He grinned. “The first one’s easy, the second one maybe. Eighty-five would really cramp my lifestyle.”
“So would breaking it. Things are different now.”
“I don’t get it. I mean, the difference is we’ve got a lot more money.”
“You don’t know how big a difference that is.”
“You’re getting way too tense, Jason.” He was sitting next to me. He put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed, just being a friend, a brother. “Come on. It’s okay.”
For five seconds I almost broke open. I had always taken care of him, through school and life, and now I needed someone to take care of me. I wanted to tell him what my life had become, and what I hated about it. I wanted to tell one person about how I didn’t know what I was doing and I was afraid, and I wanted someone to tell me why I was here. Just tell me why.
The man who could have told me wasn’t there. We’d buried him a week ago.
There was sound from the path behind us. I turned, and maybe I was even expecting it was him. It was Katie.
She was also in jeans, and I felt even more out of place in that comfortable, informal place; she sat at my left and Eric at my right. I have very few moments that are intimate, where I know I am in love; and I loved both of them then, my wife and my brother. If only money could have kept the rest of the world away from us. But instead, it drew the world in.
“Have you told him?” she asked me.
I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to tell Katie, except in anger. I regretted that I’d told her abruptly the way I had. And I couldn’t get angry enough at Eric to hurt him that way. I’d rather drown a puppy than tell this puppy his daddy had been murdered. It didn’t make any difference to me that it could have been either of them who did it.
“What?” Eric said.
I took a deep breath. “Last night I talked with a man from the police. He said that Melvin’s accident… wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t an accident?”
“That’s what they think.”
He stared right at me for a long time. “Someone killed him?”
“That’s what they think,” I said again.
“Do they know who?”
I tried to remember: what had I first said when Wilcox told me?
“I don’t think they do.”
“Who would want to?”
Did he really mean that? Was he that innocent?
“That’s what the police will try to find out.” I couldn’t tell if it was worse for Eric that Melvin had been killed, or just that there might have been someone who would have wanted to kill him. He really didn’t grasp what kind of man Melvin had been.
“How would they have done it?”
“The policeman said it was the brakes.”
“The hydraulics or the pads?”
This was a puppy with a degree in mechanical engineering. “He said the lines had been drained.”
He frowned. “How could they tell?”
“I guess they were empty.”
He shook his head. “But I saw the car. The front axle was so smashed that the hydraulic lines were torn off. There’s no way to tell if they’d been empty before the crash. And he would have known right away that something was wrong. Do they think it happened at Mr. Spellman’s house? It couldn’t have been low on brake fluid for very long.”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out soon.”
He put his chin on his hand and stared. “I… I wonder who would kill him.” Then he was quiet. At least that was done.
It wasn’t, though. Katie had a question. “What about Angela?”
“She could have killed him.” No, I didn’t say that, but only barely. Instead I said, “One of us needs to tell her.”
“We should go over together.”
Yes, we should. It was an hour to the big house, an hour to tell her, an hour back. I could get to Fred’s office by eight. I had one more word for Eric.
“This is not public yet,” I said. “Don’t talk about it, okay?”
“Who would I talk to?” The kid must have some friends.
“If someone calls. A reporter maybe. Just hang up and call me.”
“Okay.”
“That’s Rule 86-don’t talk to anyone about it.”
I left Eric to the hamburger Rosita had fixed for him and went back to my office, and dialed.
“Yes, honey?”
“Pamela,” I said. “Would you please pay Eric’s bills for me?”
“I’ll do it this afternoon. Do I still have access to the personal expenses account?”
“I think so. Thank you very much.”
Twenty minutes later Katie had changed into a somber dress and her pearls, and we were waving good-bye as Motorcycle Man shattered the peace of our neighbors. Then we were on the roads I knew so well, away from the city and down the coast. It wasn’t that I had driven them with such frequency, but rather with such portent. It had been the Road to Melvin. What was this the road to now?
My card still worked at the gate, of course. We circled around the front lawn and into the courtyard, the endless brick walls surrounding us. The wings on either side were two stories, and the monolithic mass in front was three. Forty-eight windows looked down on us as we stepped out of the car. I used to count them every time I came home from boarding school.
Angela was expecting us. We were shown in to a feathery front parlor that Melvin had never used. It had always been hers. The rest of the house hadn’t changed, but it had the feeling of a corpse at a viewing-the soul was gone. Angela had some of that feeling about her, too.
She watched me with her wide eyes, her fluffy lashes flittering about them. We smiled and exchanged just a few pleasantries, but she knew there had to be something unpleasant lurking. And Katie was looking at me.
“Angela,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I have some bad news.”
“I was afraid it must be,” she whispered.
“The police believe that Melvin’s death wasn’t an accident.”
Little tears glistened under the lashes, but not surprise. “Oh dear. I was so hoping it would just be over.” She sighed. “When you called, I knew what you were going to say.”
Well, it wasn’t the same thing everyone else had said. “You suspected?”
She smiled, so sadly. “He had always been afraid that this might happen.”
“He said that?” I had never before spoken abruptly to Angela, for fear of something breaking.
“No. But Emmanuel, the gardener, was really a bodyguard. Melvin never told anyone, but I knew.”
Emmanuel had been there for years. “Did you have any idea who he was worried about?”
“No. And I wouldn’t have asked, of course.”
Of course. Poor Angela. Mr. Wilcox of the morbid mustache was going to give her a hard time. But she could defend herself.
She was not interested in brake fluid or other details, so I asked if I could look around a little. I left her and Katie to talk while I went on a nostalgia trip.
To me, the house had been an official place, for the formal occasions and staged events that made up our family relations. I found it uninteresting. I stood in the echoing foyer with the stairs on either wall. I wandered the halls, looked into the vast ballroom that he had never once used. Then I came to his office-a room of wood paneling and deep carpet, shelves lined with books he had never read. The walls were hung with original paintings, lesser known works by American luminists-cragged mountains by Kensett, storm-swept seas by Lane. A huge antique globe on a stand and his massive antique desk and wooden armchair sat before a wide window.
Later, Katie and Angela found me sitting at the desk, looking through drawers. It was a little awkward, but I apologized.
“I should have asked,” I said.
“No, no,” Angela mewed. “It’s right for you to be here. This is your place now.”
“I’ll need to come back and go through his papers,” I said. I’d found a few of the details that Fred had mentioned concerning Melvin’s contract business with the state-the ‘other legal framework’ that I should be thankful was already in place for me. It was going to take a while to go through these drawers, and I didn’t know where else he might have papers stashed.