A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  He felt pleased, as if watching the train of his mind penetrating a new destination. The bomber was a mathematician or a computer scientist of around Hendley’s and Illich’s age. He was young enough to regard those men as his immediate rivals, and he was old enough to have seen his own chance for an Einsteinian annus mirabilis pass. Old enough to be bitter, young enough to do something about it. This man felt as Lee might have felt about Donald Whitehead, years ago, if Whitehead had continued on the meteoric rise that had first taken him out of Lee’s sights. But Whitehead seemed to have been a mere flash in the pan; after Whitehead had gotten the plum job and left school midyear, Lee had never heard of him again. Another overestimated young scholar turned average old man. Whitehead was lost amid short poppies now, perhaps pondering just the same question of what made men kill as he shuffled to his grumbling fridge and got out a fresh beer.

  14.

  OFTEN SPRING BREAK WAS SPRINGLIKE IN NAME ONLY, but in the days after Hendley’s memorial, spring secured such a foothold that some mornings felt more like summer. Lee as usual slept very little, but in the fragrant new atmosphere, with his heating turned off and his windows cranked open, he slept unusually well. Perhaps it was also because he’d decided to pretend to himself, as he had to the agents, that he really had thrown Gaither’s letter away: by an arduous effort of will, he exiled it from thought. Along with the bombing of Hendley, it could almost be seen as the last overreachings of malevolent winter, which this past year had been cruel to Lee, inflicting constant illness. He last remembered a sense of well-being when he’d taken a walk in the local state park and there’d been crimson leaves on the trees. That had been in October. Now it was April, and the two magnolia trees on his block had erupted in huge fleshy blooms, and his neighbor’s forsythia pulsed with a nuclear glow; in every other direction he looked, yesterday’s lackluster branches and twigs had been transformed by a bright pointillism of just-visible buds.

  The recollection that there was a state park to go to felt like divine revelation, and one morning after coming awake in the five A.M. twilight, he filled a travel mug with his tea and put a few slices of meat between of bread. Backing his car out of the garage, he saw that his two garbage cans, filled and placed at the curb for the pickup this morning, were already on their sides, empty. He felt light with amazement: when was the last time he’d slept through the garbage collection? Invariably it would find him still tensely in bed, straining for a morsel of postsunrise slumber to make up for a night of insomnia. The squeal of the garbage truck’s brakes, the hoarse shouts of the workers, the truck’s grinding jaws, and the thumps as his cans were tossed back—all seemed an external expression, as well as a mockery, of his unrested torment. But this morning he’d peacefully slept through the raucous event—and the event must have occurred earlier than it generally did. He’d never known the garbage to be collected before seven-thirty or eight. Getting out of his idling car to retrieve the empty cans, he noticed that his neighbors’ cans were still sitting upright, expectantly plump, at the curb. But his subdivision consisted of unnecessarily tortuous streets, so that from the base of his driveway he easily saw only the ends of two other driveways, of the across-the-street house and the house to his right. Perhaps this morning his house had been the last on an incomplete round of collections; in a short time, the trucks would come back. It seemed strange, but once back in his car he’d forgotten about it.

  At six in the morning, the park held just a few joggers pounding the trails; a few slow-moving old people in car coats were walking their dogs. Lee raised his hand at each encounter without making eye contact, as was the protocol in this park, by contrast with Mashtamowtahpa Park, which was more like the grocery store. Even if Lee had run into someone he knew here, which had never yet happened, they would have just nodded briefly before leaving each other to fragile illusions of wilderness. But soon enough Lee was really alone on the path he had chosen. He walked briskly but unhurriedly, seeing the early bloomers here—the spindly unpruned forsythia and the rarer magnolia and a redbud or two, all a few sap beats behind their suburban yard cousins—bursting brightly like motionless fireworks amid the bare trees around them.

  He ate his sandwich on the shore of the park’s smaller pond, which had not been marred by a swimming beach or a boat launch or a picnic area, so that although there was nowhere to sit, it was almost possible, despite the faint path that led here and away, to feel like an intruder in an actual Eden. He supposed there was nothing remarkable about the pond or the trees ringing it except absence, but to him that was remarkable enough: The absence of wires slinging off from one electrical tower to another, for example. The absence, at this moment, of any airplane crawling through the sky and doubled on the pond’s surface, like a metal-skinned insect. And when Lee stood in the right place and faced the right way, the absence of the path. He didn’t even sit, but leaned against a nude maple with his feet on the snow-flattened corpses of last summer’s ragweed. His sandwich was very dry, as he hadn’t taken the time to add mustard, but he savored it gratefully; now he remembered that last night he hadn’t had dinner. In all the years he had lived here, he had never thought of communion with nature as a possible pastime; a few square miles of cornfield covered over with second-growth trees was not nature to him. But now he gazed into the eye of the pond and again thought of Esther, with her container of shreds of raw meat, and her eaglets, and her patience. He had rejected the notion of Esther’s doing something like this—not just refused to embrace it but refused to believe it—because the angry, curt Esther of adolescence and young-womanhood eclipsed the previous Esther in his mind, invalidated her somehow. That had been a grave, patient child. Her attention exquisite and unwavering. He knew he saw Esther as not just divided in two but fragmented, into all the children she’d been—and that he considered the best, those who’d loved and revered him, as lost. But he could see her now, guarding her eaglets, patient and fierce like an eagle herself.

  By the time he got back to his car, it was almost ten-thirty, and he was ravenous again. He would go home and scramble some eggs, and the hell with cholesterol. He realized that until this week he had been very tired, not just for days but for months. And fatigue shrank his mind to a single gapped track on which a single train faltered…. Now his thinking was vaulted and gleaming and lively with simultaneous movement. Despite his recent exhaustion, the idea he’d had about Hendley’s killer had not evaporated. If anything, it had come to feel sounder, in his mind and, better yet, in his gut. It seemed to signal a general restoration of his life’s functioning: the week of good sleep, the brisk walk, and now, as he was considering calling Agent Morrison to share his deduction, the convenient reappearance of that very man’s car in his driveway. No less apt and unsurprising was the absence of the woman, whose name Lee had already forgotten, perhaps in self-defense: Shipman? Shankar? Lee parked beside Morrison and got out of his car feeling as glad as Morrison appeared to be at their meeting again. Beneath the late-morning light, the agent’s smallish eyes achieved new prominence, and Lee noticed that they were not just interested but interesting in themselves: a lively color neither quite blue nor green. Lee could almost have thought Agent Morrison had also had his first sound night’s sleep in a while. The agent bore down on Lee with a smile that seemed kindled from pure fellow feeling.

  “It’s funny,” Lee said, as they clasped hands. “I was just about to call you.”

  “That is funny.”

  “I hope you haven’t been waiting long?”

  “I just drove up.”

  “Well, it’s perfect timing! I’ve been up since dawn drinking nothing but tea. Would you have coffee if I made some?”

  “Music to my ears,” Morrison said, in the tone of a man who’d been waiting for just such an offer.

  Inside, Lee opened the sliding glass door that led from the eating area of the kitchen to the backyard, and with that single act his winter-stale, uncomfortable home was transformed. Now the absence of furniture seeme
d deliberate—possibly, he thought with bemusement, austerely Oriental. The impersonal, as-delivered beige walls and beige carpet, which all winter long beneath the glare of the overhead fixtures had exhibited dingy smudges and scrapes, now presented a rich, creamy surface for shifting gold panels of sun. A mild breeze pulsed, freshening everything. Lee started the coffee and then stood filling a pitcher at the kitchen sink, to water his plants. “Can I offer you anything else?” he asked Morrison, who was studying the table of bonsai and jade trees. “I was thinking of making some eggs. I took a walk early this morning, and I’m hungry enough to have breakfast again.”

  “Just coffee’s good for me, Professor, but please don’t hold off on my account. I’m the one who intruded on you. Please do make yourself eggs.”

  “That’s all right,” Lee said, although he was so hungry he was afraid for a moment that Morrison would hear his stomach, which was yawning and grumbling with a vigor Lee hadn’t experienced in at least a few decades. “And you’re not intruding. Like I said, I was about to call you.”

  While they waited for the coffee, Lee watered his plants, tipping a small amount into each pot all the way down the row and then starting again from the top, and at the same time he told Morrison the conclusion he’d reached. Morrison listened attentively—as Lee worked, he could feel Morrison’s gaze on his face—but he didn’t interrupt with questions, nor did he take notes. Lee’s notepad, he realized, was still on the countertop near where Morrison sat. When Lee was finished giving each plant a third splash of water, so that each drank its fill without overflowing—the pots had been almost dry, he’d been so absentminded—he was also done talking, and the coffee was brewed. “Milk or sugar, Agent?” he asked.

  “Please call me Jim, Professor. I’ll take it just like that, black.”

  “Then you must call me Lee, not Professor. I take it black, too.” When they were seated at the table together with their twin coffee mugs, Lee went on, “I know it must sound imprecise to you. But here’s where I can be of real help, like I said that I hoped I could be. What an outsider like you wouldn’t realize is that our field is very small. It’s true that I don’t know everyone, especially the younger professors. But if you took me and a colleague of mine at another university and a colleague of his at a third university, between the three of us we probably are familiar with everyone working in the field, at least on a cursory level. At that level it’s still very possible to assess for the presence of different factors. For example, lack of advancement, where advancement might have been expected. A bad publication record. Resentment of colleagues. Failure to get along on committees. You’d call it a profile, wouldn’t you?” Morrison’s expression was neutral, though not unfriendly, and it occurred to Lee that Morrison, like anyone in any field, was capable of feeling bested and threatened and that perhaps he, Lee, had stepped on Morrison’s toes. “Of course, this is your field, not mine. I just mean to say that I know my field, and maybe that can help you, in yours.”

  “It’s an interesting theory. Still, Professor Hendley wasn’t just a professor. No offense, Lee, but you might be seeing things too strictly in terms of Hendley’s professional life, since that was your relationship to him. It’s possible that his killer was motivated by a side of Hendley’s life that had nothing to do with his work.”

  “No offense taken at all. What you’ve said makes perfect sense. But I’m basing my theory of the killer not just on Hendley’s murder. I’m thinking of the attempted murder of Sorin Illich also.” For a strange moment, Morrison’s complete unresponsiveness, the high-stakes-poker blankness behind which his face was so suddenly and uncharacteristically hidden, gave Lee the irrational sensation he’d somehow gone too far. But then Morrison’s heavy black eyebrows belatedly jumped, as if he were surprised by an obvious point that had never occurred to him.

  “You mean the bombing at UCLA. A few years ago now.”

  “I assumed you would know all about it—”

  “I’m familiar with it. You think it’s the same perpetrator?”

  For the first time that morning, Lee felt a slipping of gears, a remote chance of error. “How could it not be?” he asked, hearing himself sound more plaintive than assertive.

  “I don’t know. You tell me.” Morrison waited encouragingly.

  “Well, Illich apparently is young—in the context of the academic world. You have to forgive us; our idea of youth is twenty years older than everyone else’s.” Lee tried a laugh, though he inwardly cringed at the way that it sounded.

  But now Morrison seemed deeply engaged, as if Lee had been in the midst of a dazzling Holmesian monologue, instead of just clearing his throat. “Go on,” Morrison said. “So he’s young, about the same age as Professor Hendley.”

  “Yes, but that’s not really the point. The point is his stature. His stature, relative to his age. In the context of our field, you could call him a hotshot.” Lee pretended to coin the term casually and then flushed, realizing that the word was inked in large, deliberate letters on the notepad, which sat at the edge of his vision—and Agent Morrison’s, he would guess.

  “You said Illich is apparently young. Don’t you know him?”

  “Me? I’d never heard of him until just a short time ago.” Lee immediately felt the lacuna in his own train of logic. “When I called him a hotshot, I meant he’s a hotshot more to the younger generation. I’ll admit it, at my age I have trouble keeping up with new work and the new applications, not just because I don’t try hard enough but because some of it is honestly beyond me,” and although these sentences could not have been more dismayingly true, Lee felt newly vulnerable, as if he’d been caught in a lie.

  “How did you come to learn about Illich, then?”

  “From an old colleague of mine who’s now at UCLA. I mean, old in age, too. A guy my age. Frank Fasano.”

  “This guy,” Morrison said, finally pulling the notepad from its unhidden, peripheral place so that it lay on the table between them.

  “He got in touch with me after Hendley was bombed. He heard about it on the news.”

  “And he told you about the Illich bombing from a couple years back.”

  “Yes.”

  “And here I thought he must be your prime suspect.”

  “No!” Lee cried, horrified, at the same time as Morrison began laughing.

  “I’m just kidding, Professor. You can’t blame me, can you? I was hoping you had it all figured out, so I could take the month off.”

  “But what do you say to my theory, honestly?”

  “Honestly? I think it’s very interesting. I need to give it more thought.”

  “What is your theory?”

  “I couldn’t even say that I have one, Professor. We try to stick to the finding of facts for as long as we can, before we let loose with the theories.”

  “Please, just Lee,” Lee reminded him. “That seems very reasonable.”

  Agent Morrison put down his empty coffee cup. “Do you mind if I revisit that restroom?”

  This time Lee did hear the roar of his plumbing. His stomach growled as if in response, and he remembered his hunger, but while the bare fact of hunger remained, the urgent, sensual aura of well-earned appetite, so wonderfully unfamiliar these days, had somehow leached away. He no longer cared if he ate eggs or wheat bran. Waiting for Morrison to return, he revisited this same waiting moment from their previous meeting, but viewed minus his fatigue and confusion. He thought of Agent Morrison’s footsteps, freely roaming the rooms of his house, and of the unflushed toilet, and of Shenkman—he remembered her name now—and her seeming hostility, in contrast, perhaps deliberate contrast, to Morrison’s friendliness.

  When Morrison came back into the room, Lee said, “What brought you here, Jim? I’m afraid I’ve been rude. You came here for a reason, and I’ve wasted your time with my Sherlock Holmes thoughts.”

  “Not at all, Lee. Your thoughts are interesting to me. And your house, I must say, is more pleasant than my motel room.”
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br />   Lee let out a brief laugh, remembering the agent’s similarly hollow compliment on his house’s layout. “Please,” he said. “You don’t have to say that. I’m aware that my house is…unattractive.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’m not normally so austere. My ex-wife took everything she could carry, as the saying goes. She only left the things that were worthless to her, like the chair that you’re sitting in.”

  “How did she manage that?”

  “How did she manage anything?” Lee demanded rhetorically, somehow forgetting, as his mind constricted to a single track again—because heartbroken rage and fatigue had many of the same debilitating effects—that he still hadn’t learned why the agent was here to see him. “With utter shamelessness and greed. You can see that she took everything. Even things she didn’t care about at all. Antique furniture, antique pictures. These old things I used to collect. Michiko didn’t care about those things. She just took them to spite me.” Lee noticed that Morrison, as if he were the host, had refilled both their cups; he took a long, acrid slug and was reminded of why he’d essentially given up coffee except for rare occasions on which he had guests. His heart was galloping again, perhaps a bit unevenly; a fresh sweat had come out on his temples, although the breeze in the room was quite cool.

  “I’m very sorry to hear it,” Morrison finally said.