The Murder Channel (16 page)

I wondered what his enemies called him. “You are Felix Zrbny’s attorney.”

He tapped a Camel from his pack and put a match to it. “That’s a lot of why I’m glued to this TV set. I figured with all the media the case would be good for business, you know? I don’t know why it matters. I don’t need the business. Never got to meet Zrbny.”

Carroll took a long drag on his cigarette. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been before David Devaine, rest his soul. I told that shithead a dozen times if I told him once. When it’s snowin’, I don’t go out that fuckin’ door. Busted my hip fifteen years ago walking through sleet on South Huntington. I don’t do snow. When they shovel and spread salt, then I go out.”

“You didn’t call the court.”

Both eyebrows shot up. “Why the fuck should I? Because his honor’s got a bee up his ass? Hah.”

“Did Zrbny retain you, Hink?”

“Look, Doc, this is my town, too, okay? I don’t want that sick fuck running around loose. That’s why I’m talking to you. I don’t have to tell you shit and you know it.”

He crushed his cigarette into a green ceramic ashtray. “Two months ago this big fucker came into my office downstairs. No appointment, no nothing. Doesn’t have a fuckin’ name, I figure, because he doesn’t introduce himself. He pushes an envelope across my desk. Will I represent Felix Zrbny through the hearing process? There’s no prep involved, he says. Burden’s on the Commonwealth. All I gotta do is show up. There’s a fuckin’ bank check for twenty grand in the envelope. I about creamed my gabardine. No way I’m gonna say no to that. The next morning I’m reading about me in the newspapers.”

“What about case files, meeting your client?”

“The guy specifically said I was not to go to the hospital and talk to Zrbny. I asked about court records. He said if I wanted to read that shit, it was up to me, but I didn’t have to waste my time. The guy was dirty. I knew that. I also knew there wasn’t anything wrong with me taking that check. Zrbny’s case wasn’t dope or kiddie porn.”

He shrugged. “I deposited the fuckin’ check.”

“That’s it?”

“Coffee’s ready. Wait a sec.”

Carroll shoved himself from his chair and disappeared into the kitchen. He was back in minutes with two mugs of coffee that tasted as good as it smelled.

“Doc, I was born in this house,” he said, lowering himself into his chair and firing up another Camel. “I spent two years in the army, one in Korea. The rest of the time I’ve been right here. I know this city. I may be greedy, but I ain’t a fuckin’ fool. I had a buddy downtown run the plate on the big guy’s car. It came back to that outfit right there.”

He pointed at his Magnavox TV. “Boston Trial Television. That’s all I needed to know. I figured if anything kicked back on me, I knew where to find him.”

I WAITED UNTIL NO CARS WERE IN SIGHT
, then jumped and grabbed the maple tree branch, hands slipping, but hauling myself into the tree. In seconds a car passed; by then I was invisible.

The snow was heavier, the wind stronger. The cold invaded my bones and stiffened my joints. My fingers were numb. I had little time to rest. I needed warmth and safety, and I knew where I would find both.

My fingers slipped through the snow coating the limb above my head. I grasped it and maneuvered myself to the end of the branch. My foot slipped, but I held on, and cleared the wall and its rack of razor wire. Then I waited again.

The yard below was dark. I could barely see the cars in the lighted parking lot fifty yards south. Hearing nothing but the wind, I released my grip and dropped into two feet of snow.

A light flashed across the yard, sweeping slowly from a row of wintering lilac bushes toward me. I dropped into the snow on my back, staring up at the
approaching light. The beam never slowed, passed me, then died.

As quickly as I could, pumping my legs in and out of the deep drifts, I moved across the yard to the rear of the building. I counted basement windows until I arrived at number seven.

The steel grid yielded to my grip as I knew it would. I rapped my knuckles against the glass.

There was no light, no sound within. I tapped a second time, and a dim light appeared through the smoky glass.

There was a shuffling noise, then, barely above a whisper, “That you, Felix?”

“Open up, Ralph,” I said.

He flipped the window bar and turned the crank. I crawled through the opening headfirst. The concrete floor was six feet below, but Ralph grabbed my belt and guided me slowly down. I lay still on my back, feeling the heat from the steam furnace in the adjacent room.

“Felix, oh Jesus, are you okay? I was sleeping. I watched about you on TV until midnight. I couldn’t keep my eyes open after that.”

He tugged my arm. “Tell me you’re okay, Felix.”

“I’m tired and cold, Ralph. That’s all. I’m fine.”

“I knew you’d come back. I just knew it. I got a place for you. Nobody will ever find you. I saved you some food. That’s how sure I was.”

Ralph Amsden had been in the hospital for thirty-five of his sixty years. He was a toothpick of a man
with white hair, bulging eyes, and one arm. When new patients met Ralph, they figured that the hospital kept him because he knew the ancient furnace and all its quirks. He did not look crazy, and only occasionally talked crazy. A few people asked why he was hospitalized at all.

Ralph was born in Boston, grew up in Jamaica Plain, entered the army at eighteen, married at twenty-two. On the day after his twenty-fifth birthday, he killed his wife, her parents, her two brothers, then took the subway to Fenway Park, watched five innings of the Orioles humbling the Red Sox, and killed a hot dog vendor.

Ralph Amsden would never leave the hospital, and that was fine with him. His only visitor had been a sister, Terry. Twice a year she made the trip by subway and bus from Jamaica Plain. She brought photographs of her kids; Ralph did not know them, and would never meet them. Terry died in 1996, and whatever real contact Ralph had with the outside world died with her.

Years earlier he had modified the basement window. It appeared secure, but in seconds became a route to freedom. Ralph figured he might have a use for it someday, but not for himself.

“You gotta fix my window,” he said now. “If anybody walks by, they’ll see it.”

I considered reminding him of the storm, telling him that no one would be out for a stroll behind the hospital through two feet of snow. Ralph would not
be reassured. I pushed myself from the floor, reached out and grabbed the steel grate, and yanked it into place.

“The snow will cover my tracks,” I said.

“You can’t be coming and going, Felix. Jesus. They’ll find you for sure.”

The next time I crawled through Ralph’s window would be the last time, but I saw no need to tell him that. I cranked the window into place.

“I got something for you,” I said, and reached into my jacket for the package of Twinkies and the candy bar that I had picked up on my way.

Ralph loved sweets. If the only foods on earth consisted of sugar, chocolate, and corn syrup, Ralph would be certain that he had arrived in heaven.

“Why’d they kill that girl?” he asked. “Jesus. They must’ve shown that twenty times. You gotta tell me the truth. I can’t get true stuff from TV. They gotta sell me shit I don’t want and couldn’t buy even if I did want it. Why’d they shoot up the courtroom? You hungry?”

“I had some soup,” I said, wondering how long it had been since I sat in Sable’s kitchen with a bowl of chicken noodle and rice and a box of crackers.

Now she was dead.

When I turned and walked away from the security guard in the parking garage, my head flooded with noise, and pain arced from the back of my head into my spine. These were sensations that I knew well, electric surges that stimulated muscle, cartilage
,
and bone. My first experience with the arrhythmic pulsing ache had been that day, that hot summer, that year I knew I was less than complete without Levana.

Someone took her away from me.

“What courtroom are you talking about, Ralph?”

“The one you were going to until those assholes flipped the truck. If you got there when you were supposed to, you might be dead now. Well, you could’ve been dead a bunch of times today, I guess.”

I sat on a folding chair and surveyed Ralph’s domain, his home for the biggest part of his life. His bed was an army cot, in disarray now because he had been asleep when I rapped on the window. Usually the bed was made with military precision—sheets without a crease, blanket pulled tight to the pillows, then folded down. His bureau was a stack of cantaloupe crates containing his folded clothes and the few objects that were important to him. A crucifix hung on the wall above the bed; a Bible lay on the small table to one side. There was no other reading material in the room. Ralph’s window on the world was his thirteen-inch black-and-white TV that Terry had brought him ten years earlier.

Steam pipes clanked overhead. The large space was filled with boxes of nonperishable hospital supplies—toilet paper, soap, shampoo, floor-cleaning solvent, paper towels. The lamp on the bedside table put out about forty watts of dusty yellow light. There was a single overhead light, but Ralph switched that
on only during the day when he worked. When I asked him about the poor lighting, he told me that he did not need to see much, just enough to get by.

Ralph filled a pan with water from the tap at the mop sink and put it on his hot plate. “I’m gonna make us some instant,” he said, and sat on his cot. “I knew some Wilsons growing up. That was in Jamaica Plain. I never heard of Albie Wilson, but he’s from Chelsea. I don’t think I ever knew anybody from Chelsea.”

I did not interrupt him. Eventually, Ralph would tell me what I wanted to know.

“There wasn’t any Vigil when I was outside,” he said, pulling a cigarette from an open box on his table.

Watching Ralph light his cigarettes was an education in adaptability. He had lost his right arm in a laundry accident twenty years earlier. The Winston dangled from his mouth as he talked and manipulated a matchbook—flipped open the cover, liberated a match but did not detach it, closed the cover behind the match, folded the match with his thumb so that the head touched the strike plate, slid it to one side and released his thumb as the match ignited. It was a fluid motion, requiring only seconds until he was dragging on his smoke.

“This Albie Wilson was part of the Vigil gang, or whatever they call themselves,” he continued. “He drove up in front of the courthouse, hopped out of the car with an automatic, ran up the steps scattering
reporters like chickens when the fox jumps into the coop, and shot up the fucking place. Jesus. You weren’t there because the fucking sheriffs don’t know how to drive.”

He laughed—a dry, crackling snicker—at his own humor. “Felix, why did you shoot that deputy?”

I thought about the bloody, semiconscious Finneran lying in the snow on Storrow Drive. “When I walked away from the crash,” I told him, “it didn’t feel right. There was something unfinished there. I didn’t want anyone to have any misunderstanding about what I will do with freedom. I went back and shot him.”

“I know what you mean,” Ralph said, nodding. “A man’s gotta finish what he starts.”

He stood, and placed his cigarette in a row of burn marks on the table’s edge. He poured hot water into two hospital mugs, dumped teaspoons of instant coffee into each mug, stirred them, then handed one to me, stuck his Winston in his mouth, and carried the second mug back to the bottom of his cot.

“What do you know about Vigil, Ralph?”

“When Terry used to visit, she told me about them. Bunch of fucking crazies want to set up their own government. Terry and her kids had an apartment near a bar called Riddle’s. That’s where these guys hang out. Well, they did back then. I don’t know about now. Terry’s boyfriend ran with that crowd. One night he didn’t come home. She didn’t mind so much ‘cause the guy was an asshole. He
used to beat her and the kids. They fished him out of the harbor a couple weeks later. One of the Vigil gang came by her place and gave her twenty bucks for groceries.”

He tapped out his butt on the metal cot frame. “What do they want with you?”