Too Close to Home

by Linwood Barclay

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Conrad said.

  “Fuck this,” I said. “I’m telling Barry all about this. Everything.” I pointed a finger at Illeana. “You got that guy killed. Not that he’s any fucking loss. But it was you, when you decided to bring your brother into this, when you decided to stick your nose in, that’s when you got that guy killed.”

  “Please, Jim,” Ellen said. “Let Conrad explain about—”

  I waved Ellen off. I wasn’t done with Conrad and Illeana. “And I guess you’d have me believe that this has nothing to do with the Langleys.”

  “It doesn’t,” Illeana said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with them, I swear.”

  “Really? Then how do you explain the gun? The gun they found by your brother’s car, the one he dropped getting back in when he was being chased by Drew?”

  Illeana, red-eyed, glanced at her husband and back at me. “I didn’t know anything about a gun.”

  “It must have already been there,” Conrad said.

  “No,” I said. “The property had been searched before.”

  “That’s not possible,” Illeana said. “Lester, he couldn’t have had anything to do with that. Nothing. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe the person who killed the Langleys sold him that gun, or gave it to him.”

  I stared at her. “And who might that have been, Illeana? Would that have been you? Did you know all about this other book, the one on Brett Stockwell’s computer, from earlier on? Was it you who wanted to get that computer out of the Langley house before it incriminated your husband?”

  “No, that’s impossible,” Conrad said. “Albert had called me about it earlier that day. I picked it up. It wasn’t in their house that night, when they were killed.”

  “This is all horseshit,” I said. “But I don’t need to sort it all out. Barry can do that.”

  “Jim,” Conrad said, taking a step toward me, trying to sound reasonable, almost kindly, “I understand that you want to bring the police into this. If I were you, I’d want to call Barry, tell him everything, make sure that Illeana’s brother is brought to justice, punished for what he and his friend did to you and Ellen.”

  I waited.

  “Illeana,” he said, and glanced contemptuously at his wife, “has done a lot to try to distance herself from her past, from the kinds of people she grew up with, from her own family, many of whom are not what you might call upstanding cit—”

  “Hey,” she started to object.

  “Shut up!” he bellowed again, his face suddenly flushing. He took a moment and continued. “But sometimes she can’t stop herself, and she calls on those people when she gets in a jam, as she did this week.”

  “I don’t know what this—”

  Conrad cut me off. “Hear me out, Jim. I know you won’t believe this, but I’m telling this to you as a friend. Because I care about you and Ellen.”

  I bit my tongue.

  “The people behind Mortie and Lester, these are not good people. They’re not . . . rational people. They’re not very happy about what happened to Mortie. They’re not very happy with your new friend Drew. And they weren’t very happy to think that Ellen here might have identified Illeana’s brother in that lineup tonight. But their unhappiness has been mitigated by Ellen’s failure to do so.”

  Ellen said, “I would have told you this if you’d given me a chance.”

  Conrad looked down at the floor briefly, as though shamed by what he was having to tell me. “It was made very clear to me and Illeana that we should pass on to you the message that if you didn’t let this drop, right now, they couldn’t guarantee your safety.”

  “What?” I said, feeling the hackles rise. “They’re threatening us? Trying to intimidate us, to keep our mouths shut?”

  Conrad nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well, for fuck’s sake, if that’s what they think—”

  “Jim,” Conrad said, keeping his voice very even, “I don’t like this any better than you do, but you don’t understand these people like I do. I need to lay this out for you. If you go ahead with this, you have to know the risks you’re taking. On behalf of yourself, and others. Drew, certainly. He killed one of their family. And Ellen. And Derek. Pursue this, you’re turning them all into targets.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Let it go, and they’ll call it even.”

  I looked at Illeana. “Who are you?”

  She didn’t say anything, but there was something in her eyes. While I’d seen moments where Conrad’s anger had frightened her, there was also this look that said, Don’t mess with me, don’t mess with my people.

  Conrad said, “While Mortie did die, and they might normally want some retribution for that, they also appreciate the gravity of the situation you were in. They’re also mindful of the bad judgment Illeana exercised. They would be grateful to see this all end here.”

  “Grateful,” I said.

  Ellen reached out and touched my arm. “We’re dropping this. We’ve been through enough. I know how wrong it seems to you, to let Illeana’s brother get away with this, but we have to do it. For ourselves. For Drew. But most of all, for Derek. If something happened to him, I could never forgive myself.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked. “On the way to the lineup?”

  “I was afraid you’d try to talk me out of it, or that you’d tell Barry. That your pride, your fucking sense of justice, would get in the way of common sense. I don’t like keeping quiet about this any more than you do, but I’ll do it if it makes us safe. Because it’s over. This thing with the disc and trying to get it back, it’s all over.”

  Nobody said anything for a minute or so. I suddenly felt very tired. I walked across the room and rested my arm on the fireplace mantel, steadying myself. I stood there a moment, looking at the cold ashes in the fireplace, still there from last winter.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Ellen came over and put a hand on my back. “Thank you.”

  “Yes,” Conrad said. “Thank you.” He took a step toward me and said, “Really, Jim, thank you.” He cleared his throat. “I wonder if I might have a moment to speak with you, privately.”

  “Huh?”

  “Come with me, to my study,” he said.

  I followed him down a carpeted hallway and into his sanctuary, a room lined with bookshelves and dominated by a large oak desk in the center that was stacked with papers, a computer off to one side.

  He grabbed one of the two leather chairs that faced the desk, indicated for me to take the other one. I sat down.

  “Again, thank you,” he said. “The fact is, there could have been other repercussions had Ellen identified Lester. Not as serious as those I intimated, but damaging just the same.”

  For a second, I don’t know why, the note he’d written to my wife, the one I’d found in her purse, came into my head, and I saw a flash of my wife’s thighs wrapped around his head.

  “There are things you don’t understand,” Conrad Chase said. “Things that could have an impact on you, and Ellen, if everything comes out.”

  “What do you mean, if everything comes out?”

  He cleared his throat, looked down at his pants, picked off a piece of lint, and let it fall to the carpet.

  “I know you don’t believe this, Jim, but I like you,” Conrad said. “I hope that when Elizabeth came to see you, she conveyed that. The fact is, you’ve really rattled me these last few days with your accusations and insinuations. So I unburdened myself to Elizabeth, had her approach you since I wasn’t having much luck on my own. And I gather she didn’t have that much luck, either.”

  I said nothing.

  “The thing is, and I fear this is going to sound insincere or patronizing, but running Thackeray these last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet governors and senators and even a couple of presidents. Plus, at the annual festival Ellen puts together, I’ve met some of the greatest literary minds in the country. Quite a few of them have had
some very flattering things to say about me. They think I’m a writer of great talent. But you, Jim, you consider me to be a fraud.”

  I wondered what I would do with a watering can if I had one just then.

  “The thing is, you’re a bright guy. A lot brighter than you let on sometimes, I think. And you’re an artist. I think you understand something of the creative process.” He smiled ruefully. “You don’t believe I wrote A Missing Part. There aren’t many people around privy to the story surrounding Brett Stockwell’s computer, so there aren’t many people to question the veracity of my authorship in the first place. You’re a very select group.”

  “I’m honored,” I said.

  “That’s why I tried to get Elizabeth to persuade you to read my new book.” He reached over the desk and patted a stack of paper about three inches thick. “This is it. I wanted you to realize, I can write a book.”

  “Even if you wrote that pile there,” I said, “it doesn’t change anything about the first book.”

  Conrad’s lips went in and out for a moment. “Yes, well. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, just a little flight of fancy here, but let’s suppose there were something to your suspicions about my first book. What if this book is designed to make up for that? Wouldn’t that be worth something?”

  Again, I was at a loss for words.

  “This is the wrong time to ask you again if you’d read it. A lot’s happened, you certainly don’t owe me any favors at the moment.”

  “When do you think that might change, Conrad?”

  He chuckled. “Good point.”

  “Here’s an idea for a book,” I said. “Why don’t you do one about a college president who’s so fucking self-consumed, even after he’s acknowledged that his wife nearly got a guy killed, he still thinks the guy would like to read his book.”

  Conrad nodded slowly. “Well, I thought it was worth a shot. Perhaps Ellen will read it. I’ll drop it by sometime.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great.” I ran a hand over my face, took a breath. Now I had a question. “What did you do with the computer, Conrad?”

  “I took out the hard drive, smashed it to bits with a sledgehammer, took a drive out to Saratoga Lake, rented a boat, and dropped it in the middle of the lake.”

  There was something about the forthright way he told me that I almost admired. “Did you look at what was on it before you did all that?” I asked.

  “Briefly.”

  “Did you notice anything else in there? Some letters, for example?”

  Conrad cocked his head and eyed me curiously. “Letters?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I didn’t notice. Why?”

  I waved my hand at him. “Doesn’t matter now.”

  He settled into his chair, tented his fingers before his chin. “You’re a decent guy, Jim, and I understand your view of me,” he said. “And you have every right to be angry at—to be appalled by—what happened to you and Ellen. You were terrorized. What my wife, Illeana, put into motion, it’s unforgivable. But there’s a reason why I asked Ellen not to identify Illeana’s brother Lester when he went into that lineup. To expose what Illeana did, and her motives, no matter how misguided and unnecessary, runs the risk of subjecting me to greater scrutiny, and ultimately, that’s going to reflect on Ellen.” Another pause. “And that will have an impact on you. And your son.”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said.

  Conrad leaned in closer to me. “You need to talk to your wife,” he said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I NEED TO TELL it from the beginning,” Ellen said, sitting at our kitchen table. When I’d come out of Conrad’s study, I’d headed straight for Ellen, said nothing more than “Let’s go,” and drove home with barely a word between us. When we got inside, Derek was sitting in the living room. MTV was on the tube, but he appeared to be fast asleep. Cutting grass all day in the sun will do that to you. I gave him a nudge. He woke with a start. “What? Where am—oh, okay.” He scratched his head. “Hey, buddy,” I said. “Your mom and I need to talk. Why don’t you hit the sack?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Groggily, and with great effort, he made his way upstairs. When we heard his door close, we found ourselves in the kitchen, standing, moving from counter to fridge to table, as though circling each other.

  “Let’s sit down,” I said, and we each took a seat at the kitchen table. “Conrad said I should talk to you. That you had some things you needed to tell me. Other things, not about what Illeana did.”

  “I don’t quite know what you mean,” she said. “Things I had to tell you about what?”

  “About everything,” I said. “About how all this got started. He wasn’t exactly specific.” I paused.

  Ellen took in a long breath and when she exhaled she seemed to tremble. “I suppose it’s time,” she said. “It’s always has been, really. I’ve wanted to talk to you about this so many times, but never felt I could. Maybe, because talking about it wouldn’t change anything, except it would probably change your impression of me.” She laughed quietly to herself. “Or maybe not. Maybe your last impression was formed when you found out about me and Conrad.”

  “I got past that,” I said.

  “No, you didn’t,” she said.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I hurt you, and you’ve never healed. And what I have to tell you now, I don’t know whether it will make things better or worse between us. It’s why I’ve held off telling you.”

  “I need to know what’s going on,” I said.

  And that was when she said she needed to start at the beginning.

  “When I got the job here,” she said, “and we made the move from Albany, they paired me up with Conrad pretty much from the beginning.”

  “I know,” I said. Like maybe I’d forgotten.

  “We—you and I—were going through a bit of a rough patch then,” Ellen said. “I’m not blaming you. It was me, too. I was throwing myself into my work, you were depressed about yours. Your art, the lousy security jobs.”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Just let me tell this,” Ellen said. “It’s hard.” She took a long breath. “Conrad advised me, offered input on who we should try to get for the festival. He read a wide cross section of stuff, from the very literary to so-called popular fiction. And so did I, although I didn’t bring a Ph.D. in English literature to the table. But together, we were able to come up with a list of people we wanted to bring to the festival, and once we’d settled on the ones we hoped to attract, we started approaching them, or at least the people who represented them.”

  I still didn’t know what this had to do with anything, but I listened.

  “That was how Conrad got to know Elizabeth Hunt. She represented a wide range of people, from the oh-so-literary to that guy who wrote about the serial killer who collected the hearts of his victims. The one they made a movie out of? Anyway, they kind of hit it off, and she said to Conrad, if he ever wrote anything, he should definitely show it to her.

  “And the truth is, he’d been working on something. For years. The Big Novel.” She said the words like they had quotes around them. “And as I got to know him better, I realized that his project, this book that meant so much to him, was going nowhere.”

  “Aw,” I said.

  Ellen’s head snapped up. “I can’t tell this if that’s what you’re going to do.”

  Admonished, I shut up.

  “He was feeling under a lot of pressure to produce something, to make his mark as a member of the Thackeray faculty. Others had been published, not that they’d had bestsellers or anything, but they’d written academic works that had been well received within the community. They had something to show for themselves. But Conrad didn’t want to produce some essay that would be read by fifty people and then tucked away on a library shelf. He wanted to do more than that.” She took a breath. “And then he met Brett Stockwell.”

  “His stu
dent.”

  “That’s right. A promising, gifted student. Gay, and troubled, moody, and mature beyond his years. Certainly where his writing ability was concerned. Conrad, who normally didn’t have a good thing to say about any of his students—who felt so much above them—talked about him all the time.”

  “Let me guess. Brett showed him the novel he was working on.”

  “He wasn’t just working on it. He’d finished it. He wanted Conrad to read it, tell him what he thought about it.” She shook her head and looked downward again. “He worshipped Conrad. He desperately wanted to know what his favorite professor thought of his novel. He so looked up to him.”

  “And Conrad betrayed him,” I said.

  Ellen gave me the look again. The one that said shut the fuck up and let her tell it.

  “So Brett gave him this book to read. He told him he’d been working on it for months, hadn’t shown it to anyone else, hadn’t had the nerve to even tell anyone else what it was he’d been working on. Conrad was very skeptical at first, because, even though he regarded Brett as a fine student, he doubted he had the stuff to write a novel at his age, at least a good one. Brett had the book on a disc, which he gave Conrad, and which Conrad read on his own computer. And he was blown away by it. It was a strong piece of work, satirical, provocative, funny. It was vastly superior to the book Conrad had been struggling to write for years.”

  Ellen stopped. “I need a drink,” she said.

  She got up, opened the fridge, and I expected her to pull out a bottle of wine. I figured that, after pouring out what she’d had the other day, she’d had a change of heart and replenished her supply.

  But she brought out a bottle of Fruitopia and held it up to me, asking, without asking, if I wanted one. I nodded.

  Ellen sat back down, uncapped the bottle, poured it into two glasses, and continued. “The thing was, Brett’s book was similar in subject matter to the one Conrad had been working on. I mean, not the exact same idea by any means, about a man who wakes up one day and finds his entire sexual identity has been changed, but it was a satire of contemporary sexual attitudes, and I think when Conrad read the book, he somehow convinced himself that this was the book he’d been trying to write all along, that in many ways he and Brett were on the same wavelength. Conrad wanted a professional opinion at this point. He wanted to know whether he was alone in thinking it was brilliant. So he sent the book to Elizabeth Hunt.”