New England White (58 page)

“That’s the reason. That’s Vanessa’s trauma. What sent her over the edge a year and a half ago.” Julia tapped the paper. “She thought you killed Gina Joule.” She picked up the page and tore it into strips, then got up and crossed the room to drop them into the shredder Lemaster kept conveniently nearby. “That was the trauma. That was the big secret. She was protecting you, Lemmie. The paper. The refusal to consider that it could have been anybody but DeShaun. The evidence is all over the place. She thought you did it.”

“Preston put the idea in her head,” said Lemaster, tonelessly. “And it stayed there until—well, until recent events.”

Julia picked up the cell phone, pushing the button to light the screen afresh. She held it close to her face, staring, until Lemaster took it gently from her hand. He closed the phone, turned it over, removed the battery. From a drawer he took a hammer. He smashed the cover, removed the memory chip, and smashed that, too. He shoved the mess neatly aside. Perhaps in recognition of his wife’s distress, he folded his hands over hers, and waited.

“And that’s what this was all about. I thought you were protecting the President, or Mal Whisted, or the Empyreals and their stupid plan. But it was Vanessa.” Her vision blurred. “You didn’t want anybody to know that she was in Kellen’s car that night. To threaten him. To make clear, if he told anybody her father did it, she would tell the world how he had—had”—she could not pronounce the words—“paid inappropriate attention to her. If anybody knew, they would have thought she—oh, Lemmie.” Julia wiped her eyes. “You had somebody swipe the phone for you, maybe you got rid of the records themselves, in whatever bunker the cell-phone company keeps them in. Could you have done that, Lemmie? Do you have that kind of”—she searched for the word—“authority?” Julia was on her feet. She did not remember rising but had backed physically away from her husband, and stood now near the window, staring at him, horror and admiration mixing, terrified of his conclusion, loving him for his instinctive use of the power the Empyreals had placed in his hands—using it to protect his own. “Will you get in trouble? For—for misusing the power they’ve entrusted to you? The Empyreals?”

“I will if they find out.” Finally he smiled. “Sit down, Jules. Sit down and pour us some more wine.”

(IV)

“I
CAN’T TELL YOU
everything, Jules. Even now. But, yes, I have a little cache of evidence that I keep around. Not the evidence Empyreals hold on to, like the original of Jock’s confession.” Tapping the pages. “A few little items of my own. To keep my friends in line. My old college buddies. After all, if you think about it, they might kick at the bit one day, and try to get rid of me. Empyreals would never avenge me, you see. They are in this for the long haul. Their focus is the fortune of the darker nation, not the preservation of Lemaster Carlyle. So I’ve kept the cache around. Every year I lodge a fresh letter with our lawyer, telling him where it’s hidden. Scrunchy knows that. Mal knows that. They’re powerful men, but they keep away from me. And from my family.”

“But Jeremy was here in case they didn’t.”

“Well, yes. He was. Or in case some of their people, unfamiliar with the rules, got a little rough. At first I just wanted him nearby. But after I realized how many people were poking around—well, yes. After that I mostly wanted him in the house, or covering whoever was out, when he could. And I took other measures, too. Never mind what they were.”

Other measures. She saw it at once. Trevor Land. Gina’s godfather. Trevor had been Lemaster’s man from the start. Through Trevor, Lemaster had arranged for Bruce to get involved with the investigation, knowing that Bruce was dogged, that he would often be around Julia and even Vanessa until he got his answers, and that he would be a formidable presence against any threat. All of this without ever exciting attention by publicly hiring a bodyguard.

“So, if you kept it hidden,” said Julia, “how did Vanessa find it?”

“At that time I kept the cache in my study. It was inside a locked cabinet. A month or so after Vanessa returned from France, I got home one night and the lock had been jimmied. I was in a panic, I can tell you. I thought Scrunchy’s people had gotten in. Mal Whisted’s. But no. Somebody had been through the pages, but only the plane ticket was missing. It had to be Vanessa.”

“She finds everything,” Julia agreed. But, inside, she realized that she was at last one step ahead of her husband. The piano. Kellen had never taped anything to the piano. He had not gotten into the house. Vanessa had purloined a clue from Kellen and hidden it there to provide an explanation for the Audi knocking over the lamps on the night he drove her home. She said, “So what happens now, Lemmie? You have your hooks in both men.”

“True.”

“But they couldn’t both have done it. Jock drove the car. Mal Whisted was drunk, and probably doesn’t remember a thing, but his family doesn’t have the kind of money this conspiracy would have cost. And Scrunchy—well, he wasn’t there, was he? But maybe he helped with the cover-up. That’s your hook into him. Or maybe the Empyreals showed each of them some piece of manufactured evidence. And so, maybe to this day, they both think they killed her.” Counting off the points on her fingers, admiring the cleverness even as she despised the act. “That was Bay’s plan from the start. Get them all tripping over each other. Tell each of them, You did it, but we’ll set up a cover, so the others will think it was them. Why not? After all, the Empyreals didn’t know which one of them would rise the highest, but it was a nice bet.”

“A very nice bet.” He seemed sad. “All these years, all these decades, the Caucasians have assumed that they are in charge. The ideology of the Empyreals is that this need not be so. The darker nation can wield enormous power, as long as we hide our hand. Public power the Caucasians would never stand for. Hidden power they can do nothing about.”

“But if the hand is…hidden…then why did Jock and Mal ever believe that the Empyreals had so much power?”

“I believe that when the police turned their attention to DeShaun, all three men were persuaded that the Empyreals could do what they promised. And what they threatened.”

“And that was it. They signed the confessions. Stupid little college boys. They signed the confessions, the Hillimans provided the cash to spread around, and all these years, Mal Whisted has been sure you’re covering for him. All these years, Scrunchy has been sure you’re covering for him. Neither one of them knew the other was even a suspect. And of course they fired their assistants when they looked into it. You told them to, and they didn’t have a choice. I must be an idiot not to have seen it. Oh, Lemmie! Of course you can afford to be blasé about the election! The Empyreals win either way!”

“Remember, Jules, I came into the plan late. Things are as they are.” A pause as he stood up and went to the window. The glare did not seem to bother him. “So—tell me, Jules. What would you do? If you had the choice. What would you have us do now?”

“Take the hooks out. Tell both men they’re free.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen. Number one, it’s not my decision. I’m a relatively minor player in Empyreals, no matter what my title might be. Number two—well, there are a lot of sunk costs, Jules. We’ve gone too far to turn back.”

“Lemmie, come on! The President—Scrunchy—he’s innocent! So is Senator Whisted! They were drunk but they didn’t kill anybody! How on earth can you say it’s too late to turn back? You’re blackmailing the wrong men!”

“I suppose we are,” he said, finally turning back toward his computer. Tap-tap-tap.

She wanted to throttle the life out of him. She wanted to hug him forever. She wanted to grab the family and head for the hills. She stared at the man who had rescued her, a man who believed in duty rather than desire, twisted now by so many conflicting obligations that he no longer understood free will, especially his own. “This is wrong, Lemmie. Can’t you see why it’s wrong?”

“No, Jules. I cannot see why it’s wrong.” Glancing up at her at last, eyes weary. Stunned by a sign of actual physical weakness in her husband, Julia took a step back. “A few months ago, when you thought the President was guilty, you seemed satisfied—reluctant, but satisfied—that the course we had chosen would lead to the best outcome for our people. The darker nation. Have you changed your mind? Don’t you see that the possibility of helping our people is the same, no matter who did the actual deed?”

She sank into the chair.

Her husband eyed her with sympathy. “I’m surprised at you, Jules. Surprised. Our opportunity to win justice for our people does not turn in any way on the actual identity of the culprit in a crime the world has long forgotten. We are avenging a far larger crime, Jules. Remember that.”

Now she knew what frightened her. The confidence she had long admired in him, even when it swelled into pride, was really the zeal of the ideologue. All these years he had spent at the table deriding left and right alike had persuaded her that Lemaster possessed no politics to speak of, apart from an admiration of his own brilliance. Now she saw how wrong she was. His politics were the politics of pure and perfect righteousness. As his own favorite philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, had once pointed out, no cause has ever claimed more victims.

“But you can’t believe it’s going to stay a secret. Sooner or later, it’s going to come out. Everything does.”

“No, Jules. Not everything does. The world is full of secrets people manage to keep.” Tap-tap-tap. “This one wouldn’t have come out if Byron Dennison hadn’t been so arrogant. He couldn’t resist the temptation. He had to meet with the frat boy himself instead of using an intermediary. He had to go to the meeting in the Landing, for the pleasure of watching the Caucasians dance to his tune. He forgot about how our hand is supposed to say hidden.” Glancing up at her. “Anyway, now it’s hidden again.”

“What about DeShaun?” she said. “Are you willing to let that lie remain out there?”

He said nothing.

“You wouldn’t lose anything if you let it be known—leaked it somehow—that Jock Hilliman was the real killer. You wouldn’t let Scrunchy or Mal off the hook. They both think they killed him. They think the evidence of Jock’s guilt is manufactured. They think those confessions you made them sign—”

“The Empyreals made them sign.”

“—you made them sign,” she repeated, “are enough. They’ll be nervous, probably, to see the old crime reopened. But they’ll both still be yours.”

He shrugged.

“What kind of man are you?” she said at last, lungs aching as if she had attempted a very long climb. But she did not know whether she was climbing up or down. “Come on, Lemmie. Don’t you care about the truth?”

“The only truth that matters,” said Lemaster with solemn kindness, “is the truth of how much we can gain for our people.” He looked at her again. “I love you, Jules. I’ve loved you since the first day of div school. But this plan is now my responsibility. I cannot turn away from it on the threshold.”

She swayed in the long, bright room, overwhelmed, not knowing who he was. Had he lied to her a moment ago about being a minor player? His doubts seemed to have vanished, in the brilliant glow of a willed belief. He could always talk anybody into believing anything, and he had talked himself into believing that the Empyreals were right.

Probably just in the last ten minutes.

And the crazy part was, she saw his point. She didn’t. Lemaster was right. He wasn’t. The world cared. It didn’t.

“Are you going to leave me now, Jules? Take the children, run to France, call the papers, ask them to rescue poor Scrunchy and Mal from the clutches of a bunch of old men from the darker nation, some tiny unknown Harlem fraternity that secretly controls the destiny of the nation? Do you honestly think anybody but the far-right fringe of the far-right fringe would even consider the possibility that it could be true?”

“I could try.”

“Yes, you could. And I’ll always love you, whatever you do.” He spoke gently, the way we do with the very ill. “I want you to stay. I want you with me. If you can’t bear it, I’ll understand. But, please, Jules, understand my position. I have to do this work. If I have you with me, I’ll do it better.”

“And Tony Tice? Why were you in touch with Tony Tice?” But she had already figured it out. “He was playing both ends against the middle, wasn’t he? This was your project now. You had to protect it. You and…and Jeremy Flew. The Empyreals sent him, didn’t they? To take care of us, but also to keep an eye on things. You knew what Kellen was doing. You had Tony to tell you how far he got in his research, except that Tony thought the chance for a buck was too good to pass up. He cheated you.” Another thought. “That hundred thousand he donated to the div school every year. Was that the Empyreals too? Oh, Lemmie! Did they buy me a job?” She swayed. And hardened. “I don’t think Tony Tice will do much time, will he, Lemmie? You’ll call somebody, and he’ll get a sweet deal.” She hesitated. “Bruce told me, Vanessa too, that Kellen started working on this project a year and a half ago. You were still at the White House. But the Empyreals needed somebody to keep an eye on things. To maybe run the whole project. And the best way to do that would be if you could be, say, president of the university. The most powerful man in the county. How did they do it? Did they have the Hillimans call Cameron? What was it?”

A warning tone when he finally spoke. “It was the search for justice. That’s all.”

The questions swirled. Did Frank Carrington really cause so much mayhem on his own? Had Jeremy Flew acted only as a bodyguard, or might he have played a more active role? And what about Kellen—how had he learned so much, so fast? Did he have a source inside the Empyreals? But she knew her husband would offer no answers. So she asked the one question that mattered most: “But who gets to make the call, Lemmie? Who decides when to use this…this influence? Who’s
wise
enough?”

Lemaster stared at his wife for a long moment, then leaped to his feet and stalked around the desk. Julia cringed instinctively away, all her suspicions rising. He took her by the shoulders and frog-marched her into the private bathroom off the study.