“No, no. Why would he go to the courthouse? Wouldn’t he know that somebody was bound to recognize him, that your father’s judicial career would be wrecked?”
“Probably,” I say, for I have considered this question. “But maybe the ruin of my father’s judicial career was Jack Ziegler’s final gift to him.”
Dana nods. “And when your father finally got out, he would have warned them that he’d written it all down. That, if anything untoward happened to him, the whole story would make its way into the light.” She is excited. “That must be what’s in the papers, Misha! All the favors he did, the companies, who owned them- everything!”
“That would be my guess, too.” I remember again how the Judge always demanded the names of the principals behind the shell companies litigating before him, and how few dared resist the demand. Justice Wainwright described my father’s orders for disclosure as a mark of his obsession with detail. But there was another reason: he was protecting himself, squirreling away information.
Which would also explain who hired Colin Scott to follow me. The possibility that he might be implicated in the papers could have provided an additional incentive, but the notion that Scott reacted out of some personal fear remains the weak link in the FBI’s chain of reasoning about what happened. I have no idea whether the Bureau suspected that Scott was the killer of Phil McMichael, the Senator’s son, but, plainly, they thought he returned because he was worried about something in the arrangements. And that makes no sense. If he was safely overseas, living under another name, why would he come back to the United States and risk arrest for murder? No, he followed me for the benefit of somebody else, somebody who paid him well to follow the trail of his former employer, and I suspect I will never know who his clients were unless I find the arrangements, for they had to be those who profited from my father’s corruption.
“You know, Misha, I really admired your father. I really did.” Pain in her deep, black eyes. I wonder how much more pain there would be if Dana knew the secret I have kept from her, the identity of the driver of the red car, slaughtered by Colin Scott. “But this… What am I supposed to do now? Forgive him? Hate him? What?”
I have to smile. Dear Dana Worth, self-centered to the last. It does not seem to have occurred to her that I am struggling with precisely the same questions. I expect little from life other than mystery and ambiguity, so perhaps it is too much to demand of my feelings about my father that they come suddenly into crystalline focus. Dana, like Mariah, needs answers that are sharply defined. Searching for something to say, I hit upon another of my father’s platitudes: “You have to draw a line, Dana. You have to put the past in the past.”
“I feel like I never knew him. Like he was really… some kind of monster.” She shudders. “He had all these sides. All these levels.”
I remember Jack Ziegler’s soliloquy. “He was trying to protect his family. He just… he kind of got in over his head.”
“That’s a pretty easy excuse.”
“I don’t mean it that way. I’m not trying to justify what he did. I just think… I don’t think he set out to do it. I think he probably got caught up.”
Dana shakes her head. She is never afraid of passing judgment, most mercilessly on herself. “I’m sorry, Misha, but that won’t wash. Your father wasn’t some kind of blundering innocent. He was an intelligent man. He knew who Jack Ziegler was. He knew what Jack Ziegler was. If it’s really true that your father went to him and asked him to permit a murder, do you really believe he didn’t realize he would be in Jack Ziegler’s thrall for the rest of his life? He wasn’t that naive, Misha. Don’t kid yourself.” She allows herself a rare shudder, then touches her elbow, still sore where bullet chipped bone. “I don’t know what to say about him, Misha. I don’t want to say he was evil… but he wasn’t just deluded, either. He made a decision to kill the driver of that car. He made a decision to become a corrupt judge.” Another shake of the head. “I can’t believe I knew so little about what was really going on in that head of his. It’s scary, Misha. And it hurts.”
“You should try being his son.”
“Oh, Misha, I didn’t mean it like that.” She squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you didn’t, Dana. But it isn’t easy for me, either.” I sigh. “Anyway, it isn’t your problem any more.”
Dana looks at me sharply, mouth wide, having heard something in my tone she does not like. She gives me my hand back. Perhaps she has realized, as I have been thinking ever since we both got shot, that our friendship will never be the same. She points a finger at me. “You don’t think it’s over,” she says, wonder in her tone. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Misha.”
“Let it go, Dana. Please.”
“Is that what you’re going to do? Let it go? Somehow I doubt it.” Standing in the middle of the Original Quad, fists folded on her narrow hips. Her voice softens. “Do you really think the box fooled them, Misha?”
“I hope it did. I hope… I hope they’ll think the Judge was just bluffing.”
“What if there’s some kind of test to show how long the box was in the ground?”
“I’m sure there is, but they can’t possibly know when the Judge buried it. For all they know, he did it the day before he died. You buried it half a year later. Can a test really discriminate within a few months?”
“I hope not.” A weak grin. “Otherwise, we’re in big trouble.”
We both think that one over. This is at our final moment together before Dana decamps for the rest of the summer-maybe with Alison, maybe not-to Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, where, a little north of Ithaca, Dana maintains what she calls her “little writing cottage,” an old and naturally cool stone house on the water. I thought we would be hugging, sentimental. Wrong again.
“If we knew where the papers were,” Dana says thoughtfully, “we might be able to use them to protect ourselves.”
“Except we don’t know where they are.”
Worried, she studies my face. “Do me a favor, won’t you, Misha, darling? When they come for you because the box was empty, and you decide to lie to protect me, please do a better job of lying than you just did.”
“Nobody’s coming for anybody,” I soothe. “We fooled them, Dana.”
But the expression on my best friend’s pale face tells me she is not really sure. To tell the truth, neither am I.
CHAPTER 60
So I keep watching, waiting for them to come, while trying to live my life. Like most professors, I generally use my summers to write. But this year I am spending all the time I can with Bentley. Kimmer does not seem to mind, and, now and then, we do things as a threesome. Sara Jacobstein reminds me that Bentley needs to see his parents treat each other with respect. Morris Young tells me that God requires the same thing. We are not getting back together, my soon-to-be-ex-wife has made that clear, but these occasions-a walk in the park, a trip to a Broadway show-are somehow not too onerous, as though Kimmer and I are both growing up a little, even as we grow apart. Once, feeling particularly gay as we stand in the foyer of the house on Hobby Road after returning from a dinner for three, Kimmer even asks me if I would like to stay the night, and I am giddy until I realize that this is no promise of a resumption of our marriage, but only an impulse born of Lionel’s temporary absence from town. When my polite refusal meets with a shrug, I know I am right.
When I am not with Bentley, I spend a lot of time driving through the countryside in my sturdy Camry, watching my rearview mirror with some care, because I have started to catch a whiff, just the faintest distant breath, of new shadows. Somebody, I am confident, is back there. Maybe Nunzio’s people, maybe Jack Ziegler’s, maybe his partners’. But I have a feeling that the breath on my neck belongs to somebody else; somebody who has not been around for a while. Somebody, however, I knew would return.
I am running out of time, but only I know it.
At the law school one midsummer’s day, Shirley Branch cannot control her ebullience, running up and down
