There was the promise, the enticing hint. But like much of J.D. Blackstone’s life, it didn’t unfold the way he had planned.
When he lumbered through the door of his condo exhausted, having been up for forty-eight hours, he figured that he would be able to finally get some sleep. It was early evening. But the nature of his insomnia was weirdly unpredictable.
He stripped off his clothes and dumped himself into bed. He didn’t remember falling asleep. But soon he was dreaming. Marilyn, his dead wife, was there in the middle of his dream. This time she kept coming in and out of focus, as if he were looking at her through a camera lens that couldn’t quite get adjusted right, that kept focusing on the depth of field in the background but not the subject. He wanted to see her face. But he couldn’t capture it.
Somewhere a voice said, Don’t forget…
And then he woke up with a start.
He looked at the clock. It was a little before midnight.
And he was wide awake.
He found himself now very frustrated that he had not brought any of his file on Vinnie’s case to work on. He could get dressed and drive down to the office and then fetch some work to do. But that seemed ludicrous.
He clicked on his TV, and while a news program droned on in the background he flipped through several magazines he had stockpiled with the intent of eventually perusing them.
He glanced through a philosophy magazine on postmodernism. And the journal of the American Psychological Association. After that he took in a few of the current poets in an issue of the Southern Review. Then a Capitol Hill political newspaper.
And then an outdoor magazine. Halfway through he noticed an announcement for a new long-distance equestrian race set in the Southwest.
Maybe I’ll get Blackjack up to speed and then enter it, he thought.
That was when he had the fleeting recognition, as he had before, that in the life he was now leading he was free to do everything, virtually without constraint, but found it difficult to muster the will to want to do anything. So he would force himself ahead in a manic, pile-driving effort to keep busy. To do whatever the task was. Never satisfied, even with victory. Never at rest.
He was now beginning to realize how, when Marilyn and Beth were alive, he would leave them often. Of course, sometimes on legal cases that required some travel. Or a few speaking engagements in connection with his professorship at the law school. But often they were his private treks into the wilds to go rock climbing up the sheer face of a mountain, or kayaking down the rapids of rivers in West Virginia, Colorado, even once in South America. That last one was with a group of experienced adventurers, but the rest were solo. Marilyn resented it and said so. She asked why he had the impulsive need to go on those one-man expeditions.
For a man who prided himself on being able to come up with breathtaking solutions for insoluble legal dilemmas and who was capable of mastering a bewildering number of different intellectual disciplines, Blackstone never could come up with a satisfactory answer for that question from his wife.
Then, after a while, they spoke less and less about it. Until finally the icy acceptance of separate lives had set in.
Blackstone had begun working on solving that a few weeks before the car accident. He figured it was just a matter of coming up with the theoretical solution and then applying it to their lives. He looked at restructuring his schedule so his time and Marilyn’s could mesh better. He did the same thing with scheduling time with his daughter, Beth. But the mechanics of it didn’t easily solve the emotional heart of the matter. Marilyn was still coldly resentful. Beth had grown distant and secretive, even if she was able to maintain a friendly exterior in a kind of superficial way.
And then they both were taken away from him.
Turning off the TV a little before four in the morning, he decided to try to crawl back into bed again. But he couldn’t click off his mind.
He tossed and flipped around in his bed for several more hours until finally, sometime after dawn, he fell into a deep sleep.
Blackstone had not set his alarm, and he had turned off the ringer on his phones.
When he awoke, it was one in the afternoon.
And now he was feeling mildly refreshed. He climbed out of bed, put on his gym trunks, and worked out on his Nautilus. Ordinarily he would then have raced down to the office. But just then he had the urge to drive out into the country again to give Blackjack a workout. He glanced at his watch. He still had time to put Blackjack through the paces and get back into town and work at his office into the evening. He put on his jeans and a cutoff work shirt.
Blackstone was halfway to the stables in the Virginia countryside when his cell phone started ringing.
“J.D.,” Frieda said on the other end, a little breathless. “You got a stack of calls from reporters this morning.”
“What’s up?” he asked. “Something break on our case?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Something broke alright. Wait a minute, Julia wants to tell you.” And then she put him on hold.
Blackstone kept driving. He was just getting off onto the county road that led to one other county highway that led finally to the stables. He was trying to figure out what was going on. The obvious answer was that the Court of Appeals had issued its decision, but he couldn’t see how that was likely. Although he had asked the Court to issue an expedited ruling, he had never heard of a court giving a decision in twenty-four hours.
Usually the panel of judges would convene in conference after argument while the case was still fresh from the arguments of counsel and then take a quick poll. If there were at least two votes out of three, they would have their decision, but it would usually take a while to draft the opinion and then get it past the other judges.
“J.D.,” Julia said coming on. “Where are you?”
“Talk to me,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“The Court of Appeals issued its ruling. Just a one-page order. We got it electronically this morning. Can you believe that kind of turnaround time? Nothing elaborate. Just the nuts and bolts. Are you on your way in?”
“How’d they rule?” Blackstone asked.
“You won,” Julia said energetically. “Here’s the bottom line: You can share the Langley note with not more than two defense experts, who have to be sworn to secrecy on the contents of the note. You can also share it with me as co-counsel. But if you want your client to see it, or anyone else for that matter, you have to show cause to the District Court and argue why.”
“Alright. Now we’ve got some momentum,” Blackstone said. “Have you looked at the file yet to find the note and take a look at it?”
“Not yet,” she said. “You’ve got stuff piled all over your office. I figured I would wait until you got back.”
“Fine,” he said. “Look, I’ll be out until later this afternoon. I’ll talk with you around five-thirty or six today, okay?”
“What do you want me to do about all the reporters?” Julia asked. “They’re descending like locusts. New York Times, National Journal, Washington Post.”
“You talk to them.”
“Me?”
“Sure,” Blackstone said. “Look, what they are really after is some hint about the contents of a note that may reveal something about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Number one, we can’t even whisper anything to them about what that note says. And number two, the stuff in that note seems to have nothing to do with that anyway. And if they are trying to figure out how that note will have an impact on our legal case, well, we really have nothing to tell them there either, right?”
“So what do I tell them?”
“That we are gratified and encouraged that the Court gave us such a quick victory. But we are prohibited from sharing anything else with the press at this time.”
“Alright,” she said. “I guess I’ll be seeing you shortly.”
“Count on it,” he said.
He glanced in his rearview mirror. There was a minivan in back of him. Far behind that vehicle there was a white utility truck.
Blackstone slowed down and then turned onto the county highway.
The minivan didn’t turn, but kept going.
When Blackstone was a mile down the tree-lined road he glanced at his rearview mirror again.
He noticed that the white utility truck had turned onto the county highway also and was heading in the same direction he was.