KC09 - Identical Read online

  10.

  On the Trail—January 30, 2008

  It was 7:30 a.m. and he stood in the light-rail station in Center City, one glove on, his right hand bare as he extended it to commuters. He was positioned in the lower level, near the bank of doors, so he could catch both the inbound and outbound rush, but there was no heat here and the temperature could not have been more than ten degrees. The young interns who had accompanied him were stomping their feet and walking in circles, but the rush of engaging with so many people distracted him from the throbbing in his ears. Since John F. Kennedy abandoned the formal top hat for his inauguration, it had been the preferred political style in the US to greet voters bareheaded.

  “Paul Gianis, hoping for your vote for mayor on April third.” He must have said that five times a minute, never varying more than a word or two.

  He loved the meet-and-greets, but not for the reason most might suspect. They taught him humility, for one thing, a trait their mother always commended, even if she practiced it rarely. In today’s world only athletes and entertainers were real stars. Paul had been majority leader of the state senate for four years, but people still registered his as no more than a familiar face, figuring they’d met him someplace unrecalled, like their cousin’s wedding. When they heard his name, the commuters’ reactions varied. Most smiled tepidly and shook as they passed by. Some stopped to tell him they’d shopped in his father’s grocery, or that they’d voted for him in the past. There were always a few who wanted a picture, particularly if they were with their kids. Plenty of folks breezed by coldly, R’s or, more often, people who regarded politicians as a plague, especially ones making it harder to get to work. Of course, people he’d known for years—lawyers on the way to the office, most of them—would stop to say hi. And there was also one great Latino guy who, by sheer coincidence, he’d run into at four or five of these stops around the Tri-Cities, who opened his arms and hugged him this morning, shouting, “Pablo, amigo!”

  Occasionally, commuters wanted longer conversations. Moms tended to ask pointed questions about schools and the Rec Department, both perilously underfunded, and younger people who were engaged in what used to be regarded as a reverse commute, going from their Center City apartments to jobs near the airport, would sometimes tarry to find out his plans to make the county more energy-efficient or to feed start-ups in the tech sector. Doing this day in and day out—and he was at a different bus stop or here every workday, and in grocery stores all over the county on the weekend—you could get a feel for the issues. There were still too many black folks moved to complain about the police force’s excesses, particularly in the North End. And inevitably he heard stories that broke his heart—today it was the dad of a gravely disabled son who couldn’t get adequate help from the schools or county agencies, but who refused to institutionalize a boy whose mother had abandoned him long ago. There was also comic relief—morning travelers who expected him to do something on the spot about their neighbor’s barking dog, or the zeta beams from Mars, or, very often, the judge hearing their divorce case, whose rulings against them were a sure sign of ingrained corruption. But he loved it all, the meeting, the wooing, the listening, telling his staffers to write down ideas and plans and names. This was the open heart of the city, full of need.

  “So like what’s with this murder thing?” a young man in a stocking cap and overcoat asked now. It was the third time this morning someone had referred to Hal’s ads. He had practiced an agonized look and a toss of his head, as if it were beyond comprehension.

  “This dude’s an asshole, right?” said the guy. His skin was spotty and he had probably experienced a miserable adolescence, but now he was clearly not lacking in confidence.

  “Your words,” he answered.

  “Yeah, but it sounds bad, man.” With that the fellow was gone.

  At 8:45, he and the two aides left the station. He had a breakfast at the Metro Club, a fund-raiser with trial lawyers. He’d lost some support there because he’d been willing to discuss damage caps as part of a failed effort at health care reform last year, but most of the attorneys attending had been colleagues forever, and he was still their guy, especially since he’d be controlling the County Law Department from the mayor’s office.

  When he opened the back door of the campaign car, a red Taurus a couple of years old, Crully was in the back seat. Mark leaned out and asked Kim and Marty, the interns, if they’d mind grabbing a cab. That could not mean anything good. Mark would only have come out in the cold because he had to brief the candidate in private on something he needed to know about before he ran into any reporters. Sure enough, Crully handed over a fistful of papers. Discovery motions from Hal’s lawyers.

  “No motion to dismiss?”

  “Huh?” Crully answered.

  “You said they’d file a motion to dismiss our complaint on First Amendment grounds and we’d be briefing it until the election. But they’ve skipped that stage and gone straight to discovery. Right?”

  Mark shrugged, indifferent to the fact that he’d been flat wrong. Hal and his lawyers had outflanked Paul and wanted Judge Lands to order production of all the evidence that the state and local police still had on hand, and to direct Paul to give saliva and fingerprints. They were going to try to do DNA tests. He read over the attached affidavit from Hassam Yavem, a couple of times. It was shocking, actually. He’d had an idle worry about DNA testing once or twice over the years, but one thing he’d been told repeatedly was that there was no way to tell his DNA from his twin brother’s. Yavem was a real scientist, though.

  Crully could tell what was on his mind.

  “Ray already talked to Yavem. It’s like one in two hundred the test will actually work.”

  “And is all that stuff even around?” he asked.

  “Apparently the blood is. They found it in the state police fridge. They actually have a ten-year retention policy and then they adios it, but not this.”

  “And why was I so lucky?”

  “AIDS,” Crully said.

  “AIDS?”

  “It’s from 1982. They didn’t do routine AIDS screening on blood in 1982. So when they got to 1992, nobody wanted to touch it. It sat there.”

  “Great.”

  Crully didn’t like what he was seeing in Paul, and he was seeing it every time this subject came up. Crully had been running winning campaigns long enough to be able to pick his races. And he chose them on two bases. First, he wanted to win. Occasionally, just for money, he’d work a stone loser in an off-year election for some Democratic gazillionaire who thought she or he was the new face of democracy. But Mark had tasted ashes often enough, and if he needed money, he could move back to D.C. and lobby. So he wanted winners, one. And two, he wanted a hardworking candidate. People would never believe how many of these men and, more rarely, women didn’t want to put in the time. They liked getting up in front of cameras or an adoring crowd, even if it was half relatives of the campaign staff. But they didn’t care for eighteen-hour days. And they wanted to pretend that the money grew on trees, that George Soros or someone was going to take a liking to them and pour down millions out of a pillowcase. They thought it was degrading or embarrassing to ask people to make their support tangible. Gianis was a pro. And tireless. Two days ago, he’d told Mark that Crully could begin adding campaign appearances in February, three more every day. And Paul still had a law office, not to mention that the state senate would go back in session next week. Gianis wasn’t going to get more than four hours’ sleep a night until May.

  Crully had met Paul three years ago when he was weighing a run for Congress. Crully had made a conditional commitment to a race in California, and ended up having to decline. But he had attended college at Easton, same as Paul, and while still a student, Mark had worked local races here, so he knew the right people to hire now. He welcomed the challenge of a big-city mayor’s race. And he liked Gianis. Straight shooter. Progressive. Could take advice. And believed in more than his own election, althou
gh they all believed in that first and foremost. Paul understood the metrics—how many volunteers, how many dollars. The guy, Clooney, who was running finance, gave Paul ten names to call before he went to sleep, and he’d have his cell out and the list in his hand as soon as the car door closed when they finished an event. Often, he’d be done by noon and ask for ten more. He didn’t whine about needing to see his wife and kids—everybody on the flipping campaign needed time with their children or girlfriends—and he didn’t come out of a church whispering about what a narcissistic asshole that preacher was. He knew you didn’t find shy types in the pulpit. This thing with Kronon was the first time Gianis seemed to have lost his usual discipline. He was acting scared was what bothered Crully. You could never win scared. Everybody—the press, your opponents, your staff—felt it. A leader always acted like a leader. Paul seemed anguished by this whole deal with his brother.

  “This is out of control,” Gianis said. Crully watched Paul stare out the window at the big buildings and crowded streets of the city he hoped soon to govern. “And what do you want me to do about this?”

  “What do you mean, what do I want? You do the obvious thing. Cooperate. Stick out your chin and say, ‘I’ve got nothing to fear. He can have my prints. He can have my spit.’ This isn’t about what happens in the courtroom. You’re fighting a war of impressions. I’ve said that before.”

  “We don’t want that test. We’re not going to get good results,” Gianis said.

  Crully thought his heart had stopped.

  “What the hell does that mean? Are your fingerprints there? Or your DNA?”

  Gianis revolved toward Crully, his mouth crimped sourly.

  “What do you think, Mark?”

  “So what do you mean ‘bad results’? That’s a good result, isn’t it, if your shit isn’t there? I’d roll up my sleeve and ink a fingerprint card in front of two dozen cameras. And I’d do it today.”

  “I can’t do it today.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to talk to my brother. I need to talk to Sofia. This is hard on my kids. I need to prepare them all.” Gianis continued to roll his tongue around inside his mouth as he turned back to the window. He removed his glasses, as he did frequently, to rub at the lumpy bridge of his nose. “And the bad result, in case you haven’t figured this out, Mark, is that Yavem won’t be able to tell whose DNA it is, and Hal and his ad team will twist that as proof I could be the murderer. And the only thing I’ll have is what I had to start, namely saying I didn’t do it. This thing is a trap.”

  Crully took some time. Gianis had a point.

  “This whole suit is becoming a train wreck,” Gianis said. “You told me I had to sue, just to make a statement, and that the lawyers would tie everything up until the election.”

  “Yeah, and you told me there was nothing to worry about. Now Kronon’s got you lying to the cops. And your sad-sack ex-girlfriend, who has the fact you ruined her life just about tattooed on her forehead, is saying you told her your brother was innocent. Don’t fuckin blame this on me. The ex, hell hath no fury, OK. But the cops?”

  “I forgot about it.”

  “Well, that was unfortunate,” Crully said.

  “I didn’t lie to the cops anyway. Not that it makes any difference.”

  Crully hadn’t talked with Paul about any of this in detail, and he wasn’t sure he cared to now. Even when shit came bubbling out of the earth like a clogged septic field, he never went back to the candidate to ask about the hot little thing on the side or the no-bid deal for a big contributor. Because he wanted to be able to tell reporters with a straight face that there was no truth to the charges, so far as he knew.

  “You didn’t lie to the cops?” asked Crully. “How is that? You told the cops that you and your brother were out drinking beers over the river when it happened. And your brother pled guilty to the murder, so unless Cass had a chat with Einstein and conquered the laws of space and time, he wasn’t with you when the woman was killed. Right?”

  Gianis assumed that agonized look Crully hated and gazed through the window again, shaking his head unconsciously at the magnitude of the complications.

  “I never told the police we were together all night. They must have misunderstood me. I said that after the picnic we went out to the Overlook and had a few beers.”

  “Do we want to go with that? A misunderstanding? Will Cass back that up?” They had said nothing in response to Kronon’s commercials, citing the ongoing litigation. Ray had filed a good motion with Judge Lands, asking him to set ground rules: Could the parties talk or not? It was a complicated issue, apparently, because Paul was a lawyer and legal ethics prohibited attorneys from making statements outside of court about a case while a lawsuit was pending. Judge Lands had scheduled a hearing for next week.

  “Of course Cass would back it up.”

  “And your brother didn’t tell you he’d killed the Kronon girl by the time you spoke to the police, right? So you didn’t recognize the significance of the timing.”

  “He’s never told me that, frankly.”

  “He didn’t tell you he was going to plead guilty?”

  “Of course he did.”

  Crully felt himself squint. “Are you splitting hairs?”

  “You could say that, I suppose.”

  Gianis was hiding something. That was the real problem. You could bad-mouth the press, and the campaign finance laws, and say politics was all flimflam, and be right 90 percent of the time, but hard truths, big truths about candidates, often emerged in campaigns. It was like performing brain surgery with a jackhammer. But it was getting clearer every day that there was something Gianis wasn’t telling.

  “Look,” said Crully. “Is there anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Come on, Paul. Who the fuck am I, Carnac? I don’t want to have to figure out the right question. You know what would sink the ship. Is this ship sinking?”

  “No.” Gianis slowly turned back to face Mark. Paul had those mystical black Greek eyes, so dark you couldn’t really see into them. “You want to hear me say it?”

  Crully didn’t know for a second. “Yes,” he said finally.

  “I didn’t murder Dita Kronon. I didn’t have a goddamned thing to do with it.”

  A good politician was always a decent actor, so Crully had learned to take everything with a grain of salt. He knew a guy whom Clinton had dragged into a quiet corner in the White House so POTUS could assure him, strictly between them, that he’d never even coveted Monica Lewinsky. But Crully couldn’t help himself: He believed Paul and felt relief wash through his entire upper body.

  “My brother thinks we should dismiss this lawsuit,” Gianis said.

  “Fuck,” Crully said. “You can’t dismiss the lawsuit. It’ll be a disaster. It will look like you’re guilty.”

  “I’m not saying I agree with him, Mark. But I take his point. It’s just a tar baby, this thing. Unless we agree to that test and hit the bull’s-eye. But it’s 199 out of two hundred we don’t. It’ll all get murkier. You’ll forgive me, but I should never have listened to you guys.”

  “OK. Blame me. You want to, go ahead. But you can’t dismiss now. You dismiss and I have to quit.”

  Gianis tilted his chin down so he could give Mark a hard look. “Threat?” he asked.

  “Call it what you want. We have to play this out in court and hope for the best. Maybe Lands imposes a gag order and makes Hal take his ads off the air.”

  “He won’t. I wouldn’t if I were the judge. You can’t let a politician file a lawsuit and silence his critics. And Du Bois Lands is a good lawyer. I used to work with him.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Crully. His heart perked up. “Why didn’t somebody tell me that?”

  “Because it’s a long story,” Paul said. They were at the Metro Club and Paul opened the door, but before he slid across the seat, he patted Crully on the shoulder and smiled for the first time on the trip. A real smile. “Buck up, M
ark. It’s actually a great day.”

  “It is?”

  “My brother gets out of prison.” He looked at his watch. “In fact, he’s out.”

  At 8:30, the correctional officers would have fingerprinted him in the administrative center, to be sure they were releasing the right guy, and let him put on the old blue jeans and the sweatshirt in which he’d surrendered. Hillcrest looked like a ranch in a cowboy movie, surrounded by a low white fence. Not even barbed wire. They called it the Honor Camp, meaning there wasn’t anyone in there who hadn’t figured out he’d do really hard time if he was caught after running off. This morning the guards would have shot the bolts on B gate, which was opened solely to release prisoners and receive deliveries from sixteen-wheelers, and swung the two sides wide. And his brother would have walked out on the frozen dirt road alone. Sofia had left before six to drive him back.

  Kim and Marty, the interns, were already under the Metro Club’s green awning. The constant pedestrian rush had ground the ice and snow of a few weeks ago into a charcoal mush that had limed over in a few stubborn clumps that still clung to the cement with the tenacity of a living creature. How much salt could the walks stand, he wondered, before they pitted and would need replacement? He’d never wondered about that in his life, but it would be a preoccupation if he became mayor. Every screw and nut in the structure of the Tri-Cities would be his concern.

  His cell vibrated just as he reached the two aides. It was his personal handheld, not the mobile from the campaign. He thought it might be Beata, who’d called once already, but he hadn’t found the kind of complete privacy even a whispered conversation with Beata required. The number was blocked.