by Peter Manus
She shakes her head. “I can tell you that no one asked me to make a payment, so it wasn’t like we hired anyone to go over there, like from an insurance company or home health service or something. And we don’t have any male paralegals in the trust department. Look, I’m totally comfortable checking to see if any lawyer or para billed time to the matter. I can do it when I get upstairs. It’ll take, like, a minute. If you don’t hear from me, there’s nothing.”
“That’d be great,” I say. I pass her my card with my cell number, subtly hinting that I’d just as soon not have her emailing me in a way that gives away to anyone checking firm emails that I’d met with her right after seeing Coburn. Something tells me that Roger wouldn’t like the smell of that. “So, I also wanted to know a little something about Jakey’s nurse.”
She nods. “Really amazing for them to have had the same live-in for all those years.”
“Yeah,” I play along. “Seemed like a rare piece of luck to me, too.”
“That’s, like, the understatement of the decade. It’s one of the biggest problems you deal with when someone needs hospice. You get a decent nurse, she finds something better. You get one who can’t find something better, you end up having to fire her.”
“Any idea why this one was different?”
“I never had any contact with her. Payments didn’t go direct. Guess she was just content there. Jake Culligan would have needed a lot of care, so probably she felt needed.”
“Mrs. Culligan seemed like she could have been a handful herself,” I point out.
“Yeah, but that could make a nurse want to stay even more. I got a sister-in-law who does it. She says that some of them develop this need to take on the toughest, saddest cases they can find. Calls it the Nightingale syndrome.” There must be something frozen, all of a sudden, about my facial expression, because she says, “You know, after that famous nurse who started the Red Cross.” She frowns. “Or, wait, that was the other one, I think.”
I try to pull it together. “Hey, you’ve been great,” I say, “but I don’t want to keep you. If I, uh, need to get in touch…” I start stumbling off aimlessly, groping for my phone.
She watches me for a moment, then points. “Partner’s over there in the Mustang.”
Sure enough, she’s made Harry. I glance back at her, in spite of my desire to rush off. “If you ever get tired of bookkeeping, give me a call,” I say.
She laughs and shakes her head. “Got enough cops in my family.”
Even before I hit the car, I’m dialing Brewster’s cell. He’s not picking up. I call Van Ness Collectibles and get the piss-and-vinegar Armand on the line, who disclaims knowledge of Brewster’s whereabouts. Not sure I believe him. I tell him that it’s important for me and Harry to take another look at the crossbow they received, including the box, and that in the meantime no one should touch it. He makes a supposedly jocular comment about “Nancy Drew and the clue of the crossbow” and then goes off looking for it, just to let me know it’s safe. Comes back and claims he has no idea what Brewster did with the thing.
“It wasn’t valuable, you know,” he tells me perfunctorily.
“Depends on what you value,” I note sagaciously, breaking the connection.
TWENTY-THREE
Marina Papanikitas’s Personal Journal
“Aw, Christ on a cracker,” Pruddie greets us. Hair’s kind of mashed on one side, making me suspect we’d caught her napping. “So when do I get to call it police harassment?”
“Couple questions, Mrs. C,” Harry says, a warning note in his voice. “Let’s go with the truth this time, and maybe we can scratch the trip to the station for a recorded interview.”
She crosses her arms and leans a shoulder against the doorframe, aiming her best jaded look at us through the screen. “You got questions, ask,” she says. Guess not allowing us in seems like a victory to her. Well, whatever lubes her up.
“Last time we spoke, you indicated that you served as Jakey’s nurse all these years.”
“I got eight years of dishes, diapers, and sheets behind me. You don’t want to call that nursing, be my guest.”
Harry’s ready. He opens the screen door with a jerk. “Okay, I can see we have to do this downtown.”
“What are you talking about? You asked, I answered. I thought that was how this worked,” she tries. I can see, through the bluster, that she’s scared.
“You must have had help, at least with the meds,” I say reasonably. Harry stops, his hand still holding the door open.
She settles against the doorjamb again, but she’s learned her lesson. “I mean, you couldn’t exactly take Jakey to the store, or say I want to go for a drink with a girlfriend, right? So of course I had someone to watch him when I needed to get out of here.”
“A nurse?”
She shrugs dismissively. “More or less. Most of these home health aides aren’t exactly trained up. Seemed to me they did a lot of sitting around watching the box up there. She was into creepy movies.”
“Did she live in?”
“She had a room up top for when she wanted it, yeah.”
“And did she use it?”
She sighs. “After a little while she was here permanent. If she had another place I guess she gave it up. Look, what do you want to know for? How was I supposed to know the nurse was important? It’s not like she would be killing anyone.”
I’m curious about why she thinks this, but Harry jumps in. “What’s this nurse’s name?”
“Anyer,” she says.
It occurs to me that the ‘r’ at the end is optional. “Anya?”
“Like Tanya without the ‘T.’”
“You have a last name for us?”
“Something foreign, started with ‘R.’ I never got the knack of it.”
“Woman lives in your house for eight years, and you don’t catch her last name?"
“Well, we wouldn’t have been using last names a lot, now would we?” she snaps. “It’s not like I hired her. A home health aide was part of the package, and the lawyer sent her.”
“Okay, okay, no need to get all hot about it,” Harry says.
She nudges at her breasts, signaling that she’s over her ruffle. “She was always a weird one,” she says as some sort of reconciliation. “Frankly, I would have replaced her, but Jakey was attached and would go bonkers if she was gone too long.”
“So she was local? You knew her?”
“She was around Southie a while, I guess.” She pauses, then adds, “And I don’t know about her people, so no need to start asking.”
“Okay, I get it,” I say agreeably. “But how’d you know of her at all? Was she in Dylan’s crowd? Maybe in school with him?”
She thinks. “She’s his age,” she muses, “but he was in and out of juvie. I wasn’t exactly President of the PTA, if you get my drift.” She examines the paint job on her nails contemplatively, then glances at me in a confidential way. “Someone killed himself, janitor at the school, and people whispered that she’d been involved with the guy.”
“Around when was this?” Harry asks.
She shrugs. “Had to be fifteen years back. Maybe more.”
“Which high school?”
“St. Francis. The one with the vigil to keep it open.” She squints at the sky. “They’re demolishing it anyway. What are you going to do?”
“So where is this ‘Anya R’ now? You know?”
She considers. “I don’t have the foggiest.”
“How did it end with her?”
“What do you mean, end?”
“I mean when Jakey died. Didn’t she talk to you about her plans?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t get something like that from that one. One day she’s here, caring for Jakey, and then next day she disappears. She was out when that snot from the law firm came by and tells me Jakey’s upstairs dead. Then later I hear her sneaking in by the ramp, so I yell for her to get in here. I tell her Jakey’s dead for days and where the hell has she
been—she’s supposed to be keeping him alive instead of taking these long walks she’s suddenly so into. I mean, you call that nursing, I say, walking around for hours, going on close to a month, talking to herself like she’s doing drugs or something?”
“Eight years his nurse and that’s how you broke the news to her?” I can’t help saying.
Harry interjects. “Think she was doing drugs, Mrs. C?”
She chooses to go with me, and points a finger. “I’m the mother. I’m the one been suffering.” She’s pretty ravaged looking—I believe her. Then she turns to Harry. “I don’t know about drugs, but I was starting to think she was cracking up. Hadn’t figured what to do, but I was thinking about calling Becker to get her checked out.”
Harry and I glance at one another. “So what happened?”
She blinks past her memory. “What do you mean?”
I try to sound patient. “After you told Anya that Jakey was dead, what did she do?”
“I don’t know. I mean, she turns around and leaves with not one word. Goes upstairs, probably because she thinks no one but a nurse can tell if a guy is dead or not.” Pruddie starts to cry, I’ll give her that—just tears, no sobbing or sniffing, so it’s not a put-on.
“After that?” Harry pushes.
She’s full-on crying now, but tries to ignore it. “She just leaves. Then she comes back and she’s got this case on wheels, the hard shell kind, and she rolls it up the outside way. She doesn’t answer when I call up the stairs—it’s like she’s here but she’s not, you know? So I leave her to herself and just wait for her to take care of it, get the coroner over and take the body, but she never does. Like a day later I realize she’s gone for good. I got my son dead and rotting right over my head and my other kid in the can. I never even saw her leave. Half expected you to be telling me she’d cut her wrists and was up in the attic with the flies circling.” She pushes aside her tears and pretends to laugh to signify that this was a joke, but her heart isn’t in it.
“So you never went up to check on Jakey yourself? I’m just wondering about where he was, exactly, when he died.”
“I told you, I can’t really do stairs with my hip.”
“Thought it was your back,” I say without thinking.
“It’s both,” she says, giving me a dark look. “They’re connected, you might have noticed.”
Harry’s probably ready to smack my head. “So let me ask you one more thing. Then we’ll get out of your hair.”
“That a promise you’re prepared to honor?” she tries to joke again, but she’s pretty dreary.
“When did Jakey die?”
She rubs her cheeks, erasing the tear tracks, then covers her mouth with her hand, thinking. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“Well, when did you discover he was dead?” I try, then I have a flash memory—the pill chart on the fridge upstairs. “Three months ago?” I throw out. “Something like that?”
“No, no,” she says. “It was more recent.” Her heart’s not in the lie, though.
I let it go. “And you haven’t seen or heard from Anya after?”
“Exactly,” she says. “And never is soon enough for me.”
In the car, I play around on my phone. Turns out there are a number of ladies going by “Anya R” on the internet. One has a pop tune she’s peddling. One’s a model. One rates books on Goodreads—seems hard to please. All of them look guilty as hell to me. Harry hangs up after leaving a message for Bernie, his pathologist pal, about needing a death date on Jake Culligan.
“He’s going to tell you three months,” I remark, scrolling. I explain about the meds calendar on Jakey’s fridge. If I’m right, Jakey died around the same time as Terence D’Amante. I try to picture an avenging nurse, finding her patient-cum-lover dead and loading up her .38 to head to Dorchester. Can’t quite get there. Hey, turns out there’s an Anya R advertising herself as a dominatrix. Never realized they used LinkedIn.
I look up. “Where are we going?”
“Concord. Want to phone ahead and clear it?”
“What’s in Concord?”
Harry swerves into the left lane. Every inept driver’s a new surprise. I think he keeps presuming that this time he must have maneuvered his way past the very last klutz on the road. “Dylan Culligan,” he says.
I like it. “Best bet for someone who knew our nurse.”
I put my phone to my ear, waiting for the connection to Concord MCI. “Dylan’s going to ask for a deal, you know.”
Harry laughs. “So what?” H.P. likes getting tough with cons.
I hear the connection go through. “At least we know this guy’s at home,” I throw out.
TWENTY-FOUR
Marina Papanikitas’s Personal Journal
Driving out to Concord Correctional, I don’t look over at Harry, but I have good peripheral vision. He’s doing his silent talking thing where you can see the eyebrow tics and dimple flexes and other nuances of a person conversing, except his lips don’t move.
“You mind if I get in on that?” I say. Normally I wouldn’t bug him, but I’ve got this giant itch in my brain about us being a step behind, from Elliot Becker on forward. Plus, to be frank, we’re heading to a mid-security prison, and prisons make me a little freaky, even when they’re tucked in among the trees next to a sweet New England town center.
“In on what?” Harry says innocently.
“I’m just wondering if we can break the silence rule and talk it through now.”
He gives me a glance. “I have a silence rule?”
“You do, Harry.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Don’t even know what a silence rule is.”
“Then how do you know you don’t have one?”
He bops the horn and gestures like the guy in front of us is simply beyond all reason. “Okay, tell me: what’s the silence rule?”
“You don’t us like to think together. You want us to come at everything separately, then compare. Were you, like, ultra-competitive with your brother?”
“Don’t have a brother.”
“See, that explains it. So, okay, if there’s no silence rule, what are we thinking about?”
“Becker. Got to admit, Pop, the guy had game. I mean, he sees the Dorchester Five story in the paper, maybe even on TV before they can get it through the presses, and he’s already down with how to maneuver it.”
“His ex said he was smart in just that way,” I agree. “A player’s player.”
“She knew the man. I mean, it’s not a stretch for him to predict that Hiram Myeroff will pay big money to make the whole nightmare go away. After all, Elliot Becker was familiar enough with young Bruno to be confident that the little hell-raiser was going to turn out to have been right in the vortex when Dorchester went mean. But where any lawyer might be pumped to represent a rich defendant in a media circus, Becker’s thinking years ahead to who’s going to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to administering the trust Myeroff will undoubtedly ante up. Becker doesn’t want to be facing off with some slip-and-fall shyster the Culligans stumble across from an ad on the tube. No, it’s better to be that shyster. All he’s got to do is woo Pruddie Culligan and he’ll have carte blanche to deal with the mess as he will, including creating an endless gravy train from the grateful city officials who hate his guts and creating a generous golden goose for himself as the Culligan trust manager. Guy had a lot of balls.”
“I recall that very fact, actually,” I agree. “And, on the bright side, this is why no one’s called us in to eat carpet for failing to solve the man’s murder within a week.”
“True, but all patience with us ends about a week from Morley’s death date.”
“So that brings us to the bird.”
“This ubiquitous Ms. Nightingale.”
“Want to start with the myth?”
He looks wary. “Am I about to regret asking the obvious?"
“‘What myth?’ you ask? We
ll, after striking out on the Anya angle, I have been refreshing my sketchy memory of the ancient tale of Philomela.”
“One of my favorites,” Harry mutters.
“Not even close,” I push ahead. “So there’s a bunch of versions, but essentially she’s a princess who gets raped and then the guy cuts out her tongue so she can’t tell.”
“Couldn’t she point him out in a line-up?”
“Sometimes he cuts off her hands too.”
“She couldn’t figure out another way to let the authorities know?”
“Harry? It’s a myth.”
“They must have had a justice system or the perp wouldn’t have needed to disfigure her. Besides, if she’s a princess she’d have connections.”
I decide to keep it simple. “It’s a myth.”
“I see. No wonder I hate myths. So how do they catch him?”
“In some versions he kills himself in remorse. In others, her sister or father gets revenge by grinding up the perp, cooking him, and serving him up to his own father or mother.”
Harry thinks. “Where’s the nightingale?”
“Vic turns into one.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s a myth.”
“Guess it beats having no hands or tongue.”
“It might,” I say patiently. “The female nightingale is mute, by the way. But I think the point is we’ve got a woman here who may be looking to get revenge on some guys she sees as having done violence to her in the past. Could be why she’s calling herself Nightingale.”
“From everything we’ve heard, this woman was in no way mutilated.”
“Jake Culligan was mutilated.”
“True enough, but Jake Culligan was no princess.”
I look at him. “You’re kind of literal.”
He laughs. “My English teachers used to write exactly that in my grade reports, all the way up. I always took it as a huge compliment. Are you saying maybe it wasn’t?”
“Course not,” I say, clicking around on my online encyclopedia. “Which Nightingale should we tackle next? Syndrome? Historical figure?”
“The one in the wig.”
