by Lis Wiehl
“A friend from Holland brought me some bulbs,” Carl said. “Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”
They moved to the porch, where Tommy took a seat in an Adirondack chair while Carl went inside. He came back a little later with two steaming mugs.
Carl sat down heavily in the chair next to Tommy. “Wow,” he said, rubbing his back. “I can’t bend over like I used to. Or more accurately, I can’t stand up again like I used to. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
“Research, actually,” Tommy said. “Did you hear about Bull’s Rock Hill?”
“Just a little bit on the radio,” Carl said.
“I’m sort of involved,” Tommy said. “I told you about my buddy Liam, right?”
“The skinny kid?” Carl said.
Tommy nodded. “They found his cell phone at the scene. He has no idea how it got there.”
“Is he the only suspect?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “He gave the police the names of the other kids at the party. I believe they’re thinking one of them did it, but maybe someone unrelated to the party found her on her way home. Have you ever heard the name Abbie Gardener?”
“I know Abbie,” Carl said. “As much as anyone can, given her condition. I’ve seen her at High Ridge when I visited some other residents there. What’s Abbie have to do with this?”
“Probably nothing,” Tommy said, “except that last night she got out of the nursing home and ended up in my backyard. My alarm went off at three in the morning. The police think she might have seen something.”
“It won’t be easy to talk to her,” Carl said. “I understand she’s in the final stages of Alzheimer’s.”
“Can I show you something?” Tommy asked, digging his phone from the pocket of his jacket. He flipped screens until he’d queued up the video he’d taken the night before. “She was saying something when I found her, but it wasn’t anything I could understand. I thought maybe if I played it for you—you speak like a hundred languages, right?”
“Not quite a hundred,” Carl said. “Before you do—are you working on this as a case?”
Carl was one of the few people Tommy had told of his new career path.
“Sort of. I’m just an interested party. Did I ever tell you about Dani Harris?”
“Is that the party you’re interested in?”
“She’s a forensic psychiatrist with the DA’s office.”
“Did you tell her you’re studying for your PI’s license?”
“Not yet,” Tommy said. “I didn’t want to seem pushy. Anyway, she’s working on the case and she asked me to help her. Okay, she didn’t exactly ask me.” He handed Carl his phone. “Can you translate this?”
“I can try.” He pressed the screen’s Play arrow and listened.
Tommy watched the expression on his friend’s face change from curiosity to concern. “It’s crazy stuff, isn’t it? What’s ‘luck’s fairy’?”
“The first part’s in Italian,” Carl said. “Do you mind if I take this inside? I just want to check something on my computer. I’ll be right back.”
While he waited, Tommy watched a flight of geese fly overhead in chevron formation, headed in a northerly direction. He’d always had a remarkably good sense of direction, even on a cloudy day or night when the sun or the stars were hidden. It was the wrong time of year for geese to fly north, but he assumed they knew what they were doing. Circling back, perhaps, to pick up stragglers.
Carl returned to the porch carrying a book. When Tommy opened it, he saw it was written in Italian. He turned back to the cover and read the title, La Divina Commedia, di Dante Alighieri.
“It’s a nineteenth-century translation of the Ferrari original,” Carl said. “I thought I remembered the passage from the Purgatorio, but I was wrong. It’s from the Inferno. Haven’t read this since I was in seminary.”
He reached over and opened the book to the page he’d bookmarked and pointed with his finger to the exact line.
“Le ali congoleare di mondo. My Italian’s not as good as it should be,” Carl said, “but I would translate it as ‘His wings freeze the world.’ In context, ‘God’s most splendid being, who beats his wings and freezes everything that surrounds him.’ ”
He handed Tommy a printout he’d made of his translation.
“What about ‘luck’s fairy’?” Tommy asked.
“Well, it’s not l-u-c-k-apostrophe-s. It’s l-u-x. Lux, that means ‘light.’ In Latin, not Italian. And ferre, spelled f-e-r-r-e, means ‘to bring.’ ‘Bringer of light’ would be the translation. ‘Whose wings freeze the world.’ Lux ferre is from the Bible. It refers to a person.”
“And who would that be?” Tommy asked.
“Lux ferre,” Carl said. “Combined to make ‘Lucifer, whose wings freeze the world.’ At least according to Dante. But what’s he written lately?”
“So Abbie Gardener was ranting about Satan?”
“I would say yes,” Carl said. “Which would be consistent with her lifelong fixation on all things ghoulish and dark. I’ve done a lot of work with old people. Most find peace and have no problem getting old, but for some … the demons come out. It may have something to do with atrophy of the frontal lobes that govern impulse control and morality. Sometimes old people lose their self-control and start whacking each other with their canes. It sounds silly, but it’s not funny when you see it.”
“Saw it firsthand,” Tommy said, pulling down the turtleneck to show Carl the scratches on his throat. “She jumped me. Out of the blue. Unbelievably strong.”
Carl leaned in to have a look.
“One more question,” Tommy said. “She asked me if I believe in something I’d never heard of—I couldn’t even find it in the dictionary. Ecstaspizium?”
“Extispicium,” Carl corrected him. “E-x-t-i-s-p-i-c-i-u-m.”
“You know what it means?”
“It refers to the practice of sacrificing an animal so that you can predict the future by interpreting the entrails,” Carl said. “A form of soothsaying practiced by the Roman haruspices.”
“Haruspices?”
“Fortune-tellers,” Carl said. “Or maybe prophets.”
“That explains what she was doing with the frog,” Tommy said. “ ‘These are the first to go, you’ll be the last,’ she said.”
“Last to what?”
“Dissolve,” Tommy said. “And let me tell you about the doctor who looked at my throat.”
He told Carl the whole story as best he could. When he was done speaking, Carl leaned back in his chair, thinking.
“What do you make of it?” Tommy said. “Figment of my imagination?”
“Maybe,” Carl said. “Or maybe you were visited by someone.”
“By whom?”
“By an angel,” Carl said. “Just a guess, but I’m biased in that direction.”
“An angel dressed as a biker?” Tommy said. “As in Hell’s Angels?”
“If you think about it,” Carl said, “if you’re an angel trying to be incognito, you could hardly pick a better disguise. Did he say anything?”
“Anything angelic?” Tommy said. “He told me to put something on the scratches.”
“So he was helpful. Are you going to tell Dani?” Carl asked.
“She’d say I’m losing my mind,” Tommy said. “Which may very well be the case. My aunt used to know Abbie pretty well. I was thinking I might try to talk to her at High Ridge Manor.”
“Good luck,” Carl said. “Let me know if you want me to go with you. As a bodyguard.”
“Thanks,” Tommy said.
“And, Tommy?”
“Yeah?”
“Just …” Carl paused. “Be careful. We can make jokes about a crazy old lady in the woods, but …”
“But what?”
“Satan is nothing to joke about. Allow for the possibility that evil is real.”
“I know it’s real,” Tommy said. “I’ll be careful.”
SATURDAY,
10.
“It’s so amazing,” said the woman standing next to Dani on the platform for the Metro North to Grand Central, fifty miles away. “I can’t believe there are all these woods and lakes so close to New York City.”
Dani placed her accent as Midwestern. “They’re not all lakes,” she told her. “Most of them are reservoirs. This is where New York City gets its drinking water. They built the dams and aqueducts in the 1800s.”
“What a good idea!” the woman exclaimed. “I’m from Minnesota. We have ten thousand lakes. Have you ever been there?”
“No,” Dani said.
“You probably wouldn’t like it,” the woman said, a comment that left Dani perplexed, but the woman moved down the platform before Dani could ask her to elaborate. Perhaps she’d mistaken Dani for a city girl, even though East Salem was a place where, for as long as anyone could remember, New York City captains of industry and robber barons and Wall Street tycoons built their castles and gentlemen’s farms specifically to get away from the urban din and clamor.
As the train pulled out of the station, Dani recalled riding into Manhattan with her parents to visit the Museum of Natural History or the MoMA or to see the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden. She’d been fascinated as a child by how rapidly the landscape beyond the window changed from rural to suburban to city to inner city, how it started with trees and fields and ponds full of ducks and geese, then houses, then the ugly hindmost parts of warehouses and storage sheds, more and more decay, old tires, broken glass, graffiti, and occasionally homeless people sleeping under cardboard boxes. Then the train would be swallowed up in darkness as the rails led underground, until it stopped and her mother or father led her by the hand into Grand Central Station and the world turned magic again.
She remembered looking at the businessmen and women on the train and wondering what she would do with her life. She’d gone into medicine because her father was a doctor. She’d turned to psychiatry because she’d found illnesses of the brain to be the most complex, challenging, and endlessly fascinating. But there were days when she wished she’d stuck to her original childhood plan of going out west and feeding wild horses by dropping bales of hay from a hot air balloon.
“I don’t think wild horses need to be fed from a hot air balloon,” her father had told her. “They already have lots of grass to eat where they live.”
So much for that dream.
At Grand Central she took the shuttle to Times Square and the uptown local to 56th Street, where she walked the short distance to John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a collection of buildings between 10th and 11th on Manhattan’s West Side. John Jay was a unique school where the athletic department included men’s and women’s rifle teams, and undergraduates took all the usual liberal arts requirements in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences before pursuing law enforcement specialties as graduate students. The previous semester Dani had taught Psych 716, Assessment and Counseling of the Juvenile Offender. This semester she was teaching Psych 701, Psychology of Criminal Behavior.
The morning passed quickly, the Bull’s Rock Hill murder never far from her thoughts. She delivered her lecture on crime and birth order (last-borns were generally more trouble than firstborns), met with an advisee, spent a few minutes chatting with a colleague, and was about to collect her mail when she saw a familiar figure browsing the employment notices on the bulletin board outside the graduate studies office. He was wearing Skechers, jeans, and a black leather jacket over a white dress shirt.
“Tommy, I think this is a little much,” she said. “If you want to talk to me, just call my office—don’t follow me around.”
He smiled at her. She had to admit he had a nice smile.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“I had no idea you’d be here,” he said. “I mean, I knew you taught here, but I didn’t know when. It said you taught here on your bio.”
It was then that she noticed a leather strap over his broad shoulder, connected to a briefcase. He seemed to be trying to hide it.
She waited.
“I’m taking a class,” he said. “And honest, I didn’t know you’d be here. But I’m glad to see you.”
“What are you taking?” she asked.
“CJ 727.”
“Cybercriminology?”
“Yup,” he replied. “It’s really interesting. Do you have any idea how many bot-networks there are out there? I’m never going Wi-Fi in an airport again.”
“So … why are you taking this class?” she asked. “What does it have to do with running a fitness center?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“So?”
“Maybe running a fitness center isn’t what I want to do with the rest of my life,” he told her. “Maybe I’m trying to broaden my horizons.”
“Doing what?”
“You have to promise not to laugh,” he said.
“I promise not to laugh.” She couldn’t help noticing how nine out of ten college women going by gave Tommy more than a passing glance, and probably not because they recognized him from his playing days. He had to know how good-looking he was. If he didn’t, she certainly wasn’t going to tell him.
“Well,” he said, leaning his head back as if bracing himself, “actually, I’m studying to be a PI.”
“What?” she said, laughing, then catching herself. “Why? From watching reruns of Magnum, P.I.?”
“Don’t knock Magnum,” he said. “That was a great show.”
“Why?”
“Well, first of all, there was the Hawaiian locale …”
“Not why was it a great show—why a PI?”
“There’s actually an answer to that,” Tommy said. He smiled briefly. “Tell you later. But if you don’t mind my asking, why not? Why does it seem so ridiculous to you?”
“It’s not ridiculous,” Dani said. “I’m sorry. It’s not ridiculous at all. I just thought you already had something you were doing.”
“I have something that makes money,” Tommy said. “And I like working with kids. But the rest of it’s pretty boring.”
Clearly Tommy was not one of those retired sports celebrities who wanted to spend his days attending memorabilia shows or writing tell-all books … though of all the retired athletes with stories to tell, his might be the most interesting.
“It’s something I always wanted to do,” he explained, leaning back against the wall with his briefcase as a cushion, hands in his coat pockets. “Ever since I was little. I wanted to either play professional football or be a private investigator. I used to think I could do both. Fight offensive linemen during the season and crime in the off-season. They’re actually kind of similar.”
“How are they similar?”
“Puzzle solving,” Tommy said. “Middle linebacker is the most cerebral position in football. Most people think quarterback, but the defense doesn’t get to know the play beforehand. You have to read and react in a split second.”
“And then you smash into people.”
“Yup,” Tommy agreed. “At which point you shut your brain off and let your body do the work. You zone in.”
“Zone in?”
“The zone,” Tommy explained. “And I don’t mean the diet. A guy interviewed hundreds of athletes who’d broken world records, and nine out of ten said, ‘Actually, I’ve done better.’ And the guy said, ‘Actually, you haven’t— we’ve been keeping track,’ but the athletes all said they didn’t feel at their peak when they broke the record. They weren’t focused, or they hadn’t slept the night before.”
“How is that being in the zone?” Dani asked.
“It means you do your best when you try without trying. You can’t get in the zone by saying, ‘Now I’m going to get in the zone.’ If you overthink it, you mess up. You train and train and think and visualize and focus and do
your mental reps, and then you let go and trust your body to do the right thing.”
“So how many cases have you had?” she said. “As a PI?”
“Yours is the first,” he told her, straightening and adjusting the strap to his briefcase higher up his thick shoulder. “Look, I have to get back to the gym, but it was great running into you. Oh—I have something for you. Got it this morning.”
He fished in his briefcase and handed her a printout.
“I had a friend translate,” he told her. “This is what Abbie Gardener said when I caught her stealing dead frogs from my pond. She’s out there where the buses don’t run, but I thought you might be interested.”
Dani took the printout but didn’t look at it. “Wait a minute,” she said, following him down the hall and out into the sunshine. “What do you mean, mine is the first?”
“I misspoke,” he said. “Liam’s case is the first. He asked if I could help him.”
“Claire hired you?” Dani asked. She walked beside him, the October sky above them clear and blue.
“Nobody hired me,” Tommy said, tossing his head back to throw his hair from his eyes. “I have more money than I know what to do with. I’m doing this because Liam is my friend, and he needs help. And you’re my friend too, I hope, and if you need my help, you’ve got it. If you ask me for it.”
Dani didn’t know quite what to make of his offer. On the one hand, the last thing she needed was a blundering amateur muddying up the waters and trampling on the evidence. On the other hand, she needed all the help she could get. She’d been John Foley’s gofer. Now she was the lead consultant, and she didn’t have a gofer. Tommy was clearly a lot brighter than she’d given him credit for, and the fact of his celebrity could open doors for her that might otherwise be closed.
They’d reached the curb, where Tommy had parked his motorcycle, a matte-black Harley Davidson Iron 883 Sportster with matching black saddlebags. He unlocked his helmet from the handlebar and put it on.
“You get one of these,” he told her, patting the seat of his bike, “and you never have to worry about parking in the city.” He mounted the bike, turned the key in the ignition, and revved the throttle. The engine growled.