A Person of Interest (38 page)

“Why have I done this to you? I might ask you the same question.

First of all, who is Jeff Trulli? You never told me you’d hired a lawyer.

That seems very combative.”

“Combative? You tore up my house! And you’re having me followed!”

“I’ve taken that tail off you, Lee. Behavioral Science thought it might be a good thing to rattle your cage, but I didn’t care for it.

Happily, I’m even starting to think I might no longer need it.”

“You expect me to believe that? You expect me to believe that you’re so nice you told those men to stop following me?”

“Lee, in the short time I’ve known you, I’ve made it a policy not to have any firm expectations about you at all.” This was said almost with the same geniality Lee remembered from their fi rst conversations. Lee felt his chest tighten with longing—to be spoken to kindly again, to be highly regarded, again. . . . “Please excuse me a minute,” said Morrison, and Lee heard a sound in the background, and then Morrison saying, indistinctly, “Is it here? Yeah, I’m coming right out.

Sorry, Lee,” he resumed. “My cab’s here. I can keep talking if you’ll pardon some bumps.”

236 S U S A N C H O I

“Your cab? Where are you going?”

“How about, since I don’t have unlimited time, instead of me telling you where I’m going, you try telling me why you called?” He might have been trying to keep up with Morrison’s taxi, on foot, he felt that breathless suddenly, with how urgent it was that he finally be understood. “Please, Jim, listen to me. The man you want really is Lewis Gaither. I know you haven’t been satisfied with this answer, and I understand now! He must have changed his name years ago. Why else would he write to me? Why else would he expose himself to me? I told you this man is my enemy, Jim. He’s hated me for thirty years, since I was a young man like you and you were just a little boy. And he is—let me tell you some more about him—he is a religious fanatic; he does not believe he is capable of anything wrong, even of
thinking
something that’s wrong. I’ve been thinking about it, my God, I’ve been thinking about nothing else: How could this happen? Why should Lewis change in this way? But the truth is that it’s not such a change. Jim, we get older. And the parts of ourselves that are the most rigid, the most extreme, the most diffi cult, sometimes these are the parts that come more and more to the top. When we’re young, they’re just an aspect, but if we’re unlucky, they grow and expand and crowd out everything else. And this is what’s happened . . . this is what’s happened to Lewis. . . .” He had been speaking urgently, passionately, unfettered by any restraints of protest from his listener, and in the course of his speech he knew, from the awful elation he felt, that these were right ideas, true ideas, that had been long assembling like the dust in the voids between stars, awaiting the confl uence needed to join in a mass. But the awful elation he felt was also the effect of another void, lying inside the phone line. His voice had poured forth, uncollected—the phone must have gone dead.

Just as he’d been on the point of whispering anxiously,
Jim?,
Agent Morrison sighed. “Maybe you really are the great actor, and I’m the big sucker.”

“Jim, I’m no actor.”

“So tell me the rest of this story. You want to tell me, don’t you?

About how he’s trying to frame you and ruin your life.”

“And he’s done it,” Lee said. “Even you think I’m guilty. You gave my name to the newspaper!”

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 237

“No, I did not. I’m going to tell you something right now, and I want you to listen to me. I did not leak your name to Eager Beaver at your piece-of-crap newspaper. Nor do I know who, on this little town’s little police force or on your little school’s little administration, might have done it. But let me explain it to you, the same way I explained it to Trulli. The Bureau has acknowledged that you are a Person of Interest. No one’s calling you a suspect, except maybe your idiot neighbors.

A
Person of Interest,
Lee, is all you have been called. It shouldn’t be news to you, or to anyone, really. A Person of Interest is a person we think may know something of interest to us. A suspect is a suspect.

You’re a Person of Interest, and you’ll stop being that if you’ll stop being so interesting.”

“But I’ve explained everything.” Lee was trembling, his voice guttering as if he’d just been on a jog. “I’ve explained everything about Gaither.”

Morrison let the slightest pause follow this return to the subject of Gaither. “Lewis Gaither never changed his name, Lee. He was born Lewis Gaither and died Lewis Gaither, and he’s been dead for almost ten years.”

These words hung in the air with a weird singularity. In the course of their whispered and hissed conversation, and outside Lee’s notice, the dense percolation of engines and voices had diminished by steady degrees. Now all that remained was a last van door slamming, and then a last acceleration receding down Fearrington Way.

“It can’t be true,” Lee whispered, almost to himself.

Morrison let the shocked murmur pass by, a featherweight rag carried off on the breeze the night slipped through Lee’s open windows. Like a seer Morrison said, in the same musing tone, “Now they’ll leave you alone until morning. They’ve done their stand-ups, wagged their tongues. No one wants to lose sleep on you yet. But in the morning maybe they’re here from the twenty-four-hour cable news. And from the regional bureau of the
Times
. A big break in the Brain Bomber story. And don’t forget Eager Beaver from your local newspaper. He’ll be back, with a sleeping bag this time, unless he’s already bunking with one of your neighbors. They seemed pretty happy to help.”

“He can’t be dead, Jim,” Lee whispered. “He wrote me that letter.”
238 S U S A N C H O I

“But you’ll go on and do what you do every day. Eat your breakfast. Teach class. Go about your business. You’re an innocent man, aren’t you, Lee?”

“
Yes
,” Lee said, the phone seeming to slip from his hand.

“I can only tell you the facts, Lee. Your Gaither is dead. Is this really a big shock to you? Most of my colleagues don’t think so. They think that you’re toying with us. But, happily, it now seems there’s another old friend of your friend, who’s more willing to talk. So if things go my way, I’ll soon know what you know. Perhaps more.” Their conversation had become strangely languid, dreamlike, a hushed game with no purpose beyond killing time. From downstairs came the roar of an engine and a loud, compact crack, as of an ax striking wood or a gun going off, and then a more diffuse noise of scattered explosion.

Voices, the engine departing again, Lee’s body abruptly returned to him, crouched in the dark pouring sweat, the handset of the phone wetly pressed to his face, magnifying his terrified pulse as it beat in his temple. Agent Morrison sharply said, “What was that? Somebody toss a brick through your front window?”

Too late Lee remembered his frayed camouflage. “I told you I wasn’t at home!”

Lee hung up and snatched the cord out of the wall.

He knew that his neighbors were at their windows, in the dark, as he inched his way back down the stairs, leaning hard on the banister to make up for his buckling legs. In the ambient light from outdoors, he could easily see the disorderly blades of glass glinting at him from the carpet. His thin curtains stirred. The temperature had gone down; he felt gooseflesh come up on his neck and his arms. At his front door, he peered through the peephole and saw his mailbox beheaded, its post angled from impact and the black box itself in the street, mouth flung open. Some distance beyond, almost to the lawn of the vengeful young mother, lay an envelope, a long white rectangle, refl ecting the light from the streetlamp so that it was starkly aglow, almost blue, like a small sheet of ice.

It felt less like courage than a yielding, an almost grateful surrender, when he opened the door and stepped onto the cool concrete stoop in his socks. The news vans were gone; all was eerily still; yet he would not have been surprised or dismayed to be cut down by bullets. Leaving
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 239

the stoop, his feet sank into his freshly cut grass, and he felt the night dew instantly soak his socks to the skin. He walked toward the bludgeoned mailbox as if on a high wire. He felt almost pierced by how intently he was watched, and somehow this certainty, the needle pricks of eyes in a loose ring around him, was impelling. He must keep moving. He reached the mailbox, bent down, and picked it up by its door. It was empty. He closed it and put it under his arm. Then, squarely beneath the streetlight, he stopped and surveyed the stillness around him, made a hurried inventory with his eyes even as his head and limbs seemed suspended, motionless as a statue’s; he had the idea that he must limit his actions as much as was possible, that he couldn’t be seen dithering, that this would deplete him, make him more vulnerable.

From a distance he must appear calm and resolved. He saw an advertis-ing circular from the grocery store rustling slightly on the young mother’s lawn. This would have been from his mailbox, too, but he didn’t retrieve it. Otherwise he saw nothing but the stark white rectangle. Delivered as the mail always was sometime late in the morning, probably while he’d been leading the five cars to Jeff Trulli’s offi ce.

He went to the envelope and plucked it up quickly and before he could hesitate tore the thing open so that he was ambushed, overpow-ered, the past’s etherized handkerchief snuffing his face; though he stooped shiveringly in the streetlamp, his nostrils had filled with a fragrance of days when he’d been a young man, the magnolia tree in full bloom and the mustified heap of old books overdue from the library. . . .

He turned quickly and recrossed his lawn, willing himself not to run, the lawn doubling and redoubling in depth. This was what felt like death, these falsely courageous deliberate steps across dew-drenched grass, his socks wetly sucking the soles of his feet, as he gazed at the face of his house, with its ruptured front window and its deserted darkness and no one in her bathrobe waiting on the front step, arms crossed over her chest, mortified but defiant, let the neighbors think what they want, fuck them, the hell with them all.

It was Aileen that he saw there, not Michiko. For an instant the lights flared on, bright little flames springing up on the eaves and the porch and behind the windows, all intact. Then the vision blinked out.

He was back on his dark stoop alone, on a pair of wet footprints.

240 S U S A N C H O I

He had slippers in the front coat closet. He stowed the dead mailbox, peeled off his wet socks, put on the slippers, and crunched carefully across the living-room carpet to the back of the house. He still gripped the shredded envelope and its contents. In the kitchen he dropped them into his briefcase, where Gaither’s fi rst letter once lay.

He removed the French numbers theorist and carried the briefcase into his bedroom. He packed by the light from his digital clock. It said 11:01 as he left the house the way he’d come in, by the sliding glass door.

His pines touched him again as he left his backyard, their needles clinging a bit in farewell to his bulkier outline—a suitcase added to the briefcase. He encountered no cars on the streets as he hurried.

He’d changed the thin-soled loafers for his old running shoes, and he jogged a few steps but was slowed by his cumbersome bags. His car was where he’d left it.

He didn’t stop to examine the new missive again, because it required no further analysis. Its origin was no less certain than its sender, and the implicit instruction it gave him enraged him not because he was doubtful about it but because of how promptly he moved to obey.

The envelope was like its predecessor, a plain business-size 10, neatly typed, except this time it addressed Dr. Lee at his home and claimed to have traveled from “12 Ailanthus Circle, Lumberton, Idaho,” though it was postmarked Pocatello. The address was a fresh fakeness that clearly succeeded “14 Maple Lane, Woodmont, Washington.” The contents comprised just one sheet, creased in thirds. It had been the cava-lier violence of those knife folds as much as the scent of the paper that had almost undone him. The page was all dense hieroglyphs of obscure mathematics. Because it was page twenty-four of a typescript, the author’s name didn’t appear, and there were just a few people on earth who might have known, as Lee did, that the author was Lee and the page from Lee’s dissertation.

One was Aileen, who had typed all those pages of baffl ing symbols herself, but of course she was dead. One was Gaither, who’d never finished his own dissertation, who’d let the loss of Aileen end his grad-school career; Lee’s dissertation must especially gall him and the chance to deface it provide an especial pleasure. As Lee had told Morrison, Gaither couldn’t be dead. He was clearly alive.

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 241

It was just after four in the morning when Lee entered the town, and though he could see almost nothing of it, he felt abrupt gravitational loss, as if he and the car, any second, were about to be airborne.

It had to belong to the past, to the lost and unsalvageable, yet once he’d come through the loose rind of outlying strip malls, just the same as the strip malls he lived among now, the old town, at its core, was the same: the same stalwart frame houses on companionable little lawns and the same brick storefronts and then the same abrupt intake of air, of surprising grandeur, as the campus first came into view.

Great temples of limestone and blood-colored brick and the acres of lawn and the wide flagstone walkways. There had always been an all-night diner on the corner of Campus and Church, and it was still there, the diner he’d once gone to for Thanksgiving dinner and into which he crawled now, like a child into bed; he was served harsh black coffee and not bothered again, even after he woke with a start and saw dawn in the windows and the early-bird townies, white and thick and reserved and unchanged by the passage of decades, coming in on their ways to their jobs, at the school and elsewhere.