The King of Lies (4 page)

“We’ll need to examine Ezra’s house,” Douglas continued, and I nodded, suddenly tired. Douglas paused, then went on. “We’ll also need to check his office. Go through his files and find out who might have reason to hold a grudge.”

This brought my head up, and suddenly it all made sense. Ezra was dead. The practice was mine, which meant that Douglas and the cops needed me. Letting law enforcement paw through a defense attorney’s client files was . . . well, it was like letting a defense attorney enter the crime scene. If I refused, they’d need a warrant. There would be a hearing and I would probably win. Judges were loath to undermine the attorney-client privilege.

I realized then that the DA had figured this out before calling me to his office the day before, and that made me ineffably sad. Quid pro quo is an ugly thing between friends.

“Let me think on that for awhile,” I said, and Douglas nodded, tossing an enigmatic look at Detective Mills.

“We found the slugs,” he said. “Both of them in the closet. One in the wall, one in the floor.”

I knew what that meant, and doubted that Ezra had entered the closet voluntarily. He’d been ordered there at gunpoint. The first shot had caught him standing, passed through his skull, and embedded itself in the wall. The second shot had taken him lying down. The killer had wanted to make sure.

“And?” I said.

Douglas looked again at Mills and started tugging on his right eyebrow.

“We don’t have full forensics yet, but they came from a three-fifty-seven,” Douglas said, leaning forward in his chair, looking as if the movement hurt his ass. “We checked the records. Your father had a three-fifty-seven revolver, a stainless Smith & Wesson.” I said nothing. “We need that gun, Work. Do you know where it is?”

His right hand came up again, working at the eyebrow. I thought very carefully before I spoke.

“I have no idea where that gun is.”

He leaned back and put his hands in his lap.

“Look for it, will you? Let us know if you find it.”

“I will,” I said. “Is that it?”

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “That’s it. Just get back to me on those files. We’ll need to get access, and I’d rather not bother the judge.”

“I understand,” I said, and did. I stood up.

“Just a second,” Mills said. “I need to talk to you about the night your father disappeared. There are a lot of unanswered questions. There may be something of value.”

The night Ezra disappeared was the same night my mother died. It was not an easy subject for me. “Later,” I said. “Okay?”

She looked at the district attorney, who said nothing.

“Later today,” she responded.

“Fine.” I nodded. “Today.”

Douglas kept his seat as Mills opened the door.

“Stay in touch,” Douglas said, and lifted his hand as Detective Mills closed the door in my face. In the hall outside, with eyes like fingers upon me, I felt very alone.

I slipped down the back stairs and passed again through the magistrate’s office. It was all but empty and I nodded at the woman behind the wire-mesh window. She popped gum at me and looked silently away. Outside, the sun still hid itself, but the rain had dwindled to mist, when what I wanted most was pounding rain. I wanted the grayness, the steady hiss and crackle of water straight from the void; I wanted purity on my face and the heaviness of a three-season suit ruined beyond repair. Without decision or action, I wanted to fade away, to be taken from view and put, for a whisper of time, in a place where no one knew me. Instead, I got the passing stare of two young boys; instead, I got damp.

It was not yet noon when I entered the office, and my secretary looked unsettled when I told her to go home. She packed her bag with uneaten lunch, a stack of legal pads, and a thesaurus, then left with a wounded step. I wanted to go upstairs and search Ezra’s personal office, but his ghost stopped me on the stairs. I’d not been up there for six months and was too depressed to face the dusty splendor of a straw empire improvidently made mine. I decided instead to find an innocuous lunch and the courage to face again my childhood home and the memories of broken bones that lay like stained carpet on the formal staircase.

For twenty minutes, I drove, searching for a lunch spot that offered a chance of anonymity. Eventually, I just gave up and hit the drive-through at Burger King. I ate two cheeseburgers as I drove twice past my father’s house. It challenged me with its thick columns, blank dull-eyed windows, and perfect alabaster paint. More castle than house, it hunkered behind hedgerows and box bushes that reminded me of pillboxes I’d once seen when Ezra took the family to the beaches of Normandy. My father, I knew, had willed the beast to me so that I could carry on his war against the old-money snobbery of this town that for years had dulled the lacquer of his magnificent achievement. But I knew now, as I always had, that that would never happen. Waging war took conviction, and while I understood the forces that drove my father, I could not relate to them. There are many kinds of poison, and I was not a fucking idiot.

I turned into the driveway, passed beneath the crossed arms of sentinel trees, and so stepped back in time, my childhood around me like broken glass. Keys jingled and I sat in the silence that followed. I saw many things that no longer were: my first bike and toys, long gone to ruin; a father flushed with early triumph; and my mother, alive, still happy, gazing at Jean’s questioning smile. I saw it all, unyellowed by time; then I blinked and it was gone, ashes in a sudden wind.

The police were not there yet and the door was heavy with disuse as I stepped inside. I disengaged the alarm system and flipped on lights as I moved through the house. Dust lay thick on the floor and on the sheets that draped my father’s furniture. Old tracks were visible as I walked slowly through the downstairs, passing the two dining rooms, the den, the billiards room, and the door to my father’s wine cellar. Stainless steel gleamed dully in the kitchen, making me think of knives with ebony handles and my mother’s pale, narrow hands.

I checked his study first, thinking to find the pistol in the top drawer with his silver letter opener and the leather journal that Jean had given him in place of a grandson. It was not there. I sat in his chair for a few seconds and stared at the only framed photograph, a faded black-and-white shot of a tumbledown shack and the unsmiling family that lived in it. Ezra was the youngest, a thick, dirty-legged boy in denim shorts, his feet bare. I peered into the black spots of his eyes and wondered at his thoughts on that day. I picked up the journal and riffed the pages, knowing that my father would never have trusted his secret self to paper, yet feeling some hope in spite of myself. It was empty, so I replaced it as I’d found it. My eyes wandered as I tried to find some sense of this man I had once presumed to know, but the room meant nothing to me. It was resplendent in old maps, leather furniture, and the mementos of a lifetime, and yet it rang so empty. The room itself was a trophy, I realized, and I could see him sitting there, and knew that he could smile at this room while his wife lay weeping in the big bed upstairs.

Sitting in his chair felt vaguely incestuous and I didn’t stay long. As I left his study, I noticed that my tracks on the dusty floor were not alone. There were other tracks, smaller ones, and I knew that Jean had been here. The tracks led from the study back to the hall and then to the wide staircase. The prints disappeared into the carpet runner that climbed the stairs, then reappeared on the hardwood of the hall that led to my parents’ room. I’d not been upstairs in over a year and the prints were obvious. They vanished on the Persian carpet that covered the bedroom floor, but by the bed, and the table where I’d hoped to find the gun, I found a half print in the dust. I looked at the bed and saw a circular indentation in the covers, as if some animal had curled there to nest.

I checked for the gun, found nothing, then sat on the bed and rubbed the impression away. After a thoughtful moment, I got up, and as I left the house, I shuffled my feet to make mute the dusty floor where once two children had played.

Outside, I leaned against the locked door, half-expecting Detective Mills to roll up the drive with a dozen squad cars in her wake. I tried to slow breathing that sounded very loud in a world of unusual quiet. From somewhere came a smell of new-mown grass.

I remembered my father’s gun from the night I saw it shoved into my mother’s face. When he saw me, there in the bedroom door, he tried to play it off as a joke, but my mother’s terror was real. I saw it in her tear-stained eyes, in her posture, and in the way her hands pulled at the belt of her robe when she told me to go back to bed. I went because she asked me to, but I now remembered the still house and the creak of bedsprings as she made peace the only way she knew how. I came to hate my father that night, but it took a long time for me to realize the magnitude of that emotion.

I never learned what they’d been fighting about, but the image never scabbed over; and as I turned away from that place, I thought of my own wife’s tears and her limp submission the night before—the bleak satisfaction I took from her smallness as I used her shamelessly. She’d cried out, and remembering the taste of salted tears, I thought, for that instant, that I knew how the devil felt. Sex and tears, like sun and rain, were never meant to share a moment; but for a fallen soul, an act of wrong could, at times, feel very right, and that scared the hell out of me.

I descended into my car and started the engine, and as I passed again beneath the trees that guarded this place and turned toward the park and home, my thoughts were dark with the dust of places the mind should never go.

CHAPTER 5

A
ll I wanted was to peel off my suit, fall into bed, and find something better across the black, sandy gulf; but the moment I turned onto my block, I saw that it wasn’t going to happen. The curving slope of driveway that should welcome a man at times like this glittered instead with shiny black and silver cars. The sharks had gathered. The friends of my wife had come, bearing their honeyed hams, their casseroles, and their eager questions. How did he die? How’s Work holding up? Then, sotto voce, when Barbara couldn’t hear: What was he mixed up in? Two bullets in the head, so I heard. Then lower still:
Probably deserved it.
Sooner or later, one of them would say what so many thought. White trash, they’d say, and eyes would glint above lips chapped by one too many tight smiles. Poor Barbara. She really should have known better.

On principle, I declined to be chased from my own home, but my car refused to make the turn into the driveway. Instead, I bought beer and cigarettes at the convenience store next to the high school. I wanted to carry the bag into the football stadium, mount the bleachers, and get slowly drunk above that rectangle of brown grass. But the gate was locked, and the chain was loud when I yanked on it. So I drove back to my father’s house and drank in his driveway. I killed most of the six-pack before I managed to go home.

As I turned onto my block, I saw that the number of cars had grown, giving my house an unfortunate festive air. I parked on the street two houses down and walked. Inside, I found the crowd I suspected: our neighbors, several acquaintances from out of town, doctors and their wives, business owners, and half of the local bar, including Clarence Hambly, who, in many ways, had been my father’s greatest rival. He immediately drew my gaze, for he stood tall and disdainful even in this monied gathering. He had his back to the wall, one elbow on the mantel, and a drink in his hand. He was the first to notice me, but looked away when our eyes met. I dismissed him, a minor irritation, and scanned the crowd for my wife, finding her across the room. Looking at her, I could say, without pause or reflection, that she was a beautiful woman. She had flawless skin, high cheekbones, and eyes that flashed. That night, she had salon-perfect hair and looked stunning in last season’s most expensive dress. She was cloistered with her most regular companions, women whose hands were cold with jewels and thin blood. When she saw me, she stopped talking, and her friends turned as one. Their eyes dissected me, settling on the beer bottle I’d carried in; and when Barbara left their circle, they said nothing, yet I imagined sharp tongues poised to flay my naked back. I lit another cigarette and thought of the funeral yet to plan. Then Barbara materialized, and for a moment we were alone together.

“Nice party,” I said, and then smiled so that my words would not sound so cruel.

She pressed hard lips against my cheek.

“You’re drunk,” she said. “Don’t embarrass me.”

That would have been the low point, had Glena Werster not chosen that moment to sweep through the front door. She flashed a smile that made her teeth look oiled, and her black dress was short and tight. The sight of her in my home made me ill. I thought of Jean and the weight of her tread as she’d mounted the steps to Glena Werster’s pillared mansion.

“What’s she doing here?” I asked.

Barbara watched over her wineglass as Glena nestled into the bosom of her little clique in the corner, and I saw worry in my wife’s eyes. When she turned to me, her whisper was fierce.

“You be nice, Work. She’s very important in this town.”

By “important,” I knew my wife meant that Glena Werster sat on the board of the country club, was filthy rich, and mean enough to ruin reputations for the joy of it.

“I don’t want her here,” I said, and gestured vaguely at the group of women huddled under the portrait of Barbara’s father. “I don’t want any of them here.” I leaned closer and she pulled back so quickly that it stank of pure instinct. I spoke anyway. “We need to talk, Barbara.”

“You’ve sweated through your shirt,” she said, flicking three fingers across the buttons beneath my collar. “Why don’t you go change?” She started to turn away, but then she turned back. She reached for my face and I leaned forward. “Shave, too, would you?” Then she was gone, back to her circle of tight-lipped friends.

So I stood alone, lost in my own home as people uttered kind words, and I nodded as if I agreed with everything they said; yet I existed in an eerie kind of silence, and the warm words broke over me like surf on a half-deaf man. A few were sincere, but none understood the first thing about my father—what made him so inexplicable, so extraordinary, and so evil.

In a pilgrimage of fumbled words, I made it to the kitchen, where I’d hoped to find a cold beer. Instead, I saw that a full bar had been arranged, and I marveled darkly at my wife, who, in the cold wake of death, could make of the impromptu an occasion. I ordered bourbon on the rocks, then felt a hand on my shoulder and a voice like crushed ice asking the bartender to make it two. I turned to see Dr. Stokes, my neighbor, whose boot-leather features and white beard made him look very much like Mark Twain.

“Thank you,” he said to the bartender. Then he steered me away from the bar with his firm doctor’s hand and said, “Let’s take a little walk.” He led me through the kitchen and out into the garage, where graying sunlight stretched dusty rectangles on the floor. He released me into the emptiness, then sat on the steps with a grunt and a flourish. He sipped his drink, then smacked his lips. “Now that’s a good friend.”

“Yes,” I said. “It can be.”

I watched him watch me as he put down his drink and lit a cigar.

“I’ve been watching you,” he finally said. “You don’t look good.”

“It’s been a bad day.”

“I’m not talking about today. I’ve been worried about you for years. Just not my place to say, if you follow.”

“What makes today different?” I asked.

He looked at me and puffed blue smoke. “I’ve been married fifty-four years,” he said. “You think I’ve never had that look, like your best friend just kicked you in the balls. It doesn’t take a genius; my wife saw it, too.” He flicked imaginary lint from his pant leg and studied his cigar as he continued. “Now, I can’t do anything about your wife—a marriage is a man’s own business—but there are some things you ought to hear, and I know damn well that no one else in there will tell you.”

Unsure what to say, I balanced my drink on an overturned wheelbarrow and lit a cigarette. The silence stretched out as I fumbled the pack back into my shirt pocket. When I looked up, I saw that shadows filled the doctor’s eyes, which made me strangely sad. He had warm eyes; always had.

“Your father was the biggest asshole I ever met,” he said, then pulled on his cigar as if he’d commented on the weather. I said nothing, and after a few seconds the old man continued. “He was a self-centered bastard who wanted to own the whole damn world, but you know that.”

“Yes,” I said, and cleared my throat. “I know that.”

“An easy man to hate, your father, but he would look you in the eyes as he slipped the knife in, if you know what I mean.”

“No.”

“He was honest about his avarice. Other honest men could see that.”

“So?” I asked.

“Am I finished yet?” he asked, and I said nothing. “Then let me talk. There was also Jean. I never liked the way he raised your sister. Seemed like a waste of a perfectly good mind. But we can’t choose our parents, and that’s her bad luck. I’ve watched her, too, and now that Ezra’s dead, I think she’ll be all right.”

A harsh laugh escaped me. “How closely have you watched her?” I asked, thinking that Jean was so far from being all right.

He leaned forward, a sharp glint in his eyes. “Closer than you, I bet,” he said, and the truth of it stung. “I’m not worried about her. It’s you that troubles me.”

“Me?”

“Yes, now shut up. This is what I came out here to tell you. So pay attention. Your father was a big man, with big visions and big dreams. But you, Work, are a better man.”

I felt tears sting my eyes and wished fervently that this man had been my father. There was blunt honesty in his face and in the way he moved his thickened hands, and for a moment I believed him.

“You’re better because you don’t want big things for small reasons. You’re better because you care—about your friends and family, things that are right; you favor your mother that way.” He paused for an instant and nodded. “Don’t choke on Ezra’s burdens, Work. I’m eighty-three years old, old enough to know a thing or two, and the most important is this: Life is goddamn short. Figure out what
you
want. Be your own man and you’ll be better for it.”

He stood slowly and I heard his joints pop. Ice rattled on glass as he drained his drink.

“Bury your old man, Work, and when you’re ready, we’d love to have you over for dinner. I knew your mother well, God rest her soul, and I’d love to tell you about her happy times. And one last thing—don’t lose any sleep over Barbara. She’s a bitch by nature, not by choice. So don’t be hard on yourself.”

He winked at me and smiled around his cigar. I thanked him for coming, because I didn’t know what else to say; then I closed the door behind him and sat where he had, on wood still warm from his narrow haunches. I sipped ice-watered bourbon, thought about my life, and wished the old man were right about all the things he’d said.

Eventually, my glass ran dry, but this I could fix. My watch showed it was almost five, and as I stood, I thought briefly of Detective Mills. I’d not called her and at the moment didn’t care; all I wanted was that drink. I was in and out of the kitchen without a word, and if that offended people, then too bad. I’d had enough. So I returned to my dank cell to watch the shadows crawl and to drink my bourbon warm.

I stayed in that awful place long enough for the light to dim and the walls to tilt. I was not an angry drunk; I didn’t get weepy and I didn’t figure out a damn thing. My jacket went into a box filled with lawn clippings I’d never emptied and my tie ended up twisted around a nail in the wall, but I kept the rest of my clothes on, which was hard. I wanted to shake things up, break the complacency bowl, and for one crazy moment I pictured myself running naked through the house. I’d chat with my wife’s friends and dare them to pretend, at the next inane social gathering, that it had never happened. And they would—that’s what kept my clothes on. Every last one of them could look me in the eye over drinks or dinner the next week, ask in all earnestness how the practice was doing, and then tell me what a fine funeral it had been.

I wanted to laugh and I wanted to kill somebody.

But I did neither. I went back inside; I mingled and I talked. I kept my clothes on, and if I made an ass of myself, no one said a word to me about it. Eventually, I left, and as I sat in my car, windows down and purple light on me like a second skin, I thanked God for one thing: that, drunk as hell and drowning in faces and words without meaning, I had not uttered the one irretrievable thought that had haunted me. And searching my ruined eyes in the mirror, I acknowledged, to myself at least, that I thought I knew who had killed my father.

Motive. Means. Opportunity.

It was all there if you knew where to look.

But I did not want to look. I never had. So I twisted the mirror up and away. Then I closed my eyes and thought of my sister, and of times that were no less hard for their simplicity.

A
re you okay?” I asked Jean.

She nodded, tears dripping off her tiny pointed chin to soak into her white jeans like rain into sand. Her shoulders hunched lower with each sob, until she looked bent and broken, her hair hanging just low enough to cover the top of her face. I pulled my eyes off the little gray teardrop circles, trying not to look at the blood that spread from between her legs. Red and wet, it soaked the new pants she was so proud of, the ones our mother had given her on that morning of her twelfth birthday.

“I called Dad and he said he’d come get us. Soon. I promise. He said so.”

She didn’t say anything and I watched the red stain darken. Without a word, I took off my jacket and spread it across her lap. She looked at me then in a way that made me proud to be her big brother, like I made a difference. I slipped an arm around her shoulders and pretended that I was not half-scared to death.

“I’m sorry,” she said tearfully.

“Everything’s okay,” I told her. “Don’t worry about it.”

We were downtown, at the ice cream parlor. Mom had dropped us off on her way to Charlotte for the afternoon. We had four dollars for ice cream and plans to walk home afterward. I barely knew what a girl’s period was. When I first saw the blood, I thought she might be hurt, and only then did I realize that her eyes had been filling with slow tears for awhile. “Don’t look,” she’d said, and bowed her head to the tears.

Dad never came, and after an hour we walked home, my jacket around her waist. It was almost three miles.

At home, Jean locked herself in the bathroom until Mom got back. I sat on the front porch, looking for the courage to tell my father what a bastard he was—for not caring about Jean, for making a liar of me—but in the end I said nothing.

How I hated myself.

I
 woke in near darkness. There was a face in my window and I blinked at the thick glasses and heavy whiskers. I pulled back instinctively, not just because the man was so ugly.

“Good,” he grunted. “I thought maybe you were dead.”

His voice was guttural, with a heavy southern accent.

“What . . .” I said.

“Shouldn’t sleep in your car. It’s dangerous.” He looked me up and down, glanced in the backseat. “Smart boy like you should know better.”

The face withdrew and, like that, he was gone, leaving me half-asleep and still drunk.
What the hell was that?
I opened the door and clambered out, stiff and sore. I peered down the street and saw him pass from light to dark, long coat flapping around his ankles, earflaps loose on his ears. It was my park walker, and after years of silent passings, we’d finally spoken. This was my chance. I could put feet to pavement, catch him in the dark, and ask my question; yet I didn’t move.