by Linda Barnes
“The woman in question is dead.”
“Dead,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“How?”
He moistened his lips with his tongue and swallowed. “A fire. She was killed in a fire.”
“An accident? What kind of fire? What happened?”
“I was out of town, at a conference. I don’t really—I have tried to avoid the details of the disaster.” He closed his eyes, his face a mask. “Understand that my friend had ended the affair with Denal—with the woman over a month before her death.”
He waited for me to say something. I waited for him. It’s a trick I learned when I was a cop: Don’t be eager to fill the silence. You learn more by listening than by talking.
The silence in the room was absolute. Outside, the clatter of dishes was interrupted by the hum of the espresso machine.
“Perhaps you would not be interested in representing my friend after all,” he said.
“Look, if the girl is dead, all you have to do is deny the story. Unless there are photographs.”
“There are no photos. I was careful—”
“Then why did you pay?”
“There are—were—letters. Are you interested in the case? If you don’t agree to—I feel I’ve left my friend open to a new situation, a new peril—”
“I’m not a blackmailer.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you were. Trusting people is not easy for me, and trusting a white person with this … It makes me uneasy to the depths of my soul. I’m not some showcase professor. I don’t have a named chair or a university designation, not yet, anyway, but I am a Harvard professor, and if this gets out, my whole life, my career, everything I’ve worked for is held by a perilous thread. God, I wish he could have held off, that this complication could have held off for another six months, another year—”
“The blackmailer’s been in touch again.”
“How did you know?”
“You wouldn’t be talking to me if he hadn’t been.”
He nodded and stared into his lap. “I thought it was a one-shot deal, that it would be over.”
“What does he want this time?”
“He’s offering to sell me another of my letters.”
“How many did you write?”
“I don’t—no more than ten.”
“Emails or actual letters?”
“Letters. Handwritten. I know, it seems old fashioned, stupid somehow. I never—I believed she had destroyed them.”
“Does he want the same amount?”
“More. Five times what he asked before.”
The blackmailer was a quick learner, I thought. And a greedy son of a bitch. A phone rang in the hallway, three times, five times, six.
I said, “You—your friend has a couple of options.”
“What are they?”
“I already mentioned one: paying up. If you do, you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t kid yourself that it’s one more time and you’re out of the woods.”
“There must be something I—he can do.”
“I would suggest your pal tell all, to his department chair and anyone else at the university with power over him, his wife as well, if he has one—”
“His wife would not be understanding.”
“Limit it to people at the university then. Tell them that he has a regrettable incident in his past that he would like to divulge in the hope that it will inspire other members of the faculty to err in other ways and not his own.”
“Hah,” he said. “Understand that this was an undergraduate with whom my friend had an affair, and a light-skinned one at that. My department chair would have my friend’s head on a plate.”
“No love lost.”
“None.”
“Could he be the blackmailer?”
“Frankly, I can’t imagine it.”
“Well, then, you could hire me to retrieve your indiscreet letters. Technically, it wouldn’t be stealing. Letters belong to the recipient. In the event of the recipient’s death, the sender has as strong a claim as anyone. I might be able to bargain with the blackmailer, convince him he ought to take what he’s gotten so far and leave well enough alone.”
“But you said you thought a blackmailer wouldn’t listen to reason.”
“Put it like this: Everyone has something to lose. You could hire me to find out how to blackmail your blackmailer.”
A slow-spreading smile widened his mouth and lit his eyes. It wiped the creases off his forehead and took years off his age. “I like that. My friend would—I like the idea of that, the symmetry. You would find something in his life to hold over his head.”
“I charge by the hour, plus expenses. I usually get a retainer. You’d need to sign a contract.”
“But—”
“It wouldn’t have to specify precise details. I’d need to know your name.”
He opened his mouth and sucked in a shallow breath. His hands were clenched so hard his knuckles stood out like shards of white bone. “I think I—I need to think it over.”
I got to my feet. “You’re not ready.” The action moved him off the dime.
“I am ready. Dammit, my life is intolerable.” He stood too, and then he stared into my eyes like it was a contest of wills, like he was memorizing their color and shape, trying to see behind them into my mind.
After five seconds that felt like five minutes, he extended his right hand. “My name is Wilson Chaney, Professor Wilson Chaney.”
Considering what I knew about him, I could have discovered his name in no time. I didn’t tell him that. I accepted his declaration as a leap of faith and shook his hand.
Don’t get me wrong: Profs who boff students are not perched at the top of my favorites list. But I doubted this guy’s livelihood was imperiled due to an amorous misstep. My demon curiosity had been aroused, not allayed by his tale.
Acknowledgments
The Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project is real and currently slated for completion circa 2005 at a cost that will probably exceed $15 billion. This novel, however, is a work of fiction. There is no Site A1520, no Horgan Construction Company, and none of the characters invented for these pages exists in real life.
I would like to thank the men and women of the Dig who answered my questions, among them, Ann Davis, Andy Paven, and Tony Brown. Thanks to Richard Dimino of the Artery Business Committee. The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have devoted columns of informative print to the subject of the Dig, and so has Boston Magazine. I’d also like to credit the Big Dig’s Web site, one of the finest on the Internet, and three books: Dan McNichol’s The Big Dig, with photographs by Andy Ryan; The Big Dig: Reshaping an American City, by Peter Vanderwarker; and Building Big, by David Macaulay, for helping me grasp a few of the complex building techniques used in the project. Thanks also to Eddie Jacobs, Nancy Hawthorne, Luis Tovar, Jennifer Magnolfi, Monica Tovar, Steve Appelblatt, Richard Barnes, Brian DeFiore, Michael Denneny, Kelley Ragland, and Gina Maccoby.
THE BIG DIG
Copyright © 2002 by Linda Appelblatt Barnes.
Excerpt from Deep Pockets © 2003 by Linda Appelblatt Barnes.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002068353
ISBN: 978-1-4299-0142-0
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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