Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  From the moment he had learned from Mia that her brother was hurt, Billy had an advantage over the sports books. He felt no guilt over using inside knowledge to win the bet—anything can happen in college football, and Brown still could have covered that spread, somehow. Billy had simply bet with the prevailing odds.

  He stopped in the men’s room and waited to use a urinal behind two Brown alumni moaning about the loss and wondering aloud when Kahn would come back from the injury.

  On the bathroom wall, somebody had penned a quote in black Magic Marker.

  Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

  —Albert Einstein

  Leave it to Brown students to quote Einstein in men’s room graffiti. Whatever happened to dirty limericks? Or the bathroom dating advice: “For a good time, call…”

  The Einstein quote reminded Billy of something—he had seen some other high-minded graffiti recently.… Where had that been?

  The walk home was about two miles, through the redbrick Brown campus, past Colonial-era homes with cobblestone walks and steps made from Westerly granite still striped from where the holes had been pounded by hand to split the rock in the quarry, maybe a hundred years ago. Billy hiked past the courthouse, a brick castle of gables jutting every which way, pink stone columns, and a four-faced clock tower. The courthouse was built into a hill so steep that the back entrance was on the fifth floor. He had been coming to the court every day but had never studied the building. Probably because he was always late, always exhausted from having worked all night.

  He walked through downtown, past the high-rise hotels—one built during the Jazz Age, one trying to look like it had been—and then under Route 95. Bums had piled boxes and foam mattresses against a bridge abutment. He walked past industrial buildings, a 1970s-style concrete apartment tower that polluted the Providence skyline with its squat, flat ugliness. To his left, the modern police station, with its prowlike atrium, looked like a giant block of masonry that had been rammed by a glass ocean liner.

  Billy heard an argument, half in English, half in Spanish. He was almost home. Home used to feel safe. Billy looked around for the black Subaru and the man in the trench coat.

  A funeral was under way at Metts & Sons on the first floor. Billy couldn’t use the stairs until it was over. He dropped onto a park bench in the parade field, his back to his house, and watched two men, probably a couple, exercising two dogs in the field. They tied their leashes together and let them go. If the dogs—a yellow Lab and a fat black mutt—had worked together, they could have run free. But the Lab wanted to run left, the mutt to the right. Billy watched the dogs yank each other around, and laughed.

  They reminded Billy of Peter Shadd and the prison break. Had the three convicts worked together, they might have made it to Canada. But Garrett Nickel persuaded Peter to betray Larry Home, and the plan began to crumble. Somebody obviously betrayed Nickel. The testimony never did reveal who had helped Garrett with the car, which had never been found.

  Ah! Billy remembered something. The construction site down by the docks—that was where he had seen some thoughtful graffiti, when the jury went there by bus. He remembered the quote—”he that believeth shall not make haste.”

  Must be from the Bible, Billy figured, though he did not recognize it.

  With an hour to kill before he could get into his apartment, Billy walked back toward downtown, went into an Internet coffee shop with free access while you sipped. He had eight dollars in his pocket. He bought a venti iced decaf caramel vanilla-hazelnut mocha latte with whole milk and sprinkled cardamom—because the drink cost exactly eight dollars, which seemed like some kind of sign.

  On the café’s computer, he ran a general Internet search for an on-line electronic Bible. There were dozens of them. He found the King James Version and then typed the quote, word for word, from the construction site into the Bible’s search feature. Instantly, the computer brought him the correct verse in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah: “Therefore thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.”

  Hmmm, so somebody had painted the last part of a long verse. Billy was pleased with himself for figuring out where the quote had been taken from. He sipped his eight-dollar drink and recalled how beautifully rendered the graffiti letters had been on the building.

  Then he remembered the way Martin Smothers had described Garrett Nickel in court: Nickel had been a graffiti artist of great reputation before he graduated to violent crime. He had met his own violent end at that construction site by the waterfront, where Billy had seen the snippet from the Bible.

  He read the full verse again.

  Inspiration clocked him across the head.

  “Phone!” he blurted to the barista, a birch white college kid with a shaved head.

  “Dude?”

  “Telephone,” Billy said. “You have one here?”

  The barista stared blankly at Billy for a few seconds. “Local?”

  “Yes, local call. Just gimme the phone.”

  The barista reached under the counter and handed Billy the cordless.

  Billy dialed Mia’s cell phone.

  She answered, saying, “Has to be Billy.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Caller ID. A coffee shop on the West Side. Who else?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Hanging with my brother,” she said. “He’s bummed because Brown lost to Cornell. Did you hear about that?”

  “Twenty-two to twelve,” Billy said. “Brown ran the ball like eleven old ladies.”

  “Hey!” she scolded, and laughed.

  “Meet me tonight.”

  She teased him with a giggle and then said, “Meet you for what?”

  Billy turned his back to the barista and walked across the cafe. “I have a crazy idea that I know what Garrett Nickel did with J.R.’s head.”

  “What!”

  “Do you have any tools?”

  thirty-six

  Some talent-starved tagger had recently sprayed “Cheryl is a slut!” in sky blue over the fragment of biblical verse on the wall. The fresh graffiti was drippy and ugly, and it seemed much more like vandalism than the Scripture in elegant letters beneath it.

  The night was overcast and dark, and a chill mist had just begun to fall. In the distance, rumbling, clanking cranes unloaded another cargo ship. Billy panned the flashlight over the construction site, the painted wall, and then across the street, where Garrett Nickel had staggered, shot and dying, and plunged into the water.

  Mia read the Bible quote out loud. “I don’t know what it means,” she said. “We still have so many questions.”

  “Yeah,” Billy agreed. “Where’s this Cheryl?”

  She laughed and smacked his arm.

  “We know Garrett Nickel was here the night he escaped,” Billy said, turning serious. “This is where he went into the water, so this building is the last thing Nickel saw before the bottom of the stream. I checked some archived photos at the paper. Back then, the construction was not as far along as it is now.”

  Mia wrinkled her nose at the abandoned jumble of cinder block and rusting steel. “It’s not even half-done now,” she said.

  “Money problems. Happens all the time,” Billy said. “Anyway, Pastor Guy testified at trial yesterday—the defense had called him as a character witness, not that he helped them much. The pastor said he did one-on-one Bible studies with Peter Shadd, which means he probably studied one-on-one with Garrett Nickel, too.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “There has been a lot of testimony about Garrett quoting the Bible from memory,” Billy said. “He did it all the time, just like the pastor.”

  “I never understood how some killers seem so reverent.”

  Billy thought about his own reverence, during his trips to confession. He felt his face redden and was glad for the darkness.

/>   “We know Garrett Nickel’s criminal record began with graffiti,” Billy continued. “Supposedly, he had a talent for it. Whoever painted this had talent, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’d prefer some separation between the characters, to make it easier to read.”

  “I’d prefer to look at Henri Matisse, but this is pretty good,” Billy said. “I think Garrett Nickel painted it just before he was killed.”

  “I’m with you,” she said. “What’s it mean?”

  “It comes from Isaiah, from a verse that speaks metaphorically about a foundation, a cornerstone,” Billy explained. “And when I read that, I realized that this building has a cornerstone. If you build something from steel and concrete, you expect it to last, so you have a little gathering and install a ceremonial cornerstone with the date chipped into it. You entomb a copy of that day’s newspaper and some other trinkets behind the cornerstone, for some future race to dig up two hundred years from now.”

  “Like a time capsule,” she said.

  Billy took from his pocket a square torn from a newspaper. “This ran in my paper a day before Garrett Nickel escaped prison,” he said. “I looked it up after I called you today.”

  The clip was from the newspaper’s business page—the paper had published a photograph of six well-groomed executives, looking goofy in business suits and hard hats, standing around an unfinished wall of cinder block. The photo caption confirmed the event that had taken place: “Cornerstone laid at waterfront office building.”

  “That photo was taken here,” Billy said.

  Mia read the caption and then said, “They were going to close up the cornerstone permanently that weekend,” she said.

  “They did close it up,” Billy confirmed. “But it was open the night Garrett Nickel decapitated your friend J.R. and ran off with the head.”

  Mia nodded, understanding. She looked intently at Billy and said, “I’ve got my dad’s old tools in the car.”

  The ceremonial cornerstone was a pink granite plaque about the size of a traffic sign and one inch thick. The date and the names of two dozen corporate executives had been chiseled into it. The stone was at the far back corner of the building, which was fine with Billy, since he never liked to destroy private property under a streetlight. He ran his finger along the edge where the slab had been cemented in place. Rain fell, light and fine, and it was not so cold now that Billy had gotten used to it.

  He tapped a nine-pound sledgehammer on the stone. “Holy shit, that’s loud,” he said. “And that was only a test.”

  “At least it sounds hollow,” said Mia.

  “That’s loud enough to wake Garrett Nickel from the fuckin’ stream.”

  She laughed and looked at him sweetly. “I wish you were funny more often. You have a real sense of humor—I’ve seen it the last couple times we talked. Why do you keep it hidden?”

  Billy pulled on work gloves.

  “Haven’t felt funny since Maddox killed my wife,” he said. He looked to see if his bluntness had shocked her. She didn’t seem shocked. “I laugh at stuff when I’m distracted.” He smiled. “I’ve felt funnier around you, but I haven’t been myself for thirteen months.”

  “That’s not a long time,” she said softly, “but isn’t it a respectful amount to mourn?”

  Billy rocked the hammer like a pendulum, getting the feel for its weight and balance.

  “I’m not mourning,” he confessed. “I’m thinking that this stone … is Maddox’s head.”

  He swung the hammer in a wide arc and crashed it into the slab.

  Wham!

  The blow echoed like a gunshot. A crack appeared in the center of the stone and zigzagged to the top.

  Mia covered her ears. “Holy shit! We’re gonna get caught.”

  Billy gestured to the cargo ship. “So much noise down there, nobody lives around here,” he said. “So there’s nobody to call the cops.”

  Her thoughts were elsewhere. “You sound so sure that you know what happened in that car,” she said.

  Billy choked up a few inches on the hammer. “The cops say they lost the original police report. That makes it sure enough for me.”

  He swung.

  Wham!

  When the bang had echoed and died, Billy pulled off a glove and ran a finger along the crack. “This won’t take long.”

  Mia asked, “What would you do with the proof about the cause of that crash? Would you hate Charles Maddox even more? Or would knowing that you’re right allow you to forgive him?”

  “I am right.”

  Wham!

  “You’re so positive Maddox is evil—yet, as you said, there’s no proof. Do you hate him for the crash? Or for shacking up with your ex?”

  Billy pressed his lips tightly together to stop himself from cursing.

  He swung the hammer three times. Wham! Wham! Wham!

  He stopped, panting. He confessed in a low, hoarse voice, “I can’t accept that she could have loved him, too. Not after me. I don’t accept that the grandest emotion in the universe is so … temporary.”

  He wiped his face on a glove. The stiff leather scratched his cheek. He looked off toward the bay. The sprinkling had stopped and the air smelled like wet asphalt.

  “You find it inconceivable that a woman could love two men,” she said.

  Billy glanced at her as he swung. The hammer’s steel head smashed against the stone. The slab shattered into chunks that crumbled to the ground, revealing a dark hole in the wall.

  “You got it,” she cried.

  Billy flung the hammer away and dropped to his knees. He aimed the light into the hole. The compartment behind the ceremonial slab was half-filled with sand. “Hold the light,” Billy told her. “I’ll dig.”

  He wormed his shoulders into the hole. The sand was cool and loosely packed, very dry.

  Within a minute, Billy pulled out a plastic bag. Parts of it were stiff with dried blood.

  From its size and its weight, they knew what was inside and saw no need to open it.

  “When Garrett Nickel painted that message about the cornerstone,” Mia asked grimly, “was he reminding himself where he had hidden the head?”

  “After hearing about Nickel in court, my guess is he painted that because it made him feel clever,” Billy said.

  “But why bring it here? Why take such a risk?”

  Billy set the bag down and reached back inside the hole. He found a piece of stiff cardboard. He brought it into the light.

  A photograph.

  Mia glanced at it and confirmed who it was. “That’s J.R.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I chased him from back alleys to abandoned houses all over this city. That’s definitely the guy who called himself J.R.”

  “Because I could swear—” The hairs on Billy’s neck waved on their own, like hundreds of little creatures that had just had a fright.

  “What?”

  “This guy looks like a younger version of Pastor Abraham Guy.”

  She stared at the photo. “I never saw the pastor before.”

  “Who ever sees people from the radio? But I’m telling you, the resemblance is striking. This guy could be his son.”

  Mia slapped a hand over her mouth. She blurted, “He called himself J.R.! Billy, can you see? J.R. stands for junior.”

  They stared at the photograph.

  “I should have figured it out,” Billy whispered. “For Chrissake, I’m a junior.”

  thirty-seven

  The white van turned up Martin’s street at 6:00 A.M., right when it was supposed to be there.

  Waiting on the sidewalk, Martin Smothers suddenly felt hollow in his gut. If he’d whistled, he might have echoed on the inside, like a cave.

  Should I be doing this?

  He remembered the call that had awakened him: a woman’s voice. She had wanted to meet. She knew of the bloody jumpsuit that had arrived anonymously at Martin’s office, and that it had come by way of FedEx.

  Nobody be
side the attorney general and the judge knew how that box had arrived.

  She sent it.… What else could it be?

  The van slowed. Martin saw a young woman at the wheel. Spiky hair, freaky-looking silver piercings, tattoos, friendly smile.

  The van stopped.

  Martin hesitated a moment and then got in.

  He slammed the door and the van drove off.

  From the back of the truck, a man said, “Good morning, Mr. Smothers.”

  Martin whirled, blinked, then slapped his cheek lightly. “William Povich?” he said, nearly in a shriek. “What the hell! Ohmigod! I can’t be talking to you. You’re a juror.” He clutched his own head. “I could get thrown off the fucking bar.”

  Martin looked to the young woman for help. Her eyes were on the road.

  “There’s some stuff you need to know,” Povich said. “C’mon back here, out of sight.”

  For the next twenty seconds, Martin seriously considered throwing himself from the van.

  The van needed shocks. It squeaked over bumps. Martin sat cross-legged over the rear axel, on the dusty metal bed, with no care for his linen suit. He sipped a Dunkin’ Donuts dark roast they had bought him at a drive-through. He tried not to think about professional ethics. Legal and moral were not always the same, he reminded himself. If he helped an innocent man beat a bad rap, wouldn’t that be moral?

  “So Pastor Guy helped plan the prison break with Garrett Nickel?” Martin said, summing up some of what he had been told.

  “Nickel must have been planning the escape a long time,” Povich said. “But he needed help on the street, once outside the prison.”

  “He needed a car.”

  “And regular clothes, too. And money.”

  “Okay,” Martin said, “but how did they arrange it?”

  “The pastor met alone with Garrett Nickel every week in Bible study. You remember Larry Home’s testimony about Garrett having cocaine in his Bible? If I were a betting man—and God knows, I am—I’d wager that the pastor was supplying the drugs, hiding them in his own Bible. When the two of them got together, they just switched books. All those prison Bibles are the identical edition.”