Cold Case (22 page)

The
CIA, I thought. Oh, yeah. All this case needed was the CIA.

“The police never found him,” I said.

“The police never looked. They didn't hate Cubans enough to make the effort. Not enough Cubans tryin' to go to South Boston High School. Understand this: If that Albion guy hadn't confessed, my kids would be visitin' their granddaddy in jail.”

“When did your father die?”

“Seven years ago. Didn't you read about it in
Time
magazine?”

“He left his son a fine line of sarcasm.”

“And not much else.”

“I'm authorized to pay you a hundred dollars for your time.”

“Oh, yeah? Who from? The Police Benevolent League?”

“Take it as a gift, from your father to his grandchildren.”

“They don't need your gift.”

“I'm leaving two fifties under this pot of marigolds. Don't disappoint me and let your boss find them.”

“Give 'em here,” he said. He mumbled his thanks.

I wanted to tell him I didn't need his thanks, but I let him have the last word. He needed it more than I did.

23

I must have driven around the rotary at the entrance to Franklin Park four or five times, brooding at the wheel. When it started to feel like there might be no exit to the merry-go-round, I flashed my turn signal, scaring everyone in sight, and pulled off onto the main track, Jewish War Veterans Drive, although no one seems to call it that anymore. I zipped by the golf course, crowded on a fine morning, past White Stadium, and the zoo's stone lions. Just driving through, I could see that Franklin Park was definitely coming up in the world. Lone joggers paced by. Walkers paraded in multiracial groups. I wondered if the city would ever bring back the stables and the horse trails, made a silent vow to take Paolina to the zoo before she got too “old” and “sophisticated” for such shenanigans. With luck, maybe she never would.

Luck
. Edgar Barrett Jr., deceased, hadn't gotten his share of good luck—given that there's a finite amount of luck in the world, an idea open to debate. Even after his death, his unemployment, his alcoholism, had left deep scars in the psyche of his only son, given him a legacy of terrible and justifiable rage.

Would Edgar Barrett, the eight-year-old boy whose universe had shattered, the thirty-two-year-old man I'd just seen, strike back some day? At the police? At the Cameron family? Did reading Garnet Cameron's name in the newspapers make him shudder with revulsion? Did he contrast his father's fate with Garnet's?

Garnet hadn't been abused by the police. He'd barely been questioned. On the other hand, he'd lost a sister he professed to love. Do the privileged classes keep their scars well hidden?

I drove home, hollered for Roz, got the standard response. Nothing.

On-line, “Switchboard” had no listing, professional or personal, for Dr. Andrew Manley. I could have disguised my voice, called the Cameron residence, and asked for him. But the FBI would have a fix on the incoming number before I started to speak, and I wanted to stay out of their way if at all possible.

So I began on Manley's “gift,” his bibliography. Most entries were articles from the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, the
British Journal of Psychiatry
, the
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
, the
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
—and my personal favorite—the
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry
. The list included books as well, most of these published by university presses or an outfit called Basic Books.

I could have dialed Keith Donovan; he's a shrink, after all. He'd be able to translate the articles' titles into sensible non-jargon prose. But he might be working. And I felt a strange reluctance to owe Donovan. Mooney and I could deal. I could pay Moon back with information I gleaned on the streets during investigations. Only one way I could pay Donovan back, considering that his domestic skills outshine mine on every level—with sex—and that felt wrong as wrong could be.

I hollered upstairs for Roz again, figuring that she might have been lying doggo the first time. No response, and I never invade her premises because I'm too scared of what I might find there. Roz would have known how to make America Online divulge the location of its psychiatric-journal file and download selected articles. I hadn't a clue. Seems like every time I click on a browser, I'm trapped for hours. There's just so much damned information out there!

Read the manual, Roz repeats like a mantra. I've tried. My manual reads as if it had been translated from Taiwanese to German and then back into English. It could be marketed as a cure for insomnia.

Options loomed. The public library, with its cool high-ceilinged rooms, where I could find a knowledgeable librarian to help me wend my way through the publication stacks. Or a stickler for detail, who'd make me fill out a thousand call slips and wait, wait, wait. A university library, where I could gain admittance by using one of many forged ID's, con a student assistant into getting me hooked into their system.

The Liberty Café.
Yes
.

The Liberty is a downstairs cellar on Mass. Ave., technically in Central Square, but close enough to MIT to practically qualify as a classroom. It offers computer time, doughnuts, strong coffee—and a lone duffer can always count on finding a nerdy show-off, male or female. The exchange rate is fairly even. I'd buy coffee, he or she would preen, find my articles, download them. I'd pay for the time. No one would advise me to read the manual.

And the coffee's really good.

The decor is something else.

As you descend the narrow steps, you might be entering a cavern, or for those in the know, I'm told, a version of Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game for grown-ups, or semi-grown-ups.

The low ceiling is lit with stained-glass panels, depicting fantasy and science fiction figures. A graphic detailing the MBTA's Red Line takes up one wall. Tables, chairs, and sofas are arranged in conversational groupings. Rugs cover the uneven floor. It looks like no other coffee shop I've ever seen. And it boasts six computer stations, all equipped with Macs and printers, and just about every server you're likely to need. At four bucks an hour, it's hard to beat.

Two cappuccinos and a “fudgy delite” were the price Stanley—who lived on the fourth floor of East Campus—demanded to put his skills to the test. He used Netscape like he'd designed it. I took notes, and was able to download six articles before my guru had to leave for a summer school class. I got comfy on a sofa, kicked off my shoes, and read, that good old archaic pursuit.

One article was devoted to a discussion of where memory was stored, apparently in all lobes of the cerebral cortex, and other areas, such as the hippocampus and the medial thalamus, that I knew I'd have trouble remembering. A second article dealt with types of memory: immediate, short-term, knowledge-and-skills, priming, associative, and episodic. I learned that “priming” is the kind of memory that makes the transition from roller skates to Rollerblades, from training wheels to a two-wheeler, seem fairly easy, a logical progression. The same article stated that episodic memory is the type involved in so-called recovered memory syndrome, and defined it as “the remembrance of the things that happen in your life—the sad things, the happy things, the scary things.” This I thought I could remember. Another article spoke of a specific trial, how recovered memory syndrome had been effectively used to prosecute a man for murder years after the event. The next two addressed rape and abuse prosecutions instituted years after the alleged crimes, and the possible link between recovered memory syndrome and psychiatric prompting or hypnotic suggestion. It seemed that an abnormal number of women remembered childhood abuse after entering therapy.

Whenever someone writes the words “abnormal” and “women” in the same sentence, I'm fairly certain the author is a man. I checked. No surprise.

I shifted on the sofa, sat cross-legged, shrugged, and ran both hands through my hair. My mind was racing in circles.

Memories recovered under hypnosis have been forbidden in Massachusetts courts for years. If the police bring in a hypnotist to try to get an eyewitness to recall the number of a license plate, everything that witness might say on the stand is considered tainted.

I wasn't sure where memories recovered with the aid of psychoanalysis stood in forensic terms.

Recovered memory syndrome was important to my case, unless Andrew Manley was leading me astray for purposes of his own, most likely to protect Tessa Cameron.

Andrew Manley supposedly believed that Thea Janis was alive. I could find absolutely no accounts of individuals who had experienced recovered memory syndrome of their own deaths. Zip.

Most of the deeply hidden—“repressed”—memories involved incest. Okay, I thought, let's suppose the worst. Famous Franklin Cameron raped his brilliant young daughter Thea. She threatened to tell. So he had her killed by a guy he just happened to know, a convenient serial killer on the loose. Sure.

I pressed my hands over my eyes, inhaled and exhaled. I didn't need more coffee. I needed air. A dose of reality.

Outside it was twilight. Amazing the hours a computer can chomp out of your day.

Although I'd parked my car by a meter that had long registered violation, I hadn't gotten a parking ticket. A lucky omen. My gas tank was full. Another omen.

Marshfield, I thought. On the ocean. A cool, starry night. The perfect time to visit a retired cop, ask him why his neatly organized, beautifully typed files sported an overdose of Wite-Out.

24

The Chamber of Commerce defines Cape Cod as comprising fifteen towns divided into countless villages, 365 lakes and ponds, long ribbons of good road, and 399 square miles of land forming a strong flexed arm reaching out to grab a chunk of the North Atlantic.

Nary a word about Marshfield, although when asked to describe the town, most locals hesitate only a moment before responding “down the Cape.”

Marshfield, the so-called “Irish Riviera,” isn't exactly on Cape Cod, Cape Cod being that land divided from the mainland by the Cape Cod Canal, with Bournedale, Cedarville, and Buzzards Bay tacked on to gain access to lovely Sagamore Beach, and including, of course, those two famous islands, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, refuges for artists, rock stars, and presidents.

Marshfield's too far north to qualify. Wrong county. A working-class neighborhood dotted with small, mostly neat, summer cottages a half mile walk from an eroding beachfront.

I am not talking “summer cottages” as in Newport or the Berkshires. I'm talking no foyer, walk smack into the living room, one or two bedrooms max, tiny kitchen, single bath. No insulation, few year-round inhabitants. Often an outdoor shower. Pebbles and sand in the backyard, a few wayward tufts of grass.

Sergeant MacAvoy's place looked winterized, a do-it-yourself job from the way the stovepipe stuck out at an angle through the shake-shingled roof. A lamp burned, which gave me hope as I climbed two steps to a square wooden porch. No doorbell. I knocked, knocked louder. No answer.

Well, it had been a nice drive. Moon ringed with a golden halo, shadowed by scudding clouds. I'd stroll down to the beach, kick off my sandals, wet my feet in the foamy tide, collect seashells for Paolina. Try again, nine-thirty or ten.

I peered in the curtainless front window. A TV the size of a small movie screen occupied most of one wall. A leather chair lay in the reclining position as if its owner had just popped out to go to the bathroom. Maybe he had. I waited five minutes, knocked again. No response. The beach, definitely.

I briefly considered a B&E, just to keep my hand in, see what other goodies Sergeant MacAvoy collected besides giant TV's. I scanned the neighborhood. This was not the big bad city, but Marshfield has a rep: Every other house was probably owned by a retired cop. Even as I stood on the porch orienting myself—ocean to the east; I could hear waves lapping the shore—loaded rifles might be pointed at my head. Former members of the force staying in shape, practicing with newly purchased nightscopes.

I decided on strategic retreat.

I stopped with one hand on the Toyota's door. An aged Buick squatted in MacAvoy's carport. Maybe he hadn't gone far, maybe toddled over to a neighbor's.

I was thinking of doing the same when a porch light snapped on with sufficient glare to blind a burglar. Blinking, I made out a bulky form on the stoop of a nearby bungalow.

“Looking for the old goat?” The voice was a woman's, low and pleasantly rough, trace of an Irish accent.

“Sergeant MacAvoy? Yes, I am. If you know where he is—”

“Where else but the bar?”

“Which bar?”

“You're not from around here.” A tinge of accusation there, a bit of suspicion. Foreigner. Beware.

“No.”

“Not a troublemaker, are you?”

“No.”

“Woody doesn't get so many women coming by. He'd be sad to miss one, I was thinking.”

“I'm glad you were thinking that.”

“Related to the man?”

“No.”

“Doesn't seem to have any family in the world.”

A test. If I'd claimed to be his niece, would I have been sent packing, never learning the name of the bar?

“Lucky Horseshoe,” said the voice. “Two blocks south and then cut catty-corner through the lot. If you're walking. You'll see the sign well after you hear the noise.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“MacAvoy jogs over most nights, so he can stagger back, if you catch my drift.”

Another voice, this one male, issued from the house. The woman responded indistinctly and ill-temperedly. Hastily, she banged the door shut. I could hear her husband's “mind yer own business” through the window. “Mind yer own business”: the code of the burned-out ex-cop. Why risk your life for twenty-five years and not live to enjoy your pension?