Frames Per Second (10 page)

“Have the police said anything to you about protection?”

“Yeah. They can’t afford it. Besides, I can’t have a couple of guys following me around while I’m trying to cover the very people who may have done it.”

“I see.” Kurt drummed his fingers lightly on the table. “That leads me to what I have to say now. I talked with Andi about our conversation about additional visitation rights.”

“I left a message on your machine for her yesterday,” Ben said.

“I know. But I’m relaying our thoughts to you. At this time, with what’s going on, we don’t think it’s safe for the children to be around you more than they are already. If anything, we think you should stay away from the children for a while. Including canceling this coming weekend.”

Ben stood up and walked to the front of the room.
Our thoughts …
We can’t see
…
We think …

Ben exhaled carefully. “You know, Kurt, I truly admire your ability to manage a room full of people. I don’t admire you using it for managing my family life.”

“Our family life,” Kurt said.

Ben had planned this weekend two months ago. He had bought tickets for an Eric Clapton concert at Great Woods, something he knew they all would enjoy.

He thought of Lainnie, crying on his chest at the hospital.

“I think you can understand my logic,” Kurt said.

And, of course, Ben could. It
was
safer for the kids to stay away from him at least for a week or so.

He just needed to get past Kurt laying it out for him.

“All right,” Ben said, shortly. “But Jake’s birthday is the end of next week. Nine days. Let’s all meet someplace public … you and Andi can bring the kids, take them home.”

Kurt said, “Naturally, I can’t commit until I talk with Andi.”
 

“Naturally,” Ben said.

CHAPTER 10

SARAH KNOCKED ON THE OPEN DOOR OF BEN’S CUBICLE. “GOT A minute for me?”

“Of course.” Ben took a box of transparency sleeves off a chair and she sat down. He had been thinking about this meeting all morning, knowing it would have to come soon.

“Well,” he said.

“Yes …” she said. “I know you and Peter were friends. Close friends if I heard him right.”

“We were.”

“You probably know he took the shuttle down to visit me and Cindy every month.”

Ben nodded.

“I was jealous of you, actually.”

Ben raised his eyebrows. “We weren’t
that
close.”

She smiled wanly. “He’d show me the pieces the two of you did together. You know he and I started as a team first. I saw us as a boy/girl version of Woodward and Bernstein. Being lovers, wedding bells, and Cindy came afterwards. Ever so much more difficult.’’ Her smile curved. “You two boys could keep it simple: work together, do amazing things on the street, and just stay buddies.”

“Buddies who sat around bars whining about loneliness after all that ‘amazing’ work.”

She hesitated, seemingly lost within herself, and then said, “Maybe we can have a drink sometime, talk this all over. I’m going to have to lean on you as Peter’s former partner.”

“That’s fine. But I’ve got to warn you that in recent months, Kurt’s had me off on other things. Peter and I were just getting back to work together when this happened. I don’t know anything more than what you heard in the editorial meeting.”

“Understood. We’re also going to have to look hard at this thing of yours with Johansen. It looks like a pretty promising lead, wouldn’t you say?”

“Promising …” he grimaced.

She waited.

He said, “If promising means I lie awake nights wondering if I got Peter killed, then, yes, it’s promising. It was my van, it was my camera bag. But there’s also this kid, this Jimbo McGuire. We know Peter was found out, at least to the extent that he was chased off by McGuire’s bodyguard.”

“Tell me again why Peter was taking photographs himself?”

“Because he was stubborn,” Ben said. “And more than a little paranoid. He wasn’t willing to take someone else along and I needed a vacation.”

“I see.” She said it calmly enough, but he could see—or thought he could—the flash of resentment.

“Got to be tough, sitting here being civil when you’re thinking,
It should’ve been you.”

“I’ve got my own guilt to worry about,” she said, with a slight edge to her voice. “I did my part destroying our marriage. He wouldn’t even be working for
Insider …”

She stopped and abruptly brushed away a tear before it even started. When her attention returned to him, her eyes somehow seemed darker. “Look, if it motivates you to feel guilty, then who am I to get in the way of it? Use it to help me find the bastards who did this. And yes, if McGuire looks like a possibility, by all means let’s follow that up, too.”

Ben put out his hand and she held it.

“Deal,” he said.

She squeezed his hand briefly, with surprising strength. She flipped open her notebook to show him a phone number. “That’s the FBI in D.C.” she said. “How about you call in that favor with that agent you saved and get us an interview with Johansen?”

After only two rings, the number was picked up and Ben asked for Agent Parker.

A man identifying himself as Agent Blaine answered Parker’s phone. “Who’s calling?”

“Ben Harris. I’m the photographer who—”

“I know who you are.” The man’s voice was flat. “What can we do for you?”

“Is Parker there?”

“He’s not.”

Ben explained they were looking for an interview with Johansen.

“This in relation to the bombing up there in Boston or is this just some color for your celebrity issue?” Blaine asked.

“I’d kind of like to know if that bomb was meant for me.”

“Well, you’re a hell of a photographer, Mr. Harris. And we appreciate what you did for Agent Parker. But people as good at interrogation as you are at snapping pictures have been grilling Johansen about Boston and a whole lot of other activities. So far, his answer is ‘no,’ and we don’t have any evidence to show otherwise. If we did, we would pass it along to …” Ben heard the rapid tap of a keyboard. “… Detective Brace on the Boston Police. Have you met with him?”

“I expect you know I have,” Ben said. “Seeing as you know so much already.”

“You’re right,” Blaine said, cheerfully. “I do. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you what I tell all the reporters—no interviews.”

“Parker said he owed me a favor, and I’m calling it in.”

The agent paused. “I’ll tell him you called, but don’t hold your breath. Agent Parker’s extremely busy right now, and our policy right now is to keep the press away from Johansen. It builds his ego up and we’re trying to wear him down.”

“His ego also trips him up,” Ben said. “I’ve seen it.”

“And maybe Parker will see it your way,” Blaine said and hung up.

The next day, Ben and Ed went to the woman’s prison in Framingham.

It was hard going. The grim consistency of the women’s stories. Stories of men who were forgiven again and again even as they beat and abused women they had sworn to love. Of men who wouldn’t stay away even when restraining orders were issued. Of women who had been pressed beyond their limits and had finally reacted with guns, with knives, with poison.

But, Ben heard nothing from any of the women that shed any light on Peter.

By the time Ben and Ed got to the last woman’s cell, most of the day was gone. Her name was Maria and she had been convicted of walking into a bar and shooting her boyfriend. Her body had been covered with bruises and cigarette burns at the time; her two children from a previous relationship had been taken to the emergency room a half-dozen times in as many months.

They were in a foster home now.

Ben started setting up his shot on autopilot, his hands and eyes knowing what to do. Simple instructions: Stand here, please. Look there, Maria. Thank you.

No thought added.

Some of his distance was due to the pain in his leg, and the floating feeling from the medication. But the women’s stories evoked images within himself, images from his own world: of Parker blurring up from the floor as Ben fired the strobe into Johansen’s eyes; of Andi and Kurt sitting across from him on the love seat telling him they were to be married; of rowing alone under the moonlight in Maine; the sound and heat as Peter disappeared right in front of him.

Of waking up in the hospital bed … Lainnie’s tears, Jake’s awkward distance … of Kurt saying after the meeting, “We think you should stay away from the children for a while.”

Ben came out of the reverie, his own anger alive in him, the taste of it bitter.

Maria was looking at him challengingly. “Uh-uh, honey, you don’t tell me where to sit. This is the picture I want.” She stood in front of the prison bars, hip cocked, her well-muscled arms crossed just under her breasts. Anger swept off her, but, even so, she laughed harshly at herself. “I know I’m a bitch, but that’s the way it’s gonna be. I let a man come in my house and tell me
what
I do and
how
I do it and
who
I see and that’s not gonna happen again for this girl.”
 

“How did it happen?” Ben asked.
 

“Ain’t you been listening?”

Ben raised the camera and repeated his question. Through the glass, he saw for a moment a desperate vulnerability replace the challenge in her eyes. He almost squeezed the shutter button to capture what was perhaps a truer portrait of her.
 

But he waited.

She said, “You know … a man puts it all together for you like that, turns all that attention on you … it feels like love.”
 

Her face hardened. “But it ain’t.”
 

Ben released the shutter.

It was just after six when they left the prison. “Grim stuff,” Ed said. “I think I’ll head to a bar and see if a few beers can help convince me the male side of the human race isn’t as despicable as I just heard. Want to join me?”

“No thanks,” Ben said, stretching carefully. He itched all over. “Home and shower. Change some bandages.”

“I didn’t hear anything that helps us with Peter, did you?”
 

Ben shook his head. “Not a thing.”
 

“Tomorrow, then.”

Ben thought about home, the empty studio, the shower. He was exhausted, and the pain had sapped a lot out of him.

He took another pill, and headed the van back toward Boston. Thirty minutes later, he impulsively took a left at the Alewife MBTA station and continued toward the North Shore. Continued on to Jimbo McGuire’s home in Nahant.

On the second day of following McGuire, Ben spotted an excellent vantage point to oversee McGuire’s real estate office on Atlantic Avenue in Boston. It was an air-conditioning unit on the roof of the brownstone across the street. Ben walked into the lobby and quickly found a small plate reading, “Walker Management Corp.” Back in the van, Ben parked around the corner, and made a quick call to information, and then to Walker. When the receptionist answered, he said, “Good morning, I represent SteamKleen rug service, and I wanted to know who I should talk to about our maintenance programs—”

As quickly as possible, she told him to send whatever literature he wanted to Chuck Crenshaw, the head of maintenance services, but that no, he was not available to take a sales call at this time.

Ben put the phone down and knelt over his bag of tricks, an oversized suitcase filled with a jumble of clothes, hats, jewelry, and other assorted junk. He selected a blue work shirt with the name “Rick” sewn over the pocket, put a thick gold-plated chain about his neck, dark sunglasses, and a baseball cap. He quickly filled out a photocopied “Work Order” and signed Crenshaw’s name at the bottom with his left hand.

At the front door, he buzzed his way in by saying to the super that Crenshaw over at Walker had sent him to service the AC. The super came out wearing a bathrobe and a sour expression. He glanced at the work order and let Ben on the roof and told him to lock the door behind him on the way down.

Ben took the cover off the AC unit and spread some tools around, before taking his camera out of the toolbox and laying it on a bean bag to support the long lens.

The next day, the same ruse worked at the building two doors down.

McGuire, however, did absolutely nothing of interest.

CHAPTER 11

ON THE MORNING OF THE FOURTH DAY, BEN WAS BACK IN THE VAN. He figured it was safe to use for at least the next day, and after that, he would need to think of something else. Maybe just get a rental van.

The camera was poised at the window of McGuire’s office as two men arrived in separate cabs in the space of five minutes. Neither of them turned his head so Ben could get a clear shot of his face.