Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  She had to be talking about Duke Schneider. The Duke, as they called him, had passed himself off as Meisner’s cousin, in order to spirit him out of the seniors’ residence. Buy why? What did that mean?

  He didn’t even want to think about the implications.

  At that very moment, Jessica Woodruff was thinking hard about the implications of having been forced to bring August Jorgensen into the inner circle, the small group of people entrusted with the knowledge that the goal wasn’t to save Boyd Davies’s life at all, but to sacrifice it for a greater good. She was angry at herself for having given in, months ago, to those who thought Jorgensen would be the right man to bring on board. She hadn’t trusted him from day one; everything about him had suggested he wasn’t a company man, a team player. The guy was a hermit, for Chrissakes, a recluse. He lived in a goddamned lighthouse.

  “But that’s the beauty of it,” they’d told her. “He’s totally out of touch. We’ll be in complete control. We’ll wind him up and tell him what to do. He’ll be perfect. You’ll see.”

  Well, maybe now they could see what Jessica had seen all along - that August Jorgensen was nothing but a trouble-maker. Worse yet, he was a snoop. He’d snooped in to see Davies; he’d snooped around till he found Meisner, and then he’d snooped himself right into the screening session where they’d been watching a demonstration on how easy it would be to re-date Meisner’s statement.

  And that promise of his, that he was one of them. Who was that supposed to fool? And what if he was prepared to break his promise, as Jessica was convinced he was? What were the implications of that? That was what occupied Jessica’s thoughts now, sitting at her desk, as the city darkened outside her window.

  For unlike August Jorgensen, Jessica Woodruff wasn’t afraid to think about implications. Thinking about implications was what Jessica did best.

  Swiveling her chair away from her desk, she propped her feet against the windowsill and looked out over the city. It was an unladylike position, she knew, one she would have avoided during normal business hours when someone might have popped into her office unannounced. But the forty-ninth floor was all but empty now, except for one or two stragglers down the hall, and the cleaning personnel beginning to make the rounds.

  The forty-ninth floor. It was quite a view she had. To the south was the Empire State Building, beyond it all of lower Manhattan, with the Battery in the distance and the Statue of Liberty out in the bay beyond it. Off to the west, across the river and just above the lights of New Jersey, was the last visible glow of sunset.

  There were people who worked their whole lives in underground mines or basements or tiny cubicles that never saw the light of day. Jessica knew they would have given anything for a view of any sort, let alone the magnificent one spread out before her now. But as much as Jessica appreciated it, it never fully satisfied her. Because as spectacular as it was, when you came right down to it, it was still the forty-ninth floor.

  It wasn’t the fiftieth.

  But that was going to change. That was going to change after the discovery that an innocent man had been executed. It wouldn’t hurt, either, that the man happened to have been African-American, poor, and unable to speak, or that he’d been an extraordinarily gifted artist in his life. His death would cause the nation to rethink - and ultimately reject - the death penalty. And the credit for the discovery would belong to Trial TV, whose investigation had been spearheaded by none other than Jessica Woodruff.

  The book would follow, Jessica’s words coupled with the actual drawings of Wesley Boyd Davies. There’d be a small number of limited-edition copies, large and handsomely bound in real leather. An exhibit of the originals, nicely framed, might be in order, perhaps followed up by an auction, preferably at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. Then the movie, with - and this was the best part - Jessica playing herself. Denzel Washington might be good for the Boyd Davies’s role, at least the adult Boyd. Best supporting actor in a nonspeaking part? That was an interesting thought. But hell, they could get anyone to play Boyd; after all, the movie was going to be about Jessica, about her never-ending crusade to see justice done. And by the time the dust had settled, she wouldn’t just have an office on the fiftieth floor, she’d own the damn floor.

  Unless something went wrong.

  The way Jessica looked at it, there were only two things that could go wrong, two weak links in the chain. The first was Kurt Meisner, and if she’d understood the Duke correctly when he’d said that he’d taken care of the other thing himself, Meisner wasn’t going to be a problem.

  That left only one remaining weak link.

  From Roanoke, August Jorgensen had driven straight through to Charleston, his heightened adrenaline level compensating for his usual aversion to being out on the highway after dark. At the airport, he’d had to wait three hours for the Hertz counter to open, so that he could turn in the keys to the Ford Focus, reclaim his truck from the parking lot, and drive the rest of the way home. By that time running on fumes, he’d barely been able to keep his eyes open, but somehow he’d managed to make it across the bridge and onto the barrier island. On the final stretch, he simply held onto the wheel and let some combination of instinct, memory, and sheer luck guide him to the lighthouse. Turning off the ignition, he knew full well that he had to have driven the width of the island, but he had absolutely no recollection of having done so.

  Was that a case of autopilot, he wondered, or more accurately auto-autopilot? Or was that redundant? Jorgensen pondered it far longer than any normal person might have been expected to. He’d been noticing lately that whenever he was overtaken by exhaustion, he tended to lose his mind.

  Once inside, he returned Jake’s hugs and kisses, apologized for having been gone, and poured him fresh water and a bowl of food. Then he pulled off the clothes he’d been wearing for the past thirty hours, climbed into bed, and collapsed.

  It was nighttime, and he was driving down a two-lane highway, much faster than he should have been. The headlights of oncoming cars blinded him, and he fought the steering wheel to stay in his lane. He took his foot off the gas, but there was no reaction. If anything, the car just went faster. He reached for the clutch with his left foot, in order to gear down, but there was no pedal there, only flat floor. Then he remembered: He was driving the Ford Focus. Only it was even smaller now, so small that the steering wheel was touching his chest, and each time he turned it to the left or right, the bottom of it rubbed against his knees.

  Faster and faster he went, reflectors whizzing by every second, the dots of the broken white line disappearing beneath him. Α long down-stretch was coming up ahead of him, and he pressed hard on the brake, but the car continued to accelerate. He looked at the speedometer, saw the needle dancing between 90 and 95, thought about flinging open the door and jumping out, when - from nowhere - Kurt Meisner’s face was suddenly in front of the windshield, screaming at him.

  “THEY’LL KILL ME!” he shouted, “THEY’LL KILL ME!”

  There was a loud thud, followed by a second and a third, and Meisner’s head, ripped free from his body, bounced off the windshield like a soccer ball, disappearing into the night sky. Jorgensen felt something wet on his forehead, reached up with his hand, fully expecting to come away with blood, only to find instead that Jake was licking his face, trying to wake him. A pounding noise was coming from somewhere. It took him a long moment to get his bearings, and to realize that he wasn’t out on the highway at all, but in his own bed, and that the pounding noise was someone knocking on the lighthouse door.

  “Just a minute!” Jorgensen called out, but his voice was raspy and wouldn’t carry, and he had to repeat himself twice to get the knocking to stop. He found a pair of jeans and a shirt, pulled them on, and followed Jake down the stairs. He swung the front door open - it wasn’t locked; he never locked it - to find someone big standing there. But he couldn’t see who it was: The sunlight behind the silhouette blinded Jorgensen, forcing him to shield his eyes and retreat back inside. />
  “Who is it?” Jorgensen asked, cocking his head and squinting, but still seeing nothing but an orange fireball. “And what happened to the night?”

  “The night ended right around the time the sun came up,” said a vaguely familiar voice. “And it’s Chet Santee, here to help you put your boat in the water. Just like always, first day of April.”

  “What time is it?” Jorgensen asked.

  “Almost three in the afternoon,” said Santee, who was finally becoming visible.

  Almost three in the afternoon. Well, thought Jorgensen, at least that explained what the sun was doing in the West. He’d heard about people sleeping half the day away; he’d just never actually done it himself.

  “Want to get to work?” Santee was asking.

  “Huh?” Jorgensen had been momentarily distracted. Something about being behind the wheel of a speeding car, heading down a highway at night.

  “The boat,” said Santee. “You want to put her in the water, or not?”

  “Yes, sure. Why not?” Although Jorgensen was able to winch the boat up out of the water each fall, he had no way of getting her back in by himself.

  “I mean, if you’re not feeling up to it-”

  “Not to worry,” said Jorgensen. “I’m fine.” A face, suddenly appearing in the windshield . . .

  It took them less than an hour. Chet Santee had a mobile boat lift, a huge contraption that looked like a giant table he’d built from an Erector Set, and then gone and attached rubber tires to the bottoms of the legs. He fired up the engine, a noisy diesel that belched black smoke, and maneuvered the thing over the catboat, before shutting it off. Next, he unrolled a couple of big canvas slings from one side of the lift, ran them under the boat, and hooked them to the opposite side of the lift. Then he started up the diesel again. Using a panel full of levers that looked complicated enough to fly a jet plane, he raised the slings, gently lifting the boat clear of the wooden cradle that had served as her winter home. Finally, he drove the lift, the catboat now suspended between its legs like a toy, down the beach and right into the water, just deep enough to where the boat floated up off the sling, and Jorgensen was able to pull her free with a bowline.

  Jorgensen wrote out a check for $30, the same rate as always, though he suspected the lift used more than $30 worth of fuel just to get from the marina to the lighthouse and back again. Before Santee left, they sat and shared a pot of tea.

  “So,” said Santee, “I see you’ll be going up to Washington in a couple of weeks, to give a big speech before the Supreme Court.”

  Jorgensen nodded. Used to be a time when people heard news. Now, with all the TV-watching going on, news was no longer something you heard; it was something you saw.

  “Think you got a chance?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jorgensen. “I’ve got a feeling they may decide at the last minute to send someone else, instead of me.”

  “How come?”

  “Well,” said Jorgensen, “I’m not entirely sure. But it seems the folks who asked me to do it are having second thoughts. They’re starting to think it might be better all around if the guy got executed. It’s complicated.”

  “What’s so complicated about it?” Santee asked. “Man can’t talk, can’t read, can’t write. We got no business killin’ him. No two ways about it.”

  “You might think so,” said Jorgensen, “you might think so.”

  Ten minutes later, Santee was gone. And it occurred to Jorgensen that in spite of having shared his insider’s knowledge of Trial TV’s grand design, he himself was still among the living. The sky hadn’t clouded over, the heavens hadn’t parted, and no thunderbolt had struck him dead.

  So much for breaking promises.

  “He’s home,” said the voice on the phone.

  “It’s about time.”

  “Ya gotta unnastand - the fuckin’ guy lives at the edge of the fuckin’ woild. It’s not like I can be drivin’ by mindin’ my own bizness. A car goes out there, he’s goin’ to see it, you know what I mean?”

  “So can’t you go on foot?”

  “Ya gotta be kiddin’.” The Duke never went anywhere on foot. He’d drive to the toilet if it was more than two rooms away. “Butcha know what? Ya jes’ gave me a very innerestin’ idear.”

  “Wonderful. Do me a favor, will you? Just do whatever you have to do.”

  “Ten-four, sweetheart. An’ don’tcha worry that pretty little face ayours.”

  She hated when he lapsed into that police jargon of his, and started sweethearting her, and pretty-little-facing her. But for once, in spite of herself, she found herself taking some measure of comfort from his reassurances. Which, as Martha Stewart might say, was a good thing.

  Because they were rapidly running out of time.

  She listened for a dial tone and touched “I” on her memory panel. She waited through three rings and was about to hang up, when she heard a click.

  “Davidson.”

  “Hi,” she said. “Hi.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “Yeah. I’m stuck in traffic on the Merritt. What’s up?”

  “Well,” she said, “I was just thinking. Suppose the old geezer doesn’t do the argument.”

  “He’ll do it,” said Davidson. “He gave us his word. That means a lot to someone like him. He’ll be all right.”

  “Well, what if-”

  “Don’t worry so much, Jess.”

  “But don’t you think we ought to have a backup, somebody who could step in at the last moment, just in case?”

  “The thing’s nine days away,” he said. “Who are you going to get at this point?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’ll be fine. If he changes his mind, I’m sure he’ll let us know. Worse comes to worst, you can always do it. You know the case as well as anybody.”

  “It’s the last thing in the world I want to do.”

  “And you won’t have to. He’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

  They blew kisses from New York to Connecticut and back, and hung up. She loved him, she really did, but sometimes he could be so dense. Well, he might not be able to see Jorgensen’s true colors, but she certainly could, and she was taking no chances. So, like a good soldier, she was sticking her own neck out to protect her superior, thereby keeping him out of the loop and providing him with - what was the term for it? - plausible deniability.

  Wasn’t that how they were always doing it in the White House?

  Edna Coombs seemed more than usually glad to see Jorgensen when he dropped by the post office Monday morning. She had a biscuit for Jake (she still kept a generous supply of lollipops for children and biscuits for dogs behind her window; all others were on their own) and an envelope for Jorgensen, all red-white-and-blue and official-looking.

  “Came in Saturday,” said Edna. “Priority Mail, from New York City. I’d a driven it out to you myself, if I’d a known you were back from, from your trip.”

  Jorgensen briefly wondered how Edna knew he’d been gone, then dismissed the thought. Edna was the local Information Center. If there was something she didn’t know about, chances were it hadn’t happened.

  Now she smiled and said, “That’s the one you were waiting on, right?”

  “Right,” said Jorgensen, not wanting to disappoint her. Actually, the return address was that of Tulane University, and typed in above the printing was the name “Reynaldo Gilbert.” That would be Ray, the law professor. He’d been at the screening of the Meisner tape, or at least he’d been in the conference room when they laid out their little plan for Jorgensen.

  Ordinarily, Jorgensen took his mail home before opening it, as much to frustrate Edna as to read it when he was good and ready to. But on this occasion he decided to open the envelope right then and there - well, off to the side a bit - just in case it called for an immediate reply or a phone call. He had no desire to drive back in the afternoon, Edna’s cheerfulness notwithstanding.

  He’d torn open the envelope,
extracted a one-page typed letter, and gotten as far as “Dear Judge Jorgensen,” when Edna whispered from her window (and an Edna Coombs whisper could be heard halfway across the Atlantic, when she wanted it to be), “Good news, I hope?”

  “Seems so,” said Jorgensen, as he read on. “They’re coming out here Wednesday - three of them, it sounds like - to teach me the Constitution.”

  “Teach it to you?” said Edna, with more than enough indignation for both of them. “I always thought you wrote the damn thing.”

  It was only on the drive back home that Jorgensen thought to look at the date on the letter (the envelope itself he’d discarded before leaving the post office, having no need of extra trash). “March 29,” it said. Meaning it had been written, and no doubt mailed, the day before his New York adventure.

  He wondered if they were still planning on coming. It would serve as a good barometer of things, he decided. If they showed up, it meant they trusted him and were going to let him argue the case next Tuesday. If they didn’t show, it meant he was out of the picture.

  He crossed the bridge that separated the mainland from the island, slowing down as he drove through the dune grasses. It was nesting season, both for birds and turtles, and he didn’t want the truck to disturb them more than necessary.

  Still, as he rounded a bend, a woodcock (or it might have been a plover of some sort) suddenly took flight in front of them, rising perilously close to their windshield. Jake barked, Jorgensen braked, and the bird somehow escaped untouched. But Jorgensen’s heart kept pounding, and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking the entire way home. The rest of the dream had come back to him in a rush. Now all he could see was Kurt Meisner’s head, bouncing horribly off the glass and careening into space. And all he could hear was, “THEY’LL KILL ME! THEY’LL KILL ME!”