Darkness, Take My Hand

  …And fifty-seven more.

  Standing there, looking at all of them, trying to comprehend the enormous gulf of diffeRenee in the myriad of messages, my head began to throb. It was like looking at a schizophrenic’s cat scan while all the poor bastard’s personalities got into a shouting match.

  “Screwy,” Angie said.

  “There’s a word, sure.”

  “Can you see anything any of these have in common?”

  “Besides that they’re all bumper stickers?”

  “I think that goes without saying, Patrick.”

  I shook my head. “Then, no, I’m at a loss.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’ll think about it in the shower,” I said.

  “Good idea,” she said. “You smell like a wet bar rag.”

  With my eyes closed in the shower, I saw Kara standing on the sidewalk as the stale beer stench flowed from the bar behind her, looking out at the traffic on Dorchester Avenue, saying it all looked just the fucking same.

  “Be careful,” she’d said.

  I stepped back out of the shower and dried off, saw her pale exposed body crucified, nailed to a dirt hill.

  Angie was right. It wasn’t my fault. You can’t save people. Particularly when a person isn’t even asking to be saved. We bounce and collide and smash our way through our lives, and for the most part, we’re on our own. I owed Kara nothing.

  But nobody should die like that, a voice whispered.

  In the kitchen, I called Richie Colgan, an old friend and columnist for The Trib. As usual, he was busy, his voice distant and rushed, the words all running together: “GoodtohearfromyouPat. What’sup?”

  “Busy?”

  “Ohyeah.”

  “Could you check something for me?”

  “Shoot, shoot.”

  “Crucifixions as a method of murder. How many in this city?”

  “In?”

  “’In?’”

  “How far back?”

  “Say twenty-five years.”

  “Library.”

  “Huh?”

  “Library. Heardofit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ilooklikeone?”

  “Usually when I get info from a library, I don’t buy the librarian a case of Michelob afterward.”

  “Heineken.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’monit. Talktoyousoon.” He hung up.

  When I came back into the living room, the “HI!” note was lying on the coffee table, the bumper stickers were stacked in two neat piles underneath it, and Angie was watching TV. I’d changed into jeans and a cotton shirt and entered the living room toweling my hair dry.

  “Whatcha watching?”

  “CNN,” she said, looking at the newspaper on her lap.

  “Anything exciting going on in our world today?”

  She shrugged. “An earthquake in India killed over nine thousand people, and a guy in California shot up the office where he works. Killed seven with a machine gun.”

  “Post office?” I said.

  “Accounting firm.”

  “That’s what happens when CPAs get ahold of automatic weapons,” I said.

  “Apparently.”

  “Any other happy news I should hear?”

  “At some point, they broke in to tell us Liz Taylor’s getting divorced again.”

  “Oh joy,” I said.

  “So,” she said, “what’s our plan?”

  “Go sit on Jason again, maybe drop by Eric Gault’s office, see if he can tell us anything.”

  “And we continue to work under the assumption that neither Jack Rouse or Kevin sent the photo.”

  “Yup.”

  “Which leaves how many suspects?” She stood.

  “How many people live in this city?”

  “I dunno. City proper, six hundred thousand, give or take; greater metro area, four million or so.”

  “Then somewhere between six hundred thousand and four million suspects it is,” I said, “less two, give or take.”

  “Thanks for narrowing it down, Skid. You’re swell.”

  11

  The second and third floors of McIrwin Hall housed the offices of Bryce’s Sociology, Psychology and Criminology faculty, including Eric Gault’s. The first floor contained classrooms, and one of those classrooms contained Jason Warren at the moment. According to Bryce’s course catalog, the class he took here, “Hell as a Sociological Construct,” explored the “social and political motives behind the masculine creation of a Land of Punishment from the Sumerians and Akkadians up to, and including, the Christian Right in America.” We’d run checks on all of Jason’s teachers and found that Ingrid Uver-Kett had recently been expelled from a local NOW chapter for espousing views that made Andrea Dworkin’s look mainstream. Her class ran three and a half hours without a break and met twice a week. Ms. Uver-Kett drove down from Portland, Maine, on Mondays and Thursdays to teach it, and spent the rest of her time, as far as we could see, writing hate mail to Rush Limbaugh.

  Angie and I decided Ms. Uver-Kett seemed to spend far too much time being a threat to herself to possibly threaten Jason and eliminated her as a suspect.

  McIrwin Hall was a white Georgian set off in a grove of birch and violently red maples with a cobblestone walk leading up to it. We’d watched Jason disappear in a crowd of students pouring through the front doors. We heard tramping and catcalls and then a sudden, almost total silence.

  We had breakfast and came back to see Eric. By then, only a forlorn and forgotten pen at the foot of the stairs gave any indication that a single soul had been through the doors this morning.

  The foyer smelled of ammonia and pine solvent and two hundred years of intellectual perspiration, of knowledge sought and knowledge gained and grand ideas conceived under the mote-rich glow of the fractured sunlight streaming through a stained glass window.

  There was a reception desk to our right, but no receptionist. At Bryce, I guess, you were already supposed to know your every destination.

  Angie took off her denim shirt, yanked at the hem of her untucked T-shirt to clear it of static cling. “The atmosphere alone makes me want to get a degree here.”

  “Probably shouldn’t have flunked high school geometry.”

  The next thing I said was, “Ooof.”

  We climbed a curved mahogany staircase, the walls laden with paintings of past Bryce presidents. Dour looking men all, faces weighted and strained from carrying so much genius in their brains. Eric’s office was at the end of the hall and we knocked once and heard a muffled, “Come in,” from the other side of the pebbled glass.

  Eric’s long salt-and-pepper ponytail fell over the right shoulder of his blue and maroon cardigan. Underneath the cardigan was a denim Oxford and a hand-painted navy blue tie with a plaintive baby seal staring out at us.

  I cocked an eyebrow at the tie as I took a seat.

  “Sue me,” Eric said, “for being a slave to fashion.” He leaned back in his chair and waved a hand at his open window. “Some weather, isn’t it?”

  “Some weather,” I agreed.

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “So, how’s Jason doing?”

  “He lives a very busy existence,” Angie said.

  “He used to be an insular kid, believe it or not,” Eric said. “Very sweet, never a moment’s trouble to Diandra, but introverted since day one.”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  Eric nodded. “Ever since he came here, he’s broken out. It’s common, of course, for kids who didn’t fit in with the jock or beautiful-people cliques in high school to find themselves in college, stretch a bit.”

  “Jason does a lot of stretching,” I said.

  “He seems lonely,” Angie said.

  Eric nodded. “I could see that. The father leaving when he was so young explains some things, but still, always there’s been this…distance. I wish I could explain it. You see him with his…”—he smiled—“…harem, I guess, when he doesn’t know you’re watc
hing, and it’s like he’s a completely different person from the shy kid I’ve always known.”

  “What does Diandra think about it?” I said.

  “She doesn’t notice it. He’s very close to her, so when he talks to anyone with any degree of depth, he talks to her. But he doesn’t bring women home, he doesn’t even hint at his lifestyle here. She knows he’s holding a piece of himself back, but she tells herself he’s just very good at keeping his own counsel, and she respects that.”

  “But you don’t think so,” Angie said.

  He shrugged and looked out the window a moment. “When I was his age, I was living in the same dorm on this campus and I’d been a pretty introverted kid myself, and here, like Jason, I came out of my shell. I mean, it’s college. It’s study, drink, smoke weed, have sex with strangers, take naps in the afternoon. It’s what you do if you come to a place like this at eighteen.”

  “You had sex with strangers?” I said. “I’m shocked.”

  “And I feel so bad about it now. I do. But, okay, I was no saint either, but with Jason, this radical change and his charge into almost de Sadian excess is a bit drastic.”

  “’De Sadian’?” I said. “You intellectuals, I swear, talk so damn cool.”

  “So why the change? What’s he trying to prove?” Angie said.

  “I don’t know, exactly.” Eric cocked his head in such a way that, not for the first time, he reminded me of a cobra. “Jason’s a good kid. Personally I can’t imagine him being mixed up in anything that would harm either himself or his mother, but then I’ve known the boy all his life and he’s the last person I would’ve ever predicted would succumb to a Don Juan complex. You’ve dismissed the Mafia connection?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  He pursed his lips, exhaled slowly. “You got me then. I know what I just told you about Jason and that’s about it. I’d like to say who he is or isn’t with total certainty, but I’ve been at this long enough to realize that no one truly knows anyone else.” He waved his hand at bookshelves crammed with criminology and psychology texts. “If my years of study have taught me anything, that’s the sum total.”

  “Deep,” I said.

  He loosened his tie. “You asked my opinion of Jason and I gave it you, prefaced by my belief that all humans have secret selves and secret lives.”

  “What’re yours, Eric?”

  He winked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  As we walked into the sunlight, Angie slipped an arm through mine and we sat on the lawn under a tree and faced the doors through which Jason would exit in a few minutes. It’s an old trick of ours to play lovers when we’re tailing someone; people who’d possibly see either one of us as incongruous in a given place rarely give us a second glance as a couple. Lovers, for some reason, can often pass easily through doors the solitary person finds barred.

  She looked up at the fan of leaves and limbs in the tree above. Humid air stirred yellow leaves against brittle pikes of grass and Angie leaned her head into my shoulder and left it there for a long time.

  “You okay?” I said.

  Her hand tightened against my bicep.

  “Ange?”

  “I signed the papers yesterday.”

  “The papers?”

  “The divorce papers,” she said softly. “They’ve been sitting in my apartment for over two months. I signed them and dropped them at my attorney’s office. Just like that.” She moved her head slightly, resettled it in the space between my shoulder and neck. “As I signed my name, I had the distinct feeling it was going to make everything much cleaner somehow.” Her voice had grown thick. “Was that how it was for you?”

  I considered how I’d felt sitting in an attorney’s climate-controlled office, bundling and bagging up my short, barren, ill-conceived marriage by signing on a dotted line and folding pages neatly three times before sliding them into an envelope. No matter how therapeutic, there’s something pitiless about wrapping up the past and tying a ribbon to it.

  My marriage to Renee had lasted less than two years, and it had been over in most respects in under two months. Angie had been married to Phil over twelve years. I had no conception what it was like walking away from twelve years, no matter how bad many of them had been.

  “Did it make everything cleaner and clearer?” she said.

  “No,” I said, pulling her tight. “Not at all.”

  12

  For another week, Angie and I tailed Jason around campus and town, up to classroom and bedroom doors, put him to bed at night, and rose with him in the morning. It was’t exactly a thrill a minute, either. Sure, Jason led a pretty lively existence, but once you got the gist of it—wake, eat, class, sex, study, eat, drink, sex, sleep—it got old pretty quick. I’m sure if I’d been hired to tail de Sade himself in his prime, I’d have tired of that too by the third or fourth time he drank from a baby’s skull or arranged an all-night fivesome.

  Angie had been right—there was something lonely and sad about Jason and his partners. They bobbed through their existence like plastic ducks on hot water, tipping over occasionally, waiting as long as it took for someone to right them, and then back to more of the same bobbing. There were no fights, but no real passion, either. There was only a sense of them—the whole group—as flippantly self-aware, marginally ironic, as detached from the lives they led as a retina would be from an eye which no longer controlled it.

  And there was no one stalking him. We were positive. Ten days and we’d seen no one. And we’d been looking.

  Then, on the eleventh, Jason broke his routine.

  I’d had no information on Kara Rider’s murder because Devin and Oscar wouldn’t return my calls, and from newspaper accounts I could tell the case had reached an impasse.

  Following Jason kept my mind off it initially, but by now I was so bored I had no choice but to brood, and the brooding got me nowhere. Kara was dead. I couldn’t have stopped it. Her murderer was unknown and free. Richie Colgan hadn’t gotten back to me yet, though he’d left a message saying he was working on it. If I’d had the time, I could have looked into it, but instead I had to watch Jason and his band of studiously feckless groupies bleed the brilliance out of a magnificent Indian Summer by spending most of their time in cramped smoky rooms dressed in black or nothing at all.

  “He’s moving,” Angie said and we left the alley we’d been in and followed Jason through Brookline Village. He browsed at a bookstore, bought a box of 3.5 diskettes at Egghead Software, then strolled into The Coolidge Corner Theater.

  “Something new,” Angie said.

  For ten days, Jason had never varied substantially from his routine. Now he was going into a movie theater. Alone.

  I looked up at the marquee, knowing I might have to follow him in and hoping it wasn’t a Bergman film. Or worse, Fassbinder.

  The Coolidge Corner leans toward esoteric art films and revivals, which is wonderful in this age of cookie-cutter Hollywood product. However, the price for this is that you do get those weeks when The Coolidge runs nothing but kitchen-sink dramas from Finland or Croatia or some other frigid, doom-laden country where all the pale, emaciated inhabitants seem to do is sit around talking about Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or how miserable they are instead of talking about moving someplace with more light and a more optimistic class of people.

  Today, though, they were showing a restored print of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. As much as I like the movie, Angie hates it. She says it makes her feel like she’s watching it from underneath a swamp after taking too many Quaaludes.

  She stayed outside, and I went in. One of the benefits of having a partner at a time like this is that following someone into a movie theater, particularly if it’s only half filled, is risky. If the target decides to leave halfway through the film, it’s hard to follow without being conspicuous. But a partner can pick him right up outside.

  The theater was almost empty. Jason took a seat near the front in the center, and I sat ten rows back to the left. A co
uple sat a few rows up on my right, and another lone person—a young woman with squinting eyes and a red bandana tied around her head—took notes. A film student.

  About the time that Robert Duvall was holding a barbecue on the beach, a man came in and sat in the row behind Jason, about five seats to his left. As Wagner boomed on the soundtrack and gunships shredded the early morning village with gunfire and explosives, the light from the screen bathed the face of the man and I could see his profile—smooth cheeks interrupted by a trim goatee, close-cropped dark hair, a stud glinting from his earlobe.

  During the Do-Long Bridge sequence, as Martin Sheen and Sam Bottoms crawled through a beseiged trench looking for the battalion leader, the man moved four seats to his left.

  “Hey, soldier,” Sheen yelled over the mortar fire at a young, scared black kid as flares lit up the sky. “Who’s in command here?”

  “Ain’t you?” the kid screamed and the guy with the goatee leaned forward and Jason’s head tilted back.

  Whatever he said to Jason was brief, and by the time Martin Sheen left the trench and returned to the boat, the guy was stepping out into the aisle and walking back toward me. He was roughly my height and build, maybe thirty, and very good looking. He wore a dark sport coat over a loose green tank-top, battered jeans, and cowboy boots. When he caught me staring, he blinked and looked down at his feet as they carried him out of the theater.

  On screen, Albert Hall asked Sheen, “You find the C.O.?”

  “There’s no fucking C.O.,” Sheen said and climbed into the boat as Jason left his seat and walked up the aisle.

  I waited a full three minutes, then left my seat as the PT boat floated inexorably toward Kurtz’s compound and Brando’s lunatic improvisations. I stuck my head in the bathroom to be sure it was empty, then left the theater.