Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  She is laughing. Very hard, the sound almost screechy as she leans over, hands on her knees. She finally pulls herself up by using a lamppost for support. “Oh, Misha, Misha!”

  I fail to see the humor. Or maybe I have slipped off the deep end and this entire scene is my imagination, because nothing is making sense.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I demand.

  “Oh, Misha, you are too funny!”

  “What’s funny?”

  “A spy? A secret agent? You mean, you seriously don’t know whose car that is?”

  Anger begins to replace my befuddlement. Garland men can bear anything except the embarrassment of not knowing something. “No, Dana, I don’t.”

  “I’ll give you a hint.” Still grinning, Dana actually wipes away a tear or two. “He’s more famous than your father.”

  “Okay, that narrows it down to a few million people.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t be like that. Listen. He lives out in Tyler’s Landing, in a big house right on the water, probably cost him four million bucks, which I suspect he paid in cash, just like he did for the car. He’s a student at the law school, and you’re right that he’s black, but that’s about all you’re right about.”

  I turn and look at the car. “Are you … are you telling me that the Porsche belongs to Lionel Eldridge? As in the basketball player?”

  “The former basketball player. He’s an ordinary student now.” Her tone is singsong, playful. “He just wants to be an ordinary lawyer, like his hero Johnnie Cochran. I heard him say it on Oprah. And also on 48 Hours. And Leno. And …”

  I keep staring as Dana keeps laughing. Lionel Eldridge. Sweet Nellie, as they used to call him back when he made the National Basketball Association All-Star Team seven times. Six foot six or so: that would certainly qualify him as the tall black man John Brown spotted in the woods behind my house. An earnest student but not a great one, not here, although he did better at Duke in his undergraduate days. Sweet Nellie, whose famous smile still earns him millions of dollars every year in endorsements. Sweet Nellie, who still owes me a paper from last spring. Last spring, when he struggled through my difficult seminar. Last spring, when I helped him get his job at Kimmer’s firm. Last spring, when I surprised the ladies at the soup kitchen and brought him with me one day to serve lunch.

  I have found my enemy.

  (III)

  ARRIVING AT MY OFFICE A FEW MINUTES LATER, I find something else, too: an envelope leaning against the door with my name and proper title typed on the front. It is identical to a package I received at the soup kitchen a thousand years ago, or maybe in October. When I tear open the top, I find exactly what I expect: the missing black pawn from my father’s chess set. I put it on top of the file cabinet, lining it up neatly, right next to the white one.

  One white pawn, one black. The only pieces on the chessboard that move in the course of the Double Excelsior. The white pawn arrived first to tell me that white moves first, and if white moves first in a helpmate, then black wins. It begins, my father wrote in his note to me. But, if it’s all the same to you, Dad, I would rather bring it to an end.

  With Dana’s help, I am about to make that happen. If all goes according to plan, I will be able to get rid of the burden my father bequeathed to me.

  Or so I foolishly imagine. But another disaster is in store.

  CHAPTER 48

  ZWISCHENZUG

  (I)

  I DID NOT EXPECT TO BE RETURNING to Washington so soon. The bad news reached me this time through Mariah rather than Mallory Corcoran, but I half expect to find Uncle Mal at George Washington University Hospital when I arrive, even though, as far as I am aware, he has exchanged perhaps five sentences with Sally Stillman in his life. In the brightly colored waiting room just off the elevator, I find instead my eight-and-a-half-months pregnant sister, along with Sally’s boyfriend, Bud, looking sullen and helpless, as strong men in despair do, and a tiny clutch of strangers, presumably waiting for news on other loved ones who have attempted suicide. Then a tall, nervous, terribly skinny woman, a representative of the paler nation, steps forward to introduce herself as Paula, Sally’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. I did not even know my cousin was in it.

  “She’s going to make it,” Paula assures me with a ghastly smile.

  I nod and clasp her arm and lay a hand, briefly, on Bud’s shoulder. Then I hurry over to sit next to Mariah, who is alone in the middle seat of a rack of three, shaking her head, elegant in another tailored pantsuit, having managed somehow to create around herself a secret space which nobody dares try to penetrate, other than such obtuse fools as myself. “You okay, kiddo?” I ask, taking her hand.

  “I don’t understand. I don’t know why she would do it.” Mariah rubs her belly, a gentle, loving circle, as though reassuring her unborn child that, contrary to appearances, the world is a safe enough place. My sister does not look at me. In her lap is one of her manila folders, the corner of a photograph peeking out. I wonder whether this is another view of the autopsy, or whether Mariah is up to something new. “She’s been doing so well. So well.”

  “At what?”

  “She was fighting it, Tal. She’d been sober for … oh, almost two months. Since just before Christmas. Giving her kids a present, she said. So she’s been going to all her AA meetings, going to church, working hard to stay sober.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  “I don’t know. She called Paula”—Mariah inclines her head toward Sally’s sponsor—“and said she couldn’t do it any more, she was taking pills. Paula did what she was supposed to do. When she realized she couldn’t talk Sally out of it, she called 911, then got over there herself, just in time to see them carry her out. Paula called me. I called you. And here we are.”

  “Where are Sally’s kids?”

  “They were with Thera when … when it happened. Sally took them to her mom’s house, then went home and took pills. I guess she didn’t want them to be the ones to find her.”

  I try to think of another useful question. “Did you call Addison?”

  Mariah gives me a look. “I’m sure he’ll be along when he can.” Then a return to the original theme: “I still don’t understand why she would do it.”

  “Was she depressed?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Unsatisfied, Mariah offers another variation: “I mean, Tal, she’s always depressed.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “They won’t let me. She … the doctor said she has to be isolated. Some kind of rule, I guess. Because of what she did. Tried to do. No visitors allowed for a couple of days or something.”

  I go over and check with the nurse and get the same information I already have: yes, it looks like Ms. Stillman is going to make it; no, we cannot see her for forty-eight to seventy-two hours. I allow myself the fantasy that Uncle Mal could get us in, but even superlawyers have limits. So Mariah and I sit side by side, hand in hand, bewildered, fearful, trying to be to each other what siblings should. My sister sheds no tears, although she seems on the verge a time or two. I reflect on God’s mysterious purposes, and marvel that my own problems, just this morning, seemed so huge.

  Paula is standing in front of us again.

  “Uh, excuse me.”

  We look up at her as though she has the wisdom of the ages on her tongue.

  “You’re Misha, right?” Paula asks slowly. Before I can answer, she turns to Mariah: “He’s Misha?”

  My sister manages to find a smile somewhere: “That’s one of his names. He has a whole bunch of them.”

  Paula looks confused. She is wearing a suit nearly as expensive as Mariah’s. Probably a lawyer, I decide, a specialist of some kind: she is too high-strung to be a lobbyist, and I cannot quite envision her in a courtroom, arguing cases. I see her chain-smoking while she designs complex tax straddles for overseas clients.

  “But you are Misha, right?”

  “Some people call me that,” I confirm. “My name is Talcott Garl
and. I’m Sally’s cousin.”

  “Can I talk to you for a minute? Privately?”

  Mariah is about to object, but I ask her with my eyes to let it be. Paula leads me off to another corner. I lean close because she wants to whisper. Paula explains that when Sally called, weeping, she just kept repeating that she couldn’t stand to know what she knew. When Paula asked what she meant, Sally mumbled, Poor Misha, poor, poor Misha. Paula pauses, perhaps to give me the chance to confess, and I assure her that I do not have the slightest idea what my cousin was talking about. Paula nods glumly, then adds that Sally told her one more thing before hanging up the phone: I don’t know why he had to get them both.

  I frown. “Who had to get both of what?”

  “I assumed she meant you. Because she started Poor, poor Misha again.”

  “That I had to get them both?”

  A curt yet inoffensive nod. “And she didn’t know why.”

  (II)

  MARIAH AND I SPEND THE NIGHT AT SHEPARD STREET. I am astonished that she has made this trip with her due date so near, but she turns out to have arranged a car and a driver for the six-hour trek each way. “It’s not that much more expensive than first-class air travel,” she explains.

  In the morning, we have a quick breakfast before I hurry home. Mariah wants to know why I am rushing, what I think of Conan pleading guilty, is it true that I punched out my wife’s boyfriend in the law library like she heard from Valerie Bing, what I am going to do about what she told me Warner said, a thousand other things. I tell her it will all be over soon and I will explain it all when I can. I brace for an acid commentary on my selfishness, but the approaching birth of her sixth child seems to have made my sister serene.

  “You be careful,” she says when the taxi arrives to take me to the train station.

  I promise her I will. I have to be. Despite this detour, the concrete situation, as chess coaches like to say, has not changed. When I am back in Elm Harbor, I will have one shot at ending it all and setting my family free.

  “Time’s up,” I whisper as the cab pulls away from the curb. The driver raises his eyebrows, perhaps thinking I want him to hurry. As we head down Sixteenth Street, picking up speed, I turn my head repeatedly, searching for the tail that has to be there.

  CHAPTER 49

  A PLAN IS CARRIED OUT

  (I)

  “I THINK I’VE FIGURED IT ALL OUT,” I tell an ostentatiously bored Mallory Corcoran on the telephone the following Monday. “The arrangements and everything. Tomorrow night I’ll have the answer.” He is delighted at the news and even more delighted to tell me he has another call that just can’t wait. He suggests I share the details with Meadows.

  “It’s all over,” I assure Lynda Wyatt when I encounter her, more or less on purpose, in the faculty parking lot that same afternoon. She tries to avoid speaking to me, but I am too fast for her. “By Wednesday morning, I’ll have all the answers.” There are still two days until her deadline, so she smiles and pats my arm, all the while looking around for the men in the white coats. On Tuesday, I continue my campaign. “I’ve solved the mystery,” I murmur to a bored Lemaster Carlyle, soon to be an ex-colleague, peeking over his shoulder in the library as he hunts for a periodical. He is sufficiently politic to force a smile and clap me on the back. “I know the whole story,” I announce to a startled Marc Hadley outside a classroom, where he stands happily, surrounded by a cloud of acolytes, their unswerving adulation having helped put his public humiliation behind him. “I think I can finally put it behind me,” I promise Stuart Land when we pass on the central staircase. “I want to thank you for your help,” I confide to little Ethan Brinkley during a chance encounter down in the courtyard. Only it is not really chance. “I’m on the verge of working out the whole thing.”

  I impart the same glad tidings, in more or less similar words, to Rob Saltpeter and Theo Mountain and Ben Montoya and Shirley Branch and Arnie Rosen and every other member of the law school faculty who might, even remotely, be connected to … to …

  … to the thing that’s going on…

  I don’t even have the words for it, but I know that it is there. As long as Dear Dana does her part, I will not even be a liar: I will know all the answers. I will even know who has betrayed me. Unless the betrayer is Dana, in which case I’m in serious trouble.

  I shake myself free of the feeling. I have to trust somebody.

  From my office, waiting for the right moment to act, I put in a call to Mariah, meaning to check on Sally, only to learn from Howard that my sister seems to be in the early stages of labor. They are timing the contractions. An ultrasound a month or so ago confirmed that the baby is a girl, and they have finally settled on a name: Mary, after Mary McLeod Bethune—an “Ma-” name like the other five, and just in the nick of time. Howard adds quietly that the lifelong Roman Catholic in him also approves. I laugh jaggedly. When Mariah gets on, I offer cheery best wishes. She thanks me, then groans, then recovers long enough to tell me that she and Howard have reserved space for Sally at a rehab center in Delaware, one of the best in the country. “We are not going to lose her again,” Mariah declares, grimly. For the first time in years, I realize how much I love my sister.

  Then it is time to get moving. I have to trust somebody, I tell myself over and over.

  (II)

  BUT I CANNOT TRUST MY WIFE.

  The day of my return from Washington, two days after discovering that Lionel Eldridge owns the ubiquitous Porsche—excuse me, Dana, the Porsche Carrera Cabriolet—I tracked down the owner himself, looking up his class schedule in the Registrar’s office, then stationing myself in the hallway outside Joe Janowsky’s employment discrimination class, waiting for Lionel to emerge. I had already tried the more traditional methods of summoning students—my secretary sent him e-mail, posted his name on what students call the “See me” board, called his house and left a message with his wife—but Lionel ignored them all. So I went to gather him in after his class.

  And I did, spotting him easily, because he towered over the other eighty or ninety students flowing out of the room at eleven. As usual, half a dozen surrounded him like a posse, awaiting the next precious pearl from his lips. When Lionel saw me, his eyes widened in what I knew to be fear. I gestured imperiously, the way professors do. He backed away, resplendent in navy blue leather and shiny gold. Just an ordinary law student. Worried about what Lynda would say if I shouted, I made my way delicately through the knot of admirers, took him gently by the arm, and whispered that I would like a few minutes. He may be Sweet Nellie, but I am still a professor of law, and one to whom he owes a paper, so he had little choice. We walked together to a quiet alcove near the Dean’s office. Other students gave us a wide berth. I noticed that Lionel kept his gaze mostly on the floor.

  First I asked him about his paper. A hopeful look flashed in his famous dark eyes. He began to make excuses—travel, his wife giving him problems, the culture shock of being at a white law school, as he called it, which, I suppose, makes Lem and Shirley and me white professors, sort of—but I cut him off. I told him coolly that he could have another month. If the paper was not in, I would flunk him. Lionel nodded and started to move off down the hall, certain, no doubt, that this threat was subject to later negotiation, as, these days, most things are. I held him in place with a light touch, the way police officers do, and he began to look alarmed. Glaring up at Lionel, I noticed the words DUKE UNIVERSITY stitched into the black leather of his jacket and remembered how he twice took his college team to the Final Four a decade or so ago. Although he has had his troubles in law school, I recalled from ages past the broadcasters’ reminding us all that he was an honor student.

  Then I pressed on.

  I told Lionel we had another matter to discuss. I asked him, point-blank, why he was following me around. I waited for him to confess that his secret girlfriend, Heather, asked him to do it, some kind of bizarre favor for her father. His response was puzzlement. He assured me he would never do s
uch a thing, so I rephrased the question. What was he doing in front of my house last week? And in the woods out back a few weeks ago?

  Now Lionel met my eyes, and even before he spoke, I knew I had guessed wrong, so terribly wrong. He was not my enemy after all, not, at least, in the way I had assumed. And he had obviously been in this situation before, because he knew exactly what to say, the worst words imaginable: It isn’t personal, Professor Garland. I like you. I admire you. Then he followed it with: I just like your wife, too. And the million-dollar smile at last.

  But by that time I already knew that Lionel had nothing to do with the arrangements or the pawn delivered to the soup kitchen or my beating in the middle of the Quad. I knew I was coming late to knowledge widely shared. I knew whose voice it had been on the telephone, calling my wife baby on the day she was supposed to be working at home and I was supposed to go to my office. I knew he called because he didn’t see the BMW in the driveway, where she always leaves it, and he wanted to know if their rendezvous was on. I knew why the students gave us a wide berth just now, allowing us to discuss our business in privacy. I knew what Dean Lynda must have thought was the unmentioned and unmentionable explanation for my irrational behavior, and why she decided to cut me a little slack. I realized that even Dear Dana Worth, from whom no gossip can quite be concealed, must have been aware of the truth, which was why she was so startled when I asked her about Lionel and Heather, and why she tried to pass it off as a joke when we saw the Porsche on the street outside of Post, so that her screechy, slightly wild laughter was meant to cover her pain at realizing that I had no idea, and she was not about to tell me, that it was the world-famous Lionel Eldridge, and not Gerald Nathanson, who was having an affair with my wife.

  CHAPTER 50

  AGAIN OLD TOWN

  (I)

  I AM ENDING MY MYSTERY WHERE IT BEGAN: in a cemetery. Was it really four months ago that Jack Ziegler emerged from the shadows on the day of the Judge’s burial to tempt me into this nightmare? Or was it only last week? In my recent confusion, not only truth and justice but time has seemed to turn in on itself, curving dutifully in the direction of gravitational pull—the pull, in this case, exerted by the mission, the desperate need to know.