Darkness, Take My Hand Page 11

  I slid my arms around her waist and pulled her up on top of me, leaned back on the couch and slid my hands up under her sweater, ran my palms along the edges of her breasts. She bit down on her lower lip and her eyes widened slightly.

  “You said something to me the other morning,” I said.

  “I said a lot of things to you the other morning,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh God’ a few times if I remember right.”

  “That wasn’t it.”

  “Oh,” she said, clapping her hands against my chest. “The ‘I love you’ phrase. Is that what you mean. Detective?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She unbuttoned my shirt down to my navel and ran her hands over my chest. “Well, what of it? I. Love. You.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “That’s the silliest question you’ve ever asked. Don’t you feel worthy of love, Patrick?”

  “Maybe not,” I said as she touched the scar on my abdomen.

  She met my eyes and hers were kind and warm, like benedictions. She leaned forward and my hands came out of her sweater as she slid down my body until her head was at my lap. She tore open the rest of my shirt and laid her face on the scar. She traced it with her tongue, then kissed it.

  “I love this scar,” she said, resting her chin on it and looking up into my face. “I love it because it’s a mark of evil. That’s what your father was, Patrick. Evil. And he tried to pour it into you. But he failed. Because you’re kind and gentle, and you’re so good with Mae and she loves you so much.” She drummed the scar with her fingernails. “So, you see, your father lost because you are good, and if he didn’t love you, that’s his fucking problem, not yours. He was an asshole, and you are worthy of love.” She rose on all fours above me. “All of mine and all of Mae’s.”

  I couldn’t speak for a minute. I looked into Grace’s face and I saw the flaws, I saw what she’d look like when she was old, how in fifteen or twenty years many men would never be able to see what an aesthetic wonder her face and body had been, and it was just as well. Because it didn’t mean shit in the long haul. I have said “I love you” to my ex-wife, Renee, and heard her say it, and we both knew it was a lie, a desperate want perhaps, but far removed from a reality. I loved my partner and I loved my sister and I’d loved my mother, though I never really knew her.

  But I don’t think I ever felt anything like this.

  When I tried to speak, my voice was shaky and hoarse and the words were strangled in my throat. My eyes felt wet and my heart felt as if it were bleeding.

  When I was a boy, I loved my father, and he just kept hurting me. He wouldn’t stop. No matter how much I wept, no matter how much I pleaded, no matter how hard I tried to figure out what he wanted, what I could do to be worthy of his love instead of victim of his rage.

  “I love you,” I’d tell him and he’d laugh. And laugh. And then he’d beat me some more.

  “I love you,” I said once as he rammed my head into a door, and he spun me around and spit in my face.

  “I hate you,” I told him, very calmly, not long before he died.

  He laughed at that one too. “Score one for the old man.”

  “I love you,” I told Grace now.

  And she laughed. But it was a beautiful laugh. One of surprise and relief and release, one that was followed by two years that dropped off her cheekbones and landed in my eyes and mingled with mine.

  “Oh my God,” she groaned, lowering herself to my body, her lips grazing my own. “I love you too, Patrick.”

  14

  Grace and I weren’t quite at the point yet where one stayed over at the other’s house long enough for Mae to find us in bed together. That moment was coming soon, but it wasn’t one either of us was going to approach lightly. Mae knew I was her mother’s “special friend,” but she didn’t have to know what special friends do together until we were sure this special friend would be around for a long time. I had too many friends growing up who had no fathers but an amazing supply of uncles parading through their mothers’ beds—and I’d seen how it had fucked them up.

  So I left shortly after midnight. As I was fitting my key into the downstairs lock, I heard my phone ringing distantly. By the time I made it up the stairs, Richie Colgan was talking to my answering machine:

  “…name of Jamal Cooper in September of seventy-three was—”

  “I’m here, Rich.”

  “Patrick, you’re alive. And your answering machine’s working again.”

  “It was never broken.”

  “Well, it must not like taking messages from the black man, then.”

  “You haven’t been getting through?”

  “I’ve called you half a dozen times in the last week, got nothing but ring-ring-ring.”

  “Try my office?”

  “Same thing.”

  I picked up my answering machine, looked underneath. I wasn’t looking for anything particular, it just seemed like what one did. I checked the jacks and portals in back; nope, everything was hooked up properly. And I had received other messages all week.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Rich. It seems to be working fine. Maybe you misdialed.”

  “Whatever. I got the info you need. By the way, how’s Grace?”

  Richie and his wife, Sherilynn, had played matchmaker between Grace and me last summer. It had been Sherilynn’s theory for the past decade that all I needed to straighten out my life was a strong woman who’d kick my ass on a regular basis and take none of my shit. Nine times she’d been wrong, but the tenth, so far, seemed to be working out.

  “Tell Sheri I’m smitten.”

  He laughed. “She’s gonna love that. Love it! Ha-ha, I knew your ass was done the first time you looked at Grace. Cooked and smoked and marinated and hung up in strips.”

  “Mmmm,” I said.

  “Good,” he said to himself and clucked. “Awright, you want your info?”

  “Pen and paper are at the ready.”

  “Case of Heinies better be at the ready, too, Slim.”

  “Goes without saying.”

  “In twenty-five years,” Richie said, “there’s been one crucifixion in this city. Kid name of Jamal Cooper. Black male, twenty-one, found crucified to the floorboards in the basement of a flophouse in old Scollay Square in September of seventy-three.”

  “Quick bio of Cooper?”

  “He was a junkie. Heroin. Rap sheet the length of a football field. Mostly small-time shit—petty burglary, solicitation, but a couple of home invasions, too, bought him two years at the old Dedham House of Corrections. Still, Cooper wasn’t nothing but a nickel-and-dimer. If he hadn’t been crucified, nobody would have noticed he died. Even then, cops didn’t seem to be busting their asses on the case at first.”

  “Who was the investigating officer?”

  “Two guys. An Inspector Brett Hardiman and, lemme see, yeah, a Detective Sergeant Gerald Glynn.”

  That stopped me. “They make an arrest?”

  “Well, here’s where it gets interesting. I had to dig a bit, but there was a local stir in the papers for a day when they brought a guy named Alec Hardiman in for questioning.”

  “Wait a minute, didn’t you just—?”

  “Yup. Alec Hardiman was the son of the chief investigating officer, Brett Hardiman.”

  “What happened?”

  “The younger Hardiman was cleared.”

  “Coverup?”

  “It doesn’t look that way. There really wasn’t much evidence against him. He’d known Jamal Cooper casually, I guess, and that was that. But…”

  “What?”

  Several phones rang at once on Richie’s end and he said, “Hold on.”

  “No, Rich. No, I—”

  He put me on hold, the bastard. I waited.

  When he came back on the line, his voice had changed back to its City Desk rush. “Patrick, Igottago.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Look,
this Alec Hardiman was convicted for another murder in seventy-five. He’s doing life in Walpole. That’s all I got. Gottarun.”

  He hung up and I looked down at the names on my notepad: Jamal Cooper. Brett Hardiman. Alec Hardiman. Gerald Glynn.

  I thought about calling Angie but it was late and she’d been beat from watching Jason do nothing all week.

  I stared at the phone for a bit, then took my jacket and left the apartment.

  I didn’t need the jacket. Past one in the morning, and the humidity lathered my skin until the pores felt sticky and fetid and sickly soft.

  October. Right.

  Gerry Glynn was washing glasses at the bar sink when I entered The Black Emerald. The place was empty, the three TV screens on, but the volume muted, the Pogues’ version of “Dirty Old Town” coming out of the jukebox at whisper volume, stools up on the bar, floor swept, amber ashtrays clean as boiled bones.

  Gerry was looking into the sink. “Sorry,” he said without looking up. “Closed.”

  On top of the pool table near the back, Patton raised his head and looked at me. I couldn’t see his face very distinctly through the cigarette smoke that still hovered there like a cloud, but I knew what he’d say if he could speak: “Didn’t you hear the man? We’re closed.”

  “Hi, Gerry.”

  “Patrick,” he said, confused but with enthusiasm. “What brings you by?”

  He wiped his palms and offered me his hand.

  I shook it and he pumped mine hard, looking me dead in the eyes, a habit of the older generation that reminded me of my father.

  “I needed to ask you a question or two, Ger, if you got the time.”

  He cocked his head and his usually kind eyes lost their softness. Then they cleared and he hoisted his bulk onto the cooler behind him and spread his hands, palms up. “Sure. You need a beer or something?”

  “Don’t want to put you out, Ger.” I settled into the bar stool across from him.

  He opened the door of the cooler next to him. His thick arm dug down inside and ice rattled. “No problem. Can’t promise what I’ll come up with.”

  I smiled. “Long as it isn’t a Busch.”

  He laughed. “Nope. It’s a…” His arm came out washed in ice water, dimples of cold jellied white against the flesh under his forearm. “…Lite.”

  I smiled as he handed it to me. “Like sex in a sailboat,” I said.

  He laughed loudly and sputtered the punchline. “It’s fucking too close to water. I love that one.” He reached behind himself and, without looking, pulled a bottle of Stolichnaya from the shelf. He poured some into a tall shot glass, put the bottle back, then raised the glass.

  “Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” I said and drank some Lite. Tasted like water, but it was still better than Busch. Of course, a cup of diesel is usually better than Busch.

  “So what’s your question?” Gerry said. He patted his ample gut. “Jealous of my physique?”

  I smiled. “A bit.” I drank some more Lite. “Gerry, what can you tell me about someone named Alec Hardiman?”

  He held his shot glass up to the fluorescent light and the clear liquid disappeared in a shimmer of white. He stared at it and rotated the glass in his fingers.

  “Now,” he said quietly, eyes still on the glass, “where would you come up with that name, Patrick?”

  “It was mentioned to me.”

  “You’ve been looking for matches to the MO of Kara Rider’s killer.” He brought the glass down and looked across at me. He didn’t seem angry or irritated and his voice was flat and monotonous, but there was a stillness to his squat body that hadn’t been there a minute before.

  “Per your suggestion, Ger.”

  On the jukebox behind me, the Pogues had at some point given way to The Waterboys’ “Don’t Bang the Drum.” The TV screens above Gerry’s head were tuned to three different channels. One broadcast Australian Rules Football, one what looked like an old Kojak episode, and the third showed Old Glory wavering in the breeze as it signed off for the night.

  Gerry hadn’t moved, hadn’t so much as blinked, since he’d brought the shot glass back down by his side, and I could just make out the sound of his breathing, shallow and thin, as he exhaled through his nostrils. He didn’t study me so much as stare through me, as if what he was seeing was on the other side of my head.

  He reached back for the bottle of Stoli, poured himself another shot. “So, Alec comes back to haunt us all again.” He chuckled. “Ah, well, I should have known.”

  Patton jumped down from the pool table and padded into the main bar area, gave me a look like I was sitting in his seat, then hopped up on the bar top in front of me and lay down, his paws over his eyes.

  “He wants you to pet him,” Gerry said.

  “No, he doesn’t.” I watched Patton’s rib cage rise and fall.

  “He likes you, Patrick. Go ahead.”

  I felt like Mae for a moment as I reached out a tentative hand toward that gorgeous coat of black and amber. I felt coiled muscle hard as a pool ball under the coat, and then Patton raised his head and mewed and flicked his tongue over my free hand, nuzzled it gratefully with a chilly nose.

  “Just a big softy, huh?” I said.

  “Unfortunately,” Gerry said. “Don’t let the secret get around, though.”

  “Gerry,” I said, as Patton’s rich coat undulated and curled around my hand, “this Alec Hardiman could have killed—?”

  “Kara Rider?” He shook his head. “No, no. That would be pretty hard to do even for Alec. Alec Hardiman’s been in prison since nineteen seventy-five, and he won’t be getting out during my lifetime. Probably not during yours, either.”

  I finished my Lite and Gerry, ever the bartender, had his hand in the ice before I set it down on the bar. This time he came up with a Harpoon IPA, spun it in his meaty palm and popped the cap off in the opener mounted on the cooler wall. I took it from him and some foam spilled down the side onto my hand and Patton licked it up.

  Gerry leaned his head back against the edge of the shelf above it. “Did you know a kid name of Cal Morrison?”

  “Not real well,” I said, swallowing against a shudder that threatened to rise every time I heard Cal Morrison’s name. “He was a few years older than me.”

  Gerry nodded. “But you know what happened to him.”

  “He was stabbed to death in the Blake Yard.”

  Gerry stared at me for a moment, and then he sighed. “How old were you at the time?”

  “Nine or ten.”

  He reached for another shot glass, poured a finger of Stoli in it and set it on the bar in front of me. “Drink.”

  I was reminded of Bubba’s vodka and its ragged chewing on my spinal column. Unlike my father and his brothers, I must have missed some crucial Kenzie gene, because I never could drink hard liquor for shit.

  I gave Gerry a weak smile. “Dosvidanya.”

  He raised his and we drank and I blinked away tears.

  “Cal Morrison,” he said, “wasn’t stabbed to death, Patrick.” He sighed again and it was a low, melancholy sound. “Cal Morrison was crucified.”

  15

  “Cal Morrison wasn’t crucified,” I said.

  “No?” Gerry said. “You saw the body, did you?”

  “No.”

  He sipped from the shot glass. “I did. I caught the squeal. Me and Brett Hardiman.”

  “Alec Hardiman’s father.”

  He nodded. “My partner.” He leaned forward and poured some vodka into my shot glass. “Brett died in eighty.”

  I looked at my shot glass, nudged it six inches away from me as Gerry refilled his own.

  Gerry caught me at it, smiled. “You’re not like your father, Patrick.”

  “Thanks for the compliment.”

  He chuckled softly. “You look like him, though. A dead ringer. You must know that.”

  I shrugged.

  He turned his wrists upward, looked down at them for a moment. “Blood’
s a strange thing.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s passed into a woman’s womb, creates a life. Could be near identical to the parent who created it, could be so different the father starts suspecting the mailman delivered more than the mail. You got your father’s blood, I got my father’s, Alec Hardiman had his father’s in him.”

  “And his father was…?”

  “A good man.” He nodded more to himself than to me and took a sip from his glass. “A fine, fine man actually. Moral. Decent. So, so, so smart. If no one told you, you’d have never guessed he was a cop. You’d have taken him for a minister or a banker. He dressed impeccably, spoke impeccably, did everything…impeccably. He had a simple white colonial house in Melrose and a sweet, kind wife and a beautiful, blond son, and you’d swear you could eat lunch off the seat of his car.”

  I sipped my beer as the second TV gave way to Old Glory followed by a blue screen and noticed that it was now The Chieftains’ “Coast of Malabar” on the jukebox.

  “So he’s this perfect guy with this perfect life. Perfect wife, perfect car, perfect house, perfect son.” He peered at his thumbnail. Then he looked at me and his soft eyes were slightly unhinged, as if they’d stared too long at the sun and were just regaining a sense of the shapes and colors before them. “Then Alec, I dunno, something went in him. It just…went. No psychiatrist could ever explain it. One day he was this normal, regular kid, and the next…” He held up his hands. “The next, I don’t know.”

  “And he killed Cal Morrison?”

  “We don’t know that,” he said and his voice was thick.

  He couldn’t look at me for some reason. His face had grown ruddy and the veins in his neck stuck out like cables and he looked at the floor and kicked his heel into the wall of the cooler. “We don’t know that,” he said again.

  “Gerry,” I said, “let me in here. Last I knew, Cal Morrison was stabbed in the Blakey by some drifter.”