Emperor of Ocean Park eh-1

by Stephen L Carter

  “Yes. Yes, I did.” She waits. I hear the children whooping in the next room. Time to bite the bullet. “Thera, I have to get into Sally’s apartment.”

  “What, you think I’m just gonna give you the key?”

  “It’s important. I wouldn’t have driven all the way down here otherwise.”

  “What’s important? What are you looking for, Talcott?”

  “There’s something… something I think Sally has hidden in the apartment. Something that came from my father’s house. I need to find it.”

  “You’re saying she stole something?”

  I shake my head emphatically. “I think she was trying to help. I think she… thought she was doing the right thing by hiding it.”

  Thera’s eyes narrow. “Help who? Your brother, right?”

  “Why do you say that?” I fence.

  “Because when she was crying for days before she… before she tried to do herself in? She kept talking about your brother and what he had done to her.” A moment while we think that one over. Her next question takes me by surprise, but it is a mother’s question: “Is the thing you want the reason she had her breakdown?”

  “I don’t know. I think it might be… a part of the reason.”

  “If you find it, will you take it away with you?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And that’s why you want the key? So you can find it and take it away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait here.”

  Thera trudges off down the hall. I hear her asking the children to quiet down. She is back a moment later with a shopping bag. “I think this is what you want, Talcott.”

  She hands it to me. I look inside. I see my old raincoat, the one I loaned Sally the morning she snuck out of the Hilton. I turn toward Thera, on the verge of explaining that this is not what I am worried about at all, that I still need that key, when I realize that the bag is heavier than it should be. I delve once more and discover, at the bottom of the sack, Mariah’s missing ledger. I am about to protest that this still is not what I need. Then I unfold the coat and find, wrapped inside, the blue scrapbook.

  “Get that devilish thing out of here,” Thera orders me. “I knew it was from Satan the moment Sally brought it in. Can’t you feel it?” She shudders, wrapping her arms around her chest. “I should have burned it. It’s ruined too many lives already.”

  (III)

  I have not come this far to grow impatient. Like my brother, I do not really care about the ledger, for it holds no secrets any longer. Only the blue scrapbook draws me. But I do not look at it, not at first. Instead, I head north again, quickly reaching I-95. I zip along for another hour, watching the rearview mirror, wishing Maxine were here to advise me. But maybe she is. I finally stop at a standard-issue motel in Elkton, just inside the Maryland border, to spend the night. Dinner is a chicken sandwich from McDonald’s, after which I settle down at the not-quite-wooden table in the spartan room, fighting to concentrate through the reek of disinfectant. From the shopping bag I pull my ancient green coat, so badly wrinkled that the dry cleaner may not be able to rescue it.

  Then I remove the blue leather scrapbook and center it on the table.

  A thing of the devil.

  I remember the day I discovered it, the Friday after my father died, and my panic when I thought poor Sally might see it. Even then, instinct told me it was better that it not see the light of day.

  Well, now it is night, and I can open it and try to figure out what frightened Sally so thoroughly that, added to the other, obscene pressures from my side of the family, she tried to take her life. So, once again, I flip through the nasty pages, the catalogue of deaths of others than my baby sister, every one a hit-and-run, every one a tragedy for some family somewhere: all of these people, I am sure, were loved.

  Ugly, yes. But what were Sally’s words?

  I don’t know why he had to get them both. That’s what Sally said just before she took the pills. Paula, her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, assumed Sally was talking about me, because she also kept saying, Poor Misha. But maybe she didn’t mean me. Maybe somebody else had to get them both.

  I have made it all the way through the album again. The last pages are blank, because the Judge stopped collecting the clippings after he got well. But how did he get well? What led to the sudden change in attitude that my siblings and I remember so keenly?

  I flip back to the last clipping, the final item my father pasted into the book before he stopped. Like all the others, this one is a story of a hit-and-run accident. Phil McMichael, I record, Dana’s old boyfriend and the son of the Judge’s old friend Senator Oz McMichael, run over in his Camaro by a tractor-trailer rig.

  So? An interesting coincidence, but so what?

  One of my father’s crabbed annotations is in the margin. It takes me a moment to decipher it. Then I have it: Excelsior.

  Excelsior?

  Not a chess problem, but a page in a scrapbook? Or both?

  Wait a minute. Had to get them both.

  I begin to read the article, trying to figure this out. The first line of the third paragraph is underlined. Ironically, Mr. McMichael’s fiancee, Michelle Hoffer, was killed in a similar accident three months ago…

  My fingers are sweating as I fumble my way to an earlier page where, sure enough, I find a picture of Mchelle Hoffer, daughter of some other wealthy family, dead in a hit-and-run accident. And, right in the margin, the same word: Excelsior.

  The Double Excelsior.

  The folks in the car.

  The folks. A driver and a passenger.

  I can see Sally, sitting up in her apartment night after night, studying the scrapbook, trying to figure out why Addison wanted her to take it, waiting for Addison to call, which he never did. One day she hits upon the translation of the Judge’s cryptic handwriting and she soon understands the whole mess. And wishes she didn’t. So what does she do? She gives the book to her mother, trying to get it out of her life, trying to get the Garlands out of her life for once and all, but it isn’t enough. She knows what my brother is hiding, and what the Judge did, and, in her fragile emotional state, she tumbles right over the edge.

  No wonder the police did nothing about Abby’s death. Back in those days, nobody was about to go after the son of the most powerful Senator on the Hill. Certainly not for running over a black girl who had been smoking pot and was driving without a license in the middle of a rainstorm in a car that wasn’t even hers. Nobody would touch this case.

  Nobody except Oliver Garland.

  Nobody except Colin Scott.

  And it wasn’t just vengeance, an eye for an eye. There were two people in the car that killed Abby, and the Judge decided in his madness that he had to get them both.

  CHAPTER 57

  SOME PIECES ARE TRADED OFF

  (I)

  With the academic year over, our small city of Elm Harbor is empty once more. Or seems to be. In the summer, not only do the students and faculty disappear, but even the year-round residents seem to withdraw to some hidden refuge, as though they do not have jobs to attend to, buses to ride, checkout counter lines to fill. I stay away from the law school. I am puttering again, arranging my condo, trying to make it livable. I play a little chess online, listen to a little music, write a little scholarship. Swallowing my terror of flying, I visit John and Janice Brown in Ohio for a couple of days, but their family is too happy for me to bear for very long. I still talk to Mariah two or three times a week, but we have little left to talk about. I do believe she is in touch with Addison, but she will never tell me if I am right.

  I am waiting. I have set out criteria for action, and the criteria have not yet been met, so I am forcing upon myself a patience unfamiliar to my nature. I begin to keep a close watch on the weather reports, hoping for a hurricane, because only a hurricane will allow me to act.

  I continue to gather information. One morning I wander over to the law school library to look up a name in Martindale-Hubbell, th
e national legal directory. That same day I lunch with Arnie Rosen, to ask him a tricky question about legal ethics. The next evening I attend a dinner party at the home of Lem and Julia Carlyle-shortly to be Judge and Mrs.-out in the suburbs, but when I realize that the only other single person there is a smart, pretty black woman a decade younger than I am, the noon anchor on the local news, and that my well-meaning hosts have seated us together, I make my excuses and depart early. She is probably wonderful, but I am far from ready.

  Two days later, a group of conservative activists launches a public campaign for an investigation into “unresolved questions” surrounding the “tragic and suspicious” death of Judge Oliver Garland. Cringing, I watch the press conference on CNN, but only long enough to ascertain that no member of the family is involved; it pains me greatly, however, to see, in the midst of the crowd of conspiracy-hunters, the somber face of Eddie Dozier, Dana’s former husband. As a onetime law clerk to the Judge, and a member of the darker nation into the bargain, he is a shining trophy for the group, and they display him right in the front row. I steel myself for a barrage of press inquiries, in response to which I intend to make no comment, but few reporters bother to call. My father, dead eight months, is very old news, and not even my old friend Eddie, who worshipped him, can bring him back to life.

  At the end of June, I drive up to Woods Hole and ferry over to the Vineyard, my first visit since January. I take a few days to open up the house for the season-no vandalism this time-then return to Elm Harbor, by arrangement with Kimmer, to get my son. Back to Oak Bluffs again for three glorious weeks with Bentley, during which I treat him to absolutely everything I can. We spend hours riding the Flying Horses in the mornings, and hours playing on the beach in the afternoons. We eat every kind of fudge. We go to the playground every day. We walk the cliffs of Gay Head and the marshes of Chappaquiddick. We go to story time at the public library. We build a huge sand castle at the Inkwell. We wait in line at Linda Jean’s. We rent bikes and I begin teaching my son to ride a two-wheeler, but he is only four and, in the end, the training wheels stay on. We consume enough ice cream to fatten an army. I buy him sweatshirts and hats and toys. I buy him his first pair of deck shoes, and he wears them everywhere. This does not represent the usual spoiling of the child of estranged parents of means; I am not, at this moment, in competition with Kimmer for our strange, marvelous son’s affections; it is just that my unfinished business remains unfinished, and sooner or later I will have to finish it, and it may finish me first.

  In short, I am afraid I am never going to see him again.

  Kimmer calls to see how our son is doing, and also to tell me how happy she is. She seems to think I will be glad for these tidings. Mariah calls with the news that Howard is moving to another investment bank, where he will be vice-chairman and heir apparent. Just for moving, she confides, he will receive a bonus in the middling eight figures, although he will be required to plow much of it back into the firm’s capital. Not sure what response is expected, I tell Mariah I am happy for them. Listening to my sister’s joy, I wonder what middling means. I recall the line from Arthur: “How does it feel to have all that money?” “It feels great.” Something like that. Certainly Mariah sounds great, and she does not mention autopsy photographs once.

  Morris Young calls with a list of Bible reading assignments.

  I make a point of perusing no newspapers from the mainland. I never watch the news and rarely listen to it. I want to live in a tiny, impossible world that includes just my son and myself, and also my wife, if she would only return.

  Pathetic.

  Lynda Wyatt phones, effusive. “I don’t know what you said to Cameron Knowland, Tal, but he’s not giving us three million for the library any more! He’s giving us six! He doubled his gift! And you know what else Cameron said? He said that his son is a spoiled brat and it’s about time one of his teachers straightened him out! He asked me to pass along his thanks. So, thanks, Tal, from Cameron, and also from me. As always, I am so grateful for everything you do for the school, and congratulations. You have the makings of a dean, Tal!”

  Great. My academic standing is obviously on the ascendancy again, not because I have developed a stunning new theory in my field, but because I seem to be helping the Dean raise money, and lots of it. I do not mention to Lynda the flaw in her hearty analysis: I never got around to trying again to reach Cameron Knowland. The knowledge would only upset her. I will never be sure, but I will always suspect, that behind the doubled gift, possibly even supplying the cash, is the fine, mischievous hand of Jack Ziegler, who even now protects the family. I hope this doesn’t mean I owe him a favor.

  Dear Dana Worth calls with the news that Theo Mountain, her Oldie neighbor, has decided to retire. She is not reluctant to say it is high time. I share this sentiment, even though I do not tell her how glad I am, or why. I suggest that it will give him more time to spend with his granddaughter. But Dana has more to tell. She knows, it seems, how the plagiarism story got out. She has teased patiently out of Theo the fact that one more professor at the law school knew about what Marc had done. I see it coming before she is done.

  “Stuart?”

  “Bingo.”

  Of course. Stuart Land was the dean when Marc published his book. Maybe Marc went to Stuart after Theo came to him; maybe Theo brought Stuart in. Either way, it would have been Stuart who brokered the deal to keep Theo quiet, for the good of the school. It might even have been Stuart who extracted, in return for Theo’s silence, Marc’s promise never to write another interesting word. No wonder Stuart tried to get me to persuade Kimmer to drop out! He wanted Marc to have that judgeship because he could no longer stand having Marc around to remind him of what he had done. And no wonder Marc was involved in the cabal that threw him over! Oh, what a tangled web…

  “You can’t trust anybody around this place,” Dana chortles.

  “Except you.”

  “Maybe me. Maybe not. This place is a regular den of iniquity.” Another snicker. “You sure you want to come back?”

  “No,” I tell her honestly, although the other half of the truth is that I have nowhere else to go.

  Walking along the Inkwell with Bentley half an hour later, watching the financially advantaged of the darker nation at play, I fill in the rest of the story for myself. Theo told me that the Judge would have known Lynda Wyatt from his service on various alumni committees. But that service took place mostly under Stuart’s deanship, before my father’s fall. Stuart, not Lynda, was the Judge’s friend. Stuart might at some point have shared with him the story of Marc’s plagiarism; might even have consulted him from the beginning. For all I know, the final deal between Theo and Marc could have been my father’s idea. Either way, the Judge could have turned around and mentioned it to Jack Ziegler, maybe in passing, perhaps forgetting that Uncle Jack would catalogue every misdeed of every person of prominence on whom he could get his hands. Which would explain how Uncle Jack knew.

  Bentley is chasing seagulls, his arms outstretched as though he, too, can fly. I keep turning the facts over in my mind, seeking another fit. Jack Ziegler, I remind myself, is a man of his word. He said he would not interfere with my wife’s nomination, so I have to believe- have to believe-that Stuart, not Jack, tipped off the White House about Marc’s plagiarism. Because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. I do not want to think of what might have happened had Kimmer reached her goal, of how Jack Ziegler, or some surrogate, would one day have marched into her chambers and told her who got her the job, as well as who protected her family in a dangerous time, and what her new responsibilities were, and what would be revealed to the world if she tried to shirk. Turning her into the Judge’s successor.

  I tremble for the wife I still adore, and am suddenly thankful that Kimmer failed.

  (II)

  I do not know why the telephone will not leave me in peace. I field two calls from the law firm where I have been consulting, and one from Cassie Meadows, with the news
that the Bureau has no leads on the second gunman, but I do not need the Bureau to tell me who it was. Then Cassie whispers that Mr. Corcoran is worried sick about me.

  “Good,” I tell her.

  “Try to see it from his point of view…”

  “No, thanks.”

  “But, Misha…”

  “I know he’s your boss, Cassie, and you look up to him. But I think he’s a liar and a sneak.” Surprised, she asks what I mean, but I am too worked up to explain.

  Calls from the Registrar, reminding me to grade the rest of my ad law exams, and calls from two literary agents, asking if I want to do a book.

  Shirley Branch phones, but she does not have any news. Mainly, she says, she just wants to see how I am doing. And to tell me how much she still misses Cinque, her vanished terrier. I ask after Kwame. She sings his praises for a few minutes, exults about how no other mayoral candidate can save the city, although she does not specify what it needs saving from. Then she sighs heavily and confesses that Kwame is so busy campaigning for the role of municipal savior that they really do not see much of each other any more. Oddly cloying, the significance, when you are lonely, of hints so faint and tiny they may not be hints at all.

  But most of my attention is still lavished on Bentley. I teach him to fly a kite, badly, and how to swim, reasonably well. We check out a stack of beginner’s books from the public library at the top of Circuit Avenue; we might as well get started on reading, too. As we walk back toward Ocean Park, Bentley carrying most of the books like the big boy he is all at once becoming, I wheel in my tracks, sensing unwanted attention, but the sleepy side street lined with tumbledown Victorians seems no different on this sunny July afternoon than on any other, and if people are watching me, I will never pick them out.

  Bentley, eyes wide, asks if I am okay.