Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 49

“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.

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 such 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.