“How’s your progress been?” Landon asked.
“Just short of ten million in pledges in the last week.”
Landon’s head swung around. “Ten million? How’s that possible?”
“I had a lot of chips to play.”
“What? You threaten to put people in the federal penitentiary if they didn’t contribute?”
It was Brandon’s turn to laugh. “Criminals rarely have any money. Despite all the talk about drug kingpins, dope dealers really don’t do all that well. Turns out most of them sleep on their mother’s couches.”
“So we’re only talking about another five or so in the next three weeks?”
“But it’ll be a lot harder. People are tapped out, or are at least having trouble reaching the bottom of their pockets.” Brandon grinned. “Makes me want to give them sort of a political wedgie and bring their pockets up a few inches.”
Landon laughed and shook his head. “People will be shocked to learn Machiavelli has a sense of humor.”
“Let’s not tell them.” Brandon pointed at Landon’s watch, then bit his lip. “We really don’t have time to stop.”
“We’ll make time.”
“T hey’ve kept up the lawn nicely,” Landon said, getting out of the limousine at the curb. He then pointed along the walkway. “Wasn’t there a tree here? A poplar or something?”
“I don’t remember,” Brandon said.
“You mean you haven’t been here since we came out together last time?”
Brandon shrugged. “You know how it is. There are only so many hours in a day.”
Landon wasn’t surprised, but wondered how their parents raised sons with such different attitudes, different feelings, maybe even different loyalties, toward family.
He felt himself well up as he cut across the grass and his heart ached even before he spotted her headstone: Jane Meyer, Born 1956-Died 1960, Now with God.
Landon stared down the marble slab, remembering the collision.
Or at least thinking he was remembering it.
He’d told the story so many times in speeches over the years, drawing so many different lessons as his political needs shifted, he wasn’t sure of the truth-except that a drunk driver had killed his little sister.
Even as a child he’d understood exactly what had been taken from him, from his parents, from their grandparents. From Brandon, he wasn’t so sure.
One thing Senator Landon Meyer knew with certainty, and without regret, was that he’d been the first six- year-old in human history who believed in the death penalty.
F ive minutes later, after a brief prayer, Landon took in a long breath and said:
“Let’s go get some money.”
Chapter 37
'Boots is gone.”
Viz was standing at Gage’s office door.
“When?”
“Day before yesterday. I’ve been going by his hotel like you wanted. I talked up one of the maids after I hadn’t spotted his van for twelve hours. She told me.” Viz grinned. “She turned red and got all fidgety when I described him and pointed out his room. I think she was doing more than cleaning.”
“You get her name?”
“Her tag said Rosa M. Full name, Rosa Montijo.”
Gage walked to the kitchen after Viz left and poured himself a cup of coffee. He collected an empty banker’s box from the supply room, then walked down the flight of stairs to the basement. He punched in the code numbers that had nearly cost Shakir his life, then went inside.
Boxes containing fifteen years of case files he and Viz had collected from Charlie Palmer’s storage locker were stacked along the wall.
Gage lined them up along the floor, year by year, and then lifted up the first in line and set it on the worktable.
He examined his hands, already grimy with dust, then searched around the room for a rag or paper towels. There weren’t any. He wiped them on his Levi’s, figuring it was the least damaging kind of dirt he was about to paw through.
He flipped open the box and sat down.
S even hours later Gage noticed the time, surprised to find it was four o’clock, now broken free from his immersion in Charlie Palmer’s life, or at least those parts leaving a paper trail.
Reflecting back on his moods as he’d examined the files, Gage found he hadn’t felt anger so much as indecision, struggling to focus, wondering what he was trying to do and who his client really was.
Socorro?
Tansy?
Maybe even Porzolkiewski?
Every person who didn’t get justice because Charlie played God and took their lives in his hands?
He knew that Faith would say: You can only do what you can do.
He decided to start with the easiest one.
Or perhaps, the hardest.
Gage walked upstairs. Tansy wasn’t at her desk.
G age hated the song. Hated it the first time he heard it. It sometimes played in his mind as he drove Highway 101 toward the bedroom communities south of San Francisco and looked up at the rows of little houses strung together like pieces of hard candy, striping the hillsides. He thought of the lyrics describing little boxes and ticky-tacky houses all looking the same. Lots of people knew it. Hardly anybody knew who’d first sung it. Gage did. Pete Seeger had been his father’s favorite folksinger. He could still recall the album it was on, recorded during the 1963 We Shall Overcome concert at Carnegie Hall.
Gage remembered his father humming it one day as they’d walked to the plaster-covered adobe building housing his one-person medical practice in Nogales. Gage had just passed his thirteenth birthday. On Saturdays he raked the front yard, watered the cactus, and collected the tumbleweeds desert winds had rolled onto the property.
Gage recalled stopping on the sidewalk and telling his father, “Maybe that’s all they can afford.”
His father had turned toward him and said, “You’re right, son.” His father gazed for a moment at the distant mesquite and saguaro-covered foothills, then said, “I think there may be a lesson in this. Sometimes even the most decent among us don’t listen to what they’re really saying.”
His father never hummed the song again and Gage never heard it again, except when his mind played it for him.
The song had faded by the time Gage had walked up the front steps of Tansy’s tiny Daly City bungalow and rang the doorbell.
Tansy peeked out of the front window and then opened the door.
“How’s Moki doing?” Gage asked, after she invited him.
“Okay. Some muscle spasms. It scared the aide so she called.”
Gage spotted Moki sitting at the dining table coloring with crayons. Twenty-four years old with the mind of a child. Maybe not even a child. Children can recognize their mothers, if only just by instinct.
Tansy directed Gage toward the couch, then sat next to him and looked down at the file in his hand, Moki’s name printed on the yellowed tab.
“It was Brandon Meyer’s old law firm that hired Charlie to work on the side of the punks who jumped Moki,” Gage said.
She shook her head. “They didn’t represent anyone. You can look. I’ve got a copy of the whole court file in the closet.”
