The Good Father (7 page)

In the months that followed, we tried to get Daniel to talk about what happened, his feelings. But he was never interested. The most he ever admitted was that it had been “scary” when the plane went into a dive, but that he had stayed busy trying to keep Jenny from “freaking out too bad.” How heroic he had seemed to me at that moment, a boy who stayed calm under pressure, who thought of others first. I was proud of him, and felt in some ways rewarded for having raised such a strong, unflappable child.

But now, sitting in first class, flying into the unknown, I wondered if something else might have happened on that cross-country flight. Something tectonic. In the face of certain death had my son come face-to-face with the notion of abandonment? Had he, as the plane fell, understood in some deep-seated way that he was on his own in this life, that his parents, who were supposed to protect him from the dangers of the world, had instead thrown him into the void? Did something in this eight-year-old boy harden at that moment, something that was still meant to be soft and hopeful? Was a worldview born of that event, one that separated my son from the only people in the world he was supposed to feel close to? Was this why he had dropped out of school and taken to the road? Was this why he never called, never wrote? Was that the moment I had lost him?

And if it was, how could I have been too blind to see it?

It was three a.m. when I landed at LAX. The smut of car exhaust greeted me as I exited the terminal. Outside the airport I hailed a cab and gave the address to the driver. We rode in silence through city streets awash in yellow gloom. I had done my residency here in the eighties, at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica. It’s where I met Ellen, at a party thrown by a fellow resident. She was the green-eyed girl on the balcony, smoking a joint. I was the second-year resident who’d been up for thirty-six hours straight. I still wore my scrubs.

“No one told me it was a costume party,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m a doctor.”

She had the body of a girl who knows how to get into trouble.

“I bet you practice saying that in the mirror,” she said.

She offered me the joint. I shook my head.

“Well, I’m not a doctor,” she said, “but I am a hypochondriac.”

“A match made in heaven,” I told her.

Ellen was a photographer who worked in a clothing store. She had grown up in a communal-housing complex in Berkeley, eating flaxseed and carob, and celebrating martyrs of the Workers Party, until her father, Bertrand, left her mother, Molly, for the Hennessy sisters, proving once and for all that “free love” was just another way for men to follow their pricks.

Ellen ended up living with her newly single mother in a condo in Glendale. She was nine. They ate Crunch bars for breakfast and watched daytime TV in marathon sessions of disillusioned sloth. Ellen’s mother showed little interest in finding work or encouraging her daughter’s
education. At least twice a week she invented reasons to keep Ellen home from school because she didn’t want to be alone.

Believing herself to be an artist and a spiritualist in the same vein as Gertrude Stein, Molly encouraged her daughter’s artistic side. But the lessons she taught were of whimsy, not hard work, and as a result Ellen never developed the kind of doggedness and perseverance that artists need to make it in the modern world. Without discipline, Ellen became the kind of person who waits endlessly for the right mood to strike, who battles a constant sense of failure and irrelevance. She was a dreamer, not a doer, and though that quality was attractive to me at first, I quickly came to find it maddening.

During my residency I lived in a cottage by the beach. On the rare mornings when I was home I would run on the sand, letting the waves break against my ankles. Ellen moved in after two months. She said it was the only way she’d ever see me. I used to stumble home asleep with my eyes open. Ellen would run me a bath, get me a drink, and pour me into bed. It seemed to suit her, this sensual nurturing. But the feeling didn’t last. She spent too much time by herself, haunted by the ghost of a depressed mother. As an only child her feelings of loneliness were pathological. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, I doubt we would have lasted a year.

My taxi pulled up in front of Cedars-Sinai Hospital at 4:15 a.m. I had spent the flight picturing this moment. Danny was upstairs, scared, wounded. Between us was the titanic weight of the federal government and our own reluctant history. Would he be happy to see me? Relieved? Or would he view this as just another incidence of his father arriving too late? Whatever the failures of the past, I would fix them now. My son was going to survive this. He was going to thrive. There are times when all men have to pick up a banner and charge into battle. This was mine. The more my son became a villain to others, the more he would become a cause to me. His vindication would be my grail.

I paused outside the hospital to straighten my rumpled suit. As a doctor I knew that family members were often brushed off by medical personnel, trivialized. Given the high profile of the case it seemed best to enter the situation as Paul Allen, doctor, instead of Paul Allen, worried father.

Inside the lobby a young man in a blue suit stood up. He put a photograph in his pocket.

“Dr. Allen,” he said. “I’m David Tolan from State. Our friend sent me.”

I nodded, shook his hand. Dean was a good man. I felt bad that he’d risked so much for me. My hands were trembling. Now that I was here I had no idea what I would say to my son. I had talked to hundreds of patients in dozens of hospitals. I always knew just what to say, even if it was to pass on a death sentence. But this? What could I say that would possibly matter?

“Is he okay?”

“I’ll let the doctor tell you,” said Tolan, “but they got the bullet out and he seems to be resting comfortably. Or as comfortably as you can rest when you’re handcuffed to a bed.”

We rode the elevator alone.

“I have cleared your visit with the Secret Service,” said Tolan. “They are doing this as a courtesy to State. You will have ten minutes with your son. No longer. Anything he says that illuminates the crime we would ask you to share with us, but I won’t be surprised if you don’t. The one condition of your visit is that you keep it secret. If you tell the press that we let you see your son, we will deny it.”

I nodded.

“I want to tell the senator’s wife how sorry I am,” I said.

“She won’t take your call. After today, don’t be surprised if no one will. Your name is now mud.”

My mind was racing. What would Danny look like? What would he say? I considered the phrase
your name is mud
. I knew that it came from Dr. Samuel Mudd, the Civil War–era surgeon who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. For helping Booth, Mudd was tried as an accomplice and jailed. His name became a symbol of disgrace, disgust.

As we rode in silence I realized I was still trying to press the wrinkles out of my suit. I wished I had a tie. I had gone to prep school, where we were taught that our appearance was our calling card.
If I had a tie
, I thought,
I could handle anything
.

“Dr. Allen,” said Tolan just before the elevator doors opened, “no offense. But if your son did this I hope he gets the chair.”

The north tower’s fifth floor had been emptied of patients. Danny had the whole wing to himself. I saw Secret Service agents standing at the nurses’ station, manning the exits. There were several Los Angeles police officers mingled with nurses and doctors, and men in suits I assumed to be Secret Service or FBI. I pulled my jacket tighter to cover the stain on my shirt, feeling small in that moment, outnumbered and outmatched.

“I’d like to see my son’s chart,” I said.

Tolan spoke to one of the Secret Service agents. He told me to raise my arms. I was patted down and then wanded. I handed over my cell phone and pager, my wallet and keys, belt and shoelaces. They didn’t want me passing anything to my son he might use to harm himself or escape. When they were done, Tolan approached accompanied by an older man in a white lab coat.

“This is Dr. Coppola,” he said.

I offered my hand. Coppola thought for a moment before shaking it.

“I read your article on fibromyalgia last year,” he told me.

I nodded. He handed me Danny’s chart.

“Your son presented with a bullet wound to the left thigh. The bullet was lodged next to the femur, close to his femoral artery. He also had multiple contusions to his face and arms, obtained I assume from the police’s efforts to subdue him.”

I felt anger, but I let it go.

“Bleeding?” I asked.

“Minimal,” said Dr. Coppola. “I was able to remove the bullet and sew up the wound using only a local. We’ll watch him for infection, but in my opinion he should be walking around in a few days.”

I felt relief. And then panic. With his physical condition taken care of, the worries became less practical.

“Who shot him?” I wanted to know.

“We don’t know for sure,” said Tolan. “No law enforcement officer on the scene reports firing their weapon. The early reports we’re hearing is that in the struggle, Danny’s gun went off and the bullet struck him in the leg.”

Danny’s gun
. The words sounded ridiculous. My son hated guns. He hated hunters. He had been a vegetarian for two years in high school.

“So you’re saying he shot himself,” I said.

“Right now that’s our theory.”

Convenient
, I thought.

“Has he asked for a lawyer?” I said.

“As far as I know,” said Tolan, “your son hasn’t said a word since his arrest.”

I looked at their faces. I could see it in their eyes. They all thought he had done it. He was a monster, and I, as his father, was at best a sad, pathetic man, and at worst a parent guilty of almost criminal negligence. Monsters don’t just become monsters, after all. They are forged in a laboratory of abuse and neglect. And who else is to blame but the parents? Even Tolan, who had shown the most sympathy, was careful not to stand too close.

“I want to see him,” I said.

Tolan spoke to a Secret Service agent. And then, at 4:37 on the morning of June 17, I was taken to see my son.

The day after Robert Kennedy was killed, conspiracy theories about his murder started to bubble up like toxic oil from the ground. His brother Jack had been shot four years earlier and allegations had been flying for months about multiple shooters, railroad hoboes, and Cuban hit squads. Just two months before the RFK shooting, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated by a sniper with a Remington Gamemaster 760 as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. James Earl Ray had been captured, but no one was convinced he had acted alone.

It was in this climate that the news of RFK’s assassination emerged. Even though he had been killed in a crowded kitchen with dozens of witnesses, even though the event, though not filmed, had been captured on audiotape, no one could believe that this solitary, diminutive Arab had killed America’s golden boy. Kennedy was a figure of controversy, after all. He had waged a long and public war with J. Edgar Hoover, the notorious head of the FBI. He had spent his years as U.S. attorney general under his brother’s presidency prosecuting the Italian Mafia. He was a marked man. He had enemies. This much was clear.

Questions arose quickly. The gun taken off Sirhan Sirhan was capable of firing eight shots, but some witnesses swore there were at least ten shots fired. Then there was the location of the wounds. Kennedy had been shot twice in the back, at a spot just under his right shoulder blade. Both shots originated from a low angle, the bullets traveling upward. The third wound was to the back of the head, the bullet entering just under his right ear and penetrating up through his brain. Witnesses all
put Sirhan Sirhan in front of Kennedy. How then had he managed to shoot him in the back?

Then there was “the girl in the polka-dot dress.” Several witnesses had claimed to see her and a man exiting the hotel moments after Kennedy was shot. Sandra Serrano, a campaign worker who was sitting on a fire escape outside the Ambassador Hotel, recalls a girl in a polka-dot dress running out of the hotel yelling, “We shot him!” Serrano said the girl was with two men.

Vincent DiPierro, a waiter at the Ambassador Hotel, recalls seeing a girl in a polka-dot dress next to Sirhan Sirhan prior to the shooting.

Melvin S. Hall, a cabdriver, claimed to have picked up a girl and two men outside the hotel moments after the shooting.

Booker Griffin, a campaign organizer, described seeing a tall man and a girl in the kitchen prior to the shooting.

The list goes on. What does it mean? In medicine we are taught to create a differential diagnosis, a laundry list of possible causes for the symptoms with which the patient presents. We are taught to organize a patient’s history: his chief complaint, associated symptoms, past medical history, relevant social data, past and current therapies. These criteria help us diagnose illness, but every symptom a patient presents with is not necessarily connected to his underlying illness. Sometimes they are peripheral. The doctor’s job is to review all the data and determine which symptoms are relevant and which are irrelevant.

A kitchen full of people, men and women alike. A girl in a polka-dot dress. She leaves the hotel with two men. Witnesses hear her yell, “We shot him!” But it’s possible that instead she said, “They shot him!”

Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner, examined Kennedy just hours after the shooting. He removed one intact bullet and several fragments from Kennedy’s body. Three forensic pathologists from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and two city coroners witnessed the autopsy. In his report, Noguchi wrote that the shot that killed RFK “had entered through the mastoid bone, an inch behind the right ear and had traveled upward to sever the branches of the superior cerebral artery.” The largest fragment of that bullet lodged in the brain stem.

A second shot entered through Kennedy’s armpit and exited through
his upper chest at a fifty-nine-degree angle. The coroner wrote that Kennedy’s arm must have been raised at the time.