The Emperor of Ocean Park (69 page)

I decide that there is no good reason to feed her fear. Not just now.

“Okay, darling. Okay. I’ll stay away from Uncle Jack. I won’t do anything to . . . to cause embarrassment. But . . . well . . .”

“You’re not going to give up looking. Is that what you were going to say?”

“You have to understand, darling.”

“Oh, I do, I do.” Her smile is warm again. She comes around the counter and hugs me from behind. We have returned to last night’s intimacy, just like that. “But no Jack Ziegler.”

“No Jack Ziegler.”

“Thanks, honey.” Kissing me again, grinning. She hops up to clear the table. I tell her I will do it. She does not object. We talk as though we have no conflict. We have grown quite skillful at pretending that there are no issues between us. So we talk of other things. We decide not to drag Bentley off to his Montessori school today. We will let him sleep late, for once, since I will be at home anyway. She reminds me that we are due for dinner tomorrow night at the home of one of her partners and asks me to confirm the sitter, a Japanese American teen from the next block who enthralls Bentley by playing her flute. I ask her in return if she will swing by the post office on the way in, to drop off two postal chess cards that I finished last night, both of which must be postmarked today. (Each player has three days per move.) When we have completed all the complex negotiations of a typical morning in a two-career family, Kimmer disappears to dress for work. She is back twenty minutes later in a dark chalk-striped suit and blue silk blouse, kisses me again, this time on the cheek, and is off, leaving, as always, promptly at eight-fifteen.

I watch through the bay window in the living room as the gleaming white BMW hurries off along Hobby Road, swallowed almost at once in the sheets of rain. I put both hands in front of me and lean on the glass. Woody Allen once wrote something, tongue firmly in cheek, about loving the rain because it washes memories away, but I still remember the photograph of Freeman Bishop’s bloody hand. I still remember the face of Special Agent McDermott glaring at me from the pages of the
Vineyard Gazette.
I see him on a boat with his buddy Foreman, and some disagreement, and McDermott/Scott tossed overboard. I see my father, arguing with a cautious Colin Scott a quarter-century ago, trying to convince him to kill the man who killed his daughter.

Yet, in the fresh light of day, even a day as rainy as this one, the images are a lot less scary. Not as scary, for instance, as the thought that
one day my wife will drive off down Hobby Road and decide to keep on going.

Gazing out at the empty street, I remember, from a long-ago college course, a snippet from Tadeusz Rozewicz, something about a poet being someone who tries to leave and is unable to leave.

That is my wife: Kimmer the poet. Only nowadays she keeps all the best lines to herself.

Or shares them with somebody else.

CHAPTER 39
UNEXPECTED VISITORS

(I)

M
ALLORY
C
ORCORAN
calls just past ten with the news that Conan Deveaux has decided to plead guilty to a single count of second-degree murder in the death of Freeman Bishop. He and his lawyer looked at the evidence and decided the stack was too high. Under the plea agreement, Conan will escape the needle, but he will remain in prison for the rest of his life. “He’s just nineteen,” Uncle Mal adds gruffly, “so that’s likely to be a very long time.”

“So he did it,” I whisper, wonderingly. I am at the kitchen counter, where I have been leafing through
Chess Life
while making hot chocolate for Bentley. How could I have misunderstood Maxine’s hint so badly?
A mistake.
Could she have meant something else?

“Probably.”

“Probably? He just volunteered for fifty years in the penitentiary!”

Uncle Mal insists on a seasoned lawyer’s pedantry: “If the choice is life in prison or execution, you take what you can get.” Then he is an old friend once more: “But, seriously, Talcott, I’m sure he did it. Please put your mind at rest. From what I hear, the case was a prosecutor’s dream. They had a witness, they had forensics to place him at the scene, they had a print or two, they had him bragging about it later. I know you thought maybe it was a frame-up, one of your sister’s conspiracies or something, but this is a little too much evidence for somebody to manufacture.”

Still marveling, I say goodbye and carry two mugs of cocoa into the family room, where Bentley is sitting at the computer, playing with a math game in which he collects little pictures of candy if he can zap the numbers that correctly answer the questions dancing around the
screen. So we can teach him the virtues of gluttony, greed, and violence all at once, while also improving his score on the math SAT he will have to take in about twelve years.

Watching him now, so engrossed he does not realize his father is near, I settle myself on the sofa and put the cups down on the coffee table. We all enjoy this room. The furniture is leather, a sofa and a loveseat and a chair, drawn together by a fake Oriental carpet—it is really from Sears. Built-in bookshelves of solid maple, painted white, surround a crumbling fieldstone fireplace; another shelf snuggles beneath the window to the back yard. There are books on politics and books on jazz and books on travel and books on black history and books reflecting our eclectic taste in contemporary fiction: Morrison, Updike, Doctorow, Smiley, Turow. There are children’s books. There is a Bible, the blandly inoffensive New Revised Standard Version, and the Book of Common Prayer. There is a collection of C. S. Lewis. There are home-improvement books and back issues
of Architectural Digest.
There are a few chess books. There are no law books.

The telephone rings again.

Bentley looks up. I point to the hot chocolate. “Mint, Daddy. Bemmy drink mint.” In a minute, he means.

The phone is not ringing any more. I realize that I picked up the receiver but, because of the byplay with my son, have not actually put it to my ear. I do so now, and immediately hear the static of a cell phone with a low battery. And a male voice:

“Kimmer? Kimmer? Hello? You there, baby?”

“She isn’t home right now.” My tone is as frosty as I know how to make it. “Would you care to leave a message?”

A long pause. Then a click.

I close my eyes, swaying a bit on my feet as my skillful son zaps numbers faster and faster. The years peel away, as does my confidence, and most of my hope. How many times over the course of our marriage have I fielded calls like this one—a mysterious man asking for my wife, then hanging up when I answer? Probably fewer than I think, but more than I would like to recall. Oh, Kimmer, how can you do this again!

You there, baby?

I fight down a wave of mind-blanking despair. Concentrate, I tell myself. In the first place, the cadence of the voice tells me that it was a black man—in other words, not Gerald Nathanson. A new affair? Two at the same time? Or my mistake, as Dr. Young suggested? No way to tell, not till my wife and I fight this one out, as, sooner or later, we will.
I cross to my study, looking for a distraction. The voice was familiar, that’s the other thing. I cannot quite place it, but I know it will come.

You there, baby?

Odd the way the immediate concerns about a dying marriage can knock worries about torture and murder and mysterious chess pieces right out of the box, but priorities are funny that way. I plop down in front of my computer. Who would be so arrogant, I wonder, and so stupid as to say the word
baby
when calling a married woman he is not even sure is home? I shake my head again, the mixture of fury and fear and sheer nerve-racking pain momentarily crowding out every rational thought. I want to scream, I want to throw a tantrum, maybe even break something, but I am a Garland, so I will probably write something instead. I am zipping through my files, trying to decide which unfinished essay to exhume for a little pointless polishing, when my eyes are drawn to a car sitting across the street.

The blue Porsche.

The driver, a shadow behind the windshield, is unmistakably staring right at our house.

(II)

I
RUN DOWN A MENU OF OPTIONS
but choose the one that, in my current mood, I like the best. From beside my desk I take the baseball bat I hid there on the night I was attacked. I poke my head into the family room and tell my son to stay put. He nods, fingers clittering furiously at the mouse, winning huge piles of candy as he solves math problems. He may not talk much, but he certainly can add, subtract, point, and click.

I pull a light jacket from the closet, then yank open the front door, brandishing the bat, swinging it against my palm, so that the driver, whoever he is, can hardly miss it. I cannot do what I really want, which is to cross the street and smash up his Porsche, because I would not, even for an instant, leave my son alone. But I get my message across. The driver, a member of the darker nation, just as I expected, stares for a moment through the window. I see mirrored glasses on an ebon face, and little else. Then, very smoothly, showing no sign of panic, he puts the car in gear and cruises off down the street.

I wave the bat exultantly in the air but deny myself the victory shout.

Instead, I go inside and shut the door and put the bat away and ask myself what in the world I thought I was doing. The red haze of fury
sometimes twists me in strange directions, but it has rarely led me quite so close to violence. Thoughts tumble through my disordered mind. The driver of the car is innocent, he lives or works nearby, and now he is going to tell everybody that I am crazy. The driver of the car is the man who called looking for Kimmer, and Kimmer is having an affair with him. The driver of the car is the man who pretended to be Agent Foreman. The driver of the car is the man who returned the chess book stolen by the men who assaulted me. All of the above. None of the above.

“You’re a sick man, Misha,” I mutter as I stand in my study. Nobody is on the street now except one of our neighbors walking her three-month-old twins in a stroller. “You need help. Lots and lots of help.”

I imagine my wife would agree. So would the man in the blue Porsche.

And, for a hateful, envious moment, I entertain a truly horrendous thought:
The man in the Porsche is Lemaster Carlyle.
Perfect Lemaster Carlyle, spying on me and cheating on his wife, seeing Kimmer behind Julia’s back. Calling Kimmer
baby.
Maybe leaving the stolen chess book in my car when he was late for Shirley’s party. It would explain why he has lately been so distant. But the voice on the phone sounded nothing like his: no Barbadian accent, for example. Besides, Lem is short, and the man John Brown saw in the woods was tall. There could be two unknown black men around, but Occam’s Razor, on which the Judge loved to rely, warns us not to multiply entities unnecessarily.

Anyway, the whole thing is a typically stupid Misha Garland idea.

I remain at the window, railing against myself the way manic depressives do, until I remember that I am supposed to be having hot chocolate with my son. I hurry back into the family room and find him still hard at work, the cocoa forgotten, his father forgotten, hooting gleefully to himself as he zaps the right answers and piles up his loot. My childhood must have produced such shining moments of joy, but what I mostly remember is the shadows.

The doorbell rings.

I swing around uncertainly, wondering if I should grab the bat again, or sweep my son out the back way, through the hedge, and into hiding with the Felsenfelds, for perhaps the driver of the Porsche has returned with friends. But the Garland training proves too strong to allow me to panic. I simply open the door, as I would on any other day.

Two men are standing there, one of whom I have met before. “Professor Garland, I wonder if you could spare us a minute?” asks Special Agent Fred Nunzio of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He looks grim.

CHAPTER 40
ANOTHER DISCOVERY

F
RED
N
UNZIO
introduces his companion as Rick Chrebet, a city detective. They make an odd couple. Nunzio is a short, fleshy man, perky and confident, with smooth black hair combed straight back. The scrawny Chrebet is thin of both hair and affect: his manner is sufficiently distant that I catch myself wanting to confess to something just to gain his interest for a minute or two. His teeth are bright and even, his lips pale, his jaw pugnacious. His fair eyes are deep-set and wary. Dizzy with déjà vu, I lead them into the sunny living room, which we never use except for company. Across the hall, Bentley happily zaps away, oblivious to his father’s sudden distress, and uninterested in the visitors. He is never interested in strangers, having perhaps inherited from me a tendency toward introspection.

“We won’t need much of your time,” says Nunzio, sleepy-eyed and nearly apologetic. “We wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important.”

I mumble something appropriate, waiting for the ax to fall. Has something happened to Kimmer? Then why would the FBI be here? Is there news from Washington? Then why would a city cop be here?

“My colleague here wanted to talk to you about something,” Nunzio continues, “and I kind of came along for the ride.”

Detective Chrebet, meanwhile, has opened his slim briefcase on the coffee table and is leafing through the contents. He withdraws a glossy color photograph and slides it across to me: heavyset white man with an unruly shock of brown facial hair, staring at the camera, a plaque with a bunch of numbers held across his chest. A mug shot. I shudder with memory.

“Do you recognize the person depicted in the photograph?” the
detective asks in his reedy, expressionless voice, the question phrased as carefully as an instruction book.

“Yes.” I look hard at Nunzio but address myself to Chrebet. “You know I do.”

Without missing a beat, he slips me another shot, a black-and-white, and this time I barely need a glance and I do not wait for the question. “Yes, I recognize him, too. These are the two men who assaulted me in the middle of the campus a few weeks ago.”