The Emperor of Ocean Park (26 page)

Yet I have no alternative.

I have just lifted the receiver to telephone Corcoran & Klein when Dorothy Dubček, my mothering secretary, buzzes me to say that Agent Nunzio is on the phone.

“Just talking to a friend of yours,” he says in his gruff way, not bothering to ask what I called about. “Bonnie Ames.”

I am a moment catching up. I have never been much good with names. Kimmer says I am just unfriendly; Dear Dana says it is genetic, calling it my “social orientation”; and Rob Saltpeter says remembering names is not so important if we honor God in everybody we meet.

Rob’s answer is my favorite, but Kimmer knows me best.

“Bonnie Ames?” I repeat, stupidly.

“Sure, Sergeant Ames. You met her.”

“Oh! Sure.” A pause as each of us waits for the other. I blink first. “So, uh, what were you talking to her about?”

He lapses into cop-speak: “She informed me that they have apprehended a suspect.”

“What?”

“In the murder of Freeman Bishop.”

“Oh! Who was it?”

“Some drug dealer.”

“You’re kidding.” Soothing relief unexpectedly flows through me at the realization that it was not after all McDermott who did the deed; a moment later, a shuddery wave of shame replaces it. Still: it was not McDermott.

“The Bureau does not allow kidding.”

“Very funny.”

“She wants you to call her. Wants to give you the details herself.” He rattles off her number, which I already have. “What did you beep me about?”

The brusque change of subject sets me back for an instant. The urgency of my original call suddenly seems less—but not to Agent Nunzio. Once I tell him that I saw McDermott, he zips through a series of questions, nailing down everything from the color of the fake agent’s shoes to the direction he took when he left. He is unsatisfied by my answers. He asks me if I really think McDermott traveled all the way to Elm Harbor just to ask me if I have a friend named Angela. I tell him it certainly seems that way. He asks me if I can think of any reason McDermott would think I have a friend named Angela, and I admit I am aware of none. He asks me if in fact I have a friend named Angela, and I tell him I cannot think of one. He asks me to call him if I happen to remember one, and I tell him I will.

“It could be important,” Nunzio warns me.

“I figured that out for myself.”

“I don’t want you to worry, Professor Garland,” he adds, unexpectedly expansive. “If McDermott is really some kind of private investigator, I’m sure we’ll track him down, and we’ll track his client down too. Those guys are a nuisance, but I’m sure he’s harmless.”

“How do you know that?” I ask, my earlier nervousness sharpening my tone. I am not reassured by the fact that McDermott said roughly the same thing:
You and your family are perfectly safe . . . from whatever might come.
I have the sense that everybody else shares some crucial bit of knowledge that I have been denied. Yet the fact that Freeman Bishop’s murderer is under arrest makes me feel safer . . . safer for my family. A little bit, anyway. “If you haven’t found him, how do you know he’s harmless?”

“Because we see this type all the time. They lie to get information, they follow people, they weasel this and that. But that’s all they do.” A hesitation. “Unless, of course, you have some kind of evidence to the contrary. About McDermott, I mean.”

“No.”

“You’ve told me everything?”

“Yes.” As I did in my meeting with Sergeant Ames, I have the sense of being under interrogation, but I have no idea for what.

“Well, then, it’s like I said.” Winding up. “You have nothing to worry about. You can go on with . . . well, whatever you’re doing.”

“Agent Nunzio . . .”

“Fred is fine.”

“Fred. Fred, look. You’re down in Washington. I’m up here. McDermott is here. I would be lying if I didn’t admit, that, uh . . .”

“You’re worried.”

“Yes.”

“I understand. But my resources are a little bit limited. And, well, it’s not as if this McDermott character has threatened you . . . .”

“No, he just dropped by to impersonate an FBI agent.”

I can almost hear him thinking, not only logistics, but politics: who owes what to whom and for what.

“Tell you what. I really don’t think you should be worried. I want to emphasize that. But, if it will make you feel better, I’ll make a couple of calls. We don’t have much of an office up there, but I’ll see what I can do. Maybe have the police take some extra cruises by your house till we track McDermott down.”

I know I am being mollified, and I also know there is little reason to worry, but I am grateful all the same.

“I’d appreciate it.”

“My pleasure, Professor.” A pause. “Oh, and I hope things work out for your wife.”

Only after we have hung up does it occur to me that I did not tell him about the pawn. But, then, perhaps I never meant to.

(III)

W
HICH LEAVES ME
B
ONNIE
A
MES
.

Having acquired a first name, the sergeant is less daunting. Still, once I track her down, she is so brusque that I marvel she asked me to call in the first place. Either she is still feeling Uncle Mal’s pressure or she is feeding a need to gloat over just how far wrong our suspicions were. The arrests in the “torture slaying” (as the reporters are calling it) of Father Freeman Bishop were made early this morning, she says: no Klansmen, no skinheads, no neo-Nazis, and no fake FBI agents either, but a Landover, Maryland, crack dealer, a small-timer—a nobody, the sergeant calls him—a twenty-two-year-old named Sharik Deveaux, street name Conan, and a member of his crew. Even as I listen to her account, I am skimming the story on the
USA Today
Web site. Sergeant Ames takes particular pleasure in informing me that Conan is black, which I already guessed. “So, no possible racial motive”—as though it was I, rather than the media, who proposed one. Mr. Deveaux, the detective continues, admits selling the precious little rocks to Father Bishop on a regular basis. Naturally, he denies the murder. But the other gangbanger—the sergeant’s word—says he helped Conan dispose of the body once the ugly deed was done, and somebody else heard Conan bragging about it. “And he has a history of this kind of thing,” she adds without elaboration.

For the barest instant, I see it happening: Freeman Bishop, bound or gagged or in some manner restrained as the two of them burn and cut and stab his twisting, helpless form, his desperate pain the very purpose of the exercise, his faith finally tested on the wretched rack of swiftly nearing oblivion:
Between thy judgment and our souls.
At that instant when the end is inexorable, we all of us, believers and agnostics, sinners and saints, discover what we truly embrace, what we truly know,
what we truly
are.
What would I, with my shaky and intermittent faith, at that instant become? Better to suppress those thoughts.

“Is this going to stand up in court?” I ask timidly.

Sergeant Ames is more amused than annoyed. The case is overwhelming, she assures me, but it will never come to that. Sooner or later, she says, Deveaux will allow his lawyer to persuade him to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty.

“Does Maryland execute murderers?”

“Not often. But Mr. Deveaux was stupid enough to kill Father Bishop in Virginia. He just rolled into town to dump the body.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to ask him that. And don’t even think about actually trying.”

“What sentence would he get? If he pleads guilty, I mean?”

“Life without parole is the best he can hope for. If he wants a trial down in Virginia? Something like this? They’ll probably give him the needle.”

Her casual confidence is chilling. “And you’re sure he did it? You’re very sure?”

“No, down here we try to arrest people at random. Especially for murder. We worry later on about making the evidence stick. Isn’t that what they teach up in the Ivy League?”

“I didn’t mean any disrespect . . .”

“He did it, Mr. Garland. He did it.”

“Thank you for . . .”

“I have to run. Say hello to your sister for me.”

I call Mariah to share my relief that the killing of Freeman Bishop had nothing to do with the Judge, and the housekeeper (not to be confused with either the au pair or the cook) tells me that my sister is back down in Washington. I call her cell phone and leave a message. I try Shepard Street, but there is no answer. Maybe it is just as well that I cannot reach her: she would likely tell me that the arrest is a setup, part of the conspiracy. So I try Addison in Chicago and, to my surprise, actually reach him at his townhouse in Lincoln Park. He is more saddened than delighted by the news. He whispers something I do not quite follow about the Hindu god Varuna, drops in a quotation from Eusebius, and warns me to take no pleasure in the pains of others, even those who sin. When it is finally my turn to speak, I assure him that I am taking no pleasure in any of this, but Addison tells me he has no
more time to talk just now, because he has to catch a plane, which is probably a lie. I suspect, on no evidence other than history, that there is a woman in his bed. Maybe Beth Olin, although two weeks would be a long time for my brother to stick with the same girlfriend.

“We should get together soon,” he murmurs so solemnly that I almost think he means it. “Call me next time you’re in the Midwest.”

“You never return my calls.” The plaintive younger brother.

“My people must misplace the messages. I’m sorry, Misha.”
My people.
If only Kimmer could hear that one.

“Actually, there are a few things I’d like to talk to you about,” I persist.

“Right, right. Listen, my brother, I’m kind of in a hurry. I’ll call you later.”

Then Addison is gone—perhaps his people have arrived to take him to the airport. I have no opportunity to mention that most of the messages I leave are at his home.

CHAPTER 14
VARIOUS FREEDOMS OF SPEECH

(I)

A
FTER LUNCH ON
T
UESDAYS
, I meet with the members of my seminar on Legal Regulation of Institutional Structure. The seminar covers everything from securities regulation to canon law to the rules that govern student-council elections, always playing the semiotic game, trying to figure out not what each rule means, but what it signifies, and how that signal is related to the purpose of the institution. The course draws some of the brightest students in the law school, and probably I enjoy it more than any other class I teach. This afternoon features a delightful, good-natured clash between two of my favorites, brilliant if slightly addled Crysta Smallwood, still struggling to figure out when the paler nation race is going to expire, and the equally talented Victor Mendez, whose father, a Cuban émigré, is a power in Republican politics, which probably puts him to the left of Victor himself. I play referee as Victor and Crysta contend across the seminar table over the question of whether sexual harassment represents a failing of institutions or of individuals. When I finally call time as the class ends at four, I award the round to Crysta on points. Crysta grins. The dozen other students laugh and pound her on the back. I remind them that we will not meet next week because I will be in Washington at a conference, and admonish them to turn in the first drafts of their term papers to my secretary before I return. With students of this caliber, there is no whimper of complaint.

Oh, but there are days when I love teaching!

I trip happily up the stairs to Dorothy Dubček’s office, where I collect
messages and faxes, then bounce down to my own little corner of the law school. Outside my office, I trumpet a cheery hello to aging Amy Hefferman, my Oldie neighbor, who was in law school with my father. She blinks her tired eyes and tells me that Dean Lynda is looking for me, and I nod as though impressed. Safely inside, I toss everything onto my desk while I check my voice mail. Nothing important. A reporter, with a question, miraculously, about tort law, not the Judge. American Express—I am late again. And one of Lynda Wyatt’s assistants: the Dean, as Amy mentioned, wants to speak to me, presumably about Kimmer’s competition with Marc Hadley. No thanks. Instead, I call the day-care center to make sure Bentley is okay, and the head teacher’s irritation blasts through the telephone. I smile at her annoyance: as long as she is angry, my son is doing fine.

My mood surprises me. I should, by rights, be dispirited. It is one week since my encounter with Not-McDermott, one week since the delivery of the pawn to me at the soup kitchen, one week since the arrest of Sharik Deveaux. Five days ago Kimmer came home from San Francisco and lovingly calmed me down. I am jumping at shadows, she murmured, kissing me gently. I have to look at things rationally, she said, cooking me a nice dinner. If the pawn was really a message and not somebody’s tasteless joke, then whoever sent it will tell me sooner or later what it means, she whispered, head on my shoulder, as we sat up together and watched an old movie. What is there to be afraid of? she asked me softly as we lay in the darkness of our bedroom, surprisingly comfortable together. The murderer is in jail, and McDermott, who has come and gone, has been declared harmless by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Day after day Kimmer has repeated the same arguments. She has been both comforting and persuasive. I have gone from frightened to worried to merely concerned. I have been trying to reach serene. I have been trying not to suspect that the real reason my wife wants me to relax is in order to keep her potential judgeship on track.

Nothing can quite drag me down. The weather has turned fair: temperatures in the fifties, and here it is the middle of a New England autumn. My mood has lifted along with the temperature. Today, for the first time since the death of the Judge, I am actually feeling like a law professor. I am enjoying the classroom; and so, it seems, are my students. (Except for Avery Knowland, whose attendance at my torts class has grown spotty and who has largely ceased to participate. I need to do something about him.) I remember that I chose this profession more than it chose me, and that I have been reasonably successful at it.