by Jan Brogan
“You wanna try one?” she asked. “Maybe the goblins and ghosts will bring you good luck.”
Ghosts. Barry had sold me an earlier version of the Caesar’s Palace game the night he died. One of the tickets I couldn’t find in my apartment. “I’m telling you, I have a feeling about you and Caesar,” he’d said.
Barry would have considered this a message. Maybe it was Barry himself sending me the sign. Signs didn’t show up too often. They had to be followed.
I cupped the quarters she’d just given me. Two dollars. A voice urged me to save the change for the Laundromat. Another voice said I could just toss the damp clothes from the dryer into my car’s backseat and let the sun finish the job.
Mrs. Fraser pushed a Halloween bowl of Tootsie Rolls and Red Hots on the counter toward me. “Sometimes I think the odds are better with these new games.”
That was exactly what Barry had said about the new games. If I won $5,000, all my financial problems would be over. I could repay my mother and my credit cards and have something left to celebrate. And it wasn’t like the casino, it wasn’t like I could lose it all. I’d only be risking a couple of dollars.
Mrs. Fraser was gazing at me with the pleased look of someone who knows she has just sold something. I got a good feeling, as if she knew just how badly I needed a shot of good luck. One last scratch ticket, why not?
But then the throaty “Ha!Ha!Ha!” of the front-door goblin startled me, as if deriding my thoughts. A man about my own age, wearing plaster-splattered overalls and a painting hat, walked in. He wanted to know if the store carried Narragansett beer and whether there was any cold. With that same sales smile, Mrs. Fraser pointed to the cooler in the back of the store.
Her eyes returned to mine. Although she didn’t say anything, I saw her disapproval of the man’s on-the-job drinking, something about the level way she looked at me and didn’t blink. I felt myself retract, my chest drop into my stomach, my fingers clench the quarters in my palm. Alcohol, gambling, compulsive calls to late-night radio—it was all the same. When Mrs. Fraser stood on her toes to pluck a ticket from the plastic dispenser, I stopped her.
“Not feeling all that lucky today.” I dropped the quarters into my skirt pocket and forced myself to walk out the door.
When I got back to the office, my phone was ringing. Carolyn gave me a skeptical look. “How much laundry did you have, anyway?”
“Too much,” I said, taking off my jacket. She gestured toward my phone. “Answer it. It’s been ringing on and off for the last half hour. Driving me crazy.”
I knew who it was. Leonard had already left two voice-mail messages: one before I’d gotten here this morning; and one when I was at the Laundromat putting in my first load of clothes. He kept saying the same thing: that he’d gone overboard because the cause was so important, that he felt a “personal responsibility” to stop casino gambling in the state. If I picked up the phone and heard him claim the moral high ground one more time, I was going to slam down the receiver. I didn’t want to have to explain to Carolyn who deserved that kind of treatment.
The ringing stopped. I left my jacket on the hook and slipped into my chair. The silence was large and welcome. Carolyn looked at me closely now, studying my relief. “Whoever it is isn’t going to give up, you know. They hang up when they get the voice message. They dial again like they’ve got nothing better to do.”
“How obnoxious,” I said.
“Yeah.” Her eyes did not leave me.
The silence continued, and after another minute, I grabbed a stack of press releases and began typing: “South Kingstown elementary school teachers are urging all students to bring in their excess candy to school the day after Halloween. The candy will be donated to the women’s shelter in Newport.”
Carolyn shifted her attention to her computer. I knocked off a second press release about a weight-loss clinic at the University of Rhode Island. The phone rang again.
Turning around, Carolyn said, “I don’t know what boyfriend you’re trying to ditch, but you can’t work at a newspaper office and not answer the phone.”
I could pretend it was a wrong number. I could announce that this wasn’t the features department, but the South County bureau, a common misdial, a digit apart. “South County, Hallie Ahern,” I said, businesslike, into the phone.
But it wasn’t Leonard. It was Matt Cavanaugh.
My stomach did an emotional pivot. Carolyn was still watching me. “AG’s office,” I mouthed.
“I was wondering if you’d heard the news,” Matt said. His voice had a warmer quality than I would have expected given my current standing with the law-enforcement community. “About Victor Delria.”
That he was not a hit man? Or in any way associated with organized crime? It was a little late in the day for Matt to be rubbing my face in it. “What news?”
“He died about an hour ago. Rhode Island Hospital. I thought you’d want to know.”
I was struck silent. Not by Delria’s death. He’d been in critical condition for some time, but by the gesture. Despite the complete and total idiot I’d made of myself, Matt Cavanaugh had called me first with the information.
I didn’t tell him that I had to pass this tip on to the city desk, where Dorothy would assign it to a reporter she could trust to get it right. He must have assumed that I had to get right to work on it, because he didn’t go into what it meant for his case, or for my role as a witness.
“Thank you for tracking me down,” I said.
There was a pause, as if this gratitude confused him. Or maybe he was about to say something, but changed his mind. “No problem,” he said, and swiftly hung up.
At home, there was another voice message from Leonard pleading with me to call him back. The second was from Walter, who explained that his gig the next night was early and that he’d be at my apartment around midnight. It occurred to me that I might be able to borrow money from Walter, who now owned three cabs in Boston and was generous by nature.
Of course, I’d have to confess to him about the gambling, and that could be worse than telling my mother. But worse in a different way. With my mother, I’d feel like a failure as a grown-up. With Walter, I’d get the spin on how failure was human, but I’d have to make all sorts of promises that my conscience would force me to keep.
I knew I’d screwed up, but Walter was a rabid twelve-step disciple. Secretly, he felt everyone was in need of some sort of program. The idea was that you were always vulnerable to everything, and even if you weren’t, you were supposed to go to meetings to provide inspiration to those who still were. He’d be on the phone in seconds scouring Providence for Gamblers Anonymous meetings that I’d have to attend.
I reached into the kitchen cabinet and pulled out a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and a box of elbow macaroni. I pictured myself walking into a church basement in Providence and telling a group of people I didn’t know that I had no control over anything in my life. I decided it might be better to just starve for a month.
I brought the soup to a slow boil, threw in a handful of macaroni, and turned on the television. I didn’t normally watch television news, but now that I was boycotting the radio, I needed a new source of background human voices.
The moral victory of not buying the scratch ticket was not as satisfying as I’d hoped. I found myself wondering if I’d blown it. If that one scratch ticket was the one. What if there’d been a $10,000 prize waiting for me under the latex? I knew I was working myself up, but I couldn’t seem to stop. One negative thought chased the other, a race with no finish line. What if I’d thrown away that one chance in a million—the only chance I was ever going to get—by walking out the liquor-store door? Maybe that’s what the front-door goblin was “ha ha ha-ing” about.
I heard a knock on a door somewhere on my floor. This was followed by laughter and welcoming voices. A second knock that sounded a little farther down the hall made me realize that the families in the building must be taking their children trick-or
-treating. I had a momentary panic wondering if I had any Almond Joy bars stashed in the cupboard, any kind of treat to hand out, but I couldn’t find any. It didn’t matter. No one knocked. Feet shuffled down the staircase. No one considered coming to my door.
The macaroni had congealed into a single lump on the stovetop, but I didn’t care. I’d lost my appetite. There was only one thing that was going to make me feel better and it wasn’t in a soup pot. The scratch tickets I’d bought the night of Barry’s murder. The ones I’d never played. Once upon a time they’d been on the bar. I searched under a stack of newspapers and under the basket of vitamin pills, but they were gone.
Finally, I got a grip on myself and went back to the stove to stir the soup. Too much water had evaporated and it looked like one big red macaroni. I was trying to decide whether or not I should just toss the whole thing in the trash when I heard the newscaster report Victor Delria’s death at Rhode Island Hospital. I shifted my attention to the TV.
The camera was on a middle-aged Hispanic woman with a toddler on her lap. She was introduced as having once been Delria’s foster mother. She told the news reporter that Delria had been orphaned when his parents died in a car accident when he was fifteen. Then suddenly, there was an insert of a family portrait and the camera zeroed in on a photo of a boy identified as Victor Delria-Lopez when he was fifteen years old.
The boy was very slight, with a narrow face and a wide, lantern jaw. The screen changed to a single photo of Victor Delria-Lopez as an adult. I dropped the spoon in the soup and moved into the living room to get closer to the television. This man didn’t have the height or the anger to terrify me or keep me awake worrying if he had friends who might come after me. This man didn’t have any viciousness at all.
This was not the man I’d picked from the photo lineup, because this was not the face that had scowled at me in front of the dairy case.
I stood there, immobile, watching the photo dissolve from the television screen. The camera shifted back to the studio, focusing on a bright-blond newscaster with a ruffle at her neckline. She wore a sad expression and spoke in a slightly nasal tone. “Delria, captured in a police chase immediately following the murder of Way land Square store owner Barry Mazursky, was cleared today of any connection to that crime. Police said that although his car matched a witness’s description of the getaway car, the forensics report and DNA testing produced no evidence linking Delria to the crime scene.”
The newscaster pursed her lips, as if she needed to discipline her vowels or concentrate on not dropping her rs. “Police said sneaker impressions left at the crime scene did not fit Delria’s footwear and that DNA analysis of hair roots and saliva on a panty-hose stocking mask recovered near the crime scene did not match Delria’s DNA.
“Police now believe that eight hundred dollars in cash found in Delria’s car did not come from the robbery, but may have come from a recent drug sale. Trace amounts of heroin powder were found in Delria’s trunk, according to the forensics report. Police have not named any other suspects in the murder of Barry Mazursky.”
The camera shifted to a weather map, and I snapped off the TV. Police might not have another suspect, but I sure as hell did. The man in the parka who was out there running free.
I went to my apartment door and double-checked the lock. Both the doorknob lock and the double lock were firm, but I knew from experience that the outer door, downstairs, was always left open. I moved to the window and scanned Elmgrove. I watched a couple head into Starbucks, but there were no children in costumes prowling about in groups with their parents. A lone man walked past the Mazursky Market, hands clenched in his pockets as he headed purposefully down Angell Street.
I watched him until he got into a car and drove off. If Victor Delria-Lopez wasn’t the man in the parka, it meant that Barry Mazursky’s murderer had been free the whole time in Providence. He’d been the one barreling through intersections and calling talk radio, intent on killing me.
CHAPTER
16
A SCRAPING SOUND was coming from my bedroom. I stepped away from the window into the alcove and stood behind the futon, trying to hide in the relative shadow. Every muscle in my legs and arms tensed as I listened. Another scrape, followed by a ping and a hiss. Steam heat. The radiator.
I needed more light. I reached for the floor lamp, but couldn’t find the switch. I groped the bulb, the neck; how did you turn this thing on? Giving up, I walked across the room to the closet, opened the door, and flicked on the light. A sputtering of fluorescence illuminated a few extra square feet with a grim light.
I turned the dimmer up on the fixture over the bar as high as it would go and snapped on the lights over the sink. I became aware of an awful chemical smell. Metal burning? I ran to the stove and turned off the burner where I’d left the soup, the liquid now boiled off and the macaroni scorched into the bottom of the pot.
Throwing the whole mess into the sink, I was forced to inhale the new burst of steam. I wished to hell Walter was coming to stay here tonight instead of tomorrow. I wished to hell that I didn’t have to wait out the night in this goddamn apartment alone.
Alone, without even the radio for company. I could taste metal in the back of my throat. When I went to crack the window, I found myself staring across Elmgrove in the opposite direction of the square, trying to make out the lights at Matt’s house. The Victorian had three floors, maybe four if there was an attic unit. I saw lights on the bottom and the top.
How long had he known that Victor Delria was not the man I’d identified to the police? Not the man in the parka. Not the man who killed Barry Mazursky.
I couldn’t remember which floor Matt said he lived on, but it was almost seven-thirty and there was a good chance that he would be home. I desperately wanted to be with another human being, and he owed me an explanation. I put on my jacket, carefully double-locked the apartment behind me, and headed downstairs. It was a cold night, and even in the stairway, I could feel the ambush of frigid air.
On the ground level, there were two outer doors, and I pushed through the first into the even colder corridor of mailboxes and discarded flyers, a limbo before the street. Pulling my jacket around me, I hesitated at the door, peering through the glass panes in both directions to make sure no one weird was hanging around. Finding a complete absence of human form, I bolted across the street, not stopping until I was on Matt’s porch, shivering.
There were three mailboxes. Cavanaugh was marked as number 3, which meant he lived on the same floor I did. If he stared hard enough, he could probably see my shadow through my front window. I hit the buzzer with force.
He didn’t answer at first, so I buzzed again. The wide front porch was more rickety than it looked from the street, with several floorboards that needed to be replaced. Fallen leaves collected around an enormous pumpkin placed beside the door, the back side of which had been gnawed by squirrels.
Slow steps made their way down the staircase. Eyes met mine through the leaded-glass side light, and he opened the door. Barefoot, Matt was wearing an old T-shirt, washed so often it was threadbare, and tattered sweatpants. There was a bag of Butterfingers in his hand. “A little late for trick-or-treaters,” he said.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” I said, suddenly embarrassed about the intrusion. The T-shirt was tight and ripped underneath the neckband and along a side seam. I found myself wondering what kind of workouts he did and what he looked like doing them.
I made myself focus on his eyes. They seemed amused. Was that a smile on his lips? He backed into the small vestibule, allowing me entrance. He studied me for a moment, and it struck me that he should have been a little more surprised by my visit. A little less amused. He touched my shoulder. “You all right?”
Although it was just his fingertips that touched me, I was aware of the bare chest that I’d been picturing underneath the T-shirt: the pectoral muscles that were defined but not bulky, the shoulders that were narrow, but solid. Christ, what was I thinkin
g? “No. I’m not all right,” I said, pulling away. “How long have you known that Victor Delria was not the guy I saw in Barry’s that night?”
He looked swiftly up the stairs. The vestibule was a common area; anyone standing on one of the landings could overhear. “Come upstairs,” he said, “where we can talk.”
I followed him up two flights of stairs, my eyes fixed on a third tear in the T-shirt, this one just above his left shoulder blade, at the seam. I could see skin underneath that still looked tan, and I wondered if he ran without his shirt on in the summer. The bare feet on the carpeting were not tan at all.
He guided me into the apartment, which was big, with a high ceiling, bare wood floors, and a lot of corduroy furniture. Dropping the bag of Butterfingers on the coffee table, he reached for a sweatshirt that was tossed on the couch and turned away from me to slip it over his head. I felt embarrassed again, as if he’d caught me trying to peek through the T-shirt holes.
The Simpsons played on television: the episode about Homer joining a gun club. Matt snapped it off, removed a dirty glass from the end table, and gestured for me to take a seat on the couch. He started to head for a La-Z-Boy, but didn’t sit down. Instead, he turned back to me, his eyes scanning for something. It took me a minute to realize that he was looking for my notebook.
I might have told him I wasn’t there as a reporter, but as a witness, a witness scared out of her mind, but I didn’t. Let him worry, let him wonder, let him feel a few knots in his stomach muscles. “I identified a completely different man to Sergeant Holstrom and you know it. Police must have known for almost two weeks that Victor Delria was not the man.”
Unconsciously, Matt returned the dirty glass to its original spot on the end table and took the seat beside me on the couch. Between the couch and the fireplace was a rough-hewn coffee table that looked impossible to destroy. He put his left foot on the table and leaned forward, resting his elbow on the raised knee, his head resting on his hand. His right knee swiveled toward mine and I had to force away thoughts of the tanned back I’d followed up the stairway.
