Dead Heat

by Linda Barnes

  There was nothing for it but a combination of running and public transportation.

  The mass of people heading toward the finish line would dash over to Lake Street and the Boston College line. So Spraggue went in the other direction, downhill to Beacon Street and the last stop on the Cleveland Circle line.

  He didn’t jog, he raced. The exuberance of the runners was contagious and he put all his pent up energy into the run, making the two miles in well under fifteen minutes, delighted with himself.

  And, wonder of wonders, a trolley! There was one stopped dead at the end of the line, the last few stragglers hopping aboard! Spraggue turned on a last burst of speed and made it onto the steamy car before the double door banged shut.

  The trolley was stuffed, jammed to suffocation. Spraggue considered the alternatives and decided that a few inches of cattle car would do, as long as it got him downtown to the finish line. He found fifty cents in his pocket, then had to scramble around to locate another quarter. The fares went up so quickly and erratically on the Green Line, you never knew what to shove in the box. And they didn’t accept dollar bills.

  After a two-minute wait, the car lurched forward. It immediately halted, for no other purpose than to tumble the standing passengers around, then pitched forward again, swaying uncertainly down the track.

  From the right-hand windows, the passengers could see the runners as they veered onto Beacon Street. It was an advertisement for good health: Get out there and run and you won’t have to endure the stench and unsteadiness of the Green Line!

  The runners, though they were by no means the fleetest, traveled faster than the trolley. Unlike their elite predecessors, they were feeling it, slogging along on automatic pilot, with blistered feet and frozen faces, barely able to respond to the crowd’s encouragement. In infrequent gaps in the row of spectators, one could see a runner sitting on the curb, pouring water over his head. One man had his shoes off and two attendants splashed water on his bleeding feet.

  He hoped the trolley wouldn’t tilt with all the passengers bunched up to one side, trying to see out the filthy windows.

  Spraggue heard the siren as they passed Washington Street, craned his neck to see where it came from. A fire on Marathon Day could be a disaster, if blaze and engines were separated by the line of runners.

  No fire. Collatos could have told him that by the siren, but Spraggue had to wait until he saw the ambulance. It raced up the wrong side of Beacon Street and must have come to a halt nearby because the siren kept blaring in his ears. The train rumbled on for a few hundred feet more, screeched to a stop.

  Spraggue, near the front of the car, could see that this was no ordinary traffic-light delay. The police car was pulled across the tracks, blue lights flashing. The MBTA driver gave a deep sigh and leaned back in his seat, shrugging his shoulders and issuing a general curse. The passengers on board groaned as one.

  Spraggue asked the driver to open the door. Even if he had to walk the rest of the way in, he was determined to get to the finish line. He started to run, but then he saw the ambulance and the circle of policemen, and curiosity made him delay.

  He joined the outer edge of the circle in time to see the man lifted and placed on the stretcher. He could hear the hum of the crowd: Why didn’t these runners prepare for the damn race? Some of these jerks couldn’t run around the block, much less—

  As they lifted the stretcher, he recognized its occupant: Donagher, prone, white-faced, and unconscious. Spraggue froze. Stopped thinking. Almost stopped breathing. Where the hell was Collatos?

  “What happened?” He asked the question of the crowd in general. No one knew. Of course there hadn’t been any shooting. Just collapsed. Must be the heat. He pressed the radio to his ear, but the commentator rattled on about the wind and the amazing two-second win by Alberto Salazar over Dick Beardsley.

  “Where will they take him?” Spraggue hollered to a white-shirted ambulance attendant.

  “Red Cross at Coolidge Corner,” a woman shouted back. “I think.”

  Spraggue started to run. Coolidge Corner couldn’t be more than a mile away. His feet moved faster than his thoughts. They were stuck on overwhelming relief, relief that there had been no sniper, nothing but a little heat stroke, a setback in the campaign but no tragedy. He wondered where Pete Collatos was. Had the two men agreed that if one went down, the other would finish the race? Hell of a way to bodyguard.

  His aching legs told him he must have covered at least three quarters of a mile, when he saw the same silent circle, heard the same siren.

  The body on the ground wore Collatos’ number. The faces in the circle were grim. Two men, one a perspiring runner, the other a samaritan from the crowd, performed CPR in a regular, hopeless rhythm. A third man grasped Collatos’ wrist. He mumbled to himself, shook his head, glanced anxiously about for help.

  The red and white ambulance, marked Massachusetts Bay Para/Medical, skidded as it came to a halt. A man and a woman in tan uniforms jumped out, leaving the doors flung wide. The woman took in the situation at a glance, opened the rear door, removed a strecher. One of the CPR administrators yielded to the tan-uniformed man. In seconds, Collatos was on the stretcher, wheeled to the mouth of the ambulance, swallowed. The woman rigged an IV as the vehicle sped off. The civilian who’d given CPR sat on the curb, looked ready to vomit. The runner who’d given aid patted him on the shoulder, rejoined the race.

  Spraggue, his heart pounding as if he’d run the full course, his mouth as dry as if he’d eaten sand, stripped off his T-shirt and used it to pick up the blue-tinted plastic water bottle that lay next to a drain near the curb, where it must have fallen from Collatos’ shaking hand. He turned and took a few running steps back toward Heartbreak Hill, stopped.

  The tall woman who had handed Donagher the bottle would be gone; he could feel it in his bones.

  TWELVE

  On the day of Pete Collatos’ funeral, spring took a giant step backward into February.

  The tulips dotting the grounds of the New Calvary Cemetery in Mattapan lay flat against the earth, their petals defeated by the chill gusty wind. A field of glistening black umbrellas, useless against the slanting downpour, blossomed instead, under a dour gray sky.

  Media representatives were there en masse, shielding their cameras and their waterlogged spiral notebooks. They’d been there all along.

  FIRST MARATHON CASUALTY IN 86 YEARS! the intial headline had screamed. SENATOR’S ILLNESS LINKED TO MARATHON DEATH had followed. And then, with the question mark accented in heavy black ink: AMPHETAMINE POISONING CAUSE OF DEATH? And so on. Continued on page 18. And photographs … endless photographs. Of a squinting Collatos, proudly displaying his gold detective’s shield. Of Donagher, attempting a weak smile in his hospital bed. Nothing too petty or too personal to escape the heavy-handed public embrace.

  By the day of the funeral, the headlines had moved on. The mysterious marathon death was relegated to the Metro pages, where the columns of print contracted, grew more speculative, finally disappeared. Juicier items: murders, rapes, airline crashes, coups d’état—all the ugliness of life that is passed off as the day’s news, conspired to erase the reality of Collatos’ death.

  What media coverage remained ensured a large turnout at the funeral. People who would have stayed away entirely or slipped off after the Mass at St. Columbkille’s, followed the solemn cortege down Market Street, lured by the TV cameras.

  Donagher, Spraggue thought, with grudging admiration, would have come, illness or no, TV cameras or no. The politician stood, head bowed, immobile, at the graveside. He’d lost weight in the past week; his clothes hung on him. Not surprisingly; he’d been admitted to Beth Israel Hospital with a temperature of 105 degrees and blood pressure registering 250 over 140. Four days he’d been hospitalized.

  Behind the senator, his pastel wife, Lila, and Murray Eichenhorn, his campaign manager, held a whispered conversation. Eichenhorn kept jerking his head around, searching the crowd, nervously
shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Spraggue wondered if the man envisioned another attack on Donagher, was terrified that he might be in the line of fire. A sniper would have had to be suicidal to take a shot at Donagher here, with half the funeral company wearing the dress blues of the Boston Police.

  Candidate Frank Bartolo would never have ventured out to the cemetery to freeze in the rain if it weren’t for the TV cameras. Spraggue had seen him conversing with Governor Edwards after the Mass, noted the governor’s vehement nods and jabbing pointed fingers as he explained to his protégé the wisdom of denying Donagher a monopoly of the six o’clock news. The governor had attended the Mass to bestow his charismatic presence on the less than assertive Bartolo, to ensure that the cameras recorded the fact that the influential governor and former State Representative Bartolo were inseparable. He’d managed to turn the church ceremony into a tasteless parody of a wedding: pews on the right for supporters of Donagher, pews on the left for the bridegroom, Frank Bartolo, the governor’s puppet.

  Spraggue stared at Bartolo, memorizing the jowly face, five o’clock shadow already visible at noon, the sleek-fitting black suit that almost disguised a paunch. Governor’s man. Safe vote for the conservative status quo. Or was he? Once elected to the Senate’s lofty heights, would Bartolo develop unexpected beliefs of his own to shock his benefactor? Did the governor have the goods on Bartolo, something related to those shady Mafia connections the Boston Globe seemed so certain of, something that would keep Bartolo in line, blackmail him into coming across with the key vote in the tight situation?

  Spraggue stood to one side, removed from the main body of mourners, not eager to be identified with one political faction or another, missing Pete Collatos. Not the brightest of men, not the best of friends. Hell, until this Donagher business started, he’d seen Collatos what? Twice in two years? But the knowledge of never again, the finality of sodden earth clunking against the iron casket, brought a lump to his throat and made him look away.

  By conservative estimate, Spraggue thought, he must have died some fifty times on stage, more if one counted the multiple comic deaths of Mortimer in The Fantastiks. On stage, he’d watched so many friends die, played Horatio to so many doomed Hamlets.… But Collatos wouldn’t be resurrected for tomorrow’s matinee.

  Aunt Mary, beside him, lightly touched his fingers. Sympathy seemed to flow from her hand to his, leaving him curiously comforted. She’d held his hand throughout that eternally long funeral after his parents had died in that fiery car crash, while he’d still thought it the “tragic senseless accident” the newspapers gloated in retelling: a fable for our time, illustrating that ever popular theme that money cannot, after all, buy happiness—or eternal life. It was summer then, but the sky had been just as leaden. Aunt Mary’s hand seemed so frail, so cold, that he pulled her closer under his umbrella, put his arm around her shoulders. His other hand, clutching the wavering umbrella, felt as if it were welded to the handle.

  No one held, comforted, or warmed the funeral’s chief mourner, Pete’s sister, Sharon. Donagher had tried, been rebuffed. Sharon Collatos … No, the last name was no longer Collatos. She had married; Spraggue remembered that, but he couldn’t recall her married name. Nor could he see a likely husband in the crowd. Did the man work Saturdays? Was he out of town? Wasn’t there a friend, a neighbor, a cousin, an aunt, to take the black-clad woman’s arm?

  He watched her while the somber priest hastily read the final words, knowing that the chill rain disposed no one to linger. Her black suit was either borrowed or purchased in haste. Or else she, like Donagher, had lost too much weight too rapidly. Borrowed, more likely; she hadn’t the coloring to wear black. Her skin and hair were too dark to set it off. Her shapeless raincoat could have been a man’s. Her hair was scraped back off her forehead and forced into a bun at the nape of her neck, blurred with a black lace veil. Her face was a mask that one tear would have cracked and shattered.

  She reminded him of Medea, not the Medea of the final curtain, but the just betrayed Medea, pondering that most horrible act of vengeance.

  What had each of these people meant to Collatos; what had he meant to them? Spraggue scanned the crowd for some young attractive woman; had Collatos dated a special girl? When had his parents died? Who was here to say farewell to a friend? Who was present to record his political loyalties on camera, to have his face splayed across the evening news?

  Shutting his eyes, Spraggue methodically relaxed, unclenching the jaw that was always the first to tense, shrugging the shoulders that were the next to go. Usually, the relaxation ceremony was reserved for preperformance jitters.

  The whole damned ritual reminded him of a performance, an empty piece of theater that had nothing to do with Pete Collatos, alive or dead.

  The priest finished droning and Medea took center stage. She hurled a bouquet of blood red roses at the coffin, an angry heave, not a gentle toss. Some cry, some involuntary grunt escaped her lips, and she looked away, blinking hard. Still no tears, no crack in the mask. Donagher took her arm, but she wouldn’t move away from the yawning hole. It took Donagher’s wife to lead her off. The pastel woman seemed so frail, but her tiny tug prevailed.

  The mourners should have melted gratefully back into their cars, escaped the gray storm and the gloomy landscape, the gaping hole filled with new death, the final sound of earth shoveled down on the coffin. But the TV cameras stayed. So, instead of bolting, the cops and politicians that made up the bulk of the herd lingered, gathered in hopeful photogenic groupings, crowded to press Donagher’s hand, express their horror at his narrow escape. And that, that last play for the attention of the cameras, turned Spraggue’s sorrow into anger.

  He left Mary standing by the car, entered the crowd near Captain Hurley, intending to ask a few, just a few of the questions he’d been longing to ask, at least to set up a later appointment, to find out what the hell the Boston Police were doing to ensure that whoever had killed Collatos wouldn’t go undiscovered, unpunished.

  Two things got in his way.

  The first was a smiling old man who stumbled, trod on Spraggue’s toe, and forgot to mumble an apology. A retired cop in faded dress blues, with a crinkled red face, the old fellow seemed to be treating the funeral like a grand occasion, a chance to get out of the house and socialize, to feel useful and young again, instead of simply enduring the tedious hours until night, when he could legitimately try for the sleep that wouldn’t come anymore.

  The old man neatly buttonholed Donagher’s campaign manager, backed him up against a budding maple. Spraggue would have passed them by, with perhaps a sympathetic smile at the obviously trapped Eichenhorn, if the red-faced cop hadn’t spoken with such drunken loudness.

  “So, Marty,” the old man sang out, and his melodic brogue pinned down his native origin as easily as his face, “It’s a treat for these old eyes to see you after so long, doing so fine, too.”

  Donagher’s campaign manager stared at the man in blank incomprehension for ten or fifteen seconds. Then he turned paper white and grabbed the old cop by the sleeve of his aged uniform.

  A tight, fake smile stretched across Eichenhorn’s mouth, but his eyes darted left and right, as if he were checking out the people in immediate earshot. He muttered something in the old man’s ear.

  The old cop hooted a laugh that wound up in a coughing fit. “Surely, there’s no harm—” he began, but the rest of his words were cut off as Eichenhorn quickly draped an arm across his shoulder and led him off under a stand of oak trees.

  Intrigued, Spraggue started to follow, wondering why a man named Murray would react so oddly to being called Marty. A cold voice stopped him, spun him around.

  “You,” the Greek Medea said. “You. I want to talk to you.”

  THIRTEEN

  Her voice was low, husky with unshed tears, but its intensity burned across ten feet of muddy ground like a laser beam. A glance at her frozen eyes told him that this was not a request to be fobbed off with t
he excuse of a waiting aunt, a matinee still to be performed.

  The Medea woman motioned him toward an isolated stand of rhododendrons, using the merest nod of her head. He tried to shield her with his umbrella. She stalked off without noticing. Weary of keeping the umbrella upright in the gale, he folded it and followed her, rain pelting his face.

  Everything about the woman was so terribly controlled, Spraggue thought as he trailed behind her … her carefully balanced walk, like a drunkard’s in a police lineup, her marionette gestures, her unanimated voice, her painted face.… She was smaller than her drawn-up posture made her seem. She had a short, sturdy body, more accustomed to jeans and T-shirts than black suits, stockings, and high heels. She stumbled as she turned to check on his progress and he sped up. One chink in that awesome armor would collapse the entire facade. He’d never be able to reassemble the pieces on his own.

  She turned and faced him, swallowed with effort. Spraggue tried to find in her granite visage some trace of a laughing windswept girl in a photograph that had been a fixture on Pete’s desk. Not a gorgeous girl, not a knockout—but a woman with such a genuine smile, such deep secret eyes, that Pete had finally hidden the photo in a drawer. Too many cops asked for his sister’s phone number, he had complained. He’d wanted better than that for baby sister.

  This woman was older than the teenager in the photo, older in ways that had nothing to do with passing years. Her eyes were sunken in dark shadows. Spraggue regretted that he hadn’t asked for the phone number of the laughing girl; then, she’d seemed too young, too innocent, too burdened with the baggage of being a friend’s treasured sister. Now she seemed too old. He wondered if the sparkle would ever reappear in her empty eyes.

  “So,” she said. “You’re Spraggue.” Her voice lowered the temperature five degrees.

  “Your brother must have described me.”

  “Pete … didn’t … We rarely spoke.… I asked someone.”