The Murder Channel (9 page)

“It’s down cellar,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

She led me down the stairs to a concrete room illuminated by a single, buzzing fluorescent tube. “My husband took care of these things,” she said, guiding me past the furnace to a wall of pipes and circuit breakers and faucets and wood-carving tools.

“He left,” she said simply.

I stared at the oddly shaped blades, each with a red-stained, numbered handle. “Those were his,” she said, following my gaze. “Here’s the tap.”

There are many different kinds of cutting, I thought, and so many different objects to cut.

I turned the red handle and heard the surge of water through the pipes.

“Now get out,” Mrs. Dayle said.

As I ate breakfast that morning, I watched her pin towels in place.

Then I walked to my bedroom, yanked on the previous day’s jeans, and stared at my Escher print—the oblivious wandering people who resembled zombies—thumbtacked on the wall beside my bed.

“We turn here,” Sable said, pointing at the sign for the Riverway. “Did you forget?”

“I was thinking about something.”

“Will you tell me about your voices?” she asked as we turned the corner.

That morning years ago, I returned to the kitchen
window just as Mrs. Dayle picked up her empty laundry basket, held her sore back, and walked slowly to her basement door.

In the next yard, beyond a fence, Shannon Waycross sunned herself. She and her husband were new in Ravenwood that summer. They had not signed up for the
Informer.
Her skin was already tanned, but she coated herself with lotion, taking great care with her stomach and upper breasts, then reclined behind her sunglasses. I knew little about her, except that she was beautiful, dark, mysterious, and alone.

“I call her my lady of sorrow,” I said now.

Sable shuffled through the deep snow. “Why do you call her that?” she asked.

“I read it somewhere when I was in school. There is a lady of tears, one of sighs, one of darkness. They are ladies of sorrow. I liked the passage because it contained my sister’s name, Levana.”

“That’s a pretty name. What does it mean?”

“My parents liked the sound of it. I don’t think it means anything.”

“What do your ladies of sorrow talk about?”

“There’s only one, but she has different sounds.”

That summer day, I heard the steady beat of a drum, an intermittent whistle or pipe, the buzz of insects, and songbirds fluting in the distance. I listened to drops of moisture collect on the refrigerator’s fruit crisper, then follow the condensation down the plastic panel. When the trickles merged
,
collided to create a torrent, I heard the roar of angry water that swept away everything in its path.

“What does she say?” Sable asked.

That day when I looked up, the sun had moved across the top of the sky. We had a scrawny maple tree that cast a slight shadow in the backyard, not enough to call shade.

“A woman lay on her stomach, her top untied, her head tucked into her folded arms. My lady of sorrow said, ‘Today.’ Then it echoed inside. ‘Today.’”

I knew what to do.

“She said only one word?”

Sable’s voice conveyed her disappointment.

“The rest was from dreams. She hasn’t spoken in years. I am waiting to hear from her.”

We turned onto the walk for her building, stamped the snow from our feet, and stepped down to the apartment. I returned to the window seat and watched the fish. Sable sat on the floor, her coat still tight around her.

“What happened to the woman?” she asked.

“What woman?”

“The one who was sunning herself.”

“She died.”

Sable was silent. She examined the backs of her hands, gazed at the fish tank, the ceiling, the door. Finally she looked at me.

“Were you sad?”

“About what?”

“When that lady died.”

I stared at a small, iridescent gray fish, darting first to the bottom of the tank, then to the top.

“I don’t remember,” I said, thinking that I never had been able to focus on the moment when Shannon Waycross stopped breathing.

I JOINED BOLTON AT THE INTERROGATION
room’s observation area. Inside, a slightly built, wiry man sat with his shaved head back, his eyes closed, his hands clasped across his stomach.

“John Jay Johnson,” Bolton said. “Also known as J-Cubed. His real name is Dermott Fremont. He’s Vigil’s head honcho. The crew hangs out at Riddle’s Bar in Jamaica Plain. Fremont runs Vigil from there, over his draft Guinness.”

“He doesn’t seem terribly upset to be here,” I said.

“Fremont plays the game well. Twenty years ago, Charlotte, North Carolina, popped him twice for statutory rape but couldn’t make either charge stick. We’ve had him in for assault, aggravated assault, impersonating a police officer. Six months in a county house of corrections is all the time he’s done.”

“Can’t expect him to stay off the street longer than that,” I said. “He has to make the world safe for anarchy. You headed in there?”

“I’ll go through the motions with him.”

“Where does Wendy Pouldice hang out these days?”

“You’ll get less from her than I’ll get from Fremont.”

“Perhaps I can exude charm. That won’t work for you.”

Bolton smiled. “She bought the Towers, a complex at the end of Huntington Avenue off the Riverway. She lives on the top floor. BTT occupies the bottom three floors. She’ll be in her office now.”

“Waycross thinks that Zrbny called her the day of the murders.”

“You’ll never get it out of her,” he said.

“Anything more on the shooter?”

“We’ve identified him—Albie Wilson. He’s a small-timer from Chelsea. Witnesses on the front steps tell us a car and driver waited for Wilson. When the shotguns fired, the driver split. There may have been a second car in the alley next to the courthouse. We don’t have confirmation on that.”

I watched as Bolton entered the interrogation room.

Fremont’s eyes were still closed when he said, “Detective Bolton, when are you going to find another aftershave lotion?”

“You tell me about the courthouse this morning,” Bolton said. “I’ll buy another fragrance just for you.”

Bolton pulled out a chair and sat.

Fremont remained motionless. “You know I don’t like court.”

“That’s precisely why I invited you here. The shooter was a friend of yours, Albie Wilson.”

“Never heard of him. Lots of people wear the tattoo who don’t have any connection with us.”

“How did you know he had a tattoo?”

Fremont opened his eyes, smiled, and sat forward in the chair. “I saw it on TV.”

Dermott Fremont was cocky street scum, an urban guerrilla who had traded his pipe bombs for Mac-10s when he moved north.

I turned and walked from the observation area.

WENDY POULDICE WAS WORKING THE CRIME
beat for a South Shore newspaper when Antone Costa carved his way across Cape Cod. I had no involvement in the case, but Wendy called me before Costa was named as a suspect in a double murder. Two young women had vanished from a Provincetown boardinghouse where they were vacationing. Police had found their mutilated remains in an isolated area where Costa buried his drug stash.

I told Pouldice to send me the information she had, asked Bolton a few key questions, and allowed the facts to percolate.

“How do you do this?” Pouldice had asked.

No reporter asked me that question. They wanted a profile, long before that term was in vogue, and they did not care how they got it, provided its author had sufficient letters following her or his name and spoke in quotable quotes. Writers asked for
the
profile, as if there were only one to describe the vagaries of the human predator. When I explained that there were as many profiles as there were killers, and that no description was carved in stone but evolved as I acquired new information, they grew impatient. They had been sold the illusion of simplicity, and they didn’t want me mucking up their ten column-inches.

Pouldice had no way of knowing that her question was the essential one, and the most difficult to answer if a profile was to have credibility. How did I arrive at my conclusions? What was the process?

“I digested the information you sent me,” I told her, “then consulted the
I Ching.”

She laughed. “Cut the shit, Doc. How do you work your magic?”

I liked her immediately. For three years before we met, we talked on the phone about cases. She was with a Boston paper when Tyrell Mann threw his .44 caliber nutty at the Columbia Point Housing Project and left nine dead.

“Meet me at Jake’s,” she said when she called.“We’ll split the tab.”

Pouldice had been at Vassar, then slid down the Mass Pike to Boston University’s journalism
school, one of the best in the country. She had paid her dues covering DWIs and spousal assault cases in places where they were not supposed to happen—Cohasset, Hingham, Norwell.

“I’ll never marry,” she told me over dinner at Jacob Wirth’s. “I hate kids, and I couldn’t stand the same fuck night after night. That whole concept is alien to me.”

When my wife Savvy and I separated, and she moved her veterinary practice to a village near Kinshasa in what was then Zaire, Wendy Pouldice was the anchor for a city news program. She called and asked me out.

“No murder,” she said. “Let’s just do Jake’s.”

In weeks, I was cooking crab curry for her in her apartment on Lime Street. It was a rebound relationship for me, a lark for her, until I could no longer tolerate her narrow view of life as a high-powered career, and she could not stand the same fuck night after night. Besides, New York was calling her. We parted amicably.

I parked on the Riverway and walked through the snow to the Towers. The Boston Trial Television directory next to the elevators did not list its owner. I found her name on the third-floor list for Pouldice Media. I signed in at the security desk and indicated my destination.

Pouldice’s secretary was a pleasant young woman whose nameplate identified her as Hannah. “Do you have an appointment? Ms.
Pouldice can’t be expecting you. She’s downstairs in the studio preparing for the evening news. It’s been quite a day.”

“We’re old friends,” I said. “I think she might grant me five minutes.”

“I doubt it,” Hannah said as she punched numbers on her phone.

She talked briefly, listened, then looked up, her eyes wide with disbelief. “You must be good friends. Take the elevator down to the second floor, turn right, and go to the end of the hall to the doors marked Studio.”

I thanked Hannah, followed her directions, and found myself on the set for
The BTT Evening Report with Bob Britton.
Donald Braverman sat just inside the door. At close range, Braverman’s muscular bulges were more impressive. So was a significant bulge under his jacket on the left side of his chest. He did not look up from his copy of
Bawdy Boston.

Talk about oxymorons.

Wendy Pouldice materialized from the darkness. “Lucas Frank, you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

She exploded in laughter. “See?”

She’d had her cheeks jacked up, eyes tightened, hair rendered platinum, and no doubt plastered the package in place with various sprays, mists, compounds, and pastes. When she laughed, I expected her to crack.

“Last I knew, you were headed for New York,” I said.

She shrugged. “That didn’t work out. What can I say? The money wasn’t right, the timing … something. Their mistake. Why did Bolton haul your ass out of the woods? Is he worried?”

Twenty years earlier there had been an unmistakable quality of desperation about Wendy Pouldice. She wanted New York; New York did not want her. Now she was the TV queen of Boston, still hungry for the edge, but far from desperate.

“You’ve talked to Zrbny. Does Bolton have reason to be worried?”

She smiled. “Like I said, some things don’t change. You do look good, a little heavier maybe, but good. Do you still cook that marvelous curried crab? You must. Anyway, we can’t talk now.”

Braverman set aside his magazine and stood. It was impossible for him to be unobtrusive.

Pouldice gave me her personal card. “Nine tonight, top floor. Security will let you through. I’ll show you an amazing view of the city. It’s better at night, I think, especially when it’s snowing.”

“Wendy …”

“Tonight,” she said, and disappeared into the set, the powerful scent of her perfume lingering in the air.

Without a word, Braverman opened the door and waited for me to leave.

On my way to the elevator, I stopped at a bathroom,
kicked open the door, and stared into the mirror. Damn it, I did look heavier. I had gained weight, although I had no idea how much. The jeans expanded in size and I studiously avoided the scale. Twenty pounds? Twenty-five? My doc had alerted me to weight, smoking, and the perils of salt. The salt, curiously, had not been much of a problem. Cigarettes and I had an on-again, off-again affair. The weight gain was due to eating and cooking—two passions of mine.