Jury of One

54

Two phone calls was all it took. Two calls to Mari Rodriguez, the governor’s chief of staff. Sixty minutes later, she was walking into the Maritime Club, one of the exclusive, predominantly male clubs in the city. Shelly did not walk among these people generally speaking, but Governor Langdon Trotter certainly did.

She knew he was in town today. It was a rather inconsequential fact to her, not because she was too busy to see him but because, busy or otherwise, neither was likely to make much of an effort to see the other. Fine. That was fine. Stay out of her way, she would stay out of his. It had been an unofficial truce for years. Anger had turned to indifference, and usually stayed there, or at least she wanted to think so.

She took the elevator to the eleventh floor, where she had scheduled her meeting. You had to schedule with the governor. But if you were an irate daughter almost screaming into a cell phone, adjustments were made. Shelly was relatively sure that the offices nearby had been cleaned out. You’re governor and you want privacy, snap a finger and it happens.

Mari wasn’t around. All she saw when the elevator popped open were two members of his security detail, wearing suits and grave expressions, phone cords winding from their waist into earpieces.

“Hello, Ms. Trotter,” one of them said. “Right this way.” They led her to an ornate set of double doors that opened into a posh library.

“Thank you, boys.”

Shelly followed the direction of the voice and saw her father sitting in the corner, reading a report of some kind. The doors closed behind her and they were alone. The whole floor was probably cleared.

“Well, hello there,” he said. The governor’s jacket was off and his sleeves were rolled up to his forearms. He removed the reading glasses perched on his nose.

She felt her hands curl into fists, but she had vented much of her anger in the hour that she had waited. She had done plenty of thinking and her calculations had produced a measure of calm.

“You know,” she said simply.

He didn’t leave his chair, which told her something. He placed a bookmark in his report and took his time setting it down on a nearby shelf. “What do I know, Shelly?”

“You know about Ronnie.”

He produced an exaggerated sigh and got to his feet. She had almost forgotten how large he was. Wide shoulders, broad neck, still the full head of white hair offset by the steel blue eyes. His lack of an immediate answer was an answer itself.

“You put the I.R.S. on my legal clinic,” she said. “I blamed the federal prosecutors for that. But it was you. A quick call to your buddies in the administration. You jeopardized a nonprofit clinic that helps kids who have no one else to help them. Classy. That’s really something.”

Her father’s tight lips parted, but he didn’t speak.

“Then you tell your little puppet Raycroft to cut a sweet deal for me. Anything to keep this quiet. Right? Anything to keep me off it, at least.”

Her father looked her over. In part, it had to be a father’s curiosity, the soulful way a man looks at his grown daughter. Was he proud of her? Impressed with her accomplishments? She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t care about his opinion. Why, she could not say. She did not understand the quirky human trait that made a grown, independent woman crave her father’s approval, even now.

“You couldn’t have me ruin another election,” she concluded.

“Oh.” Her father looked at his hand a moment, rubbing his thumb and index finger together, an old habit. “That makes it easier for you, I suppose.”

“That is exac-”

“And it never occurred to you”-he raised a trembling, angry hand while keeping his voice even-“it never occurred to you that I was trying to protect you?”

“That makes it easier for you.” She shook her head. “You could have told me-”

“Yes.”

“-and let me make that judgment.”

“Yes. And if you had ever come to me over the last seventeen years and asked me if I knew where your son was, I would have told you. But you didn’t, Shelly.”

“I didn’t know you knew. I thought it was confidential.”

“I’ve held state office for fourteen years. You’re a lot of things, Shelly, but you’re not dumb. You knew I could find out.”

She deflated.

“But you never asked.”

“And when it was clear that I wasn’t getting off this case, no matter what you did?”

He nodded. “I could have told you. I didn’t.” He sighed and stuffed his hands in his pants pockets. “The boy knows?”

“Yes.”

His jaw clenched. The information was coming loose now. The dam had sprung a leak.

“Do you see this information becoming public?”

Her shoulders rose and fell. “I can’t control Ronnie.”

“Try,” he said.

“I’ll ask him but it’s his choice.”

He didn’t seem to take that well but, as always, he hardly gave a visible reaction. The Trotter family was adept at outward appearances.

“All it would mean is your daughter chose adoption over abortion,” she said. “That works for you politically. As long as no one knows which option you wanted.”

She saw the fire, momentarily, in his eyes. She had stung him with that one. She felt the rage building, not from her father’s reckless interference in this case but from many years ago. That was the real reason she was here, she now realized, to say these words to him.

“You feel better now?” he asked.

“Not really. You?”

“Me?” He laughed. “No, Shelly, as always when it comes to you, I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

A nice counterpunch. She felt like she was back in that room, watching the expressions on her parents’ faces as she broke the news. The shock. Disappointment. Anger. Amazing, how quickly these feelings could return to the surface.

“It wasn’t my choice for you to get pregnant when you were just a girl,” he said. “That was your choice. And it was your choice not to tell me who the father was. And your choice to move away from home.”

She felt the heat rise to her face.

“But I dealt with it,” he continued. “I found your son a home. Maybe things didn’t turn out perfectly, but who can ever guarantee such a thing? And yes, when this young man was arrested for shooting a police officer-”

“Alex.”

“Yes, when Alex was arrested, I was aware that he lived with-” His eyebrows lifted, as if the entire matter disgusted him.

“With Ronnie,” she said.

Her father wet his lips. “Yes. Of course, I was concerned. I didn’t understand why, of all people, you would be involved. I thought maybe you knew about-the situation with the boy.”

“Ronnie,” she said again. “His name is Ronnie.”

“Okay, fine.” He spit the two words violently, as if they were one. He lifted his hand. “In any event-it turned out that you didn’t know anything about it. You happened to know this boy Alex, and so there you were, defending the quasi-brother of your son. Of course, I was concerned. So yes, I tried to use some persuasion to move you away from it. And yes, maybe I put in a word to Elliot Raycroft. You were sitting next to a loaded grenade, young lady, and apparently you didn’t even know it.”

She looked away from him. He had not lost his ability to persuade. But he was rationalizing. She felt her teeth grinding, which also brought her back to her teenaged years. It had all come back like an avalanche. She could see the shame even now, as he struggled even to utter the name of her son-his grandson. His complete, unadulterated disappointment. And beside her anger sat a feeling she struggled to identify. She felt, on some level, completely ridiculous. Ashamed of herself? Not quite. She realized that she had viewed herself, her life, through the lenses of her father. Was that the reason she had refused, these years, to acknowledge the existence of her son? Because it reminded her of the person who had let her father down so severely?

The issue, to use a legal term, was moot. Done. Inescapably over. And that, more than anything-that overwhelming sense of regret, of the inability to change past events-whisked the breath from her lungs.

Her father mumbled something, took a step to the side, slowly paced. He made his way over to the window. “First time I ran for this office,” he began. “There was that mistake in my nominating papers. A mistake big enough to topple my entire candidacy. I assume you heard about that.”

She had. Everyone had. When her father’s nominating petitions were filed for the governor’s race, one of his staff had failed to file the original of a particular document. The issue had been raised in the context of a murder trial involving the chief aide of her father’s Democratic opponent. By the time the information was public, the deadline for challenging nominating petitions had expired, so there was nothing anyone could do about it. The fact that her father had to ask her if she’d heard about it highlighted the gulf between them.

“The truth is, I knew about it before it was public,” he continued. “About a week after our papers were filed. I’ll never forget the look on the staffer’s face when he told me. My jugular was fully exposed. If I had been knocked off the ballot for a rinky-dink mistake like that, I would have been finished.”

She looked at him.

“And you know what was the first thing that went through my mind? The very first thought, after the staffer told me? As I was looking at the end of my political career?”

She blinked. Her eyes cast down on the carpeting.

“I thought how pleased that would make you, Michelle Ingrid.”

She watched him a moment, staring out the window, rubbing a hand over his neck. She grabbed her bag and headed for the door. “Goodbye, Dad,” she said.