Who is still alive.
Enough!
I do what I should have done in the first place and call the Elm Harbor police. As I hang up the telephone after five minutes with a skeptical desk sergeant, the doorbell rings and I jump, but it is only the delivery man with the food I ordered.
I munch morosely on the rapidly cooling pizza and sip the rapidly warming Diet Coke and wonder when I should call back. The sergeant promised to send a car over to the house as soon as one was free. Nothing I was able to say persuaded him to hurry. Perhaps he gets calls like this all the time. I sit in Aspen in the little condo, my face in my hands, as I wait for some word. Is there a protocol? An established interval between calls to the police? I do not remember when I have felt so impotent, even when I was nearly arrested the night the two men beat me up: there, at least, I knew it would all be straightened out in the end. But now, two thousand miles from home, I am utterly helpless to do exactly what Jack Ziegler was just telling me was my duty, to protect my family…
Jack Ziegler?
Should I?
Nothing to lose, not now. I pick up the phone and call the house on Red Mountain, and the telephone barely has time to ring before I hear the voluptuous voice of Henderson.
“Yes, Professor?” he murmurs before I can speak, and I am stunned only until I realize that Uncle Jack would naturally have caller ID.
“I… I need some help,” I say, not bothering with pleasantries.
“In what way, Professor?” Patient, calm, but not quite eager.
“Is Mr. Ziegler available?”
“I am afraid that he is asleep and cannot be disturbed. May I help in some way?”
“I… I can’t reach my wife,” I blurt.
“Yes?” The same quiet monotone, proclaiming a readiness to kill or be killed with no whisper of objection.
“She’s back home, in, uh, in Elm Harbor. It’s awfully late, and she’s not answering the telephone, and if… if there’s anything. ..”
“Let me call you back,” he says, and the line goes dead.
Again I am forced to wait. Now I outline a different scenario. Kimmer is not dead, and she is not running an errand or at the office. She is at another man’s house, in another man’s bed, her recent protestations of love notwithstanding. She is sleeping somewhere in Elm Harbor, not with my fellow pugilist Gerald Nathanson, but with a black man who calls her baby, although where our own baby would be during all this, my fevered imaginings are not ready to supply.
The telephone finally rings.
“Kimmer?”
“Professor Garland,” says Henderson, “I am sorry to say that we have no coverage at this time.”
“Can you give me that again in English?”
“I have no immediate means of checking on your wife. I apologize. I suggest, if you are worried, that you call the police.”
“I already did,” I mutter, hanging up, dizzy now, unreasonably shattered to discover that Uncle Jack, with all his supposed power, is unable to reach into the heart of Elm Harbor with a word, talk to some spy stationed along Hobby Road, and find out whether my wife is dead or alive or sleeping in another man’s bed.
I sit up very straight, panic starting to take me: if Jack Ziegler has no… coverage at this time… then who exactly is enforcing the edict that says my wife and child cannot be harmed?
I snatch up the telephone and call the Elm Harbor police again, and the same sergeant tells me he gave the request to the dispatcher, and he will call me when he has something.
“It wasn’t a request,” I nearly shout across the miles as everything boils over. “Didn’t you hear me? I said my wife is in danger!”
“No, sir, you said she might be in danger.”
“Well, I think she is in danger! Right now. I think… Please, send somebody over now, right now, okay?”
“Can you say what kind of danger?” He sounds only mildly more interested than he was before.
I try to think what will catch his interest. “There could be… uh, an intruder in the house.”
“Do you know for a fact that there is an intruder, or are you just saying that so we’ll skip all the calls ahead of yours?”
“Sergeant…”
“Mr. Garland, look. We only have six patrol cars on duty at night. That’s for a city of a little over ninety thousand people. That’s one car for every fifteen thousand people.” I groan at the thought of what havoc income inequalities can wreak on real lives: I am willing to bet that there are six patrol cars, all of them private, up on Red Mountain alone. “Now, we’ll get to your call as soon as we can.”
He hangs up.
It is well past eleven in the East. I call home and there is, once more, no answer. I am shaking all over now.
One last idea.
I pull Fred Nunzio’s card from my wallet and use his beeper number. And I add, at the end, the two-digit code he told me to include if the matter was urgent.
He calls three minutes later.
And sounds concerned, or at least willing to play along. “I’m sure everything is fine, but, if it will make you feel better, I’ll call this sergeant myself, okay?”
“Thank you, Agent Nunzio.”
“Fred, I keep telling you to call me Fred.”
“Fred. Thanks. And you’ll call me right back?”
“Of course.”
The wait is no more than ten minutes, which I spend pacing the first floor, wishing I had a punching bag. “Okay, Professor, there’s people on the way to your house right now. I’ll clear this line so they can call you. I’m sure everything’s fine, but call me back.”
“I will.”
Again I settle down to wait. Ten minutes. Fifteen. It is almost midnight back home, and my resources have run out. I simply have no ideas. Are matters as bleak as they seem? Surely there is a rational explanation: the telephone is not working right at Hobby Road. I should have called the operator. Except, if the telephone is malfunctioning, how could I have reached the answering machine? Midnight in Elm Harbor. No call. I want to throw things through the window, I want to grab a gun somewhere and ride to my family’s rescue, I want to pull the Judge out of the ground and shake him until he explains why he has done this terrible thing to us.
I want my family, safe and sound.
Finally, I do the one thing left to me. I kneel in front of the living-room sofa and pray that Kimmer and Bentley are safe, or, if not safe, then resting in God’s arms.
As I rise, the telephone rings immediately.
I steel myself.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” demands Kimmer, incandescent with rage. “We’re fast asleep, and all of a sudden, there’s, like, this banging on the door, and I nearly jump out of my skin, and I’m scared half to death, nobody knocks on the door at midnight, and I put on my robe and I go down there and it’s like storm-trooper city, half the cops in the world are out there, and they say you called them and the FBI called them and-”
“I was worried,” I put in, sagging in the chair as decompression hits. “Worried! So you just thought you’d wake up the whole neighborhood!”
