by Ed Gaffney
“Mrs. Giordano!” Steph shouted, hoping that her neighbor’s very prominent hearing aids would be able to pick up her voice over the rattle of the car’s engine. “Where are you going? I thought you stopped using your car!”
Mrs. Giordano’s shiny dark eyes looked enormous behind the thick lenses of her gigantic glasses. She labored to roll down her window and said in her high-pitched, halting soprano, “Hello, Stephanie, dear. Don’t you think you should have an umbrella? You’re getting all wet.”
Steph looked at the thin streams of water running down the old car’s windshield, and only then noticed the tiny dark spots rapidly appearing on the sleeves of her uniform. Sure enough, it was still raining. She put her hand over her head in a futile gesture to protect herself from the drizzle that seemed to have been falling for the entire summer. Her hair, never a particularly strong point, was going to look truly abysmal in about fifteen seconds. “I only came over to see why you were driving,” she replied. “Aren’t you going out this weekend with David?”
David was Mrs. Giordano’s son, and way too self-absorbed for any person nearly fifty years old. But he was the family member who lived closest to his mother, and so for the past several years, he had come by every few Saturdays to take her shopping. It was obvious that he didn’t like the chore, but at least he recognized that his mother was a peril on the roads.
“David forgot to come last weekend,” Mrs. Giordano said, “and now he’s in New York on business. I ran out of my heart medication last night, so I called in a refill. I was just going down to the CVS to pick it up.”
The CVS drugstore was on Main Street—easily the most heavily trafficked route in town. There was absolutely no way that Mrs. Giordano would make it there and back without crashing into someone or something. And the medication she was taking was very important. She’d already had two heart attacks, and needed to be very strict about taking her pills.
Steph saw no way out. Mrs. Giordano would refuse to take a cab, saying, as she always did, that they were “a waste of perfectly good money,” and by the time Steph got home from work that night Mrs. G. would already be asleep, and the pharmacy would be closed. Thanks to David the jerk, Steph would have to be the one to get the medicine, right now. Silently, she bid farewell to her Asian vegetable medley. “The CVS is only a few minutes down the road, and I needed to pick up a few things myself,” Steph offered. It was only half a lie. She did need some razors and some hand lotion—she just didn’t need them right now. Sort of like the headache that was slowly starting to bloom around her temples. “How about I get your prescription while I’m out? I’ll be back in ten, fifteen minutes at the most.”
“Are you sure it isn’t any trouble?” Mrs. Giordano leaned forward as if searching for something on the side of the steering column. She finally figured out where the ignition was, and then turned off the noisy engine and wrestled her keys free. A surprising silence ensued as the car’s motor finally chugged to a reluctant halt. “Normally I wouldn’t go out myself, dear, but this medicine—”
“Don’t say another word,” Steph called over her shoulder, as she headed back through the rain toward her house. “I’ll be right back.”
Steph raced inside, grabbed her purse off the table near the door, and hurried back outside to her car. If she didn’t hit any red lights, and traffic was light…
Who was she kidding? She was going to be late. For the second time this week. And her supervisor was not going to be happy about it. Damn David Giordano and his stupid trip to New York. How in the world does anybody forget their own mother? Steph hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, and her headache was getting worse by the second.
But headache or not, there was no way Mrs. Giordano was going to embark on a suicide mission when all it took was for Steph to go a few minutes out of her way to prevent it. And if her boss got so angry that she fired Steph, well, that would be a problem, but not an unsolvable one. Steph still had some money from last year’s tax refund tucked away, which she could use in a pinch. If she couldn’t get another job fast enough, she’d just dip into her savings account.
She pulled out of the driveway, and headed for Main Street.
Steph’s father, Malcolm Ayers, would have been furious if he knew what his daughter had been going through these past couple of months, since she’d taken on her newest responsibility. Malcolm had a short temper to start with, but when it came to financial matters, he didn’t have any patience at all. His last pronouncement on the subject—which was no doubt an exaggeration—came immediately after Stephanie had turned down his attempt to give her a ridiculously large amount of money on her birthday last year: “I still have so much money saved up from that damned book I wrote that I couldn’t spend it all if I tried.” Malcolm had been furious.
And if her father knew that Steph had taken a second job so she could help support a family from Thailand that had lost everything in the tsunami, he would no doubt have had a stroke.
It wasn’t that Malcolm—her father insisted that she call him by his first name—was against philanthropy. Far from it. He had always given quite generously to many charities. At the peak of Malcolm’s popularity, before—as Malcolm put it, Satan crashed the party—he gave away more than half of what he earned. “What else could I possibly buy?” he bellowed at his accountant, who had suggested that instead of donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity, he invest in real estate. “Exactly how many dwellings does one human being need?”
But as generous as he was, Malcolm Ayers firmly believed that people in Stephanie’s shoes needed to protect themselves financially, and build up their own wealth, before giving away significant amounts of cash to others in need.
Still, when Steph’s best friend from high school told her about an organization run by a few of their classmates to help the surviving residents of the tiny village of Katang, Steph had to help.
Since then, she and her friend had been contributing a few hundred dollars a week, hoping to assist the people of Katang in trying to find a way to put their lives back together without starving to death in the process.
The traffic on Main Street was mercifully light, and Steph made it in and out of the CVS drive-thru window with a minimum of trouble, then headed back home. She dropped the prescription off at Mrs. Giordano’s, and then started right out for Hartford. She decided to grab a snack at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way. She wasn’t really a fast-food person, but she had to have something to eat, or her headache would turn into a whopping migraine.
Just after Steph reached Route 4, she switched on the radio to catch a bit of the news.
“Last night’s shooting bears an uncanny resemblance to a series of brutal murders that terrorized western Massachusetts more than twenty years ago. The infamous ‘Springfield Shooter,’ Alan Lombardo, was convicted of those crimes in 1985, but authorities have acknowledged that a note left at the scene of this most recent killing appears to indicate that the man responsible for this latest crime was somehow connected to those of twenty years ago.”
By now, Steph’s heart was racing. Her headache, Dunkin’ Donuts, St. Joseph’s, Mrs. Giordano, Thailand—everything on her mind was replaced instantly by the memory of that house she’d glimpsed on her television screen. Now she knew exactly why the news station was showing it. She checked in the rearview mirror, then quickly turned off the main road onto a side street to listen to the end of the report.
“A police spokesperson released a statement that the murder took place in the Indian Oaks section of Springfield, between seven and ten P.M. last night. Anyone with any information about the killing should contact—”
By this time, Steph had already pulled out her cell phone, and was frantically dialing her father’s number. When Malcolm finally answered, she demanded, almost in tears, “Daddy, where were you last night between seven and ten o’clock?”
Forty Seconds
AS ZACK RACED TOWARD THE GUNMAN ACROSS the front of the courtroom, the completely unbidde
n realization jumped into Zack’s mind that all that separated him from the assailant was sixty feet. The same distance between home plate and first base on a softball field.
And then came the memory of that moment, over seven years ago.
“Hey, Zack. If you’re there, man, pick up. Damn. I hope you’re on your way. The game’s going to start in five minutes. Hurry up, dude.”
Zack heard the message come through the answering machine, but there was nothing he could do to respond to the call. And there was no way he was going to the softball game, either. In fact, softball was the least of his worries. At that moment, Zack wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to leave his apartment ever again.
Only two days earlier, Zack had returned from the hospital with his adopted infant son. Zack was utterly sleep-deprived, extremely hungry, and doing his best to put a diaper on the little squirming baby he had named Justin, a child who, despite his inexperience at being alive, already seemed to have mastered quite a few neat tricks.
Like screaming incessantly, kicking his legs violently, and defecating repeatedly in brand-new diapers.
And then something strange happened. One minute there was nothing but shrieking and sobbing, flailing limbs and flying urine and mucus, and the next—silence. Zack’s left hand was resting gently on the little guy’s rising and falling chest, but somehow, Zack’s right hand—actually, his right pinky—had become locked in the surprisingly firm grip of a miniature fist. And even though the nurse had told Zack that Justin’s eyes weren’t really able to focus yet, he would have sworn that the boy was looking directly at him.
For that moment, lasting probably no more than five or ten seconds, as Justin and Zack met for the first time in each other’s eyes, there was nothing but a quiet bond, a steady, certain connection.
An understanding that everything was going to be all right.
It turned out to be all that Zack needed. It became the moment he would call upon whenever the uncertainties, the insecurities, and the fear threatened to overwhelm him.
Being a single dad was going to be hard. Harder than he had imagined, and he was only in day two. But that was okay. Fatherhood was an important job. It was supposed to be hard.
Zack would face every challenge, and he would rise above them all.
Whether it be hunger, or lack of sleep, or an infinite number of soiled diapers.
And then the sound of another gunshot ripped through the courtroom.
Or whether the challenge was an armed lunatic, less than sixty feet away, firing wildly into a mob.
FOUR
August 23, 1982. It was raining when I got up, and it just kept raining the whole day, which really sucked. I was planning on doing Stewie today, but the hell with it.
I hung around the house and got drunk instead.
August 24, 1982. Today was much nicer than yesterday. I got some things done, and then, just after sunset, I went over to Stewie’s house.
I remember now that he had told me about his family when we met, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I was just getting such a powerful image of what he was going to look like when I aced him.
So I really wasn’t expecting to find his sister standing next to Stewie when he came to the door.
And then I realized, shit. Now I can’t kill him. As soon as the cops start asking questions, his sister would surely ID me as somebody he’d spent time with recently.
But I couldn’t very well just show up, knock on the door, and walk away as soon as they answered it. Talk about suspicious. So I made up some bullshit—I told them I was in the neighborhood because I was on my way to get dinner at Fitz’s Pub before maybe catching a movie—God, I can’t even remember what I said.
Anyway, they invited me in, and I figured I was really screwed. Instead of killing Stewie, I was stuck hanging out with him and his sister.
It was going to drive me nuts.
But then, I caught a break, thank God, and the whole day turned around.
While we were talking, it turned out that Stewie and his sister were also thinking about going to dinner, and they started making noise about how we could go together.
By that time I was starting to feel sick. I absolutely did not want to spend any more time with these two. I needed to find somebody to kill. But before I could even think up an excuse, all of a sudden, his sister said the magic words. “I just need to take a quick shower, and then we can get going.”
Talk about a change in plans. One minute, I’m in the shitter, and the next, it’s time for a double-header. I said sure, and Betsy left. I think her name was Betsy, but I don’t remember. Isn’t that wild? About six hours ago I was about as intimate with her as a person can be, and I don’t even remember her name.
So anyway, off she goes. A minute later, we can hear the water in the shower start to flow, and two minutes later, I’ve got Stewie all tied up. I had to wrap him pretty tight, because I left him so I could go get Betsy, or whatever her name was.
I got a little wet pulling her out of the tub after I shot her, but it was worth it. You should have seen the look on Stewie’s face when he saw me dragging her body out of the bathroom and over to him. It was almost as good as the look on his face when I shot him.
When I got tired of watching the blood flow out of him, I looked over at Betsy, and noticed something interesting. I had dragged her across the floor by her ankle, so her arms were extended back over her head. And it was weird—her face was all messed up and there was blood everywhere, but her right index finger was extended away from the rest of her hand, which was sort of in a gentle fist. Not bloody, not bruised, nothing. It was just sitting there, perfectly fine, pointing to nothing.
I don’t know why, but I decided right there that I wanted to keep it, so I went into the kitchen, found one of those nice steak knives with the wooden handles, and cut the finger off. Then I cut off one of Stewie’s, too, because it was also in really good shape.
(Commonwealth v. Lombardo, Trial Exhibit Number 8)
Zack looked up from the document he had been reviewing. He was still trying to get a sense of the kind of person he was being asked to represent, and had decided to look again at all of the journal entries that a jury had determined were written by him.
He was also looking forward to actually speaking to Alan Lombardo, but that was going to have to wait. Because Alan was an extremely slow reader.
Zack was sitting at the table in the attorney’s meeting room at MCI–Bridgewater. Lombardo sat across from him, currently reading the second page of a three-page, double-spaced conflict of interest waiver that Zack had handed to him a very long time ago. The inmate was probably in his fifties, a little shorter than average, with thin, graying hair that featured the most severe part Zack had ever seen in his life.
And his facial tic—an exaggerated and very frequent blink—was also pretty severe.
Terry was sitting to Zack’s left, expending an incredible amount of energy attempting to look like he was the consummate professional, a man of infinite patience in an expensive suit, merely waiting for his client to conclude the review of an important document.
Zack knew it was an expensive suit because Terry must have mentioned it six times on the way to the prison.
But what Terry was really doing was trying to keep from becoming the first human being to go super nova. A bead of sweat ran down the side of his face, and the muscle in his jaw was jumping around like he was grinding his teeth into dust. If Lombardo didn’t finish soon, Terry was going to end up leaping onto one of the little plastic chairs surrounding the table, and shrieking uncontrollably.
Zack hoped the chairs were stronger than they looked, because it didn’t look like Lombardo was in a hurry.
While the inmate continued to read, Zack glanced at the two-inch thick stack of papers that Lombardo had brought with him to the meeting. It appeared to be a portion of his trial transcript, held together by a large binder clip. Several lines of the top page were highlighted in pink, one in
green, and two in orange. There were notes written in the margin, in what looked like a very careful handwriting.
Lombardo sighed heavily, lifted page two with his thumb and index finger, and turned it over, placing it carefully on top of page one. Then he straightened those two sheets, and turned his attention to the final page. But before beginning to read that one, he performed for the third time what was apparently his personal legal document ritual—he tapped the table gently with his right hand, twice, and then laid it on his right thigh.
Unfortunately, as Lombardo began to peruse the top of page three, a puzzled look came over his face, he blinked furiously, and he reached over to page two, carefully turning it over to reread something at the bottom. Then, with the deliberation of a ninety-year-old with advanced arthritis, he replaced page two back on top of page one, straightened them up again, and returned to the final sheet.
A small, strangled sound escaped from Terry, and then, as if watching one more second of Lombardo’s craziness were too much to bear, the big lawyer quickly looked down at a legal pad that he had brought to the meeting. He clicked his pen frantically, and then began to scribble something.
It was probably a suicide note.
A moment later, Terry slid the pad in front of Zack. Zack got as far as reading, Heather is my—before Alan Lombardo cleared his throat. The convict was looking up through his black-rimmed glasses. In a quiet voice, he said, “I’m sorry it took me so long to read that. The font your printer used gave me a headache.”
Terry exhaled deeply, slid his legal pad back in front of him, and closed his eyes. “That’s funny,” he said, bringing his hands up to rub his temples. “I’ve got a headache, too.”
If Lombardo had picked up on the disgust in Terry’s tone, he didn’t let on. He merely blinked a few times, and continued speaking to Zack, as if he hadn’t heard anything. “So I guess you’d like me to sign this.”