends are adopted. After a while, he accepted our family’s situation as what it was. The important thing was that he knew Dan loved him and wanted to be with him.” She smiled. “Then he got to that age when he was more interested in being with his peers than his parents, and both Dan and I were just embarrassments to him.”
“Well, I guess Dan didn’t need children from me, did he?” Jessica said, bitterly.
Gwen waited a moment before she answered, softly, “He was a good father, Mrs. Herron. I imagine he would have loved having children from you.”
She stared at her tea, wished it was alcohol. “He should have married you.”
“We were very young,” Gwen said, “and going in different directions. Dan had converted to his faith. I couldn’t follow him there.”
Jessica raised her head. “You’re a nonbeliever?”
“I believe in kindness,” she replied. “You were a much better match for Dan.”
“Me? Do you think he married me out of love?”
“He spoke of you affectionately,” Gwen replied.
“I think you mean pity,” she said coolly. “My father founded our church and wanted to keep it in the family, but he had no sons, only me, a daughter. He chose Daniel to take over and married me off to him to keep the church in the family.”
Gwen eyed her over the rim of her teacup. “That sounds more like Shakespeare than the Gospels.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The old king without any sons to carry on the dynasty marries his only daughter to his hand-picked heir to keep the kingdom in the family.”
The analogy struck a nerve. “I had a choice,” she replied sharply. “I didn’t have to marry Dan.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Your marriage is none of my business.”
“Then you should have stayed out of it!” Jessica said angrily.
Gwen’s expression was both stung and sympathetic. After a moment, she said, “Dan wasn’t married to you yet when he came back into our lives. If he had been, and I’d known, I wouldn’t have let him in. After he married you, I should have— I don’t know, told him to concentrate on his new family and stop coming around. I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. I’m sorry that we interfered with your marriage.”
Her apology knocked the air out of Jessica’s anger, and she began to weep. She wept and wept in the cheerful cluttered room that had been her husband’s second home, with the woman whom he must have once truly loved; she wept for the happy life he had given up and the barren life they had lived. Gwen reached across the little table, over the fancy tea service, and held her hand until the tears stopped. She fumbled in her purse for her handkerchief, wiped her eyes, a
nd blew her nose.
“Dan’s death must have been very hard on Wyatt,” she said.
Now Gwen’s face trembled with tears. “He was waiting for Dan’s call the night Dan was killed.”
“What?”
“They talked every Thursday evening. When Dan didn’t call, Wyatt tried calling him but got a message the phone wasn’t working. We didn’t know what happened until the next day. Wyatt was devastated.”
Jessica asked, “How is Wyatt doing?”
“He’s . . . holding steady but Dan’s death was a blow.”
The room had darkened as the afternoon waned. Jessica read in Gwen’s face the emotional exhaustion she herself felt.
“Thank you for the tea,” she said. “For seeing me.”
“I think— no, I know that I’m glad you came, Mrs. Herron,” Gwen replied.
Jessica stood. “Call me Jessica. If there’s anything I can do for Wyatt, please let me know. I’ll leave you my number.”
“Thank you,” Gwen said. “Jessica, I am very sorry for your loss. I hope your faith is a comfort to you.”
“Yes,” Jessica lied. “It is. A very great comfort.”
••••
For once, I had a morning in my office instead of being on the road to some far-flung courthouse in a county the size of Rhode Island. The unusually efficient temp sent over by the agency that morning— a brisk woman named Emma Austin— was copy editing a motion for severance at her desk outside my office while I sat at my desk reading up on third-party culpability evidence or, as it was colloquially known in the defense bar, SODDI: Some Other Dude Did It.
In Theo’s version of events, Freddy Saavedra planned the bombing and Theo’s participation was minimal until Freddy made him plant the bombs. But even in this version, he completely incriminated himself.