Gravewriter (28 page)

“Do you recognize my client?”

The pastor looked to Peter. “I do.”

“How do you know Mr. Shadd?”

“I met him through my prison ministry,” the pastor said. “He was in the High Security facility, if I remember correctly. We did Bible study, trying to use the Good Word to help us reject wickedness in our lives. And, uh, as the Word tells us, ‘If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.' That's the first thing I tell the men in prison when I witness to them.”

Martin smiled. “Have you memorized the whole book?”

The pastor chuckled. “If only time would permit,” he said, his velvety radio voice projecting through the room. “I encourage my students to memorize the parts of the Holy Book that have the most meaning to them, be they about life, death, the mission of the Savior, and then to carry the tome, always.” He smiled.

“How was Peter Shadd as a student?”

Billy watched the pastor's face wrinkle for a split second. He said, “Well, Mr. Shadd didn't have much of a mind for memorization, not like some of my other students.”

Martin waited.

But that was it—the whole damn answer.

Peter sucked at Bible class.… My case is dead and this guy is shoveling dirt on me.

“Would you say,” Martin blurted to fill the silence, “that Mr. Shadd was an attentive student?”

“He tried to be, I'd say.”

“So you're saying he took his Bible studies to heart?”

The pastor's face froze in a grimace as he looked to the ceiling for the answer. “I never remember him missing an appointment.” He shrugged.

Martin felt a sudden headache, like a power drill in the forehead. “How often,” he asked, blinking against the pain, “did you visit with Mr. Shadd?”

“I went to the prison every week,” he said. “I generally met with each of the students who sought my guidance each time.”

Martin turned to the jury and said, “Every week—that's impressive. You must have felt you were making a difference with these men, considering the hassles of prison security, the paperwork, the body searches—”

“Actually,” said the pastor, interrupting, “the correctional officers are quite accustomed to my presence, and they escort me through immediately. I am never inconvenienced in any way. Their way of saying thanks, perhaps.” He smiled.

Oh come on! Throw me a crumb!

Over the next hour, Martin dragged bits of usable testimony from Pastor Guy.

Peter had never threatened him.

He had never heard Peter threaten anyone else.

The pastor never feared for his own safety in the unmonitored one-on-one study sessions with Peter.

The examination was hand-to-hand combat with a semihostile witness. The pastor was in no mood to help a smack-addicted prison escapee beat a murder charge on the eve of his first run for governor. How did it play with the jury? Martin couldn't guess.

Throughout his testimony, the pastor sneaked glances at Dillingham, his future opponent in the primary election. Quickly, he would look away. It seemed that Dillingham made him nervous and that the pastor didn't want to meet his eyes unless he had to.

Peter slouched at the defense table, absentmindedly tapping the rubber end of a pencil on a notepad.

He knows,
Martin thought in a swirl of guilt.
He knows we're going down.

P
assing under the tall, rounded concrete arch into the Brown University football stadium reminded Billy of when he used to be a sports fan, before he became a gambler and the final score became infinitely more important than how the teams arrived at it. The stadium was more than eighty years old, a throwback to the leather-helmet days when the Ivy League could play with anybody on the gridiron. Hundreds of students had worn their Brown Bears sweatshirts against the chill on a clear and cool morning.

Hamburger smoke from the concession stand wafted over Billy. Was there any better advertising than the smell of a barbecue? If only his stomach would calm down. Maybe by halftime.

He picked a spot near the forty-yard line, sat on the concrete bench. The old stadium stands, all on one side of the field, were shaped like a smile—high in the middle, sloping down on each side.

The natural grass had still not recovered from a home game in the rain two weeks before; there were patches of dirt here and there, though the field had recently been restriped, the white lines now
glowing brightly in the sun. The end zones had been colored deep burgundy,
BROWN
painted across one and
BEARS
across the other.

The stadium could hold twenty thousand people; maybe four thousand had come for the game against Cornell.

Knowledgeable hometown fans groaned aloud when the PA announced that offensive tackle Craig Kahn would not play, due to a foot injury.

Billy scanned the crowd for Mia. No luck. With her 335-pound brother hurt, maybe she had stayed home.

For a bunch of smart guys who would need those brains to make a living someday, the Brown players hit hard throughout the game; plastic pads and helmets slapped nosily against one another. But without Craig Kahn, possibly the best offensive lineman in the school's history, the Brown ground game went nowhere, and it seemed the offense was in third-and-long jams all day. Forced to pass against a vicious blitz, Brown's sophomore quarterback chucked three interceptions, two of them returned by the defense for touchdowns.

The local oddsmakers had listed Brown as an eight-point favorite before the game, but the bookies hadn't known about Craig Kahn's weight-lifting accident.

Brown lost the game by ten points, and it could have been worse, except that the Cornell coach was too classy to embarrass the undermanned home team.

Just about everyone left disappointed, except for Billy Povich.

He had won his bet.

The next time Billy saw Walter the collector, he would have Mr. C.'s money, the principal and the interest. No broken face needed.

From the moment he had learned from Mia that her brother was hurt, Billy had an advantage over the sports books. He felt no guilt over using inside knowledge to win the bet—anything can happen in college football, and Brown still could have covered that spread, somehow. Billy had simply bet with the prevailing odds.

He stopped in the men's room and waited to use a urinal behind two Brown alumni moaning about the loss and wondering aloud when Kahn would come back from the injury.

On the bathroom wall, somebody had penned a quote in black Magic Marker.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

—Albert Einstein

Leave it to Brown students to quote Einstein in men's room graffiti. Whatever happened to dirty limericks? Or the bathroom dating advice: “For a good time, call…”

The Einstein quote reminded Billy of something—he had seen some other high-minded graffiti recently.… Where had that been?

The walk home was about two miles, through the redbrick Brown campus, past Colonial-era homes with cobblestone walks and steps made from Westerly granite still striped from where the holes had been pounded by hand to split the rock in the quarry, maybe a hundred years ago. Billy hiked past the courthouse, a brick castle of gables jutting every which way, pink stone columns, and a four-faced clock tower. The courthouse was built into a hill so steep that the back entrance was on the fifth floor. He had been coming to the court every day but had never studied the building. Probably because he was always late, always exhausted from having worked all night.

He walked through downtown, past the high-rise hotels—one built during the Jazz Age, one trying to look like it had been—and then under Route 95. Bums had piled boxes and foam mattresses against a bridge abutment. He walked past industrial buildings, a 1970s-style concrete apartment tower that polluted the Providence skyline with its squat, flat ugliness. To his left, the modern police station, with its prowlike atrium, looked like a giant block of masonry that had been rammed by a glass ocean liner.

Billy heard an argument, half in English, half in Spanish. He was almost home. Home used to feel safe. Billy looked around for the black Subaru and the man in the trench coat.

A funeral was under way at Metts & Sons on the first floor. Billy couldn't use the stairs until it was over. He dropped onto a park bench in the parade field, his back to his house, and watched two men, probably a couple, exercising two dogs in the field. They tied their leashes together and let them go. If the dogs—a yellow Lab and a fat black mutt—had worked together, they could have run free. But the Lab wanted to run left, the mutt to the right. Billy watched the dogs yank each other around, and laughed.

They reminded Billy of Peter Shadd and the prison break. Had the three convicts worked together, they might have made it to Canada. But Garrett Nickel persuaded Peter to betray Larry Home, and the plan began to crumble. Somebody obviously betrayed Nickel. The testimony never did reveal who had helped Garrett with the car, which had never been found.

Ah! Billy remembered something. The construction site down by the docks—that was where he had seen some thoughtful graffiti, when the jury went there by bus. He remembered the quote—”he that believeth shall not make haste.”

Must be from the Bible,
Billy figured, though he did not recognize it.

With an hour to kill before he could get into his apartment, Billy walked back toward downtown, went into an Internet coffee shop with free access while you sipped. He had eight dollars in his pocket. He bought a venti iced decaf caramel vanilla-hazelnut mocha latte with whole milk and sprinkled cardamom—because the drink cost exactly eight dollars, which seemed like some kind of sign.

On the café's computer, he ran a general Internet search for an on-line electronic Bible. There were dozens of them. He found the King James Version and then typed the quote, word for word, from the construction site into the Bible's search feature. Instantly, the
computer brought him the correct verse in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah: “Therefore thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.”

Hmmm, so somebody had painted the last part of a long verse. Billy was pleased with himself for figuring out where the quote had been taken from. He sipped his eight-dollar drink and recalled how beautifully rendered the graffiti letters had been on the building.

Then he remembered the way Martin Smothers had described Garrett Nickel in court: Nickel had been a graffiti artist of great reputation before he graduated to violent crime. He had met his own violent end at that construction site by the waterfront, where Billy had seen the snippet from the Bible.

He read the full verse again.

Inspiration clocked him across the head.

“Phone!” he blurted to the barista, a birch white college kid with a shaved head.

“Dude?”

“Telephone,” Billy said. “You have one here?”

The barista stared blankly at Billy for a few seconds. “Local?”

“Yes, local call. Just gimme the phone.”

The barista reached under the counter and handed Billy the cordless.

Billy dialed Mia's cell phone.

She answered, saying, “Has to be Billy.”

“How'd you know?”

“Caller ID. A coffee shop on the West Side. Who else?”

“Where are you?”

“Hanging with my brother,” she said. “He's bummed because Brown lost to Cornell. Did you hear about that?”

“Twenty-two to twelve,” Billy said. “Brown ran the ball like eleven old ladies.”

“Hey!” she scolded, and laughed.

“Meet me tonight.”

She teased him with a giggle and then said, “Meet you for what?”

Billy turned his back to the barista and walked across the cafe. “I have a crazy idea that I know what Garrett Nickel did with J.R.'s head.”

“What!”

“Do you have any tools?”

S
ome talent-starved tagger had recently sprayed “Cheryl is a slut!” in sky blue over the fragment of biblical verse on the wall. The fresh graffiti was drippy and ugly, and it seemed much more like vandalism than the Scripture in elegant letters beneath it.

The night was overcast and dark, and a chill mist had just begun to fall. In the distance, rumbling, clanking cranes unloaded another cargo ship. Billy panned the flashlight over the construction site, the painted wall, and then across the street, where Garrett Nickel had staggered, shot and dying, and plunged into the water.

Mia read the Bible quote out loud. “I don't know what it means,” she said. “We still have so many questions.”

“Yeah,” Billy agreed. “Where's this Cheryl?”

She laughed and smacked his arm.

“We know Garrett Nickel was here the night he escaped,” Billy said, turning serious. “This is where he went into the water, so this building is the last thing Nickel saw before the bottom of the stream. I checked some archived photos at the paper. Back then, the construction was not as far along as it is now.”

Mia wrinkled her nose at the abandoned jumble of cinder block and rusting steel. “It's not even half-done now,” she said.

“Money problems. Happens all the time,” Billy said. “Anyway, Pastor Guy testified at trial yesterday—the defense had called him as a character witness, not that he helped them much. The pastor said he did one-on-one Bible studies with Peter Shadd, which means he probably studied one-on-one with Garrett Nickel, too.”

“Makes sense.”

“There has been a lot of testimony about Garrett quoting the Bible from memory,” Billy said. “He did it all the time, just like the pastor.”

“I never understood how some killers seem so reverent.”

Billy thought about his own reverence, during his trips to confession. He felt his face redden and was glad for the darkness.