by Ben Sanders
A woman was standing behind the counter. Thirtyish, red-haired, very polished. She must have been in the office. Totally silent. They obviously took discretion seriously.
The clock on the wall was at five seconds to midday. Marshall didn’t want it to catch him mid-phrase. He let it get to twelve, and said, ‘Good afternoon. Is Dr Davin available?’
‘No, she’s in session, and then she has another appointment until one thirty.’ She gestured at an iPad set up on a pedestal on the counter. ‘If you’d like to enter some details you can arrange an appointment. Have you visited us before?’
Quiet and somehow reassuring. Like she thought whatever inner trouble had brought him here might manifest, break through the facade.
Marshall said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ He brought out his printout on Renee Lewis. ‘Actually, I just had a couple questions. You might be able to help me.’
‘Oh. OK.’
He went to pass her the paper, poised for his have-you-seen-her routine, but then he stopped.
He looked at the iPad, thought for a moment.
‘Sir?’
‘Sorry, just thinking.’ He folded the paper and pocketed it again. Smiled apologetically. ‘Maybe it’s easier if I make an appointment.’
‘Sure. Of course.’
She gestured again to the iPad on the counter. ‘If you just touch the new client icon …’
He did so, and the iPad screen refreshed and showed a list of questions. Name, date of birth, address, gender, preferred pronouns, telephone number. Stuff about his medical history when he scrolled down. He entered his name as Michael Langello, and selected he/him from the pronouns menu. There looked to be about seventy different options. In the phone number field, he entered the number for his current burner. The address section he filled with streams of random symbols: dollars and pounds and carets and exclamations. What he hoped resembled the output of a computer gone haywire. He left all the medical history questions blank. The iPad didn’t seem to mind. It let him click through to the next screen and read Dr Davin’s debt collection policy. Heavy stuff. If you didn’t pay, they sent someone after you, apparently. He ticked the box to say that was all fine, and it gave him some more dropdown menus with available appointment hours. Marshall selected one at random, tomorrow afternoon at three p.m., touched the little icon that said CONFIRM. The screen refreshed and showed him a green tick.
‘All OK?’
He looked up, saw her smiling at him from across the counter.
‘Yeah, thank you.’ He tried to imbue his own smile with a battler’s quality: down on his luck, but making the most of it. Getting there. He stepped away, and saw her own expression softening a little, Newton’s law in human terms: the force of perceived courage bringing an equal magnitude of sympathy and admiration. He felt the burner phone in his pocket buzz, no doubt a confirmation text for his appointment.
He headed for the door. ‘Thanks for your help.’
‘No trouble.’
He stopped suddenly, like he’d just remembered something. He winced, touched his brow. ‘Oh, sorry. Man, I’m just not thinking at the moment.’
He’d caught her returning to the office. She moved back to the counter, looked at him pleasantly.
He issued what he hoped sounded like a self-deprecating chuckle, ran a hand through his hair. ‘Sorry, with everything going on, the brain’s in a bit of a blur.’ He twirled a finger, as if trying to catch himself up with his own reality. ‘I moved house a couple days ago, but I’m still … I can’t remember if I put in the new address or the old one.’
‘Oh …’ She sat down, shook a mouse to wake up a computer screen. ‘What was the name, sorry?’
‘Langello.’
He spelled it for her. If she recognized it, she gave no indication.
‘And what should the address be?’
Good question. Marshall said, ‘Nevin Place.’
He leaned on the counter as she typed. The edge of the monitor was right there by his elbow.
‘Nothing’s come up …’
‘Oh damn …’ He invented another street: ‘I must’ve put the old place. Mora Way …’ He spelled that for her, too.
More typing.
‘No. Sorry.’ Shaking her head slowly. ‘I can’t see anything.’
Marshall said, ‘Oh, damn, really? So what comes up under my name?’
‘Let’s have a look. Langello …’
He watched the keyboard as she typed Langello, watched her hand moving to the mouse, the double click, and Marshall touched the corner of the monitor, swiveling it towards him a fraction, and then leaned over for a view of the screen. Subtle and reflexive, he hoped. The automatic gesture of any reasonable person being thwarted by I.T.
There were two entries under Langello.
Marshall’s was the first, the address field full of random symbols: dollars and pounds and carets and exclamations, like some kind of coding error. The next entry showed an address on Bloomfield Street, Dorchester.
Langello, Michael.
Marshall said, ‘Well, I don’t know what’s happened.’
‘It looks like some kind of error maybe.’
‘Oh, yeah. Look at that.’
He pulled his phone from his pocket, as if about to answer a call. She was looking at him enquiringly, patient, accustomed to working with the harried. Or maybe skeptical and hiding it well, running the math on the likelihood of having two patients called Michael Langello.
He made an apologetic gesture, as if hostage to the whim of his imaginary caller, headed for the door. ‘I guess I’ll sort it out tomorrow at the appointment. Thanks for your help. Times like these, it makes a big difference.’
THIRTY-ONE
It was enough to make him throw out his old theory. He’d assumed Renee Lewis had called up the mob, got in touch somehow with Langello’s crew, asked them to keep her in hiding from D’Anton. Mob version of witness protection, like Jordan had said. With the smiley man sent out to run interference, prevent her from being found.
But it was simpler than that, obviously. They had the same therapist. Renee Lewis and Mikey Langello, both seeing Dr Davin. He could picture them in that flower-themed reception area with its leather furniture, the whole place devoid of stress. Show up open-minded with a sharing sort of attitude, maybe you start chatting to people. Small talk about all those flower paintings, and then one thing leads to another. Coffee, wander along Beacon Street, and before you know it, you’re leaving your husband. Moving up to Boston to be with an Italian mob guy, albeit one who’s getting himself squared away for seven hundred dollars an hour, or whatever people had to pay for the privilege of a leather waiting area with an iPad on the counter.
He walked down to the Back Bay subway station. Actually, they didn’t call it the subway in Boston. It was called the T, and your MetroCard was good for nothing. You needed a CharlieCard, or a CharlieTicket. That was the downside to traveling outside New York: having to learn these different systems, different rules. He liked to move through the world with a certain fluidity and confidence, operate out of reflex. There was an irksome inefficiency about standing there looking at the route map, deciding what color line he should be on. But he got it figured out. He took the orange line and then the red down to Fields Corner, and from there it was only a short walk, ten minutes, over to Bloomfield Street.
The address from the clinic led him to a two-story white clapboard place with a chain-link fence across the dirt yard, and a flag hanging from a pole above the porch. There were a lot of flags on this street. It seemed to be a flag kind of town. He stood there for a minute, just watching. No one at the windows. No car in the driveway. The fence was low enough he could step across it without opening the little gate, and he crossed the yard with its dreary flowerbed below the porch-front balustrade and creaked up the steps and rang the bell. Silence inside. Down the street, a dog had started barking, as if wired by cosmic error to the button.
‘Hey.’
Behind him.
He turned and saw a woman on the porch of the house across the street. Fiftyish and saggy. Clothing torn and hair manically tousled, as if her home were subject to some horrendous micro-climate.
She said it again: ‘Hey.’
Marshall didn’t answer.
‘She doesn’t need anything. Don’t be trying to sell her shit.’
She had a cigarette sloping out one side of her mouth, the barrel wagging in ferocious amplitude with her speech.
Marshall said, ‘I’m not selling anything.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not selling anything.’
She spread her hands. ‘So what’re you doing?’
The door opened, and he turned back to face it, saw a woman maybe eighty years old standing there with a walking frame.
Marshall said, ‘Hello. Sorry to intrude. I’m looking for Michael Langello.’
She stood holding on to the walker, shaking a little, very stooped. ‘He’s not here.’
From behind him: ‘Harriet, don’t let him sell you anything. You don’t need anything they want to sell.’
Marshall said, ‘I’m not selling anything. I’m just trying to find Mr Langello.’
‘What’s he done?’
‘Do you know him?’
‘What’s he done?’
‘A woman’s missing. I need to know if he’s seen her.’
She nodded solemnly. Her hair was dead white, hanging dead straight to her shoulders, as if trying to match the geriatric limpness of everything else. She said, ‘Are you a good man?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I said, Are you a good man?’
‘I think so.’
‘You think so.’
From behind him again: ‘Harriet, I’m gonna come over.’
‘No, don’t worry. I’m just talking to the man.’
‘What?’
The old woman closed her eyes. ‘I said I’m just talking to the man. Don’t trouble yourself.’
‘Don’t let him sell you anything.’
Marshall said, ‘I’m not trying to sell you anything.’
The eyes opened. ‘Who told you Mikey’s here?’
‘This is the address he gave his doctor.’
‘Right, well.’ She stood straighter, blue veins standing out in her hands. ‘This is his mother’s house. I’m his mother.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
She reversed away from the door carefully with the walking frame. ‘You’re the first person I’ve talked to this week. Come in for a moment.’ She shunted forward a fraction and then back again, trying to get herself turned around in the hallway, and he thought of Benny in the SUV, trying to maneuver on that narrow road in the middle of the night.
She said, ‘Give a lady five minutes and I’ll see you on your way.’ She looked across her shoulder at him. ‘Follow. That’s it. Shut the door after you.’
She led him to the kitchen. Outdated but immaculate. Dull metal bench with a metal faucet, brutishly practical. Like a wash station at a morgue. The refrigerator had a big chrome handle on it, as if repurposed from a Buick. Magnets all over it, advertising every conceivable service. She found a packet of cigarettes and a lighter on the counter, put a cigarette in her mouth and fired herself up. Every tendon in her hand straining as she flicked the wheel.
‘Sit down. No one likes an awkward stander.’
He sat down at the little Formica table, and she joined him. ‘Who’s the woman. The woman you said’s missing.’
‘She’s from New York.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Might want to give folks more detail than that. If you’re trying to find her.’
‘Her name’s Renee Lewis.’
‘And who are you? That you’re looking for Renee’s gone missing.’
‘My name’s Marshall.’
‘Police?’
‘Ex-police. I was with NYPD.’
She worked on that with a few nods. ‘Known a couple Lewises in my time. Knew a Carol Lewis, and I knew a Lewis Tennant. Never met a Renee. Not once.’ She looked at him. ‘But you think my Mikey has.’
‘Maybe. I just want to ask him.’
‘All right.’ In the slow nod and distant gaze Marshall saw a sad desire to avoid details.
She said, ‘He moved up here, I thought that’d mean I see him all the time. But I don’t. He’s even got a man brings me groceries. Won’t even do that himself.’ She pointed at the window. ‘You see that window?’
Marshall looked over. The window above the sink. ‘Yeah. I can see it.’
‘The catch is broken. It needs a new catch. I said to him, I told him to come down and see to it. I said, don’t send someone down. Come do it yourself and talk to your mother at the same time. He comes down, this is two months ago. He comes down and he takes the old catch off, but he doesn’t have a new catch to put on.’ She pointed at him with the cigarette. ‘That’s the catch. If you know what I mean. Anyway. That’s as far as he got and he hasn’t been back. I went over to Dodson’s, I bought a catch myself. You know how long it takes to walk over there, with this thing? The frame?’
‘Quite a while, I imagine.’
‘Yeah. You’re imagining correctly. Took me an age. And it won’t even fit. Goddamn me if you can get it on there, in the holes.’
Silence. She sat smoking, looking at him.
Marshall said, ‘How about this.’
She leaked smoke. ‘I’m listening.’
‘I fix your window, you tell me how to find your Mikey.’
She nodded. ‘I was thinking something along those lines.’ She rose shakily. ‘I’ll put coffee on. The thing I bought, it’s under the sink there. And if you look in the workshop, there’s tools and everything. Arthur had all sorts.’
He found the window catch in the cupboard under the sink. It was a standard sill-mounted bracket with a lever handle that could move through ninety degrees. According to the packet: TWO #8 SCREWS INCLUDED! A minute later he identified the problem. The existing screw holes on the lower sill were set too close. The pitch was out by maybe an eighth of an inch.
She said, ‘Yeah, that was the other goddamn thing. You ever seen a screw like that? Jesus Christ.’
Marshall said, ‘Yeah. It’s a square drive.’
‘Nonsense is what it is. How you take your coffee?’
‘Black with a little cream.’
‘Black with a little cream. All right.’
She showed him the stairs to get down to the workshop. He took the screws with him. A portion of the subfloor had been dug out to create the necessary headroom. There was a workbench with a vise and a circular saw, and a pegboard with various tools. An old chest of drawers filled with screws and nails in various lengths and gauges. Sitting on the bare dirt around the excavation were neon lights daisy-chained with multiplugs and extension cord. Marshall flipped the switch at the bottom of the stairs, and the lights all blinked on in hesitant sequence. Pale glow, and a faint sizzle of electricity. It looked like the mouth of some cross-border smuggling route. He dug through drawers, and amongst the decades-old detritus, he found a torn and empty packet of #8 hex head nuts. Then a minute later he found an actual nut. He wound it onto one of the latch screws to check the gauge, and then found a square-tip screwdriver that fit the screw head. He took needle-nose pliers and a rat-tail file off the pegboard and went back upstairs. It was a ten-minute job with the file to open up the right-hand screw hole on the aluminum sill, working it hard on one edge to create an oval. He lined up the handle bracket again, making sure the widened hole would accommodate the necessary screw pitch, and then he dressed the hole smooth as best he could with the tip of the file.
‘You’re a man knows what he’s doing.’
‘Some of the time.’
He drank the coffee she’d made him, and then he went outside to finally attach the new handle, standing below the open window to see the underside of the sill. Fiddly, damp-fingered work. He fixed a screw through the widened hole fi
rst, driving it through the bracket and then onto the nut held steady with the pliers. Then he jiggled the handle bracket until he’d lined up the second hole, and homed the screw.
He went back inside and the woman said, ‘There. You missed your calling.’
Marshall pulled the window closed and tested the latch. ‘See how it’s got two settings there on the lever? You can have it fully closed, or you can have it a fraction open for air.’
‘Yeah. I ain’t a total idiot.’
He sat down at the table again and lined up his tools. File, pliers, screwdriver. She sat watching him, smoking.
‘What are you going to ask him?’
‘I don’t know yet. I’ll think about it while I’m heading over.’
She smiled at that. ‘You’re a truth-dodger. But you fix a good latch, I’ll give you that.’
Marshall smiled.
‘Whatever you’re gonna say to him, you ask why he hasn’t come to visit his mother. All right?’
‘All right.’
‘Lady shouldn’t have to look beyond her own blood and family to find a good man. Here.’ She reached behind her for a scrap of notepaper on the counter and passed it to him. ‘Wrote it down for you.’
One of the fridge magnets was for a cab service. Marshall used Mrs Langello’s phone to make the call, and then waited for it at the curb, twenty minutes all up, the woman across the street coming outside every ninety seconds or so, telling him no one around here wanted to buy what he was selling.
The address the woman had given him was for Maple Street in Cambridge, and it was a forty-minute ride getting up there. A beautiful old neighborhood. Two- and three-story homes on generous sections, grand and dripping oak trees on both redbrick sidewalks. Mikey Langello’s place was an upmarket version of his mother’s. Two-story New England clapboard on a large section with a rich, well-tended lawn. White stone driveway, and a white picket fence in place of chain-link. A vine-covered pergola covering a redbrick path from the mailbox to the front door. The rear of the property was sectioned off with a vine-covered wooden fence.
‘Timed it well, bro. Gonna rain soon.’
‘Yeah, I think you’re right. Thanks for the ride.’