A Person of Interest (54 page)

“Kamikaze,”
Lee said.

“A rare case where the Japanese word is required, for us Americans to get Whitehead’s meaning. He was saving that one, in case enemies came to the door.”

The cabin in fact was so wondrously full of evidence against Whitehead—Lee remembered its dizzying riot of objects, its stacks of containers of the jagged and shiny, the disassembled and coiled, a mad magpie’s overstuffed nest—that Morrison and his colleagues had decided to peel the whole thing from foundation to shingles off the lot in one piece, and to scoop out the cellar in its bowl of dirt, and ship them east to the FBI lab without a mote of dust altered. Lee thought of his lost cap, entombed with the evidence, traveling on a flatbed truck thousands of miles under state police escort. Another scrap of his life that was forever entangled, through error and chance. Since the announcement of Whitehead’s arrest, thirty-six hours before, Sippston had been overtaken by press, by fleets of TV trucks with satellite stalks straining toward the gray sky, by reporters in unbroken-in snow boots running
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races on foot or in the rental cars that a shortage produced by demand had obliged them to share with their fiercest competitors, rushing from one spurious, self-declared Marjorie-like intimate to another (but not to the only authentic one, Marjorie; she wasn’t talking, on the advice of a lawyer), from the federal building four counties away to the foot of the road Lee had turned down with Marjorie eons before, and which now was a sentries’ encampment, protecting the evidence mother lode being mined from that small snowy clearing to which Lee had somehow ascended, not just once but twice. Their frantic movements interested Lee only insofar as they meant that the roads were clear enough for him to leave. All the roads weren’t just plowed but restored to wet asphalt by warm temperatures. Lee had persuaded two of Morrison’s lesser colleagues to drive to the library—staked out by reporters who still hoped for Marjorie—and caravan back with his Nissan. And there it sat now, in the slush-streaming lot, some vestigial snow crust still adhered to its roof like a crown in reward for its valiance. It had waited for Lee through his amazing ordeal, and would now take him home.

When Morrison heard he was leaving, he’d come to have room-service breakfast with him. It was a lively, enjoyable breakfast, despite the overcooked eggs in their oil slick of grease, and as he and Morrison talked, Lee almost felt he’d been reunited with a countryman, or a soldier with whom he had served, or a colleague with whom he’d been students, a long time ago. “I can think of a lot of reporters who’d give their right arms to hear how you helped nab him,” Morrison added as he scraped his plate clean. Then his gaze met Lee’s with new gravity. “Lee, I realize you might want to talk to the press, but I’m asking you please to hold off. Wait until he’s been tried. Understand, it’s not over, it’s only beginning. It’s critical we not jeopardize our case against Whitehead—”

“I don’t want my name mixed up in it at all,” Lee broke in, scraping his own plate. He was unusually hungry. “Please don’t ever mention me in this case again, Jim, if I could ask you this favor. Never say I was here.”

Morrison put down his fork. “You helped capture the Brain Bomber, Lee. You’d never want people to know that?” Lee remembered his peroration on the hospital sidewalk, the day Hendley was bombed. “I’ve learned my lesson, with TV and these things. I’m really not interested. I’d rather stay a short poppy, if you
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know what I mean.” He felt Morrison’s thoughtful eyes on him as he peeled back the plastic membrane on his last jelly packet and applied the clear purple substance to his last piece of toast. Then Morrison pushed himself away from the table.

“Before you go, I’ve got something for you,” he said. “Back in a minute.”

When he returned, he was holding a manila file folder, like the one from which he’d taken the list of Lee’s mail the first time he’d come to Lee’s home. “Of everything from your house, this was the only item that contained the name Gaither, back when we thought the name Gaither might be a real lead. So I had it with me because it seemed like it might be important, and then I still had it with me when we realized it was completely unimportant, and I’ve been on the move ever since.” Morrison paused, and Lee put down his toast and met the other man’s gaze, and for the first time in their acquaintanceship—could Lee call it a friendship?—he saw Morrison’s eyes seem to search, beneath the noble Neanderthal shelf of his brow, for some place of concealment, some refuge in which to recompose the generally unwavering beam that they cast. But in the next instant, the recomposure was effected, and Morrison looked at Lee without hesitation, but also with acknowledgment. “There’s a bureaucratic process you go through, a formal process, to reclaim possessions. It can be slow. And since we happen to be here together . . .” He finished the sentence by holding out the fi le folder. Lee cleared aside his plate and cutlery and wiped his hands on a napkin before taking it. He didn’t need to open it to know what it contained, but he did anyway. Aileen’s letter to him.

“Thank you, Jim,” he said, and found that though he’d meant to go on, a sort of valve in his throat seemed to close, a physical punctua-tion mark that didn’t allow for additional words, and so he didn’t attempt any.

“It’s been a pleasure to know you, Professor.”

“Please, just Lee,” Lee reminded him, finding his voice, as they shook a last time.

Driving again, his restlessness wasn’t the sort that he usually suffered while on the road, of thinking constantly about when to stop for a stretch or to use the toilet. An effervescent agitation bubbled up from
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his gut, constricting his rib cage in such a close imitation of fear it took a while to realize he in fact felt unbearable eagerness, straining him forward. The past five weeks kept returning to him in a fractured kalei-doscope form; he saw Emma Stiles recoiling, and Peter Littell’s shifty gaze of distaste, Sondra’s injured coldness, his neighbor with the baby on her hip and contempt in her eyes. And somehow this took him, by way of a shudder of realized negligence, to his house and its punctured window. He had felt that his place in the world was unsteady and worthless, a perch best abandoned and, more than that, not even his.

But a peculiar sensation of ownership was overtaking him now, that was directed toward not just his vandalized house, but his life.

He still couldn’t break the speed limit, but haste imbued all of his actions, and back in the limbo of a rest-stop McDonald’s he even tried to wolf down his burger, without much success. All her life Esther had been a fast eater, dispatching her meals in a fraction of the time that Lee took, not from gluttony but a chilly efficiency that let her push back from the family table as soon as she could. Esther’s manner of eating had horrified Lee. “Slow down, honey,” he had implored. “No one’s going to take it away from you!”

“The way you eat makes Daddy feel like we’re poor,” Aileen commented once.

“Bullshit!” Lee replied angrily, surprising his aged reflection in his car’s dirty windshield. As had been the case years before, the observation angered him in direct proportion to its accuracy. The burger was thrust back into its bag, only halfway consumed.

Perhaps love can’t surrender to loss, but at least in that tireless rebellion it recognizes itself. Before losing Aileen, Lee had not understood that her merciless knowledge of him was a rare antidote to aloneness that he would only be privileged with once. Since her death he’d grown more and more able to cherish the aspects of their marriage he had once found intolerable, and he couldn’t help but wonder, as if she were not only still alive but still married to him, if she wasn’t having the same change of heart. Whether or not, he found her wonderfully willing to restage their old arguments, as he crawled across their daughter’s Colorado and then nobody’s Kansas and even blander Missouri, hardly aware of how long the drive took, or how little the landscape varied, now that all the topographic events of the West were
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behind him. He knew that the refreshed vividness of her ghost was the product of different infusions, but mostly the absence of Gaither—his having been slain, finally, in Lee’s mind. Lee was able to admit, with a dread that was bracing, because brave, that the failure of his marriage to Aileen hadn’t been Gaither’s doing. It was Lee’s fault alone.

Because he’d felt so companioned while driving, at first it didn’t seem completely strange, as he cautiously pulled up in front of his house in the gathering twilight, to see that his front window had been closed with a sheet of plywood. Aileen had always been good at rough practical things, like constructing a trellis or unclogging the toilet. But Aileen was also dead, Lee reminded himself, as with a rush of trepidation he turned in to his driveway and returned to the sullied remains of his life.

The inside of his garage, with its exposed two-by-fours and plasterboard and the Mower of the Ages against the back wall, was almost poignant in its ignorant sameness. But when Lee entered the actual house, pushing off his shoes by habit to leave on the mat, he was conscious of difference. He smelled a persistence of cigarette smoke.

Otherwise there was a baffling cleanness, to surfaces and the carpet. Lee’s telephone notepad was turned to a fresh page and centered on the kitchen table:

I came as soon as I could: got some adjunct to proctor my fi -

nals, got here in time to stop your local hoodlums from turning
your place into their private clubhouse. And who got the ticket
for trespassing? ME. Cleaned up what I could, patched your
window. Hope to God you’re all right. At the Holiday Inn next to
campus.—FF

An arrow bisected the rest of the page, pointing toward where a picture postcard lay in careful alignment just offshore of the notepad.

The photograph showed a hideous bird. Chicken-beaked and bald-headed, with parched ridges of flesh dangling down where a chin might have been, and a small, cunning eye. The distressing head poked from what looked like a white ermine collar. The rest of the bird wore Grim Reaper attire, a dusty black enrobement like a funeral hot-air balloon around the implied skeleton hanging down from that head, the full effect reminiscent of portraits of Elizabeth I. He was thinking
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all this—ugly bird, Queen Elizabeth choked by that huge wheel of lace—and also digesting the words printed under the picture—andean condor
largest flying bird in the world
—but really he was hesitating at a perilous threshold, hand extended, heart stilled in his chest, both lungs empty and limp like the condor’s weird wattles, because he knew he couldn’t bear the disappointment if it wasn’t from her.

He wanted a beer, to give strength, but this was so pitiful that with a reckless exertion of fingers he flipped the card over.

Dear Daddy

Lee dropped into a chair and devoured the postcard. He read with such greed he’d seen all of the words several times before having any idea what they said.

Dear Daddy,

You’ll never believe where I am: Patagonia. We are saving the
condor, I’ll explain it all later. A tourist came here with a copy of
TIME
and I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. When the tour leaves I’ll get a
ride out, then a bus, flight from Santiago, layovers Houston & Chicago, I should be there 5:30 pm 6/14 pick me up if you can but if
not it’s ok.

She’d been running out of space, but she managed
I love you,

Esther

When he telephoned the Holiday Inn, tears were cresting the rims of his eyes. “Frank?” he said. “Frank, I’m home.”

“I got your mailbox back up just in time,” said Fasano. “You saw the card, right? She’s a good kid, Esther. But half Gypsy, not sure how that happened. Christ, say you’re hungry. I came all the way here, and I’m still eating dinner all by my damn self.” When he and Fasano went for sentimental, tough steaks and cheap purple wine at the Wagon Wheel, the bartender momentarily paused
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in his labors and gave Lee a long stare, as if to say to everyone who was watching that he wasn’t going to make a big scene, but that he hadn’t been fooled. The waitress who served them was tight-lipped and carelessly hostile with glasses and plates, and kept her gaze slanted away. The other patrons were momentarily paralyzed and then fervid in conversation with one another, putting their heads close together.

But no one came to their table with squared shoulders and hot coals for eyes, as the young mother had come to Lee’s door, and beneath the superficial opprobrium was a sense of excitement, as if everyone hoped Lee would stay a long time, and drink heavily, and do something bizarre, so that the story would be even more singular when told to a person who hadn’t been there.

So this is notoriety, Lee thought. He’d become untouchable in every sense of the word. Not just at the Wagon Wheel but everywhere in town he was shunned—looked away from as if his face were a male Medusa’s, while at the same time cold gazes were flung at his back—

and surrounded by a sphere of silence, so that even in the loquacious grocery line all the shoppers for ten yards around were struck mute.

But to the same extent that people found him repulsive, they left him alone. Whitehead’s arrest hadn’t dispelled the suspicion that hung around Lee, but the suspicion had altered in texture. Every assertion that Lee must have been “somehow mixed up” in the Brain Bomber’s crimes was countered by the uncertain notion of Lee’s having been somehow mixed up in his capture. Had Lee turned state’s evidence, winning immunity for his share of the guilt? Or had Lee been under-cover on the FBI side all along? Whatever the answer, to his neighbors and his fellow townspeople and even some of his colleagues, Lee was now a completely ambiguous person, and if no one felt able to judge him, no one wanted to absolve him either.