Hell Bent (13 page)

“I guess you are,” I said.

Right then Officer Guerra came over with a foam cup in each hand. He handed one of them to me. “Black okay?”

“Thanks, yes,” I said.

He gave the other one to Boyle, who didn’t bother thanking him, and then wandered away again.

Boyle peeled off the cap, took a sip, set the cup on the ground
beside him, and said, “So what do you want to tell me about that ‘but’?”

I took the top off my coffee and sipped it. It wasn’t very hot, but it tasted good. “Nothing you could call evidence,” I said. “He told me he felt like he was getting better. He talked about the future. He seemed to accept what was happening with his family. The divorce, I mean.” I waved a hand in the air. “I didn’t come away worried about him. Given everything he’d been through, he seemed okay to me, you know? As if he had things he was looking forward to.”

“You having no expertise whatsoever in the field of mental health,” said Boyle.

“You’re certainly right about that,” I said. “Just my gut.”

“Well,” he said, “it looks like your gut was off base this time.”

“Not the first time.”

“People who kill themselves,” said Boyle, “the same as mass murderers and child molesters, you talk to people who knew them, relatives, friends, business associates, whatever, more often than not they say the same thing. You’d never expect it, they say. What a shock. Quiet guy, kept to himself, maybe, but a good neighbor, always waved to you, liked animals. Who knew?”

I nodded. “If you were to make a list of suicide red flags, I suppose you’d check most of them off for Gus. I sure didn’t see it coming, though. So case closed, or what?”

“It’s in the hands of the ME,” Boyle said. “Don’t quote me, but, yeah, based on what I saw up there, that would certainly be my prediction. We gotta wait for all the forensics, of course.”

“You noticed the bullet hole in the ceiling, I assume,” I said.

Boyle rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I noticed some blood, too, brilliant fucking gumshoe that I am.”

“So what do you make of it? Shooting a hole in the ceiling, I mean?”

“I don’t make anything out of it,” he said. “It’s an anomaly. There are always anomalies. If there weren’t any crime-scene anomalies, we’d be suspicious. I speculate that Mr. Shaw fired a practice round into the ceiling, working up his courage, maybe, that’s all.”

He flipped through some pages in his notebook. I suspected that Boyle used his notebook as a device to make himself appear absentminded and dumb and to put suspects off their guard.

Or maybe he really was absentminded and dumb. I hadn’t decided yet.

After a minute of frowning at his notes, he looked up at me. “So you said that you and Ms. Shaw came here together?”

“We already talked about that,” I said.

He smiled. “Let’s talk about it again.”

I shrugged. “Alex and I were at my house. Claudia—Gus’s wife—she called Alex on her cell, said she got that disturbing e-mail from Gus and couldn’t reach him on the phone. We tried calling him, got no answer, so we came here to check it out.”

“What did the e-mail say again?”

“It was something like ‘I’m sorry,’ and, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ You can get it from Claudia.”

“Claudia being the wife of the deceased, you said.”

I nodded.

“Sounded like a man about to kill himself,” said Boyle. “That e-mail.”

“Now, in retrospect, it sure does,” I said.

Boyle nodded, wrote something into his notebook, then snapped it shut and stuck it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Okay, I guess I’m done with you for now,” he said. “As soon as my partner’s finished talking to Ms. Shaw, you’re both free to go. Might need to ask you some more questions in a day or two. Don’t leave the country.”

“Will you keep us posted?” I said.

He shrugged. “As soon as the ME comes up with his verdict, I’ll make sure someone lets you know. You being the deceased’s lawyer. Wait here.” With that, he stood up, turned, and stalked over to the Concord PD cruiser where his partner was questioning Alex.

I sipped my lukewarm coffee, and a few minutes later Alex climbed out of the cruiser and came over to where I was sitting.

I stood up and opened my arms.

She pressed her forehead against my chest. She kept her arms at her sides.

I hugged her. “You okay?”

“Not hardly,” she said. “Can we get out of here now?”

“Sure,” I said. “Where to?”

“Anywhere but here.”

We went over to my car. Aside from the Concord PD cruiser and Detective Boyle’s unmarked Crown Vic, ours was the last vehicle in what had looked like a Fenway Park parking lot an hour earlier.

Boyle and his partner, a young African American man, were talking with the two uniformed Concord cops. As I backed my car out of its slot, the four of them turned, looked at us for a minute, then resumed their conversation.

I drove down the driveway. Near the end was Herb Croyden’s house, a big white eighteenth-century center-chimney colonial bracketed by a pair of maple trees that were probably saplings in 1775 when the Shot Heard ‘Round the World was fired. It was after one in the morning, but it looked like every light in the house was blazing.

When I turned onto Monument Street heading toward Concord center, Alex said, “You mind dropping me off at my hotel? It’s just around the corner.”

“I could take you to Alewife so you could fetch your car,” I said. “We go right past it.”

“Whatever,” she said. “I don’t care.”

The lights glowed amber on the front porch of the Colonial Inn, and a floodlight lit the steeple of the white church that perched on the edge of the common. Otherwise the streets and sidewalks of Thoreau’s and Emerson’s old hometown were dark and deserted.

“Listen,” I said to Alex as I drove past the library. “Why don’t you stay at my house tonight?”

“You think that’s a good idea?” she said.

“It’s no night to be alone.”

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

“What about …?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

I felt her fingers touch the back of my neck. “Thank you,” she said softly. “I accept.”

I left my car in the Residents Only slot in front of my house on Mt. Vernon Street. When Alex and I went in, Henry was waiting in the foyer with his stubby tail all awag. Alex scootched down so he could lick her face for a minute.

I got two bottles of Samuel Adams lager from the refrigerator, and the three of us went out to the patio in back. Alex and I sat side by side in the wooden Adirondack chairs. Henry squirted on all the azaleas and rhododendrons, marking his territory, then came over and lay down beside me.

An easterly breeze had blown away the rain clouds from earlier in the evening, and now the sky glittered with a billion stars.

We said nothing for a long time. It was a comfortable silence. I’d spent a lot of time with Alex Shaw. The two of us had always been comfortable with silences.

Then Alex said, “There’s Elvis. See him?”

“Huh? Elvis?”

“You can see his guitar.” She was pointing up at the stars. “And over there’s Snoopy, with his two ears hanging down.”

I found myself smiling in the darkness. “Elvis and Snoopy constellations?”

“Yes. And look there. That’s the Green Ripper, with his long scythe.”

“You mean the Grim Reaper?”

“No,” she said. “The Green Ripper. That was Gus’s name for the Grim Reaper. He’s tilted on his side this time of year. See?” Alex was pointing toward the eastern horizon.

I looked where she was pointing, but I couldn’t make out the starry outline of the Green Ripper, anymore than I was able to see Snoopy or Elvis in the stars. But it didn’t seem important just then whether I could see what Gus had been able to see, so all I said was “Oh, yeah. Sure enough.”

“When I was little,” she said, “our family used to rent a cottage on the Cape in the summer, and on a clear night Gussie and I would go out on the back lawn and he’d sit me on his lap and show me his own personal constellations. I’d be in my little nightie, all warm and safe on my brother’s lap, and he’d tell me about the stars. He used to say,
Why shouldn’t we have our own constellations? We shouldn’t have to go along with the Greeks and Romans. Maybe they saw a bear or a hunter or somebody sitting in a chair,
he’d say,
but I see Marilyn Monroe. Who’s to tell me I’m wrong?”
Alex reached over and took my hand. “That’s how Gussie saw the world. Without preconceptions. You couldn’t tell him anything. He rejected all conventional
wisdom and received opinion. He questioned everything. He had to see it and make sense of it for himself. It’s why he was a good photographer, I think. He could see Marilyn Monroe in the stars.”

I squeezed her hand. “I’m really sorry,” I said.

She returned my squeeze. “I used to think Gussie’s lap was the most comfortable place in the whole world. I never felt safer than when I was sitting on my big brother’s lap with his strong arms around me, looking up at the sky and feeling the rumble in his chest when he told me about the stars.”

Alex let go of my hand and took a sip from her beer bottle. Then she pushed herself up from her chair. She stood there looking down at me with a question on her face.

I held up my arms.

She smiled and snuggled sideways on my lap with her cheek against my chest.

I wrapped my arms around her and held her that way while she cried.

Sometime later, we went inside. We made up the daybed in my first-floor office, and I put out some clean towels in the downstairs bathroom for her. I found a new toothbrush she could use and gave her one of my T-shirts to wear to bed.

“Will you be okay?” I said.

She shrugged. “Probably not.”

“I’ll be right upstairs.”

She arched her eyebrows at me.

“If you can’t sleep,” I said. “If you want to talk. That’s all I meant.”

She smiled. “I’ll be all right.” She put her hands on my shoulders, tiptoed up, and kissed my cheek. “Thank you, Brady. I
don’t know how I could’ve gotten through this horrible night without you.”

“I’ll be here for you tomorrow, too.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s what I used to love about you.”

Henry followed me upstairs to my bedroom. Mine and Evie’s.

Well, now it was just mine.

I lay awake for a long time.

I
t was nearly eight thirty when I woke up the next morning, about two hours later than usual, even on a Saturday. The low-angled autumn sun was streaming through my window, and it took me a minute to identify the reason for the knot of tension in my stomach.

It came to me all at once—the horror of finding Gus Shaw’s body, Gus’s constellations, Alex’s grief, the image of her in my T-shirt sleeping downstairs in my office, all mixed up with Evie and the hole she’d left in my life.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and went downstairs. I found Alex sitting at the kitchen table. Henry was sprawled on the floor beside her.

When he saw me, Henry pushed himself to his feet and came over for a good-morning ear rub, which I gave him.

“I made the coffee,” said Alex. She was wearing the T-shirt I’d given her and a pair of my old sweatpants that she must have found in my downstairs closet.

“Did Henry wake you up?” I said.

She smiled. “I was awake when he came into the room. He
sat there and looked at me, and it was absolutely obvious that he wanted me to let him out. So I did.”

I poured myself a mug of coffee and sat across from her. “Did you sleep at all?” I said.

She shrugged. “Not much.”

“That bed’s not very comfortable.”

“The bed was fine,” she said. “It wasn’t the bed. How about you?”

“I didn’t sleep so hot, either.” I took a sip of coffee. “So what’s your program today?”

“Fetch my car,” she said, “stop at my hotel for a shower and a change of clothes, then go see Claudia.”

“I’ll go with you, if you like.”

“You don’t need to do that, Brady. You must have better things to do.”

“Nothing more important. I’m offering. Moral support. Whatever. But I understand if it’s something you want to do by yourself.”

She smiled quickly. “It would be nice. I can use plenty of support. And I’d like you to meet Claudia and the girls. Thank you.” She gazed out the back window into the garden, where the finches and chickadees were swarming the feeders, and without looking at me, she said, “He didn’t do it, you know.”

“Gus?” I said.

She turned and looked at me. “I lay awake all night thinking about it, trying to be analytical and objective. I guess I knew Gus Shaw better than anybody. Better than Claudia, even.”

“In my experience,” I said, “what seems analytical and objective in the middle of the night has a way of seeming far-fetched in the light of day.”

“Well,” she said, “here it is, and the sun’s shining, and I still
don’t think he killed himself. Gussie just wouldn’t do something like that.”

“Honey,” I said softly, “he wasn’t the same man who told you about the constellations while you snuggled in his lap.”

“You don’t think I know that?” She shook her head. “Look, I know a lot of things have gone terribly wrong for him lately. In a lot of ways I barely recognized my brother. But Gussie wasn’t a suicidal person. Do you know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure what a suicidal person is,” I said, “unless you mean somebody who actually commits suicide.”

“I think some people just have it in them to kill themselves,” she said, “and some don’t. Like they’re born with it. How else do you explain why somebody whose life isn’t any worse than somebody else’s does it and the other person doesn’t? I think it’s like a gene. The suicide gene. You’re either born with it or you’re not.”

“You’re saying Gus didn’t have it,” I said.

“That’s right. He didn’t. You don’t have it, and I don’t, either. We’d never kill ourselves, no matter how unbearable things seemed to be.”

“We’re too cowardly,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Just the opposite. We’re too brave. Gussie was brave that way, too.”

“So,” I said, “if Gus didn’t kill himself, it means …”

“I know. It means somebody else did.”