The Emperor of Ocean Park Read online

  “Don’t take that tone, Tal. Wait until you see the pictures.” A beat. “Have you looked at them yet?”

  “In a minute.” I return to my chair. “When is the announcement, Mariah?”

  “Soon,” she murmurs, no longer sure I am an ally.

  “Mariah, you know . . . Okay, hold on.” The download is at last complete, four rather gory photographs, and I see no reason to think that any one of them is authentic. Three of the four do not show the face of the corpse, but the build does not resemble the Judge. Nor does the skin color, in every case too dark. The one that clearly is my father is sufficiently grainy that it is not clear why it is even there, which conspiracy it is supposed to prove. I frown and lean closer, pushing my glasses up onto my nose with a finger. One of the nonfacial shots does indeed show the black specks that Mariah called to tell me about. I suppose they could be bullet fragments, if I knew how bullet fragments look. Only . . . wait. . .

  “Mariah.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Mariah, I think . . . couldn’t that just be dirt on the lens?”

  “See? That’s the same thing the medical examiner said.”

  I remind myself that Mariah is my big sister and I love her. “Mariah, kiddo, please tell me you didn’t ask the ME about this.”

  “Oh, no, Tal, of course not.”

  “Good.”

  “I didn’t have to ask. Her statement is in this morning’s paper.”

  Oh, great. In the newspaper. The Judge must be spinning in his grave. I wonder if Kimmer has heard. “Well, if the ME says it was just dust . . .”

  “You can’t believe her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, she’s a Democrat.”

  The thing is, Mariah isn’t joking.

  So, glancing at my watch, I say what I know she wants me to say. “I’ll call Uncle Mal and ask him to look into it.” Not telling her that the great Mallory Corcoran hardly ever takes my calls any more, which means that I will be kicked down the ladder to Cassie Meadows. Or that Meadows herself is probably tired of me too, and will likely spend no more than one phone call on the matter.

  I am hoping that is all it is worth.

  (III)

  TO MY SURPRISE, not only is Meadows free to talk, but she has good news: the FBI has tracked down the mysterious McDermott. He is, indeed, a private investigator, based down in South Carolina. He has been bothering people who knew my father, especially around Washington, asking about a woman named Angela. He is well known to his local sheriff, who considers him persistent and perhaps a bit underhanded, but certainly not dangerous. He even has a real name, but the Bureau would not tell Meadows what it is.

  “Why wouldn’t they tell you?”

  She hesitates, wanting to be a Washington player like Mallory Corcoran, and thus loath to admit that she is outside certain circles of knowledge. “They said we didn’t need to know,” she finally confesses.

  “Did they say why?”

  Another pause. “I didn’t ask, to tell you the truth. Maybe I should have pressed . . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I sketch for her the substance of John Brown’s call. “Did they tell you anything about Foreman?”

  “Foreman works for him. He’s some kind of private investigator too, and, yes, Mr. Garland, he is also considered harmless.”

  At last I allow myself a ripple of relief. “Anything else?”

  “Only that the two of them have fled the jurisdiction. Left the United States. They apparently heard the FBI was looking for them and headed for Canada.”

  “Canada? What is the FBI after them for, that they would go to Canada?”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  Puzzled but relieved, I remember why I called in the first place. I tell Meadows about Mariah and her bullet fragments. Meadows laughs.

  “What’s funny?” I glance at my watch, worry about my son waiting.

  “I’ll add it to the file.”

  “What file?”

  “Mr. Corcoran had me open a file for stuff like this. We’ve got every nutty letter, every Internet posting, every right-wing pamphlet, every wild talk-show host’s theory about your father. It’s a very thick file, Mr. Garland.” Another chuckle. “We already have lots of alleged autopsy photographs in there.”

  “So what’s the funny part?”

  “Oh, well. I have a whole subfile full of e-mails from your sister.” Meadows lowers her voice. “I haven’t even bothered Mr. Corcoran with them.”

  “You’ve . . . heard from Mariah?”

  “Would you believe twice a week?” Another laugh, except that this one is humorless. “I guess she figures, you know, being as how she’s Mr. Corcoran’s goddaughter and all . . .” Meadows trails off, then adopts a more serious tone: “Somebody has to do something about her, Mr. Garland. My friends on the Hill tell me that if she doesn’t cut this stuff out . . . well, your wife won’t stand a chance.”

  CHAPTER 15

  TWO ENCOUNTERS

  (I)

  BENTLEY! HOME! Two of my favorite words!

  I arrive twenty minutes late to pick up my son because of my time on the phone with my sister, and I endure the unemotive glares of the teachers—all women, all white—whose grim silence informs me that they are prepared to call the Department of Family Services to report the Garland-Madison team as far too frequently tardy and therefore unfit to parent. I take some solace, however, from the fact that Miguel Hadley is still there, too, his parents therefore every bit as unfit as Bentley’s. Miguel, a pudgy little boy, is an amazingly bright child but never an ebullient one. He seems particularly solemn today. He hugs Bentley to say goodbye. The school encourages hugging between boys in the service of some unarticulated ideological goal—making sure they don’t grow up to be the kind of men who drop bombs on innocent civilians, perhaps. But I am not sure why the teachers bother. University kids are far more likely to grow up to be the kind of men who sit in the White House ordering others to drop the bombs, in between hugging their constituents.

  Standing off to the side, waiting for the two little boys to finish their embrace (the school preaches that we mere parents should never separate them by force), I gaze out the window toward the parking lot, hoping, through this device, to avoid having to make small talk with the teachers who staff the school. They are hopelessly well-meaning, in the manner of white liberals of their class, but because they believe they have transcended racism (which afflicts only conservatives) they remain blissfully unaware of how their disdainful elitism is perceived by the few black parents who can afford the school. Nor is there any point in enlightening them: their desperately sincere apologies would only make matters worse, signaling, as liberal apologies tend to, that the members of the darker nation are so weak of character that there can be no greater sin than insulting one.

  White liberals, of course, believe themselves to be made of stronger stuff. That is why they so often support rules punishing nasty comments made by whites about blacks but readily forgive nasty comments made by blacks about whites.

  I shake my head, struggling against the angry red direction of my musings. Does any of this diatribe actually represent what I believe? I scratch at the fading outline of a flower sticker in the corner of the window, wondering why these teachers, with their cultlike grins of welcome to every dark face, bring out the worst in me. And why I condemn liberals alone. The racial attitudes of conservatives are no better; often they are worse. These teachers, for all the arrogance of their sympathy, are not the ones scrawling KKK with cheap paint on the lockers of black high-school students or sending money to the National Association for the Advancement of White People. What is the source of my vitriol? Is it possible that I am just recalling, albeit dimly, some furious article or speech by the Judge? Odd how difficult it is becoming to tell the difference, as though my father, in death, owns more of my mind than he ever did in life.

  I wonder whether I will ever escape him.

  As I brood i
n the corner, waiting for the teachers to decide that Bentley has learned his anti-war, anti-macho, pro-hugging lesson for the day, I notice a trapezoidal black Mercedes minivan streaking and thumping across the potholes of the pitted lot. Dahlia Hadley, Miguel’s mother, has arrived in her usual heedless rush. She bustles inside, a tiny, slender whirlwind of smile and energy, and the teachers, so unnerved by my presence, begin to beam again, because everybody loves Dahlia; it’s like a rule.

  “Talcott,” she murmurs breathily, as soon as she has waved to her son, “I am so glad you are here. I was thinking of calling you. Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course,” I say, certain that something unpleasant is coming.

  Dahlia takes my large hand in her small one and draws me off to another corner of the long room, where wooden blocks lie helter-skelter, sloppiness passing as juvenile creativity.

  “It has to do with our mutual concern,” she says, glancing around. Her indigo jeans and matching sweater are a little showy, but that is Dahlia. “Do you know what I am talking about, Talcott?”

  Of course I know, but I am still free to pretend that I do not, because the Elm Harbor Clarion, no whiz at digging up stories unrelated to municipal corruption (of which our fine city has plenty), has yet to run the obligatory article on the finalists for the seat on the court of appeals. But I decide not to play games.

  “Ah . . . I think so.”

  She hesitates, then meets my eyes and smiles again. Dahlia Hadley is in her early thirties, a raucous, hennaed Bolivian even Kimmer, in spite of her best efforts, cannot help liking. Marc and Dahlia met, Dahlia points out whenever somebody will listen, after his first marriage was on the rocks. (But before he left his wife, Kimmer adds savagely.) Marc’s first wife was Margaret Story, a very distinguished historian a year older than he, with whom he had two children, the younger of whom is Heather, now a student at the law school, and the older of whom is Rick, a poet often published in The New Yorker, who lives in California. Margaret was broad and quiet and distant, even forbidding, whereas Dahlia is slim and loud and gregarious and loves to tease. But she is no mere trophy. Although she lacks a full-time academic appointment (which, in a university, makes her a citizen of the second class), she possesses a doctorate in biochemistry from MIT and, supported by various corporate grants, labors in some obscure corner of the Science Quad, testing unlikely cures for unknown diseases, passionately killing lab rats by the hundreds. The greatest threats to the impoverished, according to Dahlia, who has been one of them, are neither political nor military nor economic but biological: scientific progress and nature alike are constantly releasing new microbes into the ecosystem, and it is the poor they usually kill first and fastest. Dahlia believes that justice will be found at the bottom of a test tube. Once a group of animal-rights activists invaded her laboratory, smashing reagents, releasing contagious rodents from their cages, and spreading dangerous germs. Most of the staff fled, but Dahlia stood her ground and called the protesters racists, which first confused and then defeated them. The leader of the group, struggling to respond, made things worse, drawing an awkward analogy between the situation of the rats and the situation of the people in the barrios. He evidently assumed that Dahlia, whose skin is the red-brown of desert clay, was Mexican American. She corrected him furiously in two languages. The campus police arrived while the leader was struggling to explain his solidarity with the oppressed people of Bolivia—which, unfortunately for his argument, happens to be a democracy.

  Later, Dahlia testified at the trial. She talked about the experiments he wrecked, the people who might die: not testimony that would ordinarily be admissible, but the prosecutor pretended Dr. Hadley was merely describing the damage, and the judge went along. Dahlia drew plenty of hate mail from people who love animals more than they do human beings, but won a substantial increase in the grant from the pharmaceutical company that backs her research.

  Dahlia is a wise woman.

  “This is not an easy time for us,” she says now, and I find myself wondering briefly, and foolishly, whether she might after all have pulled me aside to discuss another subject, whether perhaps Ruthie has kept confidential what is confidential and not told Marc that his main rival for the post he craves is my wife—or, if she has told him, whether Marc might have kept it secret from his wife. Dahlia herself answers my unspoken question, saying, almost casually: “You know, Tal, the FBI has started to bother all our friends. I guess it must be the same for you.”

  “Oh, yes, right,” I mumble, quite taken by surprise, and now forced to wonder why no friends have called us to share the same news, other than John Brown’s call about Foreman, which obviously doesn’t count. Maybe the FBI has made no visits. Certainly no agents—no real agents—have been by to talk to Kimmer herself. Have they interviewed Marc? If so, the fight presumably is already over . . . and with it, possibly, my marriage.

  “Marc is very tense just now,” Dahlia whispers. “How is Kimberly holding up?”

  “Hmmm? Oh, fine, fine.”

  Mguel calls out to his mother in Spanish. Dahlia half turns in his direction and says “En un minuto, querido,” but does not release my hand. She glances at the teachers, all of whom have been watching, all of whom now pointedly look away. She pulls me farther into the corner. She seems not to want to be overheard. The teachers are probably wondering what kind of tête-à-tête they are observing. Most people consider Dahlia quite an attractive woman, but I find her features too soft and undefined, and her ambition far too openly worn, for true beauty.

  “It’s just so hard to get any news,” she pouts. “Have you heard anything?”

  And then I have it—and am stunned. Marc doesn’t know any more than we do. All of Dahlia’s clumsy pumping is a fishing expedition on her husband’s behalf. It isn’t over at all! I want to laugh aloud, so great is my relief. But I control my instincts and, as usual, my facial expression.

  “Not a word, Dahlia.” I have seen very little of Marc these past weeks: nothing more than an occasional tense hello as we pass in the hallway. I decide to do a little investigating of my own. “I guess we’ll all have to wait.”

  Dahlia does not seem to hear. She looks up at me again. She is no longer smiling. “Do you know Ruth Silverman?” Not Ruthie, I notice.

  “Yes, I know her.”

  Dahlia closes her eyes briefly. There is a girlish innocence about the gesture. Out in the parking lot, a couple of fathers are in the midst of a loud dissing match over the relative merits of the Jets and the Giants. I want to be a part of their universe, not Dahlia’s.

  “Well, she was Marc’s student. He got her her job. But she is so ungrateful. She will not tell us anything.” She shakes her head. Across the room, the restless teachers are casting surreptitious glances in our direction and irritated glances at the clock. Very likely marveling at what they take to be our intimacy, in a hurry to get home to gossip to spouses, lovers, friends, because Elm Harbor, for all its Ivy League sophistication, is nothing but a small town. You’ll never guess who I saw together at school today! I realize I am oversensitive to appearances, but my history with Kimmer has left me with that burden. “Marc keeps telling me that she has an obligation to keep quiet, but I was raised to believe you return a favor for a favor.” She has released my hand. She is gritting her perfect teeth and making fists. I notice that her nails are bitten so deeply that the flesh is fiery pink.

  “Marc is right, Dahlia. Ruthie—Ruth can’t talk about her work.”

  “It is just all so sudden,” she explains, which I take to mean that Ruthie revealed confidences to Marc earlier but, for some reason, has now stopped. Dahlia’s next words confirm my suspicion. “Three weeks ago, Marc was the leading candidate. That is what Ruth Silverman said. Then she told us that the President was looking at other names, in the interest of diversity.” Emphasizing the word in a way that suggests how little it should count when anything real is at stake. Last year, I greatly upset the students in my seminar on Law and Social Movements
by suggesting to them the following proposition: Any white person who truly believes in affirmative action should be willing to pledge that, if his or her child is admitted to a Harvard or a Princeton, he or she will at once write to the school saying, “My child will not be attending. Please hold the slot for a member of a minority group.” The consternation among my students confirmed my belief that few white people, even among the most liberal, support affirmative action when it actually costs them something. They like it precisely because they can tell themselves that they are working for racial justice while pretending that the costs do not exist. But it is not their fault: who believes in sacrifice these days?

  Diversity, I am now thinking. Ordinarily a word so empty of content that everybody can sign on without agreeing to anything, but, in this case, doubtless a code for Kimberly Madison. Which Marc must realize and, obviously, Dahlia as well. My wife’s chances are better than I thought, better than Kimmer hoped . . . if we can just manage to keep the lid on everything else. An image of Jerry Nathanson drifts across my mind, and I stifle a surge of anger at my wife, less for violating her vows than for taking such a risk with so much at stake.

  “I’m sure the President will pick the person he thinks will be the best judge,” I say, even though no President in history has actually selected judges that way.

  “I don’t know,” says Dahlia—but, then, of course, she thinks that Marc would be the best judge. Never mind that he has never practiced law a day in his life. “To tell you the truth, Tal, Marc has . . . not been himself.”

  “I’m sorry, Dahlia.”

  “This is not like him, missing his son’s party,” she continues. She somewhere lapsed from the interrogative mode into the confessional, but I am not sure when. She notices my distraction. “You remember, last Sunday? Mguel’s birthday?”

  I do remember. I had to take Bentley to the party, because Kimmer, who had promised our son she would be there, had to fly to San Francisco on Sunday morning. My wife and I fought about that, as we fight about so many things. And I remember, too, that Marc was absent. Dahlia made excuses for him: he had to attend a conference in Miami, she said, something about Cardozo. I noticed even at the time that she did not seem particularly happy about it.