Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “Mr. Corcoran thinks the Bureau is doing all it can.”

  “I see,” I mutter, although I do not. I am standing in my study, gazing out the window as I love to, wishing the late November sky would clear sufficiently to spill a bit of sunshine on Hobby Road. I draw in a breath, let it out, concentrate on not placing blame. Yet. “So, if the FBI is being so helpful, have they explained what Scott was doing out in that boat?”

  “Oh, he was keeping an eye on you, no question about that. He’d been following you for weeks, it sounds like.”

  “Swell.”

  Meadows laughs, but gently. “I don’t think you have to worry about him any more, Mr. Garland. If you see what I mean.”

  I make a small sound of assent.

  “The Bureau doesn’t think his friends had anything to do with it,” she continues, her tone conversational. She seems amused by the whole thing. “They were just fishing buddies from Charleston. One of them—let me check my notes—yep, ran a filling station. It seems Mr. Scott spun them some story about fishing in New England out of season, said he knew where they could get a boat … . Anyway, they went to the Island with him. They told the police that Scott had been drinking, and when he fell overboard and they couldn’t find him, they kind of panicked. So they returned the boat and ran off.”

  “But they came back.”

  “Later, when they were a little less drunk. But I don’t think that was until after they saw the story in the paper.”

  “So, did either one of them meet the description of … of Agent Foreman?”

  “I’m afraid not.” She actually laughs. “His friends were both white.”

  “Huh.” I remind myself of a tiny bit of wisdom from my own days of practicing law, that there are times when the story that sounds too good to be true is the story that is true.

  Meadows is still disgorging facts. “So, anyway, the Bureau raided Scott’s office down in Charleston. And guess what? They found his diaries and some files, and it looks like he told you the truth. Somebody did hire him to recover papers that your father supposedly had in his possession when he died. Unfortunately, the diary doesn’t say who hired him to do it, or what the papers were exactly.”

  “How convenient,” I mutter, suddenly quite lonely. Bentley is back at his preschool, Kimmer is back in San Francisco with Jerry Nathanson, and I have yet to venture back into the classroom. But for my wife’s possible judgeship, I would be tempted to take Dean Lynda up on her manipulative offer after all, and forgo a few more weeks. Of course, if Kimmer were not a candidate, the offer would never have been made.

  “Hmmm?”

  “If he wouldn’t trust the name of the client to paper …”

  “Oh. Oh, I see.” Enthusiastic. “You’re thinking about Jack Ziegler, I guess.”

  “That would be correct.”

  “Well, Mr. Garland, you shouldn’t worry about Mr. Ziegler. Mr. Corcoran told me you would probably think Mr. Ziegler had something to do with … with hiring Mr. Scott. Mr. Corcoran asked me to tell you that he spoke to Mr. Ziegler, and that Mr. Ziegler denied hiring Mr. Scott, and Mr. Corcoran says he is inclined to believe him.” I almost smile at the way Meadows is tripping over the need to call everybody “Mr.,” but Uncle Mal runs a very old-fashioned law firm. I wonder how long he will be able to get away with insisting on these little formalities, whether the new breed of lawyers—the ones who skip ties because their dot-com clients do—will put up with the Corcoran & Klein style. “He also asked me to tell you that he defended Mr. Ziegler in his perjury trial in ’83 and can usually tell if he is lying or not.”

  “How does he know he can tell?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind. Look. Could I speak to Mr. Corcoran myself?”

  “He’s in Brussels. But whatever you need, you can get through me.”

  I wonder whether Uncle Mal is avoiding me intentionally, foisting me off on Meadows in order to get rid of me, or if I am simply being my usual hypersensitive self.

  “But, hey, I have some good news for you,” says Meadows suddenly, ever chipper.

  “I could use some.”

  “Mr. Corcoran says that the background check on your wife has started. In fact, the Bureau will be sending a couple of agents to interview her in the next few days. And to talk to you, too.”

  “She’s out of town.” I am being quarrelsome for the sake of being quarrelsome. By rights I should be happy for Kimmer.

  “Oh, I think the Bureau will be able to track her down.” Meadows seems to be waiting for me to say something—thank you, perhaps—but I am in one of my bright red moods and am having trouble with good manners. “Anyway, Mr. Corcoran just wanted you to know that,” she concludes, deflated.

  Despite my efforts to restrain it, Garland breeding asserts itself at last: “That’s great news, Ms. Meadows. Thank you.” Or maybe I am just being polite because it has occurred to me that I need more of her help.

  “I had nothing to do with it. And, please, call me Cassie.”

  “Okay, Cassie.”

  “You’re certainly an interesting client,” she adds, and I can tell she is leading up to a hurried goodbye, to get back to serious work. “It’s been an experience.”

  “Wait.”

  “Hmmm?”

  I take a moment to select the right words. “Cassie, look, there’s something I was wondering.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” She is trying, I know, to stay friendly, but her sarcasm cuts near the bone. I hate seeming needy.

  “Because you’re good at your job,” I murmur, stroking her a little.

  It does no good. “What is it you want to know, Misha?” Very businesslike. She has no reason to take me too seriously, for there is plenty I have yet to unveil. I have not quite told everything to anybody. Not Kimmer, not Meadows, not Uncle Mal. So Meadows knows nothing of Angela’s boyfriend, let alone the peculiar repetition of the word Excelsior. The trouble is, I have to talk to somebody.

  “Well … you remember that Colin Scott said he was looking for some papers that a client left with the … with my father?”

  “Sure.” I have the impression that Cassie Meadows’s attention is on something else, work for a paying client, no doubt.

  “And you told me the FBI thinks it’s true?”

  “Mmmm-hmmm.”

  “Well, did you ever find out who?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Did you ever find out which client left the papers?”

  “Oh. Oh, well.” I have the sense that I have touched upon a delicate matter. “Well, Msha, I can assure you, the firm is going through its records with some care.” I wonder if she is the one who has been assigned to go through the records. So boring and thankless a task for a fast-track lawyer would certainly explain her irritation. “The process is pretty much complete. We haven’t found any indication of anyone who might have given your father any papers. But you have to understand, your father was an extremely busy man who did not generally have, uh, the kind of relationship with the firm’s clients that would lead to their entrusting him, and him alone, with sensitive documents.” Her uneasiness, even across the telephone line, is contagious. I get the message, the one I half expected: as far as Corcoran & Klein knows, the Judge didn’t have any clients. And I remember, suddenly and sadly, the moment at the funeral when Mallory Corcoran’s turn to speak came round. Standing before the thin congregation, his voice cracked and teary, he kept referring to the Judge’s greatness, repeating the word until I began to wonder whether he meant to imply that the greatness expired long ago, perhaps because the increasing wildness of my father’s politics had become more and more an embarrassment for a firm that once thought his name would positively glow from a letterhead already bright with former Senators and Cabinet officers.

  No clients, I register. The Judge had no clients. I make a little mental note, a knot in my memory handkerchief, and then I make another decision.

  “Does the firm happen to have any clients with �
�Excelsior’ in the name?” I ask Cassie Meadows.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  “Hold on,” she says. I hear the sound of a keyboard tapping and a mouse clicking, and then that distinctive blunk! sound that Windows generates (unless you know how to change it) when it cannot find what you are looking for. “Nope.” She pauses, clicks again, types, waits. Another blunk! “Not even in the confidential files.”

  “Well, it was just a hunch.”

  “Sure. The name just popped into your head.”

  “No, no, just something … something somebody mentioned about my dad.” I never lie well, least of all when I have no time to think.

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  Great. Now, where I was worried about generating irritation, I have created actual skepticism, if not distrust. Still, there is nowhere to go but forward, as the Judge loved to say. “I have one last favor to ask.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I’m serious this time.”

  “Okay, Misha, okay.” Somewhere during the past few minutes, Meadows began using my nickname, but she never quite asked permission. Perhaps Professor Garland is a bit too formal, but even Mallory Corcoran, who has known me all my life, calls me Talcott. I have not corrected her, because contemporary norms of conversation do not provide any tools for asking someone to be more formal in addressing you, rather than less. “One last favor.” She laughs briefly, high-pitched, reedy. “So, who do I pry information out of this time? The White House Situation Room? The CIA?”

  “No information. I have to be in Washington the end of the week for a conference on tort reform. I’d like to come by the firm and take a look at my father’s old office.”

  “There’s no point, Misha. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but the room is completely empty. There’s not even any furniture. I think one of the partners is getting ready to move in.”

  “I just need two minutes. But if you think it’s going to be a problem, I can call Uncle Mal.” Using the nickname to remind her that I have some clout with her boss.

  “No,” she says at once, “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Just call me in the morning whatever day you want to come up.”

  I tell her I will. Then, because I can tell she is getting worried, I assure her that I am through asking favors. This is probably a lie, and Meadows probably knows it. If only the dead bodies that are starting to pile up were not so conveniently and swiftly explained away, I might even leave her alone. Or maybe not. There is, after all, still the Judge’s cryptic note to decipher, but I have yet to mention it to Meadows or Uncle Mal. “I’ll try to behave,” I promise her.

  Meadows laughs.

  After hanging up, I sit irresolutely, wondering how much I really want to know. But after what happened on the Vineyard the only reasonable answer is everything I can. So I call my basketball buddy Rob Saltpeter and ask him to try to set up an appointment for me when I am in Washington at the end of the week. His contacts, in this case, are better then mine.

  “Sure, Misha,” says Rob. “Whatever will help.” But I detect in his voice, as in those of most of my friends lately, an emotion I have not previously encountered.

  Doubt.

  (II)

  A GRAY AUTUMN DUSK is falling, and I am standing at the kitchen window, watching my son at play. A little while ago, it finally occurred to me to try to reach Just Alma, down in Philadelphia, who predicted, in her confusing way, that people would be coming after me. But nobody seems to know how to reach her. Even Mariah, who keeps in touch with everybody, has only a street address, not a telephone number. I wonder, briefly, whether our mad aunt even has a telephone. Finally, I try one of her children, a social worker, who tells me that his mother always goes to the islands from December to March. He refuses, rudely, to give me a number for her, but does agree to pass along the message that I would like to speak to her. If he hears from her, that is; he assures me gleefully that he may not.

  I shake my head at the incivility of the world, even though I have shown the capacity to be a bit uncivil myself. In the old days, if I came upon my wife’s address book sitting open on the little table in the front hall, I might begin flipping through it without troubling to obtain her permission, pausing here and there to ask myself whether a particular underlined name was a contact, related to her career … or whether it was something else. I might even scribble down a few. Recently, Kimmer has become “teched-up,” abandoning her address book for a Visor Edge, and thus, intentionally or not, rendering her telephone list impervious to the scrutiny of her husband, who is irretrievably analog. (My wife sometimes accuses me, gently, of possessing “analog morality.”)

  Kimmer, whether she admits it or not, is a considerable star at the firm, and in the city’s legal community. She works much longer hours than I do, but also brings in two-thirds of our family’s income, which gives her a built-in advantage whenever I point out that her extravagant spending—clothing and jewelry and the car, mainly, but also fancy gifts for relatives back home—dents our already battered family fisc. She seems to think I should be quiet and uncomplaining as long as the money rolls in. Kimmer loves the practice of law, but our conversations about her job rarely extend any longer beyond I have to stay late tonight or I have a filing due. It pains me to realize how little I know of Kimmer’s working life, and how much her excitement over what she does for a living has become an additional barrier between us. Perhaps that is one reason I am so suspicious of Jerry Nathanson, one of the leading lawyers in the city and generally considered above reproach: when my wife speaks of her work with him, her eyes sparkle and her breath quickens. I wonder whether she displays as much emotion when, at the office, she speaks of me.

  Bentley, chasing a pigeon, stumbles over a tree branch. I stand very still, fighting the impulse to rush out the door to comfort him, and, sure enough, he comes up laughing. I smile, too. Back in September, over Kimmer’s strenuous objections, I began allowing him to venture alone into the back yard. Bentley was delighted. His mother, not yet over the pain of nearly losing him the night he was born, points out that he could fall and injure himself, but I have always believed in letting children explore, another hard lesson from the Judge, who preached that a few fractures and bruises are a small price to pay for a sense of wonder and independence. One of my father’s favorite applause lines was that the purpose of the state is not to create a society that is risk-free. His corporate audiences loved it because it implied less regulation of their products. His religious audiences loved it because it implied the fragility of our material lives. His college audiences loved it because it implied considerable freedom in their personal habits. None of his audiences quite realized, I suspect, how important a catharsis it was for my father to believe what he was telling them. And all of it, like his hard-edged conservatism itself, went back to the death of Abby.

  Before Abby was killed, my father was already a favorite of conservatives, but only because he was, as somebody once said, to his fury, a “reasonable Negro”—the kind of black man you might be willing to negotiate with. In the sixties, the Judge was not yet the dour, distracted, somehow depressing man you no doubt remember from his regrettable confirmation hearings. Even after Abby’s death, I have often thought, his career might not have taken the bizarre direction that it did, had he only experienced the emotional satisfaction of seeing her murderer—that was always the Judge’s word for the hit-and-run driver, and, by his lights, a fair one—seeing her murderer caught and punished. But the police never found a suspect. My father being who he was, my parents were regularly briefed by a senior detective: a few leads, he would tell them month after grueling month, but nothing concrete. The law had been the anchor of my father’s faith, as it was for so many civil rights lawyers of the fifties and sixties, and the inability of the vast machinery of American justice to find a sports car that killed one little girl first bewildered him, then angered him. He badgered journalists, belittled the police, and,
at the recommendation of friends, hired a private investigator, an expensive one from Potomac, whose supposed leads the police scornfully dismissed, to my father’s fury. He bearded friends in the White House, friends on Capitol Hill, even friends in the District Building, the shabby brown structure housing what there was in those days of the city’s government, and received in response only pitying condolences. He posted ever-larger rewards, but all the calls were from cranks. According to Addison, the Judge even consulted a psychic or two—“but not the right ones,” adds my brother, the radio talk-show king, who no doubt could have provided better names.

  As his ideas evaporated and his wrath mounted, my father spent more and more time locked in his study at Shepard Street. (This was before he knocked down the walls upstairs.) I would listen fretfully at the closed door, soon joined by Mariah, home for the summer from Stanford, neither of us sure whether there was something we should be doing. We would hear him muttering to himself, possibly weeping, certainly drinking. He passed the midnight hours on the phone with his few remaining friends, who began to avoid his calls. He ate little. He fell behind in his judicial work. He stopped playing poker with his cronies. My mother soldiered on in the manner of her class, hosting her parties, often alone, and representing the family at a variety of functions, always alone, but we children were terrified.

  When the time came for our annual trek to Oak Bluffs, Mariah, with a summer job in Washington, stayed behind, leaving me alone to suffer through what I truly thought was my father’s madness. I worried that it might be contagious, or hereditary. My mother offered endless tearful hugs and desperate reassurances, but no explanations. September arrived. Mariah returned to Stanford and I began my final year of high school. The house on Shepard Street became a single vast silence. The family spiraled downhill, and nobody talked about it. I stopped inviting schoolmates home. I was too embarrassed. Some nights, I myself stayed away. To my chagrin, my parents scarcely noticed. A year passed, a year and a half. I made my own escape to college. Now my parents had only each other for comfort, and their marriage—so my brother later assured me—came as close as it ever would to sundering. I spent most of my vacations away from Washington. I had no sense of being missed. And then, quite suddenly, the sea of melancholy in which the Judge was drowning dried up. I never quite understood why. All I knew was that the will of which he had preached throughout our several childhoods reasserted itself: he drew a line, as Addison later explained it, and placed Abby and the mystery of her death on the side marked Past. He came roaring out of his study like a recently uncaged animal, alive once more to life and its possibilities. He began to laugh and joke. He reawakened to his old goal of being the fastest writer on the court of appeals. He stopped his frightening new habit of drinking, and resumed his boring old one of interfering in his children’s lives. He seemed himself once more, and would not admit his momentary weakness had ever existed. So, when his old friend Oz McMichael, the cantankerous Virginia moderate who sat in the Senate forever, lost his own son to a hit-and-run driver, and dared suggest that my father join his support group of parents whose children had been killed the same way, the Judge curtly refused, and—this is still according to Addison—stopped speaking to the man altogether.