The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  But most of my attention is still lavished on Bentley. I teach him to fly a kite, badly, and how to swim, reasonably well. We check out a stack of beginner’s books from the public library at the top of Circuit Avenue; we might as well get started on reading, too. As we walk back toward Ocean Park, Bentley carrying most of the books like the big boy he is all at once becoming, I wheel in my tracks, sensing unwanted attention, but the sleepy side street lined with tumbledown Victorians seems no different on this sunny July afternoon than on any other, and if people are watching me, I will never pick them out.

  Bentley, eyes wide, asks if I am okay.

  I ruffle his hair.

  In the middle of our second week on the Vineyard, a nor’easter batters the island, and we lose electricity for nearly two days. Bentley is chipper, not at all bothered by the darkness of early evening as we eat supper by candlelight. For my son it is all an adventure. Now that he has some command of the language, he is storing up memories fast, and even talking about events that apparently occurred before he could speak. I allow him to sleep in my bed—no, I require him to—and, watching my son’s peacefully slumbering brown face before I blow out the ancient hurricane lamp I found in the attic, I marvel at how a few short months can change everything. For, if this were January instead of July, I would have fled from the Island rather than risk a night without electric lights—and without an alarm system to warn me if the dangers lurking in the shadows draw too close to the house. But those fears died down in the Old Town Burial Ground with Mr. Scott, even if the mysteries that generated them did not. I lie awake, thinking of Freeman Bishop and Agent Foreman—really an agent, even if not really a Foreman—and marvel at God’s providence. Your sons will take the place of your fathers, says Psalm 45. The thought of Bentley as my successor on earth fills me with awe and hope.

  Protect the family, Jack Ziegler instructed me. Well, I’m doing my best. Only there is more left to do.

  On Bentley’s last day with me, we picnic boldly at Menemsha Beach, watching the sun drop beneath the most beautiful horizon on the East Coast. The same beach where Mr. Scott drowned another poor soul so we would think he was dead. I dare any of the ghosts of the past nine months to show themselves. Sitting on the blanket, I hold my boy so close that he begins to squirm. I cannot seem to let go. My eyes fill. I recall the night he was born, how both he and Kimmer almost died. My terror after the doctors forced me from the delivery room. The joy we felt when it was over, both of us, mother and father, on our knees praying for our son, making all the promises to God that people hardly ever keep after they get what they want. I catch myself wondering how it all slipped away, and that is when I know it is time to go home.

  The next morning, I pack up the car, and Bentley and I sit in the short standby line for the early ferry. It is time to return Bentley to his mother; to his home. And time, finally, for me to confront my demons.

  CHAPTER 58

  A PLAUSIBLE ACCOUNT

  MALLORY CORCORAN’S SUMMER PLACE is a wrecked farm sprawling over two hundred acres near Middlebury, Vermont: a restored eighteenth-century clapboard house, half a dozen outbuildings, plenty of meadows rented to locals to graze cattle, and tangled woods where Uncle Mal likes to hunt. The farm is not difficult to find—it almost jumps at you, spreading across the road, as you head down Route 30 toward Cornwall. I have not been here since I was a second-year law student, when he invited me for Memorial Day weekend, while also entertaining the Secretary of State and a couple of Senators. I suppose he was trying to recruit me—Someday this all could be yours!—and it might even have worked, except that his friendship with my father already scared me, even if I did not, yet, know all its dimensions.

  We sit on aging bentwood rockers on the front porch, lawyer and client, sipping lemonade, while Edie plays with a couple of grandchildren and a horde of dogs and cats out in what real New Englanders call the dooryard. Uncle Mal is wearing dirty jeans, work boots, and a checked shirt: very much the gentleman farmer, or what a Washington lawyer trying to be one looks like. I am in my usual summer attire of khakis and windbreaker. My cane lies on the floor next to me, guarded by another of the many huge dogs they keep, but I want Mallory Corcoran keenly aware of its existence.

  “How much have you figured out?” he asks when we have exhausted the small talk.

  “I know you left the note at Vinerd Howse.”

  “Not me. Meadows.” He smiles without apology.

  “That’s why you had her sit in that first time. She was already involved.”

  “She was already involved,” he agrees. “But we had to do it the way we did it. We were carrying out the last wishes of our client. Your father. He left us one of those, ‘In-case-anything-happens-to-me-open-this’ letters.”

  I remember the morning I left Aspen. “And he gave you the code to turn off the alarm at Vinerd Howse. So nobody would be the wiser.” Uncle Mal nods. But I am confused. “So why didn’t he just have you tell me what he wanted me to know? Why all this crazy rigamarole?”

  Mallory Corcoran sips his lemonade, strokes another large dog between the ears as it rumbles at his side. He is not intimidated by me. He was not reluctant to see me. By his own lights, he acted honorably and has nothing to hide. “I think your father wanted you to know some things, but I am not sure he wanted to put them into ordinary language. I think he was . . . he was afraid that somebody else would come across it. So he made his arrangements and then hid them where only you could find them.”

  “A year ago,” I murmur.

  “I would say, almost two years.”

  I nod. “It’ll be two years this October since he gave you the letter.”

  Uncle Mal is too savvy a lawyer to ask me immediately how I figured this out. But he does not know the story I heard from Miles Madison, my father-in-law.

  “That sounds right,” says Mallory Corcoran, still playing with the dog.

  I nod. Earlier this summer, I consulted with my colleague Arnie Rosen, an expert in professional responsibility, who explained over lunch that an attorney’s obligation survives the death of a client. The lawyer may no longer act in the name of the client, of course, but should generally carry out any deathbed instructions, as long as they propose nothing illegal or outside the scope of the lawyer’s duties, and as long as the client is in his right mind. If what is asked seems wrong, the lawyer might try to dissuade the client or might even refuse to do it; but, if the lawyer accepts the task, the obligation exists. In other words, what Mallory Corcoran did in delivering the Judge’s letter to Oak Bluffs was within his ethical responsibility to my father—whatever its twisted morality.

  Why was it necessary to trash the first floor of Vinerd Howse? I ask. Or to break the glass?

  He shrugs. “To make sure that you would be the only one to venture upstairs and find the note. Your father’s idea.”

  “Meadows did that, too?”

  “I didn’t ask for the details.”

  “What if I had just waited for the police before going upstairs?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose they would have found the note and given it to you. The same if the caretaker—can’t remember his name—had been the first one to find it. I must confess, however, I’m not sure your father considered the possibility that Kimberly might see it before you did. I suppose it all could have gone wrong. Or maybe he just figured you were too much a gentleman to send your wife to check upstairs after a break-in.”

  I cannot tell whether I am being complimented or mocked, so I drop the subject and, instead, ask the first of the two questions that brought me to Mallory Corcoran’s dooryard. “Did you know what my father was doing? Why he left you the note?”

  “Let me anticipate. You are asking me whether I know what his arrangements were, or exactly why he wanted you to know whatever he wanted you to know. The answer, Talcott, is no. I’m afraid I didn’t know. I still don’t.”

  “Do you know why he chose me and not Addison?”

  This time the answer
is longer in coming. “It was my impression that your brother was . . . oh, out of favor.”

  “Out of favor?”

  “Your father seemed to think your brother had betrayed him.”

  This one puzzles me. But one look at Mallory Corcoran’s super-lawyer face tells me I will get no more. So I ask the second question: “Did you know what was really going on? Between my father and Jack Ziegler?”

  He has his answer ready. He has probably had it ready since the day the housekeeper called the firm to say the Judge was dead: “Your father was my partner and my friend, Talcott, but he was also a client. You know it is impossible for me to divulge what he told me in confidence.”

  “I take that as a yes.”

  “You should not construe it either way. You should not assume anything.”

  “Well, I’m your client, too. That means you have to keep my secrets.”

  “True.”

  “All right. Let me speculate for a moment.” Uncle Mal is a statue. “I don’t know exactly what my father and Uncle Jack were up to, but I know they were up to something. I don’t know how much of it you guessed, but I don’t think he would have told you very much, because . . . well, because he craved your respect.” And didn’t quite trust you, I think but do not say, for I am pouring on the butter here. The Judge didn’t fully trust you, which is the real reason he gave you only that one cryptic note and hid his arrangements someplace else. “But I’d like to tell you what I think happened.”

  “I’d be very interested in hearing that, Talcott.”

  And so I tell him. I tell him I think at first it was reasonably innocent. Probably the Judge went to Jack Ziegler to find a private investigator, and Jack Ziegler recommended Colin Scott because Scott had been a colleague at the Agency and needed work. I doubt that my father was, at first, looking for a hired killer. Perhaps Jack Ziegler meant to put temptation in his path. Perhaps it just came together at the right moment. Either way, when my father received Scott’s report, he decided not to share it with the police.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of who it named.” But there is nothing in Uncle Mal’s experienced face to tell him whether the Judge shared that particular truth. For my part, I have not shared it with Dear Dana—and never will.

  Instead of going back to the police, I continue, the Judge asked Scott to kill the driver of the car. Scott refused. That was the argument overheard by Sally and Addison: No rules where a daughter is concerned, my father argued, or begged.

  “And so my father went back to Jack Ziegler,” I continue. He went to see Uncle Jack and asked him to use his influence with Scott, or to find somebody else to do it. Maybe Jack Ziegler was surprised. Maybe he was not. From what I have read, he has always possessed a remarkable capacity to seduce others into wrong. I suspect he would have started by tossing out objections, warning my father that he had no earthly idea what he was getting into, because he knew his old friend well enough to understand that, having started down the road into the other world, he would hardly turn back just because that other world turned out to have all the deadly features he expected. On the contrary, objections of that nature would draw him further in. My father would have pressed on, insisting that he wanted the driver of the car dead. He likely said he would pay any price, he did not care what obligations he undertook, he wanted justice done. Perhaps that was the moment when he asked Jack Ziegler to make a single promise to him: that, if anything happened to him, to my father, as a result of this mess, he, Jack, would see to it that his family never came to any harm. And he trusted Uncle Jack’s word, because, as Agent Nunzio told me, his word was what Jack Ziegler lived by

  “You’re guessing,” says Mallory Corcoran, his unease growing, for I am speculating aloud now on the wrongs of two of his former clients, not one.

  “I know. But it hangs together.” He offers no disagreement, so I resume. Somehow, sooner or later, Jack Ziegler agreed to intercede, and went for permission to whoever makes such decisions in his world. A deal was consummated. Scott would do the killing. There would be no charge, just as there had been no charge for his investigative services. Instead, from time to time, the Judge would be asked for little favors. Nothing obvious: no votes to overturn the conviction of a Mafia don or a drug lord. Instead, he would be called upon to help out the companies in which illegal monies were invested. Throwing out a burdensome or expensive regulation. Overturning an antitrust verdict.

  “That’s why my father’s voting record got more conservative after Abby died,” I explain, with real pain. “Why he struck down so many regulatory schemes. He was covering his favors with a show of ideological purity.”

  “You’re still guessing, Talcott.”

  “Yes, I am. But I can hardly go interview Jack Ziegler to check my facts.” I hope he will offer to intercede, for Uncle Jack has returned neither of my calls since the cemetery, but the great Mallory Corcoran continues to sit, waiting to be impressed. Nothing has provoked a response. I know he can see my frustration, but it fails to move him.

  I ponder. From what Wainwright told me, it is plain that the Judge felt burdened by his perfidy. He had ascended to the bench to do justice, not to remain in thrall forever to criminals. No doubt the special favors went on and on and on. Perhaps, as illegal money found its way into legal businesses, the pace increased. Who knows what stocks are in the Mob’s portfolio? When the Supreme Court nomination suddenly came his way, Jack Ziegler’s partners were surely ecstatic. My father was surely worried. Maybe the truth would come out, and he would be ruined. And then perhaps he had another idea. Maybe the truth should come out, and he could escape the hell into which he had sold himself.

  “Which is where Greg Haramoto comes in,” I say, but the words prompt no reaction. “I tried to talk to Greg, but he wouldn’t.”

  Uncle Mal, a ghostly smile of reminiscence on his lips, finally makes an independent contribution: “I’m not surprised, the way your sister talked about him on television back during those very sad hearings. What was it she accused him of?”

  “Of having a crush on the Judge.”

  “That’s right. You know, people don’t forget things like that, Talcott.”

  “I’m not criticizing Greg. I just want you to understand that I’m still just guessing.”

  “I never doubted it.” He is on his feet, and I know the interview is over. “Everything you have said is guesswork. You can’t know for sure if any of it is true.”

  “I realize that.” We are walking toward my car. I had thought he would invite me to stay for lunch, but Uncle Mal has his ways, and his vacation time is sacrosanct. I suppose I should be grateful he has spared me this precious half-hour from whatever it is that big lawyers do when they own farms in the country. I cannot quite envision him milking a cow, although I seem to recall that he has a dairy herd hidden somewhere.

  Uncle Mal is holding the door for me. “You know, Talcott, guessing is not always a terrible thing. Sometimes I do a little guessing of my own.”

  I stand very still, not daring to look at him. Around the side of the house, Edie and the kids are singing a song. The cats and dogs, most of them hideously fat, are now somnolent in the summer sun.

  “I would guess that some of what you say could be true.” His voice is soft, and a little sad. “Could be, Talcott, could be. And I would also guess that, when your father came to me and left me his letter and told me about the arrangements, he told me he was thinking of quitting the firm. If I were a guessing man, I would speculate that he was scared, that something out of his past had caught up with him. He wasn’t scared of death, I don’t think. If I had to guess, I would say he was scared of exposure. Something was going to come out.”

  I turn around finally. “The arrangements . . . all this . . . wasn’t this about exposure?”

  “On his own terms.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  The weatherproof smile. “I’m not telling you anything, Talcott. You know I would never disclose a conf
idence. I’m only speculating.”

  “Okay . . . so what are you speculating?”

  “I am speculating that your father was planning to hide the information he wanted you to have, and then commit suicide.”

  CHAPTER 59

  ON THE OTHER HAND . . .

  “THAT’S THE MOST RIDICULOUS THING I’ve ever heard,” says Dear Dana Worth.

  “What is?”

  “That your father would commit suicide.”

  I shrug. “That’s what he said.”

  Dana steams, not quite ready to accept my speculations about the man she once so adored, to say nothing of Mallory Corcoran’s. We are strolling together along the bluestone walks of the Original Quad, which, nearly empty of students in the summer, can actually be quite pleasant. We have been seeing more of each other these days, although not, of course, romantically. We are both having what my parents used to call “trouble at home.” My wife, proclaiming her love for me, has thrown me out, and Alison is angry at Dana these days for worrying so much about whether what they are doing is right. Alison wants Dana to stop hanging out at her little Methodist church with what she calls the right-wing homophobes, and Dana refuses, saying they are good Christian people and she wants to listen to their point of view. Alison asks if black people are obliged to worship with white supremacists, to get their point of view. Dana says it isn’t the same at all. I am not about to get in the middle. Dana is stoic enough to qualify as an honorary Garland, but, when our various pains leak through our façades, we friends do our best to comfort each other.

  “Suicide,” Dana sneers again.

  “It does happen, Dana. People do stupid things.” One of our shared pains is that Theo Mountain suffered a massive stroke two days ago and is not expected to live. I want to blame the Judge, I want to blame Theo, but I cannot help blaming myself: was I too hard on the old man?