There was no reason to doubt Dave’s revelation. On a moment’s reflection it was not at all surprising that Dick DeRichter, the richest man in the entire Four Corners, had an illegitimate son. Why not? The Uranium King’s legend was based on his having lived by his own rules, which was precisely what had enabled him to find a mother lode of uranium ore where others had failed. If the Uranium King had an illegitimate son, it could be Ray Walker as easily as anyone else. This would be another open secret, like Angie Walker’s premarital motherhood, that Tom alone out of the entire population on the West End was not privy to. Tom could understand why the illegitimate son of a prominent man, and that son’s wife, had cultivated the habit of saying his father was dead. They would have needed a polite explanation for the hole in Ray’s biography. The world is full of this sort of useful fiction.
The relevance of this piece of intelligence to Ray Walker’s disappearance was immediately obvious. Though uranium mining had long since ceased in the region, the DeRichter family still owned hundreds of thousands of acres around Radium, and half of the property in town. They were involved in developing high-end resort property in Telluride and had recently opened the family estate on North Mountain as a high-end guest ranch. While Dick DeRichter, the old man, was in his 80s and rarely seen in public, his youngest son, Albert, as the principal overseer of the family’s interests, was a familiar figure. How was this degree of conspicuous wealth and prominence possible when Albert’s stepbrother, Ray Walker, lived in the same small community in virtual poverty? The possibilities for resentment and conflict were easy to imagine, far easier to imagine, in fact, than it was to understand how they might be able to live side-by-side peaceably. No wonder Dave, who had already expressed a sense of solidarity with his childhood friend, was disgusted. As deep as the mystery of Ray’s disappearance itself, there was a secondary mystery about why the investigation hadn’t turned immediately to questions about Ray’s relationship to his father. If the community of Radium had a deeply ingrained habit of looking the other way when it came to anything untoward related to the DeRichters, Dave was asking for more than that from Tom, who – as Dave himself had pointed out – was not really one of them.
The power of denial is strong, though, and Tom felt a pulse of resistance to being drawn into the swamp, a sixth sense warning him that he would regret it if he allowed himself to become over-involved. Better to ignore Dave’s tip, and Dave’s expectations of what the newspaper ought to do, and nobody would ever know or care. If Ray Walker had lived his entire life on the West End without feeling any great need to identify himself as Dick DeRichter’s son, why should Tom report it now? But he had another edition of the Forum to publish, the relentlessness of a deadline, so he picked up the phone and dialed Sheriff Martin.
Martin kept Tom on hold for only a few minutes.
“I’m trying to stay on top of this Ray Walker story, Sheriff,” Tom said. “And I’m wondering if there are any developments in the case.”
“Not a one, Tom,” Martin growled. “But let’s remember that Ray Walker is a competent adult and that no crime has been committed, not that we know of.”
“Does that mean you’re not investigating?”
“Now I didn’t say that,” the sheriff said. “We’re following all the standard procedures we take in any missing person case. We’ve sent out a bulletin to all the law enforcement agencies in the region. And my deputies are keeping their eyes open.”
“Could Ray Walker have been mixed up in anything that might have put him at some kind of risk? I assume you’ve interviewed his family and friends….”
“Yes, yes, of course we have.” The sheriff sounded impatient, as if he were running late for lunch. “Can we talk off-the-record, for just a moment?”
“Sure.”
“Let me just ask you a question, a hy-po-thetical question. Now I’m not saying that Ray Walker was having an affair, but let’s just say he was having an affair with a married woman, and let’s say her husband found out about it. Do you think it would be appropriate for me to tell you about that and for you to put it in your newspaper? I mean, so far as I know, it’s not a crime for a married man to have an affair with a married woman, though I will admit it that some preachers wouldn’t like it and it is the kind of thing that might cause him to hightail it, especially after her husband found out.”
“Are you telling me that Ray Walker was having an affair with a married woman, sheriff?”
“Oh, no, no, no, no, I didn’t say that. That was a hy-po-thetical. But you hear what I’m trying to tell you? These are just some of the complexities of a missing person case that law enforcement has to think about. You’ve got people’s privacy to consider, the privacy of the missing person and of the people he’s left behind. You start asking too many questions and you can end up with a big ole mess you never dreamed of.”
“That’s interesting, sheriff.”
“Why, I’m sure you have similar concerns in your business, Tom. You don’t always report every detail you know, now do you?”
Tom found it unlikely that Martin cared as much as he insisted he did about such niceties as personal privacy or the reputation of an innocent bystander, but it was fundamental to the ethos of the West that people should be left alone as long as they weren’t hurting anyone else. Martin’s strong libertarian streak was the basis of his popularity.
“I understand that Ray Walker is Dick DeRichter’s son,” Tom said.
Martin didn’t skip a beat. “Now that’s just exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about, Tom! Another hy-po-thetical!” he exclaimed. “And it might be true, but if it is true, I don’t see how that is of any concern at all to law enforcement. Where’s the crime?
“Now I want to say something on the record,” the sheriff said, “and you can write this down and put it right on page one in your newspaper with a picture of my pretty face and a big ole headline if you want to. I want to assure you and all of your readers and all of Ray Walker’s friends and loved ones that this case is open and is being investigated aggressively. The Slickrock County Sheriff’s Office is doing everything possible to find Ray Walker.”
So Ray Walker might have run off with a married woman, though there was no report of a missing woman in the West End, making this a completely hypothetical possibility, as the sheriff said. Unless the sheriff was not, in fact, trying to tip Tom off, but was trying instead to mislead him. The sheriff had no reason to tip him off, Tom reasoned, unless he hoped that Tom would blow the case open and spare him the necessity of doing it himself. Martin might just prefer to let the newspaper tarnish Ray Walker’s sterling reputation as a family man by reporting that he was having an affair, if that was where this thing was going.
Then again, if Walker was having an affair, a jealous husband might have done something about it, a hypothetical on top of a hypothetical. Or maybe Walker’s own wife did something about her philandering husband, though that was highly unlikely, Tom thought, given the obvious grief his disappearance caused her. She was not entirely convincing when she insisted that she had no idea where Ray was, but she did not strike Tom as potentially violent. Still, they could have argued and he might have walked out, or she might have kicked him out, and that would better explain her delay in reporting that he was missing. If that’s what happened, it would just add a layer of guilt to her grief, making her appear all the more aggrieved, and that wasn’t implausible at all.
Then there was Dave Best’s suggestion, albeit retracted, that Ray Walker could be involved with methamphetamines, not at all unlikely given the meth epidemic in the rural West. Meth was soul-destroying, and if Ray Walker was a meth addict, or was involved with meth addicts, foul play was not merely hypothetical, but given his disappearance was likely.
Though the list of possibilities was growing, it seemed clear that Sheriff Martin was not particularly interested in pursuing any of them. And for that, there was now a ready explanation: Ray Walker was Dick DeRichter’s son, but not a legitimate heir to the discoverer of the Whispering Jim lode, founder of the Uranium King Mining Co., and still the region’s most illustrious citizen, even in his dotage. To aggressively investigate Ray Walker’s disappearance could risk disrupting the arrangement, whatever it was, that enabled the legitimate DeRichter family to enjoy their life of luxury at their estate on North Mountain just a dozen miles away from where their bastard relative labored as an auto mechanic. This could well be what Martin was concerned about when he spoke of “a big ole mess,” a risk to the DeRichters. Because one thing was certain: Trace Martin had not remained sheriff of Slickrock County for 36 years by crossing the Uranium King.
Even if the sheriff had an ulterior motive, he had nonetheless posed a challenging question. Apart from the generalized and inchoate anxiety Ray Walker’s disappearance had clearly caused in Radium, absent a corpse, what did it matter? And if there was no crime, who was responsible for finding him?
People disappear all the time, Martin had declared, and this no doubt was true. To investigate could be an infringement on the missing man’s privacy or, from a law enforcement perspective, a waste of time and a distraction from more immediate concerns. What if the missing man didn’t want to be found? Was it his right to vanish?
Tom knew that a man might disappear for any number of reasons, for potentially as many reasons as there are men. He knew that there is nothing more personal than a man’s disappearance.
Tom’s career in journalism had come too easily. He enjoyed being a rising star, a form of celebrity measured by the time that his editors were willing to devote to his stories, his virtually unmonitored expense account, and the frequency with which his stories were given page one placement. He didn’t mind the jealousy he inspired in other reporters, most of them older than he was.
He lacked only someone to share it with, and that problem was solved when he spotted Miranda Morcineau in Mallory’s Tavern one day after work. He was captivated by her olive complexion, green eyes, and African-black curly hair: she was from Bahia in Brazil, a mixed-race beauty, all the more exotic because she was an executive with the Banco do Brasil. They were professional equals, each employed by a famous corporation, and they made a sexy and glamorous couple. He had given up his Fenway bachelor’s pad and had moved in to her chic Back Bay apartment within a few weeks after they met.
Unlike young romance as portrayed in the movies, no tiresome negotiation had been necessary. Miranda was not given to a lot of reflection or self-doubt, or at least none that she ever expressed to Tom. Shortly after they’d met and they had spent a series of nights together at her place, he mentioned that he needed to run home for some fresh clothes.
“I could just move in with you,” he joked. “It would be easier.”
“Why not?” she shrugged.
Could it really be that easy for a young man to find himself living with a beautiful woman? Was this how a soulmate identifies herself? With a shrug? Tom couldn’t help but wonder if she was his only because he was the first man to come right out and ask if he could move in with her. If another guy had come along and had asked before Tom had, would she have said to him, with a shrug, “Why not?”
She probably would have, as long as that other guy, like Tom, was willing to escort her to the clubs virtually every night. If they were indeed soulmates, the reason behind it was an unspoken assumption that her lifestyle would become theirs. It was only years later, when Tom thought back to his life with Miranda, that he realized, with nothing but shame, that this was a fateful deception, and one he bought into for the shallowest of reasons: simply because she flattered him. Dangerously, he had come to regard himself as an eminence to whom Miranda was an accessory, even an entitlement, like a Rolex watch or a Jaguar.
The truth was that he couldn’t keep up with her. What came effortlessly to Miranda, working by day and spending every night on the town, was impossible for Tom. Was it something Latin in her, something cultural or possibly something genetic that enabled her to drink and do cocaine and dance with him all evening and then wake up the next morning after just a few hours of sleep and put on her face and a business suit and join the executive class? Or was it something lacking in him that made it impossible for him to do the same things? What made her so mindlessly comfortable in her skin while he felt increasingly like an impostor in his? The alarm clock would sound, his head would be pounding and she would already be putting time in on her treadmill, watching the Today Show, having put a dark Brazilian roast up to brew.
Vanity, Tom later mused, when he tried to understand why he had wrecked his career, should have been one of the deadly sins. Of the classical seven – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride – pride might be nearly synonymous with vanity, but in modern usage pride may be justified or even virtuous whereas vanity is pride charged with narcissism, for which there is no respectable alibi. So it was his vanity – or just because he could, which was, after all, Bill Clinton’s vain and fully adequate explanation for why he hooked up with Monica Lewinsky – that led Tom to start cheating at work. Without his noticing how it happened or when it started, it was easier for Tom to invent a quote than to conduct an interview, especially when he was hung over. He had long since won the right to keep his own schedule and he started to abuse it, rarely showing up at the office before noon. To keep up with his outsized reputation, since he was often too wasted to do much legwork, he would sometimes have to make up a few interview subjects, and nobody would be the wiser. What really propelled him was that he was good at it. It seemed to be no accident that the more fabrication there was in a story, the more his editors seemed to like his work and the less they messed with him.
Of course, he took it too far and was busted. He strolled into the office at noon one day to hear from the receptionist, who was unfailingly chipper but now looked uncomfortably away, that he was wanted immediately in the managing editor’s office. Was it just his imagination or were people in the newsroom stealing awkward glances at him as he strode through? Were some of the reporters he had snubbed over the years wearing a look of smug satisfaction? Later, when he remembered that walk en route to his own execution, the last moments before his fall, it all unfolded in slow motion like a car wreck, his gory injuries as good as sustained even though he wasn’t bleeding quite yet.
He had loved working in a big city newsroom; even before it slipped away he was starting to miss it.
“Close the door,” his longtime champion Elaine Weiner said.
“What’s up?”
She looked at him coldly.
“It’s all a lie, isn’t it Tom?”
“What’s a lie?”
“Every last thing about you.”
“Hey, slow down. I mean, that’s awfully harsh, isn’t it? Did I get something wrong?”
She tossed pages she was holding, evidently some of his copy, onto her desk.
“This kid you wrote about makes for a great story. Home schooled up in rural New Hampshire, groundbreaking work on the disappearance of frogs from local ponds. Being recruited by a dozen major universities that are offering him full scholarships. And you wrote it well. The only problem is, he doesn’t exist. You invented him.”
“I….
“Don’t bother.”
“But, Elaine, you’ve got it wrong…. He’s a composite….”
“A what?” She was incredulous.
“A composite.”
She shook her head in disgust.
“I’ve got a team reviewing all of the stories you’ve written that we’ve published,” she said. “So far, at least a dozen contain major fabrications.”
“I can explain.”
“No Tom, you can’t explain. You’ve betrayed me. You’ve betrayed this newspaper and everyone who works here. You’ve betrayed your profession. And you’ve even betrayed yourself. At this point there’s only one thing left that you can do.”
He looked up at her hopefully, but her eyes were set hard.
“You can get the fuck out of here.”
“Won’t you give me a chance to…?”
“To do what? To explain? To make things right? What is there to explain? Do you have any concept of what you’ve done? You’ve not only ruined your own career. You’ve destroyed mine.”
“Elaine, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t believe you and I don’t care. You’ll say anything. You’re a sociopath. Just get out. Go.”
Tom picked himself up and stepped back into the newsroom and now there was no question at all that everyone was staring at him. He tried to smile but could produce only a grimace. He knew instantly, right then, that in his arrogance he had failed to cultivate a single friend there. If there was nobody at The Mail truly sorry to see him get his overdue comeuppance, he was aware that he was a sickening spectacle nonetheless. When he reached his cubicle, thinking he would take refuge there and collect himself, that he would buy a little time to figure out what to do next – to attempt, at least, to recover a shred of dignity – he found instead a security guard, who handed him a carton containing his personal belongings.
“I’ll escort you out,” the guard said.
Tom nodded his acquiescence and once again had to walk the gauntlet, back through the newsroom, now serving as a pitiful example to all the other reporters and editors of just how low the mighty can fall. Passing the men’s room he felt a wave of nausea. He handed the carton to the guard and ran inside and vomited.
Then, suddenly, he found himself on the street, holding the small box, which might as well have contained the ashes of his career, not moving, as if the only purpose he had left in life was to impede the orderly flow of pedestrians.
His cell phone rang. It was Miranda, calling to discuss where they would meet after work.
“I don’t want to see you anymore,” he heard himself blurt out. “I’ve moved out.” He hung up before she could reply, with no idea what he might do next.
That’s how people break, Tom thought, a half-dozen years later, when he wondered about Ray Walker’s disappearance. It is so simple, really, and no mystery at all: They just fold under pressures that nobody suspects.