A Confidential Source (25 page)

I reached into the kitchen cabinet and pulled out a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and a box of elbow macaroni. I pictured
myself walking into a church basement in Providence and telling a group of people I didn’t know that I had no control over
anything in my life. I decided it might be better to just starve for a month.

I brought the soup to a slow boil, threw in a handful of macaroni, and turned on the television. I didn’t normally watch television
news, but now that I was boycotting the radio, I needed a new source of background human voices.

The moral victory of not buying the scratch ticket was not as satisfying as I’d hoped. I found myself wondering if I’d blown
it. If that one scratch ticket was
the one.
What if there’d been a $10,000 prize waiting for me under the latex? I knew I was working myself up, but I couldn’t seem
to stop. One negative thought chased the other, a race with no finish line. What if I’d thrown away that one chance in a million—the
only chance I was ever going to get—by walking out the liquor-store door? Maybe that’s what the front-door goblin was “ha
ha ha-ing” about.

I heard a knock on a door somewhere on my floor. This was followed by laughter and welcoming voices. A second knock that sounded
a little farther down the hall made me realize that the families in the building must be taking their children trick-or-treating.
I had a momentary panic wondering if I had any Almond Joy bars stashed in the cupboard, any kind of treat to hand out, but
I couldn’t find any. It didn’t matter. No one knocked. Feet shuffled down the staircase. No one considered coming to my door.

The macaroni had congealed into a single lump on the stovetop, but I didn’t care. I’d lost my appetite. There was only one
thing that was going to make me feel better and it wasn’t in a soup pot. The scratch tickets I’d bought the night of Barry’s
murder. The ones I’d never played. Once upon a time they’d been on the bar. I searched under a stack of newspapers and under
the basket of vitamin pills, but they were gone.

Finally, I got a grip on myself and went back to the stove to stir the soup. Too much water had evaporated and it looked like
one big red macaroni. I was trying to decide whether or not I should just toss the whole thing in the trash when I heard the
newscaster report Victor Delria’s death at Rhode Island Hospital. I shifted my attention to the TV.

The camera was on a middle-aged Hispanic woman with a toddler on her lap. She was introduced as having once been Delria’s
foster mother. She told the news reporter that Delria had been orphaned when his parents died in a car accident when he was
fifteen. Then suddenly, there was an insert of a family portrait and the camera zeroed in on a photo of a boy identified as
Victor Delria-Lopez when he was fifteen years old.

The boy was very slight, with a narrow face and a wide, lantern jaw. The screen changed to a single photo of Victor Delria-Lopez
as an adult. I dropped the spoon in the soup and moved into the living room to get closer to the television. This man didn’t
have the height or the anger to terrify me or keep me awake worrying if he had friends who might come after me. This man didn’t
have any viciousness at all.

This was not the man I’d picked from the photo lineup, because this was not the face that had scowled at me in front of the
dairy case.

I stood there, immobile, watching the photo dissolve from the television screen. The camera shifted back to the studio, focusing
on a bright-blond newscaster with a ruffle at her neckline. She wore a sad expression and spoke in a slightly nasal tone.
“Delria, captured in a police chase immediately following the murder of Way land Square store owner Barry Mazursky, was cleared
today of any connection to that crime. Police said that although his car matched a witness’s description of the getaway car,
the forensics report and DNA testing produced no evidence linking Delria to the crime scene.”

The newscaster pursed her lips, as if she needed to discipline her vowels or concentrate on not dropping her
r
s. “Police said sneaker impressions left at the crime scene did not fit Delria’s footwear and that DNA analysis of hair roots
and saliva on a panty-hose stocking mask recovered near the crime scene did not match Delria’s DNA.

“Police now believe that eight hundred dollars in cash found in Delria’s car did not come from the robbery, but may have come
from a recent drug sale. Trace amounts of heroin powder were found in Delria’s trunk, according to the forensics report. Police
have not named any other suspects in the murder of Barry Mazursky.”

The camera shifted to a weather map, and I snapped off the TV. Police might not have another suspect, but I sure as hell did.
The man in the parka who was out there running free.

I went to my apartment door and double-checked the lock. Both the doorknob lock and the double lock were firm, but I knew
from experience that the outer door, downstairs, was always left open. I moved to the window and scanned Elmgrove. I watched
a couple head into Starbucks, but there were no children in costumes prowling about in groups with their parents. A lone man
walked past the Mazursky Market, hands clenched in his pockets as he headed purposefully down Angell Street.

I watched him until he got into a car and drove off. If Victor Delria-Lopez wasn’t the man in the parka, it meant that Barry
Mazursky’s murderer had been free the whole time in Providence. He’d been the one barreling through intersections and calling
talk radio, intent on killing me.

A
SCRAPING SOUND
was coming from my bedroom. I stepped away from the window into the alcove and stood behind the futon, trying to hide in
the relative shadow. Every muscle in my legs and arms tensed as I listened. Another scrape, followed by a ping and a hiss.
Steam heat. The radiator.

I needed more light. I reached for the floor lamp, but couldn’t find the switch. I groped the bulb, the neck; how did you
turn this thing on? Giving up, I walked across the room to the closet, opened the door, and flicked on the light. A sputtering
of fluorescence illuminated a few extra square feet with a grim light.

I turned the dimmer up on the fixture over the bar as high as it would go and snapped on the lights over the sink. I became
aware of an awful chemical smell. Metal burning? I ran to the stove and turned off the burner where I’d left the soup, the
liquid now boiled off and the macaroni scorched into the bottom of the pot.

Throwing the whole mess into the sink, I was forced to inhale the new burst of steam. I wished to hell Walter was coming to
stay here tonight instead of tomorrow. I wished to hell that I didn’t have to wait out the night in this goddamn apartment
alone.

Alone, without even the radio for company. I could taste metal in the back of my throat. When I went to crack the window,
I found myself staring across Elmgrove in the opposite direction of the square, trying to make out the lights at Matt’s house.
The Victorian had three floors, maybe four if there was an attic unit. I saw lights on the bottom and the top.

How long had he known that Victor Delria was not the man I’d identified to the police? Not the man in the parka. Not the man
who killed Barry Mazursky.

I couldn’t remember which floor Matt said he lived on, but it was almost seven-thirty and there was a good chance that he
would be home. I desperately wanted to be with another human being, and he
owed
me an explanation. I put on my jacket, carefully double-locked the apartment behind me, and headed downstairs. It was a cold
night, and even in the stairway, I could feel the ambush of frigid air.

On the ground level, there were two outer doors, and I pushed through the first into the even colder corridor of mailboxes
and discarded flyers, a limbo before the street. Pulling my jacket around me, I hesitated at the door, peering through the
glass panes in both directions to make sure no one weird was hanging around. Finding a complete absence of human form, I bolted
across the street, not stopping until I was on Matt’s porch, shivering.

There were three mailboxes. Cavanaugh was marked as number 3, which meant he lived on the same floor I did. If he stared hard
enough, he could probably see my shadow through my front window. I hit the buzzer with force.

He didn’t answer at first, so I buzzed again. The wide front porch was more rickety than it looked from the street, with several
floorboards that needed to be replaced. Fallen leaves collected around an enormous pumpkin placed beside the door, the back
side of which had been gnawed by squirrels.

Slow steps made their way down the staircase. Eyes met mine through the leaded-glass side light, and he opened the door. Barefoot,
Matt was wearing an old T-shirt, washed so often it was threadbare, and tattered sweatpants. There was a bag of Butterfingers
in his hand. “A little late for trick-or-treaters,” he said.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” I said, suddenly embarrassed about the intrusion. The T-shirt was tight and ripped underneath the
neckband and along a side seam. I found myself wondering what kind of workouts he did and what he looked like doing them.

I made myself focus on his eyes. They seemed amused. Was that a smile on his lips? He backed into the small vestibule, allowing
me entrance. He studied me for a moment, and it struck me that he should have been a little more surprised by my visit. A
little less amused. He touched my shoulder. “You all right?”

Although it was just his fingertips that touched me, I was aware of the bare chest that I’d been picturing underneath the
T-shirt: the pectoral muscles that were defined but not bulky, the shoulders that were narrow, but solid. Christ, what was
I thinking? “No. I’m not all right,” I said, pulling away. “How long have you known that Victor Delria was not the guy I saw
in Barry’s that night?”

He looked swiftly up the stairs. The vestibule was a common area; anyone standing on one of the landings could overhear. “Come
upstairs,” he said, “where we can talk.”

I followed him up two flights of stairs, my eyes fixed on a third tear in the T-shirt, this one just above his left shoulder
blade, at the seam. I could see skin underneath that still looked tan, and I wondered if he ran without his shirt on in the
summer. The bare feet on the carpeting were not tan at all.

He guided me into the apartment, which was big, with a high ceiling, bare wood floors, and a lot of corduroy furniture. Dropping
the bag of Butterfingers on the coffee table, he reached for a sweatshirt that was tossed on the couch and turned away from
me to slip it over his head. I felt embarrassed again, as if he’d caught me trying to peek through the T-shirt holes.

The Simpsons
played on television: the episode about Homer joining a gun club. Matt snapped it off, removed a dirty glass from the end
table, and gestured for me to take a seat on the couch. He started to head for a La-Z-Boy, but didn’t sit down. Instead, he
turned back to me, his eyes scanning for something. It took me a minute to realize that he was looking for my notebook.

I might have told him I wasn’t there as a reporter, but as a witness, a witness scared out of her mind, but I didn’t. Let
him worry, let him wonder, let him feel a few knots in
his
stomach muscles. “I identified a completely different man to Sergeant Holstrom and you know it. Police must have known for
almost two weeks that Victor Delria was not the man.”

Unconsciously, Matt returned the dirty glass to its original spot on the end table and took the seat beside me on the couch.
Between the couch and the fireplace was a rough-hewn coffee table that looked impossible to destroy. He put his left foot
on the table and leaned forward, resting his elbow on the raised knee, his head resting on his hand. His right knee swiveled
toward mine and I had to force away thoughts of the tanned back I’d followed up the stairway.

“Holstrom told me the IDs didn’t match. You said right from the start that you never saw the guy’s face when he came back
into the store. All you saw was the back of the parka and the mask. So at first, we figured you might have had the wrong guy.”

“The
wrong guy?
I might not have seen his face, but I saw how tall he was. I
told
Holstrom he was a big guy. Over six feet. That parka would have been around Delria’s ankles.”

“Delria was not that short.”

Was he going to argue every point? “I saw him on television. I saw what he looked like.”

“Me, too. He was actually taller in real life. About five feet eight.”

He sounded as if he was rattling off the statistics of a college ballplayer, deliberately focusing on extraneous details.
“You know,” he continued, in that same detached tone, “witnessing a murder is an emotional thing; it can affect your perceptions.”

“No shit.”

He ignored this, but continued in that infuriatingly detached tone, as if he was a social worker and I was a case number.
“It affects the way you remember things. It affects the way everyone remembers things. And you said you were looking up at
him while you were squatting on the floor.”

Discrediting me as a witness, was that the ploy? And then I realized that Matt was bullshitting me. Looking at me with those
sincere brown eyes and spouting absolute bullshit. I gave him a cold stare so that he would know I knew it, but he did not
shift his gaze.

“And the forensics report? That had to have come back at least a week ago, and it confirmed that the sneaker imprints weren’t
Delria’s.” Anger began pumping into all kinds of veins I didn’t realize I had, and I couldn’t stand staying seated on the
couch beside him any longer. Rising, I began pacing, setting off in the direction of a small dining area with an antique-looking
oak table. It was stacked precariously with legal pads, files, and newspapers in various stages of being clipped.

Beyond, a bow window overlooked the street, providing a clear view of my apartment building. Matt must have known that once
I’d figured out Delria was not the guy in the parka, I’d cause trouble. That’s why he’d called me at the office; it was a
calculated effort to establish trust. Maybe that was his assignment at work today. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t looked so surprised
when I’d shown up on his doorstep.