Prayers for Rain

by Dennis Lehane

  “One block down, one over, to be exact. But that’s not the most curious thing. Our contact at Cellular One told me where Wetterau was when he received the call.”

  “I’m breathless.”

  “Heading west on the Pike, just outside Natick.”

  “So at four-forty, he’s heading to get the Steadicam.”

  “And at five-twenty he’s in the middle of the intersection at Congress and Purchase.”

  “About to get his head squashed.”

  “Right. He parks his car in a garage on South Street, walks up Atlantic to Congress, and he’s crossing Purchase when he trips.”

  “You talk to any cops about it?”

  “Well, you know how the police feel these days about us in general and me in particular.”

  I nodded. “Maybe you’ll think twice next time before you shoot a cop.”

  “Ha-ha,” she said. “Luckily, Sallis & Salk has excellent relationships with the BPD.”

  “So you had someone from there call.”

  “Nah. I called Devin.”

  “You called Devin.”

  “Uh-huh. I asked him and he got back to me in about ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Maybe fifteen. Anyway, I have the witness statements. All forty-six of them.” She patted the soft leather bag on the chair to her left. “Ta-da!”

  “’Nother drink, folks?” Shakes Dooley emptied Angie’s ashtray and wiped the condensation ring from under her glass.

  “Sure,” Angie said.

  “And for the missus?” Shakes asked me.

  “Fine for now, Shakes. Thanks.”

  Shakes said, “What a pussy,” under his breath, and walked off to get Angie another Finlandia.

  “So let me get this straight,” I said to Angie, “you call Devin and fifteen minutes later you have something I’ve been trying to get for four days.”

  “’Bout the size of it.”

  Shakes placed her drink in front of her. “There you go, doll.”

  “‘Doll,’” I said when he walked away. “Who the hell says ‘doll’ anymore?”

  “Yet he somehow makes it work,” Angie said, and sipped some vodka. “Go figure.”

  “Man, I’m pissed at Devin.”

  “Why? You bug him all the time for favors. I haven’t called him in almost a year.”

  “True.”

  “Plus, I’m prettier.”

  “Debatable.”

  She snorted. “Ask around, pal.”

  I took a sip of my beer. It was warm. Popular with Europeans, I know, but so are blood sausage and Steven Seagal.

  On Shakes’s next pass, I ordered a fresh one.

  “Sure, I’ll be taking your car keys next.” He placed a frosty Beck’s in front of me, shot a look at Angie, and walked away.

  “I’m getting dissed way too much lately.”

  “Probably because you date defense attorneys who think a good wardrobe makes up for that lack-of-brains thing.”

  I turned on my chair. “Oh, you know her?”

  “No. I’ve heard half the men in the twelfth ward do, though.”

  “Hiss,” I said. “Meow.”

  She gave me a rueful smile as she lit another cigarette. “Cat’s got to have claws to make it a fight. What I hear, all she’s got is a nice briefcase, great hair, and tits she’s still making monthly payments on.” Her smile widened and she crinkled her face at me. “Okay, pooky?”

  “How’s Someone?” I said.

  Her smile faded and she reached into her bag. “Let’s get back to David Wetterau and Karen—”

  “I hear his name’s Trey,” I said. “You’re dating a guy named Trey, Ange.”

  “How’d you—”

  “We’re detectives, remember? Same way you knew I was dating Vanessa.”

  “Vanessa,” she said as if her mouth were filled with onions.

  “Trey,” I said.

  “Shut up.” She fumbled with her bag.

  I drank some Beck’s. “You’re questioning my street cred and you’re sleeping with a guy named Trey.”

  “I don’t sleep with him anymore.”

  “Well, I don’t sleep with her anymore.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Back at you.”

  There was dead silence between us for a minute as Angie pulled several sheets of thermal fax paper from her bag and smoothed them on the bar. I drank some more Beck’s, fingered the cardboard coaster, felt a grin fighting to break across my face. I glanced at Angie. The corners of her mouth twitched, too.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m telling you—” She lost the battle and closed her eyes as the smile broke across her cheeks.

  Mine followed about a half second later.

  “I don’t know why I’m smiling,” Angie said.

  “Me, either.”

  “Prick.”

  “Bitch.”

  She laughed and turned on her chair, drink in hand. “Miss me?”

  Like you can’t imagine.

  “Not a bit,” I said.

  We moved to a long table in the back, ordered some club sandwiches from the kitchen, and ate them as I brought her up to speed, told her in detail about my first meeting with Karen Nichols, my two run-ins with Cody Falk, my conversations with Joella Thomas, Karen’s parents, Siobhan, and Holly and Warren Martens.

  “Motive,” Angie said. “We keep coming back to motive.”

  “I know.”

  “Who really vandalized her car, and why?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who wrote the letters to Cody Falk, and why?”

  “Why,” I said, “did someone feel the need to fuck with this woman’s life so completely she jumped off a building rather than take any more of it?”

  “And did they go so far as to arrange David Wetterau’s accident?”

  “Access is an issue, too,” I said.

  She chewed her sandwich, dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “How so?”

  “Who sent Karen the photos of David and the other woman? Hell, who took the photos?”

  “They look professional to me.”

  “Me, too.” I popped a cold french fry in my mouth. “And who gave Karen her own psychiatrist’s notes? That’s a big one.”

  Angie nodded. “And why?” she said. “Why, why, why?”

  It turned into a long night. We read through all forty-six statements given by the witnesses to David Wetterau’s accident, and a good half saw nothing at all, while the other twenty or so backed up the eventual police determination—Wetterau tripped in a pothole, got clipped in the head by a car doing everything in its power not to hit him.

  Angie had even drawn up a crude diagram of the accident scene. It showed the placement of all forty-six witnesses at the time of the accident, and looked like a rough representation of a football game after a broken play. The majority of the witnesses—twenty-six—had been standing on the southwest corner of Purchase and Congress. Stockbrokers, mostly, heading for South Station after a day in the financial district, they stood waiting for the light to change. Another thirteen stood on the northwest corner, directly across from David Wetterau as he jaywalked toward them. Two more witnesses stood on the northeast corner, and a third drove the car behind Steven Kearns, the driver of the car that eventually clipped Wetterau’s head. Of the remaining five witnesses, two had stepped off the curb on the southeast corner as the light turned yellow, and three were in the crosswalk, jaywalking like Wetterau—two heading west into the financial district, one heading east.

  The closest witness had been that man, the one heading east. His name was Miles Brewster, and just after he passed David Wetterau, Wetterau stepped in the pothole. The car was already traveling through the intersection, and when Wetterau fell, Steven Kearns immediately went into his swerve and those in the crosswalk scattered.

  “Except for Brewster,” I said.

  “Huh?” Angie looked up f
rom the photos of David Wetterau and the other woman.

  “Why didn’t this Brewster guy panic, too?”

  She slid her chair over beside mine and looked down at the diagram.

  “He’s here,” I said and placed my finger on the crude stick figure she’d labeled W#7. “He’s moved past Wetterau, so his back would have been to the car.”

  “Right.”

  “He hears tires squeal. He turns back, sees the car plowing toward him, and yet he’s—” I found his statement, read from it. “He’s, quote, ‘a foot from the guy, reaching toward him, you know, sorta frozen’ when Wetterau gets hit.”

  Angie took the statement from my hand and read it. “Yeah, but you can freeze up in this sort of situation.”

  “But he’s not frozen, he’s reaching.” I pulled my chair in closer to the table, pointed at W#7 in the diagram. “His back was to it, Ange. He had to turn, see it develop. His arm’s not frozen, but his legs are? He’s standing, by his own admission, a foot, maybe two, from car tires and a rear bumper sliding out of control.”

  She stared down at the diagram, rubbed her face. “Our possession of these statements is illegal. We can’t reinterview Brewster and let on that we know what his original statement was.”

  I sighed. “That do make it tougher.”

  “It do.”

  “But the guy bears a second look, you agree?”

  “Definitely.”

  She sat back in her chair, raised both hands to her head to push back hair that wasn’t there anymore. She caught herself at the same time I did, gave my wide grin her middle finger as she brought her hands back down.

  “Okay,” she said, and drummed her pen on her notepad. “What’s our list of priorities here?”

  “First, talk to Karen’s psychiatrist.”

  She nodded. “That’s a hell of a leak coming from her office.”

  “Second, talk to Brewster. You got an address?”

  She pulled a piece of paper from the bottom of the thermal fax pile. “Miles Brewster,” she said, “Twelve Landsdowne Street.” She looked up from the page and her mouth remained open.

  “Gee,” I said, “what’s wrong with this picture?”

  “Twelve Landsdowne,” she said. “That would make it—”

  “Fenway Park.”

  She groaned. “How’s a cop not notice that?”

  I shrugged. “A rookie taking the statements at the scene. Forty-six witnesses, he’s tired, whatever.”

  “Shit.”

  “But Brewster,” I said, “is now officially dirty.”

  Angie dropped the fax paper to the table. “This wasn’t an accident.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Your operating theory.”

  “Brewster’s walking east, Wetterau’s walking west. Brewster slips out his foot as they pass. Boom.”

  She nodded, excitement surging past the fatigue in her face. “Brewster says he was reaching down to pick Wetterau back up.”

  “But he was actually holding him down,” I said.

  Angie lit a cigarette, squinted through the smoke at her diagram. “We’ve stumbled onto something ugly here, pal.”

  I nodded. “Big ol’ hunk of ugly.”

  16

  Dr. Diane Bourne’s office was housed on the second floor of a brownstone on Fairfield Street, in between a gallery specializing in mid-thirteenth-century East African kitchen pottery and a place that stitched bumper stickers on canvas and then sewed them to magnets for easy refrigerator attachment.

  The office was done up in some kind of Laura Ashley meets the Spanish Inquisition decor. Plump armchairs and couches with floral stitching bore an inviting sense of softness that was all but overwhelmed by their colors—blood reds and pitch ebonies, carpets that matched, paintings on the wall by Bosch and Blake. I’d always thought a psychiatrist’s room was supposed to say Please, tell me your problems, not Please, don’t scream.

  Diane Bourne was in her late thirties and so svelte I had to resist the urge to call in some takeout, force-feed her lunch. Dressed in a white sleeveless sheath dress that rode high up her throat and low to her knee, she stood out amid all the dark like a ghost floating through the moors. Her hair and skin were so pale it was hard to see where one began and the other ended, and even her eyes were the translucent gray of an ice storm. The tight dress, instead of making her look scrawny, seemed to accentuate the few soft parts of her, the flesh that swelled just slightly over her calves and hips and shoulders. The overall effect, I thought, as she took a seat behind her smoked glass desk, was of an engine—sleek, well-tuned, revving at every red light.

  As soon as we took our seats at the desk, Dr. Diane Bourne moved a small metronome to her left, so that her view of us was completely unobstructed, and lit a cigarette.

  She gave Angie a small, dark smile. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  “We’re looking into the death of Karen Nichols,” Angie said.

  “Yes,” she said, and sucked a small white cloud of smoke back into her lungs, “Mr. Kenzie mentioned as much on the phone.” She tapped a modicum of ash into a crystal ashtray. “He was rather”—her mist-gray eyes met mine—“cagey about anything else.”

  “Cagey,” I said.

  She took another small hit off the cigarette and crossed her long legs. “You like that?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I raised my eyebrows up and down several times.

  She gave me a wisp of a smile and turned back to Angie. “As I hope I made quite clear to Mr. Kenzie, I have no inclination to discuss anything in regards to Miss Nichols’s therapy.”

  Angie snapped her fingers. “Nuts.”

  Diane Bourne swiveled back to me. “Mr. Kenzie, however, intimated over the—”

  “Intimated?” Angie said.

  “Intimated, yes, over the phone that he had information which could—do I have this right, Mr. Kenzie?—pose questions as to potential ethical violations in my handling of Ms. Nichols.”

  I met her arched eyebrow with two of my own. “I wouldn’t say I was quite so—”

  “Articulate?”

  “Verbose,” I said. “But, otherwise, Dr. Bourne, that was the gist, yes.”

  Dr. Bourne moved the ashtray a bit to her left so that we could see the small tape recorder behind it. “It’s my legal duty to inform you that this conversation is being recorded.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Let me ask you—where’d you get that? Sharper Image, right? I’ve never seen one look so chic.” I looked at Angie. “You?”

  “I’m still back at ‘intimated,’” she said.

  I nodded. “That was a good one. I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but jeez.”

  Diane Bourne shaved some excess ash off against the Waterford crystal. “You two have a very nice act going.”

  Angie slugged my shoulder and I swept a hand at the back of her head that she ducked at the last moment. Then we both smiled at Dr. Diane Bourne.

  She took another tiny toke off her cigarette. “Sort of a Butch and Sundance thing without the homosexual subtext.”

  “Usually we get the Nick and Nora thing,” I said to Angie.

  “Or the Chico and Groucho,” Angie reminded me.

  “With the homosexual subtext, though. But that Butch and Sundance thing.”

  “Quite the compliment,” Angie said.

  I turned away from Angie and leaned my elbows on Dr. Bourne’s desk, looked past the swing of the metronome and into her pale, pale eyes. “Why would one of your patients have your session notes in her possession, Doctor?”

  She didn’t say anything. She sat very still, her shoulders hunched very slightly, as if preparing for a sudden bite of cold air.

  I leaned back in my chair. “Can you tell me that?”

  She cocked her head to the left. “Would you repeat your question, please?”

  Angie did so. I provided sign language.

  “I don’t quite understand what you’re driving at.” She shaved off another sliver of ash in
the crystal.

  Angie said, “Is it common practice for you to take notes during sessions with your patients?”

  “Yes. It’s common with most—”

  “And is it your practice, Doctor, to then mail those notes to the patients they concern?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then how,” Angie said, “did your notes for a session with Karen Nichols, dated April the sixth, 1994, end up in Miss Nichols’s possession?”

  “I have no idea,” Dr. Bourne said with the barely patient air of a matron speaking to a child. “Possibly she took them herself during one of her visits.”

  “You keep your files locked?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then how could Karen break into them?”

  Her chiseled face slackened along the jawline and her lips parted. “She couldn’t,” she said eventually.

  “Which would suggest,” Angie said, “that you or someone from your office gave confidential, potentially damaging information to a conceivably unbalanced client.”

  Dr. Bourne closed her mouth and her jaw tightened. “Hardly, Ms. Gennaro. I seem to remember that we had a break-in here a few—”

  “Excuse me?” Angie leaned forward. “You seem to remember a break-in?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there’d be a police report.”

  “A what?”

  “A police report,” I said.

  “No. Nothing of value seemed to be missing.”

  “Just confidential files,” I said.

  “No. I never said—”

  Angie said, “Because I would think your other clients would expect to be notified if—”

  “Ms. Gennaro, I don’t think—”

  “—confidential documents relating to the most personal aspects of their lives were in the hands of an unknown third party.” Angie looked over at me. “Don’t you agree?”

  “We could let them know,” I said. “Purely as a public service.”

  Dr. Bourne’s cigarette had turned to a curled finger of white ash in the crystal tray. As I watched, the finger collapsed.

  “Logistically,” Angie said, “that would be tough.”

  “Nah,” I said. “We just sit outside in our car. Every time we see someone rich who’s approaching the building and looks a little funny in the head, we assume they’re a client of Dr. Bourne’s and—”