Mental State, page 16
Then Royce noticed an outlier. All the books near the desk were work books, except one. It jumped out at him, as if his brother were shouting, “Over here, you dumb lug!” Right up against Alex’s desk, where one would reach to the left and find just the book for a key fact or citation, sat the Guinness Book of World Records, 1979 Edition. It was as striking as if everyone in a picture were wearing tuxedos, except one guy in ratty old blue jeans.
He had been spinning slowly, like the library was in orbit around him as he divined his brother’s system, but now he froze and he squinted at the book his brother carried around for years like a toddler’s blanket. It was deliberately out of place. There was no doubt about it.
Royce pulled it from the shelf as one would a family heirloom. It was. He turned it over delicately and laid it on the desk so he could see the cover. That was it. The one Alex had his nose in at every sporting event and family outing, the one he quoted from endlessly, and the one that had become a running family joke. It wasn’t just the book, but the actual one he had as a child, all ratty and faded and dog-eared. His memory of it was nearly perfect. Big Daddy Garlits’s drag racer was right there on the cover as he remembered. The number 5.637 seconds burst into his mind. It frightened him. He found “Garlits” in the index, and there on page five-twenty-one saw his record-breaking time: the quarter mile in 5.637 seconds for a piston-engine dragster. How many times must his brother have read him that to remember it so clearly nearly four decades later? Once he pulled that book from the shelf, it was as clear to him as his own name. The book was a madeleine cake dipped in tea. It caused the past to leap forward to reveal itself, and Royce figured, Alex’s secret along with it.
Royce flipped through frantically, looking for the treasure map, looking for Alex’s message from the past. He paused at some of the pictures that reminded him of facts Alex obsessed about—the world’s longest fingernails or the longest bridge span in the world. He turned the book on its side and held it by the spine with two hands, fluttering it back and forth. But nothing dropped out.
Frustrated, he closed the book and went to the window. Scanning the view in all directions, he stopped on the white-brick house just twenty feet to the left. It jutted out in the back further than Alex’s house, so he could see down on the roof and through the window into what appeared to be a laundry or craft room. Junk was piled high. The image of the morbidly obese man who wept over losing Alex came surging back. He was the spitting image of Robert Earl Hughes. The heaviest man in the world.
Royce lunged for the book, flipped to the index, and found the name “Robert Earl Hughes”—page twenty-one. There, put firmly into the spine was a note in Alex’s hand. The date on the top was April fourth, the morning he was murdered.
Pulling the page from the book carefully, Royce held it in his hand, feeling the texture and weight. Alex had written with a fountain pen; the letters were large and bold, and the ink soaked deep into the high-grade paper. He opened it, smoothing the page out.
Roy,
I don’t have much time left, and so I’ll keep this short. If you are reading this, I’m probably dead or missing or incapacitated in some way. Stop him, Royce. He is still doing these things, still hurting people. Take care of Claire and the kids for me. Tell them all my last thoughts were of them.
Here is what I know. I’m sorry I’ve got to tell you this. They killed me because…
CHAPTER 31
February 2015
Chicago, Illinois
The grandeur of the Union League Club ballroom in Chicago seemed an ironic setting for a panel discussion on inequality in the United States. Not many reminders of the Gilded Age were left in Chicago, but this was one of them. Sitting at the dais, waiting for his turn to speak, Alex imagined robber barons like Marshall Field and Charles Tyson Yerkes sitting in this room debating their latest business strategies. The men of that era, in their bowler hats and three-piece suits, would still find the tactics of business and politics discussed today familiar. Big business still influenced regulation although the presence of women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, and the lack of cigar smoke would have been notable differences.
When the panel was done, Alex shook hands with colleagues and beelined to the bar. He drank one scotch then retired to a set of plush chairs in the corner of the lobby area with his second. There were papers and magazines strewn about on the large marble-top coffee table, and Alex leafed aimlessly through Crain’s Chicago Business and The Economist while he swirled and savored his drink. The clink of the ice, the slight smell of must in the drapes, and the bustle of business people moving around made him deeply relaxed.
He looked up to take in more of the surroundings, when he saw Judge Duc Pham push through the revolving door entrance to the club. Pham paused in the grand foyer and turned to wait for his companion. Alex was fifty feet away and partially obscured by a large weeping fig tree in an ornate bronze planter, but he could see them as they approached. Pham was with a young man, or perhaps boy, of about thirteen or fourteen. Pham looked immaculate in a highly tailored pinstriped suit that hugged his muscular physique; the boy was wearing baggy jeans and a letterman jacket with HF emblazoned on the left chest. They talked as they walked, and both were smiling and happy. Alex didn’t want to be seen, so he slouched in his chair and ducked behind a magazine. He lowered it when they passed and watched them enter the restaurant in the corner of the first floor of the club.
The first thing that popped into Alex’s head was to wonder why Pham was in town and to marvel at the coincidence of him being at the Union League Club. A quick Google search answered his first question: Pham was a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States, a group of circuit court judges responsible for making policies for the administration of U.S. courts, and it was having its annual meeting in Chicago that weekend.
But Alex felt there was something strange about seeing Pham and that boy together. The boy looked like Alex at that age, although a bit more athletic and missing the glasses and the curly hair his mother insisted he wear on the long side. Alex couldn’t help but wonder why the soon-to-be chief justice of the United States in town for high-powered meetings would be lunching with a high school freshmen or maybe even a middle schooler. There were innocent possibilities that ran through Alex’s head: perhaps he is the son of a friend, and the judge was doing a favor; perhaps the judge was involved in an official mentoring program, and this was his mentee. Before he could think of other innocuous stories, Alex started to fidget in his chair.
He found himself standing behind the fig tree, looking in the direction of the café. He couldn’t see them, and for a moment thought they might have gone to another part of the club. The scotches had worked to lower his inhibition so he went to the front desk, where a chubby man with a lazy eye told him there were no meetings of the Judicial Conference taking place at the Union League Club. Then, Alex went to the maître d’ who told him there was indeed a reservation for Pham, but that both guests had arrived. Alex walked away and could feel the stare at his back. He walked along the hallway while scanning over the planters that separated the café’s tables from the rest of the lobby area. There in the corner by the window, he spotted Pham and his guest in an animated conversation. Alex found a spot where he could stand by a pillar and be relatively unobtrusive but have clear view of their table.
The scene seemed completely innocent. Strangers would think a father and his teenage son were out for an executive lunch at their club on a nice Friday afternoon. Sure, the kid should have been in school, but father-son days like this were part of the social fabric today in a way unimaginable when Alex was a kid. The Captain would no sooner have taken him from school to go to lunch than he would have offered to buy he and his buddies beer. Times certainly had changed. But Alex knew this wasn’t that, although he wasn’t quite sure what it was yet. Pham had no children, adopted or otherwise; he was sure of that. He wanted desperately for it to be nothing more than it appeared. He hoped it for the boy, because he was that boy, and knew that despite his ability to function well in society, the costs were enormous. He hoped it for himself, as it would deeply complicate his upcoming congressional testimony. He promised to read what they wrote for him. He promised the president’s men he would lie to Congress and to the American people. He promised…His mouth went dry at even the thought.
Alex also hoped it for the country, which didn’t need to hear about an accomplished man acting this way and a president who, whether she knew or not, was nominating him to be chief justice.
The waiter delivered a martini to the judge and what looked like a Coke to the boy. Alex breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t plying him with alcohol, which was a positive development. It was unlikely the boy would pass as twenty-one, but private clubs were probably less strict about enforcing these rules, and if the waiter believed the judge to be his father, it wouldn’t have been unthinkable for the judge to order him a beer. Maybe this was nothing. Alex felt himself relax as their lunches arrived.
The boy took bites of his hamburger and Pham pushed a salad around the plate with his fork. His eyes were wide and focused on the boy. He didn’t look down at his plate. Alex gulped.
Then Pham offered the boy a sip of his martini, which the boy took. There were no other diners within twenty feet, and Pham was discreet. One sip became ten, and the judge ordered a second and third in due course. Alex fumed. He could feel his face redden and pulse quicken, and he wanted to go over to the table, grab the boy by the leather sleeve of his jacket and drag him to safety. But rage immobilized him. Rage and fear. The fear that they would do to him what they promised if he mentioned what happened to anyone.
So, he stood there shaking his head and thinking about the implications of what he was watching. But he also doubted what he was seeing. Alex tried innocent explanations but shot them all down. Still, he hoped for the best.
When he saw Pham pay the bill, Alex whispered, “Come on, go to the exit; drive the boy home.” He was trying to will them to avoid the cataclysm about to happen. They stood together and walked slowly toward the lobby, and for a moment, Alex felt a sense of relief. Maybe he was going to rape the boy somewhere else, but if they walked out that door, Alex couldn’t be sure, and he’d fly to Washington and give his fake support to the judge in good conscience. He’d lie like they said. But, if, on the other hand…
As they walked toward the center of the lobby, Pham stopped and turned to the boy, leaned forward and said something into his ear. They paused, and Alex felt his life hung in the balance. Then they turned ninety degrees and headed toward the elevator. Alex’s blood ran cold. He closed his eyes and blew a breath like a whale surfacing. Then he walked toward them. Alex walked full steam and they were standing still, so if one were watching, it would have looked like he was charging them and would have run into their backs. But in point of fact, Alex had no idea what he was going to do. He didn’t face the choice, however, because the elevator door opened and they entered. Before they turned around, Alex darted to the side toward the front desk. He wasn’t sure if he’d been seen.
The elevator’s floor indicator, an old-fashioned model that looked like half of a clock, rose without stopping to the twenty-first floor, where the club had hotel rooms that members could use. Alex found a chair within view of the elevators and collapsed into it like he’d just run a marathon. His body ached and his mind swirled. He was briefly back in school, hearing Doug panting and groaning while he thrust at him from behind, Alex yelping softly “stop…no…” which only seemed to encourage him and make Doug moan louder. He tasted Doug’s blood in his mouth and felt his semen dripping into his underwear.
Then, he was sitting at the table in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee staring at the microphone and looking down at his remarks wondering whether he would give them as written. Written not by Alex, of course, but by Bob Gerhardt and an associate he called Finny. Remarks they’d pushed across the table at Alex when they came to visit him in his office at Rockefeller.
Every time the elevator dinged, Alex looked up, but the faces were smiling and not the ones he was looking for. He sat their fretting and sweating for what seemed like hours but was actually only about thirty minutes.
Then he heard a ding and saw the boy. His face was ashen; he wore a look that Alex had worn at that age. It was like looking in a thirty-year-old mirror. The boy walked out of the elevator but was unsteady on his feet. He shuffled and looked this way and that furtively. Although it wasn’t strange looking to casual observers, Alex had seen the boy bound into the lobby a few hours before as a different kid. Yes, there was no doubt he was now and forever a completely different person. Alex had half a mind to go up to him, put his arm around his shoulders, and have a heart to heart with him. He had this same talk with Roger Havens recently, and it did him a great deal of good. His life might have been much better had he had it with someone thirty years ago. Perhaps this was just what the boy needed. But the other half of Alex’s mind, the half that told him not to intervene, to run and hide, and to pretend this never happened, prevailed. So, he stood there like Han Solo frozen in carbonite, watching the boy walk through the revolving doors and out into the street.
At that moment, Alex realized Havens was right. The sex he’d had with Doug wasn’t a “relationship” and it wasn’t even consensual. Havens called it what it was, rape. And he was still raping boys. Of course, Alex the lawyer amended his thought—allegedly raping a boy. He knew the conclusion and what he imagined were mere speculation. But Alex the victim knew them to be true. He wasn’t looking at glacial striations and imagining Viking runes—those were the marks of a predator on that boy’s face.
Alex stumbled over to the bar and ordered a double Dickel. He swallowed it in a gulp and quickly ordered another. Within minutes he was high but it only made his head spin more and his thoughts grow more paranoid and extreme. He thought about standing up on the bar and shouting to the lobby that the next chief justice was a rapist; he thought about storming the meeting of the Judicial Conference and telling Pham’s colleagues what he’d just seen; he even looked up the phone number for the senior senator from Illinois, who he thought might be interested that he would soon be asked to vote to confirm a child rapist to the highest court in the land. But instead, he called Roger Havens.
“Roger, it’s me, Alex.” His words were slurred.
“Of course. Are you okay?”
“He did it again, Roger. He fucking did it again.”
“Calm down. I can’t really understand you.” Havens heard what he said, but he wanted to hear it again.
“Pham. His holiness. I just saw him fuck a fucking kid. I’m going to be sick.”
“What did you see, Alex? How did you see this?”
Alex told him every detail. When he was done, Havens was silent. Alex wiped the sweat from his brow with a Union League napkin. He could hear Havens swallow hard.
“My God, Alex. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I…Do you think they knew?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean. Who knew?”
“The president. The vetting team. His home-state senators recommending him. Do you think they knew he was a pedophile? They couldn’t have known, could they?”
Havens went quiet.
“Roger? You still there?”
Havens’s voice rasped like he was dredging the words up from the bottom of somewhere.
“They knew, Alex. They had to know. They knew.”
Royce turned Alex’s letter over, looking for a P.S. He went through the book several times. He walked back downstairs and out onto the front porch. The sun was setting behind the Victorian mansions across the street. The sky turned from pink to purple to black. He didn’t want to admit what was staring him in the face. Alex had damning knowledge about the president’s pick for the Supreme Court and was eliminated when he didn’t endorse the nomination. This meant the deed was done by employees of the federal government, just like Royce. There were plenty of party liners in the Bureau and elsewhere in the government who would do whatever they were asked to do, even kill innocent American law professors in their living rooms. The badge flashers, the evidence planters, the spotlight rangers.
He lurched forward on the porch and emptied his stomach into the hemlock hedge. He wiped his mouth, still hunched over the chipped cast-iron railing.
Back inside, in the powder room, he splashed water on his face and rinsed his teeth. He wanted to walk down his old street in Pittsburgh, burst through the door, drag Doug into the street, and punch his face into a pulp. He wanted to walk out to the living room, collapse on the couch and sleep for a week. But he could hear the ghostly hum of the photocopier at Emory counting down, and knew the only choice was to get them before they got him. He was outmanned, outgunned, outresourced, out-everythinged.
He needed help—a front man. Someone they wouldn’t expect to do some dirty work.
CHAPTER 32
When Claire pushed through the doors leading to the cancer ward, trailed by a posse of interns and nurses, she caught sight of Royce, squatting in a chair several sizes too small, reading a picture book to a boy. Their eyes met. She barked out instructions and signed some forms before making her way over.
“Good to see you.” Her voice was warm for a change.
“Can we find a place to talk?”
“Sure, sure.” She took him by the hand and led him into a small conference room. The table was littered with half-eaten lunches of doctors called away. The two of them took seats, pulled them close, and sat face to face.
