The Mayor of Castro Street (45 page)

*   *   *

White ran into Denise Apcar's office. “Give me the keys,” he shouted to her. “Give me the keys.”

Apcar nervously handed White her car keys and he dashed out the door.

*   *   *

Only two or three minutes had passed since Dan White had left the mayor's office. Rudy Nothenberg was waiting for George to buzz him for their 11
A.M.
appointment. It didn't make sense—Rudy had seen Dan White leave. What was taking George so long? Tentatively he stuck his head in Moscone's main office, then walked into the adjoining den and saw George's feet. He figured Moscone had fainted until he got closer and saw the blood flowing from his head onto the carpet. Moscone still held a lit cigarette in his right hand; it was burning a hole into the back of his tie.

“Get in here,” he shouted to Cyr. “Call an ambulance. Get the police.”

*   *   *

Dianne Feinstein bounded into Harvey's office with Carl. She grabbed a phone, frantically calling the police chief. The chief's lines, however, were all busy with calls from the mayor's office, but Feinstein didn't know that and kept dialing desperately. What's the matter she thought. Why can't I get through?

*   *   *

A few blocks away, Dan White was at a fast-food joint calling Mary Ann. Something happened, he said. He needed to meet her right away at St. Mary's Cathedral.

*   *   *

Carl Carlson was on Harvey's other phone, buzzing Dick Pabich. Dick had just come into his office telling Jim Rivaldo how weird White had looked. He answered Carl's call.

“Harvey's been shot. Call an ambulance.”

“Oh, sure,” Pabich answered sarcastically.

“No time for messing around. I'm serious.”

“What?”

Pabich jumped from his desk and raced toward Harvey's office. Rivaldo followed him into the corridor and saw a cadre of armed police racing toward the mayor's office. He followed them, thinking that was the best way to find the source of the ruckus, when Pabich ran back and shouted at the officers, “No, no. It's not the mayor's office. It's down here.” Several officers split off and followed Pabich to the supervisors' offices. Chief Gain arrived shortly after and sought out Feinstein, telling her the mayor had been killed too.

“Oh, no,” Feinstein gasped.

Aides now circled Dan White's office door. Dick Pabich remembered seeing White rush by and arrived at the obvious conclusion. “Dan White did it,” he said. A conservative board clerk who had never had much use for either Milk or his gay entourage scolded Dick: “How can you say such a thing?”

*   *   *

Mary Ann White left the cab and hurried across the wide brick terrazo that stretches in front of the modernistic St. Mary's Cathedral. She quickly spotted her husband in the chapel.

“I shot the mayor and Harvey,” he told her.

They talked for a few minutes. Mary Ann said she'd stand by him through any ordeal. They started walking the few blocks to Northern Station, the police station where White had once worked as a member of the San Francisco Police Department. As they walked, Mary Ann kept her hand around Dan White's waist, holding firmly onto the revolver in the belt holster, fearing he might suddenly grab the gun and shoot himself.

*   *   *

Hundreds of reporters were rushing to City Hall. Stories were muddled. Was the mayor shot? Was he dead? No, it was Harvey Milk. Milk and one of his aides? Were they dead? And, of course, the question that immediately came to all the reporters' minds: Were the shootings the work of a Peoples Temple hit squad? Jim Jones's code word for the suicide rituals—“white night”—was also supposed to trigger cadres of Peoples Temple assassins, according to reports from Jonestown. Had they started doing their bloody work?

At 11:20
A.M.
, a shaken Dianne Feinstein stepped from the supervisors' offices to make the announcement. Her face looked haggard; Police Chief Gain had to support her as she spoke.

“As president of the board of supervisors, it is my duty to inform you that both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.”

The reporters recoiled with a collective gasp that nearly drowned out Feinstein's next words.

“Supervisor Dan White is the suspect.”

Across City Hall, outside the mayor's office, press secretary Mel Wax made the same announcement to another knot of reporters. Wax added that under the provisions of the city charter, Board of Supervisors President Feinstein was now acting mayor.

*   *   *

Doug Franks easily found the book he sought in the library, checked it out, and walked the five blocks back to the senior center where he worked. When he arrived, he saw that somebody had taken a portable television to the living room where the seniors now huddled, murmuring in shock. He heard the announcer's raspy voice: “Again, Supervisor Milk and Mayor Moscone have been killed.”

Doug stumbled; he felt he was going to faint; he had just hugged Harvey, checked out a book, walked five blocks and now Harvey was dead. That's all the time it took—and someone you love is dead.

*   *   *

At 11:25
A.M.
, Dan and Mary Ann White arrived at Northern Station.

“It's there,” White said, pointing to his right hip.

The officer took the revolver from White's belt and the four spent .38 special casings and one bullet from his blazer pocket. White wanted to turn himself in at Northern Station because his friend, Paul Chignell, the vice-president of the Police Officers' Association, worked there. White asked Chignell to make sure the press stayed away from his wife. White seemed calm and detached, not particularly distraught, Chignell noted. White asked, “Is he dead, Paul?”

*   *   *

Police and officials from the coroner's office busily snapped pictures of the two undisturbed bodies for nearly an hour. Cleve Jones and Scott Smith arrived at City Hall shortly after the shootings. At first, wary supervisors' aides would not admit Smith to Harvey's office; nobody recognized him. Jones finally pulled Scott into the secured area, where grim-faced police mixed with sobbing board clerks and the small group of Harvey's stunned aides.

“It's over. We've lost it,” Jim Rivaldo kept muttering to no one in particular. He felt drawn to the door of Dan White's office where Harvey still lay. The police officer at the door warned him away from the grisly sight, but Rivaldo felt he needed to connect with the physical reality of Harvey's death. He stood outside the door as policemen were turning the corpse over to put it in the black rubber body bag. Jones stepped up and peered over Rivaldo's shoulder as the officers struggled with Milk's lanky frame. Harvey was blue now, his discolored head rolling limply, his suit and thick dark hair stained with clots of blood. Jim stared at the bloodstained wall and tried to retrace the path of Harvey's stumble to calculate what Milk had seen last. Harvey had fallen facing the window, so that before Dan White had pumped the last bullets into his staggering victim, Harvey could have looked out the window and seen the grand facade of the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House across the street.

The police finally succeeded in getting Harvey's body into the bag, which was then put on a gurney, covered with a crisp, creased hospital sheet and pushed down the hallway past his old office. At noon, the doors of the supervisors' offices opened and police wheeled the gurney into a nearby elevator—the elevator Harvey had always forsaken in favor of the grand staircase—then out a side entrance of City Hall into a waiting coroner's ambulance.

*   *   *

At about the same time Milk's body was being slipped on a rack beneath the stretcher bearing George Moscone, Dan White was sitting down with homicide inspectors Ed Erdelatz and Frank Falzon. Falzon had attended St. Elizabeth's Grammar School with White and later coached him on the police softball team; Dan had been his star player. Falzon read White his Miranda rights and then taped his twenty-four-minute confession. The interrogation of White—or, some said, the lack of it—would later prove to be one of the most controversial aspects of the murder case.

*   *   *

By noon, a small silent crowd was gathering outside City Hall, standing below the dome, staring dumbly at the police, reporters, and city officials who scurried up the wide stairs. The golden-bordered city flag above the portico was pulled to half-mast as the crowd grew. Some dropped flowers on the steps. Before long, a mound grew and an angry young man put a hand-lettered sign amid the blossoms: “Happy, Anita?”

*   *   *

The EXTRA editions were hitting the newstands on Castro Street with their bold headlines: “Mayor, Milk Slain; Dan White Seized.” Knots of Castro residents clustered on the corners, reading the newspapers in disbelief. Many of the bars and businesses quickly closed their doors and hung black bunting at their entrances. Black-bordered pictures of Harvey appeared in shop windows, store clerks slipped on black armbands. People started coming to Castro Street, to gather where they had so many times before in past crises.

Frank Robinson had spent the morning working on his new submarine disaster novel when he took his afternoon break and heard the news from a restaurant waitress. He went home, tuned into a news radio station, and started taking the dozens of calls from Harvey's other friends. He remembered the early days he and Harvey had spent bullshitting about politics on the old maroon couch in the funky Victorian storefront on Castro Street. A sense of isolation gripped Robinson as he realized this all was over now. He had no anger or hatred for Dan White. For Frank, White did not even exist as a person; White was just a tool, he thought. It was the whole society that hated gays; the game had always been stacked. You could be the best man in the world, he thought, and still the society would crucify you.

A few blocks away, Harvey's political friends from the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club were conferring at Harry Britt's house. They decided to respond to the assassinations just as they had responded to the crises of past years—a march from Castro Street to City Hall. The permits, details, and announcements fell into place as the afternoon wore on. They asked mourners to bring candles.

President Carter's statement that afternoon expressed “a sense of outrage and sadness at the senseless killing” of the two men. He praised Supervisor Milk as “a hard-working and dedicated supervisor, a leader of San Francisco's gay community, who kept his promise to represent all constituents.”

*   *   *

The board met briefly for its regularly scheduled Monday meeting at 2
P.M.
“This is an unparalleled time for San Francisco, and we need to keep together,” said Acting Mayor Feinstein. “I think we all have to share the same sense of outrage, the same sense of shame, the same sense of sorrow and the same sense of anger.” Feinstein urged the public to “go into a state of very deep and meaningful mourning and to express its sorrow with a dignity and an inner examination.…”

*   *   *

Medora Payne was on her lunch break at Lowell High School when a friend told her that Harvey and the mayor had been killed by Dan White. She had to be kidding, Medora thought, but her chemistry teacher confirmed the news. Medora could tell by the look in her teacher's eyes that it was true. She broke into tears, apologized to her friend for not believing her, and asked if she would stay with her while she wept for the funny man she had met so many years before when she took her parents' film to get developed at Castro Camera. She spent the next few hours walking around the high school's cinder track, crying and remembering the nights she had spent licking envelopes and handing out brochures for Harvey Milk.

*   *   *

Tom O'Horgan heard the news in New York City only hours before he went to the mailbox to find the letter Harvey had posted after he went to the opera, the letter ending with the exclamation—“Life is worth living.” A few hours later, Jack McKinley, hysterical from grief, joined him. O'Horgan loaned him the money to make the trip to San Francisco.

*   *   *

Mrs. Gina Moscone and the mayor's mother were attending a cousin's funeral seventy miles north of San Francisco when the assassinations occurred. The mayor's four children had converged on their home from their various schools by 1
P.M.
, when they finally arrived home. Gina took a few steps from her car and collapsed into a friend's arms. She had heard of the news of her husband's killing on the car radio.

*   *   *

“This is Harvey Milk, speaking on Friday, November 18, 1977. This is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. I've given it considerable thought to this, not just since the election. I've been thinking about this for some time prior to the election and certainly over the years. I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or potential target for a person who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbed with themselves. Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment or any time, I feel it's important that some people should understand my thoughts, so the following are my thoughts, my wishes, my desires, whatever, and I'd like to pass them on and played for the appropriate people.”

Most of the people in the room had known Harvey had made this tape. Now, only three hours after the shootings, they were following Harvey's wish that it be played. Harvey knew enough about the machinations of City Hall politics to understand that the outer trappings of sorrow would not keep politicos from immediately maneuvering to grab his seat. He had made the tape to ensure that his post would not fall into the hands of the gay moderates, whom he had so long opposed. Pabich, Rivaldo, Jones, Carlson, and Scott Smith, along with a handful of others, had originally walked into Harvey's office to play the tape, but Scott had seen Harvey's honorary clown certificate and the memorabilia cluttering Harvey's walls and could not bear to stay in the room, so they now huddled in Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver's cubicle, listening to Harvey's political will.