Flesh and Blood (11 page)

“Then why not advertise everything on the same sign?”

“Maybe the jerk-off kid has nothing to do with it,” Marino then says. “Maybe he just happened to be clearing off a sidewalk near where the truck was parked.”

It would explain why he wasn’t concerned about Marino storming around like a maniac, taking a picture of the license plate and threatening him, I think but don’t say.

“You ever seen this same truck in your neighborhood before today?” he asks.

“Not that I recall but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m rarely home during the day.”

Marino watches the gray truck turn right onto the Harvard Bridge, and I can tell he’s deliberating whether to follow it. Instead we swing left onto Audrey Street and into an MIT apartment building parking lot where we stop.

“It’s probably nothing but I’m not taking any chances,” he says. “And I don’t want whoever’s driving it to think we’re paying attention.”

“You slowed down so he could pass us,” I remind him.

“He doesn’t know it had anything to do with him.”

I’m not convinced of that. Marino was reminded of the incident this morning and got angry all over again. Had the driver of the pickup truck been observant and able to read lips he certainly would have seen Marino glaring and cursing. But I don’t mention that either as I scan our surroundings, the MIT athletic fields and football stadium just ahead. Across the river the old buildings of Back Bay are dark red brick and gray roofed.

In the distance the skyline of Boston is dominated by the Prudential Tower with its radio mast rampant like a jousting lance, and the Hancock is slightly taller, the shapes of clouds reflected in its glass. Far off the light changes the way it does over great expanses of water, the Charles flowing northeast into the harbor, then sweeping around Logan Airport and the barrier islands before emptying into bays and finally the sea. I’m reminded of what a beautiful spring day it is, the sky bright blue, the trees and grass a vibrant green.

Right now Benton and I should be on the plane to Fort Lauderdale, and I think about a condo he rented on the ocean, my birthday surprise. Knowing his taste it will be extremely nice, and then I force such thoughts from my mind because nothing good comes from imagining what isn’t going to happen. I already know our week away will be postponed, and for us that’s the same as being canceled. Our taking time off isn’t about accumulating vacation days. It’s about bad things stopping long enough for us to have nothing to worry about.

I send him a text.
You OK? Heading to my office. We need to talk.

“I got a gut feeling something isn’t right.” Marino is still on the subject of the truck. “I was only a few blocks from where Nari was shot, not to mention near your house where someone left pennies on your wall that might have been polished in a tumbler like cartridge cases.”

He calls the dispatcher on his portable and asks her to run the plate number.

“Let’s see what happens.” He rechecks the photographs on his BlackBerry. “How about dialing the number for me.” He reads the number that was on the truck.

“It’s not a good idea to have my phone involved.”

“Caller ID’s blocked on it.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want a record of my calling a number that’s unrelated to what I’m responsible for. If there’s an issue it’s hard to explain. And attorneys are always looking for issues.”

More to the point I’m not Marino’s assistant. I don’t answer to him and I’m not his partner either. But he can’t seem to remember that. I recite the number back to him and he enters it. A few seconds later a phone rings twice and someone picks up.

“Hello?” a female voice asks over speakerphone.

“Is this Sonny’s Lawn Care?”

“Excuse me? Who are you trying to reach?”

Marino repeats himself and the woman replies that he has the wrong number. He tells her who he is.

“The police? Oh my. Is something wrong?” She sounds confused and worried. “Is this about Johnny? Why is Cambridge calling me? We live in Carlisle … I do, I mean. I don’t live in Cambridge. I live in Carlisle.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m wondering if you’ve gotten other calls from people thinking they’re reaching Sonny’s Lawn Care or maybe Hands On Mechanics. Your number’s on the side of one of their trucks.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“I’m not. It’s this number.” He recites it to her.

“I don’t know what to think. We’ve had this same number for more than twenty years. It’s our home number … my home number. Well if you look in the phone book you’ll see it listed under my late husband’s name. Doctor John L. Angiers.”

It takes a moment for comprehension. Then it hits me hard.

D
R. JOHNNY ANGIERS’S WIDOW
says she doesn’t answer the phone anymore if she doesn’t know who’s calling.

“You just answered,” Marino reminds her but he’s kind about it. He’s not aggressive with her. “And you don’t know me, right?”

“I’m not sure why I did. I wasn’t thinking. There have been some odd messages in voice mail and maybe what you’re saying explains it. Now and then calls from people wanting trees pruned, sod put down. Earlier today it was someone who wanted his car fixed. If they get me directly I hang up on them.” She sounds upset. “I’m going to have to change my phone number and I don’t want to. I don’t want to change a number we’ve had for twenty years.”

“When did the calls start?” Marino asks.

“It’s been very recent. In the past several weeks.”

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Sarah Angiers.”

I check the calendar on my phone. April 28, a Monday, and I roll back my memory, pulling up the case in my thoughts. It’s one hard to forget. I found it particularly tragic and poignant, and I gave Sarah Angiers all the time she wanted when she came to my office to discuss her husband’s death. Tall and thin, she’d bothered to dress up as if she were going to church or the symphony, in a smart suit with her white hair neatly styled. I remember her as lucid and forthcoming and completely devastated.

She said she’d always been nervous about her husband going off on his own, hiking in Estabrook Woods, more than a thousand acres of undeveloped forest, hills and horse trails. She said he could be somewhat difficult when he had his mind made up and she described how much he loved to follow what she referred to as “the path” from their backyard in Carlisle all the way to Hutchins Pond in Concord.

When I examined his body in the heavily forested area where he died I was very close to Fox Castle Swamp and nowhere near Hutchins Pond. The phone signal was bad to nonexistent there, and the dozens of calls he’d made to his wife and 911 had failed. They were all right there on his outgoing log when his phone was recovered in addition to a text to his wife that wasn’t delivered. He said he was cold and exhausted so he’d found a place to sit. He was lost and it was getting dark. He would always love her. The police had nothing to go on except where he usually hiked, which was some two miles south of where he’d actually wandered.

I suspect that early into his hike he wasn’t feeling well and became disoriented, heading in the direction of Lowell Road instead of Monument Street. He realized he didn’t know where he was, and unable to reach anyone he sat on the fallen tree, getting increasingly anxious and agitated as night came. He may have panicked, suffering shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea and chest pains. Acute anxiety would have felt like a heart attack, and a heart attack would have felt like acute anxiety.

When the pain began spreading from his chest into his shoulders, neck and jaw, Johnny Angiers, a professor of medicine at Tufts, would have recognized that he was in serious trouble. He may have realized he was dying. He’d never been diagnosed with coronary artery disease but his was significant, and as I explain all this to Marino I continue to feel incredulous. I feel as if ground is moving under my feet, as if I can’t get my balance. I have no idea what is happening but it all seems too close to me like the pennies in my own backyard and the pickup truck on my street.

“One of my cases and not that long ago,” I explain. “And their phone number was on the side of a truck parked on my street this morning, not even two blocks down from my house? What the hell is going on?”

“Nothing good,” Marino says.

I Google Sonny’s Lawn Care. There’s no such company in Massachusetts. I try Hands On Mechanics and there’s no listing for that either.

“This is only getting more disturbing,” I say as the dispatcher gets back to Marino.

She tells him that the plate number belongs to a 1990 gray F-150 Ford pickup truck. It’s registered to an eighty-three-year-old white male named Clayton Phillip Schmidt with a Springfield address, some ninety miles west of here, almost across the border into Connecticut.

“Any record of the plate or vehicle being stolen?” Marino asks.

“Negative.”

He requests that all units in the area be on the alert for a 1990 gray Ford pickup truck with that plate number.

“Saw it maybe ten minutes ago on Memorial Drive, eastbound.” Marino holds the radio close to his mouth. “Took a right on the Harvard Bridge. Same vehicle was spotted around twelve hundred hours in the area of the incident on Farrar Street. Had Sonny’s Lawn Care on the door. Now has Hands On Mechanics. Possibly using different magnetic signs.”

“Thirteen to thirty-three,” another unit calls.

“Thirty-three,” Marino answers.

“Saw vehicle at approximately noon, corner of Kirkland and Irving,” unit thirteen, a female officer advises. “Had Sonny’s Lawn Care on it at that time.”

“Parked or moving?”

“Pulled off onto the shoulder.”

“You see anybody?”

“Negative.”

I open a text message Benton has just sent to me.

An unexpected development. Will tell you when I see you,
I read.

I envision him in our backyard earlier today, and the pennies on our wall and the flick of light he saw. I think of
Copperhead,
of the odd poem tweeted to me from a hotel in Morristown. Now a mysterious truck has a phone number on it that is connected to a recent death I handled—one I really don’t want further scrutinized.

I didn’t misrepresent the medical facts in Johnny Angiers’s case but I was liberal in my interpretation and decision to sign him out as an accidental death due to hypothermia. When his insurance company questioned me, pointing out that my autopsy report indicated a finding of ruptured plaque due to coronary artery disease, I held my ground. Johnny Angiers wasn’t diabetic but his vitreous glucose was elevated and this is typical in hypothermia deaths. There were skin changes, gastric lesions and damage to his organs consistent with exposure to cold temperatures.

Hypothermia may have precipitated cardiac arrest or it could have been the other way around. It was impossible to say with certainty and if I were going to err it was on the side of compassion. The accidental life insurance policy didn’t cover death by heart attack even if it was a heart attack that caused a fatal accident such as a fall or a car crash or exposure to cold. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. The company TBP Insurers is huge. It’s notorious for finding ways to avoid payment to people who have just been traumatized by the unexpected loss of a loved one.

Had I not filled out the autopsy report and death certificate the way I did, Johnny Angiers’s widow would have been forced to sell their house and stop any financial assistance they were giving to grandchildren in college and graduate school. I had ample justification to make sure that didn’t happen, and I have a deep-seated disdain for greedy unethical insurance companies. I constantly see the lives they rob and ruin, and unfortunately my run-ins with TBP aren’t new.

“I hope what’s happening doesn’t in any way compromise her,” I remark as Marino tries a number and gets voice mail. “We should head on to my office,” I add as we continue to sit in the parking lot.

“Compromise Mrs. Angiers? Why would what’s on a pickup truck compromise her? It’s not her fault.”

“The insurance company. Anything that draws attention to her or her husband’s case may not be helpful.” I’m grateful I didn’t use my phone to call a number that turns out to be hers.

TBP would make something of it.

“She’s eligible to collect the insurance money but obviously hasn’t gotten it yet,” I add.

“How do you know what she’s gotten?”

“One of their investigators called Bryce the other day wanting to set up an appointment with me about the case. In person this time. They wouldn’t do that if they weren’t still fighting it.”

“You going to sit down with them?”

“It’s not been scheduled yet since I’m supposed to be out of town. Bryce gave them dates and we haven’t heard back, which is their typical M.O. The longer they stall, the better for them. The only person in a hurry is the one who needs the money.”

“Fuckers.” Marino tries another number on his phone.

“So now it’s in your backyard, buddy,” a man answers right off. “Unbelievable.”

“THAT’S HOW IT’S LOOKING.
Your two shootings linked with the one we got here, not to mention weird shit going on,” Marino says, and I realize he’s talking to Morris County investigator Jack Kuster. “You ever hear any reports of a gray pickup truck spotted in your area, maybe one that had a company logo on the doors?”

“Not a gray one funny you’d ask. But a white truck, you know like a Ryder or U-Haul bobtail rental truck but with no name on it. Not a huge truck, maybe a ten-footer. I thought I told you about it that night you got so shit-faced at Sona. Oh yeah. That’s why you don’t remember.” Jack Kuster has an easygoing baritone voice with a heavy New Jersey accent. “I think you must’ave been drinking Blithering Idiot.”

“Skull Splitter Ale I’m pretty sure,” Marino deadpans. “What about the white truck?”

“The day before Julie Eastman was shot while she was waiting for the Edgewater Ferry, the truck I’m talking about was spotted at a construction site that had been shut down. From there it went down the road a little ways into the ferry landing parking lot.”