The Good Father (28 page)

The next day Daniel was shipped to the country’s only supermax federal penitentiary, in Florence, Colorado, known as ADX Florence, or ADMAX. There my son was placed in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day, locked in a seven by twelve cell, behind a steel door with a grate. His furniture was made out of poured concrete, his desk, his stool, his bed. There was a toilet on one wall that shut off if plugged, a shower that ran on a timer to prevent flooding, and a sink without a drain trap. Some prisoners had polished-steel mirrors bolted to the wall, but not my son. Nor was he allowed a radio or television. Instead he had a long narrow window, just four inches high, through which he could see only the sky. This was to prevent him from knowing his specific location within the complex. Communication with the outside world was strictly forbidden. The single hour per day he was allowed out of his cell was spent wandering by himself in a secure outdoor yard, under the watchful eye of armed guards.

ADMAX had opened in 1994 on the outskirts of Florence, Colorado. It was two hours north of the New Mexico border, two hours south of Denver. The prison covers thirty-seven acres and has four hundred and ninety beds. Its inhabitants are considered to be the worst of the worst—terrorists, rapists, murderers. Many had killed fellow prisoners in other correctional facilities. Others had murdered or attempted to murder prison personnel in other prisons. Many, like my son, were famous. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was housed at ADMAX. As was Terry Nichols, the surviving Oklahoma City bomber. Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged “twentieth hijacker” on 9/11, was there, as was “shoe bomber” Richard Colvin Reid. Andrew Fastow, former CFO of Enron, was serving time at ADMAX, as was Robert Hanssen, the FBI’s most famous double agent. It was a prison full of legendary men, which was the kind of creature the world believed my son to be, a Cyclops, a Minotaur, a monster of mythic proportions.

In the months since his sentencing, I had taken my investigation underground. Daniel’s arrest and trial had devoured our lives. My family was exhausted, my wife’s patience at an end. Daniel had confessed, Fran told me in no uncertain terms. It was time to move on. So two weeks after Daniel’s sentencing, I went to the box store and bought two dozen cardboard boxes. As the kids watched, I emptied our lives of every trace of the investigation. In the past year I’d amassed an exhaustive collection of biographies of men who had assassinated other men—Oswald, Booth, Burr—their histories imagined from every angle. The pages were dog-eared, text highlighted and underlined, the margins filled with handwritten notes.

I had collected stacks of research on the places my son had visited—geographical data, climate charts, anything that might contextualize his crime. In ten minutes I could find you a list of Iowa City mayors stretching back to the city’s inception. I could hand you a highlighted map of California rail travel, including timetables and discontinued routes. My file cabinet was filled with newspaper and magazine articles, computer printouts, blogs, and transcripts of telephone conversations. There were blueprints of Royce Hall and lists of gun dealerships in the greater Los Angeles area. Based on witness lists I had compiled biographical data on more than two hundred people who had stood in Royce Hall the day Senator Seagram was assassinated: pictures, résumés, educational histories.

I packed this material away, even as I found myself unable to move on. The case had become my obsession, my addiction, and like a drug or gambling habit I knew it must now be hidden from the people around me. So I filled a banker’s box with documents about Hoopler and Cobb: birth certificates, military and work histories.

I took the case I had built and boxed it up. My family watched as I carried the boxes to my car. I told them I was taking it all to the dump, but instead I drove to a storage facility and rented a locker. I would lead two lives now. On the surface I would be Paul Allen, the man who had surrendered to the inevitable, who was trying to put the past behind him. But underneath, I would continue to dig, reasoning that if I succeeded in proving Danny’s innocence, if I could manage to commute his sentence and save his life, then my family would forgive me. Even Daniel.

In this way I became two people.

At Fran’s urging we put the Connecticut house on the market. It was time to accept that our old lives, the community we had built, the schools our children went to, the neighbors, the friends were gone. We were pariahs now, shunned in supermarkets, heckled at PTA meetings. The community that had once embraced us now went out of its way to show us we were not wanted.

Last summer I had taken a leave of absence from Columbia to concentrate on Daniel’s case. This January, when I called Alvin Heidecker, the school’s president, to say I wouldn’t be returning, he seemed relieved. Alvin and I had been friends for years, but he was a practical man, who understood that my presence on the faculty was a detriment, not just academically but also in terms of fund-raising. Many of the school’s biggest donors were staunch Democrats, who could not be expected to bequeath millions to the school that employed the father of the man who had murdered their hero.

So we began to plot our escape. We fantasized about where we might go—London, Paris, Rome. I’d had invitations to work abroad in the past, and we believed, rightly or wrongly, that Europe would offer us our only real opportunity for anonymity and rebirth. But when push came to shove we found ourselves unable to abandon the country in which we had lived our lives, even though it had abandoned us. Fran grew up in Denver. Her family still lived there. A move to Colorado made sense. When the idea first came up, I nodded soberly, trying not to betray the surge of excitement that went through me. Danny’s prison was in Florence, just an hour drive. But I didn’t say that. Instead, I let Fran bring it up, holding the fact out like a carrot, as she tried to convince me that a move to rural Colorado was truly the best thing for both of us.

So we boxed the dishes and filled cardboard wardrobes with our East Coast fashions. We packed our books and sporting equipment. We took our paintings off the wall, our framed photographs (art and family), and wrapped them in plastic. We paid for insurance. We counted our boxes. Fran and I took a trip to Colorado in late November and found a house—a two-story craftsman on a quiet hillside with a view of the Rockies. All that was left was to move.

A strange thing happened to me, however, as we boxed up our past. The more of our things we packed, the less of them I wanted. Fran came
into the bedroom one evening and found me stuffing my clothes into trash bags.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I don’t want it,” I said. “Any of it. Out with the old.”

I told her that if we were going to be moving, changing our lives, then I wanted to change, too. Reinvent myself. So into black, triple-strength leaf bags went my Connecticut doctor’s suits, my chinos and linen shirts, my docksides and John Varvatos T-shirts. When they were full, I put the trash bags in the car and drove them to Goodwill. Let someone else wear them. Let someone else walk around disguised as me. I would give the world the slip. Into trash bags went my aftershave, my designer skin lotions. Anything with a scent. Anything that had defined me, the old me, the me I had decided to leave behind.

The next day I went down to the barbershop and told them to cut my hair short. I watched as the barber ran his clippers over my head, watched my hundred-dollar, salon-cut hair fall to the floor in clumps. With it went my identity. Looking in the mirror afterward I did not see the prosperous New York doctor, that leader of men. I saw a chastened man, vulnerable, exposed. The hair that remained was mostly gray. The lines around my eyes had deepened, a newfound weight pulling at my face. It was disturbing for me to see the years of life that defeat had added to my face, but it was the truth. And I needed the truth right now. It felt important somehow to understand just where I stood.

I had been an overconfident man, smug even, and because of this I had overestimated the control I had over the world. The man who stared back at me now did not look smug. He looked scared. He was fifty years old. He had suffered a stunning, last-minute reversal.

He was running out of time.

And so, seven months after two shots rang out in a packed California theater, my family became a Colorado family, mountain people, nature lovers hungry to start again. The week we arrived, Alex and Wally celebrated their eleventh birthdays. Fran and I bought them snowboards, with the hope that this would help them assimilate. In our minds, we saw our sons becoming mountain rats, suntanned mini-jocks, trailing their fingertips in fresh white powder, as they crisscrossed the slopes in a lazy S. Colorado would be a return to a life of innocence, healthy and carefree.

Children. My sons would be children again.

The day after their birthdays, they started at a new school. Aside from an early rough patch, they fit in quickly. I think they appreciated the return to normalcy. It was a relief to have homework to complete and tests to study for. They liked the grounding nature of soccer practices and Little League tryouts. They made friends. Wally quickly fell for a Mexican American girl two grades ahead, and suffered the inevitable psychic pain of unrequited love.

Fran made a good show of meeting the neighbors, of bulk-store shopping and planning weekend discovery excursions into the Rockies and down to Santa Fe and Albuquerque. We spent time with her family, aunts and cousins, who embraced us openly, despite the obvious taint we carried. This was our de facto witness-protection program. With people we met, we adopted a friendly but subtle distance. We built a social life of barbecues and card nights, PTA meetings and bake sales.

In public I refrained from mentioning my previous marriage. I glossed
over where we had come from, saying we had lived all over the East Coast. To new friends, we embraced the lie that our family was no bigger than what they could see. The trips we took to ADMAX were done in secret, the family rising before dawn and piling into the Jeep. If asked, we lied and said we were taking advantage of the early spring, using day trips to familiarize ourselves with our new terrain. In truth, we snuck forty miles south, through increasingly desolate country. In silence, mostly, but sometimes listening to classic rock on the radio. Daniel had become our secret weight, the pariah we carried in our hearts.

We adapted wordlessly to the prison rituals, the metal detectors and redundant security checks, the waiting area filled with men, women, and children of all races. We endured the judgmental stares of the guards, looks that implied
we
were responsible for the crimes of our loved ones. And if not responsible, then at least contaminated by them. The stares suggested that we, too, should be incarcerated. None of this surprised me. America was a country that believed that crime was who a person was, not just what they did. In this light there could be no such thing as rehabilitation, only punishment. And part of that punishment was, inevitably, the ostracism and conviction of a convict’s family.

So we waited in the lines, and endured invasive searches. We accepted the insults and withering looks. We did this so we could sit in a narrow cubicle facing five inches of tempered Plexiglas. We did it so we could pick up a germ-ridden telephone handset and talk to our kin.

Ironically, ADMAX had been good for Daniel. He had gained fifteen pounds. The color had returned to his cheeks. He told us he had been reading a lot, classics mostly, Tolstoy, Pushkin. He said a girl he knew in Austin had turned him on to Russian novelists. He liked their scope and emotionality. Though we asked repeatedly, he never talked about what it was like to be locked up in a seven by twelve room twenty-three hours a day after having spent so much time on the road. He never complained about the epic awfulness of the food or the disdainful treatment he received from the guards. In fact, he never complained at all. He said he had discovered that he liked the solitude. It was what had attracted him to life on the road in the first place.

Transience had given my son a necessary level of separation from the world, knowing he was only in a place for a short time, that he could only ever get so close to someone. He told us that he had enjoyed the
endless hours spent alone in his yellow Honda. He said he liked walking the streets of a town he did not know, filled with people he would never meet. He saw the human need to socialize as a weakness. It was a moment of rare confession, and when pressed to explain, he changed the subject.

During the week, we were a normal nuclear family with after-school activities to organize and dinner parties to plan. We talked about replacing screen doors and having the HVAC serviced. During the week we watched prime-time television and tried to keep up with our reading. We separated our household trash from our recyclables and packed lawn clippings into biodegradable paper sacks. On Thursdays I dragged the Toters to the bottom of the driveway and left energy drinks for the garbagemen. I had become a friend to workingmen everywhere, the kind of person who chatted about hardware to men in Velcroed weight belts at Home Depot or talked sports with auto mechanics. It was my disguise. During the week my family was invisible in our normalcy. It was on those weekends that our true identities came out.

We visited Daniel twice a month, making the hour drive early Saturday morning. Round-trip, the whole excursion took five hours, door to door. We always stopped at the same Starbucks for coffee, the same Shell station to use the restrooms. We made sure we were home by two in time for soccer practice.

On these visits I stuck to safe topics—the new house, how the kids were doing in school. Danny seemed relieved. Each visit lasted no more than twenty minutes, just enough time for small talk. Danny showed us a joke book he’d found in the prison library. Every time he tried out new material on the kids. The jokes were mostly groaners—off-color tales of farmers and their daughters—but the kids loved them and would deconstruct each joke in the car on the ride home.