The Architect (5 page)

“He’s not taking visitors,” Anderson said. “I wouldn’t even know what happened if Carter hadn’t called me.”

“I’m on the next flight back.”

“If you need anything...”

“Thanks”

They hung up.

“Excuse me,” Clevenger called out to the driver.

The driver turned around. He looked close to seventy, with gray hair combed over his bald head, his face gaunt and tired, deep crow’s-feet around his pale blue eyes.

“Change of plans. I need to get to the airport right away.”

“Not a problem.” He slowed down, moved into the
turning lane. ‘Trouble at home, huh? Couldn’t help overhearing.”

“My son.”

He glanced at Clevenger in the rearview mirror. ‘Three boys and a girl. All grown. You do the best you can, then you pray.”

“How do you know if you’re doing that?” Clevenger asked.

“What?”

“The best you can.”

He glanced at Clevenger, again. “They tell you,” he said. “Might take ‘em thirty, forty years, but they tell you.”

Clevenger looked out at the bridge. And real doubt crept into his mind for the first time since the day Billy had come to live with him—doubt about whether he had done the right thing adopting him, whether he knew what to do next. And for some reason, that doubt made him want to talk to Whitney McCormick, maybe because he knew without a doubt that they loved one another, even if that didn’t mean they would ever have a life together. He dialed her office, got put through to her.

“How’s San Francisco?” she asked.

“It was fine, until North called to tell me Billy got arrested.”

“For what?”

Clevenger told her the whole story. “He’s at the MiddletonJail.”

“Are you okay?”

Hearing her ask that question, her voice warm and steady, steadied something deep inside him. “I’m fine,” he said. “I wish I could say the same for him.”

“If you need to put the case on hold...”

“No, I—”

“I would understand. Really.”

Clevenger had put his work on hold more than once for Billy. In some ways, he had put his whole life on hold. Maybe that was the only thing to do, or maybe it was only codependence, preventing either one of them from really jump-starting his existence. “Fm not making bail for him, so he’s staying put. No reason I should stop working.”

“Your call.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Let me know when you can talk more about what you found out at the Groupmanns”.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, at the latest.”

“No rush.”

“Thanks, again, Whitney.” He was about to hang up.

“Frank?”

“Yup.”

“I hope this is the end of it. I mean, maybe this is bottom for him. Maybe he turns it around from here.”

Clevenger’s throat tightened, partly because he shared the same hope, partly because he knew Mc-Cormick was trying to help him survive parenting Billy, when what she wanted more than anything else was to be a parent herself. “Maybe,” he said.

“Take care.”

“You, too.”

“Can I get you anything?” a female flight attendant asked Clevenger.

On a good night, that question ran about 52 to 48 against, a slim victory for sobriety. On a night like tonight, with Clevenger thirsty for sleep, locked inside the suspended reality of an airplane in flight, sobriety went down in a landslide. “Vodka, rocks, please,”9 he said.

She poured it, placed it on the cup holder beside him. “Enjoy”.

“You don’t know how much.”

She smiled, moved on.

He sipped the vodka, half-thinking he’d leave most of it, call the flight attendant back to clear it away. But then he took a long swallow. He was going to be alone with his thoughts for die next six hours or so. That was a little more company than he could stand.

Demo version limitation

TWELVE

AUGUST 12, 200, 6:55 A.M. E.S.T.

Clevenger landed back at
Logan just after 6:00 A.M. and headed straight to the Middleton Jail. His third and last vodka had been at midnight. He felt pretty rough and figured he looked at least as bad.

He had visited prisoners at Middleton many times. The three officers behind the huge plate glass window in the lobby, cashiers of humanity, knew him well. He slipped his driver’s license and medical license under the window.

Chuck Valentine, stocky, late twenties, leaned toward the intercom. “Here to see Billy?”

“Right,” Clevenger said.

Valentine dropped Clevenger’s credentials into a metal, hanging file on the wall beside him, grabbed a locker key off a hook and started writing out a visitor’s pass.

That was a lot less back-and-forth than Clevenger usually got from Valentine. He looked at the other two officers, Pete Simms and Dave Leone, caught them looking at him. Simms looked down, pretended to be
absorbed in paperwork. Leone got up and headed toward the back of the office. “What’s going on here, Chuck?” Clevenger asked Valentine.

Valentine slid Clevenger’s visitor’s pass and locker key under the window, turned to add his name to the visitor’s log. “Huh?”

“I can’t get anyone to look me in the eye.”

Valentine shrugged. “Weird situation, I guess.”

“Weird, how?”

He shrugged, again.

“Weird
how
, Chuck?”

“Frank,” Dave Leone called out, from behind him.

Clevenger turned around.

Leone had walked out of the security booth and was gesturing for Clevenger to meet him at the steel door that led to the interior of the jail.

Clevenger left his things in a locker and walked over to Leone.

“You look well rested,” Leone said.

“I just flew back from L.A.”

He nodded. “You might not have heard the whole story here.”

“I doubt it,” Clevenger said.

“Not everyone knew Billy was your kid.”

Clevenger’s pulse started to race. “What happened?”

“He’s gonna be all right. He got into it with one of the guards in processing. He wouldn’t consent to the strip search. This guy’s a fuckin” hothead.”

Clevenger stared at him, waiting.

“Billy ended up with a couple of facial fractures and a concussion.”

“You’ve got to be... That’s why he wasn’t taking visitors when North called?”

“He was at Mass General getting worked up. Everybody did the right thing for him once we realized ...”

“I want to see him.”

“No problem. I just wanted to give you the heads-up, you know? It looks worse than—”

“I want to see him.”

Leone nodded, motioned to a guard perched behind another plate glass window over the steel door. The door slid open.

Clevenger walked inside.

“Follow me,” Leone said, moving past him.

“I haven’t needed an escort for about ten years, Dave,” Clevenger said.

Leone kept walking. He took Clevenger down a wide gray corridor that ended at the door to the One East cell block. Another guard under glass flipped a switch, and it opened.

One East looked like a high school cafeteria surrounded by cages. Prisoners in orange jumpsuits milled about tables and benches bolted to the floor of the common area, playing cards, reading magazines, talking trash, or just staring off into space.

Clevenger didn’t see Billy anywhere.

“He hasn’t earned any time out yet,” Leone said. He pointed toward the far corner, the last cell on the right.

Clevenger started toward it.

He saw Billy before Billy saw him, sitting on his cot, legs up, back against the cinder block wall. His left eye was covered with a heavy gauze patch. His upper
lip was badly cut and swollen and seemed to be held together by two lines of sutures. A blue-black streak ran down his forehead, over the bridge of his nose and onto his right cheekbone.

Billy turned, saw Clevenger, and hung his head.

It was all Clevenger could do to keep from crying for him—the part of him that was still the beaten child, the core innocent cowering under all the tattoos and bravado, perhaps minuscule now, perhaps all but unreachable, half memory, half ghost, yet still alive enough to grab Clevenger by the heart and not let go.

Dave Leone had caught up with him. “They don’t know whether maybe he lost some sight in that eye,” he said quietly. “Maybe all of it.”

Clevenger cleared his throat, kept walking.

“The guy’s on paid leave,” Leone went on. “Like I said, nobody knew until afterward that he was your kid.” He stopped and let Clevenger walk the last few feet by himself.

Clevenger stood just in front of the bars. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Billy said, without looking up.

“We’re in a jam, huh?”

Billy closed his eyes.

“Mind if I come in?”

He shrugged.

Clevenger looked back at Leone, who unlocked the door, let him in, and locked it behind him.

Clevenger wasn’t sure what to do next—to sit beside Billy or not, touch him or not, scream at him or not. The father in him was paralyzing the psychiatrist
in him, and vice versa. So he backed up against the wall and waited, trying to picture what his son’s eye looked like under all that gauze, wishing he had been there when the doctor told Billy he might never see out of it again.

Nearly half a minute passed before Billy broke the silence. “Fm gonna need a lawyer,” he said, glancing at Clevenger.

“They’ll give you one,” Clevenger said. He knew that wasn’t what Billy wanted to hear. He wanted to hear Clevenger would hire Tony Traini or Joe Balliro or John Haggerty or one of the other high-powered criminal attorneys he counted as friends.

“What about baiir

A lawyer and bail. He sounded like a thug. Clevenger felt himself getting angry, but tried to stay in control. Billy was more comfortable with confrontation than anything else. Transmuting sadness into rage was his game. Clevenger didn’t want to play it. He forced himself to picture Billy as a six-year-old, cowering on his bed, bruised and bleeding, waiting for the next lash from his father’s strap. “C’mon, Billy,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“She set me up to lose it That’s what happened.”

The six-year-old evaporated. Clevenger felt his anger rising again.

“She kept coming at me about why wasn’t I doing this and that—yelling, making Jake cry,” Billy said. He shook his head. “I just wanted her to shut up. I told her, ‘Shut up. Please. Just shut up.” But she wouldn’t She kept going on and on and on.”

“It might have been easier to hear her out without the alcohol on board—not to mention whatever else you were using.”

“I didn’t
want
to hear it. I don’t want to hear it now. I gave her Jake, and now she wants ... I don’t know what the hell she wants.”

That sounded like an echo of the truth. Maybe Billy really didn’t know how to deliver what Casey was asking him for—to be a real father to his son. Maybe the best he thought he could do was help bring a child into the world. Maybe the rest was too scary for him, treading too close to the scorched earth of his own childhood. “She wants Jake to have better memories of you than you have of your father,” Clevenger said. He paused. “That’s going to be harder to deliver now. We have a lot to deal with here.”

Billy turned toward the wall. “Then get me out, or at least get me a lawyer.”

“I need time to set up drug testing through the probation office, psychotherapy at the court clinic, AA, the whole nine yards. You might as well get in a few meetings with your lawyer while you’re here.”

Billy chewed his lower lip. “How long?”

“I don’t know. A couple of weeks, anyhow.”

He shook his head. “No fucking way.”

“You don’t have a lot of choices right now, partner.”

No response.

“What did they tell you at Mass General about your eye?” Clevenger asked.

Billy shrugged.

Clevenger walked over to him, sat at the edge of the bed. He wanted to hold him, but nothing about Billy’s
body language or expression suggested he was welcome to. He put a hand on his arm. “We’ll figure everything out, okay?”

Billy’s lip began to quiver. He yanked his arm away. “I can figure things out for myself,” he said.

“I don’t know if you can,” Clevenger said. “But I know you don’t need to.”

“Can I please be alone?”

“Billy...”

His jaw tightened. “Please?”

Clevenger felt a lump rising in his throat. He stood up and motioned Dave Leone to unlock the door.

Leone walked over, opened it.

“Why don’t I come by tomorrow?” Clevenger said to Billy. When he got nothing back, he turned and walked out.

THIRTEEN

“I ‘ve never seen anything
quite like it,” Clevenger told McCoraiick. He had called her from his office at Boston Forensics, quickly filled her in on Billy, then moved on to the murder case. He wanted her to know he wasn’t going to stop working. And he wanted to remind himself. “David Groupmann has taken the driver’s seat of that family like his brother was just keeping it warm for him. Shauna and the kids haven’t skipped a beat. She’s in love with David. The kids have cozied up to him—probably more than they did to their dad. It’s like Jeff never existed.”

“Denial?”

“Or acceptance. The way David tells it, Jeff and Shauna never made sense. A gay man and workaholic, married to a beautiful woman all about raising children. With Jeff gone, the pieces of the puzzle fit together better. It feels more natural to everyone.”

“Except someone died of very unnatural causes,” McCormick said. “Sounds like the brother had motive.”

Clevenger took a nip of vodka out of his pocket, a
souvenir from the plane. “For this one, maybe.” He twisted it open, poured it into the cup of coffee on his desk. “But that leaves four more.”

“Unless you make him for a copycat.”

“What do we know about him?”

“Super smart. Graduated Yale, 1983, summa cum laude, same class as his brother. Got into Harvard Law, but never went. He studied music at Juilliard, then art history at Oxford. Works as a painter, but doesn’t seem to have gotten very far with it. No criminal record. Politically conservative, but not politically active. A practicing Catholic. Never married, no children.”