Prayers for Rain (15 page)

“What’s that?” Warren wanted to know.

“It’s the session notes of Karen’s psychiatrist.”

“Well, what the hell was she doing with it?”

I glanced down at his confused face. “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”

With Warren’s blessing, I kept the session notes and pictures of David Wetterau with the other woman, then I gathered the other photos, the clothes, the broken watch and passport and wedding invitations, and placed them back into the box. I looked in at what served as evidence of Karen Nichols’s existence, and I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger and closed my eyes for a second.

“People can be tiring, can’t they?” Warren said.

“Yeah, they can.” I stood and walked to the door.

“Man, you must be tired all the time.”

As he locked the barn back up outside, I said, “These two guys you said were around Karen.”

“Yeah.”

“Were they together?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

“Anything else you can tell me about them?”

“The redheaded guy, like I said, was a snot. A weasel. Kinda guy thinks he’s smarter’n everyone else. He peeled off a stack of hundreds when he checked her in like they were ones. You know? Karen’s all sagging into him, and he’s looking at her like she’s meat, winking at me and Holly. A real piece of shit.”

“Height, weight, that sort of stuff?”

“I’d say he was about five-ten, maybe five-nine. Freck
les all over his face, dweeby haircut. Weighed maybe one-fifty, one-sixty. Dressed artsy—silk shirts, black jeans, shiny Docs on his feet.”

“And the other guy?”

“Slick. Drove a black ’68 Shelby Mustang GT-500 convertible. Like, what, four hundred of them produced?”

“Around there, yeah.”

“Dressed rich-boy shabby—jeans with little rips in ’em, V-neck sweaters over white T-shirts. Two-hundred-dollar shades. Never came in the office, never heard him speak, but I got the feeling he was in charge.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Something about him. The geek and Karen always walked behind him, moved real fast when he spoke. I dunno. I maybe saw the guy five times, always from a distance, and he made me feel nervous, somehow. Like I wasn’t worthy to look upon him or something.”

He wheeled his way back through the black fields, and I followed. The day grew deader and more humid around us. Instead of pointing toward the ramp at the back of the office, he led me to a picnic table, its surface covered in small splinters peeking up out of the wood like hair. Warren stopped by the table, and I sat up on top, pretty sure my jeans would protect me from the splinters.

He wouldn’t look at me. He kept his head down, eyes on the divots ripped in the gnarled wood.

“I gave in once,” he said.

“Gave in?”

“To Karen. She kept on talking about dark gods and dark rides and places she could take you and…” He looked back over his shoulder at the motel office, and the silhouette of his wife moved past a curtain. “I don’t…I mean, what makes a man who has the best woman the world can offer—what makes him…?”

“Fuck around?” I said.

He met my eyes and his were small, now, shamed. “Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” I said gently. “You tell me.”

He drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair, looked off past me at the wasteland of broken trees and black earth. “It’s the darkness, you know? The chance to disappear into, I mean, really bad places while you’re doing something that feels really damn good. Sometimes, you don’t want to be on top of a woman who looks at you with all this love in her eyes. You want to be on top of a woman who looks into your face and
knows
you. Knows the bad you, the nasty you.” He looked at me. “And likes that you. Wants that you.”

“So, you and Karen…”

“Fucked all night, man. Like animals. And it was good. She was crazy. No inhibitions.”

“And afterward?”

He looked away again, took a deep breath, and let it out slow. “Afterward, she said, ‘See?’”

“See.”

He nodded. “‘See? No one loves.’”

We stayed out there by the picnic table for a while, neither of us speaking. Cicadas hummed through the scrawny treetops and raccoons clawed through the brambles on the far side of the clearing. The barn seemed to sag another inch, and Karen Nichols’s voice whispered through the rural blight:

See? No one loves
.

No one loves
.

I had taken my work to a bar when Angie found me later that night. The bar was Bubba’s, a place called Live Bootleg on the Dorchester-Southie line, and even though Bubba was out of the country—off to Northern Ireland, the rumor was, to pick up the arms they’d allegedly laid down over there—my drinks were still on the house.

This would have been great if I’d been in a drinking mood, but I wasn’t. I nursed the same beer for an hour, and it was still half full when Shakes Dooley, the owner of record, replaced it with a fresh one.

“It’s a crime,” Shakes said as he drained the old beer into the sink, “to see a fine, healthy man such as yourself wasting a perfectly honest lager.”

I said, “Mmm-hmm,” and went back to my notes.

Sometimes I find it easier to concentrate in a small crowd. Alone, in my apartment or office, I can feel the night ticking past me, another day gone down for the count. In a bar, though, on a late Sunday afternoon, when I can hear the hollow, distant crack of bats from a Red Sox game on the TV, the solid drop of pool balls falling into pockets from the back room, the idle chatter of men and women playing keno and scratch cards as they do their best to ward off Monday and its horn honks and barking bosses and drudging responsibilities—I find the noises mingle together into a soft, con
stant buzzing, and my mind clears of all else but the notes laid before me between a coaster and a bowl of peanuts.

From the morass of things I’d learned about Karen Nichols, I had compiled a bare chronological outline on a fresh sheet of yellow legal paper. Once that was done, I doodled in random notes beside hard facts. Sometime during all this, the Red Sox had lost, and the crowd had thinned slightly, though it had never been much of a crowd in the first place. Tom Waits played on the jukebox, and two voices were getting heated and raw back in the poolroom.

“Motive for what?” Angie said.

I put my hand over the page, looked back over my shoulder at her. “Didn’t your mama ever teach you—?”

“It’s rude to read over someone’s shoulder, yes.” She dropped her bag on the empty seat to her left and sat down beside me. “How’s it coming?”

I sighed. “If only the dead could talk.”

“Then they wouldn’t be dead.”

“Staggering,” I said, “that intellect of yours.”

She backhanded my shoulder and tossed her cigarettes and lighter on the bar in front of her.

“Angela!” Shakes Dooley came bounding down the bar, took her hand, and leaned over to kiss her cheek. “Well, if it ain’t been too many days.”

“Hey, Shakes. Don’t say a word about the hair, okay?”

“What hair?” Shakes said.

“That’s what I keep saying.”

Angie hit me again. “Can I get a vodka straight, Shakes?”

Shakes pumped her hand vigorously before letting it go. “Finally, a real drinker!”

“Going broke on my buddy here?” Angie lit a cigarette.

“He drinks like a nun these days. People are starting to talk.” Shakes poured a generous helping of chilled Finlandia into a glass and placed it before Angie.

“So,” I said when Shakes left us alone, “come crawling back, eh?”

She gave me a smoky chuckle and took a sip of Finlandia. “Keep it up. It’ll make torturing you later that much more pleasurable.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. What brings you here, Sicilian Spice?”

She rolled her eyes as she took another drink. “I got some oddities regarding David Wetterau.” She held up her index finger. “Two, actually. The first was easy. That letter he wrote to the insurance company? My guy says it’s a definite forgery.”

I turned on my stool. “You already looked into this?”

She reached for her cigarettes, extracted one.

“On a Sunday,” I said.

She lit the cigarette, her eyebrows raised.

“And turned something up,” I said.

She curled her fingers and blew on them, polished an imaginary medal on her chest. “Two things.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re the coolest.”

She placed a hand behind her ear and leaned in.

“You’re aces. You’re the bomb. You put the ‘B’ in bad-ass. You’re the coolest.”

“Already said that.” She leaned in a little closer, hand still behind her ear.

I cleared my throat. “You are, without question or reservation, the smartest, most resourceful, perceptive private detective in the entire city of Boston.”

Her mouth broke into that wide, slightly lopsided grin that can blow holes in my chest.

“Was that so difficult?” she said.

“Shoulda rolled right off my tongue. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Just out of practice kissing ass, I guess.”

I leaned back, took a lingering look at the curve of her hip, the press of flesh on her stool.

“Speaking of asses,” I said, “allow me to note that yours still looks tremendous.”

She waved her cigarette in my face. “Wood back in the pants, perv.”

I placed my hands on the bar. “Yes’m.”

“Oddity number two.” Angie put a steno notepad on the bar and flipped it open. She swiveled her stool so that our knees almost touched. “Just before five on the day he was hurt, David Wetterau calls Greg Dunne, the Steadicam guy, and begs off. Says his mother is ill.”

“Was she?”

She nodded. “Of cancer. Five years ago. She died in ’94.”

“So he lies about—”

She held up a hand. “Not done yet.” She stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray, left several chunks of coal still burning red. She hunched forward and our knees touched. “At four-forty, Wetterau received a call on his cell phone. It lasted four minutes and originated from a pay phone on High Street.”

“Just around the block from the corner of Congress and Purchase.”

“One block down, one over, to be exact. But that’s not the most curious thing. Our contact at Cellular One told me where Wetterau was when he received the call.”

“I’m breathless.”

“Heading west on the Pike, just outside Natick.”

“So at four-forty, he’s heading to get the Steadicam.”

“And at five-twenty he’s in the middle of the intersection at Congress and Purchase.”

“About to get his head squashed.”

“Right. He parks his car in a garage on South Street,
walks up Atlantic to Congress, and he’s crossing Purchase when he trips.”

“You talk to any cops about it?”

“Well, you know how the police feel these days about us in general and me in particular.”

I nodded. “Maybe you’ll think twice next time before you shoot a cop.”

“Ha-ha,” she said. “Luckily, Sallis & Salk has excellent relationships with the BPD.”

“So you had someone from there call.”

“Nah. I called Devin.”

“You called Devin.”

“Uh-huh. I asked him and he got back to me in about ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Maybe fifteen. Anyway, I have the witness statements. All forty-six of them.” She patted the soft leather bag on the chair to her left. “Ta-da!”

“’Nother drink, folks?” Shakes Dooley emptied Angie’s ashtray and wiped the condensation ring from under her glass.

“Sure,” Angie said.

“And for the missus?” Shakes asked me.

“Fine for now, Shakes. Thanks.”

Shakes said, “What a pussy,” under his breath, and walked off to get Angie another Finlandia.

“So let me get this straight,” I said to Angie, “you call Devin and fifteen minutes later you have something I’ve been trying to get for four days.”

“’Bout the size of it.”

Shakes placed her drink in front of her. “There you go, doll.”

“‘Doll,’” I said when he walked away. “Who the hell says ‘doll’ anymore?”

“Yet he somehow makes it work,” Angie said, and sipped some vodka. “Go figure.”

“Man, I’m pissed at Devin.”

“Why? You bug him all the time for favors. I haven’t called him in almost a year.”

“True.”

“Plus, I’m prettier.”

“Debatable.”

She snorted. “Ask around, pal.”

I took a sip of my beer. It was warm. Popular with Europeans, I know, but so are blood sausage and Steven Seagal.

On Shakes’s next pass, I ordered a fresh one.

“Sure, I’ll be taking your car keys next.” He placed a frosty Beck’s in front of me, shot a look at Angie, and walked away.

“I’m getting dissed way too much lately.”

“Probably because you date defense attorneys who think a good wardrobe makes up for that lack-of-brains thing.”

I turned on my chair. “Oh, you know her?”

“No. I’ve heard half the men in the twelfth ward do, though.”

“Hiss,” I said. “Meow.”

She gave me a rueful smile as she lit another cigarette. “Cat’s got to have claws to make it a fight. What I hear, all she’s got is a nice briefcase, great hair, and tits she’s still making monthly payments on.” Her smile widened and she crinkled her face at me. “Okay, pooky?”

“How’s Someone?” I said.

Her smile faded and she reached into her bag. “Let’s get back to David Wetterau and Karen—”

“I hear his name’s Trey,” I said. “You’re dating a guy named Trey, Ange.”

“How’d you—”

“We’re detectives, remember? Same way you knew I was dating Vanessa.”

“Vanessa,” she said as if her mouth were filled with onions.

“Trey,” I said.

“Shut up.” She fumbled with her bag.

I drank some Beck’s. “You’re questioning my street cred and you’re sleeping with a guy named
Trey
.”

“I don’t sleep with him anymore.”

“Well, I don’t sleep with her anymore.”

“Congratulations.”

“Back at you.”

There was dead silence between us for a minute as Angie pulled several sheets of thermal fax paper from her bag and smoothed them on the bar. I drank some more Beck’s, fingered the cardboard coaster, felt a grin fighting to break across my face. I glanced at Angie. The corners of her mouth twitched, too.

“Don’t look at me,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I’m telling you—” She lost the battle and closed her eyes as the smile broke across her cheeks.

Mine followed about a half second later.

“I don’t know why I’m smiling,” Angie said.

“Me, either.”

“Prick.”

“Bitch.”

She laughed and turned on her chair, drink in hand. “Miss me?”

Like you can’t imagine.

“Not a bit,” I said.

We moved to a long table in the back, ordered some club sandwiches from the kitchen, and ate them as I brought her up to speed, told her in detail about my first meeting with Karen Nichols, my two run-ins with Cody Falk, my conversations with Joella Thomas, Karen’s parents, Siobhan, and Holly and Warren Martens.

“Motive,” Angie said. “We keep coming back to motive.”

“I know.”

“Who really vandalized her car, and why?”

“Yup.”

“Who wrote the letters to Cody Falk, and why?”

“Why,” I said, “did someone feel the need to fuck with this woman’s life so completely she jumped off a building rather than take any more of it?”

“And did they go so far as to arrange David Wetterau’s accident?”

“Access is an issue, too,” I said.

She chewed her sandwich, dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “How so?”

“Who sent Karen the photos of David and the other woman? Hell, who took the photos?”

“They look professional to me.”

“Me, too.” I popped a cold french fry in my mouth. “And who gave Karen her own psychiatrist’s notes? That’s a big one.”

Angie nodded. “And why?” she said. “Why, why, why?”

It turned into a long night. We read through all forty-six statements given by the witnesses to David Wetterau’s accident, and a good half saw nothing at all, while the other twenty or so backed up the eventual police determination—Wetterau tripped in a pothole, got clipped in the head by a car doing everything in its power
not
to hit him.