A Person of Interest (29 page)

So which is it?”

“Jim,” Lee implored. “I’m not being dishonest. I just don’t see why it’s important—”

“Please let me decide what’s important. Who is Lewis Gaither?

What can you tell me about him?”

Agent Shenkman had still not returned. “He was my wife’s husband,” Lee managed. He felt his gorge rising—it was a panic reaction, he knew, but he was suddenly sure he would vomit. Morrison rose and took a glass from the cupboard, filled it at the tap, and set it near Lee on the table. Lee drank. “I stole his wife,” Lee whispered, looking up gratefully. “We were friends. Then his wife left him for me.”
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“Where did you meet?”

“We were classmates. In graduate school.”

After this they both sat in silence, as if by these very few words Lee had unfurled around them the full tapestry of his past. Lee felt certain he had. Sadness pierced him. His eyes had grown damp.

Lee did not know how many minutes had passed when Morrison finally spoke. “I’d really like to believe, at this point, that you’re disclosing everything that there is to disclose, about this piece of mail.”

“I am,” Lee said passionately.

“But it’s hard,” Morrison continued, “given that, in effect, you’ve lied to us. About the nature of your relationship with this person, Lewis Gaither. About having disposed of the letter.”

“I wasn’t lying!” Lee cried, bewailing the inadvertent confusion he’d caused.

“Lee, you have to understand what it looks like to me. I really want to believe you.”

“You should!”

“As far as Agent Shenkman is concerned, while I can’t speak for her, I wouldn’t be far off base if I said that she wouldn’t be sorry to fi nd that you’re lying. But I would be. I like you, Lee, and I’d like to believe you.”

“You both should believe me!” Lee was only remotely aware that his temples were streaming with sweat—his mind was cornered and panicked, as it had sometimes been in the worst of his fi ghts with Aileen, when, after an originating spark he could never recall and a swift escalation he could hardly perceive, he found himself howling with her on a precipice, hearing that she would leave him and he declaring the same. He no longer knew how he’d gotten here or what sense it made, only that his survival relied on persuading this obdurate man. “I’m telling you the truth—”

“If that’s the case, then would you like to take a polygraph?” Morrison said.

The howl in Lee’s ears ebbed away, like the tide rushing out. He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “A lie-detector test?” he asked tentatively, afraid Morrison might burst out laughing.

But the other man’s face showed no tending toward humor. “At this point, if you’re disclosing everything, the polygraph can only serve you well.”

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“A lie-detector test implies the person being tested is suspect,” Lee said after a moment. Despite being on the defensive, he spoke to Morrison admonishingly. He felt offended to his core. At the same time, he still was a prisoner of panic. The panic interfered with his indignation: it would soon deplete it.

“The test itself implies nothing. Only the results are meaningful. If you’re telling me the truth, the polygraph shouldn’t be any problem for you.”

“It isn’t,” Lee heard himself saying. “Of course it’s no problem.”

“You consent?”

“If it will resolve this confusion, yes, of course,” Lee said, with what he hoped was calm dignity, but as he rose from the table, he was aware he was trembling—he never had eaten lunch nor, for that matter, breakfast this morning, and he found himself, like a frightened child longing for bed, picturing the warm meal he would make for himself, then the bath he would take and the beer he would drink, and the sated, self-confident man he would be when the test, which he assumed would be scheduled, like a cholesterol test at the doctor’s, was in some hazy future administered—

“If you’ll follow us, then, unless you’d rather not bring your own car. But you’re free to, of course.” And with that the remote, swift-moving, palpably malcontent man who had only a few days before begged to just be called “Jim” was replacing his notebook and pen in his pocket and departing, while Lee stumbled half blind in his wake.

16.

FOLLOWING THE FAMILIAR SEDAN, HE HAD TO STRUGGLE

to keep up when Agent Shenkman exceeded the speed limit, but even as his car plodded, his heart was a riot. He’d absorbed from somewhere that polygraphs measured heart rate and breathing, but he lacked all concrete sense of how that might work. Surely the accelerated heartbeat of a man in the grip of confusion and fear, if subjected to polygraph measurement, wouldn’t point to that man as a liar? Most racing hearts, ardent or fearful, were entirely innocent hearts. The
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machine would know that, wouldn’t it? By the time he was trying to follow the sedan into the parking lot of a Motel 6 he had never noticed at the intersection of old Route 19 with the interstate highway, Lee had difficulty turning the wheel with his petrified hands. Could the machine tell the wild pulse of terror apart from mendacity? Morrison waved him into a space, and then he was following the two agents through a tiny generic lobby, past tall plastic sentinel plants, down a dim, Windex-smelling hallway lined with black numbered doors.

He didn’t notice the number of the door that swung open to Morrison’s knock, and once shuffled into the cramped entry space between the room’s closet and the door to its bathroom, he felt scarcely able to digest his surroundings, although at the same time he saw it was just a motel room, squalid in its stark, hygienic cheapness, its mustard-toned drapes drawn to shut out the sun, a suitcase frankly open trailing trousers and socks on the nearer of two made-up beds, and a sprouting apparatus on the other, seemingly just escaped from its box, probing the motel bedspread with a half dozen suction cups.

The chair to the small writing desk had been pulled out and rotated to face the farther bed, but apart from this innovation, and the presence of suitcase and machine, the room showed no traces of occupancy, as if they had all—Lee, Morrison, Shenkman, the pale balding man who had opened the door and who looked like an insurance adjuster or an uncharismatic shoe salesman—tumbled into the room at that moment. The pale man might have been interrupted in changing his clothes after arduous travel. A pair of loafers were kicked off near the window. “Right now?” he inquired. He went padding to the machine, in his socks, and bent down to heft it from the bed to the writing desk. Tendrils trailed and were almost tripped over.

“Need a hand?” Morrison asked.

“No, no.” Once the machine had been heaved onto the desk, the pale man stood with his back to them, disentangling its many extru-sions. “As discussed?” he asked over his shoulder.

“As discussed. Give a knock on the wall when you’re fi nished. I’ll be right next door.”

“You’re not staying?” Lee exclaimed, turning back toward the door. Morrison was departing; Agent Shenkman was already gone.

“How will you know . . . How can I tell you I’m telling the truth—”
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“Gerry knows what to ask. And I’ll follow up, if necessary.” Morrison closed the door.

Lee felt his heart bounding and shuddering. After they’d been alone for an agonizing moment, Gerry tweaking and tuning, Lee could not stop himself from asking, “Are you doing this to lots of people?”

“You should probably leave all the questions to me,” Gerry said, although not unkindly.

Once Gerry had made his adjustments, he ushered Lee into the desk chair. “And untuck your shirt, please, and undo the buttons. . . .” The machine had a sort of large bladder appendage that Gerry fi tted around Lee’s torso like an oversize blood-pressure cuff. With deft, impassive fingers, Gerry affixed suction cups, wire ends, indescribable chill antennae to Lee’s skin with first-aid tape. The room was stuffy, but Lee felt himself goose-pimpling, his surface recoiling in fear and revulsion; the same defensive mental absence he employed whenever at the doctor’s office tried to armor him now, but it was interfered with by rogue cogitations, almost all in the key of self-justifi cation. He had misrepresented the letter from Gaither only to save Morrison time; why would Morrison want to meander through Lee’s sordid past? And he’d pretended he’d thrown out the letter only to cover the fact that he’d misdescribed it; and once he had seen that it mattered, he’d told the whole truth. And, come to think of it, skipping Hendley’s memorial didn’t mean he was happy that Hendley was dead. He wasn’t so self-dramatizing as to engage in hysterics like Sondra, but he was certainly sorry, and startled, and he condemned senseless murder—

who didn’t? He was an honest man, honest to a fault, in fact: witness his skipping the service because he just couldn’t stomach the pageant.

His perpetual crime was the failure to keep up appearances, to even notice the masks he’d do better to don; he should have gone to the service and wrung a few tears. Maybe he should have praised the “self-knowledge” that helped Esther drop out of college. Should have raised Aileen’s son by Gaither and said things like, “You’re no less my child than Esther!” He certainly should have hired professional landscapers to deal with his lawn, should have replaced the antiques Michiko took with cheap pieces from Macy’s, should have learned, at the very least, how not to wear his every failing and humiliation embroidered and badged on his sleeve, and certainly shouldn’t be sitting in a cheap
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motel room, sleeves pushed up as if donating blood, to allow the suspicious machine to encoil his arms. And yet he’d consented to do this precisely to keep up appearances, to show, with serene dignity, he had nothing to hide. Why then did he feel shamefaced and degraded already?

He thought again of the letter from Gaither, now surrendered to Morrison. Gaither was the only human being who had ever moved Lee to duplicity: witness not only Lee’s affair with Aileen but his absurd fibs to Morrison three decades later, when he couldn’t admit that Gaither’s arrow had been dipped in hate. “An inquiring letter from a caring old friend”: more like a sop to his own tender ego. And a rare veer from blunt honesty, although it was more honest to say he had spent his life not so much in pursuit of occasions for honesty as in wincing avoidance of lies that might get him in trouble. Perhaps it was the immigrant’s sense of hopeless illegitimacy and impending exposure, but he probably would have been the same man had he never left home: less fastidious than loath to be faulted, even by people he didn’t respect. The one time he’d been spurred to deceive, in pursuit of Aileen, he had still been a faltering liar, who had blushed, and felt burned by his secret, so that he fled Gaither’s gaze. Another man might have used passion to lay claim to righteousness, but Lee had been ashamed of the passion as well, startled by its animal strength and its adverse relation to scholarship. He had given in to it as he imagined an addict must give in to a drug, and even after Gaither had married Ruth, and engineered custody of the child, and then snatched the child away, Lee had been hampered in his response by the sense that he’d stained his own character. Who was he, with his lust and poor discipline, to harp on another man’s faults? It might have even been true that Lee’s difficulty in condemning Gaither’s acts was aggravated by Gaither’s piousness, despite Lee’s own stark atheism. Lee had mocked that piousness, but because he feared it, as any person who entertains doubts has to fear the undoubting. All of which meant that Lee was never able to muster quite as much solidarity with his new wife, against her old husband, as that new wife required. It was only once she had left him also that he became positively outraged, yet by then Gaither had been gone for years. There was nothing to do but hate him, aimlessly, to maintain dormant heat without planning to tap
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it—that wasn’t required. His hatred of Gaither became a form of fi del-ity, to himself just as much as Aileen, and until the surprise of the letter this had been satisfying and in fact inexplicably peaceful.

“The test will take place in two parts,” Gerry was explaining. “The first part isn’t part of the actual test, it’s preliminary, and I won’t be recording responses. During this part I’ll explain what my questions will be, and if you have any questions about them, you’ll ask, so we both understand what we’re talking about. The second part is the actual test.

During this part your only response to my questions should be yes or no. For example, I’m going to ask you about a letter. I will say, for example, ‘Did you receive a letter in your campus mailbox with a return address of 14 Maple Lane in Woodmont, Washington?’ And you’ll—”

“Yes,” Lee broke in.

“—and you’ll either say yes or no, depending on which is your answer. Or, for example, I’ll say, ‘Is your birth date March ninth, 1930?

And you’ll either say—”

“Yes,” Lee repeated. He knew he should not be surprised that they had his birth date.

“Then I’ll ask, ‘Was the author of the letter from 14 Maple Lane an individual named Lewis Gaither?’ And you’ll either say yes . . .” His train of thought about Gaither had absorbed him so deeply that despite its undiminished woundingness, its status as worst episode of his life, beside which the debacle with Michiko was a mere triviality, Lee experienced a sedative effect, as if he’d fi nally outfl anked his emotions. For a moment he savored the sense of self-mastery and felt complacent and even slightly heroic in the machine’s rubber clutches. He was doing his duty for justice. He was not merely seeking to prove he was honest. He was seeking to free Morrison, from the pointless distraction he himself had become. He was helping a good man fight evil, the one way he could.

“And now, if you understand fully, we’re going to begin. I’ll ask the questions I’ve already mentioned. Please only respond yes or no.

Is your birth date March ninth, 1930?”

“Yes,” Lee said. Somewhere a needle, delicate as a hair, traced a river of calm on a rotating roll of paper.