The Crime of Julian Wells Read Free Page A

the world conspired to bring him to so black an end?

2
    There are some bridges you cannot cross again, and so your only choice is simply to make the best of the shore you have chosen. And so, in the taxi, heading toward my father’s apartment, I concentrated on my life’s many satisfactions. The smaller ones, like good food, and the larger ones, like the years I’d had with my wife—comforts that Julian had not found in his youth and later chose not to seek.
    For some reason, these thoughts brought to mind a passage from one of Julian’s books, his description of Henri Landru. He’d written that the famous French serial killer had begun to talk as his date with the guillotine grew near, even going so far as to make a crude drawing of the kitchen where the bodies had been burned. Death’s approach had turned him quite gossipy, Julian said, so that in the last days, Landru had been less the condemned man silently brooding on his crimes than a washerwoman chatting in the market square.
    Not so Julian, I thought now, and instantly imagined him alone on the sunporch with his map of Argentina and God only knew what grim thoughts in his mind. Had he, in his last hours, inexplicably returned to the first tragedy that touched him? And if so, why?
    There could be no answer to these questions, of course, so rather than pursue a fruitless trail, I drifted through the mundane details of Julian’s early life.
    He was born upper-middle-class, his father a State Department official who’d been one of my father’s closest friends. His mother had died giving birth to Loretta, and after that Julian and his sister had been overseen by a series of nannies. By the time Julian and Loretta were in grade school, James Wells had retired because of a heart condition. A few years later, he’d bought the Montauk farmhouse, in which he had died at age fifty-five.
    That death had devastated Julian, and something of his lost father settled over him for many months, a lingering presence, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, which is exactly how Julian once described it. In the wake of his father’s death, he seemed ever more determined to make a mark in life. Even so, the space his father had occupied remained empty, a void never filled. “A little boy needs a hero,” he once said to me, though without adding what I knew was on his mind, the fact that with his father gone, he’d lost that hero in his own life.
    A cautious man, Julian’s father had left his two children, Julian, fifteen, and Loretta, twelve, well fixed, mostly by means of a substantial life insurance policy, the proceeds from which had retired the Montauk mortgage. A bachelor uncle had promptly moved into the house and from there attempted to assume the role of father. Boarding school had taken up the remaining slack. College tuitions had later absorbed what was left of the inheritance, so that by the time Julian graduated from Columbia and Loretta from Barnard, only the Montauk house remained.
    The surprise in all this was that despite the loss of his father and the rather haphazard and emotionally flat nature of his later upbringing, Julian had emerged with so solid, even sterling, a personal character. He had not received the intense moral education my father had provided for me—his many lectures on charity as the greatest of all virtues, his compassion for the poor and the disinherited, his deathless hope that the meek might one day inherit some portion of the earth. And yet, Julian appeared to have taught himself those very lessons, so that by the time he began to spend summers with me, he seemed already primed to receive the finishing touches of my father’s table talk—that is to say, his ancestral tales of men who’d fought under the banner of some universal goodness.
    But why was I recounting Julian’s personal history? I wondered. What good would it do now?
    None whatsoever, of course, and so I had no explanation for this bend in my mind, except that something