No One You Know (14 page)

Twenty-one

A
T TWO IN THE MORNING
T
HORPE AND
I were sitting at the large glass-top table, facing each other over a half-eaten pizza and a near-empty bottle of wine. He’d insisted on feeding me, and the only thing he could find to cook was a frozen spinach and artichoke pizza from Trader Joe’s. I was surprised how good it tasted, and how hungry I was. The wine was delicious, a 2003 pinot. I tasted raspberries and smoke, and poured myself a second glass. Thorpe was on his third.

I was all talked out, and yet I hadn’t gotten any answers. Every time I tried to steer the conversation in the direction of Peter McConnell, he steered it back to something else. We talked about a recent trip he’d taken to Lisbon, an angry letter he’d received from the now ex-wife who was immortalized in
Second Time’s a Charm,
and an early photograph by the Hungarian photographer Martin Munkácsi which he had recently acquired at considerable cost. I’d seen Munkácsi’s spare, beautiful black-and-white photographs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a couple of years before. The exhibit had featured famous portraits of American celebrities, aerial photos of female pilots, and the well-known “Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika.” But the photograph Thorpe had purchased was from the early 1920s, when Munkácsi was at the very beginning of his career.

“Do you know Munkácsi’s story?” Thorpe asked, lifting his glass.

“Didn’t he take some iconic photo of Fred Astaire?”

“Yes, but what’s really interesting is what came before all that, before he fled Hitler and moved to New York, back when he was completely unknown. One day Munkácsi was walking along with his camera when he came upon a street fight. He started taking pictures. By the end of the brawl, someone was dead. Munkácsi’s photographs were used in court to clear the accused—this was what launched his career. I’ve managed to get my hands on one of these photographs of the brawl. It’s being shipped from a gallery in Budapest next month. It will go right there, above the fireplace.”

I imagined the image of a bloody street fight hanging above Thorpe’s mantel, hovering over the room. What kind of man would want to gaze, every day, at a portrait of a murder-in-action?

“Lucky man,” I said.

“I know. You should have seen me at the gallery, trying to talk the owner into parting with it. He was determined to only sell to a Hungarian. I was speaking through an interpreter, to whom I’d promised a handsome commission, and it turns out he did more than translate. He apparently made up some elaborate story about my ancestral connection to the Hapsburgs.”

“I wasn’t talking about you,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“When I said ‘lucky man,’ I was referring to the man who was cleared of committing the crime.”

“Oh,” Thorpe said, “of course.”

It was late, and I was afraid of leaving without getting what I’d come for. As a night owl, I was always aware of the coming daylight, could sense the minutes ticking away. All of my best conversations with Henry had occurred in the middle of the night. Sunrise had a way of putting an end to intimacy; the vulnerabilities men displayed in the middle of the night seemed to disappear with the moon and stars.

Thorpe picked up his knife and began cutting his pizza into small bites. I’d forgotten his annoying habit of treating his food like he was dissecting it.

“There’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

“How does anyone live without Trader Joe’s?” Thorpe said. “I’d go hungry if it weren’t for their frozen food aisle. Did I ever tell you I met Joe Coulombe once? At a fund-raising soiree for the LA Opera. He’s a big opera fan.”

“Peter McConnell,” I said.

Thorpe peeled an artichoke off the pizza and ate it slowly, gazing intently at his plate. If I didn’t know him so well, I would have thought he hadn’t heard me. “Trader Joe’s didn’t get really huge until it was bought out in 1979 by one of the German brothers who own Aldi. People still think there’s a California guy named Joe in a floral shirt and Panama hat running the whole show.”

I was determined not to give up. “Did Peter McConnell do it?”

Thorpe blotted his lips with a napkin. “You read the book. You know my theory.”

“I’m not asking about your theory. I’m asking whether he did it.”

“Off the record?”

“Sure,” I said. “Who am I going to tell, anyway?”

“He had opportunity. He had motive. Most of the circumstantial evidence certainly pointed in his direction.”

“Most?”

“In any case like this, there are shades of doubt.”

I poured the last of the wine into his glass. “When you wrote the book,” I continued carefully, “were you doubtful?”

“Any rational person, given the facts, would experience an element of doubt. That’s unavoidable.”

“But in the book, you made it sound as though it
had
to be him.”

Thorpe picked up his glass. “It did.”

“Why?”

“Because if anyone else did it, it would have just been another sordid murder for the police ticker, suitable for nothing more than an item in the newspaper. But if McConnell did it, it was a great story—a young, beautiful math prodigy, murdered by her married lover, who knew that he would never be as brilliant a mathematician as she was.” His voice had become slightly unsteady from the wine, and a shadow of stubble had reappeared on his head. “At the end of the day, everyone wants to be taken away by a great story. Everyone wants to read about people they’re unlikely to meet in real life. From the moment I stumbled upon McConnell, I knew he was the character I’d been looking for, the one who had eluded me in all my previous attempts to write a novel.”

“But your book wasn’t a novel.”

“Nonetheless, I had to think like a novelist. If I’d approached it as a straightforward piece of journalism, I never would have found the heart of the story.”

“What if the character in your book is nothing like the actual man? What if McConnell didn’t do it?”

“One can’t rule out the possibility.”

“You don’t care that you might have ruined an innocent man’s life?”

“It’s a stretch to call him innocent,” Thorpe said. “Let’s suppose for a moment that he didn’t kill Lila; he would still be guilty of having an extramarital affair, and of using your sister to further his ambition of proving the Goldbach Conjecture.”

“When a book is labeled nonfiction, people expect to read the truth.”

“Remember what Oscar Wilde said in the preface to
The Picture of Dorian Gray:
‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written.’ Hopefully, mine was well-written and provided some pleasure. I was only trying to tell a good story. And the deeper I got into the book, the more clear it became to me that there could be only one ending. Once I understood what it was, writing the story was like following a map.”

Thorpe leaned back. “Listen, I was thinking maybe we could get together soon. I’m doing a signing at Books Inc. in Opera Plaza on Saturday. We could have lunch in the neighborhood afterward.”

The sky was beginning to lighten. Soon, it would be five a.m., and the world would yawn to life. I realized the only way to get what I wanted from Thorpe was to use his own tactics against him. My mother had once told me that her success as a trial attorney had to do with her approach to the witness stand. Many attorneys, she said, made the mistake of beginning a cross-examination from the standpoint of the aggressor. In their eagerness to make their own case, they bullied the witness. She said she saw herself, at the outset of any cross-examination, as a negotiator. Prior to a trial, she’d find out everything she could about the witnesses, and tailor her questions to each personality. In this way she could lead the conversation in the direction she wanted it to go.

By asking me to see him again, Thorpe had opened a door.

“Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it wasn’t McConnell,” I said. “Who else could have done it?”

Thorpe stood and began clearing the dishes. “We could walk down to Mangosteen afterward. Great little Vietnamese place. Best garlic beef in the city.”

I ignored his invitation and pressed on. “You interviewed dozens of people for the book. There must have been others who stood out as possibilities.”

“Have you ever had mangosteen berry juice? It’s delicious.”

He took the plates into the kitchen, and I followed him with the glasses and leftover pizza.

“I’m not asking you to remember offhand. You must have notes tucked away somewhere.”

He put the dishes in the already-full sink, squirted some dishwashing liquid into the pile, and turned on the hot water. “We’ll let them soak.”

“I like Vietnamese food,” I said after a pause. “I haven’t had it in a while.”

Thorpe turned and leaned against the counter. A few seconds passed. “John Wheeler,” he said finally. “He was a janitor at Stanford. A student claimed to see him talking to Lila in the math building the night before she died.”

“I don’t remember him from the book.”

Thorpe shrugged. “I talked to him once. He was in the first draft, but he ended up on the cutting-room floor—he wasn’t very interesting.”

“Do you have any idea where I might find him?”

Thorpe shook his head. “That was forever ago. But I can probably find his old address. Come with me.”

If the bedroom was the one place in Thorpe’s house where neatness reigned, the garage was where he had completely abandoned any pretense of order. It was designed to hold two cars, but was so overrun with boxes, gardening tools, sports equipment, and old furniture that it would have been difficult to even fit a motorcycle in there. The garage was lit by fluorescent tubes, and in the exaggerated brightness Thorpe looked increasingly haggard in his wrinkled slacks and wine-stained sweater, his morning beard. Beneath the scent of aftershave, I detected a faint but unmistakable tinge of body odor. There was a spot in the book where he described Peter McConnell as a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde, but I thought the comparison could be more aptly applied to Thorpe himself. I had the feeling that the garage, more than any other room in the house, represented the real Thorpe—not the stylish, put-together author persona he presented to the world, but the man he was in his most private moments, ripe-smelling and uncertain amidst the detritus of his lonely life.

“Welcome to the wine cellar,” he quipped.

I tripped over an old rug that was rolled up on the floor, and Thorpe took my arm to steady me. We picked our way through tottering shelves, a weight bench, and several full recycling bins to a metal file cabinet crammed into a corner. “It may look like a disaster,” Thorpe said, “but believe it or not, I actually have a system. All the notes for my old books are in this cabinet, arranged top to bottom, first book first.”

He opened the top drawer and began thumbing through the green hanging files, which emitted a musty, old-paper smell that made me think of a chiropractor’s office where I’d temped one summer after college. The temp job lasted an interminable three weeks. Just days after I left, a disgruntled former patient had walked in and shot up the office, killing the chiropractor and critically injuring the receptionist, for whom I had been the replacement while she was on her honeymoon. The event only confirmed what I knew to be true: the world was unsafe, and danger lurked in the most innocuous places. It was a lesson I had learned with Lila’s death, and over the years I saw it repeated over and over, an unrelenting pattern.

I looked over Thorpe’s shoulder, trying to read the labels on the files, but they appeared to contain only dates instead of names. Finally he pulled out a folder and flipped through it until he came to a 4×6 green notebook with the word
Memorandum
embossed in gold across the cover.

“Great notebook, isn’t it?” Thorpe said. “FBI issue. A friend of mine in the Bureau, Lucy Ranahan, gave it to me ages ago. I think it’s positively Hooveresque. Unfortunately, they don’t make them anymore.” He licked his index finger and flipped through it. “Oh,” he said, “it’s James.”

“Pardon?”

“James Wheeler, not John Wheeler. I remembered it wrong. Here’s his old contact info. He was in his fifties then, not in the best of health. It’s quite possible he’s dead now. A much younger wife, though, if I remember correctly.” Thorpe ripped the page out of the notebook and handed it to me. It had a name, address, and phone number.

“What’s this?” I said, pointing to a sketch of a face beneath the number.

“Oh, just a habit. When I interview people, I draw them. I draw the victims, too, from photographs. Helps me get into the characters. I tried to get my editor to include the drawings in the book, but she said it sent the wrong message.”

I wondered if he had drawings of Lila, of me. I reached for the book, but he held it out of my reach. “I promised you
one
name.”

“Are there others?”

He didn’t answer. We walked back through the house. In the entryway I paused in front of the fountain, stalling. I still wanted to ask him about the view. Close up, I could see that the water in the fountain was green and scummy. Dead bugs floated on the surface.