Private Screening (6 page)

“Your career in private practice is just beginning, and you're doing it the hard way—a one-man office. Don't you think you need help?”

Lord tried to deflect the question. “I like working for myself,” he said easily. “It lets me define who and what I care about.”

McIlvaine looked nettled. “Still, there are men in the city associated with Kilcannon whom it would do you good to know. I'll be there to make sure you meet them.” McIlvaine smiled. “After all, a settlement or verdict which includes back pay should make the investment in a grace note easier to swallow. The way this trial's gone thus far, you've got every reason to hope.”

Lord realized that he could have choreographed it, right down to the unspoken reminder that McIlvaine could screw up his case by not approving a settlement, prejudicing the jury against him, or giving them instructions so adverse that they would never award Jack Cole's back pay. If he could help it, Lord promised himself, McIlvaine would also never become a federal judge. “What's the tariff?” he asked coolly.

“Two hundred fifty,” McIlvaine said in his most deprecating voice. “A small price, as I say, for improving the prospects of settlement.” He smiled with conspiratorial male bonhomie. “Frankly, I wouldn't mind getting that fairy off my docket.”

Bias and misuse of office, Lord thought, and McIlvaine could get away with it. “Frankly,” he responded blandly, “
I
wouldn't mind getting ‘that fairy' off your docket.”

In his annoyance, McIlvaine's smile strained so wide that his gums showed. It gave Lord time to do some column addition: $1,700 a month for their two-bedroom house, $173 for the car, $200 for Christopher's school. Which reminded him of the daughter Jack Cole couldn't see.

Lord stood without amenities. “I'll try to make it,” he said, and headed for the door. He had mentally taken the last $500 out of savings even before the judge called after him, “And bring your wife.”

4

J
AMIE
climbed onto the black limousine.

They had stopped in the middle of San Francisco's Chinatown. Stacy stood by the passenger door. Surrounded by aides, reporters, and a cordon of police and Secret Service, she could see but a few faces. In the swelling roar, Chinatown came to her only as the smell of pork or fish or vegetables cooking, Chinese characters in neon, the face of a woman in a second-floor window, holding a baby with fine black hair.

Between the shoulders of police, a young voice called to her, “See you tonight.” Nine hours to go, she thought, and smiled in no particular direction.

Jamie stood above the noise, shoulder-held cameras seeking his face.

“The Second Coming,” a familiar voice said.

The Bronx accent was unmistakable; Stacy turned to John Damone's sardonic half-smile. “Just get here?” she asked.

“Uh-huh—your boyfriend's packed the streets. Lots of white folks out for dim sum.”

After close to ten years, Stacy could still be annoyed by his gift for speaking her least comfortable thoughts. “I saw some Chinese.”

“Not many. But then what does all this have to do with them?”

She didn't answer. Damone kept looking from Kilcannon to the cameras to the crowd: he had a hyper-alertness to new situations, an edge to the way he looked and moved, and there was nothing soft left in his face. The black beard accented the skin stretched across his cheekbones, the aggressive prow of a nose, the lines etched at the corner of his eyes. Gazing at the rooftops, he murmured, “What idiot told Kilcannon he was bulletproof?”

She began looking from the buildings to the limousine and back. Above them, Jamie raised one hand; the roar subsided to scattered cries. “
Jamie
,” a woman screamed.

He grinned. “Well”—his voice resonated through the microphone—“it's nice to be wanted. But will you respect me in the morning?”

Laughter. Stacy saw the press corps smiling with Nat Schlesinger: they loved Jamie best when he was playing off his crowds.

“
Yes
,” more voices called back.

“And on Tuesday?”

“
Yes
.…”

“Good. Because I mean to make a difference and I need your help to do that.”

In the cheers and applause, Jamie let his smile linger. “I've come here to the Chinese community, where unemployment stands so high, because the man I mean to replace as president thinks this is a place to eat. When he thinks of it at all.”

An approving burst of laughter. As it died, Stacy heard the whine of news cameras. Damone's gaze flickered to the rooftops.

“The president says that he's color-blind. I think that's true.…”

“
No
,” someone shouted.

“Really, I believe that. Remember when he appointed a black man to his cabinet, then met him at the inaugural and called him ‘Mr. Mayor'?”

A ripple of laughter, cameras jostling.

“That's when I realized that the president not only thinks that all minority citizens are equal, he thinks they're interchangeable.…”

As the laughter rose, Jamie's voice rang out, “When he thinks of them at all.”

Leaning back, he let the applause widen until it came back to him again. Stacy felt the same disturbing excitement—she could help him become president.

Damone edged close to her. “Good at this, isn't he?”

“It's easy for him.”

A reporter in the press pool called out, “Forty seconds,” and resumed timing the applause on his wrist-watch. Stacy saw a camera aiming toward her, and smiled up at Jamie. A part of her began wanting to escape.

Damone stared at something. She followed his gaze to a lone man, crouched on the roof of a trading company. “You're making me nervous,” she told him.

“I don't like this. Especially for you.”

Jamie raised the microphone again.

“But the unemployed in this community are forced to think of
him
. For they've been forced to serve as extras in the Grade B script he calls an economic program.…”

There were three sharp cracks.

Jamie recoiled, mouth falling open.

“
No
…” someone screamed.

Damone hurtled onto the car and hit Jamie at the knees; as they fell together, the crowd released a keen of agony.

“
Jamie!
” she cried out.

In the chaos, police covered Damone. As Stacy tried to reach them, a cameraman pushed her aside. All she could see were Jamie's legs; the camera was in his face.

“Stop!” a policeman shouted at her. Two Secret Service agents wrenched Damone to his knees.

Slowly, Jamie raised his head.

The two men stared at each other. “You all right?” Damone managed.

Cameras whirred; the crowd pressed against a barrier of police. Looking to the men who held Damone, Jamie's face was white.

“Let him go,” he said. “What was it?”

“Probably firecrackers, Senator.”

There was sourness in Stacy's throat. Jamie mumbled to Damone, “Thanks, anyhow,” but did not look at her.

As Damone crawled off the hood, she saw his lip was split.

“Oh, John.…”

“Reflexes,” he muttered. She touched his lip, and then his forehead bent to her shoulder.

She looked back up at Jamie. Please, she thought, you have to stop this.

He stood on the cartop as if nothing had happened.

Cameras followed him. As the tumult died, Damone turned back to watch.

Jamie spoke. “It was only
firecrackers
.…”

A deep groan.

“Still, I have to worry. At Princeton, no one ever tackled me from behind.”

The nervous laughter became applause, swelling with gratitude. For the first time, Jamie turned to her.

She grinned at him, words stuck in her throat.

5

A
RRANGING
to meet Danziger, Parnell had suggested the Pacific Union Club.

They'd needed lunch and a quiet place to talk. It was only as he waited, examining how deftly Lord had questioned him, that he fully understood his choice: the trauma Lord touched on had begun there, sixteen years before.

Parnell sat back, remembering.

He had been playing bridge when the phone was brought to his table; in these decorous surroundings—oak and leather and soft-spoken waiters—the caller had sounded like an applicant for membership. With the gentle wheeze of an asthmatic, he asked when Parnell had last heard from his son. The question was so polite, and its setting so incongruous, that for a moment Parnell was merely confused.

“Who is this?” he asked.

The caller hung up. After a moment's thought, Parnell excused himself, and went to phone his lawyer.

“What
have
you heard from Robert?” John Danziger asked.

“Very little.” Parnell's mouth felt dry. “He's been living at the Tahoe place. There's been somewhat of a rupture.”

“Occasioned by …?”

“Cumulative disagreements. At seventeen, he no longer fit comfortably at home.”

“I see. And have you tried to reach him?”

“Not yet.” Parnell adjusted the rim of his glasses. “As I said, we don't really speak.”

“If you're determined to stand on ceremony,” Danziger responded dryly, “you might have Alexis call. And let me know what happens.”

Hanging up, Parnell dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. Without calling Alexis, he phoned Lake Tahoe.

There was no answer.

At dinner, Alexis was full of high-strung humor. That afternoon they'd shown one of her old films on television, the swimsuit walk-on scene with Cary Grant. It reminded her, she told her husband, that Dorian Gray had also had a body.

Parnell excused himself, went to the library, and placed a second unanswered call. The next morning, after his third call, he invented an excursion to Bohemian Grove and drove to Tahoe without stopping.

On the piny, sunlit hill, the door of their ski home was ajar. As he approached, Parnell saw that the lock was broken; the subliminal wish to have no son became chill on his flesh.

Entering, he saw a captain's chair toppled, a beer and half-sandwich on the coffee table, the corner of a throw rug kicked up. On the floor behind that was Robert's typewriter with one sheet curling from it.

The note read simply: “Is your son worth one million dollars? Details to follow.” Without touching the telephone, Parnell drove to a gas station and called the FBI. He did not call Alexis.

For two hours he waited on the front steps, fearing their inevitable question, Why was he here?

Parnell could never tell them.

Part of it he did not know. The seeds of that last incident, he understood, lay somewhere between Alexis and himself. But by the time Robert had been forced to leave, his causes and effects were so entangled with their lives that to think of them did not illuminate, only wounded.

The tangle began with Alexis herself.

He had met her at his roommate's wedding in Newport, the same June that he had finished Yale. Daydreaming through a prewedding party, he had quite literally bumped into Alexis.

As she caught her balance, Colby saw that she was more than pretty. “I'm sorry,” he managed. “I was on a mental trip to San Francisco.”

The laughter in her cool gray eyes seemed friendly. “Then I should go with you,” she said. “To see you don't bump into things.”

Relieved at her good humor, he began to think he'd like that before he'd even asked her name.

She was Lexie Fitzgerald, she answered, and an actress. “And I'll be working in Hollywood, so perhaps some weekend I
will
visit San Francisco.”

But three months later, when he took Alexis home, his father did not warm to her. “She's an actress without money,” John Joseph told his son. “And that makes her an adventuress. If her first ambition fails, then you're her consolation prize.”

It did not matter to his father that Lexie had found acting while on scholarship at Smith, and Colby was too proud of her to yield. Instead, he financed her weekend visits between bit parts as a contract player at Fox, until he wanted her more fiercely than he'd ever wanted anything. She was small and poised and lively, with features so precisely cut that he found the subtle over-bite when she smiled at him a charming flaw. Her lack of wealth helped him feel more assured: seeing her delight in the sailing trips and polo games and parties, he began to hope that shared enjoyment might replace the male magnetism he knew he did not have. Yet she seemed so adaptable to the life he led that it bothered Colby to imagine the unspoken side of her which San Francisco did not satisfy. As Lexie drew oblique, admiring glances over dinner at the Blue Fox or dances at the Fairmont or the Mark Hopkins, he began floridly envisioning Hollywood as the palm-laden Byzantium of suntanned men who wished to trade its secrets for her own. A year after his roommate's wedding, Colby was still a virgin.

He felt Lexie responding when he kissed her, but their kisses gave no hint of whether more was wanted, or whether she remembered them as he did. Lacking his father's hearty maleness, and fearful of his own, it felt safer to be the gentleman whose code respected virtue.

One night, parked in front of the Parnells' brick Georgian home, Colby tried to broach this as protection for them both. “You may not always live in Hollywood,” he told her. “I don't want them to change you.”

She smiled. “It's not what you're imagining.”

“Then why don't you want me to visit?”

Her gaze was so self-contained that Colby felt uneasy. “Because you're something separate and apart from that. I want to keep you both clear in my mind.”

“But what is it you need there?”

“I want the chance to be more than just one person, at least for a little while. Perhaps I need the attention.” She kissed his cheek. “But nothing I ever do there will make a life with you impossible.”