“And because my father’s not around, he’s moved on to me.” She sighed. “Okay. Will I have to be there when they arrest him?”
“No. The police may want to talk to you later, though. Jackie will stay close to you, just in case.”
“Just in case it doesn’t go the way you’ve planned?”
“Just in case,” I repeated, not committing to anything. I felt that I’d let her down, but I couldn’t see what more I could have done. True, I could have banded together with Jackie Garner and the Fulcis to beat Merrick to a pulp, but that would have been to descend to his level. And now, after my conversation with O’Rourke, there was one more thing stopping me from using force against Frank Merrick.
In a strange way, I felt sorry for him.
11
There were calls made that night. Perhaps that was what Merrick wanted all along. That was why he had made his presence at Rebecca Clay’s house so obvious, that was why he had left his blood on her window, and that was why he had set me on Jerry Legere. There were other incidents, too, that I did not yet know about. Four dead crows had been strung together and hung outside the offices occupied by Rebecca’s former lawyer, Elwin Stark, the previous night. Sometime that same night, the Midlake Center had been burglarized. Nothing was taken, but someone must have spent hours going through whatever files were at hand, and it would be a long time before it became clear what, if anything, had been removed. Clay’s former physician, Dr. Caussure, had been approached on his way to a bridge tournament by a man fitting Merrick’s description. The man had boxed in Caussure’s car, then had rolled down the window of his red Ford and asked Caussure if he liked birds and if he was aware that his late patient and friend Dr. Daniel Clay had consorted with pedophiles and deviants.
It didn’t matter to Merrick if these individuals were involved or not. He wanted to create a climate of fear and doubt. He wanted to slip in and out of lives, sowing rumors and half-truths, knowing that, in a small city like Portland, word would spread, and the men he was hunting would soon be buzzing like bees in the presence of an imminent threat to the hive. Merrick thought that he had everything under control, or that he could deal with whatever arose, but he was wrong. He was being manipulated, just as I was, and nobody was really in control, not even Eldritch’s mysterious client.
Soon, people would start to die.
Joel Harmon lived in a big house off Bayshore Drive in Falmouth, with its own private jetty and a white yacht berthed close by. Portland used to be called Falmouth, back from the late seventeenth century when the Basque, St. Castin, led the natives in a series of attacks against the English settlements that resulted eventually in the burning of the town, until the end of the eighteenth century, when the city came into its own. Now the area that bore the old name was one of Portland’s most affluent suburbs, and the center of its boating activity. The Portland Yacht Club, one of the oldest in the country, was located on Falmouth Foreside, sheltered by the long, narrow Clapboard Island, which was itself home to two private estates, throwbacks to the late nineteenth century when the railroad magnate Henry Houston built a ten-thousand-square-foot summer cottage on the island, his own small contribution to rendering the word “cottage” meaningless in this part of the world.
Harmon’s house stood on a raised promontory from which a green lawn sloped down to the water’s edge. There were walls on either side for privacy, and a lot of rosebushes in carefully regimented and sheltered beds. June had told me that Harmon was a fanatical rose grower, fascinated by hybridization, and that the soil in his garden was constantly monitored and adjusted to facilitate his obsession. There were said to be roses in his beds that simply did not exist elsewhere, and unlike his peers, Harmon saw no reason to share his discoveries with others. The roses were for his pleasure, and his alone.
It was an unusually mild night, a trick of the season to lull the unwary into a false sense of security, and as June and I stood in his garden with the other guests, sipping predinner drinks, I took in Harmon’s house, his yacht, his roses, and his wife, who had greeted us as we arrived, her husband being occupied elsewhere in the party. She was in her early sixties, which made her about the same age as her husband, her gray hair interwoven with carefully dyed blond strands. Up close, her skin looked like molded plastic. She seemed to have trouble stretching it into any semblance of an expression, although her surgeon had clearly anticipated this problem and had carved her mouth into a permanent half smile, so that someone could have been telling her about the systematic drowning of puppies and kittens and she would merely have looked slightly amused at the whole affair. There was a relic of the beauty that she might once have had still visible in her face, but it had been debased by her grim determination to hold on to it. Her eyes were dull and glassy, and her conversational skills would have made a passing child seem like Oscar Wilde.
Her husband, by contrast, was the model of a perfect host, dressed casually but expensively in a blue wool blazer and gray trousers, with a red cravat to add a touch of carefully cultivated eccentricity to the whole look. He was shadowed, as he shook hands and exchanged gossip, by a beautiful Asian-American girl, young and slim with the kind of figure that caused male jaws spontaneously to unhinge. According to June, she was Harmon’s latest squeeze, although officially she was his personal assistant. He had a habit of picking up young women, dazzling them with his wealth, then dropping them as soon as a new prospect appeared on the horizon.
“Doesn’t look like his wife objects to her presence too much,” I said. “Then again, it doesn’t look like she’s aware of anything beyond the promise of her next fix of prescription medication.”
Mrs. Harmon’s empty gaze swept across the guests at regular intervals, never resting on any of them but merely bathing them in the dull light of her regard, like the beam of a lighthouse picking out the ships in its ambit. Even when she had greeted us at the door, her hand like the cold, desiccated remains of a long-dead bird in my palm, she had barely made eye contact.
“I feel sorry for her,” said June. “Lawrie was always the kind of woman who was destined to marry a powerful man and provide him with children, but she had no inner life, or none that anyone could detect. Now her children are all grown-up, and she fills her days as best she can. She was beautiful once, but beauty was all she had. She just sits motionless on the boards of various charities and spends her husband’s money, and he doesn’t object as long as she doesn’t interfere with the way he lives his life.”
I felt that I had Harmon down to a T: a self-indulgent man, with money enough to enable him to pursue his appetites and to sate them, even as his needs grew greater with each bite that he took. He came from a politically well connected family, and his father had been an adviser to the Democrats, although the failure of a number of his businesses had left enough of a whiff of scandal on him that he never managed to get close enough to the bowl to feed with the big dogs. Harmon himself had been very politically active once, working on Ed Muskie’s campaign as a young man in ’71, even traveling with him on his visit to Moscow thanks to his father’s efforts, until it became clear that not only was Muskie not going to win the nomination but it was probably a good thing that McGovern was going to clean his clock in the primaries. Muskie couldn’t keep his temper. He railed at journalists and staffers, and he did it in public. Had he won the nomination, it wouldn’t have been long before that side of him was revealed to the voters. So Joel Harmon and his family had quickly and quietly ditched Muskie, and any political idealism that he might have had was left by the wayside as he moved on to the pressing business of accumulating wealth and making up for his father’s business failings.
But according to June, Harmon was much more complex than he appeared: he gave generously to charity, not only publicly but privately. His views on welfare and social security made him almost a socialist by most American standards, and he remained a powerful, if discreet, voice in that regard, enjoying the ear of successive governors and state representatives
. He was passionate about the city and state in which he lived, and it was said that his children were mildly disturbed by the ease with which he was dissipating what they considered to be their inheritance, their social conscience being considerably less well developed than their father’s.
I wanted to keep my head clear, so I sipped orange juice while the other guests drank champagne. I recognized one or two of those whom Harmon had invited. There was a writer named Jon Lee Jacobs, who penned novels and poems about lobstermen and the call of the sea. He had a big red beard and dressed like the men in his books, except he came originally from a family of accountants in Massachusetts, and was rumored to get seasick when he stepped in a puddle. The other familiar face was Dr. Byron Russell, a young shrink who made occasional appearances on Maine Public Radio and on local TV channels whenever a serious talking head was needed on matters relating to mental health. To Russell’s credit, he tended to be the voice of reason whenever he participated, often at the expense of some treacle-voiced woman with a bum degree in psychology from a college that operated out of a trailer, and who believed in the kind of touchyfeely platitudes that made depression and suicide seem like attractive alternatives to actually listening to her. Also present, interestingly, was Elwin Stark, the lawyer who had been so reluctant to speak to me earlier that week. I felt like telling him about Eldritch, who had talked to me for a lot longer, albeit without actually telling me a great deal more than I’d learned from a fraction of the time spent speaking with Stark, but initially Stark didn’t seem any happier to meet me in person than he had been to talk with me on the phone. Nevertheless, he eventually managed to be civil for a couple of minutes. He even apologized, in a way, for his earlier brusqueness. I could smell whiskey on his breath, even though he had champagne in his glass. Clearly, he had started earlier than the rest of the guests.
“I was having a hell of a day when you called,” he said. “The timing wasn’t great.”
“My timing is often bad,” I said. “And timing is everything.”
“You got it. You still nosing around in the Clay business?”
I told him that I was. He made a face, as though someone had just offered him a piece of bad fish. It was then that he told me about the dead crows.
“Freaked my secretary the hell out,” he said. “She thought it was the work of Satanists.”
“And what about you?”
“Well, it was different, I’ll give it that. Worst that ever happened to me before was a golf club being put through the windshield of my Lexus.”
“Any idea who was responsible?”
“I can guess who you think was responsible: the same guy who’s been giving Rebecca Clay a hard time. I knew you were bad luck the minute I heard your voice.” He tried to laugh it off, but it was clear that he meant it.
“Why would he target you?”
“Because he’s desperate, and my name was all over the documentation relating to her father. I passed on dealing with the probate, though. Enough was enough.”
“Are you concerned?”
“No, I’m not. I’ve done my share of swimming with sharks, and I’ve lived. I’ve got people I can call on if I have to. Rebecca, on the other hand, only has people for as long as she can afford to pay them. You ought to let the whole business go, Parker. You’re just making things worse by stirring up the dirt at the bottom of the pond.”
“You’re not interested in the truth?”
“I’m a lawyer,” he replied. “What has the truth got to do with anything? My concern is the protection of my clients’ interests. Sometimes, the truth just gets in the way.”
“That’s a very, um, pragmatic approach.”
“I’m a realist. I don’t do criminal work, but if I had to defend you on a charge of murder, and you decided to plead not guilty, what would you expect me to do? Tell the judge that, all things considered, I thought you’d done it, because that was the truth? Be serious. The law doesn’t require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that’s acceptable to both sides. You want to know what the only truth is? Everybody lies. That’s it. That’s truth. You can take that to the preacher and get it baptized.”
“So do you have a client whose interests you’re protecting in the matter of Daniel Clay?”
He wagged his finger at me. I didn’t like the gesture, just like I didn’t care much for him calling me by my last name.
“You’re a piece of work,” he said. “Daniel was my client. So too, briefly, was his daughter. Now Daniel is dead. It’s done and dusted. Let him rest, wherever he is.”
He left us to go over and speak with the writer Jacobs. June imitated Stark’s finger wag.
“He is right,” she said. “You really are a piece of work. Do you have any conversations that end happily?”
“Only with you,” I replied.
“That’s because I don’t listen to you.”
“There is that,” I conceded, as a waiter rang a bell, summoning us to dinner.
It seemed like there were to be twelve of us, all told, including Harmon and his wife, the additional numbers being made up by a female collage artist of whom even June had never heard, and three banker friends of Harmon’s from way back. Harmon spoke to us properly for the first time as we were walking to the dining room, apologizing for taking so long to get to us.
“Well, June,” he said, “I had despaired of ever seeing you again at one of my little evenings. I was worried that I might have offended you somehow.”
June waved him away with a smile. “I know you far too well ever to be offended by anything but your occasional lapses in taste,” she said.
She stepped aside so that Harmon and I could shake hands. He had it down to a fine art. He could have given lessons in the proper duration, the force of the grip, the width of the smile that accompanied it.
“Mr. Parker, I’ve heard a great deal about you. You lead an interesting life.”
“It’s not as productive as yours. You have a beautiful house, and a fascinating collection.”
The walls were decorated with an incredible variety of art, the positioning of each clearly the subject of considerable thought, so that paintings and drawings appeared both to complement and echo one another, even occasionally clashing where their juxtaposition would have a particular impact on the beholder. On the wall to the right of where we stood, a beautiful, if slightly sinister, nude of a young woman on a bed hung across from a much older painting of an aged man on the point of expiring on a very similar bed, his final moments witnessed by a physician and a gathering of relatives and friends, some bereft, some pitying, and some merely avaricious. Among them was a young woman whose face startlingly resembled the features of the nude opposite. Similar beds, similar women, seemingly separated by centuries but now part of the same narrative due to the proximity of the two images.
Harmon beamed appreciatively. “If you would enjoy it, I’ll happily show you around after dinner. One of the benefits of having somewhat eclectic taste, whatever June’s opinion of the direction it may sometimes take, is that there is usually something to satisfy everyone within its limits. I should be most interested to see what catches your eye, Mr. Parker, most interested indeed. Now come, dinner is about to be served.”
We took our seats at the dinner table. I was between Harmon’s girlfriend, whose name was Nyoko, and the collage artist. The artist had green streaks through her blond hair, and was attractive in a willowy, vaguely disturbing way. She looked like the kind of girl who had wrist-slashing potential, and not just her own wrists either. She told me her name was Summer.
“Summer,” I said. “Really?”
She scowled. I had barely sat down, and already someone was unhappy.
“It’s my true name,” she said. “My given name was an imposition. Discarding it in favor of my real identity freed me to pursue my art.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Flake.
Nyoko was a little more in touch with objective reality. She
was an art history graduate, and had only recently returned to Maine after two years spent working in Australia. When I asked her how long she had known Harmon, she had the self-awareness to blush slightly.
“We met at a gallery opening a few months back. And I know what you’re thinking.”
“Do you?”
“Well, I know what I’d be thinking if our positions were reversed.”
“You mean if I was seeing Joe Harmon? He’s not really my type.”
She giggled.
“You know what I mean. He’s older than I am. He’s married, sort of. He’s wealthy and I drive a car that probably cost less than the brandy Joel will have decanted after dinner. But I like him: he’s funny, he’s got good taste, and he’s lived a little. I let people think what they want.”
“Even his wife?”
“You’re pretty blunt, aren’t you?”
“Well, I’m sitting beside you. If his wife starts throwing knives around after her second glass of wine, I’d like to be sure that they’re aimed at you, not me.”
“She doesn’t care what Joel does. I’m not even sure that she notices.”
As if on cue, Lawrie Harmon glanced in our direction and managed to eke an extra quarter of an inch out of her smile. Her husband, who was sitting at the head of the table, patted her left hand reflexively, the way he might have petted a dog. But for a moment, I thought some of the dullness disappeared from her eyes, and something lanced through the fog, like a camera lens fixing on the perfect moment of clarity before an exposure. For the first time that night, her gaze lingered, but only on Nyoko. Then the smile leveled out slightly, and her attention moved on. Nyoko hadn’t noticed, distracted as she was by something Summer had said to her, although I wondered if she would even have registered the change, had she been watching.
Harmon nodded to one of the waiters who stood like white compass points in a circle around us, and dishes began to appear before us with quiet efficiency. There were still two empty chairs at the end of the table.
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