Remote Control Page 7
She walked over to find him under the ash tree and her face lit with relief at finding the shade. She lowered herself to the ground and sat, leaning her back against his for support.
He offered her a cold drink from his daypack and said, “Good game. How about Nick-N-Willy’s tonight? You get to pick what kind.” He really, really wanted her to choose garlic and basil. Sometimes she liked the one with feta. He wasn’t in a feta mood.
“What do you mean, ‘good game’? We got killed out there. And I hope you don’t mind, but I told Diane that we’d join her and Raoul for dinner. Raoul is meeting with some new business associate of his. Diane figures they’ll chatter on about initial offerings and SEC regulations and she wants someone to talk to.”
Alan looked at Raoul and Ethan Han, who had ventured over near the backstop. “Raoul’s new associate is Ethan Han—you know, the guy he was telling us about at dinner last week?”
“Really, so they did hook up.” She was running the cold can of iced tea back and forth across her brow. “Then the evening might actually be interesting. Raoul’s quite taken with him.”
“Yes, he is. You’re sure you’re not too tired for this?”
“I’m fried, but I’ll make it. We won’t be out that late, right?”
“What about your medicine?”
“I gave myself a shot before the game.”
Alan pointed across the field. “That man with Raoul and Diane, over there, that’s Ethan Han.” Ethan was helping stuff catcher’s equipment into a canvas bat bag. “Keep a close eye on him. I think he’s about to put a move on Emma.”
“No way,” Lauren said. But Alan could feel her interest piquing.
“I was in on the planning. Watch.”
“Sorry, sweets, but this fish don’t swim. I’ve watched half a dozen guys try to hit on her at the office. She’ll brush him off like a fly. She’s not interested. In a funny way, she’s kind of shy.”
Alan shrugged and said, “We’ll see soon enough, won’t we?”
Not two minutes later, Emma Spire had accepted Ethan Han’s invitation to join Diane and Raoul for dinner.
It looked like they were a party of six.
Raoul had suggested pizza and beer. Alan guessed Abo’s if Raoul got his way, which he usually did, or Old Chicago if Diane was being obstinate, which she often was. But instead, at Ethan’s urging, the group ended up at a big round table at MijBani feasting on creamed lentils and curried chickpeas and cauliflower and potatoes and chapati and naan.
With less than half of a tall Kingfisher in him, Alan was forced to admit that he had lost his yearning for pizza. Lauren, too, seemed to be rallying, although Alan couldn’t tell if it was the good food that was responsible, or whether it was her fascination with the overt flirtation that was taking place between Ethan Han and Emma Spire.
Emma Spire’s internship in the DA’s office had started only a month earlier. Lauren had commented to Alan after the first day she had worked with Emma that her intensity during a personal conversation was remarkable. When you had Emma’s attention, she made you feel like the center of the universe.
Royal Peterson, the DA, assigned Emma to Lauren, who tried hard to make the experience as normal as possible for Emma, for whom nothing seemed normal anymore. Lauren refused to be interviewed for the People piece, and convinced Roy to decline to permit the magazine photographer to shoot in the office.
Emma apologized to Lauren about the People intrusion. “If I give them this, if I let them have this piece of me, maybe they’ll leave me alone for a while. Otherwise, I’m afraid they’ll camp outside the DA’s office the whole time I’m here.”
Emma Spire knew this from experience.
In the nearly two and a half years since her father’s assassination, her name had become one of those words that stand for something in the way that Jackie Kennedy’s did in the post-Camelot years.
Since that CNN day—the day her father died in her arms on the baggage carousel—Emma’s grace, compassion, and beauty entranced the public. But what cemented Emma in the nation’s consciousness after that first sunny May was that she managed to bring clarity to the confused events around her father’s assassination.
After Nelson Newell, her father’s unrepentant assassin, was convicted of the murder of a cabinet official in federal court, Emma requested permission to be a witness at his sentencing hearing. The question to be decided by the court was simply heads or tails, life sentence or execution. The federal prosecutor scheduled Emma’s testimony with trepidation, because she wouldn’t give him a hint of what she planned to say. If she hadn’t been Emma Spire, he would never have permitted her to testify.
Emma was dressed in a simple navy shirtdress with a black leather belt. Her hair was longer by a few inches than it had been in the fabled videotape of the assassination. She was thinner, more mature. Older, her eyes wiser. Watching your father being assassinated, she once told a friend, is a great diet aid.
She was sworn in and she promised to tell the truth. She took a seat in the witness box.
The federal prosecutor asked her relationship to the victim in this case, Dr. Maxwell Spire.
“He is my father,” Emma said.
“You understand the purpose of today’s proceedings?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And what the court is being asked to do?”
“Mr. Newell has been convicted of murdering my father because of his hatred of my father’s belief in freedom of reproductive choice. The purpose of today’s proceeding is to determine whether Mr. Newell’s life is to be sacrificed at the altar of retribution.”
The prosecutor opened his mouth to speak. But Emma wasn’t done.
“I will be as clear today as I am able to be: My father would not have wanted this man executed. Neither do I. I understand Nelson Newell. He believes passionately that violence is a way to solve problems. That makes him a dangerous man.” She gazed at Newell then, it seemed with pity, not hate, and directed her next words to him. “I understand what you did, Mr. Newell. That day in the airport. If I’d had a gun—I would have tried to kill you, too. That would have been my solution and my rage and it would have been as vile as yours.”
The prosecutor said, “Ms. Spire, the question—”
Emma looked directly at the judge. “Vengeance is still wrong. This man needs to be incarcerated forever. Please, do that. Don’t compound my grief, do not soil my father’s work, by killing…in his stead.”
While the prosecutor was finding his next words, Emma said, “I don’t think I have anything more to add.”
Over the course of the next year, as she began to journey beyond her grief, Emma never attempted to hide her face. She became the focus of stories in national magazines and on tabloid TV. She allowed the world to watch as she moved to L.A. and started dating a young actor, Pico Hackney, and became part of the Hollywood scene. But she never seemed to desire that the world watch. That reticence only added to her allure.
With much fanfare, she became engaged to Hackney. Then, with the world’s attention glued to their wedding, she left him alone at the altar.
“I’d become lost,” she explained to Jane Pauley when she resurfaced a few weeks later in Boulder to live in her grandparents’ home. “Hollywood was a drug I took to help me cope. Although I thought I loved him, I’m afraid that Pico, too, became a drug to distract me. That was my fault. Now I want to get my law degree. I want to live the life I might have lived if my father hadn’t been killed. I hope people will forgive me my mistakes. I hope Pico can forgive me. I would like to be left alone now. It’s time to place that other life behind me.”
“What do you think it is about her?” Lauren asked Alan as they were getting ready for bed after their dinner at MijBani.
Alan couldn’t tell how serious the question was. He answered, “Magic. Mirrors.”
“No, what’s so special? How can she be so captivating? You saw everyone knew she was there, staring at her in the restaurant.”
“What does that mean?”
“Emma’s the closest thing we have to the Kennedys. She lost a father to assassination like John Jr. She has Jackie’s elegance and style. She has youth, courage, beauty—and especially, I think she intuitively understands her role.”
“Which is what?”
Alan finished brushing his teeth while he thought about an answer. “Look at her, Lauren. She’s whatever you want her to be. Emma’s the daughter every parent’s proud of, the sister everyone wants to confide in. She’s the wife every husband wants to show off to his friends, and she’s the woman every man wants to screw with the lights on.”
“Every man?”
He smiled. “I’m speaking generally here.”
“America’s sweetheart?”
“Sure, fairy-tale stuff, don’t you think?”
Lauren seemed to be considering what Alan was saying. She pulled off her T-shirt, slid into bed, and turned on her side. She said, “What did you think of Ethan Han?”
Alan said, “Not much. His ego is the size of Ohio. But his focus tonight was Emma; we were just extras on the set. Why, what was your impression?”
She fluffed her pillow. “If he was a defense attorney, I wouldn’t want to face him.”
“Is that a compliment?”
She laughed. “I’m not sure.”
The next time Alan and Lauren saw Ethan and Emma together as a couple was less than two weeks after the softball game. The occasion was a Sunday-night dinner party at Han’s flat in the Citizens National Bank Building on the fourteen hundred block of the Downtown Boulder Mall. The invitation for the impromptu gathering had come only the Friday before, accompanied by a big bouquet of flowers and a handwritten note from Emma addressed to Lauren that read simply, “Please come.”
Diane and Raoul had been invited to the dinner, too. Alan and Lauren met their friends for a drink downtown before the party. Over cocktails, Raoul explained that the other guests would be some investors in BiModal, including Ethan’s partner, Thomas Morgan, whom Raoul described as more concerned with money than with technology.
Leaves were fluttering to the ground, many of the trees were almost bare, and a deep chill in the evening air whispered solemn promises of autumn. On the walk down the Mall toward Han’s building, Lauren described how incredulous she was about the changes she had seen in Emma since she had met Ethan.
“I swear she’s been absolutely unswayed by guys much more attractive and much more charming than Ethan seems to be. You know Anthony Tipton in my office?”
Diane said, “He’s gorgeous. The one with the ass?”
“Yes, Tony, the one with the ass. She blew him right off.”
“No,” Diane said. “The guy is like an advertisement for infidelity. But if Emma was able to leave a hunk like Pico Hackney standing at the altar, she’s a stronger woman than me.”
Raoul coughed.
Struggling for an explanation for Emma’s choice of Ethan Han over Anthony Tipton and Pico Hackney, Diane continued, “Maybe it’s Ethan’s brains she’s attracted to, or his personality?”
Alan couldn’t tell if Diane was being sarcastic or not.
Lauren said, “Ethan’s exotic. Maybe she goes in for exotics.”
Alan smiled to himself. His wife, he knew, was attracted to exotics. Alan had an alternative theory about Emma and Ethan that was less well thought out than he would like but he suspected that the women hadn’t hit on the real issue yet, either. He thought that Emma’s choice of lovers had to do with power and influence, not asses and brains.
“He’s one of the few people in town with a stature that approximates hers. I think we’re watching a true power couple here. She’s dating her own kind.”
“Like me and Raoul,” said Diane.
Alan said, “Not exactly, Diane.”
“More like Ted Turner and Jane Fonda.”
“Or Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver.”
Alan thought it was beginning to feel like a parlor game. “Yeah, more like that. That’s what I think the attraction is. It makes sense that Emma would be most comfortable with someone who has endured at least a taste of the kind of public scrutiny she has.”
Alan could see Diane making skeptical faces.
“You don’t like my theory?”
“It sounds kind of complicated, Alan. I think there’s probably an easier explanation.”
“Such as?”
“I have a feeling that Ethan’s skin is as smooth as it looks and that he’s probably damn good in bed.”
“Which building is it, Raoul?”
Raoul seemed not to hear. Diane said, “It’s the macho one—the big old bank with all the pillars down at the dead end of the Mall.”
They walked mostly in silence the rest of the way, enjoying the late-summer flowers and coleus, and the unexpected peacefulness of the brick-lined paths on an autumn Sunday.
Raoul said, “This is it,” leading them through some glass doors into the lobby of the prominent stone building.
A stately staircase led to the second floor and from there a fire door blocked their path. The fire door off the second-floor landing of the century-old bank building was controlled by a doorbell-buzzer system. Raoul punched the button and they waited to be buzzed in. When no one came, he took out his keys and let them all in the door. A long flight of dark stairs led to the third floor.
Diane said, “I always thought this whole place was nothing but retail and offices.”
“Was, I think,” Lauren said. “Ethan carved out a small apartment in back. Emma said he has the whole third floor; he uses most of it for his computers and research.”
No one greeted the group when they arrived at the top of the stairs, which led down a short hall to a spacious room lined with huge double-hung windows facing north. A big Heriz covered almost all of the red oak floor. The furniture consisted solely of butterfly sling chairs, maybe a dozen of them, in assorted colors.
“Interesting,” said Lauren.
“Nice rug,” said Alan about the Heriz. He knew rugs because his ex-wife had been a rug nut.
“I wish I wasn’t wearing a skirt,” said Diane, who couldn’t figure how the hell she was going to get back out of one of those chairs.
Suddenly music filled the room.
Raoul, whose taste in music spanned the globe, said, “Hootie and the Blowfish,” with obvious distaste just as Ethan Han entered from a door on the long wall opposite the windows. Han didn’t smile much and he didn’t smile then. He raised his arms, palms up, as though he was a pastor urging a congregation to rise and join him in prayer.
“Please,” he said.
They followed him down a short corridor into a room that looked like a garage sale at Hewlett Packard. A hundred years ago, the old bank building had been built to be grand, with ten-foot ceilings of ornate pressed tin. The carved crown moldings around the room were at least fifteen inches high. The walls had long ago been painted a rich ocher that was now dull and solemn.
The room was lined on two sides with long counter-height workbenches covered with electronics. The east side was the computer wall. Four twenty-inch monitors, each glowing with whimsical screen savers, were spaced at even increments. Processors, drives, memory devices, keyboards, mouses, scanners, printers—enough for any dozen techno-junkies—dotted the long laminated counter.
The opposing wall was covered with tools and instruments and microscopes and oscilloscopes and hundreds of color-coded bins full of electronic parts.
In the center of the room, Han’s caterers had erected a large round table covered with a cloth the color of autumn aspen leaves.
A waitress in a white blouse and black vest took coats and drink orders from the newest arrivals.
Two couples stood close to the table in the center
of the room, cradling wineglasses. They made a quick assessment of the new guests and returned to their conversations. One of the men wore a sport coat and a tie, the other a linen shirt with a band collar. One woman was in high-end denim, the other in a long rayon skirt.
Across the room, Han’s partner, Thomas Morgan, had begun pecking something out on one of the many keyboards. He turned as the new group entered the room. Han saw him, motioned with his hand, and said, “J.P., over here. I want you to meet some people.”
Thomas Morgan saved to disc whatever he had been working on and brought the screen saver back up before stuffing his hands in his pockets and strolling over with long strides. Morgan was tall and slender and he wore his tight curls piled high on his head like a cap, the sides cropped to a buzz to accentuate his build. The haircut made his head look too long and narrow, as though it were a section removed from a totem.
Morgan nodded a solemn greeting to Raoul. Ethan made introductions. “This is Raoul’s wife, Diane. And this is Emma’s friend Lauren, and her husband…it’s Alan, isn’t it? Everyone, this is Thomas Morgan. We call him J.P.”
Alan waited until Morgan faced him before holding out his hand for a handshake. Morgan kept his hand in his pocket, gazing at Alan’s outstretched hand as though it were an alien life-form, and finally said, “I don’t believe in handshakes.”
To himself, Alan grunted, Ah, Boulder. He said, “Why do they call you J.P.? Are you related to J. P. Morgan?”
Stonefaced, Ethan said, “Hardly. The only thing the two have in common is an affinity for money. Thomas’s middle name is actually Avarice.”
That’s when Emma entered the room.
Her smile. That’s it. Maybe it’s her smile that gets us.
Alan felt as though he finally had the missing ingredient of Emma’s allure figured out. She was merely pretty until she smiled. Then her beauty took on dimension. If it brightened this big cold room—and it did—it could lighten any mood, reassure any doubt, and charm grumps and grandmothers alike.