Darkness, Take My Hand (10 page)

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 couple 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.

Out on Harvard, I blinked into the sudden glare, then looked both ways for Angie, Jason, or the guy with the goatee. Nothing. I walked up to Beacon, but they weren’t there either. Angie and I long ago agreed that the one separated from the chase was the one who went home without the car. So I hummed “O Sole Mio” until I flagged down a cab and rode it back to the neighborhood.

Jason and the guy with the goatee had met for lunch at the Sunset Grill on Brighton Avenue. Angie photographed them from across the street, and in one shot, the hands of both men had disappeared under the table. My initial assumption was drug deal.

They split the tab and, back out on Brighton Ave., their hands grazed against each other, and they both smiled shyly. The smile on Jason’s face wasn’t one I’d seen in the previous ten days. His usual smile was something of a cocky smirk, a lazy grin, rife with confidence. But this smile was unaffected, with a hint of a gush to it, as if he’d had no time to consider it before it broke across his cheeks.

Angie caught the smile and hand-grazing on film. And my assumption changed.

The guy with the goatee walked up Brighton toward Union Square, while Jason walked back to Bryce.

Angie and I spread her photos on her kitchen table that night and tried to decide what to tell Diandra Warren.

This was one of those points when my responsibility to my client was a bit unclear. I had no reason to think Jason’s apparent bisexuality had anything to do with the threatening calls Diandra had received. And I had no reason, on the other hand, not to tell her about the encounter. Still, I didn’t know if Jason was out of the closet or not, and I wasn’t comfortable outing him, particularly when, in that one photograph, I was looking at a kid who, in all the time I’d observed him, looked purely happy for the one and only time.

“Okay,” Angie said, “I think I have a solution.”

She handed me a photograph of Jason and the guy with the goatee in which both were eating, neither really look
ing at the other, but instead concentrating on their food.

“He met him,” Angie said, “had lunch, that’s all. We show this to Diandra, along with ones of Jason and his women, ask if she knows this guy, but unless she offers, we don’t bring up the possibility of a romance.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“No,” Diandra said. “I’ve never seen this man before. Who is he?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Eric?”

Eric looked at the photo for a long time, eventually shook his head. “No.” He handed it back to me. “No,” he said again.

Angie said, “Doctor Warren, in over a week, this is all we’ve come up with. Jason’s social circle is pretty limited and until this day, exclusively female.”

She nodded, then tapped the head of Jason’s friend with her finger. “Are they lovers?”

I looked at Angie. She looked at me.

“Come now, Mr. Kenzie, you don’t think I know about Jason’s sexuality? He’s my son.”

“So he’s open about it?” I said.

“Hardly. He’s never spoken to me about it, but I’ve known, I think, since he was a child. And I’ve let him know that I have absolutely no problem with homosexuality or bisexuality or any possible permutation thereof without mentioning the possibility of his own. But I still think he’s either embarrassed or confused by his sexuality.” She tapped the photo again. “Is this man a threat?”

“We don’t have any reason to think so.”

She lit a cigarette, leaned back in her couch and watched me. “So where does that leave us?”

“You’ve received no more threats or photos in the mail?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t see that we’re doing much more than wasting your money, Doctor Warren.”

She looked at Eric and he shrugged.

She turned back toward us. “Jason and I are going up to a house we have in New Hampshire for the weekend.
When we come back, would you resume watching Jason for just a few more days, put a mother’s mind at rest?”

“Sure.”

Friday morning Angie called to say Diandra had picked up Jason and left for New Hampshire. I’d watched him all through Thursday evening and nothing had happened. No threats, no suspicious characters lurking outside his dorm, no liaison with the guy with the goatee.

We’d worked our asses off trying to identify the guy with the goatee, but it was as if he’d come from mist and to mist he’d returned. He wasn’t a student or teacher at Bryce. He didn’t work at any of the establishments in a mile radius of campus. We’d even had a cop friend of Angie’s run his face through a computer for a felon match, and come up empty. Since he’d met Jason in the open and their meeting had been more than cordial, there was no reason to consider him a threat, so we decided to keep our eyes open until he popped back up again. Maybe he was from out of state. Maybe he was a mirage.

“So we got the weekend off,” Angie said. “What’re you going to do?”

“Spend as much of it as possible with Grace.”

“You’re whipped.”

“I am. How about yourself?”

“I’ll never tell.”

“Be good.”

“No,” she said.

“Be safe.”

“Okay.”

I cleaned my house and it was short work because I’m rarely there long enough to mess it up. When I came across the “HI!” note and bumper stickers again, I felt a warm prickle begin to knot under the skin at the base of my brain, but I shrugged it off, tossed everything in a cabinet of my entertainment center.

I called Richie Colgan again, got his voice mail, left a message, and then there was nothing left to do but shower and shave and go meet Grace at her place. Oh happy day.

As I went down the stairs, I could hear two people
breathing heavily in the foyer. I turned the last corner and there were Stanis and Liva, squaring off for round one million or so.

Stanis was wearing about a half gallon of oatmeal for a hat and his wife’s blowsy housecoat was covered with ketchup and scrambled eggs so fresh they steamed. They stared at each other, the veins in his neck protruding, her left eyelid twitching madly as she kneaded an orange in her right hand.

I knew better than to ask.

I tiptoed past and opened the first door, closed it behind me as I entered the small hallway and stepped on a white envelope on the floor. The black rubber strip underneath the front door clamps so tightly over the threshold you’d have an easier time squeezing a hippo through a clarinet than you would sliding a piece of paper under the front door.

I looked at the envelope. No scuff marks or wrinkles.

The words “patrick kenzie” were typed in the center.

I opened the door into the foyer again and Stanis and Liva were still frozen as I’d left them, food on their bodies steaming, Liva’s hand wrapped around the orange.

“Stanis,” I said, “did you open the door to anyone this morning? In the last half hour or so?”

He shook his head and some oatmeal fell to the floor, but he never took his eyes off his wife. “Open door to who? Stranger? You think I crazy?” He pointed at Liva. “She crazy.”

“I show you crazy,” she said and hit him in the head with the orange.

He screamed, “Aaargh,” or something similar and I backed out quickly and shut the door.

I stood in the hallway, envelope in my hands, and I felt a greasy swelling of dread in my stomach, though I couldn’t articulate why completely.

Why? a voice whispered.

This envelope. The “HI!” note. The bumper stickers.

None of which are threatening, the voice whispered. At least not overtly. Just words and paper.

I opened the door, stepped out onto the porch. In the
schoolyard across from me, recess was in full swing and the nuns were chasing children around by the hopscotch area, and I saw a boy pull the hair of a girl who reminded me of Mae, the way she stood with her head cocked slightly to one side as if listening for the air to tell her a secret. When the boy pulled her hair, she screamed and slapped at the back of her head as if she were being attacked by bats, and the boy ran off into a crowd of other boys and the girl stopped shrieking and looked around, confused and alone, and I wanted to cross the avenue and find the little prick and pull his hair, make him feel confused and alone, even if I’d probably done the same thing myself a hundred times when I was his age.

I guess my impulse had something to do with growing older, with looking back and seeing very few innocent violences committed against the young, in knowing that every tiny pain scars and chips away at what is pure and infinitely breakable in a child.

Or maybe I was just in a bad mood.

I looked down at the envelope in my hand and something told me I wasn’t going to be too keen on what I read if I opened it. But I did. And after I read it, I looked back at my front door and its imposing, heavy wood and portal glass fringed by alarm tape and three brass bolt locks gleaming in the late morning sunlight, and it seemed to mock me.