The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  At night when I couldn’t sleep I scoured the newspapers for clues. Stories about Danny were clipped and placed into a file. I spent hours online searching for details, witness statements, anything that could shed new light on what happened that day. I was building an archive. I had become the keeper of the case. Any new detail would be cataloged. If there was something significant I would call Murray, rousing him from slumber.

  “Jesus, Allen,” he’d say. “It’s a quarter to three. Call me tomorrow. The hooker’s gotta go home in fifteen minutes.”

  I had sent him the Times article in which witnesses said they saw Danny wrestling with another man. At the top I wrote Can we find him??? Whenever I saw an image or statement that raised questions about the official story I sent Murray a text or e-mail. At first he responded at length, but over time his responses grew sparser, eventually becoming just a single word: Interesting.

  After I told Murray about the other man, he did some digging—calling the reporter who wrote the article, and approaching the witnesses himself—but no clear details about the wrestler emerged, other than that he had been tall and wearing a dark jacket.

  The first conspiracy theories broke within days of the shooting. Seagram had been chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He had spent the days before his death garnering votes for a bill that would have forced the administration to cut military spending by 30 percent. It also required a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate the private security firms who were getting rich off the conflict. The bill signaled the end of an era of war profiteering. But then Seagram was killed. And when the vote was finally held a week after his murder, the bill was defeated, and a new bill was introduced that earmarked an extra one trillion dollars for military spending. Clearly, wrote the bloggers, the administration had him killed to protect their war. Or the military-industrial complex had executed him to protect their boondoggle.

  Then there was the army corporal who swore he’d seen Danny on a secret military base in the New Mexico desert three months before Royce Hall. Corporal Walter Hannover said he’d been a guard at a top-secret Special Forces training facility. He said he’d seen Danny being driven onto the base last March. Once there, Hannover said, my son had been trained in small-weapons handling and infiltration techniques. Hannover claimed to have seen Danny six times in three months. The claim caught on with several national papers and was trumpeted on talk radio. The army denied that such a base even existed. Hannover took a polygraph, but the results were inconclusive. Then the army released Hannover’s records and the world learned that not only had he never served on any base in New Mexico but he had been dishonorably discharged from his posting at Fort Stockton for huffing gasoline stolen from the motor pool.

  Some claimed Hannover’s records had been doctored by the army to protect the truth, but most legitimate news organizations closed the book at that point. Like all other data about the case, the articles were dutifully clipped and the online back-and-forth was bookmarked. I wrote New Mexico? on a piece of paper in my journal. I was creating a patient file. Each symptom was cataloged, each test result. In this way I was building my differential diagnosis.

  In August I saw an article in The Washington Post that there’d been a fire in a Justice Department evidence room. Several boxes of evidence from numerous active cases had been destroyed. I became obsessed with backing up my records, pausing every thirty minutes to do both a local and online upload of my work.

  Fran said she was worried about me. It wasn’t healthy to fixate this way. I needed sleep. I told her he was my son. What was I supposed to do? She told me I needed to think about making peace with what had happened. It was time I accepted the fact that Danny might be guilty.

  “What about the wrestler?” I asked her. “Two witnesses said they saw Danny struggle with another man right after the shooting.”

  “That was a Secret Service agent.”

  “No. These two witnesses specified it was a different man. Before the agents got there.”

  “Are you sure?” she said. “There was a lot of chaos. People running.”

  “I know what I read,” I told her.

  She sighed, trying to be patient. She knew that in a very real way the future of our marriage would depend on how we navigated conversations like this.

  “You’ve seen the photograph,” she said. “The Secret Service wrestled Danny to the ground. The murder weapon has his fingerprints on it.”

  “Photographs can be doctored,” I told her. “Fingerprints aren’t as conclusive as previously thought.”

  She put her palm on my cheek. Her eyes held nothing but sympathy.

  “I think you should talk to someone,” she said. “A therapist. You need to accept that this wasn’t your fault.”

  “That what wasn’t my fault?” I said. “That Danny went to a political rally? That he moved around a lot?”

  “Paul,” she said. “I love him, too, but you’re making yourself sick over this. And your family needs you. I need you.”

  But I couldn’t let it go.

  By now I was used to seeing Danny’s face in the paper. It had lost its power to shock. Two weeks after the shooting I had taken the train to Washington, D.C., to attend a congressional hearing about the assassination. I walked the ten blocks from Union Station, having Amtraked south past brick cities and factories, past rivers and streams and rusting iron mills. The sun burst like a ruby in the sky. Leaving the station, the stately wide streets of the capital stretched out before me; shaded grass lawns, monuments landscaped with bursts of floral burn, a collection of momentary parks enshrouded by northern red and scarlet oak trees. Overhead, towering American flags snapped their red, white, and blue. Each building I passed seemed to have been deliberately constructed to inspire awe or dread.

  I had never visited the Capitol building before, though I had treated several congressmen and senators in my practice. I had watched hearings on TV, of course, Watergate, Iran-Contra. I knew the power of those rooms, the crush of cameras, the weight of history, the expectation of the crowd.

  Behind me a man on a cell phone said, Sterility, but they think it’s treatable.

  I crossed D and C streets, noting the absence of litter and the usual entropic discoloration of cities, walked past the Russell Senate Office Building, past its members and staff entrance. Ahead of me, the floodwater expanse of Constitution Avenue was patrolled by Capitol Police in white shirts and black hats. After 9/11 the driveways to all the federal buildings had been shielded by gateposts, walled off with concrete abutments to deter terrorist attacks. The footpaths had been plugged with planters, obese, concrete weeds fisting through the pavement. This is what fear does, I thought. It makes everything ugly.

  On the back lawn of the Capitol, news crews had set up their lights and cameras pointed toward the dome. Seeing them I felt a flash of panic. I wanted to remain anonymous. Murray had gotten permission for me to watch the hearings from the back of the gallery. I wore a shapeless coat and a styleless men’s hat. I didn’t want to sit up front, caught by the cameras, a Chiron under my face. PAUL ALLEN, FATHER OF DANIEL ALLEN, THE ACCUSED. I pulled the hat down over my ears.

  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?