Chapter 6 - The Paper Siege
The law does not possess a heart, but it does possess an appetite. Once you feed it the first ream of paper, it will not stop until the bones are picked clean.
By three o'clock that afternoon, the rain had settled into a sullen, gray drizzle that turned the sky the color of dirty zinc.
Inside 742 Maple Street, two locksmiths from the county seat were replacing the deadbolts.
The sound of their cordless drills—*whirrr-clack, whirrr-clack*—echoed through the empty hallways. They were installing three-inch case-hardened steel deadbolts on every exterior door, keyed to a high-security Medeco system that could not be duplicated at a local hardware store.
In the dining room, three women from the county's Adult Protective Services were conducting an inventory.
They wore blue latex gloves and carried clipboards. They moved methodically from room to room, cataloging every item that Carla and Louis had brought into the house, separating them from the property that belonged to the Harris estate.
Louis was not inside.
He was sitting on the wooden tailgate of Detective Miller’s Explorer at the end of the driveway, wrapped in a coarse, scratchy gray wool blanket the deputies had given him.
He was shivering. His socks were soaked through with brown mud, and his face was gray with the realization of what had occurred in the span of six hours.
The neighbors were watching.
Mrs. Gable, who lived at 738 and had known Lucy since their days in the Garden Club, stood at the edge of her lawn holding a large black umbrella, her arms crossed over her floral housecoat.
Mr. Henderson from 746 was leaning over his white picket fence, his pipe unlit between his teeth, watching Louis with the cold, silent judgment of a veteran who had worked thirty years in the tool-and-die plant.
The word had spread. In small towns, news does not travel along wires; it moves through the soil like water.
They knew about the birthday dinner.
Marcus, the young man Carla had tagged in her Instagram video, had shown it to his mother; his mother had called the church prayer chain; by noon, every woman within four square miles knew that Louis Harris had served dry dog food to his seventy-year-old father in the house Lucy had died in.
Arthur Vance walked out onto the porch, holding an unlit cigar between his teeth. He came to my side as I stood watching the locksmith tighten the brass strike plate on the front door.
"Miller just finished the preliminary search of her three suitcases, Ernie," Arthur said.
"And?" I asked.
"Your wife's jewelry was in the bottom of the black one," Arthur said quietly.
My hand, resting on the porch post, tightened just a fraction.
"Which pieces, Arthur?"
"All of them," Arthur replied. "The pearl necklace Lucy inherited from her grandmother. The sapphire brooch you gave her for your twentieth anniversary. And the platinum wedding band you took off her finger at the hospice."
I looked out at the street.
The rain was falling straight down now, without wind.
"She told Louis she was having them 'cleaned and appraised' for insurance," Arthur continued, his voice heavy with contempt. "She had already contacted an estate liquidator in Atlanta. Miller found the text messages on her secondary phone. She was planning to leave for the airport on Wednesday morning while Louis was at his gym."
"She was going to leave him," I said. It was not a question.
"She was going to clean out the remainder of the SunTrust account, take the jewelry, leave the keys on the counter, and vanish into Florida," Arthur said. "Louis was the patsy, Ernie. When the HELOC defaulted, the bank would have sued Louis as the co-signer. He would have held the debt, he would have held the criminal liability for the forged signature, and she would have been drinking mojitos in Sarasota under another name."
I turned away from the door.
"I am going to speak with him," I said.
Arthur reached out a hand, touching my shoulder. "Ernie... you don't have to. The order is served. Miller will drive him to the municipal shelter or a cheap motel down on the highway. You don't owe him an explanation."
"I am his father, Arthur," I said. "A man does not let a stranger deliver the final sum."
I walked down the porch steps.
My leather oxfords were clean. I walked carefully along the flagstones, avoiding the mud Louis’s associates had churned up the night before.
As I approached the Explorer, Louis looked up.
His eyes were swollen, red, and wet. The stubble on his cheeks was patchy, and his lips were blue from the cold.
"Dad," he croaked, pulling the scratchy wool blanket tighter around his shoulders. "Dad, please. You gotta listen to me. I didn't know about the jewelry. I swear to God, Dad, on Mom's grave, I didn't know she had Mom's pearls. She told me she was getting them polished for your seventy-first birthday. She told me she wanted to surprise you."
"Louis," I said, stopping four feet from him.
"Dad, I was trying to build something!" he cried, his voice breaking into that ragged, childish sob I had heard a thousand times when he was caught in an untruth. "Everything was so expensive! Everybody my age is doing things, they have things, they have companies, they have followers! I was thirty-six and I had nothing! You had this house! You had the pension! You had everything figured out, and you never gave me a chance!"
"I gave you four years, Louis," I said.
My voice was neither loud nor angry. It had that terrible, crushing weight of an unpayable debt.
"I gave you four years of my life," I repeated. "I gave you four years of silence while you brought strangers into the home your mother bled for. I gave you forty-two thousand dollars in credit card balances that I settled without a word because I was ashamed that my son was a beggar. I gave you the food from my own refrigerator. And last night, you put an animal's bowl upon my table and told me I was a freeloader."
Louis lowered his head. The tears dripped from the end of his nose onto the gray wool blanket.
"I was joking," he whispered. "It was just a joke, Dad. Everybody was laughing. I didn't mean anything by it."
"No, Louis," I said. "You were not joking. A joke has humor. What you did was a test."
He looked up, confused through his tears.
"A test?"
"You wanted to see if I was entirely dead," I said. "You wanted to see if there was any scrap of the man who raised you left inside this cardigan, or if I had finally become the ghost you called me. You wanted to know if you could kick the dog without being bitten."
Louis swallowed hard. His throat clicked.
"I am not a dog, Louis," I said. "And this is not your house."
"Where am I supposed to go?" he wept, looking around at the gray street, at the neighbors watching him from behind their curtains, at the patrol cars with their spinning lights. "I don't have any money. The cards are dead. My car... the dealer's tow truck is already coming for the BMW, isn't it?"
"The dealer was notified of the fraudulent lease application at ten this morning," I said. "The car will be off the street by five."
"I don't have anywhere to go, Dad," he repeated, rocking slightly on the tailgate. "I have fifty dollars in my pocket. That's all I have."
"Then you have fifty dollars more than I had when I arrived in this county in 1974 with a cardboard suitcase and a degree from a night school," I told him.
I reached into my breast pocket.
I did not pull out a checkbook. I did not pull out cash.
I pulled out a small, white business card.
It was the card for the *St. Luke's Men's Mission* on Fourth Street—the homeless shelter run by Pastor Thomas, a man who had served with me on the county youth council twenty years ago.
I held it out to him.
Louis looked at the card. He didn't take it.
"The mission?" he whispered, his voice rising in horror. "Dad, that's where the junkies go. That's where the bums sleep."
"That is where men go who have no roof, no trade, and no character," I said. "Pastor Thomas has a woodshop. They make pallets for the state warehouse. They pay minimum wage, minus three dollars a day for room and board. If you arrive by six o'clock, they will give you a hot meal, a dry cot, and a pair of work boots."
"I can't go there," Louis sobbed, shaking his head violently. "People will see me. Marcus will see me. What am I supposed to tell people?"
"Tell them you are finally paying for your own dinner, Louis," I said.
I dropped the business card onto his lap. It fluttered down, landing on the wet wool of the blanket.
I turned my back on him.
"Dad!" he screamed behind me. "Dad! Don't leave me out here! Dad! It's me! It's Louis!"
I walked up the flagstones.
I did not look back.
A man who looks back when he is cutting away gangrene will only hesitate, and hesitation in the face of rot is the death of the whole body.
I reached the porch.
The locksmith was packing his tools into a red metal box.
"All done, Mr. Harris," he said, handing me three heavy, brass Medeco keys on a plain split ring. "New tumblers, heavy-duty strikes. A tank couldn't kick that door in now."
"Thank you, son," I said, handing him his check.
I stepped inside.
I shut the heavy oak door.
I turned the brass deadbolt.
*Clack.*
The sound went through the house like the drop of an iron curtain.
Outside, the Explorer’s engine revved as Detective Miller put it into reverse, turning toward the street to take my son to the edge of his new life.
Inside, the house was silent.
The Adult Protective Services workers had finished their work and left through the kitchen door. The dining room was empty.
I walked into the center of the room.
The fruit flies were still hovering over the cold roast chicken. The stained tablecloth was still rumpled where Carla’s brother had leaned his greasy elbows.
I walked to the head of the table.
My chair was there.
I sat down.
I pulled the chair in until the apron of the table touched my waistcoat.
I folded my hands upon the wood.
The house was cold. The heat was off. The refrigerator was silent.
May you like
And for the first time in nine years, since the breath had rattled out of Lucy’s lungs in the bedroom upstairs, I was the only master of 742 Maple Street.
***
