Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 47

“Dana?”

“Yes, my love?” Smiling girlishly over the lunch table at Post, pretending a bit, even though I could never, ever, be her love, for about six hundred reasons, even putting aside the obvious ones.

“Dana, look. I kind of need a favor.”

“As usual.”

“Seriously. I mean, it’s important, and… and I don’t know who else to ask.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.” Dana is cautious, certain, I have no doubt, that I am about to ask her for money.

It is Wednesday, four days since my return from Aspen, and twelve days since my blow-up in the hallway with Jerry Nathanson, an event that has shrunk even further my already shaky standing around Oldie. I am lunching with Dana today because it is the first chance we have had to get our schedules synchronized. And also because I am running out of options. Earlier I planned to ask her help as a contingency. Now my need is urgent. If Dear Dana says yes, and all goes well, I will be able to get everybody off my back, and my family’s life back to normal, within a week, two at the most. My plan could put me outside Dean Lynda’s deadline, but close enough that I should be able to fudge it. If Dana says no, or if things go badly… well, then, so be it.

Munching my cheeseburger, I try to think how to put it. Over in Darien, Mariah is coming up on a deadline of her own, for her baby is due in less than a month. No more trips down to Shepard Street, but she is happy in her distraction. We speak on the phone almost nightly as the big day nears, and even Kimmer now and then gets in on the fun.

I envy my sister her joy.

Three tables away, Norm Wyatt, the architect, Dean Lynda’s blabbermouth husband, is lunching with a prosperous but somehow furtive client. I get a bit furtive myself, hunching down to get closer to Dear Dana. Correctly interpreting my motion, Dana shifts her head a bit closer to mine. As usual, I wonder what the gossip-mongers will think. I wonder why I chose to ask my favor at Post in the first place. Dana’s office would have been safer. Maybe I decided to come here because she tends to be more indulgent after meals. Or maybe because I am all at once worried about being bugged.

“Dana, look. What I’m going to ask… if you want to say no.. .”

“If I want to say no, Misha, I’ll say no. I’m very good at it.” A beat. “Except, now that I think of it, I’m not very good at saying no to you. You always seem to be asking me favors, and I always seem to say yes.” She smiles nervously. She glares at Norm’s broad back. She senses something amiss, and does not like the situation any more than I do. “I don’t know what it is about you. It’s not like you’re particularly charming or anything…”

“Gee, you’re sweet.”

“Seriously, Misha. When I think about it, it’s too weird. I can’t say why, but I never seem to be able to say no. You know what? It’s a good thing I’m not into men or we’d probably have had an affair by now.”

“If I weren’t married.” A smile. “And if I were into white women.”

“Touche.” She smiles back. “So, what’s the big favor? You want me to break Jerry Nathanson’s kneecaps? Sorry, I’m retired from that line of work.”

“No, but… well, when you hear it, it might seem kind of shocking. Scary, even. Not that there’s any real risk, it’s just not going to be easy to do. But it’s something that… well, it has to be done, and I can’t do it myself. And, if it gets done, maybe I can. .. um, put a stop to… well, whatever’s going on.”

“Well, thanks, my love, that certainly clears everything up for me.”

“And, the thing is, I won’t… I won’t be able to tell you why I need you to do it. Not now. I can explain later, but not now.”

Her smile slowly fades. “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I should be scared.”

“No, no, of course not. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“As Anthony Perkins said to Janet Leigh.”

“I don’t think there was any such line in the movie.”

“Okay, Misha, okay.” Laughing, holding up her hands. “So, tell me what you want already.”

“Look, Dana, I wouldn’t ask except…”

“Except you don’t know where else to turn, I’m your best friend in the world, and blah-blah-blah. Just ask. I told you, I’m very good at saying no.”

I draw in a breath, recognizing that I have never imposed on a friend as mightily as I am about to. But I am nearly out of choices. So I tell Dana Worth what I need done. It takes me five minutes.

And she is shocked. She tells me so, but I can see it anyway, in the widening of her coal black eyes, and hear it in the hissing of air over her teeth. She considers. She leans back in her chair. Norm Wyatt and his client are leaving. Norm waves from a safe distance, and we both wave back. A knot of students brushes past the table, chattering about Lemaster Carlyle, whom he will pick as his first law clerks, how long before he moves on to the Supreme Court.

Dear Dana turns to me once more. She tells me I am out of my mind, completely out of my mind. She tells me I am going to lose both my job and my wife. She tells me I am going to wind up in jail. She tells me that if she helps me she could wind up in jail too.

Then she tells me she will do it.

Out on the sidewalk, Dana starts to tell me about the message her pastor preached last Sunday, something about the parable of the shrewd manager. I am only half listening. “You see the point, don’t you, Misha? It doesn’t matter whether things are going the way you want them to, but only how you manage the things God puts in your-”

I grab her arm. She struggles free, because she hates to be touched.

“Misha, what’s wrong with you?”

“Dana, look.” I physically turn her. Again she shakes me off, maybe worrying that the Dean is right about my mental state. I point. “Do you see that car?”

“What car?”

“There! Right there!” For it is right in front of me, as large as life, at a meter across the street, a block from the law school. “The blue Porsche!”

My old or maybe new friend smiles. “Yes, Misha, of course I see it. Now, listen to me. This is important. Please don’t call it a Porsche. That car is not a Porsche.”

“It isn’t?”

“No, darling. It happens to be a powder-blue Porsche Carrera Cabriolet, this year’s model, and it looks like the special order with all the options, retailing for something over a hundred thousand dollars, and cash only, please, no deadbeat law professors who need financing.” Dana waits a beat. Ordinarily, this kind of Worthism makes me howl with laughter. Not today. “Misha, I think there is something seriously wrong with you, do you know that?”

“Dana… Dana, that car… it was outside my house a couple of weeks ago. And once back in December, too. And I think the man who was driving it… well, he was spying on us. On my family.” I remember rushing through the woods with John Brown. “Dana, I think it was the other man who pretended to be an FBI agent in my house. The black man. Foreman. You know, right after the funeral.”

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.

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.