Roughly three and a half minutes later, just after bolting through the Our Father, the Reverend McKendrick had us offer the sign of peace. He didn’t look too happy about it, but there were rules, I guess. I shook the hands of the husband and wife beside me, as well of those of the three old men in the pew behind me and the two old women in the pew ahead.
I managed to catch Angie’s eye as I did. She was up front, nine rows from the altar, and as she turned to shake the hand of the pudgy teenage boy behind her, she saw me. Something maybe a little surprised, a little happy, and a little hurt passed over her face, and then she dipped her chin slightly in recognition. I hadn’t seen her in six months, but I manfully resisted the urge to wave and let out a loud whoop. We were in church, after all, where loud displays of affection are frowned on. Further, we were in Father McKendrick’s church, and I had the feeling that if I whooped, he’d send me to hell.
Another seven minutes, and we were out of there. If it was all up to McKendrick, we would have hit the street in four, but several older parishioners slowed the line during Holy Communion and Father McKendrick watched them struggle to approach him on their walkers with a face that said, God might have all day, but I don’t.
On the sidewalk outside the church, I watched Angie exit and stop at the top of the stairs to speak to an older gentleman in a seersucker suit. She shook his trembling hand with both of hers, stooped as he said something to her, smiled broadly when he finished. I caught the pudgy thirteen-year-old craning his head out from behind his mother’s arm to peer at Angie’s cleavage while she was stooped over the man in the seersucker. The kid felt my eyes on him and turned to look at me, his face blooming red with good old-fashioned Catholic guilt around a minefield of acne. I shook a stern finger at him, and the kid blessed himself hurriedly and looked down at his shoes. Next Saturday, he’d be in the confessional, owning up to feelings of lust. At his age, probably a thousand counts of it.
That’ll be six hundred Hail Marys, my son.
Yes, Faddah.
You’ll go blind, son.
Yes, Faddah.
Angie worked her way down through the crowd milling on the stone steps. She used the backs of her fingers to move the bangs out of her eyes, though she could have solved the problem simply by raising her head. She kept it down, though, as she approached me, fearful perhaps that I’d see something in her face that would either make my day or break my heart.
She’d cut her hair. Cut it short. All those abundant tangles of rich cocoa, streaked with auburn during late spring and summer, rope-thick tresses that had flowed to her lower back and splayed completely across her pillow and onto mine, that could take an hour to brush if she were dressing up for the night—were gone, replaced by a chin-skimming bob that dropped in sweeps over her cheekbones and ended hard at the nape of her neck.
Bubba would weep if he knew. Well, maybe not weep. Shoot someone. Her hairdresser, for starters.
“Don’t say a word about the hair,” she said when she raised her head.
“What hair?”
“Thank you.”
“No, I meant it—what hair?”
Her caramel eyes were dark pools. “Why are you here?”
“I heard the sermons rocked.”
She shifted her weight from her right foot to the left. “Ha.”
“I can’t drop by?” I said. “See an old pal?”
Her lips tightened. “We agreed after the last drop-by that the phone would do. Didn’t we?”
Her eyes filled with hurt and embarrassment and damaged pride.
The last time was winter. We’d met for coffee. Had lunch. Moved on to drinks. Like pals do. Then we were suddenly on the living room rug in her new apartment, voices hoarse, clothes back in the dining room. It had been angry, mournful, violent, exhilarating, empty sex. And after, back in the dining room, picking up our clothes and feeling the room’s winter chill suck the heat from our flesh, Angie had said, “I’m with someone.”
“Someone?” I found my thermal sweatshirt under a chair, pulled it over my head.
“Someone else. We can’t do this. This ride has to end.”
“Come back to me, then. The hell with Someone.”
Naked from the waist up and pissed off about it, she looked at me, her fingers untangling the straps of the bra she’d found on the dining room table. As a guy, I had the better deal—I could dress quicker; find my boxers, jeans, and sweatshirt, and I was good to go.
Angie, untangling that bra, looked abandoned.
“We don’t work, Patrick.”
“Sure, we do.”
On went the bra with a hard sense of finality as she snapped the straps together in back and searched the chair seats for her sweater.
“No, we don’t. We want to, but we don’t. All the little things? We’re fine. But the crucial things? We’re a mess.”
“And you and Someone?” I said, and stepped into my shoes. “You’re all hunky-dory across the board, are you?”
“Could be, Patrick. Could be.”
I watched her pull the sweater over her head, then shrug that abundant hair out of the collar.
I picked my jacket up off the floor. “If Someone’s so simpatico with you, Ange, what was what we just did in the living room?”
“A dream,” she said.
I glanced across the foyer at the rug. “Nice dream.”
“Maybe,” she said in a monotone. “But I’m up now.”
It was a late afternoon in January when I left Angie’s. The city was stripped of color. I slipped on the ice and grabbed the trunk of a black tree to steady myself. I stood with my hand on the tree for a long time. I stood and waited for something to fill me up again.
Eventually, I moved on. It was getting dark and colder and I had no gloves. I had no gloves, and the wind was picking up.
“You heard about Karen Nichols,” I said as Angie and I walked under sun-mottled trees in Bay Village.
“Who hasn’t?”
The afternoon was cloudy, marked by a humid breeze that caressed the skin, then sank into the pores like soap, and smelled of thick, sudden rain.
Angie glanced up at the thick mass of gauze and bandage over my ear. “What happened, by the way?”
“Someone hit me with a lug wrench. Nothing broken, just very badly bruised.”
“Internal bleeding?”
“There was some.” I shrugged. “They flushed it out in the emergency room.”
“Bet that was fun.”
“A ball.”
“You get beat up a lot, Patrick.”
I rolled my eyes at her, pushed the conversation away from my physical abilities or lack thereof.
“I need to know more about David Wetterau.”
“Why?”
“You referred Karen Nichols to me through him. Correct?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you come to know him in the first place?”
“He was starting a small business. Sallis & Salk did his background checks for him and his partner.”
Sallis & Salk was the company Angie worked for now, a monster high-tech security firm that handled everything from guarding heads of state to installing and monitoring burglar alarms. Most of their operatives were ex-cops or ex-Feds, and all of them looked really good in dark suits.
Angie stopped. “Where’s your case here, Patrick?”
“There isn’t one, technically.”
“Technically.” She shook her head.
“Ange,” I said, “I have reason to believe that all the bad luck that happened to Karen in the months before she died wasn’t accidental.”
She leaned back against the banister of a wrought-iron railing fronting a brownstone. She ran a hand through her short hair, seemed to sag in the heat for a moment. In the old-world tradition of her parents, Angie always dressed up for church. Today she wore cream-colored, pleated linen pants, a white sleeveless silk blouse, and a blue linen blazer she’d removed as soon as we’d started walking.
&n
bsp; Even with the hack job she’d done to her hair (and, okay, it wasn’t a hack job; it was actually quite attractive, if you hadn’t known her before), she still looked six or seven steps above tremendous.
She stared at me and her mouth formed a perfect oval of unasked questions.
“You’re going to tell me I’m crazy,” I said.
She shook her head slowly. “You’re a good investigator. You wouldn’t make something like this up.”
“Thanks,” I said softly. It was a bigger relief than I’d expected to have at least one person not question the sanity of my investigation.
We started walking again. Bay Village is in the South End and is often derisively called Gay Village by the homophobes and family-values crowd because of the predominance of same-sex couples in the neighborhood. Angie had moved here last autumn, a few weeks after she’d left my apartment. It was about three miles from my Dorchester neighborhood, but it might as well have been on the far side of Pluto. A close-knit few blocks of bowfront chocolate brownstones and red cobblestone, Bay Village is planted firmly between Columbus Avenue and the Mass Pike. As the rest of the South End becomes ever trendier—the galleries and mochaccino houses and L.A. deco bars sprouting like ragweed, and the residents who salvaged the whole area from urban decay during the seventies and eighties getting pushed out by transplants looking to buy low now and sell high next month—Bay Village seems the last remnant of bygone days when everyone knew each other. True to its reputation, most of the people we passed were gay or lesbian couples, at least two-thirds out walking dogs, and they all waved to Angie, exchanged a few hellos and comments on the weather, a tidbit of neighborhood gossip. It occurred to me that this was far more like a true neighborhood than any I’d been in recently in the city, including my own. These people knew each other, seemed to watch out for each other. One guy even mentioned that he’d shooed off two kids he’d noticed eyeing Angie’s car late last night and suggested she get a Lojack system. Maybe I was missing some greater subtlety, but this seemed the epitome of the family-values concept, and I wondered how those good Christians ensconced in the sterility and affectation of the suburbs saw themselves as poster children for the whole ideal, yet couldn’t tell you the name of the family four houses over on a bet.
I told Angie everything I knew so far about Karen Nichols’s final months—her steep drop into alcohol and drug abuse, the letters forged in her name and sent to Cody Falk, my certainty that Cody hadn’t been the one to vandalize her car, her rape and arrest for solicitation.
“Jesus,” she said when I got to the rape part, but otherwise she remained silent as we wound our way through the South End and then crossed Huntington Avenue and walked along the expanse of the Christian Science Church Headquarters with its glimmering pool and domed buildings.
When I finished, Angie said, “So why are you interested in David Wetterau?”
“That’s the first strand that was pulled. That’s where Karen’s unraveling began.”
“And you think he may have been pushed into traffic?”
I shrugged. “Normally, with forty-six witnesses, I’d doubt it, but given that on that particular day he wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near that particular corner, and now with these letters someone sent to Cody, I’m pretty sure someone was going out of their way to destroy Karen Nichols.”
“And drive her to suicide?”
“Not necessarily, though I’m not ruling it out. For now, let’s just say I think someone was determined to destroy her life in increments.”
She nodded and we sat on the edge of the pool, and she idly ran her fingers through the water.
“Wetterau and Ray Dupuis set up their film equipment supply company, and Sallis & Salk ran checks on all of their employees and interns. They all came out clean.”
“What about Wetterau?”
“What about him?”
“Did he check out?”
She glanced at her reflection in the glassy water. “He hired us.”
“But he wasn’t the money man. He drove a VW, and Karen told me they’d bought a Corolla because they couldn’t swing a Camry. Did Ray Dupuis ask for a background check on his partner?”
She watched a ripple flow from her swaying fingers. “Yeah.” She nodded, eyes still on the water. “Wetterau checked out, Patrick. With flying colors.”
“Is there anyone at Sallis & Salk who does handwriting analysis?”
“Sure. We have at least two forgery experts. Why?”
I handed her the two samples I had of Wetterau’s signature—one with the “P” and one without.
“Could you do me a favor and see if both these signatures were written by the same hand?”
She took them from me. “I guess.”
She turned, pulled a knee up to her chest, propped her chin on top, and stared at me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing. Just looking.”
“See anything good?”
She turned her head back toward the church, a dismissive gesture, one that said flirting wasn’t part of the menu today.
I kicked at the stone foundation of the wading pool and tried not to say what I’d been feeling these past few months. Eventually, though, I gave in.
“Ange,” I said, “it’s starting to wear me down.”
She gave me a confused look. “Karen Nichols?”
“All of it. The job, the…It’s not…”
“Fun anymore?” She gave me a small smile.
I smiled back. “Yeah. Exactly.”
She lowered her eyes. “Who said life’s supposed to be fun?”
“Who said it’s not?”
The small smile tugged her lips again. “Yeah. Point taken. You’re thinking of quitting?”
I shrugged. I was still relatively young, but that would change.
“All the broken bones getting to you?”
“All the broken lives,” I said.
She lowered her knee and her fingers found the water again. “What would you do?”
I stood, stretched aches and cramps in my back that had been there since Cody Falk’s house that morning. “I don’t know. I’m just really…tired.”
“And Karen Nichols?”
I looked back at her. Sitting on the ledge by the glassy pool, her skin honeyed by the summer and her dark eyes as wide and frighteningly intelligent as ever, every inch of her just broke my heart.
“I want to speak for her,” I said. “I want to prove to someone—maybe the someone who tried to destroy her life, maybe just to myself—that her life had value. That make sense?”
She looked up at me and her face was tender and open. “Yeah. Yeah, it does, Patrick.” She shook her hand free of water and stood up on the pavement beside me. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“Shoot.”
“If you can prove that David Wetterau’s accident deserves a second look, I’ll come in on the case. Pro bono.”
“What about Sallis & Salk?”
She sighed. “I dunno. It’s like I’m starting to worry that all the shit cases they’ve been assigning me aren’t simply about paying my dues. It’s…” She raised her hand from the water, then dropped it again. “Whatever. Look, I don’t break a sweat over there. I can help you—use a vacation day here and there if I have to—and maybe it’ll be—”
“Fun?”
She smiled. “Yeah.”
“So I prove Wetterau’s accident was fishy, and you come on the case. That’s the deal?”
“I don’t come on the case. I help you with it here and there, when I can.” She stood.
“Sounds good.”
I held out my hand. She shook it. The press of her palm against mine opened holes in my chest and stomach. I was starving for her. I’d melt right there if she asked.
She pulled her hand back, stuffed it in her pocket as if it were burning.
“I—”
She stepped back from whatever she saw in my face. “Don’t say it.”
I shrugged. “Okay. I
do, though.”
“Sssh.” She put a finger to her lips, smiled around it, but her eyes shimmered with moisture. “Sssh,” she said again.
13
The Holly Martens Inn sat fifty yards off an overgrown, yellowed grass stretch of Route 147 in Mishawauk, a blip-on-the-map sort of town not far from Springfield. A two-story cinder-block collection of units arranged in one long T, the Holly Martens ran across the length of a brown dirt field and ended at a puddle so wide and black there could have been dinosaur remains in it. The Holly Martens looked as if it had been part of an army base or air-raid shelter in the fifties, and nothing about the design seemed to beckon the weary traveler to a second stay. A swimming pool sat to my left as I pulled in toward the front office. Empty and surrounded by chain link with cyclone wire on top, it was littered with shattered green and brown beer bottles, lawn chairs caked with rust, fast-food wrappers, and a three-wheel shopping cart. A peeling sign affixed to the chain link read: NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK. Maybe they’d drained the pool because people kept throwing their beer bottles in it. Maybe the beer bottles had been thrown in because they’d drained the pool. Maybe the lifeguard had taken the water with him when he left. Maybe I had to stop wondering about things that didn’t concern me.
The front office smelled like matted animal hair, wood shavings, Lysol, and newspapers spoiled by fecal pellets and dribbles of urine. That’s because behind the reception desk were at least seven cages, and all of them had rodents inside. Mostly guinea pigs, a few hamsters squeaking at their hamster wheels, feet pedaling like crazy, snouts pointed up at the wheel as they wondered why they couldn’t reach the top.
Just no rats, I thought. Please, no rats.
The woman behind the desk was bleached blond and very slim. Her body looked like it was all gristle, like the fatty deposits had run off with the lifeguard, taken her breasts and her ass with them. Her skin was so tan and hard it reminded me of knotted wood. She could have been anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-eight, and there was a sense to her of a dozen lives lived and spent before she’d turned twenty-five.