The Nomination (18 page)

“I will talk to you more tomorrow. It has been pleasant, remembering this part of my life. It was a contented time when I cared for my baby and Thomas treated me with love. It all changed, of course. That is one thing I know for certain about life. Nothing ever stays the same.”

JESSIE STOPPED FOR the night in a little no-name town off the Interstate a few miles east of Billings, Montana. She rented a motel room, this time registering as Julia Roberts. The woman who gave her the key looked up and squinted at Jessie when she read the name off the form. Jessie shrugged and smiled at her, as if to say, “Nope. Not
that
Julia.”

She had a cheeseburger and a Coke at the bar in the roadhouse next door to the motel, where an all-girl hillbilly band was playing and folks were drinking longnecks and doing the two-step on the little dance floor. Several handsome young cowpoke types tipped their Stetsons at Jessie and asked her if she cared to dance. She declined politely, and they didn't pester her.

Back in her room, she called Jimmy Nunziato in Chicago on her cell phone.

When he answered, she said, “Hey, Nunz. How you doing?”

“Jessie Church,” he said. “Jesus Christ. After that Cohen thing I thought you probably died or something.”

“Nope. I'm fine.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“Nowhere,” she said.

“Ah, shit. I get it. So I guess I know what you're after, right?”

“That's it,” she said.

“When do you need it?”

“Um, how'd Friday work for you?”

“Friday would be fine,” he said. “You want the works?”

“Yep. This is gonna be for a while. You still got a photo you can use?”

“On my computer somewhere. I never throw nothing away.”

“I'm blonde now. It's cut short. Can you do that?”

“Sure. Hard to picture you, short blonde hair, though. Anything else? I can give you big ears, fat cheeks . . .”

“Just the hair will be fine,” said Jessie. “And my age. I'm thirty-four now.”

“Thirty-four,” he said. “No shit.”

“Time flies when you're trying to survive, huh?”

“So where do you want to pick it up?” he said.

Jessie had already checked her road map and done some researching on her laptop. “There's a place called Deer Creek, a little east of Peoria. Know it?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “But I can find it. Peoria's maybe a threehour drive from here.”

“There's a Motel 8 there right off the Interstate. Let's make it seven in the evening, in the front parking lot. I'm in a gray Honda Civic, California plates. You'll recognize me. I'll be the blonde with the short hair.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'm there.”

“It'll be good to see you again, Jimmy,” she said.

“You too,” he said. “Not that I'll recognize you.”

“HELLO, MAC. I am sipping some iced tea and waiting for Jill to return from her trip to the post office.

“There is one thing I do not want you to misunderstand. At first I had no particular feelings for Thomas Larrigan. He had made a bargain with Mai Duc, and my feelings did not matter anyway, which I understood. I knew what my duty was, and I did it. It never occurred to me that I had the right to hate him or to love him. My feelings were irrelevant. I was available to him, and he could make love to me or slap me, as he wished. I was grateful when we made love and I was unhappy when he hit me. But I accepted whatever happened.

“After May was born, the hardness in my heart that had protected me for so long melted away. I loved my baby, and I found myself unable to control my feelings for Thomas. I allowed myself to love him, Mac. I could not love my child without loving her father. It began to matter to me how he treated me. I actually dreamed about the future. I thought about the war ending and Thomas taking May and me to America and how we would have more children.

“It was weakness. I understood that even then. It made me vulnerable. But I could not help myself.

“I loved watching her grow, Mac. I spoke only English to her. I sang lullabies to her and told her stories. She was a beautiful baby, and I never tired of being with her. I spent all my time with her. I had never been so happy.

“Everything changed one day a few weeks after May's first birthday. It was the rainy season. May and I had not been out of our apartment for almost a week, and Thomas had not come by for longer than that. The war was bad and close by, and Bunny was working twelve or fourteen hours every day, so I rarely saw her, either. May and I were running out of food, and I had finally decided that I had to take her out to get food, even though it was pouring rain, when Thomas showed up. When he came in the door I could see on his face that something was wrong. It was not just his normal anger or sadness, although I saw those things, too. And it was not just that he was drunk, although he was. It was more than that, and I should have been smart enough to be more careful with him.

“But May was hungry and we had been alone for a long time. So when he came in, rain dripping off him, I said, ‘Thomas, will you please get some food for us? May is hungry and we do not have any milk.'

“He ignored me. He took off his wet slicker and threw it on the sofa and went to the refrigerator. He looked inside, then slammed the door so that the whole apartment shook. ‘Where is my beer?' he yelled, and his voice was so loud and angry that May started crying.

“‘We do not have any beer,' I said. ‘I told you. We are out of everything. Will you buy some food for us and some beer for you?'

“‘Make her shut up,' he said, for May was screaming now, and at the sound of his voice, she cried even louder.

“‘She is hungry,' I said. ‘She cries because she is a baby and her stomach hurts.'

“Suddenly Thomas went to May and picked her up and began shaking her. ‘Shut up!' he yelled at her.

“Of course, she cried harder. He was yelling at her and shaking her.

“I started scratching at him and hitting him. ‘Leave her alone,' I said. ‘Please. Hit me, but be gentle with our child.'

“He turned to me, and I saw hatred in his eyes. I had never seen such hatred in Thomas Larrigan. ‘Okay, bitch,' he said. ‘I will hit you, then.' He put May back into her crib, and then he reached into his holster and took out his gun. His sidearm, he called it. It was big and square, and he held it by the barrel and raised it over his head like a club and came at me. As I backed away from him, feeling for the wall behind me with my hands, I touched the handle of the broom that I used to sweep the floor. It was an old straw broom, and the bristles had been worn down so that they were short and very stiff. As Thomas came at me, holding his gun over his head, I grabbed the broom, and with all my strength, I shoved the bristle end into his face.

“Mac, he screamed like a bull, and I saw that one of his eyes was gushing blood where the bristles had stabbed into it. And then he was on top of me and ... and then it felt as if a giant machete had split my head in half. I felt myself falling into a black bottomless hole, and I could not stop myself. It was as if my legs had melted and my head had floated away, and that is all I remember.

“I will tell you the rest of it next time, Mac. These are my true nightmares I am sharing with you now. I have tried to forget them for a very long time. It is very painful to speak of them. Please be patient with me.”

M
ac Cassidy was in his first-floor office downloading information about Simone and her films and the people she'd worked with when he heard the front door slam. He looked at his watch. Three-thirty. Like clockwork.

Then Katie called, “Daddy? I'm home.”

“Hi, honey. Come on in, give me a hug.”

A minute later she came into his office. She was looking more and more like Jane every day. She had Jane's sharp blue eyes, Jane's reddish-blonde hair, Jane's high cheekbones and pointy chin. She had a grown-up body, he couldn't help noticing. Jane had large breasts and had always complained that her butt was too big. Mac always told her that her butt was perfect, and he was being sincere.

Now Katie seemed to be growing into Jane's body.

She was wearing a knee-length gray skirt and a flowered blouse buttoned to her throat with a thin gold chain around her neck. No other jewelry. No make-up. It was how she always dressed for school. Matronly, almost.

Katie had no body piercings, not even her ears, never mind tattoos.

Mac had noticed how the other freshmen girls dressed. How could you not notice? Low-cut jeans, high-riding T-shirts, bare bellies, more often than not with a jewel glimmering out of their navels. Lipstick, eye shadow, purple hair. Nose rings, studs in their eyebrows and lips and tongues.

He found none of that offensive, but he didn't think it was particularly attractive, either. So why did it bother him that his Katie dressed and groomed herself like a business executive?

She came over to where he was sitting, hugged him from behind, and kissed his cheek. “Are you getting a lot of work done?”

“I'm doing a lot of work,” he said. “I don't know if any of it will turn out to be worth anything.”

She sat in the other chair in his small office with her knees pressed together and her hands lying quietly in her lap. Perfect posture. “Working on the new book?”

He nodded.

“How's it going?”

Just like Jane
, he thought. Jane had always asked how his work was going. About all he could ever think to tell her was that he'd written four pages today, or he'd revised a chapter, or he'd spent a frustrating day trying to dig up some arcane but vital bit of information, or he'd written nothing but did some good thinking. He never did figure out how to make a day sound interesting when he'd devoted it to scouring the inside of his head for words that matched up with the images and ideas he wanted to express.

People who didn't know better seemed to think that the writer's life was romantic and fascinating. The wives and children of writers quickly learned otherwise.

“It's going fine,” Mac told Katie. “How was your day?”

Most kids, he knew, would say, “Oh, fine,” or, “It sucked as usual,” or, “Margie dissed me in front of everybody, and I hate her.”

Not Katie. Katie went methodically through her day at school, class by class, what they were studying, the history quiz she got back, A-, she made a couple stupid mistakes, the big bio test coming up, what she had for lunch, her French teacher was out sick again, kids are gossiping that she's pregnant, she's not even married, the interesting discussion they had in English about Lady MacBeth . . .

His daughter was a mystery to him.

When she finished her recitation, she stood up, smoothed her skirt against her legs, and said, “Well, I'm going to change and get dinner started. I thawed some pork chops, and I thought we'd have rice and green beans.”

You're fifteen years old
, he wanted to scream.
You should be on the softball team. You should be riding around in some horny senior boy's car. You should be gossiping with the other girls. You should be trying out words like “bitch” and “bastard” and “shitfaced.” You should be experimenting with beer and marijuana and sex. You should be doing forbidden things and lying about them. You should not be rushing home from school every day to cook dinner for your father. What's the matter with you?

Well, he knew exactly what was the matter with her. Her mother had been run down by a commuter train, and Katie Cassidy believed it was her fault and intended to make sure nothing like that happened to her father.

He no longer knew what to say to her, how to deal with her. He'd talked to Miss Richards, the guidance counselor, and Dr. Wagner, the psychologist Miss Richards had recommended. Both of them assured Mac that this was a “stage” that Katie needed to go through, that he was lucky she hadn't reacted in the opposite way, by rebelling. This was Katie's way of grieving, they said, and it gave her life structure and meaning. Many kids would run away from home or attempt suicide. Katie was trying to be the best person she could be. She was trying to replace Jane, to fill that emptiness for her father.

No, it wasn't necessarily a normal response to what had happened. But it wasn't self-destructive, and who's to say what's normal, anyway?

Therapy would help, of course, but Katie had to be willing or there'd be no point to it. Mac had raised the subject with her several times. Her response was always the same:
I'm fine, Daddy
.
Really
.

And so she told him about her day at school and he told her about his day at his desk, and she cooked and cleaned and did her homework, and he earned the money and paid the bills, and sometimes in the evening after Katie had loaded the dishwasher, they sat in the living room and watched some dumb reality show on TV and made fun of it.

It didn't seem like a healthy relationship. But Mac didn't know what to do about it. It was working, more or less. It was getting them through each day.

She started to leave his office.

“Honey?” he said.

She turned. “Yes?”

“I've got to drive out to the Catskills in New York on Saturday. I wonder if you'd like to come along?”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

“I've got to meet with Simone—she's the subject of my book, remember?”

Katie smiled. It was a smile of patience, of tolerance. It was the sort of smile a loving parent might bestow upon a cute child. A condescending smile. “Of course I remember,” she said. “The movie star.”

“I thought you might like to meet her,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “Great.”

Some day
, Mac wanted to say,
you should say no. Some day you should get angry with me. You should yell at me, tell me I don't understand you, and you should lock yourself in your room and call your best friend and tell her how your father is unfair and stupid.

What he actually said was, “Terrific. We'll have a fun day.”

And Katie smiled and nodded and went upstairs to change out of her school clothes before she made dinner.

IT WAS HAPPENING in the Rose Garden, right outside the building where Pat Brody's office was located, but Brody was watching it on his television, live on CNN.

Old Justice Crenshaw had just finished his two-minute statement to the cameras and microphones, explaining in his soft, quavery voice that he had been hearing all the speculation and thought it was detracting from the business of the Court and so had decided not to wait until the end of the session to announce his retirement.

Brody knew that the president had put pressure on the old judge. The administration needed a quick hit of positive publicity, preferably something that would divert media attention from another month of bad economic news.

On Monday, three days earlier, the president had called Pat Brody into the Oval Office and told him he was going to announce the Larrigan nomination now rather than later. The fact that he didn't ask made it clear that he didn't want to hear Brody's opinion.

If he'd had a solid, definitive reason to think the president was making a mistake, Pat Brody would have said something, and he knew the president knew that.

But he had nothing like that. Oh, he had some doubts. Blackhole had observed the judge meeting in unusual places with an old Marine buddy from Vietnam named Edward Moran. Moran seemed vaguely unsavory, and they'd investigated him, but they'd come up with nothing. And otherwise, there were only the normal sorts of things that, if you looked hard enough, you'd learn about any man who'd been on Earth for more than half a century, who'd gone to war and to law school, who'd worked hard and made enemies, who'd made love to women and raised children.

So when the president told him that he wanted to go public with Larrigan, Pat Brody had kept his doubts to himself, preserving the president's plausible deniability.

Sometimes the president welcomed contradiction and debate from his staffers, and sometimes he wanted agreement and support. Brody was skilled at figuring out which before he said anything. That's how he had kept his job all this time.

This time, when the president said, “Any problem with this?” Brody knew he wanted support, not debate.

“He seems like a good candidate, sir,” Brody had said.

“Remember what Churchill said?” said the president. “He said: ‘Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.'”

The president was saying that he knew he might be making a mistake, and he was willing to live with it. So Brody just nodded and smiled. “You've got to be a cat. Nine lives.”

“Right,” said the president. “So we'll just have to take the chance of getting killed one more time.” He'd flashed Pat Brody his famous grin. “Keep up the good work, Pat.”

So now, as Pat Brody watched on the television set in his office almost directly beneath the Oval Office, the president introduced the tall judge with the eye patch as an American hero, a distinguished jurist, a worthy successor to Justice Lawrence Crenshaw, a personal friend, and a worthy golfing adversary.

And Thomas Larrigan thanked the president, shook his hand, moved to the microphone, and delivered a little speech that emphasized how honored he was to receive the president's confidence, how humbled to be given the opportunity to carry forth the distinguished legacy of Justice Crenshaw, how committed to serving his country, and, his punchline, how determined he was to continue trying to beat the president at golf.

It was quite a good speech, Brody thought. It hit all the right notes of humility and confidence, with the pitch-perfect hint of self-deprecating humor.

He recalled something Will Rogers had once said: “I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.”

Nobody was perfect. Not Justice Crenshaw, not the president, and certainly not Pat Brody. But they were all good enough, and unless somebody came up with more than a few secretive meetings with a former Marine buddy, he supposed Thomas Larrigan was good enough, too.

He better be, because now, with the official announcement of the nomination, the president's political future was on the line.

JESSIE PARKED IN the strip mall across the street from the Motel 8 in Deer Creek, Illinois. From where she sat, she could watch both entrances to the motel. She had put on her sunglasses and her Oakland A's cap.

Not that she didn't trust Jimmy Nunziato.