John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

He slipped into the shoulder harness, pulled on a pair of thin, black leather gloves, and then, in a familiar fashion, practiced removing the weapon rapidly once or twice. When Murphy was satisfied that his old skills were as sharp as ever, he set out. A small breeze swirled some debris around his feet as he walked. Just enough light remained in the day for him to find a convenient shadow across from O’Connell’s building, and as he slid his back up against a brick wall, he saw the first streetlights blink on. He hoped he wouldn’t have to stand there too long, but he was patient and practiced at the art of waiting.

Scott felt a rush of self-congratulatory pride.

He had already received a message on his answering machine from Ashley, who had successfully followed his maze of directions and linked up with Catherine in Vermont. He was delighted with the way things had gone so far.

The football boys had returned after unloading Ashley’s things into a self-storage facility in Medford. Scott had ascertained that, as he’d suspected, a fellow fitting O’Connell’s description had indeed asked some questions before giving a transparently phony story and disappearing down the street. But he’d been left clutching air, Scott thought. Grabbing at a phantom. All his answers would lead nowhere.

“Didn’t see this one coming, did you, you son of a bitch?” he said out loud.

He was standing in the small living room of his house, and he broke into a small jig on the worn Oriental carpet. After a second, he picked up the remote control that operated his stereo and punched buttons until Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” crashed through the speakers.

When Ashley had been little, he’d taught her the old twenties’ phrase cut a rug for dancing, so that she would come to him when he was working and interrupt him by asking, “Can we go cut a rug?” and the two of them would put on his old sixties’ music and he would show her the Frug and the Swim and even the Freddy, which was, to his adult mind, the most ridiculous series of motions ever created probably in the entire history of the world. She would giggle and imitate him until she would tumble to the floor with childish peals of laughter. But even then, Ashley had owned a kind of grace of movement that astonished him. There was never anything clumsy or stumbling about any step Ashley took; to his mind, it was always a ballet. He knew that he was smitten in the way that fathers with daughters often are, but he’d applied his critical, academic approach to his perceptions and come away reinforced with the notion that nothing else could ever be as beautiful as his own child.

Scott breathed out. He couldn’t imagine how Michael O’Connell would ever guess that she was in Vermont. Now it was simply a matter of letting some time pass, designing a new set of studies in a different city, then having Ashley pick up more or less where she had left off. A minor setback, a six-month delay, but bigger trouble averted.

Scott picked up his head and looked around the living room.

He felt suddenly alone and wished there was someone that he could share his feelings of elation with. None of his current crop of go-to-dinner-and-have-occasional-sex dates really fit the bill. His real friends at the college were truly professional in nature, and he doubted that any of them would understand. Not for one instant.

He frowned. The only person that he had really shared with was Sally. And he wasn’t about to call her. Not at that moment.

A wave of black resentment passed through him.

She had left him to take up with Hope. It had been abrupt. Sudden. A collection of bags packed and waiting in the hallway while he tried to think of the right thing to say, knowing that there wasn’t one. He had known she was unhappy. He had known she was unfulfilled and filled with doubts. But he’d assumed these things were about her career, or perhaps the way looking at middle age becomes frightening, or maybe even boredom with the complacent academic, liberal world that they occupied together. All these things he could wrap his imagination around, discuss, assess, comprehend. What he couldn’t understand was how everything that they’d once known could suddenly be a lie.

For a moment, he imagined Sally in bed with Hope. What can she give her that I didn’t? he demanded of himself, then, just as quickly, realized that that was an extraordinarily dangerous question to ask. He didn’t want to know that particular answer.

He shook his head. The marriage was a lie, he thought. The I do s and I love you s and Let’s make a life together were all lies. The only true thing that came out of it was Ashley, and he was even unsure about that. When we conceived her, did she love me? When she carried her, did she love me? When she was born, did Sally know then it was all a lie? Did it come on suddenly? Or was it something she knew all along, and as she was busy lying to herself? He put his head down for an instant, flooded with images. Ashley playing at the seashore. Ashley going to kindergarten. Ashley making him a card with flowers drawn all over it for Father’s Day. He still had that taped to the wall of his office. Did Sally know, during all those moments? At Christmas and on birthdays? At Halloween parties and Easter egg hunts? He did not know, but he did understand that the détente between them after the divorce was a lie, too, but an important one to protect Ashley. She was always seen as the fragile one, the one with something to lose. Somewhere in all those days, months, and years together, Scott and Sally had already lost whatever it was that they were going to lose.

He repeated to himself, She’s safe now.

Scott went to a small cabinet and took out a bottle of Scotch. He poured himself a stiff drink, took a sip, let the bitter amber liquid slide slowly down his throat, then raised his glass in a mock, solitary toast: “To us. To all of us. Whatever the hell that means.”

Michael O’Connell, too, was thinking about love. He was at a bar and had dropped a shot glass of Scotch into a mug of beer, making a boilermaker, a drink designed to dull the senses. He could feel himself seething within and realized that no drug and no drink would be sufficient to cover up the tension building inside him. No matter how much he drank, he was resigned to a nasty sobriety.

He stared at the mug in front of him, closed his eyes, and allowed rage to reverberate inside him, pinging off all the walls of his heart and imagination. He did not like being outmaneuvered or outthought or out-anythinged for that matter, and punishing the people who had done it was his immediate number-one priority. He was angry with himself for believing that the modest Internet troubles he’d already delivered to them would be adequate. Ashley’s family needed a far harsher series of lessons. They had cheated him out of something he was owed.

The more O’Connell raged at the indignity and insult to him, the more he found himself picturing Ashley. He imagined her hair, falling in red-blond strands to her shoulders, perfect, soft. He could draw in his mind’s eye every detail of her face, shading it like an artist, finding a smile for him on the lips, an invitation in the eyes. His thoughts cascaded down her body, measuring every curve, the sensuousness of her breasts, the subtle arc to her hips. He could imagine her legs stretched out beside him, and when he looked up into the dim light of the bar, he could sense himself getting aroused. He shifted on his barstool and thought that Ashley was ideal, except that she wasn’t because she had engineered this slap across his face. A blow to his heart. And as the liquor loosened his feelings, he could sense his reply; no caress, no gentle probing, he thought coldly. Hurt her, the way she’d hurt him. It was the only way to make her understand completely how much he loved her.