Darkness, Take My Hand (11 page)

The note read:

“Careful, Mae,” Grace
said.

We were crossing the Mass. Ave. Bridge from the Cambridge side. Below us the Charles was the color of caramel in the dying light and the Harvard crew team made chugging noises as they slid along, their oars slicing as clean as cutlasses through the water.

Mae stood up on the six-inch shoulder that separated the sidewalk from traffic, the fingers of her right hand resting loosely in mine as she tried to keep her balance.

“Smoots?” she said again, her lips smacking around the word as if it were chocolate. “How come smoots, Patrick?”

“That’s how they measured the bridge,” I said. “They turned Oliver Smoot over and over again, across the bridge.”

“Didn’t they like him?” She looked down at the next yellow smoot marker, her face darkening.

“Yeah, they liked him. Everyone was just playing.”

“A game?” She looked up into my face and smiled.

I nodded. “That’s how they got the Smoot measurements.”

“Smoots,” she said and giggled. “Smoots, smoots.”

A truck rumbled past, shaking the bridge under our feet.

“Time to come down, honey,” Grace said.

“I—”

“Now.”

She hopped off beside me. “Smoots,” she said to me with a crazy grin, as if it were our private joke now.

In 1958, some MIT seniors laid Oliver Smoot end to end across the Mass. Ave. Bridge and declared the bridge to be 364 smoots long, plus an ear. Somehow, the measurement became a treasure to be shared by Boston and Cambridge, and whenever the bridge is touched up, the Smoot markings are freshly painted.

We walked off the bridge and headed east along the river path. It was early evening and the air was the color of scotch and the trees had a burnished glow, the smoky dark gold of the sky contrasting starkly with the explosion of cherry reds, lime greens, and bright yellows in the canopies of leaves stretched above us.

“So run this by me again,” Grace said, wrapping her arm in mine. “Your client met a woman who claimed she was the girlfriend of a mob guy.”

“But she wasn’t, and he has nothing to do with any of this as far as we can tell, and the woman vanished, and we can’t find any record of her having existed in the first place. The kid, Jason, doesn’t seem to have any skeletons in his closet outside of maybe bisexuality, which doesn’t bother the mother. We’ve tracked the kid for a week and a half and come up with nothing but some guy in a goatee who might be having an affair with the kid, but who vanished into the air.”

“And this girl you knew? The one who was killed?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. All her known acquaintances have been cleared, even the scumbags she hung out with, and Devin isn’t taking my calls. It’s sort of fuck—”

“Patrick,” Grace said.

I looked down, saw Mae.

“Whoops,” I said. “It’s sort of messed up.”

“Much better.”

“Scottie,” Mae said. “Scottie.”

Just ahead, a middle-aged couple sat on the lawn by the jogging path, a black Scottish terrier lying beside the man’s knee as he petted it absently.

“Can I?” Mae asked Grace.

“Ask the man first.”

Mae walked off the path onto the grass with a slight hesitancy as if approaching a strange, uncharted frontier.

The man and woman smiled at her, then looked at us and we waved.

“Is your dog friendly?”

The man nodded. “Too friendly.”

Mae held out a hand about nine inches from the head of the Scottie, who still hadn’t noticed her. “He won’t bite?”

“He never bites,” the woman said. “What’s your name?”

“Mae.”

The dog looked up and Mae jerked her arm back, but the dog merely rose slowly on its hind legs and sniffed.

“Mae,” the woman said, “this is Indy.”

Indy sniffed Mae’s leg and she looked back over her shoulder at us, uncertain.

“He wants to be petted,” I said.

In increments, she lowered her body and touched his head. He turned his snout into her palm, and she lowered herself even more. The closer she got to him, the more I wanted to ask the couple if they were sure their dog didn’t bite. It was and odd feeling. On the danger scale, Scottish terriers fall somewhere in between guppies and sunflowers, but that wasn’t much comfort as I watched Mae’s tiny body inch closer and closer to something with teeth.

When Indy jumped on Mae, I almost dove at them, but Grace put a hand on my arm, and Mae shrieked and she and the dog rolled around on the grass like old pals.

Grace sighed. “That was a clean dress she was wearing.”

We sat down on a bench and watched for a while as Mae and Indy chased each other and stumbled into each other and tackled each other and got up and did it again.

“You have a beautiful daughter,” the woman said.

“Thank you,” Grace said.

Mae came dashing past the bench, hands up at her head, shrieking as Indy nipped at her heels. They went about another twenty yards and then went down in a tiny explosion of grass and dirt.

“How long have you been married?” the woman asked.

Before I could answer, Grace dug her fingers into my thigh.

“Five years,” she said.

“You seem like newlyweds,” the woman said.

“So do you.”

The man laughed and his wife poked him with an elbow.

“We feel like newlyweds,” Grace said. “Don’t we, honey?”

“We put Mae to bed around eight, and she dropped off quickly, her fuel supply exhausted by our long walk around the river and her game of tag with Indy. When we came back into the living room, Grace immediately began picking things up off the floor—coloring books, toys, tabloid magazines, and horror paperbacks. The tabloids and books weren’t Grace’s, they were Annabeth’s. Grace’s father died when she was in college, and he left both girls a modest fortune. Grace depleted hers pretty quickly by paying what wasn’t covered by her scholarship during her final two years at Yale, then supporting herself, her then-husband Bryan, and Mae before Bryan left her and Tufts Medical accepted her on fellowship, and she burned through most of what remained on living expenses.

Annabeth, four years younger, did a year of community college and then blew through the bulk of her inheritence during a year in Europe. She kept photographs of the trip taped to her headboard and vanity, and every one of them was taken in a bar. How to Drink Your Way Through Europe on Forty Grand.

She was great with Mae, though—made sure she was in bed on time, made sure she ate right and brushed her teeth and never crossed the street without holding her hand. She took her to children’s school shows and to the Children’s Museum and to playgrounds and did all the things that Grace didn’t have time for while working ninety-hour weeks.

We finished cleaning up after Mae and Annabeth and then curled up on the couch and tried to find something worth watching on TV and failed. Springsteen was right—fifty-seven channels and nothing on.

So we shut it off and sat facing each other, legs crossed at the knees, and she told me about her past three days in ER, how they kept coming, the bodies stacking up on gurneys like cordwood in a winter cabin, and the noise level reaching the pitch of a heavy metal concert, and an old woman who’d been knocked over in a purse-snatching and banged her head against the sidewalk holding Grace’s wrists as silent tears leaked from both eyes and she died just like that. Of fourteen-year-old gang members with baby’s faces and blood sluicing off their chests like wet paint as doctors tried to plug the leaks and a baby brought in with a left arm twisted completely backwards at the shoulder joint and broken in three places around the elbow, his parents claiming he’d fallen. Of a crack addict screaming and fighting the orderlies because she needed her next fix and didn’t give a shit if the doctors wanted to remove the knife from her eye first.

“And you think my job is violent?” I said.

She placed her forehead against mine. “One more year and I’m in cardiology. One more year.” She leaned back, took my hands in hers, rested them on her lap. “That girl who got killed in the park,” she said, “isn’t connected to this other case, is she?”

“What gave you that idea?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering.”

“No. Just happens we took the Warren case around the same time Kara was murdered. Why’d you think that?”

She ran her hands up my arms. “Because you’re tense, Patrick. Tenser than I’ve ever seen you.”

“How so?”

“Oh, you’re acting real well, but I can feel it in your body, see it in the way you stand, like you’re expecting to get hit by a truck.” She kissed me. “Something’s got you wigged out.”

I thought of the last eleven days. I’d sat at a dinner table with three psychotics, four if you counted Pine. Then I saw a woman crucified to a hill. Then someone sent me a package of bumper stickers and a “HI!” Then I found the “don’tforgettolockup” note. People were shooting up abortion clinics and subway cars and blowing up
embassies. Homes were sliding off the sides of hills in California and falling through the earth in India. Maybe I had reason to be wigged out.

I slid my arms around her waist and pulled her up on top of me, leaned back on the couch and slid my hands up under her sweater, ran my palms along the edges of her breasts. She bit down on her lower lip and her eyes widened slightly.

“You said something to me the other morning,” I said.

“I said a lot of things to you the other morning,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh God’ a few times if I remember right.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“Oh,” she said, clapping her hands against my chest. “The ‘I love you’ phrase. Is that what you mean. Detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She unbuttoned my shirt down to my navel and ran her hands over my chest. “Well, what of it? I. Love. You.”

“Why?”

“Why?” she said.

I nodded.

“That’s the silliest question you’ve ever asked. Don’t you feel worthy of love, Patrick?”

“Maybe not,” I said as she touched the scar on my abdomen.

She met my eyes and hers were kind and warm, like benedictions. She leaned forward and my hands came out of her sweater as she slid down my body until her head was at my lap. She tore open the rest of my shirt and laid her face on the scar. She traced it with her tongue, then kissed it.

“I love this scar,” she said, resting her chin on it and looking up into my face. “I love it because it’s a mark of evil. That’s what your father was, Patrick. Evil. And he tried to pour it into you. But he failed. Because you’re kind and gentle, and you’re so good with Mae and she loves you so much.” She drummed the scar with her fingernails. “So, you see, your father lost because you are good, and if he didn’t love you, that’s his fucking problem, not yours. He was an asshole, and you are worthy of
love.” She rose on all fours above me. “All of mine and all of Mae’s.”

I couldn’t speak for a minute. I looked into Grace’s face and I saw the flaws, I saw what she’d look like when she was old, how in fifteen or twenty years many men would never be able to see what an aesthetic wonder her face and body had been, and it was just as well. Because it didn’t mean shit in the long haul. I have said “I love you” to my ex-wife, Renee, and heard her say it, and we both knew it was a lie, a desperate want perhaps, but far removed from a reality. I loved my partner and I loved my sister and I’d loved my mother, though I never really knew her.

But I don’t think I ever felt anything like this.

When I tried to speak, my voice was shaky and hoarse and the words were strangled in my throat. My eyes felt wet and my heart felt as if it were bleeding.

When I was a boy, I loved my father, and he just kept hurting me. He wouldn’t stop. No matter how much I wept, no matter how much I pleaded, no matter how hard I tried to figure out what he wanted, what I could do to be worthy of his love instead of victim of his rage.

“I love you,” I’d tell him and he’d laugh. And laugh. And then he’d beat me some more.

“I love you,” I said once as he rammed my head into a door, and he spun me around and spit in my face.

“I hate you,” I told him, very calmly, not long before he died.

He laughed at that one too. “Score one for the old man.”

“I love you,” I told Grace now.

And she laughed. But it was a beautiful laugh. One of surprise and relief and release, one that was followed by two years that dropped off her cheekbones and landed in my eyes and mingled with mine.

“Oh my God,” she groaned, lowering herself to my body, her lips grazing my own. “I love you too, Patrick.”

Grace and I
weren’t quite at the point yet where one stayed over at the other’s house long enough for Mae to find us in bed together. That moment was coming soon, but it wasn’t one either of us was going to approach lightly. Mae knew I was her mother’s “special friend,” but she didn’t have to know what special friends do together until we were sure this special friend would be around for a long time. I had too many friends growing up who had no fathers but an amazing supply of uncles parading through their mothers’ beds—and I’d seen how it had fucked them up.

So I left shortly after midnight. As I was fitting my key into the downstairs lock, I heard my phone ringing distantly. By the time I made it up the stairs, Richie Colgan was talking to my answering machine:

“…name of Jamal Cooper in September of seventy-three was—”

“I’m here, Rich.”

“Patrick, you’re alive. And your answering machine’s working again.”

“It was never broken.”

“Well, it must not like taking messages from the black man, then.”

“You haven’t been getting through?”

“I’ve called you half a dozen times in the last week, got nothing but ring-ring-ring.”

“Try my office?”

“Same thing.”

I picked up my answering machine, looked underneath. I wasn’t looking for anything particular, it just seemed like what one did. I checked the jacks and portals in back; nope, everything was hooked up properly. And I had received other messages all week.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Rich. It seems to be working fine. Maybe you misdialed.”

“Whatever. I got the info you need. By the way, how’s Grace?”

Richie and his wife, Sherilynn, had played matchmaker between Grace and me last summer. It had been Sherilynn’s theory for the past decade that all I needed to straighten out my life was a strong woman who’d kick my ass on a regular basis and take none of my shit. Nine times she’d been wrong, but the tenth, so far, seemed to be working out.

“Tell Sheri I’m smitten.”

He laughed. “She’s gonna love that. Love it! Ha-ha, I knew your ass was done the first time you looked at Grace. Cooked and smoked and marinated and hung up in strips.”

“Mmmm,” I said.

“Good,” he said to himself and clucked. “Awright, you want your info?”

“Pen and paper are at the ready.”

“Case of Heinies better be at the ready, too, Slim.”

“Goes without saying.”

“In twenty-five years,” Richie said, “there’s been one crucifixion in this city. Kid name of Jamal Cooper. Black male, twenty-one, found crucified to the floorboards in the basement of a flophouse in old Scollay Square in September of seventy-three.”

“Quick bio of Cooper?”

“He was a junkie. Heroin. Rap sheet the length of a football field. Mostly small-time shit—petty burglary, solicitation, but a couple of home invasions, too, bought him two years at the old Dedham House of Corrections. Still, Cooper wasn’t nothing but a nickel-and-dimer. If he hadn’t been crucified, nobody would have noticed he died. Even then, cops didn’t seem to be busting their asses on the case at first.”

“Who was the investigating officer?”

“Two guys. An Inspector Brett Hardiman and, lemme see, yeah, a Detective Sergeant Gerald Glynn.”

That stopped me. “They make an arrest?”

“Well, here’s where it gets interesting. I had to dig a bit, but there was a local stir in the papers for a day when they brought a guy named Alec Hardiman in for questioning.”

“Wait a minute, didn’t you just—?”

“Yup. Alec Hardiman was the son of the chief investigating officer, Brett Hardiman.”

“What happened?”

“The younger Hardiman was cleared.”

“Coverup?”

“It doesn’t look that way. There really wasn’t much evidence against him. He’d known Jamal Cooper casually, I guess, and that was that.
But
…”

“What?”

Several phones rang at once on Richie’s end and he said, “Hold on.”

“No, Rich. No, I—”

He put me on hold, the bastard. I waited.

When he came back on the line, his voice had changed back to its City Desk rush. “Patrick, Igottago.”

“No.”

“Yes. Look, this Alec Hardiman was convicted for another murder in seventy-five. He’s doing life in Walpole. That’s all I got. Gottarun.”

He hung up and I looked down at the names on my notepad: Jamal Cooper. Brett Hardiman. Alec Hardiman. Gerald Glynn.

I thought about calling Angie but it was late and she’d been beat from watching Jason do nothing all week.

I stared at the phone for a bit, then took my jacket and left the apartment.

I didn’t need the jacket. Past one in the morning, and the humidity lathered my skin until the pores felt sticky and fetid and sickly soft.

October. Right.

Gerry Glynn was washing glasses at the bar sink when
I entered The Black Emerald. The place was empty, the three TV screens on, but the volume muted, the Pogues’ version of “Dirty Old Town” coming out of the jukebox at whisper volume, stools up on the bar, floor swept, amber ashtrays clean as boiled bones.

Gerry was looking into the sink. “Sorry,” he said without looking up. “Closed.”

On top of the pool table near the back, Patton raised his head and looked at me. I couldn’t see his face very distinctly through the cigarette smoke that still hovered there like a cloud, but I knew what he’d say if he could speak: “Didn’t you hear the man? We’re
closed
.”

“Hi, Gerry.”

“Patrick,” he said, confused but with enthusiasm. “What brings you by?”

He wiped his palms and offered me his hand.

I shook it and he pumped mine hard, looking me dead in the eyes, a habit of the older generation that reminded me of my father.

“I needed to ask you a question or two, Ger, if you got the time.”

He cocked his head and his usually kind eyes lost their softness. Then they cleared and he hoisted his bulk onto the cooler behind him and spread his hands, palms up. “Sure. You need a beer or something?”

“Don’t want to put you out, Ger.” I settled into the bar stool across from him.

He opened the door of the cooler next to him. His thick arm dug down inside and ice rattled. “No problem. Can’t promise what I’ll come up with.”

I smiled. “Long as it isn’t a Busch.”

He laughed. “Nope. It’s a…” His arm came out washed in ice water, dimples of cold jellied white against the flesh under his forearm. “…Lite.”

I smiled as he handed it to me. “Like sex in a sailboat,” I said.

He laughed loudly and sputtered the punchline. “It’s fucking too close to water. I love that one.” He reached behind himself and, without looking, pulled a bottle of Stolichnaya from the shelf. He poured some into a tall shot
glass, put the bottle back, then raised the glass.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers,” I said and drank some Lite. Tasted like water, but it was still better than Busch. Of course, a cup of diesel is usually better than Busch.

“So what’s your question?” Gerry said. He patted his ample gut. “Jealous of my physique?”

I smiled. “A bit.” I drank some more Lite. “Gerry, what can you tell me about someone named Alec Hardiman?”

He held his shot glass up to the fluorescent light and the clear liquid disappeared in a shimmer of white. He stared at it and rotated the glass in his fingers.

“Now,” he said quietly, eyes still on the glass, “where would you come up with that name, Patrick?”

“It was mentioned to me.”

“You’ve been looking for matches to the MO of Kara Rider’s killer.” He brought the glass down and looked across at me. He didn’t seem angry or irritated and his voice was flat and monotonous, but there was a stillness to his squat body that hadn’t been there a minute before.

“Per your suggestion, Ger.”

On the jukebox behind me, the Pogues had at some point given way to The Waterboys’ “Don’t Bang the Drum.” The TV screens above Gerry’s head were tuned to three different channels. One broadcast Australian Rules Football, one what looked like an old
Kojak
episode, and the third showed Old Glory wavering in the breeze as it signed off for the night.

Gerry hadn’t moved, hadn’t so much as blinked, since he’d brought the shot glass back down by his side, and I could just make out the sound of his breathing, shallow and thin, as he exhaled through his nostrils. He didn’t study me so much as stare through me, as if what he was seeing was on the other side of my head.

He reached back for the bottle of Stoli, poured himself another shot. “So, Alec comes back to haunt us all again.” He chuckled. “Ah, well, I should have known.”

Patton jumped down from the pool table and padded into the main bar area, gave me a look like I was sitting
in his seat, then hopped up on the bar top in front of me and lay down, his paws over his eyes.

“He wants you to pet him,” Gerry said.

“No, he doesn’t.” I watched Patton’s rib cage rise and fall.

“He likes you, Patrick. Go ahead.”

I felt like Mae for a moment as I reached out a tentative hand toward that gorgeous coat of black and amber. I felt coiled muscle hard as a pool ball under the coat, and then Patton raised his head and mewed and flicked his tongue over my free hand, nuzzled it gratefully with a chilly nose.

“Just a big softy, huh?” I said.

“Unfortunately,” Gerry said. “Don’t let the secret get around, though.”

“Gerry,” I said, as Patton’s rich coat undulated and curled around my hand, “this Alec Hardiman could have killed—?”

“Kara Rider?” He shook his head. “No, no. That would be pretty hard to do even for Alec. Alec Hardiman’s been in prison since nineteen seventy-five, and he won’t be getting out during my lifetime. Probably not during yours, either.”

I finished my Lite and Gerry, ever the bartender, had his hand in the ice before I set it down on the bar. This time he came up with a Harpoon IPA, spun it in his meaty palm and popped the cap off in the opener mounted on the cooler wall. I took it from him and some foam spilled down the side onto my hand and Patton licked it up.

Gerry leaned his head back against the edge of the shelf above it. “Did you know a kid name of Cal Morrison?”

“Not real well,” I said, swallowing against a shudder that threatened to rise every time I heard Cal Morrison’s name. “He was a few years older than me.”

Gerry nodded. “But you know what happened to him.”

“He was stabbed to death in the Blake Yard.”

Gerry stared at me for a moment, and then he sighed. “How old were you at the time?”

“Nine or ten.”

He reached for another shot glass, poured a finger of Stoli in it and set it on the bar in front of me. “Drink.”

I was reminded of Bubba’s vodka and its ragged chewing on my spinal column. Unlike my father and his brothers, I must have missed some crucial Kenzie gene, because I never could drink hard liquor for shit.

I gave Gerry a weak smile. “Dosvidanya.”

He raised his and we drank and I blinked away tears.

“Cal Morrison,” he said, “wasn’t stabbed to death, Patrick.” He sighed again and it was a low, melancholy sound. “Cal Morrison was crucified.”