The King of Lies (5 page)

I let him go, the opportunity lost to the paralysis of indecision. I got back into my car, mouth like glue, and I looked for gum or a mint but found neither. I lit a cigarette instead, but it tasted horrible, so I tossed it. My watch showed it was ten o’clock; I’d slept for two, maybe three hours. I peered down the street at my house. The cars were gone, but lights still burned, and I guessed Barbara was up. My head was pounding and I knew that she was more than I could bear right then. What I really wanted was another beer and an empty bed. But what I needed was something entirely different, and as I sat there, I realized that I’d been putting off the inevitable. I needed to go up to Ezra’s office, to make peace with his ghost and to look for his gun.

I turned the ignition, thought of all the stupid drunks I’d defended on DWI charges, then drove to the office. It was that kind of day.

I parked in back, where I always did, and let myself into the narrow hallway that ran past the tiny break room, the copy room, and the supply closet. When I got to the main office area, I flipped on a lamp and tossed my keys onto the table.

I heard something upstairs, a scrape followed by a low thump, and I froze.

Silence.

I stood and listened, but the sound didn’t come again. I thought of Ezra’s ghost, found the thought not funny, and wondered if I’d imagined it. Moving slowly, I walked to the front of the office and turned on every light. The stairwell to Ezra’s upstairs domain gaped at me, all darkness and slick, shiny walls. My heart was up and running and I felt that unhealthy bourbon sweat. I smelled myself in the stillness and wondered if I was a coward after all. I reached for some kind of calm and told myself that old buildings settle and drunken men imagine things all the time. I reminded myself that Ezra was dead.

I flashed a glance around the place, but everything looked as it always had: desks, chairs, and filing cabinets—all in order. I looked back up the narrow stairwell and started to climb. I moved slowly, one hand on the rail. Five steps up, I stopped, thinking that I saw movement. I took one more hesitant step, heard something, and stopped. Then something huge, dark, and very fast descended upon me. It crashed into my chest and I was falling. I felt a moment of blinding pain; then all was blackness.

CHAPTER 6

I
 saw light. It flickered and died, then flickered again. It hurt. I didn’t want it.
   “He’s coming around,” a voice said.

“Well, that’s something at least.” I recognized the voice. Detective Mills.

I opened my eyes to bright, fuzzy light. I blinked, but the pain in my head didn’t go away.

“Where am I?”

“Hospital,” Mills said, and leaned over me. She didn’t smile, but I smelled her perfume; it was ripe, like a peach too long in the bag.

“What happened?”

Mills leaned closer. “You tell me,” she said.

“I don’t remember.”

“Your secretary found you this morning at the foot of the stairs. You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck.”

I sat up against the pillows and looked around. Green curtains surrounded my bed. A large nurse stood at my feet, a bucolic smile on her face. I heard hospital voices and smelled hospital smells. I looked for Barbara. She wasn’t there.

“Somebody threw a chair at me,” I said.

“I beg your pardon,” Mills said.

“Ezra’s chair, I think. I was walking up the stairs and somebody pushed the chair down on top of me.”

Mills said nothing for a long moment. She tapped a pen against her teeth and looked at me.

“I talked to your wife,” she said. “According to her, you were drunk last night.”

“So?”

“Very drunk.”

I stared in dumb amazement at the detective. “Are you suggesting that I fell down the stairs?” Mills said nothing and I felt the first stir of anger. “My wife wouldn’t know very drunk if it bit her on the ass.”

“I corroborated her story with several people who were at your house last night,” Mills said.

“Who?”

“That’s hardly relevant.”

“Relevant! Christ. You sound like a lawyer.” Now I was mad. Mainly because I was being treated as if I were stupid. “Have you been to my office, Detective Mills?”

“No,” she replied.

“Then go,” I said. “See if the chair is there or not.”

She studied me, and I could all but see the debate. Was this guy for real or just being an ass? If she’d ever considered me a friend, I saw right then that she did no longer. Her eyes were intolerant, and I guessed that the pressure was getting to her. There had been many stories in the paper—retrospectives on Ezra’s life, thinly worded speculation about the manner of his death, vague details about the investigation—and Mills had been mentioned many times. I understood that this case would make or break her, but for some reason I’d imagined that our personal relationship would remain apart.

“What’s your secretary’s name?” she asked. I told her and she turned to the nurse, who looked uncomfortable. “Where’s your phone?” The nurse told her to use the one in the triage nurse’s office. Down the hall. Second door. Mills looked back to me. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, and I almost smiled before I realized she wasn’t making a funny.

She flapped her way through the curtains and disappeared. I heard her heels on the tile and then I was alone with the nurse. She fluffed my pillow.

“Is this the emergency room?” I asked.

“Yes, but Saturday morning is slow. Shootin’ and stabbin’ is done until tonight.” She smiled and suddenly became a real person.

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Oh, nothing but some bruises and such. Your headache might last longer than it would have otherwise.” Another smile and I knew I wasn’t the first Saturday-morning hangover she’d seen. “You’ll be discharged shortly.”

I laid my fingers on the warm dough of her forearm. “Has my wife been to see me? Five five. Short black hair. Pretty.” She looked blank. “Hard eyes,” I added, only half-joking. “Attitude.”

“I’m sorry. No.”

I looked away from the pity in her face. “Are you married?” I asked.

“Twenty-two years,” she said.

“Would you leave your husband alone in the emergency room?” She didn’t answer, and I thought, No, of course not; differences end at the hospital door.

“That would depend,” she finally said. She smoothed my blankets, her hands moving sure and quick, and I thought she didn’t want to finish the sentence.

“On?” I asked.

She looked at me and her hands grew suddenly still. “On whether or not he deserved it.”

And there it is, I thought, the difference between her and me. Because I would be there regardless. No matter what. Suddenly, this nurse was not an unexpected friend, and with that bleak realization the warmth in the tiny curtained place evaporated. And even though she remained and tried to make further conversation, I found myself alone with my headache and the disjointed images of the previous night.

I
had
heard a sound. Wheels on wood flooring. Ezra’s big leather chair being rolled to the top of the stairs. I knew I was right about that. I’d felt the weight, damn it.

I hadn’t been that drunk.

When Mills appeared, she looked pissed. “I spoke to your secretary,” she said. “There’s no chair at the bottom of the stairs. There was no chair when she found you this morning. Furthermore, nothing is out of place. No windows are broken. No sign of a forced entry.”

“But Ezra’s chair . . .”

“Is at his desk upstairs,” Mills said. “Where it has always been.”

I thought back to the day before. I’d sent my secretary home early.

“Maybe I forgot to lock the door,” I ventured. “Look, I’m not making this up. I know what happened.” Both Mills and the nurse stared at me, wordlessly. “Goddamn it, somebody threw a chair down those stairs!”

“Listen, Pickens. You’re not high on my list of favorites right now. I wasted an hour yesterday trying to track you down, and I’m not going to waste more time because you decided to tie one on. Do I make myself clear?”

I didn’t know what infuriated me more, that Mills refused to accept what I’d told her or that my wife lacked the decency to come to the hospital. My head was about to split, my body felt like the loser at a Tyson fight, and I thought I might puke hospital green.

“Fine. Whatever.”

Mills looked at me as if she’d expected more fight and was disappointed. The nurse said she had some papers for me to sign, then disappeared to fetch them. Mills stared at me and I stared at the ceiling, determined to keep my mouth shut. This day could go two ways. It could get better or it could get worse. After what felt like a long time pretending to be interested in white acoustic tile, Mills finally spoke.

“We still need to discuss the night Ezra disappeared.” Her tone was softer, as if it had occurred to her that this information might be
relevant
and that I controlled it. I said nothing, and her temper finally exploded. “Damn it, Work, he was your father!”

I looked at her then. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” I said, and immediately regretted the words. There had been venom in my voice, and I saw the surprise in the detective’s eyes. “Listen. I need a shower. I need to talk to my wife. Can we do it this afternoon?” She started to speak and I cut her off. “Your office. Three o’clock. I’ll be there.”

“Don’t make me regret this,” she said.

“I’ll be there. Three o’clock.”

The ripe-peach smell lingered after Mills left. Would I make the meeting? Maybe. The night in question had been a bad one and I’d not talked about it. Ever. Some secrets you keep, and I’d shared this one with my sister alone. It was Ezra’s last gift, a lie wrapped in guilt and mortified to pure shame. I’d lost sleep to that lie, and maybe my soul, too. What did Jean call it?
Ezra’s truth.
Well, Ezra’s truth was my truth; it had to be, and if Jean thought differently, she was kidding herself.

I lifted the sheet. Somebody had put me in a tie-up dress. Perfect.

The nurse let me dangle for almost an hour. When she finally appeared with my paperwork, I still had no clothes, and she left me for another twenty minutes while she collected them for me. The day was getting worse and the feel of dirty clothes against my skin only made it more so.

I limped out of the emergency room and into a day made dull by low scudding clouds. Sweat came instantly in the prickly damp heat. I felt for my keys, couldn’t find them, and remembered I had no car, either. So I walked home, and if anyone saw me, they didn’t offer a ride. At home, I closed the door as if against a pursuing wind. “I’m home,” I called.

The house was empty, as I knew it would be. Barbara’s car was gone. The message light blinked its red eye at me, and on the kitchen island I saw a note—a beige rectangle of expensive stationery, with Barbara’s tight writing beneath a pen laid across it in a perfect diagonal. I walked over without real interest.

“Dear Work,” it began, which surprised me. I expected something different. “I’ve gone shopping in Charlotte. Figured you could use the space. I’m sorry that last night was so hard for you. Maybe I could have been more supportive. And I agree . . . we do need to talk. How about dinner tonight? Just the two of us. Barbara.”

I left the note where it lay and went for a shower. The bed was made, which reminded me that I had no clean suit for Monday. I looked at the clock; the cleaners closed in twenty minutes. I tossed the filthy remnant of my suit into the closet and took a shower.

When I got out, I dressed and went to the office. Inside, I pocketed my keys and looked around. Mills was right about some things. Everything looked normal. But somebody had almost killed me, and I wanted to know why. If there was an answer here, I expected to find it upstairs.

Ezra’s office ran the length of the building. The walls were raw brick and looked warm above the twenty-thousand-dollar Persian rug. There were exposed beams, leather furniture, and Tiffany lamps. Ezra had had no taste of his own and had to pay for it. I tried to remember the decorator’s name and failed. She’d liked oil paintings and low-cut tops. I saw her breasts once when she bent over to spread some fabric samples. Ezra had caught me looking and winked. It had made my skin crawl, but in sharing the pleasure of those full pale breasts, he’d treated me like an equal for the first and last time. How fucked-up was that?

Ezra’s paintings spoke of money—the old kind. Looking at them, you heard the bugle and smelled the dogs. The people in these paintings had gamekeepers, gun bearers, and beaters. They hunted in fine clothes and returned to a silver table service and servants. They hunted hart and stag instead of deer, pheasant rather than quail. Their homes had names.

This was the beast that had ridden my father’s back. Old money had humbled him, but more than that it had angered him. Because no matter how good he was, how successful, or how rich, he had always lacked that casual arrogance. Poverty had been his goad; it had driven him, but he’d never understood how strong it made him. Standing on his expensive rug, I wished now that I’d told him. I thought of the photograph of his family that he’d kept on his desk at home. He’d often stared into those tired faces and nodded as if in conversation. He’d fought to escape their world more than to provide for us, and that hurt in ways I’d never explored. Those people were long dead, too cold and rotten to be impressed, but those had been his priorities.

“Shadowboxing the past,” Jean had once called it, stunning me with her perception.

I walked to his massive desk and examined the chair. There were scuff marks on the leather, but they could have been old. I rolled it off the carpet and listened to its wheels on the wood floor. It was the same noise I’d heard the night before. I replaced the chair and checked the walls of the stairwell. They were scuffed, too, but that could have been from anything. Back at the desk, I ran my hands over the leather and nodded, satisfied that I’d not imagined anything.

The previous night, I’d caught this chair in the chest. Mills could kiss my ass.

I looked around the office. Someone had come here for a reason.

I sat in Ezra’s chair, now mine, and tossed my feet up on the desk. I looked for a sign. What was so important?

After Ezra disappeared, most of our clients followed suit. Ezra had courted them. Ezra had held their hands. He’d gotten the press, and they’d had no idea that most of the underlying work was mine. “Just business,” they’d said, before taking their files to the first big city firm they could find. Ezra’s death had made plenty of Charlotte lawyers rich, a fact that would kill him if somebody hadn’t already done the job. He hated Charlotte lawyers.

And I was left on the court-appointed list, bottom-feeding.

So I doubted anybody was up here for his files. Truth be told, I didn’t care if Mills got the files. There was nothing there. I’d combed through them months earlier, looking for crumbs. I just didn’t want to make it easy.

Then I remembered why I’d come the night before. I searched Ezra’s desk, his filing cabinets, and even the end tables adjacent to the long leather couch that sat against the wall. Nothing. No pistol. I opened the chest under the window and got down on my knees to peer underneath his desk. I went back downstairs and searched every conceivable place where a gun might be hidden. After half an hour, I had no doubt that my office was gun-free.

I climbed the stairs again, turned at the top, and walked out onto Ezra’s expensive Persian rug. Immediately, I saw that something was different. It was a small thing, but it leaped out at me. I stopped. I stared at it.

Across the room, near the foot of Ezra’s long couch, the corner of the rug was folded under. It lay directly in my line of sight: the corner, along with a foot or more of fringe, tucked under. I quickly scanned the rest of the office, but saw nothing else that seemed out of place. I walked across the room toward the folded corner. Seven long strides, then I felt something yield beneath my foot. I heard the low groan of flexing wood. I stepped back, saw a slight rise beneath the carpet. I stepped on it again. Another creak.

I flipped back the rug and found a section of loose flooring—two wide boards that rose minutely at one end, warped, as if by time or water damage. They were only a quarter inch higher than the rest of the floorboards, but the cut lines did not line up with the rest of the boards. It appeared that the ends had been sawed at some point; they were rough and still pale. The other boards were almost black with age, the cracks between them packed solid.