by Joshua Corin
Tom shook his head. “It’s a wig.”
“It’s a nice wig.” Esme took another swallow. “He knew about the sting?”
“Yes.”
“He’s smart.”
“Yes.”
“I’m smarter.”
And a grin spread across her parched lips.
Tom sat down.
“It’s about the election,” she explained. “There’s a group called the Unity for a Better Tomorrow. They’re a Christian organization. They’ve sponsored events for Kellerman. Their first event was in Atlanta last November. Guess where the second event was?”
“And the religious angle ties back to the Mencken quote in the videotape. Galileo’s a zealot.”
“Most psychopaths are.” She took another gulp of water. “The next event was in Santa Fe, right after Christmas. That’s where our guy’s going next.”
“What a coincidence,” replied Tom. “That’s where I’m going next too.”
Esme nodded.
Silence passed between them. Silence, and history.
Then:
“He could have killed me, Tom.”
“I know. You’re very lucky.”
“No.” She took a breath. “He had his gun to my head. He could have killed me. He could have pulled the trigger. But he didn’t. Why?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll be seeing him soon. I’ll be sure to ask him for you, okay?”
She nodded weakly. The past few minutes had been quite an exertion, and all her energy was now drained away.
Tom knew it was time to go. He kissed her forehead.
“I am so sorry,” he whispered.
Esme muttered something in response.
“What?” He leaned in close. “I didn’t hear you.”
But she had fallen asleep.
13
Meteorology in San Francisco was a mug’s game. No amount of technology or science could predict what warm, cold, dry, wet, windy, calm weather would occur from moment to moment, seasons be damned. And in the City by the Bay, it was possible to be warm, cold, dry, wet, windy, and calm at the same time.
On today, the first of March, the weather gods brewed up something fierce. It began with a fog, as most everything here did. Residents woke up to white soup. Folks wielded flashlights to find their morning paper. Lilly Toro used her Bic lighter, and carried her copy of the San Francisco Chronicle back to her ex-girlfriend Penny’s kitchen table. Penny was already gone. She worked the morning shift at a twenty-four-hour sex shop over in Chinatown. Usually Lilly would be gone too, either on assignment or at least on her way to Mission Street, but as of two days ago she was on suspension, pending review.
“The problem,” explained her editor, “is that your ambition superseded your common sense. You’re very gifted, Lilly, but extraordinarily callow, and the fact is you compromised the security of a federal investigation.”
Had her informant been the real deal, none of this would have happened. She would have written a great story and, instead of a reprimand, she’d be getting a raise. She’d have been barraged with offers, instead of crashing at her ex’s split-level. Had her informant been the real deal, had he been a cop, the data she’d given him on the task force wouldn’t have come back to bite her at all. At worst, the inside scoop would have leveraged a better working environment between the feds and the local P.D.
Was she ambitious? Sure. But this was America. Since when was ambition a crime in America? Was she callow, naive? Lilly sat down at the kitchen table, lit up a Marlboro and exhaled plumes. Who wasn’t a fool, in this day and age?
To wit, she read the paper.
By the time she got to the business section, the sky outside had blackened like dried blood and the first rumbles of thunder echoed throughout the city. Lilly had to turn on the kitchen light, lest the words on the page fall into shadow. She was on her third cigarette now. The mug she was using for an ashtray was filling up nicely.
She could have read the paper on her Hello Kitty laptop. SFGate.com was one of the oldest and most comprehensive Web sites of any newspaper in the country. In fact, her first job at the company had been to maintain some of its Internet content. This led to blogging, which led to offline reporting, which led to, which led to, which led to, etc.
Rain now, pelting. Thunderstorms were so percussive.
Lilly moved on to sports. The Giants were readying for their first exhibition game. They were playing the Dodgers. How funny it was that two New York franchises, two rivals, ended up out west in the same state. Lilly’s love of the game came from her father. The man loved his westerns and he loved his baseball. What an apple-pie American.
She hadn’t spoken to them since she’d returned. They had called her. They had read about her ordeal. They left her messages, asking if she was all right, if there was anything they could do. But it was too little, too late. The day she came out of the closet, when she was only fifteen years old, they had practically kicked her to the curb. And now they wanted to be nurturing?
Outside, a cat meowed. Someone must have left her out in the rain. Poor thing. Lilly considered heading out into the storm to find the animal. She knew Penny had tuna in the cupboard.
She turned to the metro section.
She could have read the paper on her laptop, yes, but there was something textural about newsprint. She liked the fact that it got all over her fingertips. There was a symbolism there. Or maybe she was, in her own way, just as much a traditionalist as her old man.
Outside, again, the cat meowed.
She was about to snub her cigarette and rescue the poor kitty when an item in the Metro section caught her eye. Presidential candidate Bob Kellerman was scheduled to speak today at Sproul Plaza, UC-Berkeley’s historic rally point. Undoubtedly the Chronicle had its soporific political reporters covering the event. But were any of them high school buds with Deedee Rimes, esteemed sergeant with the Berkeley campus police?
Lilly scrambled for her cell phone.
Deedee was not pleased. “You got to be fucking kidding me, L.”
“D, you owe me…”
“Don’t even go there.”
“In eleventh grade—”
“Don’t do it, L.”
“If I hadn’t written that essay for you—”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
“D, you know I’m right.”
“Of course I know you’re right. You remind me about it every fucking time we get a beer. You tell the bartender. ‘My friend Deedee’s going to buy me a drink. Let me share with you why.’”
Lilly sucked on her Marlboro and sighed fumes. “I’m in a bad way, D. My luck’s been for shit. I need this.”
Silence on the other line. Then:
“This makes us even, L. You even mention the eleventh grade again, and I’ll knock you on your ass so hard your ancestors’ll need crutches. Got it?”
Lilly got it, and hopped in the shower. What she knew about politics could fit on a napkin, but a backstage exclusive with a national figure was sparkly from all angles. All she had to do was poke him or his staff with the right question—the kind of wild inquiry the sleepyheads in political journalism would never dream of asking—and she could leverage whatever quote she received back into the good graces of her lord and master, the San Francisco Chronicle.
It was an old trick, really. Public figures are armored against most anything relevant the press can throw at them, so you blindside them with an allegation so preposterous they just have to take the bait. Then you’ve got them. But what to ask?
Lilly didn’t kid herself. This wasn’t the noble approach. This was the recourse of desperation. Speaking of, once dressed she grabbed a tin of tuna from the cupboard and carried it out with her to the front porch. In the time she’d spent in the shower and getting ready, the rain had tapered off to an ugly drizzle. The cat, a white tabby sodden with mud, was curled up underneath an awning.
“Good kitty,” she said, and headed for her precious pink VW Beetle, parked bes
ide the mailbox. She’d found the old car on Craigslist, of all places. It always took a minute to start, but once it got going, it purred like, well, like a good kitty.
Berkeley was a three-cigarette drive. As she neared the campus, the traffic became predictably dense. Fortunately, her Beetle could travel nicely in the narrow breakdown lane, and Lilly skipped ahead of the honking throng and up to the south gate. She snagged her press ID from the glove compartment and dangled it for the guards. They directed her to a nearby parking lot.
UC-Berkeley’s massive campus was oriented around Sather Tower, a 300+ foot clock-and-bell obelisk colloquially referred to as The Campanile. As she locked her car, she couldn’t help but stare at the mighty stone finger. Her mind immediately flashed to Charles Whitman, the boy who in 1966 mounted the administration building at the University of Texas at Austin, a rifle in his arms, and proceeded to target forty-five people.
The Campanile would make the perfect staging ground for her sniper.
She reached in her purse for another cigarette. Her tiny hands were trembling now. Get a grip, she chastised herself. Amarillo was old news. Today was about your future! By now her hands and feet were tingling, and inside her rib cage her heart was galloping.
She was experiencing an anxiety attack, her fourteenth since she’d returned to San Francisco. Her doctor had prescribed Xanax, but she’d just sold them to a buddy for some easy cash. Now, as her lungs squeezed and squeezed like angry fists, as the dizziness came, and the nausea, she just wanted to climb back into her Beetle and drive to her buddy’s apartment and snatch back those pills and down the whole vial. The first time she had suffered an anxiety attack, she thought she was dying. Because that’s what it felt like. And even though she knew she wasn’t dying, that her onslaught of symptoms was completely psychosomatic, that she was actually okay, even though she knew these things—it didn’t make one lick of difference. Perception was exploitative, perception was everything, and who knew that better than Lilly Toro.
Lilly closed her eyes and took account of her organs, one by one. Chill out, she demanded. She shuttled her imagination to a pleasant memory: her first adult kiss, behind a church on Martin Blvd. The ways that kiss had made her feel were ironically quite similar to now—the racing heart, the tingling limbs—but all saturated with such warmth and security. Lilly let that wink of sunshine suffice her panic, override it. Good conquers evil, she insisted. And her symptoms began to subside. Yes. Yes.
She opened her eyes, checked her reflection in her Beetle’s side mirror. Her black hair was matted to her sweaty forehead. She fixed it, took a final, steadying breath and marched on to Sproul Plaza, carefully avoiding any glimpse of the looming bell tower in the distance.
Okay. Back to more important matters. What to ask Bob Kellerman? As she approached the masses gathered on the quad, she started narrowing her choices. She could go kinky (“Is it true you enjoy paddling?”) or she could go criminal (“Is it true you enjoy gambling?”). Both were sensationalistic. Both would amount to a denial, but by then she’d have her foot in the door.
Bob Kellerman denies allegations of gambling.
It was tabloid journalism, to be sure, but the balance in news between ethics and entertainment had been tipped long ago to favor the latter. That was what had been so attractive about her task force story. She maneuvered through the crowd of undergrads. The storm clouds had dissipated and a sunny drunken glow poured out over the field. And there was Deedee near the dais on the stairs. The candidate and his handlers were probably still inside, prepping their talking points. Lilly shoved toward her old pal.
“Hey, D, how about a kiss?” Lilly’s bravado was just that—one didn’t recover from an anxiety attack in twenty minutes. But bravado was expected, so bravado was provided.
“What have you got now, L, thirty-one piercings?”
“One for every flavor, babe.”
“You can go backstage,” said Deedee, “ after the speech. You’ll have maybe thirty seconds.”
“That’s all I need.”
“I know. I’ve heard.”
Lilly rolled her eyes and scanned the crowd for a good place to stand. The audience was diverse, but she expected nothing less from a Berkeley crowd. Still, her fellow Goths had to be somewhere, usually in the shade…and there they were. Lilly joined them under a poplar tree.
The president of the college, Nancy Holland, approached the podium. It was time.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began, and Lilly tuned out the rest. She wasn’t here to listen to Nancy Holland. She wasn’t even here to listen to Bob Kellerman. She was here to snare a quote.
A pasty-faced teenager to her right offered her a clove cigarette. She gladly accepted. She felt like a kid again.
Finally, Bob Kellerman took the stage. The audience sang out in symphonic applause. Lilly couldn’t help but be swept up in the adoration. She couldn’t see what was so special about the man but the crowd ate him up.
He was a good-looking man, not movie-star handsome but the physiognomy of a Norman Rockwell character, one who loved to watch his first-born son hit a home run in Little League. Another apple-pie American. His hair and eyes were the same shade of chestnut brown, and the maple-colored tie he wore underlined their earthiness. He had a curious scar across the middle of his left eyebrow, almost indistinguishable and yet impossible to ignore. Did it stem from a childhood accident? One of the few facts Lilly recalled about the man was that he was a volunteer fireman. Perhaps the scar came from that. Perhaps there wasn’t a scar at all, and some genius in makeup had penciled it in to make Kellerman appear more rugged.
He spoke for forty-five minutes. Much of the time he seemed to be extemporizing off the top of his head, but Lilly was certain it was an oratory trick. The thesis of his speech was conservation, always a safe topic in enviro-conscious Northern California. He referenced Berkeley’s activist past and encouraged everyone to vote for change and…Lilly tuned him out. Politics wasn’t her thing. She used the time he spoke to come up with her Outrageous Question. By the time he wrapped up, she’d chosen.
According to Deedee, the candidate was going to retreat into Sproul Hall where he would reconnoiter with his entourage, and then they would exit out the Telegraph Avenue door to a rope line. According to Deedee, the best time for her thirty seconds would be in Sproul Hall, and she had to climb over (and under) co-eds to get there. Fortunately, Lilly’s small size and big attitude made crowd-climbing none too difficult, and she met up with Deedee at the top of the stairs.
“Thirty seconds,” Deedee reminded her.
Lilly nodded and entered the building and there he was, the man of the hour, surrounded by a cadre of Important People whom Lilly neither knew nor cared about.
“Governor Kellerman!” she called out, inflecting her voice with even more hoarseness than usual—all the better to grab his attention. And grab his attention it did. He glanced over at her, curiosity in his eyes, and then his human pit-bull bodyguard stomped between them.
“No press,” the bodyguard growled.
“Just one question?” She angled her tiny head to the side and again caught Kellerman’s gaze. She flashed him an innocent grin. “Please?”
“Sure,” the governor replied. He probably thought she was an undergrad. She weaved past the bodyguard and approached Kellerman. He was taller than she expected, and that kind fatherly air he projected on stage intensified in person. This was a man you wanted to hug after a hard day’s work.
“What’s your question?” he asked.
But Lilly had nothing to say. She suddenly didn’t want to ambush this obviously good man. She suddenly didn’t want to be there at all.
“I…”
“Yes?”
A few of the Important People now stared at her, waiting.
“Your…” She’d never felt so ashamed in her life. Not for her inability to speak but for the horrible words she’d come so close to saying. “It…”
One of the Important People w
hispered in the governor’s ear. He nodded and held out his hand.
“I’m afraid I have to go,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Ms. Toro.”
She shook his hand and they went out the south gate and Lilly remained in the lobby of Sproul Hall, utterly flustered. He’d called her Ms. Toro. How had he known her name? Oh, the press pass around her neck. Right. Yes. The press pass. She fanned a hand—the hand he shook—in front of her face.
But wait! Maybe if she asked him something relevant, something substantive…
She rushed out the south doors. The governor was already halfway down the rope line, signing autographs. When someone would hand him a gift, which happened every fifth or sixth person, he warmly but mechanically passed it back to one of his handlers, who was carrying a large bag for that very purpose. Photographers were capturing the candidate in all his user-friendly charm. Lilly recognized a few of them from the Chronicle.
Then she saw Galileo, wearing a 49ers cap, nearly blended in the crowd.
Governor Kellerman was about to shake his hand.
“No!” she cried, but the crowd was much louder than even she could yell, especially when her hyperventilating returned. Because anxiety attacks aren’t tamed so easily, and hers returned with reinforcements. The sight of the killer, her “Ray Milton,” reignited her tingling, her nausea, her palpitations. The world spun off its axis. She wasn’t going to faint. She was going to implode.
Through blurred vision she watched as he reached into the pocket of his red raincoat for a gun. No—wait. Not a gun. A short white envelope. He slid the envelope into Kellerman’s outstretched hand…and Lilly could stand still no longer. Kellerman wasn’t going to be shot, not today, thank fucking Christ, and so she ran, ran from the noise, the crowd, the air, ran away, pushed through the door and back into Sproul and toward the nearest restroom and into the first cubicle and she locked the door and fell to her knees and dry-heaved into the still water, which shimmered with each empty breath.
The killer was here. Why? He hadn’t pulled the trigger. He hadn’t even taken out his gun. He’d handed Kellerman a goddamn envelope. No, that was good. Stop analyzing. Control your breathing or you’re going to pass out on a toilet in Berkeley. Wouldn’t be the first time, but still. Think about that first kiss, that first kiss, that first—