“Can I ask why?”
“No.”
“How much trouble are you in?”
“It’s not me that’s in trouble.”
“Then who?”
Justin was looking at Frank, unsure of what to say, when there was a knock on the library door. The brothers turned their heads quickly, as if they had been caught at something. And there was Cindy, standing in the doorway in a pleated fifties dress, as if expecting company all along.
“Congratulations, Justin,” she said without an ounce of cheer.
“There’s nothing to celebrate yet.”
“No? Because Frank’s been celebrating since he came back from the prison. He’s going to celebrate himself to death.”
“I just had a few,” said Frank.
“He’s very excited about his father getting out of jail, as he should be,” said Cindy. “As are we all. Do you happen to know of any houses for rent in your area? We’re suddenly looking.”
“I’m sure you won’t have to leave.”
“You don’t think your father will want his house back? He already mentioned that Overmeyer woman to Frank. He expects her to move in here with him. And it won’t be long until he reclaims the corner office that Frank has been using to keep the company alive. I think he wants everything just the way it was.”
“Five years in jail will change anyone,” said Justin. “I’m sure he’s different.”
“You’re suddenly sure about a lot of things, Justin. How did that happen?”
“Maybe you’ll join the company after Dad gets out,” said Frank. “That was always his dream, his two boys working for him. You could take the bar, be our corporate counsel.”
“No, thank you,” said Justin. “I might have been a law student before, but now I pour drinks. Unless Dad wants me to work the occasional cocktail party for him, I’ll go my own way.”
“That’s so noble of you,” said Cindy. “So now, only Frank has to deal with him.”
“Cindy, if you’ll excuse us,” said Frank, raising his glass in dismissal, “we’re conducting some family business here.”
“Oh dear, I wouldn’t want to interrupt that. I just wanted to say thank you to Justin. Thank you, Justin.”
“You’re welcome.”
“He’s the hero of the day, all right,” said Frank.
“And we’re all so happy,” said Cindy.
Justin looked around, saw not an ounce of happiness on either face, and knew there was none on his own. Cindy gave Justin a final bitter look before leaving the room and shutting the door behind her.
“She’s not so enthused about the new way of things,” said Frank.
“And you?”
“He’s my father. I have no choice but to be enthused. What was it you needed, ten thousand?”
“Yes.”
“In cash?”
“Yes.”
“This isn’t—”
“No.”
“And you really, really—”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. I’ll juggle some firm accounts and take it out tomorrow. I’ll call it a fee for investigative services.”
“Thank you.”
“Anything else?”
“Don’t tell Dad.”
“That was assumed.”
“And stop drinking so damn much.”
“Why should I? It’s a celebration, isn’t it? We’re going to have to put up banners.” Frank lifted his glass. “Daddy’s coming home.”
56.
BOMBARD OF SACK
The insight came to him in, of all places, a lawyer’s office. It arrived like a satori, swift and devastating, a fork in the eye. And like a fork in the eye, it pierced something fragile, and afterward nothing ever looked the same again.
It wasn’t enlightenment, for in that moment of vicious perception Justin saw the raw truth that he was never about the search for enlightenment; he wouldn’t have recognized enlightenment if it approached him with a name tag and one hand clapping. “Hello, I am Enlightenment,” would say Enlightenment, and Justin’s true self would reply, “Get lost, dude. Can’t you see I’m busy?” And what he was busy doing was hiding. The meditation, the tatami mats and ceremonial teas, the calm words coming from an apparently calm center were all fronts. What he was really searching for was an emotional desert to call his own. Before his mother’s murder, he was a member of the human race, with all its untidy ambitions and messy emotions. After his mother’s murder, he was as good as dead, and eager to stay just that way.
But all of that was about to change.
“Tell me about yourself, Justin,” said Sarah Preston.
“There’s not much to tell,” said Justin. “I pour drinks at Zenzibar on Sixteenth Street.”
“How nice. That sounds exciting.”
“Not really.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. You must be like Bogart in Casablanca.”
“Hardly,” said Justin.
They were sitting almost knee to knee in front of her office desk at her law firm on a high floor in one of the city’s office towers. The floor was a warren of little offices, each with a secretary out front, the kind of beehive that had been waiting for Justin out of law school. It gave him the creeps to be up there, as if he were in an alternative history of his life. In the office next door was probably another Justin Chase, toiling on a brief that meant either a small bump or a small dent in some huge corporation’s quarterly profits. Was the other Justin Chase happy with his high salary, his blonde wife, his shiny BMW? Most likely ecstatic, the son of a bitch.
“Well, I’m glad you came,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you that it’s really exciting to finally meet you in the flesh.”
“You’ve heard so much about me?”
“From your father, dear. He is so proud.”
“No, he’s not.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Don’t you want to talk, like, about the case?”
“In time. I’ve heard the outlines of what happened from your father, and read the reports in the newspaper. Of course, I’m going to need the details from you before we go to court. Still, I thought it was important that we meet face-to-face and get to know each other.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.” She looked at him and pulled back a strand of hair. “On the case, I mean.”
“So you do meet-and-greets with all of your witnesses?” said Justin.
“Just the special ones.”
Sarah Preston was tall and thin, dressed quite stylishly, with just a bit too much makeup. Even the rouge, though, couldn’t hide a certain grayness, not just in her overly coiffed hair, but in her pallor. She was trying quite hard, Justin could tell, to be charming and ingratiating. Trying way too hard. As if she were coming on to him, except she wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t.
“Your father said you found this Mrs. Moss on your own,” said Sarah Preston.
“It wasn’t as hard as it might seem. My aunt was a big help, as were some others.”
“Who else?”
“Just…I don’t know.” There was something in her manner that made him hesitate to bring up Annie’s name. Eventually the lawyer was going to have to hear about her, but since everything he told her was bound to get back to his father, he wasn’t ready to go into all of that, at least not just yet.
“How well do you know my father?” he said.
She smiled brightly, and the effect was like a beam of light hitting her face. “As well as you can know someone in prison, I suppose. He’s a very intelligent man.”
“Yes, he is.”
“And very gentle.”
Justin tilted his head at that. His father was a lot of things, but gentle was not one of them.
“And you’re representing him pro bono?” said Justin.
“Our firm asks that we all do some pro bono work as part of our firm culture. It’s in that spirit that I’ve taken on your father’s case.”
“Your father’s assets are all tied up in litigation. The house, his stake in the company, all of it was transferred to Frank to keep it from creditors. Whatever cash he had went to his defense lawyers, and he never received the life insurance payout, for obvious reasons.”
“But he could get you paid if he wanted to.”
“Maybe, but I’m glad to do it for him without payment,” she said, which was about the most unlawyerlike thing Justin had ever heard a lawyer say. “It’s an honor representing your father.”
“An honor?”
“He’s quite a man,” she said. “Unique. And on top of that, he’s an innocent man sentenced to jail for the rest of his life. How many lawyers get a chance to right such a wrong?”
“And you’re sure he’s innocent?”
“Aren’t you? After the suicide and the evidence they found in the Moss house, what else could you think?”
“That’s right,” said Justin. “What else?”
“That’s why I am so excited to meet you, Justin.” She leaned forward and patted his knee. “You’re a big part of his life, and I have the feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other.”
There it was again, the sense that she was coming on to him. He pulled back, stood up from the chair, wandered around the office, knowing all the while that she was staring at him. It was a fairly large office, bigger than most of the others he had spied while being led down the hallway, a partner’s office. But even so, the furniture was stock and the photographs on the walls were routine shots of Philadelphia: the fountain in Logan Square, the art museum, Independence Hall. Nothing too personal, no family photos. And her left hand, the one that had patted his knee, was bare of rings. He started having a weird feeling about this room and this woman and being here, like he was touching something soft and moldy.
“How did you meet my father?” he said.
“He was one of my students,” she said, swiveling around in her chair to follow Justin’s wanderings.
“Students?”
“I was an English teacher before I went to law school. My passion was Shakespeare. When I was still trying to make partner, I was advised that I needed some public-interest work to burnish my credentials. So, though I am embarrassed to admit it, I only started teaching in the prison to get ahead at the firm. Shakespeare for the incarcerated. A stupid idea, I suppose, but it worked. There was much more interest than you would imagine, and the discussions were quite lively. Truth is, I learned more about Shakespeare from the inmates than I ever did from my professors or at the Old Vic. Last year we were putting on Henry IV, Part 1, when your father joined the group. In all my classes at the prison, I had never met anyone like him.”
“I bet not.”
“He was so quick, and had such keen insights. And Justin, you’ll like this. He told me he had a son that reminded him of Prince Hal in the story. He was referring to you.”
“I don’t know the play.”
“Oh, you should read it. Fabulous. Prince Hal is the play’s true hero, who fights the battle at the end that saves his father’s crown. Stirring, actually. The performance was quite well received by the other prisoners. Here, let me show you.”
She stood, went over to her desk, pulled open a drawer, and pulled out a photograph in a simple wooden frame.
“Here,” she said. “I cast your father as the king.”
“He liked that, I’m sure,” said Justin as he took the photograph.
A group of men, scraggly in their prison togs, with just a few accessories to define the character each was playing. The men stood around Sarah Preston, who looked much less spiffy in the picture, her hair not done, her face not made-up, her clothes not Nordstrom. Something had changed in Sarah Preston from when this photograph was taken, and Justin, sadly, had an idea of what that was.
He picked his father out of the photograph right off, standing next to the lawyer with a Burger King crown on his head. There was a bearded inmate with a pillow under his shirt. There was a young prisoner with another crown and a sword. And off to the right, an old man, also with a sword, who looked a lot like…No, it couldn’t be.
“Who’s that?” said Justin, pointing at the old man with the sword.
“Hotspur,” said Sarah. “He’s the villain of the play, the great warrior trying to unseat the king. It’s Hotspur who fights Prince Hal at the end.”
“No,” said Justin, “I mean who is he, for real?”
“Vern.”
“Vern?”
“Yes. Vernon Bickham. He was in for forgery or something. But I think he’s out already.”
“Vern,” said Justin.
And then he stopped speaking. Because this Vern wasn’t just another old man with bad teeth who looked a lot like Birdie Grackle. He was an old man with bad teeth who looked enough like Birdie Grackle that he could have been Birdie Grackle’s twin. Except the sleeve of the shirt on the arm holding the sword was rolled up to the elbow and there, on the forearm, was Birdie Grackle himself, with a crown of thorns. No twin at all.
What a peculiar coincidence, thought Justin in the first blush of recognition, when his mind was still befogged by the shock of it all. What an amazing coincidence. And then the fog lifted and the amazingness of the coincidence fell apart as the reality of what it all meant slammed into him.
Like a fork in the eye.
57.
MOUTHFULS OF VODKA
The knock on the door came when Annie Overmeyer was packing to pack it all in.
It was late, and she was a little drunk, and that would have been the obvious explanation for why she was throwing shift and shirt into her bag. But her packing to leave, to flee actually, was no drunken folly. It was, instead, a failure of the alcohol to soothe what normally it soothed.
She had tried drinking it away, the emotions that had overwhelmed her the night before after Justin Chase had spurned her completely, the anger and self-pity, the hurt, the sadness, the pathetic yearning to be something other than she was. She had tried to drown it all and yet, unhappily, alcohol had failed her. It had been such a friend, along with bad sex and the occasional vampire novel, just what she needed to keep her mind from the truths of her life. But the bottle wasn’t working just now, the vodka she had downed didn’t numb. Instead it perversely made her more aware of what had happened to her life.
There should have been a warning label on the bottle. Caution: life as viewed after drinking contents may appear more pathetic than you can bear. And the only response she could have had was, “Really now, how is that possible?”
You get into a habit of low expectations, which gives you a sort of contentment. You go through life as if through a mist, seeing little farther than your nose and scorning all that only appears wispy and faint. Then a bolt of lightning splits the mist and gives you a glimpse of all you might be missing. And doesn’t that just ruin the hell out of your day? That’s what Justin Chase had been in their night together, a bolt of lightning that allowed her a glimpse of all she had let drift out of her life.
It wasn’t the sex, which was fine, really, but still just sex. She could find cocksmen in any dive in the city that could give Junior a run for his money. And it wasn’t that he was so superspecial a guy. Really, all that Zen crap was fake nineties bullshit that made her teeth ache. And, to top it all, he was just a bartender; Mark from King of Prussia pulled in more in a month than Chase could dream of making in a year behind the bar. And no one knew better than Annie how much she liked her creature comforts: facials at the spa, a bright new pair of shoes that lifted her calf just so. So what was it?
It was their way together. Lying in bed beside him—and yes beneath him and above him, too, belly to belly, hand to hand, tongue to breast—there was no subterfuge, no abject neediness, no sense of obligation or payment owed, no unbalanced emotions or subjugation. They weren’t there making up for
childish slights, playing out their adolescent neuroses, searching for the emotionally distant daddy or seeking revenge on the cheerleader who cut them in high school. It was just easy and fun and intimate in such a naked way that it seemed almost obscenely pure. She’d had, for a single evening, the type of relationship that she had always thought was merely the mewling fantasy of romance novelists and lonely country-club wives. She had glimpsed what was, for her, the holy grail: a relationship of equals without the usual dose of self-loathing.
It had been a lie, of course. Justin Chase had proven to be no different than every other self-satisfied scoundrel who had talked his way between her legs, just a more convincing actor with a unique line of patter. But the promise of the thing she had glimpsed, that intimacy, was what she had tried unsuccessfully to numb with the vodka and why she was packing now. Because it had exposed with the brightest of lights what was truly absent in own her life, and how much less she was settling for night after unsatisfying night. And if she couldn’t drown that promise in mouthfuls of vodka, then she would do the only other thing that was sure to numb her spirit.
And so she was packing, filling a suitcase for a quick and unplanned getaway to Minnesota, to her girlhood home, so her parents could give their unbidden advice and tell her exactly what she should do with her life. A week in that gray Lutheran landscape and she’d be pawing at the door like a dog, desperate to head off to some new place, any new place. Mom and Dad were always good for that. Every day at home was like Thanksgiving, filling her soul with the true spirit of thankfulness that she was not, thank God, living at home anymore. Minnesota was such a great place to be from.
And then the knock at the door.
Her first response was annoyance. When she was half-drunk and in the middle of a self-pity party she didn’t want anyone trying to sell her on vacuum cleaners or Jehovah. But then she wondered how the solicitor had gotten past that front security door without ringing her up first. And then she thought about Mrs. Moss, dead in her chair, and the glimpse she caught along that darkened hallway of the strange figure tearing out of the house. And then she grew scared, damn scared.
Another knock, the muffled sound of a voice.
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