“He has to stay here.”
“No. No way.”
“Anywhere you take him, any hospital, any funeral home, you’d have to explain the gunshots.”
He gave me a long look, nothing moving in his face, before saying, “He’s my brother. I’m not leaving him here with the people who killed him.”
“Where would we take him?”
“Just get him in the car. I have a place.”
When Ryan came back in, his gun tucked away, he wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I told him Frank’s plan. He shrugged and said, “Fine.” We went back to the foyer and lifted Victor’s body by the wrists and ankles onto a spare bedsheet we’d found in the surgical suite. We carried him out and laid him gently into Riklitis’s trunk and eased it closed. Then I drove Frank and Jenn around to the front and parked well away from the building on the grass near the gate while Ryan went back inside Halladay’s once last time to carry out the final act of a grievous night.
He was gone about three minutes. Then he came jogging out, got into the passenger side and said, “All the chemicals in that place, we have about half a minute before it goes up.”
Go up it did, not much more than thirty seconds later, a fireball that topped about four storeys and ensured that firefighters, not police, would be the first responders. Fingerprints and forensic traces would be hard to collect, thanks to Ryan’s conjuring. No bodies would be identified until we were well out of the country. They would all be ashes, just like Harinder Patel and whoever else had run afoul of Sean Daggett.
To our surprise, the Charger was still in the lot of the cemetery where we had left it, neither ticketed nor towed. Jenn and I got in the front; Ryan took the wheel of Riklitis’s car and led the way back to Jamaica Pond, where we would help Frank slip Victor’s body into the cold black water stocked with all the fish he had named.
CHAPTER 40
Frank insisted he was okay to drive Riklitis’s car home from Jamaica Pond.
“You got shot in the head,” I said.
“This is Boston. Who the fuck’s gonna notice?”
Off he went with a short blast of his horn. Ryan drove Jenn and me back to our hotel and went off to see if Lugo would buy the guns back at a discount. “We can’t take them home,” he said, “and I could use some of that cash back. Plus I hate to waste good weapons.”
Jenn didn’t want me to rent another room for her. “I can’t be alone,” she said. The reality of what had happened to her, and all around her, was sinking in. She started to shake and cry again as soon as we were by ourselves. She knew bad things had happened to her. “What if the fucker didn’t use a condom?” she cried. I ran a hot bath for her, waited until she got in, ran down the hall to get ice, and poured two bottles of vodka out of the mini-bar over some cubes in a water glass. While she soaked and drank and cried over the phone to her partner, Sierra, I sat just outside the bathroom with my phone, listening to a tirade that Mike Gianelli had left on my voice mail.
“You useless bastard,” he said. “You cowardly piece of shit. I told you David Fine was dead and did you even have the decency to call me back? I’ve had his father in my office the last two hours, crying his fucking eyes out, wondering where the hell you are and what the hell you’ve been doing all this time he’s been paying you. Not only that, one of David’s co-workers also turned up dead, a lab tech at Sinai. Beaten to death and dumped in a park. The Boston PD is handling that one, but there’s all kinds of things I’d like to ask you if you have the nerve to call. Only I don’t think you do. Man, I had you wrong. I thought you were better than this. I thought you were stand-up. Ron Fine sure didn’t get his money’s worth when he hired you.”
Who said he had?
The next message was from Ron himself, asking me to call him at the Marriott at Copley Place. “The police got me a room here,” he said. “They have a corporate rate for-for families of victims of crime.”
When Jenn got out of the bath, I got her to lie down in the bed farthest from the door and she was soon asleep. When her breathing had settled into a constant rhythm, I went online and booked three seats on the first Toronto flight I could find for the next morning. Once the bloodbath at Halladay’s was discovered, and Daggett’s body in particular identified, the cops would want another word with me. Jenn too. She and I needed to get back on Canadian soil; once we were there, they couldn’t make us come back to Massachusetts without a lot of delays and paperwork. We’d have time to rest and heal ourselves. To align stories and prepare affidavits. To try to forget the horrors we’d seen and committed. Who knew how that would go? We’d regret the work David Fine would never do and the lifelong pain his family was in for, but if we were smart, we’d also make ourselves remember the lives we had saved. Who knows who else Daggett would have killed along the way if he’d kept at his grisly business?
After I booked the flights, I waited for Ryan to get back. I didn’t want Jenn to find herself alone if she woke up. We didn’t say anything to each other when he came in. I just took the car keys from the counter where he’d put them down and left the room. I still had one thing to do tonight. Maybe the hardest of all.
Ron Fine’s room at the Marriott overlooked Copley Square, where far below crowds of people made their way in and out of bars and restaurants. He was wearing a white dress shirt, no tie and dark grey slacks. The fringes of his tzitzis hung down below his belt.
“They’re saying he’s been dead more than thirty-six hours, but they won’t release the body yet,” he said. “By our custom he should be in the ground already. But the state police are in charge, because it appeared to be a killing for hire, and they say it’ll be at least another day or two, maybe more. And if they mention an autopsy again, I swear I’ll blow my stack. I mean, whoever killed David blew his head off. What is there to autopsy?”
Looking at this broken, grieving man, I felt ever deeper shame and guilt over David’s death and how I’d used his body. All I said was, “Nothing.”
“Nothing. Not a thing. Which, by the way, seems to sum up your contribution. According to Gianelli, you were nowhere to be seen the last two days. You ignored messages. Changed hotels. Left it to him to call us. Maybe I put too heavy a burden on you, Jonah, telling you Hashem wanted you to find my son, but you accepted it, didn’t you? You accepted my money. Was there anything you did to earn it?”
His fists were bunched and his jaw muscles clamped together; his eyes hard and flat.
“There were things …” I said.
“What?”
“That I couldn’t tell Gianelli.”
He stepped closer, looking like he was considering taking a swing at me. “What are you saying? You’re not cooperating fully with the investigation?”
“There are things he cannot know.”
“How can you hold anything back? My son is dead.”
I closed the space between us and put my hand on his arm. It was tensed as though he were gripping a racket.
“So is the man who killed him.”
“What!”
“You remember what my brother told you about me? That I don’t let go? I didn’t, Ron. Neither did Jenn. We saw it through to the end.”
He gripped my arms, both of them, and stared deeply into my eyes. “What exactly are you saying?”
“Is there anything to drink in your room?”
“That’s what you want, a drink?”
“Please, Ron. Pour us both one.”
He found an airline-size bottle of Scotch in his mini-bar and handed it to me. He took nothing for himself.
“There’s a lot I can’t tell you yet,” I began. “And even more that I can’t tell Gianelli.”
“Why?”
“Crimes were committed. By me. And a man whose help I enlisted.”
“And as a result the man who killed David is dead,” Ron said.
“Yes. His name was Sean Daggett. He’ll be all over the news tomorrow.”
“He killed David himself?”
“No. He hired whoever did.”
“And you know why.”
“Yes. He was selling organs on the black market.”
“And David was involved in this?”
“Very briefly. And completely against his will. He wanted to report Daggett to the police, but Daggett struck first, tried to abduct him. Made him run.”
“And you won’t tell the police any of this?”
“I can’t without incriminating myself. Just know that Daggett and his men are dead.”
“Did you kill him, Jonah?”
My neck muscles tightened as if a giant hand were bunching them together. “A sequence of events that he himself set in motion ran its natural course.”
“And that’s all you have to say?”
“For now.”
“How can you expect me to leave it at that? What do I tell Sheila?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Knowing the man is dead-that he’ll never come to trial-I don’t know what to feel. My first hope was always that you would find David alive and well and bring him home. My last hope, I suppose, was that if you didn’t, and someone was held responsible, that I would attend every day of their trial and put on public record what a life they had wasted. I’ll never get the chance to do that now. I feel very conflicted.”
I couldn’t tell him how I felt without telling him more than he could know. All I could offer was the lame, “What had to happen happened.”
“None of us knows what has to happen, Jonah. That’s the exclusive province of Hashem.”
“I just wanted you to know that no one got away with killing David.”
“Of course they did.”
Ron walked over to the mini-bar, knelt in front of it and took out a bottle of Scotch, unscrewed the cap and drank about half of it down. Then he sank heavily into a club chair. “What I’ll always wonder,” he said, “is why Hashem wanted David to come to Boston. I mean, I know why David wanted to come. ‘It’s the hub,’ he’d say. ‘The hub of medical research.’ This was where he was going to make his mark. One of the last times I spoke to him, he told me the donor in the first-ever kidney transplant had passed away. He had given a kidney to his twin brother back in the fifties, in Boston, just up the street from Sinai. David said, ‘Dad, can you imagine the courage it took to donate a kidney when it had never been done before?’ ”
“David had more courage than you can imagine,” I said, thinking of how he’d protected Sandy Lerner on the beach.
“More than you can tell me now,” he said.
“Yes.”
He drank down the rest of the bottle and stared at the fridge as if deciding whether to have another. “You know Micah still doesn’t know his brother is dead? I wanted him to come down here with me and help me get the body home. But he’s off work for the weekend, out at some cabin without cellphone reception, playing guitar with his friends. That’s what I’m left with now, Jonah. A pot-smoking hippie who plays dumpy coffee houses. David is gone and Micah is left.”
Everyone counts, I wanted to say. Even we second sons, who sometimes disappoint our parents, frustrate them as we fail to live up to the achievements of our dominant older siblings. I sipped my drink and watched Ron’s face contort in grief, his chin puckered and shaking, eyebrows pulling down, tears falling anyway. I could only imagine what my mother would go through if Daniel died prematurely and she was left with just me. Would she howl and curse God for taking away the great lawyer and family man, leaving only the bachelor with the rent-controlled apartment and undistinguished life?
He doth bestride the world like a colossus, Cassius said of Caesar, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves.
A dishonourable grave. That was about all I’d been able to do for David Fine. Took me all of five days on the job.
When I got back to the hotel, Jenn was still asleep. Ryan was on the other bed, watching TV with the sound off: a local news report that showed firefighters battling to contain the inferno in Wellington Hill. There’d be no word yet about any victims inside, of course. It would be hours before it would be safe enough for anyone to get into the crumbling structure.
He went down to the desk to book another room for himself. I laid my tired body down and wondered how well Ed and Sandy Lerner would hold up under police questioning. They were bound to get a visit, once the Boston cops linked the Coopers’ island residence back to them. He had been an actor once; he’d need every last bit of that skill to stay out of the spotlight. His daughter would simply follow his lead, I guessed, as was her custom. I had no doubt Chuck Stayner could lie his way through a police interview; it would be a simple matter of slipping on his professional mask.
I channel surfed awhile to help me relax, maybe drift off, settling on an outdoor network showing men in hip waders fishing a deep, rushing river treed on both sides, a blue sky behind it, just a few white clouds in friendly shapes. Jenn woke up and asked me to lie beside her and hold her and maybe find some godawful movie or reality show. We rested against each other on the one clean bed and searched the channels until we found a sixties flick that combined surfing, singing and a monster from the Bad Prop Lagoon. We laughed at every dumb scene and song. It was only during the commercials that Jenn would start to weep.
EPILOGUE
The temperature in Toronto has been above freezing the last ten days. Green shoots of crocuses are poking through the dark fragrant mud in the flower beds around my building. A lone whippoorwill has been perched on the telephone wires across the street, singing its plaintive notes. The Blue Jays open at home next Monday.
Jenn is still away.
I got a postcard the other day from Cuba, where she and Sierra have been holed up. It showed a huge marlin breaking free of the surface of the ocean, blue black against a clear sky. “This will be me again,” she wrote on the back.
I don’t know when she’s coming back to work. Or even back home. We haven’t talked about it at all. I imagine the reality of what happened to her while she was at Halladay’s is still sinking in. I suggested she get counselling but she said, “I used to work on a rape crisis line, remember? I know exactly what they’d say.”
She hasn’t told me yet whether she is pregnant. She did go for a full exam before she left for Cuba but she didn’t offer the results and I didn’t ask. There are other risks, of course: that her rapist might have infected her with HIV or something else. She doesn’t even know if it was only one man. Those results will take longer to know.
It’s still sinking in for me too. Ugly dreams raid my sleep, including one where a man in a surgical mask starts to cut away my face with a scalpel. Waves of depression roar up on me without warning. It’s not the same depression I experienced after the concussion. It’s something else entirely.
On the plus side, my brother the lawyer, my colossus who doth bestride me, has been helping me stay out of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, despite the fervent efforts on the part of authorities to have me deposed there regarding the deaths of Sean Daggett and numerous others found inside Halladay’s and painstakingly identified. And the deaths of David Fine and Carol-Ann. And the disappearance and presumed death of Harinder Patel of Somerville.
“Do not set foot in that city,” Daniel said. “I don’t care if they ask you to throw out the first pitch at Fenway. Don’t even go to Buffalo. The minute you cross the border, you’re theirs.”
Instead, he has been drafting an affidavit that provides my version of said events. It is sadly lacking in details but so far says nothing that is out-and-out perjury. If my brother is going to get all the respect and adulation he commands from our one and only parent, he might as well fucking earn it. And if he can come up with a document that keeps the Commonwealth off my back, he will have done so, in spades.
As I lie in bed at night, trying to fall asleep, I think about Lesley McConnell and I wonder if she has had her transplant yet. I wonder how Frank is handling the death of his kid brother.
I think of Rabbi Ed and the misguided mission he set for himself, for his ego, and the tragedy it led to. I think of Ron and Sheila Fine, of course, wishing so badly I could have done better by them, that I could have come home triumphantly, David in tow, the threat to his life erased and his future as bright and shining as the city of Boston once was. All I got for them was a $250,000 endowment of a scholarship in David’s name, courtesy of Dr. E. Charles Stayner, to be given annually to the most deserving transplant fellow. I think of Shana and regret the stone wall that got thrown up between us. She was a lovely young woman, just the kind I think I could fall in love with, given half a chance. Instead, she’s another in a long line that got hurt by getting close to me.
I am not a violent man. I keep telling myself that. I think of myself as a good man at heart, who keeps getting caught up in deeds committed by men who really are violent. So call it justice. It’s how I think of it broadly. Why then can’t it roll off me the way it does Ryan? Why do I feel the cold crushing weight of every corpse? Until last June, my cases at Beacon Security had never involved more than a fist here, an elbow there. Since then, my three forays into the United States have been storms of violence.
So I tell myself, if it only happens when I go to the States, where the stakes seem higher and guns abound, then there’s a simple solution. Turn down any work that would take me there. Recommend someone local instead. Accept any referral fees, which is what I should have done when Ron Fine called. Stay in Canada, where cases rarely degenerate into the same kind of carnage. Hide my passport and keep my peace-loving self at home. Because that is what non-violent men do.
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