“That’s right.” Rollins nodded. “He said to be here at six.”
“I’ll take you to your table. He called to say he’s running late.”
The woman led the two of them back through the dining room to a corner booth, lit by a flickering candle. Schecter had met Rollins here at this very table many times back when Rollins was doing the Blanchard story. Schecter had always dined with his back to the rear wall, so he could scan the crowd, just as he had always ordered the veal. He hated fish, he told Rollins more than once. He came only for the atmosphere. “Every other place seems so new,” he’d said.
“You feel all right about this?” Marj asked after the hostess had seated them. “You seem a little edgy.”
“A lot’s happened today.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not too happy to be back near Tina, but I’m trying to at least act calm. She’s not that far away, you know.”
It was true: Rollins’ North End apartment building was just a few blocks away. Rollins had insisted on coming by cab so as not to advertise his presence. “She’d have to be psychic to find us here,” he told her.
“She found you before,” Marj said.
“That man Jeffries found me. He must have followed me back from North Reading, then told Sloane, and Sloane got Tina to keep an eye on me. That’s my guess anyway.”
Marj flagged down a waiter and ordered a strawberry daiquiri, and Rollins asked for a glass of iced tea. Marj fell silent, waiting for her drink, while Rollins continued to check his watch and scrutinize the faces of the other diners as they arrived. Finally, the hostess gave out a squeal, and Rollins spotted a heavyset man in a wrinkled raincoat by the front door. Al Schecter. He acknowledged Rollins with a wave. As he handed his raincoat to the hostess, he leaned over to whisper something that caused her to squeal again and then to slap him playfully on his bulky shoulder. “You’re terrible,” she teased.
Smiling, Schecter made his way down the dining room toward Rollins and Marj, stopping occasionally to say hello to a couple of his fellow diners. The distinctive Schecter scent—a mixture of sweat, cigars, and aftershave—reached Rollins a moment before the detective himself did.
“Edward Rollins!” Schecter bellowed as he swung his thick hand into Rollins’ and pumped it a couple of times. Rollins felt comforted to see this big bull of a man. Broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, Schecter had been a football lineman in college, and he still looked like he could go headfirst through a brick wall if necessary.
Conscious of Marj beside him, Rollins started to introduce her, but Schecter broke in. “Hey, she is cute.” Then he took a step back to survey Rollins’ colorful attire. “And she’s dressing you, too?”
Schecter winked at her. “What say we dump this guy and go someplace?”
“I can’t,” Marj replied coolly. “I’ve already ordered a drink.”
Rollins suddenly felt oily inside his new clothes, but Schecter let out a deep-throated rumble of pleasure. “Oh, she’s a live one.” He slid into the open booth by the wall and set down his briefcase on the seat beside him, then hailed the waiter for a beer. “And he’ll have one, too.” He pointed toward Rollins.
“I’ve got some iced tea coming—”
“Fuck that,” Schecter said. “I just came from the chief. When you see what he gave me, you’ll need some booze in you. Lots.”
“What did you find?” Rollins asked.
“Drink up, Rollins.” Schecter turned to Marj. “He needs to loosen up, don’t you think? So uptight all the time.”
“We’ve been working on that,” Marj said.
“I’ll bet you have.” Schecter grinned, then glanced around at the restaurant walls. “Place has been spruced up a bit. I’ll have to speak to Joey.” He reached for one of the toothpicks that were set out in a little dish. Silence descended on the table for a moment, but then the drinks came, and Schecter downed some of his beer. “You spoken to Pat at all?” he asked Rollins, referring to his wife.
Rollins shook his head. “No, should I have?” He’d always liked Schecter’s wife—a quiet, easygoing woman with a gentle sense of humor, which was key to getting on with Al.
Schecter thought Rollins might have talked to her in trying to get in touch with him. “I was just curious to see how she was doing.”
“I take it you’re divorced,” Marj said.
“Yup.” Schecter reached for his beer and took a long chug.
“So what happened?” Rollins pressed.
Schecter looked at him. “I didn’t think you cared about personal stuff.” He turned to Marj. “This your influence?”
“Maybe I banged on him a little,” Marj admitted. “But he’s been going through some things.”
“So I gather.” Schecter finished off his beer and told them the story. Everything had been reasonably steady until the kids were grown and his wife hit fifty. “Pat started going through some changes, getting peevish. Nothing was right for her. Then it was arguments, real bitchy stuff that surprised me. She started giving me shit about the hours I keep. You know how it is, detective work takes time. She started telling me, what’s the point of being married if I never see you, blah, blah, blah.” It went on like that for a year or two. “Then one night, I come home and no Pat. No note, no explanation. I had to call all over the place to find out that she’d started shacking up with somebody she’d met at the club.”
Pat had never struck Rollins as someone who’d take such a risk, and, for all his grumbling, Schecter had seemed happy with his marriage. But then, Rollins had never thought his own parents would break up, either. He glanced at Marj, whose eyes peered out at Schecter over the top of her daiquiri.
“It killed me. We tried to work it out, but she told me she was in love with the guy. Seventeen years we were married. I was in the middle of something like twelve different investigations. But I stopped everything. I went up to Rockport, just for a few days I thought, to try and get my shit together. Been there ever since. I’d always talked about going up there one day. Course, I always thought I’d be there with Pat. But it’s just me. I run a little taxi service, shuttling tourists around the islands. It’s okay. Been there a year and a half now.”
“Who was the woman on the phone?” Rollins asked.
“Oh, that’s Annie. I met her last summer. Nice kid. Real sweet. You’d like her. Doesn’t give me any trouble.”
“God forbid,” Marj said.
Schecter looked at her and then to Rollins. “Oh, yeah, a live one,” he said again, with a slightly different tone this time.
The waiter came to take their order. Schecter ordered the veal, while Rollins and Marj both went for the trout special.
“Well, I’m sorry.” Rollins finally took a sip of beer. It was a watery, American variety, a shade too warm. He thought of Pat, off on her own, with two teenagers whom Schecter had barely mentioned. He felt sorry for himself, seeing Schecter diminished, and for Marj, who had to hear all about it. Breakups, deaths, endings, and departures of any kind—they always made him feel small and helpless.
“Father! Father! Don’t go!”
Marj reached under the table and gave his hand a squeeze.
“We had seventeen years. Who knows? Maybe that was enough.” Schecter opened his briefcase. “But now drink up.” He tapped Rollins’ beer glass. “Go on, finish it off. I got pictures here, and some of them are a little rough.”
Rollins reluctantly downed the last of the watery brew; he could feel his head lightening.
“Okay,” Schecter said when Rollins was done. He withdrew a manila envelope from the briefcase and handed it across the table to Rollins. “Take a look at these. Turned out the chief knew all about that house of yours.”
Rollins spilled out a dozen black-and-white glossies. The top one was nearly all skin, bare flesh that looked like plastic in the dim light. Rollins picked it up. His fingertips were soon moist where they touched the photo paper. There was a naked man with his bare buttocks raised over a woman spread-eagled under
him, her skirt bunched up around her waist. The couple is down on a rug, and, at this angle, the lower portions of a few clothed onlookers—a pair of shoes, a trouser leg, a short skirt—are visible around the naked couple. Rollins gazed at it with astonishment. “My God, what is this—some kind of orgy?” It seemed to be the stuff of tawdry magazines. “You sure this is the right house?”
“Number twenty-nine Elmhurst, right?”
Rollins nodded, still staring down at the photograph.
“God,” Marj said from beside him, her eyes still on the photograph. “Quite a party.”
Schecter took another swig of beer. “Chief said it was some kind of swingers club. Saturday night kind of thing. Get in there and fuck whoever.” He must have seen Marj’s pinched expression. “I know, with all the diseases around?”
Rollins stared at the picture, stunned by its crude starkness. He thought about that ring of onlookers, and now himself, here, watching them. It seemed like a vicious parody of his own night work. He’d tried to capture the whole picture, understanding where the anonymous drivers on random roads fit in to the social landscape. He wanted to know who they were. But these shots simply bore in on the gruesome truth of what they were—rutting animals, nothing more.
“They all like this?” Marj reached over and flipped to the second one: A chubby woman wearing only a party hat is sitting on a balding man in a leather chair. His hairy arms encircle her, his fingers squeezing the nipples of her immense breasts. Her mouth is open, her eyelids half-shut, in apparent communion.
“That’s so gross!” Marj said. She turned to the third and quickly brought a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God—look at that guy.” It showed a man in a T-shirt with his pants off, writhing on the bare floor, while a slender woman squats down on his face and a woman with long hair bends over his midsection.
That was all the pictures that Rollins could bear. He reached over, stacked them up again, and passed them back across the table to Schecter.
“Beauts, aren’t they?” Schecter said, shaking his head. He caught the eye of the waiter and ordered another round of drinks.
“Who took the pictures?” Marj asked.
“Some neighbor. He shot ’em through a back window with some low-light film. That’s why they’re so grainy. Then he went around front and snapped all the license plates he could see.” He dug through the pile of pictures again. “He got some outside shots, too, of the people coming out.”
“How come?” Marj asked.
“Just to bust their balls. It was screwing up the neighborhood, all the cars and activity.” He burrowed into the pile again. “Okay, here’s where it gets interesting. Check these out.”
Rollins didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he could take this. The images were so coarse, the sex so loveless. He kept imagining a print of him and Marj in the bathtub. Would their own ecstasy look any less dreary?
“Go on,” Schecter said. “These are tame. See if there’s anyone you recognize.”
Schecter picked a few of the exterior shots out of the pile and slid them before Rollins. The house looked slightly different in the bright light of the flash camera, which produced some glare off the metal siding, and turned the shrubs into rubber. But it was definitely 29 Elmhurst: Rollins recognized the medieval door, and the limestone walkway.
The photographs had been taken in close succession, from the side of the neighboring house. In the first one, the faces are all turned toward the street. The next one is closer-in, and two men have turned in shock to face the camera. And in the last one, one of the men is lunging furiously at the photographer, fists clenched.
Rollins looked closer, astonished. “Christ—is that Jeffries?” he asked.
“Where?” Marj leaned into him, hunching over the picture for a better look.
Rollins pointed at the angry man going at the photographer with his fists.
“Oh, my God!” Marj screamed. “It is. It’s him.”
“Thought so,” Schecter said. “Check out the back.”
Rollins flipped it over and found a label bearing the words WAYNE JEFFRIES in all caps.
“Apparently, Wayne beat the shit out of the photographer. Guy hung on to the film, though, and ID’d him by his car.” Schecter reached across the table and tapped his finger by the second snapshot. “I told you, he’s a serious hothead. He’s lucky the photographer didn’t press charges.”
“Am I missing something here?” Marj asked.
Schecter looked at Rollins. “You didn’t tell her?”
Marj: “Tell me what?”
Finally, Rollins spoke. “He has a criminal record, Marj. He served some time in Concord State Prison for aggravated assault.”
“What did he do?”
“Apparently, he stabbed someone in the eye.”
Marj gave Rollins a look.
“I didn’t want to scare you.”
“Well, maybe there are things I should know, even if they do scare me.”
Rollins thought about fear, how it had paralyzed him all these years. “I wanted to protect you, Marj. That’s all.”
“Well, maybe you can’t.”
Schecter had been watching them, his eyes moving from one to the other during the argument. “Okay, ease back, you two,” he said finally. “You’re going through some tough stuff here. So let’s just take it slow.” He pulled out a photograph. “Take a good look at this one. Recognize anybody?”
Rollins looked carefully at the faces. He didn’t recognize the two men out front, and two of the people cowering in the background were completely obscured by either a hand or an arm. But there was a woman on the far left, just stepping off the front steps and onto the brick walkway. Her face had been hidden behind one of the men in the first picture, but now, even though she had lifted a hand to conceal herself, Rollins could see some short hair swinging loose as she jerked her head away, and the outline of her face was plainly visible around the edge of her rising fingers. “Jesus,” Rollins said.
“What?” Marj demanded.
“It’s Elizabeth Payzen.”
“That’s what she looks like?” Marj asked. “I thought she’d be younger.”
She did look somewhat haggard, Rollins realized. Graying. “Maybe it’s the light.”
“I thought it was her.” Schecter thumped his hand down on the table with a big, self-satisfied smile.
“But what’s she doing there?” Marj asked. “I thought she was a lesbian.”
“Who knows?” Schecter said dismissively. “Looks like it was pretty much a free-for-all.” Schecter gulped some beer. “But now wait, there’s more.” He picked through several photographs of license plates. “Okay, take a look at this one.”
He pushed the glossy photo toward Rollins. A dark Saab. An antique. As he looked at it, Rollins could feel the blood drain out of his face, and there was a strange buzzing sensation deep behind his eyes.
“It’s Father’s car. A Saab ’96.” Rollins shook his head slowly. “What’s it doing there?”
“So they were right.” Shecter flipped over the photograph. HENRY ROLLINS said the label.
Rollins felt things swirling around him. “Now wait a second, that doesn’t mean he was there. Somebody could have taken his car and—”
“Then you might want to take a look at this,” Schecter said and dipped into his briefcase for a second envelope.
He slid that one toward Rollins.
“Don’t open it, Rolo,” Marj told him. “You don’t need to know any of this.” She pushed the envelope back in front of Schecter. “Come on, let’s leave. Let’s just walk out of here.” She raised her voice to Schecter. “Thank you. It was good of you to be so helpful. But I think we’re done now. Come on, Rolo. Let’s go. We’re out of here.”
Rollins could feel her hands on him, pushing him out of the booth.
“Okay, have it your way,” Schecter said. He reclaimed the envelope with his thick hands.
Marj continued to press against him, but Rollins did not budge. �
��No,” he said evenly. “You were right before. There are things I need to know, even if they scare me.”
“But not this, Rolo.”
Again Schecter pushed the envelope to Rollins’ side of the table. “It’s your choice, my friend.”
“I know.”
“Rolo,” Marj said.
Rollins said nothing. His fingers felt stiff as he opened the envelope, and slid out the photograph. Like all the others, it was in grainy black and white, with poor lighting. As he nervously scanned the scene, he saw only skin and shadows at first. But then he saw the man in a suit and tie, sitting in an upholstered chair in the far corner of the room. The hard eyes, the resolute jaw—the sight plunged into Rollins’ heart.
“That’s him in the chair?” Schecter asked.
Rollins couldn’t speak. His mouth and throat were dry as paper.
“Do me up, darling?” from his mother, sweet-scented in the front hall, turning her back and lifting her hair away. And his father beside her in his evening clothes, his tassled shoes sparkling, reaching for the fastener at the back of her neck.
“This is just too—sordid,” Rollins declared, and he looked across at Schecter, searching his eyes for confirmation.
“I’m with you there,” Schecter said.
The sight of his father in the chair lived inside him now, feasting on him.
His eyes burned into the image on the photograph: A fleshy, heavily made-up woman is perched on his knee facing the camera. She is wearing nothing but a pearl necklace, which dangles down over her flabby breasts, while she paws at his cheek with her left hand as if trying to win his attention.
“At least he isn’t doing anything too gross,” Marj added hopefully, patting Rollins’ thigh under the table. “Just watching, looks like.”
Rollins twisted around to her, and Marj dropped her eyes, plainly regretting her choice of words.
Schecter cut in: “But now, you see who that is, don’t you?”
Rollins returned to the photograph, where Schecter was pointing to a couple his father appeared to be observing rather coolly. They are off to his right, a topless woman with short hair leaning into a thickset, shirtless man in the doorway. Looking more carefully, Rollins could see that she’s fondling him through his unzipped fly.
The Dark House Page 25
