The Whale's Footprints - Rick Boyer

by Rick Boyer

  "I doubt if he can arrest him. But maybe. Maybe he's having the paperwork started on a warrant right now. Who knows?"

  "Tony, where's Jackie?"

  "But I was just thinking. Is this folder of his papers enough evidence? Does it provide enough motive for a warrant? I mean hell, they cleared him once. Why—"

  "Charlie! Joey!"

  We turned to see Mary dancing in front of the wall phone, which was dangling on its cord, scraping the floor.

  "He's gone with him! With him!" screamed Mary, collapsing on the floor. I reached for the receiver and grabbed it.

  "Who's this?"

  "Dad?”

  "Tony, where's Jack?"

  "That's just what I was trying to tell Mom. He went out to dinner with that Professor Hartzell. Hartzell called and said he wanted to take Jack out to dinner before he left to show there were no hard feelings. He picked Jack up about half an hour ago. Why? What's going on?"

  THIRTY-ONE

  Joe HAD HIS CRUISER'S dash beacon on, and we flew along the Cape Highway for Woods Hole. Mary was in the back seat, crying and carrying on. We had the radio going, and Joe was trying to raise Paul Keegan or his office on it. No luck. I sat there next to Joe with clenched teeth, closing and unclosing my fists. All I could think of was taking Hartzell's neck in my hands and squeezing.

  The speedometer said a hundred and twelve on the straights, but it seemed to me that the road, lit up by the stabbing beams of our headlights, was moving underneath us as slow as molasses.

  Joe's face was wet with sweat. One hand was on top of the wheel, the other clutched the microphone, punching down the call button, saying the same thing over and over: 'Jack Adams, white male, age twenty-three, six foot two, hundred ninety pounds, blond hair, blue eyes with Lionel Hartzell, white male, age sixty, five foot seven, weight, one seventy, thin white hair, glasses . . . request all local units in Falmouth and Woods Hole check eating establishments in area, including Coonamessett Inn. Do you read? Over . . ."

  "Hurry, for Chrissakes!" I shouted, pounding the dashboard. Joe punched the pedal down further. Hundred Fifteen, hundred twenty, hundred twenty-five . . .

  We shot past cars in the right lane. The exits whizzed by: Brewster, Harwich, South Dennis, Yarmouth Port, Hyannis, Barnstable, Marstons Mills . . .

  Hundred thirty, hundred thirty-five . . .

  "Joey! Joey! Joey! Not so fast!"

  "Keep it to the floor Joe. Keep it right on the goddamn floor!"

  I scarcely remember the drive south into Woods Hole. Along those twisty roads and tight turns, with thick woods all around, I remember mostly a continual blur of headlights sweeping past dark pine trees, the squeal of tires and shriek of brakes. And always, the white-hot hum of the big engine.

  Then we were at the Coonamessett Inn, jerking to a halt in the parking lot behind a police car with lights flashing. Joe and I were out of the cruiser and running for the entrance when we were met by two cops who told us that Jack and old man Hartzell had left about fifteen minutes earlier.

  There was some sort of brief conference, I guess, but I scarcely recall it. It was a dark, scary dream, punctuated with bright flashing lights cutting the air and reflecting off the badge of the officer we talked with, the night all bluish black, and cold. I think I was shouting; Joe told me more than once to be quiet. Then Mary came up and was crying. Next thing I knew, we were back in the cruiser again, all three of us, with Joe trying to calm us down, saying that three other police cars were cruising the area, looking for them.

  "Have they gone to Swope? Have they tried Lillie Hall? What about the docks? Oh Christ, Charlie! The docks!" screamed Mary. I wanted to jump out of the car and run in all directions. I wished there were twenty of me, running in all directions at the speed of light and calling Jack's name so he could hear me. Then I could find him and hug him and kill Hartzell. But there was only one of me and I was riding in a car—trapped in one place—and I couldn't get out and it was killing me. Mary was reaching her arm over the seat, holding on to my hand so hard her nails were digging into my palm, making me bleed. Charlie, oh Charlie! she was saying. We'll find him, we'll find him, God help us, we'll find him, I kept saying, and wishing it were true.

  "A blue Ford Escort," Joe said. "Hartzell's got a blue Ford Escort, wagon I think. Look out for it."

  Then we were screaming along Water Street and turning down School Street.

  "Where the hell are you going?" I shouted to Joe.

  "To Jack's place. Drop Mary off. Check Hartzell's house."

  So we fishtailed to a stop in front of the boys' house. Joe leaned on the horn until Tony came running out, breathless, planting his hands on each side of Joe's window as he leaned inside the cruiser.

  "The police phoned. So Hartzell's the guy?"

  "Yeah, looks like. Take your mother inside and wait," said Joe.

  "Which way is Hartzell's?"

  "Up that way, third on the right. We checked it though; nobody there. Uncle Joe, is there—"

  "Gotta go kid," said Joe, opening the door for Mary and hauling her out. He dragged her out of the car like a rag doll and shoved her into Tony's arms.

  "Watch the street here. They pull up anywhere, yell at Jack to bail out of the car. Now, you got an idea where they could be now? They left the Coonamessett already."

  "Hell, they could be anywhere. Maybe check their lab in Lillie, then . . . I don't know."

  "I'm coming too. Charlie! Chhaaarrrlie!"

  We spun out of there and back onto Water Street. I glanced back to see Mary getting into Tony's car. Tony was already behind the wheel. Damn. We barreled right through town and slid to a halt in front of the big stone building.

  Joe pulled a bull horn out from somewhere under his dashboard, right behind the twelve gauge pump that sits upright near the radio. He leaped from the car and pointed the horn up at the dark building.

  {Jack! Jack Adams, you up there?"

  A window flew up.

  "They're not here; we just checked, Lieutenant. Maybe on the—"

  BLAM!

  He was interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. From the sound it made, I knew it was a large-bore pistol, and not far away. BLAM! . . . BLAM! . . . BLAM!

  Too late! Too late! Oh my God, my God! I was crying to myself as I ran down the street, guided by the noise. My throat was making a gurgling whine, and it ached. Jackie! Jackie!

  A car door slammed off to my left. In the parking lot behind Water Street, Tony and Mary were getting out of the car. Next to it, I saw an empty blue Escort with a door left open.

  "N000000000!" she screamed. She ran after me and Tony after her. A lighted door was in front of me. It was the door to the supply shed, the Marine Resources building. I heard Joe yelling at Mary, then I was at the door, leaping full at it, bumping it open fast with my knee. An old man was inside, under the light, taking aim with a revolver, aiming at somebody on the floor.

  BLAM!

  I hit him full force, knocking him across the cement floor. But it was too late. Too late, too late, too—

  I turned and looked at the man on the floor.

  It was Lionel Hartzell. I turned again, and saw the old man trying to get to his feet. Then I recognized him; it was Boyd Cunningham, Andy's father.

  "He killed him," Cunningham said sadly. "He killed him, Dr. Adams . .

  "Where! Where's my son?" I screamed.

  "He killed my boy . . ."

  "Where's my son? You—” I grabbed him and shook him until my arms ached. He raised a trembling arm and pointed to the big brine tank.

  I jumped over to the big tank and peered inside.

  There, caught in the spray and bubbles, was Jack, motionless on the bottom.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I DON'T REMEMBER diving into that tank. I don't remember the eels, or the cold. I only became aware of the cold later when Jack came to and started shivering as he finished coughing up the brine that had almost killed him. I remember sitting on the concrete floor, holding him in my arm
s after we'd gotten most of the sea water out of him. He'd started to move during the mouth-to-mouth, then spat up a gallon or so of brine and began to shake all over. Mary was there, too, of course, and I'll never forget her change of tone from hysteria to warm thanks.

  "Ohhhh, Jackie. It's okay, hon . . . Mommie's here . . ."

  Somebody had brought a little green tank of oxygen, and we put the mask over his face for maybe twenty minutes. He tore it off when he came to completely, probably because it scared him. When you've gone without breathing for several minutes, you generally don't want anything in front of your face afterwards. So he lay there while we covered him with blankets until the ambulance came. The only commotion was the kicking Mary and I heard behind us as we were reviving him. It was a flat, wet, hollow sound. It was Tony, kicking old man Hartzell's head. Kicking hard, as if it were a soccer ball, and shouting very bad things at the dead man.

  They tried to pull him away; he slugged one cop, clipped another with a kick to the knee which sent him hobbling away on one leg, and then went back to kicking the prone body of the professor. Ugly thing to do, and I must say Hartzell's appearance wasn't improved by it. And I must also say that I really didn't give a damn, no matter if the old guy was sick. Couldn't have cared less. They got Tony under control and his Uncle Joe kept a huge, hairy paw on the kid's shoulder. Finally, Tony turned around and buried his dark head on Joe's beefy shoulder and cried his lungs out in relief.

  They hauled Hartzell out of there in a plastic body bag, then put the bracelets on Boyd Cunningham, who stood meekly in the corner in the company of two officers until they put him in a cruiser. The other two officers who had tried to subdue Tony were discussing charging him with assaulting an officer (make that two), until Joe turned around and informed them in no uncertain terms that unless they canned that conversation immediately, put the notion entirely and permanently out of their heads, they were going to be very personal witnesses to an exceptionally barbaric example of assault on officers, and that they would be lucky to get out of the hospital within two weeks.

  Joe, at around two hundred thirty pounds, is impressive when he gets steamed. Fortunately, it doesn't happen often. When it does, people sit up and take notice.

  They put Jack on a gurney and wheeled him out to the ambulance. Mary, Tony, and I rode with him, with Joe following in his cruiser. They put a hot blanket over Jack, and when I saw his younger brother leaning over him, putting his head on his chest, crying, I came apart at the seams, and wept in that silent, strangled way men do all the way to the hospital in Hyannis.

  * * *

  The following Monday, September 25, I was driving Paul Keegan back down to the Cape. He'd ridden up to Boston with Joe the previous Saturday, the morning after the fireworks, taking Boyd Cunningham up to his arraignment for killing Lionel Hartzell, and now he needed a way back to Woods Hole to pick up his cruiser. There was no doubt that it was Boyd who killed Hartzell. The autopsy, in which I, as acting M.E., reluctantly took part, showed conclusively that death was brought about instantaneously by four .357 Magnum, 125-grain, semi-Jacketed hollow-point bullets, at close range. Two of these entered the chest, one the abdomen, with the final one passing through the shoulder region. Any but the last would have proven fatal.

  Therefore, not much attention was paid to the other injuries induced after death—the massive contusions of the head, and the dislocated mandible, brought about by "post-mortem trauma" inflicted by an "enraged blood relative of the deceased's intended murder victim."

  End of file. Thank God.

  "Ten to one Cunningham gets two years, reduced to pro," said Keegan, looking out the window at the Columbia Point campus of U. Mass., as we headed down the constantly jammed Southeast Expressway—everybody's least favorite artery.

  "Jury or no jury, but especially with a jury, there's no way they'll pin anything on him except involuntary manslaughter. Given what happened to his son, and the man's emotional state—"

  "Not to mention the fact that he probably saved Jack's life—"

  "Yeah. He'll walk, with probation. How's Jack doing?"

  "He's fine. Totally fine. The last thing he remembers that night is walking with Hartzell into the supplies building and staring at the tank. That's when Hartzell sapped him from behind and flipped him into the water. He doesn't remember coming to in the shed, or the ride in the ambulance, either. The next clear memory is the hospital in Hyannis."

  "Well, I'm glad he's okay. You got nice kids."

  "Thanks; we've worked at it."

  It wasn't until we crossed over the canal that he asked the question I knew was coming.

  "So what's the big deal with Joe and marriage, Doc? I mean, I gather it's a sensitive subject."

  "Yep. Rather sensitive."

  There was a pause, and a nervous shifting of backsides on the car seats.

  "I mean, can you tell me?" he asked.

  "The reason it's hard for me to talk about it, Paul, is that I was involved."

  "Oh . . ."

  "Well, here goes: two years or so before Mary and I got married, Joe married his old high-school sweetheart, Jessica Baldi. What a wedding. And what a happy couple. Joe and Mary's dad was still alive then, and Joe went to work in the family business, Brindelli's. He'd just graduated from Syracuse with a business degree, and was more than happy to take over the management of the stores. They're home-improvement stores. You know, combination lumberyard and giant hardware store. It used to be a construction company, but when labor costs went sky-high in the sixties, old man Brindelli converted the construction company to three big home-improvement centers in Schenectady. Joe managed all of them, with his office in the central store. After his dad died, Joe became president. Soon afterwards, Jessica gave birth to their son, Peter. Joe was overjoyed. Business was doing well; things couldn't have been better."

  "Uh-oh. Sounds too good to be true."

  "It was. At that time, I was just beginning my practice, and Mary and I had just gotten married and moved to Boston, where I'd taken my first position, a staff physician in internal medicine at Mass. General."

  "Yeah, I didn't think you were from around here," said Keegan.

  " 'Course not. Can't you tell by my normal speech, my cautious driving, and my affinity for functional efficiency? I'm from Illinois and Iowa, places like that. Places that are essentially German and Nordic, as opposed to Latin and Celtic.

  "Well aren't you the lucky one."

  "Anyway, Mary got pregnant and had our first son, Jack, just after we moved. Joe's little boy Peter was a little older than Jackie, but they toddled around together as kids. Joe, Jessica, and Mary and I used to rent a cottage together on the Cape during summer vacations. At Christmas, Mary and Jackie and I would drive out to Schenectady to see the Brindellis, and so on. Well, when Peter was seven, he came down with meningitis."

  "I know that's serious," said Keegan.

  "Yes, serious. And often fatal. As it happened, Joe and Jessica were visiting us at the time. So we rushed young Peter to Children's Hospital, where I, along with two other doctors, decided to administer a fairly new and quite successful antibiotic called chloramphenicol."

  My hands had begun, ever so slightly, to tremble. I gripped the steering wheel tighter, but it didn't help.

  "Results were what we expected; Peter shook off the meningitis and recovered. It wasn't until six weeks later, back in Schenectady, that Joe and Jessica noticed his declining health."

  "So the meningitis came back?"

  "No. That wasn't the problem. What happened was a phenomenon that eventually led to the recall of chloramphenicol from the market. It seems that in isolated cases—and the odds are figured at maybe one in fifty thousand—this antibiotic works against the recipient's bone marrow. The result is a condition called aplastic anemia, in which the patient's bone marrow shuts down completely. Both red and white blood counts plummet. The patient becomes progressively weaker, unable to fend off infection . . . and eventually dies. The progress and sym
ptomology closely resemble leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's . . . any of the catastrophic blood disorders . . ."

  "Oh my God. Ohhhh, my God . . ."

  "So what the two families had to do then was to rush young Peter, recently turned eight, back to Boston to Children's Hospital and watch him die."

  "Jesus."

  "And there wasn't a single, solitary, goddamned thing any of us could do about it. He just sank lower and lower. And all the latest medical advances, all the best care, all the best intentions, all the hours of prayers and oceans of tears, were of no avail, you see . . ."

  I was having trouble holding the wheel now. I slowed down a bit.

  "You okay, Doc?"

  "No. No, I am not. I haven't been totally okay since it happened, which was, let's see, almost fourteen years ago. Anyway, that year was one I'd never be able to get through again. Little Jackie kept asking when his cousin was going to get well. Finally, on a cold fall day in October, we had to pull the sheet up over him. Joe and Jessica went back to Schenectady, and I was left with the knowledge that I had taken part in recommending the drug that set the whole ghastly thing in motion."

  "But hell, Doc, you didn't know. It was an accident."

  "I keep saying that. Mary keeps saying that. Even Joe keeps saying it. Sometimes it even helps. Anyway, the upshot was, I quit medicine. Now perhaps, if I'd had several years of successful practice under my belt, or if the kid was not a beloved, blood relative, or something . . . then maybe I'd have weathered it. But the fact that it was Joe's boy . . . Joe's and Jessica's, and that it happened at the very beginning of my practice, made it just too much."

  "So you became a dentist."

  "Right. I became a dentist for less than a year, then I quit that."

  "But aren't you a dentist now?"

  "No, I'm an oral surgeon, a doctor who works on people's mouths and jaws, and who removes teeth that are difficult. I quit being a dentist because it was boring and unpleasant. I couldn't stand being the guy nobody wants to see."

  "So how's your current job better?"