Belson nodded.
“You bag it, label it, take it to the lab, stay with it, wait for it.”
“Okay, Marty,” Belson said.
“Nobody but you and the lab guy touches it.”
“Okay, Marty.”
“I’ll get some divers to look in the water for the shell casing,” Quirk said.
“Three feet of water?” Belson said.
“Yeah, but you got to put your face in it. You want to do that without a dive mask?”
“Or with one,” Belson said.
“I’ll get some divers,” Quirk said.
As we walked back toward the bridge, my father said, “He was here.”
Quirk nodded.
“Maybe still is,” Quirk said.
“Either way, we got his name,” my father said.
“We got a name,” Quirk said.
“You think he’s walking around with fake ID?” my father said.
“I would,” Quirk said, “I were him.”
“Except for serial killing,” my father said, “he may not be a criminal. He might not know how to get a fake ID.”
I said, “There are websites, Daddy.”
“On fake IDs?”
“Everything you ever wanted to know.”
“I retired just in time,” my father said.
“There must have been some people with no ID,” I said. “What did you do with them?”
“An officer took them home or wherever so they could get one.”
“Were there any for whom there was neither?”
“I don’t know,” Quirk said. “If they didn’t have a home or didn’t have an ID anywhere, the instructions were to take them in.”
“For not having ID?”
“Any charge the, ah, arresting officer could think of.”
“My God,” I said. “They’ll be rioting in Harvard Yard.”
9
On Thursday nights, Julie and I usually had supper together at the bar of the Metropolitan Club on Route 9 in Chestnut Hill. We were drinking blood-orange cosmopolitans, which were entirely exquisite. And so were we. Julie was maybe a little more zaftig than I was, which I didn’t envy, though I think she thought I did. She had on low-rider Cavalli jeans and a medallion-print white cotton blazer over a black camisole. I was in my work clothes. Tan faux-suede jeans, a yellow tee, and a blue cotton blazer. Both of us had on open-toe heels. Mine were lower than Julie’s. But not repellently sensible.
“The bar scene here is always nice,” I said to Julie.
“You think we should go somewhere else?” Julie said.
“That wasn’t a criticism,” I said.
“But how come a couple of hotties like us don’t get hit on more?” Julie said.
“Maybe we don’t invite it?” I said.
“I’m inviting as hard as I can,” Julie said.
“It must be me,” I said.
“You? You don’t want to meet somebody?”
“I may have met more somebodies than I want to right now,” I said.
“That policeman on the North Shore?” Julie said.
I shook my head.
“Oh,” Julie said. “I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t just him,” I said. “He couldn’t break with his ex-wife, but I couldn’t let go of Richie.”
“For God’s sake,” Julie said. “Richie’s married to someone else.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you ever see him?”
“Yes. We share Rosie, remember.”
“Hell,” Julie said. “Michael and I share children, for crissake. It doesn’t mean I get moonie-goonie when I go to pick them up.”
“It’s not even that I have hopes,” I said. “It’s that what I have to share still seems to belong to him.”
“What’s your shrink say?”
“We’re working on it,” I said.
“What do you say?”
“Me?”
“Yes,” Julie said. “Why can’t you share yourself with someone else?”
“I love Richie,” I said.
“Even though you divorced him?”
“Yes.”
“That’s crazy,” Julie said.
“Is that a professional judgment?” I said. “Or just one pal to another?”
“Both. Love is an amalgam of pathology, rationalization, and fantasy. Men use it. They use it so they can jump your bones, and when they’ve done that enough, they use it so you’ll take care of them.”
“Care?”
Julie finished her drink and gestured to the bartender.
“You bet,” Julie said. “Men are babies, in case you haven’t noticed yet.”
“Actually, I hadn’t much,” I said.
I knew this tirade. I’d heard it from my mother before I ever met Julie, and I heard it from her so often that I could almost lip-synch it with her. I also knew that after two drinks, when the faucet got turned on, there was no turning it off until the tirade had emptied out.
“They are. You have to tend to them sexually, see that their laundry is done, feed them, arrange their social life, make conversation for them, take care of their children, tell them all the time that they are a good boy.”
“In so many words,” I said.
“And if you don’t do all of that, they go find another mommy,” Julie said.
“You think that’s what it’s all about?” I said. “Oedipus?”
“Of course it is,” Julie said. “They want to stay home with their mommy, and when they find out they can’t, they start scurrying around looking for an adequate substitute.”
Citing a concrete refutation of her generalizations was never effective when she was deep into her tirade mode. But I was bored, and the evening stretched long ahead, so I did it anyway.
“Richie wasn’t like that,” I said.
“You think,” Julie said. “You’re looking at him through those rosy romantic blue eyes. He’s no different than all the rest.”
“Gee,” I said. “You know him better than I do.”
“I do,” Julie said.
She drank some of her fresh drink.
“I know them all,” she said. “I see them clearly, without all that fuzzy claptrap you’re peeking through.”
“‘Fuzzy claptrap,’” I said. “Wow!”
“You know what I’m talking about,” Julie said. “That matrix of romanticism you apply to everything.”
“You are on a really good run, Jule,” I said. “‘Matrix of romanticism.’”
“Laugh if you want to, but you know I’m right.”
Julie drank some more of her blood-orange cosmo.
“Does your shrink believe in love?” she said.
“I think so,” I said. “She has not called it ‘fuzzy claptrap.’”
“Ask her sometime,” Julie said, “what she thinks.”
“I will,” I said.
Julie looked up and down the bar.
“Two guys down at the corner of the bar are speculating about us,” Julie said.
I nodded.
“I’m a little speculated out,” I said. “So if something develops, you’re on your own.”
“Sure,” Julie said.
She looked down the bar again.
“Gives me the choice of which one, then, doesn’t it?” she said.
I nodded. I had finished my first drink, but the second one that Julie had ordered for me sat undrunk.
“Given how you feel about men and love,” I said, “why do you want to choose either one?”
“That they’re babies doesn’t mean they’re not amusing,” Julie said.
“A minute ago you we
re telling me they were a waste of human resources,” I said.
Julie grinned at me suddenly, and I remembered why we were pals.
“That was before I noticed them checking us out,” Julie said.
“And now?” I said.
“Getting laid,” Julie said, “is the best revenge.”
10
I sat and drank coffee and ate doughnuts with my father in the front seat of his car in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts shop in Union Square in Somerville. Rosie sat between us. My father was the only person I knew who had a car with room to seat three in front if one of them didn’t mind the transmission hump. It reminded me of my childhood, when I would sometimes sit in front in the middle between my mother and father so I wouldn’t fight with Elizabeth in the backseat.
“What kind of car is this?” I said.
“Crown Vic,” my father said.
“I mean, who makes it?”
“Ford,” my father said.
“Why’d we come over here for breakfast?” I said. “There’s twenty Dunkin’s closer to my place than this.”
“I like this one,” my father said.
He broke off a small piece of cinnamon doughnut and gave it to Rosie.
“It was the murder weapon,” my father said. “All three murders.”
Rosie chewed vigorously on her doughnut.
“But not the old ones, the ones you were on.”
“No.”
“So he was there, in the Public Garden, while we were?”
“Yep.”
“So we have his name.”
“Yep.”
“Or a name.”
My father gave Rosie another bite of doughnut.
“Daddy,” I said. “She’ll get fat as a pig.”
He nodded.
“We going to start interviewing everyone we ID’d?” I said.
“Yes,” my father said. “If we can find them.”
“You think it’s going to be a fake ID, too,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“No?”
“He hangs around to watch,” I said. “Maybe he’d like the thrill of being investigated. How will we know who he is.”
“We can narrow it some,” my father said.
“With the FBI profile?”
“I’m not much impressed with those,” my father said. “But most serial killers are white males. We could start by eliminating the females and the not-white men. See what happened.”
“And there’s probably some others you could eliminate,” I said. “Very old, or in a wheelchair, or blind, whatever.”
“So maybe we got a hundred real suspects,” my father said. “Some of them will have alibis for at least one of the other killings.”
“And some of them won’t, and some of them won’t even remember what they were doing three weeks ago.”
“Still,” my father said. “Say we’re lucky. We might cut it in half, so we’ve got fifty suspects.”
“One of whom is excited to be in the mix,” I said.
“If he’s in the mix,” my father said.
“Unless he’s stupider than he seems to be, powder residue won’t be useful,” I said. “Even if you don’t wash, it’s pretty much undetectable on your hands after about an hour.”
“It can stay on your clothes for a while,” my father said.
“Not if you wash them,” I said.
“Which he probably did.”
As we talked, Rosie fixed my father in a laser-like stare. Now, getting nothing for several minutes, she gave a piercing yap.
“Does that mean, ‘Give me another doughnut, you dumb bastard’?” my father said.
“Yes,” I said.
My father gave her another bite.
“Now shake your head firmly,” I said. “And say, ‘No more.’”
He did it. Rosie studied him for a minute and then turned around twice and lay down.
“I’ll be damned,” my father said.
“It’s all in the early training,” I said.
My father looked at me thoughtfully for a minute.
“Now you tell me,” he said.
11
I had taken off my makeup. I was barefoot, wearing sweats and a T-shirt. Rosie had just finished supper when Richie came to my loft, carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey. When Rosie saw him she did three spins and raced the length of the loft, turned, headed back, jumped on the bed, picked up her squeaky toy, jumped off the bed, dashed back to Richie, and squeaked her toy at him. Could I get changed and made up while Rosie was distracting him? No. He scooped her up with his free hand and held her while he sat at the small table in the bay and put the bottle of whiskey on the table.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
Richie nodded. I looked at the bottle.
“At least it hasn’t been opened yet,” I said.
Rosie sniffed carefully at Richie’s neck, seemed satisfied, and settled down in his lap, with her head hanging over his thigh.
“I need to talk,” he said.
Don’t you have a wife for that? I went to the kitchen and put some ice in a bucket, and brought it, with two lowball glasses, to the table. Richie poured us each a drink. I sat opposite him and picked up my glass.
“So,” I said. “How ’bout them Sox.”
Richie took a drink of whiskey. He was not generally much of a drinker, and on the occasions when he did drink, he didn’t get drunk.
“I have your picture on top of a file cabinet in the back office at the tavern,” Richie said.
“I hope I look better than I do now,” I said. “You caught me unprepared.”
“I’ve seen you more unprepared than this,” Richie said.
“True,” I said.
“And you always look good, prepared or unprepared.”
I nodded. Richie looked like he always did, starched white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, the sleeves turned back over his forearms. Pressed jeans. Polished loafers. He rubbed Rosie’s belly softly as he talked.
“Kathryn saw the picture a little while after we got married,” he said, “and wanted to know why it was there. I told her I had forgotten to get rid of it, and would do so promptly.”
I felt a little nip of something, maybe anxiety, in the bottom of my stomach. Richie sipped some more whiskey. I took a small swallow of mine to see what effect it would have on the little nip.
“But I didn’t,” Richie said.
“It’s still there,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And Kathryn knows it?”
“Yes.”
“Has it become an issue?” I said.
“A very large one,” Richie said.
“So why don’t you get rid of the picture?” I said.
The nip in my stomach had grown enough so I could tell that it was not anxiety as much as it was excitement. Richie finished his drink and put more ice in his glass and poured himself more whiskey. He looked at it for a moment, then drank some.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You can’t.”
“No.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“Yes.”
“That might have been unwise,” I said.
Richie nodded. We were quiet. Rosie had shifted in Richie’s lap so that he could rub more of her stomach. He and I looked at each other.
“It was true,” Richie said.
“The truth is sometimes unwise,” I said.
“Pretending doesn’t work so well, either,” Richie said.
I drank some whiskey.
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
Richie stopped rubbing Rosie�
��s belly for a moment. Rosie shifted again so she could nudge at him with her nose. He nodded silently and resumed rubbing.
“What did she say,” I asked.
“She said this was about a lot more than a picture.”
“And she was right,” I said.
“Yes.”
“So how are you now?” I said.
“I’m sleeping in the guest room,” Richie said.
“Are you talking?”
“No.”
I tried to stay neutral. To ask honest questions. To help him. But I was having trouble with my focus.
“Don’t you think you should?” I said.
“Yes.”
“But?”
Richie shrugged.
“We’re not talking,” he said.
“You could have thrown it out,” I said. “Or put it in a drawer.”
Richie nodded. Still rubbing Rosie’s belly with his one hand, he turned his whiskey glass slowly in front of him on the table with the other.
“I won’t,” he said.
I drank again. The whiskey had rounded some of the most jagged edges of my anxious excitement. But I still felt as if I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I got up and took my glass with me and walked the length of my loft. With her head hanging, Rosie opened her eyes and watched me upside down as I walked back. I didn’t sit.
“You won’t get rid of me,” I said.
“I can’t,” Richie said.
“Welcome aboard,” I said.
“You can’t get rid of me,” Richie said.
“No.”
“That’s what happened to you with that cop up in Paradise.”
“Partly,” I said.
“What was the other part?’
“He couldn’t get rid of his ex-wife,” I said. “Remember?”
Richie smiled with no visible pleasure, and shook his head.
“A goddamned daisy chain,” he said.
12
In response to some sort of internal clock, Rosie had jumped down from Richie’s lap and gone to bed. On the table between us, the whiskey level in the bottle of Black Bush was a couple inches lower. It was dark outside my windows.
“How did we fuck this up so bad?” Richie said.
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