Brock’s voice was strong, if a little detached. Billy noticed he used the term “the judge” to put emotional distance between himself and what he had witnessed.
“I didn’t scream, exactly. I chattered, like in the monkey cage at the zoo. He got rough, shoved me into a few walls until I shut up. Then he suddenly decided we’d leave.”
“Just like that?”
Brock nodded. He looked away and told the next part of the story to an imaginary audience on the sidewalk.
“We left out the back door. He told me to guide him through the woods to the road. I was numb from the neck up—I didn’t even think of getting a flashlight. He followed me into the woods. It was slow, by just the light of the moon. I was afraid he’d shoot me and leave me in the swamp. Even though I was leading the way, I was afraid to stumble into a shallow grave he had prepared for me. Or that he’d force me to dig my own. The mind comes up with all kinds of scenarios.”
“I’m sure,” Billy croaked. He cleared his throat and blinked the starchy feeling from his eyes, for what the kid had gone through. He also felt a stir in his belly. His newsman’s instincts were buried, but not dead. This would be a hell of a story.
“Wanna hear the worst of these scenarios?” Brock asked.
With a nod, Billy accepted the penance.
“Out there in the woods, I got to thinking … if a killer forces you to dig your own grave, should you do a good job?”
He went on to describe the carjacking—how Rackers dragged Stu Tracy out of the old Lincoln and forced Brock to drive. He described the harrowing fight against the car’s sloppy steering, through snaking country roads, with Stu and Adam Rackers in the backseat. He recalled the moment he realized Rackers would never let them walk away alive, and he described his dangerous gamble, to drive ever faster in a last-gasp effort to force Rackers to hand over the gun.
The crash? A patchwork of visions in his mind, he told Billy, but no memories he could trust.
Billy prodded him with questions. They were probing, intelligent questions, and they belied the thought ringing relentlessly through Billy’s skull.
Should you do a good job digging your own grave?
“So he just forced you into the woods?” Billy asked. “Without taking anything? No silverware or jewelry or even the judge’s wallet?”
“He had come for a safe. Maybe he didn’t want to scavenge for the little stuff.”
“Like your mom’s diamond earrings?” Billy replied, shooting the kid a raised eyebrow. “Rackers took nothing except you, and your father’s life.” In trying to convince Brock that Rackers was a hired killer, Billy was beginning to convince himself, and he argued with a breathy passion. “That’s why we think somebody paid him.”
Brock thought it over. He shrugged. “He might have just missed the earrings.”
“He missed the stones,” Billy agreed. “And how a sharp-eyed thief like Adam Rackers could do that is a mystery. That’s why it’s important you tell me everything that happened.”
The color drained from Brock’s cheeks. He slid a finger slowly down the line of stitches on his face, slowly enough to count each stitch. Then he said in a low voice, “Something he said didn’t make sense at the time.”
He paused, waiting for Billy.
“Something you didn’t mention to the police?” Billy prompted.
“I didn’t think it mattered,” Brock confessed. “But when he suddenly decided he was leaving, and that I was coming with him, I was surprised. He hadn’t even checked upstairs for a safe. He just looked at his watch, cursed under his breath, and told me, ‘The man gets mean when you make him wait.’ At the time I thought he was talking about himself, like he was telling me he was the man.”
Billy squeezed Brock’s shoulder. “Who knows what the hell he meant?” he said. As his mouth spoke the gentle lie, Billy offered the young man a silent oath to track down The Man, who had paid a shooter to kill Brock Harmony’s father and Rhode Island’s best judge.
ten
The train lurched to motion and rolled from an underground bunker near the State House in downtown Providence, heading south on rails parallel to the highway, into the early-morning headlights speeding up Route 95 toward the city. The six-car electric Amtrak coach ground down the tracks with a mesmerizing hum. The steel wheels made a tooting toy horn noise in the curves. The train motored past the windowless backsides of warehouses, under bridges scored by graffiti, past the stacks of used tires piled behind auto body shops that tried to make a good impression from the front. Martin opened his newspaper. The sun rising over his left shoulder made a natural reading lamp. People staggered like drunkards down the aisle toward the café car. Commuters on their way to Manhattan read spreadsheets and magazines, or walled themselves behind their BlackBerries or their iPods. This was an eclectic group in this car, Martin thought, judging by the tones on their cellular telephones, which cried for attention with rock music, circus themes, and the opening bars to the theme from Hogan’s Heroes.
Martin had been too nervous for breakfast. Now his empty stomach churned. He found himself at the obituary page. He scanned quickly to be sure there was nobody he knew, and then he settled into the obit of a retired family doctor.
… he was the first sight on this earth for more than six thousand newborns, delivered with calm, with expertise, and with dry wit and contagious poise that gave even first-time fathers the confidence to cut the cord … .
Martin smiled. Though the obituaries were unsigned, he knew Povich’s writing when he saw it. Everybody was a hero in a Billy Povich obit, because Billy had an eye for what set regular folk apart. That was what also made him a good investigator. An assignment to type obituaries on the overnight shift had been a demotion for Billy, a hint from his editors that his services were no longer required. Instead of sulking, Billy had embraced the job. He didn’t type obituaries all night, he wrote them. His writing gave the paper a depth of soul it never had before.
Outside the windows, smears of green whipped alongside the train at more than a hundred miles an hour. Greater Providence is so congested, a native to the city can forget how much of the state still feels rural and unspoiled. In South County, the forest opened around the train, and the land pitched gently across miles of perfect green turf farms. Huge diamonds of black earth marked the summer harvest, where the land would be rested and then seeded again. The houses grew larger and farther apart as the train pushed south, over the Pawcatuck River into northeastern Connecticut. For miles, the train hugged the seacoast, traveling a narrow right-of-way between million-dollar estates on the right and the still waters of Long Island Sound on the left. The land met the water at a bulwark of rust-colored boulders and smooth cordgrass that was now more tan than green, as its color faded with the summer. Cabin cruisers neatly filled the slips of private marinas that dotted the inlets.
The train slowed here to highway speed.
Martin leaned his forehead on the window and appreciated the view. A wooden dock, bleached silver by the elements, reached into the water. An overturned aluminum rowboat rested upon the dock, and a stately great blue heron, its beak a stiletto, rested on the boat. A seascape artist could have made use of this view.
If only I were a painter, Martin thought. Instead of a goddamn lawyer who could not ignore a question that pestered him.
He wiped his wet palms on his pants. From his coat pocket he pulled a single sheet photocopied from Gil Harmony’s two-hundred-page last will and testament.
Section 167, perpetual maintenance of Midtown condominium.
What the heck was this about?
Gil had commuted to New York by train eight times per month to teach class, so it made sense he would buy a condo for the two nights each week he stayed in the city. He had plenty of money. Why deal with hotels?
But why would the judge establish in his will a generously funded trust to continue to pay condominium fees, and “to maintain the apartment in its current condition in perpetuity”?
Martin reminded himself he was obsessing about four lines tucked into an enormous document that dispersed tens of millions of dollars to charitable causes around the Western world and in Africa.
Christ, why can’t I just let it go?
He was reminded of what Mr. Thybony, Gil’s executor, had said on the phone.
Let it go, Marty. Let it go.
Martin had called only for an explanation, not to challenge the paragraph on behalf of his clients, June and Brock Harmony.
Thybony had stonewalled him. “It’s in there because Gil wanted it that way,” he had said.
But why?
“Let it go, Marty. Let it go.”
On Gil’s video, Martin remembered, the judge had called Ken Thybony the keeper of his secrets.
The condo’s address was not in the will, but property deeds are public records, and Gil’s deed had been filed in the county recorder’s offices. The unit was on the twenty-seventh floor of an anonymous forty-story high-rise. Gil Harmony had owned the condo for two years.
In the marsh to Martin’s right, acres of salt meadow hay bloomed deep purple. The two-foot stalks had been combed erratically by the wind like a head of cowlicks. On the edges of the marsh, white birch grew in clumps of four or five. The train passed beaches, sliced through forest that hung overhead to make a tunnel, and sailed over blond fields of wild wheat.
Another train appeared from nowhere. It passed in the other direction with a sudden hiss, in less than two seconds on parallel tracks.
That’s the trouble with trains, Martin thought. Once you’re aboard, there’s no way to chicken out and turn back.
If his imagination could have supplied one reasonable explanation for that section of Gil’s will, Martin would have saved a hundred dollars in train fare and stayed home. He had promised himself he’d jump the train at one of the scheduled stops if he could come up with some explanation. If Gil had died of a heart attack or in a car accident, this trip would have been easier to skip. But in a murder, no possible clue was too obscure to leave unexamined.
Martin was going to have to knock on the door.
The train left the marshlands and plowed through suburbs, stopping briefly in New Haven, where the concrete buildings near the tracks were crumbling, as if they had been gnawed by some immense steel-jawed monster. The train stopped again in Stamford, overlooking a junkyard with water views, near office towers that grew fatter as they got taller. On the south side of Stamford, civilization overtook the forest; cultivated gardens squeezed out the wild woods. As the train approached New York, plants were confined to reservations inside chain fences.
The sky darkened as the spires of Manhattan came into view. The train crossed the East River on a bridge high above a lonely tug pushing a barge loaded with yellow storage containers. Martin pulled his suit coat tightly around himself, like a straitjacket. The city looked like a bed of nails. He feared what he would find there. Or that he would find nothing at all, no clue to who paid for the hit on his mentor. Or, even worse, that he would somehow learn that he was wrong, and that Gil Harmony had died in a robbery, as a random victim. Wrong place, wrong fucking time. Randomness upset Martin. Randomness would mean there was no grand plan for everyone, that fate played no role in our lives, and that nothing happened for a reason. That there is no god. Randomness meant there was no right or wrong, and that the term justice was shorthand for pushing paper through a courthouse bureaucracy. He shivered in his coat.
On his third step outside Penn Station, a raindrop struck Martin’s nose. No, it can’t rain now. He walked as far as the curb before the clouds unleashed a ferocious downpour. All around him, travelers instantly whipped open black umbrellas like gunslingers with oily quick draws. Who had said anything about rain today? Martin felt like the only person in Manhattan without an umbrella. The first ten cabs he tried to hail ignored him.
Screw this. The apartment was twenty-five blocks away. He turned up his collar, hunched into the slanting rain, and walked. This was the loudest rain he had ever heard, a relentless pounding on cars and streets, on the metal roofs of newspaper stands, and on the stretched fabric of thousands of umbrellas. It was the kind of rain that inspired a man to build an ark.
He was quickly soaked straight through his lucky Boston Red Sox silk boxer shorts, which his militant vegan wife would no longer allow him to keep in the house because, she had decided, they represented the ruthless exploitation of the silkworm. Rainwater gushed along the curbs in little rivers that flowed hard enough to churn tiny white rapids. Martin’s socks were soaked and he didn’t bother to try to hop the puddles. Passing cars threw sheets of water over pedestrians. The rain soaked Martin’s beard and plastered the hair haphazardly against his neck. He passed a junk store selling umbrellas for forty dollars each, and marveled at the proprietor’s moxie.
Finally, he found Gil Harmony’s condominium building. The doorman didn’t want to hear Martin’s conspiracy theories about a murdered judge, or any long-winded narrative about a will in probate court in Providence, Rhode Island. Martin finally just paid off the goddamn doorman. Pocketing enough cash to buy a market-rate umbrella, if he had wanted, the doorman discreetly stepped aside. The building’s lobby had been done in art deco cream and black, with a pink marble floor partially hidden by a monstrous round braided rug. Good God, how hideous. Alone in the elevator, Martin leaned his head against the brass doors and watched the drips run off his sports coat. His waterlogged clothing conformed to his body like a wetsuit, and Martin realized his potbelly made him look like he was in the third trimester. As he wondered if the bribe he had paid the doorman was tax deductible, the elevator opened to a pair of decorative rubber plants in ceramic pots, and a long white hallway full of doors.
His feet squished down the hallway. Wet, cold, and fearful he was on a fool’s errand, Martin thought that nothing on earth could have made him more miserable.
Then he knocked at the late Gil Harmony’s condominium.
The door flew open almost instantly. A woman appeared. She was short and broad-shouldered and a little paunchy, with Caribbean skin and a long brown ponytail highlighted with strokes of gold.
“Yeah?” she demanded, and gave him a look-over. “Oh Lord, what the hell happened to you?”
Martin’s hands smoothed his sopping coat. “It’s raining,” he blurted. “I’m looking for … is this two seven one six?”
“What do you want?” She had a slight Spanish accent. “I get all the magazines I need.”
A voice from deeper in the apartment called out, “Ma? Is that Zach?”
“No, it ain’t,” she yelled back, and then looked to Martin for some explanation.
“I’m a friend of Judge Gilbert Harmony,” Martin stammered.
“Gil’s dead.”
“I know that, I’m … may I ask who you are?”
“I’m his wife.”
eleven
Her name was Nelida and her fabric softener smelled like Christmas trees. Martin huddled on a three-legged barstool in her kitchen and watched his linen suit, shirt, socks, and lucky Boston Red Sox boxer shorts tumble in her professional-style clothes dryer. She had lent him a long white terry-cloth robe, with a tasseled gold rope for a waist belt, and the letters GH embroidered in scarlet script over the breast pocket.
Gilbert Harmony’s robe.
I’m his wife.
She chopped scallions on a maple cutting board. Martin watched her from behind. She wore steep wedge sandals, a loose pair of dark knee-length gauchos, like something a stylish cowgirl might wear to a rodeo, and a clingy patterned top in muted southwestern colors. Her weight shifted from one foot to the other and Martin noted the easy pivot of her hips.
She was not Gil Harmony’s wife, exactly, she had explained to Martin, after hustling him into the apart
ment and demanding he strip his wet clothes in her bathroom. For two years, she and Gil had enjoyed something of a common-law arrangement, two nights a week. She was around thirty-eight, he guessed, about twenty years younger than her lover. Martin liked how she moved: smooth and precise, like a dancer.
Her kitchen was mostly white, with Corian countertops, stainless-steel appliances, and a tremendous copper hood over the stove. Six bottles of wine, all reds, dangled in a wire rack suspended from the ceiling, next to a hanging rope of garlic and a cluster of dried parsley. She dropped a handful of scallions into a pan of hissing hot olive oil.
Martin cleared his throat. “You don’t have to feed me,” he said.
“You said you had not eaten. So you’ll have an omelet.” She turned down the blue flame under the pan and stirred the scallions with a wooden spoon. “No more arguing with me.”
Fine, then. No more arguing. He was starving and his mouth watered at the scent of home cooking.
There was no reconciling this woman, this apartment, even the robe, with the judge Martin had known in Providence. So he stopped trying. The woman was real; therefore, Martin’s long-standing image of Gil Harmony was false. Or at least incomplete and in need of a rewrite. Martin imagined Gil’s voice in his head. Even the Constitution had to be amended, Marty.
Nelida’s silence as she cooked for him made Martin feel even more naked inside Gil Harmony’s robe. He attacked the quiet. “I’m sorry, um—for your loss.” The words came out like a question and Martin regretted saying them.
“A loss unlike I have ever known,” she confirmed. Her dainty eyebrows rose and fell, agreeing with what she had spoken. She poured yellow egg batter from a mixing bowl into the pan, and then turned the heat down again. She looked at him. “A loss for you, too. He was your friend.”
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