The Emperor of Ocean Park (21 page)

“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 fake 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.

“Did you believe her?” Mariah asks, as though in contact with my thoughts. “Sergeant Ames, I mean? About Father Bishop?”

“You mean, do I think she was lying?”

“I mean, do you think she was
right?
Please don’t play word games with me, Tal, I’m not one of your students.”

I have to answer this carefully; I do not want to make my sister my enemy all over again. “I know what you meant,” I say slowly. “I think, if she
isn’t
right, then the alternative is that he was tortured because of . . . because of something to do with the Judge. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not?” Her question is sharp; again I must pick the right words.

“Well, let’s suppose—let’s suppose that there is some bit of information that the Judge took to his grave with him, information that somebody wanted. I don’t believe this, you understand, it’s just a supposition.”

Mariah gives a small, tight nod. I plunge on.

“Even if it’s true—even if there
is
some bit of information—well, I doubt that the Judge would have confided anything important in Freeman Bishop. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but, come on.”

“Nobody who knew Daddy would think he would tell Father Bishop anything.”

“Nobody who knew Freeman Bishop would think the Judge would tell him anything.”

My sister rubs her womb again, protecting her baby. “So he wasn’t . . . tortured . . . for information about Daddy, was he?”

“I don’t think so. If I thought anything else, I would grab my family and head for the hills.”

“If your family would go.” Mariah cannot help being mischievous when the subject of Kimmer comes up. I decide to ignore it.

“The point is, kiddo, the reason I think Sergeant Ames is right is that I can’t think of any reason that anybody would have . . . done those things to him.”
I promised to protect you, and so I shall.
I can repeat this mantra to myself, but reiteration does not make it feel true. Not completely. What feels true is that somebody is out there—Uncle Jack’s
others
—playing a very long game, waiting for me to do . . . well, whatever it is that everybody expects me to do. I sense no danger, but I sense no peace.

Mariah nods. “Neither can I,” she says. She runs a hand over her eyes. “She was really something, that detective. She was one tough lady.”

“Well, you got her to admit that the note was most likely a fake . . . .”

“Oh, Tal, give it a rest.” Mariah’s voice has gone unexpectedly hard. I have stumbled into her realm of expertise. “I didn’t get her to do anything. Cops don’t ever admit anything they don’t want to. She told us what she wanted us to know, and that’s all.”

“Well, that’s my point.” I am excited now. “She wanted us to hear all that stuff about drugs. Why? I bet the only reason she told us was that she doesn’t believe we’re going to keep it secret. She
wants
us to spread it around.”

“I never knew you were such a cynic.” Mariah shakes her head as though she has never been one. She shifts in her chair and her finger stabs toward me. “I
liked
Sergeant Ames.”

“But did you believe her about the drug dealers?”

“Well, they did find his car by the Navy Yard.”

“I bet there’s about a hundred fifty thousand people down in Southwest who don’t do drugs or sell them,” I preach.

“Give it a rest,” Mariah repeats. “Everybody knows Father Bishop does coke. Or he did, anyway. Everybody’s known for years.”

“Everybody knows
what?”

“You’re so innocent, Tal. Why are you the last to hear everything?” She laughs. At least we seem on relatively good terms again. “You really don’t know?”

I shake my head.

“Well, it’s an old story. Laurel St. Jacques caught him snorting three or four years ago, right in the sacristy. You remember Laurel, don’t you? She married André Conway? I know you must remember André.” A devilish smile, reminding me that I am Kimberly Madison’s second husband. André was her first.

“I remember André,” I say quietly. I also remember—although I never mention it—an irrational fury at André after he won the first round in our battle for Kimmer Madison, including a moment, in his apartment, when we nearly came to blows. At that time he was a local news producer named Artis. His new appellation came when he decided to make documentary films. “I even remember he married Laurel.”

“Do you remember that they’re divorced?”

“Rings a bell somewhere.” I hope she is not hinting anything about André and my wife. Unbidden, my thoughts lead me down toward their usual obsessive fear: André is in Los Angeles these days, and Kimmer is often in San Francisco, and he could fly up to see her . . . .

Oh, stop it!

“I heard there was another woman involved,” says Mariah, her old streak of cruelty unexpectedly manifesting itself.

“There usually is.”

Mariah glances at me, perhaps trying to figure out if I am putting her down with what she disdains as my
Ivy League cleverness,
as though she has none of her own. I keep my poker face on. “Well, anyway,” she finally continues, “Laurel caught Father Bishop at it a couple of years ago. And, Laurel being Laurel, she naturally told everybody. It’s a wonder he wasn’t fired on the spot. I think Daddy must have been off the vestry by then, or Father Bishop would have been gone. But they decided to keep him around. I guess they all must have felt sorry for him or something. You know us Episcopalians, Tal. We love to feel
compassion
for people. We’re never happy unless we’re ignoring somebody’s sins to show how tolerant we are,” adds my sister, who converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry Howard and, Kimmer likes to say, has followed the Church’s teaching on birth control ever since.

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, it was quite the little scandal, Tal.” She flaps her hand for emphasis, tosses her head the way she used to when she wore her hair straight and long, then rushes eagerly on, happy for the chance to share gossip I seem to have missed. “Quite a few people left the church over it, as a matter of fact. The Cliftons left. Oh, they were furious! And Bruce and Harriet Yearwood left. Also Mary Raboteau. No, wait, she retired and went to Florida or something. I was thinking of Mrs. Lavelle—she’s the other one who left. And you’d think Gigi Walker would have left, she’s such a bluenose, but, well, I guess she had her reasons to stay.” An odd little laugh. My sister loves being judgmental, even when nobody else in the room knows what she is judging. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it, Tal.”

“No, I missed it.”

“Daddy thought Father Bishop should quit voluntarily, you know, save everybody all the trouble? But he went in front of the congregation and did one of those God-isn’t-finished-with-me-yet sermons, and that was pretty much the end of that. Oh, that reminds me.” My sister is on her feet. “I promised Sergeant Ames that I would call Warner Bishop. Poor guy, he doesn’t have anybody left.” Mariah vanishes into the foyer. A moment later I hear her tread on the stairs, going up to the study to find the Judge’s address book. I am amazed. I assumed that my sister was just talking when she said she would reassure Father Bishop’s family, but I forgot how seriously she takes promises. When we were children, she used to run to our parents to complain whenever I (or, more frequently, Addison) went back on a promise. In the Garland household, promise-breaking was pretty much a court-martial offense. Our mother would punish us, usually confining us to our rooms for a couple of hours, but our father would do something far worse: he would call us into the little downstairs study he used in those days and deliver one of his excruciating lectures, letting the full force of his chilly, dispassionate disapproval wash over us as we stood before his desk at parade rest.
Promises are the bricks of life, Talcott, and trust is the mortar. We build nothing in life if we make no promises, and we tear down what others have built if we make them and break them.
Something like that. He struggled to make the same point to the Senate Judiciary Committee, explaining his relationship with Jack Ziegler:
Friendship is a promise of future loyalty, loyalty no matter what comes. Promises are the bricks of life . . . . I will never abandon a friend, and I expect that my friends will never abandon me.

That’s a very noble sentiment, Judge, but the fact remains that this particular friend of yours was under indictment for. . .

With respect, Senator, it isn’t a matter of nobility. It’s a matter of what kind of world you want to build. If you want to build at all—or just to tear down.

Lots of friends did abandon him, of course, once they calculated that the Judge was more likely to wind up in prison than on the Supreme Court.

I go to the sink and wash our cups. When the water stops running, I hear Mariah’s voice drifting down the stairwell. Mariah, who can be warm and vivacious when she chooses, will probably be a considerable comfort to Warner Bishop, Freeman Bishop’s hapless son, now some kind of advertising executive in New York, with whom my sister once put in time in Jack and Jill and all the other youth groups of our set. Homely, chunky, awkward Warner Bishop, who wanted desperately to date Mariah when they were teenagers, but never quite succeeded in drawing her interest. According to Addison, Warner has carried a distant torch for her ever since. Oh, our closed little world!

“Drug dealers,” I mutter. Maybe, maybe not. Whoever it was, I do not even need to close my eyes to see the photos of what they did to Father Bishop. To his hand, to his thigh, and, easily imagined, to other parts of his anatomy that the detective chose, perhaps out of kindness, not to share.

Freeman Bishop, drug user, came to a drug user’s end. How is it that I alone seem not to have known?

Maybe Mariah is right. Or maybe she is nuts. Or maybe I am.

Maybe I should make a peace offering.

Drying my hands on a kitchen towel of hideous red-and-black design, I dither for a moment, wondering if it is time to use the card Jack Ziegler gave me in the cemetery. But it isn’t: after a murder, the last thing I need is to call in a monster for help. And then I know exactly what to give. The memory of my father’s lectures reminded me. I think Mariah’s hunt for a hidden clue will bear no fruit, but I do not want her to think I am her enemy. What I will offer is less a clue than a memento of the man our father was—a memento that might even persuade my sister to abandon her search. I stand up and head down the dark hallway to the claustrophobic first-floor library with its cherry cabinets. After a quick, covetous glance at the Miró, I sit behind the desk and roll the chair over to the bookshelf where my father kept his scrapbooks. I hunt through them for several minutes before giving up in puzzlement.

Mariah moved it, I am thinking. Or somebody else in the endless parade through the house after the funeral: Mariah’s children, Howard Denton, Just Alma, the unpronounceable au pair, Mrs. Rose, Sally, Addison, his little white girlfriend, Uncle Mal, Dana Worth, Eddie Dozier, the woman who cleans the place, one of the numberless cousins, anybody.

The blue album with the newspaper clippings of hit-and-run accidents is gone.

CHAPTER 11
A MODEST PROPOSAL

“Y
OUR WIFE
and Marc Hadley are both up for the same judgeship,” Stuart Land informs me as soon as I am seated in his capacious chamber around the corner from mine.