Mask Market

way a car needs gas.

“Her father brought me into his company, but I was never the son-in-law,” he went on, as hyper-vigilant to attacks on his credentials as an abused child is to a subtle shift in a parent’s voice tone. “I hadn’t studied business in college—I don’t think anybody studied business back then—but I had an aptitude for it, and it came to the surface quickly. Before I was thirty, I was virtually running the company. And when my father-in- law died—heart attack; he wasn’t a man who ever listened to doctors—the segue was as natural as if I’d been groomed for the position since birth.”

“But your wife was the actual owner? Is that what you meant earlier, when you said—?”

“That this was mine?” he said, sweeping his hand in a gesture meant to encompass the whole house. “Yes, that’s exactly right. When we divorced, the prenup—I remember us laughing when I signed it: just a piece of paper her bourgeois father insisted upon, it was never going to matter to us—kicked in. There was never an issue of child support. Beryl had been gone quite a while, and she was no longer a minor, anyway.”

“Beryl was an only child?”

“Yes,” he said. “I wanted more kids. Especially later, when Beryl started to…act out. I thought, if she had a little brother or a little sister, it would be…I don’t know, a good experience for her. For them both, I mean.”

“Did she ever have a pet?” I asked. Remembering that she hadn’t when her father had first come to me, wondering if they’d ever tried that.

“You mean, like a dog or a cat? No, my wife was highly allergic.”

“She couldn’t be around animals?”

“Well, she could tolerate them in small doses. Like when we visited a friend’s house and they had a dog, she would pat it and everything. But to have one in the house, well, that would have been impossible for her.”

I shifted position to show I was listening close, said, “You were still together when Beryl came back to visit you, that last time?”

“Together? We were still married, yes. But the life we planned for ourselves had already disappeared.”

“You never got to be bankrollers?”

“Oh, we certainly did that. You wouldn’t believe some of the people who were guests in our home. That was part of what we wanted from our…contributions, I suppose. For Beryl to be exposed to the finest thinkers of our generation. The best minds, the best causes. And she was. My wife and I funded some major initiatives. And plenty of them weren’t tax-exempt, either.”

“Did you attract government attention?”

“Oh, I’m sure we did. Everyone in our circle was under some form of surveillance—it came with the territory.”

And made you feel like a real player, too, I thought, but kept it off my face.

“By the time Beryl was, oh, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine years old, it seemed like the revolution was dying. You know, the Age of Reagan and all that. The country changed…and so did our…raison d’etre, you might say. Oh, we still contributed—the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example—but we weren’t dealing directly with the principals anymore. Instead of sitting around our living room, being in on the strategy, we were going to galas and writing checks.

“If you study history, you come to understand that everything changes in cycles. A wave crests, breaks, and the water is calm again. I knew, eventually, we would return to a time of…involvement, I suppose you’d call it.”

Good fucking luck, I thought. But my expression told him I was paying attention to every word he spoke.

That’s technique. Professionalism. And it’s going out of style. If America is a nation of sheep, TV is the shepherd. Jurors think CSI is a documentary. They’ll vote to acquit even when three witnesses saw the defendant shoot the victim, because there were no fingerprints on the recovered pistol—the one with checkered wood grips. Defense attorneys sum up in child-molestation cases by shrieking, “Where’s the DNA?” at juries who just know every human contact leaves traces a lab can detect. After all, the TV told them so.

Cops get infected with the same virus. They overdose on Law and Order reruns and end up thinking they have to “win” every interview. It’s not about the information anymore; it’s about the repartee.

I don’t care what side of the law you work: You never want to confront your subject while he’s still talking. In fact, you don’t want to interrupt him at all. Threats are for amateurs; verbal dueling is for fools. A pro knows there’s no reason to get your man talking if you’re not going to listen.

Good interrogation is like panning for gold. You let everything the other guy says pass through the mesh of your attention, encouraging him to keep it coming, knowing that the little nuggets won’t be obvious until you’re done sifting.

There’s a rhythm to it. When the flow slows, you have to tap the right nerves to get it moving again.

“You don’t think that Beryl…I don’t know…felt let down when things changed around your home?” I probed. “When you stopped…participating so actively?”

“Beryl? She was hardly ‘political’ at that age. And, the truth is, she never seemed to care. Oh, she got along well enough with the people we had over, and she understood why her mother and father were so committed to social change. She knew racism was wrong. She knew Vietnam had been an ongoing war crime, perpetrated against innocent citizens. She knew about the grape boycotts. About apartheid. About…well, a whole range of progressive movements. And she seemed, if not enthusiastic, at least supportive. But it was never her passion.

“She had a wonderful collection of…mementos, I suppose you’d call them. Special little gifts that people who came to visit would bring to her.” He gestured toward a chest-high shelf hung on two wrought-iron brackets, standing against the wall to his left. The shelf was crowded with small objects, a random sprinkling of wood, metal, and stone. I wasn’t close enough to see more.

“She never took them with her,” he said, sadly. “Even that last time.”

“So when you and your wife stopped…?”

“It was fine with Beryl,” he said. “She had plenty of activities. Piano, dance, art lessons, horseback riding—I let her do anything she wanted to try. Except that karate. That was going just too far. I mean, we were all for young women growing up with self-confidence, but the only place she could have gone for classes was run by a man my wife said made her very nervous. People didn’t talk about it back then, but we all knew some…pedophiles deliberately put themselves in a position to have access to children.”

“Did you ever meet the guy?”

“Well, I did, actually. Beryl was just so insistent, and I could never really say no to her, so I drove over there myself one night. Frankly, I couldn’t see what my wife had gotten so worked up about—the instructor seemed like a perfectly innocuous individual.”

“Was he Asian?”

“That’s right,” Preston said, defensive again. “But that had nothing to do with my wife’s decision, I assure you. His English wasn’t all that…precise; I guess that would be an accurate assessment.”

“He didn’t try and sell you anything, then?”

“You mean for Beryl? No. In fact, he said he personally didn’t teach the children’s classes. But he did suggest I might want to study with him myself.”

“You?”

“Yes. Do you find that so strange?”

“Not at all. I was just wondering if you listened to him.”

“How do you mean?”

“The way you explained it to me when I first got here. How you’ve got a gift for—”

“I didn’t say it was a gift,” he cut me off, somewhere between aggressive and defensive again. “I said it was a technique, listening for qualities in a person’s voice. And that I discovered I had some aptitude for it.”

“Okay. So when you were talking to the sensei…?”

He closed his eyes, going back there. I could see him listening then.