Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” My sister has never sounded so contrite in her life. The tactic seems to have some effect.

  “I want you to look at these,” the detective says, her voice softer. She slides two glossy black-and-white photographs from her folder. “These are, mmm, the least horrible.”

  Mariah glances down and then looks away; but I do not want to lose face before the formidable B. T. Ames, so I force myself to stare, and force my protesting mind to process what it is seeing.

  To look at the photographs is to realize immediately that whoever tortured Father Bishop did it, at least in part, for the fun of it. One picture is a close-up of a hand. If not for all the blood, you might not notice on first glance that three fingernails are missing. The second shot appears to show the meaty part of Freeman Bishop’s thigh. Bright, almost bubbly circles are burned into his skin. Puckers of pain, like craters on the moon. I count them—five, no, six—and this is just one small area of his body. I try to imagine what kind of person could do this to another. And keep on doing it, because this took a while. And where somebody could do it, to ensure that nobody would hear his screams. I doubt that a gag over his mouth would have been enough.

  “It’s different when you see it, isn’t it?” the detective asks.

  “Do you—did you—” I am stuttering. This can’t be what Jack Ziegler was talking about. It just can’t. I start over. “Do you have any idea why somebody would do something like this?”

  Sergeant Ames answers my question with one of her own. “Do you?” Her eyes are on me once more, watching as I examine the photographs. I sense an uneasy stirring in Mariah next to me, and I am not sure why.

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you have any idea why somebody might have done this?”

  “Of course not!”

  My protests do not interest Sergeant Ames. “Do you have any reason to think that Father Bishop had any information that somebody else would want?”

  “I don’t know what you mean … .”

  “Well, he was tortured.” The detective gestures at the photographs in what seems to be exasperation. “Usually, that means somebody wants information.”

  “Unless the torturing was just for show,” Mariah interjects quietly.

  Sergeant Ames turns toward my sister, her eyes alight with cautious re-evaluation—not of the case, but of Mariah.

  “Or the work of a psychopath,” I put in unwisely, not wanting to be left out if the detective is now ready to toss respect around.

  “Right,” says Sergeant Ames, her words made all the more scathing by the monotone in which they are delivered. “If it turns out that somebody cut out his liver and ate it with fava beans, I’ll give you a call.”

  I bristle at this put-down, but, before I can think of a suitable riposte, the detective is making a little speech. “You’re wondering why I am asking these questions. Let me try to explain what is going on here. You’ve read what was in the papers, I assume. So you know that Father Bishop, may he rest in peace, died of a gunshot wound to the head. Well, that gunshot wound was to the base of the skull, angled slightly upward. No amateur would put a shot there. The amateur takes his cue from the movies and shoots people in the side of the head or maybe the throat. But if you want to be sure, you do the base of the skull. You also know that Father Bishop had cigarette burns on both of his arms and one of his legs and the side of his neck. You know he was missing three fingernails. You know that he was found with his hands tied behind his back. Other things were also done. You don’t need all the details. But this man was tortured. Tortured viciously. The way that drug dealers, for instance, do it when they want something.”

  Hearing it put so starkly, and by a police officer, I almost cringe, for all I can think about is my family. The detective, however, has chosen her words with care. Mariah picks up on the little hint before I do, but Phi Beta Kappans tend to figure things out fast. Her head bobs up again.

  “I thought it was a hate crime.”

  “Well, I can see why you would think that. The newspapers say it was a hate crime and the television says it was a hate crime and the NAACP says it was a hate crime and the governor of this fine state says it was a hate crime and I understand that the President of these wonderful United States even suggested it might be a hate crime. And so do the two busloads of protesters who are arriving this weekend to remind us all about how terribly the people of my town treat black people—never mind that there is absolutely no reason to think that the crime actually occurred here. But you know something? Hate crimes, even murders, tend to be committed by amateurs. This wasn’t.” She is watching our faces again. “Now, you have not heard me say it was a hate crime and you have not heard anybody from the police say it was a hate crime, have you?”

  Mariah, the onetime journalist, keeps at it: “So was it a hate crime or wasn’t it?”

  Sergeant Ames fixes my sister with a baleful glare, as though she has recognized too late the species she has admitted to the inner sanctum. The detective’s eyes are a flat, obsidian black, daring anybody to tell a lie in her presence. She plainly does not like being interrogated. But when she speaks, her voice is almost mechanical.

  “Mrs. Denton, we do not know for sure what kind of crime it was except that it was a nasty one, and the person who did it is running around free. We will find who did it and then we will know what kind of crime it was.”

  “Wasn’t there a note?” I ask.

  “Evidently, we read the same newspapers, Mr. Garland. I read in one of them that there was a note pinned to Father Bishop’s shirt, and somebody else had an exclusive report that the note was from a white supremacist group that wants to take the blame.”

  “In the papers,” murmurs Mariah, the ghost of a smile on her lips. She did not read the detective’s comment quite so contemptuously as I did.

  “I am not confirming that,” the sergeant agrees, smiling back. Now that each knows the other’s agenda, they are comfortable together: more evidence, if any is needed, that the world would be better run by women.

  “You are not confirming it,” Mariah explains, probably for my benefit, “because, if there was a note and you don’t tell anybody what it says, you can use it to sort the kooks who always call after a crime like this from people who might actually be able to help solve it.”

  “That’s one of the reasons, yes.”

  I look from one of them to the other. There is something more here, some level of comprehension the two of them have already passed while I am still struggling to manage the first rung. It is rather like watching a chess game between two grandmasters, all the subtle maneuvers that make so little sense to the unschooled mind until, in a sudden flurry, one of them is defeated.

  “The other reason,” Mariah suggests in the same quiet tone, “is that the letter could be a fake.”

  “I didn’t say that,” the detective interposes immediately, her smile disappearing as though she has belatedly recalled that smiles are banned in this sad little room. I can feel the tension rising once more—and then, suddenly, I see where they are heading.

  “Sergeant Ames,” my sister says formally, “we are here because we have families, and we are worried about them.” She rubs her ample belly to underline the point: she means we are worried about our children. “If you can persuade us that there is no relation between what happened to Father Bishop and what happened—what might have happened—to our father, we will go away and never bother you again. I promise you. We won’t blab to the papers. I used to be a journalist, and I was always very good at keeping my mouth shut. I never revealed a source. My brother, as you know, is a lawyer, so he knows how to keep a confidence. I know you feel we used connections to barge in here. I’m sorry about that. But we did it for the sake of our families. And nothing you tell us will go any further than the two of us. I promise you that, too. And if we can ever do anything for you …”

  She leaves the r
est hanging in the air. Oh, but my sister is good! What a reporter she must have been! Without saying a word that can be held against her, Mariah has managed to threaten, indirectly, to make a nuisance of herself if she does not get what she wants. More important, she has also raised the specter of our supposed family influence—all of it, of course, actually the largesse of Mallory Corcoran.

  Sergeant Ames gets the message. And is far too experienced to let herself get angry. Instead, she takes a nibble at the bait.

  “Father Bishop’s family,” she says, “has not been very cooperative. They seem to think—well, the racial angle is giving them problems.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” Mariah says at once, as though she runs the Gold Coast, which our mother once hoped she would. “I was in Jack and Jill with Warner Bishop.”

  The detective nods as though she knows all about the various social organizations for the children of middle-class African America. “Warner Bishop seems to think we’re all rednecks out here,” she says.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Mariah promises.

  Sergeant Ames looks back at me briefly, but she addresses herself to my sister. “I won’t show you the note,” she says. “I can’t do that. I’m sorry. But I can tell you, in the privacy of this room, that there is absolutely no reason for you to worry about the safety of your families. There really is no connection between this crime and your father. But you’re right about the other part. There was a note, and we do think it was a fake. That is, we do not think this was a white supremacist thing.”

  She pauses, wanting us to take the next step. I am about to offer another question, but Mariah raises a hand and slips hers in ahead of mine.

  “It was drugs, Sergeant, wasn’t it?”

  Sergeant Ames looks at her, then looks at me, then looks back at my sister. There is real respect there.

  “Yes,” the detective finally says. “Yes, we think it was drugs. Now, this also stays in this office. You cannot even tell Father Bishop’s family, not just yet.” A pause to let this sink in; police detectives can make threats too. “But we are quite confident that you and your father and your families are not involved. We have to wait a day or so for toxicology to be sure, but I already know from other evidence what they’ll tell us: that Father Bishop was a fairly heavy user.”

  The detective stops. My jaw does not exactly drop, but I am pretty sure that time stands still and my heart skips a few beats, and lots of other clichés happen at the same time. So it was not simple incompetence that caused Freeman Bishop’s sermons to meander into meaninglessness. I am astonished, and embarrassed, by the depth of my relief.

  But Mariah sticks to the problem.

  “How does that explain what happened to him?”

  Sergeant Ames sighs. She hoped to get away with less, it seems, but now will have to tell us the rest. I am still wondering, however, what her purpose was in interrogating me. Was it just intimidation?

  “We don’t publicize this,” she says, “because we are afraid of copycats. But, in the Washington area, I’m including the suburbs, we see a dozen or so of these cases a year. Most of them you never read about or see on television, because the victims are less prominent. The kind of torture Father Bishop suffered—well, it’s horrible, but it’s more common than you might think. In particular, it is used a lot by dealers to make their customers who are behind in their payments tell them where they have money stashed. They torture the information out of them and then shoot them in the back of the head. Or sometimes they get gratuitous about it, torturing for kicks. And we are pretty sure that is what happened here. Even a very tough man would have had a lot of trouble holding out against a fraction of what they did to him, and from what people tell me, Freeman Bishop, may he rest in peace, was not particularly tough. If they wanted information from him, I think they probably got it pretty fast. The rest of what they did to him was for kicks.” A pause to let this sink in. The temperature in the room drops several degrees. “Still, the basic fact remains the same: Freeman Bishop, we are pretty sure, was killed because he used drugs and couldn’t pay for them.”

  “Pretty sure?” I ask, just for something to say.

  The sergeant glares at me. She would rather I shut up, her eyes say, so that she can pretend that I am not in the room. Mariah is the one she trusts. As far as Sergeant B. T. Ames is concerned, I am furniture.

  I see my mistake an eyeblink later, but my sister sees it faster. She is already up on her feet, pulling me to mine, thanking the detective for her time, shaking hands as though closing a sale. Sergeant Ames steps around us and opens the door so that the rest of the squad can hear her dismiss us.

  “Look, Mr. Garland. Mrs. Denton. I’m really sorry about your father. I am. But I have a murder on my hands and a lot of work to do. So, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to the job.”

  (II)

  WE DRIVE TOGETHER to Shepard Street, where Mariah plans to spend the night; I am flying home on the shuttle a bit later this evening, but will return next week for the funeral of the man who, last week, officiated at the Judge’s. The house is eerily silent after the hubbub of a week ago; it sounds like the house of a dead man. Our footsteps echo like gunfire on the parquet of the front hall. Mariah grimaces, explaining that she sent all the Judge’s Oriental carpet runners out for cleaning right after the funeral. She raises her palm in half-apology, then turns on the CD player, but her kind of music this time, not my father’s: Reasons, the long version, by Earth, Wind and Fire, which remains, in my sister’s casual judgment, the single greatest pop recording ever made. The Judge would have been appalled. I remind myself that this is my sister’s house now, that I am a guest, that she can do what she wants.

  After Mariah visits the powder room, we find ourselves once again in the absurdly bright kitchen, sitting together at the table, sipping hot chocolate in companionable silence, almost—but not quite—friends again. I loosen my tie. Mariah kicks off her shoes.

  “I wish you wouldn’t stay here alone,” I tell her.

  “Why, Tal,” laughs my sister, “I didn’t know you cared.”

  Most siblings would identify this at once as the moment to say, You know I love you; but most siblings did not grow up in my family.

  “I worry about you, that’s all.”

  Mariah tilts her head to one side and wrinkles her nose. “You don’t need to worry, Tal, I’m a big girl. I don’t think anybody is going to break into the house tonight and burn me with cigarettes.” Since that is exactly what I am scared of, I say nothing. “Besides,” she adds, “I won’t be alone.”

  “You won’t?” This takes me by surprise.

  “No. Szusza is bringing the kids down tomorrow.” I assume this is the name of the latest unpronounceable au pair. “Well, some of the kids, anyway,” she corrects herself, but maybe she has trouble keeping track. I would. “And Sally’s staying with me tonight. So don’t worry.”

  “Sally?” I didn’t know my sister and our cousin were so close.

  “She’s been great, Tal. Really great. She’s coming by right after work. We’re going to start going through Daddy’s papers.” Mariah looks up at me sharply, as though I have objected to this plan. “Look, Tal, somebody has to do it. We have to know what’s here. For all kinds of reasons. There are a lot of records and things that we might need. On the houses and stuff. And, who knows, maybe … maybe we can find some kind of clue.”

  “Clue to what?”

  Mariah’s russet gaze goes flinty. “Come on, Tal, you know what I’m talking about. You’re the one who had Jack Ziegler screaming at you in the cemetery last week. He thinks there is something somewhere, some kind of … well, I don’t know what.” She closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again. “I want to find what he is looking for, and I want to find it before he does.”

  I think this over. The arrangements. Well, she could be right. The Judge might have left a piece of paper, a diary, something to help us figure out what has Uncle Jack so worried. And what the fa
ke FBI men evidently wanted. And maybe Sergeant B. T. Ames. The arrangements. Maybe a clue will turn up. I doubt it—but Mariah, ex-journalist, just could be right.

  “Well, good luck,” is all I can think of to say.

  “Thanks. I have a feeling we’ll find it.” She sips her hot chocolate and makes a face: too cold.

  “It could even be fun.”

  Mariah shrugs, somehow conveying her determination. “I’m not doing it for fun,” she says to her cocoa, unconsciously rubbing her womb again. I find myself wondering what my wife is doing at this instant.

  “Have you heard from Addison since the funeral?” I am making conversation.

  “Nope. Not a word.” She chuckles derisively. “Same old Addison.”

  “He’s not so bad.”

  “Oh, he’s great. Can you believe what he said about Daddy? In the eulogy? That maybe there was some reason to think he did something wrong?”

  “That’s not exactly what he said,” murmurs Misha the peacemaker, a role into which I somehow stepped while trying to survive in the turbulent household of my adolescence, and one that I have never managed to relinquish.

  “That’s the way I heard it. I bet that’s the way it sounded to most of the folks who were there.”

  “Well, maybe he did leave it … a little ambiguous.”

  “It was a funeral, Tal.” Her eyes are flat. “You don’t do that at a funeral.”

  “Oh, I see your point, kiddo.”

  Which is not precisely the same as agreeing with it, a nuance my sister catches at once. “You never want to take sides, do you? You like the view from the fence.”

  “Mariah, come on,” I say, stung, but I offer no counterargument, not least because I do not have one.

  We let the silence envelop us for a while, escaping into our own minds. I am adding up all the hours of work I have waiting for me back home, secretly furious that I allowed Mariah to spook me into this trip. Everything the detective said made sense; and none of my sister’s theories are remotely plausible. I peek at my watch, hoping Mariah doesn’t see, and lift my mug to my lips, only to put it down fast. My hot chocolate tastes as bad as hers.