The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  Wait.

  What was it Mariah said? Somebody who would have left except—except—

  I hurry back into the kitchen, snatch up the telephone. For once I reach Mariah on my first try. Battling back her efforts to fill my ears with the latest conspiracy news gleaned from the Internet, I throw in the crucial question:

  “Listen, kiddo, wasn’t there somebody you said would have left the church over Father Bishop’s drug use, except she had her reasons?”

  “Sure. Gigi Walker. You remember Gigi. Addison used to date her little sister? Of course, Addison used to date everybody, so I guess that isn’t much of a—”

  “Mariah, listen. What did you mean when you said she had her reasons?”

  “Oh, Tal, why are you the last to hear everything? Gigi and Father Bishop were an item for years. This was after his wife died, and after her husband left, so it wasn’t quite the scandal it could have been. But, still, Daddy said he didn’t think a man of the cloth—”

  Again I interrupt. “Okay, okay. Listen. Gigi. That’s a nickname, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And her real name is . . .”

  Even before my sister answers, I know what she is going to say. “Angela. Angela Walker. Why do you want to know?”

  Mariah babbles on, but I am not listening. The telephone is trembling in my hand.

  No wonder Colin Scott, according to Lanie Cross’s tale, gave Gigi Walker such a hard time that she cried. He knew what I now know, but he knew it first.

  I have found Angela’s boyfriend.

  But somebody else found him first, which is why he is dead and can tell me nothing.

  (II)

  I CANNOT REACH AGENT NUNZIO. Sergeant Ames refuses to listen to my theories, and I can hardly blame her. If I have actual evidence that she has the wrong man in custody, she suggests that I should share it with her. If I do not, then I should leave her alone and let her do her job. The trouble is, I am in the dangerous middle ground. Sitting in the kitchen of Vinerd Howse, trying to figure out how to get her to take me seriously, I run up against a wall. I think I know who tortured Freeman Bishop to death and what he wanted, but I am certainly in no position to prove it. Bonnie Ames, on the other hand, has a witness willing to testify that Conan bragged about what he did, a history of violent behavior on the part of her suspect, and evidence that Freeman Bishop was behind in money he owed Conan for drugs.

  I do not know how Colin Scott manufactured all that evidence, but I have no doubt that he did so. Poor Freeman Bishop was not included in Jack Ziegler’s command that the family not be harmed. So Scott tortured him to learn what he was supposed to tell me, and, as the sergeant pointed out grimly when Mariah and I visited her, it is unlikely that the priest held anything back. And there is the problem, I reflect as I hang up the telephone and begin once more to wander the house. If Father Bishop told Colin Scott everything, why did Scott still see a need to follow me? If he was following me, he obviously had not learned where my father hid . . . whatever he hid.

  Which means that Freeman Bishop never told him.

  Which means that Freeman Bishop never knew.

  I think he was a mistake. The bad kind.

  Now I understand what Maxine was talking about. Freeman Bishop was murdered because Colin Scott thought he was Angela’s boyfriend. And he was, indeed, Angela’s boyfriend. He just wasn’t the Angela’s boyfriend my father meant.

  Nevertheless, as far as I am concerned, it was the Judge who got him killed.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE SKELETON

  (I)

  “YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENED,” announces a gleeful Dana Worth, striding into my office uninvited.

  “That’s right,” I tell her crossly, barely looking up from the galley proofs I am busily correcting with a broken red pencil. I have not had the emotional energy to do a lot of work since my return from the Vineyard. It is the end of the second week of January and Elm Harbor’s streets are choked with dirty snow. The spring semester formally begins on Monday, but the minutiae of law school life cannot hold my attention. Students have been coming in with excuses for not having their papers done on time. I have not wasted words scolding them. The library still wants the book I have misplaced. Earlier today, Shirley Branch called, still depressed about her missing dog. I tried to be comforting, as a mentor should, even though I was tempted to tell her—it was a near thing—that I can only look for one missing item at a time. On the Vineyard, Maxine begged me to continue the search for the arrangements, but I am not sure I will be able to do it. Too many ghosts now haunt me.

  Last night around eleven-thirty, the telephone woke us, and Kimmer, who sleeps on that side of the bed, picked up the receiver, listened for about three seconds, and handed it to me without a word: Mariah again, calling to disclose a fact she had previously hidden. As my wife pulled the blanket over her head, my sister told me what she had wheedled out of poor Warner Bishop when the two of them finally talked over a cozy dinner in New York. In the telling, Mariah confirmed my fears. Warner, it seems, lied to the police. On the night Freeman Bishop died, just as Sergeant Ames said, he informed his vestry that he would be a little late for the meeting because he had to stop and comfort a distraught parishioner. But he told his son, who happened to call just before he left, a different story. Father Bishop said he would be late because he had to see an FBI agent who had dropped by the church earlier in the day, set up a clandestine meeting to talk about an unnamed congregant, and sworn him to silence. Why did Warner keep this fact from the police? Because he was scared, said Mariah. Of whom? Of whoever killed his father. She grew enthusiastic. I wanted to tell you earlier, Tal, when I was over at your house. But you spent so much time dissing me that I didn’t really trust you. Now I do. I tried to remember whether I was really so cruel. Before I could figure out whether Mariah expected me to apologize, she was on to the next point in her brief. See why I don’t trust the FBI? But she knew as well as I did that the real FBI had nothing to do with what happened to Freeman Bishop.

  “Misha, come on, pay attention.” Dear Dana brushes aside a stack of papers—never mind where I want them to be—and hops onto the corner of my desk. Her feet do not reach the floor. She strikes her famous pose again, soles flat on the side. “This is good news. This is important.”

  I lean back in my aged chair and hear the familiar crack of the broken bearings. In my experience, nothing but faculty politics ever arouses such exuberance in my occasional friend, so I steel myself for an interminable tale of triumph or tragedy, related somehow to the question of who will or will not be appointed to the faculty, an issue, although I have not informed Dana, about which I no longer actually care.

  “I’m listening,” I tell her.

  Dana flashes her pixie grin, the one she reserves for teasing old friends and baiting new students. She is wearing a dark sweater and a pair of beige pants that would fit a twelve-year-old, but the sharp crease suggests a product affordable only by twelve-year-olds who live in Beverly Hills. “It actually has more to do with that wife of yours than with you.”

  “I’m still listening.” I cannot imagine what aspect of Kimmer’s life Dana would find so fascinating, but I am always willing to learn.

  “This is a good one, Misha.”

  “No doubt.”

  “You’re no fun, you know that?”

  “Dana, are you going to tell me or not?”

  She pouts briefly, unaccustomed to this new, less playful Misha Garland, but decides, as Dana always will, that her gossip is too juicy to remain unconfided.

  “Well, you’ll never guess who spent the last two hours in Dean Lynda’s office.”

  “True.” I turn my attention back to the proofs.

  “True?”

  “True, I will never guess. So why don’t you just tell me.”

  Dana makes a face and waits for me to notice, then plunges on. “I’ll give you a hint, Misha. They were using both of her telephone lines—this person and Lynda,
I mean—and they were on the telephone to just about everybody in Washington, trying to persuade them that he didn’t plagiarize the world-famous Chapter Three of his one and only book.”

  My chair tilts forward with a surprised crunch. For a marvelous instant, the worries about my father and his arrangements and Freeman Bishop and the roller woman evaporate.

  “You don’t mean . . .”

  “I do mean. Brother Hadley.”

  “You’re kidding. You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding. Chapter Three? The one he’s always quoting? The one everybody is always quoting? Well, it turns out he copied it from an unpublished paper by none other than Perry Mountain.”

  “Marc plagiarized Theo’s brother? Marc? I don’t believe it.”

  Dana is disappointed by my skepticism; she wanted my cheers. “Why do you find it so hard to believe? You think Marc is some kind of paragon? You think he doesn’t cheat and steal like everybody else?”

  “Well, no, it’s just that I can’t believe Marc would ever think that somebody else’s ideas were good enough to call his own.”

  This wins me the coveted Dear Dana Worth grin of approval.

  “Well, in case you’ve forgotten, Brother Hadley also has the greatest writer’s block in the history of Western civilization. So maybe stealing somebody else’s ideas is better than never publishing at all, huh?”

  I shake my head. This is happening too fast. Kimmer’s path is suddenly clear—

  Except—except—

  “Dana, what exactly is Marc supposed to have done?”

  “Well, this is the good part, my dear.” She hops off my desk and begins to wear the familiar circle in my carpet. “It seems that some student was going through the archives out at UCLA, you know, throwing away old files—”

  (II)

  “—AND HE COMES ACROSS SOME PAPERS of none other than Pericles Mountain,” I tell Kimmer on the telephone minutes later, having had her secretary call her out of a meeting as soon as Dana went on to spread the bad news along the corridor. I sense my wife’s growing impatience as I repeat the story Dana told me. Impatience, but excitement too. “And so now he’s sitting there in some subbasement of the UCLA Law School, reading through this stuff, the way students do when they’d rather not be working, and it happens that he just read Marc’s book in one of his classes, and he notices this draft, and the language is very similar, and he gets to wondering if this is maybe an early draft of the book. Like maybe he can show it off next week in the seminar, surprise everybody by telling them what the great Marc Hadley thought about writing before he changed his mind.” We both laugh. Kimmer is so delighted by this news that we are almost happy together. “Only, when he looks at it a little more closely, it turns out not to be a draft of The Constitutional Mind. It’s just a draft of some paper that Perry Mountain wrote. He’s about to throw it away, but the similarity of the language sticks in his mind. So he saves it from the recycling bin and takes it back to his apartment and a couple of days later he compares it with the book and, sure enough, it’s almost word for word the same. So the next day he tells his professor, and one professor tells another, and, well, here we are.”

  “I don’t believe it,” my wife marvels, although she plainly does. “Do you know what this means, Misha? I can’t believe it.”

  “I know what it means, darling.”

  “He’ll have to withdraw, won’t he? He’ll have to.”

  She is almost giddy, a Kimmer I have never seen.

  “I think you’re right. He’ll have to withdraw. Congratulations, Your Honor.”

  “Oh, honey, this is so wonderful.” It strikes me suddenly that Kimmer is taking a little too much pleasure in her rival’s misfortune—or, rather, misfeasance—and it seems to strike her, too. “I mean, I’m sorry for Marc and all, and, if I’m gonna get it, I didn’t want to get it this way. This is just . . .” A pause. I can almost hear her mood beginning to shift, even if for no other reason than that she is moody. “Have you talked to Mallory?”

  “Nobody but you.”

  “I’d love to know what folks are saying in D.C.”

  “I’ll call him as soon as we’re done,” I promise.

  “I think I’ll make a few calls of my own.” I am not sure why this strikes me as more ominous than optimistic.

  “It’s pretty amazing,” I say, just to keep the conversation going.

  “But I don’t get it.” Kimmer throws in an objection because she thinks human beings are rational. “I don’t understand why he would be so stupid. Marc, I mean.”

  “Well, we all make mistakes.”

  “This is a pretty big one.” As she thinks it through, her mood shift continues, clouds of doubt forming. I can hear it in her voice. “It doesn’t make any sense, Misha. Why would Marc copy it? Wouldn’t he be afraid of getting caught?”

  “Well, here’s the interesting part. It turns out that Perry Mountain got sick and never published the article. The Constitutional Mind came out three years after Perry Mountain died.”

  Skeptical Kimmer remains unpersuaded. Her good humor is definitely beginning to fade. “And nobody noticed? Perry didn’t send a draft to anybody else? Maybe Theo, for instance? I mean, I’d have thought Theo would be screaming from the day the book was published.”

  I frown. I did not consider this possibility. I tell her I will call Dana and see.

  “Dana is your source for all this?” Kimmer splutters. Thinking to bring my wife the news she most wants to hear, I have instead managed to anger her. “I mean, come on, Misha, I know she’s your buddy and all, but it’s not like she always has her facts right.”

  “Kimmer—”

  “And she can’t stand Marc,” my wife adds, as though she herself can. “So maybe she’s a little biased.”

  “On the other hand, she always knows what’s going on around here.”

  “I’m sorry, Misha.” My wife is her old, cold self again, suspicious of everyone and everything. “It’s just that I have the feeling I’m being set up.”

  I try to keep it light. “This would be an awful lot of trouble to go to just to set you up, darling.”

  A silence while she thinks this over. “I guess you’re right,” she grudges. “But I gotta tell you, honey, it sounds awfully weird.”

  It is only after I glumly hang up the phone and return to my unfinished galley proofs that I realize Kimmer may be half right. It does look like a setup. But my wife is not the one being set up.

  (III)

  “SURE I KNEW ABOUT IT,” Theophilus Mountain tells me, a broad smile materializing from some unexpected valley in his acres of beard. “You think I wouldn’t have noticed?”

  As usual after arguing with my wife, I am feeling logy, my head filled with fuzz rather than thought. I do not quite get Theo’s point.

  “You knew Marc copied Chapter Three from . . . from your brother? You knew it all these years? And you didn’t do anything about it?”

  Theo laughs, shifting his round body in his wooden desk chair. He is delighted to be present at the rout of Marc Hadley, one of his many enemies. Most of those Theo despises he hates for their politics; Stuart Land, for example. But the ambitious Marc Hadley carefully cultivates the image of a scholar not driven by politics; Marc he hates for his arrogance. From the day he arrived in Elm Harbor a quarter century ago to teach constitutional law, Marc Hadley has never kowtowed to Theophilus Mountain in the way that the youngsters in his field used to do . . . and the way nobody does any longer. Nowadays, they kowtow to Marc Hadley instead. Theo has never forgiven Marc for changing the rules.

  “I never saw the point,” says Theo. He begins to pace his huge office, located all the way at the end of the second floor, overlooking the main entrance of Oldie. Theo Mountain, say the wits, watches the new faculty come in the door and watches the old ones get carried out; but Theo himself seems eternal. The office he inhabits is eternal, too, a law school legend, an incredible mess, featuring stacks of papers halfway to the ceil
ing, covering just about every surface. My office is cluttered, true, as many around the building are, but Theo’s is awesome, a masterpiece, a monument to a true genius of disorganization. The only way to sit down is to move some of the junk aside. Theo never seems to care where you put what you move or which stacks you knock over in the process of emptying a chair; he never throws anything away but never looks at anything he keeps. It is said that he has copies of every faculty memo going back to the dawn of the twentieth century. Sometimes I think he might.

  “I never saw the point,” he repeats, striding over to his file cabinet and yanking open drawers in apparently random order. “Marc was younger then, and a bigger idiot than he is now, and he was convinced, the way you all are when you first arrive, that he knew pretty much everything there was to know. So one day we had lunch and talked about Cardozo. And it turned out he didn’t know much about Cardozo at all.” Theo has found something to fascinate him in the back of one of the drawers. He leans over and pokes his head in, just like a cartoon character, and I half expect his upper body to disappear, with his feet tumbling in just behind.