It was an interesting thought.
He sat down again and gestured at the feathers in the frame, “So now you give me a clue. Why did your professor friend go see Miss Perry again?”
Was this a trick question? There did not seem to be any secondary meaning to it.
I said, “I thought I told you about that.”
He shook his head just enough to show irritation. “About the first time, yeah. I mean the second time.”
“When?”
“That Sunday. The Sunday she disappeared?”
What goes through the mind at a moment like that? You’re suddenly off balance and can’t see the ground. A mental vertigo.
I said, “I didn’t know they had ever met except the once at Starbucks.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
That was why he came. Just that one question.
There was no need to ask him how he knew it. He had questioned her. And he had done it without all of my presumptions.
He finished his coffee and left shortly after that. I finished getting dressed and drove over to Harvard Square.
I didn’t want to think too much about this. Any thinking was going to ball up into wrong conclusions. I wanted to know the facts first. The only way to get those were from Rebecca.
She was not in her office. A note on the door directed package deliveries to the office next door. I called her.
“Hello.”
“Hello. You free for a bit to talk?
“I’m having lunch with a couple of students. Be finished in half an hour or so.”
Rebecca responds very quickly to things. She heard something in my voice in just those few words. I could tell. I found my place on the window sill in the hall outside her office and waited.
I don’t think fifteen minutes had passed before she was coming up the stairs.
“What’s the matter?”
I looked toward her office door and she turned and unlocked it and we both went in. The silence was saying more than words. She usually had some little story to tell and went right to it. I couldn’t think of anything else to say but what was on my mind.
She threw her coat across a couple of file boxes stacked in a corner. She is the type who hangs everything up very carefully.
She was getting angry. The build of thoughts were visible on her face. “Alright. Come on. Get to it.”
“You went to see Des the weekend she disappeared.”
Somehow, Becky had already guessed that this was what I knew. There was no change in her eyes.
“I did.”
This was the other side of Rebecca Sawyer. Never give an inch. Never admit a mistake.
“Can you tell me about that?”
She was ready for confrontation. The only play I had was to keep putting the ball in her court until she made up her own mind to tell me what she wanted.
“Why do you think I went?”
“I can guess. But I’d probably be wrong. You’re the only one to tell me that.”
“How’d you find out? The Lieutenant?”
“Yes.”
“What’d he say?”
“Nothing. He just asked me if I knew you’d gone to see her a second time.”
Becky let a breath out that seemed like it must have hurt. Then she collapsed in her chair. I sat down across the desk from her and waited.
She seemed suddenly becalmed. The wind was gone with her anger. She took one more breath for good measure. She was looking at her hands.
“I did. I’m not sure why. I just needed someone to talk to. Someone who might understand. I was obsessing about you. It wasn’t rational.” She smiled weakly but kept her eyes on her hands. “I think I wanted to tell her everything. As it if would matter to her.” Becky looked up at me. “That’s not fair. The funny thing is, I knew it would. I knew she would care. . . And something else. I just had the feeling that she was not happy. It wasn’t your fault. It just seemed to me that she was unhappy, and that you were not going to make a difference in that.”
I had no idea what she meant.
“Where did you go?”
“She met me for dinner at Jacob Wirth’s. She’d just been with you I think and she came there directly. When I called, she said she could come right away. As if she had been thinking of calling me herself.”
I waited. Rebecca had reached a moment in her story that seemed to require some reconsideration. She looked away again and studied her thought against the mat on her desktop.
Finally, she said, “I will admit this now, even though I’m likely to regret it later. I liked her. She seemed like a very smart woman. She chose her words wisely and said exactly what she wanted to say. I was impressed. . . More than that. It was like she had suddenly become a friend. How’s that for odd. You know, I don’t have a lot of friends, John. Not like you. Just ex-husbands.” She let out a laugh and shook her head. “It was easy to understand why—” she shrugged and shook her head again, “Why you were caught.” She looked to see what my reaction was to that.
Rebecca remembers details like that—like my previous reference to being a fish. I defended myself with the obvious questions. “What did you say? What did she say?”
Becky kept her eyes on mine then.
“I told her I loved you. Of course. I said it again.”
For some reason I felt I needed to defend myself. “You told her that before. But, you know, you’d never actually said that to me.”
She wasn’t going to back away from it. “No. I didn’t. Because I really only knew the truth of it when I was up there on the island by myself.”
I had come there to Becky’s office with my own load of anger. I hadn’t wanted to think about what it might mean that she had anything to do with Des’s disappearance. Now my own anger was gone, and everything felt unbearably heavy. I got some air into my own lungs.
“And what did Des say?”
“She just nodded and smiled. She told me she loved you too. Then she asked me about when I had first met you.”
“Did she say anything about herself?”
“Not much. I just told her some things about myself. She already knew a little. It seems you’d mentioned me to her more than once. I was surprised at that. But the conversation was mostly about you. We even laughed about you a few times. About some of your bad habits.”
I didn’t really need to know more than I already did about those. What I needed was some of Detective Wise’s dispassion.
“Can you recall anything else she might have said about herself?”
Becky looked at me for a longer moment then. For the first time I thought she might be aware of my own pain over all this.
“Yes. A little. The thing that struck me was early on. She said she was surprised I had called her again, but glad I had done it. She said she had never been able to go back to things like that herself. Her whole life had always been going it one direction. Never back.”
“What do you think she meant by that?”
“I wasn’t sure. I thought it was meant to be critical of me at first, but then I realized it was just an observation about herself. Critical of herself.”
“What happened afterwards?”
“We just went our separate ways. I actually shook her hand. It seemed like the thing to do. Good sports and all that.”
I pushed the question. “She never seemed upset? She never looked disturbed about anything?”
“No—Well, . . . once. When we were still waiting for our food and we were mostly talking about what we each did for a living. I made a remark. About you. She had wondered why you were willing to work at a job that didn’t engage your full abilities. I said you were like a big dog. You were too loyal to people. That you shouldn’t be working for Connie, but he was a friend and he’d asked you to help and that was all there was to it. Something like that. And she defended you. She said you were the first man she had ever met that she could depend on. She said it rather vehemently. That was obviously important to her.�
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The mental image that came to mind easily then was of Desiree’s father. Wasn’t he the man who had first abandoned her?
“What else?”
“Nothing. Not about herself. I suppose I did most of the talking.”
I left. I probably should have given Rebecca a hug. I just wasn’t in the mood. There was no avoiding the obvious thought that Desiree had disappeared within hours of speaking with Rebecca. This could not be a coincidence.
I drove into Boston for no good reason and sat down on a bench in the Public Garden. The last scrap of sun drifted away from me, and I hunkered down in my coat. I had a job for Connie at 6:30, so there were a few hours to kill. The rubble of ice and leaves at the center of the drained pond caught my disposition perfectly.
That first night in September, Des and I had walked through here. Right along that walkway in front of me. We had been talking continuously since we finished dinner. I suppose it was something of an effort to catch up on all the years we had not known each other and wished we had. I had told Des about my kids. No, she had asked me about my kids, and I had told her quite a lot. Even about my worry that Sarah was going to be getting married a bit too soon. Connie’s son was still a wild boy.
She had laughed at that. She said, “Did you know that women used to start childbearing within a year of puberty? Biologically speaking, we are the same exact creature as they were. Then, the average fourteen-year-old was already a mother. And that was the way it was for tens of thousands of years until what we call civilization came along.”
I had answered, “Is that supposed to make me feel better about my Sarah? I’m not sympathetic to the idea that we should all go back to hunting and gathering. Civilization is not an incidental matter. I like Beethoven. I like the difference. I have a friend who spends all her time on that very kind of thing.”
“Your professor friend?”
“Yes.”
I suppose I had mentioned Rebecca at some point that evening in September. I couldn’t remember all I said now.
But my mind wouldn’t stay tuned to the one thing. It was easier to avoid some things for others.
I sat there in the Public Garden on a bench until my parking meter ran out while I rethought the murder of poor Mary Andrews once again. There were no stars in the sky this night.
24. What this is
I was disappointed. That’s a fact.
When I was a kid, one of the local television stations used to have a small library of films they would run whenever a ball game got rained out. One of those films was Call Northside 777. I think it was my favorite at that time. It appealed to my boyhood need for order in a disordered world. It was a sort of ‘police procedural’ with a reporter played by Jimmy Stewart doing the legwork trying to save the life of an innocent man on death row. A man he had helped to convict. Against his better judgment, the reporter followed lead after lead developed from scarce facts. Day after dogged day, he made his way through the dark side of 1940’s Chicago until he found the truth. Tenacity, disappointment, and grit set in a noirish world of hoods and whores. Very appealing to a fourteen-year-old mind on a rain delay.
The first problem was that my own trails only led from the balmy sea breezes of Scituate to the sun-bleached parking lot of a Goodwill store in Quincy in less than three hours. And I had my answer. Very disappointing. It was sixty degrees in December. Everybody was in a good mood. The fortyish librarian in Scituate practically jumped at the chance to lead me right to the shelf of high school yearbooks. Under other circumstances I would have chatted her up. She wasn’t wearing a ring. Instead I went right to it. My first guess was 1989 because that volume did not require me to bend over to the bottom shelf. I found Fabian Lugano in the 1988 yearbook.
Within about ten minutes I had these facts. He liked skin diving. He was soft on a girl named Patty Moriarty. He was considered something of a daredevil.
At the Scituate police station I used Connie’s name to make contact with a Sergeant Leveritt. He pulled the public record up on Fabian Lugano in less than two minutes. Young Fabian was arrested six times before he graduated from high school. All passes. He “borrowed” a neighbor’s car when he was fourteen (when he should have been watching old movies). Twice he was caught with lobsters stolen from traps off-shore. He had been found with small amounts of drugs twice. No charges. A slap on the wrist every time. He had two older brothers who had never been arrested. His family no longer lived in town.
On a guess I asked if there was a record for Patty Moriarty. Yes, there was. And a conviction. For drug possession.
Now Connie has a rule I like. When you are looking for something, look for something else that the thing you want would be with. He states it a little more crudely than that, but that’s it. So, my next target was Patty Moriarty. That took another five minutes. She had two older sisters and a younger brother. The brother’s name was Dave. And following a third arrest for prostitution she had gone to a rehab facility in Quincy run by St. Theresa’s.
I called St. Theresa’s while sitting in the parking lot outside of the Scituate police station. I told them my name was David Moriarty and I was looking for my sister. Did they know where I could find her? They did, as a matter of fact. She was working at Goodwill. I called Goodwill and asked to speak to Patty Moriarty. They couldn’t connect me, but they told me she worked at the Quincy store. So, there I was, after about three hours of looking. Jimmy Stewart would be jealous of me.
Patty Moriarty is no longer the cute blonde pictured in the 1988 Scituate High School yearbook. She’s about ten years younger than I am, but she has false teeth. She is about forty pounds heavier than she once was. And she has two long evenly spaced scars on her forehead. They don’t look accidental.
I bought a silk tie from the rack of castoffs next to where she was running the register. I took my time at that. I listened to her. She did not sound like a stupid woman. She spoke well. She made change quickly. She was friendly. The smile looked genuine.
When there was no line I stepped up. Then I squinted at her name tag.
I said, “Patty?”
She turned and gave me the look I wanted. No clue.
“Yes.”
“Patty Moriarty?”
“Yes.”
“Geez!”
“What?”
“You’ve changed. A little. But then we all have, haven’t we?” I patted by stomach.
“From what?”
“From high school.”
“Do I know you?”
“Sorry. No reason for you to remember me. John Finn. I was there in 1987. And most of ‘88. I transferred from Hingham. I joined the Army right after.”
She nodded and shrugged. “Why would you remember me?”
I said, “Long story.”
She looked back into the store. There was no one coming
She said, “Tell me.”
I shrugged and told the lie with appropriate reluctance. “I had a crush on you. You were as pretty as anything I ever saw.”
She smiled, and then shook the smile away.
“I don’t remember you.”
“That’s because you were always with another guy. Black hair.” I held my hand out about six inches lower than my own head. “Built. I was never built. I was the skinny guy then, believe it or not. Not until I got into the Army. Not even then, really.”
She exhaled, “That was Fabian. He was my guy back then.”
I shrugged. “So I just watched, I’m afraid.”
She shook her head as if to clear it. “Were you in Miss Stenson’s homeroom?”
“No. Taylor. Mr. Taylor was my pain.”
That name was one of the few I had seen in the yearbook that popped to mind at that moment. There was a chance that Mr. Taylor, whoever he was, never had a homeroom. But I went with it.
“I remember him. Tall guy. Chemistry. Still had pimples.”
“That’s t
he one.”
She nodded a few seconds away, and then smiled again, “So what are you doin’ now?”
“Looking for a tie.” I held it up. “Going on a job interview. I need more work. . . Why else would I be out on the street looking for a tie at eleven o’clock in the morning?”
Eyebrows raised, “Yeah. But you got some kind of a job, right?”
I showed her my badge as I pulled out the three dollars for the tie. “Security guard.”
She rang the sale through. I looked at her hand. “I see you broke up with Fabian. Do you work here full time?”
“Yeah.”
“Any kids?”
“No. We never got married. . . You know?” Her face went cold. Without the smile, any semblance of her past looks were totally gone. Then she said, “He was just in it for the screw. You know?”
The harsh assessment made me feel uncomfortable about my own bit of subterfuge.
I looked out the window at my car as if I was ready to go, and then hesitated. I wish I had taken a few acting lessons with Burley back in the day. My reactions felt wooden. Then I turned back.
“I’m sorry. Now that you mention it, I seem to remember he got arrested once, didn’t he? Drugs, right?”
The face grew colder, if that was possible. “Yeah. We both did.”
“Sorry.”
A customer came up. I lingered to the side. Two more customers came.
She looked me over several times during those transactions. From where I was standing, I could see pretty much all of her right down to the Reeboks. Her black slacks were tight. She had gained some of the weight at her rear end, but not enough to ruin things completely. If you looked hard enough, you could see the girl she had been. Fabian had spoiled a good thing.
With the customers gone again she turned and faced me, her back to the register.
“Why are you hanging in here?”
“Just to chat.”
“You married?”
“No.”
“Kids?”
“Three.”
“Life sucks, doesn’t it? Kids or no kids.”
I said, “No. Not really. I never saw it like that.”
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