I nodded. Another photo of her and Wetterau, more pebbles of glass falling to my hand as I lifted it. Another set of big smiles, this one taken at a party, Happy Birthday streamers hanging behind their heads, stretched across someone’s living room wall.
“You know she was hooking?” I asked as I placed the photo on the floor beside the other two.
“I figured,” he said. “Guys coming over a lot, only a couple of them coming back a second time.”
“You talk to her about it?” I lifted a stack of collection notices mailed to her old address in Newton, a Polaroid of her and David Wetterau.
“She denied it. Then she offered to blow me for fifty bucks.” He rolled his shoulders, glanced down at the frames on the floor. “I should have kicked her out, but, man, she seemed kicked enough.”
I found returned mail—all bills, all stamped with red lettering: RETURNED DUE TO LACK OF POSTAGE. I put it aside, removed two T-shirts, a pair of shorts, some white panties and socks, a stopped watch.
“You said most guys never came back. What about the ones who did?”
“There were just two of ’em. One I saw a lot—little redheaded snot about my age. He paid for the room.”
“Cash?”
“Yup.”
“The other guy?”
“Better-looking. Blond, maybe thirty-five. Would come by at night.”
Underneath the clothes, I found a white cardboard box about six inches tall. I removed the pink ribbon on top and opened it.
Warren, looking over my shoulder, said, “Shit, huh? Holly didn’t tell me about those.”
Wedding invitations. Maybe two hundred, written in calligraphy on pale pink linen: DR. AND MRS. CHRISTOPHER DAWE REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY FOR THE WEDDING OF THEIR DAUGHTER, MISS KAREN ANN NICHOLS, TO MR. DAVID WETTERAU ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1999.
“Next month,” I said.
“Shit,” Warren said again. “Little early to have had ’em, don’t you think? She’d have had to order them eight, nine months before the wedding.”
“My sister ordered them eleven months in advance. She’s an Emily Post kind of girl.” I shrugged. “So was Karen when I met her.”
“No shit?”
“No shit, Warren.”
I placed the invitations back in their box and tied the ribbon neatly back on top. Six or seven months ago, she’d sat at a table, smelling the linen, probably, running her finger over the lettering. Happy.
Underneath a crossword puzzle book, I found another set of photos. These were unframed, in a plain white envelope bearing a Boston postmark, dated May 15 of this year. There was no return address. The envelope had been mailed to Karen’s Newton apartment. More photos of David Wetterau. Except the woman in the photos with him wasn’t Karen Nichols. She was brunette, dressed all in black, a model’s thin frame, an air of aloofness behind her black sunglasses. In the photos, she and David Wetterau sat at an outdoor café. They held hands in one. Kissed in another.
Warren looked at them as I shuffled through them. “Ah, that’s not good.”
I shook my head. The trees surrounding the café were stripped. I put the liaison at sometime in February, during our balmy nonwinter, not long after Bubba and I had visited Cody Falk, and right before David Wetterau got his skull crushed.
“You think she took them?” Warren asked.
“No. These shots were done by a pro—telephoto lens shot from a roof, perfect framing of the subjects.” I leafed through them slowly so he could see what I meant. “Zoom close-ups of their hands entwined.”
“So you think someone was hired to take those.”
“Yeah.”
“Someone like you?”
I nodded. “Someone like me, Warren.”
Warren looked at the photos in my hand again. “But he’s not really doing anything wrong with this girl.”
“True,” I said. “But, Warren, if you received photos like these of Holly and a strange guy, how would you feel?”
His face darkened and he didn’t speak for a few moments. “Yeah,” he admitted eventually, “you got a point.”
“The question is why someone would give these photos to Karen.”
“To screw with her head, you think?”
I shrugged. “That’s definitely a possibility.”
The box was almost empty. I found her passport and birth certificate next, and then a prescription bottle of Prozac. I barely glanced at it. Prozac seemed the very least she would have been entitled to after David’s accident, but then I noticed the date of the prescription: 10/23/98. She’d been taking an antidepressant long before I met her.
I held the bottle in my palm, read the prescribing doctor’s name: D. Bourne.
“Mind if I take this?”
Warren shook his head. “Be my guest.”
I pocketed the vial. All that was left in the box was a sheet of white paper. I turned it over and lifted it out of the box.
It was a page of session notes bearing Dr. Diane Bourne’s letterhead and dated April 6, 1994. The subject was Karen Nichols, and it read in part:
…Client’s repressive nature is extremely prominent. She seems to live in a constant state of denial—denial of the effects of her father’s death, denial of her tortured relationship with both mother and stepfather, denial of her own sexual inclinations which in this therapist’s opinion are bisexual and bear incestuous overtones. Client follows classic passive-aggressive behavioral patterns and is wholly unaccepting of any attempts to gain self-awareness. Client has dangerously low self-esteem, confused sexual identity, and in this therapist’s opinion, a potentially lethal fantasy version of how the world works. If further sessions do not yield progress, may suggest voluntary committal to a qualified psychiatric hospital…
D. Bourne
“What’s that?” Warren wanted to know.
“It’s the session notes of Karen’s psychiatrist.”
“Well, what the hell was she doing with it?”
I glanced down at his confused face. “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”
With Warren’s blessing, I kept the session notes and pictures of David Wetterau with the other woman, then I gathered the other photos, the clothes, the broken watch and passport and wedding invitations, and placed them back into the box. I looked in at what served as evidence of Karen Nichols’s existence, and I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger and closed my eyes for a second.
“People can be tiring, can’t they?” Warren said.
“Yeah, they can.” I stood and walked to the door.
“Man, you must be tired all the time.”
As he locked the barn back up outside, I said, “These two guys you said were around Karen.”
“Yeah.”
“Were they together?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”
“Anything else you can tell me about them?”
“The redheaded guy, like I said, was a snot. A weasel. Kinda guy thinks he’s smarter’n everyone else. He peeled off a stack of hundreds when he checked her in like they were ones. You know? Karen’s all sagging into him, and he’s looking at her like she’s meat, winking at me and Holly. A real piece of shit.”
“Height, weight, that sort of stuff?”
“I’d say he was about five-ten, maybe five-nine. Freckles all over his face, dweeby haircut. Weighed maybe one-fifty, one-sixty. Dressed artsy—silk shirts, black jeans, shiny Docs on his feet.”
“And the other guy?”
“Slick. Drove a black ’68 Shelby Mustang GT-500 convertible. Like, what, four hundred of them produced?”
“Around there, yeah.”
“Dressed rich-boy shabby—jeans with little rips in ’em, V-neck sweaters over white T-shirts. Two-hundred-dollar shades. Never came in the office, never heard him speak, but I got the feeling he was in charge.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Something about him. The geek and Karen always walked behind him, moved real fast when he s
poke. I dunno. I maybe saw the guy five times, always from a distance, and he made me feel nervous, somehow. Like I wasn’t worthy to look upon him or something.”
He wheeled his way back through the black fields, and I followed. The day grew deader and more humid around us. Instead of pointing toward the ramp at the back of the office, he led me to a picnic table, its surface covered in small splinters peeking up out of the wood like hair. Warren stopped by the table, and I sat up on top, pretty sure my jeans would protect me from the splinters.
He wouldn’t look at me. He kept his head down, eyes on the divots ripped in the gnarled wood.
“I gave in once,” he said.
“Gave in?”
“To Karen. She kept on talking about dark gods and dark rides and places she could take you and…” He looked back over his shoulder at the motel office, and the silhouette of his wife moved past a curtain. “I don’t…I mean, what makes a man who has the best woman the world can offer—what makes him…?”
“Fuck around?” I said.
He met my eyes and his were small, now, shamed. “Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” I said gently. “You tell me.”
He drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair, looked off past me at the wasteland of broken trees and black earth. “It’s the darkness, you know? The chance to disappear into, I mean, really bad places while you’re doing something that feels really damn good. Sometimes, you don’t want to be on top of a woman who looks at you with all this love in her eyes. You want to be on top of a woman who looks into your face and knows you. Knows the bad you, the nasty you.” He looked at me. “And likes that you. Wants that you.”
“So, you and Karen…”
“Fucked all night, man. Like animals. And it was good. She was crazy. No inhibitions.”
“And afterward?”
He looked away again, took a deep breath, and let it out slow. “Afterward, she said, ‘See?’”
“See.”
He nodded. “‘See? No one loves.’”
We stayed out there by the picnic table for a while, neither of us speaking. Cicadas hummed through the scrawny treetops and raccoons clawed through the brambles on the far side of the clearing. The barn seemed to sag another inch, and Karen Nichols’s voice whispered through the rural blight:
See? No one loves.
No one loves.
15
I had taken my work to a bar when Angie found me later that night. The bar was Bubba’s, a place called Live Bootleg on the Dorchester-Southie line, and even though Bubba was out of the country—off to Northern Ireland, the rumor was, to pick up the arms they’d allegedly laid down over there—my drinks were still on the house.
This would have been great if I’d been in a drinking mood, but I wasn’t. I nursed the same beer for an hour, and it was still half full when Shakes Dooley, the owner of record, replaced it with a fresh one.
“It’s a crime,” Shakes said as he drained the old beer into the sink, “to see a fine, healthy man such as yourself wasting a perfectly honest lager.”
I said, “Mmm-hmm,” and went back to my notes.
Sometimes I find it easier to concentrate in a small crowd. Alone, in my apartment or office, I can feel the night ticking past me, another day gone down for the count. In a bar, though, on a late Sunday afternoon, when I can hear the hollow, distant crack of bats from a Red Sox game on the TV, the solid drop of pool balls falling into pockets from the back room, the idle chatter of men and women playing keno and scratch cards as they do their best to ward off Monday and its horn honks and barking bosses and drudging responsibilities—I find the noises mingle together into a soft, constant buzzing, and my mind clears of all else but the notes laid before me between a coaster and a bowl of peanuts.
From the morass of things I’d learned about Karen Nichols, I had compiled a bare chronological outline on a fresh sheet of yellow legal paper. Once that was done, I doodled in random notes beside hard facts. Sometime during all this, the Red Sox had lost, and the crowd had thinned slightly, though it had never been much of a crowd in the first place. Tom Waits played on the jukebox, and two voices were getting heated and raw back in the poolroom.
K. Nichols
(b. 11/16/70; d. 8/4/99)
a. Father dies, 1976.
b. Mother marries Dr. Christopher Dawe, ’79, moves to Weston.
c. Graduates Mount Alvernia HS, ’88.
d. Graduates Johnson & Wales, Hospitality Mgmt., ’92.
e. Hired, Four Seasons Hotel, Boston, Catering Dept, ’92.
f. Promoted Asst. Mgr., Catering Dept., ’96.
g. Engaged to D. Wetterau, ’98.
h. Stalked by C. Falk. Car vandalized. First contact w/ me: February ’99.
i. D. Wetterau accident, March 15, ’99. (Call Devin or Oscar again, try to see BPD report.)
j. Car insurance cxld due to lack of payment.
k. May, receives photos of D. Wetterau and other woman.
l. Fired from job, May 18, ’99, due to tardiness, multiple absences.
m. Leaves apartment, May 30, ’99.
n. Moves into Holly Martens Inn, June 15, ’99. (Two weeks missing. Where’d she stay?)
o. Seen w/ Red-Haired Geek and Blond Rich Guy @ HM Inn, June-August ’99.
p. C. Falk receives nine letters signed K. Nichols, March-July, ’99.
q. Karen receives private psychiatrist’s notes, date uncertain.
r. Raped by C. Falk, July ’99.
s. Arrested for solicitation, July ’99, Springfield Bus Depot.
t. Suicide, August 4, ’99.
Overview: Falsified letters sent to C. Falk suggest third-party involvement in K. Nichols’s “bad luck.” C. Falk not being vandalizer of car suggests same. Third Party could be Red-Haired Geek, Blond Rich Guy, or both. (Or neither.) Possession of psychiatrist’s notes suggests possibility of Third Party being employee of psychiatrist. Further, ability by psychiatric employees to garner personal info of private citizens supplies opportunity to Third Party to infiltrate K. Nichols’s life. Motive, however, seems nonexistent. Further, assumptions—
“Motive for what?” Angie said.
I put my hand over the page, looked back over my shoulder at her. “Didn’t your mama ever teach you—?”
“It’s rude to read over someone’s shoulder, yes.” She dropped her bag on the empty seat to her left and sat down beside me. “How’s it coming?”
I sighed. “If only the dead could talk.”
“Then they wouldn’t be dead.”
“Staggering,” I said, “that intellect of yours.”
She backhanded my shoulder and tossed her cigarettes and lighter on the bar in front of her.
“Angela!” Shakes Dooley came bounding down the bar, took her hand, and leaned over to kiss her cheek. “Well, if it ain’t been too many days.”
“Hey, Shakes. Don’t say a word about the hair, okay?”
“What hair?” Shakes said.
“That’s what I keep saying.”
Angie hit me again. “Can I get a vodka straight, Shakes?”
Shakes pumped her hand vigorously before letting it go. “Finally, a real drinker!”
“Going broke on my buddy here?” Angie lit a cigarette.
“He drinks like a nun these days. People are starting to talk.” Shakes poured a generous helping of chilled Finlandia into a glass and placed it before Angie.
“So,” I said when Shakes left us alone, “come crawling back, eh?”
She gave me a smoky chuckle and took a sip of Finlandia. “Keep it up. It’ll make torturing you later that much more pleasurable.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What brings you here, Sicilian Spice?”
She rolled her eyes as she took another drink. “I got some oddities regarding David Wetterau.” She held up her index finger. “Two, actually. The first was easy. That letter he wrote to the insurance company? My guy says it’s a definite forgery.”
I turned on my stool. “You alr
eady looked into this?”
She reached for her cigarettes, extracted one.
“On a Sunday,” I said.
She lit the cigarette, her eyebrows raised.
“And turned something up,” I said.
She curled her fingers and blew on them, polished an imaginary medal on her chest. “Two things.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re the coolest.”
She placed a hand behind her ear and leaned in.
“You’re aces. You’re the bomb. You put the ‘B’ in bad-ass. You’re the coolest.”
“Already said that.” She leaned in a little closer, hand still behind her ear.
I cleared my throat. “You are, without question or reservation, the smartest, most resourceful, perceptive private detective in the entire city of Boston.”
Her mouth broke into that wide, slightly lopsided grin that can blow holes in my chest.
“Was that so difficult?” she said.
“Shoulda rolled right off my tongue. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Just out of practice kissing ass, I guess.”
I leaned back, took a lingering look at the curve of her hip, the press of flesh on her stool.
“Speaking of asses,” I said, “allow me to note that yours still looks tremendous.”
She waved her cigarette in my face. “Wood back in the pants, perv.”
I placed my hands on the bar. “Yes’m.”
“Oddity number two.” Angie put a steno notepad on the bar and flipped it open. She swiveled her stool so that our knees almost touched. “Just before five on the day he was hurt, David Wetterau calls Greg Dunne, the Steadicam guy, and begs off. Says his mother is ill.”
“Was she?”
She nodded. “Of cancer. Five years ago. She died in ’94.”
“So he lies about—”
She held up a hand. “Not done yet.” She stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray, left several chunks of coal still burning red. She hunched forward and our knees touched. “At four-forty, Wetterau received a call on his cell phone. It lasted four minutes and originated from a pay phone on High Street.”
“Just around the block from the corner of Congress and Purchase.”