“Really?”
“I guess it’s more like he plays at golf. But you’ve met him. He’s been to the office.”
“That’s right. Of course.”
“So?”
“Is he your real father?”
“Victor?”
“I’m just curious.”
“He’s been the only father I’ve ever known. He married my mother when I was six.”
“So he’s your stepfather. What happened to your real father?”
“He died. Victor?”
“How?”
“He just did. Victor, stop.”
“You never told me what happened to your real father.”
“That’s right, I never did.”
“Do you want to now?”
“No, I don’t. Victor, what are we going to do about François?”
“I don’t know.” I picked up the photograph of Leesa Dubé, showed it to Beth. “She looks awfully familiar, doesn’t she?”
“A woman that pretty, I don’t think you’d forget.”
“No, I don’t think I would.”
“And I must admit she had marvelous teeth. All right, I’m going to go talk to our client before they ship him out for the night.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to come up with something? Anything?”
“I hope so,” I said, though what I really meant was, I doubt it.
She stood up wearily, made to leave the room, and then stopped. “By the way,” she said, “someone mailed back that key you lost.”
“I didn’t lose a key.”
“You must have. It came for you, in an envelope, with no note.” She pointed to a manila envelope addressed to me, with no postage and no return address.
“Hand-delivered?” I said.
She shrugged.
I emptied the envelope into my hand. A single bronze key with the number 27 stamped on it and the word E-ZEE.
“It’s not mine,” I said. “It must be a mistake.”
“Then toss it,” she said before leaving the room.
I turned the key over in my hand, back and forth, trying to figure what it might be, and failing. The hell with it, I thought as I slipped it into my pocket. I had other things to concern me just then.
I had felt a strange hope for a moment, a hope that I’d been wrong when I imagined the little girl in the back of the Pontiac to be Beth. Yes, I knew her father, a charming man with a slight limp and a penchant for bad jokes. No, Beth was not the type to be haunted by her past. And yes, she would have told me the truth of it long before. We were best friends. There were no secrets between us. But of course I had secrets I’d never told her. And, it appeared, she had secrets of her own.
So it was just as I had imagined. I had mentioned my concerns about Beth to Whitney Robinson. Whit must have told Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob must have burrowed like a mole into Beth’s past to see what he could find. And then, in my next appointment, Dr. Bob had maneuvered his one-sided conversation to spill the horrific events of that past to me. The whole chain of events made me feel like I had fallen into a pit of sludge.
What a strange man he was, Dr. Bob. Dentist to François’s first defense attorney. Dentist to the troubled boy who testified to seeing François at the crime scene. Dentist now to François’s second defense attorney. He seemed in the middle of everything. Well, almost everything.
I picked up the picture of Leesa Dubé. Turned it one way, turned it the other. What was it Beth had said? And I must admit she had marvelous teeth. And they were, weren’t they? Like a pretentious movie director, I used my fingers to frame the photograph so that only her smile was visible.
Holy molars, Batman.
Now I knew why the picture seemed so familiar. I had seen that smile before, every time I stepped into Dr. Bob’s office. It was on the wall, part of the smile hall of fame. Dr. Bob was Leesa Dubé’s dentist, too. Did that explain anything? Who the hell knew? But I was going to find out.
I picked up the phone, placed a call to his office, got the great man himself on the phone.
“Hey, Doc,” I said, “you want to go out for a beer?”
57
The shoreline of Chicago is one of the great sights to behold from behind the window of a passenger jet. The smooth surface of the great lake seems to glisten with endless promise, and then, there in the distance, at the very edge of the water, rises a fabulous assortment of idiosyncratic towers, all shapes and sizes and colors, all shining majestically in the sun. You feel, while still over the expanse of Lake Michigan, that you are soaring toward Oz.
Which I found somewhat appropriate, because just then I was flying into Chicago to discover the man behind the curtain.
You must never underestimate the effect of childhood trauma, had said Dr. Bob. It often explains everything. Look in the past, and the present becomes clear. He was talking about Tanya Rose, and I believe he was trying to explain, in his roundabout way, what was actually going on with Beth. But as a species we are relentlessly self-referential. If Dr. Bob was giving me advice on finding the root of Beth’s character, maybe he was inadvertently giving me advice on finding the root of his own. After our meeting in the bar, with the bizarre fistfight and the blood on the floor, I figured it was time to peek into my dentist’s childhood.
But where had that childhood even been?
To his patients, Dr. Pfeffer’s boyhood home seemed to be as mysterious as the rest of his life. Carol had listed the possibilities with a sense of wonder: Albuquerque, Seattle, Burma. Burma? Is there even a Burma anymore? I decided to forget about the rumors and think it through on my own. It wasn’t as if Dr. Bob hadn’t given me enough clues. There was the fishing he did as a boy, yellow perch, he’d said, using fathead minnows as bait. There was the way he referred to soda as pop and the way he said he was used to cold weather. All this indicated that he spent his formative years somewhere in the upper Midwest. But what narrowed it down for me, I suppose, more than anything, was his antipathy for the New York Mets.
Now, I could relate to his loathing. I grew up a Phillies fan, and we feel about the Mets the way Pakistan feels about India; the nuclear option is never off the table. But I know they don’t feel the same way in Albuquerque or Seattle or Rangoon. In those far-off places, the Mets are just another bad baseball team with ugly uniforms. But that’s not all they were to Dr. Bob.
Our plane headed north along the coast of Lake Michigan before leaning to the left and slipping inland, toward O’Hare. Even though the seat-belt sign was on, I climbed to the other side of the plane, to a vacant window seat. From there I could see the coastline as it fled north, as if trying to outrun the fancy apartment buildings that ran along its length into the suburbs. I was looking for something specific, trying to follow the converging lines of the avenues as they made their way toward a singular shrine. And then I spotted it, smaller than I imagined, stuck smack in the middle of its urban neighborhood, without the seas of parking lots that ring most of its kind. A dark boomerang of a building surrounding a wedge of jade.
Wrigley Field.
The ballpark was why I had come to Chicago. One person’s miracle, Dr. Bob had said, is another person’s disaster. What did that mean, or the strange invocation of a name that seemed still to haunt him? And don’t get me started, he had said, on Don Young. Who the heck was Don Young?
The story is sad and all too familiar. It is 1969, in the heat of summer, and the Chicago Cubs are solidly ensconced in first place. This is a great Cub team, managed by Leo the Lip, with Ernie Banks, Ferguson Jenkins, sweet-swinging Billy Williams, Hall of Famers all, and the legendary Ron Santo, who should be in there with them. On a July night, the Cubs arrive at Shea Stadium, ready to put away the fading Mets. The Cubbies are up three to one in the ninth, when the Met second baseman hits an easy liner to center field. Inexplicably, the Chicago center fielder, a raw rookie, breaks back, allowing the ball to fall in front of him for a double. One out later, the mighty Donn Clendenon hits a shot deep to center. The rookie gets a jump on it and snags it just as he hits the wall, but the blow knocks the ball loose. Another double. Jones and Kranepool do the rest, knocking in three, giving the Mets the game. The next night, Tom Seaver pitches a one-hitter. The Cubs are reeling, the Mets, the eventual World Series champion “Miracle Mets,” are rising, the season has turned.