Walking across the sun-dappled quadrangle to Jordan Langford’s office, I mused over the probability that I would soon find myself dropping to the next rung down the career ladder and tending the bar at the Fall Creek Tavern.
Ahead of me on the brick walkway, a student was tossing a Frisbee to an Irish setter. The dog leaped into the air to catch it on the fly, clamped it firmly in his mouth, and ran off past the statue of Francis Channing Barlow, the Union Civil War general.
Jordan’s office was on the top floor of Hastings Hall, a granite edifice with medieval parapets and stone gargoyles perched at each corner. His suite took up the entire floor and had an impressive view of both the campus and the lake beyond. I could almost see my cabin from the reception area.
A young woman looked up from the receptionist’s desk after I came through the outer plate-glass door. She was obviously a student intern. A two-inch-wide purple streak ran down the middle of her blonde hair, which was cropped at the neck as if someone had cut it with hedge clippers. An open paperback copy of The Fountainhead sat on the desk in front of her.
Removing my uniform hat, I said, “I’m here to see the Emperor of St. Andrews if he happens to be in residence at the moment.”
She grinned, revealing two levels of metal braces. Over her shoulder, I saw Jordan come through the door of his office, his eyes absorbed in the folder he was carrying. Dropping it on his secretary’s desk, he looked up and saw me.
“Do you know who you look like?” asked the intern, holding the eraser of her yellow pencil to her chin.
I shook my head.
“My favorite actor.”
“Who is that?”
“Harrison Ford. Before he got old.”
“I’m his illegitimate son,” I said.
“Are you funning me?” she asked, her eyes widening.
“Jake,” called out Jordan Langford from across the suite.
I followed him through the door and shut it behind me. Under the twelve-foot-high ceilings, his walnut partners’ desk gleamed in front of the leaded casement windows. An oil painting of Benjamin Franklin dominated the wall above the fireplace. It hadn’t been there the last time I visited.
“Your truck was illegally parked in the provost’s personal space,” he said. “She had you towed away.”
“That’s why you called me up here?” I asked.
He stared at me for several seconds.
“You look so ridiculous in that uniform,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He was dressed in a charcoal-gray, double-breasted suit with a white shirt and red-speckled power tie. Behind him, a power wall of photographs included pictures of Jordan with Bush the younger, Clinton, Obama, Mandela, and Beyoncé. I had met two of those same presidents. One of them had even pinned a medal on me. In looks and presence, Jordan was more charismatic than both of them.
“I understand you were the first one on the scene at the bridge this morning,” he said.
“Yeah, aside from whoever it was that helped him over the railing. What were you doing there?”
I could see the question made him uncomfortable. I had known him since we were college roommates and knew how he reacted to just about any situation. He stared hard at me as if weighing whether to tell me the truth.
“Let’s just say I happened to be driving by,” he said.
“At six in the morning in your tennis whites?”
“Leave it alone, Jake.”
I decided to leave it alone.
“Janet Morgo says you don’t think Dennis Wheatley’s death was a suicide.”
“That’s right.”
It finally struck me who Dennis Wheatley was, or at least had been. Although I hadn’t recognized his grossly contorted features when he was hanging under the bridge, he was the man who had become famous after creating a franchised chain of fast food restaurants designed to reverse America’s trend toward obesity. He was the poster boy alumnus for St. Andrews College.
“We’re trying to keep a tight lid on things for the moment,” Jordan said. “You can probably understand why.”
“Yeah,” I nodded.
I remembered Dennis Wheatley from the series of funny, self-deprecating television commercials in which he offered Americans free bonus meals if they lost weight.
He had installed computerized cheat-proof scales that worked like ATMs in each of his restaurants so that customers could record their ongoing weight loss wherever they were. He was a multibillionaire and on the Forbes list of twenty richest Americans.
“There’s something else,” said Jordan. “Dennis Wheatley was a dying man, and he was increasingly despondent in recent weeks. I talked to him almost every day. He had pancreatic cancer, and it had metastasized. He told me the doctors only gave him a few weeks to live, and he hadn’t told his wife.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Until a few weeks ago, he thought he had licked it,” said Jordan. “It was in remission and then came roaring back. Evelyn Wheatley is . . . intense. He didn’t want her to worry.”
“She’s on the warpath now.”
“Evelyn also doesn’t know that Dennis gave the college a gift of fifty million dollars two weeks ago. I was going to make the announcement at the trustees meeting on Monday.”
“Who else knows about the gift?”
“Aside from Wheatley’s portfolio manager, no one to my knowledge. Unlike most of the major pledges we receive, Dennis’s gift was unrestricted. No strings attached. He just said, ‘Jordan, do some good with it.’”
“You’ve already received it?”
“The money’s sitting in my private discretionary fund account right now.”
“What do you plan to do with it?”
“A global warming research center in his name,” he said.
There was a knock at the door, and his secretary’s face appeared around the edge.
“Congressman Cornwell is on the phone again for you from Washington.”
“Tell Sam I’ll have to call him back,” he said with an easy smile as he sat down on one of the leather sofas. “I need ten minutes undisturbed, Jenny.”
“Certainly,” she said, closing the door behind her.
His smile disappeared.
I dropped my uniform hat on the other couch and sat down opposite him. Even though we were the same age, he definitely looked younger. His mocha-toned skin was as smooth and unlined as the day I had met him in college. At six feet, he was still lean and hard. There was a touch of gray at the temples of his close-trimmed black hair.
“I haven’t seen you for a while. How’s it going over there?” he asked, his expressive brown eyes locking onto mine.
“I have nothing to do,” I said. “I do that well.”
“You once did a lot of things well.”
“Yeah . . . but I handed in my cape a long time ago.”
“To say you’re overqualified for the campus police would be a joke.”
He was right.
“Look, I’m grateful for the job, Jordan. My prospects were limited. It was this or repossessing used cars.”
“Janet Morgo wants you out of her department,” he declared. “She told me last week that you’re a bad influence on the rest of her team. She asked that I find you another soft landing . . . maybe the catering office.”
“I was thinking about quitting anyway,” I said, deciding not to bring up my suspension.
“To do what?” he asked skeptically.
“I’m thinking of running against Congressman Cornwell,” I said. “There’s a real groundswell of support out there. I’m already feeling it over at the Fall Creek Tavern.”
Chuckling, he said, “I can handle Janet for now. She can be difficult sometimes, but she’s a lot better than the last chief we had, believe me. You never met him, but he was as big a Neanderthal as Jim Dickey.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“So what else is new?” he asked, as if he had all the time in the world. It was obvious he wanted or needed something. I had no idea what it could be.
“A couple of guys think I should be starting at fullback in today’s game,” I said.
“If the Tank is ready to go, then so am I,” he said with a grin.
Jordan and I had been the tandem backs on the only St. Andrews football team to ever win a Division III national championship. He had the footwork of Emmitt Smith and ran like a deer. I ran straight ahead like Riggins and carried the pile. He went all-American and was voted most valuable player. I had my left knee replaced.
“So let’s cut to the chase. What do you need, Jordan?”
He stood and went to the open window that looked out over the quadrangle. I waited for him to tell me what was on his mind. I assumed it had something to do with Dennis Wheatley’s death. Maybe all that money.
“I’m sure you remember that there was actually a time when I was deeply committed to the advancement of the human condition, Jake,” he said as if dictating a term paper. There was another pause. He seemed to be waiting for my confirmation. I didn’t say anything.
“Thanks to the inspiration of Dr. King, Medgar Evers, and a whole lot of others who blazed the trail, I’ve had the chance to explore those boundaries . . . through a legacy forged in blood. I’ve always treasured that. When I got back from the Peace Corps, I decided to work in the inner city in order to advance that legacy. I was a good community advocate. I really was,” he said. “I earned my stripes during those years in Detroit just like you did in the army.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, still wondering where it was all heading.
“And as I look back on it, I was happy then,” he went on. “And Blair was happy.” He paused again and said, “I think she was happy.”
Blair was his wife. He was the one she left me for. After I had received her Dear John letter, I received a long one from him. Without apologizing, he tried to explain how it all happened. He hoped I would understand and forgive them.
“Anyway, she says she was happy. Happiness, peace, contentment . . . that’s what life is supposed to be about, right Jake?”
“Sure,” I replied. “You’re talking to Mr. Happy.”
I had never heard him sound so confused and bewildered. The Jordan Langford I knew had always been certain of everything, particularly his own blazing star in the universe. A lot of people had predicted he would be a senator or governor, if not president someday. I had always assumed that was one of the reasons Blair married him.
“We have a lot more of everything right now, but we’re not content, Jake,” he said, still staring out at the campus. “Blair and I argue all the time. She wanted me to stay in community work. I saw the chance to do a lot more on the executive side. I learned I had a talent for it . . . the gift of working with people and discovering that they usually came to believe in me . . . and to follow me. There are a lot of community advocates in this country, but there are very few good executives to marshal all that talent and make it work. I saw that when I moved over to the administrative side . . . that I could be exponentially more influential than as one good community organizer. It’s all about the validity of how a man chooses to spend his life.”
It was starting to sound like the beginning of a resignation speech. I wondered if he was thinking about quitting his job. Maybe he wanted to run for something. But he wouldn’t have called me in to talk about that.
“You can take the position that everything has its validity on some level,” he said. “I wasn’t fearful of idealism back in Detroit. But many of the groundbreaking things I took pride in then somehow ring false today.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“All right . . . take our minority faculty members. When you and I were here as students, this college didn’t have any. Now thanks to me, there are more than two dozen . . . and they all claim to celebrate racial and ethnic diversity. But when I issued a directive last year that all incoming freshmen would have their roommates randomly selected so each kid could experience true diversity, they organized campus protests. I was branded an Uncle Tom and a lot worse.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said.
“And it wasn’t enough for them to have African and Latino learning centers,” he went on. “Now we’re building separate and segregated living centers.”
He started pacing in front of the fireplace.
“Meanwhile I’ve got a government department full of professors who openly advocate the overthrow of capitalism while demanding six-figure salaries and threatening to move to other schools if they don’t get a new pay package.”
“Let them quit,” I said.
His head shook back and forth.
“You don’t understand what I have to deal with. Flaubert got it right when he said he tried to live in an ivory tower but a tide of shit kept eating away at the walls.”
“I’ve got more important things to do,” I said, standing up.
“Like what?”
“Like taking my dog for her chemotherapy treatment,” I said. “Anyway, Captain Morgo suspended me from duty twenty minutes ago.”
“Goddamn it. Now I’ll have to kiss her ass to reinstate you.”
“I really don’t care, Jordan,” I said.
“I put myself on the line for you after the army kicked you out.”
I was almost at the door when he called out, “Jake . . . Wait!”
When I turned around, he seemed to be on the verge of losing his composure again. For a moment, I thought I saw actual terror in his eyes. Then the confident mask was back in place.
“I only meant that . . . look . . . I know you got a raw deal in Afghanistan.”
“So long, Jordan.”
I was going through the door when his final words stopped me in my tracks.
“I need your help, man,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked, closing the door again.
“I’m being blackmailed, Jake.”