The Front (14 page)

She smells him, feels his arm barely brushing her sleeve, feels his presence like gravity. Pulling her in.

“Um. Well.” Sips her wine. “Start with this. Why do they call you Geronimo?”

“Not sure who
they
are. But why don't you venture a guess. This should be good.”

“A mighty warrior. Always on the warpath. Maybe someone who makes potentially fatal leaps. Remember when we were kids? You jump off the high dive and yell ‘Geronimo' ?”

“Didn't have access to a pool when I was a kid.”

“Oh, no. You're not going to give me some discrimination sob story, are you? I happen to know that when you were a kid, people of color were allowed in public schools.”

“Didn't say it was about discrimination. I just didn't have access to a pool. The
they
you're talking about is my grandmother. She's the one who nicknamed me Geronimo. Not because of his warrior status or fatal leaps or whatever but because of his eloquence. He said, ‘I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us. And the sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say.' ”

Something catches in her chest. “I don't see the connection,” she says.

“Between those words and the person sitting next to you? Maybe I'll tell you, but it's your turn. Why Stump? Honestly speaking? I can't think of any good reason for anybody to call you Stump.”

“The World War Two Navy destroyer, USS
Stump
,” she says.

“I thought that might be it.”

“Seriously. My father came here to escape Mussolini, every horror you can think of when you conjure up that monstrous period of history. One that I hope to hell is never repeated, or I'll believe our entire civilization is damned.”

“I worry we're already damned. Worry about it more every day. I'd probably move if there was a good place to run.”

“Imagine how the old-timers feel. My dad watches the news three, four hours a day, says he keeps hoping if he watches long enough, things will get better. He's depressed. Sees a psychiatrist. I pay out of pocket because . . . Well, don't get me started on health coverage and all the rest of it. When I was a kid, he started calling me Stump because of the war hero the ship was named after. Admiral Felix Stump, known for his gallantry, his fearlessness. The ship named after him had the motto: ‘Tenacity: Foundation of Victory.' My father always said the secret to success is simply not giving up. Kind of a cool thing to tell a little girl.”

“When you had your motorcycle accident, didn't it ever occur to you to change your nickname?”

“And how do you do that?” She looks at him, and for reasons she can't fathom, what he just said hurts. “People have called you Stump most of your life and suddenly you tell them, ‘Hey, now that half my leg's been amputated, don't call me Stump anymore.' It would be like not calling you Geronimo anymore because you got whacked out and leapt off your balcony or something, paralyzed yourself.”

“I'm not reading into this that you might have had suicidal thoughts when you crashed your motorcycle into a guardrail, am I?”

Reaching for her wine, she says, “I don't guess Lamont's ever mentioned my accident. Since she never's really mentioned me, according to you.”

“She's never mentioned you, according to her. Never once except the other morning when she said I'd be working with you. Which, by the way, wasn't true at that time, because you had no intention of helping.”

“There's good reason why she doesn't talk about me,” Stump says. “And there's good reason why she'll probably always regret I didn't die in that accident.”

Win is quiet for a moment, looking out the window, drinking his wine. She feels his distance, as if the air between them just got cooler, and anxiety and guilt rush back at her with force. What she's doing is wrong. What she's done is wrong. She gets up from the couch.

“Thanks,” she says. “I'd best head out.”

He doesn't move. Just stares out the window. The candlelight moving on his profile makes her ache.

“If you need any further help with reports, other paperwork, well, I'm happy to. Anytime,” she says.

He turns his head, looks up at her. “What?”

“I'm saying it's not a problem. No big deal.” Her feet don't want to move. “You forget who you're talking to.” Why doesn't she shut up. “I know when someone has a hard time reading. Another one of those pieces that doesn't fit. Yet one more way you fool people.” She's suddenly on the verge of tears. “I don't know why you feel you have to lie about it. To me. I've known it for about as long as I've known you. All those times you come in my shop, ask clever questions to disguise the fact that you can't read the ingredients on a damn jar of marinara sauce. . . .”

He stands up, moves close to her, almost menacingly.

“ You've got to get past it, that's all,” she says, and it crosses her mind that he might hurt her.

Maybe she's goading him into it. Because she deserves it, after what she's done.

“Then both of us are lame,” he says.

“That's a terrible word. Don't ever use it around me. Don't ever use it around yourself,” she says.

He grips her shoulders, is inches from her face, as if he's about to kiss her, and her heart pounds so hard it throbs in her neck.

“What happened between you and Lamont?” he says. “You asked me the same question. Now I'm asking you.”

“It's not what you think.”

“How the hell do you know what I think?”

“I know exactly what you think. Exactly what somebody like you would think. All guys like you think about is sex. So if something happens that someone can't talk about, it has to be about sex. Well, what she did to me is about sex, all right.”

She pulls him down to the couch, forces his hand on her lower leg, knocks it against her prosthesis, and it makes a hollow sound.

“Don't,” he says, almost on top of her, the light of the candle gently shaking the darkness. “Don't do this,” he says, sitting up.

“The night we were at Sacco's. She drank at least a bottle of wine by herself, went on about her father, this aristocrat, rich, some internationally prominent lawyer, and how she never meant anything to him and how much she feared it had messed her up, made her act out in ways she didn't really understand and was sorry about later. Well, there's this guy, and he's been staring at her, flirting with her all night. She ends up bringing him back to my house, and they go at it in my bedroom. I'm the one who slept on the couch.”

Silence. Win starts rubbing the back of her neck.

“He was this loser, this stupid, crude, ignorant loser, and as luck would have it, a convicted felon she'd sent to prison a few years earlier. Of course, she didn't remember. All the people who go through her court, so many damn cases you can't remember faces, names. But he remembered her. Which is why he hit on her in the bar to begin with.”

“She did something stupid,” Win says quietly. “And you were there to see it. Is it really such a big deal?”

“It was to pay her back. To screw her good, as he put it. To screw her worse than she screwed him, he was yelling that morning on his way out my door. Then what does she do? She pulls his case, does a little digging, finds out he's in violation of his parole. Goes back to jail for six months, a year, I don't remember. One day, he and a couple of his redneck buddies see me filling my Harley at a Mobil station on Route Two, follow me, and he starts whooping at me out his window, yelling, making sure I saw his face right before he ran me into the guardrail.”

Win pulls her against him, rests his chin on top of her head. “She know?” he asks.

“Oh, sure. Couldn't do anything about it, though, now could we? Or it would come out in court how I first met the guy. How my thinking it was safer to let the two of them have sex in my bedroom instead of her disappearing with some jerk she'd just met in a bar. How my treating her like a friend, in other words, ultimately lost me a leg.”

He touches it, traces it with his finger, over her knee, rests his hand on her thigh, says, “It's not about sex. Not the way you mean it. She couldn't ruin that part of you if she tried.”

The pathologist who performed the autopsy on Janie Brolin lives on a narrow inlet of the Sudbury River, in an odd little house on an odd property as overgrown as Nana's.

The patio in back is missing bricks and almost completely covered with ivy. An old wooden canoe is stranded in a yard scattered with bright yellow daffodils, violets, and pansies. Win rings the bell, showing up unannounced, and already his day is starting out badly because of good news from the labs. Tracy found prints.

His idea of trying luminol paid off in one respect—a latent print fluoresced on the disposable camera package he found in the Victorian mansion, meaning whoever touched the cardboard had a copper residue on at least one of his fingers. Copper and blood both fluoresce when sprayed with luminol, a common crime scene problem that in this instance worked to Win's advantage. Unfortunately, the copper-residue print doesn't match anyone in the AFIS database. As for other prints? The ones on the wine bottle came back to Stump and Win, and as for Farouk, he left several partials on the envelope he touched. The Fresca can and note from Raggedy Ann both have prints that match one another but don't match anybody in AFIS, either.

Stump lied.

Now's not the time to think about it
, he tells himself as he rings Dr. Hunter's doorbell again.

How could she?
In his arms, in his bed, staying with him until four a.m. He just made love to a lie.

“Who is it?”

Win identifies himself as state police.

“Come around to the window and give me proof,” a strong voice says through the door.

Win moves to one side of the porch, holds his credentials up to the glass. An old man in a three-wheel mini-scooter peers at the creds, then at Win, seems satisfied, drives back to the door, and lets him in.

“Safe as it is around here, I've seen too much. Wouldn't trust a girl scout,” Dr. Hunter says, driving into a wormy chestnut living room that overlooks the water. On a desk is a computer and a router, piles of books and papers.

He parks across from the fireplace, and Win sits on the hearth, looking around at photographs, many of them younger versions of Dr. Hunter with a pretty woman who Win supposes was his wife. A lot of happy moments with family, friends, a framed newspaper story with a black-and-white picture of Dr. Hunter at a crime scene, police everywhere.

“I have a feeling I know why you're here,” Dr. Hunter says. “That old murder case suddenly in the news. Janie Brolin. Must say, I couldn't believe it when I first heard. Why now? Then, of course, our friendly local DA is known for, shall we say, her surprises.”

“Ever enter your mind way back then that the Boston Strangler did it?”

“Utter nonsense. Women raped and strangled with their own clothing, their bodies displayed, and all the rest? It's one thing to use a scarf or stockings and tie them in a bow, quite another to use the victim's bra, which in my experience usually happens when the killer was sexually assaulting her, shoving and tearing at her clothing, and the bra is the most obvious and convenient ligature because of its general vicinity to the neck. I should add that Janie wasn't the sort to let anybody in her house for any reason whatsoever unless she was absolutely certain who it was.”

“Because she was blind,” Win supposes.

“I'm not far from it myself. Macular degeneration,” he says. “But I can tell a lot by a person's voice. More than I used to. When one of your senses gets worse, the others pitch in and try to help it out. Journalists were more circumspect in 1962, or maybe her family just wouldn't talk or the press wasn't interested. I don't know, but what was left out of the papers, as best I recall, was Janie Brolin's father was a doctor in London's East End and no stranger to crime, patched up victims of it on a regular basis. Her mother worked in a pharmacy that had been robbed a couple of times.”

“So Janie wasn't naïve,” Win says.

“Feisty, street-smart, which is one of the reasons she had the pluck to take a year abroad, all by herself, and come to Watertown.”

“Because of Perkins. She was blind and wanted to work with the blind.”

“That's the speculation.”

“You ever talk with her family?”

“Her father, just once and very briefly. As you well know, not everybody wants to talk to the pathologist. They can't deal with our part in it, mainly ask the same question time after time.”