Too Close to Home

Ellen reached out and touched my arm. “We’re dropping this. We’ve been through enough. I know how wrong it seems to you, to let Illeana’s brother get away with this, but we have to do it. For ourselves. For Drew. But most of all, for Derek. If something happened to him, I could never forgive myself.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked. “On the way to the lineup?”

“I was afraid you’d try to talk me out of it, or that you’d tell Barry. That your pride, your fucking sense of justice, would get in the way of common sense. I don’t like keeping quiet about this any more than you do, but I’ll do it if it makes us safe. Because it’s over. This thing with the disc and trying to get it back, it’s all over.”

Nobody said anything for a minute or so. I suddenly felt very tired. I walked across the room and rested my arm on the fireplace mantel, steadying myself. I stood there a moment, looking at the cold ashes in the fireplace, still there from last winter.

“Fine,” I said.

Ellen came over and put a hand on my back. “Thank you.”

“Yes,” Conrad said. “Thank you.” He took a step toward me and said, “Really, Jim, thank you.” He cleared his throat. “I wonder if I might have a moment to speak with you, privately.”

“Huh?”

“Come with me, to my study,” he said.

I followed him down a carpeted hallway and into his sanctuary, a room lined with bookshelves and dominated by a large oak desk in the center that was stacked with papers, a computer off to one side.

He grabbed one of the two leather chairs that faced the desk, indicated for me to take the other one. I sat down.

“Again, thank you,” he said. “The fact is, there could have been other repercussions had Ellen identified Lester. Not as serious as those I intimated, but damaging just the same.”

For a second, I don’t know why, the note he’d written to my wife, the one I’d found in her purse, came into my head, and I saw a flash of my wife’s thighs wrapped around his head.

“There are things you don’t understand,” Conrad Chase said. “Things that could have an impact on you, and Ellen, if everything comes out.”

“What do you mean, if everything comes out?”

He cleared his throat, looked down at his pants, picked off a piece of lint, and let it fall to the carpet.

“I know you don’t believe this, Jim, but I like you,” Conrad said. “I hope that when Elizabeth came to see you, she conveyed that. The fact is, you’ve really rattled me these last few days with your accusations and insinuations. So I unburdened myself to Elizabeth, had her approach you since I wasn’t having much luck on my own. And I gather she didn’t have that much luck, either.”

I said nothing.

“The thing is, and I fear this is going to sound insincere or patronizing, but running Thackeray these last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet governors and senators and even a couple of presidents. Plus, at the annual festival Ellen puts together, I’ve met some of the greatest literary minds in the country. Quite a few of them have had some very flattering things to say about me. They think I’m a writer of great talent. But you, Jim, you consider me to be a fraud.”

I wondered what I would do with a watering can if I had one just then.

“The thing is, you’re a bright guy. A lot brighter than you let on sometimes, I think. And you’re an artist. I think you understand something of the creative process.” He smiled ruefully. “You don’t believe I wrote A Missing Part. There aren’t many people around privy to the story surrounding Brett Stockwell’s computer, so there aren’t many people to question the veracity of my authorship in the first place. You’re a very select group.”

“I’m honored,” I said.

“That’s why I tried to get Elizabeth to persuade you to read my new book.” He reached over the desk and patted a stack of paper about three inches thick. “This is it. I wanted you to realize, I can write a book.”

“Even if you wrote that pile there,” I said, “it doesn’t change anything about the first book.”

Conrad’s lips went in and out for a moment. “Yes, well. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, just a little flight of fancy here, but let’s suppose there were something to your suspicions about my first book. What if this book is designed to make up for that? Wouldn’t that be worth something?”

Again, I was at a loss for words.

“This is the wrong time to ask you again if you’d read it. A lot’s happened, you certainly don’t owe me any favors at the moment.”

“When do you think that might change, Conrad?”

He chuckled. “Good point.”

“Here’s an idea for a book,” I said. “Why don’t you do one about a college president who’s so fucking self-consumed, even after he’s acknowledged that his wife nearly got a guy killed, he still thinks the guy would like to read his book.”

Conrad nodded slowly. “Well, I thought it was worth a shot. Perhaps Ellen will read it. I’ll drop it by sometime.”

“Yeah, that’d be great.” I ran a hand over my face, took a breath. Now I had a question. “What did you do with the computer, Conrad?”