Boston Noir (16 page)

"That's fucked up."

"You were an affectionate boy. You brought out the tenderness in people. In me. And yes, I felt needed; I felt connected to another person for the first time since Gerard died."

"Did you wonder how
I
felt?"

"If it was a problem for you, you should have told me. I would have respected that. I had an understanding with myself. I thought I had your permission."

"If nothing sexual ever happened, why do I remember that it did?"

"Could you be making it up, Train?"

And then there's a knock, and Mr. Markey opens the door and steps into the room. He stamps his feet, tosses a fifth of brandy to Lionel and a newspaper to Father Tom. "You're famous, Father."

The man behind Mr. Markey takes off his glasses and his balaclava. He wipes his glasses with a hanky and puts them back on.

Mr. Markey says, "I believe you've already met my friend, Mr. Hanratty."

"Twice," Father Tom replies.

Mr. Markey says, "You'll excuse us, gents," and Lionel gets up and follows Mr. Hanratty down the hall to the kitchen.

"He's a reporter," Father Tom says.

Mr. Markey smiles. "Terrance doesn't write for the
Globe
; he delivers it."

Father Tom points to his face. "He did this to me."

"He can be a little feisty. I try to keep him on a short leash." Mr. Markey shrugs. "So tell me, Father, does our Lionel still make your heart beat faster?"

Father Tom stands and steps toward the door. "I'm not going to sit here and listen to this."

Mr. Markey grabs Father Tom's arm at the wrist and twists it until the palm is behind his back and the elbow is locked. "I've read somewhere that pain elevates our thoughts," Mr. Markey says, and he tugs at the arm until Father Tom feels like it'll snap at the wrist and shatter at the shoulder. "Of course, I'm not a theologian."

Father Tom is bent at the waist and in tears. "Please, you're hurting me."

"Keeps our mind off amusements."

"You're insane."

"Have you ever slept on a bed of crushed glass, Father?"

"Please, dear God!"

"Worn a crown of nettle?" Mr. Markey lifts the arm slowly. "These are not rhetorical questions, Father. Answer me."

"No, I haven't."

Mr. Markey releases Father Tom and shoves him back onto the sofa. "What excruciating bliss when the pain ends. You feel grateful to me right now, don't you?"

Father Tom can't move his arm.

"Thank me."

"Thank
you
?"

Mr. Markey leans over him. "Thank me!"

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." Mr. Markey tousles Father Tom's hair, pats his head. "Pain releases endorphins. You feel a little high. I believe you have practiced certain endorphin-releasing austerities yourself, have you not?"

"I'm not a masochist, if that's what you mean."

"The time you slammed your hand in the car door?"

"An accident."

"That's not what you told your therapist. Why on earth would you have wanted to punish yourself like that?" Mr. Markey walks to the window and admires the storm. "You don't get to see but one or two nor'easters like this in a lifetime."

Father Tom wonders if he could make it out the door before Mr. Markey catches him. And then what?

"I'm sure you struggled, Father, fought the good fight. You always wanted to do the right thing, but those little cock teasers wouldn't let you. Always with their sweet little asses and their angelic smiles." He leans forward and whispers: "You liked bending their heads back and kissing their exposed throats, didn't you? Absolutely divine, isn't it?"

"You filthy--"

"An ecstatic moment and yet so difficult to put into words." Mr. Markey takes off his gloves and pulls up the sleeves of his car coat. "Nothing up my sleeve." And then he reaches behind Father Tom's ear and holds up a folded piece of loose-leaf paper. "What have we here?" He unfolds it. "My associate, Mr. Hanratty, discovered this in your dresser beneath your unmentionables while we were speaking earlier. It seems to be a list of boys' names. Should I read them?"

"Boys from the parish, boys I've worked with."

"But not
all
the boys you've worked with. What's special about these boys?"

"Everyone has his favorites."

Mr. Hanratty returns and hands a manila folder to Mr. Markey, who holds it up for Father Tom to see. "You can guess what this is, I'm sure."

"Class photos," Father Tom says.

"Of boys."

"Perfectly innocent," Father Tom says.

"They help you get off, I'll bet."

Father Tom feels the throbbing pain in his closed eye. "Look," he says, "it was a constant battle. I was always thinking about this...this abomination and trying not to think about it. I had no time for friendship or music or dreams or joy or charity or anything else that makes life worth living. If I had relaxed for a moment, I knew I might lose control. But I did not!"

"You are a victim of yourself. Is that what you're saying?
You're
the victim?"

Father Tom notices that the Pope's painted eyes seem to shimmer in their sockets and spin like pinwheels and Mr. Markey's voice sounds tinny and far away, and then Lionel's a boy again, and he and Lionel are kneeling by the kid's bed saying their prayers, and then he tickles Lionel until he begs him to stop, and Father Tom stops and says,
What a great relief when the pleasure ends
. And he drapes his arm around Lionel's shoulders and kisses his blond head, like a father saying goodnight to his beloved son, and then, he can't help it, he tickles Lionel again until the boy yells,
Help!
And then Father Tom feels his head snap and realizes he's been slapped.

"Thanks, you needed that," Mr. Hanratty says.

"Why were you screaming for help, Father?" Mr. Markey puts the watch cap on Father Tom's head. "Let's go for a walk."

Mr. Markey closes the door behind them. He stands on the porch with Father Tom while Mr. Hanratty shovels a path through the waist-high drift to the middle of the windswept street where the snow is only shin-and ankle-deep.

"Where's Lionel?" Father Tom asks.

"Sleeping it off."

Father Tom pulls the cap down over his ears. The ringing in the left is worse. "What's the best I can hope for?"

"That we've been wrong all along, and there's no afterlife."

"That's absurd."

"That way you won't know you're dead. And in hell."

"You have no right to judge me."

"Who would want to live forever anyway? We'd be so bored we'd kill ourselves."

Mr. Markey leads Father Tom to the street. Mr. Hanratty spears his shovel into the snow. All Father Tom can see out of his squinted eyes are the slanting sheets of blowing flakes, the snowy hummocks of buried cars, and the indistinct facades of houses. He hears what might be the distant drone of heavy machinery or the blood coursing through his head. Mr. Markey and Mr. Hanratty stand to either side of him and lock their arms in his. Heads bowed into the wind, they begin their trudge down I Street.

"Where are you taking me?"

Mr. Markey says, "We thought you might need help."

"I
have
hope." Hope is the last emotion to leave us, Father Tom thinks. He sees the lyre player on her rock and speculates that you don't hope
for
something, do you? You just hope. To wait is to hope. Hope is a rebuke to the cold and starless sky.
Iam
, it says.
I will be
. Father Tom sees movement to his right and makes out a bundled and hooded figure sweeping snow from a porch.

Mr. Markey leans his face to Father Tom's ear and says, "Not
hope
!
Help
!" The figure on the porch stops, regards the three lumbering gentlemen, turns, and goes into the house. And then Mr. Markey adds, "Sometimes a message must be sent," but what Father Tom hears is "Sometimes a messy, musky scent," and he wonders why this man is speaking in riddles. Mr. Markey tells Mr. Hanratty how we all have our burden to carry, and he points to Father Tom and says, "And this is the cross-eyed bear." Why would they call him that? Father Tom wonders.

When they reach Gleason's Market, Father Tom knows the rectory is around the block, and he's relieved to see that they're taking him back. They had him rattled earlier with that talk of no afterlife and all. But what else could they do, really? Soon he'll be sipping Mrs. Walsh's potato and barley soup after a hot bath, and then he'll go to his room and read and look out on this magnificent storm. Maybe he'll read right through his Graham Greene novels like he did the winter he was laid up with the broken leg. He sees a light on in the rectory kitchen, or at least he thinks he does. With all this bone-white snow in the air, it's not like you can actually look
at
anything. You look
through
the white. It's like peering at the world through linen. But then the light goes off, or was never on, and he thinks of the tricks your eyes can pull on you, like when you stare at the sky and the clouds seem to race up and away from you. No, the light is still on. He turns to Mr. Markey and says, "Everything's all right then?"

"Copacetic, Father." Mr. Markey looks at Father Tom's florid and swollen face, at his tiny blue eye, fixed in baggy lids like a turquoise bead on a leather pouch. A ragged little thin-lipped cyclops.

They walk past the rectory and follow a path that Mr. O'Toole has evidently plowed between the garage and the school. Father Tom looks up at the fourth-grade classroom and sees his nine-year-old self in the window by the pencil sharpener, nose pressed against the glass, looking down at him. When he peers out the window, Tom sees a battered old drunk being helped home by two friends, and he would like to know whose grandfather this is, but Sister calls him back to his seat for the spelling bee. Father Tom thinks now that he remembers that stormy morning when this ungainly procession passed below the window as he watched, but the old man could not have been him. A person can't be in two places at the same time. And then Monsignor McDermott is standing in the window. Father Tom would like to wave hello, but the men have his arms. The monsignor blows his nose and wipes it and then tucks his hanky up the sleeve of his cassock. Father Tom struggles to free the arm, and his escorts release him. He waves, but to an empty window. He considers screaming but doubts his voice would carry in the muffled stillness of the snow. And if it did? He lifts his arms, and the gentlemen lock theirs in his and walk.

"That's better," Mr. Markey says.

When they head up an alley and away from the rectory, Father Tom asks Mr. Markey, "Who do you think you are?"

"Nobody."

"You're somebody."

"Am I?"

"And I think I know you."

Father Tom is warm under this snowy blanket and would like to take off his jacket. He feels the icy snow whipping at his face and sees a pearl-handled straight razor lying on a bloom of crimson snow by his groin. He's on his back. His legs are buried beneath the drift. How long has he lain here? He gurgles, coughs, tastes blood in his mouth. He'd been dreaming of falling through a starless purple sky away from the vision of Christ when he realized he was tumbling toward the infernal abyss, and he screamed himself awake, thank God. His left arm is bent at the elbow and points to heaven. He tells the arm to move, but nothing happens. He might as well be telling someone else's arm to move. He remembers long ago lying helplessly in Lionel's bed with the dozing boy and trying to will him to turn, to rest his head on his, Father Tom's, chest and his slender arm on Father's waist. And later when Lionel whimpered and opened his teary eyes, Father Tom held him and said, "You've had a bad dream, Train, that's all. Don't cry, baby, don't cry. Don't cry."

But if he did not, in fact, scream himself awake moments ago, and if this is, indeed, hell, this frozen drift of blood and guilt, then Father Tom is happy to know that at least they don't take your memories away, which makes sense, because without a past you don't exist, and there can be no hell for you. He knows that his memories of love and affection will comfort and sustain him for eternity. And then he sees Mr. Markey and Mr. Hanratty standing over him. But when Mr. Hanratty pulls back his balaclava, Father Tom sees that it's Gerard, and he's with Jesus and not with Mr. Markey, and Jesus has His arm draped over Gerard's shoulders. Jesus waves at Father Tom and says, "So long, small fry!" They shake their heads and turn away.

"Stop, please!" Father Tom says, or thinks he says. And then he watches them somehow as they walk back in the direction of St. Cormac's, watches Jesus whisper into Gerard's ear, and the two of them turn again to glance back at him, but all they see is a black smudge in a white world that looks otherwise unsullied.

T
his was her, he figured. The poet. That was the first thing Marcella Ahn had said on the phone, that she was a poet. She was, in fact, the uber-image of a poet, straight black hair hanging to her lower back, midnight-blue velvet pants, lace-up black boots, flouncy white Victorian blouse cinched by a thick leather belt. She was pretty in a severe way, too much makeup, lots of foundation and powder, deep claret lipstick, early thirties, maybe. Not his type. She stumbled through Cafe Pamplona's small door and, spotting Toua, clomped to his table.

"Am I late? Sorry. I'm not quite awake. It's a little early in the day for me." It was 1:30 in the afternoon.

She ordered a double espresso and gathered her hair, the ruffled cuffs of her blouse dropping away, followed by the jangling cascade of two dozen silver bracelets on each wrist. With exquisitely lacquered fingers, silver rings on nearly every digit, she raked her hair over her shoulder and laid it over her left breast.

"Don't you have an office? It feels a little exposed in here for this type of conversation."

Actually, this was precisely why Toua Xiong liked the cafe. The Pamplona was a tiny basement place off Harvard Square, made to feel even smaller with its low ceiling, and you could hear every tick of conversation from across the room. Perfect for initial meetings with clients. It forced them to lean toward him, huddle, whisper. It didn't lend itself to histrionics or hysterics. It inhibited weeping. Toua didn't like weeping.

Besides, he no longer had an office. After Ana, his girlfriend, had kicked him out of their apartment, he'd been sleeping in his office, but he'd gotten behind on the rent and had been kicked out of there too. These days he was sacking out on his former AA sponsor's couch.

"You used to be a cop, Mr. Xiong?" she asked, pronouncing it
Zee-ong.

"Yeah," he said, "until two years ago."

"You still have friends on the force?"

"A few."

"Why'd you quit?"

"Complicated," Toua said. "
Shee-ong.
It's
Too-a Shee-ong.
"

"Chinese?"

"Hmong."

"I'm Korean myself."

"What is it I can do for you, Ms. Ahn?"

She straightened up in her chair. "I have a tenant," she said in a clear, unrestrained voice, not at all inhibited. "She's renting one of my houses in Cambridgeport, and she's on a campaign to destroy me."

Toua nodded, accustomed to hyperbole from clients. "What's she doing?"

"She's trying to drive me insane. I asked her to move out. I gave her thirty days' notice. But she's refused."

"You have a lease?"

"She's a tenant at will."

"Shouldn't be too difficult to evict her, then."

"You know how hard it is to evict someone in Cambridge? Talk about progressive laws."

"It sounds like you need a lawyer, not a PI."

"You don't understand. Recently, she started sending me anonymous
gifts.
Like candy and flowers, then things like stuffed animals and scarves and hairbrushes and, you know, barrettes--almost like she has a
crush
on me. Then it got even creepier. She sent me
lingerie.
"

"How do you know it was her? Maybe you have a secret admirer."

"Please. I have a lot of admirers, but she's not one of them. I know it was her."

"Well, the problem is, none of that's against the law, or even considered threatening."

"Exactly! You see how conniving she is? She's diabolical!"

"Uh-huh." He took a sip of his coffee. "Why do you think she's doing these things?"

"I don't know. I've been nothing but charitable toward her."

"Although there was that minor thing of asking her to move out."

"Look, something really strange has been happening. I got a high-meter-read warning from the Water Department. The bill last month was $2,500. You know what that amounts to? She's been using almost ten thousand gallons of water a
day.
" She dug into her purse and produced the statement.

"
This
is grounds for eviction," Toua said, looking at it. "Excessive water use."

"That's what I thought. But it's not that simple. It could be contested as a faulty meter or leak or something, even though I've had all that checked out. She categorically denies anything's amiss. You see what I mean? She's trying to play with my
mind
. What I need is evidence. I need proof of what she's
doing
in there."

Ten thousand gallons a day. Toua couldn't imagine. The woman had to be running open every faucet, shower, and spigot in the house 24/7, punching on the dish and clothes washers over and over, flushing the toilets ad nauseum. Or maybe experimenting with some indoor hydroponic farming, growing ganja.

"I guess I could do a little surveillance," he said, giving the water bill back to Marcella Ahn.

"Round the clock?"

Toua laughed. "I have other cases. I have a life," he said, though neither was true.

"I own another house on the same lot, a studio. The tenant just left. You could move in there for the duration."

"You realize what this might cost?" he asked, trying to decide how much he could squeeze out of Marcella Ahn.

"That's not an issue for me," she said. "I want to know everything. I want to know every little thing she's been doing or is planning to do, what she's saying about the situation and me to other people, what's going on in her life, a full profile. The more I know, the more I can protect myself. Your ad said something about computer forensics?" Business had gotten so bad, Toua had been reduced to stuffing promotional fliers into mailboxes, targeting the wealthy demographic along Brattle Street, where people could afford to act on their suspicions, infidelity being the most common. "Can you hack into her e-mail?"

"I won't do anything illegal," he told her.

"You won't, or can't?"

"Anything I get trespassing would be inadmissible in court."

"Would it be trespassing if I gave you a key?"

"That's a gray area."

"As are so many things in this world, Mr.
Shee-ong.
I don't care what it takes. Do whatever you have to do. I want this woman out of my life."

Marcella Ahn, it turned out, was something of a slumlady. The house in Cambridgeport was a mess, a two-bedroom cape with rotting clapboards, rusted-out chain link, the yard over-flowing with weeds and detritus. The second house was a converted detached garage in back, equally decrepit. Toua spent two days cleaning it, bringing an inflatable bed and some furnishings from his storage unit to try to make it habitable.

The studio did, however, provide a good vantage point for surveillance. The driveway and side door were directly in front of him, and a couple of large windows at the back of the main house gave Toua a view into the kitchen through to the living room. He set up his video camera and watched the tenant.

Caroline Yip was an Asian waif, five-two, barely a hundred pounds. Like Marcella Ahn, she had spectacular butt-length hair, but it was wavy, seldom brushed, by the looks of it. She had none of Marcella Ahn's artifices, wearing ragtag, thread-bare clothes--flip-flops, holes in her T-shirts and jeans--and no makeup whatsoever. She was athletic, jogging every morning, doing yoga in the afternoons, and using a clunky old bike for transportation; her movements were quick, decisive, careless. She chucked things about, her mail, the newspaper, dishes, flatware, never giving anything a second glance. Her internal engine was jittery, in constant need of locomotion and replenishment. Despite her tiny size, she ate like a hog, slurping up bowls of cereal and crunching down on toast with peanut butter throughout the day, fixing mammoth sandwiches for lunch, and stir-frying whole heads of bok choy with chicken, served on mounds of rice, for dinner.

During one of those first nights, after Caroline Yip had left on her bicycle, Toua entered the house. From what he had observed, he was not expecting tidiness, but he was still taken aback by the interior's condition. The woman was an immense slob. Her only furnishings were a couch and a coffee table (obviously street finds), a boom box, a futon, and a few ugly lamps, the floors littered with clothes, CDs, shoes, books, papers, and magazines. There was a thick layer of grease on the stove and countertops, dust and hair and curdled food on every other surface, and the bathroom was clogged with sixty-two bottles of shampoo and conditioner, some half-filled, most of them empty. No photos or posters adorned the walls, no decorations anywhere, and there were no extra place settings for guests. She didn't need companionship, it appeared, didn't need mementos of her family or her past, reminders of her origins or her identity. She was a transient. Her house was a functional dump. Her attention resided elsewhere.

By poking through her bills, pay stubs, calendar, and checkbook, Toua gleaned several more things: Caroline Yip had no money and lousy credit; she taught classes at three different colleges as a poorly paid adjunct instructor; she supported herself mainly by waitressing at Chez Henri four nights a week; she had no appointments whatsoever, not with a lover or friend or family member or even a dentist, in the foreseeable future.

He downloaded her e-mail and website usernames and passwords and configured her wireless modem so he could access her laptop covertly, but there wasn't much activity there, nothing unusual. Nor did her cell phone calls, which he was able to pick up on his radio scanner, merit much interest over the next few days, nothing more personal than scheduling shifts at work. She was a loner. She didn't have a life. Just like him.

She was also, like Toua, an insomniac. On consecutive nights, he saw her bedroom light snapping on for a while, going out, turning on, which explained the dark circles under her eyes and the strange ritual she practiced in the mornings, meditating on the living room floor, beginning the sessions by trying to relax her face, stretching and contorting it, mouth yowling open, eyes bulging--a horrific sight. What kept her up at night? What was worrying Caroline Yip, preoccupying her?

She would end up supplying the answers herself. He supposed, given their proximity, that it was inevitable they would run into each other. The morning of his fifth day, as he was walking down the driveway, she surprised him by coming out the side door, laundry basket in hand. He thought she'd left on her jog already.

"Oh, hey," she said. "You're my new neighbor, aren't you?"

They introduced themselves, shaking hands.

"Where'd you live before this?" she asked.

"Agassiz," he said. "You know, near Dali."

"I love that restaurant."

"How about you? How long you been here?"

"Oh, four years or so."

Up close, she was more appealing than he'd anticipated. As opposed to Marcella Ahn, she was exactly his type, natural, unpretentious, a little shy, forgetful but not at all ditzy, not unlike his ex-girlfriend. Toua had to remind himself that Caroline Yip was the subject of his investigation, and that she was, in all probability, unstable, if not out-and-out dangerous.

"Hey, I gotta go," she said, "but if you're not doing anything later, we can have a drink in the garden." They both looked over at the "garden," broken concrete slabs and crab-grass where a battered wire table and two cracked plastic chairs were perched, and they shared a smirk. "I make a mean gin and tonic."

"I don't drink," he told her.

"Iced tea, then."

It was a bit unorthodox, but Toua accepted the invitation. He thought it'd give him an opportunity to probe, so he met her outside at 6, Caroline Yip bringing out two tall glasses of iced tea, Toua a plate of cheese and crackers.

They made small talk, mostly chatting about the neighborhood, the laundromat, nearby stores, takeout places--soul food from the Coast Cafe on River Street, steak tips from the Village Grill on Magazine. Then, as casually as he could, Toua asked, "What's the owner of this property like?"

"What do you mean?"

"She a decent landlord? She fix things when they break?"

"She's a cunt."

"Okay," he said. He had thought he'd have to work a little harder to uncover her feelings. He had agreed to give Marcella Ahn daily e-mail updates, but thus far he'd had nothing to report. Caroline Yip wasn't doing anything untoward in the house, and her water usage, according to the meter, which he dutifully checked every day, was normal. He had begun to think this was all a figment of Marcella Ahn's imagination, that the gifts had been from a fan (did poets have fans?), that the meter had been malfunctioning or there'd indeed been a leak. But now, startled by the vehemence with which Caroline Yip said "cunt," he reconsidered. "Why do you say that?"

"Let's talk about something else. Want a refill?"

She took their glasses and went into the kitchen. She returned with a gin and tonic for herself.

"When'd you quit drinking?" she asked, handing him his iced tea.

"The first time?" Toua said. "After college."

"There must be a story there."

"Long story. I'll tell it to you some other time, maybe."

"I'm interested."

"It's not very interesting."

"Come on. Start at the beginning. Where'd you grow up?"

She kept pressing, and finally he told her the story, not bothering to disguise it. When he was three, his family had fled Laos to the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, where they spent three years before being shipped off to White Bear, Minnesota. He worked hard in school and was accepted to M.I.T., but once there he felt overwhelmed, afraid he couldn't cut it, and he started drinking. In his sophomore year, he flunked out. He enlisted in the army and served as an MP in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, then returned to the States and joined the Cambridge Police, going to night school at Suffolk for years and finally getting his degree. Eventually he made detective, staying sober until two years ago, after which he quit the force.