The Emperor of Ocean Park (58 page)

“No, Tal. Listen to me. Of course Villard was real. No, what I’m telling you is that
somebody else paid for the detective.
Don’t you see? Either Daddy borrowed the money or—well, I don’t know what. But the money came from somebody else. And if we find out who that somebody else is, we’ll find out who killed Daddy.”

I am not quite believing any of this, but not quite rejecting it either. Emotionally, I am in no fit state for rational judgments just now.

“And you think that the somebody was . . .” I leave the rest hanging, inviting the response we both know is coming.

“It was Jack Ziegler, Tal—who else? Come on. It had to be Uncle Jack. I was right the first time, Tal. Daddy was afraid of Uncle Jack. That’s why he had the gun. But it didn’t do him any good. Jack Ziegler killed him and took the report.”

So the Mariahan conspiracy theory, as I suspected, has not changed. Yet it occurs to me that my sister might be on to something, whether or not she knows it. Because at the heart of her reconstruction is a simple truth that frightens me . . . frightens me because I know some facts that she does not.

“But wait a minute. I still don’t see why Jack Ziegler would do it.” I do, of course. I am objecting, probably, just to keep the conversation going.

“Yes, you do! There was something in the report he didn’t want anybody to know, so he had to get the only copy. Why else would he have killed Daddy in the house?”

“Then why did he leave the empty folder?” I object.

“I don’t know all of it! That’s why I need your help!”

A thought strikes me. “That public call for an investigation you mentioned . . .”

“Somebody talked them out of it, Tal. Somebody got to them, don’t you see? And Addison’s useless,” she adds, mysteriously, while I am still busily exulting over the fact that somebody talked them out of it. “You and I are the only ones left who care. So you and I have to prove what really happened.”

“We don’t have enough information.”

“Exactly! That’s why we need to work together! Oh, Tal, can’t you see?” She turns to John Brown. “You understand, John. I know you do. Explain it to him.”

“Well,” John begins. “Maybe it would be better if . . .”

An interruption. The other two women, broad, fair Kimmer and dark, slender Janice, come outside with the steaks, all seasoned and ready for the grill. There is corn on the cob, wrapped in foil, and a small plate of sliced greens, which will also receive a light touch of flame. And two Cokes, because neither John nor I drink alcohol: John out of religious conviction, I out of simple fear, given my father’s history. We dutifully exclaim over the food, which does look awfully good. There is some ritual teasing about how the men are so busy playing basketball that we do not yet have a decent fire going. Kimmer is still irritated at me about Mariah’s presence, but with our friends around, she is being a good sport. Last night I told her finally about the call from the agency about my father’s speaking dates; she was furious at their presumption, and I loved her more for it.
You’re not your father, and they have no right to pretend you are!
I told her I had already said no, and she told me I did the right thing. If they ever call me back, I will say no again.

“You want me to put them on the grill?” Kimmer asks, hands on her hips in mock irritation.

“No, darling.”

“Then you guys get to work.” She swats my bottom playfully. Surprised, I tickle her. She grins and pushes me away. “Work!” she repeats.

“Mariah, we could use some help in the kitchen,” adds Janice, to my sister’s astonishment, for she has been feeling like a fifth wheel.

Mariah turns her sullen gaze toward me. “Just think about it,” she says. Kimmer and Janice return to the house, Mariah sulking in their wake.

“Your sister’s a trip,” John murmurs as we walk back into the yard.

“Hmmm? Oh. I’m sorry about that.” Taking a second or two to find my place in the conversation once more, because I am still a bit dazed to be on such good terms with my wife, even if it is just for show.
“Mariah has—well, she hasn’t been herself since our father died. I want to thank you, you and Janice, for being so nice to her.”

“Janice is nice to everybody.” As though he himself is not.

“That’s true.”

“I don’t know how she does it.” He shakes his head, but there is pride in his voice: he loves his wife so, and she obviously loves him right back. I try to remember exactly how that sensation feels, only to decide I have never felt it. “Mariah could be right, though,” John adds thoughtfully.

“Oh, come on. You don’t think the autopsy results were faked.”

“No, not about the autopsy. And not about your father being murdered.” John shrugs. “But what I’m saying is, she could be right about the private detective. That somebody else paid him.”

“You’re not serious.”

“You think he worked for free? Mariah said he was expensive.”

“Hmmmph.” My usual intelligent response.

John waits while I examine the steaks and lay them, one by one, on the long grill. He is wearing loose, clean blue jeans and a New York Athletic Club windbreaker over a white dress-shirt. His shoulders are remarkably broad for so short a man, but the start of a paunch is evidence that he no longer works out regularly.

“Add her story to yours, Msha.” John balances on the balls of his feet, his hands behind his back, letting me do the work. “The combination is interesting.”

“Hmmmph,” I repeat, not wanting John to take Mariah seriously.

“Maybe the report is what the fake FBI guys were looking for.” When I do not rise to this, John murmurs: “You haven’t told her everything, have you?”

“No.”

“She doesn’t know about the note from your dad, right? Or the pawn?”

“No.”

“She’s your sister, Misha. You really should share that stuff.”

I give him a look. “The way she’s been acting?”

John is hardly interested. He is no longer looking at either me or the steaks, but instead is gazing off toward the trees beyond the fence marking the border of our property and the beginning of the two acres owned by the president of the First Bank of Elm Harbor. Can I be boring my friend? “John?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m listening. Go on.”

“You have to understand about Mariah. It isn’t just this one thing. She, um, she has always been . . . excitable. She has always had a tendency to jump to conclusions. I mean, okay, she’s smarter than I am, but she’s not always, um, reasonable. She . . . I guess she’s a little bit passionate, you know?”

“Yes.” Absently. He continues to study the fence.

“I have this friend. Eddie Dozier. You remember Dana? Dana Worth? I’ve told you about her, right? Well, Eddie is her ex-husband. He’s black, but he’s pretty far to the right. Into all this anti-government stuff. Anyway, Dana told me the other day that Eddie and Mariah have been talking, that he’s the one who convinced her that the autopsy results were faked. You know, those specks in the photo? I’ve tried to convince her not to talk to him any more, but she just—”

“Misha.” Softly.

“—won’t listen to anything I tell her. I don’t know. I have to find some way to get her to back off, to stop all of this before it gets out of—”

“Misha!”

“What?” Annoyed that John, who never interrupts, has broken in.

“Misha, there’s somebody in the woods. On the hill. Don’t turn around.”

From what seems a very great distance, I hear my voice, answering calmly with the Gospel according to Kimmer: “It’s just my neighbor. I told you, the president of the bank lives over there—”

John’s laugh is cold. “Not unless the president of the bank is tall and black. And, besides, he has a pair of binoculars. He’s watching us.” Pause. “It could be that Foreman guy.”

I turn around at last. I cannot help myself.

“I don’t see anybody,” I whisper.

“He’s gone. We must have spooked him.”

(II)

J
OHN
B
ROWN
is as level-headed a man as I know. He is not given to hallucinations. If he says somebody was there, somebody was there.

We warn our mystified wives that we have to go check something out. Then we leave the steaks and go into the woods. I suppose I should be worried—the watcher, if there was one, had to be Foreman—but if
the late Mr. Scott turned out to be harmless, how dangerous can his sidekick be? Besides, being part of a team increases courage remarkably.

“Over here,” John murmurs, pointing to the spot where he thinks the man he saw was standing, between two barren trees. But we find only a few tracks in the melting snow, neither one of us outdoorsman enough to know how long they have been there, or even where they lead, for they vanish quickly in the brambles. My old friend and I look at each other. He shakes his head and shrugs, the message clear. We are trespassing and cannot linger long.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“I think we missed him.”

“I think so, too.”

“But if he scares so easily, Misha, I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

“Neither do I. I’d still like to know who he is.” I do not want to remain up here. A neighbor could see two black men creeping through the woods and get the wrong idea, and I have already had my obligatory once-a-decade encounter with the law.

“You don’t think it was that Foreman guy?”

I turn toward him. “You saw him. I didn’t.”

John frowns. He is disappointed in me. “I don’t think you’re telling me everything, Misha.”

“I don’t know what you think I’m leaving out.”

His voice remains milder than mine. “You can’t play games with your friends.”

“I’m not,” I snap. John shrugs. As we prepare to return to my property, we hear a car growl into life on the adjoining street, which runs parallel to Hobby Road. Racing over the slushy ground, we reach the sidewalk in time to see a powder-blue Porsche disappear into the distance. But this is the ritzy part of town, and it could belong to anybody.

Although the driver looks black, and we are the only black family on Hobby Hill.

“I think you should call somebody,” says John.

“I’m going to sound silly,” I sigh, thinking of Meadows’s warning about the risk to my wife’s potential nomination. But I know that on Monday I will make the call anyway, just to be on the safe side, and that Cassie Meadows, down in Washington, will roll her eyes and make another note in the conspiracy file.

I also know something else, which I do not share with my friend as
we trudge back down the snowy, leaf-strewn hill. Hidden within Mariah’s ramblings was a tiny nugget of hard information, a new and troubling fact over which she skipped too lightly because she was searching for an epic conspiracy to end our father’s life. I know who has read the missing report.

CHAPTER 32
A PIECE OF THE ANSWER

(I)

T
HE CLEAR, ICY WATERS
lap at my sneakers as I sit on the sand, my arms encircling my knees, gazing out across the mists of Menemsha Bight to Vineyard Sound. The afternoon sun, hanging low in the sky, sparks bright golden triangles in the swells before me. Off to my left is a long jetty built of huge stones, a favorite spot for summer people who like to fish. On the right, the headland presses far out into the water, and a handful of homes, from this distance stolid, secluded, and spacious, dot the point. Their shingles are weathered to that wonderful New England gray-brown. A clutch of fishing boats bobs along the horizon, sailing in with the day’s catch, their labor finally done. And somewhere out there is the spot where Colin Scott, whom I knew as Agent McDermott, went overboard.

The question is who pushed him, for I no longer believe that he fell.

If I ever did.

After John and I chased Foreman through the woods, I made my decision. I waited for the Browns to depart and then, on the first workday of the new year, I picked up the telephone and fought my way through Cassie Meadows and various secretaries until I finally reached Mallory Corcoran. I told him about the chess book being taken and returned. I told him about the pawn being delivered to the soup kitchen. And I asked him point-blank if he knew anything about these matters.

He asked a perfect lawyer’s question:
Why do you say “these matters”? Are you telling me you think they’re related somehow?
Not an answer, just a question.

And I knew I couldn’t trust him any more. Bizarre. I trust an
unidentified voice on the phone at two-fifty-one in the morning that assures me there is no more danger, but not my father’s law partner, who sat behind him in the hearing room for two days when things began to go sour, then gave him a job and a healthy stipend after he left the bench.

So, why am I back here? Goodness knows, my trips are stretching our budget. Worrying about money again, I did not, after all, say no to the man from my father’s speakers’ bureau when, persistent as ever, he called back much sooner than he had promised. I did not say yes, either, but I allowed him to fill my head once more with the beguiling vision of earning close to a hundred thousand dollars for three days’ work. Plus first-class air travel, he added.

I told him I would think about it.

I creak to my feet and shuffle down to the water, yearning for the delicious shock of cold spray on my face. I have been on this pebbly beach for a little over an hour, walking, sitting, praying, thinking, skipping stones, but mostly worrying the facts around in my mind. I have spotted a couple of beachcombers, year-round people, but have stayed clear of them. I need to think—and to work up my courage.

The truth is, I am not quite sure what I am doing back on the Vineyard. I only know that I woke very early on Thursday quite clear in the conviction that I had to return, even if only for one day. Kimmer, already up, was sitting at the kitchen table in a long tee shirt and nothing else, working on a brief. Standing in the arched doorway, I watched her strong body move under the loose white cotton. I allowed myself ten or twenty seconds of fantasy, then crept up behind her and kissed her on the back of the head. Kimmer pushed her glasses up on her nose and smiled but did not offer her lips. I sat down next to her and took her hand and told her I had to go. She did not seem sad. She did not throw a tantrum. She did not even argue. She just nodded solemnly and asked when.