The Good Father (6 page)

These are the facts. And yet if Sirhan Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy, how did he shoot him three times in the back?

Murray arrived at ten thirty. I heard him yelling in the hall. After a few minutes the door opened and Moyers escorted him in.

“Get your coat,” he told me.

We rode the elevator in silence. When I tried to speak, Murray put his finger to his lips.

The temperature had dropped a few degrees, enough for me to shiver as I crossed the parking lot to his car.

“There’s a myth,” said Murray, “that Secret Service agents take a blood oath where they swear to lay down their lives to protect our president. In truth, there’s no such oath.”

We climbed into his Porsche. I buckled the racing harness.

“With your car I always feel like I’m climbing into a fighter plane,” I told him.

He put the car in gear, pulled out of the gate, throwing a middle finger at the guards.

“Here’s the latest,” he said. “I talked to the Department of Justice. They sent me to Homeland Security. I called Homeland Security and they said, ‘Call the Secret Service,’ so I called a guy I know at the FBI. He says they’re holding Danny at a facility in downtown Los Angeles. He has been treated by a paramedic but has not been to a hospital. As far as my guy knows, the bullet is still in his leg.”

“He could lose the leg, Murray.”

“Calm down. Then I called another guy I know at CBS and leaked the story that the Secret Service is denying Danny treatment. They’re going to run it on the eleven o’clock news.”

Looking down I noticed a red stain on my shirt. Had I cut myself somehow? But then I remembered the pizza, Fran and I hunched over in front of the TV, eating. It felt like two hundred years ago.

“My buddy also said they have still photographs of Danny pulling the trigger,” said Murray. “No way it wasn’t him. For what it’s worth.”

I couldn’t believe it. This was a boy who’d cried over the death of a neighbor’s cat. Until I saw the picture myself, I refused to believe he’d been anything more than an innocent bystander.

“Somebody set him up,” I said.

Murray raised his eyebrows as if to say,
I’m sure you’re right
. But I could tell he didn’t believe it.

As a clinician I asked myself, what did this photograph show? My son with a gun, or my son
firing
a gun? They were two very different things. He was a boy in a crowd. An assassin fires at the stage. There is a struggle with spectators. My son gets caught in the middle. He ends up with the gun. Is it likely? No. But it is possible, and in my business it is the unlikely that shows itself time after time to be true.

Two years ago I’d had a patient who came into the hospital complaining of chest pains. Tests showed an inflammation of the pericarditis. He complained of weakness and loss of appetite. His CBC and ESR were elevated, as was his blood pressure. The resident who saw him diagnosed classic heart disease and called in a cardiologist. For two weeks they treated him as a heart patient, and his condition got progressively worse. After noticing signs of livedo reticularis on his arms and legs, the original doctor called me in.

We reviewed the symptoms together. Then I spoke with the patient. He told me that a few months earlier he had contracted hepatitis B. When his kidney function test came back with a BUN greater than forty milligrams per deciliter I knew that the problem wasn’t his heart. The patient suffered from polyarteritis nodosa, which is a disease of unknown cause in which immune cells attack a patient’s arteries. We treated him with prednisone and cyclophosphamide, and he began to improve immediately.

Every doctor who saw him swore the problem was his heart. But in medicine you have to look past the easy assumptions. The facts can be misleading. There is a tendency to recognize only the symptoms that
add up to the diagnosis in your head, but it is the symptom that doesn’t fit you should be following.

We drove north on I-95. My cell rang. I answered. It was Dean.

“You’re booked on a flight from JFK to LAX. It leaves in an hour. Can you make it?”

I looked at Murray.

“JFK,” I said.

Murray swerved across three lanes of traffic, took the exit at fifty, blew a stop sign, made a U-turn, and merged back onto the highway going the opposite direction. My heart was somewhere in my armpit.

“They’ve taken Danny to Cedars-Sinai Hospital,” said Dean. “In the morning they’ll move him to a federal penitentiary, and then it will take weeks to see him. I have assurances that if you arrive before then you will be allowed to see him.”

“Thank you, Dean.”

“Keep my name out of this,” he said. “I’ve spent my life serving the Democratic Party. The last thing I need is the press to get hold of this.”

“I’ll take it to my grave,” I said.

“Well,” said Dean, “maybe not to the grave. None of us should carry anything that far.”

We made JFK with fifteen minutes to spare. Dropping me off, Murray said he would drive straight to my house. He told me he would protect my family as if they were his own. In his eyes I could see him calculating the billable hours. To reach the terminal we had to pass through three security checkpoints. Murray was told to pop the trunk, not once but twice. One of the officers explained that Homeland Security had raised the threat level from yellow to red.

“ ’Cause that kid shot the senator,” he said.

That kid
. Already the story was taking hold. It had a hero and a villain. How long before my son’s life was beyond saving?

Inside, the terminal was a chaotic, bubbling cauldron of madness. A bug-eyed hysteria had gripped the crowd. Armed guards and soldiers were everywhere. Modern air travel had already become a metaphor for the refugee experience. Tonight there was an added sense of desperation to our flight. We, the nation’s travelers, were Africans chased into the desert by drought, Albanians running toward tent cities, hounded by the deafening whumpa of bombs. We were herded together clutching our things, menaced by men with guns. We stripped off our clothes, passed through scanners, our every possession analyzed, our bodies wanded by humorless men in uniform, watched over by soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs. We showed our travel documents, our IDs, praying our names had not made it onto some kind of list.

As the father of the country’s most notorious gunman, I knew it was just a matter of time before I was recognized, before men in white shirts with automatic weapons pulled me aside and escorted me into the dark
bowels of the machine. But bureaucracies are notorious for their slowness, their incoherence. And so, though I waited to be pulled aside, I passed through every checkpoint with little more than a second look. In fact, it would be weeks before my name made it onto any kind of watch list, a fact that would serve as both a relief and a caution for all the implications it carried about our government’s true ability to keep us safe.

I flew to L.A. nonstop, the 747 punching its way through the jet stream. Dean had booked me a first-class ticket. There were warm nuts and a pillow for my neck. I tried to sleep, but my head was too busy with thoughts of my son. Being on an airplane brought back memories I had long tried to suppress. Memories of fear and grief. Memories of panic and guilt. Daniel had almost died on an airplane when he was eight. It was on a flight to Los Angeles from New York. It was the first year of my divorce from his mother, and he had visited me for Christmas. As usual he flew alone, entrusted to the care of busy flight attendants. At the airport he had been paired with another child, a young girl, also traveling between divorced parents for the holidays. Jenny Winger. Jenny had turned eleven one month earlier. The kids sat together in the middle of the plane, Daniel in the window seat, Jenny by the aisle.

I had often wondered what these flights were like for my son. I suppose I had romanticized them in my mind: picturing a young boy on his own, enjoying an adventure. Though separation had been difficult, I liked to think that I was helping my son become a world traveler, that as a result of his parents’ divorce he would reach his teens mature beyond his years. When other parents criticized me for shipping him off, I would point out how much more self-sufficient my son was becoming than their coddled brood. And wasn’t that what we, as parents, were supposed to do? Prepare our children as best we could to function on their own in the outside world?

This particular flight was early in our divorce. Possibly even Daniel’s third solo trip. If he had ever been scared by these airport adventures, he had not shared it with me. It was a night flight, leaving New York around six. The skies were clear over JFK, but storms had been gathering over the Midwest for days, pounding the region with heavy rain, sleet, and snow. I took Daniel to the airport in a cab, paying the driver to wait. I walked Daniel through security and all the way to his gate, where
a flight attendant checked us in. I told her that my son was flying alone, that I wanted to make sure he got to Los Angeles in one piece. The flight attendant pointed to Jenny, who sat alone, watching the flashing lights of the tarmac through the large plate-glass window. The flight attendant said children often traveled better in pairs. She winked at Danny. Maybe he’d even end up with a girlfriend.

I was single myself back then, a divorced man with a conflicted hunger for women, and I have to admit that I studied the stewardess’s profile when she turned. I noted the tightness of her skirt, the multiple piercings in one ear—which indicated a rebellious streak, a slight hint of sexual anarchy. She was young and busty and blond. She laughed easily. I mentioned I was a doctor, and that my son was going to visit my
ex-
wife. The attendant told me she would take extra-special care of Daniel. She gave his shoulder a squeeze.

On the plane Daniel had a Sprite and some animal crackers. He had a backpack stuffed with clothes, games, comic books. Anything I could think of that might keep him occupied for the long flight. The movie on the flight was
Titanic
, an odd choice for a mode of transportation fueled by prayer and the suspension of disbelief. It was over Ohio that the turbulence hit, a great sudden jerk, like the plane had dropped off a ledge. After the first jolt the captain put on the
FASTEN SEAT BELT
sign and instructed flight attendants to take their seats. He tried to find a smoother altitude. A second jolt hit the plane, then a third. The fourth jolt opened several overhead compartments, loosing luggage. Drinks spilled. A passenger was struck in the head by a woman’s laptop. This was when the first scream rang out.

Outside the windows, passengers could see lightning strikes. Rain buffeted the wings and fuselage. My son sat alone in a plane full of strangers. The lights flickered and went out. The plane’s electrical system had shut down. In the cockpit warning sirens came on. The plane started an uncontrolled descent, a free fall. What must that feel like? To fall from the sky? The terrifying, weightless plunge. The violence of speed. An airplane without propulsion tumbles like a mountain through space. In the main cabin, the screams multiplied. People began to shout and beg.

In the cockpit, the captain fought to bring the plane out of its dive. He knew he had seconds to correct the situation before the plane and all
aboard were lost. His first officer had frozen. Without electrics, the captain knew he would never keep the plane in the air. His only chance was to turn everything off and restart the engines, hoping that this would reset the electrics. It was an insane risk. Once off, the engines might not restart. The ground was, at most, seven to ten minutes away. But the captain was out of options. Every second that passed they lost more and more altitude, descending into the heart of the storm. So the captain barked orders to his crew. He said a little prayer, and then he reached over and turned off the plane.

In the main cabin my son sat gripping his armrests. He was eight years old. For his last birthday we’d had cake from Carvel and played racing games at the arcade. The icing from the cake stained his lips blue, like a corpse, turning him into a tiny, pale-faced zombie. Danny thought it was funny and I agreed. I was used to the look of death. I wasn’t superstitious about it. I knew the difference between a living child with sugar-blue lips and a corpse.

For his birthday, Daniel had gotten a skateboard from his mother, a science kit from me. He seemed happy. He appeared untroubled by the fact that his mother and father couldn’t stand each other. That they needed to put three thousand miles between them in order to have a civilized conversation on the phone. He went to bed that night with sticky fingers, still in his clothes, long after his bedtime. He was happy, he said. But was that true? Or had he already begun to tell me what I wanted to hear?

Now, twenty-five thousand feet above Ohio and dropping, my son clung to the armrests of a dead airplane, falling like a ball of paper tossed into a garbage can. In the cockpit, the captain counted to fifteen, then flipped the switches to restart the engines. For a brief moment nothing happened. His prayers went unanswered. The crew and passengers were all dead. Then the port engine roared to life, followed by starboard. The electrical system flickered, once, twice, and came back on. He had power. The captain and first officer, working together, pulled the plane out of its dive. The world stabilized. The screaming in the main cabin slowly stopped, and cheers of disbelief rang out.

Did my son cheer? Did he feel relief? Did he cry? A small child all alone in the face of death. Did he vomit or urinate in his pants? I saw the story on the news later that night, a plane that had lost power over the
Midwest. Heart in my throat, I called his mother, who said that Daniel seemed fine. The plane had landed on time, and when she asked him how the flight was he said, “Long.” I sat up all night crying, consumed by thoughts of my only son dying. My poor boy. No one should have to face that kind of fear alone.

I thought of him now, handcuffed to some hospital bed, a bullet in his leg, arrested for a crime he could not have committed. Was this fear worse? Did the perspective of age make the fear of death greater? In this respect, maybe, the child has the advantage over the man. And yet what father wouldn’t want to protect his son from all fear, to hide from him the truth about death? After that flight, I had vowed never to send him off alone again.