Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  “She says she’s not coming back until we’re a democracy again.”

  Bay Dennison never precisely laughed: more a bray of delight, amused and condescending, as if he alone saw the world authentic and whole. “That’ll be the day.” Another guffaw. “So, any new books on the way?” He waved at the sheets on his rolling table. “I have to judge the competition.”

  Julia shook her head. Mona had not published a volume in over a decade, although her furious essays still found an audience in the more marginal publications of righteously hating left anger. “You’ll have the stores all to yourself, Bay.”

  “I dated her once. Maybe twice. You were just a little girl.” The good eye lapped at her as a younger man’s might. According to Lemaster, the worst of his tumors was behind the bad one. “Did she ever tell you?”

  “Yes, Bay. You told me, too.”

  “We went to the White House. LBJ was President. Danced all night. Lyndon danced with her, too. Wouldn’t let her go. And poor Lady Bird leaned over to me and said, ‘I don’t mind him dancing, but why does he have to slobber all over her?’” Dennison laughed, so his guests laughed, too. The story had appeared in the second volume of his memoirs. Most historians and Johnson insiders thought it no truer than the rest of Bay’s angrily exaggerated memories, many of which led to furious denials. But he wisely protected himself from liability by defaming only the dead. “I liked LBJ. People hated him for Vietnam, but he was the best of them all. Did the Civil Rights Act. Great Society. Voting Rights Act. Knew how to sit in a back room and drink whiskey and make deals. If you shook his hand, he’d keep his word. That’s what matters, Julia. Keeping your word.” A sly glance at Little Master, as if expecting an argument.

  “I agree,” said Lemaster, right on cue.

  Still Byron Dennison addressed himself only to Julia. “Know what the problem is nowadays? We haven’t had a real drinker in the White House since Nixon. Don’t know how they get anything done without the stuff. No wonder they’re all at each other’s throats. Too much tee-totaling down in Washington, if you want my opinion.”

  “You could be right.” We visit the dying to seek their permission to go on living, Granny Vee used to say. Maybe that explains why we agree with whatever they tell us.

  “I liked Nixon, too. He’d do you a deal. Just lock up the silver and keep your hands on the table.”

  “So you keep telling me, Bay.”

  “Sit in my lap.”

  “I can’t. I have to watch my blood pressure.” Dennison laughed, the sound spluttery and wet, and Julia, smiling to make sure he knew her mood was gay, voiced the question his earlier comment had sparked. “Did you know him, Bay? Kellen Zant?”

  He slapped the table in mirth. “Everybody knew that old faker.”

  “Faker?”

  “Mau-Maued everybody into hiring him. Made a fortune off of being the official, true-blue, certified Negro economist.” The good eye swiveled her way. Lemaster stood mute, a spectator at the play. “I liked him. Yeah, he was a faker. But he was my kind of faker.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do. Zant would call up some corporation and say, ‘How come you don’t have any black consultants?’ Then he’d threaten to go on television and make a stink about how they didn’t have any. And guess what? They’d hire him.”

  Despite her husband’s presence and her respect for the old man, Julia could not keep a certain stiffness from her voice. “He was good at what he did. Those models to calculate the proper valuation of options—”

  More laughter. Like most men accustomed to power, Byron Dennison valued his own opinions above other people’s facts. “He was good at what he did. And what he did best was making money for Kellen Zant. I know he said he was doing it for his client. I know he said he was doing it for the people. But he was really doing it for Kellen Zant.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “You don’t have to defend your boyfriends to me, Julia. I told you I liked him.”

  Cheeks flaming, Julia tried to answer, but the old man grabbed her wrist, stopped laughing, and tugged her close to whisper in her ear.

  “Trust your husband,” he murmured, dying breath hot and moist.

  “I try,” Julia said, very surprised, as Lemaster busied himself examining his mentor’s ego wall.

  The grip was iron. “Try harder. It matters.”

  After that came the part of the visit Julia hated. After ritual hugs, and ritual drinks, and ritual questions about the children, she was politely but firmly banished from the house. Bay Dennison studied his protégé’s face and told Julia to return in an hour. Knowing this moment would come, she had worn loose pants and sneakers. And, after an autumn spent far too close to Cookie’s, she could use the exercise. So she left the two men alone. This was their element, scheming together. Bay Dennison had been for many years supreme leader of the Empyreals, and Lemaster, through the two decades she had known him, had never made a major decision without consulting his mentor first. The Empyreals might be a good distance from the top of the heap, but the connection still mattered, and her husband nurtured it.

  She wondered what decision he was making now.

  Julia stopped in a deli for a bottle of water, and then walked through the Public Garden, finding it surprisingly crowded. There was old snow on the ground, but the temperature was in the forties, perfect walking weather. She stayed on the main paths, crossing each bridge several times, striding hard past the statues and monuments, because she was working out, not sightseeing, working hard because she was out of shape. The third time Julia passed the greening statue of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Mary Mallard was sitting on the bench, smiling at her.

  “I’m full of surprises,” the writer said.

  (II)

  MARY HAD HER SNEAKERS ON TOO, so they walked together. She lit a cigarette, but Julia made her put it out.

  “You’ve changed,” said Mary, adjusting her scarf.

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “I like you this way. You have your shit together. You make eye contact. You’re confident. You even walk differently.”

  Julia had to laugh. “All that in a few weeks.” Then: “What are you doing here, Mary? You obviously followed me.”

  “From Elm Harbor? That would take some fancy driving, not to be seen.”

  “All right, you’re a fancy driver.”

  They were passing the swan boats, stacked and covered for the season. On the shore, a bevy of children played an intricate game of freeze tag, watched over by nuns. “I’m here because you need help, Julia. You can’t do this alone.”

  “I’ve been walking alone most of my life.”

  “I mean, track down what Kellen was working on. It’s obvious that’s what you’re up to. Obvious to me, anyway.” She waved a hand. “And that accounts for the aura you’ve got these days, too.” She laughed alone this time. She even had her own water bottle, and swigged deeply. “Seriously, Julia. You need my help. I can keep you out of trouble. Save you from mistakes. Share my resources. My expertise.”

  “Mary—”

  “And I can tell you things you can’t possibly know.”

  “Like what?”

  They had reached a set of boulders. Mary sat while Julia stretched. “Like, I’m not the only person who followed you today.”

  Julia’s first instinct, quite irresistible, was to glance wildly around, although she had no idea what, or whom, she was looking for. Her next was to glower. “You made that up.”

  Mary shrugged. “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. That’s the point. You wouldn’t even think to wonder. And if you did wonder, you wouldn’t know what to look for.”

  “And you would?”

  “Of course. The kind of books I write? I pick up surveillance now and then.”

  Along with hubris and paranoia, Julia thought, but did not say. Mary was right. She could not do this alone. More to the point, she didn’t want to. A partner would be wonderful. The question
was whether Mary Mallard was the right one.

  “Tell me exactly what Kellen told you.”

  “This really is a new you, isn’t it?”

  “Come on, Mary. You’re auditioning for a place. What was Kellen up to? What did he say?”

  The writer sighed and gazed off toward the pond. The Make Way for Ducklings sculpture glistened darkly in the bright winter sun. Clearly Mary wanted that cigarette, and Julia took a perverse pride in denying permission. “Kellen came to see me a few months ago. We had met when I interviewed him for my book on the corporate accounting scandals. Kellen earned a ton of money from his lectures, and he lectured on the scandals, and, well, anyway, we met. He loved capitalism, wasn’t worried by its excesses, believed markets could mostly regulate themselves. And he loved to argue. I learned not to disagree with what he said, because winning meant so much to him. And, yes, if you’re wondering, he came on to me a couple of times, but, well, that was never going anywhere.” She put her hands flat on the rock, tilted her head back, closed her eyes to take the sun. “So, anyway, he called me last summer and said he had come up with something that would interest me. I suggested we have a drink the next time he was in D.C., which we did, about a week later. Late July, I think, because I go to Maine in August. He told me about Gina Joule. I’d never heard of her. He told me the story, and I told him there are a million stories like that one. I wasn’t interested unless there was a book in it, or at least an article. He said this was different. This wasn’t just some black boy lynched for allegedly killing a white girl. This was a black boy who died in the place of somebody who mattered. That was Kellen’s term. Somebody who mattered.”

  “So you got interested.”

  “A little. Not too much. Given what I do for a living, people peddle these tales all the time. But then he told me about Hilliman Suite, and who lived there, and I got very, very interested. He said he was pretty sure he could prove that one of the guys from Hilliman Suite was at least dating her, which would already blow a hole in the official story, and maybe blow the election wide open. He said with enough time he was sure he could prove more. He said he would put it on the market. He would do an auction to capture the surplus. An all-pay auction, he said. I didn’t know what that was, but it didn’t matter. I asked why he was telling me. I don’t pay for information, I said, even information that can blow an election wide open. He said he needed somebody who knew how to present things. He wanted me to write up his findings for this auction. I told him that wasn’t exactly the business I was in, but, believe me, Julia, by now I was hooked. I wanted that story. The trouble was, he wanted me to swear never to tell a soul. Well, I make my money by writing about what I learn, not by keeping it secret. We argued for a couple of weeks, and then he said he would send me a teaser, so I’d know he was on the level. In September I got a photograph in the mail. No return address, by the way, and no note, but the postmark said Elm Harbor.”

  “What was in the photo?” Julia asked, because Mary had paused and was pursing her lips, perhaps drawing on the imaginary cigarette.

  “It was a young man on a sofa asleep. That was all. A young man, late teens, early twenties, asleep on a sofa. I called Kellen, I told him this didn’t help. He told me if I could identify the young man he would identify where it was taken. So I did. It didn’t take long, because I knew who he was investigating. It was a photo of Senator Malcolm Whisted when he was in college. When I told Kellen, he sent me a note, with an address on it in Tyler’s Landing. I looked up the address at the time the Senator was a student, and, sure enough, it was Merrill and Anna Joule’s house.”

  “That’s not much to go on.”

  “That’s what I told him. Same thing I told you at the funeral. The fact that Senator Whisted slept at her house once didn’t prove anything. The Whisteds knew everybody. Kellen asked if it would matter if he told me young Mal was drunk at the time. I said no. In college everybody’s drunk all the time. Kellen laughed. He said that’s why it’s called a teaser.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Not quite.” Mary pursed her lips, wanting that cigarette badly. “He said the whole case really proved why nonrivalrous consumption was almost impossible.”

  “Spell that for me.”

  Mary did, and loaned Julia a pencil and paper to write it down. “It means—” the writer began, but Julia held up her hand. She did not want Mary’s explanations. Or her biases.

  “Thanks.” Julia looked at her watch. “I have to go.”

  “Lemaster’s with Bay Dennison, right?”

  “You’re very good at this, Mary.”

  “Hey, I don’t need you to tell me that.” She stood up. “So, do we have a deal?”

  “No.”

  The white woman’s face fell. “But I told you—”

  “Mary, listen. You’re half right. I do need help. And I can certainly use yours. I’d love it if you signed on. But if you do, you have to know that it’s my project, not yours, and the information I give you will be the information I choose to give you.” She considered. “And you can’t write anything without my permission.”

  “Are you sure you and Kellen weren’t married or anything? I mean, you talk just the same.”

  “Oh, and one more thing. We get Christmas season off.”

  Mary was appalled. “You know, Julia, the Iowa caucuses are in two months.”

  “If you can solve the mystery without me before then, you’re welcome to it.”

  “And here I thought I was the bitch.”

  Julia smiled. This being-in-charge business was fun.

  CHAPTER 33

  ’TIS THE SEASON

  (I)

  CHRISTMAS SLIPSTREAMED PAST the family like a billboard beside the highway, first a distant glimmer, then looming closer and larger, then suddenly full and bright and cheery and easy to read, but blink and it is in the rearview mirror, beyond the curve you just passed, and gone. Astrid and her children came to town, the hatchet having evidently been buried between the cousins, and even went to midnight mass at Saint Matthias, where, following the service, Lemaster showed an unaccustomed lack of tact, complaining to anyone who would listen about the Nativity scene near the altar. He objected, said Lemaster, not to the blond whiteness of the Baby Jesus or the decidedly Aryan features of Mary and Joseph, but, rather, to the presence and number of the wise men, the Magi. Matthew’s Gospel, he argued over coffee in the parish hall, did not specify the number of Magi, but did note explicitly that they visited the child (not baby) Jesus at his house—not, as tradition has it, in the manger where he was born. The shepherds, not the wise men, were led to the manger. The senior warden, pale as a cadaver and nearly as animated, murmured in his funereal tones that tradition was what kept people Anglican, but Lemaster was unmoved. Tradition was one thing, he said. Defying the Gospels was another.

  Riding home, the Escalade bravely holding course around the slick curves, Lemaster fulminated to his wife, and to part of his family—others rode with Aunt Astrid in her Lincoln Navigator—on the matter of the church’s resistance to what seemed to him the plain truth. When her father finally paused for breath in the vast family quiet, Vanessa, in the back, leaned forward between the plush bucket seats and asked sweetly whether it was really likely that Dads alone had it right and everyone else, who had followed the tradition for centuries, right down to those who celebrated, con mucho gusto, Three Kings Day, had it wrong. Before he could answer, she continued, “It’s like Saint Paul’s journeys in the first century. We don’t know all the places he went. The Bible doesn’t tell us. But tradition fills in the answers, right? The tradition teaches that he went to Spain, it’s unbroken and pretty much unchallenged, and so we say, yes, okay, he probably went to Spain. So—what’s wrong with accepting the tradition that there were in fact three wise men? After all, it’s not as if the Bible says there was some other number.”

  Lemaster started to reply—gently, as he always did when Vanessa spoke—but he stopped because he noticed, the sam
e time everyone else in the car did, that her mouth was still moving although her words had dried up. When they arrived at Hunter’s Heights, Jeremy Flew, who seemed to have no home of his own, had eggnog waiting, delicately spiked, and he helped the children leave cookies and milk for Santa. Four young people then scurried for their bedrooms to allow the grown-ups to wrap the gifts—none of them from Mona, who always forgot, and apologized later. Julia tried to send Vanessa to bed, too, but her daughter, pronouncing herself too old for such nonsense, refused. Instead she sat in the kitchen drinking one Diet Sprite after another and rereading a dog-eared book about Roman military strategy.

  “What are you doing?” Aunt Astrid asked at one point.

  “Reading.”

  “I mean, why do you spend so much time reading about war? When we should all be working together for peace?”

  Vanessa never looked up. “Getting ready,” she said.

  That was how they spent Christmas Eve.

  (II)

  BRUCE VALLELY SPENT THE LATE AFTERNOON of Christmas Eve at the shopping mall in Norport, although not shopping. He sat in the Mustang convertible with the top up, in a far corner of the parking lot, talking to Rick Chrebet, whose family thought he was picking up a few last-minute gifts. Rick kept saying he was risking his pension if he got caught. But he passed along some of his notes anyway. Back home, Bruce marveled at the amount of work Rick had managed before the investigation had shut down. He had even determined, by a similar but not identical path of reasoning, that Lemaster Carlyle was a possible suspect. Rick, less impulsive than his former partner, had also troubled to obtain an item that Bruce had overlooked.

  A copy of Lemaster’s résumé.

  One look sent Bruce’s theory of the case out the window.

  Gina Joule had disappeared in February 1973, during Lemaster’s junior year.

  The résumé was explicit and unambiguous: January–June 1973, study at Oxford.

  When the university reopened for business after New Year’s Day, Bruce would check the dates to be sure the résumé was accurate. But he knew already that it would be. Unless the future president of the university had rushed home to the States just in time to kill Gina Joule and fly back to England, Lemaster could not have done the deed. That did not mean that he could not have murdered Zant, but it reduced the likelihood considerably.