Dying Memories (14 page)

Chapter 43

As Chuck Boxer sat opposite Emily Chandler in the kitchen of her small North End apartment, he had to admit she was the real deal. She’d clearly been crying recently, but even with no make up on to cover the puffiness around her eyes and the blotchiness of her pale skin, she was stunningly gorgeous. From the pictures he’d seen of Karen Wilkerson taken before she’d been beaten, she was attractive in a blonde, superficial sort of way, but not like this. It made no sense for Conway to throw away a woman like this to go ape shit over this other woman who dumped him over seven months ago, especially given how clear it was that Emily Chandler had been willing to give her heart and soul to Conway. But as he had learned from almost twenty years on the job, you never know what the fuck’s going on inside someone’s head, even when they appear sane, like Conway had.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said quietly, her eyes cast down to the table. She had her hands clasped tightly and her small knuckles showed bone-white. “I couldn’t trick him like that. I couldn’t ask him to come to the apartment.”

Boxer had been scowling at her ever since she took that second call from Conway, and he kept it up. After Conway had called that first time he asked her to lure Conway over if he tried calling her again. He wasn’t happy that she didn’t do it, but he couldn’t really blame her either. At least she didn’t warn Conway that he was there, and in a way he was proud of her. He’d sure as fuck like to have someone like her in his corner. Earlier forensics came to pick up the bloody clothing that Conway left behind, and they since had been able to identify two blood types from it, both matching the victims. Boxer had been hanging around for the last couple of hours hoping Conway would show, but it was clear from his phone conversation with Emily that that wasn’t going to happen, and he thought he’d try rattling Conway with his call and see if that brought the sonofabitch in.

“I still haven’t gotten a good answer why you waited two and a half hours to call us.” Boxer said as he consulted his notepad. “You’re still claiming that Conway entered your apartment at approximately a quarter to six this morning, and that’s when you saw him getting out of the bloody clothes that we picked up earlier?”

She bit her lip and nodded, a few tears seeping from her eyes.

“If that’s the case why the over three hour delay in calling us?”

She shook her head. Her voice sounded emotionally spent as she told him that she must’ve been in shock. “That has to be the reason,” she said. “Somehow I blocked it out until hours later.”

“Are you sure that’s why? It wasn’t to give Conway a head start, was it?”

Emily forced herself to meet Boxer’s hard stare. Her eyes had a lost look in them as she shook her head. “No, that wasn’t my reason,” she said.

Boxer decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was shock and that it happened the way she told him it did. She certainly looked like that was the case. “Conway just came out and admitted to you what he did?” he asked.

“I guess he had to,” Emily said. “There was so much blood on his shirt and his hands. I guess Bill felt he had to explain it to me.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“That he killed them.” She froze, her eyes squeezing tight as if she were fighting hard to keep from sobbing. When the moment passed, she continued, “That’s what he told me. That he killed his ex-girlfriend and her fiancée.”

“Those were his exact words?”

Her color paled as she shook her head. Very softly, she said, “I just killed that bitch ex-girlfriend of mine, and that dick she’s been fucking.”

“Did he give you a reason beyond that his ex-girlfriend was a bitch and the guy was a dick?”

Weakly, she shook her head.

“So that’s it, huh? He just took off what he had on, cleaned himself up, got dressed in fresh clothing, and then was on his merry way leaving his bloody clothing behind? Why the fuck would he do that?”

The profanity accidentally slipped out from Boxer and his neck reddened from the way Emily’s eyes widened with surprise over it. She shook her head and told him she didn’t know why Bill left his clothing behind.

“Here’s what I really don’t get,” Boxer said, more to himself than to Emily. “Conway’s got his own apartment. Why would he come here to clean up and change? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

She didn’t say anything, but then again it wasn’t really a question. Boxer made a pained face as he rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. More sedately he asked whether Conway had been talking recently about his ex-girlfriend.

“I never heard of her until today,” Emily said with a sad, fragile smile.

“He hasn’t been making any threats about her?”

“No.”

“As far as you know he hasn’t been in contact with her?”

Again, biting her lip, she shook her head.

“Has he been acting strangely at all?”

He could see her struggling as she nodded.

“A few days ago Bill started telling me that he was kidnapped outside of his apartment,” she said, her brow creased and troubled, “then he told me he was only joking. I couldn’t help feeling he was being serious at first. And since then he’s been so preoccupied… and then there were his all-night stakeouts the last two nights.”

“What about these stakeouts?”

“I don’t know what he was doing,” Emily said, her voice exhausted. “All Bill told me was that it was for a story he was working on. I’m sorry. I know you’re investigating a murder, but this has been very hard on me and I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I’m feeling dizzy and I think I need to lie down.”

“Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“No, I don’t think so. I just need to lie down, that’s all.”

Boxer nodded. She looked wiped out and he was out of questions anyway. Gruffly, he told her that if she heard from Conway again to let him know, and he handed her a card with his cell phone number on it. He got up to leave, but stopped as he saw how hard she was struggling to hold it together. “I’m sorry I had to give you such a hard time,” he said, his ears now burning as red as his neck. “This whole business just doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. If I was Conway and I had you waiting for me no way I would give a damn about someone like Karen Wilkerson.”

That started her sobbing. It was mostly a silent sobbing, one that she struggled hard to stop. Boxer watched helplessly, wanting to somehow comfort her. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do, and his eyes dulled in resignation of that. He left the apartment.

Chapter 44

Trey Megeet sat unresponsive during his weekly therapy session. His eyes were deadened, his lips pulled downward into a despondent frown, his chest caved. Twenty minutes into the session, his psychiatrist scribbled a note in his pad reminding him to increase Megeet’s Zoloft dosage. He then informed his patient that he was ending things early. That he had better ways to spend the remaining half hour of their scheduled session than watching Megeet sit like a lump. While the psychiatrist waited for a guard to escort Megeet back to his cell, he picked up a paperback pulp novel dealing with an ex-dominatrix turned PI that he had bought recently. When a guard arrived to take Megeet from the office, the psychiatrist gave him a quick nod and then was back into his book.

Megeet had sunk into a deeper depression since meeting with that newspaper reporter. Before he agreed to talk to him he knew it was a pipedream at best that he’d get his version of the truth out there. He could tell that the guy didn’t believe him and would be writing yet another article about what a crazy motherfucker he was, but that wasn’t what had him so depressed. What sunk him into a deeper state of despair was realizing that he should’ve been hit by that car too. The memory was so clear in his mind of his wife being slammed hard by that car and the expression on Tim Zhang’s face just before he sped off. All these years later that memory was still stuck in his head, still as vivid and real as ever. When he closed his eyes at night he’d see it as if it were happening all over again. Sometimes even when his eyes were open he’d see it. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get the damn thing out of his mind.

He could understand his co-workers being confused about his whereabouts when the hit-and-run happened, and them messing up the time of when he later wandered into the office. But when he recounted the incident to that reporter he realized there was something about it that didn’t feel right, that just didn’t make any sense. He would’ve been holding hands with his darling Charlaine when they crossed that street. They always held hands when walking across streets. So why wasn’t he hit too? He should’ve been unless he was only imagining what seemed so real to him. Maybe what they’ve been telling him is the truth; that Tim Zhang really was in California at the time Charlaine had her life so brutally ended. And maybe he wasn’t there with her like they kept telling him. The fact that he wasn’t hit by that car made him think that maybe they’d been right and he’d been wrong, which meant that his memory that seemed so real was only imagined by him. The thought of that sickened him. If it was true then not only wasn’t Charlaine’s death avenged, but he’d taken an innocent life.

As Megeet was led into the cell block and through a common area, his gaze wandered to a TV set that was bolted high on the wall, and his slow shuffling came to an abrupt stop. His eyes widened and a look of utter confusion contorted his facial features. On the TV was a picture of the reporter he had just spoken to. Megeet asked the guard if he could watch the news story they were showing.

“Three minutes,” the guard told him.

A very thin young woman whose long, big blond hair looked as if it had been painted with shellac was reporting how
Boston Tribune
reporter Bill Conway had broken into the townhouse where his ex-fiancée lived with former dot com whiz kid, Joseph Hartley, and after stabbing Hartley to death, had savagely beaten his ex-fiancée leaving her in critical condition. While Megeet watched this a smile cracked his face—the first time that had happened since his wife was killed. The guard noticing it asked him what was so funny.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just that that motherfucker’s crazier than I am.” Still grinning savagely, he turned away from the TV set and trudged off towards his cell.

Chapter 45

This time as Bill’s dad attacks him, it’s different than two years earlier when he was beaten senseless. Bill is several inches taller, and while thin and rangy, all the hours spent on the job moving furniture has strengthened him. He absorbs a half dozen blows from his dad, but as Frank’s hands are wrapping around his throat, Bill head butts him and throws Frank down.

The way Frank’s head collides with the corner edge of the coffee table probably kills him instantly, but Bill follows him to the floor, battering Frank’s face until it is nearly unrecognizable. It is only then that Bill realizes what he is doing. He crawls off of Frank’s body and heads to the bathroom. There he struggles to strip off his clothing, his right hand badly swollen and radiating with pain. It takes some time, but once he is able to get his clothes off, he stands under the shower until he scrubs the blood off of him, his own and his dad’s. After finding some clean clothes to put on, he calls the police.

Three weeks later Bill sits in a small room with his court appointed lawyer and a New York City assistant district attorney. Up until then, Bill has been confined to Bellevue for psychiatric observation and to recover from his injuries, which include a broken nose, a cracked orbital bone, a fractured cheekbone, a broken right wrist and a fractured index finger on his right hand. The police use the time to go through Frank Conway’s financial records. They find that the ten thousand dollar insurance payout he received for his wife’s death was withdrawn a day after the check cleared, and they are going by the assumption that Conway borrowed money from a loan shark, most likely for gambling, and later murdered his wife for the insurance money so he could pay off his debt. Since the ten thousand dollars seemed to have disappeared after it was withdrawn from the bank, that seems as likely as any other scenario they can come up with.

The assistant district attorney who sits opposite Bill and his lawyer looks uncomfortable as he explains how his office sympathizes with Bill’s plight, and that they recognized how unusual these circumstances are, but that they can’t allow vigilante justice.

“Bullshit,” Mark Shapiro spits out angrily. Shapiro is Bill’s appointed lawyer, and is a tough looking man in his forties. He is clearly a fighter, and given all the dents and scars on his face looks like he had spent many hours brawling during his younger days. In fact he was a Golden Gloves finalist when he was sixteen, and got beat in the quarter finals when he was seventeen.

Shapiro is livid as he stares imaginary bullets at the assistant district attorney. “Frank Conway murdered his wife for a lousy ten grand insurance policy and got away with it. When my client was fifteen he was beaten so badly by Conway that he needed to be hospitalized. The system failed him, and he was given no choice but to live the last three years on the streets, and still somehow graduated high school. He deserves a medal, not prison. And this was not vigilante justice. It’s justifiable homicide. Conway was trying to choke my client to death, just like he did his wife, Susan.”

The assistant district attorney reluctantly takes a photo from a folder and places it on the table. “I wish I could agree with you,” he says. “But the way it looks is that Bill, after a three year absence, broke into the family apartment to confront his father and murder him. With the savagery of the attack, I can’t accept justifiable homicide. How can I with the way Frank Conway was beaten?”

Shapiro compresses his lips into a tight grimace as he struggles to contain his anger. “All that was done postmortem,” he says. “I read the coroner’s report. Frank Conway died when he hit his head on the edge of the coffee table. Which happened as a result of my client trying to defend himself. The restraint my client showed was nothing short of remarkable. If that piece of scum had been my father, I would’ve done much worse to him. So would you have.”

The assistant district attorney ignores that last remark and explains how the coroner’s report states that that is a possible cause of death, not the definitive cause. That Frank Conway could’ve been killed by the beating he sustained after his fall. “It all comes down to that what Bill did afterwards showed his state of mind and his true intentions. I can’t let him skate on this.” He takes a deep breath, says, “Manslaughter, second degree. Two years in a minimum security facility where he will undergo treatment for his anger issues.”

Bill has been listening quietly to all this. He speaks up in a soft voice, saying, “How about if I join the army instead? That will give me a chance to serve my country.”

The assistant district attorney thinks it over and nods. “I can live with that,” he says
.