“Desiree knew he had an allergic reaction to coke, didn’t she?” I said.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Tony only did pot and booze, though as a Messenger and all, he wasn’t supposed to—”
“Lisardo belonged to the Church of Truth and Revelation?”
He looked up at me. “Yeah. Since he was, like, a kid.”
I sat on the arm of the couch for a moment, took a deep breath, got a mouthful of Donald Yeager’s pot fumes for my trouble.
“Everything,” Angie said.
I looked over at her. “What?”
“Everything this woman’s done since day one has been calculated. The ‘depression,’ Grief Release, everything.”
“How’d Lisardo become a Messenger?” I asked Donald.
“His mother, man, she’s kinda nutty ’cause her husband’s a loan shark and shit; she joined, forced Tony into it, about ten years ago. He was a kid.”
“How’d Tony feel about it?” Angie said.
He waved his hand dismissively. “Thought it was a pile of shit. But he respected it, too, kinda, ’cause he said they were like his dad—always scamming. He said they had lots of money—boatloads of the shit—they couldn’t report to no IRS.”
“Desiree knew all this, didn’t she?”
He shrugged. “Not so’s she told me or nothing.”
“Come on, Donald.”
He looked up at me. “I don’t know. Tony was a talker. Okay? So, yeah, he probably told Desiree everything about himself from the womb on. I mean, not long before he died, Tony told me he’d met this dude was going to take off the Church for some serious cash, and I’m like, ‘Tony, don’t be telling me these kinda things.’ You know? But Tony was a talker. He was a talker.”
Angie and I locked eyes. She’d been right a minute ago. Desiree had calculated every single move she’d made. She’d targeted Grief Release and the Church of Truth and Revelation. Not the other way around. She’d zeroed in on Price. And Jay. And everyone else, probably, who’d ever thought they were zeroing in on her.
I whistled softly under my breath. You almost had to hand it to the woman. She was a piece of work, unlike any other.
“So, Donald, you didn’t know the cigarettes were laced?” I said.
“No,” he said. “No way.”
I nodded. “You just thought she was being nice, giving her ex-boyfriend a free pack of smokes.”
“No, look, it’s like, I didn’t know know. I just, see, Desiree, she’s, well, she gets what she wants. Always.”
“And she wanted your best friend dead,” Angie said.
“And you made sure she got it,” I said.
“No, man, no. I loved Tony. I did. But Desiree—”
“Was a great fuck,” Angie said.
He closed his mouth, looked at his bare feet.
“I hope she was the greatest of all time,” I said. “Because you helped her kill your best friend. And you gotta live with that for the rest of your life. Take it easy.”
We walked to his door, opened it.
“She’ll kill you, too,” he said.
We looked back at him. He leaned forward, packed weed into the bong with trembling fingers. “You get in her way—anything gets in her way—she’ll wipe it out. She knows I won’t say anything to any real cops, because I’m…nothing. You know?” He looked up at us. “See, Desiree? I don’t think she cares about screwing. Good as she is at it, I get the feeling she could take it or leave it. But destroying people? Man, I bet that gets her off like a bottle rocket on the Fourth of July.”
35
“What’s she gain by coming back here?” Angie said, adjusting the focus on her binoculars and peering through them at the lighted windows of Jay’s condo in Whittier Place.
“Probably not her mother’s memoirs,” I said.
“I think we can safely rule that out.”
We were parked in a lot under an expressway off-ramp, on an island between the new Nashua Street Jail and Whittier Place. We’d sunk as low as possible in our seats so we could get a clear view of the bedroom and living room windows of Jay’s place, and in the time we’d been here, we’d seen two figures—one male, one female—pass the windows. We didn’t even know if the female was Desiree for sure because Jay’s thin curtains were drawn and all we could see were silhouettes. The identity of the male was anyone’s guess. Still, given Jay’s security system, we thought it was a safe bet that that was Desiree up there.
“So what could it be?” Angie said. “I mean, she’s got the two mil probably, she’s safely hidden in Florida with enough money to get as far away as she wants. Why come back?”
“I don’t know. Maybe to finish the job she started almost a year ago.”
“Kill Trevor?”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
“To what end, though?”
“Huh?”
“To what end? This girl, Patrick, she always has an angle. She doesn’t do anything for just emotional reasons. When she killed her mother and tried to kill her father, what do you think her primary motivation was?”
“Emancipation?” I said.
She shook her head. “That’s not a good enough reason.”
“A good enough reason?” I put my binoculars down and looked at her. “I don’t think she needs much of a reason. Remember what she did to Illiana Rios. Hell, remember what she did to Lisardo.”
“Right, but there was logic there. There was reason, twisted as it may have been. She killed Lisardo because he was the only link between her and the three guys who killed her mother. She killed Illiana Rios because it helped cover her tracks when she stole the two million back from Price. In both cases she achieved a notable gain. What’s her gain now if she kills Trevor? And what was her original gain when she tried to kill him eight months ago?”
“Well, originally, we can assume it was money.”
“Why?”
“Because she was probably the primary beneficiary of his will. Her parents die, she inherits a few hundred million.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“Okay,” I said. “But now that makes no sense. No way Trevor’s still got her in the will anymore.”
“Right. So why’s she coming back?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
She lowered her own binoculars, rubbed her eyes. “It’s a mystery, isn’t it?”
I leaned back against the car seat for a moment, cracked my neck and back muscles against the seat, and instantly regretted it. Once again, I’d forgotten about my damaged shoulder and the pain exploded across my collarbone, drove straight up the left side of my neck, and stabbed its way into my brain. I took a few shallow breaths and swallowed against the bile surging in my chest.
“Illiana Rios had enough in common with Desiree physically,” I said eventually, “to make Jay think her corpse was Desiree’s.”
“Yeah. So?”
“You think that was by accident?” I turned on the car seat. “Whatever their relationship was, Desiree picked Illiana Rios to die in that motel room precisely because of their physical similarities. She was thinking that far ahead.”
Angie shuddered. “That woman is intense.”
“Exactly. Which is why the mother’s death makes no sense.”
“Excuse me?” She turned on the car seat.
“The mother’s car broke down that night. Right?”
“Right.” She nodded. “And then the mother called Trevor, which ensured she’d be in the car with him when Lisardo’s friends—”
“What’re the odds, though? I mean, given Trevor’s schedule and work habits and relationship with his wife to boot—what are the odds Inez would call him for a ride? And what’re the odds he’d be there to receive that call? And what’s to say he’d even agree to pick her up, not just tell her to hop a cab?”
“It is leaving a lot to chance,” she said.
“Right. And Desiree never leaves anything to chance, as you said.”
“You’re saying the m
other’s death wasn’t part of the plan?”
“I don’t know.” I looked up at the window and shook my head. “With Desiree, I don’t know a lot. Tomorrow, she wants us to accompany her to the house. Ostensibly for protection.”
“As if she ever needed protection in her entire life.”
“Right. So why does she want us there? What is she setting us up for?”
We sat there for quite a while, binoculars pointed up at Jay’s windows, waiting for an answer to my question.
At seven-thirty the next morning, Desiree showed herself.
And I almost walked into her field of vision.
I was coming back from a coffee shop on Causeway Street, Angie and I both having decided our need for caffeine after a night in a car made the risk worthwhile.
I was about ten feet from our car, across from Jay’s building when the front door opened. I pulled up short and froze by a support beam to the expressway ramp.
A well-dressed man in his late forties or early fifties came out of Whittier Place first, a briefcase in hand. He placed the briefcase on the ground, went to shrug into his topcoat, then sniffed and leaned back into the bright sunlight, got a taste of uncommonly warm March air. He put the topcoat back over his arm and picked up his briefcase, looked back over his shoulder as a small group of morning commuters came out behind him. He smiled at someone in the group.
She didn’t smile back and at first the bun in her hair and the glasses over her eyes threw me. She wore a charcoal woman’s business suit, the hem of the skirt stopping just at her knees, a stiff white blouse underneath, a dove-gray scarf around her neck. She paused to work at the collar of her black topcoat, and the rest of the crowd broke for their cars or walked toward North Station and Government Center, a few heading for the overpass that led toward the Museum of Science or Lechmere Station.
Desiree watched them go with flat contempt and an air of rigid hatred in the set of her slim legs. Or maybe I was reading too much into it.
Then the well-dressed man leaned in and kissed her cheek and she ran the backs of her fingers lightly across his crotch and stepped away.
She said something to him, smiling as she did, and he shook his head, a bemused grin on his powerful face. She walked into the parking lot, and I saw that she was heading for Jay’s midnight-blue 1967 Ford Falcon convertible, which had been sitting in the parking lot since he’d left for Florida.
I felt a deep, uncompromising hatred for her as I watched her place her key in the door lock, because I knew the time and money Jay had spent restoring that car, rebuilding the engine, searching nationwide for specific parts. It was just a car, and appropriation of it was the least of her crimes, but it seemed like it was a part of Jay still alive out there in the lot and she was closing in for one last kick.
The man walked out onto the sidewalk almost directly across from me and I stepped back farther behind the support beam. He changed his mind about the topcoat as he got a hit of the biting wind coming down off Causeway Street. He put it on as Desiree started the Falcon, and then he began to walk up the street.
I stepped around the support beam and behind the car, and Angie’s eyes met mine in the sideview mirror.
She pointed at Desiree, then herself.
I nodded, pointed at the man.
She smiled and blew me a kiss.
She started the car and I cut across the street to the sidewalk, followed the man up Lomasney Way.
A minute later, Desiree passed me in Jay’s car, followed by a white Mercedes, which was followed by Angie. I watched all three cars wind up to Staniford Street and go right, heading toward Cambridge Street and an infinite number of possible destinations beyond.
By the way the man ahead of me tucked his briefcase under his arm and dug his hands into his pockets at the next corner, I could tell we were in for a walk. I let fifty yards get between us and followed him up Merrimac Street. Merrimac emptied onto Congress Street at Haymarket Square and another blast of wind found us as we crossed New Sudbury and continued in the direction of the financial district, where more architectural styles mixed together than in just about any city in which I’d ever been. Shimmering glass and slabs of granite towered over sudden four-story bursts of Ruskinian Gothic and Florentine pseudopalaces; modernism met German Renaissance met postmodernism met pop met Ionic columns and French cornices and Corinthian pilasters and good old New England granite and limestone. I’ve spent entire days in the financial district, doing nothing but looking at buildings and feeling, on more optimistic days, that it could stand as metaphor for how to live in the world—all these different perspectives piling in on each other and still managing to make it work.
Though, if I had my druthers, I’d still nuke City Hall.
Just before we would have entered the heart of the financial district, the man turned left, cutting across the nexus of State, Congress, and Court streets, stepping on the stones that commemorate the site of the Boston Massacre, and walked another twenty yards and turned into the Exchange Place Building.
I broke into a trot because Exchange Place is huge with at least sixteen elevator banks. When I walked onto the marble floors under ceilings that stretched four stories above me, I didn’t see him. I took a right into the express elevator corridor and saw two doors sliding to a close.
“Hold, please!” I jogged to the doors and just managed to get my good shoulder in between them. They receded but not before giving my shoulder a hard squeeze. Tough week for shoulders.
The man leaned against the wall, watching me as I came in, an annoyed look on his face, as if I’d interrupted his private time.
“Thanks for holding the door,” I said.
He stared straight ahead. “There are plenty of other elevators at this time of morning.”
“Ah,” I said, “a Christian.”
As the doors closed, I noticed he’d pressed floor 38, and I nodded at the button, and leaned back.
He looked at my bruised and pocked face, the sling around my arm, the clothes I’d wrinkled almost beyond recognition by sitting in a car for eleven hours.
“You have business on thirty-eight?” he said.
“I do.”
I closed my eyes, leaned against the wall.
“What sort of business?” he said.
“What sort do you think?” I said.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Then maybe you’re going to the wrong floor,” I said.
“I work there.”
“And you don’t know what sort of business they do? Jeez. First day?”
He sighed as the elevator raced past floors 1 through 20 so fast I thought my cheeks would slide off my chin.
“Young man,” he said, “I think you’ve made a mistake.”
“Young man?” I said, but when I got a closer look at him I realized my original estimate of his age had been off by at least a decade. His tan, tight skin and rich dark hair had thrown me off, as had the energy in his step, but he was at least a young-looking sixty.
“Yes, I really think you have the wrong place.”
“Why?”
“Because I know all the firm’s clients, and I don’t know you.”
“I’m new,” I said.
“I doubt it,” he said.
“No, really,” I said.
“No way in hell,” he said and gave me a paternal grin of perfectly capped white teeth.
He’d said “firm,” and I took a guess that it wasn’t an accounting firm.
“I was injured,” I said, indicating my arm. “I’m a drummer for Guns N’ Roses, the rock band. You heard of them?”
He nodded.
“So we had a show last night at the Fleet and somebody set off some pyrotechnics in the wrong place, and now I need a lawyer.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“The drummer for Guns N’ Roses is named Matt Sorum, and you don’t look anything like him.”
A sixty-year-old Guns N’ Roses fan? How could t
his be? And why was it happening to me?
“Was Matt Sorum,” I said. “Was. He and Axl had a falling-out, and I was called in.”
“To play at the Fleet Center?” he said as the elevator reached 38.
“Yeah, buddy.”
The doors opened and he blocked them into the return panel by placing his hand against it. “Last night at the Fleet Center, the Celtics played the Bulls. I know. I’m a season ticket holder.” He gave me that great smile again. “Whoever you are, pray this elevator gets back down to the lobby before security does.”
He stepped out and stared at me as the doors began to close. Behind him, I saw the words GRIFFIN, MYLES, KENNEALLY AND BERGMAN in gold leaf.
I smiled. “Desiree,” I whispered.
He reached forward and slapped his hand between the doors and they jumped back.
“What did you just say?”
“You heard me, Mr. Griffin. Or should I call you Danny?”
36
His office had everything the prosperous man needs, save a jet hangar. And he could have fit one if he chose.
The outside offices were empty except for a single male secretary filling coffee filters at intervals of every fourth cubicle and inside each office. Somewhere, far on the other end, someone ran a vacuum cleaner.
Daniel Griffin hung his topcoat and suit jacket in his closet and walked around a desk so big I was sure it was measured in yard lines. He took a seat and motioned for me to sit across from him.
I stood.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private investigator. Call Cheswick Hartman if you want my life story.”
“You know Cheswick?”
I nodded.
“You’re not the one who extricated his sister from that…situation in Connecticut several years back?”
I lifted a heavy bronze statuette off the corner of his desk, looked at it. It was a representation of some Eastern god or mythological figure, a woman wearing a crown on her head, but her face marred by the trunk of an elephant in place of a nose. She sat cross-legged as fish jumped from the sea toward her feet, her four hands holding a battle ax, a diamond, an ointment bottle, and a coiled serpent respectively.