Angie drank some beer. “If I did, Doctor, I’d pick a woman with a better body. Call me shallow.”
“Yeah,” Bubba said, “you need to get some meat on those bones, Doc.”
Diane Bourne turned her eyes on me again, but they were less calm, less certain. “You, Patrick, did you enjoy watching?”
“Two girls and a guy?”
She nodded.
I shrugged. “It was a lighting issue, really. I like my porn with higher production values, to tell the truth.”
“Plus the hairy ass factor,” Bubba reminded me.
“Good point, Ebert.” I smiled at Diane Bourne. “Lovell had a hairy ass. We don’t be digging hairy asses. Doctor, who shot that video?”
She drank some more wine. In the face of her probes into our psyches, we’d grown more glib. One of us she might have been able to make progress with, but all three of us together could outglib the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Neil Simon combined.
“Doctor?” I said.
“The video was on a tripod. We shot it.”
I shook my head. “Sorry. Won’t wash. There’s four different angles on that tape, and I don’t think any of you three got up to move the tripod.”
“Maybe we—”
“There’s also a shadow,” Angie said. “A man’s shadow, Diane, against the east wall during foreplay.”
Diane Bourne closed her mouth, reached for her wineglass.
“We can burn you down, Diane,” I said. “And you know it. So don’t fuck around with us anymore. Who shot the tape? The blond guy?”
Her eyes snapped up and then dropped just as quickly.
“Who is he?” I said. “We know he maimed Lovell. We know he’s six-two, weighs about one-ninety, dresses well, and whistles when he walks. We’ve placed him with both Karen Nichols and Lovell at the Holly Martens Inn. We go back and ask questions, I’m sure we’ll get a description of you there as well. What we need is his name.”
She shook her head.
“You’re not in a position to negotiate, Diane.”
Another shake of the head, another draining of her goblet. “I won’t under any circumstances discuss this man.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“Yes, I do, Patrick. Oh, yes, I do. It may not be an easy choice, but it’s a choice. And I will not cross this man. Ever. And should the police question me, I will deny he even exists.” She emptied the wine bottle into her goblet with a shaky hand. “You have no idea what this man is capable of.”
“Sure, we do,” I said. “We found Lovell.”
“That was spur-of-the-moment,” she said with a bitter grin. “You should see what he’s capable of when he has time to plan.”
“Karen Nichols?” Angie said. “Is that what he’s capable of?”
Diane Bourne gave her bitter grin a derisive turn downward as she looked at Angie. “Karen was weak. Next time, he’s choosing someone strong. Add to the challenge.” She gave Angie a flat, contemptuous smile, and Angie damn near knocked it off when she slapped her.
The wine goblet shattered against the serving dish and a red mark the shape of a salmon steak obscured Diane Bourne’s left cheekbone and ear.
“Damn,” I said, “no leftovers for this house.”
“Don’t get the wrong impression of us, bitch,” Angie said. “Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean things can’t get physical.”
“Very physical,” Bubba said.
Diane Bourne looked at the shards of her glass sticking out of the plate of carved white meat. She watched as her wine pooled in the divots of her hammered copper.
She jerked a thumb at Bubba. “He’d torture me, maybe even rape me. But you don’t have the stomach for it, Patrick.”
“Amazing how your stomach feels when you walk outside,” I said. “Come back after it’s all done.”
She sighed and settled back into her chair. “Well, you’re just going to have to do it. Because I won’t betray this man.”
“Out of fear or love?” I asked.
“Both. He engenders both, Patrick. As all worthy beings do.”
“You’re done as a psychiatrist,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
She shook her head. “I think not. You release that tape to anyone, I’ll file breaking and entering charges against the three of you.”
Angie laughed.
Diane Bourne looked at her. “You are breaking and entering.”
“You should have fun explaining this,” Angie said and swept her hand over the table.
“Officer, they were cooking!” I said.
“Basting!” Angie said.
“And, madam, how did you respond?”
“I helped carve,” Angie said. “And, of course, I showed them to my china.”
“Did you go with the light meat or the dark?”
Diane Bourne lowered her head and shook it.
“Last chance,” I said.
She kept her head down, shook it again.
I pushed my chair back from the table, held up the videotape. “We’ll make copies and it’s going out, Doctor, to every psychiatrist and psychologist listed in the yellow pages.”
“And the media,” Angie said.
“Oh, God, yeah,” I said. “They’ll go nuts.”
She looked up and tears filled her eyes and her voice cracked when she spoke. “You’d take my career?”
“You took her life,” I said. “Have you watched this tape? Did you look in her eyes, Diane? There’s nothing there but self-hatred. You put that there. You and Miles and this blond guy.”
“It was an experiment,” she said, and her voice was clogged. “It was just an idea. I never thought she’d kill herself.”
“He did, though,” I said. “The blond guy. Didn’t he?”
She nodded.
“Give me his name.”
A hard shake of the head that sent her tears to the table.
I held up the tape. “It’s his name or your reputation and career.”
She continued to shake her head, softer now but continuous.
We gathered our things from the kitchen, took what was left of our beer from the fridge. Bubba found a Ziploc storage bag and dumped the remainder of the stuffing and potatoes in there, then took another one and filled it with turkey.
“What are you doing?” I said. “There’s glass in there.”
He gave me a look like I was autistic. “I’ll pick it out.”
We walked back into the dining room. Diane Bourne stared at her reflection in the copper, elbows on the table, the heels of both hands pressed to her forehead.
As we reached the foyer, she said, “You don’t want him in your life.”
I turned back and looked in her hollow eyes. She suddenly looked twice her age, and I could see her in a nursing home forty years from now, alone, spending her days lost in the bitter smoke of her memories.
“Let me decide that,” I said.
“He’ll destroy you. Or someone you love. For fun.”
“His name, Doctor.”
She lit a cigarette, exhaled loudly. She shook her head, lips tight and pale.
I started to leave, but Angie stopped me. She raised a finger, her gaze locked on Diane Bourne, her body very still.
“You’re ice,” Angie said. “Isn’t that right, Doctor?”
Diane Bourne’s pale eyes followed the trail of her smoke.
“I mean, you have this cool, patrician thing down pat.” Angie placed her hands on the back of a chair, leaned into the table slightly. “You never lose your poise, and you never get emotional.”
Diane Bourne took another hit off her cigarette. It was like watching a statue smoke. She gave no indication that we were still in the room.
Angie said, “But you did once, didn’t you?”
Diane Bourne blinked.
Angie looked over at me. “In her office, remember? The first time we spoke to her.”
Diane Bourne flicked some ash and missed the ashtray.<
br />
“And it wasn’t when she spoke about Karen,” Angie said. “It wasn’t when she spoke about Miles. Do you remember, Diane?”
Diane Bourne raised her eyes and they were pink, angry.
“It was when you spoke about Wesley Dawe.”
Diane Bourne cleared her throat. “Get the fuck out of my home.”
Angie smiled. “Wesley Dawe, who killed his little sister. Who—”
“He didn’t kill her,” she said. “You get that. Wesley wasn’t anywhere near her. But he was blamed. He was—”
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Angie’s smile broadened. “That’s who you’re protecting. That was the blond man on the bog. Wesley Dawe.”
She said nothing, just stared at the smoke as it flowed from her mouth.
“Why did he want to destroy Karen?”
She shook her head. “You’ve gotten the name, Mr. Kenzie. That’s all you get. And he already knows who you are.” She turned her head, gave me her pale, desolate eyes. “And he doesn’t like you, Patrick. He thinks you’re a meddler. He thinks you should have walked away from this when it was proven Karen’s death was by her own hand.” She held out her hand. “My tape, please.”
“No.”
She dropped her hand. “I gave you what you wanted.”
Angie shook her head. “I drew it out of you. Not the same thing.”
I said, “You’re the master of the psyche, Doctor, so turn your gaze inward for a moment. Which is more important to you—your reputation or your career?”
“I don’t see—”
“Pick,” I said sharply.
Her jaw set as if it were on steel pins, and she spoke through gritted teeth. “My reputation.”
I nodded. “You can keep it.”
Her jaw loosened and her eyes were bewildered behind her glowing cigarette coal as she took another long haul of smoke into her lungs. “What’s the catch?”
“Your career is over.”
“You can’t end my career.”
“I’m not going to. You’re going to.”
She laughed, but it was a nervous one. “Don’t overestimate yourself, Mr. Kenzie. I have no intention of—”
“You’ll close your office tomorrow,” I said. “You’ll refer all your clients to other doctors, and you’ll never practice in this state again.”
Her “Ha!” was louder, but sounded even less sure.
“You’ll do this, Doctor, and you’ll keep your reputation. Maybe you can write books, line up a talk show. But you’ll never work one-on-one with a patient again.”
“Or?” she said.
I held up the videocassette. “Or this thing starts playing cocktail parties.”
We left her there and as we opened the door, Angie said, “Tell Wesley we’re coming for him.”
“He already knows,” she said. “He already knows.”
20
Rain fell softly on sun-drenched streets the afternoon I met Vanessa Moore at a sidewalk cafe in Back Bay. She’d called and asked to meet so we could discuss Tony Traverna’s case. Vanessa was Tony T’s attorney; we’d first met the last time Tony jumped bail, and I had appeared as a witness for the prosecution. Vanessa had cross-examined me the same way she made love—with a cool hunger and sharpened nails.
I could have declined Vanessa’s invite, I suppose, but it had been a week since the night we’d cooked for Diane Bourne, and in that week, we seemed to have taken four steps back. Wesley Dawe did not exist. He wasn’t listed in census records or with the Registry of Motor Vehicles. He did not own a credit card. He had no bank account in the city of Boston or the state of Massachusetts, and after getting slightly desperate, Angie discovered no one by that name existed in New Hampshire, Maine, or Vermont.
We’d gone back to Diane Bourne’s office, but apparently she’d taken our advice to heart. The office was closed. Her town house, we soon discovered, was abandoned. In a week, she hadn’t shown up there, and a cursory search of the place revealed only that she may have taken enough clothing to get by for a week before she had to either do laundry or shop for more.
The Dawes went fishing. Literally, I found out, after I’d impersonated a patient of the doctor’s and learned they were at their summer home in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
We lost Angie’s help when she was assigned by Sallis & Salk to join a team of bodyguards watching an oily South African diamond merchant around the clock as he did whatever it was oily diamond merchants do when they come to our little hamlet.
And Bubba went back to doing whatever it is Bubba does when he isn’t out of the country buying things that could blow up the Eastern Seaboard.
So I was a bit adrift, and caseless, it seemed, when I found Vanessa sitting outdoors under a large Cinzano umbrella, the gentle drizzle bouncing off the cobblestone and spraying her ankles, but leaving the wrought-iron table and rest of Vanessa untouched.
“Hey.” I leaned in to kiss her cheek and she slid a hand along my rib cage as she accepted it.
“Hi.” She watched me take my seat with the amusement that lived in her eyes like twin birthmarks, a lusty vivacity that said just about anything was hers for the taking. It was just a matter of her choosing.
“How you doing?”
“I’m good, Patrick. You’re damp.” She patted a napkin to dry her palm.
I rolled my eyes and raised a hand to the heavens. The shower had come suddenly as I’d walked from my car, broke from a tear in a lone cloud that floated through an otherwise glossy sky.
“I’m not complaining,” she said. “Nothing looks better on a handsome man in a white shirt than a little rain.”
I chuckled. The thing with Vanessa was that even if you saw her coming, she kept coming. Ran right at you and then through you, made you wonder why you’d even tried to ward her off in the first place.
We may have agreed months ago that the sexual component of our relationship was over, but today Vanessa seemed to have changed her mind. And when Vanessa changed her mind, the rest of the world changed theirs with her.
Either that, or she was just trying to work me into a lather, leave me standing alone after I’d made my move so she’d have something even better than sex to get her off that night. With her, you never knew. And I’d learned in the past that the only way to play it safe with her was not to play at all.
“So,” I said, “why do you think I can help you with Tony T?”
She used her fingers to pick a pineapple chunk off her fruit plate, tossed it back in her mouth, and chewed it to pure pulp before speaking.
“I’m working on a diminished capacity defense,” she said.
“What?” I said. “‘Your Honor, my client’s a moron so let him go’?”
The tip of her tongue ran lightly under her upper teeth. “No, Patrick. No. I was thinking more along the lines of: ‘Your Honor, my client believes himself to be under a very real threat of death from members of the Russian crime syndicate, and his actions have stemmed from this fear.’”
“The Russian syndicate?”
She nodded.
I laughed.
She didn’t. “He’s honestly quite afraid of them, Patrick.”
“Why?”
“His last job, he robbed the wrong safe.”
“Belonging to a member of the syndicate?”
She nodded.
I tried to follow the logic of her proposed defense. “So he was so terrified, he blew town and went to Maine?”
Another nod.
“That’ll help on the bail jumping,” I said. “What about the other stuff?”
“Building blocks, Patrick. All I need is to get the illegal flight thrown out and everything can build from there. See, he crossed state lines again. That’s federal. I get the federal charges tossed, the state stuff will fall in line.”
“And you want me to…”
She wiped a thin drop of rain from her temple and gave me a chuckle so dry you could hang a nail on it. She leaned in to the table. “Oh, Patrick, there
are several things I could possibly want from you, but in terms of Anthony Traverna, I just need you to attest under oath to his fear of the Russians.”
“But I wasn’t aware of it.”
“But maybe, in hindsight, you remember how fearful in general he seemed during the ride back from Maine.”
She speared a grape with her fork, sucked it off the tines.
She was dressed down this afternoon in a simple black skirt, dark cherry tank top, and black sandals. Her long walnut hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she’d foresaken her contacts for wafer-thin eyeglasses with red rims. And still the sensual power pouring from her limbs and flesh would have blown me out into the street if I hadn’t been used to it.
“Vanessa,” I said.
She speared another grape, propped her elbow on the table, and let the grape hover an inch from her lips as she stared over it at me. “Yes?”
“You know the DA will call me.”
“Well, actually the bail jump’s federal, so it’ll be the AG’s office.”
“Fine. But they’ll call me.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll try to get what you need on cross.”
“Yes, again.”
“So why ask me down here today?”
She considered the grape, but still didn’t eat it. “If I told you Tony was scared? I mean, terrified. And that I believe him when he says there’s an open contract on him?”
“I’d say you’d attach garnishing to his estate and go on about your business.”
She smiled. “So cold, Patrick. He is, though, you know.”
“I know. But I also know that wouldn’t be reason enough to ask me here.”
“Point taken.” She flicked her tongue and the grape disappeared from the fork. She chewed and swallowed, took a sip of mineral water. “Clarence misses you, by the way.”
Clarence was Vanessa’s dog, a chocolate Lab she’d bought on impulse six months ago and, last time I’d noticed, didn’t have a clue how to raise. You said, “Clarence, sit,” and Clarence ran away. You said, “Here,” and he shit on the rug. There was something likable about him, though. Maybe it was the puppy innocence in his eyes, a wide aiming-to-please that filled his brown pupils even as he pissed on your foot.
“How’s he doing?” I asked. “Housebroken yet?”