Stephen Carter - Emperor of Ocean Park

“What gun?”

“The Judge… obtained a gun. He was…” I thought the surprises were finished, and this one seems scarcely plausible. But it is the only explanation. Uncle Mal had it completely upside down. What my father told the Colonel was the literal truth: he wanted protection. But not, as Mariah imagines, from a would-be killer. He wanted protection from a blackmailer. On the screen of my mind, the last month of the Judge’s life unscrolls. When Wainwright reappeared, my father called Jack Ziegler, and the two of them had their secret dinner. It is so easy, now, to see what favor the Judge must have asked that led his old friend and chief tempter finally to refuse him. Seeing the humor in our string of errors, I manage a laugh.

“What’s funny, Misha?”

“I know you’ll find this hard to believe, Mr. Justice, but I think my father planned to kill you. Seriously. If you didn’t leave him alone, if you kept threatening to expose him. He bought a gun, and I think he planned to shoot you with it.”

Wainwright’s eyes darken. For a grim moment, he seems to be contemplating another way the story could have ended. Then his face twists in a snarl. “So now you know what kind of man your father really was. The great Judge Oliver Garland. You say he was prepared to murder me. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. He was a monster, Misha, a soulless, selfish, arrogant monster.” Outside, another tree splits in two, the crunch loud and sudden. The gun quivers as Wainwright glances around. Then his wrathful eyes are on me again. I see now why he hasn’t killed me yet. He wants the son to suffer first for the sins of the father. And it seems to be working. “Your father is the one who got me into this mess in the first place, Msha. He’s the one who got me started. So what do you think of that?”

I say nothing. I am no longer capable of surprise where the Judge is concerned. But it is easy to see how the Judge might have enticed him. The poor boy from Tennessee trailer trash makes good. A rich wife? Perhaps the fruits of two rich decades of taking bribes, laundered through his wife’s family. Something. Too sophisticated, I am sure, for me to figure out, but the result is the same: Wallace Wainwright, the great liberal, the man of the people, got rich from fixing cases.

At least, if motive matters, my father did it for love.

“He was like a devil, your father. You have no idea how persuasive he could be! And quite thoroughly corrupt. Is that cold enough for you? Taking his orders from Jack Ziegler. Voting the way he was told. Think about that, Misha. But he was so clever that nobody knew. And when he approached me, he was very cagey, he talked his way around to it slowly… Never mind. A love of money is the root of all evil, isn’t it? I wanted to do good and do well, and your father… exploited that.”

I am about to protest that my father never took money; and then I hold my tongue, for I see it as part of his evil genius that he kept this fact from Wallace Wainwright. I will never know just how the Judge seduced the future Justice, but I notice how Wainwright’s self-pitying diatribe has caught the cadence of Washington: he took the bribe, but it was all the fault of the briber.

Wallace Wainwright seems to realize how he sounds, for he calls a halt. “We have spent too much time on memory lane, Misha. Now, the disk, if you please. Just put it on the table.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m not afraid of you. You don’t dare hurt me.” Desperation. “You saw what Jack Ziegler did to your drones.”

“Ah, yes, my drones. Good word. Drones. Yes.” A tone of pride. If I can just keep appealing to his vanity, I can keep him talking. “It’s not that easy, you know. To find drones, I mean.” That crooked smile. “I am, after all, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. You have no idea what risks I took. I had to go back to my contacts from the old days, in the Marines… Never mind. It was a risk, but that chain is broken. Yes. The drones never knew who hired them, and nobody can trace it back to me.”

That chain is broken. Perhaps Wainwright himself has removed the key link. With, say, the very gun he is holding on me.

“I see.” Just something to say. The casual admission that he, in his position, has recently murdered somebody has left me in little doubt about my own fate.

“No, you don’t see.” Reaching across the table with the gun, then drawing it back before I can figure out whether to try to grab his hand. He is unaccountably angry. The wind blows something against the porch. “You don’t agree. You think if you were in my position you would have made a different choice.”

“I just know the choice you made.”

Without warning, Wainwright explodes. “You’re judging me! I don’t believe this. You’re judging me! How dare you! You’re even worse than your father!” He gestures wildly with his gun hand, which gets my adrenaline pumping harder. “You probably think I should have done something noble, like turning myself in. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you have any idea who I am? For the last decade, I’ve been the only hope, do you realize that? The Constitution is dying, in case you didn’t notice. No. It’s being murdered. It’s fine for you to cast stones, you sit in your office and write articles that nobody reads. I’m the one who’s been up there fighting for freedom and equality in this reactionary age! I’ve been leading a whole wing of the Supreme Court!” His voice softens. “And they needed me, Misha. They did. The work we’ve done up there for justice is too important to let it be derailed by… by something like this. I couldn’t quit, Misha. Even if Jack Ziegler would have let me go, I didn’t have the right. The Court needed me. The nation needed me. Yes, all right, I’m not a saint, I made some compromises a long time ago, I know that. But the issues matter, too! If I had left the Court, if my wing had lost its leader, the law would be inestimably worse. Don’t you see that?”

Yes, I see it. I am dizzied by his hypocrisy, but I see it. Temptation, temptation: Satan never changes.

“So you… couldn’t resign.”

“No, I couldn’t. This was bigger than me. My fate didn’t matter, only the issues. It was a calling, Misha, the fight for justice, and I had no choice but to heed it. The Court needed me. To preserve some vestige, however small, of decency and goodness up there. People believe in the Court. If I had allowed scandal to damage the image of the Court, real people would have been hurt.” He is back to the beginning and seems exhausted by his own argument. “Real people,” he says again.

“I see.”

“Do you, Misha?” Waving the gun again. “I wish I could fight on, I really do. But I’m tired, Misha. I’m so tired.” A sigh. “Now, please, Misha, give me what I came for.”

Still reeling from his diatribe, I muster a final bit of pluck: “And then what?” When he says nothing, I say what I am thinking: “You didn’t just come here for the disk. You came here to kill me.”

“True. I did. I won’t lie about that. I wish there were another way. But, Misha, you still have a choice to make. I don’t want you to suffer unnecessarily. Your death can be swift and painless, a bullet in the back of the head, or it can take time-if I shoot, say, your knees first, then your elbows, then maybe your groin. Hurts like hell but won’t kill you for a while.” He gestures with the gun. “Now, give me the disk.”

“No.”

“I killed people in Vietnam. I know how to use a gun, and I am not afraid to do it.” I remember the photo in his office, a much younger Wainwright in Marine dress uniform. I have no doubts.

“You might be willing to shoot me,” I try, “but you won’t do it in the house, because there’s too much chance of leaving some forensic evidence.”