The Matlock Paper Read online

  Matlock walked past her into the living room. He looked for his cigarettes and tried to remain calm. She followed him. “What did he mean?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Has it anything to do with … this?” She gestured her hand over the apartment.

  “I don’t think so.” He lit his cigarette and wondered what he should tell her. The Nimrod people hadn’t wasted any time finding associations. If it was Nimrod.

  “What did he mean by … ‘standing behind the globe’? It sounds like a riddle.”

  “It’s a quote, I think.” But Matlock did not have to think. He knew. He recalled Shakespeare’s words precisely: Knowest thou not that when the searching eye of heaven is hid behind the globe and lights the lower world … then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen … in murders and in outrage bloody here.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know! I can’t remember it.… Somebody’s confusing me with someone else. That’s the only thing I can imagine.… What did he sound like?”

  “Normal. He was angry but he didn’t shout or anything.”

  “No one you recognized? Not specifically, but did you ever hear the voice before?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. No one I could pick out, but …”

  “But what?”

  “Well, it was a … cultivated voice. A little actorish, I think.”

  “A man used to lecturing.” Matlock made a statement, he did not ask a question. His cigarette tasted sour so he crushed it out.

  “Yes, I guess that would describe it.”

  “And probably not in a science lab.… That reduces the possibilities to roughly eighty people on campus.”

  “You’re making assumptions I don’t understand! That phone call did have something to do with what happened here.”

  He knew he was talking too much. He didn’t want to involve Pat; he couldn’t involve her. Yet someone else had—and that fact was a profound complication. “It might have. According to the best sources—naturally I refer to television detectives—thieves make sure people aren’t home before they rob a place. They were probably checking me out.”

  The girl held his wavering eyes with her gaze. “Weren’t you home then? At quarter to four?… The question is not inquisitorial, my darling, simply a point of information.”

  He swore at himself silently. It was the exhaustion, the Beeson episode, the shock of the apartment. Of course the question wasn’t inquisitorial. He was a free agent. And, of course, he was home at quarter to four.

  “I’m not sure. I wasn’t that concerned with the time. It was one hell of a long evening.” He laughed feebly. “I was at Archie Beeson’s. Proposed seminars with young instructors promote a lot of booze.”

  She smiled. “I don’t think you understand me. I really don’t mind what Poppa Bear was doing.… Well, of course, I do, but right now I don’t understand why you’re lying to me.… You were here two hours ago, and that phone call wasn’t any thief checking your whereabouts and you know it.”

  “Momma Bear’s reaching. That doesn’t go with the territory.” Matlock was rude. It, too, like the lying, was obviously false. Whatever his past rebellions, whatever his toughness, he was a kind person and she knew that.

  “All right. I apologize. I’ll ask one more question and then I’ll leave.… What does Omerta mean?”

  Matlock froze. “What did you say?”

  “The man on the phone. He used the word Omerta.”

  “How?”

  “Very casually. Just a reminder, he said.”

  8

  Field Agent Jason Greenberg walked through the borderless door of the squash court. “You’re working up quite a sweat there, Dr. Matlock.”

  “I’d hate to have it analyzed.… Anyway, it was your idea. I would have been just as happy at Kressel’s office or even downtown somewhere.”

  “This is better.… We’ve got to talk quickly, though. The gym registry has me listed as an insurance surveyor. I’m checking the extinguishers in the corridors.”

  “They probably need checking.” Matlock walked to a corner where a gray sweatshirt was wrapped in a towel. He unwound it and slipped it over his head. “What have you come up with? Last night was a little hairy.”

  “If you discount confusion, we haven’t come up with a thing. At least nothing specific. A couple of theories, that’s all.… We think you handled yourself very well.”

  “Thanks. I was confused. What are the theories? You sound academic, and I’m not sure I like that.”

  Greenberg’s head suddenly shifted. From the right wall there could be heard a dull thumping. “Is that another court?”

  “Yes. There are six of them on this side. They’re practice courts, no balconies. But you know that.”

  Greenberg picked up the ball and threw it hard against the front wall. Matlock understood and caught it on the bounce. He threw it back; Greenberg returned it. They maintained a slow rhythm, neither man moving more than a foot or two, each taking his turn to throw. Greenberg spoke softly, in a monotone.

  “We think you’re being tested. That’s the most logical explanation. You did find Ralph. You made a statement about seeing the car. Your reasons for being in the area were weak; so weak we thought they were plausible. They want to make sure, that’s why they brought in the girl. They’re being thorough.”

  “Okay. Theory number one. What’s number two?”

  “I said that was the most logical.… It’s the only one, really.”

  “What about Beeson?”

  “What about him? You were there.”

  Matlock held the squash ball in his hand for a few seconds before lobbing it against the side wall. The wall away from Greenberg’s stare.

  “Could Beeson have been smarter than I thought and sent out an alarm?”

  “He could have. We think it’s doubtful.… The way you described the evening.”

  But Matlock had not described the entire evening. He had not told Greenberg or anyone of Beeson’s telephone call. His reasons weren’t rational, they were emotional. Lucas Herron was an old man, a gentle man. His sympathy for troubled students was legendary; his concern for young, untried, often arrogant new instructors was a welcomed sedative in faculty crises. Matlock had convinced himself that the “grand old bird” had befriended a desperate young man, helping him in a desperate situation. He had no right to surface Herron’s name on the basis of a phone call made by a panicked drug user. There were too many possible explanations. Somehow he’d speak with Herron, perhaps over coffee at the Commons, or in the bleachers at a baseball game—Herron loved baseball—talk to him, tell him he should back away from Archer Beeson.

  “—about Beeson?”

  “What?” Matlock had not heard Greenberg.

  “I asked you if you had second thoughts about Beeson.”

  “No. No, I haven’t. He’s not important. As a matter of fact, he’ll probably throw away the grass and the pills—except for my benefit—if he thinks he can use me.”

  “I won’t try to follow that.”

  “Don’t. I just had momentary doubts.… I can’t believe you arrived at only one theory. Come on. What else?”

  “All right. Two others and they’re not even plausible-both from the same egg. The first is that there might be a leak in Washington. The second—a leak here at Carlyle.”

  “Why not plausible?”

  “Washington first. There are fewer than a dozen men who know about this operation, and that includes Justice, Treasury, and the White House. They’re the caliber of men who exchange secret messages with the Kremlin. Impossible.”

  “And Carlyle?”

  “You, Adrian Sealfont, and the obnoxious Samuel Kressel.… I’d like nothing better than pointing at Kressel—he’s a prick—but, again, impossible. I’d also take a certain ethnic delight in knocking a venerated WASP like Sealfont off his pedestal, but there, too—no sense. That leaves you. Are you the one?”

  “Your wit i
s staggering.” Matlock had to run to catch the ball which Greenberg threw into a corner. He held it in his hand and looked at the agent. “Don’t misunderstand me—I like Sam, or at least I think I do—but why is he ‘impossible’?”

  “Same as Sealfont.… In an operation like this we start at the beginning. And I mean the beginning. We don’t give a goddamn about positions, status, or reputation—good or bad. We use every trick in the books to prove someone guilty, not innocent. We try to find even the flimsiest reason not to clear him. Kressel’s as clean as John the Baptist. Still a prick, but clean. Sealfont’s worse. He’s everything they say. A goddamn saint—Church of England, of course. So, again, that leaves you.”

  Matlock whipped the ball up in a spinning reverse shot into the rear left ceiling. Greenberg stepped back and slashed the ball in midair into the right wall. It bulleted back between Matlock’s legs.

  “I gather you’ve played the game,” said Matlock with an embarrassed grin.

  “The bandit of Brandeis. What about the girl? Where is she?”

  “In my apartment. I made her promise not to leave till I got back. Outside of safety, it’s one way to get the place cleaned up.”

  “I’m assigning a man to her. I don’t think it’s necessary, but it’ll make you feel better.” Greenberg looked at his watch.

  “It will and thanks.”

  “We’d better hurry.… Now, listen. We’re letting everything take its normal course. Police blotter, news-papers, everything. No covers, no counter stories, nothing to obstruct normal curiosity or your perfectly normal reactions. Someone broke into your apartment and smashed up the place. That’s all you know.… And there’s something else. You may not like it, but we think it’s best—and safest.”

  “What?”

  “We think Miss Ballantyne should report the phone call she received to the police.”

  “Hey, come on! The caller expected to find me there at four o’clock in the morning. You don’t spell that kind of thing out. Not if you’re on a fellowship and expect to work for museum foundations. They still revere McKinley.”

  “The eye of the beholder, Dr. Matlock.… She just received a phone call; some man asked for you, quoted Shakespeare, and made an unintelligible reference to some foreign word or city. She was goddamn mad. It wouldn’t rate five lines in a newspaper, but since your apartment was broken into, it’s logical she report it.”

  Matlock was silent. He walked over to the corner of the squash court where the ball had settled and picked it up. “We’re a couple of ciphers who got pushed around. We don’t know what happened; just that we don’t like it.”

  “That’s the idea. Nothing is so convincing as someone who’s a bewildered injured party and lets everybody know it. Make an insurance issue about those old books of yours.… I’ve got to go. There aren’t that many extinguishers in the building. Anything else? What are you doing next?”

  Matlock bounced the ball on the floor. “A fortuitous invitation. Fortuitously received over a number of beers at the Afro-Commons. I’m invited to a staged version of the original puberty rites of the Mau Mau tribes. Tonight at ten o’clock in the cellars of Lumumba Hall.… It used to be the Alpha Delt fraternity house. I can tell you there are a lot of white Episcopalians spinning in hell over that one.”

  “Again, I’m not following, Doctor.”

  “You don’t do your homework, either.… Lumumba Hall is very large on your list.”

  “Sorry. You’ll phone me in the morning?”

  “In the morning.”

  “I’ll call you Jim if you’ll call me Jason.”

  “No kiss, but agreed.”

  “O.K. Practice some more in here. I’ll take you when this is over.”

  “You’re on.”

  Greenberg let himself out. He looked up and down the narrow corridor, satisfied that no one was there; no one had seen him enter or leave the court. Continuous thumping could be heard within the walls. All the courts were in use. Greenberg wondered, as he was about to turn the corner into the main hallway, why the Carlyle gymnasium was so heavily attended at eleven o’clock in the morning. It was never the case at Brandeis; not fifteen years ago. Eleven o’clock in the morning was a time for class.

  He heard a strange noise that was not the sound of a hard ball against thick wood and turned quickly.

  No one.

  He entered the main hall and turned once again. No one. He left quickly.

  The sound he heard was that of a stubborn latch. It came from the door next to Matlock’s court. Out of that door a man emerged. He, too, as Greenberg had done less than a minute before, looked up and down the narrow corridor. But instead of being satisfied that no one was there, he was annoyed. The obstinate latch had caused him to miss seeing the man who’d met with James Matlock.

  Now the door of court four opened and Matlock himself stepped into the corridor. The man ten feet away was startled, pulled his towel up to his face, and walked away, coughing.

  But the man wasn’t quick enough. Matlock knew that face.

  It was the patrolman from his apartment at four o’clock in the morning.

  The patrolman who had called him “Doctor.” The man in uniform who knew beyond a doubt that the campus troubles were caused by the “weirdos and the niggers.”

  Matlock stared at the retreating figure.

  9

  Over the large cathedral doors one could see—if one looked closely, or the sun was shining at a certain angle—the faded imprint of the Greek letters AΔΦ. They had been there in bas-relief for decades, and no amount of sand blasting or student damage could eradicate them completely. The fraternity house of Alpha Delta Phi had gone the way of other such buildings at Carlyle. Its holy order of directors could not find it within themselves to accept the inevitable. The house had been sold—lock, stock, leaking roof, and bad mortgage—to the blacks.

  The blacks had done well, even extremely well, with what they had to work with. The decrepit old house had been totally refurbished inside and out. All past associations with its former owners were obliterated wherever possible. The scores of faded photographs of venerated alumni were replaced with wildly theatrical portraits of the new revolutionaries—African, Latin American, Black Panther. Throughout the ancient halls were the new commands, screeched in posters and psychedelic art: Death to the Pigs! Up Whitey! Malcolm Lives! Lumumba the Black Christ!

  Between these screams for recognition were replicas of primitive African artifacts—fertility masks, spears, shields, animal skins dipped in red paint, shrunken heads suspended by hair with complexions unmistakably white.

  Lumumba Hall wasn’t trying to fool anyone. It reflected anger. It reflected fury.

  Matlock didn’t have to use the brass knocker set beside the grotesque iron mask at the edge of the doorframe. The large door opened as he approached it, and a student greeted him with a bright smile.

  “I was hoping you’d make it! It’s gonna be a groove!”

  “Thanks, Johnny. Wouldn’t miss it.” Matlock walked in, struck by the proliferation of lighted candles throughout the hallway and adjoining rooms. “Looks like a wake. Where’s the casket?”

  “That’s later. Wait’ll you see!”

  A black Matlock recognized as one of the campus extremists walked up to them. Adam Williams’ hair was long—African style and clipped in a perfect semicircle above his head. His features were sharp; Matlock had the feeling that if they met in the veldt, Williams would be assumed to be a tribal chief.

  “Good evening,” Williams said with an infectious grin. “Welcome to the seat of revolution.”

  “Thanks very much.” They shook hands. “You don’t look so revolutionary as you do funereal. I was asking Johnny where the casket was.”

  Williams laughed. His eyes were intelligent, his smile genuine, without guile or arrogance. In close quarters, the black radical had little of the firebrand quality he displayed on the podium in front of cheering supporters. Matlock wasn’t surprised. Those o
f the faculty who had Williams in their courses often remarked on his subdued, good-humored approach. So different from the image he projected in campus—rapidly becoming national—politics.

  “Oh, Lord! We’re lousing up the picture then! This is a happy occasion. A little gruesome, I suppose, but essentially joyful.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Matlock smiled.

  “A youngster from the tribe reaches the age of manhood, the brink of an active, responsible life. A jungle Bar Mitzvah. It’s a time for rejoicing. No caskets, no weeping shrouds.”

  “That’s right! That’s right, Adam!” said the boy named Johnny enthusiastically.

  “Why don’t you get Mr. Matlock a drink, brother.” And then he turned to Matlock. “It’s all the same drink until after the ceremony—it’s called Swahili punch. Is that O.K.?”

  “Of course.”

  “Right.” Johnny disappeared into the crowd toward the dining room and the punch bowl. Adam smiled as he spoke.

  “It’s a light rum drink with lemonade and cranberry juice. Not bad, really.… Thank you for coming. I mean that.”

  “I was surprised to be invited. I thought this was a very ‘in’ thing. Restricted to the tribe.… That didn’t come out the way I meant it.”

  Williams laughed. “No offense. I used the word. It’s good to think in terms of tribes. Good for the brothers.”

  “Yes, I imagine it is.…”

  “The collective, protective social group. Possessing an identity of its own.”

  “If that’s the purpose—the constructive purpose—I endorse it.”

  “Oh, it is. Tribes in the bush don’t always make war on each other, you know. It’s not all stealing, looting, carrying away women. That’s a Robert Ruark hangup. They trade, share hunting and farming lands together, coexist in the main probably better than nations or even political subdivisions.”

  It was Matlock’s turn to laugh. “All right, professor. I’ll make notes after the lecture.”

  “Sorry. Avocational hazard.”

  “Avocational or occupational?”