THE PRESIDENT 2 (18 page)

When Gina realized that Christian was literally hovering over her, she smiled and told him to sit down.

“I can’t do that, ma’am,” he said.
 
“The president expects me to protect you.”

Gina smiled.
 
Christian was like a son to Dutch, but Dutch was like some great, mythical figure to Christian.
 
His every move seemed to center around making sure he was doing right by Dutch.

Dutch
, Gina thought, as her mind drifted to their dust-up last night.
 
It was their first severe argument and it was a doosie.
 
It was so bad that Dutch not only walked out on her, but he spent the night in the guest room.
 
And it wasn’t because he had a late meeting, either.
 
It was because he had had it with her.

He was opposed to what she was about to do, and she understood his concern.
 
But what hurt her was the way he never once tried to see it from her point of view.
 
Yes, Marcus Rance was the scum of the earth for the crimes he was convicted of committing.
 
Gina was one of those attorneys who had seen it all and she knew all about those drive-by shootings where the shooter had such low regard for life that he didn’t care who was caught in the crossfire.
 
He knew Marcus’s crimes were inexcusable.
 

But he was still her father’s son.
 
He was still her flesh and blood.
 
And now that he was off Death Row and granted permission to have guests, she felt compelled to come.

The timing was wrong, she understood that.
 
Dutch’s political opponents and what Sarah Palin rightly called that
lame street
beltway media would try to make hay out of it, she knew that too.
 
But ever since she found out about Marcus Rance’s existence last year, she’d wanted to see him.
 
But it was an impossibility then.
 
Dutch was in a bitter re-election campaign and the press was trying, through her, to link him in every way to Marcus Rance.
 
No way was she going to give them the hammer to hammer Dutch with.
 

But the election was over now and Dutch had won.
 
He was now constitutionally barred from ever seeking the presidency again and therefore, for all intents and purposes, his political campaigns were over.
 
The Democratic Party was relying on his support, of course, but that, Gina felt, wasn’t about her.
 
She wasn’t delaying any longer seeing her father’s son because of any allegiance she had to the Democratic Party.

And when Marcus Rance walked into the Warden’s office, chained from hand to foot like the animal he probably was, surrounded by not only prison guards, but the Secret Service too, Gina understood Dutch’s resistance.
 
Because in just that moment she was resistant too.
 
She wanted to get up and run away herself.

But she didn’t.
 
She stayed.
 
And what struck her was the familiarity of him.
 
In the newspaper photos of him, which were always mug shots, he looked like some wild-haired, menacing-looking thug of a man.
 
But now, in person, he was this short, chubby, bespectacled, nerdy-looking man who looked remarkably, almost uncannily, like her father.

“Sit down, Rance,” the Warden ordered as guards pressed on his shoulders and slammed him down into the chair in front of the desk.
 
After Gina assured the Warden that she was fine, he and the guards left.
 
The Secret Service, however, remained in the background, but they remained.
 

“I know who you are,” Rance said with a wide, gap-tooth grin.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yes ma’am.
 
You’re my sister.
 
Oh, and the First Lady of course.”

“And you’re Marcus Rance, my father’s son, the convicted murderer of innocent people.”

Rance’s grin left.
 
He glanced at the Secret Service, at Christian, and then he looked more suspiciously at Gina.
 
“What’s all this about?” he asked.

“I wanted to meet you.
 
I wanted to see how you could come from a great, wonderful man like my father, and do the things you did.”

“Great and wonderful?” Rance said incredulously.
 
“When was he so great and wonderful?
 
Before or after he left my mama while she was pregnant with me?
 
Before or after she had to take him to court just to get a little child support, and even then he denied paternity?
 
Before or after my mama died and those state social workers tried to get him to come and get me and he wouldn’t.
 
And I was put in foster home after foster home where I was beaten, falsely accused, and raped so many times that I wanted to kill the next motherfucker who so much as looked at me funny.
 
But of course our daddy had nothing to do with all of that.
 
He was too busy being great and wonderful.”

He exhaled.
 
Looked her up and down.
 
“Try living with those kind of odds stacked against you,
sis
, and I’d bet what side of that desk you would have been on today!
 
No rich, white president would have wanted to fuck you then!”

The secret service quickly moved for Rance but Gina stopped them.
 
She was shaken by his harsh past and by her father’s part in that harshness, but she willed herself not to show it.

When the agents backed off, she looked Rance dead in the eye.
 
“Are you saying that, in light of your background, your behavior should be excused?”

“That’s what you saying.
 
I’m not saying that.
 
I know I messed the fuck up.
 
I know I did some stupid shit in my day.
 
But the crime they’re accusing me of, I didn’t do.”

Gina smiled.
 
“Oh.
 
You’re innocent.
 
I see.”

“I didn’t say anything about being innocent.
 
I’m not innocent.
 
But I didn’t do no drive-by and kill those people, I’m saying that.
 
Because it’s the truth.”

Gina stared at her brother.
 

“Why you think they commuted my sentence?” he asked.
 
“Because they know it too.
 
Look at the evidence, if you don’t believe me.”

“What will I find if I look?”

Rance seemed to move to the edge of his seat, prompting an agent to move closer to him.
 
He glanced at that agent, bitterly, but then looked at Gina.
 
“You’ll find that I was at work when they said that drive-by happened.”

“Work?” Gina blurted out.
 
“What work?
 
According to press accounts you were a drug dealer when that crime occurred.”

“But that ain’t the truth.
 
Yeah, okay, I slung drugs when I was a kid, but I been out of that.
 
I was working all kinds of jobs since then.
 
I was working at Winchell’s when that drive-by happened.
 
Had clocked in and everything.
 
And made my rounds like I always do.”

“What’s Winchell’s?
 
And what kind of rounds were you making?”

“Winchell’s is a furniture store in Abilene.
 
I deliver furniture, that’s what rounds I make.
 
And I was delivering furniture when they said that drive-by occurred.”

“Are they saying you shot those people in your delivery truck?”

“No!
 
They say I shot them in my car, and that car been stolen for like two weeks.”

Christian almost smiled.
 
That story was absurd to even him.
 
But Gina and even LaLa, to his surprise, didn’t seem to find it absurd at all.

“Did you report your car as stolen?”

“Yeah I reported it!
 
But them police trying to say they don’t have no record of it.”

“And did your employer testify that you were at work?”

“He testified.
 
Said I clocked in.
 
Then them prosecutors twisted him all up till he said he couldn’t verify for sure that I stayed on my delivery route the whole time, even though the family I delivered the furniture to said I got there at the time I was supposed to get there.”

“So they believe while on your way to that delivery you went and committed yourself a drive-by shooting?”

“That’s what they saying.
 
But I would have had to ditch the truck, take my partner with me--”

“What partner?”

“The employee who delivered furniture with me,” Rance said, amazed that she didn’t know every detail of his case.
 
“His name’s Jason Craig.
 
But because he ain’t upstanding either they didn’t believe his report at all.”
 
Then Rance looked Gina dead in the eye.
 
“There are so many holes in this conviction, sis, you wouldn’t believe it.
 
And they convicted me anyway.
 
It was like my past was on trial, not my present, not my future, not whether or not I did what they said I did.
 
It was terrible.”

Gina could see the horror in his eyes, as if he was still amazed himself by what he perceived to be a monumental miscarriage of justice.
 
And she didn’t’ dismiss his claim out of hand because she couldn’t; because in her nearly decade work with Block by Block Raiders in Newark, she’d seen even worse.

“What’s your lawyer’s name?” she asked the man whom she still couldn’t reconcile as her brother.

NINE

Victoria and Max stood at the lunette window and watched as Dutch and Caroline walked in deliberately slow strides across the Nantucket estate.
 
It reminded both of them of the old days, when the pair was so much in love that it was ridiculous to Max even then.
 
At least Dutch was deeply in love.
 
Max had already discovered and Victoria eventually found out, that Caroline loved Dutch, but so many other men, too.