Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 39

Mallory Corcoran calls just past ten with the news that Conan Deveaux has decided to plead guilty to a single count of second-degree murder in the death of Freeman Bishop. He and his lawyer looked at the evidence and decided the stack was too high. Under the plea agreement, Conan will escape the needle, but he will remain in prison for the rest of his life. “He’s just nineteen,” Uncle Mal adds gruffly, “so that’s likely to be a very long time.”

“So he did it,” I whisper, wonderingly. I am at the kitchen counter, where I have been leafing through Chess Life while making hot chocolate for Bentley. How could I have misunderstood Maxine’s hint so badly? A mistake. Could she have meant something else?

“Probably.”

“Probably? He just volunteered for fifty years in the penitentiary!”

Uncle Mal insists on a seasoned lawyer’s pedantry: “If the choice is life in prison or execution, you take what you can get.” Then he is an old friend once more: “But, seriously, Talcott, I’m sure he did it. Please put your mind at rest. From what I hear, the case was a prosecutor’s dream. They had a witness, they had forensics to place him at the scene, they had a print or two, they had him bragging about it later. I know you thought maybe it was a frame-up, one of your sister’s conspiracies or something, but this is a little too much evidence for somebody to manufacture.”

Still marveling, I say goodbye and carry two mugs of cocoa into the family room, where Bentley is sitting at the computer, playing with a math game in which he collects little pictures of candy if he can zap the numbers that correctly answer the questions dancing around the screen. So we can teach him the virtues of gluttony, greed, and violence all at once, while also improving his score on the math SAT he will have to take in about twelve years.

Watching him now, so engrossed he does not realize his father is near, I settle myself on the sofa and put the cups down on the coffee table. We all enjoy this room. The furniture is leather, a sofa and a loveseat and a chair, drawn together by a fake Oriental carpet-it is really from Sears. Built-in bookshelves of solid maple, painted white, surround a crumbling fieldstone fireplace; another shelf snuggles beneath the window to the back yard. There are books on politics and books on jazz and books on travel and books on black history and books reflecting our eclectic taste in contemporary fiction: Morrison, Updike, Doctorow, Smiley, Turow. There are children’s books. There is a Bible, the blandly inoffensive New Revised Standard Version, and the Book of Common Prayer. There is a collection of C. S. Lewis. There are home-improvement books and back issues of Architectural Digest. There are a few chess books. There are no law books.

The telephone rings again.

Bentley looks up. I point to the hot chocolate. “Mint, Daddy. Bemmy drink mint.” In a minute, he means.

The phone is not ringing any more. I realize that I picked up the receiver but, because of the byplay with my son, have not actually put it to my ear. I do so now, and immediately hear the static of a cell phone with a low battery. And a male voice:

“Kimmer? Kimmer? Hello? You there, baby?”

“She isn’t home right now.” My tone is as frosty as I know how to make it. “Would you care to leave a message?”

A long pause. Then a click.

I close my eyes, swaying a bit on my feet as my skillful son zaps numbers faster and faster. The years peel away, as does my confidence, and most of my hope. How many times over the course of our marriage have I fielded calls like this one-a mysterious man asking for my wife, then hanging up when I answer? Probably fewer than I think, but more than I would like to recall. Oh, Kimmer, how can you do this again!

You there, baby?

I fight down a wave of mind-blanking despair. Concentrate, I tell myself. In the first place, the cadence of the voice tells me that it was a black man-in other words, not Gerald Nathanson. A new affair? Two at the same time? Or my mistake, as Dr. Young suggested? No way to tell, not till my wife and I fight this one out, as, sooner or later, we will. I cross to my study, looking for a distraction. The voice was familiar, that’s the other thing. I cannot quite place it, but I know it will come.

You there, baby?

Odd the way the immediate concerns about a dying marriage can knock worries about torture and murder and mysterious chess pieces right out of the box, but priorities are funny that way. I plop down in front of my computer. Who would be so arrogant, I wonder, and so stupid as to say the word baby when calling a married woman he is not even sure is home? I shake my head again, the mixture of fury and fear and sheer nerve-racking pain momentarily crowding out every rational thought. I want to scream, I want to throw a tantrum, maybe even break something, but I am a Garland, so I will probably write something instead. I am zipping through my files, trying to decide which unfinished essay to exhume for a little pointless polishing, when my eyes are drawn to a car sitting across the street.

The blue Porsche.

The driver, a shadow behind the windshield, is unmistakably staring right at our house.

I run down a menu of options but choose the one that, in my current mood, I like the best. From beside my desk I take the baseball bat I hid there on the night I was attacked. I poke my head into the family room and tell my son to stay put. He nods, fingers clittering furiously at the mouse, winning huge piles of candy as he solves math problems. He may not talk much, but he certainly can add, subtract, point, and click.

I pull a light jacket from the closet, then yank open the front door, brandishing the bat, swinging it against my palm, so that the driver, whoever he is, can hardly miss it. I cannot do what I really want, which is to cross the street and smash up his Porsche, because I would not, even for an instant, leave my son alone. But I get my message across. The driver, a member of the darker nation, just as I expected, stares for a moment through the window. I see mirrored glasses on an ebon face, and little else. Then, very smoothly, showing no sign of panic, he puts the car in gear and cruises off down the street.

I wave the bat exultantly in the air but deny myself the victory shout.

Instead, I go inside and shut the door and put the bat away and ask myself what in the world I thought I was doing. The red haze of fury sometimes twists me in strange directions, but it has rarely led me quite so close to violence. Thoughts tumble through my disordered mind. The driver of the car is innocent, he lives or works nearby, and now he is going to tell everybody that I am crazy. The driver of the car is the man who called looking for Kimmer, and Kimmer is having an affair with him. The driver of the car is the man who pretended to be Agent Foreman. The driver of the car is the man who returned the chess book stolen by the men who assaulted me. All of the above. None of the above.

“You’re a sick man, Misha,” I mutter as I stand in my study. Nobody is on the street now except one of our neighbors walking her three-month-old twins in a stroller. “You need help. Lots and lots of help.”

I imagine my wife would agree. So would the man in the blue Porsche.

And, for a hateful, envious moment, I entertain a truly horrendous thought: The man in the Porsche is Lemaster Carlyle. Perfect Lemaster Carlyle, spying on me and cheating on his wife, seeing Kimmer behind Julia’s back. Calling Kimmer baby. Maybe leaving the stolen chess book in my car when he was late for Shirley’s party. It would explain why he has lately been so distant. But the voice on the phone sounded nothing like his: no Barbadian accent, for example. Besides, Lem is short, and the man John Brown saw in the woods was tall. There could be two unknown black men around, but Occam’s Razor, on which the Judge loved to rely, warns us not to multiply entities unnecessarily.

Anyway, the whole thing is a typically stupid Misha Garland idea.

I remain at the window, railing against myself the way manic depressives do, until I remember that I am supposed to be having hot chocolate with my son. I hurry back into the family room and find him still hard at work, the cocoa forgotten, his father forgotten, hooting gleefully to himself as he zaps the right answers and piles up his loot. My childhood must have produced such shining moments of joy, but what I mostly remember is the shadows.

The doorbell rings.

I swing around uncertainly, wondering if I should grab the bat again, or sweep my son out the back way, through the hedge, and into hiding with the Felsenfelds, for perhaps the driver of the Porsche has returned with friends. But the Garland training proves too strong to allow me to panic. I simply open the door, as I would on any other day.

Two men are standing there, one of whom I have met before. “Professor Garland, I wonder if you could spare us a minute?” asks Special Agent Fred Nunzio of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He looks grim.