A Person of Interest (34 page)

ciency of which had been webbing his movements for weeks; he felt the confines of the trap only now that he’d begun thrashing. Panic threatened to stampede over all his deductive achievements. “The FBI can’t see the truth, Gaither’s made sure of that. Yes! You’re right to say he’s framing me,” the simple word for what was happening to him so-lidifying now that she’d said it, like the crystal whose hard edges and facets surprisingly spring from a cloudy solution. For a moment his heart jerked with hope; she would be his ally after all.

A cross between pity and horror distorted her face. “You’re scared, aren’t you,” she said. “Now that everyone thinks it was you.” Again she’d swept aside all the murk and delivered a verdict, but this time Lee was so shocked by the world she revealed, the unthinkable process already elapsed, he could not even speak. He might have been shot and wound up somehow stuck to the line marking life off from death. He was still there a long time after Rachel had driven away.

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19.

A FEW MINUTES PAST SEVEN THE NEXT MORNING, HE

grew aware of a gathering, cars arriving, doors opening, indistinct voices joining together. He hadn’t slept at all that he was aware of, had not even moved from the armchair to bed. As if at a primal signal, he stood up from the chair, his blood surging, and locked himself in his downstairs bathroom. He showered rapidly, scattering soap gobbets onto the walls. He slashed his razor over his face. He stubbed his toe but didn’t feel it, roughly yanked on clean clothes. The tableau of himself and Rachel in the booth at the Wagon Wheel some twelve hours before floated past, isolated and unexplainable. The doorbell rang, and in the action of answering it he had the sense of producing, himself, the procession that bore down on him, the way a magician pulls a colorful handkerchief chain from a hat.

It was Agent Morrison who served him the search warrant. “Professor, for your own privacy I would suggest that you sit in the back of your house, in your bedroom or kitchen, with the blinds drawn, until we’re all finished. Members of the media have accompanied us here, unfortunately.” Morrison’s tone of voice suggested he and Lee had never met except perhaps on the most bureaucratic occasions. A small herd of purposeful adjuncts, in zipped jackets and gloves, were pouring through the door. Lee had the detached, uncertain thought that there were far more purposeful adjuncts than there were household objects, even if they counted his forks and separated his laundry. Outside, he saw his neighbors clustered excitedly at the edge of his lawn, a few of them nodding as they spoke to those reporters who weren’t otherwise preoccupied with shifting and positioning their cameras. So here at last were the TV reporters. It had only been weeks since he’d spoken to them with such facility and passion outside the hospital in which Hendley lay dying, and yet he felt he had never seen anything like them before. Burly, potbellied men looking slightly cycloptic with the lenses of cameras hitched onto their shoulders, and other men probing the air with long poles baited with microphones, and still
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other men, and a woman, microphone-poking their ways to and fro, trailed by people unfurling long cords, as Lee did every once in a while when he vacuumed his carpet. Lee found himself transfixed in his doorway, his just-showered body a fountain of sweat.

“What are we looking for, Agent?” a reporter was shouting.

“Professor, please get out of the way,” Agent Morrison said from behind him. “I would really suggest you get out of the doorway and sit in your kitchen.”

Lee stared at the cycloptic eyes, which stared patiently back. Several people were asking him questions. He shook his head, stumbling over himself as he groped his way back through his front door and into the living room. When he reached his picture window, he pulled aside the curtain, as if this view might be different.

The cameras seemed to content themselves with his oddly forgotten form, sweating and blinking on the far side of the window screen and otherwise utterly still as behind him the drawers to his telephone table were emptied, then the few shoe boxes of recent miscellanea—

disputed bills, replacement batteries not yet replaced—then the single bookshelf on the staircase landing, then even his desk—from his spot he could only have heard this, but he seemed to float upward so that he could see, as the searchers swarmed into that room, their movements eclipsing and revealing and eclipsing the sparse little tableau on the desk’s leather surface, the papier-mâché candy dish and the photograph of Esther in the faux-stained-glass frame. Another photograph of Esther, from a year later, hung on the wall. They were small windows onto the last year before Aileen left. The two Esthers, only slightly different from each other, seemed to gaze at Lee expectantly, and he seemed to gaze back, as the jacketed forms crisscrossed in the foreground, though he still hadn’t moved from his spot in the living-room window.

“Get out of that window and sit in the kitchen; you’ll be more comfortable,” Agent Morrison said, passing by.

There was so little; he could sense them thinking that, pawing over it impatiently like dogs. For a man in his seventh decade, where was all the stuff? Had he hidden it? Driven it out to the country and buried it? The dull truth was, he’d been a thrower-away all his life, and if he hadn’t pitched it, then someone had taken it from him. Everything that most mattered to him could fi t in his briefcase. Esther’s pictures
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and her shoes, and a handful of papers. He had a single, two-drawer filing cabinet in the corner of his study, gray and ugly and almost entirely full of transient items, household records that apart from those concerning his mortgage he’d throw away in a couple of years, bank statements and paid bills and tax stuff, but in the back there was a slim clutch of items concerning Aileen. Their divorce papers, and the letter she’d written, from before they were married.

Time seemed to have stuttered. He had remembered those things, and then, without meaning to, he’d burrowed deep into himself, and now he resurfaced, to see the two-drawer filing cabinet as it was borne downstairs and out the front door.

“Wait—” he said.

He had also been remembering, somewhere in the midst of that temporal glitch, the first of Aileen’s collapses, when they hadn’t had any idea what was gathering in her. The paramedic had been shouting out her blood pressure as it nosedove, numbers plummeting second by second, and Lee had been screaming incoherent imprecations and wrenching Aileen’s bloodless hands, and all around them had been the sort of pandemonium no sane person associates with the salvation of life. It had looked like life’s utter unraveling, as this present scene did: the very last things roughly yanked from their moorings, Aileen falling from him, white as ash, while syringes and tubes flew around. But Aileen shuddered suddenly, and the oxygen mask dropped off her face, and she said to Lee, with a sort of amazement, “I’m not scared at all.” It hadn’t been the beatific acceptance of death; later she’d told him it was just that the worst had arrived, and she wasn’t afraid. “You know: ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself.’ ”
I’m not scared at all.
For his part, Lee had been so terrorized it was surprising his heart hadn’t stopped. Yet now he thought he might understand, as he watched his house being dismantled: when disaster’s thumb bears down on
you,
there’s a peace to that pressure. The worst isn’t coming, it’s here. And there’s nothing left to fear.

Except this loss.
“Wait,
” he cried, plunging out the front door in pursuit. He felt a hand grip his wrist, like a cuff.

“Professor,” Morrison said. “I really think you’d be more comfortable if you sat in the kitchen.”

It disappeared, that downpressing thumb, Aileen’s fearless peace—why couldn’t he keep hold of the least goddamned thing?— “I
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need something out of there,” he gasped, making for the cabinet as it was borne across his freshly mowed lawn. His free arm pinwheeled ridiculously—Morrison had him firmly by the other wrist. “Get your hands off me!” Lee shrieked.

Herky-jerky they danced with each other on Lee’s welcome mat for the avid cameras, straying perhaps five steps from where they had started before moving back, the big agent with the filing cabinet having turned to give a glance to the scuffle, turned away, resumed his steady, laden steps toward a truck at the curb like a professional mover; he paused again at a fresh cry from Lee and met Morrison’s eyes, so that now the three of them stood on the lawn in an oval of news cameramen, the fi sh-eyes of the lenses turned on them and the long fishing poles—the booms, Lee would learn—following with their microphone bait, while at the same time the petty procession of old-bill-filled shoe boxes and calculus textbooks and much of the basement—cardboard evidence boxes into which had been whatever-way hastily dumped crescent wrenches and pliers and hammers and drill bits and C-clamps and random scrap ends of lumber from a shelf-building project of ten years ago and slivers of balsa and dowel from a dollhouse-building project of twenty years ago and coffee cans of loose nails and a four-fifths-full sack of lawn fertilizer and countless other things he never could never have named, staring at the stripped space, until he read the newspapers—continued, the steady annoyance of the box-bearing agents and the steady obstructiveness of the unmoving newspeople a happy symbiosis despite the pro forma shouts of,

“Please
move,
you are on private property, move to the curb,” despite the stubborn evasive response of, “What are we looking for, Agent? Is this what we’re looking for?” A gray filing cabinet of telephone bills and the voice of a woman long dead?

Lee’s previous TV appearance had been on its surface entirely different, but perhaps at some more basic level exactly the same. The fi rst time he’d been a Hendley-envying, rattled bomb victim transformed into selfless and eloquent hero. This second time he was even more simply himself, and turned into a criminal.

Restrained by Jim Morrison’s hands, he watched the gray fi ling cabinet vanish into the truck. The cameras watched it also, as they’d watched other items, although when the breaking news aired in a
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couple of hours, the clearly mundane things—the school textbooks, the can opener—would be edited in favor of the opaque evidence boxes, the opaque fi ling cabinet. Also not to be shown was Lee shaking his head very slightly, in acquiescence, so that Morrison unhanded him. Lee walked back into his house, and then into his bedroom, where the agents were done, and observed the tawdry appearance of his ungarnished bed, a mattress and box spring on bare metal frame with four scuffed plastic casters clawed into the carpet. His armchair appeared to have been reupholstered with threadbare dish rags. His dark wood dresser and his antique floor lamp did not elevate the generic cheapness of the room so much as suggest they’d been burglarized from more tasteful surroundings. The dresser’s drawers were yanked out, dripping unfolded clothes. A basket of laundry was dumped on the floor. A dizzying shame overwhelmed him, that so many strangers had seen the squalor of his bathroom.

Lee closed the door and crept onto his bed. He hadn’t pressed the button of the lock; he was afraid he might be reprimanded. He heard the thump of feet and the shifting of objects. No one pursued him, to put a camera and microphone close to his face. No one needed to, having already captured him lunging and twisting in Morrison’s grasp and then crazily yelling, “It’s none of your goddamned business!” The ceiling of this room, like the ceilings of all the rooms, was done in that same textured plaster that resembled acne. Lee stared at the irregular bumps as if he might find a pattern.

Through the thin walls, he heard Agent Morrison say, “Dr. Lee is a Person of Interest to this investigation. He is not a suspect. It’s as simple as that. We have never said he’s a suspect. If we ever do say it, you’ll know.”

“But what exactly do you mean by that, Agent? Is there some legal difference between the two terms?”

“Dr. Lee is a Person we’ve been talking to and who’s fully cooperating—”

“Is he going to face charges?”

“Look, this isn’t a briefing. You people aren’t even supposed to be here.”

“Can we expect him to be upgraded from a Person of Interest into a suspect pretty soon?”

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Lee rolled his head back and forth, almost writhed in torment. In the kitchen his phone began ringing. He had been so swiftly dispossessed he felt a moment of childlike dismay that no one of the agents or TV reporters took the trouble to answer it for him. Who was calling? Was it Esther? He gasped, writhed, clenched into motionlessness suddenly. From where he lay, when he looked to his right, into the dresser’s mirror, he saw refl ected the fi ssure between the edge of the blinds and the frame of the window that lay to his left. The two slivers of view, reflected and real, were entirely different; of course, this was the simplest geometry, the angles of incidence and refl ection, but while the leftward view muffled itself in the bosk of a pine Lee had planted for privacy a few years before, the rightward just managed to escape the pine’s boughs and run clear to the street. There a knot of spectators stood talking, one of whom, as Lee watched, suddenly turned and strode straight toward the pine, as if he’d realized, as had Lee at that instant, that the pine tree was protective only in concert with the basic respect neighbors grant to each other, and that today the respect had been breached with remarkable speed, perhaps permanently.

“I saw him out in the yard once,” he called over his shoulder to his less-bold companions. “I don’t know what the hell he was doing, dig-ging holes in the middle of the night. Maybe burying things.” In fact he’d been planting a Japanese maple, at the start of a summer that had been such a hell that he’d waited to dig until sunset. The delicate maple had scorched and expired within days, and then its slight skeleton, almost invisible from a few yards away, had remained memorializing itself for almost a year because Lee couldn’t bear to acknowledge his failure enough to uproot it; and the following spring he’d accidentally run into it with the lawn mower. But he was thinking of none of this now, as in a rush of pure instinct he twisted off the bed and fell hard on the side farthest from the window. Sore and gasping, he crouched out of sight on the carpet as the man crackled past the fat pine—unlike the maple, it had thrived—and presumably pressed his face onto the glass. “Naw, nothing,” the man called toward the street, in a tone of apology. Lee heard the man’s movement in the direction of the backyard but remained where he was, his heart clogging his throat. He’d lain stunned and still when the force of the bomb had
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