Darkness, Take My Hand (9 page)

I’d crawled into
bed at four that morning, been awakened by my Salvador Dali dream sometime around seven, and didn’t fall back asleep until about eight.

Which meant nothing to Lyle Dimmick and his buddy, Waylon Jennings. At exactly nine, Waylon started screaming about the woman who’d done him wrong, and the harsh grate of a country fiddle climbed over my windowsills and rattled china in my brain.

Lyle Dimmick was a permanently sunburned housepainter who’d come here from Odessa, Texas, because of a woman. He’d found her, lost her, got her back, and lost her again when she ran back to Odessa with some guy she met in a neighborhood pub, an Irish pipefitter who decided he’d always been a cowpoke at heart.

Ed Donnegan owned almost every three-decker on my block, save for my own, and every ten years, he got around to painting them, and every time he did, he hired a single painter for as long as it took to paint them all, rain, snow or shine.

Lyle wore a ten-gallon hat and a red handkerchief around his neck and black wrap-around Gargoyle sunglasses that took up half of his small, pinched face. Those sunglasses, he said, seemed like something a city boy would wear, and they were his only concession to living in a god-awful world of Yankees who had no appreciation for God’s three great gifts to mankind—Jack Daniel’s, the horse, and, of course, Waylon.

I stuck my head in between the shade and the screen
and saw that his back was to me as he painted the house next door. The music was so loud he’d never hear me, so I pulled down the window instead, then stumbled up and pulled down all the others in the bedroom, and reduced Waylon to just another tinny voice ringing in my head. Then I crawled back into bed and closed my eyes and prayed for quiet.

Which meant nothing to Angie.

She woke me shortly after ten by bouncing around the apartment making coffee, opening windows to another fresh autumn day, and rattling through my refrigerator, as Waylon or Merle or Hank Jr. poured back through my screens.

When that didn’t rouse me from bed, she opened the bedroom door and said, “Get up.”

“Go away.” I pulled the covers over my head.

“Get up, ya baby. I’m bored. Now.”

I threw a pillow at her and she ducked and it arced over her head and shattered something in the kitchen.

She said, “You weren’t fond of those dishes, I hope.”

I stood and wrapped the sheet around my waist to cover my glow-in-the-dark Marvin the Martian boxer shorts and stumbled out into the kitchen.

Angie stood in the middle of the room, coffee cup held in both hands, a few broken plates on the floor and sink.

“Coffee?” she said.

I found a broom, began sweeping up the mess. Angie put her cup on the table, bent by me with a dustpan.

I said, “You’re still a bit unclear on this sleep concept, aren’t you?”

“Overrated.” She scooped up some glass and dumped it in the wastebasket.

“How would you know? You’ve never tried it.”

“Patrick,” she said, dumping another load of glass, “it’s not my fault you stayed out until the wee hours drinking with your little friends.”

My little friends.

“How do you know I was out drinking with anybody?”

She dumped the last bit of glass, straightened. “Because your skin is a shade of green I’ve never seen before, and
there was an incredibly drunken message on my answering machine this morning.”

“Ah.” I vaguely recollected a pay phone and a beep from some point last night. “What did this message say?”

She took her coffee cup off the table, leaned against the washing machine. “Something like ‘Where are you, it’s three in the morning, something’s really fucked up, we gotta talk.’ The rest I couldn’t understand, but by then you’d started speaking Swahili anyway.”

I put the dustpan, broom, and wastebasket in the pantry, poured myself a cup of coffee. “So,” I said, “where were you at three in the morning?”

“You’re my father now?” She frowned and pinched my waist just above the sheet. “You’re getting love handles.”

I reached for the cream. “I don’t have love handles.”

“And you know why? Because you still drink beer like you’re in a frat.”

I looked at her steadily, poured extra cream into my coffee. “You going to answer my original question?”

“About my whereabouts last night?”

“Yes.”

She sipped her coffee, looked over the mug rim at me. “Nope. I did wake up with a warm, fuzzy feeling, though, and a big smile on my face. Big smile.”

“Big as the one you’re wearing now?”

“Bigger.”

“Hmm,” I said.

She hoisted herself up onto the washing machine. “So, you called me, shit-faced, at three A.M. to do more than check up on my sex life. What’s up?” She lit a cigarette.

I said, “You remember Kara Rider?”

“Yeah.”

“Someone murdered her last night.”

“No.” Her eyes were huge.

“Yes.” With all the extra cream, my coffee tasted like baby’s formula. “Crucified her on Meeting House Hill.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. She looked at her cigarette like it might tell her something.

“Any idea who did it?” she said.

“No one was parading around Meeting House Hill with
a bloody hammer singing, ‘Boy, oh boy, do I like to crucify women,’ if that’s what you mean.” I tossed my coffee in the sink.

Quietly, she said, “You done snapping for the day?”

I poured fresh coffee into the cup. “Don’t know yet. It’s still early.” I turned around and she slipped off the washing machine and stood in front of me.

I saw Kara’s thin body lying in the cold night, swollen and exposed, her eyes blank.

I said, “I ran into her the other morning outside the Emerald. I had a feeling, I dunno, that she was in trouble or something, but I let it go. I blew it off.”

“And what?” she said. “You’re somehow to blame?”

I shrugged.

“No, Patrick,” she said. She ran a warm palm up the side of my neck, forced me to look in her eyes. “Understand?”

Nobody should die like Kara did.

“Understand?” she said again.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess.”

“No guessing,” she said. She removed her hand and pulled a white envelope from her purse and handed it to me. “This was taped to the front door downstairs.” She pointed to a small cardboard box on my kitchen table. “And that was leaning against the door.”

I have a third-floor apartment with a bolt lock on both the front and back doors and usually two guns stored inside somewhere, and none of this probably deters break-ins as much as the two front doors to the three-decker itself. There’s an outside one and an interior one, and they’re both reinforced with steel and made of heavy black German oak. The portal glass in the first one is wired with alarm tape, and my landlord has fitted both doors with a total of six locks that require three different keys. I have a set. Angie has a set. My landlord’s wife, who lives in the first-floor apartment because she can’t stand his company, has one. And Stanis, my crazy landlord—terrified that a Bolshevik hit squad is going to come for him—has two sets.

All in all, my building is so secure I was surprised some
one could even tape an envelope to the front door or lean a box against it without setting off nine or ten alarms and waking five city blocks.

The envelope was plain, white, letter-size with “patrick kenzie” typed in the center. No address, no stamp, no return address. I opened it and pulled a piece of typing paper from inside, unfolded it. There were no address headings, no date, no salutation, no signature. In the middle of the page, centered, someone had typed one word:

HI!

The rest of the page was virgin.

I handed it to Angie. She looked at it, turned it over, turned it back to the front. “’Hi,’” she read aloud.

“Hi,” I said.

“No,” she said, “more like ‘Hi!’ Give it that girlish giggle.”

I tried it.

“Not bad.”

HI!

“Could it be Grace?” She poured another cup of coffee.

I shook my head. “She says hi an entirely different way, believe me.”

“So, who?”

I honestly didn’t know. It was such an innocuous note, but weird too. “Whoever wrote it is a master of brevity.”

“Or has an extremely limited vocabulary.”

I tossed the note on the table, pulled back the tape on the box and opened it as Angie looked over my shoulder.

“What the hell?” she said.

The box was filled with bumper stickers. I pulled out a handful, and there was still another two handfuls waiting.

Angie reached in, grabbed a fistful.

“This is…odd,” I said.

Angie’s brow was furrowed and she had a curious half smile on her face. “You could say that, yeah.”

We took them into the living room and laid them out on the floor in a collage of blacks and yellows and reds and blues and shiny iridescents. Looking down at all
ninety-six of them was like standing over a world of petulance and hollow sentiment and the hopelessly inept search for the perfect sound-bite:

HUGS NOT DRUGS; I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE; LOVE YOUR MOTHER; IT’S A CHILD NOT A CHOICE; I JUST FUCKING LOVE TRAFFIC; IF YOU DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT; ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING; IF I’M A ROAD HOG, YOUR WIFE’S A PIG; VOTE FOR TED KENNEDY AND PUT A BLONDE IN THE WATER; YOU CAN HAVE MY GUN WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS; I’LL FORGIVE JANE FONDA WHEN THE JEWS FORGIVE HITLER; IF YOU’RE AGAINST ABORTION, DON’T HAVE ONE; PEACE—AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME; DIE YUPPIE SCUM; MY KARMA BEATS YOUR DOGMA; MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER; POLITICIANS LIKE THEIR PEASANTS UNARMED; FORGET ’NAM? NEVER; THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY; HONK IF YOU’RE RICH AND HANDSOME; HATE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE; I’M SPENDING MY CHILD’S INHERITENCE; WE ARE OUT & WE ARE EVERYWHERE; SHIT HAPPENS; JUST SAY NO; MY WIFE RAN OFF WITH MY BEST FRIEND AND I’M SURE GOING TO MISS HIM; DIVERS DO IT DEEP; I’D RATHER BE FISHING; DON’T LIKE THE POLICE? NEXT TIME YOU’RE IN TROUBLE, CALL A LIBERAL; FUCK YOU; FUCK ME; MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT ST. CATHERINE’S ELEMENTARY; MY CHILD BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT; HAVE A NICE DAY, ASSHOLE; FREE TIBET; FREE MANDELA; FREE HAITI; FEED SOMALIA; CHRISTIANS AREN’T PERFECT, JUST FORGIVEN…

…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.”

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 watching, 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 be
tween 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.”