Intent to Kill

by James Grippando

  “Baseball is still his special thing. He probably reads three or four sports sections a day. Babes says it’s important to know your enemy,” she said, with a wan smile, “so we also got him a subscription to the New York Times. And he never throws anything away. Like I said, he reads to collect information. You should see his bedroom. Stacked floor to ceiling.”

  “He saves newspapers?” said Emma.

  “And magazines. Everything from the Pawtucket Times to Sports Illustrated. Paul says that one of these days the floor will collapse under all that weight.”

  Emma suddenly had a thought. “Did this Lieutenant Benjamin speak to Babes?”

  “As a matter of fact, he seemed determined to speak to Babes alone. Paul and his tough love for Babes—he insisted that we leave the room and let that impostor have his time alone with Babes. Poor boy is still traumatized about it.”

  “What did he and Babes talk about?”

  “I don’t know. I was in the kitchen with Paul, and I can’t get Babes to open up about it.”

  Emma glanced in Babes’s direction. “Do you mind if I talk to him?”

  Rachel bristled.

  “I won’t push,” said Emma. “I’ll keep it light.”

  “Well,” Rachel said tentatively, “I guess that would be okay.”

  Emma crossed the porch and sat in the wire chair on the other side of the little round table from Babes. He was so into his newspaper that he didn’t notice her. She took her BlackBerry from her purse and laid it on the table beside his newspaper.

  “You have one of these, Babes?”

  His gaze slowly shifted from the sports page to the BlackBerry.

  Emma said, “I can get the Internet on that. You want to pull up some baseball scores?”

  He picked up the BlackBerry and pushed a few buttons, his focus now on the device. “Can I get the Times article I’m reading?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. What’s it about?”

  His posture straightened, his eyes brightened. He was suddenly engaged; they were talking about what he wanted to talk about. “The San Diego Padres are in New York to play the Mets this week.”

  “Are you a Mets fan?”

  “Heavens, no.”

  Heavens, no, thought Emma. She had forgotten how stiff and formal Babes’s speech could be.

  Babes continued, “The article is of particular interest to me, however, because it is about former Boston Red Sox catcher Josh Bard, who was a career .240 hitter with the Red Sox and has batted an astonishing .338 in 231 at bats since being traded to the National League Padres.”

  “I see,” said Emma. It was precisely the kind of statistical detail that would captivate Babes, recited exactly the way he’d read it and committed it to memory. He continued to summarize the article in language more suitable for the printed word, spouting more of a monologue than a conversation. Emma pretended to be interested, but then something really did catch her attention.

  In the masthead of Section A, which Babes had set aside, each of the printed letters in the words The New York Times was crossed out in pen and rearranged into “They strike women.”

  “That’s an interesting anagram,” said Emma, remembering Rachel’s earlier comment about the change in Babe’s anagrams.

  “Oh. Just something I came up with.”

  Emma noticed another anagram in the Sports section—this one in the body of the lead article. “What’s that one say?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Can I see?”

  He shrugged, seemingly reluctant to share. But he didn’t physically stop Emma from sliding the paper toward her. In paragraph two of the article about the Padres and Mets, former Boston Red Sox “catcher Jason Bard” was circled in ink with “Crash hard object” written in the margin next to it.

  “That’s a rather stupid one, actually,” said Babes.

  Emma was still impressed. Anagrams were not a skill she possessed.

  “If I really thought about it,” Babes said, “I’m sure I could come up with something better.”

  He took the newspaper back from her, clicked his pen, and turned his laserlike stare back to the newsprint. Just like that, he was completely disengaged from their conversation and absolutely refocused on the New York Times.

  Emma watched him work, the wheels turning in her head.

  “I’m back,” said Paul, breaking the silence as he climbed the steps.

  Emma rose and stepped away from Babes before Paul could sit down. “Could we talk in private?” she said to both him and Rachel.

  Paul glanced toward his son, then back at Emma, as if to tell her that they already were in private. But Emma indicated she wasn’t comfortable. Paul led them down the front steps, and they followed the sidewalk to where Emma’s car was parked at the curb.

  Emma said, “I was going to wait for Ryan to get here before we discussed anything important, but something just hit me, and I need to talk about it. What exactly did this Lieutenant Benjamin ask you?”

  Paul answered. “He was actually very to the point with Rachel and me. He wanted to know who we thought the tipster might be.”

  “And he said you have a list of people who you thought might be the tipster,” said Rachel. “He wanted to know if you had shown us that list.”

  “I don’t have a list,” said Emma. “But that’s all he asked?”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “To be honest, he seemed more interested in getting Babes alone and talking to him.”

  “That’s what Rachel told me,” said Emma. “Which is interesting.”

  “In what way?” said Rachel.

  “Last night, all the Providence news stations and two in Boston ran the story about an anonymous tipster coming forward in the investigation. It’s possible that the media attention riled the tipster up, pushed him to show up here this morning pretending to be a cop.”

  “But why? He should just help us.”

  “That goes without saying, but here’s another possibility. It could be that the driver who caused the accident saw the report on the news and freaked. He could have hired someone to come and find out exactly how much the police know, or come here himself.”

  Paul’s expression turned to disgust. “That’s a stomach-turning thought—that we were possibly sitting in our living room with the man who killed Chelsea.”

  “Either way, you satisfied him rather quickly that you didn’t know anything. But something made him zero in on Babes. He needed to get Babes alone. The question is, why?”

  “I can’t answer that,” said Rachel.

  “I can’t either,” said Emma. “But something just came to me—it may sound screwy, but hear me out.”

  “Go ahead,” said Paul.

  Emma said, “We didn’t go public with this part, but you know that the tipster used a three-year-old copy of the Pawtucket Times to communicate with me, in code.”

  “Ryan told us,” said Paul, “but we haven’t actually seen it.”

  “The point is that the tipster created a coded message in an old newspaper. I find that very interesting, particularly since I just watched Babes decode words in the New York Times, and Rachel tells me that he has a collection of old newspapers in his room.”

  “Are you saying that our son is the anonymous tipster?” said Paul.

  “I would just like to ask him some questions.”

  “This is crazy,” said Rachel.

  “I have to agree with Rachel,” said Paul. “If you think that for three years Babes has been sitting on useful information about the driver who caused his sister’s crash, I’m afraid you’re way off base. Maybe I’m overreacting, since Rachel has already laid into me for letting Lieutenant Benjamin have Babes to himself. But this kind of interrogation you want—anything that dredges up the memory of Chelsea’s death—is too much for Babes right now.”

  Rachel took a breath, trying to steady her voice and downplay her anger. “You see, Emma, people with AS often have prodigious memories, but unhappy memories are partic
ularly vivid, and the replaying of unhappy moments in their life can persist for years and—”

  “Oh, knock off the psychobabble, Rachel,” he said. “The bottom line is that Babes isn’t up for it. Just look at him, for Pete’s sake. We had to give him that Koosh ball to make him stop pulling his eyelashes out.”

  “It’s a tactile release that his therapist encourages in order to keep him from engaging in socially unacceptable or destructive forms of self-stimu—”

  “I said stop it, Rachel. My point is this: on his bad days, Babes is barely functional. I’m not one to coddle our boy, but I’m afraid that if you start interrogating him now, you’ll undo thousands of dollars’ worth of therapy and push him back into a world where he has only bad days.”

  “Mom,” called Babes, “it’s getting cold out here. I want to go inside.”

  “I’ll take him,” said Paul, walking back up to the porch.

  Babes kept his nose in his newspaper as his father took him by the arm and led him down the front steps. He handed Emma her BlackBerry as he passed, and the men walked around to the back of the house. Emma and Rachel returned to their patio chairs to wait for Ryan.

  “I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “We have to do what’s best for Babes. I hope you understand.”

  “I never judge in situations like this.”

  They sat in silence for a minute. Then Emma heard a faint noise coming through the open window that sounded like the back door opening. A howl emerged from inside the house—definitely Babes—followed by Paul’s shouting.

  “Enough with the damn newspaper, Babes! Now give it to me, damn it!”

  Babes screamed like a child.

  Rachel looked at Emma nervously, and those carved-in-wax worry lines in her face seemed to deepen right before Emma’s eyes.

  There was another howl from inside the house, this one louder than the last.

  Rachel’s gaze drifted off vacantly toward the street as she spoke, and her voice weakened as if she were speaking more to herself than to Emma.

  “We always do what’s best for Babes,” she said.

  10

  FOR A GUY WHO HADN’T ROLLED OUT OF BED TILL LUNCHTIME, Ryan’s day was surprisingly full.

  The two hours he spent in Pawtucket seemed like theater of the absurd. Paul and Rachel, nervous about the morning’s events, were in fine form. Babes peered through the window in silent fascination as the forensic specialists checked the living room for prints. A real detective from the sheriff’s department showed up to take written statements from Paul and Rachel. Paul then left for work at the hardware store, and Emma headed off to the crime lab to see if an in-person appearance might expedite the forensic analysis.

  After everyone left, Rachel got her time alone with Ryan.

  “Emma Carlisle thinks Babes might be the anonymous tipster,” she said.

  Ryan listened carefully as Rachel recounted her earlier conversation with Paul and Emma, after which he told her about the message on Chelsea’s grave.

  Ryan said, “The newspaper was placed on Emma’s car in Providence sometime after she parked there in the morning. The flowers were at the cemetery in Pawtucket before I got there that afternoon.”

  “Yes, Emma covered all that. Apparently the man who heckled you on the air was at work all day and couldn’t have been at Chelsea’s grave after calling into your show.”

  “That’s what I understand.”

  “Sounds like somebody is covering for him, if you ask me.”

  “Maybe,” said Ryan. “But let me ask you this: Was Babes home all day yesterday?”

  “Well, not all day. He was out for a couple of hours.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No. He was with his friend Tom.”

  Tom, thought Ryan. And the thought was sobering. “I’ll look into it,” he said.

  “What do you mean ‘look into it’?” she said, her tone uncharacteristically sharp. “You don’t actually think Chelsea’s own brother is playing this game, do you?”

  Ryan’s head was throbbing again. Sleeping pills were just not worth the side effects. “Honestly, I’m not capable of thinking anything at the moment.”

  “He was with Tom, for heaven’s sake. It’s not possible.”

  Ryan didn’t say anything, but he disagreed with her on at least one point: with Tom, anything was possible.

  By 3:30 P.M. Ryan was riding the MBTA Red Line out of Boston and under the Charles River, to a city that was on just about everyone’s list of “most livable”—as long as you were looking for an education and not a job.

  Cambridge is for most people synonymous with the ivy-clad halls of Harvard University, but it is also home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the science and engineering mecca of the world. The 168-acre campus stretches for about a mile on the north riverfront, defined by a variety of distinctive and stylistically inconsistent buildings—from its Great Dome designed by William Welles Bosworth to the twenty-first-century “starchitecture”; from the postwar modern designs of alumnus I. M. Pei to the controversial containment building for an on-campus nuclear reactor. MIT’s meritocratic work ethic was legendary—not once since its creation in 1861 had the school awarded an honorary degree—and students lived by the five-letter motto, IHTFP, which, depending on one’s appetite for competitive academics, could be decoded as “I Have Truly Found Paradise” or “I Hate This F—ing Place.”

  It so happened that the current student body included Babes’s best friend.

  Tom Bales was, without a doubt, the smartest person Ryan had ever met. He was also the only man in Cambridge who wore short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts year-round. He’d even worn one with his tuxedo at Ryan and Chelsea’s wedding. Tom was Babes’s only guest. The two had been friends since early childhood, and the bond endured as they grew older, even if it wasn’t a conventional friendship. After Tom went away to college, he made a point of finding paid work for Babes. Professors or students who needed raw data inputted into a research matrix could count on Babes. It was the perfect way for Babes to fill a chunk of his day with a meaningful task in the comfort zone of his own bedroom, with the only human he had to deal with directly being his boyhood friend.

  Through an exchange of text messages, Ryan and Tom agreed to meet outside MIT’s famous domed library on Killian Court, the picturesque green space facing the river where commencement was held every spring. Ryan arrived to find Tom flat on his back on the lawn, his hands clasped behind his head, eyes closed and bearded chin pointing toward the late-afternoon sun. Scores of students were cutting across the court heading to and from classes, but Ryan had no trouble spotting Tom in his trademark Hawaiian shirt.

  “Aloha,” said Ryan.

  Tom sat up as Ryan took a seat on the lawn facing him, a stack of textbooks between them. On several occasions Babes had told Ryan what his friend was studying, but Ryan could recall it no more than Tom could have hit a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball. All Ryan could say with any degree of certainty was that this walking brain in the Technicolor shirt would very likely own fifty U.S. patents before his thirtieth birthday and end up selling his company for nine figures. It was just the way things worked on this side of the Charles River.

  “So you’re worried about Babes,” said Tom.

  In vague terms, Ryan had told him as much in the text message. “Yeah. The three-year anniversary was yesterday.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Rachel tells me that you and Babes spent some time together.”

  Tom looked confused, but only for a moment. “Rachel, right. She’s still Mrs. Townsend to me. Yeah, she called me around nine-thirty in the morning and said she didn’t know where Babes was.”

  “She called you?” said Ryan.

  “Mr. Townsend was at work, and she couldn’t reach you. Babes did his usual morning walk over to the diner for coffee at seven, but two hours later, he still wasn’t back and he wasn’t answering his cell. You know how routine he is, and this was not his
usual pattern at all. She was getting worried.”

  “So you came down?”

  “Sure. I don’t mind the drive. Turned the heat on and put the top down on the Mini Cooper. Good way to clear my head.”

  “You went looking for him?”

  “Well, it’s not as daunting as it sounds. There are only so many places Babes feels comfortable going. I found him right away, no sweat.”

  “Where?”

  He paused to choose his words. “At the scene.”

  “Of Chelsea’s accident?”

  Tom nodded.

  Ryan said, “What was he doing there?”

  Tom sucked down a couple gulps of his extra-large coffee. “You ever seen his crash box?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “I’d say it’s his personal way of grieving. It’s where he keeps things about Chelsea’s accident.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Anything and everything. When I caught up with him yesterday, he was pacing from one end of the crash site to the other, like a detective. He had a couple of glass pellets in his pocket, maybe from a shattered windshield or a busted headlight. Every accident scene has little pieces of debris that aren’t cleaned up. He’s collected dozens of little mementos like that over the years.”

  Ryan couldn’t believe this was the first he’d heard of this. “Does he go there often?”

  “All the time,” said Tom. “Sometimes just to sit and think. But he’s also collected lots of stuff.”

  Ryan’s gaze drifted across Killian Court toward the frieze of a marble-clad building that bore the name Newton. It was as if the proverbial apple had just fallen on his head. “What about newspaper clippings?”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they part of Babes’s crash box?”

  “I don’t know. Could be. Why?”

  Ryan didn’t want to share the details about the anonymous tip. “No reason.”

  Tom let it slide, his attention having turned to a passing student. Her backpack and matching denim handbag were Tommy Bahama. He gathered up his books and sprang to his feet, seeming to sense a match made in Hawaiian-Caribbean heaven.