{"product_id":"the-emperor-of-ocean-park-isbn-9780375712920","title":"The Emperor of Ocean Park","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e•\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e INSPIRATION FOR THE MGM+ ORIGINAL SERIES \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e• \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eONE OF \u003ci\u003eTIME MAGAZINE\u003c\/i\u003e'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • In his triumphant fictional debut, Stephen Carter combines a large-scale, riveting   novel of suspense with the saga of a unique family.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eThe Emperor of Ocean Park is   set in two  privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the Eastern   seabord—families who summer at Martha’s Vineyard—and the inner circle of an Ivy League   law school.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Beautifully written and cleverly plotted. A rich, complex family saga, one deftly woven through a fine legal thriller.” —John Grisham\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Talcott Garland is a successful law professor, devoted father, and   husband of a beautiful and ambitious woman, whose future desires may threaten the   family he holds so dear.  When Talcott’s father,  Judge Oliver Garland, a disgraced   former Supreme Court nominee, is found dead under suspicioius circumstances, Talcott   wonders if he may have been murdered. Guided by the elements of a mysterious puzzle   that his father left,  Talcott must risk his marriage, his career and even his life   in his quest for justice. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuperbly written and filled with memorable characters,   \u003cb\u003eThe Emperor of Ocean Park\u003c\/b\u003e is both a stunning literary achievement and  a grand literary   entertainment.“Beautifully written and cleverly plotted. A rich, complex family saga, one deftly  woven through a fine legal thriller.” \u003ci\u003e--\u003c\/i\u003eJohn Grisham\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Rich, rewarding and compelling....  Transports readers into a different world and creates characters that resonate long  after you’ve finished it.”  \u003ci\u003e--USA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Full of energy...high-spirited and fleet  of foot.... This novel...lives on the page.... It’s not much of an exaggeration to  think that in Stephen Carter the black upper class has found its Dreiser.” \u003ci\u003e-- The  New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A remarkable debut novel.... A rare look into the world  of wealthy and established black families.... One is at a loss to name another book...that  has sought to convey, with such clarity, such depth of understanding or such cultural  analysis, the uniqueness of this experience.”  \u003ci\u003e--Los Angeles Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A  thrilling entertainment.” \u003ci\u003e--Newsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Rich, rewarding and compelling.... Transports  readers into a different world and creates characters that resonate long after you’ve  finished it.”  --\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A delightful, sprawling, gracefully written, imaginative  work, with sharply delineated characters who dwell in a fully realized narrative  world.” --\u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A dense, dark legal thriller.... Talcott’s  clear-eyed observations of his peers, both white and black, give \u003cb\u003eEmperor\u003c\/b\u003e a social  conscience that most books of its ilk lack.” --\u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Closely observed, often affecting....  Written with easy authority...nimble...satiric.... Persuasive.” --\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A thriller as heady as it is hefty.... Using...wry descriptions of place, power  and privilege, Carter keeps attitude spinning.... With \u003cb\u003eEmperor\u003c\/b\u003e, Carter fills the  gap between intrigue and intelligence.” --\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Carter writes powerfully about  such virtues as love, faith and forgiveness...and offers a strong commentary on race  as seen through the relationships between his characters.” --\u003ci\u003ePhiladelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “An admirable debut.... Mr. Carter’s storytelling skills are impressive.” --\u003ci\u003eWall  Street Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003cb\u003eThe Emperor of Ocean Park\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis an outstanding work of fiction....  Masterfully developed.... A gripping story.” --Newark\u003ci\u003e Sunday Star-Ledger\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[Carter]  has shed an unblinking eye on an area of race and culture conspicuously absent in  popular fiction.” --\u003ci\u003eMiami Herald\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A light thriller for the beach; a wicked satire  of academic politics; a stinging exposé of the judicial confirmation process; a trenchant  analysis of racial progress in America.” --\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003eStephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He is the author of seven acclaimed nonfiction books, including\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Culture of Disbelief\u003c\/b\u003e and\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eCivility\u003c\/b\u003e. He lives with his wife and children near New Haven, Connecticut.PROLOGUE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE VINEYARD HOUSE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen my father finally died, he left the Redskins tickets to my brother, the house on Shepard Street to my sister, and the house on the Vineyard to me. The football tickets, of course, were the most valuable item in the estate, but then Addison was always the biggest favorite and the biggest fan, the only one of the children who came close to sharing my father's obsession, as well as the only one of us actually on speaking terms with my father the last time he drew his will. Addison is a gem, if you don't mind the religious nonsense, but Mariah and I have not been close in the years since I joined the enemy, as she puts it, which is why my father bequeathed us houses four hundred miles apart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was glad to have the Vineyard house, a tidy little Victorian on Ocean Park in the town of Oak Bluffs, with lots of frilly carpenter's Gothic along the sagging porch and a lovely morning view of the white band shell set amidst a vast sea of smooth green grass and outlined against a vaster sea of bright blue water. My parents liked to tell how they bought the house for a song back in the sixties, when Martha's Vineyard, and the black middle-class colony that summers there, were still smart and secret. Lately, in my father's oft-repeated view, the Vineyard had tumbled downhill, for it was crowded and noisy and, besides, they let everyone in now, by which he meant black people less well off than we. There were too many new houses going up, he would moan, many of them despoiling the roads and woods near the best beaches. There were even condominiums, of all things, especially near Edgartown, which he could not understand, because the southern part of the island is what he always called Kennedy country, the land where rich white vacationers and their bratty children congregate, and a part-angry, part-jealous article of my father's faith held that white people allow the members of what he liked to call the darker nation to swarm and crowd while keeping the open spaces for themselves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd yet, amidst all the clamor, the Vineyard house is a small marvel. I loved it as a child and love it more now. Every room, every dark wooden stair, every window whispers its secret share of memories. As a child, I broke an ankle and a wrist in a fall from the gabled roof outside the master bedroom; now, more than thirty years after, I no longer recall why I thought it would be fun to climb there. Two summers later, as I wandered the house in post-midnight darkness, searching for a drink of water, an odd mewling sound dropped me into a crouch on the landing, whence, a week or so shy of my tenth birthday, I peered through the balustrade and thus caught my first stimulating glimpse of the primal mystery of the adult world. I saw my brother, Addison, four years older than I, tussling with our cousin Sally, a dark beauty of fifteen, on the threadbare burgundy sofa opposite the television down in the shadowy nook of the stairwell, neither of them quite fully dressed, although I was somehow unable to figure out precisely what articles of clothing were missing. My instinct was to flee. Instead, seized by a weirdly thrilling lethargy, I watched them roll about, their arms and legs intertwined in seemingly random postures--making out, we called it in those simpler days, a phrase pregnant with purposeful ambiguity, perhaps as a protection against the burden of specificity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy own teen years, like my adulthood dreary and overlong, brought no similar adventures, least of all on the Vineyard; the highlight, I suppose, came near the end of our last summer sojourn as a full family, when I was about thirteen, and Mariah, a rather pudgy fifteen and angry at me for some smart-mouthed crack about her weight, borrowed a box of kitchen matches, then stole a Topps Willie Mays baseball card that I treasured and climbed the dangerous pull-down ladder to the attic, eight rickety wooden slats, most of them loose. When I caught up with her, my sister burned the card before my eyes as I wept helplessly, falling to my knees in the wretched afternoon heat of the dusty, low-ceilinged loft--the two of us already set in our lifelong pattern of animosity. That same summer, my sister Abigail, in those days still known as the baby, even though just a bit more than a year younger than I, made the local paper, the \u003ci\u003eVineyard Gazette\u003c\/i\u003e, when she won something like eight different prizes at the county fair on a muggy August night by throwing darts at balloons and baseballs at milk bottles, and so solidified her position as the family's only potential athlete--none of the rest of us dared try, for our parents always preached brains over brawn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFour Augusts later, Abby's boyish laughter was no longer heard along Ocean Park, or anywhere else, her joy in life, and ours in her, having vanished in a confused instant of rain-slicked asphalt and an inexperienced teenager's fruitless effort to evade an out-of-control sports car, something fancy, seen by several witnesses but never accurately described and therefore never found; for the driver who killed my baby sister a few blocks north of the Washington Cathedral in that first spring of Jimmy Carter's presidency left the scene long before the police arrived. That Abby had only a learner's permit, not a license, never became a matter of public knowledge; and the marijuana that was found in her borrowed car was never again mentioned, least of all by the police or even the press, because my father was who he was and had the connections that he did, and, besides, in those days it was not yet our national sport to ravage the reputations of the great. Abby was therefore able to die as innocently as we pretended that she had lived. Addison by that time was on the verge of finishing college and Mariah was about to begin her sophomore year, leaving me in the nervous role of what my mother kept calling her only child. And all that Oak Bluffs summer, as my father, tight-lipped, commuted to the federal courthouse in Washington and my mother shuffled aimlessly from one downstairs room to the next, I made it my task to hunt through the house for memories of Abby--at the bottom of a stack of books on the black metal cart underneath the television, her favorite game of Life; in the back of the glass-fronted cabinet over the sink, a white ceramic mug emblazoned with the legend BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL, purchased to annoy my father; and, hiding in a corner of the airless attic, a stuffed panda named George, after the martyred black militant George Jackson, won at the fair and now leaking from its joints some hideous pink substance--memories, I must confess in my perilous middle age, that have grown ever fainter with the passage of time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAh, the Vineyard house! Addison was married in it, twice, once more or less successfully, and I smashed the leaded glass in the double front door, also twice, once more or less intentionally. Every summer of my youth we went there to live, because that is what one does with a summer home. Every winter my father griped about the upkeep and threatened to sell it, because that is what one does when happiness is a questionable investment. And when the cancer that pursued her for six years finally won, my mother died in it, in the smallest bedroom, with the nicest view of Nantucket Sound, because that is what one does if one can choose one's end.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy father died at his desk. And, at first, only my sister and a few stoned callers to late-night radio shows believed he had been murdered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* * * * * * \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE WHITE KITCHEN\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e(I)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe news of the Judge's death reached us several times in the years before the event actually occurred. It is not that he was ill; he was, as a rule, so vigorous that one tended to forget his wavering health, which is why the heart attack that at last cut him down was, at first, so difficult to credit. It is simply that he led the sort of life that generated rumor. People disliked my father, intensely, and he returned the favor. They spread stories of his death because they prayed the stories were true. To his enemies--they were legion, a fact in which he gloried--my father was a plague, and rumors of a cure always raise hopes in those who suffer, or love those who do. And, in this case, some of those my father plagued were not people but causes, which, in America, can always count their lovers in the millions, unlike individual people, who die unloved every day. Not one of his enemies but hated my father, and not one but spread the stories. Self-styled friends would call. They were always whispering how sorry they were. They had heard, they would say, about my father's heart attack while promoting his latest book up in Boston. Or his stroke while taping a television interview out in Cincinnati. Except that there would not have been one: he would be alive and well in San Antonio, speaking to the convention of some conservative political action committee--the Rightpacs, Kimmer calls them. But, oh, the gleeful rumors of his demise! My mother hated the rumors, not for the heartache, she said, but for the humiliation--there were standards, after all. But not in the rumor mill. Waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket, just before my son Bentley was born, I was astonished to read on the cover of one of the more imaginative tabloids, just beneath the weekly Whitney Houston story (TALKS CANDIDLY ABOUT HER HEARTBREAK) and just above the latest way to lose as much weight as you want without diet or exercise (A MIRACLE DOCTORS WON'T TELL YOU), the gladsome tidings that the Mafia had put out a contract on my father, because of his cooperation with federal prosecutors--although, when Kimmer made me go back to the store and buy it and I read the whole thing, all one hundred fifty words, I noticed a pointed lack of detail as to what my father could possibly have to cooperate with prosecutors about, or what he might know about the Mafia that would be so dangerous. I called Mrs. Rose, the Judge's long-suffering assistant, and finally caught up with him on the road in Seattle. He took the opportunity to warn me yet again on the insidiousness of his enemies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"They will do anything, Talcott, \u003ci\u003eanything\u003c\/i\u003e to destroy me,\" he announced in the oracular tone he tended to adopt when discussing those who disliked him. He repeated the word a third time, in case my hearing was off: \"Anything.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIncluding, I noted while leafing through the pessimistic pages of \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e a few years back, accuse him of paranoia. Or was it megalomania? Anyway, my father was sure they were out to get him, and my sister was sure they were right. When the Judge skipped Bentley's christening three years ago, worried the press might be there, Mariah defended him, pointing out that he had missed half the baptisms of her children--no difficult feat, given the numbers--but by then she and I were barely speaking anyway.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnce a false story of my father's demise made the real papers--not the supermarket tabloids, but the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, which killed him on a wintry morning in a commuter plane crash in Virginia, one among a dozen victims, his apparent presence on board noted poignantly, but also coyly: CONTROVERSIAL FORMER JUDGE FEARED DEAD IN CRASH is what the headline said. The irony was plain to the most casual follower of current events, because what people feared was not my father dead but my father alive; and because of the unhappy turning his career took, which was also, my father liked to say, the fault of the \u003ci\u003ePost\u003c\/i\u003e and \"its ilk.\" Left-wing muckrakers, my father called them in his well-remunerated speeches to the Rightpacs, who were pleased to hear this angry, articulate black lawyer blaming the media for his resignation from the federal bench not long after the collapse of his anticipated elevation to the Supreme Court, where, his conservative fans loved to remind his liberal critics, he had argued and won two key desegregation cases in the sixties. Oh, but he could be confounding! Which is why Mariah was certain that there were smiles of relief all along the Cambridge-Washington axis (where she picked up that hackneyed phrase I will never know, but I suspect it was from Addison, who could always stand her) when the early editions of the \u003ci\u003ePost\u003c\/i\u003e carried the crash story and a couple of the more careless news-radio stations repeated it. The plague, it seemed for a glorious instant, was at an end. But my wily father was not on board. Although his name was on the manifest and he had checked in, he had prudently chosen that occasion to argue via long distance with my mother, then busily dying at the Vineyard house, over the cost of some repairs to the gutters, and the discussion grew sufficiently extended that he missed the flight. The airline got its passenger list wrong, this being back in the days when it was still possible to do such a thing. \"That's how much she loved me,\" the Judge told us in a drunken ramble the night of Claire Garland's funeral. He cried, too, which none of us had seen before--only Addison even claimed to have seen him take a drink since the bad period just after Abby died--and Mariah slapped my face when, the very next day, I pointed out to her that, in the six years of my mother's illness, my father spent as much time on the road as he did at her bedside. \"So what?\" my sister demanded as I groped for a suitable riposte to a palm across the cheek--a question, once I thought about it, that I was ill-prepared to answer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd perhaps I deserved the rebuke, for the Judge, despite his coldness toward most of the world, including, usually, his children, was never anything but tender and affectionate with our mother. Even when my father was a practicing lawyer, before the move to government service, he was constantly leaving meetings with clients to take calls from his Claire. Later, on the Securities and Exchange Commission and then on the bench, he would sometimes leave litigants waiting while he chatted with his wife, who seemed to take such treatment as her due. He smiled for her in a natural delight that told the world how grateful he was for the day Claire Morrow said yes; at least until Abby died, after which he did not do much smiling for a while. Once a semblance of family stability was re-established, my parents used to take evening walks along Shepard Street, holding hands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf course, my father was on the road constantly. At the time of his death, he liked to call himself just another Washington lawyer, which meant that when he wanted to reach me he would have Mrs. Rose place the call, his own time being too precious, and, when I came on the line, he would invariably put me on the speakerphone, perhaps to leave his hands free for other work. Mrs. Rose told me once that I should not be upset: he put everybody on the speakerphone, treating it as though it had just been invented. Indeed, everything that he was doing was new to him. He was, formally, of counsel to the law firm of Corcoran \u0026amp; Klein--\u003ci\u003eof counsel\u003c\/i\u003e being a term of art covering a multitude of awkward relationships, from the retired partner who no longer does any lawyering to the out-of-work bureaucrat trying to bring in enough business to earn a full partnership to the go-go consultant looking for a respectable place to hang a shingle. In my father's case, the firm offered a veneer of gentility and a place to take his messages, but little more. He saw few clients. He practiced no law. He wrote books, went on nationwide speaking tours, and, when he needed a rest, showed up on \u003ci\u003eNightline\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eCrossfire\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eImus\u003c\/i\u003e to beguile the evil armies of the left. Indeed, he was the perfect talk-show guest: he was willing to say nearly anything about nearly anybody, and he would call anyone who argued with him the most erudite and puzzling names. (The censors would have a terrible time when he used words like \u003ci\u003ewittol\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003epettifoggery\u003c\/i\u003e, and he was once bleeped out on one of the radio talk shows for describing a particular candidate's shift to the right during the Republican presidential primaries as an act of \u003ci\u003eecdysis\u003c\/i\u003e.) Oh, yes, people hated him, and he reveled in their enmity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMariah, naturally, made more of all this than I did. I have always thought that the far left and far right need each other, desperately, for if either one were to vanish the other would lose its reason to exist, a conviction that has freshened in me from year to year, as each grows ever more vehement in its search for somebody to hate. Now and then, I even wondered aloud to Kimmer--I would say it to no one else--whether my father manufactured half his political views in order to keep his face on television, his enemies at his heels, and his speaking fees in the range of half a million dollars a year. But Mariah, having been in her time both philosophy major and investigative journalist, sees oppositions as real; the Judge and his enemies, she would say, were playing out the great ideological debates of the era. It was the culture war, she would insist, that brought him down. I thought this proposition quite silly, and came to think, after years of reading about it, that the scandal-mongers who drove him from the bench might have had a point; and I made the mistake of saying this, too, on the telephone to Mariah, not long after Bob Woodward published his best-selling book about the case. The book, I told her, was pretty convincing: the Judge was not a victim but a perjurer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* * * * * * \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e(II)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first thing I notice about Uncle Jack is that he is ill. Jack Ziegler was never a very large man, but he always seemed a menacing one. I do not know how many people he has killed, although I often fear that it is more than the numbers hinted at in the press. I have not seen him in well over a decade and have not missed him. But the changes in the man! Now he is frail, the suit of fine gray wool and the dark blue scarf hanging loosely on his emaciated frame. The square, strong face I remember from my boyhood, when he would visit us on the Vineyard, armed with expensive gifts, wonderful brainteasers, and terrible jokes, is falling in on itself; the silver hair, still reasonably thick, lies matted on his head; and his pale pink lips tremble when he is not speaking, and sometimes when he is. He approaches in the company of a taller and broader and much younger man, who silently steadies him when he stumbles. A friend, I think, except that the Jack Zieglers of the world have no friends. A bodyguard, then. Or, given Uncle Jack's physical condition, perhaps a nurse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Well, look who's here,\" Addison seethes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Let me handle this,\" I insist with my usual stupidity. I discipline myself not to speculate about what Mariah suggested as we sat in the kitchen Friday night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"All yours.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore Jack Ziegler quite reaches us, I warn Kimmer to stay down by the car with Bentley, and, for once, she does as I ask without an argument, for no potential judge can be seen even chatting with such a man. Uncle Mal steps forward as though to run the same interference for me that he does for his clients as they leave the grand jury, but I motion him back and tell him I will be fine. Then I turn and hurry up the hill. Mariah, of course, is already gone, which is just as well, for this apparition might push her over the edge. Only Addison remains nearby, just far enough away to be polite, but close enough to be of help if . . . if what?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Hello, Uncle Jack,\" I say as Abby's godfather and I arrive, simultaneously, at the grave. Then I wait. He does not extend his hand and I do not offer mine. His bodyguard or whatever stands off to the side and a little bit behind, eyeing my brother uneasily. (I myself am evidently too unthreatening to excite his vigilance.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I bring you my condolences, Talcott,\" Jack Ziegler murmurs in his peculiar accent, vaguely East European, vaguely Brooklyn, vaguely Harvard, which my father always insisted was manufactured, as phony as Eddie Dozier's East Texas drawl. As Uncle Jack speaks, his eyes are cast downward, toward the grave. \"I am so sorry about the death of your father.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Thank you. I'm afraid we missed you at the church--\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I despise funerals.\" Spoken matter-of-factly, like a discussion of weather, or sports, or interstate flight to avoid prosecution. \"I have no interest in the celebration of death. I have seen too many good men die.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome by your own hand, I am thinking, and I wonder if the other, rarely mentioned rumors are true, if I am talking to a man who murdered his own wife. Again Mariah's fears assail me. My sister's chronology possesses a certain mad logic--emphasis on the adjective: my father saw Jack Ziegler, my father called Mariah, my father died a few days later, then Jack Ziegler called Mariah, and now Jack Ziegler is here. I finally shared Mariah's notion with Kimmer as we lay in bed last night. My wife, head on my shoulder, giggled and said that it sounds to her more like two old friends who see each other all the time. Having no basis, yet, to decide, I say only: \"Thank you for coming. Now, if you will excuse me--\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Wait,\" says Jack Ziegler, and, for the first time, he turns his eyes up to meet mine. I take half a step back, for his face, close up, is a horror. His pale, papery skin is ravaged by nameless diseases that seem to me--whatever they are--an appropriate punishment for the life he has chosen to live. But it is his eyes that draw my attention. They are twin coals, hot and alive, burning with a dark, happy madness that should be visited on all murderers at some time before they die.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Uncle Jack, I'm s-sorry,\" I manage. Did I actually stammer? \"I have--I have to get going--\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Talcott, I have traveled thousands of miles to see you. Surely you can spare me five of your valuable minutes.\" His voice has a terrible wheeze in it, and it occurs to me that I might be breathing whatever has made him this way. But I stand my ground.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I understand you've been looking for me,\" I say at last.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Yes.\" He seems childishly eager now, and he almost smiles, but thinks better of it. \"Yes, that is so, I have been looking for you.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You knew where to find me.\" I was raised to be polite, but seeing Uncle Jack like this, after all these years, brings out in me an irresistible urge to be rude. \"You could have called me at home.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"That would not be--it was not possible. They know, you see, they would consider that, and I thought--I thought perhaps . . .\" He trails off, the dark eyes all at once confused, and I realize that Uncle Jack is frightened of something. I hope it is the specter of prison or of his obviously approaching death that is scaring him, because anything else bad enough to scare Jack Ziegler is . . . well, something I do not want to meet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Okay, okay. You found me.\" Perhaps this is forward, but I am not so frightened of him now; on the other hand, I am not very happy about spending time in his company either. I want to flee this sickly scarecrow and retreat to the warmth, such as it is, of my family.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Your father was a very fine man,\" says Uncle Jack, \"and a very good friend. We did much together. Not much business, mostly pleasure.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I see.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The newspapers, you know, they wrote of our business dealings. There were no business dealings. It was nonsense. Trumped-up nonsense.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I know,\" I lie, for Uncle Jack's benefit, but he is not interested in my opinions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"That law clerk of his, perjuring himself that way.\" He makes a spitting noise but does not actually spit. \"Scum.\" He shakes his head in feigned disbelief. \"The papers, of course, they loved it. Left-wing bastards. Because they hated your father.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot having exchanged a word with Jack Ziegler since well before my father's hearings, I have never heard his opinions about what happened. Given the tenor of his comments, I doubt he would be interested in mine. I remain silent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I hear the fool has never been able to get a job,\" says Uncle Jack, without a trace of humor, and I know who has been pulling at least a few of the strings. \"I am not surprised.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"He was doing what he thought was right.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"He was lying in an effort to destroy a great man, and he is deserving of his fate.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI cannot take much more of this. As Jack Ziegler continues to rant, Mariah's nutty speculations of Friday seem . . . not so nutty. \"Uncle Jack . . .\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"He was a great man, your father,\" Jack Ziegler interrupts. \"A very great man, a very good friend. But now that he is dead, well . . .\" He trails off and raises his hand, palm upmost, and tilts it one way, then the other. \"Now I would very much like to be of assistance to you.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"To me?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Correct, Talcott. And to your family, naturally,\" he adds softly, rubbing his temples. The skin is so loose it seems to move under his fingers. I imagine it tearing away to leave only an unhappy skull.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI glance over at the cars. Kimmer is impatient. So is Uncle Mal. I look down at my baby sister's godfather once more. His help is the very last thing I want.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Well, thank you, but I think we have everything under control.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"But you will call? If you need anything, you will call? Especially if . . . an emergency should arise?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI shrug. \"Okay.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"With your wife, for instance,\" he continues. \"I understand that she is going to become a judge. I think that is wonderful. I understand that she has always wanted this.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It isn't certain yet,\" I answer automatically, surprised that the secret has spread up into the Rocky Mountains, and also not wanting Jack Ziegler anywhere near her nomination. He has already spoiled one judicial career too many. \"She isn't the only candidate.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I know this.\" The burning eyes are gleeful again. \"I understand that a colleague of yours believes the job to be his for the taking. Some would call him the front-runner.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am thrown, once more, by the breadth of his knowledge; I choose not to wonder how he knows what he knows. I am glad that Kimmer is not within earshot.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I suppose so. But, look, I have to--\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Listen, Talcott. Are you listening?\" He has drawn close to me again. \"I do not think he has the staying power, this colleague of yours. It is my understanding that a fairly large skeleton is rattling around in his closet. And we all know what that means, eh?\" He coughs violently. \"Sooner or later, it is bound to tumble out.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What kind of skeleton?\" I ask, sudden eagerness overwhelming my caution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I would not concern myself with such things if I were you. I would not share them with your lovely wife. I would wait patiently for the wheel to turn.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am mystified, but not precisely unhappy. If there is information that would kill off Marc Hadley's chances, I can hardly wait for it to--what did he say?--tumble out. Even though Marc and I were once friends, I cannot resist a rising excitement. Perhaps America's obsession with the use of scandal to disqualify nominees for the bench is absurd, but this is my wife we are talking about.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill, what","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304373440741,"sku":"NP9780375712920","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375712920.jpg?v=1767739163","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-emperor-of-ocean-park-isbn-9780375712920","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}