“Guy is fucking drunk,” Mo said. “Kenzie?”
Tony belched again, then began singing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
“Okay. He’s drunk,” I said. “Where’s my money?”
“You let him drink?” Mo wheezed like a chunk of meatball had lodged in his esophagus.
I picked up the newspaper, read the lead. “Mo.”
Tony heard the tone of my voice and stopped singing.
Mo was too fired up to notice, though. “I dunno here, Kenzie. I don’t fucking know about guys like you. You’re gonna give me a bad rep.”
“You already have a bad rep,” I said. “Pay me.”
The article began: “An apparently distraught Newton woman jumped to her death late last night from the observatory deck of one of the city’s most cherished monuments.”
Mo asked Tony, “You believe this fucking guy?”
“Sure.”
“Shut up, fucko. No one’s talking to you.”
“I need a bathroom.”
“What’d I say?” Mo breathed loudly through his nostrils, paced behind Tony, and lightly rapped the back of his head with his knuckles.
“Tony,” I said, “it’s just past this couch, through that door.”
Mo laughed. “What, he’s going to take the chair with him?”
Tony unlocked the cuff around his wrist with a sudden snap and walked into the bathroom.
Mo said, “Hey!”
Tony looked back at him. “I gotta go, man.”
“Identified as Karen Nichols,” the article continued, “the woman left behind her wallet and clothes on the observatory deck before leaping to her death…”
A half-pound hunk of ham hit my shoulder and I turned to see Mo pulling back his clenched fist.
“The fuck you doing, Kenzie?”
I went back to reading the paper. “My money, Mo.”
“You dating this mug? You fucking buy him beers, maybe get him in the mood for love?”
The observatory deck of the Custom House is twenty-six stories up. Dropping, you’d probably glimpse the top of Beacon Hill, Government Center, skyscrapers in the financial district, and finally Faneuil Hall and Quincy Marketplace. All in a second or two—a mélange of brick and glass and yellow light before you hit cobblestone. Part of you would bounce, the other part wouldn’t.
“You hearing me, Kenzie?” Mo went to punch me again.
I slipped the punch, dropped the paper, and closed my right hand around his throat. I backed him into his desk and pushed him onto his back.
Tony stepped out of the bathroom and said, “Like, shit. Wow.”
“Which drawer?” I asked Mo.
His eyes bulged in a frantic question.
“Which drawer is my money in, Mo?”
I eased my grip on his throat.
“Middle drawer.”
“It better not be a check.”
“No, no. Cash.”
I let him go and he lay there wheezing as I went around the desk, opened the drawer, and found my money wrapped in a rubber band.
Tony sat back in the chair and recuffed his own wrist.
Mo sat up and his bulk dropped his feet to the floor. He rubbed his throat, gacked like a cat spitting up a hair ball.
I came back around the desk and picked the newspaper up off the floor.
Mo’s tiny eyes darkened into bitterness.
I straightened the pages of the paper, folded it neatly, and tucked it under my arm.
“Mo,” I said, “you have a pimp’s piece in the holster on your left ankle, and a lead sap in your back pocket.”
Mo’s eyes hardened some more.
“Reach for either of them, I’ll show you exactly how bad my mood is today.”
Mo coughed. He dropped his eyes from mine. He rasped, “Your name is shit now in this business.”
“Gosh,” I said. “More’s the pity, huh?”
Mo said, “You’ll see. You’ll see. Without Gennaro, I hear you need every penny you can get. You’ll be begging me for work come winter. Begging.”
I looked down at Tony. “You be okay?”
He gave me a thumbs-up.
“At Nashua Street,” I told him, “there’s a guard named Bill Kuzmich. Tell him you’re a friend of mine, he’ll watch out for you.”
“Cool,” Tony said. “Think he’d bring me a keg every now and then?”
“Oh, sure, Tony. That’ll happen.”
I read the paper sitting in my car outside Mo Bags Bail Bonds on Ocean Street in Chinatown. There wasn’t much in the article I hadn’t heard off the radio, but there was a picture of Karen Nichols taken from her driver’s license.
It was the same Karen Nichols who’d hired me six months before. In the picture she looked as bright and innocent as she had the day I met her, smiling into the camera as if the photographer had just told her what a pretty dress she had on, and what nice shoes, too.
She’d entered the Custom House during the afternoon, taken a tour of the observation deck, even talked to someone in the Realtor’s office about the new time-sharing opportunities available since the state had decided to pick up some extra cash by selling a historical landmark to the Marriott Corporation. The Realtor, Mary Hughes, recalled her as being vague about her employment, easily distracted.
At five, when they closed the observation deck to anyone but time-sharers with codes for the keyless entry system, Karen had hidden somewhere on the deck, and then at nine, she’d jumped.
For four hours, she’d sat up there, twenty-six stories above blue cement, and considered whether she’d go through with it or not. I wondered if she’d huddled in a corner, or walked around, or looked out at the city, up at the sky, around at the lights. How much of her life and its pivots and dips and hard, sudden L-turns had replayed in her head? At what moment had it all crystallized to the point where she’d hoisted her legs over that four-foot balcony wall and stepped into black space?
I placed the paper on the passenger seat, closed my eyes for a bit.
Behind my lids, she fell. She was pale and thin against a night sky and she dropped, with the off-white limestone of the Custom House rushing behind her like a waterfall.
I opened my eyes, watched a pair of med students from Tufts puff cigarettes desperately as they hurried along Ocean in their white lab coats.
I looked up at the MO BAGS BAIL BONDS sign, and wondered where my Johnny Tough Guy act had come from. My entire life, I’d done a good job staying away from macho histrionics. I was pretty secure that I could handle myself in a violent confrontation, and that was enough, because I was just as certain, having grown up where I did, that there were always people crazier and tougher and meaner and faster than I was. And they were only too happy to prove it. So many guys I’d known from childhood had died or been jailed or, in one case, met with quadriplegia because they’d needed to show the world how bad-ass they were. But the world, in my experience, is like Vegas: You may walk away a winner once or twice, but if you go to the table too often, roll the dice too much, the world will swat you into place and take your wallet, your future, or both.
Karen Nichols’s death bugged me, that was part of it. But more than simply that, I think, was the dawning realization over the last year that I’d lost my taste for my profession. I was tired of skip-tracing and shutterbugging insurance frauds and men playing house with bony trophy mistresses and women playing more than match point with their Argentinian tennis instructors. I was tired, I think, of people—their predictable vices, their predictable needs and wants and dormant desires. The pathetic silliness of the whole damn species. And without Angie to roll her eyes along with my own, to add sardonic running commentary to the whole tattered pageant, it just wasn’t fun anymore.
Karen Nichols’s hopeful, homecoming-queen smile stared up from the passenger seat, all white teeth and good health and beatific ignorance.
She’d come to me for help. I’d thought I’d provided it, and maybe I had. But during the six month
s that followed, she’d unraveled so completely from the person I’d met that it might as well have been a stranger in the body that dropped from the Custom House last night.
And, yes, the worst of it—she’d called me. Six weeks after I’d dealt with Cody Falk. Four months before she died. Somewhere in the middle of all that fatal unraveling.
And I hadn’t returned the call.
I’d been busy.
She’d been drowning, and I’d been busy.
I glanced down at her face again, resisted the urge to turn away from the hope in her eyes.
“Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay, Karen. I’ll see what I can turn up. I’ll see what I can do.”
A Chinese woman passing in front of the Jeep caught me talking to myself. She stared at me. I waved. She shook her head and walked away.
She was still shaking her head as I started the Jeep and pulled out of my parking spot.
Crazy, she seemed to be thinking. The whole damn planet of us. We’re all so crazy.
5
What we presume about strangers when we first meet them is often correct. The guy sitting beside you at a bar, for example, who wears a blue shirt, has fingernails caked with dirt, and smells of motor oil, you can safely presume is a mechanic. To assume more is trickier, yet it’s something we all do every day. Our mechanic, we’d probably guess, drinks Budweiser. Watches football. Likes movies in which lots of shit blows up. Lives in an apartment that smells like his clothes.
There’s a good chance these assumptions are on the mark.
And just as good a chance that they’re not.
When I met Karen Nichols, I assumed she’d grown up in the suburbs, came from comfortably middle-class parents, spent her formative years sheltered from dissension and mess and people who weren’t white. I further assumed (all in an instant, the span of a handshake) that her father was a doctor or the owner of a modest, successful business, a small chain of golf shops, perhaps. Her mother was a homemaker until the kids went to school, and then she worked part-time at a bookstore or maybe for an attorney.
The truth was that when Karen Nichols was six years old, her father, a marine lieutenant stationed at Fort Devens, was shot by another lieutenant in the kitchen of Karen’s home. The shooter’s name was Reginald Crowe, Uncle Reggie to Karen, even though he hadn’t been a blood relation. He’d been her father’s best friend and next-door neighbor and he shot her father twice in the chest with a .45 as the two sat having Saturday afternoon beers.
Karen, who had been next door playing with the Crowe children, heard the shots and came rushing into her home to find Uncle Reggie standing over her father. Uncle Reggie, seeing Karen, promptly put the gun to his own heart and fired.
There was a picture of the two corpses that some enterprising Trib reporter had found in Fort Devens’s files and published in his paper two days after Karen leapt to her death.
The headline above the story read: SINS OF SUICIDE-WOMAN’S PAST HAUNT PRESENT, and the story reenergized water-cooler conversation around the city for at least half an hour.
I never would have guessed Karen, at six, had been such a close witness to horror. The house in the suburbs came a few years later, when her mother was remarried to a cardiologist who lived in Weston. Karen Nichols, from that point, grew up untouched and unchallenged.
And while I was pretty sure that the only reason Karen’s death received any news play whatsoever stemmed more from the building from which she chose to jump than any curiosity regarding her need to do so, I also think that she became, for a moment, a morbid reminder of the ways in which the world or the fates could mangle your dreams. Because in the six months since I’d seen her last, Karen Nichols’s life had been on a slide steeper than a fall from the Eiger.
A month after I’d solved her Cody Falk problem, her boyfriend, David Wetterau, had tripped while jaywalking during rush hour on Congress Street. The trip hadn’t been much—a fall to both knees that tore a hole in one pant leg—but while he was down, a Cadillac, swerving to miss him, had clipped his forehead with the corner of its rear fender. Wetterau had been comatose ever since.
Over the next five months, Karen Nichols slipped ever downward, losing her job, her car, and finally her apartment. Not even the police could ascertain where she’d lived her final two months. Psychiatrists popped up on the news shows to explain that David Wetterau’s accident coupled with her father’s tragic death had snapped something in Karen’s psyche, cut her loose from conventional cares and thought processes in a way that ultimately contributed to her death.
I was raised Catholic, so I’m well versed in the story of Job, but Karen’s string of bad luck in the months before her death bothered me. I know luck, both good and bad, runs in streaks. I know bad streaks often run a long, long time, with one tragedy perpetuating the next, until all of them, major and minor, seem to be going off like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July. I know that sometimes bad shit simply happens to good people. And yet, if it started with Cody Falk, I decided, then maybe it hadn’t stopped on his end. Yes, we’d scared him witless, but people are stupid, particularly predators. Maybe he’d gotten over his fear and decided to come at Karen from her flank, instead of head-on, destroy her fragile world for siccing Bubba and me on him.
Cody, I determined, would need a second visit.
First, though, I wanted to talk to the cops investigating Karen’s death, see if they’d tell me anything that could help keep me from dropping in on Cody half-cocked.
“Detectives Thomas and Stapleton,” Devin told me. “I’ll reach out, tell ’em to talk to you. Give it a few days, though.”
“I’d love to make contact quicker.”
“And I’d love to take a shower with Cameron Diaz. Neither’s going to happen, though.”
So, I waited. And waited. I eventually left a few messages and bit back on my urge to drive over to Cody Falk’s and beat answers out of him before I knew the proper questions to ask.
In the middle of all the waiting, I got restless and copied down Karen Nichols’s last known address from her file, noted from the newspaper accounts that she’d been employed in the Catering Department of the Four Seasons Hotel, and left the office.
Karen Nichols’s former roommate was named Dara Goldklang. While we spoke in the living room she’d shared with Karen for two years, Dara ran a treadmill facing the windows as if she were in the final lap of a track meet. She wore a white sports bra and black spandex shorts and kept looking back over her shoulder at me.
“Until David was hurt,” she said, “Karen was barely here. Always over at David’s. Pretty much just picked up her mail here, did some laundry, took it to David’s for another week. She was moony over that guy. Lived for him.”
“What was she like? I only met her once.”
“Karen was sweet,” she said, then followed that almost immediately with: “Does my butt look big to you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t look.” She puffed her cheeks as she ran. “Come on. Look. My boyfriend says it’s getting big.”
I turned my head. Her ass was the size of a crab apple. If her boyfriend thought it was big, I wondered on which twelve-year-old he’d seen a smaller one.
“Your boyfriend’s wrong.” I sat back in some kind of red leather beanbag thing supported by a glass bowl and base. It may have been the ugliest piece of furniture I’d ever seen. It was definitely the ugliest I’d ever sat in.
“He says I need to tone up my calves.”
I glanced at the muscles in the backs of her calves. They looked like flat stones bulging under the skin.
“And get a boob job,” she puffed. She turned back toward me so I could glimpse the orbs under her sports bra. They were about the size, shape, and firmness of two regulation baseballs.
“What’s your boyfriend do?” I asked. “Physical training?”
She laughed, and her tongue fell over her lower lip. “Puh-lease. He’s a trader on State Street. His body is for shit, like he’s
got a little Buddha under his abs, stringy arms, ass starting to sag.”
“But yet he wants you to be perfect?”
She nodded.
“Seems hypocritical,” I said.
She held up her hands. “Yeah, well, I make twenty-two-five as a restaurant manager, and he drives a Ferrari. How shallow of me, right?” She shrugged. “I like the furniture in his condo. I like eating at Cafe Louis and Aujourd’hui. I like this watch he bought me.”
She held up her wrist so I could see it. Stainless steel and sporty, and maybe ran a grand or more, all so you could be perfectly accessorized while you worked up a sweat.
“Very nice,” I said.
“What do you drive?”
“An Escort,” I lied.
“See?” She wagged a finger over her shoulder at me. “You’re cute and all, but your clothes, that car?” She shook her head. “Ah, no. Couldn’t sleep with a guy like you.”
“Wasn’t aware I’d asked.”
She swiveled her head back in my direction, stared at me as fresh dots of perspiration broke out on her forehead. Then she laughed.
I laughed back.
What a hoot it was in there for thirty seconds or so.
“So, Dara,” I said, “why’d Karen lose her place in this apartment?”
She turned away, stared back out the window. “Well, it was sad, right? Karen, like I said, was sweet. She was also kinda, well, naive if you know what I mean. She had no practical reality touchstones.”
“Practical reality touchstones,” I said slowly.
She nodded. “That’s what my therapist calls them—you know, the things we all have that ground us, and not just people but tenants and—”
“Tenets?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Tenets,” I said. “Tenants are people who live in your building. Tenets are principles, articles of faith.”
“Right. That’s what I said. Tenets and principles and, you know, the little sayings and ideals and philosophies we hold on to to get us through the day. Karen didn’t have any of those. She just had David. He was her life.”
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