Darkness, Take My Hand (12 page)

“Cal Morrison wasn’t
crucified,” I said.

“No?” Gerry said. “You saw the body, did you?”

“No.”

He sipped from the shot glass. “I did. I caught the squeal. Me and Brett Hardiman.”

“Alec Hardiman’s father.”

He nodded. “My partner.” He leaned forward and poured some vodka into my shot glass. “Brett died in eighty.”

I looked at my shot glass, nudged it six inches away from me as Gerry refilled his own.

Gerry caught me at it, smiled. “You’re not like your father, Patrick.”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

He chuckled softly. “You look like him, though. A dead ringer. You must know that.”

I shrugged.

He turned his wrists upward, looked down at them for a moment. “Blood’s a strange thing.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s passed into a woman’s womb, creates a life. Could be near identical to the parent who created it, could be so different the father starts suspecting the mailman delivered more than the mail. You got your father’s blood, I got my father’s, Alec Hardiman had his father’s in him.”

“And his father was…?”

“A good man.” He nodded more to himself than to me and took a sip from his glass. “A fine, fine man actually.
Moral. Decent. So, so, so smart. If no one told you, you’d have never guessed he was a cop. You’d have taken him for a minister or a banker. He dressed impeccably, spoke impeccably, did everything…impeccably. He had a simple white colonial house in Melrose and a sweet, kind wife and a beautiful, blond son, and you’d swear you could eat lunch off the seat of his car.”

I sipped my beer as the second TV gave way to Old Glory followed by a blue screen and noticed that it was now The Chieftains’ “Coast of Malabar” on the jukebox.

“So he’s this perfect guy with this perfect life. Perfect wife, perfect car, perfect house, perfect son.” He peered at his thumbnail. Then he looked at me and his soft eyes were slightly unhinged, as if they’d stared too long at the sun and were just regaining a sense of the shapes and colors before them. “Then Alec, I dunno, something went in him. It just…went. No psychiatrist could ever explain it. One day he was this normal, regular kid, and the next…” He held up his hands. “The next, I don’t know.”

“And he killed Cal Morrison?”

“We don’t know that,” he said and his voice was thick.

He couldn’t look at me for some reason. His face had grown ruddy and the veins in his neck stuck out like cables and he looked at the floor and kicked his heel into the wall of the cooler. “We don’t know that,” he said again.

“Gerry,” I said, “let me in here. Last I knew, Cal Morrison was stabbed in the Blakey by some drifter.”

“Black guy,” he said, the soft grin again playing on his lips. “That was the rumor at the time, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Can’t find someone to blame, blame a jig. Right?”

I shrugged. “That was the story back then.”

“Well, he wasn’t stabbed. That was just what we told the media. He was crucified. And it wasn’t a black guy did it. We found red hair and blond hair and brown hair in Cal Morrison’s clothing, but no black. And Alec Hardiman and a friend of his, Charles Rugglestone, had been seen in the neighborhood earlier that night, and we were already on edge about the other killings, so until we busted someone, we didn’t mind the black guy story circulating
for a while.” He shrugged. “Not like too many black guys were going to stumble into this neighborhood back then, so it seemed a safe cover for a while.”

“Gerry,” I said, “what other killings?”

The bar door opened, the heavy wood banging against the brick exterior and we both looked at a man with spiky hair and a nose ring and a torn T-shirt hanging untucked over fashionably eviscerated jeans.

“Closed,” Gerry said.

“Just a wee spot to warm me stumuch on a lonely night,” the guy said in a horrendously fake brogue.

Gerry came off the cooler and walked around the bar. “You even know where you are, son?”

Underneath my hand, Patton’s muscles tightened and he raised his head, stared at the kid.

The kid took a step forward. “Just a wee spot of whiskey.” He giggled into his hand, blinked into the light and his face was swollen with booze and God knows what else.

“Kenmore Square is that way,” Gerry said and pointed back out the door.

“Don’t want Kenmore Square,” the guy said. He swayed slightly from side to side as he fumbled in his waistband for his cigarettes.

“Son,” Gerry said, “it’s time for you to be moving on.”

Gerry put his arm on the guy’s shoulder and for a moment the guy looked ready to shrug it off, but then he looked at me and then Patton and then down at Gerry. Gerry’s demeanor was kind and warm, and he was four inches shorter, but even this guy, drunk as he was, sensed how quickly that kindness could disappear if he pushed it.

“Just wanted a drink,” he mumbled.

“I know,” Gerry said. “But I can’t give you one. You got cab fare? Where you live?”

“I just wanted a drink,” the guy repeated. He looked up at me and tears leaked down his cheeks and the damp cigarette hung flacid between his lips. “I just…”

“Where you live?” Gerry asked again.

“Huh? Lower Mills.” The guy sniffled.

“You can walk around Lower Mills dressed like that
without getting your ass kicked?” Gerry smiled. “Place must have changed a lot in ten years.”

“Lower Mills,” the guy sobbed.

“Son,” Gerry said, “ssshh. It’s okay. It’s all right. You go out this door, you take a right, there’s a cab half a block up. Cabbie’s name is Achal and he’s there till three on the dot. You tell him to take you to Lower Mills.”

“I don’t got no money.”

Gerry patted the kid’s hip and when he pulled his hand away there was a ten-dollar bill in the kid’s waistband. “Looks like you got a sawbuck you forgot about.”

The kid looked down at his waistband. “Mine?”

“It ain’t mine. Now go get in that cab. Okay?”

“Okay.” The kid sniffled as Gerry led him back out the door, and then suddenly he spun and hugged as much of Gerry as he could get his arms around.

Gerry chuckled. “Okay. Okay.”

“I love you, man,” the kid said. “I love you!”

A cab pulled to the curb outside and Gerry nodded at the driver as he disentangled himself. “Go on now. Go on.”

Patton lowered his head and rolled into a fetal position on the bar, closed his eyes. I scratched his nose and he nipped my hand gently, seemed to smile sleepily at me.

“I love you!” the kid bellowed as he stumbled out.

“I’m moved,” Gerry said. He shut the door to the bar and we heard the taxi’s axles clack as it pulled a U-turn on the avenue to head down to Lower Mills. “Deeply moved.” Gerry locked the door and raised his eyebrows at me, ran a hand through the rusty stubble on his head.

“Still Officer Friendly,” I said.

He shrugged, then frowned. “Did I do that at your school—the Officer Friendly lecture?”

I nodded. “Second grade at St. Bart’s.”

He took his bottle and shot glass over to a table by the jukebox and I joined him, left my shot glass on the bar, seven feet away from me, where it belonged. Patton remained on the bar, eyes closed, dreaming of large cats.

He leaned back in his chair and arched his back, stretched his arms behind his head and yawned loudly.
“You know something? I remember that now.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “That was over twenty years ago.”

“Mmm.” He brought the chair legs back to the floor, poured himself another drink. By my count he’d had six shots and there was absolutely no noticeable effect. “That class was something, though,” he said, tilting the glass toward me in toast. “There was you and Angela and that shitbird she married, what was his name.”

“Phil Dimassi.”

“Phil, yeah.” He shook his head. “Then there was that head case Kevin Hurlihy and that other nut job, Rogowski.”

“Bubba’s okay.”

“I know you guys are friends, Patrick, but give me a break. He’s a suspect in maybe seven unsolved homicides.”

“Real nice guys, I’m sure, the victims.”

He shrugged. “Killing is killing. You take a life without cause, you should be punished. All there is to it.”

I sipped my beer, glanced at the jukebox.

“You don’t agree?” he said.

I held out my hands, leaned back in my chair. “I used to. Sometimes, though, I mean come on, Gerry—Kara Rider’s life was worth more than the life of the guy who killed her.”

“Beautiful,” he said and gave me a dark smile. “Utilitarian logic at its best, and the cornerstone of most facist ideologies, if you don’t mind me mentioning.” He downed another shot, watching me with clear, steady eyes. “If you presuppose that a victim’s life is worth more than a murderer’s, and then you yourself go and kill that murderer, doesn’t that then make your own life less worthy than the murderer you killed?”

“What,” I said, “you’re a Jesuit now, Gerry? Going to wrap me up in syllogisms?”

“Answer the question, Patrick. Don’t be glib.”

Even when I’d been a kid, there’d always been something oddly ethereal about Gerry. He didn’t exist on the same plane as the rest of us. You sensed that some part of
him swam in the spiritual murk that the priests told us existed just above the realm of our everyday consciousness. The place from which dreams and art and faith and divine inspiration were sprung.

I went behind the bar for another beer, and he watched me with those calm, kind eyes. I dug around the cooler, found another Harpoon, and came back to the table.

“We could sit here and debate it all night, Gerry, and maybe in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be true, but in this one, yeah, some lives are worth a lot more than others.” I shrugged at his cocked eyebrow. “Might make me a facist but I’d say Mother Teresa’s life is worth more than Michael Millken’s. I’d say Martin Luther King’s was worth a lot more than Hitler’s.”

“Interesting.” His voice was almost a whisper. “So if you are able to judge the worth of another human life, you are yourself, by infeRenee, superior to that life.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Are you better than Hitler?”

“Absolutely.”

“Stalin?”

“Yes.”

“Pol Pot?”

“Yes.”

“Me?”

“You?”

He nodded.

“You’re not a killer, Gerry.”

He shrugged. “Is that how you judge? You’re better than someone who kills or orders others to kill?”

“If those killings are done to victims who pose no real physical threat to the killer or the person who orders the killing, then yes, I am better than them.”

“So you’re superior to Alexander, Caesar, several U.S. presidents, a few popes.”

I laughed. He’d set me up and I’d felt it coming, but I hadn’t seen where it would come from.

“Like I said, Gerry, I think you’re half Jesuit.”

He smiled and rubbed his bristled scalp. “I’ll admit, they taught me well.” His eyes narrowed and he leaned
into the table. “I just hate this idea that some people have more of a right to take a life than others. It’s an inherently corrupt concept. You kill, you should be punished.”

“Like Alec Hardiman?”

He blinked. “You’re part pit bull, aren’t you, Patrick?”

“What my clients pay me for, Ger.” I reached across and refilled his shot glass for him. “Tell me about Alec Hardiman and Cal Morrison and Jamal Cooper.”

“Maybe Alec killed Cal Morrison and Cooper, too, I don’t know for sure. Whoever killed those boys was making some kind of statement, that’s for sure. Crucified Morrison below the Edward Everett statue, shoved an ice pick through his larynx so he couldn’t scream, cut off pieces of him that were never found.”

“What pieces?”

Gerry’s fingers drummed the tabletop for a moment, his lips pursed as he decided how much to tell me. “His testicles, a kneecap, both big toes. It fit with some other victims we knew about.”

“Other victims besides Cooper?”

“Not long before Cal Morrison was killed,” Gerry said, “a few winos and hookers from the Zone downtown to as far away as the Springfield bus depot were murdered. Six in all, starting with Jamal Cooper. The murder weapons varied, the victim profiles varied, the methods of execution varied, but Brett and I believed it was all the work of the same two killers.”

“Two?” I said.

He nodded. “Working in tandem. Conceivably it could have been one guy, but he would have had to be astonishingly strong, ambidexterous, quick as lightning.”

“If the murder weapons and MO and victim selection were so varied, why’d you think it was the same killers?”

“There was a level of cruelty to the kills like I’d never seen before. Never seen since, either. Not only did these guys enjoy their work, Patrick, but they—or he—were also thinking of the people who found the bodies, how they’d react. They cut a wino into a hundred sixty-four pieces. Think about it. One hundred and sixty-four pieces of flesh and bone, some no bigger than a fingertip, left on the bu
reau top and along the headboard, spaced out on the floor, hanging from hooks along the shower rod in this little flophouse room down in the Zone. Place ain’t even there no more, but I can’t drive by the space it used to occupy without thinking about that room. A sixteen-year-old runaway in Worcester, he snapped her neck and then twisted her head around a hundred eighty degrees, wrapped it in duct tape so it would stay that way for the first person through the door. It was beyond anything I’ve ever come up against, and no one can tell me that those six victims, all still officially unsolved cases, weren’t killed by the same one or more people.”

“And Cal Morrison?”

He nodded. “Number seven. And Charles Rugglestone, possibly, would be number eight.”

“Wait,” I said, “the Rugglestone who was friends with this Alec Hardiman?”

“You bet.” He raised his glass, put it back down, stared at it. “Charles Rugglestone was murdered in a warehouse not far from here. He was stabbed with an ice pick thirty-two times, bludgeoned with a hammer so hard that the holes in his skull looked like small animals had been living in his brain and decided to eat their way out. He was also burned, piece by piece, from his ankles to his neck, most of it while he was still breathing. We found Alec Hardiman passed out in the dispatch office with Rugglestone’s blood all over him and the ice pick a few feet away, his prints all over it.”