Lie Down with the Devil

by Linda Barnes

  That night, we extinguished the lights, not knowing who might have heard the shots, who might open fire next. I felt the need to laugh, knew it would come out high and shrill, realized I had clamped my hand over my mouth. Mooney found a small flashlight. By its weak and wavering beam, we searched for a cell phone, rifling the pockets of dead men, violating the rules.

  Mooney didn’t call 911. He called Thurlow’s personal number. Thurlow helped us pick up the pieces. And Eddie Nardo was right.

  The little fish got caught. The big ones swam leisurely away. The feds are still trying to decode the evidence I took from Consortium Guidance. Kyle Haber couldn’t or wouldn’t say who, besides Hastings, was providing the cash to defeat the Nausett tribe’s land purchase. Cash is cash, cold and hard to trace, and Haber says he was just a courier, just a guy who muled money from here to there. Sometimes a little muscle, sometimes a guard.

  I’m grateful he wasn’t a better one. He never heard Dailey coming, never saw what hit him.

  Dailey had placed a homing device under the rear bumper of Mooney’s Buick. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here at McLean, walking the grounds with Paolina and Mooney, exclaiming over a raft of purple crocuses.

  We’re very careful with each other, keeping our voices low, our eyes wide, experimenting with the idea of it, the idea of the three of us. I don’t know if Mooney feels this way, but I feel like I have a new window on the anxiety that led Paolina to cut herself.

  I’d been thrown into the trunk of the Buick; Mooney had traveled in the trunk of the Volvo. Both of us knew the taste of that terrifying darkness, a shadow of the velvet horror Paolina had faced in Colombia. It’s turned into part of my nightmare. And I was older, and I’d been a cop.

  Mooney still was.

  You go AWOL, you’re in trouble. You walk in with two solved murders, dead mobsters, and a renegade federal agent, you get welcomed back more warmly than you might have been greeted otherwise.

  Of course, Dailey had warned Sam to leave town long before Mooney ever got the idea to do the same in order to save me the humiliation and grief of having my lover charged with murder. I’m sure Sam, now firmly the Boston mob’s heir apparent, attended his father’s funeral. Every federal agent in town must have been there, too, snapping photos of faces shaded by wide-brimmed hats, writing down license plates.

  Sam and I have spoken. Twice.

  The first time, he told me exactly what “happened in Las Vegas.” Solange had skipped one key detail, for all her seeming frankness. I can only imagine she found the discussion of bodily fluids distasteful.

  Prior to Sam’s December visit, she had gotten a visit from a young man with a strange request. A used condom, one of Gianelli’s, would she save one? Sell the young man one? Name her price. Solange had sent him packing; a weirdo, she’d thought, some wacko pervert. But she had mentioned it to Sam, that last time in Vegas. So Sam had suspected that someone was out to get him, to topple the Gianelli empire. He didn’t know it was Jonno, his father’s wife’s son.

  The DNA submitted in the Wilder case was Sam’s hair, root ball still attached. Jonno hadn’t succeeded in Vegas, but he must have broken into Charles River Park, carefully stolen hair from Sam’s silver-backed hairbrush. The DNA made the district attorney think long and hard before charging Hastings with murder. The trial attorneys are afraid it will muddy the case so badly that a jury will never convict.

  The second time, I saw Sam in person. I needed to do it that way. I’m still not sure why.

  I never meet a flight at Logan. You fly in to visit me, you take the T or you take a cab because I know the traffic at Boston’s airport. I know the Sumner and the Williams tunnels and I know the Dig, so I don’t drive to Logan unless I’m piloting a hack and getting paid by the half mile; it’s as simple as that.

  This once, I made an exception, parking my rental in the Central Lot, a gazillion miles from Terminal E, where the international arrivals land, striding purposefully over the new tile, noting the public art, the New Englandy lobsters and horseshoe crabs that studded the flooring, listening to New Age music piped in to fill the interminably long corridors. I got to the reception area early, perhaps as penance, and sat in a molded plastic seat that had been molded for someone else’s bottom. Public service announcements bombarded me: Do not leave your luggage unattended; do not accept packages from strangers. Twice, I went to the ladies’ room and washed my hands.

  Sam’s eyes had lit when he saw me, but then there was a subtle change, a darkening that made me wonder what he’d heard, what he knew. For a guilty moment, I’d felt like running away, sprinting for the escalator, and disappearing into the night.

  “Hey,” he’d said. “I wasn’t expecting you. There’s guys here to pick me up.”

  I’d stared at the two dark-haired men in suits. “I know.”

  “Pretty obvious?”

  “They look uncomfortable unarmed.”

  “I’ll tell them to get lost.”

  I’d said, “No. I’m not staying.”

  “Me, neither. Let’s go someplace.”

  “No,” I’d repeated. “That’s not what I mean. It’s better if we do it here.”

  “Do what?”

  “Say goodbye, Sam.”

  The two bodyguards had approached tentatively. One had nodded briefly, wordlessly accepting Sam’s attaché case. The other had stood, hands loosely at his sides, knees slightly bent, ready in case a fight broke out.

  “There’s food in Terminal C if you don’t want to go far,” Sam had sounded puzzled. “There’s nothing here in E.”

  I’d suggested that we take a walk, asked him to leave the goons behind. While he conferred with them, I’d concentrated on breathing, in and out, on not looking at Sam Gianelli. I confess, he exerted a powerful physical pull as we’d strolled down the corridor toward the duty-free shop.

  “So,” he’d said, “things went big-time wrong and you got stuck in the middle. You probably think I owe you an apology, but I tried to—”

  “No.”

  “So? You don’t like the danger level inherent in being with me? Carlotta, listen, Italy was terrific, better than terrific. Incredible. Sicily. Palermo. You could come with me for a little while, test it out. Bring Paolina, see how she adjusts. She’ll love it. You’ll see. Spanish and Italian are so close, she won’t have any trouble.”

  “I’m not afraid to be with you, Sam,” I’d said slowly, watching my shoes as they met the tiles. “That’s not it.”

  “What?”

  “Danielle Wilder.”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “You might as well have killed her, Sam.”

  “Oh. I see. The jury’s in.”

  A man and a woman rushed down the corridor, late for a flight, holding hands and swinging their arms as they ran. The matching grins on their eager faces caught my eye and held it. I’d run like that once, holding tightly to Sam’s hand.

  I shook the memory off and said, “You wanted an in with the Nausett tribe, so you went after the paralegal—”

  “Oh, no. Forget that. I did not seduce her and turn her and abandon her. Danielle Wilder was no innocent. She was a gift for the taking. We hit it off in a bar and, believe me, she was out for the main chance. She couldn’t tell me about her crooked boss fast enough.”

  “She deserved what she got?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “You use people, Sam.”

  “Not people I love.”

  “Are you sure who they are, Sam?”

  I turned my head. The man and woman had made it as far as the security line. The man struggled, laughing and wrestling with backpack and jacket, hopping on one foot, then the other, to remove his shoes. The woman slipped hers off quickly.

  Sam said, “What’s going on here? You said you loved me.”

  “I do, Sam. I love you, but I don’t like you. I don’t admire you and I can’t live with you. I can’t marry you. I won’t.”

  “So goodbye?” he sai
d.

  “Yes.”

  “The good cop wins.”

  For a moment I’d thought he was talking about Mooney, that Sam knew about Mooney, and while I’d never meant to hide that from him, I hadn’t exactly spelled it out yet. I may have been fooling myself, but I’d convinced myself that I’d made the decision to split with Sam before that night in Marshfield, that the night in Marshfield would never have happened otherwise. Then I’d realized that Sam hadn’t been talking about Mooney at all. That he’d been talking about me, that I was the good cop. Which meant I was the bad cop, too.

  “Don’t call me,” I said. “Don’t call Paolina.”

  “Carlotta, we can work something out. Come on—”

  “No, Sam, we can’t work it out. Look what’s just happened. You knew you were being framed, but did you talk to me? You kept me in the dark; you told your hired goons to keep me out of it. And, no, I’m not saying it’s your fault. Fault has nothing to do with it. It’s just who you are, how you were brought up, how you think. Clap the women and the children in the safe house. Do the dirty work; don’t talk about it. If there is fault, it’s mine. I let myself get blinded by you. I didn’t want to hear, so I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to know. But it won’t work for the long run; I’m not that kind of person. I have to love all of you, not just the part you let me in on.”

  The recorded announcement warned me not to lose sight of my personal belongings, and a distant cash register beeped. I could hear people chatting as they queued to buy candy bars and newspapers before boarding flights to distant places. Sam opened his mouth, but I no longer wanted to hear what he had to say.

  “I’m not done,” I told him. “Even if you walked out on the mob today, there’s too much I’ve ignored in the past, and I can’t forget about it. I won’t. And there’s Solange, and I can’t work that out. We play by different rules, Sam, that’s all it is. The game is the same, but the rules are different for me and you, and I’m not going to change and neither are you.”

  The corridors seemed twice as long and twice as empty after I’d turned and walked away, as though I’d had to march for hours through a twisting labyrinth before making it back to the distant parking garage and the car. Three-quarters of the way there, I’d straightened my shoulders and lifted my head, already starting to feel lighter, as if I’d cast off a weight I’d been carrying for too long.

  I never had a ring, so I didn’t have to send it back.

  I passed a stand of lilac bushes and stopped to inspect the hard, intact buds. There were fat buds on a nearby stand of rhododendrons, too. Aphids on the undersides of evergreens. When I looked for Paolina, I couldn’t find her, but after a while, I heard the low murmur of the Andean pipes.

  She was sitting under a yew tree, and my impulse was to reprove her for sitting on the damp ground. I let it go. Mooney sat there, too, legs stretched, brown hair tousled, listening and chewing a blade of grass. I joined them, and Paolina played a tune that sounded as old as the earth beneath our feet.

  I’m okay, getting through tomorrow, then the day after that, looking forward to Paolina going back to school whenever she’s ready, or taking the GED, if she’d rather. Who says we all need to march through life in lockstep, graduating high school at the same time, starting college at the same time? I’m working; I’ve got a couple of new cases that will keep groceries on the table. Oh, and Proposition 6 passed. The Nausett can buy the land, but they’ll have to look for a new lawyer and a legitimate source of funds.

  Casino gambling is headed to the land of the Puritans and the Pilgrims.

  Me, I’m gambling on Mooney. It feels like a sure thing, but who knows?