Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Rena glances at Brooks. She nods, just slightly. He hasn’t managed a way to tell her what he’s found, but each of them knows that when the other has something important to raise, their job is to cover the other’s back.

  “Maybe you should take Vic home. I’ll call you later,” he says. “I’ll take the judge home.”

  Vic looks angry and hurt and Rena realizes this is a mistake. Vic deserves to be part of this, whatever it is.

  Madison is harder to read—he always has been.

  “Let’s finish dinner and then take a walk together,” Brooks says, bailing him out.

  “Then we better get the check,” Rena says.

  They walk over to the tow path, a gravel road alongside the canal from which mules would pull the barges by rope. The heat of the day has released and the summer humidity has broken. The June night is pleasantly cool.

  “What is so urgent?” Vic demands.

  “Judge, if you lie to us, if you hold something back, you will get found out, and at this point that will sink your nomination.”

  “Peter, what are you talking about?” Vic says.

  “I sent Walt Smolonsky to California two days ago. He called me tonight. Alan Martell is not the first attorney who had cases before you who’s been murdered. So has a woman named Rochelle Navatsky. Both were killed recently. Both cases are unsolved.”

  “And you think there is some connection between these killings and me?”

  “I don’t know, Judge. Is there?”

  “Peter!” Vic exclaims.

  “Did you know Navatsky had been murdered?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And it didn’t occur to you to tell us?”

  “Tell you what exactly, Peter?” Madison says, his voice rising. “That there had been a terrible coincidence?”

  “That you are connected to two people who have been murdered?”

  “Connected? You sound like a tabloid TV program. Do you know how many lawyers I’ve met across the bench? How many trials? It’s like saying that if two of the thousands of law students I have had in class had both died of the same disease that I was somehow connected.”

  “I don’t care about all those trials. I care about the three involving these two lawyers.”

  “What do you want to know?” Madison asks.

  “Was there anything special about them?”

  “Special? As best as I can remember, one was a drug trial, another a robbery, and I think one was a rape and murder. Were they special? In America, sadly, no.”

  “Peter, you can’t possibly think that there is some connection here between these people being killed,” Vic says.

  “I can’t possibly assume there isn’t.”

  “I would be grateful, Randi, if you could take both of us home,” Madison says, looking at Rena.

  “That’s a good idea,” Rena says. “I’m going to California.”

  Brooks’s expression tells him she has his back, even though he has caught her off guard. “Hearings in three days,” she says.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow from San Francisco.”

  Part Four

  Hearings

  June 22 to July 1

  Forty-three

  Monday, June 22, 1:13 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  Virtually no one hears Senator Furman Morgan bang the gavel. The old man’s gaunt, speckled hand cannot swing the wooden hammer hard enough anymore to silence the cavernous Senate Judiciary Committee room in the Hart Senate Office Building. His voice, however—reedier than it once was and marked now by a higher timbre and a slow, appealing vibrato—still resonates.

  “I’d like to call the committee back to order. Judge Madison, if you would please return to the witness table.” The southern drawl is more pronounced when he speaks in public.

  Madison, standing with his daughter and Brooks, turns, nods and heads toward his seat.

  “Judge Madison, I also want to thank you for your patience. Our protocol in this body calls for members of the committee to make opening statements before the nominee testifies for him or herself. So I want to congratulate you for having already sat this morning through twenty-one speeches.”

  Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building fills with laughter.

  “Now, if you would please stand and raise your right hand, I will swear you in.”

  On the floor photographers scramble for position.

  “And keep your hand up for a few extra moments, Judge. This being a representative democracy, we have eighteen photographers who want to take your picture. And that particular image of you swearing the oath, I have learned, is what they call, I believe, the ‘money shot.’”

  More laughter.

  “Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you will give before this Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  “I do.”

  “Thank you. Now, Judge, you may be seated. And the floor is yours.”

  From her seat in the row behind the witness table, Brooks takes a deep breath, trying to calm brittle nerves, and silently prays: Please, Rollie, say it as written.

  Madison had procrastinated about writing his opening statement, agreed to a draft last week, torn it up Saturday—the morning after the argument with Rena—and recrafted something yesterday morning. Brooks thinks it’s good, better than good. She just doesn’t know if he will deliver it now or start ad-libbing again.

  She wishes Rena were here. Not off in San Francisco with Smolo “running down leads.” She had to handle the weekend chaos without him.

  They had survived last week’s crisis over Madison’s antiwar background. But he wasn’t strengthened by it. It was still a scare. And even scares you survive add up. That is Washington math. Reagan called it “blood in the water.”

  Madison at least looks the part he plays now. They brought the president’s tailor to a room at the Hay-Adams, and she, Vic, and Rena had picked out a new charcoal gray Hickey Freeman suit and a black and silver dotted tie. The clothes transformed the judge from university intellectual into someone with whom senators could better relate, like a CEO or a head of state.

  He’s starting.

  “Senator, first, I want to thank all the members of the committee for the many courtesies you’ve extended to me and my daughter over the last month. I have found these meetings to be invaluable in better understanding the concerns of the committee as it undertakes its constitutional responsibility of advise and consent.”

  They had battled over that line all weekend. She wanted him to thank the senators. He had argued it sounded like pandering.

  She breathes.

  He also recognizes, Madison continues, how thoroughly the senators and their aides have prepared for these hearings—reading the books, articles, and opinions he has written. “It strikes me that consuming these writings of mine, particularly the scholarly literature, may constitute some new form of cruel and unusual punishment.”

  Several senators nod their appreciation at Madison’s attempt at levity, but there is no laughter.

  Don’t try to be funny, she had warned, especially not ironic. But the line had remained.

  He also thanks the two home state California senators who formally introduced him to the committee this morning. “And I owe a debt I can never repay, most of all, to my daughter, Victoria, to my colleagues at the court in California, at the Stanford and Harvard law schools, and across the country. And finally I want to thank President James Nash for the honor of his nomination. I’m humbled by his confidence.”

  The photographers are still moving. Senator Morgan coughs disapprovingly, and Brooks recalls a nun from her Sunday school who used to cough in warning that way.

  Now Madison gets to the meat of it. Brooks’s heart is pounding.

  “In America, we are taught that we live in a land of laws, not men—and I would add to that, women. That concept, so central to the Founders’ idea of the new
country, says something, I think, about the role of judges, and the role I imagine I would play on the Supreme Court. We must be as dispassionate as possible, for we are there to interpret the laws, to the best of our ability, not to make them. We are the law’s servants, not the other way around.

  “The question is how best to do that. My view is that this is best done with an open mind, with humility, and without dogma, platform, or agenda. While everyone is shaped by his or her own life experience, judges must more than match that with the gift of empathy and the intelligence to imagine experiences beyond their own. In other words, in addition to knowing the law, a wise jurist must listen—really listen—and have the ability to put himself or herself into the shoes of those who might be affected by the Court’s decisions on all sides of a matter.”

  Senator Morgan is leaning back in his chair, his eyes nearly closed. Senator Stevens of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat, is leaning forward, peering over reading glasses. Senator Tucker of Texas is staring at Madison. Senator Upton, their top swing vote, is watching Madison but stealing glances at other senators. Most of the rest of the panel appear to be listening intently.

  “Finally, there is another question that fundamentally shapes how a judge will rule. What does that judge think is the purpose underlying our system of law? What is the law for? I believe the underlying purpose of the vast web of law we have built—our Constitution, our statutes, our rules, regulations, practices, and procedures—is to help the many live together productively, harmoniously, and in freedom. In other words, the key concept of our Constitution and our laws is to promote liberty.

  “It has been said that the law is those wise restraints that make us free. That sounds right to me.

  “So my promise to you is this: I will listen. I will try to read the law with humility and in accordance with its basic purposes. And I will do my utmost to see that decisions I help make reflect the letter and the spirit of the law that belongs to everyone.”

  Brooks feels a rush of adrenaline. Rollie, you goddamn, lovable, petulant, genius pain in the ass. Thank you.

  He has even used the phrase “to read the law.” Madison had written “interpret,” and they had quarreled over it. Say “read,” she said. Interpret is a hot word.

  “Hot,” he had said with quizzical dismissal. “Judges are not simply reading. Is it controversial now to suggest they think, too?”

  Yes, Rollie, it is. Say “read.”

  His reaction was something between disgust and horror, but today, bless his contrary ass, he has said “read.”

  Then she realizes the silence around her.

  They had wanted a statement to be brief, cogent, to give senators as little as possible to find objectionable. What Madison finally wrote was so succinct, the audience doesn’t realize he has finished.

  Senator Morgan leans back and to one side to hear an aide whisper in his ear. In the momentary awkward silence, Senator Stevens coughs and then mumbles something to Senator Fuller sitting next to him.

  During the pause, Brooks feels a tap on her shoulder. Spencer Carr has slipped into the hearing room and taken a seat behind her. You rarely see the chief of staff in public other than at White House photo ops.

  “Good start, Randi.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where’s Peter?”

  What had her partner told the White House about going to California?

  “Running down a loose end.”

  Forty-four

  10:30 A.M.

  San Francisco

  “This is like looking for a dead rat in a closet full of snakes.”

  That is Smolonsky’s phrase for a hopeless task.

  He might be right, Rena thinks.

  He and Smolo are trying to solve two murders three thousand miles and three months apart. They have no leads, no knowledge of the cases, and no formal law enforcement authority in the jurisdictions involved. And they have twenty-four hours.

  They also need to do it without raising the suspicions of the people they’re interviewing.

  Yeah, a dead rat in a closet of snakes.

  They’re testing just one theory: Is there reason to think the two murders are related? That narrows the list of potential killers. But it also might be a bogus theory.

  “We have to be able to rule it out.”

  “Meaning we have to be able to prove a negative,” Smolonsky had said.

  “That’s not as hard as people think. If the facts aren’t there, it’s ruled out.”

  That’s when Smolonsky mentioned the dead rat.

  Rochelle Navatsky’s killing is a blank slate. She was bringing groceries home. Someone grabbed her and suffocated her. There were virtually no clues, no fingerprints, no forensics, no suspects. The killer apparently wore gloves, left nothing behind. Police suspect a robbery gone wrong.

  The Martell murder is different. Whoever killed him seemed out of control. The wounded dog is weird. It happened three thousand miles away.

  Hard to think it is the same killer.

  Rena looks back at the lawyer he is interviewing and tries to focus.

  Drew Kimmel had sat second chair for Rochelle Navatsky eight years ago at the murder trial of Robert Johnson, the kid convicted of killing the cheerleader. He now works at a private law firm. Rena has told him he is here as a special investigator from Washington looking into the Martell death.

  They are sitting in a twenty-fifth-floor conference room of Kimmel’s law firm, a space designed to inspire or intimidate—depending on whether the firm represents you or the other guy. Rena can see Alcatraz Island and the Bay Bridge to the east out the enormous windows, the bridge almost in silhouette from the morning sun reflected off the shimmering bay. The land here seems energized by the convergence of sun and sea, the light brightened by it, the air cleansed.

  “Why were you second chair?” Rena asks. “You were the more experienced lawyer.”

  “Rochelle was good, and we wanted her to get experience. You have to start somewhere.”

  “How’d she do?”

  “Mr. Rena, how exactly can I help you?”

  “Frankly, I’m fishing, Mr. Kimmel. I’m trying to find out if there is anything that might link the deaths of Rochelle Navatsky and Alan Martell.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’ve flown out here from Washington. I am pretty serious.”

  “So where do we start?” Kimmel asks.

  “With the trial of Robert Johnson.”

  “What I remember most was the case was circumstantial.”

  “But enough to convict?”

  “Obviously yes,” Kimmel says.

  He’s defensive. Too defensive.

  “What was the evidence?”

  “Johnson was obsessed with the girl, Regina Morrison. He had taken a lot of pictures of her and had sort of a shrine at his house.”

  “What else?”

  “He and Morrison were seen having some kind of argument in the parking lot of a fast-food place. A lot of people had seen it. And, of course, there was the chrome pipe.”

  “The chrome pipe?”

  “That was key. Johnson was cited for speeding later that night. The officer noticed a chrome pipe on the floor of the car. When they found Morrison’s body a couple of days later, the officer remembered the pipe and the white car. Johnson couldn’t explain why the pipe was there. The car was borrowed. He said the pipe wasn’t his.”

  As he recalls details, Kimmel is becoming calmer.

  “And Johnson had no alibi. He had this job as a pizza delivery guy, but he wasn’t working yet that day at the approximate time of death. He said he was out driving around and thinking.”

  “No physical evidence?”

  “That was our argument. The police had woven together the story of an obsessed young man who snapped after rejection. But a story was all they had. No forensic evidence. No trace to prove that the chrome bar was the murder weapon. Not even clear the white car Morrison got into that night was the sa
me white car Johnson was driving.”

  “Did he kill her?”

  Kimmel runs his hand through his sandy hair again, which falls back exactly into place each time.

  “Honestly, I didn’t know.”

  Kimmel wants to tell him something.

  “Look, Mr. Rena, if the client pleads not guilty, you need to assume he’s not. That’s how it works.”

  “Rochelle Navatsky couldn’t poke holes in all that?”

  Kimmel’s eyes move to Alcatraz in the distance.

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Begin with the fact that you feel guilty about the quality of the defense you two gave Robert Johnson.”

  Kimmel tries angry but his heart isn’t in it.

  “Rochelle became an excellent trial lawyer. But this was her first murder trial . . . she took the loss hard.”

  “Harder than she should have?”

  “I think most people in jail think they got incompetent representation and spend their time in prison blaming their lawyer.”

  “Is that what Johnson did?”

  “Actually, he just seemed to be in shock. Or more like shattered. Like he expected bad luck to happen.”

  “So she wasn’t to blame for him being convicted?”

  The question seems to jar Kimmel.

  “Mr. Rena, this was an awful crime. A rape-murder of a beautiful, beautiful young girl. In those kinds of cases, juries tend to want to find justice for the victim, not the accused.”

  “And Johnson died in jail?”

  Wiley’s file on this was slim.

  “Stabbed. There aren’t a lot of details.”

  They weren’t known, or Kimmel hadn’t taken the trouble to learn them?

  “What did you make of Alan Martell?”

  Kimmel sighs.

  “I knew him fairly well in those days. And I didn’t like him. He was arrogant and shouldn’t have been.”

  “But he won?”

  “Oh, juries loved him. He thought trying cases was easy. Just tell a story. Focused more on that than the law.”

  “Don’t a lot of lawyers?”