Not while the old man was alive.
“You’re a fucking burden!” he heard himself scream aloud. “You cheating son of a bitch!”
He screamed in his mind: Die if you want.
Billy stopped his struggle and lay very still. He cursed the dark notion in his head. Die if you want. He denied it. Not my thought. Not my thought. The tears he could not deny, burning lightly like diluted acid in his eyes. He realized he was losing consciousness, blending dream and reality. He saw his son and his father in the apartment again. There was no smoke. They were eating breakfast in the middle of the night and watching an infomercial on television about that mechanical bed that rose up and down at the touch of a button. Operators are standing by … . Side by side they sat. His father and his son. Two old pals with the same blue eyes. The true source of Billy’s anger suddenly revealed itself. He was not afraid of losing his son in a fire, not really. He was enraged by the knowledge that the boy would never abandon the old man who had abandoned Billy.
He bit hard and crunched sand between his molars, and thought about the three decades after the old man had left the family. And then he seethed at the irony, which seemed at the moment the product of a god with a sick sense of humor—after the old man’s bad health had finally broken him and brought him to Billy’s door to claim the unearned love that was his by blood, he wanted to stop his treatments, and leave Billy again.
Billy imagined footsteps, dashing lightly in the sand.
He pictured Bo running toward him, but the footsteps were too quick and rhythmic to be those of a little boy, and the fantasy dissolved.
He withdrew from his dreamworld and felt the snap of reality in the stabbing pain in his rib.
He listened.
The footsteps grew louder, too loud not to be real. Nearly on top of him, they stopped. He held his breath and stared out from the hole.
The dark outline of a human figure eclipsed the stars.
Billy did not flinch. He breathed silent, shallow breaths. Should he call out, or stay invisible, buried under shadows? Trapped and beaten, barely conscious, he had never been so vulnerable. Fear throttled him and he said nothing.
The figure wavered over the hole for what seemed a long time. Its feet sent tiny avalanches of pebbles down the side of the trench.
Then a woman’s voice softly and urgently called, “Povich?”
Billy gasped. A familiar voice he could not place. But the voice was real; he was sure of it. Tears flooded his eyes again; he had never heard such beauty in his own name.
“I’m—I’m here. I’m in the sand.”
“Are they gone? All of them?”
Billy did not know for sure, but he could not take the chance she might become afraid and leave him. “Yes,” he ventured. “We’re alone.” He wondered who she was, and she read his mind—
“It’s Kit Bass,” she said. “I was Judge Harmony’s clerk. I saw you the day they opened his will, though we were not formally introduced.”
After a half beat of silence, Billy offered, “Well, how do you do?”
She chuckled softly. Billy recalled her face: narrow and a little mousy; two dozen freckles, heavier on one side than the other; small upturned nose; eyes that looked sleepy when she smiled, as if she had just woken to something—or someone—who made her very happy.
“Those three men work for Rhubarb Glanz,” she said. “The little one is Robbie—he’s Glanz’s son. Ain’t he a son of a bitch? The day will come when I kick his ass. According to my research, the other two used to be cellmates, if that tells you anything. I’ve been following them since my own run-in at Glanz’s nightclub. Tonight, I saw them drive behind your office.”
“They sent me a fax. Maybe from a laptop, I don’t know. Got me to run out the back door, into a trap.”
“I ducked down in my car when they drove away. They passed under a streetlight and I recognized you riding with them.” She paused. “Forgive me, Mr. Povich—”
“It’s Billy, please.”
“—but I didn’t know if you were mixed up with them. So I followed you. Robbie Glanz always drives at exactly the speed limit so it’s easy to keep a safe distance without losing them.” She paused. “You’re not really Martin Smothers’s law clerk, are you?”
“His clerk makes a lot more money than I do.”
“You’re his investigator.” She didn’t bother to wait for confirmation. Dropping to her knees at the edge of the hole, she said, “How bad are you hurt?”
“I’m trapped in here, buried.” He thought about the question and realized he had not answered it. “I’m fading out.”
“It’s so dark … . I have a flare in my trunk.”
Billy shuddered; she was asking permission to leave his side.
“My car is hidden up the road about a mile, as close as I dared to leave it.”
A mile? “That’s gonna take nearly an hour to hike up and back,” Billy said. “I don’t know if I can stay awake.”
She stood and dusted off, chuckling as if she had just heard something cute and naive, like from the mouth of a child. “See you in twelve minutes, Billy,” she promised. “Five and a half minutes to the car, five and a halfback. Sixty seconds to open the trunk.”
With that, she dashed off.
The flare’s fluttering red glow turned a small circle of the moonscape into Mars. Like an enormous firecracker, the flare hissed dangerously and reminded Billy of what Garafino, the shark, had told him about messing with Rhubarb Glanz. Do you puff dynamite like a big red cigar?
Kit had found a long-handled shovel at the construction site. She wore loose-fitting shorts and a tight half tank. Her skin glistened in the red light. Her thighs were braids of muscle. Her thin arms, hanging from squared-off swimmer’s shoulders, were deceptively strong, and she filled the shovel with big helpings of sand. She worked to free him as rhythmically as the goons had to bury him.
Twelve minutes, she had said. Billy doubted she had been gone even that long. This woman was built for speed, he marveled. He watched her dig for a few minutes. He thought about Gil Harmony. How did the judge inspire so much loyalty from one law clerk?
Billy said, “The day they opened the will, I left before the judge came to you on the video. I’m curious. What did he leave you?”
She smiled sadly and kept digging, though a little more slowly. “His Bible, that’s all. No money, which he knew I wouldn’t have taken. Just his mother’s old family Bible, which stayed in his desk when he served in the state senate, to remind him that Somebody was looking down on him. When he was appointed to the bench, he used that Bible to swear his oath of office.”
“I didn’t know he was a religious man.”
“Not outwardly pious. Congregationalist. Liked the social aspect of church. But I know that he prayed.”
“Why do you think he left you the Bible?”
She stopped for a moment, leaned on the shovel. “Because he wanted me to know that he’d be looking down on me.” She smiled sadly at Billy, and then went back to work. “We should call the cops when I get you out of here. What they did violates chapter eleven of the criminal code, sections five and twenty-six dash one, felonious assault and kidnapping. With their criminal records, they could each get up to forty years.”
“They won’t.”
“Well, even if they pleaded down to get concurrent sentences, they’re looking at hard time.”
“We’re not calling the cops.”
“What—? That’s ridiculous. They nearly killed you.”
“My word against theirs. They have better lawyers than the state. They’ll never do any time.”
“The grand jury can make their lives miserable. Maybe an indictment would put a scare into them?”
Billy sighed. Kit knew the General Laws of Rhode Island by heart. But she never studied under a professor like Rhubarb Glanz. He told her, “One hour after Robbie Glanz gets a subpoena on a pissy little charge like this, I will accidentally fall down a flight of stairs
to my death. Maybe more than once.”
“They can’t—I’m a witness.”
“They’ll kill you, too.”
She heaved a shovel of dirt with a grunt and said, “So what are we supposed to do? Cower in fear of these assholes? Let them do whatever they want to us? What about the law?”
“If you’re going to take down the king, you better aim for the heart. We have to nail Rhubarb Glanz.”
“Rhubarb Glanz wasn’t here tonight,” she said. “We can’t prove he told those men to leave you buried, where you would have died of exposure.”
“The sand is now quite warm, thank you, like a five-hundred-pound blanket.”
“Billy!”
Sharply, he informed her, “We’re going to take down Rhubarb Glanz for hiring a street punk to shoot Judge Harmony in cold blood.”
He had stunned her. Kit’s hand covered her throat. “I was there,” she whispered, “when Glanz made the threat.”
“I know. Tell me what happened.”
She explained softly, “Glanz came in with those two big goons and demanded Gil reduce the sentence he had imposed on David Glanz Jr., the son.” She closed her eyes. Sweat droplets raked her cheek. “I’ll never forget it. Gil and I were at lunch, talking about some decision he was writing. I remember clearly that after Glanz made his demand, Gil took his napkin from his lap and dabbed the corners of his mouth, staring through Glanz the whole time, before he slowly stood and told that old mobster where he could get off—not in those terms, of course—”
“Of course.”
“—because Gil, the judge, I mean, was a gentleman. Glanz didn’t even blink. He had to know a man of Gil Harmony’s moral stature would never bend to a threat like that.”
She looked at Billy and seemed to be waiting for him to agree. “Naturally,” Billy said, absentmindedly. Her face distracted him; he noted how her dark eyes and her hard jawline softened when she spoke of the judge.
She shoveled in silence for a minute, sending tiny shock waves through the sand and into Billy’s body.
Then suddenly, as if the thought just struck her, she blurted, “You just said you knew? You knew about the threat? How could you? I wanted to report it to the cops afterward, but Gil persuaded me not to. He said it wasn’t a serious threat, and that Glanz was just protecting his standing with his crooked employees. ‘All for show,’ Gil said to me, before we both swore an oath of secrecy. Nobody knows about the threat, not even … his wife.”
Oh, Jesus Christ, Billy thought in horror. She loved the judge. Kit’s face screamed it. She could barely force herself to acknowledge out loud that Gil Harmony had a wife. Billy felt the creep of the death smile on his face and turned his head to the sand.
“How could you know this, Billy?”
Billy concentrated on the pain in his ribs and obliterated the smile.
She waited for the answer, one hand on her hip like an impatient traveler at a bus stop. Her posture sent a subliminal message that the shovel would do no work until Billy admitted how he knew of the threat. She drilled him with her eyes.
Give it to her straight. She was tough and had wanted Billy to know it. He would not embarrass her with mercy.
“I heard it from Mr. Smothers,” Billy said, “who heard it in New York from the judge’s mistress, who had heard it from the judge.”
Kit stepped backward. Her lips silently formed the word mistress. She looked away a moment, perhaps reconciling old memories and nagging questions with this new information. Then suddenly she returned to digging, faster and more violently than before.
Billy watched the flex of her muscles. She had not protested or probed for more information about this mistress.
Kit had not been the judge’s lover, Billy decided. The revelation about Gil Harmony had obviously surprised her, and no mistress would be surprised by a second mistress. Though the cynic inside Billy warned him to be careful. Maybe she was playing him with that subtle twitch of rage at the corner of her mouth. As Martin liked to say, there were a lot of great actors in the world.
The flare sputtered. Kit cleared the sand from Billy without another word and then cast the shovel aside. She helped him crawl free.
Pain provoked ironic laughter from Billy that trailed off into a groan and a cough. He flexed his arms and legs in a quick self-diagnostic. Nothing broken, he confirmed. The bone bruises on both elbows and his shins would be with him for a few weeks. A dark red paste of congealed blood and sand smeared his raw wrists. He had not taken any blows to the head, probably because unconscious men keep their secrets, and the goons had needed Billy to talk.
I’ve taken worse beatings, Billy thought with a trickle of pride.
He leaned against the side of the trench, grimaced at the deep pokes of pain in his rib cage. The duct tape around his wrists had lost its tackiness in the sand, and Billy slipped his hands from the cuff. Kit untied the binding from around his ankles.
“So how do we do it?” she asked, a hard starch in her voice. “How do we fucking take down Rhubarb Glanz?” She looked him up and down. “Can you walk?”
Billy waved off the last question. “In a minute.” He spat grit from his mouth. “We tried confronting Glanz to find a connection to the judge’s death, but Glanz is too well protected.”
“Following Robbie never led me to the father,” she agreed.
“Until we find a weak spot in his defense, we should work on the shooter, Adam Rackers. We trace him backward to Glanz. There must have been some meeting, or a connection through a bagman. There was a payoff somewhere—nobody kills a judge for money without insisting first on a deposit.”
“What can we learn about Rackers that the police couldn’t?”
Billy wiped a finger inside his armpit, then cleared the sand from under his lips. “The police get their information from good citizens,” Billy said. “We’re not under those kinds of limitations.”
She shot him a sideways look as the flare sputtered out and abandoned them in a moonlit crater of sand. Without the hiss of the flare, the silence was more unsettling than the darkness.
“Do you know those kind of people?” she asked.
“I have sources,” Billy confessed. Another thought came suddenly to him and he wondered if his conscious mind had suppressed it until she had freed him from the sand. He told her straight:
“I sold you out to them.”
sixteen
Martin nearly hurled himself at his assistant’s feet.
“Thank God you’re here,” he blurted. “Do you have my speech? You’re smiling. That means you do? Is it any good? Will it read like I wrote it myself? I don’t want people to think my employee had to write my speech for me. Don’t look at me like that! Do you have my shoes?” His assistant held up a plastic grocery bag. “Oh, Christ, thankfully! Does it always echo in here like this? Son of a bitch, I hate that echo. Do I seem nervous? Is it humid in here? Christ, it’s like a rain forest in this State House.” He blotted his forehead with his necktie.
Carol patted Martin’s arm. “Easy, boss,” she comforted in a velvety voice that clashed with the stir of devil in her huge round eyes.
“What?” Martin said. “What’s the grin?”
“I was mingling in the audience before I came up here. I saw the judge’s comatta.”
He shushed her. “Not too loud!” Though he was sure nobody could hear them in the ricochet of voices, amped through a PA system, which echoed off marble floors and walls and careened through the alcoves and stairways of the Rhode Island State House. This was where a young Gil Harmony, barely out of law school, served two terms in the state senate.
Carol inspected her boss. “Your shirttail is coming out.” She opened his jacket, one side and then the other, clicked her tongue, and pointed to a black spot on his shirt. “That silly fountain pen exploded in your pocket again, so keep this coat buttoned up.”
“Oh, fuck.” He jammed his shirttail into his pants.
“And don’t worry about the speech. I
t’ll sell.”
“Is it profound?”
“Makes the Gettysburg Address read like a dirty limerick.”
Was she joking? Would she joke with him a few minutes before Martin had to read a speech about his murdered mentor? Martin stuck his little pink hands on his hips. “Now quit that,” he ordered. “You know I have no ear for hyperbole.”
Carol pulled a pair of size 81/2leather cap toe oxfords from a shopping bag. “Why can’t you keep these at the office?” she asked.
“My wife can smell dead cow straight through a filing cabinet.”
Martin kicked off his hideous 100 percent nonanimal, faux leather plastic loafers. He paused a moment and glanced around unconsciously to make sure his militantly vegan wife was not around. The upper reaches of the state capitol were empty. What makes a taboo so exciting? he wondered. He enjoyed a tickle in his potbelly and felt the stretch of his grin as he slipped his feet into genuine cowhide shoes he would never dare bring near his own house.
Martin and Carol peered together over a third-floor balcony rail, into the State House rotunda. Far below, the memorial service for Justice Gilbert Harmony was under way. More than a hundred well-dressed people competed for standing room on four great staircases that led into the hall. The rotunda is a soaring space befitting a cathedral, built of pillars and balconies standing upon each other, from the brass seal of the state embedded in the white marble floor to the high point of the capitol dome, 149 feet above. For a century, the rotunda has been the site of protests and celebrations, public announcements and government denouncements. More recently, it had become a backdrop for wedding photos.
As an indoor courtyard open to each floor of the building, the rotunda is bright, and seems built of equal parts air and rock. Veins of black swirl though the white marble pillars, the staircases, and the balcony rails polished as smooth as a beach stone. Four arches near the top of the space are gilded in gold, and decorated with murals of ladies in flowing gowns and laurel leaf crowns, holdings books and swords to represent literature and justice. The dome that caps the rotunda is 50 feet across, painted a blend of blue and white, like the sky.
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