All Our Yesterdays (34 page)

Kramer smiled a little.

“Then,” he said, “I guess it would be fair to say that things were closing in on him.”

Gus nodded.

“Was there any hope of safety?” Kramer said.

“Yeah.”

“Were the mechanisms of safety in his control?”

“No.”

They were both quiet while Kramer thought about what he’d heard.

“Ritualized behavior,” he said, “which is what you have described, devolves from an attempt to control circumstances which would otherwise overwhelm you. When confronted with something fearful, for instance, and beyond control, a child will create a fantasy which grants him at least the illusion of control.”

Kramer paused and looked at Gus. Gus knew he was wording this carefully so that the uninitiated cop could follow it.

Gus nodded.

“The fantasy becomes life sustaining, so that in instances when the fantasy is threatened by reality, it must be defended. And when one is enacting a fantasy the danger is great, because reality will almost certainly clash with fantasy.”

Kramer paused again to let Gus digest the information.

“Fear is the mother of ritual,” Gus said.

Kramer made a faint nod that hinted of approval.

“Yes,” he said.

“So if Mr. X is, say, fantasizing about little girls,” Gus said, “and then finds himself actually having sex with little girls, the actuality may scare him.”

“Most fantasies, enacted, are less rewarding than they were as fantasies,” Kramer said.

“So X might have been having sex with a kid forty years ago and some aspect of it scared him. And then
he either didn’t have sex with kids again, or he did but nothing scared him.”

“Possible,” Kramer said. “Though you have to understand that he has never not been scared. That’s why he has the fantasy. It’s when the fantasy is threatened.”

“Would there have been other kids?”

“I know too little,” Kramer said. “The human condition is too various.”

“I know that,” Gus said. “Give me a guess.”

Kramer shrugged. “The fear that drew him to little girls might have continued to draw him. He may have been violent only under special circumstances.”

“Something the girls did?”

“Not necessarily. People who defend themselves with ritual resort to it when there is external pressure. It doesn’t have to be something about the little girls.”

Gus nodded again, slowly.

“Except that it happens to them, it may have nothing to do with the girls,” Gus said.

“Yes. The pressure of his situation could have driven him to seek a little girl again and, when he did whatever made him kill the first one, may have made him kill this one. Do you know why he killed the first girl?”

“No.”

Kramer looked quietly at Gus for a while.

“Your son holds you in high regard,” he said. “And he is not a fool. But I cannot conspire with you to conceal several murders. In due course I will need to know that you’ve acted.”

Gus nodded. He sat for another long moment, and then he stood and put his hand out.

“Thanks for your help.”

Kramer stood and returned the handshake.

“May I ask you a question?” he said.

“Sure.”

“I asked you if Mr. X had the means to control his safety and you said no.”

Gus nodded.

“Do you know who controls those means?” Kramer said.

“Me,” Gus said.

T
hey were in one of the chintz-and-maple bedrooms at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. Gus lay on the bed, his head propped on the pillows. In the bathroom the shower was running. Then it shut off. In another five minutes Laura came out of the bathroom naked except for a pair of high heeled shoes. She stood at the foot of the bed with her legs apart like a fashion model, her head cocked and her hands on her hips. She was wearing lipstick, he noticed, and her hair was carefully brushed.

“So what do you think?” she said.

Gus looked carefully at her, running his eyes the full length of her, and smiled and silently applauded. She turned slowly so he could see all sides. There was an adjustable mirror attached to the dresser, and she tilted it so that she could examine herself full length in it, as she turned.

“All that tennis may have paid off,” she said. She completed her turn and faced Gus again.

“You don’t mind me posing, do you?”

“I like it,” Gus said.

“Tom and L…” She shook her head and shrugged.

“Tom didn’t like to see you naked?” Gus said.

“No.”

“That’s sort of unusual, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what’s usual, Gus,” Laura said. “I’ve only known Tom and now you. Are you usual?”

“I think so,” Gus said. “What was Tom’s objection?”

She shook her head quickly, as if she didn’t like the conversation.

“I don’t know, really,” she said. She paused, and reddened slightly.

“What?” Gus said.

“We didn’t come here to talk about Tom, did we?”

“Tell me what you were remembering.”

“My wedding night,” Laura said. “Tom and I were never intimate before we were married. A few kisses. And our wedding night was very awkward.”

“He didn’t know what to do?”

“Neither of us was too sure, but that wasn’t it so much. When he saw me for the first time”—she glanced down at her naked self—“he was frightened…. He didn’t … we didn’t … consummate the marriage until weeks later … in the dark.”

“How old were you?”

“Eighteen.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“My mother,” Laura said. “My mother and his mother were friends. They sort of put us together.”

“His mother was Hadley Winslow?”

“Yes. She was very eager that he marry.”

“I’ll bet,” Gus said. “You love him?”

Laura thought about it, and after a moment shook her head.

“No,” she said. “He was an appropriate mate: Ivy League, Episcopalian, wealthy. I was a good girl. I did what I was bidden.”

“And you didn’t learn to love him?”

“No. Everyone told me I would. But I didn’t. Does anyone?”

Gus shook his head.

“I guess he matters to me. But he’s very remote. We’ve gotten used to each other. I’ve lived with him most of my life. We’ve had children. He was not unkind. He never withheld money. We had barely enough sex to conceive the children”—she smiled sadly—“under cover of darkness. And beyond that, we were partners at dinner parties and doubles matches. We had twin beds and separate dressing rooms, and Tom was out more than he was in … in all senses. I don’t really know him very well. He loves Cabot, I think. He seemed very far away from Grace…. He’s remote.”

Gus was quiet.

“What are you thinking?” Laura said.

Gus remained quiet another moment, then he smiled at her.

“Enough with the love talk,” he said. “Into the bed.”

T
he house was right where his father’s report said it was, the forty-year-old typescript looking somehow antique in the age of word processors. They weren’t even his father’s words really, just the cumbersome locutions of policeman speak. Only the signature, C. B. Sheridan, with the big flourished
S
, made him think of the man who wrote it. Conn was a long time dead.

“A fine mess you left for me, Pa,” Gus said aloud as he tried the gate and found it fastened with a chain.

He went back to his car and got out a bolt cutter and returned to the gate and cut the chain. He opened the gate, put the bolt cutter back in his trunk, got back in his car, and drove up the dirt driveway under the overhanging foliage, across the little bridge, and parked in front of the house.

The sun filtered through the thick green overlay of untrimmed shrubs. The damp smell of the slow brook mixed with the smell of weeds and late summer heat. A trumpet vine as thick as a python coiled up the front porch pillars and hung oppressively over the front door. The door was locked. Gus knocked. There was no response. Gus went back down to his car and got a flat prybar from the trunk. He went slowly back up the steps onto the front porch, inserted one end between the door and the jamb, level with the dead bolt, and jimmied the door open.

The living room was messy, with soft-drink cans and movie magazines and stuffed animals scattered about. On the living room floor, near a door in the left-hand wall, was a long-dark smear. He went and squatted on his heels and looked at it. He didn’t touch it. Then he stood and walked through the door in the left wall. It was a bedroom. There was another dark smear on the floor. The bed was unmade and a wide dark brown stain blotched the sheets and one of the pillows. The stain had leeched a little way into the other pillow. Gus picked up the badly stained pillow and looked at it carefully. Then he put it aside and looked at the mattress where the stain had soaked through. He felt around on the surface of the mattress and found a hole. He hoisted the mattress and felt underneath it. There was no exit hole. He dropped the mattress and took a Buck knife out of the small case on the back of his belt and cut into the mattress. When he had cut a big enough opening, he put his hand in, and felt around, and came out with a distorted lead fragment that no longer looked like a bullet, having been misshaped by its passage. He took a small plastic sandwich bag out of his pocket and dropped the slug into it and sealed the bag by pressing the blue line into the yellow line until it looked green.

Gus went slowly though the rest of the house, looking at the children’s clothes: the baby doll pajamas, and little girl’s underwear; romance magazines, and comic books, and stuffed animals. He went back into the bedroom and stared down at the stained bed.

“Tommy, you are a weird son of a bitch,” he said aloud. “And I let you walk around loose.”

Then he turned and went out of the little house and
got back in his car. At the foot of the driveway, he closed the gate and readjusted the chain so that the cut link didn’t show.

Then he drove back to Boston.

T
he sun poured into the mayor’s office through the windows that overlooked Quincy Market. Mary Alice sat quietly on the other side of his desk while Flaherty talked on the phone.

“Lose it,” Flaherty said into the phone. “I don’t give a fuck what you do, get this office and my campaign separated from the fucking thing.”

He hung up the phone and turned toward her.

“Autopsy report says that young girl they found last week in Brighton—she’d had sexual intercourse. Probably with an adult. And probably had been having intercourse for some time.”

Mary Alice winced.

“How old?”

“Coroner’s guessing thirteen.”

“God.”

“Even the fucking pederasts are trying to screw up my election,” Flaherty said.

“Everything happens to me,” Mary Alice said.

“What?”

“Just the punch line to an old joke,” Mary Alice said.

“Yeah, well, your fucking boyfriend has no leads, he says. He ain’t solving shit. And neither is his fucking kid.”

“Parnell. Chris’s not even on the case. He’s your
“Yeah, and has he solved one?”

Mary Alice sighed and didn’t answer.

“He was your idea, don’t forget,” Flaherty said.

“How could I forget? You keep reminding me.”

Flaherty got up and took his stance in front of the window, looking down on Quincy Market with his hands clasped behind his back.

“You’re a smart broad, Mary Alice. And you give excellent head …”

“Everybody tells me that,” Mary Alice said.

“… but sometimes I can’t figure you out. Why did you get me involved with your boyfriend’s son.”

He turned slowly from the window, his hands still behind his back, and stared at her, his thought half completed.

“And having done that, and still, as far as I know fucking his father, why are you now fucking me?”

“Girl’s got to look out for herself,” Mary Alice said.

He gave her his riveting gaze, the one he used on his campaign posters.

“No bullshit, Mary Alice. I want to know.”

“Because you want to know, Parnell,” Mary Alice said, “it does not necessarily follow that I have to tell you.”

Flaherty held his look for another moment and then laughed.

“Hey,” he said, “Mary Alice, I’m the fucking mayor. You’re supposed to do what I say.”

“Professionally,” Mary Alice said.

“I’m not sure you do anything, except professionally.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you are a career oriented broad,” Flaherty
said. “And you consider the career implications of everything you do, dressed or undressed.”

“I’m a single woman,” Mary Alice said. “I’ve been a single woman a long time, long enough to know that nobody’s going to gallop up on a white horse and rescue me.”

“You were married.”

“Yeah, to the back end of the horse.”

Flaherty grinned.

“And you latched onto Gus,” he said.

“Not right away. Gus does not have a happy marriage. I was divorced. We latched onto each other.”

“He pays your rent,” Flaherty said.

“How would you know that?”

“I like to keep up with things.”

“He’s gotten as much out of the deal as I have.”

“You love him?”

Mary Alice shrugged.

“I like him, at least,” she said.

“He straight?” Flaherty said.

Again Mary Alice shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He seems to have a lot of money for a policeman, but … he doesn’t say much.”

“That’s for goddamned sure,” Flaherty said.

“He loves his son,” Mary Alice said.

“Most people love their children,” Flaherty said.

“I know, but for Gus, the kid is like all there is. Like if he does well it’s some sort of redemption for Gus.”

“Lot of weight for the kid to carry,” Flaherty said.

Mary Alice smiled.

“Why, Parnell, that’s damned near sensitive.”

“Sure. Why’d you hang me with him?”

“I didn’t hang you with him. You decided to follow my suggestion.”

“Whatever. What’s your deal?”

“I thought he might actually help. I thought it might get Gus energized. I thought it might help Gus and Chris get free of each other.”