Chapter 10

My practice was in the doldrums, and little money was coming in. Ever since Lawrence’s release, I’d more or less stopped meeting with new clients. This was foolish, yet his case seemed to loom over everything, eclipsing more lucrative bids for my attention. Teddy’s phone, on the other hand, was ringing off the hook.

Despite my doubts, our father seemed to be living up to his end of the bargain he’d made with him. Every week it seemed another incarcerated client or family member called wanting Teddy to write an appeal or a habeas petition, and his tiny office was suddenly cluttered with boxes of transcripts. I had depositions to take in my civil cases, discovery to review, motions to file, but whenever I turned to this real work I had to fight through dread.

The next Saturday, the sky was gray outside my office window, and around two a misting rain began to fall, dashing my plans for a ride. I’d been up late at my desk going through transcripts of my father’s first trial, adding to the collection of empty beer cans in my wastebasket. After three hours of desultory effort, I moved to the wing chair in the corner and closed my eyes, a transcript open on my lap.

The phone rang. When I answered it, I heard, “This is Eric Gainer. How are you, Leo?”

Hearing his voice instantly conjured up those old pot-smoking, punk-rock-listening days. Even back then, when he was a teenager, Eric could be irresistible. His attention, when he turned it on anyone, was like a beam of warmth. His voice was familiar to me in recent years only from the news. We hadn’t spoken directly to one another since high school.

“It’s been a while,” I replied. “I don’t get over to the city much these days.” There was nothing much else to say.

He got to the point. “Jackson said you wanted to talk to me.”

“That’s right. Strictly off the record. For old times’ sake.”

“Why don’t you come to my place. It’s Jackson’s, actually. Give me a ring when you’re almost here. I’ll open the garage and you can park inside.” Was it that he didn’t want to be seen with me? It made sense, since my father’d been accused of murdering a man who’d worked for him. I tried not to let it bother me, but it did.

I drove into the city to the address I’d written down. The impressive Cow Hollow house was perched three stories above a garage, which opened as I turned onto Gainer’s street. I pulled up over the sidewalk and inside. Eric met me at the door. We stood in his kitchen swapping reminiscences, quickly exhausting the safe subjects in our shared past. “You shoot pool?” he presently asked.

He led me upstairs to a den with bookshelves, a fireplace, and a pool table. There was also a corner bar and two narrow windows facing the street below. The books on the shelves appeared to have been read, their spines creased. Along the rails, the only way to complete cross-table shots was to clear the books from a section of shelf, providing another foot of space to draw back the cue.

I’d asked for the meeting, and I knew that if I wanted answers, I needed to take the lead. “I won’t beat around the bush. I came here because I wanted to ask you about your relationship with Russell Bell. Do you mind telling me how on earth you came to hire him?”

He nodded, unsurprised by the question. “You and I both know that it doesn’t fix anything to lock people up. The most advanced civilization on earth, but we’re still medieval in the way we punish crime. Someday, with luck, I’ll be in a position to have a real influence on our policies. Imprisonment isn’t a solution. It’s the heart of our problem. When these people finally get out, no one will trust them. What choice do they have but to go back to a life of crime?”

“You can’t mean that hiring Russell was about practicing good public policy.”

“Of course not. It wasn’t anybody’s business but mine. He was on my private payroll, not the city’s. Actually, I hired him because it was the only thing I could think to do to make amends for the mess Gary Coles and I made of his life.”

So that was it. Liberal guilt. I ought to have known. “Then I’m more impressed. You’re the first politician who behaves in a worthy manner and doesn’t feel the need to tell the whole world about it.”

“Worthy? I don’t know. I haven’t talked about this with anybody. Not in the sense of what it means to me, privately. What it’s meant in my life.” He was arranging the balls in the triangle, clacking them back and forth. He looked up. “The thing is, I’d actually like to talk about it with you.”

It struck me that I was about to cede control of our conversation. But if he was willing to talk, I was ready to listen.

Eric handed me a cue. “You take the first shot. We won’t play for money.”

I broke, but nothing fell. Then it was Eric’s turn. The intent, familiar way he moved around the table made me realize how much time he must spend here. It was where he did his thinking, I guessed. He’d poured us both Scotch. He made his shots with casual ease, hardly seeming to notice that I was in the game. I wasn’t, not really. The game wasn’t the point. It was just something to do with his body while we talked.

“I know what people say about me, that my whole career is built out of what happened the day of that kidnapping, my feeble attempt at heroism. Without that experience, I don’t even think I’d ever have dreamed about going into politics.”

“You were a hero,” I said. “I remember that much.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” he said, as if still angry at himself after all these years.

“You did everything you could. You chased the van down. You all but pulled the guy out from behind the wheel, with the girl lying there, terrified, a sack over her head. You got all skinned up when he sped away and you finally fell off, and then you were out there nonstop, putting up posters, comforting the family until she was found alive. You were a legitimate hero. Everyone admired you.”

“And I took full advantage of it, didn’t I.” Thunk in the corner pocket. “It was just like being a basketball star, everyone looking at me, thinking how great I was. Then Gary Coles came along and I signed my deal with the devil.”

I wondered why he was telling me all this but I didn’t interrupt. “Christ, he made it easy to lie. I don’t think I’d ever felt so good about anything as I did about the lies I told during that trial. He made lying seem like a selfless, heroic act, like the natural culmination of what I’d done out there on the street, chasing the abductor down and trying to grab him. All I had to do was say that I saw his face, that they’d gotten the right guy, and I could go on being a hero. And that’s what I did, Leo—and I never looked back. Not until they came to me years later and said he was getting out, that I needed to testify in the retrial. The thought of it made me physically ill.”

I looked at him with new understanding, and new caution. “A lot of well-meaning people lied because Gary Coles made them feel it was the right thing. You weren’t the only one.”

“That’s cold comfort for someone who’s always held himself to a higher standard. Or tried to. Anyway, the majority of those people weren’t actually well-meaning. From what I understand, most of the cops had figured out that Coles would cover their tracks for them. Anything for a conviction. And no one ever caught him.”

“My brother did.”

“Maybe, but only after he was dead, and only by using Coles’s own tactics.” He missed his shot and straightened. “Or are you going to tell me you really believe your father’s innocent?”

I missed badly. He caught the cue ball as it dropped into the corner pocket.

“I do,” I answered him. “I wouldn’t have been involved with freeing him if I didn’t.”

“Principled stand. I hope you believe it. Well, here’s to avoiding hypocrisy.” He raised his glass and positioned the cue ball where he wanted it. “Russell sent me a letter after I was first elected. He wanted my help reopening the case. He wanted me to admit I’d lied in my testimony, sign a statement to that effect. I left that letter out on my desk for a long time. It was followed a few months later by a second one accusing me of the most cynical motivations: of using the opportunity his case had given me to launch my political career and reap personal gain, all at the expense of his life.

“It struck me as the letter of an innocent man. It affected me more deeply than you could imagine. The consciousness of that lie had been stewing in me, and the letter was like a storm breaking. I’d put all that behind me, I thought, made amends in my own way. But, of course, not to Russell. His life was still ruined. He was still in the joint. I never responded to either letter, but after Russell got out with your father’s help, and after I told the DA that I couldn’t testify in the retrial, Russell came to see me, and I offered him a job as my driver.”

“Just like that,” I said. We were standing across the pool table from one another. Neither of us had taken a shot in some time.

“Just like that,” Eric repeated, as if bewildered by his own act. “What would you have done? What can anyone do for a man like that?”

I wouldn’t have lied and helped Gary Coles frame the man in the first place, I wanted to say. Instead I asked him, “How did you stand it, having him there in the car with you day after day, reminding you of what you’d done? He was in prison for how long, twelve years?”

Eric moved the cue ball, giving himself a better line on the corner pocket. I hadn’t scratched, so he shouldn’t have touched it, but it was his table. His rules. “The more pertinent question is how did I stand it knowing he was in prison, knowing it was my fault, during all those years when he wasn’t driving my car?”

“What was he holding over you, Eric?”

He grabbed the cue ball and rolled it fast into the corner pocket, then flung his cue onto the table. “I don’t know what you’re hinting at. The reason I asked you here is that I just need your father to—back off for a while.”

“What do you mean, ‘back off’?”

“Your father called the office a number of times. I asked Jackson to handle it, and I told Jackson I didn’t want to hear the details. From what I gather, your father thought he could shake down Russell, or shake me down, about something connected with that old case. Maybe he wanted money. Maybe he thought I could have some influence on his behalf in the DA’s office, get the charges thrown out, who knows. I told Russell that if he ever had trouble with anyone about the past, if anyone ever tried to use his background as leverage, he should come to me.”

“Maybe he wanted to warn you about Russell.”

“I hardly needed warning. I knew all about Russell.”

The edge in his voice made me look up. “What is it? What’s going on?”

Gainer just shook his head. “You need to make your father understand that he’s not going to get out of this mess by threatening me.”

“Threatening you? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Eric.”

“You really don’t know what he’s been doing, do you?” He left the room. I followed him. There was an office nook in the corner of the next room. From a desk drawer he took out a sheet of paper and held it in front of me. I reached for it, but he snatched it back. “Look, but don’t touch.”

It was a printout of an e-mail sent to his official city e-mail address. The From line was an e-mail address composed of gibberish letters, from an anonymizer website. A picture had been attached to the e-mail, but it wasn’t displayed on the printout. Rather, a file name was listed in the attachments field in the header, a series of digits corresponding to a date and time, like the file name a digital camera automatically gives to a picture.

This one had evidently been taken on the eleventh of February at 3:32:29 am, because the file name was 0211033229.jpg. It was April now. I made an effort to burn those digits into my memory. The message said, You’ve been a very bad boy, Eric, and I know all about it. Now will you follow my instructions? Keep ignoring me, and you’ll get what Russell got.

“Now do you see?” Eric asked me. “You want that coming out in court? Is that what your father wants?”

“You can’t prove he sent this.” My mind, however, had flown back to my father’s near admission that he’d blackmailed Bell, and to his earlier attempt to get out of prison by falsely accusing Santorez of having my brother shot.

“You can’t prove he didn’t.”

“This can’t come into evidence. It was sent from an anonymizer website, untraceable.” At least not without a court order, but I didn’t want to think about that. My father, having spent the last twenty years in prison, would have no inkling about IP addresses, cookies, Internet history folders, the invisible trail that every online action leaves.

“Where’s the picture? What does it show?” I wanted to know.

“Never mind,” Eric said. “Just pass the message to your father. He needs to back off if he doesn’t want this coming to light.”