He saw a loveliness he’d taken for granted and sought to make amends. His hand in her clothes stuck to her like a stamp. “You’re letting the hair grow back.”
“Summer’s over.”
“I do love you,” he said in a tone that left no doubts, no questions.
“Then why did you keep me guessing so long?”
A push landed him slant-wise across the quiet cobbles of a down comforter. Her knees bestrode him. Sloping over him with palms planted on his chest, she ground against him as if the joy of life were overwhelming, every piece of it encased in the urgent. She rode him with her eyes clamped shut, her nostrils flared, and her jaw shoved to one side. When she collapsed upon him, she shed tears — happy ones, she said, but they alarmed him, heightening a sense of responsibility.
Her hair covered a pillow when they made love again, he the aggressor this time, with the same air of necessity she had shown. Afterward, they went straight off to sleep, nothing to disturb them except an unremembered dream or two.
It was evening when they rode the elevator to the lobby. On their way to the dining room they passed a man sitting on one of the leather couches, a magazine in his lap. Patricia glanced back and poked Anthony.
“Did you see how he stared at us?”
Anthony looked over his shoulder, narrowed his eyes, and said, “He was on the bus with me.”
• • •
Ira Smith played golf that afternoon and played it badly. When he teed off, the ball failed to make head against a stiff breeze. Shots usually made he missed. Everything was off, his step, his rhythm, his reaction, as if something had untuned him. He stuffed an iron into the bag and quit early. Much pressed upon him. He suspected his wife of having poured sugar into the gas tank of his son’s car, the engine rendered useless. Worse, he suspected her of infidelity, but did not want to confront her. He was reasonably certain that if guilty she would not deny it.
He let an attendant take away the motorized cart and his bag of clubs. A maple full of leaves shook some loose and yielded birds. Curving overhead, dipping a wing like an oar, a small pleasure plane was carried by a current. On his way into the car lot, he glimpsed Myles Yarbrough’s sun-scraped face and saw no way to avoid him.
Looking up, sweeping back his thinning hair, Yarbrough said, “When I was a little kid I used to wonder if airplanes did harm to the sky. You know, if the propellers tore holes.”
Ira exchanged his prescription sunglasses for his horn-rims. Yarbrough fell in stride with him.
“I’m stupid about so many things. To this day, I don’t know how ocean water can support the weight of a ship.”
“I used to know,” Ira said, “but I’ve forgotten.”
Yarbrough rubbed his forehead, a rusted surface of faint freckles. He looked as if he needed a drink of water. “Phoebe said she saw you. I guess you know everything.”
“I’m a lawyer same as you, Myles. Everything’s in confidence.”
“I guess you think I’m a fool.”
“There are all kinds of fools. You could be one kind and I another.”
They approached their cars. Yarbrough drove a Jaguar he could not afford but felt he owed to himself. “But you must wonder why I married her. The thing is, Ira, it was different. It was like playing with fire.”
Not that far away, oblivious of the world, Anne Lapierre and Dick English were engrossed in conversation. A headband gave Anne a girlish look, adding to her considerable appeal. English obviously enjoyed looking at her. Her eyes were promises. Her lips were never quite together.
Yarbrough said, “I want to keep her, I really do. Do you think I have a chance?”
“Don’t ask me what you know I can’t answer.”
“I’m just trying to ride it out, it’s all I can do.”
“Occasionally that’s enough.”
Anne, the sun blazing in her red hair, noticed them and waved, but only Myles waved back. Ira felt queer in the face and light in the head. Eyes brimming, he saw too much.
Yarbrough said, “What would you do?”
“Exactly what you’re doing,” he replied.
• • •
When Chief Morgan arrived at the police station, Meg O’Brien had a mouthful from a sandwich and struggled to speak. She half rose from her desk and gesticulated. Sputtering, she said, “Get over to the Heights … been a shooting.”
His heart sank. “Where in the Heights?”
She told him the number, the name. She wiped mayonnaise from her upper lip and added, “Eugene’s already there.”
“What next?” he said, not to her.
He drove with a wind up Ruskin Road to the Heights and swerved through the Gunners’ stone gateway and up an avenue of tapered arborvitae. Sergeant Avery’s cruiser was parked between an Infiniti and a BMW. The cruiser was leaking oil. The Infiniti bore an M.D. plate.
As Morgan approached the front entrance, Sergeant Avery came out of it. The man behind him, tailored smartly, looked every inch a doctor. Sergeant Avery said, “Ambulance just left, Chief. Guy named Gunner shot himself.”
The doctor stepped forward. “You’ll excuse me.”
Morgan grabbed his arm. “Tell me about it.”
“Mr. Gunner had suffered a serious stroke and was depressed. That’s it.”
“If he had a stroke, how’d he manage to hold a gun?”
“Not very well,” the doctor said and pulled free. “In a manner of speaking, he’s still alive.”
“If you can call it that,” Harley Bodine said from the doorway and stepped out with a cold smile.
The doctor pushed on. Sergeant Avery stood with his hands in his pockets. Morgan let his arms dangle.
Bodine said, “I feel sorry for the both of you, him more than you. Poor bastard doesn’t know how to die.”
• • •
He was back the next morning, sitting in Christopher Columbus Park, the air festive. Stainless steel pushcarts under umbrellas of flaming colors dispensed ice cream, popcorn, croissants, German sausages. Peddlers hawked leather goods, handcrafted jewelry, silk scarves, pocket tabulators. From the street a bannered car with a roof sign and speaker promulgated a political candidacy. A breeze from the harbor smelled human. Dudley reckoned they would sleep late and was right. At noon they emerged from the Marriott. He bought a croissant and followed them.
With silly abandon they cut through traffic surging through the streets under the steel fretwork of the Central Artery. Dudley had to dodge cars to keep them in sight. He figured they’d head for Quincy Market and was wrong. They went all the way to Summer Street and walked it to Washington. The boy had the build of a runner, the girl a healthy robustness that made him think of things to eat. He ate the croissant while they window-shopped Filene’s.
On busy Bromfield Street they stepped into the doorway of the Massachusetts Bible Society and talked quietly, deep into each other. They looked melancholy, in need of a laugh. Poised across the street, shielded by a streaming sidewalk crowd, Dudley saw love in their faces, beauty in their youth. In their melancholy he read a relationship not unlike his and Mary’s. When they stepped from the doorway, the girl drew her arm through the boy’s.
On Tremont Street, traffic held still for a moment and then plunged ahead. The boy and girl muscled through a crowd in which Dudley, prone to head colds, was aware of sniffling noses and hectic sneezes. He drew too close when the girl stopped at a display window and produced a tube to do her lips. “I want always to be pretty for you,” he heard her say.
When the lights allowed, he followed them across the street to the wide sidewalk along the Common and fell to a reasonable distance behind them. But when a man behind him made a spitting sound, he quickened his step. A woman, blown sideways by a new rush of traffic, held onto her dress.
He trailed them to Boylston Street, where the girl looked over her shoulder as if she sensed eyes aimed at them from the distance. Two men cut in front of him, one ranting, his heavy hand butchering the air. A caravan of sil
ver and green buses, monster-size, jolted by. The fumes offended him, but a woman casting crumbs for pigeons pleased him.
Near the corner of Charles, where traffic ran breakneck, he caught up to them. The girl’s name he didn’t know and didn’t need to. Anthony was enough. He liked the way the three syllables bonded themselves together. He liked the way Anthony’s fair hair flopped over his head and spilled to the nape of his neck. The girl’s hair was a rush of blackness embracing her shoulders.
Lights, which had held the traffic, released it. When he drew up behind them at the curb’s edge, he saw the girl’s face in bold profile and heard her say, “It’s that creep.” The tone was Sweeney’s, and the words seemed to lie against the air like the faint ink on an old letter, the writer long vanished. A crowd compacted against them. The girl, barely turning her head, said, “Fuck off.”
Cars shooting around the corner were perilous in pursuit of each other, one after another, tires squealing. A taxi charged. It was not Anthony he pushed in the small of the back, it was the girl, but Anthony lunged after her. Cars immediately began slamming against one another, the noise thunderous. The reek of antifreeze and gasoline was fierce as hoods flew up and radiators gushed. Anthony had been thrown, the girl dragged. Dudley, an anonym in the hysterical crowd, slipped away.
Chief Morgan heard the report on the radio, Kate Bodine’s voice: a teenage couple had been struck at the corner of Boylston and Charles. The girl was pronounced dead at the scene, and the boy was in critical condition at Massachusetts General Hospital. Police were withholding their names until the families could be notified. Morgan was at his desk. He’d been sorting through the contents of a bottom drawer, but now he sat back in his chair with no skill in keeping his mind from racing. Ten minutes later he phoned WBZ, got hold of Kate, but she knew nothing other than what she had reported.
“Why are you interested, James? This is Boston, not Bensington.”
“I’m a news junkie.”
“Don’t play games with me.”
“It’s an excuse to hear your voice,” he said. “How are things? Are you happy or sad?”
“Too busy to be either.”
“I miss you.”
“When I get five minutes to myself, I’ll miss you too.”
His next call was to the Boston Police, Division A, but the sergeant who talked to him said that the investigating officers were not available and their report not yet prepared. “Would you call me when it is?” he said, doubting the likelihood that anyone would.
He went home.
His mind was hot, overpacked. TV was an anodyne. Lying on the sofa, his shoes off, a blanket thrown over him, he watched a sitcom, which he tried to find funny. During a commercial he fell into a deep sleep that carried him well into the night and would have lasted until morning had the telephone not shattered the quiet.
“Is this the residence of James Morgan?”
He didn’t recognize the voice, which lacked a human quality and could’ve been piped into a court of law where justice was truly blind and all judgments final. “Yes,” he said.
“The police chief?”
He tried to get a focus on his watch. He thought it read eleven-fifteen. It was five to three. “Yes.”
“My name is Ira Smith. I live on Bellevue Drive in the Heights. I want you to come here.”
• • •
Mary Williams couldn’t sleep and woke Soldier, who said, “What are you worried about? He’s back, that’s what you wanted.”
“I know,” she said, the covers pulled to her chin. Her voice was tinny. She had only a faint hold on her emotions and would have had none at all without Soldier, whose hand rested on her stomach. “This time he’s gone too far,” she said.
“Too far for what?”
Her eyes fought the dark. She wanted to see the ceiling. “This time they’ll get him.”
“Get him for what? What’s he done?”
“What I told him not to do.”
“You say things, Mary, but they don’t tell me anything.”
She thought of things that saddened her: a butterfly deprived of its wings, rain on the window in November. In November her father had submitted to the terror of depression. “The girl,” she said, “was a beautiful child.”
“What girl? You’d better start clueing me in.”
“How much do you love me, Soldier?”
“You already know. How much do you trust me?”
She told him about the child Fay, the afternoon on the bank of the Charles, a picnic for many children, with games and music. The little girl, wandering off, accepted Dudley’s hand along a stretch of paved bank, where he took his hand away and told her to look down. Keep looking. Keep looking.
“Jesus Christ, Mary.”
She told him about the boy Glen, who looked fourteen but was sixteen to the day and wore braces. Who’d had a newspaper opened to his horoscope. “Both were flawed.”
“That’s why he did it?”
“There was money involved, but that was not the reason.” Her eyes pierced the dark. The ceiling glimmered. “The thing is, Soldier, he’s done it again.”
“Jesus Christ.”
They rose from the bed and went into the bathroom. She used the toilet. Then Soldier did. He showered, and she washed up at the sink. Drying himself, he said, “I don’t get it. Why does he do it if not for the money?”
“It releases him. It lets him soar. It makes him special.”
“And you let him do it?”
A sigh came from her depths. “You don’t understand. I wouldn’t have been able to stop him, and I didn’t want to lose him.”
“What about the money?”
“He always gives it to me.”
She put on a robe, and Soldier donned fatigues. In the dark of the passage she put an ear to Dudley’s door and heard the sound of his sleep, which she knew was deep, as if drugged. In the kitchen she made herbal tea for herself, instant coffee for Soldier.
“He’d never survive a state prison,” she said, and for moments her features lacked prominence, like a headstone too often rubbed. “They’d tear him apart.”
“Loony bin is where they’d send him.”
“He wouldn’t survive that either. He’d drown.”
Soldier tested his coffee, enjoyed the swallow, and took another. “You’re asking me something.”
“Yes,” she said.
“What do I get out of it?”
“What you’ve never had. A home.”
• • •
In the predawn dark Chief Morgan drove to the Heights, to Bellevue Drive. Lights blazed in the Smiths’ house, a near mansion less intimidating than the Gunners’ presumptuous one. Climbing out of the car, Morgan was put on edge by the restless number of birds already awake, the chirping emanating from trees he couldn’t see. His footsteps resounded on a brick walk flanked by ground ivy. A door hung open for him. Stepping inside, he saw the heat of hell in Ira Smith’s face.
“My wife has something to tell you.”
“What’s it about?”
“This way.”
He was led deep into the house to a room where ceiling plants festooned the windows and other plants stood tall in massive pots. Regina Smith sat in a wicker chair with her arms folded tightly, her knees glued together. Nothing in her face moved. Like an air-brushed photo, it bore no imperfections except an almost imperceptible cast in one eye.
“Tell him what you told me,” Ira Smith said.
Her eyes came alive in a glare. “Call the police.”
“This man is the police. You don’t tell him, I will.”
“Go to hell.”
“I am in hell.” His voice was bone-dry.
She looked at Morgan. “His son killed my daughter.”
“No,” Ira Smith said. His arms slackened, then his legs, and he touched a table for support. “Tell him the truth.”
• • •
The first light on the dew-drenched lawn was tentative, mirage-li
ke. The two men walked through it. Ira Smith needed air. He took great gulps of it, his throat parched from repeating everything into a tape recorder. He said to Chief Morgan, “I have to get back to Boston. I have to be with my son.”
“I’ll have someone drive you,” Morgan said.
“No. I need time alone.”
Meg O’Brien, though she lacked official status, sat with Regina Smith in the plant room. Neither spoke. Sergeant Avery, unshaved, was in the kitchen and drinking coffee he had brought in a thermos. Morgan poured a cup and told him to join Meg in the plant room. Sergeant Avery nodded. “I think she scares Meg.”
“That’s why you’re here, Eugene.”
A little later Morgan telephoned Kate Bodine at her apartment in Brookline and woke her from an apparent sound sleep.
“Sorry, Kate, but I have to warn you that Bodine’s likely to be arrested before the day’s over.”
She went dead silent, and Morgan counted the seconds ticking away. Then she said, “Are you telling me you were right?” Her voice rose. “Are you saying I was sleeping with the devil?”
At eight o’clock he phoned his friend, Lieutenant Bakinowski, at the state police barracks in Andover and said, “I have something for you.”
• • •
“This is absurd,” Harley Bodine said when, mid-afternoon, state troopers escorted him from his office in Boston. During the drive to Andover he spoke not at all, his gaze on the racing landscape and glyphic road signs of Interstate 93. In the interrogation room at the barracks, where Lieutenant Bakinowski laced the air with pipe smoke and Chief Morgan sat silently to one side, he was composed, formal, and indeflectable. At times he showed concern but not alarm, which prompted Bakinowski to whisper to Morgan, “The son of a bitch is good.”
With a passing nod at Morgan, Bodine said from the side of his mouth, “That man broke up my marriage. And he’s responsible for the attempted suicide of Paul Gunner and the mental breakdown of Mr. Gunner’s wife. Suits are pending against him.”
Bakinowski said, “Let’s stick to my questions.”
“In light of her tragedy,” Bodine asked, “is Mrs. Smith in her right mind?”
The interrogation went on, with nothing altering Bodine’s composure, except Bakinowski’s pipe smoke, which from time to time he batted away. He asked for a soft drink and was given a can of Pepsi, from which he took only a single swallow. A sandwich was brought in, but he didn’t touch it. Morgan could feel a terrible headache coming on.
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