Darkness, Take My Hand (14 page)

We found Jade
, Gabrielle, and Lauren dining together in the student union, but no Jason. The women gave us “Who the fuck are you?” looks, but answered our questions. None of them had seen Jason since this morning.

We stopped by his dorm room, but he hadn’t been by since the previous night. His roommate stood in a haze of pot fumes with Henry Rollins’s pissed-off wail booming through his speakers and said, “Nah, man, I got like no idea where he’d be. ‘Cept with that dude, you know.”

“We don’t know.”

“That dude. You know, that, like, dude he hangs out with sometimes.”

“This dude got a goatee?” Angie said.

The roommate nodded. “And like the most hollow eyes. Like he ain’t walking among the living. Be a babe if he was a chick, though. Weird, huh?”

“Dude got a name?”

“None I ever heard.”

As we walked back to the car, I could hear Grace asking me a few nights ago, “Are these cases connected in any way?”

Well now, yeah, they were. So what did that mean?

Diandra Warren receives a photograph of her son and makes a reasonable logical leap that it’s connected to the Mafia hood she inadvertently angered. Except—she didn’t inadvertently anger him. She was contacted by an imposter, and they met in Brookline. An imposter with a harsh Boston accent and wispy blond hair. Kara Rider’s hair,
when I saw it, looked freshly dyed. Kara Rider used to have blonde hair and her credit card receipts put her in Brookline around the same time “Moira Kenzie” had contacted Diandra.

Diandra Warren had no TV in her apartment. If she read a newspaper, she read
The Trib
, not
The News
.
The News
had plastered Kara’s photograph across page one.
The Trib
, far less sensationalistic and actually late on the story, hadn’t published a photograph of Kara at all.

As we reached the car, Eric Gault pulled behind it in a tan Audi. He looked at us with mild surprise as he got out.

“What brings you kids by?”

“Looking for Jason.”

He opened his trunk, began picking up books from a pile of old newspapers. “I thought you’d given up on the case.”

“There’ve been some new developments,” I said and smiled with confidence I didn’t feel. I looked at the newspapers in Eric’s trunk. “You save them?”

He shook his head. “I toss them in here, take them to a recycling station when I can’t close the trunk anymore.”

“I’m looking for one about ten days old. May I?”

He stepped back. “Be my guest.”

I pulled back the top
News
on the pile, found the one with Kara’s photo four down. “Thanks,” I said.

“My pleasure.” He shut the trunk. “If you’re looking for Jason, try Coolidge Corner or the bars on Brighton Avenue. The Kells, Harper’s Ferry—they’re big Bryce hangouts.”

“Thanks.”

Angie pointed at the books under his arm. “Overdue at the library?”

He shook his head, looked at the stately white and red-brick dorm buildings. “Overtime. In this recession, even us tenured profs have to stoop to tutoring now and again.”

We climbed into our car, said good-bye.

Eric waved, then turned his back to us and walked up to the dorms, whistling softly in the gradually cooling air.

We tried every bar on Brighton Ave., North Harvard, and a few in Union Square. No Jason.

On the drive to Diandra’s place, Angie said, “Why’d you grab that newspaper?”

I told her.

“Christ,” she said, “this is a nightmare.”

“Yeah, it is.”

We rode the elevator up to Diandra’s as the waterfront rose, then fell away from us into an overturned bowl of black ink harbor. The apprehension that had been sitting tightly in my stomach for the last few hours expanded and eddied until I felt nauseous.

When Diandra let us in, the first thing I said was, “This Moira Kenzie, did she have a nervous habit of tucking her hair behind her right ear, even if there was nothing to tuck?”

She stared at me.

“Did she?”

“Yes, but how did you…?”

“Think. Did she make this weird, sort of laughing, sort of hiccuping sound at the ends of her sentences?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes. Yes, she did.”

I held up
The News
. “Is this her?”

“Yes.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said loudly.

“Moira Kenzie” was Kara Rider.

I paged Devin from Diandra’s.

“Dark hair,” I told him. “Twenty. Tall. Good build. Cleft in his chin. Usually dresses in jeans and flannel shirts.” I looked at Diandra. “Do you have a fax here?”

“Yes.”

“Devin, I’m faxing you a photo. What’s the number?”

He gave it to me. “Patrick, we’ll have a hundred guys looking for this kid.”

“You get two hundred, I’ll feel better.”

The fax machine was at the east end of the loft, by the desk. I fed it the photo Diandra had received of Jason,
waited for the transmission report, walked back to Diandra and Angie in the living area.

I told Diandra we were slightly concerned because we’d received conclusive proof that neither Jack Rouse nor Kevin Hurlihy could have been involved. I told her that because Kara Rider had died shortly after impersonating Moira Kenzie, I wanted to reopen the case. I didn’t tell her that everyone who’d received a photo had had loved ones murdered.

“But he’s okay?” She sat on the couch, tucked her legs under her and searched our faces.

“As far as we know,” Angie said.

She shook her head. “You’re worried. That’s obvious. And you’re holding something back. Please tell me what. Please.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I just don’t like it that the girl who impersonated Moira Kenzie and got this whole thing rolling has turned up dead.”

She didn’t believe me and she leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “Every night, no matter what, between nine and nine-thirty, Jason calls.”

I looked at my watch. Five past nine.

“Is he going to call, Mr. Kenzie?”

I looked at Angie. She was peering intently at Diandra.

Diandra closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she said, “Do either of you have children?”

Angie shook her head.

I thought of Mae for a moment.

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so.” She walked to a window, her hands on the backs of her hips. As she stood there, lights from an apartment in the building next door went out one by one and pools of darkness spread across her blond floor.

She said, “You never stop worrying. Never. You remember the first time he climbed out of his crib and fell to the floor before you could reach him. And you thought he was dead. Just for a second. And you remember the horror of that thought. When he grows older and rides his bike and climbs trees and walks to school on his own and darts out in front of cars instead of waiting for the light to
change, you pretend it’s okay. You say, ‘That’s kids. I did the same thing at his age.’ But always in the back of your throat is this scream, barely suppressed. Don’t. Stop. Please don’t get hurt.” She turned from the window and stared at us from the shadows. “It never goes away. The worry. The fear. Not for a second. That’s the price of bringing life into this world.”

I saw Mae reaching her hand down by the mouth of that dog, how I’d felt ready to jump, to tear the head off that Scottish terrier if need be.

The phone rang. Nine-fifteen. All three of us jerked at once, and Diandra crossed the floor in four strides. Angie looked at me and rolled her eyes upward in relief.

Diandra picked up the phone. “Jason?” she said. “Jason?”

It wasn’t Jason. That was immediately apparent when she ran her free hand up along her temple and pressed it hard against the hairline. “What?” she said. She turned her head and looked at me. “Hold on.”

She handed me the phone. “Someone named Oscar.”

I took the phone from her and turned so that my back was to her and Angie as another set of lights went out in the building beside us and spread the darkness across the floor like liquid while Oscar told me that Jason Warren had been found.

In pieces.

In an abandoned
trucking depot along the waterfront in South Boston, the killer had shot Jason Warren once in the stomach, stabbed him several times with an ice pick and bludgeoned him with a hammer. He’d also amputated his limbs and placed them on windowsills, left his torso sitting in a chair facing the door, and tied his head to a dead power cable hanging from an elevated conveyor belt.

A crew of forensics cops spent the night and most of the next morning in there and never found Jason’s kneecaps.

The first two cops on the scene were rookies. One quit the force within a week. The other, Devin told me, took a leave of absence to seek counseling. Devin also told me that when he and Oscar entered the truck depot, he’d first thought Jason had run afoul of a lion.

When I hung up that night after receiving word from Oscar and turned to Diandra and Angie, Diandra already knew.

She said, “My son is dead, isn’t he?”

And I nodded.

She closed her eyes, and held one hand up by her ear as if motioning for a room to be quiet so she could hear something. She swayed slightly, as if to a breeze, and Angie stepped up beside her.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, eyes still closed.

By the time Eric arrived, Diandra was sitting on her window seat, staring out at the harbor, the coffee Angie’d
made sitting cold and untouched beside her. In an hour, she hadn’t spoken a single word.

When Eric entered, she stared at him as he removed his raincoat and hat, placed them on a hook, looked at us.

We stepped into the kitchen alcove, and I told him.

“Jesus,” he said, and for a moment he looked as if he’d be sick. His face turned the color of paste and he gripped the bar until his knuckles whitened. “Murdered. How?”

I shook my head. “Murdered is enough for now,” I said.

He rested both hands on the bar top, lowered his head. “What’s Diandra been like since she heard?”

“Quiet.”

He nodded. “That’s her way. You contact Stan Timpson?”

I shook my head. “I assume the police will.”

His eyes filled. “That kid, that poor beautiful kid.”

“Tell me,” I said.

He stared past my shoulder at the fridge. “Tell you what?”

“Whatever you know about Jason. Whatever it is you’ve been hiding.”

“Hiding?” His voice was small.

“Hiding,” I said. “You haven’t felt right in this since the beginning.”

“On what do you base—”

“Call it a hunch, Eric. What were you doing at Bryce tonight?”

“I told you. Tutoring.”

“Bullshit. I saw the books you pulled out of the car. One of them was a Chilton car guide, Eric.”

“Look,” he said, “I’m going to go to Diandra now. I know how she’ll react and I really think you and Ange should leave. She won’t want you to have seen her when she cracks.”

I nodded. “I’ll be in touch.”

He adjusted his glasses, walked past me. “I’ll see you get full payment for whatever remains on the bill.”

“We’ve already been paid, Eric.”

He crossed the loft to her and I looked at Angie, cocked
my head toward the door. She picked her purse up off the floor and her jacket off the couch as Eric placed a hand on Diandra’s shoulder.

“Eric,” she said. “Oh, Eric. Why? Why?”

She fell off the window seat into his arms as Angie reached me. And as I opened the door, Diandra Warren howled. It was one of the worst sounds I’ve ever heard—a raging, tortured, ravaged noise that blew from her chest and reverberated across the loft and clamored in my head long after I’d left the building.

In the elevator, I said to Angie, “Eric’s wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“He’s wrong,” I said. “He’s dirty. Or he’s hiding something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. He’s our friend, Ange, but I don’t like the feeling I get from him on this.”

“I’ll look into it,” she said.

I nodded. I could still hear Diandra’s awful howl in my head and I wanted to curl up and cover myself against it.

Angie leaned against the glass elevator wall and hugged herself tightly and we didn’t speak once on the ride home.

One of the things being around children teaches you, I think, is that no matter what the tragedy, you must keep moving. You have no choice. Long before Jason’s death, before I’d even heard of him or his mother, I’d agreed to take Mae for a day and a half while Grace worked and Annabeth went to Maine to see an old friend from her year in college.

When Grace heard about Jason, she said, “I’ll find someone else. I’ll find a way to get the time off.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing changes. I want to take her.”

And I did. And it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I know society tells us it’s good to talk about tragedy, to discuss it with friends or qualified strangers, and maybe so. But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort
of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.

I’m prone to brooding as it is, and I spend a lot of time by myself which makes it worse, and maybe some good would have come if I’d discussed Jason’s death and my own feelings of guilt about it with someone. But I didn’t.

Instead, I spent my time with Mae, and the simple act of keeping up with her and keeping her entertained and feeding her and putting her down for her nap and explaining the antics of the Marx Brothers to her as we watched
Animal Crackers
and
Duck Soup
and then reading Dr. Seuss to her as she settled into the daybed I’d set up in the bedroom—the simple act of caring for another, smaller human being was more therapeutic than a thousand counseling sessions, and I found myself wondering if past generations had been right when they accepted that as common knowledge.

Halfway through
Fox in Sox
her eyelids fluttered and I tucked the sheet up under her chin and put the book aside.

“You love Mommy?” she said.

“I love Mommy. Go to sleep.”

“Mommy loves you,” she mumbled.

“I know. Go to sleep.”

“You love me?”

I kissed her cheek, tucked the blanket under her chin. “I adore you, Mae.”

But she was asleep.

Grace called around eleven.

“How is my tiny terror?”

“Perfect and asleep.”

“I hate this. She spends whole weeks being a perfect bitch around me, and she spends a day with you and she’s Pollyanna.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m so much more fun to be around.”

She chuckled. “Really—she’s been good?”

“Fine.”

“You doing any better about Jason?”

“Long as I don’t think about it.”

“Point taken. You okay about the other night?”

“With us?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Something happen the other night?”

She sighed. “Such a dick.”

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Nice, ain’t it?” I said.

“Nicest thing in the world,” she said.

The next morning, while Mae still slept, I walked out onto my porch and saw Kevin Hurlihy standing out front, leaning against the gold Diamante he drove for Jack Rouse.

Ever since my pen pal sent his “don’tforgettolockup” note, I’d been carrying my gun wherever I went. Even downstairs to pick up my mail. Especially downstairs to pick up my mail.

So when I walked out to my porch and saw Psycho Kevin looking up at me from the sidewalk, I assured myself that at least my gun was only a reach away. And luckily, it was my 6.5 mm. Beretta, with a fifteen-shot clip, because with Kevin, I had a feeling I’d have to use every bullet I had.

He stared at me for a long time. Eventually, I sat down on the top step, opened my three bills, and leafed through my latest issue of
Spin
, read some of an article on Machinery Hall.

“You listen to Machinery Hall, Kev?” I said eventually.

Kevin stared and breathed through his nostrils.

“Good band,” I said. “You should pick up their CD.”

Kevin didn’t look like he’d be dropping by Tower Records after our chat.

“Sure, they’re a little derivative, but who isn’t these days?”

Kevin didn’t look like he knew what derivative meant.

For ten minutes, he stood there without saying a word, his eyes never leaving me, and they were dull murky eyes, as lively as swamp water. I guessed this was the morning
Kevin. The night Kevin was the one with the charged-up eyes, the ones that seemed to pulse with homicide. The morning Kevin looked catatonic.

“So, Kev, I’m guessing here, but I’d say you’re not a big alternative music fan.”

Kevin lit a cigarette.

“I didn’t used to be, but then my partner pretty much convinced me that there was more out there than the Stones and Springsteen. A lot of it is corporate bullshit, and a lot is overrated, don’t get me wrong. I mean, explain Morrisey. But then you get a Kurt Cobain or a Trent Reznor, and you say, ‘These guys are the real deal,’ and it’s all enough to give you hope. Or maybe I’m wrong. By the way, Kev, how did you feel about Kurt’s death? Did you think we lost the voice of our generation or did that happen when Frankie Goes to Hollywood broke up?”

A sharp breeze creased the avenue and his voice sounded like nothing—an ugly soulless nothing—when he spoke.

“Kenzie, a guy skimmed over forty large from Jackie a few years back.”

“It speaks,” I said.

“This guy is like two hours from taking a flight to Paraguay or some fucking place when I find him at his girlfriend’s.” He flicked his cigarette into the bushes fronting the three-decker. “I made him lie face down on the floor, Kenzie, and then I jumped up and down on his back until his spine broke in half. Made the same sound a door makes when you kick it in. Exact same sound. There’s that one big loud crack and all those little splintering noises at the same time.”

The sharp breeze rode up the avenue again, and the crisp leaves in the gutters made a crackling sound.

“Anyway,” Kevin said, “the guy’s screaming, his girlfriend’s screaming, and they keep looking at the door to this shitty fucking apartment, not because they think they got a chance of getting to it, but because they know that door means they’re locked in.
With me
. I have the power. I decide what images they take to hell with them.”

He lit another cigarette and I felt the breeze bore through the center of my chest.

“So,” he said, “I turn this guy over. I make him sit up on his broken spine, and I rape his girlfriend for, I dunno, a few hours. Had to keep throwing whiskey in the guy’s face to keep him from passing out. Then I shot his girlfriend like eight, maybe nine, times. I pour myself a drink and I look in the guy’s eyes for a while.

“It’s all gone. All his hope. All his pride. All his love. I own it. Me. I own it all. And he knows it. And I walk behind him. I put my gun against the back of his head, right at the brain stem. And then, you know what I do?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I wait. I wait like five minutes. And guess what? Guess what the guy did, Kenzie. Guess.”

I folded my hands across my lap.

“He begs, Kenzie. Fucking guy’s paralyzed. He’s just let another guy rape and kill his girl and he couldn’t do shit. He’s got nothing to live for. Nothing. But he begs to stay alive anyway. This fucking crazy world, I swear.”

He flicked his cigarette into the steps below me and the coals shattered and were picked up and swirled by the wind.

“I shot him in the brain just as he started to pray.”

Usually when I’d looked at Kevin in the past, I’d seen nothing, a great hole of it. But now I realized it wasn’t nothing, it was everything. Everything rancid in this world. It was swastikas and killing fields and labor camps and vermin and fire that rained from the sky. Kevin’s nothing was simply an infinite capacity for all of that and more.

“Stay away from the Jason Warren thing,” he said. “That guy who ripped off Jackie? His girlfriend? They were friends of mine. You,” he said, “I don’t ever remember liking.”

He stood there a full minute, his eyes never leaving mine, and I felt filth and depravity violate my blood and stain, stain, stain every inch of my body.

He walked around to the driver’s side of the car, rested his hands on the hood.

“I hear you went out and got yourself a ready-made
family, Kenzie. Some doctor cunt and her little girl cunt. This little girl, she’s what, like four years old?”

I thought of Mae sleeping only three stories up.

“How strong you think a four-year-old’s spine is, Kenzie?”

“Kevin,” I said and my voice felt thick and filled with phlegm, “if you—”

He held up a hand and pantomimed a chatterbox, then looked down as he opened his door.

“Hey, fuckhead,” I said, my voice loud and hoarse on the empty avenue, “I’m talking to you.”

He looked at me.

“Kevin,” I said, “you go anywhere near that woman or her child and I’ll put enough bullets in your head to make it look like a fucking bowling ball.”

“Words,” he said, opening his door. “Lotta words, Kenzie. See you around.”

I pulled the gun from against the small of my back and fired a round through his passenger window.

Kevin jumped back as the glass imploded onto his seat, then looked at me.

“A promise, Kevin. Take it to the fucking bank.”

For a moment, I thought he’d do something. Right there. Right then. But he didn’t. He said, “You just bought a plot at Cedar Grove, Kenzie. You know that.”

I nodded.

He looked in at the glass on the seat and fury suddenly exploded across his face and he reached into his waistband and started around the car fast.

I aimed the gun at the center of his forehead.

And he stopped, hand still in his waistband, and then very slowly, he smiled. He walked back to the driver’s door, opened it, then rested his arms on the hood and looked at me. “Here’s what’s going to happen. Enjoy your time with that girlfriend of yours, fuck her twice a night if you can, and make sure you’re extra special nice to the kid. Soon—maybe later today, maybe next week—I’ll come calling. First, I’ll kill you. Then I’ll wait a while. Maybe I’ll get something to eat, go to the track, have a few beers. Whatever. And after that, I’m going to drop by
your woman’s place and kill her and her little girl. And then I’m going to go home, Kenzie, and laugh my ass off.”