Blackmail

Theron

The chowder was clam, thick as plaster, in a bread bowl the size of a catcher's mitt, and she ate it with the ferocious concentration of a woman who has been told by her obstetrician to consume forty grams of protein a day and intends to meet the quota out of spite.

"You're not eating," said Dess.

"I am eating."

"You're moving a spoon in a circle."

"It is an ancient and respected technique."

"It's a chowder, Theron. It's not a seance." She tore off a piece of the bowl and dunked it. "Eat it. You have the look. The one where your eyes go all flat. I know it now. I can see it from across a room."

They were at the back booth of Tidewater Coffee, in the corner by the window, where the light fell in a long pale bar across the table. It was a quarter past one. The lunch crowd had thinned to a few clerks and an old man with a crossword. Outside, the wind blew grit down Wickenden Street, and a sandwich board with the day's specials skated along the gutter like a drunk.

He lifted a spoonful, and ate it.

It was warm and salty and sweet, with a ghost of bacon in it. It tasted exactly like the first meal he had ever shared with her, in a different winter, in this same booth, when she had slid a mug of coffee toward him and said drink, you look like death in a nice coat. He swallowed. He set down the spoon.

"It is excellent," he said.

"Liar. It's a little over-salted."

"It is excellent because you brought it."

"Oh, shut up." She was pink. "Okay. I have a question that isn't a question."

"I am at your disposal."

"It's more of a— a hypothetical. You don't have to answer. I'm just checking something." She wiped her fingers on a napkin, folded it, unfolded it. "Say you're a person who's told someone you'll tell them something. On a date. Sunday. And say that between now and then, the person finds out a piece of it. By accident. Not by looking. By accident. Would you want them to say?"

He did not move.

His heart gave one slow, heavy, ruinous knock.

"I— beg your pardon?"

"Would you want to know? If they knew a piece?"

"I—" He kept his eyes on her face. It was open, flushed, a little anxious, as unguarded as a child's. There was no trap in it. No knowledge. Only the pure, stubborn, careful fairness of a woman who had put herself through a night of reading and decided to ask a question rather than a demand. She has heard something, he thought. Or she is about to.

Say it now.

Say: Dess. Yes. I want you to say. Because there is a thing. And I have been a coward. And I should like to tell you at once.

"I think," he said, in a voice that was barely a voice, "that a person in that position would wish to hear it."

"Even if the date was Sunday?"

"Even if."

"Even if it ruined the plan?"

"The plan is not important."

"Okay," said Dess.

She picked up her spoon.

"Okay?"

"That's all I wanted. I wanted to know what you'd say." She smiled, shaky and sweet. "You passed."

"I do not understand."

"You don't have to." She dipped the spoon in the chowder. "I made a decision. About a thing. I'm not going to tell you which. But if it comes to it, if there's a piece that I have to ask about before Sunday, I'll ask. And I'll expect a straight answer." She held his gaze. "That's all. That's the question that isn't."

He sat quite still.

A piece, he thought. She has a piece. She has been given a piece.

By Ansel? By Hale?

By my own silence?

"Dess," he said.

"Mm?"

"If you ask me, I shall answer."

"I know you will." She reached across the table, and put her hand over his. It was warm, small, a little damp from the steam. "And I want you to know, whatever it is, I decided you were worth waiting for. That's all. It's not a threat. It's just a fact. I put it in the ledger."

"What did you write?"

"I wrote, 'Dess gave: eight days. Dess received: the chance to not be a coward.'" Her voice wavered. "It's for me. It's not for you. But I thought you should know it's there."

He turned his hand over under hers.

He held it. He held it so hard that he felt the small bones shift. And he looked at the woman across the table, with chowder on her chin and a clementine peel in her pocket and her whole fierce honest heart in her face, and thought: If I do not tell her tonight, I do not deserve her.

If I tell her tonight, I lose her.

And she is carrying my brother's son.

He said, "Eat your soup."

She laughed, and let go.

…

Wade Pruitt called at 4:20.

He did it from a number Theron did not know, a flat blank string of digits that resolved on the screen as UNKNOWN, and for a second Theron let it ring. He stood at the window of his office with his hand on the glass. Below, on Wharf Street, a cement truck was reversing into a pit with a slow, patient, insectlike beep. He thought: do not answer. Let it go to the machine.

He answered.

"Mr. Wexcombe."

"Dr. Pruitt."

"It's not Doctor. I told you. I'm a lab administrator." The voice was thin and tight and quick. It was the voice of a man speaking from the inside of a car with the windows rolled up. "I'm sorry to bother you. I'm sorry to call you at work. I know it's— I know you're busy."

"I am. What do you want?"

"I need to meet."

"I do not think that would be wise."

"I think it would. I think it would be very wise." A pause, a ragged breath. "I've got something. I've had it for a while. I wasn't going to use it. I swear to God. I'm not that kind of person. But things have changed, Mr. Wexcombe. There's been— A situation. At the clinic. There's an audit. A state audit. They're going back through the donor logs. They want to know where four thousand four hundred seventeen went."

Theron closed his eyes.

"I see."

"I'm going to lose my license. Not the license. My position. I'll lose my life. I've got a mortgage in Barrington. I've got a kid at Moses Brown. I've got a wife who—" The voice cracked. "I need five hundred thousand dollars."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I need it by Friday."

"Dr. Pruitt—"

"It's not for me! It's for a— a lawyer. A good one. To make it go away. And a place to go, for a while, if it doesn't. It's not that much. You can do it in your sleep." His breath hitched. "I'm not threatening. I want to be clear. I'm asking. But I've got a lot of paper, Mr. Wexcombe. I've got the check. I've got the memo you signed. I've got a voice recording of our meeting in the Narragansett Club, on the twentieth of November. I've had it in a safe-deposit box. And if I go down, it all goes."

"It would implicate you."

"I know."

"You took forty thousand dollars. You altered a donor record."

"I know." It was almost a sob. "I know! I'm not stupid. I'd be in prison. But it would implicate you, too. You paid me. You offered. You came to me. It's your name on the check. And there's a woman." A ragged laugh. "There's a woman, Mr. Wexcombe, who might like to know."

The room was very quiet.

A single bar of afternoon sun lay across the carpet. In it, dust turned slowly.

"Where?" said Theron.

"What?"

"Where would you like to meet?"

…

The Garrison Street parking garage was a poured-concrete cavern that smelled of exhaust, damp, and old cigarettes. It rose four levels above a vacant lot on the edge of the Jewelry District, with a ramp that spiraled up through the dusk like a shell. On the fourth level, in a far corner, where the lights had burned out and the walls were stained with seepage, stood a single gray Honda.

Theron parked beside it.

He sat for a moment, with the engine off, listening. A drip somewhere. The distant howl of a siren. Beside him, in the passenger seat, Dell Okafor sat with his hands on his knees and the faintly tragic expression of a man at the funeral of an acquaintance.

"I do not like it," said Dell.

"You have said."

"I'll say it again."

"I would expect nothing less."

"I think you should let me go in alone."

"You are not going in alone."

"Then I'll stand behind you."

"You will remain in the car." Theron took off his gloves and laid them on the dashboard. "If I am not back in fifteen minutes, you may call Mr. Pryor, and the police, in that order. Not in the other."

"Sir—"

"Dell."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you."

He got out.

The air in the garage was cold and thick. His footsteps rang on the concrete, flat and sharp. He walked to the Honda and opened the rear door, as instructed, and slid into the back seat. The interior was dark and smelled of pine air freshener and sweat. A man sat behind the wheel with his hands at ten and two.

Wade Pruitt had aged ten years since November.

Theron remembered him as a plump, glossy, comfortable man of forty-five with soft hands and a golf tan and an air of benign managerial well-being. This man was gray. He had lost twenty pounds. His shirt collar stood away from his neck. His eyes were bloodshot and ringed with blue, and a muscle jumped in his cheek, and on the dashboard before him lay a small green bottle of Tums and a pair of reading glasses with one lens cracked.

"Mr. Wexcombe."

"Pruitt."

"Thank you for coming."

"You gave me little choice."

"I didn't want to." The thin voice shook. "I want you to know that. I really didn't. I'm a— I'm a coward. I know it. I took your money because I'd got into trouble with some, with some investments, and I thought, who does it hurt? A donor's anonymous. A dead man's sperm. Who does it hurt?"

"A great many people, it appears."

"I know." Wade turned in the seat. In the gloom his face was naked with panic. "It's not even about the audit. That's not the real thing. I could survive the audit. I've been lying to auditors for twenty years. It's— somebody knew. Somebody called me. Somebody told me, last week, that they had the Narragansett Club recording. They quoted me a line."

"What line?"

"'The money is for your discretion, Dr. Pruitt, not your friendship.'"

Theron went still.

He had said it. He remembered. It had been a November night in a private dining room with oak paneling, and a waiter pouring wine, and a man with a hunted face across the table, and he had heard himself say it in a dry, cool, civilized voice. The money is for your discretion, Dr. Pruitt, not your friendship. It had seemed to him at the time a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

"Who called you?"

"I don't know. A man. A smooth voice." Wade licked his lips. "He said that if I didn't give him the original, he'd go to the state attorney general. He said I'd go to jail. I said, give you what? He said, you know. And I said, I don't have it. And he said, you do. You have it in a box at the Citizens Bank on Westminster. And I think you'd better bring it to me by Friday."

"And you told him?"

"I told him nothing! I swear! I told him I'd think about it. I hung up. I was shaking so bad I threw up in a trash can." Wade passed a hand over his face. "And then I thought, if somebody else has already found out about the recording, then it isn't mine anymore. It's worth something. It's going to be sold. So I might as well—"

"Sell it to me."

"Yes."

"For five hundred thousand dollars."

"Yes."

"And what is it you propose to sell?"

"The original. The check. The signed memo. And—" Wade swallowed. "A thing I haven't told you."

"Which is?"

"Who the man was."

There was a pause.

Somewhere below them, in the concrete bowels of the garage, a car alarm began to whoop, was silenced, began again. Theron sat very still on the cold vinyl seat, with his hands on his knees. He could hear his pulse in his ears. He could feel it in the fingers of his left hand, a fine hair-thin vibration, as of a violin string touched in the dark.

"You recognized the voice," he said.

"I recognized the car," said Wade. "I went out into the lot, after the call, to get some air. And there was a cream-colored sedan parked across the street. With a driver. And a man in the back, in a yellow scarf. He was reading a paper. And I thought: I know that scarf. And he looked up, and he lifted two fingers to his hat, and I thought I would faint."

"Hale."

"Yes."

"Hale Wexcombe called you."

"I didn't say that. I said I saw a man."

"But you know."

"I know I took fifty thousand dollars from him since Christmas," said Wade Pruitt, and began, quite quietly, to cry.

…

It came out in pieces.

It came out in the stale-smelling dusk, over the sound of the car alarm, in a series of dry hiccuping gulps, with the Tums bottle rattling in the man's hand. He had been approached on the twenty-third of December, he said, three days after the will went into the public record. By a lawyer, a polite dry lawyer in Providence, who had said that a certain family was concerned about irregularities at the Women's Fertility Center. He had been asked to keep an eye on the records. To report any request regarding Donor 4417. He'd been paid twenty thousand dollars up front, and ten each month.

"And you told them about me."

"I told them about the inquiry. I told them there'd been a request in November. I told them the name of the requester." Wade wiped his face. "I told them what you'd paid me. I thought, I've already sold it once, who does it hurt if I sell it twice? And the more they paid me, the less I— The less I—"

"Felt it."

"Yes."

"And in January?"

"In January they asked me about the mother."

"What did you tell them?"

"What I knew. Her name. Her date of birth. Her insurance. Her appointment times." Wade's whisper was a thread. "I thought it was just records. I thought, it's a name on a form. It isn't a person. I'd never seen her. I'd never met her. I didn't have to think about her as a human—" He broke off. "And then I saw her. At the clinic, in the lobby. In February. She was reading a Highlights magazine. A children's magazine. She'd found it in the rack. She was laughing at a puzzle. And I thought: oh, God. She's real."

Theron closed his eyes.

"I called her," said Wade.

The words fell into the dark.

"I beg your pardon?"

"On Monday. At her office. I used my handkerchief over the phone." The man's voice had gone high and thin and strange. "I didn't tell her anything. I just— I said, ask him about the hearing. I thought, if I can get it out into the open, if she knows, then it's not a secret, and nobody can blackmail you, and nobody can blackmail me. I thought I was— I thought I was being noble."

Theron opened his eyes.

He turned his head, slowly, and looked at the man in the driver's seat. He looked at the gray face, the bloodshot eyes, the trembling hands. He thought of Dess in her glass cubicle with a black telephone. He thought of her at the table that noon, in the pale light, folding and unfolding a napkin. Say they found out a piece. By accident. Would you want them to say?

Not by accident.

By a coward in a Honda, with a handkerchief over his mouth.

"You called her," he said.

"Yes."

"On Monday."

"Yes. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry—"

"What did you say?"

"I said— I gave her the date. The hearing. And I said to ask you about a lawyer in Delaware." Wade flinched. "I read that part from a note."

"Whose note?"

"I— The man's. The lawyer's. The one who paid me. He sends me instructions. In the mail. Not by phone. On plain paper." The words were tumbling now. "He said, if anything happened, if the mother had to be, encouraged to ask questions, that was the line. That was the wording. 'Why does a man who loves you need a lawyer in Delaware?'"

Theron sat.

The cold had come into the car, thick and sharp, and the Tums rattled once, twice, and fell still.

Kessler.

Hale's man. Hale's lawyer. Hale's words in Wade's mouth. A telephone call to a woman at her desk, designed to put a thorn under her skin six days before I could pull it out gently.

He wants her to ask. He wants her to ask me before Sunday, in a rage, on her own terms, so that I will be forced to answer in the worst possible light.

He is not trying to stop me from telling her.

He is trying to make sure that when I tell her, she will not believe it.

…

"I will give you two hundred and fifty thousand," said Theron.

Wade stared.

"That's half."

"That is what you will receive."

"I said five—"

"You said five, and I said two fifty, and I would remind you that you are sitting in a Honda in a parking garage with a man who has the power to destroy you." He spoke very quietly. He did not raise his voice. "You took money from me, and money from my uncle, and you sold the name of a pregnant woman to a lawyer, and you telephoned her at her place of work. I am not in a negotiating mood."

"But the recording—"

"I do not want the recording."

"What?"

"I do not want it. Keep it. Send it to the attorney general, if you like. I shall plead guilty to whatever it is, and pay whatever fine they levy, and I shall do so with a clear conscience, for I deserve it." Theron's jaw was tight. "I have no interest in buying your silence. I have an interest in buying something else."

"What?"

"A signed statement."

Wade's mouth opened.

"A sworn affidavit, notarized, setting out the circumstances in which you were approached by Hale Wexcombe's representatives. Dates. Amounts. The name of the lawyer. The wording of the instructions. And the original of every note." He paused. "And the name of the man in the gray sedan."

"I don't know the man in the sedan."

"But you know who hired him."

"He's— I think it's a firm. In Pawtucket. Barrow and Voss." Wade licked his lips. "They do insurance. Surveillance. They did a job for the clinic once."

"Barrow and Voss."

"Yes."

"Thank you." Theron took a pen from his breast pocket. "You will sign it Thursday. At Mr. Pryor's. You will have your own counsel present, at my expense. In return, you will receive two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which I shall transfer to your lawyer's trust account upon execution. And you will leave the state."

"Leave—"

"For a time. Until the matter is resolved. I should prefer that you not be available to either side."

"You're buying me."

"I am buying a piece of paper."

"That's the same thing."

"It is not," said Theron. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he was gripping the pen like a dagger. "It is the opposite. I am paying you not to lie. I should have thought you would appreciate the novelty."

Wade made a small choked sound.

It might have been a laugh. It might have been a sob. He bent forward over the wheel and laid his forehead on his hands, and his thin shoulders heaved, and for a long moment neither man spoke.

"You're also guilty," he said at last, muffled. "You know that. Whatever happens. You paid me to change a record. You did the same as him."

"I know."

"You're no better."

"I am aware."

"Then why—"

"Because I would rather be guilty and honest," said Theron, "than innocent and a coward." He opened the door. "Thursday. Ten o'clock. Do not be late."

He got out.

He walked back across the cold concrete in the failing light. His shoes rang. The car alarm had stopped. The sky, framed in the open side of the garage, was a deep clear bruised blue, and a single star had come out above the jewelry-district rooftops, small and hard and white.

Dell was standing outside the Bentley with his hands at his sides.

"Eleven minutes," said Dell.

"I was efficient."

"What did he want?"

"Five hundred thousand dollars."

"What did you give him?"

"Half."

Dell looked at him for a long moment.

"I'd have given him nothing," he said.

"I know."

"I'd have given him a ride in a lake."

"I know that too."

"But I'm not the one with the conscience." Dell opened the rear door. "Where to, sir?"

Theron looked up at the star.

"Home," he said. "I find that I am exceedingly tired."

…

He sat in the back seat, in the dark, with the lights of Providence sliding across the glass.

He did not speak. Dell did not ask him to. The Bentley moved through the evening traffic with the grave unhurried weight of a hearse, past the lit windows of Federal Hill, the dark mass of the Statehouse, the neon of a pizza shop, the bell of a church. A woman was walking a dog. A boy ran for a bus. He watched them with a feeling of enormous remoteness, as if he were looking at the lit world through the wrong end of a telescope.

He used her, he thought. Hale used a frightened man to frighten a woman. He used a sentence. He put a splinter in her thumb and then arranged to be standing beside her when she pulled it out.

And I sat in a booth and said: yes, a person would wish to hear it.

And I did not say it.

Because I did not know she had been given the pin.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes.

She has the date. She has Courtroom Six. She has the phrase "a lawyer in Delaware." And she is a claims adjuster. She will see it by Thursday. She will have the Ives Holdings deed pulled by Friday, because the hole in the wall is exactly the shape of her own suspicion.

I have three days.

I have to tell her before she asks.

I have to tell her tonight.

His phone buzzed.

He looked at it.

Dess: GUESS WHAT.

Dess: Glucose test. 112. NORMAL. Dr. Pratt says I'm "a model of metabolic virtue." I have it in writing. I'm putting it on the refrigerator.

Dess: Celebrate with me?? I made a pot roast. It's a disaster but it's a CELEBRATORY disaster.

Dess: Come at 7. Don't be late. Don't bring flowers. Bring your face.

He read it.

He read it again.

The Bentley slowed at a light. In the stillness he heard the tick of the turn signal, small and regular, like the clock on a bomb. His thumb moved over the glass.

Tell her, said the voice. Tonight. At her table, over the pot roast. Say: I have something I must tell you. It is about my family. And it is bad.

And she'll put down her fork.

And look at you.

And you will say: Article Four.

He looked at the message. A model of metabolic virtue. He could hear her laughing as she typed it. He could see her at the kitchen counter in the gray robe with the oven mitt on one hand, delighted, flushed, triumphant, pleased with a number. A good number. A number that was hers.

Not tonight, said another voice. A smaller one, shabby, cowardly, and enormously persuasive. Not on the one night she is happy. Let her have the glucose. Let her have the pot roast. You have until Sunday. You will tell her on Sunday as you promised, in the calm and the daylight, and it will be easier then.

It will not be easier.

It will be later.

He typed:

T.W.: Splendid news. I am delighted beyond measure. I shall be there at seven.

He sent it.

The light changed. The car moved forward. He leaned his head back against the leather and closed his eyes, and the lights of the city slid red and green across his lids, and he felt in his chest the exact shape of the thing he had just done: not a lie, not a truth, but a small flat postponed stone, set down gently in a place where it would be found.

Three more days, he thought.

And a pot roast.

He found, to his horror, that he was smiling.