The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “But the men who got their fingers cut off . . .”

  “I will protect you,” he emphasizes, flapping a hand, and I comprehend instantly that I may not step another inch down that road. For a harrowing instant, I know true fear. “You and your family. As long as I live.”

  “I understand.”

  “If these men truly accosted you, I would think their misfortune was a sign that you are truly safe.” Jack Ziegler lets his meaning sink in. Then his bleary eyes find mine. “I had hoped you were here with news of the arrangements.”

  I pause. There is opportunity here, I can sense it, if I can only get my creaky brain back into operation. “Not news exactly. But I think I might be on the track.”

  Once more I hesitate to press forward. If I complete the thought, I am committed to my path. I made my decision long before landing in Aspen, but between the decision and the act God has placed the will; and the will is quite sensitive to terror.

  Still Abby’s godfather waits.

  “But, well, if you could just explain a couple of things to me—well, things would be so much easier.” I am annoyed at myself. Just as in the cemetery, I am tongue-tied in Uncle Jack’s presence. I suppose I have reason: Jack Ziegler is a murderer many times over, an efficient broker in just about every illegal substance, a middleman to the underworld, with connections to organized crime so complex, so neatly obscured, that nobody has ever quite succeeded in tracking them down.

  Yet everybody knows they are there.

  “A couple of things,” he repeats, promising nothing. I notice a line of perspiration along his forehead. His hands as he brushes it away betray a slight tremor, and his eyes intermittently lose their focus. An attack of nerves? His illness? “A couple of things,” he says again.

  I nod, swallow, steal a glance out the window, this time without quite feeling like I am tumbling off the mountain—but still I cannot figure out how the house stays up.

  I look back at Jack Ziegler again, and I realize, from the fact that he is waiting with so much patience, from the fact that he agreed to see me at all, that he is every bit as needy as I am. So my voice is calmer and more certain when I say: “First, I was wondering if you saw my father, oh, about a year and a half ago. A year ago last October. Around then.”

  His eyes cloud again, and I realize he is actually trying to remember. “No,” he says at length. “No, I think not. At that time I would still have been in Mexico for my treatments.” He sounds uncertain, not deceptive. Still, it is hard to be sure. “Why?”

  “I just wondered.” Realizing this sounds ridiculous, I reinterpret it. “I . . . heard a rumor, I guess.”

  “And is that why you came all this way, Talcott? To chase down a rumor?”

  “No.” Time to roll the dice. “No, Uncle Jack, I came because I want to ask you about Colin Scott.”

  “And who, please, is Colin Scott?”

  I hesitate. Colin Scott, I know from Ethan Brinkley, had several names, and there is no reason to think Jack Ziegler knows them all. On the other hand, if, as I suspect, he has been keeping tabs on my life these last few months, he can hardly have failed to hear the name once or twice.

  “Colin Scott,” I repeat. “He used to be called Villard. Jonathan Villard. He was a private detective. My father hired him to find out who was in the car that killed Abby. Your goddaughter.”

  Now it is Jack Ziegler’s turn to hesitate. He is trying to work out how much I know and how much I am guessing and how much he can hide. He does not like being vulnerable to me, and his willingness to show me this calculating side suggests that he wants my help.

  “And?” he asks.

  “I think you used to know him in the CIA.”

  “And?”

  “And you had to be the one who put my father in contact with him.”

  “And?” Not even telling me if I am hot or cold. There is a wheeze in his voice, wet and sickly. He puts a hand flat over his chest, then bursts into a fit of phlegmy coughing, doubling over. Instinctively, I take his arm, which, beneath the bathrobe, has melted away almost to the bone. Harrison is next to us in an instant, gently removing my fingers, guiding Uncle Jack to the sofa, handing him a tall glass of water.

  Jack Ziegler gulps the water, and the coughing subsides.

  “Please sit down, Professor,” the wiry Harrison orders gravely. His voice is a reedy chirp, and I look twice to make sure he really is the tough guy he obviously wants to appear. I examine his shoulders and decide that he is.

  I sit as commanded, on a spindly chair across from the scariest man I know. Harrison proffers a pill, which Uncle Jack waves peevishly away. Harrison’s outstretched hand might be carved from stone. Uncle Jack glares but finally yields, swallowing the pill, swigging the water.

  Harrison withdraws.

  Could he, too, be a nurse? Am I imagining too much? I glance at the infamous Jack Ziegler, slumped on the gorgeous sofa, spittle on his dry lips, his hand waving feebly, but not in time to the music. Why was I so afraid of him? He is sick, he is dying, he is scared. I look around the room. Not a museum, a mausoleum. My heart is seized with an unexpected wave of pity for the man huddled across from me. We sit in silence for a few minutes, or, rather, we sit without talking: Finlandia has been replaced by what sounds like Wagner, although I am unable to identify the piece. Jack Ziegler leans back on the sofa, his eyes closed.

  “Please excuse me, Talcott,” he whispers without moving. “I am not yet recovered.” He does not say from what.

  “I understand.” I pause, but I am too well bred to avoid what I must say next: “If it would be easier for you, I can come back another time.”

  “Nonsense.” Another cough, not as loud, but dry and rattling and obviously painful. He opens his eyes. “You are here, you have come this great distance, you have questions. You may ask.” Although I may not answer, he is telling me.

  “Colin Scott,” I say again.

  Jack Ziegler blinks, his eyes watery and ancient and mildly confused. I try to remember all the crimes he is supposed to have committed, all the connections with the Mafia, with the arms dealers and the drug lords and other people whose livelihood depends on the misery of others. But I am finding it difficult to recall why this doddering old man seemed so scary a moment ago. I remind myself about the men whose hands were mutilated after they attacked me, but it stirs less horror than before.

  “What about him?” Uncle Jack finally says, blinking hard.

  “I don’t think my father paid him. There don’t seem to be any canceled checks in my father’s papers.” I decided before I ever set foot in this house to leave Mariah out of it. Best that Abby’s godfather find it necessary to kill no more than one of Abby’s siblings.

  “What was it for which your father failed to pay?”

  “For the work he did. Tracking down the sports car.” I swallow, my uneasiness building afresh as his face strengthens once more, but the time for caution was before I lifted the receiver to call Jack Ziegler in the first place. “My father didn’t pay him for his work.”

  “So?”

  This single syllable possesses an affect heretofore missing: a sleeping beast seems to be slowly waking, and Jack Ziegler does not seem nearly so doddering.

  “I don’t imagine he worked for free,” I say carefully.

  “So?”

  My fear is creeping back, stroking my back and thighs with chilly fingers. Somehow, Uncle Jack has altered the temperature of our conversation.

  “I think . . . I think you paid him. Paid the detective.”

  “I paid him?” The coal-black eyes are sharper now, and my stomach is touched by the same twisting unease I felt when I was a child on the Vineyard and my father gave me a torch and ordered me to burn a hornets’ nest Mariah had discovered in the eaves above the porch. I knew then that unless I got every one of them I was going to be stung. A lot.

  “That’s what I think.”

  “That I paid this Scott for his work for your father.” Jack Ziegler e
nunciates the words slowly and clearly, as though offering me the opportunity to retract my testimony.

  “Yes.” I may be stirring the hornets, but at least my voice is calm.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because you and my father were old friends. Because you were his daughter’s godfather.” I force the next words out, knowing he will never tell me which version is true. “Or maybe you helped him because you . . . you wanted my father to owe you a favor. A favor you could later ask him to repay.”

  Jack Ziegler makes the spitting sound I recall from the cemetery. His long fingers stroke the dying flesh of his chin.

  “Maybe there are no checks to the late Mr. Scott because your father did not pay him anything. Maybe he did not pay him anything because Mr. Scott did not work for him.”

  “I don’t think that’s it. I think there are reasons why my father could not write him checks. I think that Mr. Scott . . . well, let’s say he didn’t exactly have the kind of background with which a federal judge could afford to be associated.”

  “So?”

  “So my father had to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Maybe, even then, he was thinking about the Supreme Court.” When this evokes nothing but the same hard-eyed stare, I continue. “Besides, I’m not even sure my father could have afforded to pay him. Not on a federal judge’s salary, especially in those days.”

  Jack Ziegler is wonderfully relaxed. “What else do you think, Talcott? This is really quite intriguing.”

  I hesitate, but it is a little late to turn back.

  “I think Colin Scott did do a report about the accident. I think he figured out who did it. I think he gave it to my father. But I don’t think my father ever took it to the police, did he? I think, when he saw what was in it, he asked Mr. Scott to do something for him, and, when he said no, my father brought the report to you and asked for your help.”

  I stop. The next words simply will not emerge. It is not that I am too frightened to speak them; it is that I am less sure than I was two hours ago that I want to know the answer.

  But Jack Ziegler refuses to let me avoid the rest. “You say your father came to me for my help? I see. And what is it that you suppose happened then?”

  Well, this is what I flew up the mountain to discuss. This is the moment toward which I have been working, through all the conversations with Wallace Wainwright and Lanie Cross and all the memories I have teased from Sally and Addison and even Mariah, through all the evidence I have assembled, with and without their help, up to and including the missing scrapbook. If I am not going to say it, all the months of work are wasted. So is the trip to Aspen.

  To be sure, if I do say it, there is a nontrivial possibility that I will never see my wife and child again. But I have, as so often, the courage of the fool.

  “I think, somehow, you got Colin Scott to . . . to take care of the problem for him.”

  So there, finally, it is out in the open.

  Jack Ziegler shakes his head slowly, and a bit sadly, but his eyes angle away from me, gazing out on the vertiginous view. “Take care of it?” He snickers. Then coughs. “You sound like a bad movie. Take care of what?”

  “You know what I mean, Uncle Jack.”

  “I know what you mean, Talcott, and, frankly, I am insulted by it.”

  His tone is low, almost caressing, and it chills me. Once again, something vaguely threatening thickens the air between us.

  “I’m not trying to—”

  “You are accusing your father of a crime, Talcott. You use silly euphemisms, but that is what you are doing, eh? You think your father paid this man Scott to do a murder.” He is growing less and less simple by the moment. “That is bad enough. But now you are accusing me of helping him.”

  Once you stir the nest, the Judge told me, you had better keep on burning, because you can never outrun the hornets if they get loose.

  “Look, Uncle Jack, I know how you make your living.”

  “No, I don’t think you do.” His mouth puckers and he holds up a twisted hand. He pokes a shriveled finger in my face. “Oh, I know, I know, you think you know. Everybody thinks they know. They read the newspapers and those imbecilic books and whatnot. Those fool committee reports. But nobody really knows. Nobody.” He struggles to his feet. I have the good sense, for once, not to offer to help. “Come with me, Talcott, I want to show you something.”

  I follow him as he pads in his slippers across the long room, passing in front of that amazing window with the dizzying, panoramic view of Aspen, and out into the stainless-steel kitchen, where a stout Slavic woman is preparing lunch. Now I see the source of that zesty smell, for she is pouring powder into a pot. My host snarls at her in some language I do not recognize, and she smiles thinly and disappears. The back wall of the kitchen shares the same view through huge windows. On the far side, the room opens into a greenhouse. I follow Jack Ziegler inside, where a bewildering variety of plants perfume the air. I wonder how the intermixing aromas affect the taste of the food.

  “Look,” says Uncle Jack, pointing at something on the other side of the glass wall. “See what I mean? Everybody.”

  Now it is my turn to be confused. “Uh, everybody what?”

  “Everybody thinks they know. Look!”

  I look. I throw a serious expression on my face, hoping Uncle Jack will mistake my befuddlement for concentration, as I have not the faintest idea what he is talking about. I follow the path of his trembling finger. I see his sweeping lawn, the crisp snow sparkling in the rich mountain sun, I see high hedges, and the narrow road winding upward toward the ever-more-ostentatious homes of film producers and software entrepreneurs even wealthier than my baby sister’s godfather. A minivan rumbles by: Kimmer hates them, considering them matronly, and refuses to let us buy one. A power company truck is parked a hundred yards up the hill as the uniformed crew, one male, one female, does something clever up on the pole. A bit closer in, a muscular woman in black boots and yellow spandex, evidently heedless of the cold, walks what my untutored eye decides is a Doberman. A battered red pickup bearing the logo of a lawn-care firm wheezes past, ferrying a trio of snow-blowers.

  Jack Ziegler stands next to me like a statue, his finger pressed to the glass. I do not know what he is pointing at. I do know that the plants are starting to make me gag.

  “Okay,” I say carefully. “I’m looking.”

  “Well, do you see them?” His senility has made a sudden return, and I wonder again whether it is feigned. “Do you see them watching us?”

  “See who?”

  He grabs my shoulder. His fingers, hot with fever, dig into the muscle like talons. “There! The truck!”

  “The truck? You mean the one over by the pole?”

  “Yes, yes, do you see it?”

  “Okay, yes. I see the truck.”

  “Well, then, you understand. You have no idea how they harass me—”

  “Who? The power company?”

  Uncle Jack looks at me hard, and for an instant the clouds seem to dissipate. “Not the power company,” he says in a reasonable tone. “The FBI.”

  I look again. “It’s a power company truck—”

  “It is only a cover. They are here to harass me.” He laughs unexpectedly, and his eyes darken and roll. His gleeful madness has returned. “The power goes out up here at least twice a month. Do you know why?” I shake my head. “So they can send their trucks and listen in on my telephone. So my alarm systems won’t work and they can plant their bugs.”

  “Bugs—”

  “Right here, in my house, in my kitchen, there are bugs!” To my astonishment, he produces a fly swatter from somewhere and whacks a spot on the wall. “Take that!” he cackles with such glee that for a moment I think that I might have misunderstood him, that he really is talking about insects. “And that!” he cries, turning away to smack the refrigerator, then one of the dark green granite countertops. “That’ll rattle their earphones!” he hoots.

&
nbsp; He tosses the fly swatter vaguely toward a closet, slips an arm around my shoulders, and leads me back into the great room, as he calls it. “They want to know what I do for a living. They think I am a criminal, for goodness’ sake!” He pauses at his immaculate desk and scribbles something on a pad. “Like you do,” he mutters. “Like you do.” Then he coughs wetly, not bothering to cover his mouth.

  Embarrassed, I make my typical retreat. “Uncle Jack, I, uh, I didn’t mean—”

  “But I’m on to them,” he giggles, talking right through me. “And so, when the power goes out, do you know what I do?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell you what I do,” he says, his expression crafty as he slips his arm around me once more. “I go around with a flashlight and kill their bugs!”

  “I see,” I say, wondering whether I have come on a fool’s errand.

  “No, I don’t think you do see,” he mumbles. Then he tilts his face sharply upward and bellows: “Harrison!”

  The skinny bodyguard materializes at once. “Yes, sir?”

  This is it. They are throwing me off the side of the mountain. Kimmer, I forgive you. Take good care of our boy.

  “Is this house bugged, Harrison?” Abby’s godfather demands.

  “Occasionally, sir.”

  “And do we kill the bugs?”

  “Whenever we can, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Harrison, that will be all.” Uncle Jack hands him the scribbled note, and the butler-valet-nurse-bodyguard withdraws. I begin to breathe normally once more. This is how they communicate in a house where any word might be overheard: they write each other notes. Now I understand what Henderson meant about Uncle Jack’s popularity—and how everybody would know I am coming to visit. “Bugs everywhere,” says Jack Ziegler, shaking his head sadly.