“Hey,” I whispered. “Hey, guy. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
I willed myself not to look away from the bewildered pain in his face, that searching question.
He lowered his head slowly and vomited a stream of pure black.
“Oh, Jesus.” It came out of me in a hoarse whisper.
I crawled over to him, and when I touched his head, I felt the fire there, the scorch of fever. He rolled over and lay on his side and panted. I turned on my side with him and he looked up at me as I caressed his trembling rib cage and sweaty, feverish brow.
“Hey,” I whispered as his eyes rolled up to whites. “Hey, you’re not alone, Clarence. Okay? You’re not alone.”
His mouth opened wide as if he were about to yawn and a racking shudder thrust its way through his body from his back paws to his burning head.
“Goddammit,” I said when he died. “Goddammit.”
28
“I want to burn him alive,” I said to Angie over the cell phone. “I want to kneecap the sick prick.”
“Calm down.”
I sat in the waiting room of the veterinarian’s office where Vanessa had demanded we take Clarence. I’d carried the soft corpse in and laid it on a cold metal table. Then I’d seen a request that I leave in Vanessa’s eyes and I’d followed it back out into the waiting room.
“I want to cut off his fucking head and piss down his neck.”
“Now you sound like Bubba.”
“I feel like Bubba. I want him dead, Ange. I want him gone. I want this to stop now.”
“Then think,” she said. “Don’t go caveman on me. Think. Where is he? How do we find him? I checked the houses on the list. He’s not—”
“He’s a mailman,” I said.
“What?”
“He’s a mailman,” I repeated. “Right here in the city. Back Bay.”
“You’re not kidding,” she said.
“Nope. Wetterau lived in Back Bay. Karen was always at his place, according to her roommate, only came home to pick up clothes and mail.”
“So you think she sent her mail…” Angie said.
“From Wetterau’s. In Back Bay. Dr. Dawe makes all his drops to Back Bay mailboxes. The destinations don’t matter because the mail is intercepted before it even gets there. Vanessa lives in Back Bay. Suddenly her mail’s not getting through. We’ve been giving this douchebag too much credit. He’s not running around all over creation with crack timing to fuck with people’s mail. He’s stealing it at the source.”
“A goddamn mailman,” Angie said.
The door to the vet’s office opened, and I saw Vanessa lean against the doorjamb, listen to something the doctor said.
“I gotta go,” I told Angie. “See you in a bit.”
Vanessa’s bruised face was blank, her steps stiff as she walked out into the waiting room.
“Strychnine,” she said as I approached. “Injected into chunks of prime rib. That’s how they think he killed my dog.”
I placed a tentative hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.
“Strychnine,” she said again and walked toward the exit. “He killed my dog with poison.”
“I’m close,” I said as we stepped outside. “I’m going to get him.”
She stood on the stone steps, looked up at me with a ghost’s smile—weightless and floating. “Good for you, Patrick, because I got nothing left for him to take. Mention that to him the next time you two chat, would you? I got nothing left.”
“A mailman,” Bubba said.
“Think about it,” I said. “We give him credit for being practically omnipotent, but he’s actually limited. Files he had access to through Diane Bourne and Miles Lovell only, and the correspondence of people who lived in Back Bay. He fucked with Karen’s mail and Vanessa’s and made sure the money drops went through Back Bay mailboxes. That means he’s either Central Post Office in the sorting department—in which case he’s gotta sort through a few hundred thousand pieces of mail a night to find the right ones, or—”
“It’s his route,” Bubba said.
I shook my head. “No. He’d have to stand around in public going through the mail. That doesn’t work.”
“He drives the pickup route,” Angie said.
I nodded. “Drives around in a truck, empties the blue mailboxes, fills the green ones. Yup. That’s our boy.”
“I hate mailmen,” Bubba said.
“That’s because they hate your dogs,” Angie said.
“Maybe it’s time to teach the dogs to hate ’em back,” I said.
Bubba shook his head. “He poisoned the fucking dog?”
I nodded. “I’ve seen humans die, and it still got to me.”
“Humans don’t love like dogs,” Bubba said. “Shit. Dogs?” His voice was as close to tender as I’d ever heard it. “All they know how to do if they’re treated right is love you.”
Angie reached out and patted his hand and he gave her that soft, disarming smile of his.
Then he looked at me and the smile turned mean and he chuckled. “Oh boy oh boy oh boy. How many ways we gonna fuck Wesley up, my brutha?” He held up his hand.
I high-fived him. “Couple thousand,” I said. “For starters.”
You can sit on one of the prettiest streets in the country, and if you’ve been sitting long enough, it begins to look ugly. Angie and I had been sitting on Beacon Street, halfway between Exeter and Fairfield, for two hours, the mailboxes fifty yards up on our right, and in that time I’d had plenty of opportunity to appreciate the dusky charcoal town houses and black wrought-iron trellises hanging beneath bright white dormer windows. I’d enjoyed the sharp summer smell of abundant flora in the air and the way the fat raindrops dripped through the trees and clattered on the pavement like coins. I could tell you how many of the buildings had roof gardens or just flower boxes jutting from windowsills, which were occupied by businessmen and -women, tennis players, joggers, pet owners, and artists running out with paint-splattered shirts only to return ten minutes later with Charrette bags filled with sable brushes.
Unfortunately, after about twenty minutes, I didn’t really care.
A mailman passed us, bulging bag bouncing off his outer thigh, shrouded in rain gear, and Angie said, “Hell with it. Let’s just get out and ask him.”
“Sure,” I said. “Not like he’d mention to Wesley that people were asking about him.”
The mailman climbed some slick stairs with careful steps, reached the landing, and swung his bag around to the front of his thighs and dug into it.
“His name’s not Wesley,” Angie reminded me.
“It’s the only name I got right now,” I said. “You know how much I hate change.”
Angie drummed her fingers on the dashboard, then said, “Shit, and I hate waiting,” and tipped her head out the window, let the rain fall on her face.
The serpentine twist of her legs and waist coupled with the arch of her back as she did so made me recall images of her from our days as lovers that made the car seem about four times as small, and I turned my head and stared back through the windshield at the street.
When she pulled herself back in, she said, “When’s the last time we had a sunny day?”
“July,” I said.
“El Niño, you think?”
“Global warming.”
“Signs of a second shift in the polar ice caps,” she offered.
“Beginnings of a biblical flood. Break out the ark.”
“If you were Noah and God gave you the head’s up, what would you bring?”
“On said ark?”
“Sí.”
“A VCR and all my Marx Brothers movies. Couldn’t survive long without my Stones or Nirvana CDs, I suppose.”
“It’s an ark,” she said. “Where you going to get electricity at the end of the world?”
“Portable generators aren’t an option?”
She shook her head.
“Shit,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d want to l
ive then.”
“People,” she said wearily. “Who would you take?”
“Oh, people,” I said. “You should have made that clear. Without the Marx Brothers tapes and the tunes? They’d have to be people who knew how to party.”
“Goes without saying.”
“Let’s see,” I said. “Chris Rock to keep me laughing. Shirley Manson to sing…”
“Not Jagger?”
I shook my head hard. “No way. He’s too good-looking. He’d hurt my chances with the chicks.”
“Oh, there’ll be chicks?”
“Gotta be chicks,” I said.
“And you the only guy?”
“I’m going to share?” I frowned.
“Men.” She shook her head.
“What? It’s my ark. I built the damn thing.”
“I’ve seen your carpentry skills. It won’t get out of the harbor.” She chuckled, turned on the seat. “So what about me? What about Bubba and Devin and Oscar and Richie and Sherilynn? You’re just going to leave us to drown while you play Robinson Crusoe with the bimbos?”
I turned, caught the malicious gaiety in her eyes. Here we were stuck on a grindingly boring stakeout, having one of our more inane conversations, and suddenly the job was fun again.
“I didn’t realize you wanted to come along for the ride,” I said.
“I’m going to drown?”
“So,” I said, and shifted on the seat, brought one leg up off the floor, and our knees touched. “You’re saying if I was one of the last guys on the planet…”
She laughed. “You still wouldn’t have a chance with me.”
But she didn’t pull away when she said it. She moved her head in another inch.
I could suddenly feel it in my chest, a cool funnel of air that loosened as it twirled—loosened everything that had been clenched and sore since Angie walked out of my apartment with the last of her suitcases in hand.
The gaiety left her eyes and was replaced by something warmer, but unsettled, still questioning.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What?”
“About what happened in the woods last year. About that child.”
She held my eyes. “I’m not sure any longer that I was right.”
“Why’s that?”
“Maybe nobody has the right to play God. Look at the Dawes.”
I smiled.
“What’s funny?”
“Just…” I took the fingers of her right hand in mine, and she blinked, but didn’t pull them away. “Just that over the last nine months I’ve been seeing it more your way. Maybe it was a relative situation. Maybe we should have left her there. Five years old, and she was happy.”
She shrugged, squeezed my hand. “We’ll never know, will we?”
“About Amanda McCready?”
“About anything. I think sometimes when we’re old and gray, will we finally be settled about the things we’ve done, all the choices we made, or will we look back and think about all the things we could’ve done?”
I kept my head very still, my eyes on hers, waiting for the searching to settle, for her to see whatever answers she was looking for in my face.
She tilted her head slightly, and her lips parted a tenth of an inch.
And a white post office truck sluiced through the rain on my left, glided in front of us, clicked on its hazards, and double-parked in front of the mailboxes fifty yards ahead.
Angie pulled away and I turned forward in my seat.
A man in a clear, hooded slicker over his blue and white postal uniform jumped from the right side of the truck. He held a white plastic carton in his hands, its contents protected from the rain by a plastic trash bag taped loosely on top. The man came around to the front of the mailboxes, placed the crate by his feet, and used a key to open the green mailbox.
Most of his face was obscured by the rain and the hood, but as he emptied the carton of mail into the box, I could still see his lips—thick and red and cruel.
“It’s him,” I said.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded. “A hundred percent. It’s Wesley.”
“Or the Artist Formerly Known as Wesley, as I like to call him.”
“That’s because you need psychiatric care.”
As we watched him fill the green box, the postman descended the stairs of a brownstone and called out to him. He joined him at the boxes and they chatted, raised their heads to the rain, then down again, laughed about something.
They bullshitted for another minute and then Wesley waved, hopped in the truck and drove off.
I opened my door and left Angie’s sudden, surprised “Hey!” behind as I ran down the sidewalk, my hand raised and yelled, “Wait up! Wait!” as Wesley’s truck reached the green light at Fairfield and kept going, drifting into the far left lane for a turn onto Gloucester.
The postman narrowed his eyes at me as I reached him.
“Trying to catch a bus, buddy?”
I bent over as if out of breath. “No, that truck.”
He held out his hand. “I’ll take it.”
“What?”
“Your letter. You trying to send something, right?”
“Huh? No.” I shook my head, then gestured with it up Beacon as Wesley made the turn onto Gloucester. “I saw you two talking here, and I think that’s my old roommate. Haven’t seen him in ten years.”
“Scott?”
Scott.
“Yeah,” I said. “Scottie Simon!” I clapped my hands as if elated.
The postman shook his head. “Sorry, pal.”
“What?”
“That ain’t your buddy.”
“It was,” I said. “That was Scott Simon, no question. I’d recognize him anywhere.”
The postman snorted. “No offense, mister, but you may want to see an optometrist. That guy’s name is Scott Pearse, and no one’s ever called him Scottie.”
“Damn,” I said, trying to sound deflated as fireworks exploded through my body, electrified it.
Scott Pearse.
Got you, Scott. Goddamn got you.
You wanted to play? Well, hide-and-seek is over. Let the real games begin, motherfucker.
29
I spent the week sitting on Scott Pearse—following him to work every morning, following him home every night. Angie covered his days while I slept, so I’d leave him when he picked up his truck at a garage on A Street, be watching again when he left the General Mail Facility along the Fort Point Channel after his final mail collection of the day. His routine, that week anyway, was maddeningly innocuous.
In the morning, he’d leave A Street, his truck fully loaded with large parcels. These he’d deliver to the green boxes throughout Back Bay, where they’d be picked up by the mail carriers on foot and brought to people’s doorsteps. After a midafternoon lunch, according to Angie, he’d head out again, this time with an empty truck, that he’d gradually fill with the contents of the blue mailboxes. Once that was done, he’d drop the mail at the sorting facility and clock out.
He’d have a single-malt scotch every night with his fellow postmen at the Celtic Arms on Otis Street. He always left after one drink, no matter how many men tried to pull him back down to his seat, always dropped ten bucks on the table to cover the Laphroaig and the tip.
Then he’d walk down Summer Street and follow Atlantic north until he reached Congress, where he’d turn right. Five minutes later, he’d be up in his Sleeper Street loft, and he’d stay there until lights-out at eleven-thirty.
I had to work at it to begin thinking of him as Scott and not Wesley. The name Wesley had fit him—patrician and haughty and cold. Scott seemed too bland and middle class. Wesley was the name of the guy you knew in college who was captain of the golf team and didn’t like blacks at his parties. Scott was the guy who wore tank tops and loud baggy shorts, organized pickup games, and puked in the back of your car.
But after some time spent watching him in which he acted far more like a Scott t
han a Wesley—watching TV alone, reading in a slim leather recliner under a gooseneck lamp in the center of his loft, pulling Fit-N-Easy meals from his freezer and nuking them in his microwave, eating them at the bar that curled around the edge of his kitchen—I eventually came around to the idea of Scott. Scott the Sinister. Scott the Asshole. Scott the Marked Man.
The first night I followed him, I found a fire escape with roof access behind the building across the street from his. His loft was four stories off the ground and two below my rooftop perch, and Scott Pearse hadn’t bothered with curtains over his floor-to-ceiling dormers except in the bedroom and bathroom. So I had an unobstructed, well-lit view of his spacious living room, kitchen, and dining area, the framed black-and-white photographs that hung from his walls. They were chilly photos of stripped trees and frozen rivers that snaked under mills, a massive garbage dump in the foreground with the Eiffel Tower miles off in the backround, Venice in December, Prague on a black night awash in rain.
As I moved my binoculars from one to the next, I became certain that Scott Pearse, himself, had taken them. They were all exquisitely composed, all had a detached, clinical beauty, and all were as cold as death.
In all the nights I watched him, he never did anything out of the ordinary, and that in itself began to seem bizarre. Maybe in his bedroom, he made the calls to Diane Bourne or other confederates, picked his next victim, or planned for the next stage of his assault on Vanessa Moore or someone else I cared about. Maybe he had someone chained to the bedpost in there. Maybe after I thought he’d gone to bed, he sat up reading private psychiatric files and stolen mail. Maybe. But not while I was watching.
Angie reported the same thing regarding his days. Pearse never dawdled long enough in his truck to have the opportunity to look through any of the mail he picked up during the second half of his shift.
“He’s strictly by-the-numbers,” Angie reported.
Fortunately, we weren’t, and in the only joyful irony of that week, Angie obtained Pearse’s phone number by breaking into his mailbox on Sleeper Street and peeking at his phone bill.
But otherwise, nothing. His façade began to seem impenetrable.