The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  For example, the fact that Colin Scott may be dead but Foreman is still alive.

  My family is in no danger, Uncle Jack just assured me again, and I believe that he believes it, but I am not supposed to be in any danger either, and somebody assaulted me in the middle of the campus. True, somebody who sounded just like Henderson called later to apologize, but he called later.

  Eight o’clock, ten in the East. I try Kimmer’s cell phone. I try her office. Then I try my home number again. When there is still no answer, I do something I almost never do, which is to call Dear Dana Worth at her house, two blocks from mine on Hobby Road. I suppose I do not call because Alison makes me uneasy, or maybe I am the one who makes her uneasy. Either way, we do not get along. So it is Alison, of course, who answers the phone.

  When I apologize for calling so late, Alison trots out the tired old joke, that she had to get up anyway because the phone was ringing. Her tone tells me that she is half serious, that she is annoyed that I called, so perhaps it is an awkward moment, a proposition on which I would as soon not speculate.

  When I ask for Dana, Alison asks why.

  “Because I need to talk to her.”

  “About what?”

  “It’s . . . it’s private.”

  A brief, furious silence over the line. “Well, she’s not here right now.”

  “Do you expect her soon?”

  “I have no idea,” Alison grumbles, and the anger in her tone tells me that the two of them have been fighting again, as they often do.

  I can hardly ask Alison, who has no reason to like me, to do what I had planned to ask of Dana—to go by the house and see if Kimmer and Bentley are home and safe—so I make my excuses and hang up.

  Another call home. Still the answering machine.

  I cross to the living-room window again. There is little furniture in the place: a glass-topped dinette with six imitation leather chairs, an ugly green sofa and matching loveseat, two beanbag chairs on which, in a pinch, someone could sleep. The sofa, I suppose, also folds out into a bed. I push the curtain aside once more. Dark in Aspen. Dark on Hobby Road. More worried than ever, I return to the kitchen and try Don and Nina Felsenfeld, next door.

  No answer. No machine. I remember that they have gone to visit a daughter down in North Carolina for a few days. And it is ticking fast toward ten-thirty back East.

  I am beginning to tremble.

  Who else can I call in the neighborhood? Peter Van Dyke, who lives right across the street, scarcely knows I am alive. Tish Kirschbaum, my next-nearest neighbor from the law school, has a house right around the corner, but we are not close. Theo Mountain, who resides one street over, is surely asleep. Within a couple of blocks are Ethan Brinkley and Arnie Rosen and a few other colleagues, but on all of Hobby Hill, there is nobody, with the exception of Dear Dana, fellow outcast, I can imagine waking to help me scare away the bogeyman. If there is a bogeyman.

  Nothing is wrong, I keep telling myself. Everything is fine. Kimmer is asleep, I try. But the answering machine is right next to the bed. So she fell asleep downstairs, maybe in the family room, watching television and drinking wine. Except that Kimmer never drinks herself to sleep: it was the Judge who used to do that. She is at the office, then, finishing some urgent project, Bentley sleeping on the floor as she works, but the notion is insane, and, besides, I tried there already. So she is stuck in a traffic jam. Dead in a traffic accident. Maybe I should try the university hospital? She is out in the yard, being tortured by Foreman.

  Who is still alive.

  Enough!

  I do what I should have done in the first place and call the Elm Harbor police. As I hang up the telephone after five minutes with a skeptical desk sergeant, the doorbell rings and I jump, but it is only the delivery man with the food I ordered.

  (II)

  I MUNCH MOROSELY ON THE RAPIDLY COOLING PIZZA and sip the rapidly warming Diet Coke and wonder when I should call back. The sergeant promised to send a car over to the house as soon as one was free. Nothing I was able to say persuaded him to hurry. Perhaps he gets calls like this all the time. I sit in Aspen in the little condo, my face in my hands, as I wait for some word. Is there a protocol? An established interval between calls to the police? I do not remember when I have felt so impotent, even when I was nearly arrested the night the two men beat me up: there, at least, I knew it would all be straightened out in the end. But now, two thousand miles from home, I am utterly helpless to do exactly what Jack Ziegler was just telling me was my duty, to protect my family . . . .

  Jack Ziegler?

  Should I?

  Nothing to lose, not now. I pick up the phone and call the house on Red Mountain, and the telephone barely has time to ring before I hear the voluptuous voice of Henderson.

  “Yes, Professor?” he murmurs before I can speak, and I am stunned only until I realize that Uncle Jack would naturally have caller ID.

  “I . . . I need some help,” I say, not bothering with pleasantries.

  “In what way, Professor?” Patient, calm, but not quite eager.

  “Is Mr. Ziegler available?”

  “I am afraid that he is asleep and cannot be disturbed. May I help in some way?”

  “I . . . I can’t reach my wife,” I blurt.

  “Yes?” The same quiet monotone, proclaiming a readiness to kill or be killed with no whisper of objection.

  “She’s back home, in, uh, in Elm Harbor. It’s awfully late, and she’s not answering the telephone, and if . . . if there’s anything . . .”

  “Let me call you back,” he says, and the line goes dead.

  Again I am forced to wait. Now I outline a different scenario. Kimmer is not dead, and she is not running an errand or at the office. She is at another man’s house, in another man’s bed, her recent protestations of love notwithstanding. She is sleeping somewhere in Elm Harbor, not with my fellow pugilist Gerald Nathanson, but with a black man who calls her baby, although where our own baby would be during all this, my fevered imaginings are not ready to supply.

  The telephone finally rings.

  “Kimmer?”

  “Professor Garland,” says Henderson, “I am sorry to say that we have no coverage at this time.”

  “Can you give me that again in English?”

  “I have no immediate means of checking on your wife. I apologize. I suggest, if you are worried, that you call the police.”

  “I already did,” I mutter, hanging up, dizzy now, unreasonably shattered to discover that Uncle Jack, with all his supposed power, is unable to reach into the heart of Elm Harbor with a word, talk to some spy stationed along Hobby Road, and find out whether my wife is dead or alive or sleeping in another man’s bed.

  I sit up very straight, panic starting to take me: if Jack Ziegler has no . . . coverage at this time . . . then who exactly is enforcing the edict that says my wife and child cannot be harmed?

  I snatch up the telephone and call the Elm Harbor police again, and the same sergeant tells me he gave the request to the dispatcher, and he will call me when he has something.

  “It wasn’t a request,” I nearly shout across the miles as everything boils over. “Didn’t you hear me? I said my wife is in danger!”

  “No, sir, you said she might be in danger.”

  “Well, I think she is in danger! Right now. I think . . . Please, send somebody over now, right now, okay?”

  “Can you say what kind of danger?” He sounds only mildly more interested than he was before.

  I try to think what will catch his interest. “There could be . . . uh, an intruder in the house.”

  “Do you know for a fact that there is an intruder, or are you just saying that so we’ll skip all the calls ahead of yours?”

  “Sergeant . . .”

  “Mr. Garland, look. We only have six patrol cars on duty at night. That’s for a city of a little over ninety thousand people. That’s one car for every fifteen thousand people.” I groan at the thought of what havoc income inequal
ities can wreak on real lives: I am willing to bet that there are six patrol cars, all of them private, up on Red Mountain alone. “Now, we’ll get to your call as soon as we can.”

  He hangs up.

  It is well past eleven in the East. I call home and there is, once more, no answer. I am shaking all over now.

  One last idea.

  I pull Fred Nunzio’s card from my wallet and use his beeper number. And I add, at the end, the two-digit code he told me to include if the matter was urgent.

  He calls three minutes later.

  And sounds concerned, or at least willing to play along. “I’m sure everything is fine, but, if it will make you feel better, I’ll call this sergeant myself, okay?”

  “Thank you, Agent Nunzio.”

  “Fred, I keep telling you to call me Fred.”

  “Fred. Thanks. And you’ll call me right back?”

  “Of course.”

  The wait is no more than ten minutes, which I spend pacing the first floor, wishing I had a punching bag. “Okay, Professor, there’s people on the way to your house right now. I’ll clear this line so they can call you. I’m sure everything’s fine, but call me back.”

  “I will.”

  Again I settle down to wait. Ten minutes. Fifteen. It is almost midnight back home, and my resources have run out. I simply have no ideas. Are matters as bleak as they seem? Surely there is a rational explanation: the telephone is not working right at Hobby Road. I should have called the operator. Except, if the telephone is malfunctioning, how could I have reached the answering machine? Midnight in Elm Harbor. No call. I want to throw things through the window, I want to grab a gun somewhere and ride to my family’s rescue, I want to pull the Judge out of the ground and shake him until he explains why he has done this terrible thing to us.

  I want my family, safe and sound.

  Finally, I do the one thing left to me. I kneel in front of the living-room sofa and pray that Kimmer and Bentley are safe, or, if not safe, then resting in God’s arms.

  As I rise, the telephone rings immediately.

  I steel myself.

  (III)

  “WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?” demands Kimmer, incandescent with rage. “We’re fast asleep, and all of a sudden, there’s, like, this banging on the door, and I nearly jump out of my skin, and I’m scared half to death, nobody knocks on the door at midnight, and I put on my robe and I go down there and it’s like storm-trooper city, half the cops in the world are out there, and they say you called them and the FBI called them and—”

  “I was worried,” I put in, sagging in the chair as decompression hits. “Worried! So you just thought you’d wake up the whole neighborhood!”

  “You didn’t answer the phone when I called, and I thought . . .”

  “Because I didn’t hear it! We were asleep, I told you!”

  I rub my temples. Yes, she said the word twice.

  “Who’s we?” “Who the hell do you think? Me and Bentley. He missed you, he was crying, so I lay down with him in his bed, and we fell asleep. There’s no phone in there, Msha,” she adds, just in case I forgot.

  “But how was I supposed to know . . .”

  “I don’t know, Misha, but you could have come up with a better idea! I mean, I can’t take this shit all the time! You disappear for hours and don’t tell me where you are, you get into fistfights at your office, you almost get arrested”—suddenly, unaccountably, my wife is crying—“it’s too much for me, Misha, it’s too much, I can’t take this!”

  “Kimmer, I’m sorry . . . I didn’t . . .”

  “Sorry! I don’t want you to be sorry! I want you to stop acting so crazy!”

  “I was worried . . .”

  “No, Misha, no! I don’t want to hear it, okay? I don’t want any more stories or any more excuses or any more explanations. You say you love us, but you keep thinking about you. You, you, you! Well, you have to stop acting crazy. You have to stop all the nutty theories and calling the police from Colorado and getting crazy telephone calls at two in the morning”—yes, I now see, Kimmer was listening in the night I was beaten near the library—“and just getting into trouble. It has to stop, Misha. I can’t take any more of this. It’s not fair. You have to go back to the way you used to be. Because, if you don’t, I can promise you, Msha, one day you’re gonna come home from one of your crazy trips and we won’t be here!”

  Hanging up on me.

  She calls me back six minutes later to apologize, but the damage, I fear, might this time be too great.

  (IV)

  IN THE MORNING, waiting for the taxi to take me to the airport, I feel foolish for last night’s terrors. In the light of a crisp Aspen day, the larger terror is losing my family. Now that I have had some sleep, I realize that Kimmer is right. I have been acting crazy, and I do have to stop. The only trouble is, I cannot stop yet, no matter what threats my wife might make. We are not yet free: that was the message Jack Ziegler tried to impart last night. He will continue to protect us because he promised my father he would, but he can carry out his promise only if I continue my search. Presumably, that was his deal with . . . well, whomever a man like Jack Ziegler has to deal with. Leave him alone and he’ll find the arrangements. I guarantee it. Quid pro quo. If I give my furious spouse what she wants, if I abandon the search for the arrangements, then Uncle Jack might be unable to protect my family.

  Everything is still a mess.

  And it is all the Judge’s fault.

  The beep of a horn announces that my taxi has arrived. I peek out the window and see the white van idling, the driver reading the newspaper. I go to the front hall, turn off the alarm, grab my overnight bag and my coat, and take a last look around. Have I left it all as neat as I found it? I hope so.

  There is a way out of this. Morris Young would probably say that God will show it to me in time, and I think perhaps he has. A way to keep my wife and also keep the family safe. I believe I can do it, but I know I cannot do it without help, and I am running out of people who might be willing to . . . well, to take a chance for the sake of friendship. Really, there is only one. So I had better hurry back to Elm Harbor and ask.

  With a shrug, I reset the alarm with the proper code, which will cause it to re-engage ninety seconds after I exit. I pause, my memory unexpectedly jogged by this simple act. A secret conviction that has been growing in my mind leaps once more to the surface. Frowning in worry, I open the door. And stop short.

  In the middle of the doormat is a manila envelope with my name printed on the front in black felt-tip, block letters so big I could read them fifty yards away.

  I wave to the driver, then stoop and pick it up with trembling fingers.

  It is a little larger than the envelope that held the white pawn delivered to me at the soup kitchen, and I can feel something hard and flat inside. It does not feel like the missing black pawn I guessed it might be. I close my eyes, swaying slightly in the crisp mountain air. For a silly moment, I imagine myself reliving the past, frozen forever in an instant of time, forced to open the same envelope over and over again.

  But this envelope holds no pawn.

  Instead, I tear it open to find a hard metal disk, no more than an inch across, brass in color but smudged an ugly brown in places. I rub the disk. The stain flecks off. I turn it over, but even before I read the letters engraved on the other side, I realize what I am holding in my hand: a tag from a dog’s collar. I do not have to read the name to know the tag belongs—or belonged—to Shirley Branch’s dog, Cinque.

  The brown stain is dried blood.

  A note, generically word-processed and printed on plain white paper, provides the punch line: DO NOT STOP LOOKING. No translation necessary. The blood tells a story of its own.

  They can’t hurt me, the well-connected Jack Ziegler assured me; can’t hurt me, can’t hurt my family. Uncle Jack promised it, and I believe him; I have never for an instant doubted his power.

  But nobody has mentioned a prohibition on sc
aring me half to death.

  CHAPTER 46

  RESTING PLACES

  (I)

  THE LAW SCHOOL STANDS at the corner of Town Street and Eastern Avenue. If you follow Town Street away from the university, past the aging sandstone pile shared by the music and fine arts departments, past the low, nondescript building that holds, improbably, the catering, parking, and public relations offices, you come to the eastern edge of the campus, marked by a poorly fenced, bumpy parking lot full of cheery red-and-white University Transit buses, all purchased secondhand from school districts looking to upgrade. Here you cross Monitor Boulevard (named not for the Civil War gunship but for a local kid who had a brief, uninspired professional football career in the sixties), and, suddenly, you are no longer on university property.

  The difference is immediately apparent.

  On the other side of Monitor from the parking lot is a disused park containing the muddy, grassless remnant of a softball field at one end and, at the other, what might pass for a playground among parents not picky about broken glass, splintered wooden swings, and seesaws missing a crucial bolt or two. Usually a couple of crackheads lounge harmlessly on what is left of the benches, nodding and smiling in their secret dreams. Today the park is deserted. Few students or professors venture out too far to the east, because of the crime rate—or, as Arnie Rosen likes to say, the perceived crime rate. The remnants of a public housing project lie a few more blocks in this direction, aging gray towers with the ubiquitous cream-colored window shades, and public housing, in the minds of most people, signals danger.

  One wintry afternoon four or five years ago, I stood at the edge of this park with the Judge, who was in town for some alumni function, and he simply shook his head, wordlessly, as tears welled in his eyes— whether for his lost youth (when the park, if it existed at all, was no doubt vibrant), or the lost lives of those members of the darker nation who suffer here, or some fugitive memory of his Claire, or of Abby, or of his shattered career, I dared not ask. “You know, Talcott,” he pronounced in his preacher’s voice, “we humans are capable of so much joy. But we are born unto trouble . . .”