Now You See Her (2 page)

So what? you ask. So first thing tomorrow morning, I’m discussing a homicide case with Detective Francis Devaney. He’s counting
on the newfound psychic ability that recently put me in a working relationship with the Homicide Division of the Metropolitan
Boston Police. No, it’s not a paid position. I’m an unofficial adviser. The reward is beyond a Wall Streeter’s comprehension:
quite simply, it’s adventure beyond my wildest dreams. Me, Reggie Cutter, ex–executive wife and twenty-five-year authority
on ensembles for ladies’ luncheons, volunteer committees, banquets, teas, corporate galas. I tell you, as the ultimate makeover,
helping cops solve a murder beats a face-lift by a light-year.

For the past month, Devaney has waited while my wounded arm healed from my “rookie cop” adventure. Well, my arm is now hoisting
ten-pound free weights, and I’ve counted down the hours to tomorrow’s talk. Devaney’ll offer me a psychic’s deputy badge,
so to speak, and I’ll salivate like Pavlov’s dog. I’m just that eager. But if I blank out, I’ll be sidelined. He’ll be polite
and distant. “No hard feelings, Reggie.” “Of course not, Frank.”

Oblivious, Meg clicks her ballpoint and reaches for her briefcase with a pro’s nimbleness. “My car’s at the corner. Maybe
lunch next week,” she says. “And love that green jacket, Reggie. Bet it’s terrific in decent light.”

“I like your purple too, Meg, and your brooch.”

“It’s my Red Hat outfit. You must know the Jenny Joseph poem about wearing purple and a red hat when a woman gets older? It’s
about breaking free.”

“Vaguely.”

“It’s a great women’s group. You have to be over fifty.”

“Not quite yet.”

“We’ll welcome you. You’ll love us. It’s a fun bunch. I’m flying to this year’s convention. I’m looking for a hard-shell hatbox
for the overhead.”

Outside on the stoop, I fumble with my umbrella as Meg reaches to close the front door. Neither of us can explain the next
moment. Meg’s arm is outstretched, fingers ready for the knob. Before she can grasp it, the door starts to move. We watch
it, standing still as two statues. Neither of us touches the door, but both of us feel a sharp cold draft. All by itself,
the massive front door swings shut with a hard slam.

A
t 8:11 a.m., Devaney arrives, a burly man with a barrel chest and graying hair cut short. Blue eyes, crooked nose. “Reggie,
I’m early.”

“Detective Frank Devaney, come right in.”

He fills the room in his tweed sport coat and a mustard tie with ovals like slide specimens. His usually ruddy cheeks are
a bit colorless, like the morning.

“How about some coffee? How about a muffin?”

“Water’s good,” he says.

We sit in the front room among my late aunt’s furnishings, the carved oak chest and hurricane lamps and shelves of books.
I, in navy slacks and a cream blouse with light makeup and a natural-tone lipstick, have claimed the bentwood rocker. It was
my late Aunt Jo’s, as was this South End townhouse condo here on Barlow Square, which I inherited and moved into after my
divorce. Devaney commands the sofa, his feet flat on my favorite of Jo’s kilims. “Where’s the pup?”

“Biscuit’s with her co-owner. I’m now dog sharing.”

“Vacation time-share pets?”

Joint custody of Biscuit the beagle is a twisted tale. “My dander allergy,” I say, and let it go at that.

“How’s the arm? Soreness gone?” He tells me that the scar from my first crime case will fade. Actually, my dimple-size scar
feels like a badge.

“And how’s the upstairs dentist?”

Is this cop-style chitchat? H. Forest Buxbaum, D.M.D., is the new tenant Meg found for the upstairs flat, which is a huge
chunk of my post-divorce income, since my settlement stocks have crashed.

“The acid test, Frank, will be when I knock at Dr. Buxbaum’s door with a midnight toothache.”

He chuckles, asks about my kids.

“Jack’s still drawing a paycheck in Silicon Valley, and Molly’s probably got a sleeping bag in her sculpture studio in Providence.
Both fine. And your boys, still overseas?”

“One in the desert, one at sea on a destroyer. Their mother wants them back stateside.” He rubs his eyes. “I do too. They’re
adults, and still we worry.”

I nod. “They’re out on their own but still our kids.”

“Maybe I will take that coffee.”

It occurs to me that he’s stalling. He looks tired. “Frank, was a crime reported on Dartmouth Street last night at about nine?
It’s on my mind. I heard footsteps and scuffling on the sidewalk in the fog.”

“Walking by yourself? Reggie, you’re not in a gated community anymore.”

I flash to the private subdivisions and security patrols of my past. Luxury prisons. “Frank, I will not live shut in behind
locked doors in Boston. Anyway, I was driven home in that fog, with visibility of about four feet.” I say nothing about the
slammed front door, which Meg and I murmured about in cryptic tones. “Every intersection was a war of nerves.”

He can’t disagree. “No, nothing reported on Dartmouth last night I know of. Nothing in the Back Bay.” Momentary relief. Maybe
I only imagined the worst.

“You okay, Frank?”

His thighs strain the weave of his trousers. “Let me tell you, Reggie, no police department in this country thinks there’s
enough personnel to do the job A to Z. The public wants blood, the media and politicians hammer you. Add a high-profile crime,
like the Dempsey case, and everyone’s on us like buzzards.”

“Sylvia Dempsey.” The woman murdered by the river. Is this the case for my psychic sense? “Do you have leads?”

He shoots me a look. “Not you too.”

“A person ought to be able to walk by the Esplanade at twilight without being bludgeoned.”

“Forget ought.” He puts his mug down, takes a notebook from an inside pocket, and lays it on the coffee table between us.
“Did you visit Boston in the crack years, Reggie?” This is not chitchat.

“Crack cocaine years? No.”

“In those years, Reggie, you stepped on crack vials like they were seashells on the beach. People set their families on fire.
Mothers threw babies off roofs. The homicide rate went sky-high. We had a hiring freeze. Openings in the division, we couldn’t
fill them.”

This is not about Sylvia Dempsey. This is something from the past.

“It got to be a blur,” he says. “Lowlifes and snitches angled for their own deals with cops and the DA. Notes got sloppy,
and witnesses ran together in your mind. It’s probably hard for you to imagine that.”

Me? One autumn I served on three ball committees and mixed up the Baccarat and Tiffany and Waterford table favors. Tragic
at the time.

“Don’t get me wrong, we got some real good convictions. We put away scum. But then a few particular cases—” He twists his
wedding band. “You think those cases are over and done with, past history, but then you find an old notebook in a drawer,
open it up, and a detail comes back.”

The notebook on the table—I know this now—is coming my way in minutes. It will be the psychic prompt. I’ll be expected to
hold it and to feel the extrasensory vibes, though there are no guarantees. I say, “So you have doubts about some of those
cases.”

“Yeah, doubts. I checked old notes and files on a case about a man named Henry Faiser. He’s doing twenty to life in MCI Norfolk
for shooting a man we thought was trying to buy drugs. Faiser was twenty-one years old at the time. The victim was a white
college student named Peter Wald.”

“Faiser’s black?” He nods. “This happened close by?”

“About half a mile away on a block near the turnpike on Eldridge Street. It’s a fancy condo high-rise now, but then it was
three shabby houses and a body shop, which Vehicle Theft was already watching because they suspected stolen cars stripped
for parts.”

“A chop shop.” Again, he nods. I get no points for knowing this lingo. The notebook lies untouched.

“Homicide was watching the house next to the shop. A crack house, we thought. A woman had died there, and the cause of death
was heart failure, inconclusive as a criminal case. So we kept an eye on the house. The DEA was in it too.”

“The Drug Enforcement Agency?”

“Feds, so there were turf issues.”

“But Henry Faiser shot and killed Peter Wald. That’s a fact?”

“Faiser was known to be living in the house, and also known to be at the scene of the murder. A gun was found in the weeds
in a vacant lot alongside the house. Ballistics proved it was the murder weapon. We had information that Faiser shot Wald
in a dispute over a drug buy.”

“Faiser was a drug dealer?”

“A sometime dealer. Now and then.”

“So he had prior convictions?”

“He had arrests.”

“Not convictions?”

He shakes his head. “Charges were dropped.”

“For lack of evidence?”

He looks me in the eye, and the moment hangs. “Reggie, how many homicides do you think I worked so far in my career, twenty
years a cop? Give me a number.”

“One hundred fifty.”

“Nowhere close.”

“Two hundred?”

“Over five.”

“Five hundred murders.” I am stunned.

“In the crack years, assault cases turned into homicides. I didn’t even see my wife, my boys. I missed their Little League,
birthdays, our anniversary. Day and night we all worked, and we still got behind.”

“You think Henry Faiser did not kill Peter Wald?”

He sucks one cheek. “Does the name Jordan Wald ring a bell?”

“Wald? The candidate Wald?”

“State Senator Jordan S. Wald. He’s running for lieutenant governor.”

“Carney and Wald?” I recall the names on the yard sign at the “haunted” house. A memory kicks in. My late Aunt Jo talked about
a State Senator Wald who pushed legislation for tough environmental standards. It was one of her many causes. “Is Wald the
environmentalist?” He says yes. “Was Peter Wald related to the senator?”

“Peter Wald was his son. And into environmental causes too. An activist.”

“What was he doing there?”

“It was a drug scene, Reggie, a dealer on every corner.”

“Peter Wald was there to buy drugs?”

“We never knew for sure.” Devaney’s face says otherwise. He blinks and lowers his gaze. A moment passes.

“But there was pressure to find the killer,” I say. “And now, years later—how many years?”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen years later, you’re not sure.”

He pulls the knot of his tie, opens his collar but does not meet my eyes. “Let’s say as a veteran in Homicide, I know how
easy it is to convict innocent people. Plus, there’s hepatitis in the prison system. Hepatitis B and C. It’s almost an epidemic.
Prison health care isn’t exactly the Mayo Clinic.”

The nub of it: Henry Faiser is in prison for a murder he maybe did not commit, and he’s seriously sick. Years after the fact,
Devaney is bedeviled by guilt. “So you’ve opened old files and”— I swallow hard, the challenge before me on the table—“and
an old notebook.”

Here’s what’s next. Frank Devaney will put the notebook into my hands, ask me to hold it and to receive a psychic message.
A feeling, an image, something. Will I have to tell him that my intuition is temporarily out of order?

My mouth is dry as he lifts the brown tooled-leather notebook, clasping it like a prayer book. “I’ll turn to the particular
pages,” he says. “You can hold it. That’s what your Aunt Jo did. I always had to give her something to hold.”

My Aunt Jo, psychic number one, and me, the sequel, though I didn’t understand in childhood that my so-called overactive imagination
was really a sixth sense. All those tests they put me through from third grade on—results inconclusive. No one would listen
to my aunt’s explanation, which became the secret we eventually shared, aunt to niece.

“Frank, let me say something up front. I want to be honest. The fact is, I’m not sure I can help you today. In that fog last
night… well, maybe my sixth sense fogged up.”

“Reggie, when it came to psychic abilities, your aunt was also modest. She never bragged. She never promised more than she
could deliver. I appreciated that.”

“I’m not my aunt.”

“In the police department, sniffer dogs have more credibility than a psychic. If Homicide saw this, I’d never live it down.”

Perspiration dots his brow. My armpits prickle. The notebook is in my palms, clasped in my fingers. Eyes closed, I try to
focus, reach deep inside, imagine that I am one with the notebook. I try not to hear Frank Devaney breathe.

What happens? I think random thoughts—my son’s birthday later this month, I’m out of bananas.

Reggie, prepare to admit the truth, I tell myself. It’s a setback but not defeat. There will be other cases. Frank Devaney
will come calling again…so I hope. For now, honesty is crucial. “Frank, it’s not working. My sixth sense has come to a halt.”

“You’re sure?”

Eyes opened, I try to give back the notebook. He doesn’t take it.

“Maybe you need time.”

“Psychic messages don’t work on a timer.” I put the notebook next to him on the sofa.

His eyes look both hard and sorry. “You’re positive?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, no hard feelings on this one, Reggie.”

I force this out. “Of course not, Frank.”

Slowly, he pockets the notebook and rises. I, too, rise, feeling like I’m made of wood. We move toward the door. I am rollerblading
on the edge of self-pity, a crime-case Cinderella in a patch of rotting pumpkins. I say, “Maybe the moral of the story is,
be careful when you clean out your desk.” He frowns. “That’s when the notebook surfaced, right? When you rooted through your
desk?”

“No. It’s when I got a letter from Henry Faiser.”

“From prison? Telling you that he didn’t kill Peter Wald?”

His nod is long, slow, reluctant. “He writes every once in a while. To say he’s doing time for somebody else’s murder, yes.”

We’re at the door. “Where’s the letter?”

Devaney pulls a small envelope from his inside pocket. It’s addressed in the block letters of children and terrorists. “See
for yourself.”