Darkness, Take My Hand

by Dennis Lehane

  “Black guy,” he said, the soft grin again playing on his lips. “That was the rumor at the time, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Can’t find someone to blame, blame a jig. Right?”

  I shrugged. “That was the story back then.”

  “Well, he wasn’t stabbed. That was just what we told the media. He was crucified. And it wasn’t a black guy did it. We found red hair and blond hair and brown hair in Cal Morrison’s clothing, but no black. And Alec Hardiman and a friend of his, Charles Rugglestone, had been seen in the neighborhood earlier that night, and we were already on edge about the other killings, so until we busted someone, we didn’t mind the black guy story circulating for a while.” He shrugged. “Not like too many black guys were going to stumble into this neighborhood back then, so it seemed a safe cover for a while.”

  “Gerry,” I said, “what other killings?”

  The bar door opened, the heavy wood banging against the brick exterior and we both looked at a man with spiky hair and a nose ring and a torn T-shirt hanging untucked over fashionably eviscerated jeans.

  “Closed,” Gerry said.

  “Just a wee spot to warm me stumuch on a lonely night,” the guy said in a horrendously fake brogue.

  Gerry came off the cooler and walked around the bar. “You even know where you are, son?”

  Underneath my hand, Patton’s muscles tightened and he raised his head, stared at the kid.

  The kid took a step forward. “Just a wee spot of whiskey.” He giggled into his hand, blinked into the light and his face was swollen with booze and God knows what else.

  “Kenmore Square is that way,” Gerry said and pointed back out the door.

  “Don’t want Kenmore Square,” the guy said. He swayed slightly from side to side as he fumbled in his waistband for his cigarettes.

  “Son,” Gerry said, “it’s time for you to be moving on.”

  Gerry put his arm on the guy’s shoulder and for a moment the guy looked ready to shrug it off, but then he looked at me and then Patton and then down at Gerry. Gerry’s demeanor was kind and warm, and he was four inches shorter, but even this guy, drunk as he was, sensed how quickly that kindness could disappear if he pushed it.

  “Just wanted a drink,” he mumbled.

  “I know,” Gerry said. “But I can’t give you one. You got cab fare? Where you live?”

  “I just wanted a drink,” the guy repeated. He looked up at me and tears leaked down his cheeks and the damp cigarette hung flacid between his lips. “I just…”

  “Where you live?” Gerry asked again.

  “Huh? Lower Mills.” The guy sniffled.

  “You can walk around Lower Mills dressed like that without getting your ass kicked?” Gerry smiled. “Place must have changed a lot in ten years.”

  “Lower Mills,” the guy sobbed.

  “Son,” Gerry said, “ssshh. It’s okay. It’s all right. You go out this door, you take a right, there’s a cab half a block up. Cabbie’s name is Achal and he’s there till three on the dot. You tell him to take you to Lower Mills.”

  “I don’t got no money.”

  Gerry patted the kid’s hip and when he pulled his hand away there was a ten-dollar bill in the kid’s waistband. “Looks like you got a sawbuck you forgot about.”

  The kid looked down at his waistband. “Mine?”

  “It ain’t mine. Now go get in that cab. Okay?”

  “Okay.” The kid sniffled as Gerry led him back out the door, and then suddenly he spun and hugged as much of Gerry as he could get his arms around.

  Gerry chuckled. “Okay. Okay.”

  “I love you, man,” the kid said. “I love you!”

  A cab pulled to the curb outside and Gerry nodded at the driver as he disentangled himself. “Go on now. Go on.”

  Patton lowered his head and rolled into a fetal position on the bar, closed his eyes. I scratched his nose and he nipped my hand gently, seemed to smile sleepily at me.

  “I love you!” the kid bellowed as he stumbled out.

  “I’m moved,” Gerry said. He shut the door to the bar and we heard the taxi’s axles clack as it pulled a U-turn on the avenue to head down to Lower Mills. “Deeply moved.” Gerry locked the door and raised his eyebrows at me, ran a hand through the rusty stubble on his head.

  “Still Officer Friendly,” I said.

  He shrugged, then frowned. “Did I do that at your school—the Officer Friendly lecture?”

  I nodded. “Second grade at St. Bart’s.”

  He took his bottle and shot glass over to a table by the jukebox and I joined him, left my shot glass on the bar, seven feet away from me, where it belonged. Patton remained on the bar, eyes closed, dreaming of large cats.

  He leaned back in his chair and arched his back, stretched his arms behind his head and yawned loudly. “You know something? I remember that now.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “That was over twenty years ago.”

  “Mmm.” He brought the chair legs back to the floor, poured himself another drink. By my count he’d had six shots and there was absolutely no noticeable effect. “That class was something, though,” he said, tilting the glass toward me in toast. “There was you and Angela and that shitbird she married, what was his name.”

  “Phil Dimassi.”

  “Phil, yeah.” He shook his head. “Then there was that head case Kevin Hurlihy and that other nut job, Rogowski.”

  “Bubba’s okay.”

  “I know you guys are friends, Patrick, but give me a break. He’s a suspect in maybe seven unsolved homicides.”

  “Real nice guys, I’m sure, the victims.”

  He shrugged. “Killing is killing. You take a life without cause, you should be punished. All there is to it.”

  I sipped my beer, glanced at the jukebox.

  “You don’t agree?” he said.

  I held out my hands, leaned back in my chair. “I used to. Sometimes, though, I mean come on, Gerry—Kara Rider’s life was worth more than the life of the guy who killed her.”

  “Beautiful,” he said and gave me a dark smile. “Utilitarian logic at its best, and the cornerstone of most facist ideologies, if you don’t mind me mentioning.” He downed another shot, watching me with clear, steady eyes. “If you presuppose that a victim’s life is worth more than a murderer’s, and then you yourself go and kill that murderer, doesn’t that then make your own life less worthy than the murderer you killed?”

  “What,” I said, “you’re a Jesuit now, Gerry? Going to wrap me up in syllogisms?”

  “Answer the question, Patrick. Don’t be glib.”

  Even when I’d been a kid, there’d always been something oddly ethereal about Gerry. He didn’t exist on the same plane as the rest of us. You sensed that some part of him swam in the spiritual murk that the priests told us existed just above the realm of our everyday consciousness. The place from which dreams and art and faith and divine inspiration were sprung.

  I went behind the bar for another beer, and he watched me with those calm, kind eyes. I dug around the cooler, found another Harpoon, and came back to the table.

  “We could sit here and debate it all night, Gerry, and maybe in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be true, but in this one, yeah, some lives are worth a lot more than others.” I shrugged at his cocked eyebrow. “Might make me a facist but I’d say Mother Teresa’s life is worth more than Michael Millken’s. I’d say Martin Luther King’s was worth a lot more than Hitler’s.”

  “Interesting.” His voice was almost a whisper. “So if you are able to judge the worth of another human life, you are yourself, by infeRenee, superior to that life.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Are you better than Hitler?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Stalin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pol Pot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me?”

  “You?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re no
t a killer, Gerry.”

  He shrugged. “Is that how you judge? You’re better than someone who kills or orders others to kill?”

  “If those killings are done to victims who pose no real physical threat to the killer or the person who orders the killing, then yes, I am better than them.”

  “So you’re superior to Alexander, Caesar, several U.S. presidents, a few popes.”

  I laughed. He’d set me up and I’d felt it coming, but I hadn’t seen where it would come from.

  “Like I said, Gerry, I think you’re half Jesuit.”

  He smiled and rubbed his bristled scalp. “I’ll admit, they taught me well.” His eyes narrowed and he leaned into the table. “I just hate this idea that some people have more of a right to take a life than others. It’s an inherently corrupt concept. You kill, you should be punished.”

  “Like Alec Hardiman?”

  He blinked. “You’re part pit bull, aren’t you, Patrick?”

  “What my clients pay me for, Ger.” I reached across and refilled his shot glass for him. “Tell me about Alec Hardiman and Cal Morrison and Jamal Cooper.”

  “Maybe Alec killed Cal Morrison and Cooper, too, I don’t know for sure. Whoever killed those boys was making some kind of statement, that’s for sure. Crucified Morrison below the Edward Everett statue, shoved an ice pick through his larynx so he couldn’t scream, cut off pieces of him that were never found.”

  “What pieces?”

  Gerry’s fingers drummed the tabletop for a moment, his lips pursed as he decided how much to tell me. “His testicles, a kneecap, both big toes. It fit with some other victims we knew about.”

  “Other victims besides Cooper?”

  “Not long before Cal Morrison was killed,” Gerry said, “a few winos and hookers from the Zone downtown to as far away as the Springfield bus depot were murdered. Six in all, starting with Jamal Cooper. The murder weapons varied, the victim profiles varied, the methods of execution varied, but Brett and I believed it was all the work of the same two killers.”

  “Two?” I said.

  He nodded. “Working in tandem. Conceivably it could have been one guy, but he would have had to be astonishingly strong, ambidexterous, quick as lightning.”

  “If the murder weapons and MO and victim selection were so varied, why’d you think it was the same killers?”

  “There was a level of cruelty to the kills like I’d never seen before. Never seen since, either. Not only did these guys enjoy their work, Patrick, but they—or he—were also thinking of the people who found the bodies, how they’d react. They cut a wino into a hundred sixty-four pieces. Think about it. One hundred and sixty-four pieces of flesh and bone, some no bigger than a fingertip, left on the bureau top and along the headboard, spaced out on the floor, hanging from hooks along the shower rod in this little flophouse room down in the Zone. Place ain’t even there no more, but I can’t drive by the space it used to occupy without thinking about that room. A sixteen-year-old runaway in Worcester, he snapped her neck and then twisted her head around a hundred eighty degrees, wrapped it in duct tape so it would stay that way for the first person through the door. It was beyond anything I’ve ever come up against, and no one can tell me that those six victims, all still officially unsolved cases, weren’t killed by the same one or more people.”

  “And Cal Morrison?”

  He nodded. “Number seven. And Charles Rugglestone, possibly, would be number eight.”

  “Wait,” I said, “the Rugglestone who was friends with this Alec Hardiman?”

  “You bet.” He raised his glass, put it back down, stared at it. “Charles Rugglestone was murdered in a warehouse not far from here. He was stabbed with an ice pick thirty-two times, bludgeoned with a hammer so hard that the holes in his skull looked like small animals had been living in his brain and decided to eat their way out. He was also burned, piece by piece, from his ankles to his neck, most of it while he was still breathing. We found Alec Hardiman passed out in the dispatch office with Rugglestone’s blood all over him and the ice pick a few feet away, his prints all over it.”

  “So he did it.”

  Gerry shrugged. “Every year, because his father asked me to, I visit Alec at Walpole. And, maybe, I dunno, because I like him. I still see the little kid in him. Whatever. But as much as I like him, he’s a cipher. Is he capable of murder? Yeah. I don’t doubt that for a second. But I can also tell you that no single man, no matter how strong—and Alec wasn’t all that strong—could have done what was done to Rugglestone.” He pursed his lips and downed the shot. “But as soon as Alec went to trial, the killings I’d been investigating dried up. His father, of course, retired not long after the arrest, but I kept looking into the Morrison murder and the six that came before it, and I cleared Alec of involvement in at least two of those.”

  “But he was convicted.”

  “For Rugglestone’s murder only. Nobody wanted to admit that they’d suspected a serial killer was out there and didn’t notify the general public. No one wanted more egg on their faces after the son of a decorated cop was arrested for a brutal murder. So Alec went to trial for Rugglestone’s murder and he was sentenced to life in prison and he’s up at Walpole rotting away. His father went to Florida, probably died trying to figure out where it all went so wrong. And none of this would matter, I suppose, except that someone crucified Kara Rider on a hill and someone else gave you my name and the name Alec Hardiman.”

  “So,” I said, “if there actually was more than one killer, and Alec Hardiman was one of them…”

  “Then the other one’s still out there, yeah.” Dark pockets had formed under his eyes and hollowed them out. “And if he’s still out there after almost twenty-something years, and he’s been holding his breath all this time for some sort of comeback, I’d say he’s probably pretty pissed off.”

  16

  It was snowing on a bright summer day when Kara Rider stopped me to ask how the Jason Warren case was going.

  She’d changed her hair back to its original blond and she was sitting in a lawn chair outside The Black Emerald wearing only a pink bikini bottom and the snow fell to either side of her and piled up by the chair, but only sun fell on her skin. Her small breasts were hard, and beaded with perspiration, and I had to keep reminding myself that I’d known her since she was a little kid, and I shouldn’t be noticing them in a sexual context.

  Grace and Mae were half a block up, Grace placing a black rose in Mae’s hair. Across the avenue a pack of white dogs, small and gnarled like fists, watched them and drooled, thick streams pouring from the sides of their mouths.

  “I got to go,” I said to Kara, but when I looked back, Grace and Mae were gone.

  “Sit,” Kara said. “Just for a sec.”

  So I sat and the snow fell down the back of my collar and chilled my spine. My teeth chattered as I said, “I thought you were dead.”

  “No,” she said. “I just went away for a while.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Brookline. Shit.”

  “What?”

  “This place looks just the fucking same.”

  Grace stuck her head out of The Black Emerald. “You ready, Patrick?”

  “Got to go,” I said and patted Kara’s shoulder.

  She took my hand and laid it against her bare breast.

  I looked at Grace, but she didn’t seem to mind. Angie stood beside her and they both smiled.

  Kara stroked her nipple with my palm. “Don’t forget about me.”

  Snow was pouring on her body now, burying it.

  “I won’t. I gotta go.”

  “Bye.”

  The legs of her lawn chair collapsed under the weight of the snow, and when I looked back I could just make out her form under drifts of soft white.

  Mae came out of the bar and took my hand and fed it to her dog.

  I watched my blood foam in the dog’s mouth, and it didn’t hurt—it was almost sweet.

  “See,” Mae said
, “he likes you, Patrick.”

  The last week of October, we bailed out of the Jason Warren case by mutual agreement with Diandra and Eric. I know guys who would’ve milked it, played up to the fears of a worried mother, but I don’t milk cases. Not because I’m particularly moral, but because it’s bad business when half your living comes from repeat clients. We had files on all of Jason’s teachers since he’d come to Bryce (eleven) and all his known acquaintances (Jade, Gabrielle, Lauren, and his roommate) except the guy with the goatee, and nothing about any of them suggested they were a threat to Jason. We had write-ups of our daily observation work, as well as synopses of our meeting with Fat Freddy, Jack Rouse, and Kevin Hurlihy, and my own telephone discussion with Stan Timpson.

  Diandra had received no more threats, phone calls, or pictures in the mail. She’d spoken with Jason in New Hampshire, mentioned that a friend of hers had seen him with a guy in the Sunset Grill the previous week, and Jason had described him as “just a friend” and offered no more information.

  We spent another week tailing him, and it was more of the same—explosions of sexual activity, solitude, studying.

  Diandra agreed that we were all getting nowhere, that there was nothing outside of her having received that photograph to suggest Jason was in any danger whatsoever, and we finally came to the conclusion that maybe our original perception—that Diandra had inadvertently angered Kevin Hurlihy—had been correct after all. Once we’d met with Fat Freddy, every hint of threat had disappeared; maybe Freddy, Kevin, Jack and the whole mob had decided to back off, but hadn’t wished to lose face to a couple of PIs.

  Whatever the situation, it was over now, and Diandra paid us for our time and thanked us, and we left our cards and home numbers in case anything sprang back up and went back to our lives during our business’s dullest season.

  A few days later, at his behest, we met Devin in The Black Emerald at two o’clock in the afternoon. There was a “Closed” sign in the doorway, but we knocked and Devin opened the door, locked it behind us after we came in.

  Gerry Glynn was behind the bar, sitting on the cooler, not looking very happy, and Oscar sat by a plate of food at the bar, and Devin took his seat beside him and bit into the bloodiest cheeseburger this side of an open flame.