A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  The car stayed with him all the way to the Wagon Wheel. A few of the times he managed the increasingly spasmodic flicking of his eyes to the rearview—he would feel his Nissan twitch to the right in tandem—it seemed to have gone, but then, the next time he looked, it was back, unless it was replaced by another white car that was almost the same. He couldn’t tell what the make was. It only looked very generic, and new. Then he pulled into the Wagon Wheel parking lot, at five o’clock occupied by just two other cars, and the white car continued, whispering out of sight down the riverside road.

  Lee felt he could hear—as if it had quavered a note upon being drawn taut—the thread linking that car to the letter from Gaither.

  He’d arrived at the bar with an hour to spare, meaning to translate his thoughts into the briefest and clearest and calmest speech possible, but he had no idea where to start. He thought of the way Gaither had changed, all those decades ago, how the mild, plainly handsome young man, whose feelings Lee had feared he might injure by rebuffing the church invitations, had abruptly shape-shifted into a grim-jawed patriarch of revenge. The ruthless campaign he had waged for his child, his sanctimonious, cold condemnation of his wife and her lover…This didn’t help Lee to make his thoughts calm. While he sat there gripping his keys and staring out the windshield, a heavy man emerged from the bar, climbed into one of the two other cars, and drove off; a young man arrived on foot, passing Lee’s car very quickly and heading inside as if late; and a new car pulled in. It was Rachel. Lee saw her turn off her engine and sit, gazing forward at nothing. Then she raked one hand through her short hair, checked herself in her mirror, and got out. Seeing Lee brought her up short, visibly dismayed, and Lee understood that she had come to have a drink ahead of him, to be established, even fortressed, in the bar as he arrived. In a sense this had been his intention, too.

  He got out also. “We’re both early,” Rachel said, resuming her approach. He saw that she was striving for courteous lightness, as if the occasion of their meeting were no stranger than the weekly colloquium, but he could no more emulate her tone than he could stop himself saying,

  “I know who killed Hendley.”

  She recoiled, clearly horrified; she managed mostly to conceal her reaction, but it registered as anger in her face. “Really,” she said, as if unveiling the murderer were somehow as foul an act as the murder itself.

  “We should go in,” he said, and though her face hadn’t recovered—it was the face she had shown him that morning—she let him lead her inside.

  The only patron was the young man who’d arrived on foot. He sat at the center of the bar, nursing a beer, and didn’t look up at them. Nevertheless, Lee chose the most remote booth, and it was only after he was seated in it, hunched by instinct away from the bar and the door, urgently poised to unravel his story, that he remembered it was the same booth Rachel had sat in the day of Hendley’s memorial.

  “Don’t you want something?” she interrupted, as he drew breath to speak. She seemed less solicitous than suspicious of him, for not hewing to the conventions.

  When they were seated together again in front of his Black Label and her glittering tumbler of syrup—he guessed it was bourbon—he told her, as clearly and as simply as he could, who Gaither was, how and when he had known him, and why he imagined that Gaither had turned to violence. She didn’t interpose any comments or questions, only sometimes pushed her chin forward, with her head slightly turned, which he belatedly realized was her way of telling him to speak up. Even so, he spoke just above a whisper. The young man at the bar still had his back to them, but to Lee it seemed almost a conspicuous show of noninterest.

  “Why haven’t you told the investigators?” Rachel asked when he was finished.

  “I did. I told them ‘Lewis Gaither,’ but they weren’t satisfied. They think I’m not telling them the right person. Now I realize this can’t be his name anymore. He wouldn’t contact me if he knew I could just point a finger and say ‘Lewis Gaither.’ He can get me, but I can’t get him. He’s cast a shadow on me, and I can’t even see where he is.”

  “Are you saying he’s done this on purpose, to hurt you?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s done this—killed Rick—to hurt you.”

  “Yes,” he repeated, with even more emphasis, feeling only the gladness of gears meshed at last, of sharing with Rachel his terrible realizations. He saw something pass through her, like bad weather under the skin. Only then did he understand that to her there might be something unwelcome in the idea of her lover’s death as a mere utensil, the vehicle for a vendetta between other men.

  A little of her drink had splashed onto the table. “I’m sorry,” she said, snatching her hands toward herself in a gesture of withdrawal that continued, in clumsy extension, until she was suddenly standing up out of the booth. “I’m not up for this. I’m very sorry. I need to go.”

  It was one more bewildering snag, perhaps no worse than the voracious student gossip, which had clearly found its echo among faculty, and no worse than Littell’s opportunism or the “reclassification” of his polygraph test, but because just a moment before he had felt forward movement, the fresh setback affected him powerfully. “Wait!” he cried, lunging after. “You have to help me. Help me!”

  He’d forgotten all about the bartender, whoever that was, and about the young man who’d been hunched at the bar, seeing only the young woman’s back as she tried to escape him, and in any case now they were outside again, Rachel gripping her car keys as if she thought Lee might attack her. “You’re trying to tell me that you’re being framed?” she said, turning abruptly. “So this Gaither person wrote the manifesto. He wrote this screed of irrational, cowardly hatred for computers and the people who work on them. It doesn’t quite suggest that applied mathematicians like Rick or Neal Kalotay shouldn’t get tenure, but it might as well have.”

  Lee couldn’t follow this sudden barrage; he remembered the day she’d erupted with tears, the day she’d seemed to fling open the door to her soul, in the very same bar they’d just left. “Gaither always was a fanatic. He failed at mathematics, he never got his degree, and this must enrage him. But I’m not sure what he says in this manifesto. I haven’t read it myself—”

  “Oh, you don’t have a copy?” she sneered.

  He could see, from the irrelevant comment, that her passions had scattered her thoughts. All his past combat with Esther rushed to counsel him now. The moment’s unmerciful pressure seemed to unlock his brain, and he understood several facts simultaneously: that Rachel was hardly older than Esther, not yet thirty; that the death of Hendley was the first tragedy of her life; and that for both reasons she disliked what she took as a shift in attention, from her situation to Lee’s. She was failing to grasp that Lee could help her to justice and vengeance, if she could help him to thwart Gaither’s game—the diabolical efficiency of which had been webbing his movements for weeks; he felt the confines of the trap only now that he’d begun thrashing. Panic threatened to stampede over all his deductive achievements. “The FBI can’t see the truth, Gaither’s made sure of that. Yes! You’re right to say he’s framing me,” the simple word for what was happening to him solidifying now that she’d said it, like the crystal whose hard edges and facets surprisingly spring from a cloudy solution. For a moment his heart jerked with hope; she would be his ally after all.

  A cross between pity and horror distorted her face. “You’re scared, aren’t you,” she said. “Now that everyone thinks it was you.”

  Again she’d swept aside all the murk and delivered a verdict, but this time Lee was so shocked by the world she revealed, the unthinkable process already elapsed, he could not even speak. He might have been shot and wound up somehow stuck to the line marking life off from death. He was still there a long time after Rachel had driven away.

  19.

  A FEW MINUTES PAST SEVEN THE NEXT MORNING, HE grew aware of a gathering, cars arriving, doors opening, indistinct voices joining together.
He hadn’t slept at all that he was aware of, had not even moved from the armchair to bed. As if at a primal signal, he stood up from the chair, his blood surging, and locked himself in his downstairs bathroom. He showered rapidly, scattering soap gobbets onto the walls. He slashed his razor over his face. He stubbed his toe but didn’t feel it, roughly yanked on clean clothes. The tableau of himself and Rachel in the booth at the Wagon Wheel some twelve hours before floated past, isolated and unexplainable. The doorbell rang, and in the action of answering it he had the sense of producing, himself, the procession that bore down on him, the way a magician pulls a colorful handkerchief chain from a hat.

  It was Agent Morrison who served him the search warrant. “Professor, for your own privacy I would suggest that you sit in the back of your house, in your bedroom or kitchen, with the blinds drawn, until we’re all finished. Members of the media have accompanied us here, unfortunately.” Morrison’s tone of voice suggested he and Lee had never met except perhaps on the most bureaucratic occasions. A small herd of purposeful adjuncts, in zipped jackets and gloves, were pouring through the door. Lee had the detached, uncertain thought that there were far more purposeful adjuncts than there were household objects, even if they counted his forks and separated his laundry. Outside, he saw his neighbors clustered excitedly at the edge of his lawn, a few of them nodding as they spoke to those reporters who weren’t otherwise preoccupied with shifting and positioning their cameras. So here at last were the TV reporters. It had only been weeks since he’d spoken to them with such facility and passion outside the hospital in which Hendley lay dying, and yet he felt he had never seen anything like them before. Burly, potbellied men looking slightly cycloptic with the lenses of cameras hitched onto their shoulders, and other men probing the air with long poles baited with microphones, and still other men, and a woman, microphone-poking their ways to and fro, trailed by people unfurling long cords, as Lee did every once in a while when he vacuumed his carpet. Lee found himself transfixed in his doorway, his just-showered body a fountain of sweat.

  “What are we looking for, Agent?” a reporter was shouting.

  “Professor, please get out of the way,” Agent Morrison said from behind him. “I would really suggest you get out of the doorway and sit in your kitchen.”

  Lee stared at the cycloptic eyes, which stared patiently back. Several people were asking him questions. He shook his head, stumbling over himself as he groped his way back through his front door and into the living room. When he reached his picture window, he pulled aside the curtain, as if this view might be different.

  The cameras seemed to content themselves with his oddly forgotten form, sweating and blinking on the far side of the window screen and otherwise utterly still as behind him the drawers to his telephone table were emptied, then the few shoe boxes of recent miscellanea—disputed bills, replacement batteries not yet replaced—then the single bookshelf on the staircase landing, then even his desk—from his spot he could only have heard this, but he seemed to float upward so that he could see, as the searchers swarmed into that room, their movements eclipsing and revealing and eclipsing the sparse little tableau on the desk’s leather surface, the papier-mâché candy dish and the photograph of Esther in the faux-stained-glass frame. Another photograph of Esther, from a year later, hung on the wall. They were small windows onto the last year before Aileen left. The two Esthers, only slightly different from each other, seemed to gaze at Lee expectantly, and he seemed to gaze back, as the jacketed forms crisscrossed in the foreground, though he still hadn’t moved from his spot in the living-room window.

  “Get out of that window and sit in the kitchen; you’ll be more comfortable,” Agent Morrison said, passing by.

  There was so little; he could sense them thinking that, pawing over it impatiently like dogs. For a man in his seventh decade, where was all the stuff? Had he hidden it? Driven it out to the country and buried it? The dull truth was, he’d been a thrower-away all his life, and if he hadn’t pitched it, then someone had taken it from him. Everything that most mattered to him could fit in his briefcase. Esther’s pictures and her shoes, and a handful of papers. He had a single, two-drawer filing cabinet in the corner of his study, gray and ugly and almost entirely full of transient items, household records that apart from those concerning his mortgage he’d throw away in a couple of years, bank statements and paid bills and tax stuff, but in the back there was a slim clutch of items concerning Aileen. Their divorce papers, and the letter she’d written, from before they were married.

  Time seemed to have stuttered. He had remembered those things, and then, without meaning to, he’d burrowed deep into himself, and now he resurfaced, to see the two-drawer filing cabinet as it was borne downstairs and out the front door.

  “Wait—” he said.

  He had also been remembering, somewhere in the midst of that temporal glitch, the first of Aileen’s collapses, when they hadn’t had any idea what was gathering in her. The paramedic had been shouting out her blood pressure as it nosedove, numbers plummeting second by second, and Lee had been screaming incoherent imprecations and wrenching Aileen’s bloodless hands, and all around them had been the sort of pandemonium no sane person associates with the salvation of life. It had looked like life’s utter unraveling, as this present scene did: the very last things roughly yanked from their moorings, Aileen falling from him, white as ash, while syringes and tubes flew around. But Aileen shuddered suddenly, and the oxygen mask dropped off her face, and she said to Lee, with a sort of amazement, “I’m not scared at all.” It hadn’t been the beatific acceptance of death; later she’d told him it was just that the worst had arrived, and she wasn’t afraid. “You know: ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself.’” I’m not scared at all. For his part, Lee had been so terrorized it was surprising his heart hadn’t stopped. Yet now he thought he might understand, as he watched his house being dismantled: when disaster’s thumb bears down on you, there’s a peace to that pressure. The worst isn’t coming, it’s here. And there’s nothing left to fear.

  Except this loss. “Wait,” he cried, plunging out the front door in pursuit. He felt a hand grip his wrist, like a cuff.

  “Professor,” Morrison said. “I really think you’d be more comfortable if you sat in the kitchen.”

  It disappeared, that downpressing thumb, Aileen’s fearless peace—why couldn’t he keep hold of the least goddamned thing?—“I need something out of there,” he gasped, making for the cabinet as it was borne across his freshly mowed lawn. His free arm pinwheeled ridiculously—Morrison had him firmly by the other wrist. “Get your hands off me!” Lee shrieked.

  Herky-jerky they danced with each other on Lee’s welcome mat for the avid cameras, straying perhaps five steps from where they had started before moving back, the big agent with the filing cabinet having turned to give a glance to the scuffle, turned away, resumed his steady, laden steps toward a truck at the curb like a professional mover; he paused again at a fresh cry from Lee and met Morrison’s eyes, so that now the three of them stood on the lawn in an oval of news cameramen, the fish-eyes of the lenses turned on them and the long fishing poles—the booms, Lee would learn—following with their microphone bait, while at the same time the petty procession of old-bill-filled shoe boxes and calculus textbooks and much of the basement—cardboard evidence boxes into which had been whatever-way hastily dumped crescent wrenches and pliers and hammers and drill bits and C-clamps and random scrap ends of lumber from a shelf-building project of ten years ago and slivers of balsa and dowel from a dollhouse-building project of twenty years ago and coffee cans of loose nails and a four-fifths-full sack of lawn fertilizer and countless other things he never could never have named, staring at the stripped space, until he read the newspapers—continued, the steady annoyance of the box-bearing agents and the steady obstructiveness of the unmoving newspeople a happy symbiosis despite the pro forma shouts of, “Please move, you are on private property, move to the curb,” despite the stubborn evas
ive response of, “What are we looking for, Agent? Is this what we’re looking for?” A gray filing cabinet of telephone bills and the voice of a woman long dead?

  Lee’s previous TV appearance had been on its surface entirely different, but perhaps at some more basic level exactly the same. The first time he’d been a Hendley-envying, rattled bomb victim transformed into selfless and eloquent hero. This second time he was even more simply himself, and turned into a criminal.

  Restrained by Jim Morrison’s hands, he watched the gray filing cabinet vanish into the truck. The cameras watched it also, as they’d watched other items, although when the breaking news aired in a couple of hours, the clearly mundane things—the school textbooks, the can opener—would be edited in favor of the opaque evidence boxes, the opaque filing cabinet. Also not to be shown was Lee shaking his head very slightly, in acquiescence, so that Morrison unhanded him. Lee walked back into his house, and then into his bedroom, where the agents were done, and observed the tawdry appearance of his ungarnished bed, a mattress and box spring on bare metal frame with four scuffed plastic casters clawed into the carpet. His armchair appeared to have been reupholstered with threadbare dish rags. His dark wood dresser and his antique floor lamp did not elevate the generic cheapness of the room so much as suggest they’d been burglarized from more tasteful surroundings. The dresser’s drawers were yanked out, dripping unfolded clothes. A basket of laundry was dumped on the floor. A dizzying shame overwhelmed him, that so many strangers had seen the squalor of his bathroom.

  Lee closed the door and crept onto his bed. He hadn’t pressed the button of the lock; he was afraid he might be reprimanded. He heard the thump of feet and the shifting of objects. No one pursued him, to put a camera and microphone close to his face. No one needed to, having already captured him lunging and twisting in Morrison’s grasp and then crazily yelling, “It’s none of your goddamned business!”