The King of Lies

  She was right. He depended on it. He could use it, and suddenly I knew. Not the exact combination to his safe, but I knew where to find it. And just like that, opening the old man’s safe became the most important thing in my world. It was something I had to do, and I knew how to do it.

  I’ve got to go,” I said. I put my hand on her arm and she did not flinch away. “I’m sorry, Barbara.”

  She nodded and looked at the floor, more smoke writhing from her lips.

  “We’ll talk more later,” I said, and picked up the keys. I stopped at the garage door and looked back. I expected her to appear different somehow, but she didn’t. She looked as she always had. My hand was on the door when her voice stopped me a final time.

  “One question,” she said.

  “What?”

  “What about your alibi?” she asked. “Aren’t you worried about losing your alibi?”

  For an instant, our eyes locked. She let her shutters drop, and I saw into the depths of her. That’s when I knew that she knew. She’d known all along; so I said the words, and with their passing, a weight seemed to fall away, and in that instant even Barbara was untainted.

  “You were never my alibi, Barbara. We both know that.”

  She nodded slightly, and this time the tears came.

  “There was a time I would have killed for you,” she said, and looked back up. “What was one little lie?”

  The tears came faster, and her shoulders trembled as if finally exhausted by some invisible load. “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

  “We do what we need to do, right? That’s what survival is all about.”

  “It’s just a question of getting to the point where it has to be done. That’s why we’ll both be okay. Maybe we can part as friends.”

  She sniffed loudly, and laughed. She wiped at her eyes. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “It would,” I agreed. “Listen, I’ll be at the office. I won’t be long. When I get back, we’ll talk some more.”

  “What are you going to the office for?” she asked.

  “Nothing, really. I just figured something out.”

  She gestured at the pain-filled space around us: the room, the house, maybe the entirety of our lives together. “More important than this?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied, lying. “Of course not.”

  “Then don’t leave,” she said.

  “It’s just life, Barbara, and it gets messy. Not everything works out the way you want.”

  “It does if you want it badly enough.”

  “Only sometimes,” I said. Then I left, closing the door on the life behind me. I started the car and turned around. The children were still in the park, tiny flashes of color as they ran and screamed. I turned off the radio, put the car in drive, and then I saw Barbara in the garage. She watched me in utter stillness, and for an instant she did look different. But then she waved at me to wait and ran light-footed to the window.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “I don’t want it to end like this.”

  “I’ve got to.”

  “Damn it, Work. What’s so important?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing that concerns you.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself and leaned over as if her stomach hurt. “It’s going to end badly. I know it will.” Her eyes grew distant. She looked down at the park, as if the sight of the children affected her, too. “Ten years of our lives, and it’ll all be wasted. Just gone.”

  “People move on every day, Barbara. We’re no different.”

  “That’s why it never could have worked,” she said, and I heard blame in her voice. She looked down at me. “You never wanted to be special, and there was nothing I could do to make you want that. You were so ready to be satisfied. You took the scraps from Ezra’s table and thought you had a banquet.”

  “Ezra was chained to that table. He was no happier than I was.”

  “Yes, he was. He took what he wanted and took pleasure in taking it. He was a man that way.”

  “Are you trying to hurt me?” I asked. “Because this is unpleasant enough as it is.”

  Barbara smacked her hand on the top of the car. “And you think it’s pleasant for me? It’s not.”

  I looked away from her then, turned my eyes down the hill to the flashes of color that stained the dark green grass. Suddenly, I wanted to be away from this place, but something remained to be said. So I said it.

  “Do you know what our problem is, Barbara? You never knew me. You saw what you wanted to see. A young lawyer from a rich family, with a near-famous father, and you assumed you knew me. Who I was. What I wanted. What I cared about. You married a stranger, and you tried to turn him into someone that you recognized. For ten years, you beat me down, and I let you do it; but I could never be what you wanted. So you grew frustrated and bitter, and I grew despondent. I hid from myself, as if it would all just go away, and that makes me as bad as you. We married for the wrong reasons, a common-enough mistake, and if I’d been man enough, I would have ended it years ago.”

  Barbara’s lips twisted. “Your self-righteousness makes me ill,” she said. “You’re no better than me.”

  “I don’t pretend to be.”

  “Just go,” she said. “You’re right. It’s over. So just go.”

  “I’m sorry, Barbara.”

  “Save your fucking sympathy,” she said, and walked back to the house.

  I let her go, and for that moment I seemed to float; but the absence of pain can pass as pleasure for only so long, and I still had things to do. I pointed her car toward the office.

  A psychiatrist could probably explain my obsession with opening Ezra’s safe. In tearing down his last secret, I was replacing him, assuming his power. Or struggling to understand him. To outdo him. Truthfully, it was nothing that complicated. I’d worked in that building for ten years, thirteen if you counted the summer jobs during law school. During that time, my father had made no reference to the safe. We were family. We were partners. He shouldn’t have kept secrets from me. Yes, I was curious, but more than that I was disturbed; and some part of me believed that tearing down this secret would make my father known to me once and for all. Our truest self is often the person we allow no one else to see—who we are when we are alone. In the real world, we edit. We compromise and prevaricate.

  I wanted to see the man behind the curtain.

  For what I’d realized was this, and I should have seen it sooner: Ezra cared about having money; it was the curse of growing up dirt-poor. Money bought food. Money fixed the roof. Having it meant survival. So the million-dollar jury award that made him famous and ultimately rich was not the most important thing after all. I’d been wrong about that. Because big-dollar jury verdicts are appealed, and even if they’re not, nobody cuts a check the day of the verdict. Making money versus having money. In that equation, only one date matters: the day you deposit the check.

  I didn’t know what date that was, but there would be records. Somewhere in the office was a deposit record showing a cash infusion of $333,333.33, exactly one-third of one million dollars. By the time he died, a few hundred grand amounted to chump change, but that was the money that had made him. I should have seen it.

  I parked in back and looked up at the tall, narrow building. Already I felt like a stranger there, and Barbara’s words echoed in my mind: Ten years . . . wasted. Just gone.

  I got out of the car. No one was around, but in the distance I heard sirens, and I thought of Mills. She was looking at Ezra’s gun, slapping her open palms against the hard muscles of her thighs. She would find the anonymous caller and I would be identified. I would be arrested, tried, and convicted. All I had was Hank, and the faded hope that Vanessa Stolen could save both body and soul.

  Inside, the office was musty, as if weeks or months had passed since last I’d been there. Shadows stretched through slatted blinds, and dust hung in the alternating bars of light. The place was silent and unwelcoming, as if my thoughts had
betrayed me. I did not belong. That was the message. The building knew.

  I locked the door behind me, moved down the short hall and into the main reception area. Sound was muffled; I pushed through air that felt like water, and accepted that much of what I felt was formless dread. I tried to shake it off.

  The cops had seized my computers, so I went down the narrow, creaking staircase to the basement, where boxes rose in jagged mounds and a single bare bulb dangled as if from a gibbet. The place was packed with old case files, tax records, and bank statements. I saw broken furniture, an exercise machine that dated to the seventies, and eight different golf bags. It was a mess, and the oldest stuff was in the very back. I waded through it, trying to figure out the system. The boxes were stacked haphazardly but were grouped together by dates. So the files from any given year would be found together, buried in a mass grave.

  I located what I thought would be the right year and started tearing open boxes. There was no order to it at all, which surprised me. Ezra had always been meticulous in his affairs. Files numbered in the thousands, crushed into misshapen cardboard cartons. And inside the larger boxes I found smaller containers holding monthly calendars, receipts, message slips, dried-out pens, and paper clips. There were half-used legal pads and discarded Rolodex cards. It was as if Ezra had emptied his desk every year and then started fresh with new supplies. I opened his day planner for December, saw the small exclamation point he’d placed on December 31, and realized then why this was so different. It was a finished year, and like so much of his past, Ezra had boxed it away to be forgotten. Ezra had always cared about the future. Everything else was one step above refuse.

  I found what I was looking for in the bottom of the seventh box, buried beneath a foot and a half of divorce pleadings. I recognized the well-creased spine of the thick black ledger book that Ezra had always preferred. It made a cracking sound when I opened it, and I fingered the green paper, now browned at the edges, and saw the rows of Ezra’s precise figures. My first impression was of smallness. Small writing and small numbers—nothing like his stature or the billings he would soon come to achieve. I found the deposit entry on the thirty-third page. The deposit above it was for fifty-seven dollars, the one below for an even hundred. His handwriting was unvaried, so that one-third of a million dollars might well have been a daily deposit. Looking at it, I could only imagine the satisfaction that entry must have given him. Yet, it was as if he’d bottled up any symptoms of joy or pleasure. Maybe he’d been selfish with it; maybe he’d just been disciplined. But I could still remember the night he took us out to celebrate. “Nothing can stop me now,” he’d said. And he’d been right, until Alex shot him in the head.

  I left the basement and turned off the light. The smell of moldering cardboard followed me as I headed for Ezra’s office. I paused at the foot of the stairs, remembering the sound of a heavy chair crashing down; but now there was only silence, and so I broke it, my feet heavy on the time-worn stairs. The rug looked different; maybe it was the light, but it seemed to ripple at the far corner. I pulled it back, wondered again if my mind was playing tricks on me. The wood was chipped at the edge, gouged around the nail heads. The marks were unfamiliar, small, as if made by a flathead screwdriver. I ran my fingertips over them, wondering if someone else had been here.

  I dismissed the thought. Time was not on my side, and I had a number burning holes in my brain. I grabbed the hammer and went to work on the nails. I tried to slip the claw beneath the heads. I gouged more wood, scratched the nail heads shiny, but could not get them out. I rammed the claw into the crack at the boards’ ends and leaned back on the handle. No give. I pulled harder, felt the tension in my back as I heaved. But the four big nails were too much.

  I ran back to the basement, back into the weak light of that one dangling bulb, then around the cardboard junkyard to the tool corner, where I’d seen a snow shovel, a ladder, a busted rake, and an old car jack. I found the lug wrench that went with the jack; it was two feet long with a sharp, tapered end. Back upstairs, breathing hard, I pushed the narrow end between the boards, pounded the other end with the hammer. Steel slipped into the crack where that yellow-white wood seemed to smile at me. I jammed the hammer against the base of the wrench for leverage, held it there with my foot, and then I put one hundred and ninety pounds on that long wrench. I leaned into it, heard wood crack and then splinter. I shifted down the board. Pried up one ragged piece and then another, until the whole thing came loose. I ripped the boards out, felt splinters in my palm and ignored them. I threw the ruined boards aside.

  The safe challenged me, and for a moment I was afraid; but I pictured my old man’s ledger entry, knew it was the right number. I was ready to tear him down, ready to know, so I dropped again to my knees. I knelt above this last piece of him, said a silent prayer, and typed in the date that he’d made the largest deposit of his life.

  The door swung up on silent hinges, opened to darkness; and then I blinked.

  The first thing I saw was cash, lots of it, banded together in stacks of ten thousand. I removed all of it. The money was solid in my hand, a brick of currency that I could smell over the mustiness. At a glance, it looked like almost $200,000. I put it on the floor beside me, but it was difficult to look away. I’d never seen so much hard currency. But I wasn’t here for money, so I returned to the gaping hole.

  There were pictures of his family. Not his wife and children. Not that family. But the one that raised him, the impoverished one. There was a faded picture of Ezra and his father. Another of his father and his mother. One of several dirty, blank-eyed children who may have been siblings. I’d never seen these before, and I doubted that Jean had, either. The people looked used up, even the children, and in one group shot I saw what had made Ezra different. It was something in his eyes, like in the photo on his desk at home. There was strength in them, as if, even as a child, he could move worlds. His brothers and sisters may have sensed this, for in the photographs they seemed to hover around him.

  But they were all strangers to me. I’d never met a single one of them. Not once.

  I put the photos next to the money and returned to the safe. In a large velvet box I found some of my mother’s jewelry—not what she was wearing when she died, but the really expensive stuff, which Ezra once referred to as “fuck-you baubles,” and only brought out when he wanted to impress a man or make the guy’s wife look cheap. Mother hated to wear them, and she once told me that they made her feel like the devil’s concubine. Not that they weren’t beautiful; they were. But they, too, were tools, and never intended as anything else. I put the box aside, planning to give it to Jean. Maybe she could sell them.

  The videotapes were on the bottom, three of them, unmarked. I held them as I would a snake, and wondered briefly if I’d been wrong—that maybe there were things about a father that a son should never know.

  Why would he keep videotapes in a safe?

  A VCR and a television sat in the corner. I picked a tape at random and put it in the player. I turned on the television and pushed the play button.

  At first, there was static, then a sofa. Soft lights. Voices. I looked at the long leather couch behind me, then back at the screen. They were the same.

  “I don’t know, Ezra.” A woman’s voice, somehow familiar.

  “Humor me.” That was Ezra.

  I heard the sound of a gentle smack, a burst of girlish laughter.

  A woman’s legs, long and tan. She ran past the camera, flung herself onto the couch. She was naked, laughing, and for an instant I saw a flash of white teeth, and equally pale breasts. Then Ezra heaved into view, filling the screen. He shrank as he moved to the couch, but I heard him mumble something. Then her voice: “Well, come on, then.” Her arms above her head, face obscured. Her legs opened, the left finding the back of the curved leather couch, the right circling his waist, guiding him down.

  He collapsed onto her, buried her under his massive body; but I saw her legs, and she had the streng
th to rise up beneath him. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Like that. Fuck me like that.” And he did, slamming her, driving her down and into the yielding leather. Narrow arms escaped from beneath him, found his back, and dragged claw marks into his skin.

  Watching, I felt sick, but I could not look away. Because some part of me knew. It was the voice. The way her legs joined. That brief, horrible flash of teeth.

  I knew, and in bleak disbelief I watched my father nail my wife to the couch.

  CHAPTER 33

  The images were hammer blows. He used her, manhandled her, and her eyes, when I saw them, glowed like an animal’s. There was no office, no world; it was gone, obliterated, and I could not feel the floor that rushed up to meet my knees. My stomach clenched, and my mouth may have filled with bile, but if it did, I never tasted it. Every sense was overwhelmed by the one that I could forever do without. Sights no man should see swelled and burst like rotten fruit. My wife, on her back, then on her hands and knees. My father, hairy as any farm animal, grunting over her as if she, too, were mindless flesh, and not the wife of his only son.

  How long? The thought found me. How long had this gone on? And then, quick on its heels: How could I have missed it?

  And just when I could take no more, the screen went dead. I sagged into myself and waited for a collapse that never came. I was numb, staggered by what I’d seen and by what the sight implied. Her voice, when she spoke—it shocked the hell out of me.

  “You nailed the boards down.”

  I turned and saw her. She stood by Ezra’s desk. I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs and so had no idea how long she’d been there. She lowered the remote control to the desk. I climbed to my feet. She looked calm, but her eyes were glazed and her lips were damp.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve tried to open that damn safe?” She sat on the edge of the desk and looked at me; her face remained pale, and her voice was equally colorless. “Late at night, usually, while you slept. It was the best thing about being married to a drunk. You were always a heavy sleeper. I knew about the tapes, of course. I shouldn’t have let him do that, but he insisted. I didn’t know he kept them in the safe until it was too late.”