“No. I honestly just wanted to get some information. I guess I never thought beyond that.”
She flipped her steno book closed and sat back in her chair.
“Are those cigarettes in your shirt pocket?”
“Camels.”
“If you let me have one I’ll let you use our special smoking area on the side of the building.”
“As long as we don’t have to talk,” I said, following her through the access door, down a dreary connecting hallway to a side door, and out to a picnic table around which clung the bitter residue of banished smokers. We sat down and shared an ashtray.
“Tell you what,” she said. “Let’s really just talk off the record. I have no problem with that.”
I remember back at the company being warned in the sternest terms to never speak to anyone from the press under any circumstances without our PR people’s prior approval and involvement in the interview. It was one of the few
direct commands I submitted to with unqualified obedience. So much so that the head of corporate affairs complained I was undermining our credibility by stonewalling the media.
“You told me not to talk to them,” I’d said to the PR guy.
“Not not talk. Just not talk without our involvement.”
“So I don’t talk about the wrong things?”
“I don’t like the characterization, but I accept the gist of it. We need to control our message.”
“You do, I know,” I said sincerely. “And you’re good at it. I’m a lot better at controlling product quality. Let’s stick to our strengths, what do you say?”
We eventually reached a compromise where the PR people would send over questions or requests for information from the media—which usually meant industry magazines, but sometimes the general press—and I’d write back an answer. I never saw anything in print attributed to me that resembled anything I ever wrote down, which proved the wisdom of our strategy.
Roberta and I stared at each other and smoked in silence for a few minutes. Then my curiosity got the best of me.
“What’s that mean, exactly, off the record?” I asked her.
“You tell me anything you want and I promise not to print any of it. Except those things that will win me a Pulitzer Prize or get me fired for letting some other paper get a scoop on something I should’ve had.”
“Pretty airtight deal.”
We quietly smoked some more, then I put out my cigarette and tossed her an extra from my pack.
“Sorry to bother you,” I told her, standing up. “You don’t have to escort me through the building. I can walk around.”
Which I started to do when she called me back.
“What if I answer your questions first and then you decide if you’ll answer some of mine.”
I walked back to her.
“I can’t afford to mess up here,” I said to her. “It’s not my life being at stake. It’s the crap I’ll have to take from my lawyer.”
Her face, heavily jowled and marred with the antique vestiges of acne, looked amused.
“I spent almost twenty years as a reporter at the
Boston Globe
before marrying a guy I didn’t know at the time was about to inherit a place on Gin Lane. You want to check out if my word is good, call anybody there who knew me. I have no reason to break a trust with you. I don’t care that much about your story, and I don’t need the money or the job.”
I sat down and took the cigarette I’d given her off the table and lit it. Then I gave her a fresh one.
“You wanna talk about messing up,” she said, waving it at me.
“I was looking for a way to research a news story that’s about ten, maybe fifteen years old. I thought it might be quicker to ask a reporter who was around at the time.”
“That was early on for me, but I was here. What story?”
“Jeff Milhouser and some sort of bank fraud.”
“The victim’s father,” said Roberta.
“He was a Town Trustee back then. I was told he used Town money to collateralize personal loans.”
“Can you wait here?” she asked, then lumbered back inside the building, leaving me alone with my self-recrimination.
She came back ten minutes later with a handful of loose paper.
“Pulled this off the archives,” she said. “Piece of cake. Ain’t computers grand?”
“So they tell me.”
Roberta leafed through the stack till she found something she liked, which she read, then handed over to me. It was a
report on Milhouser’s plea bargain, in which he gave up his seat as a Trustee, paid a hundred grand fine and got five years’ probation. The charge was the way Hodges remembered it. Milhouser was trying to start a retail nursery business on County Road 39, but was having trouble raising the capital with his house fully mortgaged and his credit rating in the toilet from a prior bankruptcy. He’d told East End Savings and Loan that the money he used to buy a six-month CD, which collateralized the loan, had come from an inheritance, when in fact it was Town funds. It was a simple plan, in every sense of the word, that came a cropper when accounts payable at Town Hall started bouncing checks before the CD term came due and Milhouser could jockey the funds back where they belonged.
The Town Treasurer at the time, a guy named Zack Horowitz, had authorized the withdrawals based on Milhouser’s suggestion that the Town take advantage of new investment vehicles being offered through some big commercial banks. What made Horowitz think this was a good idea, or why he let one of the Town Trustees handle the theoretical transactions, wasn’t clear from the news story, but the report of the Treasurer’s resignation, shortly after Milhouser’s scheme was uncovered, explained how he probably stayed clear of criminal court himself.
The bank’s position on the matter was more curious. Since the nursery deal fell through before he could close, Milhouser was able to return the loan, so technically, from the bank’s point of view, no harm was done except for some slight misrepresentation on the loan application. Milhouser’s legal trouble was then solely with the Town.
“You remember this?” I asked her.
“Sorry. Vaguely at best. Is it okay to ask you something now?”
“I guess.”
“Why are you interested in this?”
I didn’t know what was worse. Feeling endangered by a boneheaded move or being asked to examine motives I always preferred to leave unexamined.
“I don’t know.”
“No fair.”
“It’s the truth. I don’t know. It just seems interesting to me. A little ripple in the continuum.”
“Of course. One of those.”
I found myself imagining I had an understanding with Roberta Camacho. That was probably what she wanted me to think.
“I’ll tell you when I know myself,” I told her.
“You’ll tell me everything—me and nobody else. When you’re ready. I’ll wait. I’m patient. No deadline pressure. We’re a weekly.”
“So I hear.”
I stood up again, this time like I really meant it.
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
“Don’t thank me till I ask my other question.”
“Yeah?” I asked, unhappily.
“It’s all about jealousy, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where I come from a fistfight in front of a beautiful woman is always about the beautiful woman.”
“It wasn’t a fistfight. And it was about her real-estate development, not her,” I said.
“So not an old boyfriend.”
“Not since high school, if you believe what you hear.”
“Do you?”
She wasn’t taunting me. It was more of a challenge to my reserve. A prod. I wish I could say that it didn’t work, but it did.
“It’s irrelevant.”
“Why do you think that, if you really do?”
“No such luck. But thanks,” I said, and walked away with as clear an intent as I could express without looking like a bigger idiot than I felt.
“For what?”
I could have said “for the serving of humble pie” but she wouldn’t have known what I meant, and she’d still be calling after me. But I would have meant it. For those who live inside their minds the greatest hazard is hubris, an assumed immunity to false perception, an unflinching loyalty to cold logic. It’s the arrogance of reductionism—that every problem can be dissected into its irreducible parts and then reassembled into an entirely coherent solution, its mysteries laid bare. I’d always known this was delusional, a lazy habit of the mind. I’d scolded myself on the matter before, and now had a chance to do it again.
I was consoled, however, by a new line of thinking, a new arrangement of the random information I’d begun to gather up, reshuffle and reconfigure into a freshly conceived potential.
Interesting, I said to myself, with all due humility.
T
HE DETOX FACILITY
I’d been confined to was in Westport, one of the tonier tanks in the area, courtesy of my ex-wife, who couldn’t bear any ex-husband of hers writhing with the DTs in so sordid a town as Bridgeport.
The first thing I did when I got out was find the nearest bar. I knew just the place, a fern bar on Boston Post Road that had worn into an approximation of a local joint, frequented by a jovial blend of barflies, retired stockbrokers and narcissistic Peter Pans working as underpaid golf pros and crewing on racing yachts up and down the Gold Coast. Better yet, the place was within walking distance of the detox facility, important for a newly released patient without a car.
It was early fall so the weather was okay for a walk. Over the last two weeks I’d been able to work out at the over-equipped, under-utilized gym several hours a day. I thought that was the main reason my headaches had subsided and my reflexes were returning to nearly normal. I still had a
little money left over from the conflagration of the divorce and a fresh new debit card to get it when needed. Other than that, all I had were the clothes I was wearing when they admitted me and a cottage out on Long Island that I hadn’t seen in a while.
I was halfway to the bar when a dark blue Mercedes brushed by me and pulled on to the shoulder. I kept walking, hands in my pockets, head down.
The driver’s side door opened and Jason Fligh flowed out in a three-piece pinstriped suit and black silk duster. Big, but still evenly proportioned in middle age, he would have filled all the space in front of me even without the Mercedes.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“Late for what?”
“To pick you up when you were released.”
“No kidding.”
“I told them I’d do it. Obviously they didn’t tell you. Get in.”
I had mixed feelings about seeing him. I’d been dedicating myself to the pursuit of amnesia, trying to rewire my memory reflexes so the sight of certain human faces or everyday objects wouldn’t instantly trigger a flood of remorse. The last month had been particularly challenging to the program, given the facility’s curious insistence on complete sobriety.
It was vaguely comforting, though, watching him cast concerned sidelong glances at me as we drove along in silence.
“Where you staying?” he finally asked me.
“Haven’t worked that out yet.”
“I’d say you could stay with me till you figure it out, but you’d have to come to Chicago.”
“I like Chicago, but you’re right. I’m bound to New York and its hallowed environs.”
“So where am I driving you?”
“Adelaide’s. Take a right here. It’s down there on the right.”
“Great, I’m hungry, too,” said Jason. “I’m buying.”
I didn’t want to correct him on my intent, especially since he was buying. We made it halfway through the first round of cocktails before it dawned on him.
“Are you allowed to be drinking that stuff?” he asked.
“They told me to lay off the bourbon. This is vodka.”
“And here I am aiding and abetting.”
For his sake I paced myself, which was probably smart given my reduced capacity. We talked about baseball and his wife’s law practice and the manifold achievements of his children, who were spread around the country at top-tier universities. I told him what I could about my daughter, though at the time she wasn’t talking to me or returning my letters or answering her phone without a machine to intercept my calls. I didn’t tell him that part so as not to cast a pall over the joy he took in kid talk. He avoided talking about the University of Chicago probably for similar reasons. That would make it even harder for me to hold up my end of the conversational quid pro quo. I dragged him into it anyway because I knew he enjoyed his work almost as much as his kids. And I liked listening to him, since he actually had a pretty interesting job. This went on straight through dinner, making it easier for both of us to avoid discussing me. Though when the check arrived it became unavoidable.
“So, Sam, what’s your plan?” he asked.
I didn’t have one. I didn’t have a plan for when I’d start planning. All I had was the fuzzy outline of a concept, the centerpiece of which was a preliminary decision to breathe and take in food. I didn’t want to tell him that, so I said I was working on some temporary things that would keep me
busy and maybe after that figure out something permanent. The way I said it sounded really convincing to me, but Jason didn’t buy it exactly.
“Baloney. Now, tell me what you’re gonna do,” he said.
I didn’t have an answer.
“You don’t care, do you?” he said. “I can see it. You’re planning to drift back into never-never land where you’ll be until some other desperate foolishness puts you back into the system, which you may or may not survive next time. You’ll continue this cycle until me and your daughter, who’s told me she’s done with you forever, which I don’t believe by the way, are standing there holding hands at some cemetery while the Catholic clergy struggles to find a redemptive lesson in the whole sorry mess.”
I thought he was a little optimistic about my daughter and the priesthood bothering to show up, but the rest of the storyline had a credible ring. Though it put me in a quandary. I knew he wanted to buck me up, but I actually liked the sound of it. Everything but the funeral bit at the end, which if I played my cards right could be dispensed with.
The only problem was I found self-destruction sort of tedious to be around, even my own. I really didn’t want to inflict any of that on people like Jason Fligh, good people whose true hearts deserved greater respect. People it’s immoral to drive away just so you can disassemble yourself in private. So I took the only path that was left open to me. I lied.