Denial (15 page)

"Your anger," she smiled.  "It was dripping down my face a few minutes ago.  Where else does it show up?"

I licked the crystal of my watch to get the last of the powder.  "I specialize in evaluating murderers, to figure out if they're crazy.  I listen to them describe how they strangled, cut and bludgeoned their victims.  I go to morgues and visit corpses."

"You enjoy it?"

"It's a job.  A strange job, but a job."

"C’mon."

"C’mon what?"

"You could be a professor if all you wanted was a job.  You don't have to go to morgues."

I smiled at her determination to get at the truth — that anyone who makes a life of trying to understand killers is connected to them at some basic level.  "I guess I like it, then."

"But it's not enough."

"It's plenty."

"I don't think so, or you wouldn’t need the tootie."  She took a long drink of her scotch.

"If you're going to be my analyst, you should start charging me," I said.  "Especially since you seem to be so good at it."

She put her drink down on the pew, stood up, unbuttoned her jeans and let them drop to the floor.  She came over and stood between my legs.  "So pay up."

I ran my hands down her graceful arms, over her hips and squeezed her ass, burying my fingers between her cheeks.  Her body was younger than Kathy's, firmer, further from death.

She backed up a few steps and let me look at her, motionless in the moonlight, wearing nothing but her white, ribbed tank top.  I could see the folds of skin beneath the sparse triangle of red hair where her legs met.

She turned and walked toward the bed.  I started after her.  She climbed the three steps up the platform, picked up a coiled black leather belt from the nightstand and laid it on the patchwork comforter.  Then she knelt over the mattress.

My heart was racing as I took the stairs behind her.  I picked up the belt with a trembling hand.  But after the first thwack of leather against her bottom, watching a band of creamy skin start to redden, I lost all fear.  I lashed out again, then again, enjoying Rachel's groans, her quivering as she waited for the next blow.  "Say ‘Please,’" I told her.

She looked back at me.  "Please," she whimpered.

I hit her again.

She arched her back, bringing her bottom up off the mattress.  "Do what you want."

I leaned over her and used the belt to bind her wrists.  Then I knelt down behind her.  I had never sodomized a woman before.  I wet myself with saliva and pushed my way inside her, slowly, reveling in her resistance.

She screamed.

I pushed deeper.

*            *            *

I left Rachel at five in the morning.  The Rover was covered with dew.  I pulled myself inside, rolled down the windows and breathed deeply of the morning air.  Four hours sleep in two days had left me light-headed.  My legs felt weighty.  I still had about a quarter gram in my pocket, but I didn't reach for it.  I wanted to linger on empty, really let myself touch rock bottom.

I looked up at the Tobin Bridge.  The first commuters were making their way toward Boston, probably unaware that beneath them, in Chelsea Harbor, the day was already going full throttle.  I could see three tugboats bullying a tanker toward a fueling station onshore.  Only a faint drone from their engines reached me, but the force they generated was obvious from the cottony wake they churned.  I once shared a bottle of scotch at the Surf Lounge with a tugboat captain out of Salem Harbor who had laughed at me when I used the word
romantic
to describe his work.  The tug's charm, he had explained, is an illusion:  Onboard, the mismatch between the vessel's size and its power means constant danger.

I started the car and turned down Broadway, toward Route 16 east.  I needed to pick up some clothes in Marblehead before heading over to McLean.  During my residency I had joked with the staff on the detox unit at Tufts about the way the place filled up around the third week of each month, when the addicts had blown through their welfare checks and couldn't afford to get high.  As soon as the next month's checks were issued, the place cleared out again.  Now it didn't seem so funny:  I was the one who had waited to admit myself until my pockets were almost empty.

I wondered whether I would find Kathy at home.  If she had waited up for me all night, I could count on a scene.  Once her anger was kindled, my trying to reason with her only fed the flames.  Usually, she'd end up belting the wall or kicking a couple of antiques to pieces.  Even fracturing her fingers hadn't stopped her the last time, when she'd borrowed my copy of
The Pugilist at Rest
and found a Polaroid of Isabela Cadronale, a twenty-two-year-old Brazilian journalist we'd met together on the beach at St. Croix, wearing nothing but a bow tie.  My bow tie.  Kathy had kept flailing away with her swollen fist, as if she felt no pain.  I ended up having to hold her down a good ten, fifteen minutes until her jealousy burned itself out.  Then the silent tears started, as they always did, a prelude to our best sex.

Why didn't I feel guilty about my indiscretions?  I mean, not even a little guilty.  Not even with the salt of Kathy's tears on my tongue.  And why had she always come back for more?  Were we laced together by love or by the promise that I would hurt her, again and again?

I hadn’t agreed with Ted Pearson, my psychiatrist, when he'd suggested that my drinking, drugging and philandering were all fueled by a deep-seated ambivalence about intimacy, but why else would I keep Rachel close to me, but in pain, for hours?  Why else would I caress her naked body, yet penetrate only her ass?  Why delight in the fact that we moved in a perfectly coordinated rhythm, but only because she dared not move at all without my hands guiding her hips, lets I tear her with an ill-timed thrust?

There was little traffic, and the road was dry, but I drove slowly around Bell Circle in Revere.  As I passed the Wonderland Dog Track, I lighted a Marlboro.  It frightens me to admit it, but I would have stopped in at Manny's window if the place had been open — to bet one dog, maybe two.  How could I explain that?  Why couldn't I feel alive unless I was living at the edge of ruin?

I had reached the Lynnway when I heard a siren.  I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a police cruiser about a hundred yards behind me.  I checked my speedometer, saw that I was under the speed limit and pulled to the right to get out of the way.  The siren stopped, but the cruiser followed me into my lane and started to close the distance between us.  I could feel my pulse quicken with the irony of being nabbed the day I planned to detox.  With the videotape Emma Hancock had of me buying in front of the Emerson, I worried she could claim her men had reasonable cause to search me.  And if they found the cocaine, I could be looking at a couple months in the Essex County jail.  Maybe more.  What a meaty
Evening Item
headline my sorry life would make:  ‘Doctor Heal Thyself:  Local Psychiatrist Arrested for Cocaine Possession.’  I accelerated back up to the speed limit and took the package out of my pocket.  The siren started to sound behind me again.  I checked the rearview mirror to make sure I wasn't likely to be seen, unfolded the package and snorted what was left.  Then I popped the paper in my mouth, chewed it up and swallowed it.  I veered into the breakdown lane and slowed to a stop.  The cruiser parked behind me.

The way my luck had been going, I should have guessed that Kevin Malloy would get out of the passenger side.  He hooked his thumbs over his belt and started toward my window.  An older cop I didn't recognize stayed behind the wheel.

I left the car running and turned on the CD player.  Big Mama Thornton was singing the blues.  I upped the volume.

Malloy plopped his hairless arm on my door.  He was holding a pair of cuffs.  "You know, we've been behind you with the siren since the fucking dog track."

I smiled, trying to imagine the clumsy race a
fucking dog
would run.

"Something wrong with you?  What's so funny?"

I sobered myself.  "Big Mama Thornton."  I nodded at the stereo.  "That's her, singing ‘Little Red Rooster.’  One of the greats, Mama was.  And one funny lady.  I do lose myself in her."  I couldn’t resist needling him.  "Sorry I didn't hear your siren sooner.  It's really neat, and the blue lights are very cool, too."

He was looking around the interior of the car.  "Glad you like ’em," he said evenly.

"Stop to chat?" I asked.

"Afraid not."

My anxiety level was climbing.  "Let's see:  You thought I was the Good Humor man and you wanted a Nutty Buddy."

He squinted and pointed at me like he was going to say something.  Then, without a word, he reached through the window and lightly touched my chest.

I look down.  My denim shirt was speckled with tiny white rocks of cocaine.  When I looked back at him, he was licking one off his fingertip.

"Looks like we've got a problem," he said. Clicking the cuffs like castanets.

My stomach sank.  I thought about mentioning the $350-a-month payoff he'd been taking from Willie Hightower at Pug's, but I figured it was better to wait for his next move.

"I bet when we vacuum this shitbox for tootie we'll understand why you plow into other people's cars."

"Plow into other people's cars?"

"Spare me.  The kid with the 'stang filed a hit-and-run at the Revere Police station late last night.  Says you smashed into him, then took off.  The on-duty officer over there let us know, seeing as you work with us — or used to."

"I paid the sonofabitch in cash."

"Oh, good.  Then we're all set.  Go at receipt?"

"Sure."  I couldn’t hold back.  "Like the ones you give Willie Hightower every month."

Malloy's upper lip thinned, exposing those yellow teeth of his.  "You'll have to follow me back to the station."

A crazy thought came into my head.  If I was going to take a fall, why not really dive deep?  My hunting knife was right under my seat.  I stared at his belly, then focused several inches higher on the point where the aorta emerges into the abdomen, no longer shielded by the sternum.

"You want to follow me like a big boy, or you want to ride with us in the cruiser?"

I looked him in the eyes and saw my father. 
You want to walk up to your room and take your punishment like a man, or you want I should carry you up, like a little baby?

Malloy clicked the cuffs together again.

I could smell the booze on my old man's hot breath.  Didn't he have the knife coming to him?  Would justice not be served? 
Where's your anger?
  I heard his voice again.

"
OK, I guess we'll do this the hard way
."

Or was it Malloy I had heard?  I shook my head.  Too much damn cocaine, I told myself.  I wasn't thinking right.  I needed that detox.  I needed sleep.  I rubbed my eyes, and Malloy was back.  I took a deep breath.  "Lead the way," I told him.

Chapter 9

Thursday, 6:15
A.M.

The door to Emma Hancock's office was open when I go to the station.  She glanced up at me as Malloy and the older cop, who had introduced himself simply as Grillo, hustled me into the same cell where Westmoreland had been held.  I stood at the door as they locked me in.  "Where's your other guest?" I asked.

He didn't answer.

"What am I charged with?"

"That's a tough one.  So many choices.  Cocaine possession.  Driving to endanger.  Resisting arrest."

"
Resisting arrest?
  I followed you here."

"Details," Grillo said.  He slapped Malloy on the back.

"Do I get a phone call?"

Malloy chuckled.  "I thought
I
was the one going to bad movies."  He turned, and the two of them started for the door.

I sat down on the cot and looked around the cell.  My eyes lingered on a spray of dried blood along the wall where Westmoreland had stood as he bit his tongue.  A few red smudges were also left on the floor where I'd taken him down after he had attacked me.

I turned and checked out the other cells:  All empty.  With Sam Fitzgerald's stamp of approval Hancock had probably transferred her prize prisoner to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, to await trial for murder.

My head started to throb.  I worried my pressure might be rocketing from the coke and decided to lie down.  The odor of decay wafted off the cot and blanketed me.  I stared at the bunk overhead, then raised myself on my elbows to read a word scrawled in blood on the flip side of the mattress.  It said
GEORGE.
"George LaFountaine," I said out loud.  I collapsed back on the mattress and closed my eyes.

I woke just a few minutes later to the jangling of keys as Emma Hancock stepped inside the cell.  I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and sat up.

She leaned back against the wall.  "I warned you," she said.

"I underestimated you, Emma.  I thought  you were worried about me screwing up the commissioner thing for you.  It didn't cross my mind that you were gunning for the corner office.  I would have been more careful dealing with the future
Mayor
Hancock."

"I could do a lot for this city.  But it's a long road from here to there."

"You take curves pretty well."  I pointed up at the dried blood on the wall.  "You moved the general along.  That's one less roadblock.  Fitz is a lousy psychiatrist, but he knows where his bread is buttered."

Hancock pressed her lips together and shook her head.  She looked drained.  "I didn't move him."

I nodded automatically, then realized I didn't understand.  "What do you mean,
you didn’t move him
?"  I glanced around the cell again.  Empty.

She looked down for a few moments, then over at me again.  "He's dead, Frank.  He killed himself."

"Killed himself."

"He shoved a sock down his throat.  Tobias Lucey found him late last night."

I got to my feet and spoke through my teeth.  "I told you to watch him."