Darkness, Take My Hand

  “Hey, Eric.” I held out my hand.

  He shook it. “Glad you could make it, Patrick.”

  “Hi, Eric.” Angie extended her hand.

  As he leaned over to shake it, he realized he’d exposed the gun. He closed his eyes for a moment and blushed.

  Angie said, “I would feel a lot better if you placed that gun on the coffee table until we leave, Eric.”

  “I feel like a fool,” he said, trying to crack a smile.

  “Please,” Diandra said, “just put it on the table, Eric.”

  He unsnapped the holster as if it might bite and put a Ruger .38 on top of the manila envelope.

  I met his eyes, confused. Eric Gault and a gun went together like caviar and hot dogs.

  He sat beside Diandra. “We’ve been a little on edge lately.”

  “Why?”

  Diandra sighed. “I’m a psychiatrist, Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro. I teach at Bryce twice a week and provide counseling for staff and students in addition to maintaining my practice off campus. You expect a lot of things in my line of work—dangerous clients, patients who have full psychotic episodes in a tiny office with you alone, paranoid dissociative schizophrenics who find out your address. You live with those fears. I guess you expect them to be realized one day. But this…” She looked at the envelope on the table between us. “This is…”

  I said, “Try telling us how ‘this’ started.”

  She sat back on the couch and closed her eyes for a moment. Eric placed a hand lightly on her shoulder, and she shook her head, eyes still closed, and he removed it, placed it on his knee and looked at it as if he wasn’t sure how it had gotten there.

  “A student came to see me one morning when I was at Bryce. At least she said she was a student.”

  “Any reason to think otherwise?” Angie said.

  “Not at the time. She had a student ID.” Diandra opened her eyes. “But once I did some checking I found there was no record of her.”

  “What was this person’s name?” I said.

  “Moira Kenzie.”

  I looked at Angie and she raised an eyebrow.

  “You see, Mr. Kenzie, when Eric said your name I jumped on it, hoping you’re related to this girl.”

  I thought about it. Kenzie isn’t a terribly common name. Even back in Ireland, there’s only a few of us around Dublin and a few more scattered up near Ulster. Given the cruelty and violence that festered in the hearts of my father and his brothers, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that the bloodline looked to be close to its end.

  “You said this Moira Kenzie was a girl?”

  “Yes?”

  “So she was young?”

  “Nineteen, maybe twenty.”

  I shook my head. “Then, no, I don’t know her, Doctor Warren. The only Moira Kenzie I know is a cousin of my late father. She’s in her mid-sixties and she hasn’t left Vancouver in twenty years.”

  Diandra nodded, a curt, bitter one, and her pupils seemed to dim. “Well, then…”

  “Doctor Warren,” I said, “what happened when you met this Moira Kenzie?”

  She pursed her lips and looked at Eric, then up at a heavy ceiling fan above her. She exhaled slowly through her mouth and I knew she’d decided to trust us.

  “Moira said she was the girlfriend of a man named Hurlihy.”

  “Kevin Hurlihy?” Angie said.

  Diandra Warren’s golden skin had paled to eggshell in the last minute. She nodded.

  Angie looked at me and again raised her eyebrows.

  Eric said, “You know him?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “we’ve met Kevin.”

  Kevin Hurlihy grew up with us. He’s pretty silly-looking—a gangly, tall guy with hips like doorknobs and unruly, brittle hair that looks like he styles it by sticking his head in a toilet bowl and flushing. When he was twelve years old, a cancerous growth was successfully removed from his larynx. The scar tissue from the surgery, however, left him with a cracked, high-pitched mess of a voice that sounds like the perpetual angry whine of a teenage girl. He wears Coke-bottle glasses that make his eyes bulge like a frog’s, and he has the fashion sense of an accordionist in a polka band. He’s Jack Rouse’s right-hand man and Jack Rouse runs the Irish Mafia in this city, and if Kevin looks and sounds comical, he isn’t even close.

  “What happened?” Angie said.

  Diandra looked up at the ceiling and the skin over her throat trembled. “Moira told me Kevin scared her. She told me he had her followed constantly, forced her to watch him have sex with other women, forced her to watch him have sex with associates, how he beats men who even look at her casually, and how…” She swallowed, and Eric placed a tentative hand on top of her own. “Then she told me how she’d had an affair with a man and Kevin found out and how he…killed the man and buried him in Somerville. She begged me to help her. She…”

  “Who contacted you?” I said.

  She wiped her left eye, then lit a long white cigarette with the antique lighter. As afraid as she was, her hand only betrayed the slightest tremor. “Kevin,” she said, the word popping out of her mouth like it was sour. “He called me at four in the morning. When the phone rings at four in the morning, do you know how you feel?”

  Disoriented, confused, alone, and terrified. Just the way a guy like Kevin Hurlihy wants you to feel.

  “He said all these foul things. He said, and I quote, ‘How’s it feel to be living your last week on earth, you useless cunt?’”

  Sounded like Kevin. Class all the way.

  She inhaled with a hiss.

  I said, “When did you receive this call?”

  “Three weeks ago.”

  “Three weeks?” Angie said.

  “Yes. I tried to ignore it. I called the police, but they said there was nothing they could do since I had no proof it was Kevin who called.” She ran a hand through her hair, curled into herself a bit more on the sofa, looked at us.

  “When you talked to the police,” I said, “did you mention anything about this body buried in Somerville?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” Angie said.

  “Why have you waited so long before seeking some help?”

  She reached over and slid Eric’s gun off the manila envelope. She handed the envelope to Angie, who opened it and pulled out a black-and-white photograph. She looked at it, then handed it to me.

  The young man in the photo looked to be about twenty—handsome, with long, sandy brown hair and two days’ beard stubble. He wore jeans with rips in the knees, a T-shirt under an unbuttoned flannel shirt, and a black leather jacket. The college grunge uniform. He had a notebook under his arm and was walking past a brick wall. He seemed unaware his picture was being taken.

  “My son, Jason,” Diandra said. “He’s a sophomore at Bryce. That building is the corner of the Bryce Library. The photograph arrived yesterday by regular mail.”

  “Any note?”

  She shook her head.

  Eric said, “Her name and address are typed on the front of that envelope, nothing else.”

  “Two days ago,” Diandra said, “when Jason was home for the weekend, I overheard him telling a friend on the phone that he couldn’t shake the feeling someone was stalking him. Stalking. That’s the word he used.” She pointed at the photo with her cigarette and the tremor in her hand was more noticeable. “The next day, that arrived.”

  I looked at the photo again. Classic Mafia warning—you may think you know something about us, but we know everything about you.

  “I haven’t seen Moira Kenzie since that first day. She isn’t enrolled at Bryce, the phone number she gave me is for a Chinese restaurant, and she’s not listed in any local phone directories. But yet she came to me. And now I have this in my life. And I don’t know why. Christ.” She slapped both palms down into her thighs and closed her eyes. When she opened them, all the courage she’d presumably been sucking out of the thin air for the last three weeks was gone. She looked terrified and suddenly
aware of how weak the walls we erect around our lives truly are.

  I looked at Eric, his hand on Diandra’s, and tried to gauge their relationship. I’d never known him to date a woman and always assumed he was gay. Whether true or not, I’d known him for ten years and he’d never mentioned a son.

  “Who’s Jason’s father?” I said.

  “What? Why?”

  “When a child’s involved in a threat,” Angie said, “we have to consider custody issues.”

  Diandra and Eric shook their heads simultaneously.

  “Diandra’s been divorced almost twenty years,” Eric said. “Her ex-husband is friendly but distant with Jason.”

  “I need his name,” I said.

  “Stanley Timpson,” Diandra said.

  “Suffolk County District Attorney Stan Timpson?”

  She nodded.

  “Doctor Warren,” Angie said, “since your ex-husband is the most powerful law enforcement officer in the Commonwealth, we’d have to assume that—”

  “No.” Diandra shook her head. “Most people don’t even know we were married. He has a second wife, three other children, and his contact with Jason and me is minimal. Believe me, this has nothing to do with Stan.”

  I looked at Eric.

  “I’d have to agree,” he said. “Jason has taken Diandra’s name, not Stan’s, and he has almost no contact with his father outside of a birthday phone call or Christmas card.”

  “Will you help me?” Diandra said.

  Angie and I looked at each other. Hanging out in the same zip code as people like Kevin Hurlihy and his boss, Jack Rouse, isn’t something either Angie or I consider healthy. Now we were being asked to cruise right up to their dinner tables and ask them to stop bothering our client. What fun. If we took Diandra Warren’s case, it would go down as one of the more patently suicidal decisions we’d ever made.

  Angie read my mind. “What,” she said, “you want to live forever?”

  2

  As we left Lewis Wharf and walked up Commercial, the schizophrenic New England autumn had turned an ugly morning into a glorious afternoon. When I woke up, a breeze so chilly and mean it seemed the exhalation of a Puritan god was hissing through the cracks under my windows. The sky was hard and pale as baseball leather, and people walking to their cars on the avenue were hunched into thick jackets and oversized sweaters, breath steaming around their faces.

  By the time I left my apartment, the temperature had risen into the high forties, and the muted sun, trying to push through the sheet of hard sky, looked like an orange trapped just beneath the surface of a frozen pond.

  Walking up Lewis Wharf toward Diandra Warren’s apartment, I’d removed my jacket as the sun finally broke through, and now as we drove back to the neighborhood, the mercury hovered in the high sixties.

  We drove past Copp’s Hill, and the warm breeze sweeping off the harbor rustled the trees overlooking the hill and several handfuls of burnished red leaves crested the slate headstones and fluttered down onto the grass. On our right, the stretch of wharfs and docks glinted under the sun, and to our left the brown, red, and off-white brick of the North End hinted of tile floors and old open doorways and the smells of thick sauces and garlic and freshly baked bread.

  “Can’t hate the city on a day like this,” Angie said.

  “Impossible.”

  She grasped the back of her thick hair with one hand and twisted it into a makeshift ponytail, tilting her head toward the open window to catch the sun on her face and neck. Watching her with her eyes closed and a small grin on her face, I was almost prepared to believe that she was completely healthy.

  But she wasn’t. After she left her husband, Phil, left him in a bloody heap retching off her front porch, payment for having tried to batter her body one time too many, Angie passed the winter in the mist of an increasingly short attention span and a dating ritual which left a succession of males scratching their heads as she abandoned them without notice and moved on to the next.

  Since I’ve never been a paragon of moral virtue, I couldn’t say much to her without sounding like a hypocrite, and by early spring she seemed to have bottomed out. She quit bringing warm bodies home and started to participate fully in case work again, even fixed up her apartment a bit, which for Angie meant she cleaned the oven and bought a broom. But she wasn’t whole, not like she used to be.

  She was quieter, less cocky. She’d call or drop by my apartment at the oddest hours to talk about the day we just shared. She also claimed she hadn’t seen Phil in months, but for some reason I couldn’t fully explain, I didn’t believe her.

  This was all compounded by the fact that for only the second time in all the years we’ve known each other, I couldn’t always be there for her at a moment’s notice. Since July, when I met Grace Cole, I’d been spending whole days and nights, sometimes full weekends, with her whenever we could get time together. Occasionally I’m also enlisted into babysitting duty for Grace’s daughter, Mae, and so I’m often beyond the reach of my partner except in the case of an absolute emergency. It wasn’t something either of us ever really prepared for, since as Angie once put it: “There’s a better chance of seeing a black guy in a Woody Allen movie than seeing Patrick in a serious relationship.”

  She caught me watching her at a light, opened her eyes fully and looked at me with a tiny smile playing on her lips. “Worrying about me again, Kenzie?”

  My partner the psychic.

  “Just checking you out, Gennaro. Purely sexist, nothing more.”

  “I know you, Patrick.” She leaned back from the window. “You’re still playing big brother.”

  “And?”

  “And,” she said, running the backs of her fingers along my cheek, “it’s time for you to stop.”

  I lifted a strand of hair out of her eye, just before the light turned green. “No,” I said.

  We stopped inside her house long enough for her to change into a pair of cut-off denim shorts and for me to take two bottles of Rolling Rock from her fridge. Then we sat out on her back porch listening to her neighbor’s over-starched shirts crack and snap in the breeze and enjoyed the day.

  She leaned back on her elbows, stretched her legs out in front of her. “So, we have a case suddenly.”

  “We do,” I said, glancing at her smooth olive legs and faded denim cut-offs. There might not be much good in this world, but show me anyone who has a bad thing to say about denim cut-offs and I’ll show you a lunatic.

  “Any ideas how to play it?” she said. Then, “Stop looking at my legs, you pervert. You’re practically a married man now.”

  I shrugged, leaned back myself, looked up at the bright marble sky. “Not sure. Know what bothers me?”

  “Besides Muzac, infomercials, and New Jersey accents?”

  “About this case.”

  “Pray tell.”

  “Why the name Moira Kenzie? I mean, if it’s a fake, which we can probably assume, why my last name?”

  “There’s something known as coincidence. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s when the—”

  “Okay. Something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “Kevin Hurlihy seem like the type of guy who’d have a girlfriend to you?”

  “Well, no. But it’s been years, really, since we’ve known him.”

  “Still…”

  “Who knows?” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of weird, ugly guys with beautiful women and vice versa.”

  “Kevin’s not just weird, though. He’s a sadist.”

  “So are a lot of professional boxers. You always see them with women.”

  I shrugged. “I guess. Okay. So how do we deal with Kevin?”

  “And Jack Rouse,” she said.

  “Dangerous guys,” I said.

  “Very,” she said.

  “And who deals with dangerous people on a daily basis?”

  “Certainly not us,” she said.

  “No,” I said, “we’re wusses.”

  “And proud
of it,” she said. “Which leaves…” She turned her head, squinted into the sun to look at me. “You don’t mean—” she said.

  “I do.”

  “Oh, Patrick.”

  “We must visit Bubba,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I sighed, not real happy about it myself. “Really.”

  “Damn,” Angie said.

  3

  “Left,” Bubba said. Then, “About eight inches to your right. Good. Almost there.”

  He was walking backward a few feet ahead of us, his hands held up near his chest, his fingers wiggling like he was backing in a truck. “Okay,” he said. “Left foot about nine inches to your left. That’s it.”

  Visiting Bubba in the old warehouse where he lives is a lot like playing Twister on the edge of a cliff. Bubba’s got the first forty feet of the second floor wired with enough explosives to vaporize the eastern seaboard, so you have to follow his directions to the letter if you want to breathe without artificial assistance for the rest of your life. Both Angie and I have been through the process countless times before, but we’ve never trusted our memories enough to cross those forty feet without Bubba’s help. Call us overly cautious.

  “Patrick,” he said, looking at me gravely as my right foot hovered a quarter inch off the ground, “I said six inches to the right. Not five.”

  I took a deep breath and moved my foot another inch.

  He smiled and nodded.

  I set my foot down. I didn’t blow up. I was glad.

  Behind me, Angie said, “Bubba, why don’t you just invest in a security system?”

  Bubba frowned. “This is my security system.”

  “This is a minefield, Bubba.”

  “You say tomato,” Bubba said. “Four inches left, Patrick.”