Steven Gore: Power Blind

The phone beeped again. This time it was his driver. Landon rose, and then glanced down at the Supreme Court building across the street. It seemed at this moment like a fist with two fingers missing, mangled and powerless-

But not for long.

As he walked down the hallway toward the elevator, he wondered what the president’s reaction would be when he heard the two names. How would a president who had always fled to the center because he’d lacked the courage of his convictions adjust to this reminder that he owed his presidency to contributors who were finally demanding that they receive what they’d been paying for over all these years.

The sun cresting the East Bay hills blinded Gage as the bridge exit into San Francisco looped back toward the waterfront. He descended into the shade of the office towers and condo complexes that had reshaped the shoreline in the quarter century since he had converted the hundred-year-old warehouse into his firm’s offices. A minute later, he emerged near the four-lane Embarcadero, its palm-bordered trolley line giving the boulevard the unnatural and uncomfortable appearance of having been harvested from the San Diego harbor and grafted onto San Francisco Bay.

Gage paused at an intersection as a still-groggy runner crossed against the light, then drove south past a scattering of piers and restaurants, and slipped into an alley. He parked along the back wall of his building and walked around to the front, where he spotted his surveillance chief sitting on the concrete steps, staring across the street toward the water.

“Thanks for calling Socorro,” Viz said as Gage approached. “Your and Faith’s condolences meant a lot to her.”

Hector McBride had been nicknamed by Gage for his godlike ability to catalogue the covert lives of his targets and to condense and evaporate like an omniscient cloud. Despite standing a couple of inches taller than Gage’s six foot two, it sometimes seemed the ex-DEA agent could disappear into the sliver of a midday shadow.

But not today. Today his despair surrounded him like a physical presence.

Gage examined Viz’s drawn face, and then sat down beside him.

“The problem was Charlie,” Gage said, “not your sister.”

Viz shrugged. “Still…”

“How’s she holding up?”

“It’s kind of like he died twice. When he first got shot, the doctors said he wasn’t going to make it, so she got herself ready. Kind of steeled herself, then she got blindsided.”

“Have they figured out what caused his death?” Gage asked.

“A seizure, maybe a heart attack. They’re doing an autopsy this morning.” Viz glanced up at the hazy sky, then out at the commuter traffic inching toward downtown through a humid alloy of fog and smog. “Maybe yesterday’s heat had something to do with it.”

Viz leaned forward, knees spread, forearms resting on his thighs, rotating his gray Stetson between his hands, fingers working their way along the inside of the sweatband and his thumb along the brim.

“I’d appreciate you and Faith coming to the funeral. For Socorro’s sake. It’s going to be pretty lonely. Charlie didn’t have any real friends, and his parents aren’t well enough to travel from Florida.”

“We can even come back to the house afterward, if you think it would help.”

Viz nodded, then lowered his head, his unfocused eyes oblivious to his rotating hat.

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“About what?”

“About dying too soon-” Viz caught himself, flustered, eyes pained. His own words reminding him of the death of Gage’s father three months earlier. “Sorry, I didn’t mean…”

Gage’s mind pushed past the final memory of his father at the moment of his death to their last conversation a day earlier. Sitting by his bedside at the family’s southern Arizona ranch, holding his hand as they gazed out the adobe-framed windows at the desert. His father, a family physician, had laughed about being paid in Yaqui corn, Apache chickens, and Mexican tamales in the years after World War II, cried about friends he’d lost in combat when he was young and to disease as he got older, and wondered aloud about the changes the world would see after he was gone.

“My dad told me his only regret was that he wouldn’t live long enough to see how everything turned out,” Gage said.

Viz pulled away and looked over at him. “But nobody ever…”

Gage nodded. “I think that’s why he had a little smile on his face when he said it.”

“But there’s a difference between your father and Charlie.” Viz’s voice rose, more in frustration than in argument. “A big difference.” He set down his hat on the step next to him, as if preparing to plead Palmer’s case. “Your dad’s life had a kind of completeness. Charlie’s was unfinished, and he didn’t have a chance to make things right.”

“He had lots of chances,” Gage said, “he just never took them.”

They both knew it was worse than that, for the lens through which Palmer had chosen to view others’ lives had filtered those chances out.

Even more, Palmer’s kind of life made his the kind of death that brought all his acts and deceits into the present, and into the space between the two of them sitting on these steps.

Palmer had spent his career as part of an underworld of lawyers and private investigators-as clandestine as a secret society and as public as a Hollywood celebrity trial-that exploited victims’ shames and terrors and forced them to choose silence over justice.

In the years after he’d left the San Francisco Police Department, Palmer had been the surreptitious hand that had tipped the scales in countless child custody hearings and divorce battles, in sexual harassment complaints, even in disputes over movie rights and royalties. He’d been an expert in the art of leverage, in discovering the embarrassing lapse, the plagiarized high school term paper, the drunken confession on a defunct social networking site, the juvenile petty theft from Victoria’s Secret, the videotaped menage a cinq in a college dorm, the used condom in a Las Vegas hotel room, or the empty bottle of Prozac in an aging star’s garbage.

He’d also been an expert at avoiding exposure; for those furious enough to expose him also had the most to lose.

And sitting there next to Viz, with him so desperate to redeem the unredeemable, it was unimaginable to Gage that Palmer had found the courage in his final moments to crawl out of the darkness and into a light that would transform his entombed past into a living legacy.

“It’s just hard to live with mixed feelings about dead people,” Viz said. “He did a lot of bad stuff as a cop and an investigator, but he was also a brother-in-law who tried to do good for his kids.” He sighed. “The truth is I’m not sure they have a clue about who he really was.”

Viz turned toward Gage and spread his hands.

“But how could they? All they ever saw were movie stars and politicians calling him, begging for his help. And it wasn’t like he could ever go to career day at their school and describe what he really did for a living.”

“What about Socorro? You think she understands?”

“I’m not sure she’s ever seen past what she thought she saw on their first date.” Viz shook his head and blew out a breath. “And I hope she never does.”

They sat in silence listening to an airplane banking over the city and heading east, the engine roar fading until it merged with the rumble of traffic and the growl of container ships powering across the bay toward the Port of Oakland.

Gage glanced in the direction of the Palmer’s Victorian mansion on Russian Hill, beyond the concrete and steel of the financial district and the brick-lined alleys of Chinatown, his mind’s eye seeing it standing among oaks and weeping willows.