Stay Close (32 page)

Megan closed her eyes.

“He tried to kill me.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.” She sounded like a scared child. It was obvious and a bit of cliché, but we don’t really age in a straight line. We age in a circle, curving back to childhood, but in all the wrong ways. “You have to get me out of here, Megan.”

“I’m a little busy—”

“Please? He had a knife. A real big one. The same one you keep in your kitchen, you remember, the one I got you for Christmas from that Home Shopping Network? It’s the same kind. Check your kitchen. Is the knife still there? Oh God, I can’t stay here another night…”

Megan didn’t know what to say. Another voice came on the phone. “Hi, Mrs. Pierce, this is Missy Malek.”

She ran the nursing home. “Please call me Megan.”

“Right, you’ve told me that, sorry.”

“What’s going on over there?”

“As you know, Megan, this behavior is nothing new for your mother-in-law.”

“It seems worse today.”

“This isn’t a disease that improves with time. Agnes will continue to get more and more agitated, but there are things we can do to help in these situations. I’ve spoken to you about this before, am I right?”

“You have, yes.”

Malek wanted to move Agnes to the third floor, out of “independent living” to the “reminiscent floor” for those with advanced Alzheimer’s. She also wanted authorization to use heavier sedatives.

“I’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Malek said, “though rarely this acute.”

“Could there be something to it?”

“Pardon?”

“To what Agnes is claiming. She still has plenty of moments of clarity. Could there be something to it?”

“Could a man be breaking into her room with your kitchen knife and threatening to kill her? Is that what you’re asking me?”

Megan wasn’t sure how to respond. “Maybe, I don’t know, maybe someone on your staff is playing a prank or she’s misinterpreting something…”

“Megan?”

“Yes?”

“No one is playing a prank. It is the cruelty of her disease. We understand when it is something physical—losing a limb, needing a transplant, whatever. This is similar. It is not her fault. It is something chemical in her brain. And sadly, as I’ve tried to stress, this isn’t a problem that will get better. Which is why you and your husband really need to seriously reevaluate Agnes’s living arrangements.”

Megan’s phone felt suddenly heavy. “Let me speak to Agnes please.”

“Of course.”

A few seconds later, the scared voice was back. “Megan?”

“I’m on my way, Agnes—and I’m taking you home. You just stay put, okay?”

W
HEN YOU FIRST GET TO
the Atlantic City boardwalk, you are pretty much stunned by the seedy albeit lively predictability of it all. Skee-ball arcades, funnel cakes, hot dog stands, pizza stands, time-share salesmen, mini-golf, suggestive T-shirt shops, souvenir stands—all perfectly blended in among giant casino hotels, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum (this one featured a “penis sheath” from New Guinea used, according to the caption, “as decoration and protection against insect bites,” not to mention a heck of a conversation starter), and upstart new malls. In short, Atlantic City’s boardwalk is exactly what you expect and probably want: total cheese.

But every once in a while, the boardwalk threw you a surprise. If you’ve played the board game Monopoly, you know the geography, but there, tucked in an alcove where Park Place meets Boardwalk, with the tacky Wild Wild West–themed façade of Bally’s Hotel and Casino looming as its backdrop, was a Korean War memorial that, for a few moments anyway, had the ability to strip away the kitsch and make you reflect.

Broome spotted Ray Levine standing next to the memorial’s almost supernaturally dominant figure—a twelve-foot-high statue of
The Mourning Soldier
sculpted by Thomas Jay Warren and J. Tom Carillo. The soldier had his sleeves rolled up, his helmet in his right hand, but what struck you, what gave you pause, was the way the bronze figure looked down, clearly grieving, at the too-many dog tags dangling from his left hand. You could see the devastation on his brave, handsome face as he stares at his fallen comrades’ tags, the rifle still strapped to his back, the dagger still on his hip. Behind him, a group of weary soldiers seem to materialize from a wall of water, one carrying a wounded or perhaps dead comrade. Next to that, under an eternal flame, the names of 822 New Jerseyans killed or missing are engraved.

The effect would normally be sobering and reflective, but here, shoehorned among the flotsam and jetsam of the Atlantic City boardwalk, it was profound. For several moments, the two men—Broome and Ray Levine—just stood there, staring up at the dog tags clutched in the mourning soldier’s hand, and said nothing.

Broome moved a little closer to Ray Levine. Ray sensed him, knew he was there, but didn’t turn toward him.

“You come here a lot?” Broome asked.

“Sometimes,” Ray replied.

“Me too. Kinda puts it in perspective somehow.”

Tourists walked mere feet away, checking out the casino signs for jackpots and cheap buffets. Most never saw the memorial or if they did, they cast their eyes away as though it were the homeless begging for change. Broome got it. They were here for other reasons. Those guys on the wall, the ones who had fought or died for such freedom, would probably get it too.

“Heard you were in Iraq during the first war,” Broome said.

Ray frowned. “Not as a soldier.”

“As a photojournalist, right? Dangerous work. Heard you took shrapnel in your leg.”

“No big deal.”

“That’s what the brave always say.” Broome noticed Ray’s backpack and the camera in his hand. “You take pictures here?”

“I used to.”

“But not anymore?”

“No. Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

Ray shrugged. “It’s stone and bronze. It never changes.”

“As opposed,” Broome said, “to something like, say, nature. Or like something growing near ruins. Those are better places to take pictures, right?”

Ray turned and faced him for the first time. Broome could see that Ray hadn’t shaved. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot. Megan had told him that she’d met up with her former beau last night for the first time in seventeen years. Clearly he had reacted by hitting the bottle, something, according to those who knew him, Ray Levine did with a fair amount of regularity.

“I assume, Detective Broome, that you didn’t call to ask me my theories on photographic subjects.”

“Maybe I did.” Broome handed him the anonymous photograph of Carlton Flynn at the park. “What can you tell me about this?”

Ray glanced at it, said nothing. “It’s amateurish.” He handed it back to Broome.

“Ah Ray, we’re always our own toughest critics, aren’t we?”

Ray said nothing.

“We both know you took this picture. Please don’t bother with the denials. I know you took it. I know you were at the ruins the
day Carlton Flynn disappeared. And I also know you were there seventeen years ago when Stewart Green disappeared.”

Ray shook his head. “Not me.”

“Yeah, Ray, you. Megan told me everything.”

He frowned. “Megan?”

“Oh, that’s her name now. You know her as Cassie. She’s married, you know. Did she tell you that? Two kids?”

Ray said nothing.

“She didn’t want to sell you out, if that means anything to you. In fact, she insists you’re innocent. She says you sent this picture to help us.” Broome tilted his head. “Is that true, Ray? Were you looking to help us find the truth?”

Ray stepped away from the statue and started toward the dancing water in the Fountain of Light. Sometimes the fountain, which had been there for nearly a hundred years, danced high, but right now the water was barely visible, bubbling maybe two or three inches.

“There’s two ways I can play this,” Ray said. “One, I lawyer up and not say a word.”

“You could do that, sure.”

“Two, I can talk to you and cooperate and trust it will work out.”

“I confess that I prefer option two,” Broome said.

“Because option two is dumb. Option two is how a guy like me gets in a jam, but you know what? We’re in Atlantic City, so I’m going to roll the dice. Yeah, I took that picture. I go to that park once a year and take pictures. That’s what I do.”

“Hell of a coincidence.”

“What?”

“You being there the same day Carlton Flynn gets grabbed.”

“I was there February eighteenth. I go there every February eighteenth, except when I spent a little time out west.”

“What’s so special about February eighteenth?”

Ray frowned. “Now who’s playing games? You talked to Cassie, so you know.”

Fair enough, Broome thought. “It’s like a pilgrimage or something?”

“Something like that. I go, I sit, I take pictures, I contemplate.”

“Contemplate?”

“Yep.”

“All because your girlfriend ran off on you there?”

Ray didn’t reply.

“Because, if you don’t mind me saying, Ray, you sound like a pussy-whipped pansy. Your girl left you—so what? Grow a pair and move on with your life. Instead you go back to where she dumped your pathetic ass and take pictures?”

“She didn’t dump me.”

“No? So Megan has been biding her time under a pseudonym with the rich husband and two kids, just waiting for your career as a fake paparazzo to take off?”

Ray actually smiled at that. “Does sound kind of pathetic.”

“So?”

“So I’m pathetic,” Ray said with a shrug. “I’ve been called worse. Anything else I can help you with, Detective?”

“Let’s go back seventeen years to that night by the ruins.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me what happened.”

Ray’s voice sounded canned. “I was supposed to meet Cassie. I saw Stewart lying there. I figured that he was dead, so I took off.”

“That’s it?”

“Yep.”

“You didn’t call an ambulance or help him?”

“Nope.”

“Wow, Ray, you’re quite the humanitarian.”

“Did Cassie tell you what Stewart Green was like?”

“She did, yes.”

“So you get it then. Half of me wanted to do the Snoopy happy dance when I saw him.” Ray held up a hand. “And, yes, I know that gives me a great motive, but I didn’t kill him.”

“You sure he was dead?”

Ray turned to him. “I didn’t go over and check vital signs if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Then you weren’t sure?”

Ray mulled it over. “There’s something else you might want to know. Not about that night, but about this February eighteenth.”

“Go on.”

“I worked a job that night. After I took the pictures in the park.”

“A job?”

“Yeah, a bar mitzvah, as a hired paparazzo.”

Broome shook his head. “Glamour profession.”

“You have no idea. Do you know what job I just came from? Grand opening of a Ford dealership. They had a red carpet out and anyone who stopped by got to walk it and we crowded them and took pictures, and then they tried to sell them a Focus or an Escort or whatever. Anyway, when I was leaving the bar mitzvah, I got jumped. Someone stole my camera.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

“Right, like I wanted to waste a whole night on that. But that’s
not my point. At first, I figured it was just a routine mugging, but then I wondered how come the guy only took my camera and didn’t at least try to grab my wallet.”

“Maybe he felt rushed.”

“Maybe. But when I got home, I saw Carlton Flynn on the TV. That’s when I realized I had a picture of him. See, the pictures were still on my camera, but I have a Wi-Fi connection that automatically uploads them to my home computer every ten minutes or so. But the mugger wouldn’t know that.”

Broome saw where he was going with this. “So you think the mugger may have been after the picture?”

“It’s possible.”

“So you sent it to me anonymously?”

“I wanted to help, but I wanted to keep my name out of it for obvious reasons. Like you say, the fact that I was there for both disappearances was suspicious. I can see from your face that it still is. But that’s why.”

“You get a look at the guy who jumped you?”

“No.”

“Height, weight, white, black, tattoos, anything?”