“I’ve been away,” he tells me now, as I sit in my study eating a tuna sandwich and watching a fresh flurry of midwinter snow blowing around the street. Another four to six inches are forecast, but Kimmer went to the office anyway. Addison sounds exhausted. “Sorry.”
“Away where your cell phone doesn’t work?” I ask peevishly.
“Argentina.”
“Argentina?”
“I never told you? I was looking at land. I’ve been there, I don’t know, seven or eight times in the past two years. I’m thinking I might build a house down there.” To live in until the Democrats are back in the White House, maybe. “And I had such a good time I thought I’d stay a few days. The days became weeks and… well, anyway, I’m back.”
Days became weeks?
“So-what did you do? Took time off from the show?”
“The show is getting a little old, to tell you the truth. I think it’s time for me to get back to work on the book.” Addison says something like this every few years, but all it ever means is that he is about to change jobs. Nobody I know has ever actually seen him write a line.
“That would be great,” I offer loyally. “To do the book, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a history that needs to be written.”
“Yeah.” It isn’t just exhaustion that is depressing my brother’s voice, I realize. There is a sense of resignation. I wonder what it is to which he is resigned. “Hey, guess what, bro? The FBI was out talking to me. About your wife.” A small chuckle. “Like, sure, I know anything about her.”
“It’s her background check, Addison. They have to talk to everybody.”
“I know that. I just don’t know why her damn background check has to include so many questions about my damn money.” But I am sure Addison remembers, as I do, the embarrassingly cursory investigation of the Judge. Procedures, it is said, have been tightened since those days. “So, anyway, you left lots of messages. Must be something important.”
I have had plenty of time to think about how to handle this moment. I work around to the more urgent issue by starting with the lesser one.
So I tell my brother about Mariah’s visit and the missing report from Jonathan Villard. I explain that there is no copy to be found anywhere, including the police files, where Meadows drew a blank. I tell him about the two pages of notes in the Judge’s handwriting. All we can glean from the notes, I add, is that the car that killed Abby had two people in it.
“Huh,” is Addison’s only comment. Then he adds, surprised, “You guys have made a lot of progress,” and I know, at that moment, that I am right. My brother pauses again, but I wait him out. Finally, he asks the question that surely troubles him most: “So, why are you telling me this?”
“You know why,” I say softly. Waiting for his answer, I can hear the television in the family room, where Bentley is watching a squeakyclean video that John and Janice Brown, his godparents, gave him for Christmas. Two nights ago, Kimmer and I attended the annual post-holiday bash of Lemaster Carlyle’s fraternity, joining a couple of hundred other well-to-do members of the darker nation, dancing the electric slide, the cha-cha slide, and a brand- new invention known as the dot-com slide into the wee hours of the morning. Maybe we do have a bit of a social life after all.
“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.
Addison 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,
