For now I know what should have been obvious, what I should have understood all along but suddenly can see with a horrid crystal clarity. Colin Scott, also known as Special Agent McDermott, indeed used the name, sometime earlier in life, of Jonathan Villard. When he had to disappear, the Agency created the story of Villard’s death from cancer.
No wonder the police have no copy of Villard’s report. Maybe the Judge never gave it to them. Maybe he never intended to. Maybe he lied to the family when he said otherwise.
My father’s opponents were right from the start. He did not deserve a seat on the Supreme Court. But not for the reasons they thought: not because he had too many lunches with Jack Ziegler or, their true motive, because of his disagreeable political views.
They were right because the Judge knew Colin Scott.
They were right because, when Abby died and the police failed, the Judge did not simply hire a detective.
He hired a killer.
PART III
UNPROVIDED FLIGHT
Unprovided flight -In the composition of two-move chess problems, a square to which the Black king can move without immediately suffering a checkmate. The would-be solver will naturally focus on finding a way to checkmate on this square, making the problem too easy. Unprovided flight is considered a serious and perhaps fatal aesthetic defect in composition.
CHAPTER 38
Tuesday is trash day. I drag the cans down to the curb underneath a wrathful sky, then take a short jog along Hobby Road, which is all my body can bear: three blocks west, which takes me toward the campus, three blocks back, then three blocks the other way, which takes me to the edge of the Italian working-class neighborhood that borders Hobby Hill, and then, just as the cold winter rain begins to spatter, three blocks home. Twelve blocks total, probably less than a mile.
I have slept poorly during the week since my conversation with the diminutive Ethan Brinkley. I know what has to be done next, but I am loath to do it. And not only because my wife is all but begging me to stop. The truth is, I am afraid of learning anything else about my father. I have discovered that the Judge paid somebody to do murder, and hiring a killer is a capital offense in most of the United States. The rest can amount to no more than variations on a theme.
For several seconds, I try very hard to hate my father, but I lack the capacity.
Instead, I run harder. My muscles, considerably out of shape, set fire to my tendons in protest, but I press on. Nice and easy, nothing too strenuous, but keep moving, keep moving, you can run for miles if you just forget to stop! I pass my house again, cozy and warm, and temptation yawns before me, but I decide to run on. The air is crisp, good jogging weather, with little hints of distant spring on every breeze. I run and I think.
A sedan-not green and muddy like the one in Dupont Circle, not a Porsche like the one John Brown and I saw behind the house-zips through a puddle and sprays me with dirty water. I hardly notice. I am reviewing my colleagues in my mind, face by face, the kind ones and the haughty ones, the bright ones and the dim ones, the ones who respect me and the ones who despise me, trying, with no success, to figure out who among them might have betrayed me-if you call it betrayal when the only obligation broken is the obligation of humanity. For someone around the building seems to be keeping a close eye on me, knowing when I am off to the soup kitchen and when I am heading for the chess club. Who is the unseen enemy? An ambitious youngster on the rise, like Ethan Brinkley? A member of the old guard, like Theo Mountain or Arnie Rosen? Why not Marc Hadley, my wife’s rival? We were friends once, but that has been a while. Or the great Stuart Land, who thinks he still runs the law school? Goodness knows what fantastic calculations are masked by his plastic smile. Must the spy be male? Dean Lynda seems to have taken a powerful dislike to me. .. although I have made it easy for her. Must the spy be white? The distant Lem Carlyle, in the best Barbadian tradition, keeps his true opinions to himself… and he has been evasive around me lately. But guesswork will solve nothing. My wife spent the entire weekend in San Francisco: the deal, she says, is coming to a crucial point. I spent the entire weekend with my son. I did no work of any description, just cared for my boy. When a weary Kimmer returned yesterday afternoon, she sat in the kitchen sipping Chardonnay while I tried to talk to her about the events of the past week, but she cut me off: Please, not now, Misha, I have a headache. Smiling at her own witticism to hide the basic truth that she is tired of listening to me on this theme. Instead of hearing me out, Kimmer walked around the counter and kissed me for a while to shut me up, then rummaged in her bag and handed me my latest second-place trophy, a goldrimmed quartz desk clock, signaling me that her latest transgression was huge. I thanked her unhappily and hurried out the door, rushing to make an evening lecture by a law school classmate who now teaches at Emory, where she has become the nation’s leading expert-possibly, the nation’s only expert-on the Third Amendment. I returned home three hours later to discover that Kimmer, despite her exhaustion, had waited up for me, and we made the hopeless, passionate love of clandestine paramours who might never see each other again. Later on, just before falling asleep, my wife told me she was sorry, but she never said for what.
My lungs are signaling that they have had enough. Running more slowly now, I cut through a side street four blocks from my house. This route takes me past the sprawling campus of Hilltop, the stuffiest of the city’s several private elementary schools, and I remind myself that just about a year from now we will be making an appointment so that Bentley can have his interview. To see if he is good enough for the Hilltop kindergarten. Interview. At all of four years old! I jog onward, not quite believing that we are going to put our little boy through this nonsense. Once upon a time, all the university kids got in, but that was before rising costs, and their eternal partners, tuition hikes, forced Hilltop to go in search of the children of the region’s commercial class. Last year the school rejected the youngest of my colleague Betsy Gucciardini’s three shy daughters, and for the next month Betsy wore her frustration and despair like twin veils of mourning, seeming to equate failure to gain a place at Hilltop with the end of her child’s productive life. I wonder, not for the first time, what has happened to America, and then I remember that my old buddy Eddie Dozier, Dana’s ex, is about to publish a book advocating the abolition of the public schools and rebates of all the tax dollars that support them. The market, he assures us, will provide a plentiful supply of private replacements. So every child in America can have an interview before starting kindergarten. Swell.
“Focus on what matters,” I wheeze, slowing finally to a walk.
By the time I stumble through the door, it is past seven. Kimmer has bacon and eggs ready-usually my job- and she even kisses me lightly on the lips. She is so sweet that the last few months might never have happened. She apologizes: not for refusing to listen to me last night, but for the fact that she has to go to the office this morning. She hoped to work from home today, but too many things have come up. I smile and shrug and tell my wife I understand. I do not tell her that I am wounded. I do not tell her how sure I am that the main thing that has come up is that I told her that I might work from home, too, so we could spend the day together.
Instead, I smile.
