Act of God (25 page)

“The insurance company investigated, too?”

Another whole body shrug. “Aw, they ran a routine check, but what can you do? We got no eyewitnesses, no physical evidence, nothing but motive on account of the policy and opportunity on account of no certain time of death. You take that to the DA, you get laughed at. Even the company’s lawyer backed off it, said they’d never survive summary something-or-other.”

“Summary judgment, maybe.”

“Yeah, that was it. You have to have some kind of evidence for your side—on homicide by the beneficiary or at least suicide by the decedent—and we didn’t.”

I sat back in my chair, letting the salt air wash over me. “Something tells me you didn’t stop there.”

Folino worked his hands, then replaced them on the arms of his chair. “It was just too pat, you know? I mean, granted the dead woman lives there for years, you still have kind of a healthy respect for the edge of the building. More so, you have some booze in you.”

“Autopsy?”

“Enough of the gin so she shouldn’t have been driving, but not so much she’d have been stiff. And no note or particular depression beyond her apparently shitty life and shitty kids. But all I had was the policy and the neighbors, who wouldn’t have noticed King Kong going by their windows, and the tingling, you know?”

“My stomach’s acting up on this one, too.”

“Account of the insurance.”

“Right.”

He gave it a few seconds. “Let me tell you, I can’t prove it, and if somebody can sue me, I’ll deny I even said it, but I think my decedent had some help going off that roof.”

“You said before the aunt claimed the kids did it.”

“Only about twenty times.”

“What do you think?”

“You mean, were they in it together?”

“Yes.”

Folino turned that around, but only a little. “No. No, I watched them at the service they had for the mother. Wasn’t more than a ‘So long, have a nice day’ service, by the way. No, I’d say neither one cared for the mother or trusted each other. Oil and water, at best.”

“Could it have been an act?”

“I don’t think so. The aunt, neither.”

“Darlene Nugent?”

“I don’t think she was acting with the screaming and the carrying on and all. And she didn’t seem like she could stand the kids, either. Weren’t for the aunt, the service would have been over in maybe half the time. This Nugent, she was crying at the coffin—closed, I guess I don’t have to tell you that. But the kids, they were sneaking peeks at their watches, and after a while, not even sneaking them, you know?”

I let it settle for a minute.

Folino said, “Sure I can’t get you something to drink?”

“Just one more question, maybe. You said you didn’t think the kids were in it together.”

“Right. And nobody else had motive, far as I could see.”

“So you figure if the dead woman had help, it was one of the kids acting alone.”

“Off the record?”

“Off the record.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Which one?”

Folino looked me straight in the eye. “Take your pick.”

I nodded and got up. “Thanks.”

As he was about to say something, there was the crackle of gunfire from a fairly short distance.

Folino said, “You know what that is?”

“Moon Island?”

“That’s right. I forgot you guys from Boston have to qualify out there, you want a permit to carry.”

“Every five years.”

“Let me tell you something, I sit here sometimes, and they’re going all day long. It’s kind of late today, but last year, when the Boston force was switching over from revolvers to the Glocks? They were sending the guys in for like three days, familiarization firing with the things. Man, you would’ve thought it was Kuwait City around here. The funny thing is, though, I … I enjoyed it. I never once fired my service revolver on duty. Never once in the thirty years. But the sound of the gunfire, it makes me think about being a young cop and wondering if I ever would. You know what I mean?”

“Not knowing what life’s going to bring.”

“Right. I lived my whole life in this city, Cuddy. Never been west of Worcester, you can believe it. I grew up here and joined the force and just stayed with the folks. I looked after them when they got sick, never married, myself. You?”

“Once.”

“Recently?”

“Not for a while.”

He nodded. “I been thinking, last couple of years, I should’ve tried it, too. At least once. Never really missed not having a wife while I was on the force, always things to do and people to see and all the other guys getting divorced when their wives found out about their fooling around on the side.”

I was starting to feel uncomfortable. “It doesn’t work for everybody.”

“No. But then, you never really know till you try. Me, I never did. Just got a little older and more tired and more set in my ways. For years, I looked forward to my pension, and now I have it. And I sit here and I watch the ocean and I wonder, just a little, where it all went.”

I thought about Roger Houle staring at the urn in his wife’s garden and me visiting Beth’s graveside and finally the retired cop sitting in front of me watching the boats go by. I figured I knew what Folino meant, but he looked up at me anyway.

“Get married again, Cuddy. And don’t ever fucking retire, you can help it.”

I thanked him for talking with me and made my way up the macadam drive to my car.

Roses
.

“Pink ones. Mrs. Feeney said the pinks were the freshest.”

So they’ll last awhile.

“They’ll have to, Beth.”

Because it’ll be a while before I see you again.

“Yes. It’s not so much that I’m going away somewhere.”

In a way you are.

I stopped, looked down at her. “What do you mean?”

It’s been building for some time, John. You’re just the last to see it.

“To see what?”

That it’s time for you to move away from me and toward Nancy, move toward her for real.

My jaw tightened without me saying anything.

It’s okay, John. It’s
…
natural.

“That doesn’t mean—”

It’s right, too. You’ve been a good husband to me, in life and afterward, for so long.

“I don’t regret a minute of that, Beth.”

No, but at some point you would, and it’s better to see it coming than go through it once it arrives.

I knelt down, placing the index and middle finger of my right hand where her lips might be. “There aren’t words.”

There don’t have to be.

Commonwealth Brewery is on a cross street between the Government Center parking garage and the Boston Garden. The street floor has high ceilings and copper ducts and crimped-copper tables for eating and a long, crowded bar for drinking. Behind the bar are massive copper kettles, though the real work is done downstairs, where another bar has glass walls onto the micro brewery, allowing you to watch the workers in the funny outfits at each stage of the brewing process.

Nancy was standing at the bar on the street level, her briefcase off the shoulder and onto the floor between her legs. She held a pint of amber ale in her hand, talking with a guy in a suit who stood with his hands on his hips so that you could see his designer suspenders. He looked as though he had as many advanced degrees as dimples in his cheeks.

As I moved toward her, Dimples moved away to rejoin his clones down the bar. Nancy went up on tiptoes to give me a kiss, short but sweet with only a slight pong from the ale.

I said, “Who’s my competition?”

“He’s just perfect, don’t you think? The guy managed to mention he has an MBA from Harvard in the second, fourth, and sixth sentences out of his mouth.”

“I didn’t think they even bothered to call it ‘Harvard’ over there. I thought it was just ‘the B-school.’ ”

“Yeah, but he heard my Southie accent and probably figured he had to translate for the townie.”

“What drove him off?”

“I told him I was your parole officer and we were meeting here because I was afraid to see you anywhere but a public place.”

“You want I should rough him up a little before we’re seated?”

“Save it for later, help you work off dinner.”

I tapped the hostess, and Nancy carried her ale to a table while I ordered a different one from a traveling waitress. As I took the chair across from Nancy, she looked up at me with a glittery, half-tooth smile that always reminds me of Loni Anderson at the switchboard on
WKRP in Cincinnati,
even though the two women couldn’t look less alike.

I said, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that I like seeing you four nights in a row.”

“We don’t usually?”

“Not usually. Not your fault, either. One or the other of us will have something going professionally, and it’s just not feasible.”

“That’s going to be true generally, you know.”

“I know. I’m not so much complaining about that as enjoying this.”

She reached a hand across the copper and worked her nails on me. “So, tell me about the shoulder.”

“There’s not that much to tell, really. The doctor said the X-rays and MRI showed no structural damage, so she sent me to this physical therapist, who beat me up for a while, then tortured me on half a dozen machines.”

“Nautilus stuff?”

“I didn’t notice the name on them, but different functions that seemed to have more gauges than weight markers.”

“Do you have to go back?”

“To the therapist, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Nancy played with her ale without drinking any. “You’re sure?”

“Well, I got the impression the guy would love to see me again, given what they charge. He ‘assessed’ my shoulder and cut a length of red elastic off a roll. It looks like a Bulgarian prince’s cross-sash, but it’s called a ‘Theraband,’ and he showed me a ‘regimen’ of exercises with it to bring back the strength in the joint.”

“And you have to repeat this ‘regimen’ every day?”

“Or so.”

The waitress brought my drink, a wheat beer I’d had there before. If you’ve never had fresh-brewed, think about the last time you went to the trouble of squeezing juice directly from an orange instead of pouring it from a box or bottle, and you’ll have the idea.

I held up my pint, clinking it against Nancy’s. “To a new regimen.”

“Of exercise?”

“Of everything.”

A
SSUMING YOU’RE NOT IN
love with bus travel, there are basically three ways to get from Boston to the Sunrise area in New Jersey. First, you can fly to Newark and rent a car there for the fifty or so additional miles. Problem is, with any kind of luggage, it’s tough to make the subway connections out to our Logan Airport, which means cabbing it through the tunnel and having to allow about an hour for traffic and more time to be sure you’ll check in early enough to make your plane. Given those problems you may as well take Amtrak, which runs from South Station to Newark and then continues on to Philly, D.C., and eventually somewhere in Florida. The problem with the train is that you’ll still burn four to five hours and have to see Hertz or Avis for the rest of the trip, anyway. Accordingly, with luggage, it’s easier just to drive your own car all the way.

To do that, I got up fairly early on Saturday. After Nancy left, I did the series of exercises with the Theraband tied to my doorknob, feeling vaguely silly and weak as a kitten in the left shoulder. I packed casual clothes and one suit, and the Theraband and the knee brace, then put on a pair of shorts and a polo shirt for the drive. Down at the space behind the condo, I loaded my suitcase into the trunk of the Prelude and headed off for the Mass Pike.

I took the turnpike west to Sturbridge, the traffic fairly light for the Saturday of July Fourth weekend, then got onto Interstate 84, which cuts diagonally southwest through Connecticut. To avoid construction in Hartford, I took the so-called “alternate route,” which also had construction on it and added ten miles to the trip. From there it was clear sailing to Brewster, New York, where I picked up 684 south. After half an hour of trees and reservoirs, I maneuvered through the tricky interchanges and terrible drivers that bring you to the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson and one of the grandest water views in the east. About eight miles further on is the turnoff for the Garden State Parkway, a useful road marred by heavy traffic and countless thirty-five-cent tollbooths. Somebody from Jersey once told me that the roadway paid for itself within its first few years of operation in the sixties, the state skimming pure profit from it ever since.

I pulled into a convenient rest stop for gasoline and had a hamburger that was barely warm and a Coke that was clearly flat. Back on the road, I passed a lot of exits, some for towns I recognized like Elizabeth and Union, others for ones I didn’t, like Kenilworth and Winfield Park. At the intersection of the New Jersey Turnpike, I stayed on the Parkway, crossing the Raritan River and winding closer to the coast, though I never actually saw any ocean. The cars were bumper-to-bumper, but still doing sixty miles an hour. Gratefully, I took an exit for Sunrise that turned out to be quite a ways from it. After negotiating a couple of traffic rotaries (called “circles” in Jerseyese) and passing three big restaurants, all with plywood across their windows and FOR SALE signs on their doors, I got onto Route 35, which ran north/south along the water.

A few miles later, Traci Wickmire proved to be right: There was both a Sunrise and a Sunrise Beach, which was not great news from the standpoint of checking motels and hotels. Hitting the one where Darbra Proft had stayed might take a while, so to be sure I had a room for the night, I checked into a chain place at about four P.M. It advertised a baseball card show in one of its function rooms, but there were plenty of vacancies, even so close to the beach on the middle of the three big summer weekends. My room was small and clean, with a double bed, shower rather than tub, and cable TV.

After unpacking, I got back in the Prelude and started down Route 35, showing the photo I had of Darbra Proft draping herself over Rush Teagle and his guitar. Four guesthouses and two motels later, nobody had recognized her, and I was hungry again.