My bathroom stranger and I stood there together, swallowing the view. I wondered anew why anyone would actually move to Providence if they hadn't been born here. My excuse was an escape from an alcoholic father in South Boston. Providence was far enough away that he couldn't, or wouldn't bother to, reach me.
Scott's arms lay limp by his sides. I expected something clever or witty—a prelude to the dance to bed—but I wasn't disappointed when he simply reached his arms out and pulled me to him, smothering my face, shoulders, and neck with surprisingly expert kisses.
“It can't just be my perfume,” I managed to gasp.
“I need this. I need you,” he said. “I'm so damn lost.”
And then—I swear on my dead mother's soul—he swooped his arms under my legs and lifted me off my feet, and as if he'd been living there his whole life, he carried me to the bed hidden in the far corner of the room behind a mirrored screen. Strong dude, I thought briefly.
As he fumbled with buttons and zippers, he asked me if I was okay with this, “this” meaning sex, and “okay” meaning he would stop if I wanted him to. That was all the go-ahead I needed: one more chance to say no—considered and rejected—and then I opened the floodgates, helping him with the all the troublesome fasteners keeping us apart. And then he seemed to calm down, as if just knowing I was willing and wanted him as much as he wanted me was enough for him. He stopped and buried his head into my chest.
“Are you okay with this?” I asked him. And then I swear I felt a dampness, the trickle of water roll down between my breasts—and at a cool 68 degrees inside the air-conditioned 1000-square-foot open space of my apartment, it wasn't sweat.
“I'm sorry.” His bloodshot eyes were staring deep into mine. “I seem to be apologizing a lot tonight.”
I waited for additional information, or another tear-fest, but I got nothing.
“Look, buddy,” I said. “I don't mean to kill the moment, but are you crying or do I need a HEPA filter on my vacuum cleaner?”
He placed both his palms flat against my cheeks. “You're so different from anyone I've ever been with.” His hands ran up my face and through my hair. He smiled ruefully. “I'm going to say something, and you may not like it, but I think it's a compliment.”
I remained silent, staring into his sad eyes.
“You are the most sexy yet unfeminine woman I've ever met. How in the world do you do it?”
“Dial soap.”
His eyes narrowed in a soft smile. “I bet you were a real tomboy when you were a kid. You wore your hair in braids? Or was it always a bed-messed mop?” He took an enormous breath, and his eyes went blank again. He had already jumped ahead in his mind—on to something else—the same thoughts that had brought the initial swell of tears to his eyes.
“What's wrong, man-named-Scott who I've still not formally met? Something's really out of whack in your life, isn't it?”
If he didn't answer, I wouldn't ask again. It was a prosecutorial handicap even in personal relationships—I wouldn't interrogate him unless he was under oath, so I waited for a noncustodial confession. “I'm not holding you here,” I advised. “You're free to leave if you've changed your mind about this.”
He kissed me gently on the forehead and then pulled away, lying next to me. “I'm in trouble,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I knew that when I first laid eyes on you.”
He rolled to the side of the bed and sat up, grabbing for his pants and rifling through the pockets, where he found what he was looking for. Feeling at home already, he didn't ask my permission to smoke as he lit his Marlboro Light and threw the match into the ashtray on my bed table.
“I guess we're going to skip the good part,” I said, taking his pack from him and popping out a cigarette of my own. “Was it good for you? Because I've got to tell you, I've had better.”
“I may have killed my wife tonight.”
Certain now that our moment of passion was over, I grabbed my pants from the floor. “You think you killed her?” I pulled on my pants, sans underwear, which I rarely wore anyway, and then, bare-chested, moved toward him for a light.
“I blacked out,” he said, holding the match to me. “I took some pills. I'm not supposed to drink with them. I blacked out and when I came to, she was dead.”
I should have been having second thoughts by then, but I wasn't afraid. If he'd just killed someone, it hadn't been premeditated. Hell, I wasn't even sure anyone was dead. He looked like the kind of screwed-up, tightly wound guy who could convince himself that cutting off his wife's Saks charge was tantamount to grievous bodily assault. So I figured they'd had a fight, albeit a bad one, and maybe he even whacked her, and she fell. But I didn't see any cuts or defensive wounds on him. And he was stark naked, so I could see everything there was to see. So a fight that ended in one of them dead? Nah.
I nodded my head a few times to keep him calm. “So, um, where's your wife now?” I asked.
“A friend's boat in the Newport harbor.”
“You sure she's dead dead?”
He looked at me with owlish eyes and blew smoke out of his trembling lips. With a falsetto crack in his baritone voice, he said, “She's dead all right. They're both dead.”
“Both?”
He nodded slowly.
With each additional detail the evidence was mounting exponentially, and I was building an airtight case against him at Mach speed: Husband finds his wife with another guy. Testosterone-powered jealousy turns an otherwise docile guy into a murderer. Happens all the time. But with the right sleazy defense lawyer, he could go with an insanity defense. Plead temporary insanity that prevented him from understanding right and wrong, or even a heat-of-passion type thing to get his charges reduced from murder to some lesser manslaughter offense. With good behavior, he'd be out in maybe two and a half years…
What the hell was I thinking?
Better question: Why was I thinking like a defense lawyer when I should have been handcuffing him to the bed and dialing the cops?
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You actually murdered your wife because you found out she was cheating on you? Because I've got to tell you, if I find a guy cheating on me, I just go tell him to have a ball. Believe me, it's not half as much fun to cheat if you have permission. ‘Go fuck her, and then go fuck yourself,’ I say to him, and he usually responds by taking me out for a nice dinner. I mean, jealousy is a real waste of time, and the fallout from it, which in your case was murder, is a real bitch.”
He turned to me, delving into my eyes as if he were seeing me for the first time. I could see the pain in his eyes as they kept drifting away into the smoke from his cigarette. Maybe he was wondering what sane female would sit around chatting with some nude dude who just confessed to murder, or maybe he was sobering up and he didn't like my hair….
“Who are you?” he said.
I stuck my hand out to him. “Assistant Attorney General Shannon Lynch. Homicide's my specialty. You've certainly come to the right place.”
He didn't shake my hand. I guess we were beyond that, he and I. We'd already bonded at a much starker level.
“You're a prosecutor?”
“Yup. I incarcerate scumbags for a living. And I can usually sniff 'em out by their stink. So I gotta tell you, you're smelling pretty sweet to me right now, despite your earlier nap on the toilet floor.”
He went calmly back to the butt of his Light, taking his last hit deep, like it was the extinguishing roach of expensive pot. He blew the smoke from his mouth and stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray until it broke apart. “My wife was having an affair,” he explained.
I nodded. We'd been through this part before.
“With a woman,” he added.
“No shit?” I said.
“You don't know who I am, do you?”
I knew enough. He was an overly emotional guy who'd just killed his wife and her lesbian lover. A nice guy from what I could tell, unlike the kind I typically fell for. This schmuck
sitting next to me had obviously snapped when he found his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto. He was handsome, well-heeled, and doubtless had never suffered a broken heart in his life, so I assumed he wasn't used to being double-duped. He must have snapped. Simple as that. So what else did I need to know? Did I care what his name was? He had attached an importance to it as if he was someone special and not just some garden-variety homicidal maniac.
He weakly extended a shaking hand to me. “Scott Boardman, senator from Connecticut and the Democratic Party's hopeful in the upcoming presidential election. But I think I just sank my chances. What do you think?”
I thought he was the hottest guy I'd laid eyes on since my crush on Charles Sewell, chief of police of the Providence Police Department. I wanted to wipe the damp hair from his wolf-pup gray eyes and wrap my arms around his broad but firm waist. I wanted to take over where we'd left off a few minutes before, then, over a postcoital smoke, we could talk over strategy—both political and criminal. But I didn't say any of this because eloquence was not my strong suit, especially when I was sexually frustrated.
“I think you're fucked,” I said. “And despite what didn't happen between us here tonight, I'm going to have to screw you a little bit more by calling the cops and turning you the hell in.”
“Do you have any single malt?”
“You're cut off. Now get your clothes, go into the bathroom, and wash your face while I wake some people up. I'll try to preserve whatever dignity you have left-keep the news off the ticker for at least tonight—but you know you're done politically. Even if your wife jumped off the damn boat and committed suicide, no presidential candidacy can withstand the death of a spouse from anything other than natural causes.”
“Miss Lynch, I've been in politics since I was a kid, and I know my career is just as dead as my wife is right now.”
He picked up his clothes and retreated to my bathroom while I walked to my landline and dialed Mari, who was still dining at Al Forno, slurping the last of her Ligurian pesto pasta. “Call Chief Sewell,” I said. “Tell him we got a high-profile matter that requires his presence ASAP. Tell him we're bringing in Senator Scott Boardman as a possible murder suspect, and to keep it zipped until he gets here.”
“No joke, Shannon?”
“No joke. He's here at my place. Meet me in the garage.”
“I knew I recognized him,” she said. And then, without further ado, she hung up.
I walked to the bathroom door and heard the goodbyes of a conversation Senator Boardman was having on his cell. I knocked and he emerged clothed and ready to go. I let him smoke another cigarette by the windows while I began my cross-exam. “Are you scared?” I asked. “Cuz I'm a pretty good ally here. I can walk you through this, and maybe out of it, real quick.” I snuck a smooch behind his ear.
He took another drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke out fast. Then he came to me and kissed me on the cheek. “I can't involve you.”
I stroked his back once, then perched on my windowsill before I spoke. “That's kind of too late now, since Brooke Stanford spotted us together in the bathroom tonight. And who'd you call in there?” I nodded toward the bathroom. “Your lawyer?”
He nodded. “And Jake Weller, my public relations man. He was supposed to meet me tonight at the restaurant. He never showed. He needs to know what's going on.”
“What'd he say? Your campaign is in the toilet?”
“I didn't get him. He'll hear about this in the goddamn news and have a heart attack.”
He walked back over to the bedside table and stubbed out his cigarette. We descended to the garage in silence, where my faithful friends already stood in a huddle awaiting my arrival with the celebrity suspect.
Laurie's head poked up first. “On his way,” she said to me without further explanation, referring of course to Chief of Police Sewell.
As Beth was saying “We told him no sirens,” an unmarked but unmistakably official-looking Ford Crown Vic pulled into the garage. My very married lover, Charles, aka Chucky, Sewell, emerged from the backseat.
“Hey, Sewell,” I said. “How's the wife and kids?”
“What's this about?” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Why am I not home in my climate-controlled house watching the real news?”
Well-bred, but no longer presidential hopeful, Scott Boardman made the introduction. Boardman pronounced his name and extended his hand to Chucky, who understandably refused to shake hands with a murder suspect. Chuck just nodded at Boardman and then pulled me a few feet away, whispering, “Isn't he the senator from—?”
“You know this bloke?” I said. “He told me he thinks his wife and her lover were murdered tonight. The bodies should be on some boat in the Newport harbor.”
“Cat tails,” he said, nodding to himself.
“How in hell did you know they were lesbians, Chuck? Am I the only politically challenged one of this group?”
“His wife's a lesbian?” He almost choked.
“‘Cat tails’?” I repeated.
He dropped his head to his shoulder. “Christ, Lynch. You're thick tonight. All that booze is rotting out your brain. Cattails is the name of his boat. A sixty-eight-footer. Is that where the wife is?”
“A friend's boat was what he said.”
Chucky left me wavering on the proverbial dock and walked back to Boardman and the rest of the group. “Ms. Lynch here says you made some incriminating statements earlier this evening. Do you care to repeat them now, or do you want a lawyer?”
As if on cue, a dark-suited man with hair damp from a recent shower and looking very much the corporate white-collar defense lawyer strode into the garage.
He exhaled the name “Scott,” and caught his breath. “Say nothing.” Then he quickly turned his attention to Chief Sewell. “What the hell kind of Rhode Island shuffle is this? It looks like a lynch mob—”
“‘Lynch mob,’” I repeated. “I like the sound of that.”
The dark-suited stranger leaned in close to me. I could smell Listerine on his breath.
“What exactly did you make my client say without the benefit of counsel?”
“We didn't talk much until after we had sex, so his incentive to lie was wholly lacking by then.”
“Enough,” Scott Boardman said softly. “Let's not make this more of a circus than it already is.” He looked at his attorney, who was directing all his attention to Chucky Sewell, assuming that as a man, Chucky was the one in charge.
“I'm Ron Esterman,” he said to Chucky. “I'd like to take Senator Boardman home if I may? Unless you intend to hold him…”
Chucky announced that he actually might not mind getting a statement as long as the suspect was already in our grasp. He suggested that Senator Boardman might like to ride in the police car with him and that Mr. Esterman could follow in his shiny black Lexus parked at the curb.
Scott Boardman suddenly became the tough-talking senator. “I'd like to give my statement later, after I speak with my attorney.”
I walked closer to Boardman, still sympathetic. “Hey, Scott, you have to go with the chief. You just confessed—”
He backed away, looking at me as if I'd just sprouted multiple horns from my spike-haired head.
His mouthpiece spoke for him. “Senator Boardman and I are going to talk for a bit.” Then directly to Chucky he said, “You'll find the Booths' boat moored at Forty-one Degrees North, a restaurant on Thames Street in Newport. Endurance is the boat's name. We'll come down to the station later this evening.”
“Who's Booth?” Chucky said.
“Muffie Booth is—was a friend of Mrs. Boardman's. I believe you'll find both women on the Booth family's boat.”
Chucky nodded to the cops standing around him to make sure they got the information. “I'd like the senator to leave his car keys with us if you don't mind.”
“I do mind,” Ron Esterman said. “At this point we don't even know that a crime has been committed. We'll wait for a warrant.�
�
“Ron,” Scott said, “I've got nothing to hide. But do what you think is best.”
Needless to say, I was a bit shocked. First a naked murder confession, and then suddenly he's got nothing to hide? But Chief Charles Sewell and Attorney Ron Esterman were now in charge of Senator Boardman's immediate legal future, so I bit my tongue and kept silent, knowing professionally when to defer to the proper authority. I'd get my chance at Scotty later.
Ron Esterman handed Chucky his business card. “Call me when—and if—you get a warrant.”
Beth and Laurie went home, but Marianna convinced me to raise the mast on my Chevy Suburban to hunt pirate ships on the high seas—or in this case, a multimillion-dollar yacht moored at the harbor of 41° North restaurant in Newport, Rhode Island, where a couple of bloody bodies were just then being discovered by the local cops.
DAVY JONES'S LOCKER
MARIANNA'S IDEA OF FUN IS GOING TO THE morgue to visit her victims. She insists she can hear them talk to her. Me? I can take the uncommunicative stiffs or leave them. The smell of death doesn't juice me like it does her. If you ask me, the girl is a died-in-the-wool necromaniac. (Yeah, I know I spelled it wrong.)
“You need to come too, Shannon,” Mari said to me, pushing me toward my car. “It's personal for you now. We need to find out what happened before you get into this guy any deeper. Or, I should say, before he gets into you.” Then she stopped and faced me in a sudden assumption of authority. “Or is it already too late?”
“No, but not for lack of trying. He was too drunk to get it up, I think.”
“Or perhaps he was too tired after a double murder.”
I didn't argue. Not because I thought she was right (being wrong has never stopped me from a good fight), but because I was too busy planning my escape from the death scene in Newport. “Mar, how is seeing dead bodies going to help? The ME will go and tell us what we need to know. What's the damn point of mucking around in all that blood?” I was now behind the wheel but still stalling as I shoved the key into the ignition. “You take the damn car and go. Leave me home. I've been on trial all day and it's been a long night. I'm frigging wilting from exhaustion.”
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