'I keep thinking about things, Warren,' I told him. 'I know it's because of this thing with Keith. But I keep going back to our family, too.'
Warren laughed. 'Why bother? They were gone before you grew up. Mom. Jenny. You were still a kid when they died.'
'But I don't want to be a kid anymore,' I told him. 'I want to know what you know. About everything.'
'I told you what I know.'
'Maybe there was more,' I said.
'Like what?'
'Like that insurance man you told me about. Why would he have come around the house, asking questions about Mom and Dad?'
Warren shrugged. 'Who knows?'
'Dad told me there was no insurance on Mom,' I said.
'Then I guess there wasn't any insurance.' He took a sip of beer. 'Jesus, what difference does it make, anyway?'
'It makes a difference because I want to know.'
'Know what?'
The words fell like stones from my mouth. 'If he killed her.'
Warren's eyes grew very still. 'Jesus, Eric.'
'Fucked with the car some way. The brakes.'
'Dad didn't know anything about cars, Eric.'
'So, you don't think—'
Warren laughed. 'Of course not.' He peered at me as if I were very small, a creature he couldn't quite bring into focus. 'What's the matter with you? Dad kill Mom? Come on, Eric.'
'How can you be so sure?'
Warren laughed again, but this time, mirthlessly. 'Eric, this is nuts.'
'How do you know?' I repeated.
'Jesus, Eric,' Warren said. 'This is weird.'
'What if he killed her?' I asked.
Warren remained silent for a moment, his gaze downcast, as if studying the last small portion of beer that remained. Then he said, 'What good would it do, even if you found out he did?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'But as it stands, everything seems like a lie.'
'So?'
'I don't want to live like that.'
He drained the last of the beer. 'Eric, everybody lives like that.' He grinned and the grim seriousness of our former discussion simply fell away from him. 'Lighten up, Bro—everybody's fake.'
I leaned forward and planted my elbows on the table. 'I want to know the truth.'
Warren shrugged lightly. 'Okay, fine,' he said wearily. 'Knock yourself out. Hell, Dad's a pack rat. Kept everything in that old metal filing cabinet, remember? Wouldn't throw it away, or anything in it. Heavy fucking thing. Remember the trouble we had moving it into your basement?' He drained the last of the beer and looked at me drowsily. 'If he had a policy on Mom,' he said, 'that's where it would be.'
SEVENTEEN
The next night, after Meredith and Keith had already gone to bed, I quietly made my way to the basement. It was a gray metal filing cabinet, the one in which my father had kept his records and which Warren and I had removed from the little house my father had lived in before I'd finally convinced him to take up residence at the retirement home.
I'd taken him to Shelton Arms on a snowy January day, then returned to the house and helped Warren pack up Dad's belongings and transport them to the basement where they'd rested undisturbed until now.
My father's old rolltop desk stood beside the cabinet. I opened it, pulled over a plain metal chair, took out a stack of files from the top drawer of the cabinet, and began to go through the yellow crumbling papers I found inside, the records of my father's many failed enterprises along with his increasingly desperate attempts to salvage them.
But that was not the history I was looking for. I didn't care that my father had failed, that his business dealings were shadowy, that he'd squandered thousands of dollars to keep up appearances, joined expensive clubs at the very time my mother was scouring local thrift shops in order to keep her children clothed.
None of that mattered because I wasn't looking for evidence of bad business decisions or foolish investments. I was Peak and Kraus, my gaze, like theirs, focused by suspicion, looking for evidence of a crime.
It emerged slowly, like a body rising through layers of accumulated silt, the excruciating details of my father's ruin. The decline began in the late sixties as his real estate holdings were decimated by soaring interest rates. Steadily, for five years, he defaulted on one mortgage after another, his banker friends no longer willing to extend further credit, so that he lost both residential lots and commercial properties, his wealth dropping from him like petals from a wilting rose.
By the fall of 1974, he had nothing left but the family house, itself mortgaged to the gills, literally sinking in a slough of debt. I was twelve years old that autumn, now attending the expensive private school my father had denied Warren, a little boy dressed in his school uniform, complete with navy blue blazer with brass buttons, the crest of Saint Regis embroidered on the breast pocket.
Each night, I returned to a house that was disappearing, though I didn't know that at the time. Warren stayed in his room most of the time, and Jenny had begun complaining of terrible headaches. My mother made increasingly modest meals, which she served at a table my father hardly frequented anymore. 'He's in New York,' my mother would explain, 'on business.'
The disastrous nature of that business was apparent in the papers I rifled through that night, applications for loans and their subsequent denials, threatening letters from lawyers and creditors and even local tradesmen, all of them demanding payment ... or else.
Under such a barrage, men have been driven to suicide or simply run away, in either case leaving their families to fend for themselves. But on rare occasions some men take a third, far more drastic, option. They kill their families.
Until that night, it had never occurred to me that at some desperate moment, with the fifth scotch of the evening trembling in his hand, my father might actually have considered this final course.
Then, suddenly, it was there, the terrifying suggestion that he had.
A suggestion, not evidence, and yet it stopped me cold, so that for a long time, I simply stared at what I'd stumbled upon, the real estate section of the
In what way, I wondered, had my father planned to be a bachelor again?
Was it only that he'd considered option one, abandonment?
Or had he considered option three as well, a final, irrevocable break that would truly leave him free?
I didn't know, couldn't know, and yet, in my current state of mind, one the shadowy basement perfectly mirrored, I found that I could neither dismiss the possibility that my father had truly contemplated our murders nor suppress my need to discover if he actually had.
And so I continued through his papers, watching with an ever-deepening sense of desperation as his circumstances grew more dire. As the weeks of that last disastrous year passed, the dunning letters became more threatening and my father's responses increasingly laced with fabrications. He began to invent correspondence with 'anonymous backers,' to claim sources of revenue he did not have, and to pepper his letters with the names of important people—mostly politicians—who were, he said, 'getting in on the ground floor' of whatever wholly fanciful enterprise he was at that moment proposing. The line between delusion and reality appeared to fade, and because of that, I could no longer tell if he was outright lying or if he had begun to believe his own fantasies.
