Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 59

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” says Dear Dana Worth.

“What is?”

“That your father would commit suicide.”

I shrug. “That’s what he said.”

Dana steams, not quite ready to accept my speculations about the man she once so adored, to say nothing of Mallory Corcoran’s. We are strolling together along the bluestone walks of the Original Quad, which, nearly empty of students in the summer, can actually be quite pleasant. We have been seeing more of each other these days, although not, of course, romantically. We are both having what my parents used to call “trouble at home.” My wife, proclaiming her love for me, has thrown me out, and Alison is angry at Dana these days for worrying so much about whether what they are doing is right. Alison wants Dana to stop hanging out at her little Methodist church with what she calls the right-wing homophobes, and Dana refuses, saying they are good Christian people and she wants to listen to their point of view. Alison asks if black people are obliged to worship with white supremacists, to get their point of view. Dana says it isn’t the same at all. I am not about to get in the middle. Dana is stoic enough to qualify as an honorary Garland, but, when our various pains leak through our facades, we friends do our best to comfort each other.

“Suicide,” Dana sneers again.

“It does happen, Dana. People do stupid things.” One of our shared pains is that Theo Mountain suffered a massive stroke two days ago and is not expected to live. I want to blame the Judge, I want to blame Theo, but I cannot help blaming myself: was I too hard on the old man?

“So, the story is supposed to be that your father was going to kill himself because he was scared of being exposed? And then you were supposed to track down his arrangements and he would get his revenge?”

“Something like that.”

“Sorry, Misha, that doesn’t make any sense at all. No matter what kind of man your father really was. If some reporter or somebody was going to expose him, why would the fact that he was dead make them stop? A dead man can’t even sue for defamation.”

“I’m not sure it was that kind of exposure. Not public.”

“What’s the other kind?”

“Maybe somebody was threatening to tell his family what he had been doing.”

“But why? What would that somebody want from him? And why would that somebody stop just because he was dead?”

I shake my head in frustration, still chewing on cotton, still sure of the existence, out there somewhere, of an interested party who has not been fooled. The only thing I can think of that somebody might want badly enough to threaten my father is the one thing I have not yet found: the arrangements. “I don’t know,” I confess.

Dana sighs, exasperated, maybe toward me. We continue through the empty Quad, where, in my student days, I used to walk with the Judge, who would reminisce for a while, then drag me along to drop in on those of his old professors who were still living, and those of his classmates who were now on the faculty. He would introduce me airily to my own teachers as though they had never seen me before, never embarrassed me in class, never commanded me to redo fifty-page papers in three days, and they fussed over me because they fawned over him; even then, my father had the magic that enraptured, the presence that demanded respect, and, besides, with Reagan in the White House, every one of them knew that the Honorable Oliver Garland would sit on the Supreme Court of the United States the instant that a vacancy occurred. When the visiting was done, I would drive the Judge to the lilliputian Elm Harbor airport in my shabby but earnest Dodge Dart, and we would sit in the coffee shop and eat stale Danish while waiting out the inevitable delay of the small commuter plane that would carry him back to Washington, and, to pass the time, he would bombard me once more with newer versions of the same old questions, as though hoping for a different set of answers-how were my grades, when would I hear about law review, whom was I dating these days-and, invariably, I was tempted to lie about the first two and tell the truth about the third, if only to see the look on his face, and to make him leave me alone.

By then, of course, he was already Jack Ziegler’s judicial drone, so his desperate hopes for me, which I resented, take on a pathetic yet lovingly ambitious quality: he wanted his son the lawyer to wind up in a different place.

“Misha?” Dana has another question. “Misha, why would Jack Ziegler do it?”

“Do what? Let him out of the deal? Let him retire?”

“No, no. Why would he go to the courthouse? Wouldn’t he know that somebody was bound to recognize him, that your father’s judicial career would be wrecked?”

“Probably,” I say, for I have considered this question. “But maybe the ruin of my father’s judicial career was Jack Ziegler’s final gift to him.”

Dana nods. “And when your father finally got out, he would have warned them that he’d written it all down. That, if anything untoward happened to him, the whole story would make its way into the light.” She is excited. “That must be what’s in the papers, Misha! All the favors he did, the companies, who owned them-everything!”

“That would be my guess, too.” I remember again how the Judge always demanded the names of the principals behind the shell companies litigating before him, and how few dared resist the demand. Justice Wainwright described my father’s orders for disclosure as a mark of his obsession with detail. But there was another reason: he was protecting himself, squirreling away information.

Which would also explain who hired Colin Scott to follow me. The possibility that he might be implicated in the papers could have provided an additional incentive, but the notion that Scott reacted out of some personal fear remains the weak link in the FBI’s chain of reasoning about what happened. I have no idea whether the Bureau suspected that Scott was the killer of Phil McMichael, the Senator’s son, but, plainly, they thought he returned because he was worried about something in the arrangements. And that makes no sense. If he was safely overseas, living under another name, why would he come back to the United States and risk arrest for murder? No, he followed me for the benefit of somebody else, somebody who paid him well to follow the trail of his former employer, and I suspect I will never know who his clients were unless I find the arrangements, for they had to be those who profited from my father’s corruption.

“You know, Misha, I really admired your father. I really did.” Pain in her deep, black eyes. I wonder how much more pain there would be if Dana knew the secret I have kept from her, the identity of the driver of the red car, slaughtered by Colin Scott. “But this… What am I supposed to do now? Forgive him? Hate him? What?”

I have to smile. Dear Dana Worth, self-centered to the last. It does not seem to have occurred to her that I am struggling with precisely the same questions. I expect little from life other than mystery and ambiguity, so perhaps it is too much to demand of my feelings about my father that they come suddenly into crystalline focus. Dana, like Mariah, needs answers that are sharply defined. Searching for something to say, I hit upon another of my father’s platitudes: “You have to draw a line, Dana. You have to put the past in the past.”

“I feel like I never knew him. Like he was really… some kind of monster.” She shudders. “He had all these sides. All these levels.”

I remember Jack Ziegler’s soliloquy. “He was trying to protect his family. He just… he kind of got in over his head.”

“That’s a pretty easy excuse.”

“I don’t mean it that way. I’m not trying to justify what he did. I just think… I don’t think he set out to do it. I think he probably got caught up.”

Dana shakes her head. She is never afraid of passing judgment, most mercilessly on herself. “I’m sorry, Misha, but that won’t wash. Your father wasn’t some kind of blundering innocent. He was an intelligent man. He knew who Jack Ziegler was. He knew what Jack Ziegler was. If it’s really true that your father went to him and asked him to permit a murder, do you really believe he didn’t realize he would be in Jack Ziegler’s thrall for the rest of his life? He wasn’t that naive, Misha. Don’t kid yourself.” She allows herself a rare shudder, then touches her elbow, still sore where bullet chipped bone. “I don’t know what to say about him, Misha. I don’t want to say he was evil… but he wasn’t just deluded, either. He made a decision to kill the driver of that car. He made a decision to become a corrupt judge.” Another shake of the head. “I can’t believe I knew so little about what was really going on in that head of his. It’s scary, Misha. And it hurts.”

“You should try being his son.”

“Oh, Misha, I didn’t mean it like that.” She squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you didn’t, Dana. But it isn’t easy for me, either.” I sigh. “Anyway, it isn’t your problem any more.”

Dana looks at me sharply, mouth wide, having heard something in my tone she does not like. She gives me my hand back. Perhaps she has realized, as I have been thinking ever since we both got shot, that our friendship will never be the same. She points a finger at me. “You don’t think it’s over,” she says, wonder in her tone. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Misha.”

“Let it go, Dana. Please.”

“Is that what you’re going to do? Let it go? Somehow I doubt it.” Standing in the middle of the Original Quad, fists folded on her narrow hips. Her voice softens. “Do you really think the box fooled them, Misha?”

“I hope it did. I hope… I hope they’ll think the Judge was just bluffing.”

“What if there’s some kind of test to show how long the box was in the ground?”

“I’m sure there is, but they can’t possibly know when the Judge buried it. For all they know, he did it the day before he died. You buried it half a year later. Can a test really discriminate within a few months?”

“I hope not.” A weak grin. “Otherwise, we’re in big trouble.”

We both think that one over. This is at our final moment together before Dana decamps for the rest of the summer-maybe with Alison, maybe not-to Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, where, a little north of Ithaca, Dana maintains what she calls her “little writing cottage,” an old and naturally cool stone house on the water. I thought we would be hugging, sentimental. Wrong again.

“If we knew where the papers were,” Dana says thoughtfully, “we might be able to use them to protect ourselves.”

“Except we don’t know where they are.”

Worried, she studies my face. “Do me a favor, won’t you, Misha, darling? When they come for you because the box was empty, and you decide to lie to protect me, please do a better job of lying than you just did.”

“Nobody’s coming for anybody,” I soothe. “We fooled them, Dana.”

But the expression on my best friend’s pale face tells me she is not really sure. To tell the truth, neither am I.