The Emperor of Ocean Park (65 page)

“No, I don’t know why,” says my big brother, his voice now peevish.

“Because you know where the report is.”

“I
what?”

“You know where it is. Or you know what was in it.”

“What makes you think that?” Addison sounds more frightened than irritated. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“I think you do. Remember the day we buried the Judge? You were up there by the grave, and I came over to talk to you? Remember what you said? You said you wondered if we’d ever find
the folks
who were in the car that killed Abby. That’s what you said,
the folks.
”

“You heard me wrong,” he says after a pause.

“I don’t think so. There isn’t any word I could mistake for
folks.
No word that’s singular.” Silence. “All these years, Addison, everybody in the family has talked about finding the
driver
of the car. Mom used to say it before she died. And Dad. And me and Mariah, and you, too. But at the cemetery you knew there were two people in the car. I think you knew because you read the report.”

“That’s a little thin,” Addison announces, but I can tell his heart is not in the quarrel he is trying to provoke. “Maybe I just misspoke. Maybe I was guessing. You can’t make anything out of it.”

“Come on, Addison, don’t play games. You know I’m right. Either the Judge gave you a copy or you just took it from his files. But I know you’ve read it. And I’d like to know what’s in it.”

Another pause, longer this time. I hear what might be a voice in the background, then Addison’s whispered reply. He seems to be telling somebody to give him a minute. Maybe somebody he took to Argentina with him. Or somebody he didn’t.

Then my brother is back.

“Shit,” he says.

(II)

A
DDISON IS UNHAPPY
. I am complicating his life. He would rather be off lecturing on a college campus or looking at property in South America or doing his talk show, even if it is getting a little old—anything other than spending emotionally costly time with a member of his family. All three Garland children have spent our adulthoods fleeing from our father, but Addison fled the furthest, which might be why he was the one the Judge loved best. Until the last couple of months, I have always admired Addison, but the way he has been avoiding me has tested my fraternal commitment.

“Look, my brother, I don’t actually have a copy of the report. I never
had a copy. I just read it once.” Another pause, but he can find no escape. “Dad showed it to me.”

I draw in a breath. Addison sounds so nervous that I am not sure whether to believe a word he says. “Okay. So, what was in it?”

“You don’t want to know any more about it, Misha.” Addison’s voice hardens. “You really don’t.”

“Actually, I do.”

“You’re crazy. You’re as crazy as he was.”

Probably he means the Judge, but I suppose there are plenty of other candidates as well. A week and a half ago, I finally got a call back from Special Agent Nunzio. Without mentioning Maxine, I told him I thought Father Bishop was murdered by mistake. He thanked me coolly for my idea and promised unenthusiastically to look into it. Could have been worse.

“I just want to know the truth,” I tell my brother calmly.

Addison sighs. “I don’t understand you, Tal. You’re a Christian, right? And I think it says somewhere you’re supposed to make your life a work of forgiveness, not a work of vengeance.”

This sets me back even further. I thought Maxine left me at sea, but this must set some kind of record for the most Delphic reply.

“I’m not seeking any vengeance.”

“Well, yeah, that’s what you say. But maybe it’s bullshit.” Addison loves vulgarity, believing, I suspect, that it makes his otherwise cultured Garland speech more authentically black. Actually it sounds forced, like a child playing with a new vocabulary. “You might
think
you don’t want vengeance, but you might be wrong. You don’t really know what’s in your heart making you act this way. You need to ask God to heal your heart, bro.”

I have long since stopped eating. I am ruining my appetite trying to fight through all the verbal smoke Addison is blowing across the miles; and to understand why he is doing it.

Addison, meanwhile, is quoting Scripture. “‘Bless those who persecute you,’ Paul tells us in Romans 12. Remember? ‘Do not repay anyone evil for evil.’ And if you read the story of Samson . . .”

I cut him off, something I have hardly ever done since childhood. “I’m not trying to return evil for evil, Addison. Come on. I’m not trying to do anything to anybody. I’m just trying to find out what’s going on.”

“Yeah, you
say
that. But, see, it could be that there’s shit that, if you knew, you
would
want a piece of somebody.”

“Addison, please. I’m not trying to hurt anybody.” Because it has occurred to me that the vengeance my brother is discussing might have something to do with himself. “I just need to know what was in the report.”

“No, you don’t. Believe me. You don’t need to know, you don’t want to know. You want to leave the past in the past, bro, and move on to the future. You want to love your wife and family and take care of business at home. You want to face the world with a whole lot of forgiveness in your heart. But you absolutely do not want to know what was in that report.”

“Why not?”

“Temptation. Do you want to be led into temptation? Because that report was full of temptation to sin, believe me.”

Setting me back even more. But I have made it this far. I press on.

“Addison, please. At least tell me when Dad showed it to you.”

Another pause as the wheels go round in that subtle, manipulative mind. “Say a year ago. A little more. Yeah. Last fall.”

I have the sense that he is coloring the truth, shading it, shifting it in a comfortable direction, the way witnesses often do. I decide to settle in for a long game, concealing my own impatience while allowing his to grow. Having taken a deposition or two in my time, I understand the virtue of circling gradually to the main point, and pretending to be bored when you get there.

“Do you know why he showed it to you?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, can you tell me how he came to show it to you?”

Again my brother makes me wait. I do not understand what is worrying him so, but I can feel its effects through the telephone line. “Like I said,” he begins, “it was maybe a year and a half ago. Dad called. He was coming to Chicago to give some speech, and he wanted to know if we could get together for dinner or something. I said yeah, sure, whatever. I mean, you know, I’m not into his kind of politics, but he was my father, okay? So we had dinner, over at his hotel. One of those elegant little private places downtown. Not in the dining room, up in his suite. Naturally he had a suite. Huge. Two bedrooms, like he needed them, right? But, you know, all those right-wing crazies he always used to speak to, they loved him. They never spared any expense. Listen. He got these huge fees, right? Thirty thousand dollars a pop? Forty? Sometimes more. How come? So his audience could go back to the
country club and tell their golf buddies that a black man agreed with their right-wing craziness, which meant that it was true, right?” I have never heard such hostility in his voice. Or maybe I just never realized quite how much Addison hated the Judge.

“So, anyway, we have dinner up in his suite. He says he doesn’t want anybody to hear what we’re talking about. So I’m joking around, okay, and I say, ‘Well, what if they bugged your suite?’ And he doesn’t laugh. He takes it very seriously. He looks at me and he says, ‘Do you think they might have?’ Or something like that. And I’m, like, uh-oh. So I tell him I was only joking and he says he changed suites once already just to be on the safe side. And I tell him yeah, that was a smart move, but I’m thinking that he’s, you know, maybe he’s . . . well, you know. Maybe there’s some kind of problem. Are you sure you wanna hear this?”

“Yes.” My voice is tight.

“Okay. You asked for it. We sit down to dinner at the table—the suite had like a dining area. And he has a couple of folders, and I’m thinking we’re gonna talk about the family finances. You know, like,
Here’s where all the money is if anything happens to me?
And he has that really serious look on his face, the one he used to use when he was gonna give us one of his lectures, you know, about right and wrong, keeping your promises, all the bullshit he used to talk to us about. And he gets real excited and he says to me, he says, ‘Son, we have to talk about something important,’ and I’m, like, yes, I was right. He says it might be a little tough to take, and I just sit up straight and nod, and he says there’s a part of his life he’s never really talked to the family about, and I nod, and he says he’s coming to me because I’m the eldest child, and I nod my head again.”

My face burns at this—the old, familiar jealousy over Addison’s favored place in the Judge’s heart—but I have the wit, for once, to remain silent.

“And so now I think he’s gonna tell me about the money, but, instead, he opens the folder and he pulls out a sheaf of papers, five or six pages, and he says to me, ‘I want you to read this. You need to know.’ I ask him what it is. I’m thinking it’s like an investment plan or something. And he says to me, ‘This is Villard’s report.’ And so I ask him who Villard is. I wasn’t goofing, I really didn’t remember. And he gets mad and he says, ‘Son, I told you to read it, so just read it.’ You know what he could be like. ‘Just read it.’ So I did.”

Addison clams up. He has no sense of leaving a story unfinished. I asked how he came to read the report and he has told me.

“Did he say why he wanted you to read it?”

“He had some story. I don’t know. Something had spooked him.”

“Spooked him?”

“I don’t know, okay? I mean, I really didn’t listen that closely. I wasn’t interested.”

“Not interested? Addison, he was our father!”

“So what? Listen. I could tell you a few things you don’t wanna know about . . . about our father. That confirmation thing, it just about wiped him out. You never realized that, you and Mariah, but you weren’t the ones he used to call up at night, drunk—yeah, he started drinking again. You didn’t know that, did you?”

I do know, of course, because Lanie Cross told me, but, now that my brother seems to want to talk, I am not about to break his narrative flow.

“So, yeah, he used to call me up in the middle of the night, crying about this or that. Because I was the
eldest.
‘I wouldn’t share this with anybody but you, son.’ That’s what he used to say. Like it was some great honor, having him wake me up at two in the morning to tell me how he deserved to die for his sins, how they were gonna kill him one day, never mind worrying about who
they
were. So, yeah, Dad was a paranoid, okay? He thought everybody in the world was coming after him. The truth is, he was as crazy as a bedbug. Is that what you want to hear, bro? Is that straight enough for you? Yeah, great, so he had some kind of story about how somebody came to see him and now he was in real trouble and he needed me to look at these papers. And me, I’m sitting there in his hotel trying to figure out how me reading this report is gonna get him out of trouble. Not that I completely cared. I was so sick of him, so sick of all the crap I took from him over the years—”

Addison makes himself stop. Garland men can do that, like turning a switch. Surely that is one of the reasons that our women always grow to loathe us.

“Maybe I was wrong,” he continues in a milder tone. “The Judge came to me for help and I turned him away. That was wrong in every religion I know. And to talk about him the way I am now, that’s wrong, too.” Another pause. I imagine him in his house in Chicago, eyes closed, for he is whispering what sounds like a prayer, maybe for forgiveness, maybe for strength, maybe for show.

“Addison.” The whispering continues. “Addison!”

“You don’t have to yell, Misha.” The cocky big brother is back. The furious, nearly inarticulate Addison of two minutes ago is gone, a demon driven out. “There’s this great new invention, the telephone?
And you can talk in a normal tone and the person at the other end can be all the way in Chicago and he can still hear you just fine.”

“Okay okay, I’m sorry. But look. What was the story? Who came to see him? You said somebody spooked him . . . .”

“Well, you know, I don’t think I should talk about that part. I mean, the Judge kind of made me promise not to tell.”

I ponder. I am close, so close, and Addison has never been any good at keeping secrets, except when he has to hide one girlfriend from another. There must be a way to pry this one loose. Certainly I am determined to try. Somewhere deep down, in that place that Garland men never reveal, my anger is beginning to burn. A degree of anger at my brother, for playing these games, but mostly anger at my father, for confiding in his first son, the fly-by-night activist, instead of his second son, the lawyer.
If you wanted to confide in Addison,
I wish I could shout at him,
then why in the world didn’t you arrange to have the pawn and the note delivered to him instead of to me?

Not that I would ever shout at the Judge.

Then I remember how Addison, alone among the children, argued with our father. When the Judge would take over the dinner table for one of his lectures on what to do and what to avoid doing, Mariah and I would sit dutifully, mouthing all the right responses,
Yessir, No sir, Whatever you say, sir
—and Addison, even as a teenager, would look him dead in the eye and say,
Bullshit, Dad.
He would be grounded for a week, of course, but we could see the pride in his handsome eyes, and even in the Judge’s.
I like the boy’s chutzpah,
he would tell our mother,
even if it’s misdirected.

Well, his chutzpah has carried him a good long way. Let’s see how far.

“So, what happened to the report?”

“What do you mean, what happened to it?” Combative.

“Did you read it? Did Dad take it with him?”