The King of Lies

  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.

  I dug my nails into the white, rough meat of the cut ends and lifted. The boards rose easily. Beneath them, I found a safe. I should not have been surprised—my father was a secretive man—and yet I stared at it for a long time.

  It was long and narrow, set between the floor joists. Its front was brushed metal, with a numeric keypad on the right side. I settled onto my knees, considering this new problem. Should I tell Mills? Not yet, I decided. Not without knowing its secrets.

  So I tried to open it. I guessed at the combination. I tried every birthday in the family and every Social Security number, too. I tried the date Ezra passed the bar and the date he married my mother. I tried phone numbers, then I ran everything backward. I wasted half an hour staring at the safe and punching buttons; then I beat on it with my fists. I hit hard. I tore skin. It was that much like my father—hidden, silent, and unbreakable.

  Eventually, I rocked away from the hard metal. I wedged the boards back into place and straightened the rug. I studied the scene critically. The lump under the rug remained, small but visible. I stepped on it. The creak was audible.

  I went downstairs to the supply closet. On the top shelf I found the claw hammer and nails we used to hang pictures and diplomas. The nails were too small to be of use, but on the back of the shelf I found a half box of ten-penny nails—big, heavy brutes, like you’d use to nail a coffin shut. I grabbed a handful. Upstairs, I drove four of them into the loose boards, two in each one. The hammer was loud, and I swung it a few times too many, scarring the boards when I missed. Two of the nails went in straight and two bent as I drove them; I pounded them flat. When I replaced the rug there was no discernible lump. I stepped on the boards. Silence.

  I put the hammer and extra nails on top of Ezra’s bookshelf and dropped wearily to the couch. It was deep. “Sleeps one, screws two,” Ezra
once said, and I’d found that joke funny. Now it was just hard and cold, so I climbed wearily to my feet. Back in my car, I swiped at my face with a shirtsleeve. I was spent and shaky, and blamed it on the hangover; but deep down I wondered if I was coming apart. I turned on the air conditioner and laid my forehead against the hardness of the steering wheel. I breathed in and I breathed out, and after awhile I straightened. I needed to do something, needed to move; so I put the car in drive and pulled into thin traffic.

  It was time to see Jean.

  You could always hear the trains coming at her house. She lived in the poor part of town, next to the tracks, in a house that time had not spared. It was small, white, and dirty, with a covered front porch and green metal rockers like the blacks used to have when we were kids. A rusty oil tank leaned against the clapboards, and once-bright curtains stirred in the fitful breeze that passed by her open windows. I used to be welcome there. We’d drink beer in the shade of the porch and imagine what it must be like to grow up poor. It wasn’t hard; kudzu grew over the fence and there was a crack house a block away.

  The trains came by about five times a day, so close that you felt the vibrations in your chest, deep and out of tune with your heart; and the whistle, when it blew, was so loud, you couldn’t hear a scream if it came from your own throat. The train gave the air a physical presence, so that if you spread your arms wide enough, it might push you down.

  I got out of the car and looked back up the street. Tiny houses settled in silence, and a dog on a chain walked small circles in the dirt of the nearest yard. It’s a mean street, I thought, and crossed to my sister’s house. The steps sagged under me and there was dirt on the porch. A musty smell wafted from the open window, and I saw shadowed humps beyond. I knocked at the screen door, sensed movement, and heard a woman’s voice. “Yeah, yeah. Coming.”

  The door opened and Alex Shiften blew smoke at me. She leaned against the jamb and looked beyond me. “It’s you,” she said.

  Alex was the most purely physical person I’d ever met. She wore cutoffs and a tank top with no bra. She was long and lean, with wide shoulders and well-defined arms. She was intense, focused, and I thought she could probably kick my ass. I knew she’d like to try.

  “Hello, Alex,” I said.

  “What do you want?” she responded, finally meeting my eyes, cigarette dangling from her lips. Her hair was blond and cropped above broad cheekbones and narrow, tired-looking eyes. She had five rings in her right ear and wore thick black frames with no glass in them. Beyond naked antagonism, her eyes held nothing for me.

  “I’m looking for Jean.”

  “Yeah, no shit. But Jean’s gone.” She started to edge back inside, her hand eager on the door.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex answered. “Sometimes she just drives.”

  “Where?”

  She moved back onto the porch, crowding me backward. “I’m not her keeper. She comes and goes. When we want to be together, we are; otherwise, I don’t hassle her. That’s free advice.”

  “Her car’s here,” I stated.

  “She took mine.”

  Looking at her, I wanted a cigarette, so I asked for one. “I’m all out,” she said, and my eyes fell to the pack wedged into her front pocket. Her eyes challenged me.

  “You don’t much care for me, do you?” I asked.

  Her voice didn’t change. “Nothing personal.”

  “What, then?” Alex had been around for almost two years; I’d seen her maybe five times. Jean would not talk about her, not where she came from, not what she’d done with her twenty-odd years. All I knew was where they’d met, and that raised some serious questions.

  She studied me and flicked her cigarette into the bare dirt yard. “You’re bad for Jean,” she said. “I won’t have it.”

  Her words stunned me. “I’m bad for Jean?”

  “That’s right.” She inched closer. “You remind Jean of bad times. With you around, she can’t let go. You drag her down.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, and gestured around me, taking in everything, including Alex. “I remind her of happy times. Before all this. Jean needs me. I’m her past. Her family, damn it.”

  “Jean doesn’t look at you and see happiness. She sees weakness. That’s what you bring to the table. She sees you and remembers all the crap that went down in the pile of bricks you grew up in. The years she spent choking on your father’s bullshit.” Alex stepped closer. She smelled of sweat and cigarettes. I backed away again, hating myself for it. She lowered her voice. “Women are worthless. Women are weak.”

  I knew what she was doing and felt my throat tighten. It was Ezra’s voice. His words.

  “Fucking and sucking,” she continued. “Isn’t that what he would say? Huh? Beyond housekeeping, women are good for two things. How do you think that made Jean feel? She was ten the first time she heard him say that. Ten years old, Work. A child.”

  I couldn’t respond. He’d said that only once, to my knowledge, but once was enough. They are not words a child easily forgets.

  “Do you agree with him, Work? Are you your daddy’s boy?” She paused and leaned into me. “Your father was a misogynistic bastard. You remind Jean of that, and of your mother; of how she took it and acted like Jean should, too.”

  “Jean loved our mother,” I shot back, holding my ground. “Don’t try and twist that around.” It was a weak statement and I knew it. I could not defend my father and did not understand why I felt compelled to do so.

  Alex continued, firing words at me like spit. “You’re a stone around her neck, Work. Plain and simple.”

  “That’s you talking,” I said.

  “Nope.” Her speech was as flat as her gaze, devoid of doubt or question. I looked around the squalid porch but found no help, just dead plants and a porch swing, where, I imagined, Alex filled my sister with lies and hate.

  “What have you been telling her?” I demanded.

  “You see? There’s the problem. I don’t need to tell her. She’s smart enough to figure it out.”

  “I know she’s smart,” I said.

  “You don’t act like it. You pity her. You condescend.”

  “I do not.”

  “I won’t have it,” she spat out, as if I’d interrupted her.

  “I’ve taken her beyond all that. I’ve made her strong, given her something, and I won’t have you fucking it up.”

  “I do not condescend to my sister,” I almost shouted. “I care for her. She needs me.”

  “Denial won’t change fact, and she needs you like a hole in the head. You’re arrogant, like your father; she sees that. You presume to know what she needs, as if you could ever understand, but here’s the truth of it: You don’t know the first thing about who and what your sister is.”

  “And you do, is that it? You know who my sister is? What she needs?” My voice was up. Anger moved in me and it felt good. Here was the enemy. Something I could see and touch.

  “Yeah. That’s right,” she said. “I absolutely do.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Not what you want. Not empty dreams and illusions. Not a husband, a station wagon, and a weekly bridge club. Not the goddamn American dream. That package already sucked her dry.”

  I stared at her glittering eyes and wanted to jam my fingers in them; they saw too clearly how much I was like my father. I’d never trusted Jean to find her own way, a brutal truth, and the fact of that, thrown so bluntly in my face by this woman I barely knew, drained me.

  “Are you sleeping with my sister?” I asked.

  “You know something, Work, fuck you. I don’t need to explain myself. Jean and I are together now. We know what we want, and you’re not part of the equation.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “Why are you here?”

  “Q and A is over, asshole. I want you out of here.”

  “What do you want with my sister?” I shot back. She clenched her fis
ts at her sides and I saw the bunch and play of muscles under her skin. Blood suffused her neck. She twisted her lower jaw.

  “You need to leave,” she said.

  “Jean owns this house.”

  “And I live in it! Now get the hell off my porch.”

  “Not until I talk to Jean,” I said, and crossed my arms. “I’ll wait.” Alex stiffened, but I refused to back down. I’d been pushed around too much in the past twenty-four hours. I wanted my sister, needed to know that she was all right. I needed her to understand that I was there for her, that I always would be. Indecision fluttered on Alex’s face. Then there was movement behind her, and the screen door swung open. Jean stepped onto the porch. I stared dumbly.

  Her face was pale and puffy under tousled hair. Red rimmed her eyes and I saw that they were swollen.

  “Just leave, Work,” she said. “Just go home.”

  Then she turned and was gone, swallowed by the musty house. Alex grinned in bright triumph, then slammed the door in my face. I put my hands to the wood, then let them fall to my sides, where they twitched. I saw Jean’s face; it hung in the air like smoke. There was grief there, and pity, a dread finality.

  In numb disbelief, I returned to my car, where I swayed, an emotional cripple. I stared at the house and its dirt yard and heard the whistle of an approaching train. I held my breath to keep from screaming; then all was wind and thunder.

  CHAPTER 7

  I’d always heard about the last laugh, mostly from Ezra. I never knew that the last laugh could be something real, a thing you could remember and miss.

  I could still hear my sister’s laugh. It had always been a good one, even when she didn’t quite get the joke. Usually soft, it had a peculiar hiccup in the middle. Her lips signaled it with a twitch; then her small white teeth appeared briefly, as if she were nervous; but sometimes it boomed and she snorted through her nose. Those laughs were rare. I loved them, mainly because she could never stop once she started, and tears would track silver down her face. Once, when we were kids, she laughed so hard, she blew a snot bubble with her nose, and we both laughed until we thought we might die for lack of air. It was the single best laugh of my life. That was twenty-five years ago.