Occasionally I tried to think, but I couldn't. I was past thinking; I had thought altogether too much in my life. Something more was required now, something that would make the memories tolerable.
The loneliest part of the Mass Pike is the stretch going into the Berkshires, when you have passed the cities—Worcester, Springfield—but haven't reached the posh vacation areas of Tanglewood and Stockbridge. Here there was just the occasional eighteen-wheeler thundering past in the night to remind me that I was still a part of reality. I got off the highway finally and started making my way along deserted rural roads. The Boston Symphony was long gone for the year, the foliage was past peak, and the skiing season had yet to start; there was no reason for most people to be out here. I knew where I was going, although I wasn't quite sure how to get there.
I was headed for Shangri-la.
I found it finally, when I caught a glimpse of a large pseudo-Oriental sign in the fog. I wondered how much Everson had to bribe someone to get the sign approved.
I turned and drove past the sign, up a long paved driveway. I had expected an electrified fence or some other form of high tech security, but I pulled right up to the circular drive in front of the mansion without encountering anything.
I have an army of M.B.A.'s who come in by day and make money for me, but at night it's just me.
It was only as I turned off the engine and started to open the door that the animal came bounding toward me out of the fog like the hound of the Baskervilles. It was a Rottweiler, and it was angry. It barked furiously at me on the other side of the window while I cringed in my seat and wondered about the strength of the glass in a Buick Regal.
After a lifetime there was a shouted command, and the dog calmed down. A heavyset man in a black leather jacket approached, aiming a rifle at my head. I opened the window a crack.
"This is private property," the man said.
"Yes, of course. I'm Senator James O'Connor—Do you recognize me? I'd like to talk to Paul Everson, if he's here."
The man didn't look as if he recognized me. He didn't look as if it would make any difference to him if I were President Kenton. "You don't have an appointment," he said flatly. He knew Everson's schedule.
"Still, I'm sure he'll see me," I replied. "Ask him. I won't be going anywhere."
The man turned and walked away without answering. The Rottweiler stayed where it was. I rolled my window back up and waited.
It was absurd to have thought that Everson would really be alone. Men like him needed guards. Terrorists could kidnap him, after all; disgruntled investors or laid-off CEOs could lob grenades at him. At least he was here, apparently, and that meant he would see me.
After a while the guard returned, now looking appropriately deferential. He grabbed hold of the dog. "Won't you come with me please, Senator?" he said.
I got out, keeping an eye on the dog, and followed the guard into the mansion, which looked Spanish, not Oriental; I wondered if the movie magnate who originally owned it had brought it with him from Southern California. Everson was waiting by the door. "Jim, what a pleasant surprise!" he said. "Come on in. What brings you here?"
He didn't look pleasantly surprised. He looked as if he wanted to invite the guard inside with us. But instead he dismissed him and led me into the marble-floored entrance hall. We stood beneath a mammoth crystal chandelier. "Nice little place you've got, Paul," I said. "Doesn't it make you feel cramped, though?"
Everson laughed, not very successfully. "You've never been here before, right? Like a tour? I have this collection of antique autos—"
"Yeah. I saw some pictures in a magazine once. Actually I'd just like to have a talk."
That didn't make him look any happier. "All right," he said. "Can I take your jacket?"
I shook my head.
"Fine," he said. "Let's, um, go into the office area."
I followed Everson through a wilderness of huge but deserted rooms to one that looked as if it belonged in a military command center rather than a country estate. Unlike Finn's office, it made no pretense of culture; there were no books, no classical music—just an array of electronic equipment: computers and fax machines and printers and phones. The only way you could tell you weren't on Wall Street was by looking out the French doors that opened onto the foggy woods.
"The world's at my fingertips," Everson said. "Want to know current prices on the Nikkei?"
I shook my head.
Everson forced a smile. "Yeah, that's not very impressive. It's the information that other people can't get that makes the difference."
"Like the dirt on Bobby Finn."
"Precisely."
He sat down at a desk in front of the French doors; I sat opposite him. I was as nervous as he was. One of his machines hummed to life, and I jumped.
"Just a fax," Everson said. We waited in silence for the machine to finish. "So," he continued, "you want to have a talk."
I nodded. "About Amanda Taylor."
His expression didn't change. "All right," he said.
"She knew that you killed your wife," I said. "Liz told her."
"That wasn't very nice of Liz."
"I had a private eye looking into her murder," I went on, "since you didn't seem able to come up with anything. I called him today and asked him to find out your whereabouts on the day of the murder. He got back to me a few hours ago. He told me you were meeting with some executives from the Horvath Corporation at the Prudential Center that afternoon. The Prudential Center's about a five-minute walk from Amanda's apartment."
Everson nodded. "Mr. Sharpe does good work," he said. "I'll have to use him someday."
So he knew about Kevin's private eye. Was there anything he didn't know? "A remarkable coincidence, wouldn't you say—your being in the same neighborhood the afternoon Amanda was killed?"
"That's one way of looking at it," he said.
"Of course, what does it matter to you if some reporter knows the truth about your murder case? Double jeopardy is still the law of the land, right? And you're beyond the reach of any exposé. The world already dislikes you, but that doesn't change the way you live your life."
Everson shifted in his chair. "I can't disagree with anything you've said so far, Jim. But I still don't see—"
"Jackie Scanlon," I said. Once again there wasn't a flicker of change in Everson's expression. "I'm so sick of that name," I went on. "It haunts me. It's in my thoughts every day of my life, but I almost never say it out loud. Because if I say it out loud, all my fears might come true. Jackie Scanlon."
"Who," Everson asked, "is Jackie Scanlon?"
But he knew. He could wear his poker face forever, and I'd still know that he knew. It didn't matter how the knowledge had come his way: Perhaps Tom Glenn had sold it to him, perhaps he had tapped Scanlon's phone, or perhaps he had simply deduced it out of a hundred scraps of information about me. All that mattered was that he knew—and he had known on the day he was in the Back Bay taking over yet another hapless company. "Amanda was interviewing people about me in the weeks before she died," I said. "I bet she got in touch with you. She figured you were important in my life, and she was right. And you would have known all about her, right? Because you make it your business to know everything, especially if it has to do with me. Because you still think you owe me. Because you think if you can even the scales with me, you'll somehow find forgiveness for murdering your wife.
"And this was your chance, right? Maybe you even knew about Danny and Tom Donato talking to her about Jackie Scanlon; you knew about the tapes she possessed, tapes that would end my career and put me in prison. You knew that she had lied about herself to make me trust her. So you agree to be interviewed. You go to her apartment. Maybe you try to buy her off—probably not, though. You know she's got money. You know she's just trying to make a name for herself. You know there's only one thing to do, and you know how to do it because you've done it before."
I fell silent for a moment. Everson didn't respond; he was sta
ring intently at me, as if hypnotized. "You're saying I killed her," he murmured finally.
"You made your wife's murder look like a suicide," I said. "This time you try to make the murder look like a robbery or the work of a psycho. You don't do a very good job, though; maybe you're out of practice. I'm implicated, and then I have to come to you for help. Isn't that a strange situation? You want to reassure me, but you don't want to tell me the truth because you're afraid of my conscience, afraid I'll think I'll have to go to the police with the information and ruin both you and me. So you keep telling me, 'Don't worry about the tape, don't worry about the tape,' but you don't tell me why. You don't tell me that you have Danny's tape; you even have Donato's tape, which you think I don't know anything about. You have them, right?"
"Jim, I-"
"Right?" And I reached into my jacket and pulled out Liz's gun, as I had at Donato's. This time it wasn't just for protection.
"Oh, Jim," Everson whispered.
"Show me the tapes, Paul."
Everson slowly unlocked a drawer of his desk and took out two cassettes. He tossed them to me, one after the other. I glanced at them long enough to make out Amanda's writing on the labels; that was all I needed to see. "They've been erased," Everson said, "So I'm afraid you won't be able to listen to them. Now put the gun down, Jim, because we've got to talk."
I shook my head. "I don't want to listen to anything you have to say, Paul. You'll say you did it for me. Fine. You'll say she was a bad person, that she conned me. Well, I don't know about that, but I can see where you might believe it. The thing is, nothing you can say matters.
"What matters are my memories. How I see myself when I've got nothing left to do but remember. What matters is that you have murdered two women, and it was my fault you murdered the second one. Because I should never have let you escape unpunished after you told me you murdered the first.
"At first I thought I should come out here and make you turn yourself in. Cavanaugh's going to arrest me tomorrow, see, and I figured that having you confess would solve all my problems. You could tell them you did it to keep Amanda from revealing that you'd murdered your wife. Great. Nothing to do with Jim O'Connor. Cavanaugh wouldn't be able to touch me.
"And then I thought: You'll wriggle out of it. You'll find a technicality or bribe a judge or just come up with another hotshot young lawyer like me to believe in you and make the jury believe in you, too. Oh, you might serve some time, but nowhere near enough to punish you for what you've done.
"I had to do something more. If I kill you, I avenge Amanda, and I also avenge Liz. I start making up to her for all I've done over the years. So what if I go to jail? At least I'll find some peace. There's a lot to be said for finding peace."
Everson's eyes didn't leave the gun. "Jim, you've been under a tremendous strain—"
"I've been under a tremendous strain ever since I can remember, Paul. That doesn't change anything."
"I didn't kill her, Jim," he whispered. "If you'll just give me a chance—"
"I'm sorry, Paul. I suppose you think this is unfair, you were only trying to do me a favor. Well, life isn't fair. I can't see any other way out."
Everson kept staring at the gun. I stared back at him, waiting, I suppose, for the trigger to pull itself. And then he stood up. "Shoot me if you have to," he said. "Otherwise, I'm going for a walk." And he turned and headed for the French doors.
Damn you, I thought. I raised the gun and aimed.
But I didn't pull the trigger. Everson opened the French doors and disappeared into the fog.
So why didn't I shoot? Cowardice? Prudence? A sudden attack of rationality? I don't know. But in that moment my latest house of cards started to fall, and I was helpless to stop it.
My immediate reaction, though, was disgust at my inability to do what I had come all the way out here to do. I followed Everson outside.
I shivered in the damp air. The Rottweiler barked in the distance, and I shivered some more. I assumed Everson would stay close to the mansion, on the manicured lawn that surrounded it, but I thought I heard him off in the trees, so I headed toward the sound. The light from the mansion reached only a few feet away from the doors, and soon I was groping in the dark, listening for his footsteps.
Abruptly I was in the woods, and all I could see were the black outlines of the trees as I brushed past them. This is ridiculous, I thought. I should go back inside. I should throw away the gun and return to Boston. But I couldn't. I had come too far. I had to find him.
But where was he? The woods scared me. Never mind the Rottweiler; there were probably bears here. Wolves.
There was a murderer here.
I thought I heard an owl. "Who, whoooo?" I had never heard an owl before.
The gun trembled in my hand. I was lost now. Which way was the mansion? Which way was civilization? Nothing but trees and fog. City boy. I longed for a streetlight. I was helpless without electricity.
"She did love you, you know."
I whirled. It took my eyes a moment to spot him, a black silhouette leaning against a black tree.
"She didn't want to hurt you," he went on. "She just wanted to understand you, particularly after what Liz told her. You had left her, and she was trying to figure out how to get you back. She erased the tapes and gave them to me, to show me her sincerity. She was trying to get in touch with you. She was going to explain everything. But she never got the chance."
"You killed her first," I said. My voice sounded thin and quavering in the darkness.
There was a long silence. The owl hooted again. When Everson finally spoke, his voice was almost pleading. "Jim, you don't have to pretend. I understand; I've been there. When I came out of Amanda's apartment that afternoon, I saw you going in. Oh, you had a hat on, and your head was down and you were obviously trying not to be noticed, but it was you all right. I suppose I should have told you about it when you first came to me for help, but I assumed you had your reasons for this charade. I didn't know what to do. I figured Amanda explained to you about giving me the tapes, but what if she didn't? Maybe telling you the truth would worry you more—knowing that I knew. So I just tried to calm you down. I've been trying to protect you, Jim; that's all I've been doing. But I don't know how to protect you from yourself. I just can't figure you out anymore. It looks to me like you're going to destroy yourself no matter what I do. I suppose that's your right. And if you want to destroy me as well, I guess that's your right, too. But I think you should confront the truth before you do anything."
The truth? I didn't understand a word of Everson's speech. It was as if his meaning were lost in the fog along with everything else. "What is the truth?" I whispered.
"Jim, I know that you killed her."
What?
And in that awful moment I knew that Everson was right. The better the politician, the more he believes in the roles he plays. I had spent this campaign learning the truth about everyone else; now I was learning the truth about myself. Everyone is guilty, and no one more than I.
I could feel myself in Amanda's apartment. Feel the hot rage building in me. Feel myself confronting the lover who was only using me, who was about to destroy me. She denies everything, she tries to explain, but I don't want to hear explanations. The rage becomes uncontrollable; my hand reaches out for the knife—
"Who, whoooo?"
The moment passed. What was going on? I wasn't that good a politician (or, perhaps, not that bad a one). I might have been stupid, but I wasn't crazy. Amanda loved me; Everson said so. Even Brad Williams and Harold said so. And I was with Jackie Scanlon when she was murdered. Everson didn't know that, but it was true; I hadn't hallucinated our meeting. So what was he talking about?
And then I understood. I lowered the gun and stood motionless in the fog.
"Jim? Are you okay, Jim?"
I looked at Everson. No, I wasn't okay. I wasn't a murderer, but I wasn't okay. "Can you tell me how to get out of this place, Paul?" I asked.
He
pointed.
"Thanks."
I started walking through the woods. Everson may have called out to me, but I didn't pay any attention. Eventually I saw the lights of the mansion. I walked around it to my car. I didn't think about the Rottweiler; I didn't think about what the guard might do if he noticed the gun in my hand. I got into my car and threw the gun into the glove compartment. Then I sat back and closed my eyes.
I had come so close to ruining everything.
But perhaps everything was already ruined.
I started the car then and drove slowly down the road that took me out of Shangri-la.
It was time to start the long journey home.
Chapter 29
The journey back now seems like a dream, but it was a car trip like any other. I had to stop for gas; I went to the bathroom; I stood in line to buy a Whopper and ate it as I drove. The car phone rang intermittently; I ignored it. I listened to soft rock on the radio.
My mind, though, was far away. Lost in memories.
The fog started to lift as I got closer to Boston. The toll collector at the Allston toll plaza recognized me and wished me good luck on Tuesday. I flashed my professional smile at him and drove on.
I made my way through familiar streets. The last time I had driven to Brighton I had seen only what was new; now I saw only what I had seen a thousand times before, only what had endured. Look—there's Brighton High, where Danny had his triumphs. Look—there's the library where I spent so many hours that Mrs. Linehan, the sweet old children's librarian, said I might as well just move in. Look—there's St. Columbkille's Church, where we went to mass as long as my grandmother was alive. St. Comical's, my father always called it, to Gramma's dismay.
Look—there's the old homestead. I paused for a closer examination. The hedges we had always hated to trim were gone. There were pots of chrysanthemums lining the front stairs. The porch had been screened in, the driveway repaved. The place looked as if it were in better shape than ever.
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