The Good Father (12 page)

Cameramen and technicians stood around drinking store-bought coffee. Anchormen in priceless blue suits sat in folding chairs, reading newspapers as they waited for some recordable action to begin. Approaching the Capitol—all steps and pillars, sharp-cornered squares and triangles—I caught a glimpse of the Washington Monument out of the corner of my right eye, a wicked sliver against a fluttering sheet of blue. At the same moment I heard the first cricket click of cameras signaling the inevitable onslaught of tourists, the elderly couples in their bright nylon running clothes, the Japanese businessmen loaded down with technology, the fat American families and glottic Germans, lining up behind velvet ropes for aseptic, guided tours.

Looking up at the Capitol steps, I had a sense of what it meant for men to rule each other. I felt a recognition of place that went beyond simple geography. This was a building whose image had been drilled deep into my consciousness by countless photographs, movies, and TV news reports. Seeing it here, muscular and broad, I endured a sensation that was not entirely human. The reverence of the elephant in its graveyard, the bear in its cave.

In my muscles and joints I felt it.

Behind me a woman said,
I’m able to compartmentalize my life more
. A man in a paint-stained denim vest made a run for the parking lot and was chased down by police. A hundred digital cameras clicked and flashed and the hair on my neck bristled. There was an aura beyond television to the agglomeration of monuments that surrounded me, beyond
words or photographs. It was the difference between standing before a dynamic painting and spotting a picture of the painting in a magazine. To be here was to recognize the authority of location.

It was also to realize the full obscenity of my son’s crime. After all, Jay Seagram wasn’t just a man. He was a senator, a presidential candidate. Like this building he was an edifice, a symbol, as outsized as the buildings that surrounded me. An attack on a president was an attack on the presidency. An attack on a presidential candidate was an attack on democracy itself. Elections are about hope, the Secret Service agent had told me. And my son was accused of murdering hope. The hope of his country, of the world.

I showed my ID to one of the guards. His eyes widened as he realized who I was. But he didn’t say anything, just wrote me out a pass and pointed me toward the steps.

Inside I stuck to the periphery, trying to go unnoticed. Men in suits stood in clusters. There were uniformed police everywhere.

The hearing room was huge. On the dais up front only a few congressmen had taken their seats. They milled around conferring with aides. I found a chair near the back.

Mark Foster was the committee chair that year. He called the hearing to order at five minutes after nine. He made an opening statement that was heavy on patriotism and outrage.

This hearing, Foster clarified, was not a trial. Daniel Allen would have his day in court. This hearing was to examine security failures in the protection of a presidential candidate. After Loughner’s assassination attempt in Phoenix, he said, his committee had demanded stricter security standards. A congresswoman had been gunned down at a rally outside a supermarket. Suddenly the life of every politician was on the line. Our elected officials had become fair play, open targets for disenfranchised gunmen everywhere. Seagram’s murder had only reinforced the fear that public service was now a high-risk occupation.

“To be frank,” Foster said, “we want to know who screwed up, and what we can do to make sure this tragedy never happens again.”

Michael Miles, the director of the Secret Service, took his place before the committee. He made an audiovisual presentation, in which he walked the committee members through a virtual re-creation of Royce Hall. He showed us the greenroom where Seagram had rested
before the event. It was here he’d spoken to his children via webcam. Miles brought up a timeline on the screen.

Ever since the assassination of Robert Kennedy the Secret Service had provided security for presidential candidates. Each candidate had a team assigned. This included advance men who visited locations prior to the candidate’s appearance and made sure the area was secured. In addition Seagram had two agents at his side at all times. When traveling he had an advance car and a follow car. Local police provided extra security.

At two thirty Seagram and his wife had arrived at UCLA, driving in through the main gates, past manicured lawns where students were studying. A large crowd of well-wishers was assembled to greet him. There was also a small crowd of protestors. Both groups were kept at least twenty feet from the senator as he climbed out of his town car, then turned and helped his wife. They stood for a moment and waved to the crowd, then went inside.

Royce Hall, I knew from my readings, was built in 1928, one of four original university buildings. It houses the UCLA Center for Performing Arts as well as several other departments that keep offices and classrooms upstairs. The main function of the building is to house an 1,800-seat theater. There is a large balcony in back and several rows of box seats on the sides.

At two forty-five, the doors were opened and students and faculty began to stream in. In accordance with Secret Service protocol, everyone had to pass through a metal detector. There were no exceptions. This raised the most pressing issue of the day: How had the assassin managed to smuggle a gun into the building?

“Initial test results on the firearm,” said Miles, “revealed an epoxy residue, which forensic experts have matched to common duct tape. A thorough sweep of the building in the days after the attack showed similar tape residue on the rear side of a fire extinguisher found here.”

He pointed to an area on the blueprint that appeared to be a hallway on the second floor.

“So,” said Senator Foster, “you’re saying the gun was hidden in the building before the event.”

“We believe so, Senator,” said Miles. “We believe the gunman, or someone known to him, gained access to the building at some point before
that day and left the gun. Then, on the day, the gunman slipped upstairs and retrieved it.”

He brought up a photo the Secret Service had taken of the fire extinguisher. It was a large red cylinder that sat in a recessed cubbyhole in the wall. There was a glass door with a latch in front of it.

“You said ‘someone known to him,’ ” said Senator Foster. “Are you saying you believe there is a conspiracy at work here?”

I sat up taller in my seat.

“We are still assessing the situation, Senator. So far there is no evidence that anyone other than Daniel Allen was involved in this assassination.”

Speculation. I made a note in my book:
Accomplice? Tape residue
.

“How would Daniel Allen have gained access to the building before the event?” asked a senator from South Carolina.

“Royce Hall was locked down as of three p.m. the day before the rally,” said Miles. “No one came in or out without showing ID and passing through a metal detector. This means the gun would have to have entered the building before that.”

The senators wanted to know how long the rally at Royce Hall had been on the books.

“As far as I know,” said Miles, “the UCLA rally was set up on May 24.”

“So three weeks earlier.”

“Yes, Senator.”

“Who would have that information?”

“Unlike a presidential visit, Senator,” said Miles, “campaign rallies are public events. They are well publicized to try to gather a large crowd. Details about this rally were first announced on June 9, a week prior.”

“So in the six days between the announcement of the event, and the day when the Secret Service closed the hall, the gunman—”

“Or someone known to him.”

“Or someone known to him smuggled this weapon inside and taped it to the back of a fire extinguisher.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Am I right in believing that Daniel Allen had been a volunteer for the Seagram campaign?”

“Yes, sir. In Austin, Texas, he worked for six weeks handing out flyers and registering voters.”

“And am I also right in thinking that his supervisor in Austin later went on to join the national campaign?”

“Yes, sir. His name is Walter Bagwell.”

“And was Mr. Bagwell in Los Angeles on the day of the assassination?”

“Yes, sir. He was in Royce Hall at the time of the shooting.”

“And is there any evidence that Daniel Allen contacted Mr. Bagwell in the days leading up to the event?”

“We have spoken to Mr. Bagwell. He claims not to have spoken to Mr. Allen for at least three months.”

Senator Foster took off his glasses and rubbed his brow.

“What happened here, Mr. Miles? How could a thing like this happen?”

“There were gaps in the pre-event screening.”

“Gaps.”

“Errors.”

“Have the agents responsible been disciplined?”

“Senator, if I may, the task of protecting a presidential candidate is substantially more complicated than protecting the president. Candidates want to maintain a Secret Service invisibility. They don’t want a wall between them and the voters. In addition, events are often scheduled at the last minute, giving advance teams no time to secure the site.”

“These sound like excuses.”

“They’re not excuses, Senator. They’re facts. The agents on Senator Seagram’s detail were good men. They were thorough men. The truth is, in order to ensure this tragedy never happened, we would have needed a team three times the size of the one we had. We would have needed to close off Royce Hall for three days beforehand, and perform daily sweeps of the building. And that level of security just isn’t possible on a political campaign, where rallies are scheduled days, sometimes hours in advance.”

“So you’re saying this shooting was inevitable.”

“No,” said Miles. “But to stop it we would have to have been lucky. And we weren’t.”

My son was born at six p.m. on April 9, 19__. He weighed six pounds, ten ounces. When the nurse went to clear his airway, he grabbed her gown with an iron grip. We were in Saint John’s Health Center, where I was finishing my residency. Ellen had already been in labor for nineteen hours, when the doctor performed an emergency C-section. Under bright, sterile lights my child was cut from his mother, the first incision made quickly, the first cry audible within seconds. I sat by Ellen’s ear and spoke soothingly as she strained to see her son. Her arms were strapped down in a crucifixion pose. Our son was brought over and pressed to her face, and then my wife was wheeled off to recovery as I chased after the delivery nurse. I was thirty years old. I’d been on call the night before and, in the nursery, I stood over the bassinet swaying, almost asleep on my feet. But there was this energy surging through me as well. I was a father. I had a son. My own father had died when I was a boy. I had grown up, like Senator Seagram, with just a mother. Did I even know what a father did?

Daniel stared up at me with giant eyes. He was warm and dry now, mouth moving, arms and legs freed from the amniotic pool. At this moment he was a creature of pure possibility. An idea of immortality. The love I felt was uncorruptible. The things in my life that had seemed random now felt deliberate. All steps in some giant master plan. The history of the earth, with all its wars and disasters, its famines and floods, had been leading to this one moment, this one child lying on soft cotton staring up at his father.

One day he would learn how to laugh. He would drink juice from a
glass. He would learn how to whistle. Everything was new. Staring up at me, hearing my tired voice, he reached out his tiny hand. He knew me, even though he had never seen me before. And I knew him. He was the love I’d been trying to express my whole life.

When Daniel was two he developed a fever that lasted for three weeks. It was a devilish foe, relentless, jawbreaking. A swollen furnace that drugs could allay but not eradicate. Every day we hoped it would end, and every day his temperature would creep impossibly high again: 104, 105, 106. I was in my residency at the time, a young doctor with an untrained mind. Danny’s condition became my motivating force. I cornered colleagues and pored over medical journals. The longer the fever lasted, the worse were the scenarios I worked up in my head: leukemia, Epstein-Barr, meningitis. Ellen and I took Daniel to specialist after specialist. Doctors drew blood and looked in his ears and down his screaming throat. Danny was too young to understand what was happening, too young to accept that his parents were only trying to help, not in collusion with torturers. Thermometers were slipped into his rectum. Tongue depressors gagged him. Orderlies with clubby hands jammed him into cold imaging machines looking for shadows.

In the end, no diagnosis could be found to match the existing symptoms. One day the condition simply disappeared. The fever broke. Normalcy returned. His pediatrician chalked it up to the great mysteries of life. Ellen and I were just grateful it was over. And Daniel emerged from the experience seemingly unchanged. He ran and played and laughed as he always had. But now, in retrospect, the diagnostician in me began to wonder. Did this unexplained malady alter my son on some deeper, primal level? Did it affect some deep brain change, some chromosomal or chemical shift?

Because even as I was certain my son was innocent of murder, I could no longer avoid the conclusion that he was not what anyone would consider normal. At twenty, Daniel was a fleeting spirit, private to the point of reclusion. He was a gypsy, an escape artist who had detached himself from society, with all its rules of human contact.

If I had ever known him, truly known his hopes and dreams, his thoughts and emotions, that time had passed. His actions were now those of a stranger. They were symptoms of a larger condition—the condition of being Daniel—and I had to believe that if I could decode
those symptoms, deconstruct the choices he had made, the things he’d done and said, if I could recognize the pattern, then I would understand my son.

As a scientist I knew that this thing we call “personality” is really a combination of physical and psychological factors. Hormones drive us, genetics. We are a product of our chemical wiring—too little dopamine and you get depressed, too much and you can become schizophrenic. And because of this, in order to understand Daniel’s choices, I had to accept the hypothesis that some of those choices may have been made for him—that he was as much a victim of biology as an independent actor of his free will.