Dying Memories

by Dave Zeltserman

  “I’d like that,” she said, her eyes remaining locked on Bill’s.

  Jeremy was oblivious to the way Bill and this woman were looking at each other, and as he left his seat to join her at her table, he gave Bill a sly wink, and asked her if she would like to join him on his trip—the wink to Bill clearly to indicate that what he really wanted was to get her in the cab with him to the airport. “I could try to scrounge up an extra ticket,” Jeremy offered. “My itinerary will have us in Rome, Florence and Venice. So what do you say, would you like to see these paintings in person instead of just from a book? Are you up for an adventure?”

  Her smile shifted slightly but she resisted the urge to comment about his proposed adventure. Instead she politely declined his invitation, while briskly shaking hands with him and introducing herself as Emily Chandler. When she shook hands with Bill it was different. Their eyes remained locked and neither of them seemed willing to let go. Jeremy finally picked up on what was happening and he groaned inwardly, his mood quickly turning sullen. He waved the waiter over and ordered himself dinner, telling the waiter he was in a hurry. Later, when Emily mentioned the museums he should be visiting and what they had of special interest, his expression showed mostly disinterest. He was several inches taller than Bill, and he considered himself better looking, and he took it personally whenever women gravitated towards Bill instead of himself. After a couple of glasses of wine, he lightened up, accepting the obvious mutual attraction that Bill and Emily felt. He signaled the waiter over and asked that his dinner be packed up to go. After the waiter walked away, he mentioned how he’d better be heading off to the airport.

  “Really? That’s a shame,” Bill said with forced disappointment. “You’re sure you don’t have time to eat here?” Emily put up a token effort also.

  Jeremy smiled thinly at that. “Probably best that I get going.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t want to miss your plane,” Bill said. His eyes flashed as he remembered something. With a concerned smile, he asked, “What are you doing with Augustine?”

  Emily raised an eyebrow at that.

  “Augustine’s my roommate,” Jeremy explained to her. “A demanding little Persian cat with a pushed-in face who can out stare just about anyone.”

  “Why the name Augustine?” Emily asked with a wry smile. “Is it because he’s a saint, or that he waddles around like a hippo?”

  “Very good,” Jeremy said. “St. Augustine of Hippo. I named him that more because of his philosophical demeanor, but he is a fat little guy.” Then to Bill, “A neighbor’s going to be looking after him.”

  “You could’ve left him with me,” Bill said.

  “Yeah, right. If I did that I’d never get him back.” Jeremy crossed his index and middle fingers and told Emily how Bill and his cat were crazy about each other. “Bill likes to pretend he’s a dog person, but probably the only reason he’s hung around me the last five years is because of Augustine.”

  “He is a pretty cool cat,” Bill said.

  The waiter brought over a bag with Jeremy’s dinner packed away. As Jeremy left the table, Bill joined him. The two of them shook hands. Jeremy pulled him closer for an embrace.

  “Ten days, fuck,” Bill said. “I can’t even imagine that. Have a great time.”

  Jeremy nodded. “You bet I will. And for this one time only, I hope you kick the Globe’s ass with this story.” He pulled Bill even closer. In a low voice he added, “It’s good to see you finally moving on past Karen, and this girl’s certainly a sweetheart. Just don’t do anything stupid, okay? Try not to go nuts and marry her while I’m gone.”

  “Sure,” Bill said.

  “And you still won’t tell me what you got on this shooting?”

  “Not a chance.”

  Jeremy smiled at that. Stepping back, he gave Bill a solid punch in the arm that was meant to look friendly, then waved so long to Emily, and with his duffel bag and dinner in tow, left the restaurant. When Bill returned to the table, Emily remarked about what a character his friend is. “Did he really think there was a chance I’d fly off to Italy with him?” she asked.

  “It’s hard to tell sometimes with Jeremy,” Bill offered diplomatically. He had ordered lasagna with meatballs, and when it was brought over, Emily helped him with it, as she did with a chocolate coated cannoli. As they sat and talked, Bill learned how Emily was from Cedar Falls, Iowa, and had moved to Boston six months earlier to work on a doctorate degree in art history. He admitted he was originally from Queens, New York, but avoided mentioning anything else about his childhood, and she didn’t press him on it, seeming to sense it was something he didn’t want to talk about.

  The time went by fast, with Bill mostly lost in Emily’s soft hazel eyes, and he was surprised when the waitstaff started grumbling about closing up and saw that it was almost midnight. Emily lived three blocks away, and he asked her if he could walk her back to make sure she got home safely.

  “I’d like that,” she told him.

  Bill carried her books under one arm and soon found himself holding hands with Emily as they walked. It was the kind of thing he might’ve done back in high school—at least if he’d had anything resembling a normal teenage existence. Emily’s apartment building was a red brick building that had to be at least two hundred years old, and when they got to it they made their way up four flights of steps to her apartment door. Bill kissed her gently on the lips, pulling away after a few seconds knowing that otherwise he wouldn’t be able to. As it was it left him dizzy.

  “I’d like to see you tomorrow,” he said. He had told her a little about the story he was breaking in the Tribune, not wanting to go into too much detail about a violent killing during what amounted to their first date. “I’m probably going to be stuck at work until late tomorrow night working this story, but how about lunch?”

  “I’d like that, Bill.”

  The look in Emily’s eyes and her shy smile confirmed her words. Since she didn’t have a cell phone, Bill gave Emily his for her to key in her phone number. As she handed him back his phone, she also took hold of his jacket collar and brought him closer to her for a longer, more passionate kiss, which left his face flushed and allowed him to taste the faint remnants of the strawberry flavored lip gloss she wore. He waited until she opened her door before handing her back her books, and watched to make sure she got into her apartment safely. Once her door closed, he stood quietly for a minute reflecting on how much his life had changed over the course of the day.

  When he left he felt light enough where he could’ve flown down the steps, and as he made his way back to his car, he realized he was smiling that same dopey grin from earlier. If he would’ve known that in a little over a week he was going to be wanted for murder his euphoria might’ve been dampened, especially if he realized that that was going to be the least of his troubles.

  Chapter 2

  Detective Chuck Boxer was an eighteen year veteran of the Boston Police force. Forty-six years-old, a large barrel-chested man with a ruddy complexion, thinning red hair and a thick neck that too often turned beet red either because of anger or impatience. When he arrived at the North Street station he found a copy of the Tribune left on his desk with paragraphs circled in red and a note from his captain asking him what the fuck was going on, and as he sat with his Dunkin Donuts coffee and an apple that he had brought from home and read the front page article and the inside pages, both his ears and neck burned a brighter red than the ink his captain had used on those pages. He had been assigned as the lead investigator for the Post Office Square shooting from the other day, and when he heard what Gail Hawes had told the arresting officers he didn’t completely buy it, which was why he asked that her statement be kept from the media, at least until they could find her daughter’s death certificate and look into any involvement Forster might’ve had. By the time he left the crime scene and was back at the station, Hawes’s lawyer had shown up and had shut her down. From what Boxer could see of her demeanor, she di
dn’t appear outwardly crazy, and from the little he was able to check into her background, he couldn’t find any signs of mental illness. But after less than two hours of checking and while still waiting for her daughter’s death certificate to be tracked down, he was pulled off to investigate an armed robbery of a liquor store on Cambridge Street.

  The article didn’t surprise him. He thought there was a chance the daughter would turn out to be imaginary, or if real, had died a more ordinary death. He couldn’t help being annoyed that someone had leaked her statement, but it would’ve been much worse if they hadn’t officially kept this bottled up. He wondered which it was, whether Hawes was crazy, or whether she had another motive for killing Forster and was trying to build an insanity defense. Of course, it was possible that this Conway guy at the Tribune had his facts wrong and there was a daughter after all, but his gut told him that wasn’t the case. Shit. He was going to have to look into whether Hawes and Forster had had an affair that turned sour. The thought, though, that she could intentionally make up an imaginary deceased daughter infuriated him.

  Boxer took a few slow deep breaths to try to calm his temper, then put the Tribune aside and sat quietly eating his apple, all the while wishing it was a Dunkin Donut’s chocolate cruller. His gaze wandered towards the photo on his desk of his daughter, Alice, and his ex-wife, Melissa. Most mornings he’d avoid that picture, but now he sat still and studied Alice’s chubby cheeked smiling face and her equally chubby and awkward body. She was six when the picture was taken, and unfortunately physically resembled him a lot more than his wife, but she was such a good-natured kid, and smart as a whip, at times saying things that would astound him. It was too bad she couldn’t have inherited more of Melissa’s genes. If she had, not only would she have had a better chance of growing up to be petite and blonde and pretty, but maybe she also wouldn’t have come down with lymphoma. The picture was taken several months before she was diagnosed, and Alice died four months after that. God, he missed her. After they buried her, he didn’t want him and Melissa to grow apart in the clichéd manner that he had been warned about when a child dies, but it happened anyway. He couldn’t help the distance he started feeling towards her, and he knew she felt the same—and she had better reason than him since every time she’d look at him she’d have to be reminded all over again about Alice. They ended up divorcing, and it had been over six years since he’d heard from her.

  He chewed the apple down to its core, tossed that into his wastebasket, then sat silently drinking his coffee, this time staring blankly at nothing in particular. When he was done with his coffee, he sighed wearily and lumbered to his feet. Under doctor’s orders he had recently lost thirty pounds in the hopes of keeping his high cholesterol and family history of heart disease from killing him, and giving him a chance to make it to fifty, which usually didn’t happen with the men in his family. Now after his weight loss, his eighty-nine dollar mud-brown wool-blend suit hung loosely on him, not that it fit him all that well to begin with. He wondered why he bothered, but stopped himself, instead reminding himself as he often did when he fell into these dark thoughts that he was doing it for Alice. That he had to live for her. He knew that would sound sappy if he ever admitted it out loud, but he felt there was a good amount of truth to it. That he needed to experience life as much for Alice as himself.

  He headed to Captain Lou Harrison’s office, and walked in without bothering to knock. He told Harrison not to believe everything he reads in newspapers.

  “You telling me then she did have a daughter?”

  Boxer shrugged noncommittally. “Hell if I know. I’m still waiting on my request to track down the kid’s death certificate. But Christ, if the kid did exist I wouldn’t even know what name she would’ve had. For all I know Hawes could’ve put the kid up for adoption. I’ll try her lawyer and see if he can shed any light on this, but right now I can’t tell you.”

  “Figure out a way so you can.”

  Boxer nodded and scratched lazily along his jaw. He swallowed back what he wanted to tell Harrison about how if he really wanted that, then don’t pull him off for another armed robbery. Instead he said, “Sure, I’ll see what I can find. I’m also going to have to look into whether Hawes and Forster knew each other. Maybe she has another motive that she’s trying to cover up. It’s possible she’s just nuts. She should be sent to Bridgewater for evaluation.”

  “That’s the district attorney’s call, not mine. And find out how the fuck her statement got leaked to the Tribune.”

  Boxer’s eyes darkened as he nodded. “Don’t worry, I plan to,” he said.

  Chapter 3

  Bill Conway spent part of the morning trying unsuccessfully to track down Kent Forster’s widow and the rest of it back at the company where Gail Hawes’s was employed so he could talk with more of her coworkers. As with the other day, none of them ever heard her mention anything about having a child, nor about Kent Forster or had any inkling of what she was going to do. Like everyone else he had talked to about her, they seemed genuinely shocked that she was capable of shooting a man down in cold blood, even someone who might’ve murdered her daughter. While the trip gave him additional quotes for his next day’s story, he didn’t learn anything new, not that he expected to.

  He had arranged to meet Emily in Kenmore Square for lunch, and all morning he couldn’t shake an uneasiness deep in his gut that when they saw each other again the magic from the night before would be gone and that they’d be like strangers, awkward and uncomfortable with each other. Later when he saw her waiting inside of Eastern Standard Kitchen and her face lit up with the most radiant smile he’d ever seen, he knew his fears had been unfounded.

  She was dressed in a pink blouse, jeans and tennis sneakers, wore a faded brown suede jacket, and instead of her hair pulled into a pony tail, she’d let it down so it fell past her shoulders. Like the other night, she didn’t bother with any makeup, and also like the other night, she was absolutely stunning. He kissed her lightly on the lips, and instantly felt just as much at ease with her as he had the other night. Nothing had changed. They both ended up ordering cheeseburgers. As slender and petite as she was, she matched him in cleaning off her plate, and he was happy to see that she had a healthy appetite and didn’t eat like a bird like Karen always did. The few times that a silence occurred between them, it was a comfortable silence, one which neither of them felt the need to fill.

  When they separated with him having to go back to work and her to teach an undergraduate class, their kiss was every bit as electric as the second one that Emily had pulled him into the other night. He was near floating when he walked back to his car, his mind too preoccupied to notice the man with the very pink face and small dime-sized eyes who stood across the street keeping himself hidden in the shadows.

  Chapter 4

  It was quarter past one when Bill returned back to the Tribune offices in South Boston, and he found a message waiting for him from Detective Chuck Boxer, which didn’t surprise him. He gave the Boston City detective a call back. Without bothering with any pleasantries, Boxer demanded to know who the fuck leaked Hawes’s statement to him.

  “Come on, Detective, I can’t tell you that. If you want to insist on asking, I’ll have to tell you it came from a bystander.”

  “Fuck you it did, there weren’t any bystanders close enough to hear what she said.”

  “Again, if you’re going to insist, let’s just say that one of them could read lips. Maybe even had a pair of binoculars, or at least opera glasses.”

  There was a silence over the other end, and while Bill waited for a barrage in response to his ludicrous claim, he checked his emails. One of them had as its subject ‘insight into Gail Hawes and her mystery daughter’, with the field showing where the email came from left blank. Bill opened up the email. The message said:

  You need to speak to Janet Larson. 418 Pleasant Street, Arlington. No thanks necessary. Just happy to help.–yer pal, G.

  The street address
given matched Gail Hawes’s apartment building. At the bottom of the email was a link to a newspaper article from a Raleigh, North Carolina newspaper. Boxer had said something, but Bill was too distracted to pay attention to what it was. He clicked on the link while asking the detective to repeat what he had said. Instead of the detective trying to tear Bill a new one for not giving up his source, Boxer was asking Bill what he thought.

  “About what?” Bill asked, still too distracted from what he was looking at. The story that the link took him to was from three years earlier, and was about an eleven year-old Smithfield girl named Jenny Larson whose body was discovered left in a ditch. His pulse quickened as his first thoughts were that Gail Hawes had had a daughter after all and that the baby was adopted by Janet Larson. As he scrolled through the article and saw a picture of Jenny’s parents he realized that wasn’t the case—that this was something entirely different. Janet Larson looked like she could’ve almost been a twin of Gail Hawes.

  “What the fuck do you think I’m asking about?” Boxer growled angrily, interrupting Bill’s thoughts. His gruff voice showing some embarrassment, Boxer added, “Did you find anything that pointed to Hawes having a daughter? Maybe a kid that she gave up for adoption?”

  “I don’t think that’s what happened,” Bill said. “I couldn’t find anyone who remembered her being pregnant.” As he talked he scanned the article. At the time it was written there were no suspects for the girl’s murder, and it suggested that Jenny Larson had also been sexually abused with death caused by strangulation. The article had a picture taken several months before Jenny’s murder with her in a girl scout uniform, and as Bill looked at it his voice died in his throat. She was as thin as a stick, dirty blond hair, a shy smile, and near toothpick arms and legs. Bill stared silently at the picture for several seconds before looking away and asking Boxer whether they’d sent Hawes to Bridgewater yet for a psychiatric evaluation. “If you haven’t you probably should,” Bill added.