by D. W. Buffa
“A little before that. I thought he wanted to go over the speech again, talk about the arrangements that had been made—who was going to introduce him, the kind of off-the-cuff remarks he should make—but all he wanted to talk about was Fitzgerald and what he should do.”
“Because he didn’t want to see him. Isn’t that what he wanted to tell you, that Fitzgerald might be waiting at the airport, but that didn’t mean he was going to do anything beyond shaking his hand and saying hello? Walter Bridges did not want Fitzgerald on the plane, did he?”
Ellison was even more puzzled than usual. He could not understand how I had come to know this. Nothing had been said about it at the trial, he was sure of it.
“When you were asked to come to the president’s cabin the second time, he wasn’t alone, was he? Michael Donahue was there with him, wasn’t he?”
Ellison’s head snapped back. A crooked grin broke sideways across his mouth.
“How did you…? Yes, Donahue was there.”
“The president wasn’t in a very good mood, was he?”
I was guessing, but after what Carson Youngblood had told me, it seemed unlikely that someone as famous as Walter Bridges for never forgetting, or forgiving, a fight, would suddenly become even tempered and affable.
“Not particularly, no.”
“Not particularly, no?” I repeated with mocking laughter. “He and Donahue had been arguing, a shouting match that got ugly, a knockdown, drag out fight, and all because Bridges did not want to see Fitzgerald and Donahue insisted that he had to. Isn’t that what happened?”
“I don’t know anything about a fight. I wasn’t there. I was in another part of the plane, meeting with my staff, for most of the flight. As I told you, after that first meeting with the president, I didn’t see him again until I was called to come back, ten, fifteen minutes before we landed.”
“And when you got to the president’s cabin, he was there with Donahue and he wasn’t happy. He did not want to see Fitzgerald. Is that correct?”
“He said he didn’t think it was a good idea, but that Donahue thought it was.”
“What did Donahue say? Why had he changed his mind about a meeting with Fitzgerald?”
“He said that Fitzgerald had let everyone know that the president was refusing to see him, despite the fact that he had made three separate requests for a few minutes of the president’s time. Fitzgerald was going to be there, waiting with the others, and knowing Fitzgerald, he was probably going to stage something that would dominate all the television coverage. If we let him have a private meeting on the plane, we could solve both problems at once: Fitzgerald would have his meeting and the only television coverage of it would be whatever we decided to tell the press.”
“He didn’t say anything about using the meeting to keep Fitzgerald from finding out what was really going on, what they were really planning to do?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“But Donahue wanted the president to do it, and the president agreed, but he didn’t like it?’
“That’s pretty much it. The president did not like Fitzgerald, and when he didn’t like someone, the last thing he wanted was to be in the same room with them.”
“Remind us, if you will, Mr. Ellison,” I said quietly as I turned to the jury. “You said when you testified before that the president agreed to meet with Senator Fitzgerald, but for only ten minutes. Do I remember that right?”
“Ten minutes. He must have told me three different times. Ten minutes. Then I was to come in and break it up. Not one minute more.”
“And that is what you did—waited ten minutes from the time you let Senator Fitzgerald into the president’s cabin; waited ten minutes exactly and then opened the door, ready to tell the president that he did not have any more time, that the meeting had to end, and then, to your astonishment, you found the president laying on the floor and Kevin Fitzgerald, the knife still in his hand, standing next to the body. What did you do then?”
“What did I do…? I started shouting as loud as I could.”
“You didn’t think to go toward Fitzgerald, try to wrestle the knife away, because, after all, you could not really be sure, could you, that the president might not still be alive?”
It had all happened so fast, the president on the floor covered with blood, Fitzgerald and the knife, he had not had time to think, and then, before he could do anything, the Secret Service burst inside. It was over before he knew it. Which was another way of saying he was frozen with fear. But I was not there to call him a coward. I had another, deeper purpose.
“You were looking straight at him, and Fitzgerald was looking straight at you. You had just come through the door, whatever he was doing, he must have turned.”
“That’s right. He looked right at me. I’ll never forget it.”
“What is it, precisely, that you’ll never forget?”
It seemed an odd, even a perverse, question. What did someone who had just murdered the president of the United States look like? Ellison could not even guess what I might mean.
“Was his face contorted, full of anger, full of rage? Did he look like a homicidal manic, a man who, in the very next moment, might come after you?”
Ellison had not thought about it, and now that he had to, he seemed surprised, and uncertain.
“No, he didn’t look like that at all. There wasn’t any anger, any rage. And no, I didn’t think he was about to come after me. I’m not sure how I should describe it. He didn’t seem afraid, like he wanted to get away. He looked like he was trying to figure out what he should do, now that he had just killed the president.”
“I want to be sure of this. You walked in, found him with the knife still in his hands, the president dead on the floor, and you did not feel that you yourself were in any danger?”
He shook his head, and seemed to think back on what he had seen.
“No. Maybe I should have, but no, I didn’t.”
It was an answer that at least let him think himself not a coward after all.
“Thank you, Mr. Ellison, that’s all I—no, I’m afraid there is something else I need to ask you. You were chief of staff under President Bridges. Under President Spencer, Michael Donahue occupies that position. He’s moved up into the position you held, and you…” I smiled at the jury before I added, as kindly as I could, “Perhaps you’ll have a chance to spend some time with us, here in San Francisco, after all.”
No one, including Raymond St. John, had any idea what I was doing. The strong suspicion was that I did not know myself. But if I wanted to grasp at straws, asking questions that I might better have asked on cross-examination when the prosecution first called the witnesses I was calling now, there did not seem any reason to interfere. When Judge Silverman asked if St. John wished to cross-examine Richard Ellison, St. John barely rose from his chair to barely whisper that no, he did not. Silverman then had an announcement of his own.
“Because of other matters which require the attention of the court, the next witness will be the last one called today.”
He looked at each of us, St. John and me, a reminder of what he had told us that morning in chambers.
“Mr. Antonelli?”
“Yes, your Honor. The defense calls Milo Todorovich.”
The head of the president’s Secret Service detail, Todorovich, reported to the director, but Youngblood would not have told him anything about our conversation late one evening on the other side of the Golden Gate. Or so I assumed. Because as soon as I asked the first question, I was almost certain I was wrong, and that Youngblood had told him everything.
“There was a violent argument on Air Force One, on the flight out here, between Walter Bridges and Michael Donahue, wasn’t there?”
“And then some,” replied Todorovich, leaning forward, eager, as it seemed, to describe in detail everything that had happened.
“And then some?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“Bridges—the president—was in a r
age. He was often in a rage, especially when someone was saying something about him he did not like.”
“Did Donahue say something about him he didn’t like?”
“No, I don’t think so. No one who worked for him—so far as I know—ever did that, at least not to his face. It was something else, something about Fitzgerald. What you need to understand,” he went on, looking at the jury in the same measured way he had learned to survey the faces in a crowd. “What you need to know, is that there were some people, just the mention of their name would set him off. Fitzgerald was not the only one, but I would have to say he was at the top of the list.”
“Did you know the reason why Bridges disliked him so much?”
“Disliked him? There was that, all right, but that wasn’t the reason, that was the effect. He was afraid of him, afraid of what he could do—what he might do. He was scared of what Fitzgerald was doing, the investigation into his dealings with the Russians; scared that if he somehow survived whatever that investigation uncovered, he would have to face Fitzgerald in the next election, and that Fitzgerald would win in a walk.”
“Is that what he and Donahue were arguing about on the flight—what Fitzgerald might find out, what was going to happen in the next election?”
“I can’t say for sure. I wasn’t in the room. I was just outside, but the door was partway open and I had spent enough time around the president to know when he was getting ready to start throwing things.”
Todorovich had been called by the prosecution, but he was my witness now, more than willing to tell everything he knew.
“They were arguing about Fitzgerald, whether Bridges should meet with him at all?”
“Yes, that’s right. Bridges didn’t want to do it. He refused. Said there was no way he would give ‘that son of a bitch the time of day.’”
“But despite that initial refusal, he finally agreed to do it. What did Donahue say—if you know—that made him change his mind?”
“He told him that he didn’t have any choice, that Fitzgerald already knew too much, and that they had to ‘keep him in the dark’—those were Donahue’s words—about what they were really planning. He told him, reminded him, that everything was almost ready, that after they met with the people they were going to meet with after the speech, things would be put in motion no one could stop.”
I walked back to the counsel table and stood directly behind Fitzgerald. I wanted the jury to look at him when they looked at me.
“This is extremely important, Agent Todorovich. As best you can remember, those were the words, the exact words, that were used by Michael Donahue to the president: that they ‘had to keep Fitzgerald in the dark,’ and that, after they met later that night with certain people—cyber warfare experts, from what we have learned in other testimony—something would be ‘set in motion that no one could stop’? Are you sure, absolutely sure, that is what was said?”
“I’m trained to take a bullet for the president. I’d do the same thing for the truth.”
“Which means, doesn’t it,” I asked, stealing a glance at Raymond St. John, “that if Walter Bridges had lived, whatever he and Michael Donahue were planning to set in motion would have started?”
St John was about to object. With a sudden, quick question, I cut him off.
“One last thing, Agent Todorovich. Jenny Ann Carruthers, the White House communications director, wasn’t on that flight, was she?”
“No, she stayed in Washington.”
“Am I wrong in thinking that this was the first, and only, time that Walter Bridges made a trip, an official trip, without her?”
“No, you’re not wrong. She had gone on all the others.”
We were finished for the day. The courtroom cleared out and I was left alone with Fitzgerald. His two guards stood on the far side of the room, past where the clerk had her desk, having a conversation of their own.
“I’m not sure I know what you’re doing,” said Fitzgerald, expecting an explanation. “Is there a reason you kept asking about the meeting I tried to get with Bridges, or the argument about whether Bridges should do it?”
“There is a reason, and more than just one.”
He thought he understood.
“Because you could then bring out that the reason Bridges agreed to see me on the plane was part of their conspiracy, that they had to keep me ‘in the dark’ about what they were really planning. But I knew what they were planning to do, what they were going to do about the election.”
“But you didn’t know when. You didn’t know it was going to be that soon, and whatever they thought you knew, they could be reasonably certain you did not know that.”
“Who is left? What are you going to call?”
“Two more. Carruthers and Donahue.”
“Because of what they’ll have to admit now that all the other evidence is in about their involvement?”
I ignored the question, or rather let him interpret my silence as the agreement he expected. I signaled the guards that we were finished and got up to leave.
“One last thing, Kevin. You need to know something. You’re going to win, you’re going to be acquitted. The only question is whether you really want to be.”
Perhaps for the first time in his life, Kevin Fitzgerald was too stunned to speak.
TANGERINE DROVE ME into the city, the way she now did every morning. It had rained hard during the night and the water sprayed behind the wheels of the cars on the Golden Gate even as the heavy gray clouds began to splinter and break apart under a bright rising sun. A rainbow arched across the bay from the city to the Berkeley Hills. The air was fresh and clean, and if it had been anywhere but San Francisco, you might have thought it the start of spring instead of the beginning of fall.
“It’s your voice,” I said when we were halfway across the bridge. “That’s what I forgot to tell you. Reynaud thinks you sound French when you’re speaking English; Albert thinks it sounds like silk velvet or burnished brass, he isn’t sure which.”
“French, silk velvet, burnished brass? What are you talking about?” Her eyes never left the road in front of her, but she laughed at the way she knew I was looking at her. “Jean-Francois thinks I sound French?”
“He’s right, you do.”
“I didn’t know you spoke French.”
“I don’t. But that’s how you sound.”
“Unintelligible?” She laughed again, this time quietly, and in a lower tone.
“It’s the rhythm, the way everything you say seems subtle and intimate. It makes everyone feel you are sharing things you would only share with them.”
She did not laugh, she only smiled.
“Silk velvet, burnished brass—that sounds like Albert’s favorite combination: some brand of whiskey and some jazz recording from his collection. Yes, I remember,” she added, her eyes flaring open at the memory. “George Shearing, the once famous jazz pianist. It was the name of one of his albums, if I remember right.”
“I don’t think that is what he meant. Silk velvet—smooth and rich and bright and full of excitement, but never loud. Burnished brass seems as good a way as any to describe how you speak.”
I could have been talking to her about anything, as long as it kept my mind off the trial, but her voice was magical and I wanted to talk about that. She had an answer, of course; she always did.
“So now you can call me a brassy, bossy…?”
“Burnished, something bright and finely polished.”
“And what, Mr. Antonelli, shall we say about that seductive voice of yours? How to describe the voice that if a hundred people were shouting all at once would be the only one anyone would want to hear, or would be able to remember later? I’ve never heard a voice like yours before.” And then, with a quick sideways glance to let me know not to get too full of myself, she added, “You could have worked in a carnival, or sold things on the radio.”
“After today, I may be looking for a new career.”
“If there is
one thing I’m certain of, it is that you’ll never have to look for something else to do. Even if you wanted to, you can’t. You promised we were going to France.”
We reached the end of the bridge and passed through the toll plaza. She headed for the exit that would take us to the hospital from where I would take a cab. I put my hand on her wrist.
“Drop me at the courthouse, then find a place to park and come in. Lives are going to be changed today. You need to be there.”
The courthouse was under siege. The trial was drawing to a close. There were, as everyone now knew, only a few more witnesses to call, and then closing arguments. Today, tomorrow, maybe the day after that, and the case would go to the jury, and then, finally, there would be an end to it. Kevin Fitzgerald would either be the assassin half the country was convinced he was, or the man who had saved the nation as the other half believed. I fought my way through the horde of reporters clamoring for a statement, a few words, anything they could use to show the world what might be going to happen. With the help of the police, I made my way into the courthouse where, because cameras were not allowed inside, I was followed by just a handful of newspaper reporters to the courtroom.
Fitzgerald, dressed impeccably as usual, had been brought in before anyone else. I took my place next to him and immediately began a last-minute review of the questions I had listed in my longhand scrawl on a yellow legal pad. I never read a question to a witness, I never used a note. There was not time, not if you wanted to hold a witness, keep them so intent on making sure they heard what you were asking, so caught up in this fast-moving conversation that they could not stop to consider what they wanted to say or how they wanted to say it.
Raymond St. John took his place at the other counsel table. The clerk sat at her small desk. The court reporter set up her machine. The doors at the back were opened and the reporters and spectators were allowed inside; counted as they came in to the limit of the courtroom’s capacity. Fitzgerald bent toward me to ask a question. I had not finished with my list and with a slight movement of my head let him know it would have to wait. The bailiff announced that everyone should rise, that court was in session and that the Honorable Judge Leonard Silverman was presiding. Two steps before he reached the bench, the judge, never one to waste even a moment’s time, waved his hand in the general direction of the bailiff and told him to bring in the jury. Bounding up to his chair, he waved his hand again, the signal that everyone could now sit down.