Prayers for Rain

by Dennis Lehane

  “You will not.”

  “—we approach and tell them about the break-in.”

  “In the interest of the public good,” Angie said. “People’s right to know. Gosh, we’re kinda swell that way, aren’t we?”

  I nodded. “No coal in our stockings this Christmas.”

  Diane Bourne lit a second cigarette and watched us through the smoke, her pale eyes flat and seemingly nonplussed. “What do you want?” she said, and I detected just the hint of a throb in her vocal cords, a slight ticking not unlike the metronome.

  “For starters,” I said, “we want to know how those session notes took flight from your office.”

  “I haven’t the faintest.”

  Angie lit her own cigarette. “Get the faintest, lady.”

  Diane Bourne uncrossed her legs and tucked them to the side in that effortless way all women can and no man is remotely capable of. She held her cigarette up by her temple and gazed at Blake’s Los on the east wall, a painting that was about as calming as a plane crash.

  “I had a temp secretary a couple of months ago. I sensed—no proof, mind you, just a sense—that she had been going through the files. She was only with me a week, so I didn’t give it much thought after she left.”

  “Her name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “But you have records.”

  “Of course. I’ll have Miles get them for you on your way out.” Then she smiled. “Oh, I forgot, he’s not here today. Well, I’ll make a note to have him send that information to you.”

  Angie was sitting two feet away, but I could feel her pulse quicken and her blood warm along with my own.

  I indicated the outer office with a backward jerk of my thumb. “Miles would be who?”

  She suddenly looked as if she regretted ever mentioning him. “He’s, ah, just someone who works for me part-time as a secretary.”

  “Part-time,” I said. “So he has another job?”

  She nodded.

  “Where?”

  “Why?”

  “Curious,” I said. “It’s an occupational hazard. Humor me.”

  She sighed. “He works at Evanton Hospital in Wellesley.”

  “The psych hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doing what?” Angie asked.

  “He’s their records clerk.”

  “And how long has he worked here?”

  “Why do you ask?” Another small cock of the head.

  “I’m trying to ascertain who has access to your files, Doctor.”

  She leaned forward, tapped some ash into the tray. “Miles Lovell has been in my employ for three and a half years, Mr. Kenzie, and to answer your next question, No, he would have no reason to remove session notes from Karen Nichols’s file and mail them to her.”

  Lovell, I thought. Not Brewster. Uses a false last name, but sticks to his first name out of comfort. Not a bad move if your name is John. Kind of dumb, though, if you name’s somewhat less common.

  “Okay.” I smiled. Picture of the satisfied detective. No more questions here about ol’ Miles Lovell. He’s right as rain in my book, ma’am.

  “He’s the most trustworthy assistant I’ve ever had.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “Now,” she said, “have I answered all your questions?”

  My smile widened. “Not even close.”

  “Tell us about Karen Nichols,” Angie said.

  “There’s very little to tell…”

  Half an hour later she was still talking, ticking off the details of Karen Nichols’s psyche with all the consistency and emotion of that metronome of hers.

  Karen, according to Dr. Diane Bourne, had been a classic bipolar manic depressive. She had over the years taken prescriptions for lithium, Depakote, and Tegretol, as well as the Prozac I’d found in Warren’s barn. Whether hers was a condition mandated by genetics became largely irrelevant when her father died and his killer shot himself in front of Karen. Following textbook patterns, according to Dr. Bourne, Karen, far from acting out as a child or an adolescent, had been preternaturally well behaved, molding herself into the role of perfect daughter, sister, and eventually, girlfriend.

  “She modeled herself,” Dr. Bourne said, “like a lot of girls, after television ideals. Repeats mostly in Karen’s case. That was part of her pathology—to live as much in the past and an idealized America as she could, so she idolized Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards and also all those mothers from fifties and sixties sitcoms—Barbara Billingsley, Donna Reed, Mary Tyler Moore again as Dick Van Dyke’s wife. She read Jane Austen and missed the irony and anger of Austen’s work entirely. She chose instead to see her work as fantasies of how a good girl’s life could be successful if she lived correctly and opted to marry well like Emma or Elinor Dashwood. So this became the goal, and David Wetterau, her Darcy or Rob Petrie, if you will, was the linchpin to a happy life.”

  “And when he was turned into a vegetable…”

  “All those demons of hers, repressed for twenty years, came back to roost. I had long suspected that were Karen’s model life ever to suffer a serious fissure, her breakdown would manifest sexually.”

  “Why would you suspect that?” Angie asked.

  “You must understand that it was her father’s sexual liaisons with the wife of Lieutenant Crowe which predicated Lieutenant Crowe’s extreme act of violence and the death of Karen’s father.”

  “So Karen’s father had an affair with his best friend’s wife.”

  She nodded. “That’s what the shooting was all about. Add in certain aspects of the Electra complex, which at six years old would have surely been blooming, if not raging, in Karen, her guilt over her father’s death, and her conflicted sexual feelings for her brother, and you have a recipe for—”

  “She had sexual relations with her brother?” I said.

  Diane Bourne shook her head. “No. Emphatically, no. But, like a lot of women with an older stepbrother, she did, during adolescence, first recognize symptoms of her sexual awakening in terms of Wesley. The male ideal in Karen’s world, you see, was a dominating figure. Her natural father was a military man, a warrior. Her stepfather was domineering in his own right. Wesley Dawe was given to violent, psychotic episodes and, until his disappearance, was being treated with antipsychotic medication.”

  “You treated Wesley?”

  She nodded.

  “Tell us about him.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I think not.”

  Angie looked at me. “Out to the car?”

  I nodded. “Need to pick up a thermos of coffee, but then we’re good to go.”

  We stood.

  “Sit down, Ms. Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie.” Diane Bourne waved us down to our seats. “Jesus, you two don’t know when to quit.”

  “Why we get the big bucks,” Angie said.

  Dr. Bourne leaned back in her chair, parted the heavy curtains behind her, and looked out on the heat-choked brick of the building across Fairfield from her. The metallic roof of a tall truck bounced the hard sun back into her eyes. She dropped the curtain and blinked in the darkness of the room.

  “Wesley Dawe,” she said, her fingers pinched over her eyelids, “was a very confused, angry young man the last time I saw him.”

  “When was this?”

  “Nine years ago.”

  “And he was how old?”

  “Twenty-three. His hatred of his father was total. His hatred of himself was only slightly less so. After he attacked Dr. Dawe that time, I recommended he be involuntarily committed for both his family’s well-being and his own.”

  “Attacked how?”

  “He stabbed his father, Mr. Kenzie. With a kitchen knife. Oh, typical of Wesley, he botched the job. He aimed for the neck, I think, but Dr. Dawe managed to raise his shoulder in time, and Wesley ran from the house.”

  “And when he was caught, you—”

  “He was never caught. He disappeared that night. The night of Karen�
��s senior prom, actually.”

  “And how did that affect Karen?” Angie asked.

  “At the time? Not at all.” Diane Bourne’s eyes caught a glint of light slanting through the gap in the curtains behind her and the flat gray turned shiny alabaster. “Karen Nichols was powerful in her denial. It was her primary shield and her primary weapon. At the time, I think she said something to the effect of, ‘Oh, Wesley, he can’t seem to stop acting out,’ and then went on to speak in great detail about her prom.”

  “Just like Mary Richards would,” Angie said.

  “Very astute, Ms. Gennaro. Exactly like Mary Richards would. Accentuate the positive. Even to the detriment of your own psyche.”

  “Back to Wesley,” I said.

  “Wesley Dawe,” she said, exhausted now from our questions, “had a genius IQ and a weak, tortured psyche. It’s a potentially lethal combination. Maybe if he’d been allowed to mature into his late twenties with proper care, his intelligence would have been allowed to gain dominance over his psychosis and he would have led a so-called normal life. But when he was blamed for his baby sister’s death by his father, he snapped, and shortly thereafter, disappeared. It was a tragedy, really. He was such a brilliant boy.”

  “It sounds like you admired him,” Angie said.

  She leaned back in her chair, tilted her head toward the ceiling. “Wesley won a national chess tournament when he was nine. Think about that. Nine years old, he was better at something than any other child in the country under the age of fifteen. He had his first nervous breakdown at ten. He never played chess again.” She tilted her head forward, held us with those pale eyes. “He never played, period, again.”

  She stood and her shimmering whiteness towered over us for a moment. “Let me see if I can find that temp’s name for you.”

  She led us back into a rear office with a file cabinet and small desk, opened the file cabinet with a key, and riffled through it until she held up a piece of paper. “Pauline Stavaris. Lives—are you ready?”

  “Pen in hand,” I said.

  “Lives at Thirty-five Medford Street.”

  “In Medford?”

  “Everett.”

  “Phone number?”

  She gave it to me.

  “I trust we’re done,” Diane Bourne said.

  “Absolutely,” Angie said. “It was a pleasure.”

  She led us back through her main office and then out to the foyer. She shook our hands.

  “Karen wouldn’t have wanted this, you know.”

  I stepped back from her. “Really?”

  She waved at the foyer. “All this mess you’re stirring up. All this sullying of her reputation. She cared deeply about appearances.”

  “What do you think her appearance was when the cops found her after a twenty-six-story swan dive? You tell me that, Doctor?”

  She smiled tightly. “Goodbye, Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro. I trust I’ll never see either of you again.”

  “Trust all you want,” Angie said.

  “But don’t bet on it,” I said.

  17

  I called Bubba from the car. “What are you doing?”

  “Just got off the plane from Mickland,” he said.

  “Fun time?”

  “Bunch of pissed-off midgets, and don’t even ask me what language they speak ’cause it don’t sound anything like English.”

  I did my best pure-porridge Northern Irish accent. “Yer man take yew for a sessiun, did he, yah?”

  “What?”

  “Fer fook’s sake, Rogowski, got a fierce amount of cotton in yer ars?”

  “Cut it out,” Bubba said. “Goddammit.”

  Angie put her hand on my arm. “Stop torturing the poor fella.”

  “Angie’s with me,” I said.

  “No shit. Where?”

  “Back Bay. We need a delivery man.”

  “Bomb?” He sounded excited, like he had a few lying around he needed to get rid of.

  “Ah, no. Just a tape recorder.”

  “Oh.” He sounded bored.

  “Come on,” I said. “Remember, Ange is with me. We’ll go drinking afterward.”

  He grunted. “Shakes Dooley says you forgot how.”

  “Well, school me, brother. School me.”

  “So we follow Dr. Bourne home,” Angie said, “and then we somehow slide a tape recorder into her place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dumb plan.”

  “You got a better one?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “You think she’s dirty?” I said.

  “I agree there’s something fishy about her.”

  “So we stick to my plan until we have a better one.”

  “Oh, there’s a better one. I’ll come up with it. Trust me. There’s a better one.”

  At four a black BMW pulled up outside of Dr. Bourne’s office. The driver sat inside for a bit, smoking, and then he got out and stood on the street, leaned back against the hood of the Beemer. He was a short guy who wore a green silk shirt tucked into tight black jeans.

  “He has red hair,” I said.

  “What?”

  I pointed at the guy.

  “So? Lotta people with red hair. Particularly in this town.”

  Diane Bourne appeared on the front landing of her building. The redheaded guy raised his head in recognition of her. Very slightly, she shook her head. The guy’s shoulders rose in confusion as she walked down the stairs and passed him, her head down, her footsteps fast and deliberate.

  The guy watched her go, then he turned slowly and looked around the street as if he suddenly sensed he was being watched. He tossed his cigarette to the sidewalk and climbed in his BMW.

  I called Bubba, who was parked over on Newbury in his van. “Change of plans,” I said. “We’re tailing a black Beemer.”

  “Whatever.” He hung up. Mr. Hard-to-Impress.

  “Why are we following this guy?” Angie said. I let two cars get in between us and the BMW before I pulled away from the curb.

  “Because he’s a redhead,” I said. “Because Bourne knew him and acted like she didn’t. Because he looks hinky.”

  “Hinky?”

  I nodded. “Hinky.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I heard it on Mannix once.”

  We followed the BMW south out of the city with Bubba’s black van riding our rear bumper straight into the rush-hour crunch. From Albany Street on, we averaged about six miles a decade as we crawled through Southie, Dorchester, Quincy, and Braintree. Twenty miles, and it took us only an hour and fifteen minutes. Welcome to Boston; we just fucking live for traffic.

  He got off the expressway in Hingham and led us through another half an hour of bumper-to-bumper down one humid, crabby lane of Route 228. We passed through Hingham—all white colonials and white picket fences and white people—and then wound past a strip of power plants and mammoth gas tanks under high-tension wire before the black Beemer led us into Nantasket.

  Once a grungy beach community with a soiled-neon carny atmosphere that attracted lots of bikers and women with flabby, exposed midriffs and stringy hair, Nantasket Beach slipped into a sterile, picture-postcard loveliness when they tore down the amusement park that once fronted its shores. Gone were the cheesy teacup rides and ratty wooden clowns you’d knock down with a softball to win an anemic guppy in a plastic bag. A roller coaster that, in its time, had been acknowledged as the country’s most dangerous had had its twisted dinosaur of a skeleton shattered by wrecking balls and pulled by its roots from the earth so they could build condos overlooking the boardwalk. All that remained of the old days were the ocean itself and a few arcades bathed in sticky orange light along the boardwalk.

  Pretty soon they’d replace the arcades with coffee bars, outlaw stringy hair, and as soon as anyone stopped having any fun whatsoever, they could safely call it progress.

  It occurred to me, as we wound our way down the beach road past the site of the old amus
ement park, that if I ever had kids, and I took them to places that had once mattered to me, all there’d be to show for my youth would be the buildings that had replaced it.

  The BMW took a quick left just past the end of the boardwalk, then a right, and another left before he pulled into the sandy driveway of a small white Cape with green awnings and trim. We rolled past, and Angie watched in her sideview mirror.

  “What the hell is he doing?”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head, eyes on the mirror. “Bubba.”

  I looked in the rearview, saw that Bubba had pulled his black van to a rest on the shoulder about fifty yards before the redhead’s house. As I watched, he hopped out of the van and ran up between two Capes that were near identical to the redhead’s and disappeared somewhere in the backyards.

  “This,” I said, “was not part of the plan.”

  “Carrottop’s in his house,” Angie said.

  I U-turned and drove back down the street, passing the redhead’s house as he closed his front door behind him and continuing past Bubba’s van. I drove another twenty yards and pulled over on the right shoulder in front of a home construction site, the skeleton of another Cape sitting on bare brown land.

  Angie and I got out of the car and walked back toward Bubba’s van.

  “I hate when he does this,” she said.

  I nodded. “Sometimes I forget he has a mind of his own.”

  “I know he has a mind of his own,” Angie said. “It’s how he uses it that keeps me up nights.”

  We reached the rear of the van just as Bubba came bounding out from between the two houses, pushed us aside, and opened the rear doors.

  “Bubba,” Angie said, “what have you done?”

  “Sssh. I’m working here.” He tossed a pair of branch cutters into the rear of the van, grabbed a gym bag from the floor, and shut the doors.

  “What’re you—”

  He put a finger to my lips. “Sssh. Trust me. This is good.”

  “Does it involve heavy explosives?” Angie asked.

  “You want it to?” Bubba reached for the van door again.

  “No, Bubba. Very much no.”

  “Oh.” He dropped his hand from the door. “No time. Be right back.”