by D. W. Buffa
“He said that?” she asked with her mouth turned down at the corners and her eyes alive with all the excitement of things still bright and new. “But you told him, didn’t you, that I would always be faithful to you.”
“Always. Or at least until tomorrow.”
We were sitting on the sofa, looking out through sliding glass doors. The moonlight made a shadow drawing of the Golden Gate on the bay below. She hit me gently on the shoulder with her hand.
“You might have trusted me at least a week.”
I wondered if anyone really had, and then realized that it had probably never been a question. She was so good looking, so damned irresistible, that the only thing you could think about was being with her. There was nothing after that.
“You had dinner with him. Did he have anything interesting to say?”
“Everything he says is interesting; but no, nothing in particular,” I replied, keeping the confidence I had been given.
“And what did you think of what happened at trial today?” she asked, picking up from the coffee table in front of us the drink she had made.
“Did you watch it on television? What did you think?”
She became serious. Holding the glass in both hands, she stared down into it.
“I think…I don’t know what to think, except you are a great lawyer and Kevin doesn’t look anything like a man on trial for murder.” She thought a moment. “You know what he looks like, sitting there? The way he looked when he was sitting at the front table at one of those fund-raising dinners, hundreds of people in the room, waiting to give his speech.”
I had not thought of it, but she was right. It was exactly what he looked like: eager and alert, everything in place, suit pressed, tie straight, shoes shined, hair combed, teeth brushed, just waiting for the moment to jump to his feet and flash that winning smile, the perfect candidate, ready to tell you everything you wanted to hear. And yet…
“There is a little more to him than that, I think. He knows he’s on trial for murder. He understands the seriousness of the situation.”
“I don’t mean that he doesn’t. He always has—understood his situation, I mean. Understood, and been ready to do what he has to do to meet it.”
I sat against the corner pillow and watched the way she held herself with such perfect ease, the way she gave even the slightest movement of her hands, the slightest movement of her eyes or mouth, a meaning, and as many interpretations as you could invent.
“Faithful for at least a week,” I repeated her teasing rejoinder. “How faithful do you think you would have been if Fitzgerald had been willing to give up his ambition and married you?”
An instant’s anger flashed in her eyes, replaced a moment later with a glance of bittersweet nostalgia.
“The honest answer is I don’t know. Maybe until someone like you came along. But I would have tried; really, I would have tried. Enough of that now. You probably didn’t see the coverage today, what they’re saying about you and the trial and what is likely to happen, all those self-proclaimed experts on television, or what they’re writing in the papers.”
I did not care what anyone was saying on television; I did not care what anyone was writing in the newspapers. I just wanted to watch her talk.
“It all depends on the channel you watch. Whatever they’re saying on one of them, they’re saying something completely different on another,” she explained, her dark eyes glittering with the antic memory of what she was now so eager to describe. “There is one guy—he really hates you—who says it’s just disgraceful, that it should not be allowed, to raise as a defense that Bridges had to die, that it is ‘okay to kill someone if you don’t happen to agree with what they think.’ I think those are the words he used. Then—and when you think about it, it is really quite funny—he quotes that line from some play Shakespeare wrote: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ He said it with one of those grim smiles that makes you think he wants you to think he is only kidding, but that he really means it, or at least wouldn’t mind if someone did it. Then there are the ones on the other side. They won’t come out and say that Kevin did what he had to, they won’t go that far. No one wants to be the first to come right out and say that Kevin saved the country and should be acquitted, but you can hear it in their tone, see it in the way they talk among themselves, the sympathy they feel. They call it a tragedy; they never call it murder. Tragedy, because Kevin Fitzgerald thought he did not have a choice, not because Walter Bridges was killed.”
She sat on the edge of the sofa, her knees close together, holding her drink in her hand, smiling into it as if she were looking into a mirror, seeing not her own reflection but a portrait of her own remembered past.
“Do you know how I got my name, why my parents called me Tangerine?”
I did not know, I could only guess, but I guessed with unknown knowledge, a sense that there could be only one reason.
“The song.”
She looked from her glass to me. She was not surprised, only curious.
“The lyrics started bouncing through my head the moment we were first introduced.”
“My father loved that song; my mother did not like it. What mother would? A song about a woman who men adore, a woman all the talk of the Argentine. My father was always more the romantic. But he married my mother and spent his life with broken dreams. He had to make a living. He sold insurance. He worked in an office. During one spring break while I was in high school, I met him one day for lunch, and when we were walking back to the building where he worked, he told me—and I never forgot the look in his eyes when he said it—that work, work like his, was just another name for slavery. He died of a heart attack when he was forty-seven, a sad, desperate man who never got tired of telling me that I should live life like an adventure and never settle for anything else. My mother hated him.”
“Hated him?”
“He was a dreamer, which, for her, meant he was useless. It’s the reason she thinks I have a perfect marriage—Winslow money—the same reason my father would be so disappointed. So, tell me, Antonelli,” she said as she turned to me with sad, wistful eyes, “what do you think? Was my father right, should life be lived like an adventure, or my mother, who thinks I can marry for money and not be a whore?”
It was not true that you could learn to know someone over time; you knew them, if you ever knew them, the first time you met them and their eyes told you that you had not just met them after all. I had not known what I was going to say until I heard myself say something I never thought I would, and knew immediately that I meant everything I said.
“Then leave your husband and marry me.”
She tossed her head and laughed, a soft, sweet laugh that taught me perfect happiness and changed my life forever.
JENNY ANN CARRUTHERS had served three terms in Congress from a district just outside Charleston, South Carolina before deciding to join the then new administration of Walter Bridges. She had the Southern manner of easy, slow familiarity, and the polished smile of an insincerity so congenial that instead of rampant duplicity, seemed to practice the closer intimacy of the acknowledged thief. She could lie to your face and with those long, batting eyelashes of hers fan away your resentment. You knew she would never tell the truth, and you found yourself admiring the consistency with which she lied. She was the best press secretary Walter Bridges could have found. I had no idea why Raymond St. John was calling her to the stand. It did not take long to find out.
“Would you tell the jury what your job was when you worked for President Bridges?” asked St. John after he had her state her name for the record, a name that was slightly different than the one she had used since her first campaign for public office. Jennifer Anastasia Carruthers was a little too aristocratic, a little too formal, for a constituency raised on television. Everyone felt comfortable with Jenny Ann. All the political consultants had said so.
She turned slowly, her flat, rather narrow chin staying steady in the a
rc, and faced the jury. It was part of her training to look at the cameras, to look at those you wanted to convince instead of one of those baying reporters who were always jumping up and down with their arrogant insistence that you answer only them.
“I served as White House director of communications during the presidency—the all too short presidency—of Walter Bridges,” she replied in an accent that screamed its Southern origins.
Fitzgerald tugged my sleeve.
“She was born and raised in Pennsylvania, went to Yale, married a med school student. First time she ever saw South Carolina was when he took his first job at a hospital and they moved there,” he whispered.
St. John stood at the far corner of his table. There was nothing but empty space between him and the witness, or between him and the jury. Instead of moving closer the way he usually did, to take up a more conversational tone and make the jury feel more involved in what was said, he stayed where he was. He did not want to block the view of the television cameras; he wanted this witness in particular to have the chance to talk directly to all those millions watching. He wanted everyone to see and hear the prosecution’s preemptive strike.
“You were his press secretary, and in that capacity, were you in fairly regular contact with the president?”
“Every day. Several times. I went over with him every press release issued in his name. Discussed with him each morning the questions that were likely to be asked in that day’s briefing. Asked if there were any announcements he wanted me to make. Asked if there were any matters, especially related to national security, he did not want me to discuss. So, yes, I was with the president, every day, from early morning until sometimes quite late at night.”
“In addition to your discussions with the president about what you, and other people in the White House, were going to tell the press, were there conversations in which you discussed with the president news stories written about him?”
Jenny Ann Carruthers looked not at the jury as she had before, but at the courtroom crowd and the cameras in back.
“President Bridges was very concerned with the kind of coverage we were being given. He did not understand—really, none of us could—why the press was spending so much time reporting about things that had never happened, stories in which they almost never bothered to provide the names of any of their so-called sources.”
“Stories about Russian involvement in the last election? Russian money, Russian banks…stories like that?”
“Yes, that’s exactly right. There was nothing to any of it, nothing at all, but that didn’t make it stop. They kept repeating it, every day in the press, every day on television,” she said, outraged at how she and the president had been treated. “There was nothing to it,” she repeated. “Nothing but made up lies. The people who hated us—the people who hated him—would take a perfectly ordinary meeting—someone talking with the Russian ambassador; someone not even in the government, an old friend of the president, having a business meeting with a foreign investor—and turn it into a conspiracy, subversion, an attempt to destroy American democracy. It was disgraceful, that’s what it was!”
I was on my feet, ready with an objection, when, changing my mind, I just stood there, too confused to speak.
“Mr. Antonelli?” asked Evelyn Patterson, peering down from the bench. “Do you wish to make an objection?” she asked in a way that left little doubt she would sustain it.
“I was going to, your Honor,” I admitted. I scratched the back of my head. “And I probably should. Instead of answering the prosecution’s question, the witness is giving a speech. But, to tell you the truth, like everyone, I like a good story, especially one filled with myth and fantasy. So, no, your Honor, I think I’ll just sit back and listen.”
A whisper of laughter rippled through the crowd, silenced by a glance of disapproval from the bench. Jenny Ann Carruthers looked at me as if I were the one who should be on trial for murder. Raymond St. John ignored the interruption and continued as if I had not said a thing.
“It’s your testimony here today that, so far as you have any direct knowledge, no one connected with the president was involved with the Russians, or with anyone else, in an improper way?”
“That’s correct, Mr. St. John. There was no truth to any of it.”
“I want to move on to something else. The trip out here to San Francisco. You weren’t with the president. Was there a reason?”
“There wasn’t really any reason for me to come. The speech had been written, all the arrangements made. There were other people who could handle the press covering the trip. There were a thousand things to do in Washington: the president’s legislative agenda, the need to work out our communications strategy, the—”
“Yes, I understand,” interjected St. John, determined to keep her on point. “You weren’t on the trip, but did you help plan it?”
“Yes. It was partly my idea. We had lost California in the election, and we probably were not going to win it next time either. But it was important to communicate the message that the president was president of all the people, not just those who voted for him. That was one reason, there were others. We thought the Bay Area—because of Silicon Valley—would be the perfect place to give a speech on the way technology could be used to jumpstart the economy, to get it moving again the way it should, the way President Bridges was determined to do.”
“You said there were other reasons. That was one of them.”
She glanced briefly, but only briefly, at Kevin Fitzgerald sitting next to me. For a second time he tugged my sleeve.
“When she was in the House, they used to say she was the one member of Congress you could always trust to keep her word, if only she could remember what it was. It’s why she has always been such a good liar: she can’t remember far enough back to know that what is coming out of her mouth isn’t what she has always believed.”
I started to turn my attention back to the witness. He tugged again.
“Be careful dealing with her. When it comes to what she wants, she’s lethal.”
“The other reason,” prodded St. John when Carruthers seemed to hesitate.
“The defendant, Senator Fitzgerald.”
“Would you explain to the jury what you mean?”
Jenny Ann Carruthers took a breath, not a deep one, but the kind you take at the last second, when it’s time to deliver a speech, a dramatic part, something you have made an effort to learn by heart.
“Senator Fitzgerald had, from the beginning, opposed everything President Bridges said or did. It was clear to the president, it was clear to all of us, that he had decided that open and aggressive opposition was the best, and probably the only, opportunity he had to get his own party’s nomination and run against the president in the next election. The president was never one to run away from a challenge. We decided to take the fight to the senator’s home ground. He had not left us any choice.”
“He hadn’t left you any choice? I’m not sure I understand,” said St. John in a way that suggested he really had not understood what she was driving at.
“The senator had made threats,” she replied in a voice harsh, brittle and combative. “He had threatened the president’s life!”
The courtroom erupted. There were shouts of protest, shouts, though fewer of them, of support. Reporters, too astonished to shout anything, looked at each other as if for confirmation that they had heard the same charge. Judge Patterson pounded the gavel as hard as she could, twice, three times, and then, as the noise subsided, promised expulsion to anyone who raised their voice again. St. John was more surprised than anyone. It was all he could do to conceal his displeasure at a witness giving testimony he had not heard from her own mouth before. In all the commotion I was the only one to notice the anger in his eyes, his only thought that Jenny Ann Carruthers had damn well better be able to prove what she had just alleged. He was cautious.
“You’re testifying, here today, that the defendant, Kevin Fitzgerald, th
reatened to kill the president?”
She did not hesitate.
“Yes, and he did it in public, on the floor of the United States Senate. He said—and this is a direct quote—that the country could not survive another two years of a Bridges administration, and that the only way to save the country was to get rid of Walter Bridges! And after what he’s done, we know exactly what he meant, don’t we?”
Human intelligence, often traced on a curve from stupidity to genius, should perhaps be thought of in terms of a circle on which you always ended with the two of them so close together they overlapped. For a moment no one knew what to make of what they had just heard. The courtroom was silent. Raymond St. John was speechless.
“Mr. St. John, do you have any more questions of the witness?” asked Judge Patterson, staring in wide-eyed wonder at Jenny Ann Carruthers.
“Yes, your Honor. Ms. Carruthers, would you like to clarify what you just said? You testified that there were several reasons why it had been decided to have President Bridges give a speech in San Francisco. The last one you mentioned is because the defendant had threatened him. Did you mean to say that Senator Fitzgerald threatened to murder the president? Or did you mean to say,” he went on, encouraging the suggestion that she must have meant something else, “that Senator Fitzgerald, in a speech he gave on the Senate floor, threatened some kind of political action as a way to end the president’s hold on power?”
Jenny Ann Carruthers looked at Raymond St. John with the contempt of the bully for the weakling too scared to fight.
“My meaning is plain enough. Fitzgerald threatened the president. Then he killed him.” She turned to throw a challenge at the jury. “How much more evidence do you need than that?”