Darkness, Take My Hand (23 page)

“It seems so.”

“So how does that profile apply to either Gault or Glynn?” I asked.

“Gault pointed you to Diandra Warren. Glynn pointed you to Alec Hardiman. From a benign perspective, such actions would suggest that neither man could be involved since he’s trying to help. However, remember what Dolquist said—this guy has a relationship with you, Mr. Kenzie. He’s daring you to catch him.”

“So Gault or Glynn could be Arujo’s mystery partner?”

“I think anything’s possible, Mr. Kenzie.”

The November sun was fighting a losing battle with the encroachment of thickening layers of slate in the sky. In direct sunlight, you felt warm enough to remove your jacket. Outside of it, you were ready to look for a parka.

“In the letter,” Bolton said as we crossed the schoolyard, “the writer said some of the victims would be ‘worthy’ and others would meet the reproach of the guiltless.”

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“It’s a line from Shakespeare. In
Othello
, Iago states, ‘All guiltless meet reproach.’ Several scholars argue that this is the very moment in which Iago passes from a criminal with motive into a creature beset by what Coleridge called ‘motiveless malignancy.’”

“You’re losing me,” Angie said.

“Iago had a reason to wreak vengeance on Othello, slim as it was. But he had no reason to destroy Desdemona or gut the Venetian army of talent and officers the week before a Turkish onslaught. Yet, the argument goes, he became so impressed with his own capacity for evil that it became, in and of itself, enough motive to destroy anyone. He starts the play by pledging to destroy the guilty—Othello and Cassio—but by the fourth act, he’s set on destroying
anyone
—’all guiltless meet reproach’—simply because he can. Simply because he enjoys it.”

“And this killer—”

“May be a similar creature. He kills Kara Rider and Jason Warren because they are the children of his enemies.”

“But killing Stimovich and Stokes?” Angie said.

“No motive at all,” he said. “He does it for fun.”

A light, misting rain speckled our hair and jackets.

Bolton reached into his briefcase and handed Angie a piece of paper.

“What’s this?”

Bolton squinted into the mist. “A copy of the killer’s letter.”

Angie held the letter away from her, as if its contents might be contagious.

“You wanted in the loop,” Bolton said. “Right?”

“Yes.”

He pointed at the letter. “Now you’re in the loop.” He shrugged and walked back toward the schoolyard.

    
patrick
,

“Oh,” Angie said, tossing the letter on her dining room table, “this is good. This guy sounds sane.” She scowled at the letter. “Jesus.”

“I know.”

“People like this,” she said, “exist.”

I nodded. In and of itself that was horrifying. There’s enough evil in the average person who gets up every day, goes to work, thinks of himself as good as much as possible. But maybe he cheats on his wife, maybe he fucks over a co-worker, maybe, in his heart of hearts, he thinks there’s a race or two of people who are inferior to him.

Most of the time, our powers of rationalization being what they are, he never has to face it. He can go to his death thinking he’s good.

Most of us can. Most of us do.

But the man who wrote this letter had embraced evil. He enjoyed the pain of others. He didn’t rationalize his hate, he reveled in it.

And reading his letter was, above all else, tiring. In a uniquely sordid way.

“I’m beat,” Angie said.

“Me too.”

She looked at the letter again and touched her palms to her shoulders, closed her eyes.

“I want to say it’s inhuman,” she said. “But it isn’t.”

I looked at the letter. “It’s human all right.”

I’d made myself a bed on her couch and was trying to get comfortable when she called to me from the bedroom.

“What?” I said.

“C’mere a second.”

I walked to the bedroom, leaned against the doorway. She was sitting up in the bed, the down comforter spread over and around her like a rose pink sea.

“You okay on the couch?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I said and headed back for the couch.

“Because—”

I turned back. “Huh?”

“It’s big, you know. Plenty of room.”

“The couch?”

She frowned. “The bed.”

“Oh.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “What’s up?”

“Don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?”

Her lips turned up in an attempt at a grin and it came out looking horrible. “I’m afraid, Patrick. Okay?”

I have no idea what it cost her to say that.

“Me too,” I said and came into the bedroom.

Sometime during our nap, Angie’s body shifted and I opened my eyes to find her leg curled over mine, wrapped tightly between my thighs. Her head was tucked into my shoulder, her left hand draped across my chest. Her breath fluttered against my neck, rhythmic with sleep.

I thought of Grace, but for some reason I couldn’t picture her fully in my head. I could see her hair and her eyes, but when I tried to form an image of her face, whole, it wouldn’t come.

Angie groaned and her leg tightened against mine.

“Don’t,” she mumbled very softly. “Don’t,” she repeated, still asleep.

This is the way the world ends, I thought, and faded back to dreams.

Late in the day, Phil called and I answered on the first ring.

“You awake?” he said.

“I’m awake.”

“Thought I’d drop by.”

“Angie’s asleep.”

“That’s cool. I just…sitting alone, waiting for this guy to try something, it’s driving me nuts.”

“Come on by, Phil.”

While we slept, the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees and the sky turned to granite. Wind roared down from Canada and poured across the neighborhood, rattled
windows and bucked the bodies of cars parked along the avenue.

The hail unleashed itself shortly afterward. When I went into Angie’s bathroom for a shower, it spit against the windows like sand carried by sweeps of water off the ocean. By the time I was drying off, it spewed against windows and walls as if the wind were ejecting nails and lug nuts.

Phil brewed coffee while I changed into fresh clothes in the bedroom, then come back into the kitchen.

“She still asleep?” he said.

I nodded.

“Goes out like Spinks fighting Tyson, don’t she? One minute she’s all bright-eyed energy, the next she’s crashed like she ain’t slept in a month.” He poured some coffee into a mug. “Always been that way, that girl.”

I got myself a Coke, sat at the table. “She’ll be okay, Phil. No one’s going to get to her. Or you either.”

“Mmm.” He brought his coffee to the table. “You sleeping with her yet?”

I leaned back in my chair, cocked my head, and raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re way out of line, Phil.”

He shrugged. “She loves you, Patrick.”

“Not that way. You never understood that.”

He smiled. “I understood a lot, Patrick.” He cupped the mug in both hands. “I know she loved me. I’m not arguing that. But she’s always been half in love with you, too.”

I shook my head. “All those years you beat her, Phil, guess what? She never, not once, fooled around on you.”

“I know that.”

“Really?” I leaned forward a bit, lowered my voice. “Didn’t keep you from calling her a whore on a regular basis. Didn’t stop you from pummeling the shit out of her when you felt in the mood. Did it?”

“Patrick,” he said softly, “I know what I was. What I…am.” He frowned and stared into his coffee cup. “I’m a wife beater. And a drunk. And that’s that. There you go.” He smiled bitterly at the cup. “I beat that woman.” He looked over his shoulder toward her bedroom. “I beat her and I earned her hate, and she’ll never trust me again.
Ever. We’ll never be…friends. Not on any level near what we used to be.”

“Probably not.”

“Yeah. So, however I became what I became, I did become that thing. And I’ve lost her and I deserved to because she’s better off without me in her life in the long run.”

“I don’t think she’s planning to ever boot you out of her life, Phil.”

He gave me that bitter smile. “That’s classic Ange, though. Let’s face it, Patrick. Angie, for all her fuck-you, I-don’t-need-anyone attitude, can’t say good-bye. To anything. That’s her weakness. Why do you think she still lives in her mother’s house? With most of the furniture that was here when she was a kid?”

I looked around, saw her mother’s ancient black pots in the pantry, her doilies on the couch in the den, realized Phil and I were sitting in chairs her parents had purchased from the Marshall Field’s in Uphams Corner that had burned down sometime in the late sixties. Something can sit in front of you your whole life, waiting to be noticed for what it is, and often you’re sitting too close to really see it.

“You got a point,” I admitted.

“Why do you think she never left Dorchester? A girl as smart and beautiful as her, the only time she’s been out of state was on our honeymoon. Why do you think it took her twelve years to leave me? Anyone else would have been gone in six. But Angie can’t walk away. It’s her flaw. Probably has something to do with her sister being the opposite.”

I’m not sure what kind of look I gave him, but he held up a hand in apology.

“Touchy subject,” he said. “I forgot.”

“What’s your point here, Phil?”

He shrugged. “Angie can’t say good-bye, so she’ll work hard to keep me in her life.”

“And?”

“And I won’t let her. I’m an albatross around her neck. Right now, I need us to—I dunno—heal a bit more. Get
some closure. So she knows completely that I was the bad guy. It was all, all, all me. Not her.”

“And when that’s done?”

“I’m gone. A guy like me, I can get work anywhere. Rich people are always remodeling their homes. So soon, I’m hitting the road. I think you two deserve your shot.”

“Phil—”

“Please, Pat. Please,” he said. “This is me. We been friends since forever. I know you. And I know Angela. You might have something real nice with Grace now and I think that’s terrific. I do. But know yourself.” He bumped his elbow into mine and looked hard in my eyes. “Okay? For once in your life, buddy, face yourself. You’ve been in love with Angie since kindergarten. And she’s been in love with you.”

“She married you, Phil.” I bumped his elbow back.

“Because she was pissed at you—”

“That’s not the only reason.”

“I know. She loved me, too. For a while, maybe, she even loved me more. I don’t doubt it. But we can love more than one thing simultaneously. We’re human, so we’re messy.”

I smiled, realized it was the first time I’d smiled naturally in Phil’s presence in a decade. “We are that.”

We looked at each other and I could feel the old blood rippling within us—the blood of sacred bonds and shared boyhoods. Neither Phil nor I ever felt accepted in our homes. His father was an alcoholic and an unregenerate womanizer, a guy who slept with every woman in the neighborhood and made sure his wife knew it. By the time Phil was seven or eight, his household was a DMZ of flying plates and accusations. Anytime Carmine and Laura Dimassi were in the same room, it was about as safe as Beirut, and in one of the great perverse misinterpretations of their Catholic faith, they refused to divorce or live apart. They liked the daily skirmishes and nightly makeup sessions of passionate lovemaking that had them thumping against the wall separating their bedroom from their son’s.

I was out of my house as much as possible for different reasons, so Phil and I took refuge together, and the first
home we both felt comfortable in was an abandoned pigeon coop we found on the roof of an industrial garage on Sudan Street. We cleaned all the white shit out and reinforced it with boards from old pallets and slid some abandoned furniture in there, and pretty soon we picked up other strays like ourselves—Bubba, Kevin Hurlihy for a while, Nelson Ferrare, Angie. The Little Rascals with class rage and larcenous hearts and complete lack of respect for authority.

As he sat across from me at his ex-wife’s table, I could see the old Phil again, the only brother I ever had. He grinned, as if remembering it all himself, and I could hear the sounds of our childhood laughter as we roamed the streets and ran like wolves over rooftops and tried to stay three steps ahead of our parents. Jesus, we’d laughed a lot for kids who should have been permanently angry.

Outside Angie’s house, the clatter of hail sounded like a thousand sticks beating against the roof.

“What happened to you, Phil?”

His grin disappeared. “Hey, you—”

I held up a hand. “No. I’m not judging. I’m wondering. Like you told Bolton, we were like brothers. We
were
brothers, for Christ’s sake. And then you went south on me. When’d all the hate take over, Phil?”

He shrugged. “I never forgave you for some things, Pat.”

“Like what?”

“Well…You and Angie, you know…”

“Sleeping together?”

“Her losing her virginity to you. You were my best friends and we were all so Catholic and repressed and sexually skewed. And you two, that summer, you distanced from me.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes.” He chuckled. “Oh, yes. Left me with Bubba and Frankie Shakes and a bunch of other pituitary cases with mush for brains. And then—what was it, in August?”

I knew what “it” was. I nodded. “August fourth.”

“Down at Carson Beach, you two, well, did the deed. And then, genius that you were, you treated her like shit.
And she came running to me. And I was second choice. Again.”

“Again?”

“Again.” He leaned back in his chair and spread his arms in an almost apologetic gesture. “Hey,” he said, “I always had charm and I always had my looks, but you had instinct.”

“You kidding me?”

“No,” he said. “Come on, Pat. I was always thinking things through too much, and you were doing them. You were the first guy to realize Angie wasn’t just one of the guys anymore, the first to stop hanging out on the corner, the first to—”