“All guys?”
“Most, I’d bet.”
“You?”
“No,” I said. “Not me.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
That stopped her. The smile left her face and her skin paled to eggshell, and her mouth lay open as if it had forgotten how to use words.
“What did you just say?” she managed eventually.
“You heard me.”
“Yeah, but…” She turned in her seat, looked straight ahead for a moment. Then she turned to the middle-aged black woman sitting in the seat beside her who’d been following our conversation since we got on the plane without any pretense to be doing otherwise.
“I heard him, honey,” the woman said, knitting what appeared to be a small beaver with lethal-looking needles. “Loud and clear. Don’t know about all this aura bullshit, but I heard that part just fine, thank you.”
“Wow,” Angie said to her. “You know?”
“Aww, he ain’t that good-looking,” the woman said. “He maybe rate a ‘gee’ but he don’t rate no ‘wow,’ seem to me.”
Angie turned back to me. “Gee,” she said.
“Go on,” the woman said to me, “get back to telling us about this slut made you coffee.”
“Anyway,” I said to Angie.
She blinked, closed her mouth by placing the heel of her hand to her jaw and pushing up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back to that.”
“If I wasn’t, you know—”
“In love,” the lady said.
I glared at her. “—with you, Ange, yeah, I would’ve been a dead man in there. She’s a viper. She picks guys—almost any guy—and she gets them to do her bidding, whatever that may be.”
“I want to meet this girl,” the woman said. “See if she can get my Leroy to mow the lawn.”
“But that’s what I don’t get,” Angie said. “Guys are that stupid?”
“Yes.”
“What he said,” the woman said, concentrating on her knitting.
“Women and men are different,” I said. “Most of them anyway. Particularly when it comes to their reactions to the opposite sex.” I took her hand in mine. “Desiree passes a hundred guys in the street, at least half of them will think about her for days. And when she passes, they won’t just go, ‘Nice face, nice ass, pretty smile,’ whatever. They’ll ache. They’ll want to possess her on the spot, melt into her, inhale her.”
“Inhale her?” she said.
“Yes. Men have a completely different reaction to beautiful women than women do to beautiful men.”
“So Desiree again is…?” She ran the backs of her fingers up the inside of my arm.
“The flame, and we’re the moths.”
“You ain’t half bad,” the woman said, leaning forward and looking past Angie at me. “If my Leroy could talk that sort of sweet bullshit you talk, he’d have gotten away with a lot more than he did these last twenty years.”
Poor Leroy, I thought.
Somewhere over Pennsylvania, Angie said, “Jesus.”
My head came off her shoulder. “What?”
“The possibilities,” she said.
“What possibilities?”
“Don’t you see? If we invert everything we thought, if we look at things from the perspective of Desiree being not just a little screwed up or slightly corrupt, but a black widow, a machine of relentless self-interest—then, my God.”
I sat forward. “Run with it,” I said.
She nodded. “Okay. We know she put Price up to the robbery. Right? Right. And then she gets Jay thinking about getting that money back from Price. She plays the opposite. You know, ‘Oh, Jay, can’t we be happy without the money?’ but of course, inside, she’s thinking, ‘Take the bait, take the bait, you fool.’ And Jay does. But he can’t find the money. And then she realizes where it is. And she goes there, but she doesn’t get caught like she said. She gets the money. But now she’s got a problem.”
“Jay.”
“Exactly. She knows he’ll never stop trying to find her if she disappears. And he’s good at his job. And she has to get Price out of the way, too. She can’t just disappear. She has to get dead. So…”
“She killed Illiana Rios,” I said.
We looked at each other, my eyes as wide as hers, I’m sure.
“Shot her point-blank in the face with a shotgun,” Angie said.
“Could she have?” I said.
“Why not?”
I sat there thinking about it, letting it sink in. Why not, indeed?
“If we accept this premise,” I said, “then we’re accepting that she’s—”
“Totally without conscience or morality or empathy or anything which makes us humane.” She nodded.
“And if she is,” I said, “then she didn’t just become that way overnight. She’s been that way for a long time.”
“Like father, like daughter,” Angie said.
And that’s when it hit me. Like a building had fallen on me. The oxygen in my chest swirled into a vortex created by a single instant of horrifying clarity.
“What’s the best type of lie in the world?” I asked Angie.
“The type that’s mostly true.”
I nodded. “Why does Trevor want Desiree dead so badly?”
“You tell me.”
“Because he didn’t set up that murder attempt on the Tobin Bridge.”
“She did,” Angie said in a near whisper.
“Desiree killed her mother,” I said.
“And tried to kill her father.”
“No wonder he’s pissed at her,” the woman beside Angie said.
“No wonder,” I repeated.
34
It was all there to see in black-and-white for anyone who had the right information and the right perspective. With headlines such as THREE MEN CHARGED IN BRUTAL SLAYING OF MARBLEHEAD SOCIALITE, or ALLEGED THRILL-KILL TRIO ARRAIGNED FOR CARJACK KILL, the stories quickly fell off the front page when the three killers—Harold Madsen of Lynn, Colum Devereaux of South Boston, and Joseph Brodine of Revere—entered guilty pleas the day after the grand jury’s decision to indict.
Angie and I went straight from the airport to the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. We sat in the periodical room and scrolled through microfilm of the Trib and the News until we found the stories, then read each one until we found what we were looking for.
It didn’t take long. In fact, it took less than half an hour.
The day before the grand jury met, Harold Madsen’s attorney had contacted the District Attorney’s Office with a proposed deal for his client. Madsen would enter a plea of guilty to first-degree manslaughter for a sentence of fourteen to twenty years. In exchange, he would finger the man who had hired him and his friends to kill Trevor and Inez Stone.
It had all the makings of a bombshell, because up to this point, no mention had ever been made of the murder resulting from anything but a botched car theft.
CARJACK KILLER CLAIMS: IT WAS A HIT, the News screamed.
But when the man Madsen claimed had hired them turned out to have died two days after Madsen’s arrest, the DA laughed them out of his office.
“Anthony Lisardo?” Assistant District Attorney Keith Simon said to a Trib reporter. “Are you kidding me? He was a high school buddy of two of the defendants who died of a drug overdose. It’s a pathetic ploy by the defense to give this sordid crime a grandeur it never had. Anthony Lisardo had absolutely no connection to this case.”
No one on the defense team could prove he did, either. If Madsen, Devereaux, and Brodine had been contacted by Lisardo, that fact died with him. And since their story hinged on contact with Lisardo and no one else, they took the fall for Inez Stone’s murder all by themselves.
A defendant who pleads guilty before a potentially costly trial for the state usually gets some time taken off his sentence. Madsen, Devereaux, and Brodine, however, were each convicted of first-degree murder, both the judge and the DA having r
ejected a reduction to second degree with depraved indifference. Under recent Massachusetts sentencing guidelines, there is only one possible prison term for first-degree murder—life without possibility of parole.
And personally, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over three scumbags who shot a woman to death and obviously had abscesses where their hearts should have been. Nice knowing you, boys. Careful in the shower.
But the real criminal, the person who’d put them up to this, planned it, paid for it, and left them to suffer for it alone—that person deserved as much agony as, if not more than, those boys would be subjected to for the rest of their lives.
“Case file,” I said to Angie as we left the microfilm room.
She handed it to me and I leafed through it until I found our notes on our meeting with Captain Emmett T. Groning of the Stoneham Police Department. Lisardo’s companion the night he drowned was a kid named Donald Yeager of Stoneham.
“Phone books?” Angie asked the clerk at the information desk.
There were two Yeagers in Stoneham.
Two quarters later, we’d narrowed it down to one. Helene Yeager was ninety-three years old and had never known a Donald Yeager. She’d known a few Michaels, some Eds, even a Chuck, but not that Chuck.
Donald Yeager of 123 Montvale Avenue answered his phone with a hesitant “Yeah?”
“Donald Yeager?” Angie said.
“Yeah?”
“This is Candy Swan, program director of WAAF in Worcester.”
“AAF,” Donald said. “Cool. You guys kick ass.”
“We’re the only station that really rocks,” Angie said and flipped me the bird as I gave her a thumbs-up. “Donald, the reason I’m calling is we’re starting a new segment on our seven-to-midnight show tonight called, ahm, Headbangers from Hell.”
“Cool.”
“Yeah, and what we do is interview fans such as yourself, local interest stuff, just so you can speak to our other listeners about why you love AAF, who your favorite bands are, that sort of thing.”
“I’m going to be on the air?”
“Unless you got other plans for the night.”
“No. No way. Shit. Can I call my friends?”
“Absolutely. I just need your verbal consent, and—”
“My what?”
“You need to tell me it’s okay for us to call you back later. Say around seven.”
“Okay? Shit, it’s the balls, man.”
“Good. Now you’ll be there when we call back?”
“I’m not going anywhere. Hey, do I like win a prize or something?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “How’s two black Metallica T-shirts, a Beavis and Butthead video, and four tickets to Wrestlemania Seventeen at the Worcester Centrum sound?”
“Awesome, man! Awesome. But, hey?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought Wrestlemania was only up to number sixteen.”
“My mistake, Donald. We’ll call you at seven. Make sure you’re there.”
“With bells on, babe.”
“Where’d you come up with that?” I said as we took a cab back to Dorchester to drop off our luggage, clean up, replace the guns we’d lost in Florida, and get our car.
“I don’t know. Stoneham. AAF. They seem to go together.”
“The only station that really rocks,” I said. “Dude.”
I took a fast shower after Angie’s and came back into the living room to find her rummaging through piles of her clothes. She wore a pair of black boots, black jeans, and no shirt over her black bra as she went through a stack of T-shirts.
“Mistress Gennaro,” I said. “My, my. Whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks.”
She smiled at me. “Oh, you like this look?”
I let my tongue fall over my lip and panted.
She came over to me, a black T-shirt hanging from her index finger. “When we get back here later, feel free to take it all off.”
I panted some more and she gave me a beautiful, wide grin, mussed my hair with her hand.
“Sometimes you’re sorta cute, Kenzie.”
She turned to walk back to the couch and I reached out and caught her around the waist, pulled her back to me. Our kiss was as long and deep as the first one we’d had in the bathroom the night before. Maybe longer. Maybe deeper.
When we broke from it, her hands on my face, mine on her lower back, I said, “I’ve been meaning to do that all day.”
“Don’t control your impulses next time.”
“You’re fine with last night?”
“Fine? I’m great.”
“Yes,” I said, “you are.”
Her hands came down my cheeks, rested on my chest. “When this is over, we’re going away.”
“We are?” I said.
“Yes. I don’t care if it’s to Maui or just down the street to the Suisse Chalet, but we’re putting a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and ordering room service, and we’re staying in bed for a week.”
“Whatever you say, Mistress Gennaro. You’re the boss.”
Donald Yeager took one look at Angie in her black leather jacket, jeans, boots, and Fury in the Slaughterhouse concert T-shirt with the rip over her right rib cage, and I’m quite sure he started composing his letter to the Penthouse Forum on the spot.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“Mr. Yeager?” she said. “I’m Candy Swan from WAAF.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” she said.
He opened his apartment door wide. “Come in. Come in.”
“This is my assistant, Wild Willy.”
Wild Willy?
“Yeah, yeah,” Donald said, hustling her in and barely glancing at me. “Nice to meet you and shit.”
He turned his back to me and I came in behind him and shut the door. His apartment complex was a pale, pink brick building on Montvale Avenue, Stoneham’s main strip. The building was squat and ugly, two stories high, and probably housed about sixteen units. Donald’s studio apartment, I assumed, was representative. A living room with a foldout couch that spilled dirty sheets from under the cushions. A kitchen too small to cook an egg in. From the bathroom off to the left, I could hear the steady drip of water. A scraggly roach ran along a baseboard by the couch, probably not looking for food so much as lost and disoriented from the mushroom cloud of pot smoke that hung over the living room.
Donald tossed some newspapers off the couch so Angie could take a seat under a six-foot-tall, four-foot-wide poster of Keith Richards. It was a photo I’d seen before, taken back in the early seventies. Keith looked to be very stoned—surprise—and leaned against a wall with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, the omnipresent cigarette in the other, wearing a T-shirt that bore the words JAGGER SUCKS.
Angie sat down and Donald looked up at me as I threw the bolt lock on his door and removed my gun from its holster.
“Hey!” he said.
“Donald,” Angie said, “we don’t have a lot of time here, so we’ll be brief.”
“What’s this got to do with AAF, dude?” He looked at my gun and even though I hadn’t raised it from its place down by my knee, he recoiled as if he’d been slapped.
“The AAF story was bullshit,” Angie said. “Sit down, Donald. Now.”
He sat. He was a pale kid, emaciated, with bushy yellow hair cut short and sticking straight up off his apple-shaped head. He looked at the bong on the coffee table in front of him and said, “You guys narcs?”
“Stupid people annoy me,” I said to Angie.
“Donald, we’re not narcs. We’re people with guns and not a lot of time. So, what happened the night Anthony Lisardo died?”
He clapped his hands over his face so hard I was sure it would leave welts. “Oh, man! This is about Tony? Oh man, oh man!”
“This is about Tony,” I said.
“Oh, dude!”
“Tell us about Tony,” I said. “Right now.”
“But then you’ll kill me.”
“No w
e won’t.” Angie patted his leg. “I promise.”
“Who put the coke in his cigarettes?” I said.
“I don’t know. I. Do. Not. Know.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not.”
I cocked the pistol.
“Okay, I am,” he said. “I am. Put that thing away. Please?”
“Say her name,” I said.
It was the “her” that got him. He looked at me like I was death itself and cringed on the couch. His legs rose off the floor. His elbows tightened against his sparrow’s chest.
“Say it.”
“Desiree Stone, man. It was her.”
“Why?” Angie said.
“I don’t know.” He held out his hands. “Really. I don’t. Tony’d done some shit for her, something illegal, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He just said stay away from the chick because she was bad fucking news, buddy.”
“But you didn’t stay away.”
“I did,” he said. “I did. But she, man, she came over here, like, supposedly to buy some weed, you know? And, man, she, I gotta tell ya, she, well, wow, is all I can say.”
“She screwed you so hard your eyes spun,” Angie said.
“My toes spun, man. And, like, all’s I can say is, well, she should have a ride named after her at Epcot. You know?”
“The cigarettes,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, right.” He looked down at his lap. “I didn’t know,” he said softly. “What was in them. I swear to God. I mean, Tony was my best friend.” He looked at me. “My best friend, man.”
“She told you to give him the cigarettes?” Angie said.
He nodded. “They were his brand. I was just supposed to leave them in his car. You know? But then we went driving and ended up down at the reservoir, and he lights one up and goes out into the water, and then he gets this funny look on his face. Like he’s stepping on something and he don’t like the way it feels? Anyway, that was it. Just that funny look on his face and he sorta touched his chest with his fingertips, and then he went under water.”
“You pull him out?”
“I tried. But it was dark. I couldn’t find him out there. So after like five minutes, I got scared. I left.”