Darkness, Take My Hand

  Diandra flinched, lowered her eyes, and sipped her wine.

  I shrugged. “Possibly. You never know, though.” I looked at Diandra. “You said that in the past you’ve feared patients. Any of them recently released from wards or prisons who might hold a grudge?”

  “I’d have been notified.” She met my eyes and hers were vibrant with confusion and fear, a deep, encompassing fear.

  “Any current patients who might have the motive and resourcefulness to do this?”

  She spent a good minute thinking about it, but eventually shook her head. “No.”

  “I’ll need to speak to your ex-husband.”

  “Stan? Why? I don’t see the point.”

  “I need to rule out any possible connection to him. I’m sorry if it upsets you, but I’d be a fool if I didn’t.”

  “I’m not obtuse, Mr. Kenzie, but I promise you Stan has no connection to my life and hasn’t for almost two decades.”

  “I have to know everything I can about the people in your life, Doctor Warren, particularly anyone with whom you have a relationship that is not picture perfect.”

  “Patrick,” Eric said, “come on. What about privacy?”

  I sighed. “Fuck privacy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me, Eric,” I said. “Fuck privacy. Doctor Warren’s, and yours too, I’m afraid. You brought me into this, Eric, and you know how I work.”

  He blinked.

  “I don’t like the way this case feels.” I looked out at the darkness of Diandra’s loft, at the icy sheen on her windows. “I don’t like it and I’m trying to catch up on some details so I can do my job and keep Doctor Warren and her son out of danger. To accomplish that, I need to know everything about your lives. Both of you. And if you refuse me that access”—I looked at Diandra—“I’ll walk away.”

  Diandra watched me calmly.

  Eric said, “You’d leave a woman in distress? Just like that?”

  I kept my eyes on Diandra. “Just like that.”

  Diandra said, “Are you always this blunt?”

  For a quarter second, an image flashed through my brain of a woman cascading down onto hard cement, her body filled with holes, my face and clothes splattered with her blood. Jenna Angeline—dead before she hit the ground on a soft summer morning as I stood an inch away.

  I said, “I had someone die on me once because I was a step too slow. I won’t have that happen again.”

  A small tremble rippled the skin at the base of her throat. She reached up and rubbed it. “So you definitely think I’m in serious danger.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. But you were threatened. You did receive that photo. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to screw with your life. I want to find out who that is and make them stop. That’s why you hired me. Can you call Timpson for me, set up an appointment for tomorrow?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “Good. I also need a description of Moira Kenzie, anything you can remember about her, no matter how small.”

  As Diandra closed her eyes for a full minute to conjure up a complete image of Moira Kenzie, I flipped open a notepad, uncapped a pen, and waited.

  “She was wearing jeans, a black river-driver’s shirt under a red flannel shirt.” She opened her eyes. “She was very pretty with long, dirty-blond hair, a bit wispy, and she chain-smoked. She seemed authentically terrified.”

  “Height?”

  “Five five or so.”

  “Weight?”

  “I’m guessing about one ten.”

  “What kind of cigarettes did she smoke?”

  She closed her eyes again. “Long with white filters. The pack was gold. ‘Deluxe’ something or other.”

  “Benson and Hedges Deluxe Ultra Lights?”

  Her eyes snapped open. “Yes.”

  I shrugged. “My partner switches to them every time she tries to quit by cutting back. Eyes?”

  “Green.”

  “Any guesses on ethnic background?”

  She sipped her wine. “Northern European maybe, a few generations back and maybe mixed. She could have been Irish, British, even Slavic. She had very pale skin.”

  “Anything else? Where did she say she was from?”

  “Belmont,” she said with a note of mild surprise.

  “Does that seem incongruous for any reason?”

  “Well…if someone’s from Belmont, usually they go to the finer prep schools, et cetera.”

  “True.”

  “And one of the things they lose, if they ever had it, is a Boston accent. Maybe they have a light one…”

  “But not a ‘If you come to my pahty don’t fahget the beah’ type of accent.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But Moira did?”

  She nodded. “It didn’t register at the time, but now, yes, it does seem a bit odd. It wasn’t a Belmont accent, it was Revere or East Boston or…” She looked at me.

  “Or Dorchester,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “A neighborhood accent.” I closed my notebook.

  “Yes. What will you do from here, Mr. Kenzie?”

  “I’m going to watch Jason. The threat’s to him. He’s the one who feels ‘stalked,’ it was his picture you received.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to limit your activities.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Keep your office hours and appointments,” I said, “but take some time off from Bryce until I have some answers.”

  She nodded.

  “Eric?” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “That gun you’re carrying, you know how to use it?”

  “I practice once a week. I’m a good shot.”

  “It’s a little different shooting at flesh, Eric.”

  “I know that.”

  “I need you to stick as close as you can to Doctor Warren for a few days. You can do that?”

  “Certainly.”

  “If anything happens, don’t waste time trying to get a head shot or put one in some attacker’s heart.”

  “What should I do, then?”

  “Empty the gun into the body, Eric. Six shots should put down anything smaller than a rhino.”

  He looked deflated, as if his time spent at the gun club had just been revealed for the futile exercise it usually was. And maybe he really was a good shot, but I doubted anyone who attacked Diandra would be wearing a bull’s-eye in the center of his forehead.

  “Eric,” I said, “would you walk me out?”

  He nodded and we left the loft, walked down a short hall to the elevator.

  “Our friendship can’t get in the way of how I do my job. You understand that, don’t you?”

  He looked at his shoes, nodded.

  “What’s your relationship with her?”

  He met my eyes and his were hard. “Why?”

  “No privacy, Eric. Remember that. I have to know what your stake is here.”

  He shrugged. “We’re friends.”

  “Sleep-over friends?”

  He shook his head and smiled bitterly. “Sometimes, Patrick, I think you need a little polish.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not paid for my table manners, Eric.”

  “Diandra and I met when I was at Brown working on my doctorate and she was just entering the graduate program.”

  I cleared my throat. “Again—are you two intimate?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re just very good friends. Like you and Angie.”

  “You understand why I made the assumption.”

  He nodded.

  “Is she intimate with anyone?”

  He shook his head. “She’s…” He looked up at the ceiling, then back at his feet.

  “She’s what?”

  “She’s not sexually active, Patrick. By philosophical choice. She’s been celibate for at least ten years.”

  “Why?”

  His face darkened. “I told you—choice. Some people aren’t ruled
by their libidos, Patrick, hard as that concept may be for someone such as yourself to understand.”

  “Okay, Eric,” I said softly. “Is there anything you’re not telling me?”

  “Like what?”

  “Skeletons in your closet,” I said. “A reason why this person would be threatening Jason to get to you?”

  “What’re you implying?”

  “I’m not implying anything, Eric. I asked a direct question. Yes or no is all that’s required.”

  “No.” His voice was ice.

  “Sorry I have to ask these questions.”

  “Are you?” he said and turned and walked back to the apartment.

  6

  It was close to midnight when I left Diandra’s, and the city streets were quiet as I drove south along the waterfront. The temperature was still in the mid-fifties and I rolled down the windows on my latest hunk of shit and let the soft breeze cleanse the musty confines.

  After my last company car suffered a coronary on a bleak, forgotten street in Roxbury, I found this ’86 nut brown Crown Victoria at a police auction my friend Devin, a cop, had told me about. The engine was a work of art; you could drive a Crown Vic off a thirty-story building and the engine would keep chugging long after the rest of the car had shattered into small pieces. I spent money on everything under the hood and I had it outfitted with top-of-the line tires, but I left the interior the way I’d found it—roof and seats yellowed by the previous owner’s cheap cigars, back seats torn and spilling foam rubber, broken radio. Both rear doors were sharply dented, as if they’d been squeezed by forceps, and the paint on the trunk was torn off in a jagged circle that revealed the primer underneath.

  It was a hideous eyesore, but I was reasonably certain no respectable car thief would want to be caught dead in it.

  At the traffic light by the Harbor Towers, the engine hummed happily as it guzzled a few gallons of gas a minute, and two attractive young women crossed in front of the car. They looked like office workers: Both wore tight but drab skirts and blouses under wrinkled raincoats. Their dark panty hose disappeared at the ankles into identical white tennis shoes. They walked with just a hint of uncertainty, as if the pavement were sponge, and the quick laugh of the redhead was a bit too loud.

  The brunette’s eyes met mine and I smiled the innocuous smile of one human soul acknowledging another on a soft, quiet night in an often bustling city.

  She smiled back and then her friend hiccupped loudly and they both fell into each other and laughed uproariously as they reached the curb.

  I pulled away, slid onto the central artery, with the dark green expressway girded above me, found myself thinking I was a pretty odd guy if a smile from a tipsy woman could still lift my spirits as easily as it had.

  But it was an odd world, too often populated with Kevin Hurlihys and Fat Freddy Constantines and people like a woman I’d read about in the paper this morning who’d left her three children to fend for themselves in a rat-infested apartment while she went on a four-day bender with her latest boyfriend. When child welfare officials entered her apartment, they had to pull one of the kids, screaming, from the mattress his bedsores had fastened him to. It sometimes seemed in a world like this—on a night when I was filled with a growing sense of dread about a client who was being threatened for unknown reasons by unknown forces whose unknown motives couldn’t possibly be good enough—that a smile from a woman shouldn’t have any effect. But it did.

  And if her smile picked up my spirits, it was nothing compared to what Grace’s did when I pulled up to my three-decker and saw her sitting on the front porch. She was wearing a forest green canvas field jacket that was four or five sizes too big for her over a white T-shirt and blue hospital scrub pants. Usually the bangs of her short auburn hair fanned the edges of her face, but she’d obviously been running her hands through it during the last thirty hours of her shift, and her face was drawn from too little sleep and too many cups of coffee under the harsh light of the emergency room.

  And she was still one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.

  As I climbed the steps, she stood and watched me with a half-smile playing on her lips and mischief in her pale eyes. When I was three steps from the top, she spread her arms wide and tilted forward like a diver on a high board.

  “Catch me.” She closed her eyes and fell forward.

  The crush of her body against mine was so sweet it bordered on pain. She kissed me and I braced my legs as her thighs slid over my hips and her ankles crossed against the backs of my legs. I could smell her skin and feel the heat of her flesh and the tidal pull of each one of our organs and muscles and arteries hanging as if suspended beneath our separate skins. Grace’s mouth came away from mine and her lips grazed my ear.

  “I missed you,” she whispered.

  “I noticed.” I kissed her throat. “How’d you escape?”

  She groaned. “It finally slowed down.”

  “You been waiting long?”

  She shook her head and her teeth nipped my collarbone before her legs unwrapped themselves from my waist and she stood in front of me, our foreheads touching.

  “Where’s Mae?” I said.

  “Home with Annabeth. Sound asleep.”

  Annabeth was Grace’s younger sister and live-in nanny.

  “You see her?”

  “Just long enough to read her a bedtime story and kiss her good night. Then she was out like a rock.”

  “What about you?” I said, running my hand up and down her spine. “You need sleep?”

  She groaned again and nodded and her forehead hit mine.

  “Ouch.”

  She laughed softly. “Sorry.”

  “You’re exhausted.”

  She looked into my eyes. “Absolutely. More than sleep, though, I need you.” She kissed me. “Deep, deep inside me. You think you can oblige me, Detective?”

  “I’m a hell of an obliger, Doctor.”

  “I’ve heard that. You going to take me upstairs or are we going to put on a show for the neighbors?”

  “Well…”

  Her palm found my abdomen. “Tell me where it hurts.”

  “A little lower,” I said.

  As soon as I closed the apartment door behind me, Grace pinned me against the wall and buried her tongue in my mouth. Her left hand grasped the back of my head tightly, but her right ran over my body like a small, hungry animal. I’m usually on the perpetually hormonal side, but if I hadn’t quit smoking several years ago, Grace would’ve put me in intensive care.

  “The lady is in command tonight, I take it.”

  “The lady,” she said and nipped my shoulder, not very lightly, “is so horny she might have to be hosed down.”

  “Again,” I said, “the gentleman is happy to oblige.”

  She stepped back and stared at me as she pulled off her jacket and tossed it somewhere into my living room. Grace wasn’t a big neat freak. Then she kissed my mouth roughly and spun on her heel and started walking down my hallway.

  “Where you going?” My voice was a tad hoarse.

  “To your shower.”

  She peeled off her T-shirt as she reached the door to the bathroom. A small shaft of streetlight cut through the bedroom into the hall and slanted across the hard muscles in her back. She hung the T-shirt on the doorknob and turned to look at me, her arms crossed over her bare breasts. “You’re not moving,” she said.

  “I’m enjoying the view,” I said.

  She uncrossed her arms and ran both hands through her hair, arching her back, her ribcage pressing against her skin. She met my eyes again as she kicked off her tennis shoes, then peeled off her socks. She ran her hands over her abdomen and pulled the drawstring on her scrub pants. They fell to her ankles and she stepped out of them.

  “Coming out of your stupor yet?” she said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  She leaned against the doorjamb, hooked her thumbs in the elastic band of her black panties. She raised an eyebrow as I walk
ed toward her, her smile a wicked thing.

  “Oh, would you like to help me remove these, Detective?”

  I helped. I helped a lot. I’m swell at helping.

  It occurred to me as Grace and I made love in my shower that whenever I think of her, I think of water. We met during the wettest week of a cold and drizzly summer, and her green eyes were so pale they reminded me of winter rain, and the first time we made love, it was in the sea with the night rain bathing our bodies.

  After the shower, we lay in bed, still damp, her auburn hair dark against my chest, the sounds of our lovemaking still echoing in my ears.

  She had a scar the size of a thumbtack on her collarbone, the price she had paid for playing in her uncle’s barn near exposed nails when she was a kid. I leaned over and kissed it.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Do that again.”

  I ran my tongue over the scar.

  She hooked her leg over mine, ran the edge of her foot against my ankle. “Can a scar be erogenous?”

  “I think anything can be erogenous.”

  Her warm palm found my abdomen, ran over the hard rubber scar tissue in the shape of a jellyfish. “What about this one?”

  “Nothing erogenous about that, Grace.”

  “You keep evading me about it. It’s obviously a burn of some sort.”

  “What’re you—a doctor?”

  She chuckled. “Allegedly.” She ran her palm up between my thighs. “Tell me where it hurts, Detective.”

  I smiled, but I doubt it was much of one.

  She rose up on her elbow and looked at me for a long time. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said softly.

  I raised my left hand, used the backs of my fingers to brush a strand of hair off her forehead, then allowed the fingers to drop slowly down the edge of her face, along the soft warmth of her throat, and then the small, firm curve of her right breast. I grazed the nipple with my palm as I turned the hand, moved it back up to her face and pulled her down on top of me. I held her so tightly for a moment that I could hear our hearts drumming through our chests like hail falling into a bucket of water.