American Outrage

by Tim Green

  “Think your fans will recognize you without your makeup?” he said, sneering.

  Jake tried to pull the door shut, but Muldoon grabbed hold of it and said, “Wait till I get some B roll of your kid.”

  Jake popped out and punched both hands, palms out, into Muldoon’s chest. The producer stumbled backward, tripped on the curb, and went down hard, ass first, on the concrete.

  Jake took half a step toward him, drew back a fist, then jumped back into the cab, slammed the door, and told the cabbie to go. Halfway down the block, Jake took out his ticket and gave him the address of the parking garage. He asked Martha if she was all right. She was huddled in the corner, but she nodded that she was.

  “I want to see him,” she said after another block.

  “Martha, we don’t know Sam’s your son. That’s why we have to do this test. He might not be.”

  She looked at him, her eyes red and swollen, and nodded.

  “So, I need you to just be cool with him,” Jake said. “Okay? I’m going to get the test kit from him and ask him to wait. You and I can do the test and talk.”

  The cab dropped them at the garage and Jake gave them his ticket. Sam arrived just as the attendant pulled the BMW up out of the garage. He had the test kit under his arm. His hands were jammed into his pockets and he was looking at his sneakers so that the unruly bangs covered most of his eyes.

  “Sam, Martha,” Jake said, ushering Sam into the backseat. “Martha, Sam.”

  Sam never looked up. Martha got into the front seat and Jake started driving uptown.

  “There’s a quiet place in Central Park. Up on 105. The Conservatory Garden?”

  “I know it,” Martha said. Her eyes were locked straight ahead.

  After a few minutes, she began to make small sniffing noises. Jake glanced and saw a tear roll down her cheek. He checked the rearview mirror. Sam was clutching the test kit to his chest, head down.

  “I’m sorry,” Jake said, not to anyone specifically.

  He parked on the street and went around to open the door for Martha. After he helped her out, he leaned over the seat and told Sam that it might be a good idea for him to wait. Sam looked relieved, and he handed over the kit without looking at Jake.

  Jake gave him back some money and said it was okay to find a diner if he was hungry, but to keep his cell phone on.

  “She seems nice,” Sam said.

  “I’m sure she is,” Jake said.

  Jake and Martha passed through the Vanderbilt Gate, a massive decorative stone arch that once was an entrance to that family’s mansion. They settled on the edge of a fountain, side by side. The brilliant pink blooms of the crabapple trees shed their petals in swirling clusters.

  Jake opened the DNA kit and explained to Martha how to swab the inside of her cheek.

  “They use cheek cells for the analysis,” he said, opening one of the envelopes for her to deposit the swab. “Totally painless.”

  When he had all three he put them into their individual bags, then back into the box. He sealed it up and affixed the mailing label before setting it aside. Then he removed the hand-size DVD camera from his shoulder bag.

  “I’m just going to put what you say on DVD, Martha,” Jake said. “Not for TV, I’m not with those other people. This will be for the police.”

  He reached out and gave her arm a squeeze. She offered a weak smile, but sighed and began to talk. She was bitter, recounting her childhood as a little girl no one wanted; then her face brightened when she described meeting Clinton Eggers at a beach party on Martha’s Vineyard. He was everything her family hated, wild, irreverent, a big, burly, drug-using musician. She loved everything about him, and all her prayers were answered when he loved her back.

  Her father was in China, and for a month, she spent every minute with Clinton. But September came, and he had a tour. She was going to finish school in January and then he promised they’d be together.

  “I was on the pill,” she told Jake, her eyes slipping out of focus. “When I met Clinton, I stopped. I wanted to get pregnant. I wanted to have his baby and have him take me away from my family.

  “I was back at school when I found out and he came to get me. I’d just turned eighteen, so they couldn’t really stop us, but we had to run. When we got married in Las Vegas, it was in the papers. My father, being a politician, he had to just go along like it was okay. That’s how it is. On the outside, everything’s always okay.

  “I stayed on the road with Clinton and his band,” she said. “It wasn’t easy, but I was free. Then, he died, and I did, too. Inside anyway.

  “They brought me back. I tried to kill myself, but they pumped my stomach. That would have been too embarrassing. They gave me tranquilizers. I was a zombie, but part of me knew my baby was coming and it was the one thing I started to hope for. I started to think about him as part of Clinton. I remember going into labor, but it’s all fuzzy. I think they gave me something. It was all like a dream, a bad dream, and then there I was, in bed, and my baby was gone.”

  Martha winced and dropped her head. Jake reached over and touched her arm. Behind her, pink and white petals from the crabapple blossoms swirled in the breeze and one rode it far enough to lodge in her hair. Jake brushed it away.

  “When you say he was gone,” he said, speaking softly and smoothly, “do you mean because he died during the delivery?”

  She sniffed and raised her chin, tears welling in her eyes.

  “We had the funeral, and I, I went through it all, drugged,” she said. “That’s how they kept me. So it’s just a fog. But inside me, there was something, something that kept saying my baby wasn’t in that coffin. I kept having this feeling that they took him, and did something, and now I think I know what.”

  “What do you think they did?” Jake asked.

  “They gave him away,” she said, her composure and her words crumbling. She looked down and shook her head. “They didn’t want me to have him. There’s something about the will and something vesting and him being the oldest. I think he would have inherited a lot of the family money. There’s this trust.”

  Then she raised her head and stared hard into the camera, her hands clenched into knots, and said, “They said I was crazy. They’ll say it now. But I’m not crazy. They’re evil. They are so evil.”

  Jake took a deep breath and quietly thanked her as he switched off the camera. Martha moved closer to him and wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him tight. He held her and stroked the back of her head and told her it was all right, even though it wasn’t.

  54

  GRAVEL CRUNCHED AND POPPED under Niko’s tires as he rolled around the broad circle in front of Ridgewood. He looked up at the roofline, three stories high, and the endless rows of shuttered windows, and thought of Versailles.

  Niko pulled to a stop behind a black Suburban, and when he got out a man emerged from the truck and marched toward him. Niko stiffened. When the man introduced himself as Vick Slatten, Niko hesitated before giving his own name and saying he was there to see the congressman. Slatten said he was head of security for the Van Buren family and he spoke in the bullying manner of a camp guard. Niko tilted his head, saying that he was a lawyer whose client had business with the congressman.

  Slatten bared his teeth. “We know why you’re here. Come on.”

  Niko followed Slatten up the stone steps and into a great foyer with two grand marble stairways curving their way from opposite sides of the space to a balustrade on the second floor. A massive crystal chandelier filled the space above them. Slatten broke off to the right, down a long broad hallway, and into a room lined with books and looking out over a two-acre garden. They crossed a thick Persian rug, passing through a pair of leather couches to a mahogany desk, and sat down facing it. Slatten looked at his watch and gave Niko a brief, false smile before tugging up the legs of his slacks, crossing his legs, and settling into his chair.

  After twenty minutes, a door among the bookshelves opened and the congressman
came through giving orders to a young man who swam in his wake the way a pilot fish will trail a shark. The young man took notes about a dinner the congressman wanted to have and the precise order in which to invite the guests, changing his mind three times between the doorway and the desk, where he sat and intertwined his fingers. He reminded Niko of an accountant, with his thin face, frameless glasses, and bowtie.

  “And you’re Mr.—” the congressman said, picking up a sheet of paper and wrinkling his lips, “Karwalkowszc.”

  The right corner of Van Buren’s mouth gave a little twitch, as if it had been tugged at with a piece of fishing line.

  Niko cleared his throat and patted the courier envelope under his arm.

  “My client asked me to give you this, Congressman,” Niko said.

  The congressman nodded at Slatten, who got up and extended his hand. Niko hesitated, then handed over the file, which Slatten delivered to the congressman.

  Van Buren snapped off the rubber strap and began removing the papers. Slatten circled the desk to observe over his shoulder. As Van Buren read, a tremor ran through the papers in his hands. His lips stretched tight.

  Niko cleared his throat and said, “It’s everything you agreed to with my client?”

  Van Buren looked up with clear brown eyes, startled. He took a check from the top drawer of his desk and gave it to Slatten, returning to the papers before the check was in Niko’s hands. One hundred thousand dollars in a Cayman banknote made out to a corporation in Cyprus. Niko took a breath and let it out slowly before standing.

  “Wait,” Van Buren said to him. He looked up with a blink, his mouth twitched and tightened into a smile that revealed the tips of teeth too white and too perfect to have been his own. He touched the yellow bowtie.

  “Tell him I want the boy. There’s a million if he brings me the boy.”

  Niko steadied himself, gave half a bow, and left the room.

  55

  WHEN THEY DROPPED MARTHA at Llewellyn House, Muldoon and his TV crew were nowhere in sight. Martha opened the car door, then turned toward the backseat. She reached over and touched Sam’s cheek. Her lower lip disappeared beneath her top teeth. Sam hung his head and turned away. She didn’t say anything, she just sat there for a moment before jumping out.

  “One week?” she asked Jake.

  “I’ll mail this out right away,” Jake said.

  Martha nodded, glanced at Sam, then hurried up the steps without looking back. Jake watched the door close, then asked Sam if he wanted to move up into the front seat.

  “I’m okay,” Sam said quietly, but he pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, hiding his face in its shadow.

  Jake put the car back in gear and headed for the FDR Drive. On their way to Kingston, Jake made two calls. One was to Judy, asking her to dinner and to bring all the information she had on Ridgewood, especially any kind of maps or information on the family’s cemetery. The second call was to the undertaker’s wife, whose tone took on a high-pitched giddiness when she realized it was Jake.

  “I know it’s a strange question,” Jake said, “but would a coffin for an unborn infant like that be sealed in like, some concrete containment or something?”

  “No,” she said, sounding uncomfortable with the shop talk. “There’s no concrete or anything. It’s all sealed in the container. Nothing gets into those things.”

  “So, it’s just, like six feet of dirt?” Jake asked.

  “Not six feet,” she said. “They used to do that before embalming. No one gets buried more than a couple feet these days.”

  “Like two feet? Three?”

  “Closer to two.”

  Jake thanked her and glanced back at Sam. The hood was down but his eyes met Jake’s in the mirror.

  Jake pulled into the fire lane at Home Depot and left Sam sitting there. He was in and out with a shovel, a can of bug spray, and a flashlight in five minutes, and then they were on their way back to the Quality Inn. They checked back in, then headed for dinner. Judy met them in the Rondout District at a redbrick, three-story restaurant called Ship to Shore. She had a photo album that included some shots she took during her tour of Ridgewood for her flower show article as well as a copy of the funeral photo from the paper’s archives. Jake let the waiter fill their wineglasses before he starting digging in to the album.

  Judy was halfway through her glass with a purple tint on the fine hair above her lip when Jake pointed to a photo at the top of the page. Beyond a trellis bursting with pink roses lay a company of tombstones in manicured grass. When Jake asked Judy if she could draw him a rough map of Ridgewood and where the cemetery plot lay, she finished off her glass before she said she’d try. With the tip of her tongue peeking out between her lips, she went to work on a notepad that Jake removed from his briefcase.

  When she handed it over, she said, “You’re not getting me into trouble, right?”

  “Would I do that?” Jake said, studying the map. “Does the wall go all the way around the property?”

  “Jake,” she said, watching him refill her glass, “what are you doing?”

  “Filling your glass. A toast. Here’s to the truth, however we find it.”

  After she took a sip, Judy said, “Do you mean however we find it, or however we find it?”

  “Both.”

  “You’re honest, anyway,” she said.

  “That’s what he always tries to do,” Sam said, taking a bite from an onion ring. “He says.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Jake said. “It makes you sound insincere.”

  “If you go to the very back of the estate, the side facing the river,” Judy said, “there’s a terrace with stone steps leading to a grassy outcrop where they have weddings and things like that.”

  “Good.”

  “What are you going to do there?” she asked.

  “Just checking some things.”

  “Not with him, right?” Judy asked, nodding at Sam.

  “I’m going,” Sam said.

  Jake looked at Sam, his hands resting on the table balled into fists and his dark eyebrows knit tight.

  “He can stay with me,” Judy said. “The NBA playoffs are on.”

  “I hate basketball.”

  “Actually, I think I’ll need him,” Jake said. “There’s not going to be any trouble.”

  As they rode across the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge to the other side of the Hudson, Sam said, “She’d be a good mom.”

  The tires thumped a steady rhythm over the sections of concrete. Jake looked out the window at the sleeping mountains that lay alongside black water below. Somewhere downriver a buoy winked back at the stars overhead.

  “Yes, she would,” he said, cracking his window and letting the musky smell of water and trees fill the BMW.

  “What does she care if I go with you, though?” Sam said above the howling air.

  “Just a nice person,” Jake said, raising his chin and sitting up straight in the seat.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “You’ll see,” Jake said.

  They left the bridge behind and with it the broad canopy of stars. The road they took twisted southward through a dark tract of trees planted close to the road when it was only a carriage track. They passed through the hamlet of Rhinecliff, a cluster of diminutive nineteenth-century houses built into the hill overlooking the river, and continued south on Route 85. They were several miles out of town when Jake drove past the massive stone gates to Ridgewood without slowing down. Sam swung around in his seat, craning his neck for a view of the towering gates. Jake drove for nearly a quarter mile before he pulled a U-turn. They passed the gates again, going another quarter mile before pulling off the road and easing the car down the slight bank and into some pine trees.

  When they got out, Jake sprayed his suit coat and pants with bug repellent as if he were wearing the same sweatshirt and jeans as Sam. He slung the camera bag over his shoulder, hoisted the shovel, and scooped up the flashlight. As
they walked back up the road toward the gates, a creepy glow showed itself above the trees, light from the Van Buren mansion that made Jake think of dying embers twisting with worms of orange light.

  56

  THEY KEPT CLOSE TO THE TREES, and were able to see well enough without the flashlight. It wasn’t until they turned toward the river and plunged deep into the woods that Jake flipped it on. The dense wood made the going rough, especially with a shovel and camera bag. Jake twisted and ducked through low branches and tangles of saplings. Finally they came to the stone wall and the six-foot buffer of tall grass between it and the woods.

  Jake played his light up the side of the rock wall, ten feet to the top.

  “Too bad we didn’t bring a ladder,” he said.

  “How would you get it through those trees?” Sam said.

  “Good point.”

  The tall grass was already damp, but the going was much easier. Jake flicked off the flashlight. Enough light spilled over the wall from the mansion that they could make out the swath of grass as a pale green strip between the blackness of woods and wall. After a time, Jake’s knee began to throb. The Ferragamo shoes rubbed blisters into his heels. When they reached the back corner of the wall, the topography dropped off quickly. The grass swath ended and the trees on the slope hugged the wall. Jake flipped his light back on. Dirt and rocks skittered down the embankment as they moved along the base of the wall toward the outcrop, clinging to the trunks of the trees for support.

  They were breathing hard by the time they climbed over the low stone balustrade surrounding the terrace. To their right, the tar-black river lay in the valley below, mutely reflecting the wash of stars overhead. Jake set the shovel down and told Sam to catch his breath as he climbed the stairs and scouted the territory beyond the main terrace above them. A great lawn opened up between the terrace and the mansion with a long reflecting pool in its center. On either side of the pool were elaborate gardens with flower trellises, sculpted shrubbery, statues, and fountains. Nearly every window in all three wings of the massive building was lit, enough light to cast long black shadows beneath the broad old trees.