The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

  “An Irish solution to all of life’s problems, but hey, that’s real Boston Mick talk.”

  He threw back his whiskey, reached for his beer, and nearly drained it too. Then he motioned for the bartender to bring him another round.

  “It’s been a long day,” he said. “But it must have been a long couple of days for you. I’ve been monitoring you in all media.”

  “Then I’m surprised you’d agree to down a few with a future convicted felon, not to mention such an unpatriotic, adulterous . . .”

  He nudged the whiskey glass in my direction.

  “Drink up,” he said.

  I took a small sip of the whiskey.

  “All of it,” he said.

  I threw it back in one go.

  “Well done,” he said, and motioned to the bartender for another whiskey.

  My equilibrium was suddenly sent sideways—but then it subsided again and I felt myself back on terra firma, albeit it with a nicely numbing buzz.

  “Okay,” Leary said. “Tell me everything that’s happened.”

  I did as commanded, even though it took around twenty minutes. Leary remained impassive during my monologue, studying my face with a certain professional detachment. When I finished, he said nothing for a moment. Then he waved his finger again in the direction of the bar, asking for refills for our now empty glasses.

  “Sounds like you’ve had a hell of a week,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a small notebook and a ballpoint pen.

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “And you say that the Jose Julia people want an answer by the end of tomorrow?”

  “I’m not going to do the program,” I said.

  “I think you shouldn’t make that decision just yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a hunch. But first, tell me the name of the town you used to live in when Judson came a-calling?”

  “Pelham, Maine.”

  He wrote this down.

  “And who were the people you knew in Pelham?”

  I gave him a few names—but, of course, as I hadn’t been back to Pelham since leaving it, I had no idea whether any of these people were still alive.

  “That’s for me to find out,” he said.

  “But when?”

  “I’ve got a day off tomorrow—and I’ve been recently thinking about breathing some country air. So maybe I’ll just drive up to Pelham in the morning and see if anyone still remembers you there.”

  NINETEEN

  GREG TOLLAND LOOKED like a scarecrow. An aging scarecrow—and one who was undoubtedly put together in the 1960s. He was around six feet four, stringbean thin, with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. He wore tight, faded blue jeans, cowboy boots, and—this was an interesting sartorial touch—a blue blazer, a blue button-down shirt, and a Harvard Law School tie. The wardrobe and the hairstyle sent out a mixed message—late-middle-aged hippie who still came out of the establishment and could play them at their own game.

  His office—on Congress Street in downtown Portland—was a rabbit warren of small rooms. The walls of this labyrinth were covered with assorted posters—from an old enlarged photograph of Martin Luther King, to an environmental group advertisement showing George W. Bush about to press a detonator and blow up the world, to historic TROOPS OUT OF VIETNAM notices, to more recent NO TROOPS TO IRAQ signs. There wasn’t much of a staff—only four youngish assistants who seemed to be very engaged in assorted administrative tasks. One of them was manning a reception desk piled high with legal files and new mail. She was in her early twenties, wearing overalls and sporting big frizzy hair. I had a fast nostalgic pang for assorted vanished friends from college in the sixties who used to adopt the same splendidly no-style style.

  “You must be Hannah,” she said as I came in the door. “Greg’s expecting you, please go right in.”

  There was no door on Greg’s office—another political statement—so there was nowhere to knock. But he was on his feet and walking toward me as I paused in front of the doorless door frame.

  “Hey there, Hannah,” he said, extending his long bony hand in my direction. “I am so pleased to meet you—not just because, as I said on the phone, your dad is the last of the great progressives, but also because I so respect the way you’ve been handling yourself during this entire shabby business.”

  “Even though I’ve refused to say I’m sorry?”

  He motioned for me to sit in the wicker chair opposite his desk—a desk that seemed to be awash in paperwork. Filing was not a high priority in this legal practice.

  “That was the smartest thing you did—and not just from a purely ethical standpoint. Had you apologized, you would have opened yourself up to the legal argument that you had admitted guilt. Instead, we’re into a classic he said/she said situation. It doesn’t mean that the feds won’t go after you, especially with the attorney general’s predilection for chasing after anyone with even the vaguest radical past. But it does make it harder when it comes to building a case against you.

  “Now I went out yesterday and actually bought Tobias Judson’s book—which, believe me, I didn’t want to do, on the grounds that it was putting money into his sanctimonious little pocket. But I naturally needed to see what we were up against . . . besides, that is, bad prose. I’m not surprised that he could only get this piece of crap published by a right-wing goon house. To call it treacle is to insult treacle.”

  “But it’s still selling—number twenty-eight in the Amazon Top Hundred yesterday . . . not that I’ve been checking these things.”

  “Well, it has been getting a considerable amount of publicity—and all due to your daughter’s disappearance, from which Judson has immensely benefited . . . not, of course, that he’d ever think of doing something so cynical and callous as riding on the back of someone else’s misfortune.”

  He raised his eyebrows like Groucho Marx. I decided that I was going to like Greg Tolland.

  “Now, I’m certain you’re sick of doing this, but it would be really useful if you could take me back through the entire story again—literally from the moment Judson popped into your life all those years ago.”

  Greg Tolland was very skillful in the art of cross-examination, especially when it came to peeling back the layers of my tale and exposing the hidden conflicts underneath.

  “After you made love to Judson for the first time, did you mention to him about how guilty you felt?”

  “Of course.”

  “And what was his reply?”

  “He accused me of having ‘bourgeois values.’”

  A tight smile from Greg Tolland.

  “That’s one to drop during the face-to-face debate.”

  “I still haven’t made up my mind about that one yet.”

  Another wry smile from Greg Tolland.

  “Even though you know that it’s your only real shot to stick it to him?”

  “Did you ever have an abortion?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you think Jeff ever convinced a girlfriend to have an abortion?”

  I was a little thrown by the question and said so.

  “Sorry for my bluntness,” Tolland said, “but in my experience, the real rabid pro-lifers often have some skeleton in the closet and have taken an extreme position because they have done something of which they are actively ashamed.”

  “Well, I know of no such skeleton in Jeff’s past, but even if I did, I wouldn’t let you use it against him.”

  “Even though Judson’s side might enlist him against you?”

  This stopped me short.

  “I can’t believe he’d publicly take his side,” I said.

  Actually I could believe it, especially after the conversation we’d had this morning. It was around eight-thirty and I was waking up in my hotel room in Boston, thankfully alone. Well, to be honest about it, I wasn’t that thankful. After three shots of whiskey and three beer chasers, I ended up walking the half block back to the hotel on the arm of Detective
Leary, who promised me that he wouldn’t drive himself home (he was three ahead of me in the drinks stakes) and instead would be taking a cab back to his apartment in Brookline. As soon as we reached the front of the Onyx, I did something rather out-of-body and alcohol-induced. I leaned over and kissed him. Not a light little peck on the cheek—a proper, deep kiss. He responded with considerable enthusiasm—but then, after a moment or two, gently disengaged himself from our embrace.

  “This is a good idea which is not a good idea,” he said quietly.

  I pulled him toward me again.

  “Don’t think, just . . .”

  He held me by the shoulders.

  “I want to. But—and it’s a big but—we have pretty strict rules about getting involved with anyone who’s part of a case . . .”

  I kissed him.

  “I won’t tell,” I whispered.

  “Hannah . . .”

  I kissed him again.

  “It’ll just be a night . . .”

  “Hannah . . .”

  “And I’ll still respect you in the morning.”

  He suppressed a laugh.

  “I have never, ever used that line myself,” he said.

  I kissed him again.

  “Don’t go . . .”

  He took my hands in his, held them for a moment, then let them go.

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” he said, “see if your hangover’s a doozy.”

  Then, with a light kiss on the top of the head, he directed me into the hotel’s revolving doors. As I started circling around, he waved good-bye and sauntered off.

  I made it back to the room, managed to unlock the door, strip off my clothes, climb beneath the sheets, and pass right out. The next thing I knew, it was morning. Thin light was seeping in. The bedside clock said 6:52. My head felt as if it had been cleaved by an anvil. My guilt made whatever alcohol-induced pain I felt right now seem comparatively mild.

  Don’t think, just . . .

  I pulled the pillow over my face. Trust me to make a drunken pass at an ex-Jesuit who just happens to be investigating my daughter’s disappearance. Score ten out of ten for stupidity . . . especially with everything else breaking around me.

  I rolled over, hoping sleep would whisk me off again for several hours. No such luck. I had left Portland in such a hurry that I had no book with me. So I turned on the television, snapping it right off again when I flicked onto Fox News and saw Lizzie’s photograph fill the screen. You can run, but you can’t hide. Margy was right: this thing was bound to keep on attracting media interest until Lizzie was found.

  I got up. I ran myself a bath. As I lay in it, a strange realization clouded over me: I had nothing to do today. No job to go to, no husband to phone, no commitments, bar the meeting with Greg Tolland this afternoon. But other than seeing the lawyer who would try to keep me out of jail, my day was my own—an empty slate, on which was to be written . . . ?

  What? That was a strange feeling, especially after decades of always having a task at hand, always privately moaning to myself about never really having enough time. Even after the kids left home, time still seemed chockablock. Preparing for classes, teaching classes, advising students, sitting on committees, running a house, keeping fit, attending the book group, reading, reading, reading, my work with the homeless, my work in adult literacy programs, making certain I saw every new movie of worth, making certain I got down to Boston once a month to hear a concert at Symphony Hall, making certain I stayed abreast of all current events, making certain I . . . filled the time.

  Curious, isn’t it, how so much of that time was filled without Dan. And yet, he was always there—the guy waiting for me when I got home . . . who called in the middle of the day just to say hello . . . who liked to surprise me with a night out at a big-deal restaurant downtown . . . who always seemed to be content with how things were between us . . . the man I still expected to be there with me . . . because, hell, we’d made it through all the tricky stuff—the early years of adjustment, the decades of child rearing, the usual postfortysomething midlife crap. We were the exception to the modern rule: the long-married couple who hadn’t stayed together out of some grim duty or warped psychological neediness. We were still together because we still wanted to be together, despite the usual shortcomings. And how many couples can say that after . . .

  We were still together because . . .

  No, that was a reality that was no longer true. Now the sentence had to be changed to the past tense: We had been together because . . .

  The past tense. How could we have ended up in the past tense? And how could Alice have . . . ?

  No, don’t go there. Because even trying to work out the mechanics of their affair—how they first hooked up, the tentative start, the first clandestine lunch or dinner, that moment when he put his hand on hers, their first kiss, the moment he started taking off her clothes, the . . .

  Stop. This is a futile exercise—and one that is guaranteed to drive you into even greater regions of despair. Move on, now . . .

  I got out of the bath. I dried myself, got dressed, and went downstairs to breakfast, hiding behind a magazine, and never once looking at the television news being broadcast on a flat plasma screen opposite me. At eight a.m., I returned to the room, sat down in the armchair by the bed, and made a call I’d been dreading.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Jeff said as soon as he answered his cell phone.

  “Are you really going to cut me off just like that?” I asked.

  “You act like it’s my fault this has happened.”

  “I am hardly saying that. I am just asking you to talk this through with me and consider . . .”

  “Consider? Consider? You’re asking me to give thought to this situation—when you obviously gave no thought to the effect your comments would have on your son and daughter-in-law when you gave that interview to The Boston Globe.”

  “All I said was . . .”

  “I know exactly what you said. I can read. And do you know what I read last night? Tobias Judson’s lurid account of my mother having sex with a man who wasn’t my father while I was sleeping in the same room. Now how do you think that made me feel, Mom?”

  “I know, I know. I’ve told you how bad I feel . . .”

  “How do you think this looks for me? You made love with him while I was right there. And then, you thought nothing of bringing me along while you drove getaway for your lover . . .”

  “Jeff, sweetheart, you have to try to understand—”

  “No, Mom, I don’t have to understand anything. And if you start in on that ‘He coerced me . . . I had no choice’ stuff, I’ll hang up. Because so many secrets and lies have come tumbling out the past couple of days, I don’t know if the frontier between your delusions and what actually happened exists anymore.”

  “But whatever you think about my behavior at the time, can’t you see that Judson is selling his side of the story in order to make a buck and also augment his public profile? And can’t you also see that the only way he can really tell the story is by embellishing . . .”

  “Just answer me this: did you sleep with Tobias Judson while married to my father?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And did you bring Tobias Judson to Canada when he was on the run from the FBI?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And did you smoke all the way to and from Canada while I was in the backseat of the car?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “Just answer the question,” he said, sounding like the public prosecutor he briefly once was.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Do you know that I called my doctor this morning about this and he’s scheduled a chest X-ray for Monday . . .”

  “Don’t you think that’s just a little overcautious?”

  “You would think that. Just like you’d try to deny the inherent dangers of secondhand smoke . . .”

  “Jeff, this was thirty years ago. Surely . . .”

  �
��Surely what? Surely it doesn’t matter? Is that your lame excuse? Or maybe it’s Surely Jeff, you’re being the little prig as usual? Or how about, Surely you don’t believe a born-again idiot like Tobias Judson? Well, guess what, Mom? I’m happy being a prig, just as I’m happy in my Christian faith. And I am going to hang up now before I blow up and say some very un-Christian things. Just know this: I am in complete accord with Shannon when it comes to keeping you away from our kids. And nothing you can say or do will change that.”

  Before I could reply, the line went dead. When I called back, I got his voice mail. I didn’t leave a message.

  Hours later in Greg Tolland’s office, I related this conversation to him. He said, “May I give you a piece of difficult advice? No matter how desperate you are to speak to your son, let him be right now. From what I can gather, he’s rather dogmatic—and, in my experience, once a dogmatic person adopts a hard-line position, he is loath to surrender it . . . because that means admitting he is wrong. If you are that doctrinaire, you are not going to back down, especially if, like your son, you have a wife who is very much part of the fanatical wing of the Evangelical Free Church. I Googled her this morning—she’s quite the poster girl for the antiabortion movement in Connecticut.”

  “It would be easy to blame her for the position Jeff’s taken against me. But the fact is: he’s a grown man . . . and not a stupid one. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “Which is why the other side might use him against you.”

  “If that happens,” I said quietly, “so be it.”

  He then told me he wanted to propose a counterstrategy to “scare the crap” out of the other side. He wanted to publicly announce that we were planning to sue Judson and his publishers for an excessive sum of money, on the grounds that he had defamed my character.

  “Take it from me,” he said, “the chances of us winning anything in a court of law are virtually nonexistent, because, as I said before, it’s your word against his. Still, by simply announcing we’re going to sue them for, say, $20 million . . .”

  “Good God.”

  “It’s a ridiculous figure, I know. But that’s the idea—frighten them into thinking we mean business. They’ll know it’s all strategic on our part, but the public impact will be made. And it will also send a message to the Justice Department that we plan to mount a very robust defense of your position . . .”