“You ought to try me sometime, junior.”
Outside, the sun pouncing at them, Junior said, “How’d she know my name?”
“I don’t think he did,” Papa said.
The loitering youths were gone. The truck was as they left it, except for a beer can someone had thrown into the bed. Farther up the street music shot out of a storefront church. Papa started up the motor, and pondering something, took his time pulling onto the street.
“I ain’t seen a ballgame in ages.”
“I ain’t either, Papa.”
“We’re lucky, maybe we can get bleacher seats.”
“You takin’ me, Papa?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
Papa turned left at the tail of the street and rejoined the city’s hot traffic, fiery in its sound, eye-maddening in its confusion, which several times made him curse, especially when cabbies cut in front of him. He threw a look at Junior, who was fidgeting in his seat. “Keep an eye out for the Citgo sign. That’s how I can find Fenway Park.”
Junior wheezed, as if too much were going on, a question of whether he could juggle it all. Papa threw him another look.
“You gonna be sick, I’ll turn around right now,” he threatened.
“I won’t be, Papa, I promise.”
• • •
Chronicle aired at seven-thirty on Channel Five, opening with a shot of the village green and a sweep of the town hall, the Congregational church, and the ivy-matted library, outside of which the names of war dead were scored in marble. Then came glimpses of Tuck’s General Store, Pearl’s Pharmacy, and the Blue Bonnet Restaurant. A voice-over said: “This is the bucolic community of Bensington, where the old rubs against the new.”
The camera cut across the green to a bright backdrop of smart little shops selling gourmet foods, giftware, leisure equipment, and children’s designer clothes. The sunstruck plate glass of Roberta’s Ladies Shoppe looked like a slab of ice in which a svelte mannequin stood frozen in a summer frock. “It’s a growing town, population seven thousand, with the biggest influx during the Reagan years. It has become home to investment bankers, brokers, captains of commerce, and sports superstars. Natives living in old Victorians sit on their rose-trellised porches and watch the Audis and Jaguars go by.”
Scenes shifted through pristine woodland butchered to accommodate mock mansions flourishing balconies and cupolas like statements of the owners’ worth. Ornamental ponds and swimming pools dimpled the grounds. “This is the exclusive section called Oakcrest Heights. Gerald Bowman, chief executive officer of the Bellmore Companies lives here. So does Crack Alexander of the Boston Red Sox.”
The camera switched to the owner of the voice, Peter Mehegan, a veteran Boston journalist whose unassuming appearance made him look like a native of the town. An old-fashioned bell jangled overhead when he opened the door of Tuck’s General Store. Glancing back into the eye of the camera, he said, “This is not a town where killing is common.”
Randolph Jackson, who had grown wealthy selling woodland to developers, watched the program to the end. Ensconced in an overstuffed chair, he thrilled to the emphatic sound of his voice when Peter Mehegan interviewed him. He heard himself say: “Either case, an accident or cold-blooded murder, we want the guilty person caught fast. If it was an accident, he should face the music like a man.”
Doris Wetherfield watched the program while sewing new buttons on a blazer, and Meg O’Brien taped it on her VCR in the event that the chief missed it. Chief Morgan did indeed miss it. He had long since quit waiting for the Ray balls to come home and was having supper in the lounge of a restaurant in neighboring Andover. The television over the bar was tuned not to Chronicle but to the baseball game. While settling his bill, he glanced up and saw Crack Alexander strike out.
Fred Fossey, who was wearing his VFW cap for no particular reason, tuned in when the images of Flo and Earl Lapham appeared on the screen. The Laphams were their younger selves, the occasion of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The editor of the local weekly had provided Peter Mehegan with the photograph. Fossey rose from his chair with eyes filled with feelings for Flo. Standing straight, he saluted Earl.
Dr. Skinner, who had declared the Laphams dead, was watching a movie channel. He liked old dramas of foreign intrigue, in which people were obliged to show their papers.
At the home of Lydia Lapham’s aunt, the television murmured to a vacant room. Lydia was restlessly asleep in an upstairs bedroom from a sedative she had given herself, and Miss Westerly was making tea in the kitchen. On the unseen screen Peter Mehegan was interviewing Lieutenant Bakinowski, whose hair had been wet-combed into a crest.
“How is the investigation going, Lieutenant?”
“I’m not without leads.”
“Have you a suspect?”
Bakinowski seemed to nod.
“Is the suspect local?”
“Yes.” Bakinowski’s eyes acquired a slight cast. “Beyond that, I can say no more.”
• • •
The headlights of the pickup plowed through the dark of the dirt drive. The high beams swarmed with moths, caught the eyes of an animal, and illuminated stumps, raspberry canes, and the skeletons of bicycles. Moonlight whittled holes in the pines. Papa Ray ball pulled up near the little house, killed the motor, and sat still. Peepers, nighttime birds, and frogs from the swamp made their noises. Eyes darting, Papa said, “Somebody’s been here.”
Junior squinted. He had a headache from the excitement of his day. With a shiver he said, “How can you tell?”
“I ever been wrong?”
Junior’s headache felt like a nail in his forehead. “Maybe it was somebody wantin’ a bike fixed.”
“Maybe.”
Junior went into the house, and Papa stayed outside to look around. The heat of the day was in the house and mixed moistly with the smells of male belongings. At the kitchen sink Junior thrashed his face with water and dried it in a towel that could have been cleaner. Then he drank water from a chipped mug that may have belonged to his mother. He had no memory of her, though vaguely he remembered playing with her clothes, which his father had stuffed into a box. Those were his memories: a few threadbare dresses, a sweater ruptured at the elbows, a frayed bra deprived of two of its catches, underpants with elastic waists robbed of their goodness. With no photographs to go by, he painted pictures of her in his mind.
Occasionally through the years he had dreamed of her crouching naked in the kitchen and had awoken with the suspicion that the dream might be grounded in reality. He never dared to ask his father. Nor did he ever ask Clement, who might have told him.
The only women in his life he could remember were his grandmother, whose breasts were dry biscuits hardly worth stealing a peek at, and his aunt, who was more interesting. She had a squirrel between her legs. Then his grandmother died, and his aunt went off to become a whore — that was what he heard Papa tell Clement. Then his aunt died, and Papa said, We’re the only Rayballs left, just the men. Except he was looking at Clement, not Junior.
Clement was the hero of the family. Clement finished school; Junior left after the eighth grade. Clement went into the army and sent home a picture of himself in a jeep. Junior still had it. Clement had mysterious jobs and mailed money to Papa. Junior was unemployable, with eyes that seemed channeled inward except when they were charting the movements of girls and women. Clement was special; Junior was a piece of shit.
Still at the sink, he uncapped a new bottle of aspirin. He always saved the cotton, though for what purpose he could not say, the same way he could not tell why he kept having that same dream about his mother. Through the window he glimpsed a shape in the moonlight. One leg cocked like a dog’s, Papa was taking a leak near the woodpile.
Junior switched on the light in his little bedroom, where Clement’s army picture was tacked to a wall. The picture was a Polaroid that had faded Clement into a ghost. He sat on the edge of his unmade cot and made a face. The aspirin had
left a taste. Kneading his brow, he wished he could pull the nail from it, and he wondered why he had been born instead of someone else, someone bigger and better, like Clement. Then he felt eyes on him. Papa had come in and was peering at him.
“I bet he was here.”
“Who, Papa?”
“The chief. Sometimes I can smell him,” Papa snarled.
Junior lifted his head, which felt swollen. “I don’t smell nothin’ dif’rent.”
“That’s ‘cause you ain’t had him breathin’ in your face for twenty years,” Papa said and stood motionless, on the alert, as if the chief might be lurking. Outside, insects were singing their loudest. Inside, a moth attacked the lamp. Papa glared.
Junior said, “You blamin’ me?”
“No, I ain’t blamin’ you. You don’t know how to be blamed.”
Averting his eyes, Junior stared at Clement’s ghost. When he was ten, he had eaten spoiled meat and nearly died. Clement, not Papa, finally took him to the hospital in Lawrence and saved his life. And it was Clement who tried to put sense into his head, but always the assortment of words were too clever for him. Always his skull tightened, and a rage built. That was when he used to hate his own brother.
He said, “I miss Clement.”
“You got me. You got nobody else.” Papa’s eyes beat upon him. “You ain’t even thanked me, what I did for you today.”
“Thank you, Papa.”
A while later, naked under a musty sheet, Junior fell into a restless sleep and dreamed of the roof lights of a police car spinning red and blue into the night. The colors battled each other, neither winning, every strike a miss.
• • •
At the lounge in Andover, settling his bill, Chief Morgan watched Crack Alexander, in the throes of a slump, hitless his last thirty at-bats, take a third strike and then slam his bat so hard into the turf that it splintered. Cursing the umpire, he was ejected from the game, which was already lost. Someone at the bar said, “There’s a man trying to stomp his own shadow.” With a deeper concern, Chief Morgan said, “That’s a man who wants to take it out on somebody else.”
He drove back to Bensington, into Oakcrest Heights, a little town within a town. Stone lions flanked the entrance to the grounds of Crack Alexander’s residence. Lamplight led the way along a curving drive. Morgan’s headlights snared a young rabbit, a cottontail that took fright and fled with giant hops over clipped grass. Its white behind could have been a baseball bouncing to the depths of the outfield.
He parked near the garage, three stalls, one containing a Rolls, another a Jeep Cherokee. The remaining stall was empty. The house was outsize, lavish for a childless couple. Morgan had once taken a dip in the indoor swimming pool, which consumed a wing. A bowling alley occupied a good portion of the basement. Lights burned in every window as a security measure. Morgan rang the bell.
In a glass panel beside the door Sissy Alexander showed a face of clear surfaces distinguished by troubled cornflower eyes. When she opened the door, the fatigue of anxiety tilted her posture, which did not surprise him. It was the reason he had come. Her lips reached out but uttered no words and offered no kiss. He said, “Did you watch the game?”
“Part of it.”
“He didn’t do well.”
“He hasn’t in a while.” She spoke in a soft, semi-secret voice never louder than it had to be. Her nerves were wrung, yet she smiled. Her barley-blond comeliness appeared borrowed from an age when fashion favored fullness and roundness.
“When do you expect him?” Morgan asked.
“Hard to tell.”
“If you like, I’ll wait.”
“I can handle him,” she said, which he doubted. The first time he had met her, following her surreptitious call to the station, he had viewed a cut and swollen mouth and bruised arms. Her husband, outplayed by younger teammates during a miserable road trip, had vented his frustration on her, as if she had undone a portion of his virility. “He’s not predictable,” Morgan warned.
“Who is?” she responded, her mouth parting into a slow smile. “Who would have thought you and I …” Her soft voice tailed off, and briefly she took asylum in his arms, her body tense with overlapping feelings for the two men in her life.
“Don’t be afraid to call,” Morgan said, his mind flashing unevenly, at odds with the beat of his heart. The last time he had made love to her was on a bed of flowers, from which she had risen with pansies in her hair and Sweet William adhering to her backside. “I’ll be at the station,” he said.
“This late?”
“Yes.”
She stepped back and drew herself up straight. “You’re good to me, Jim.”
“I want you to be good to yourself,” he said.
He drove over a moon-drenched road to the center of town. The town hall was dark except for the lights of the police station, where flying insects filled the glow. The officer on duty, a cousin of Sergeant Avery’s, said, “Meg O’Brien wants you to call her, Chief.”
Morgan looked at the wall clock. “This late?”
“She said it wouldn’t matter.”
He went into his office, to his desk. Somebody had obviously used it. His pen lay out of its holder. Someone had used his yellow notepad and carelessly ripped away sheets, leaving tatters. The varnished wedge with his name on it was turned the wrong way. Bakinowski, he suspected.
Meg O’Brien answered on the first ring. Her voice was ominous. “Something’s going on, Chief, I don’t know what.”
He pinched his eyes shut for a moment. “Give me a clue, Meg.”
“Lieutenant Bakinowski’s been asking questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Crazy ones. They didn’t make sense, not one bit until I watched Chronicle. Did you see it, Chief?”
“Should I have?”
“I’ve taped it, you’ll see it. He has a suspect.”
“What?” Suddenly he reassessed his darkest suspicions of Junior Rayball. “Who?”
“He hasn’t said.”
“Who do you think it is?”
“Matt MacGregor.”
3
Chief Morgan and Lieutenant Bakinowski met for a late breakfast at the Blue Bonnet, where they sat at a corner table and spoke in low voices. Mitch Brown in his baker’s whites stole looks at them from the galley window, and Agnes Brown observed them from the cash register. Their waitress, a plump, rosy woman who had worked the rush hour, gave off heat like a little wood stove as she served Bakinowski pancakes topped with melting pats of butter. A silver pitcher held the syrup. Morgan, who had ordered a muffin, tore the tab off a tiny container of grape jelly. Their coffee mugs steamed. “Murderers,” said Bakinowski, “have to be damn careful today they don’t leave behind something of themselves. A drop of blood can do them in, not to mention a shred of skin, a strand of hair, a trace of semen.”
Morgan spread jelly, slowly. He had had less than a full night of sleep broken by a dream in which his wife did not quite appear, her image molded in indistinct clay.
Pouring syrup, Bakinowski smiled and said, “One of the conspiracy stories out of the Kennedy assassination is that the real killer in the book building jerked off before he put the president in his sights. The FBI proved the semen wasn’t Oswald’s, but Hoover and LBJ suppressed the evidence.”
“First I’ve heard that,” Morgan said without interest.
“You got a theory?”
“Kennedy is history.”
“I’m talking about the Laphams.” Bakinowski filled his mouth and ate heartily until the immobility of Morgan’s face began to annoy him. “Did you hear me?”
“I did.”
“What I’m asking is if you’ve got anything to share.”
Morgan reached for his coffee. “Not offhand.”
They stared at each other, Bakinowski with jaws moving with another mouthful. He had replaced his blue business suit with one of dim plaid that carried a tincture of red. A pattern of diamonds occupied his t
ie. “I think we can agree the shooting was premeditated, which makes it a double homicide. Shooting of the wife brought on the death of the husband.”
Morgan concurred with a nod. The coffee was strong, and for the first time in a long time he craved a cigarette.
“Something else we might agree on, Chief. It shouldn’t have been the mother. The target was the daughter.”
“That was my feeling from the start.”
“Our minds are running on the same track, that’s good.” Bakinowski, a fast eater, was cutting into more pancake drenched with syrup. His fork dripped. “Nine homicides out of ten, the perpetrator is family or friend, sweetheart, someone the victim knew well. In this case, the intended victim is an attractive woman, so we look to the husband. Lydia Lapham’s got none, but she’s got a boyfriend. That must’ve jumped into your mind right off.”
“It didn’t.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I know Matt MacGregor too well.”
“I can understand where you’re coming from, he’s one of your own, but let me tell you what I got.” Bakinowski hunched over his plate, his eyes emerging from their caves. “MacGregor and Lydia Lapham have been going together for years, right?
People are expecting them to get married, he’s expecting it, he’s pushing it. You know all this, but here’s something you might not know. A week ago she gives him a final answer, straight out, and it’s no, never, he’s not for her. I got that from the hospital she works at — two sources, a nurse she’s friendly with and a doctor she’s dated.”
Caught off stride, Morgan glanced away. He was not surprised that MacGregor, tight-lipped about personal matters, had said nothing. On the other hand, in view of the events, he felt he should have been told.
Bakinowski said, “I bet you didn’t know that about the doctor.”
The only other patron, a trucker, dipped a doughnut into his coffee and ate the wet. Morgan, whose gaze had landed on him, shifted it to the front window, through which he glimpsed a distant figure rising out of a shiny car. It was Arlene Bowman in the dazzle of a white tennis costume. He saw her, then he did not. She had moved quickly toward the cluster of shops. “Have you confirmed this with Miss Lapham?” he asked.
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