by Steven Gore
Buddy took a sip of his iced tea. “Has he told you about the movie we just wrapped?”
Donnally shook his head. “He said he wanted it to be a surprise.”
“And you haven’t gotten over the surprise of the last one yet.”
Don Harlan’s previous film was a remake of all his Vietnam War movies from the early 1980s through the late 1990s. But this time no longer from the perspective of the American soldiers who he’d always portrayed as berserk Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now monsters, but from the point of view of the kinds of villagers who’d set up the ambush by the North Vietnamese soldiers who killed Donnally’s older brother. It had been an artistic success, but a commercial failure, playing first to a few near-empty art theaters, then at fund-raisers for wounded Afghanistan and Iraq War veterans.
“I’m afraid he’s the one who hasn’t gotten over it,” Donnally said. “He went into a tailspin of depression, not because it didn’t make any money, but because he’d spent his life hiding from the truth, then acknowledged it and put it out there where it could never be hidden from again. He only came out of the fog trailing behind it when a producer came to him with a bag of money to make something new.”
Buddy looked away, seeming to gaze past Donnally toward the take-out counters. His face had flushed a little by the time his eyes returned to Donnally’s. He looked to Donnally like a little boy trying to keep a secret.
“What?” Donnally asked, then glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t recognize anyone in the booths behind him or placing orders and no fans were approaching. He thought back on what he had just told Buddy. “You have something to do with financing the new picture?”
Buddy rocked his head side to side. “Let’s just say that some of us old-timers got together. We all have more money than we can ever spend and it only seems to serve to corrupt our children and grandchildren.”
His granddaughter’s drunken nights in New York clubs and screaming episodes with her parents were subjects of multimillion-hit Internet videos, and her tours through rehab were reported on afternoon entertainment news programs like box scores. Buddy had long since stopped giving interviews to the entertainment press because all the reporters wanted to talk about were her escapades.
And the last thing the girl needed was more money or the promise of it as an inheritance.
“We hoped . . . maybe . . .” Buddy ended the sentence with a shrug.
“How did you know he needed the lifeline?”
“He stopped talking to us. Wouldn’t return our calls. We thought he was embarrassed because of what happened with his last movie, so we got somebody to front for us.” Buddy half smiled. “If it happened to another director, he’d have appreciated the irony that some of the people he hired to act in the film were also investors. And we didn’t realize going in that he’d have a lot of trouble finishing it.”
Buddy looked down at his unfinished sandwich and pushed the plate away.
“He kept forgetting things, like what we’d shot the previous day, script changes, sometimes even who was playing what part.”
Buddy fell silent, then he nodded as though he’d just gotten an insight into what had been going on.
“Looking back, I think some of it was structural. He was trying to tell the same story from four different points of view, like Rashomon and The Outrage. Except he was using different actors for each substory, and that made it hugely complicated. Four different guys playing different versions of what seemed like the same role.”
Donnally thought of the DVD his mother’s doctor had viewed showing the scenes of four men turning away and walking through the same door.
“Hell, none of us knows what the real truth of the tale is. It was like getting to the end of a mystery novel and discovering that somebody ripped out the last chapter.”
“What’s the movie about?”
Buddy shook his head. “Can’t say. We all signed confidentiality agreements, even the caterers and prop guys and the uniforms who guarded the set.”
“How about just a hint?”
Buddy raised his palms toward Donnally. “No can do.”
Donnally looped back to his father’s symptoms. “But not all of his problems had to do with the structure of the filming.”
Buddy rocked his head side to side again, then spread his hands on the table.
“What do I know?”
“Enough so you were thinking about calling me.”
Buddy held his nose. “He started to smell bad toward the end of filming. Body odor like an Amazonian stevedore in a Humphrey Bogart flick. That was the first thing we noticed that made us think the problem might be him and not the nature of the work.” He tapped the Formica tabletop as though he was annoyed at a negligent child. “Everyone has time for a shower.”
Buddy squinted at Donnally. “You haven’t seen him since you came down?”
Donnally shook his head. “I wanted to get an idea of what to look for before I went up to the house. My mother’s gerontologist hinted at a few things, but she doesn’t know him like you do.”
“I’m not a shrink, so don’t look to me for a diagnosis. All I know is what I saw, not what it means. I’m not an expert in . . . in . . .”
Buddy’s voice trailed off and he glanced away.
Donnally didn’t force him to say the word Alzheimer’s.
“And there was something else. He’d talk on and on, real excited and animated, about Shooting the Dawn and some of his older films. First I thought he was trying to make comparisons in order to give the actors guidance about what he wanted. Then I thought he was trying to use them as models to teach some lessons to the assistant director who was helping him. A smart young guy. A couple of years out of USC film school. Seemed really in tune with your father. I think he saw all this too.”
Buddy shook his head, returning himself to the train of thought he had interrupted.
“But then it hit me. The old movies seemed more real to him than the scenes he was getting ready to shoot.” He held his hand up close to his nose for few seconds. “I mean right there in his face.”
After reading material Janie had given him, Donnally knew without Buddy saying it that short-term memory loss was one of the most common symptoms of Alzheimer’s and was the way it often first showed itself. It was also the one most often ignored or excused merely as old age by friends and family. It was the oldest memories that seemed to the victim to be the most real and alive, but even those might be confused or conflated.
“Other times he would drift away in his own world, like a son . . . som . . .”
Buddy closed his eyes and held his arms out in front of him like a sleepwalker. He opened them again. “Like in the silent movies. I can’t remember how to say it.”
“Somnambulist?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Somnambulist. Sometimes it was like we were talking to a zombie.”
CHAPTER 8
We’re a long way from understanding the physiology of the brain,” Dr. Katrina Pose said to Donnally. They were standing in the semicircular driveway of his parents’ Hollywood Hills mansion. She had been walking to her car when he drove up. She smiled. “I’m sure you didn’t need Janie to tell you that.”
“But with respect to Alzheimer’s, she’s deferring to you.” Donnally smiled back. “She still considers me to be in the normal range.”
Donnally had first met Dr. Pose five years earlier at her office down the block from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. It was while his mother was undergoing tests for Parkinson’s disease. He had expected the gerontologist to be Hollywood or Beverly Hills in her manner, wearing the intentional, calculated, and disinterested expression of those who were always, or hoped always to be, on camera. Instead, she looked like the tall, awkward, and smartest girl in high school who was now all grown up.
Standing there with her, Donnally felt the irony of his father having chosen her as his mother’s doctor, but his now becoming her diagnostic subject.
He also knew that h
is father would someday view this discussion as a betrayal.
Donnally directed her away from the house and toward the native garden overlooking downtown Los Angeles in the hazy distance.
“It’s not just his personal habits,” Pose said, “or his sometimes seeming to live more in the past than the present. There are serious things happening that go beyond just memory impairment or some milder form of dementia, things that indicate Alzheimer’s. And the fact that it seems to be developing quickly suggests it might be combined with some other neurological condition. Your mother said that with respect to recent events he gets confused about what happened, when it happened, and in what order. And there’s his inability to think of words, common ones, even standard phrases in the industry. Falling silent halfway through thoughts and sentences, and then a burst of anger and withdrawal into himself.”
Pose pointed down the hillside toward a new concrete retaining wall bisecting the shrubbed descent toward the cliff.
“One day I witnessed some of it. I was driving up and I heard him start to yell something to the contractor. Then he stopped midsentence, with his hand in the air, pointing and stammering. Finally, his face flushed and he gave up and went inside.”
“And you’re thinking this is physiological, not psychological? A brain issue and not just temporary depression?”
“There are lots of things that can contribute to the kinds of behaviors your father is exhibiting, even beyond the physiological. Worries about aging and loss of vitality. A first true recognition of the inevitability of death. The light of fame that has given meaning to his life fading into an empty darkness. Religious questioning after a lifetime of blind avoidance or acceptance. Sometimes it can begin with guilt, like your father’s over your brother’s death. Even things that were only partly in a person’s control can cause the mind to suppress or rewrite the past, or distort the present or throw the victim into a vortex of confusion.”
The doctor paused, then said, “In the old Freudian days we’d have called it the return of the repressed.”
Pose was talking about his father, but Donnally was also thinking about Judge McMullin. He was beginning to wonder whether the source of the judge’s doubts about the Dominguez case had the same sources as the peculiar behavior and distorted thinking his father had been exhibiting.
“Why did you start with guilt and not depression?” Donnally asked. “Because of his last movie?”
“More because of the way your mother has been framing it. I think they’re combined in her mind as one thing or that it was guilt that led to depression.”
Donnally glanced back at his mother’s second-story window. He knew she was lying in bed, perhaps terrified by the thought that her advanced Parkinson’s had left her helpless to care for her husband during his decline. He felt his heart wrench and his body lean toward the front door, moved by the urge to break off the conversation and go to her. But he fought it off. She needed clarity about his father as much as he did, but was less able to achieve it than he was.
“Are you sure that it isn’t wishful thinking on her part?” Donnally asked. “Hoping it’s something that can be talked through or medicated away, rather than Alzheimer’s, which can’t.”
“Well, it’s not that it can’t be . . .” Pose’s voice trailed off.
They both knew drugs could only delay the progression, and then only briefly, but not cure the underlying disease. That was irreversible.
Donnally glanced along the side of the house, past the parking apron and toward the garages in the back. The door to his father’s was open and his car was missing.
“You know where he is now?”
Pose looked toward the empty garage and her brow furrowed. “He was supposed to be here this afternoon, and I saw him when I arrived; otherwise I wouldn’t have called you to come down. He’d talked about some digital effects he wanted some help with from a company in San Diego, but I didn’t think he was leaving town until tomorrow.”
“Why San Diego? L.A. has the best people in the world for doing that kind of thing. Ones he’s worked with for years.”
“My guess? Secrecy. That’s been one of his preoccupations.”
Donnally felt a rush of anger, as though his father was evading him, even though he couldn’t have been aware that Donnally was traveling down to see him.
“Any clue how long he’ll be gone?”
Pose shook her head.
“I’m happy for the chance to visit my mother, but if he’s already left, I’m not going to accomplish what I came down for. I was hoping to get a sense of him myself and try to figure out a way to get him in for some tests.”
“Can’t you stay for few days?”
Donnally shook his head. “I’ve got to get back up north. I’ve got someone else’s memories to deal with until my father shows up again.”
CHAPTER 9
The Paul Ordloff that Donnally found sitting at the bar in the Ocean View Lounge near Monterey along California’s central coast matched the black-and-white photo in the San Francisco Bar Association Directory. Just add fifteen years, rosacea from nose to cheeks, skin jaundiced by the bar lights, and shoulders that Donnally guessed had been rounded by the gravity of his clients’ crimes.
Donnally slid onto a stool next to him and made a show of glancing around the dark room with its walnut tables and shadowed booths packed with laughing and cackling attendees of the Annual Criminal Defense Death Penalty Conference.
“Where’s the ocean view?” Donnally asked him. “Or is the sign out front false advertising?”
Ordloff held his highball glass up toward the neon Anchor Steam sign above the mirror behind the bar. “In here.” Then he cocked his head toward Donnally, squinted at him, and smiled. “I know you. People versus Bernard Bitsky. Murder most foul.” He took a sip and smacked his lips. “You were young and I was desperate.”
Ordloff’s direct examination of Donnally during a hearing on the defense motion to suppress Bitsky’s confession still annoyed him, but he’d decided on the drive up from Los Angeles to Monterey that he wouldn’t bring it up if Ordloff didn’t.
But Ordloff did.
“You knew I wasn’t lying,” Donnally said. “Your client confessed before I could even read him his rights. Right after I put him in my car for the ride down to the Hall of Justice. That’s the truth.”
“Truth?” Ordloff turned toward him in a drunkard’s lean and smirked, showing old smoker’s teeth, long and yellowed with tar. “What did truth have to do with it? Lives were at stake.”
“Like in the Israel Dominguez case?”
Ordloff pulled back and narrowed his eyebrows at Donnally. “The plot thickens as a new character suddenly enters the play from stage right.” He glanced toward the door. “Sorry, stage left.” Then back at Donnally. “The question is why. Are you with the attorney general’s office now and trying to make sure Dominguez gets the needle?”
Donnally shook his head.
“Then gone private and working for his appellate lawyers?”
Donnally shook his head again and reached into his jacket pocket and handed Ordloff a copy of the letter Dominguez had sent Judge McMullin.
Ordloff read it over, holding it up and facing it toward the faint overhead lights, rocking his head side to side as he read it.
“I didn’t realize you’d joined the great battle against death.” Ordloff set the letter down, then reached over and shook Donnally’s hand. “Welcome to the Monterey Death Festival.” He pointed at the conference binder lying on the bar next to his glass. “I didn’t see you listed as an attendee. I would’ve noticed your name for sure. I always look for familiar ones, especially ex-cops who’ve now gotten religion or people who might want to buy me a drink.”
“I haven’t and I will.” Donnally glanced around. “I’m not sure why anyone opposed to the death penalty would even be here. Seems to me the best way to oppose it is not to participate. I’m not sure you can have it both ways.”
“That
’s what lawyering is.” Ordloff grinned. “Having it at least both ways and getting paid for it.”
“I’m not sure that’s an answer. As far as I can tell, ninety-nine percent of lawyers and judges won’t have anything to do with capital cases.”
Or, like Judge McMullin, would have nothing more to do with them.
Donnally gestured toward the tables behind them filled with attendees, their drinks, and their monogrammed conference binders.
“These people are the one percent that’s left. They stop and the machine stops. I would’ve thought they’d have figured that out by now. You said it. Lives are at stake. If they don’t want lives taken, they shouldn’t be taking part in taking them.”
Ordloff scrunched up an eye toward Donnally. “Do you always say everything that’s on your mind?”
Donnally shrugged. “Not always.” Then he caught the attention of the bartender, pointed at Ordloff’s empty glass, and held up two fingers. The bartender nodded and reached behind him toward the scotch bottles lined up together in front of the mirror.
“But at least you end up asking every question that’s on your mind.”
Now it was Donnally’s turn to smile. “I usually get around to them all.”
The bartender poured and set their drinks down in front of them. Donnally slid a twenty to him. Given that the bar was located on the exclusive bay side of the city, he didn’t expect to receive much in change.
Ordloff took a sip from his and said, “And your first question concerns why I put on the defense I did in the Dominguez case.”
Donnally nodded. “In the letter he claims he’s innocent and that he told you so from the moment you first interviewed him in the jail after Judge McMullin appointed you to represent him.”
Ordloff leaned back and spread his hands as though speaking for all the attorneys around him in what he was about to say.
