Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 55

“You weren’t at graduation,” I say to Theo Mountain the next day. We are, once more, in his office, and I am standing in the huge bay window.

“No.”

“Everybody noticed. You haven’t missed one in-what? Twenty years?”

“I couldn’t make it,” he mumbles, but this is a new, shiftier Theo. All the triumphal condescension has been drained from his manner. He sits listlessly at his desk, waiting for the ax to fall. I know perfectly well why he was not present, and he knows I know. He has been able to read the fury in my face every time I have seen him over the past two weeks. The last thing he wanted to do yesterday was sit among the faculty on the stage and worry about whose fault it was that I got shot.

“You know, Theo, you have a great view from up here.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“You can see down the alley to the Original Quad. You have a straight line almost to the edge of the campus.” I turn back to face him. He is a hunched, beaten shadow. I know now why he took so long to offer his condolences on my father’s passing. He was ashamed of his own actions, as well he should have been. But trying to hate him does no good. I lean heavily on my cane. The pain is bad today. Dr. Serra says I will suffer from internal aches on and off for the rest of my life.

Which, if I miscalculate over the next few weeks, may not be very long.

“Why did you do it, Theo?”

“Do what?” he asks, in an unpersuasive stab at an innocent tone.

“Why did you send me the pawns?”

Still he will not look at me. Nor will he speak. He is gazing at the photographs on his desk: one of his late wife; one of his only child, a daughter, now in her early fifties and a very senior partner at a Wall Street firm, but in the photograph a shy undergraduate; and one depicting the three Mountain brothers climbing rocks somewhere, looking tough and strong, back in the days when, together, they ruled the world of legal academia. He just shakes his head.

“Come on, Theo, talk to me. I know most of it. I want the rest of it.” When he says nothing, I move around to the front of the desk. “You saw me leave Oldie that day, because you can see everything from your window. You made a pretty good guess from my route that I was headed to the soup kitchen. It was lunchtime. I was rushing. And you’re the one who hooked me up with Dee Dee in the first place. And so you called whoever you called and told her to drop off the first envelope. Who was it, by the way? That you called?”

“My granddaughter,” he says at last, still hunched over. “I couldn’t very well trust anybody else.” So simple. His granddaughter, a student at the college. Had my wits been about me, I might have figured it out. “I told her not to go inside, and to make sure to leave before you came outside,” he adds, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “I told her to give it to Romeo, and to tell him she was paid. No point in having you identify her.”

Or you, I am thinking.

I hobble to a chair, shove aside the papers stacked on it, and manage to sit. Anger seems to make my lingering pains that much worse. “And the other pawn? The black one?”

“That was easier. I saw you and Dana go to lunch.” His gaze bounces around the room, settling briefly on my glowering face before landing on the file cabinet where, for twenty clever years, Theo hid the evidence of Marc’s plagiarism. Perhaps it should have stayed there. “It didn’t matter whether you got them inside the law school or outside, so I did one of each. They were supposed to arrive close together, but… well, for a while, I chickened out.”

“Instructions from my father,” I propose. Who wanted to remind me that the Double Excelsior was a chess problem, revolving around two pawns, and wanted to signal me that white moved first… and wanted me sufficiently intrigued to keep hunting.

“Yes,” he says grudgingly. “He asked me to do this for him… you know, if anything ever happened to him. We were on a television show together, oh, two years ago.” He focuses on me again. “He asked me while we were in the greenroom.”

“But he didn’t give you the pawns at that time.”

“No. No, he said they would arrive when they were needed. And they did, a week or so after… you know, after he died.” He sighs. “And, before you ask, Talcott, I’m afraid the envelope didn’t have a return address.”

“Was it, by any chance, postmarked Philadelphia?”

Theo Mountain’s sad eyes brighten briefly. “I think it might have been Delaware.”

My turn to sigh. Good old Alma, in such a hurry to get away the morning after the funeral, the pawns probably hidden in her handbag, stopping on her way home to mail them to Theo. No wonder she went off to the islands. I wonder just how many people the Judge drew into his lunatic conspiracy.

“So, when you told me you weren’t close to my father at the end, when you told me he was close to Stuart, you were lying. Trying to point me in the wrong direction.”

“I was trying to point you in the wrong direction, yes, but I wasn’t lying.” Spoken like an elected official charged with perjury. “Your father and I weren’t close any more. That was true. He and Stuart were close. That was true, too. When your father came to me, I asked him why he didn’t want Stuart to do it. He got irritated and said he didn’t really trust Stuart.” Theo shakes his shaggy head, regaining, for that tiny instant, his old bonhomie. “Who could blame him? Stuart would sell his granddaughter for a nice fat consulting fee.”

But I see that Theophilus Mountain has not penetrated to the truth. Stuart, whatever his politics, is a better man than Theo. More direct, less underhanded. Either Stuart turned the request down flat, or the Judge guessed that he would and never bothered to ask. He came to Theo precisely because of his old teacher’s byzantine love of conspiracy.

“And what about Marc Hadley?” I ask.

“What about him?” Theo echoes faintly, exhausted from pretending to be strong.

“You told me you didn’t tell the White House about his plagiarism …”

“I didn’t, Talcott! That was true!”

“I know it was. But somebody was feeding the White House transcripts of Marc’s after-dinner talks, where he floated all those crazy ideas. That was you, Theo. Okay, so you didn’t have the right political views to have any influence with the current administration. But Ruthie Silverman was your student, too, just like she was Marc’s. She would have listened to you.”

He shrugs.

My rage boils over. “And did you ever think, Theo, did you ever think for a moment that it would boomerang on my wife? That you would wreck her chances while you were in the act of sabotaging Marc Hadley’s? That you would wreck what was left of my marriage, too?”

Theo says nothing. He looks genuinely shocked. By the cost? By his discovery? I find that I no longer care. I cannot bear his presence any more, this man I so admired. I stab the Oriental carpet with my cane, push myself to my feet.

“Goodbye, Theo,” I mutter, making for the door.

“I would never have done it,” Theo insists, his voice climbing a couple of registers into true shrillness in his urgent effort to persuade me, “if I had known how it would turn out.”

From the door, I give him a look. “Yes, you would.”