by John Philpin
I told Pouldice to send me the information she had, asked Bolton a few key questions, and allowed the facts to percolate.
“How do you do this?” Pouldice had asked.
No reporter asked me that question. They wanted a profile, long before that term was in vogue, and they did not care how they got it, provided its author had sufficient letters following her or his name and spoke in quotable quotes. Writers asked for the profile, as if there were only one to describe the vagaries of the human predator. When I explained that there were as many profiles as there were killers, and that no description was carved in stone but evolved as I acquired new information, they grew impatient. They had been sold the illusion of simplicity, and they didn’t want me mucking up their ten column-inches.
Pouldice had no way of knowing that her question was the essential one, and the most difficult to answer if a profile was to have credibility. How did I arrive at my conclusions? What was the process?
“I digested the information you sent me,” I told her, “then consulted the I Ching.”
She laughed. “Cut the shit, Doc. How do you work your magic?”
I liked her immediately. For three years before we met, we talked on the phone about cases. She was with a Boston paper when Tyrell Mann threw his .44 caliber nutty at the Columbia Point Housing Project and left nine dead.
“Meet me at Jake’s,” she said when she called.“We’ll split the tab.”
Pouldice had been at Vassar, then slid down the Mass Pike to Boston University’s journalism school, one of the best in the country. She had paid her dues covering DWIs and spousal assault cases in places where they were not supposed to happen—Cohasset, Hingham, Norwell.
“I’ll never marry,” she told me over dinner at Jacob Wirth’s. “I hate kids, and I couldn’t stand the same fuck night after night. That whole concept is alien to me.”
When my wife Savvy and I separated, and she moved her veterinary practice to a village near Kinshasa in what was then Zaire, Wendy Pouldice was the anchor for a city news program. She called and asked me out.
“No murder,” she said. “Let’s just do Jake’s.”
In weeks, I was cooking crab curry for her in her apartment on Lime Street. It was a rebound relationship for me, a lark for her, until I could no longer tolerate her narrow view of life as a high-powered career, and she could not stand the same fuck night after night. Besides, New York was calling her. We parted amicably.
I parked on the Riverway and walked through the snow to the Towers. The Boston Trial Television directory next to the elevators did not list its owner. I found her name on the third-floor list for Pouldice Media. I signed in at the security desk and indicated my destination.
Pouldice’s secretary was a pleasant young woman whose nameplate identified her as Hannah. “Do you have an appointment? Ms. Pouldice can’t be expecting you. She’s downstairs in the studio preparing for the evening news. It’s been quite a day.”
“We’re old friends,” I said. “I think she might grant me five minutes.”
“I doubt it,” Hannah said as she punched numbers on her phone.
She talked briefly, listened, then looked up, her eyes wide with disbelief. “You must be good friends. Take the elevator down to the second floor, turn right, and go to the end of the hall to the doors marked Studio.”
I thanked Hannah, followed her directions, and found myself on the set for The BTT Evening Report with Bob Britton. Donald Braverman sat just inside the door. At close range, Braverman’s muscular bulges were more impressive. So was a significant bulge under his jacket on the left side of his chest. He did not look up from his copy of Bawdy Boston.
Talk about oxymorons.
Wendy Pouldice materialized from the darkness. “Lucas Frank, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
She exploded in laughter. “See?”
She’d had her cheeks jacked up, eyes tightened, hair rendered platinum, and no doubt plastered the package in place with various sprays, mists, compounds, and pastes. When she laughed, I expected her to crack.
“Last I knew, you were headed for New York,” I said.
She shrugged. “That didn’t work out. What can I say? The money wasn’t right, the timing … something. Their mistake. Why did Bolton haul your ass out of the woods? Is he worried?”
Twenty years earlier there had been an unmistakable quality of desperation about Wendy Pouldice. She wanted New York; New York did not want her. Now she was the TV queen of Boston, still hungry for the edge, but far from desperate.
“You’ve talked to Zrbny. Does Bolton have reason to be worried?”
She smiled. “Like I said, some things don’t change. You do look good, a little heavier maybe, but good. Do you still cook that marvelous curried crab? You must. Anyway, we can’t talk now.”
Braverman set aside his magazine and stood. It was impossible for him to be unobtrusive.
Pouldice gave me her personal card. “Nine tonight, top floor. Security will let you through. I’ll show you an amazing view of the city. It’s better at night, I think, especially when it’s snowing.”
“Wendy …”
“Tonight,” she said, and disappeared into the set, the powerful scent of her perfume lingering in the air.
Without a word, Braverman opened the door and waited for me to leave.
On my way to the elevator, I stopped at a bathroom, kicked open the door, and stared into the mirror. Damn it, I did look heavier. I had gained weight, although I had no idea how much. The jeans expanded in size and I studiously avoided the scale. Twenty pounds? Twenty-five? My doc had alerted me to weight, smoking, and the perils of salt. The salt, curiously, had not been much of a problem. Cigarettes and I had an on-again, off-again affair. The weight gain was due to eating and cooking—two passions of mine.
My third passion, apparently, was denial.
“NO ONE SEES ANYONE ELSE,” I WHISPERED to the window.
“What?” Sable asked.
“Britton.”
Sable was silent.
“The man in Guzman’s,” I said.
“He was rude,” she agreed.
“He didn’t see us.”
Her laugh was gentle. “How could anyone not see you?” she asked.
Mr. Polowski saw me, I thought.
That August morning.
I pulled myself away from the kitchen window, slipped my feet into the basketball shoes I left under the kitchen table the night before, grabbed my canvas sack from the hall, and walked to the front stoop. I folded each Informer in thirds, tucked the right third into the left, and slowly filled the bag with creased photographs of Gina Radshaw.
My bicycle leaned against the wall in the driveway. I hooked the bag of papers over the handlebars and pedaled along Ridge Road.
After only three stops, I could not keep the sweat from streaming into my eyes, stinging, blurring my vision.
“Too hot to be doing that, Felix,” Mr. Polowski called from behind the bamboo shade on his porch. “You should be at the pool with the other kids.”
I smiled and waved.
If I were at the community pool, Gina would be there. She would not be pleated in my bag. Perhaps she would save my life.
“You’ve gone away again,” Sable said.
“I was watching the snow.”
“What happened that day? You said it was in summer a long time ago.”
When I delivered Mrs. Dayle’s paper, she did not come to the door.
I made the big curve on Ridge Road, then turned right on Maple Street and stopped in front of Shannon Waycross’s house. I knew that she sunned herself on the other side of the fence, but I could not see her.
As I pedaled away I realized that when Gina Radshaw finished guarding lives, she walked down the hill from the pool on Butternut Lane, walked from one end of Maple to the other, passed Shannon Waycross behind her fence, then turned left on Ridge Road, passed Mrs. Dayle who breathed her words, then took th
e shortcut through the woods to the bus stop.
For six days a week since July 1, these people shared space on different planes.
My father called at noon, like he always did. “I left tuna from when I made my lunch,” he said.
“Okay,” I told him.
“You do your papers?”
“Yours is on your chair.”
“It’s hot.”
I waited.
“Where will you be?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Here.”
“I’ll be home at six.”
The only variation each day was what my father left me to eat. Tuna, Swiss or cheddar, bologna, turkey roll, salami.
I switched on the TV, allowed the news to unwind itself in silence until 12:15, then turned up the volume for “Local Scene with Wendy Pouldice.”
“Today’s guest is …”
I wanted her to say my sister’s name.
“… Levana Zrbny.”
The camera panned from Pouldice to a pile of dirt-encrusted bones.
“… guest is Leonard Portman, a man with an unusual hobby, and he’ll tell us about it when we return after …”
I wandered into the kitchen and examined the refrigerator’s contents. Tuna in a metal bowl covered with waxed paper; a plastic container of iceberg lettuce; five bottles of Carling’s beer; a jar of sausage and olive pasta sauce—the previous night’s leftover. I sat cross-legged on the floor and felt the cool air on my face.
Now, I looked at Sable. “You don’t have a TV,” I said.
She shrugged. “They offered to put one here. I didn’t want it.”
“How do you know the world?”
“I live in the world, Felix.”
I gazed at the street, the blowing snow, a police cruiser driving slowly past the building. “It’s getting dark,” I said.
“Is this when you kill someone?”
I studied the drifting snow, watched it fold over itself and pack against a parked car or a wall. Where there was no immovable object, it blew and tumbled from the glow of one streetlight to another.
“I have to talk to someone,” I said.
“Does it have to do with that summer day?”
It was that day and more. It was an accumulation of times and places and faces all crashing together.
I pushed my hands through my hair. “My father drank Carling’s and watched sitcoms,” I said. “He seldom laughed. He might say, ‘Levana would like this show,’ or, ‘Your mother would think this was racy.’ He used that word, ‘racy,’ whenever he saw a girl in a tight sweater or short skirt.”
I paused, picturing my father in his chair watching TV. “He didn’t delude himself that my sister and mother were alive. He had new relationships with them as dead people.”
“I’m sorry,” Sable whispered.
At night I heard him pray to his plastic Jesus and say good night to his girls. They were there in the house, their souls lingering in the air like the suffocating scent of pine that my father sprayed to mask the stench of meat fried in oil and garlic and onions. When he watched TV, sometimes he looked up, as if one of them drifted across the room and caressed his slick black hair.
“God will tuck you in, Levana,” he said.
And, “We will be together again, Magda.”
I doubted that my mother was looking forward to that reunion.
I looked at Sable, at her intense and caring eyes barely visible in the dim light. “I used to walk into the room and hear my father mumbling to his dead family,” I said. “I wanted to tell him that I was dead. I thought maybe he would talk to me then. He seldom spoke to me. I don’t think he saw me after my mother died. He gave me instructions. He asked about my day. The evening meal was a silent time, then he watched TV and talked with the dead. Sometimes for emphasis he said things twice. No one ever came back to life.”
“What happened to your sister?”
Levana walked twenty yards ahead of me on Ridge Road. A white car stopped beside her, and she leaned down to the passenger window. I figured she was giving directions to the driver. Then someone yanked her from the sidewalk through the window, and the car screeched away.
“I don’t know what happened to her,” I said. “She vanished.”
“You were very close to her.”
“Our mother was dead. Our father spent the time that he wasn’t at his shop, at church or in the cemetery. Levana and I promised to take care of each other.”
“Then she went away, or what?”
I looked at Sable’s wide dark eyes. They were like Levana’s round innocent eyes, always in awe, as if she were amazed by life.
I returned my gaze to the blowing snow. “She went away,” I said.
RAY BOLTON SAT AT HIS DESK. NEVILLE Waycross leaned against the wall.
“Pouldice give you the time of day?” Bolton asked.
“Tonight,” I said, pushing aside some papers and sitting on the corner of his desk. “We have a date.”
Bolton’s eyes widened.
“Don’t worry. I’ll pick up some condoms. You get anything out of Fremont?”
Bolton shook his head. “We had eight of his cronies in here. Nothing. Wilson’s driver dumped the car in a parking garage downtown. The technicians are lifting prints now. Wilson has a half-brother, Nicky Noonan. A patrol unit is bringing him in. Wilson and Noonan share more than a fraternal history.”
“Any leads on Zrbny?”
“Sure,” Bolton said, leaning back in his chair. “He was at the kiosk in Harvard Square before the deputies picked him up at the hospital this morning. He had lunch at Durgin Park, the Union Oyster House, and a cafeteria on Park Street.”
“Big guy, big appetite,” I muttered.
“But nobody ever really sees him,” Waycross said. “It’s what I was telling you earlier, Lucas.”
“I know what Neville means,” Bolton said. “Fifteen years ago we interviewed kids at the school he attended. If they remembered him at all, it was as a name that took up space in the classroom. A couple of teachers said he was bright, but didn’t apply himself.”
“He’s like a ghost,” Waycross continued. “Ray, what was it the kids said about him disappearing into the hillside?”
Bolton sighed. “Just that. Kids would see him on the path through the woods. Then they wouldn’t. They thought he had a cave up there. Lucas, how much time do we have?”
A parole board released Edmund Emil Kemper III from Atascadero State Hospital after he had served five years for killing his grandparents. In his confession to police, he said he shot and repeatedly stabbed his grandmother, then waited for his grandfather to come home and shot him, because he wanted to know what it felt like to kill. Three years after his release he killed again—eight times in twenty-three months.
In 1981, Michael Ross dragged an Ohio sixteen-year-old into the bushes, and bound and gagged her before police interrupted him. He pleaded guilty and was given a probationary sentence of two years. Six months later he tried to strangle a woman in her home. A month later, out on bail and undergoing a sixty-day psychiatric evaluation in Connecticut, Ross killed for the first of at least six times.
The man of two dozen aliases, and alleged killer of eight known victims, Angel Maturino Resendiz, was detained and released by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in El Paso on June 2, 1999. Days later, two of his suspected victims were found, bludgeoned to death.
“I don’t know the answer to that question,” I told Bolton.
“What are we paying you for?”
“To observe a man that the Commonwealth had in custody. I get time-and-a-half for schussing around Boston.”
“I’d like to look at the files,” Waycross said.
Bolton opened his mouth, but the former cop silenced him with a wave of his hand.
“I saw Shannon. I don’t want to read about her. I’ve never read any of the case materials. There might be something in there that I don’t know about, or that I’ve forgotten.”
&nbs
p; “There are copies of most of the reports in the conference room,” Bolton said.
“Take time out to watch the BTT evening news,” I told him as he headed for the door.
“Why do you care what Pouldice’s outfit has to say?” Bolton asked.
“She’s a CEO. What’s she doing in the studio prepping for a newscast hours before it airs? And why does she have her muscle with her?”
“Braverman?”
“She knows something that we don’t,” I said.
“BTT coverage has been nonstop since this morning. Every reported sighting, we get there, Vigil’s already there and BTT’s cameras are shooting the story. Pouldice’s people are getting interviews before we get them. We have to stand in line. Things have gotten crazy, Lucas.”
“This has always been a crazy business. You just never noticed. You ready to get out?”
Bolton had been eligible for retirement for three years. He refused to leave until he had cleared his cold cases.
“I’ve got one more unsolved, Stallings. When that’s a wrap, I’m out of here.”
I remembered the case. Theresa Stallings was fifteen, a high school freshman when she disappeared from a Dorchester basketball court.
“That was ten years ago,” I said.
“Eleven last September.”
“You never found a body.”
“Nothing. I’ve got a short, red-haired guy hanging around the court a couple of days before she disappeared, and I’ve got a white car, no make.”
“You planning to die behind that desk?”
“I still talk with Mrs. Stallings every Friday before I leave the office. She tells me how the kids are doing. Virginia is on the dean’s list in college. William’s wife is going to have a baby.”
Bolton pushed himself from the desk and stood. “I’m tired, Lucas. I won’t deny it. When Louise died, I promised myself they’d all be closed before I walked out the door. I dream about Theresa Stallings.”
Ray’s wife Louise died of leukemia six years earlier. Her nightmare throughout their marriage was that a police captain would knock on her door at three A.M. to tell her that she was a widow. She was certain that Ray would predecease her, and die violently, but she never asked him to stop being a cop. She hated the bad guys and loved that her husband brought them down.
