Murder Suicide (5 page)

"His wife Theresa pushed for an inpatient psychiatric evaluation to assess his competency to consent to the surgery.  She thought the risks were too high, that he was being irrational.  But so far as I know, she was only aware of the speech and vision issues, along with a question of mild short-term memory loss.  John indulged her request.  He spent five days her on Axelrod six."

"Can you get me his records?" Clevenger asked.

"Leave me an address.  I’ll get them off to you as soon as I can," Heller said.  "If he didn’t lose faith, if he was actually prepared to go to surgery with me, I’d like nothing better than to see the sonofabitch who stole John’s future spend the rest of his in a cage."

"Do you think he ever told his wife — or anyone else — about the extent of the amnesia?"

"So far as I know, he was confiding in two people:  me and his lawyer, Joe Balliro, Junior."

"Balliro.  Snow wasn’t fooling around."

"He was laying some very complicated legal groundwork," Heller said.  "The living will, and so on."

"So with all the paperwork, someone could have found out.  A secretary in the office.  A photocopy clerk.  A friend of a friend of Snow’s mistress."

Heller nodded to himself.  "His mistress.  There’s a wild card."

"How so?"

"John tried to end the relationship a few weeks before his surgery.  He thought it would be easier on her.  She considered the two of them soul mates.  She was pushing for a real life together."

"And Snow?"

"I think he had trouble loving people."

"Why do you say that?"

"I listened to him quite a bit.  He was a perfectionist.  He loved ideas and ideals.  Genius.  Beauty.  Perfect romance.  Not much in the world met his expectations — not even his own brain.  He was uncompromising."  He paused.  "He told me she didn’t respond well to the breakup."

"Any idea what he meant by that?"

"She threatened to hurt herself, again.  I guess she had a history of cutting her wrists, or something."

"Sounds borderline," Clevenger said, referring to borderline personality disorder, a character disorder with symptoms including intense, unstable relationships, extreme fear of abandonment and repeated threats of suicide.

"I can’t speak to her diagnosis," Heller said.  "What I know is that she’s very beautiful, very wealthy and very troubled.  She’s married.  Runs a gallery somewhere in town."

Clevenger was silent.  His pulse started to race.  He suddenly had a very bad feeling that his work on the Snow case had started even before he visited the morgue.  "Did Snow mention her name?" he asked Heller.

"He called her Grace," Heller said.  "I didn’t know if that was her real name and I didn’t push him on it."  Heller noticed Clevenger wasn’t looking so good.  "You alright?" he asked.

"Did he happen to mention what sort of business her husband is in?" Clevenger asked.  Then he just waited for his day to come full circle, like a boomerang.  One, two, three seconds...

"I know she was very private about it.  Paranoid.  She said she didn’t want to be overshadowed by her husband anymore.  Owned by him.  But I’m pretty sure she said it was banking.  Yeah, definitely.  She told him that much.

The Four Seasons

Another Winter Day, One Year Before

Snow had just delivered the morning keynote at a conference on radar system design at the Four Seasons Hotel on Tremont Street.  He walked out of the hotel.  The sky was dark.  A light drizzle was falling.  He couldn’t bear the thought of going back inside.  He crossed the street and disappeared into the Public Garden.

He wasn’t scheduled to present again for a few hours — a panel discussion on missile detection.  If he lingered in the lobby or at a reception, he would face one engineer after another tirelessly trying to pick his brain.  What they never seemed to grasp was that he couldn’t share what he knew.  He had been a spectacular success as a researcher at M.I.T., but had utterly failed as a teacher.  How was he to teach a moment of inspiration, of epiphany?  The facts in his brain were inert until a force greater than he breathed life into them, converting them into the seeds of ideas.  And then those ideas grew without his consent, breaching where they needed to.  He was really no more than a plagiarist of inventions born inside him.

He walked past the public skating rink, noticing the happy faces of the children and their parents as they glided over the ice.  He, himself, had little time for leisure.  The creative force inside him drove him seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.  He had a wife, a son and daughter, a gracious home, enough money to never work another day.  But the force had
him
, and that trumped everything.

The Garden ended at Arlington Street.  He crossed it, started down Newbury.  He remembered a café three blocks away, figured he’d stop there, grab an espresso.  But within a few minutes the sky went charcoal gray and started pouring freezing rain.  And just as it did, he looked through the window of the nearest storefront and saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

She was in her mid-thirties, with auburn hair and the body of a mermaid, wearing a simple black dress — and she was looking back at him through impossibly green eyes. He had the sense she had been looking at him for some time.  For a split second he wondered whether she was real or another product of his imagination.

He walked inside, found himself surrounded my magnificent oil paintings hanging in splashes of light along the walls.  They were scenes of Boston, including the Public Garden and Commonwealth Avenue, but the artist had made something more of them, deconstructing all the harshness of line and form to create an ideal city in which people and buildings and the streets and sky were joined by swirls of color, swept into a world far more enchanting than the sum of its parts.

His gaze traveled to the far wall, to the portrait of a naked woman standing behind lace curtains at dusk, gazing out the bow window of her brick town home onto lanterned Beacon Street.

Snow walked toward the portrait, stopped about ten feet away.  He knew instantly that it was of the woman he had seen in the window.  He imagined himself in the painting, behind her, hands on her shoulders, kissing her neck.

"The artist is Ron Kullaway," she said, walking up beside him.  "He lives up in Maine."

Her voice combined strength and intelligence with a hint of vulnerability.  "Magnificent," he said, without looking at her.

"He’s becoming one of America’s greats.  You’ve seen his work before?"

"I haven’t."

"I think he makes life seem worthwhile," she said.  "Worth living."

He felt the back of her hand brush ever so lightly against his.  Or did he?  "How does he do that?" he asked.

"I think it’s what he leaves out, more than what he paints."

"The structure," Snow said.  "The boundaries."

"What limits us.  He either doesn’t see it or chooses to ignore it."

Snow finally let himself look at her.  When he did, he was even more taken with her.  "You never asked him?  It must have taken him quite a long time to capture you."  He looked back at the canvas.

She smiled.

"How much is it?"

"Two hundred thousand."

"For a glimpse of life as worth living."

"Some people never even get that."  She paused.  "If it’s something you can walk away from, you shouldn’t even consider it."

He stepped back from the painting, turned to her.  "John Snow," he said, extending his hand.

"Grace Baxter," she said, taking it.

He noticed she wore a wedding band and a diamond solitaire that had to be five carats.  On her wrist were three diamond tennis bracelets.  All those gems said she belonged to someone, but nothing else made him feel she was taken — not her tone of voice nor the look in her eyes nor the touch of her hand.  "Would you have dinner with me tonight?" he asked, letting go.  "I promise to make a decision on the painting before we leave the restaurant."

She agreed to meet him at Aujourd’hui, upstairs at the Four Seasons, after his last presentation.  But she arrived early.  He saw her standing at the back of the room listening to his remarks, "Reducing Rotational Energy in Flight."  He noticed men in the room, including his partner Collin Coroway, stealing glances at her.  He wished he could say something more than he was, something expansive about the universe or creativity or love.  But he was confined to the laws of physics.

She never looked even slightly bored.

"What do you call the work you do?" she asked him later, as he poured her a glass of wine.

"I’m an aeronautical engineer.  An inventor."

"And what kinds of things, exactly, do you invent?"

"Radar systems.  Missile guidance systems."

She smiled.

"Care to share the thought?"

"It’s not really my place.  I hardly know you."

Sitting with her, hearing her voice, smelling her perfume, made him want to tell her the absolute truth.  "It doesn’t feel that way," he said.

"No, it doesn’t."

He felt something long frozen in him begin to thaw.  "So you can share that thought," he said.

"Okay..." she said.  "Why do you think you focus so much energy on what can and cannot be seen?  Why are you interested in radar, and how to get around it?"

"It’s something I have a gift for," he answered.  "It chose me.  I didn’t choose it."

"But
why
?" she asked.  "
Why
do you have that ‘gift’?"

He looked confused.

"Is there something about you, John Snow, that you don’t want people to see?  Or is it that you’re not willing to look at yourself?"

In that instant, Snow felt something he had never felt before.  He felt as though someone had connected with his truth, a truth even deeper than his genius, a truth of the heart.

"You have the answer, but you’re not ready to share it," she said.

"Maybe," Snow said.

"You won’t even confirm or deny that."  She sipped her wine.

"Tell me more about you."

"You want me to go first.  Okay.  What do you want to know?"

"Do you have dinner with all your customers?"

"Oh."  She ran a fingertip along the rim of her wine glass.  "You want to know if you’re special."

Again, Snow felt a nearly gravitational pull toward his core.  "Yes," he said.  "I suppose I do."

"I wouldn’t be here for a commission.  The last thing I need is money."

They had that in common.  "What do you need?"

She shook her head.  "We both have very good radar, John.  And we both like flying below it."

"You’re married," he said.

"I am.  And you?"

He nodded.

She suddenly looked sad to him, and he was amazed at who her apparent sadness moved him.  He was often at a loss when people became emotional around him, unable to fathom what they might be feeling or why, and that made him feel even more alone, even more a hostage to his mind than he usually felt.  Not so with this woman.  "I don’t want to be invisible," he said.

She looked around the room, checking to make sure no one was looking, then slid her hand under his.

Her touch made his breathing ease, his pulse slow.  He didn’t know what to do or say, so he slowly pulled his hand away, reached into his suit jacket pocket and took out a check made out for two-hundred-thousand dollars to the Newbury Gallery.  He placed the check beside her glass.  "I’ll take the painting," he said.  "But this can’t be the last time we see each other."

"I told you I’m not for sale."

There was a cool edge to her voice that made him panic.  "I didn’t mean it that way," he said.  "Really.  I’m not good at this."  He looked into her eyes, slid his hand under hers this time.  "What I meant was... I wouldn’t want the painting to remind me that we managed to hide from one another."

She looked into his eyes, saw he meant what he had said and slipped her thumb into the palm of his hand.

*            *            *

They met at the Four Seasons one week later, this time in a suite overlooking the Public Garden.  They had spoken by phone every day since their dinner, sometimes two or three times in a day, luxuriating in sharing more and more of each other’s worlds — the art that literally surrounded Baxter at the Newbury Gallery, Snow’s inventions taking form at Snow-Coroway Engineering.

Neither of them could risk a public relationship, so neither took offense that their intimacies should unfold inside the hotel.

Snow’s driver, Pavel Blazek, a man he trusted implicitly, reserved the suite, charging it to his own credit card.

Snow arrived fifteen minutes before Baxter.  He walked into the marble bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror.  He had the skin and hair and physique of a much younger man.  His forehead was broad, his jaw straight, his chin slightly cleft.  He was handsome, and he knew it, but he knew it objectively, in the way he knew the properties of carbon or the laws of gravity.  He had never known what to use his looks for.

Now, for the first time, he wanted to be attractive — for Grace.  He was wearing a new shirt and blazer, when any of his old ones would have done for him.  He had had his unruly hair trimmed.  He had shaved away two days growth of beard, when he usually waited longer, until it became scratchy and distracted him from his work.

He poured himself a glass of water, reached into his pocket for two Dilantin tablets, swallowed them.  In the hours he had spent on the phone with Baxter, he had made only a single, passing reference to having had seizures as a child.  He withheld the fact that they had never completely stopped.  He did not want her to think of his as broken.

He walked through the bedroom to a plate glass window facing the Public Garden.  It was a sunny, ice-cold day.  Everything looked crisp.  He could see the skating rink, crowded with families.  And he thought how nice it would be if he could go skating there with Grace one day.

He checked his watch.  Almost 4:00
P.M.
   She would be there any minute.  He felt half-excited, half-worried.  Because he still wondered whether Baxter was real or something he had dreamed up.  He had allowed himself to share more of his thoughts and feelings with her than any other human being.  Was that because she was his soul mate or because he wished he were the kind of man who cold have a soul mate?  With his marriage on life support, had he simply conjured up a rationale for pulling the plug?  Did he have the potential to be fully human or was he pretending he did?