Fallen Idols

by J. F. Freedman

  He helped himself to some more coffee. “You and your brothers are all I have left. Emma, too, now, thank God, but it's not the same. You're my blood, and I have to pour as much of my love into you as I humanly can” He sagged back. “Or I'll never be happy, and neither will a big part of you.”

  Walt got up and came over to Tom, as Tom was afraid he would. It was a sloppy hug, and the kiss on the cheek was even sloppier

  “I love you, son.”

  Tom was supposed to reply “I love you, too, dad,” but he didn't have it in him.

  After Welt went into his study Emma came back into the kitchen. She closed the door behind her. “How did it go?” she asked.

  “It could have been worse,” Tom answered flatly, “Are you going to come back?” she asked nervously, as if fearful of the answer. Not about her, about Walt, “I don't know.”

  she reached over and lightly touched the back of his hand “I hope you do.”

  Her touch fluttered like a bird's heartbeat—his entire body ached with desire. What was she doing to him, he wondered? Had it been a mercy fuck, a show of defiance of anger toward his father? Or even—he was afraid to allow himself to consider this possibility—that it was simple attraction, that she was the kind of free woman who went after whatever she wanted, regardless of consequences?

  He wanted to take her in his arms, right here, right now. But he couldn't. She had made that clear, last night,

  “I'd want to know beforehand that he isn't spoiling for a fight,” he told her. “Of course, his actions could belie his words. Saying and doing … very different.”

  She nodded in understanding. “I honestly believe he can't help himself, because I know he was looking forward in seeing you. If it makes you feel any better, he was like this with Clancy, too. Although not as vicious,” she admitted. “For some reason you brothers bring out a dark side in him. It's tragic.”

  He lashes out at us from guilt, Tom wanted to tell her. About being with you. “So everything's fine until we show up. Super.”

  “I didn't mean it like that. My God, this turned out so badly!”

  “It's okay,” he told her. “I'm leaving.”

  And as he said this a sense of calmness came over him that he hadn't possessed since he'd gotten on the airplane to come here. He was leaving, returning to his own world. Messed up it might be, but it was is, and he owned it.

  “This is not about you, Emma.” He looked over at the closed kitchen door. “But I'm coming around to believing his instincts were right about not wanting to be with us. If he wants to be left alone, we should honor that. We're his sons, but we're not his keepers.”

  “Except he doesn't,” she said passionately. “When you're not here, he talks about you ceaselessly. He has a real hunger for his family.”

  “Until he bites in, and then he gets indigestion.”

  She smiled. “A biteful of you wouldn't make anyone sick.”

  Care to find out again? he thought. But even as he did, he knew he had to give that up, unless she decided other wise. And he knew, with yet another ache, that she wouldn't.

  “Will you stay in touch?” she asked him.

  “He knows how to reach me.” He paused. “So do you.”

  Walt and Tom stood at the curb by Tom's rental.

  “I hope you'll give me another chance,” Walt said.

  “It's up to you, dad,” Tom replied bluntly. He felt good.

  better than good—liberated. He wasn't in thrall to the great god anymore. If they ever did reconcile, it would be a balanced relationship.

  “I swear to God I'll make it up to you.”

  “That would be great, dad.” But I'm not holding my breath

  Wall wrapped his arms around Tom, who stood and book it.

  Tom got into his car and began driving away. Looking In the. Mirror, he could see Walt waving him good-bye, opposite of the way it used to be when he was a little kid and his father would drive off to work in the morning. And farther behind, in the half-shadow of the front door arch, there was Emma, watching.

  Just before he reached the comer she turned and went back inside.

  CHICAGO

  Will moved to Chicago the weekend after Tom returned from his trip to Los Angeles. Merrill Lynch transferred him there, at his request. It wasn't New York, but it was a big step up. He'd be running his own section with more autonomy, and they were giving him a large raise.

  The firm had rented a beautiful apartment for him in a six-story pre-war brownstone in Lincoln Park. The new digs were on the top floor of the building. The front door opened onto a small foyer, which spread out into a thirty foot-long living/dining room, with built-in Art Deco cabinets, that ran the length of the building, front to back. There was a full-size, well-equipped kitchen, two large bedrooms each with its own private bath, an additional guest half-bath off the foyer, twelve-foot-high ceilings with elaborately carved crown moldings, and sweeping bay windows that looked down onto the street, which was shaded by a high arching canopy of birches, aspens, and elms.

  “The baby mogul's moved up to the high-rent district,” Callie quipped, as she walked from room to room, checking it out. She dodged the delivery men who were bringing in some of the new furniture Will had ordered. “There's going to be a conga line out the door once the babe hot line gets the word out that Will Gaines has moved to town.”

  “I wish,” he said with a grin.

  Callie ran her finger along the burnished cherrywood wainscoting in the dining room. “What're you going to do with all this space?”

  Will, his arms laden with hanging clothes he'd carried up from the U-Haul he had driven from Minneapolis, grinned good-naturedly. “Throw wild, debauched parties, of course.”

  It was a fabulous apartment, but he could well afford it. His company was paying part of the rent, they had paid for his moving expenses, and had given him a furniture allowance. What he hadn't told his brother and sister-in-law, because he didn't like to blow his own horn, was that one of the big New York bond firms had tried to steal him away and he had used their offer as a bargaining chip. He also didn't tell Clancy that he'd insisted on being sent to the Chicago office, which was bigger than the Minneapolis one–their second-largest. He could have gone to the home office in New York, which would have accelerated his climb up the ranks, but he specifically wanted Chicago. The enormity and intensity of New York was off-putting to him– he wasn't ready for that radical a change yet. He young, he had time. Unless he completely screwed up he”d still be a partner by the time he was thirty-five. New York could wait a few years.

  The main reason he had wanted to come here, though, rather than remain in Minneapolis or move to New York, was family He would be living in the same city as his oldest brother and sister-in-law, and Tom was a three-and-a-half hour drive away, less than an hour on the Detroit-Chicago shuttle. It was important now for the brothers to be close, not only emotionally, but in actual physical proximity.

  He and Clancy had talked to Tom, after Tom had returned from Los Angeles. The old man's behavior had been ugly and selfish, but it was in character with the way he'd been acting for the past year, so that information, although it pissed them off, wasn't a surprise. What had really scared them was Tom's discovery regarding Walt's nonstatus at UCLA, and the phantom job offers. Either their father had gone round-the-bend delusional, or he was weaving a dense web of lies about his life.

  And it had gotten worse. During the past few days Will and Clancy had contacted the archaeology programs at every major college and university in California that had one. The information they had uncovered was uniformly bleak. None of the name schools—Stanford Berkeley, USC, the other UC schools that had tendered ogy departments, the Claremont Colleges—had tendered faculty positions to Walt. Most of the departments they'd gotten in touch with had not been in contact with him at all. No lectures, no symposiums, nothing. They knew Walt had left Wisconsin but none of them had any knowledge of his whereabouts, particularly that he was living right
under their noses. There were a few allusions to the circumstances that had driven Walt from Madison, and one cryptic comment about La Chimenea, but otherwise it was a blank slate.

  The brothers hadn't wanted to dig deeper into the life of Walt Gaines. Now, with these new and stunning revelations added to the information Tom had discovred they felt they had no choice.

  Though the bay windows, the sun could be seen going down over the darkening treetops. The guys opened folding chairs around Will's new dining table while Callie spread out paper plates, plastic utensils, and cup –– the regular stuff was somewhere in the stacks of unopened packing boxes that were strewn about the floor in the midst of the rest of the furniture, which hadn't been arranged yet.

  Tomorrow, Will would start putting things in order. He had time to shape the place up, he was taking a week off before starting in at the new office. Tonight was for kicking back. And after dinner, serious talk.

  But first, a toast. Callie poured from the bottle of Taittinger she had brought to memorialize the occasion and held her own glass aloft.

  “To Jocelyn Murphy Gaines,” she said in a clarion voice “We will never forget you.”

  The brothers nodded gravely and drank. Then Clancy stood and raised his glass. “And to Walt Gaines. We'll never forget you, either, dad, no matter how hard you try to make us.”

  The Chinese food they'd ordered in was good but the meal wasn't festive, not the carefree celebration they had planned for when Will had told them he was moving to town. There was unfinished business hanging over their heads now a cloud that was following them wherever they went. While they ate, they talked about everything except Walt. How it had gone at Finnegan's today, what kind of crowd to expect tomorrow—a larger-than-usual one, since the were on the road for a critical game against the Redskins. Clancy had ordered four extra kegs, and he'd need them They talked about today's game, a cliffhanger that Northwestern had won at the final gun on a blocked field attempt from point-blank range. They talked about Will's new neighborhood, where the good restaurants were, the good bookstores, clothing stores, coffeehouses.

  Callie unearthed a pot in the jumble of packed boxes and made cowboy coffee. They drank it laced with bourbon Clancy had brought from the bar and smoked a joint, which Callie rolled with an expert's panache, the three of them sitting back in their fold-up chairs as the dry pungent smoke drifted up to the high ceiling.

  There was no way of putting off the inevitable any longer. “So what're we going to do about dad?” Clancy asked. “We need a plan.”

  “Follow the money,” Will answered crisply. A pad of paper and a ballpoint rested on his lap. “That's the cardinal rule. Whenever there's a situation like this, the money trail will lead you to the source, or close. The firm hires investigators who do nothing but that.”

  Clancy shook his head. “We're not bringing detective into this,” he said in a sharp tone of voice. “This is family, strictly.”

  “I'm merely telling you how it's done professionally.”

  “You may have to, at some point,” Callie prodded her husband. “There might be information you need to get to get to that you don't know how.”

  “Later—if we absolutely must—we'll deal with professionals,” Clancy said forcefully. “We're nowhere near there yet.”

  Neither Will nor Callie responded. They didn't need to verbalize what they all knew, including Clancy: that they were.

  Clancy was half-asleep on his feet—his perpetual shortchanging himself of rest, on top of the anxiety this mess was causing, was draining. “You're right. Money is the logical place for us to start, because of the discrepancies over it.”

  “You mean lies,” Callie corrected him. “Deceits.”

  Clancy shot her a dark look. “Yeah. Lies and deceits.”

  “You guys are the ones who said that, not me,” she pointed out. “But if you're going to dig up your dad's buried bodies …” She caught herself. “That's a terrible metaphor. I'm sorry.”

  “It's okay.”

  “If you're going to chase after whatever you can find about Walt's secrets, financial or otherwise, no matter how unsavory,” she rephrased, “you can't be sentimental about it. You're doing detective work, you need to be as objective as you can. Sentiment clouds your vision.” She looked at him. “Are you mad at me for butting in? Should I excuse myself?” She started to get up.

  Clancy grabbed her arm and pulled her back down, “I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at dad. I don't mean to take out my hostility on you.”

  “This is a bitch,” she commiserated.

  “I know. But we're there now, so let's keep going and hope nothing more terrible turns up.”

  Will's expression was dubious. “Let's don't pretend nothing else will. We have to be prepared for more bad news.” He picked up his pad and pen. “Let's make a list and slop conjuring up bogeymen.” Right on,” Clancy said. He raised a forefinger, “Insurance. What kind they had, how much, how it was dispersed.”

  Will wrote on the pad. “And dad's retirement package from the university, and mom's,” he said. “That should be the most important, that's where they'd have the most money They were going to live on it.” He paused, looking up into space. “I still can't believe she's dead.”

  Clancy nodded. “I know. I'm always expecting her to walk in the door. Okay, what else?”

  “Investments. Stocks, bonds, IRAs, mutual funds. Maybe they had money salted away in places we wouldn't have expected them to.” Will scribbled another note. “I'll do that. There's a database program at the office that should give me access to whatever we need.”

  “Is that legal?” Callie asked dubiously.

  “No,” Will told her candidly. “But it's done all the time. Privacy in this country is as extinct as the dinosaur. Every kid on the Internet knows that.”

  “We can debate civil liberties some other time,” Clancy said impatiently. “Let's stay on focus. I'll look into their retirement packages from the university and their insurance policies.”

  “It's going to take me a week or two to ramp up,” Will said. “First I've got to dig out of this mess”—his hand swept the room that was a jumble of unpacked boxes and crates—”and get set up in my new office.”

  “There's no rush,” Clancy said. “These questions aren't going away.”

  Will tossed the notepad aside. ‘This is not going to be pleasant.”

  “Tell me about it,” Clancy answered dolefully. “Dad’ financial situation is only part of what we need to get into. We know he's been lying about going back to teaching. What about the rest of it? The big book he claims his publisher is breathing down his neck for, for instance. Is that real or is that bullshit, too?”

  Will nodded. “And don't forget La Chimenea. Tom told me that when Professor Janowitz at UCLA told him dad wasn't teaching there, and wasn't going to be, he also threw out a cryptic remark about thefts at the site that were somehow associated with dad.”

  Clancy nodded. “Tom mentioned that to me, too.”

  “That could be a land mine, if there's problems down there like that dad isn't copping to,” Will said. “La Chimenea was going to be the pinnacle of his career. Now he doesn't even want to talk about it.” He grimaced. “We're going to have to find out about that, too, I'm afraid, sooner or later.”

  “What a mess,” Clancy groaned, Callie had been listening as they formed their plan. Now she spoke up. “Aren't you forgetting something?” she asked.

  “what?” Clancy said,

  “The woman Walt's living with. What's her name again?”

  “Emma,” Clancy told her. “Emma Rawlings.”

  “Who is she?” Callie questioned. She paused, then asked “Could she be connected to any of these issues you guys are wrestling with?”

  Clancy sat back. “I haven't thought about that.” This was spinning out of control. “Why would she be?”

  She ticked the obvious reasons off on her fingers. “because when a young, beautiful, intelligent, financially secure w
oman—she's all these, right? …”

  He nodded. “Yes, she's all that.”

  “ … when a woman like that gets together with an older man, there's usually an agenda.” She smiled.

  “Which is usually money—his. But if she has her own, then it's different.”

  “Dad said she does,” Clancy answered morosely. “But How you've got to wonder about whether anything he's telling us is the truth.”

  Callie nodded. “Maybe there isn't any connection,” she continued. “But here she is, all of a sudden, with your dad. An attraction a thought a terrible ordeal. Granted, Walt can run rings around plenty of men who are younger than him, but still, doesn't this relationship feel peculiar somehow? Don't you want to know about her background, since every other aspect of Walt's life is now under suspicion? I know I do.” She rocked on the heels of her shoes. “I'm remembering something you told me about him and her that's making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”

  “What?” Clancy asked, almost fearfully.

  “You told me Walt met her at a party, at UCLA. She's a graduate student there, right?”

  “Yes, that's what he told me,” he answered slowly. He could see where this was going.

  She said it before he could. “Except this Professor Janowitz told Tom that Walt hasn't had any connection to UCLA. They don't even know he's living in L.A. So how could he have met her there if he's never been there?”

  “This is getting to be as complicated as Rubik'a Cube,” Clancy lamented.

  “Hold up,” Will said, interjecting. “We need to find out more about Emma Rawlings, I agree. But she's secondary. We can't juggle a dozen balls in the air. Let's take this a few steps at a time. If we're still dissatisfied after we find out about dad's financial affairs, we'll look into her.”

  “Agreed,” Clancy said with alacrity. ‘This is much more complicated than we thought it would get.” He put his arm around Callie's shoulder. “We'd better get going Busy day tomorrow. You coming down to the bar?” he asked Will. “It'll be a zoo, but it'll be fun.”