The Wrong Man (33 page)

The sun was unrelenting. It was one of those Valley days where the stagnant air seemed trapped between the hills, obese with heat, when I parked a few blocks away from Matthew Murphy’s office. A film of wavy, unapologetic warm air hung just above the sidewalk.

In many older New England cities, it is easy to see where the reconstruction dollars ran out and the local politicians counted up votes and saw little return. In the space of a single block or two, upscale businesses give way to a seedier, more decrepit look. It is not precisely decay, the way a tooth rots from the inside out, but more a sort of resignation.

The block where I expected to find his office was perhaps a little more rundown than some of the others. A dark and cavernous bar on the corner advertised
TOPLESS ALL DAY ALL NITE
on a handwritten sign stuck beneath a bright red
BUDWEISER
neon light in the window. Across from that was a small bodega with stacks of chips, fruits, Tecate malt drink, and canned foodstuffs cluttering the aisles, and a Honduran flag hanging by the front door. The rest of the buildings were the ubiquitous redbrick of almost every city. A police car rolled past me.

I found the entrance to Murphy’s building midblock. It was an unremarkable place, with a single elevator inside next to a directory that listed four offices on two floors.

Murphy was across from a social services agency. A cheap black wooden plaque by the door had his name and the phrase
Confidential Inquiries of All Natures
underneath in gold script.

I put my hand on the door to enter the office, but it was locked. I tried a couple of times, then reached up and knocked loudly.

There was no answer.

I knocked again and swore a couple of times under my breath.

When I stepped back, shaking my head and thinking that I had wasted the entire day driving down to the office, the door to the social services agency opened, and a middle-aged woman carrying an armful of dossiers emerged. She sighed when she saw me and offered up quickly, “No one’s there anymore.”

“Did they move?” I asked.

“Sort of. It was in the papers.”

I looked surprised, and she frowned. “You have business with Murphy?”

“I have some questions for him.”

“Well,” she said stiffly, “I can give you his new address. It’s just a half dozen blocks from here.”

“Great. Where about are we talking?”

She shrugged. “River View Cemetery.”

23

Anger

H
e reminded himself to remain calm.

This was difficult for Michael O’Connell. He generally functioned better on the edge of rage, where streaks of fury colored his judgment, reliably steering him into places where he was comfortable. A fight. An insult. An obscenity. These were all moments that he enjoyed almost as much as he did when he was making plans. There were few things, he thought, more satisfying than predicting what people would do, then watching them do it, just as he’d imagined they would.

He had observed Ashley’s furtive dash from her building to the taxi, noting the cab company and identifying number. He wasn’t surprised that she was going somewhere. Running came naturally to people like Ashley and her family, he had told himself. He considered them cowards.

He called the dispatcher for the cab service, gave the taxi’s ID number, and said he’d found some prescription glasses in a case that the young lady had apparently dropped on the sidewalk. Was there any way he could return them to her?

The dispatcher had hesitated for a moment while he went over his log of radio calls.

“Ah, I don’t think so, fella.”

“Why not?” O’Connell had asked.

“That trip was to the international departures terminal at Logan. You might as well just chuck ’em. Or drop ’em in one of those eyeglasses-for-charity boxes you see.”

“Well,” O’Connell said, trying to make a joke, “somebody’s not gonna see too many sights in wherever they’re going on vacation.”

“Tough luck for her.”

That was an understatement, Michael O’Connell thought, seething inwardly.

Now he was perched a half block from her apartment, watching three young men move boxes out of her apartment building. They had a midsize U-Haul truck double-parked in the street outside, and they seemed to be hustling to get the job done and get on their way. Once again, O’Connell told himself to remain calm. He shrugged his shoulders to try to loosen the tension that had built up in his neck, and he clenched and unclenched his fists a half dozen times, trying to relax himself. Then he slowly sauntered down the block toward where the three young men were working.

One of the boys was carrying two boxes of books, with a lamp precariously balanced on top, when O’Connell arrived at the front stoop. The boy was a little unsteady under the weight.

“Hey, coming or going?” O’Connell asked.

“Just moving out,” the boy replied.

“Let me grab that for you,” O’Connell said, reaching out for the lamp before it fell to the sidewalk. He had an electric sensation as he wrapped his fingers around the metallic base, as if the mere touch of Ashley’s belongings were the same as stroking her skin. His hand caressed the lamp, and in his mind’s eye he recalled precisely where it had been in the apartment, on the bedside table. He could sense the light throwing an arc over her body, illuminating curves and shapes. His breathing accelerated, and he almost felt dizzy when he handed it to the moving boy.

“Thanks,” the boy responded as he wedged the lamp unceremoniously into the truck. “Just got the damn desk and the bed and a rug or two to go.”

O’Connell swallowed hard and gestured toward a pink bedspread. He remembered that one night he had kicked it aside, before bending over her form. “This isn’t your stuff?”

“Nah,” the boy responded, stretching his back. “We’re moving a professor’s daughter’s stuff. Getting paid pretty well.”

“Not bad,” O’Connell said slowly, as if biting off each word, working hard to keep anything other than idle curiosity out of his voice. “This must be the girl that lives on the second floor. I live down there.” He gestured toward a couple of other buildings. “She’s pretty hot. She leaving town?”

“Florence, Italy, the man says. Got a scholarship to study.”

“Not bad. Sounds like a good deal.”

“No shit.”

“Well, good luck with the stuff.” O’Connell gave a small wave and continued walking. He crossed the street and found a tree trunk to lean against.

He breathed in rapidly, letting an icy cold compulsion build up inside him. He watched Ashley’s furniture disappear into the back of the truck and wondered if what he was watching was really happening. It was like standing in front of a movie screen, where everything seemed real, but not. A taxi driver with a fare to Logan International Airport. A trio of college kids packing and moving on a quiet Sunday morning. A private detective with an address in Springfield taking his picture from a car parked across from his own apartment. Michael O’Connell knew it added up to something, but precisely what, he wasn’t yet certain. He was sure of one thing, however. If Ashley’s folks thought that buying her a plane ticket would get her away from him, they were genuinely mistaken. All they had managed was to make things far more interesting for him. He would find her, even if he had to fly all the way to Italy.

“No one steals from me,” he whispered to himself. “No one takes what’s mine.”

Catherine Frazier pulled her fleece jacket a little closer and watched her breath like smoke curl in front of her. The night air had an edge that predicted the evenings to come. Vermont is like that, she thought, it always gives a warning about what is coming, if one is only careful enough to pay attention. A cold taste of the dark sky on her lips, a sensation of numbness on her cheeks, above her a rattle of tree branches, a thin edge of ice on the ponds in the morning. There would be flurries in the next few days. She made a mental note to check her store of split wood piled up behind her house. She wished she could read people with the same accuracy as she did the weather.

The Boston bus was a little late, and instead of waiting inside the bowling alley and restaurant where it made its stop before heading on to Burlington and Montreal, she had stepped outside. Bright lights made her strangely nervous; she was more comfortable in shadows and fog.

She was looking forward to seeing Ashley, although, as always, she was a little nervous about how precisely she was to refer to her during her visit. Ashley wasn’t her granddaughter, nor was she a niece. She wasn’t related through adoption, although that was closest to what she was. Vermonters, as a rule, rarely butted into anyone else’s business, having that Yankee sensibility that the less said, the better. But Catherine knew that the other ladies of her church, and the folks behind the counter at the general store, the Ace Hardware, and other places where she was well-known, would have their questions. Like many in New England, they all had fined-tuned radars for any small act that suggested hypocrisy. And something about welcoming her daughter’s partner’s child into her home, while silently but obviously condemning that relationship, put some feelings on edge.

Catherine put her head back and let her eyes sweep over the canopy of night sky. She wondered if one could have as many conflicted feelings as there were stars in the heavens.

Ashley had been a child when she had first entered Catherine’s life. She remembered her first meeting with Ashley and found herself smiling in the darkness at the memory. I was wearing too many clothes. It was hot, but I had on a woolen skirt and sweater. How silly. I must have seemed like I was a hundred years old.

Catherine had been stiff, almost arch, stupidly formal, holding out her hand for a handshake, when she had been introduced to the eleven-year-old Ashley. But the child had disarmed her immediately, and so, in some respects, what truce she had with her own daughter, and the civility she displayed outwardly toward her daughter’s partner—Catherine hated that word; it made their relationship seem like a business—stemmed from her affection for Ashley. She had attended raucous birthday parties and dismally wet soccer games, watched Ashley play Juliet in a high school production, although she hated it when the character Ashley played died on the stage. She had sat on the edge of Ashley’s bed one night while the fifteen-year-old had sobbed uncontrollably at the breakup with her first boyfriend, and she had driven fast, far faster than ordinary, to get to Hope and Sally’s home in time to snap pictures of Ashley in her prom dress. She had nursed Ashley through a bout with the flu, when Sally had been preoccupied with a court case, sleeping on the floor next to her, listening for her breathing throughout the night. She had hosted Ashley when she’d shown up, camping gear in tow, with a couple of college friends, heading toward the Green Mountains, and entertained her at dinner in Boston on a couple of happy occasions and one truly wonderful time in the bleacher seats at Fenway, when Catherine had found an excuse to go to the city and had offhandedly called, although she had inwardly known that seeing Ashley was the real reason for the trip.

She pawed at the gravel in the parking lot, waiting for the bus, and thought to herself that life had not delivered to her the grandchildren that she had wanted and expected, but instead fate had delivered Ashley. She believed that in the first moment that she had met Ashley, and the child had peered out shyly and asked, “Would you like to see my room? Maybe we can read a book together?” that she had entered into a wholly different realm, where Ashley was exempted from all the disappointment and difficulty that Catherine and Hope experienced.

“Damn it,” Catherine said out loud. “How late can a bus be?”

In that moment she heard the wheezing noise of a big diesel engine, slowing to make a turn, and she saw headlights cutting across the darkness of the parking lot. She stepped forward quickly, already waving her arms above her head in greeting.

Sally’s secretary buzzed her and said, “I have a Mr. Murphy on the phone who says he has some information for you.”

“Put him through,” Sally said.

“Hello, Mr. Murphy. What have you got for me?”

“Well,” he said, speaking in a world-weary, cynical tone, “not as much as I can get, and will get, assuming you want me to continue, but I was figuring that you’d want an update sooner rather than later, given the, ah, personal nature of this particular inquiry.”

“That would be correct.”

“You want the bottom line? Or details first?”

“Just tell me what you know.”

“Well, I don’t think you’ve got too much to worry about. You’ve got something to worry about, that’s for sure, don’t get me wrong, but let me put it this way: I’ve seen worse.”

Sally felt a surge of relief. “Okay, that’s good. Why don’t you fill me in?”

“Well, he’s got a record. Not a real long one, and not one with a whole lot of red flags, if you know what I mean, but enough to be concerned.”

“Violence?”

“Some. Not too much. Fights, that sort of thing. No weapons that I can see from the charges filed against him. That’s good. But it can also mean he just hasn’t been caught.