Sacred: A Novel (26 page)

His office had everything the prosperous man needs, save a jet hangar. And he could have fit one if he chose.

The outside offices were empty except for a single male secretary filling coffee filters at intervals of every fourth cubicle and inside each office. Somewhere, far on the other end, someone ran a vacuum cleaner.

Daniel Griffin hung his topcoat and suit jacket in his closet and walked around a desk so big I was sure it was measured in yard lines. He took a seat and motioned for me to sit across from him.

I stood.

“Who are you?” he said.

“Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private investigator. Call Cheswick Hartman if you want my life story.”

“You know Cheswick?”

I nodded.

“You’re not the one who extricated his sister from that…situation in Connecticut several years back?”

I lifted a heavy bronze statuette off the corner of his desk, looked at it. It was a representation of some Eastern god or mythological figure, a woman wearing a crown on her head, but her face marred by the trunk of an elephant in place of a nose. She sat cross-legged as fish jumped from the sea toward her feet, her four hands holding a battle ax, a diamond, an ointment bottle, and a coiled serpent respectively.

“Sri Lankan?” I said.

He raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Ceylon back then, of course.”

“Duh,” I said.

“What do you want from me?” he said.

I glanced at a photo of a smiling beautiful wife, then at another of several grown children and a multitude of perfect grandchildren.

“Vote Republican?” I said.

“What?”

“Family values,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“What did Desiree want?” I said.

“I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

He was recovering from the shock out by the elevator, his voice deepening, and his eyes growing righteous again. It wouldn’t be long before he was threatening to call security again, so I had to cut him off at the knees.

I came around the desk and moved a small reading lamp, sat on the desktop, my leg an inch from his. “Danny,” I said, “if you were just having a tryst with her, you never would have let me out of the elevator. You have something huge to hide. Something unethical and illegal and capable of sending you to jail for the rest of your life. Now I don’t know what that is yet, but I know how Desiree works, and she wouldn’t waste five minutes on your flaccid genitalia if you weren’t giving her something big in exchange.” I leaned forward and loosened the knot on his tie, unbuttoned his collar. “So, tell me what it is.”

His upper lip was speckled with sweat and his tight jowls had begun to sag. He said, “You’re trespassing.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s the best you can come up with? Okay, Danny.”

I got off the desk. He leaned back in his chair, pushing its wheels back from me, but I turned away from him and headed for the door. I looked back at him. “In five minutes when I call Trevor Stone to tell him that his lawyer is fucking his daughter, should I give him a message on your behalf?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t? I got pictures, Danny.”

You gotta love the bluffs that work.

Daniel Griffin held up a hand and swallowed several times. He stood up so quickly the chair spun away from him, and then he placed his hands on his desk for a moment, sucked oxygen from the air.

“You work for Trevor?” he said.

“Used to,” I said. “Not anymore. But I still have his number.”

“Are you,” he said, his voice rising, “loyal to him?”

“You’re not,” I said with a chuckle.

“Are you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t like him and I don’t like his daughter, and as far as I know both of them might want me dead by six o’clock tonight.”

He nodded. “They’re dangerous people.”

“Yeah, Danny? Tell me something I don’t know. What are you supposed to do for Desiree?”

“I…” He shook his head and walked to a small fridge in the corner. He bent by it, and I drew my gun, released the safety.

But all he pulled out was a bottle of Evian. He guzzled half of it, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes widened when he saw the gun. I shrugged.

“He’s a mean, evil man and he’s going to die,” he said. “I have to think of the future. I have to think of who’s going to handle his money when he’s gone. Who’s going to control the purse, if you will.”

“Big purse,” I said.

“Yes. One billion, one hundred and seventy-five million dollars at last count.”

The figure rocked me a bit. There’s the kind of money you can envision filling a truck or a bank vault. And then there’s the kind of money that is too big for either.

“That’s not a purse,” I said. “That’s a gross national product.”

He nodded. “And it has to go somewhere when he dies.”

“Jesus,” I said. “You’re going to alter his will.”

His eyes dropped from mine and he stared out the window.

“Or you’ve altered it already,” I said. “He changed his will after the attempt on his life, didn’t he?”

He stared out at State Street and the back of City Hall Plaza and nodded.

“He cut Desiree out of it?”

Another nod.

“Who’s the money go to now?”

Nothing.

“Daniel,” I said. “Who’s the money go to now?”

He waved his hand. “A variety of interests—university endowments, libraries, medical research, things like that.”

“Bullshit. He’s not that nice.”

“Ninety-two percent of it goes into a private trust in his name. I have power of attorney to release from that trust a certain percentage of interest earned each year to the aforementioned medical research companies. The rest remains in the trust and accrues.”

“What medical research companies?”

He turned from the window. “Those specializing in cryogenic research.”

I almost laughed. “The crazy bastard is going to freeze himself?”

He nodded. “Until there’s a cure for his cancer. And when he wakes, he’ll still be one of the richest men in the world because the interest on his money alone will keep him current with inflation into the year 3000.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “If he’s dead or frozen or whatever, how’s he keep an eye on his money?”

“How does he keep me or my successors from stealing it?”

“Yes.”

“Private accounting firm.”

I leaned against the wall for a moment, took it all in. “But, that private accounting firm only kicks into action once he’s dead or frozen. Right?”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

“And when does he intend to deep-freeze?”

“Tomorrow.”

I laughed. It was so blatantly absurd.

“Don’t laugh. He’s crazy. He’s not to be taken lightly, though. I don’t believe in cryogenics. But what if I’m wrong and he’s right, Mr. Kenzie? He’ll dance on our graves.”

“Not if you change the will,” I said. “That’s the one loophole in his plan, isn’t it? Even if he checks the will before he climbs in his cooler or whatever the hell it is, you can still change or replace it with another, can’t you?”

He sucked from the Evian bottle. “It’s delicate, but possible.”

“Brilliant. Where’s Desiree now?”

“I have no idea.”

“Okay. Grab your coat.”

“What?”

“You’re coming with me, Daniel.”

“I’m doing no such thing. I have meetings. I have—”

“I have several bullets in my gun and they’re calling their own meeting. Know what I mean?”

We hailed a cab on State Street and rode against the morning rush hour traffic down into Dorchester.

“How long have you worked for Trevor?” I said.

“Since 1970.”

“More than a quarter of a century,” I said.

He nodded.

“But you sold that out in a few hours last night for a touch of his daughter’s flesh.”

He reached down and straightened the crease in his trousers until the cuff of his pants settled just so on his gleaming shoes.

“Trevor Stone,” he said and cleared his throat, “is a monster. He treats people like commodities. Worse than commodities. He buys, sells, and trades them, dumps them in the garbage when they’re no longer of use to him. His daughter, I admit, I long thought to be his opposite. The first time we made love—”

“When was this?”

He straightened his tie. “Seven years ago.”

“When she was sixteen.”

He looked out at the gridlocked traffic on the other side of the expressway. “I thought she was a gift from heaven. A flawless, kind, caring beauty who would become everything her father wasn’t. But as time wore on, I saw that she was acting. That’s what she is, a better actor than her father. But no different. So, being an old man, and having lost my innocence a long time ago, I realigned my perspective on the situation and took what I could from it. She uses me, and I use her, and both of us pray for the demise of Trevor Stone.” He smiled at me. “She may be no better than her father, but she’s prettier and much more fun in bed.”

Nelson Ferrare looked at me through bleary eyes and scratched himself through his Fruit Of The Looms. Behind him, I could smell the stale sweat and spoiled-food aroma permeating his apartment like a fever.

“You want me to sit on this guy?”

Daniel Griffin looked terrified, but I don’t think it was Nelson he feared yet, though he should have. It was Nelson’s apartment.

“Yeah. Till midnight. Three hundred bucks.”

He held out his hand and I put the bills in them.

He stepped back from the doorway and said, “Come on in, old man.”

I pushed Daniel Griffin over the threshold and he stumbled into the living room.

“Handcuff him to something if you have to, Nelson. But don’t hurt him. Even a little bit.”

He yawned. “For three bills, I’ll make him breakfast. Too bad I can’t cook.”

“This is outrageous!” Griffin said.

“At midnight, kick him loose,” I said to Nelson. “I’ll see you.”

Nelson turned and shut the door.

As I walked down the hallway of his building, I heard his voice through the thin walls: “One simple rule of the house, old guy: You touch the remote control, I cut your hand off with an old saw.”

I took the subway back downtown and picked up my personal car from the garage on Cambridge Street where I keep it stored. It’s a 1963 Porsche I restored much in the same way Jay restored his Falcon—piece by piece over many years before it was even roadworthy. And after a time, it was the work, and not the result, that I felt a fondness for. As my father once said when he pointed out a building he’d helped construct before he’d become a fireman, “The building don’t mean shit to me, but that brick there, Patrick? And that whole row on the third floor there? I put them there. The first fingers to ever touch them were mine. And they’ll outlive me.”

And they did. Work and its results always outlived those who labored at it as any Egyptian slave-ghost will tell you.

And maybe, I thought as I pulled the cover off my car, that’s what Trevor can’t accept. Because the little I knew of his businesses (and I could have been very wrong; they were so diversified), his stake in immortality was very slim. He didn’t seem to have been much of a builder. He was a buyer and a seller and an exploiter, but El Salvadoran coffee beans and the profits they yielded weren’t tangible once the coffee was drunk and the money spent.

What buildings bear your fingerprints, Trevor?

What lovers retain your face in their memory with joy or fondness?

What marks your time on this earth?

And who mourns your passing?

No one.

I kept a cell phone in the glove compartment and I used it to call Angie on the cell phone in the Crown Victoria. But she didn’t answer.

I parked in front of my house and engaged the alarm, went upstairs, and sat around waiting.

I called her cell phone ten times in the next two hours, even checked my own phone to make sure the ringer button was in the “On” position. It was.

The battery could have died, I told myself.

Then she would have used the adapter and plugged it into the cigarette lighter.

Not if she was out of the car.

Then she would have called here.

Not if she didn’t have time or wasn’t near a phone.

I watched a few minutes of
Monkey Business
to get my mind off it, but even Harpo chasing women around the ocean liner and the prospect of the four Marx Brothers doing their Maurice Chevalier imitations to get off the boat with the singer’s stolen passport wasn’t enough to hold my concentration.

I turned off the TV and VCR, dialed the cell phone number again.

No answer.

That’s what I got the rest of the afternoon. No answer. Nothing but the ringing on the other end and the ringing in my head.

And the silence that followed. Loud, mocking silence.

The silence followed me as I drove back to Whittier Place for my six o’clock meeting with Desiree.

Angie wasn’t just my partner. She wasn’t just my best friend. And she wasn’t just my lover. She was all those things, sure, but she was far more. Ever since we’d made love the other night, it had begun to dawn on me that what lay between us—what, in all probability had lain between us since we were children—wasn’t just special; it was sacred.

Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.

Without her—without knowing where she was or
how
she was—I wasn’t merely half my usual self; I was a cipher.

Desiree. Desiree was behind the silence. I was sure of it. And as soon as I saw her, I was going to put a bullet in her kneecap and ask my questions.

But Desiree, a voice whispered, is smart. Remember what Angie said—Desiree always has an angle. If she was behind Angle’s disappearance, if she had her tied up somewhere, she’d use her as a bargaining chip. She wouldn’t have just killed her. There’s no profit there. No gain.

I came down the expressway off-ramp for Storrow Drive and then swung right so I could loop around Leverett Circle and pull into Whittier Place. But before I reached the circle, I pulled over, engine idling, and put my hazards on for a minute, forced myself to take some breaths, to cool the broiling blood in my veins, to think.

The Celts, the voice whispered, remember the Celts, Patrick. They were crazy. They were hot-blooded. Your people, and they terrorized Europe in the century before Christ. No one would mess with them. Because they were insane and bloodthirsty and ran into battle painted blue with hard-ons. Everyone feared the Celts.

Until Caesar. Julius Caesar asked his men what was all this nonsense about these fearsome savages in Gaul and in Germany, in Spain and Ireland? Rome feared no one.

Neither do the Celts, his men answered.

Blind courage, Caesar said, is no match for intelligence.

And he sent fifty-five thousand men to meet over a quarter million Celts at Alesia.

And they came with blood in their eyes. They came naked and screaming with fury and hard-ons and complete and utter disregard for their own well-being.

And Caesar’s battalions wiped them out.

By implementing precise tactical maneuvers, without any emotion whatsoever, Caesar’s garrisons conquered the passionate, determined, fearless Celts.

As Caesar rode in his victory parade through the streets of Rome, he commented that he’d never met a braver leader than Vercingetorix, the commander of the Gallic Celts. And, maybe to show what he truly thought of simple bravery, Caesar underscored his point by brandishing the severed head of Vercingetorix throughout the course of the parade.

Brain, once again, conquered brawn. Minds subdued hearts.

To rush in like a Celt, shoot Desiree in the knee, and expect to get results, was stupid. Desiree was a tactician. Desiree was a Roman.

My raging blood chilled to ice as I sat in my idling car, the dark waters of the Charles rolling along on my right. My heartbeat slowed. The tremors in my hands disappeared.

This wasn’t a fistfight, I told myself. Win a fistfight, all you are is bloody, your opponent slightly more so, but he’s usually ready for another fight if the mood hits him.

This was war. Win at war, chop your opponent’s head off. End of story.

“How are you?” Desiree said as she came out of Whittier Place, ten minutes late.

“Fine.” I smiled.

She stopped by the car, appraised it with a whistle. “This is gorgeous. I wish it were warm enough to put the roof down.”

“Me, too.”

She ran her hands along the door before she opened it and got in, gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Where’s Miss Gennaro?” She reached across and ran her fingers along the wood-finish steering wheel.

“She decided to stay in the sun a few more days.”

“See? I told you. You wasted a free plane ticket.”

We shot across to the expressway on-ramp, cut into the lane for Route 1 with several blaring horns going off behind us.

“I like the way you drive, Patrick. Very Bostonian.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Beantown to the core.”

“My God,” she said. “Just listen to this engine! It sounds like a leopard’s purr.”

“That’s why I bought it. I’m a sucker for leopard purrs.”

She gave me a deep, throaty laugh. “I bet.” She crossed her legs, leaned back in the seat. She wore a navy-blue cowl-neck cashmere over painted-on blue jeans and brown soft leather loafers. Her perfume smelled like jasmine. Her hair smelled like crisp apples.

“So,” I said, “you been having fun since you’ve been back?”

“Fun?” She shook her head. “I’ve been holed up in that apartment since I landed. I was too afraid to stick my head out until you came.” She pulled a pack of Dunhills from her purse. “Mind if I smoke?”

“No. I like the smell.”

“An ex-smoker?” She pushed the dashboard lighter in.

“I prefer the term recovering nicotine addict.”

We pulled through the Charlestown Tunnel and rode up toward the lights of the Tobin Bridge.

“I think indulging addictions has been given a bad rap,” she said.

“Is that so?”

She lit her cigarette and sucked back on the tobacco with an audible hiss. “Absolutely. Everyone dies. Am I right?”

“As far as I know.”

“So why not embrace the things that’ll kill you anyway? Why single out certain things—heroin, alcohol, sex, nicotine, bungee jumping, whatever your predilection—for demonization when we hypocritically embrace cities which spew toxins and smog, eat rich food, hell, live in the late twentieth century in the most industrialized country on the planet?”

“You got a point.”

“If I die from this,” she held up the cigarette, “at least it was my choice. No excuses. And I had a hand—I had control—in my own demise. Beats getting hit by a truck while jogging to a vegetarians’ seminar.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Never heard it put quite that way before.”

We cruised up on the Tobin Bridge, and the span reminded me of Florida, the way the water seemed to physically drop from underneath us in a rush. But not just Florida, no. This was where Inez Stone had died, screaming as bullets entered her flesh and vital organs, as she looked into the face of madness and matricide, whether she was aware of the latter or not.

Inez. Had her death been part of the plan or hadn’t it?

“So,” Desiree said, “is my philosophy nihilistic?”

I shook my head. “Fatalistic. Marinated in skepticism.”

She smiled. “I like that.”

“Glad I could oblige.”

“I mean, we all die,” Desiree said and leaned forward in her seat. “Whether we want to or not. Just a simple fact of life.”

And she reached over and dropped something soft into my lap.

I had to wait until I passed under a streetlight until I saw what it was because the fabric was so dark.

It was a T-shirt. It bore the words
FURY IN THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE
in white letters. It was ripped at the point where it would fall over the wearer’s right rib cage.

Desiree dug a pistol into my testicles and leaned in to me until her tongue flicked along the outer edge of my ear.

“She’s not in Florida,” she said. “She’s in a hole somewhere. She’s not dead yet, but she will be if you don’t do exactly what I say.”

“I’ll kill you,” I whispered as the bridge peaked and began its curve toward the other side of the river.

“That’s what all the boys say.”

As we looped around Marblehead Neck, the ocean boiling and belting against the rocks below, I cleared images of Angie from my head for a moment, quelled the black clouds of worry that threatened to suffocate me.

“Desiree.”

“That’s my name.” She smiled.

“You want your father dead,” I said. “Fine. Makes a certain amount of sense.”

“Thank you.”

“For a sociopath.”

“Such a sweet tongue.”

“But your mother,” I said. “Why’d she have to die?”

Her voice was thin and light. “You know how it is between mothers and daughters. All that pent-up jealousy. All the missed school plays and arguments over wire hangers.”

“But really,” I said.

She drummed her fingers on the barrel of the gun for a moment.

“My mother,” she said, “was a beautiful woman.”

“I know. I’ve seen pictures.”

She snorted. “Pictures are bullshit. Pictures are isolated moments. My mother wasn’t just physically beautiful, you dick. She was elegance incarnate. She was grace. She loved without reservation.” She sucked in a breath.

“So, why’d she have to die?”

“When I was little, my mother took me downtown. A day for just the girls, she called it. We had a picnic in the Common, went to museums, had tea at the Ritz, rode the swan boats in the Public Garden. It was a perfect day.” She looked out the window. “Around three o’clock, we came upon this child. He was my age—probably ten or eleven at the time. He was Chinese and crying because someone had thrown a rock from a passing school bus and hit him in the eye. And my mother, I’ll never forget this, held him to her chest and wept with him. Silently. The tears rolling off her cheekbones and the boy’s blood staining her blouse. That was my mother, Patrick.” She turned from the window. “She wept for strangers.”

“And you killed her because of that?”

“I didn’t kill her,” she hissed.

“No?”

“Her car broke down, you fuck! Get it? That wasn’t part of the plan. She wasn’t supposed to be with Trevor. She wasn’t supposed to die.”

She coughed loudly into her fist, sucked a harsh, liquid breath back into her body.

“It was a mistake,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You loved her.”

“Yes.”

“So her death hurt you,” I said.

“More than you could possibly imagine.”

“Good,” I said.

“Good that she died, or good that her dying hurt me?”

“Both,” I said.

The great cast-iron gates parted before us as we turned into Trevor Stone’s driveway. I drove through the opening, and the gates closed behind me and my lights arced up ahead of us through the carefully manicured bushes and shrubs, curled left as the white gravel driveway snaked around an oval lawn with an enormous birdbath in its center, then broke gracefully to the right onto the main drive. The house lay a hundred yards up, and we passed through a row of white oak on either side, the towering trees standing proud and unyielding like sentries spaced at five-yard intervals.

When we reached the cul-de-sac at the end of the road, Desiree said, “Keep going. There,” and pointed. I drove around the fountain and it lit up at the same time, yellow streams of light coursing through sudden eruptions of frothy water. A bronze nymph floated above it all, twisting in slow revolutions, dead eyes on a cherub’s face watching me as I passed.

The road doglegged at the corner of the house and I followed it back through a stretch of pine to a converted barn.

“Park it there,” Desiree said, and pointed at a clearing to the left of the barn.

I pulled over and shut off the engine.

She took the keys and got out of the car, pointing the gun at me through the windshield as I opened my door and stepped out into the night, the air twice as frigid as it had been in the city due to the wind screaming off the ocean.

I heard the unmistakable sound of a round ratcheting into a shotgun chamber, and turned my head, looked down the black barrel at Julian Archerson standing at the other end.

“Evening, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Lurch,” I said. “A pleasure as always.”

In the dim light I could see a chrome cylinder sticking out of the left pocket of his topcoat. I got a closer look as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and realized it was an oxygen tank of some kind.

Desiree came around beside Julian and lifted a tube that hung off the tank, straightened the kinks in the tube until she extended a translucent yellow mask through the darkness.

She handed the mask to me and twisted the knob on the tank, and it hissed.

“Suck on this,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Julian dug the shotgun muzzle into my jaw. “You don’t have a choice, Mr. Kenzie.”

“For Miss Gennaro,” Desiree said in a sweet voice. “The love of your life.”

“Slowly,” I said as I took the mask.

“What’s that?” Desiree said.

“That’s how you’re going to die, Desiree. Slowly.”

I put the mask to my face and took a breath, immediately felt numbness tingle through my cheeks and fingertips. I took another one, felt a cloudiness invade my chest. I took a third, and everything went green, then black.