Authors: April Smith
ELEVEN
BOSTON IS a massive traffic jam just like Los Angeles except here the cars are crammed together even more tightly, pushing through tiny, twisting, illogical roads that used to be cow paths.
Or maybe it’s just that I have arrived during rush hour in the middle of a spring sleet storm.
I am stuck on the ramp leading out of Logan Airport, watching the wipers of the rented Taurus sweep away crescents of slush. Through the momentary clear spots I strain impatiently to make out the road to Boston, to Randall Eberhardt’s past, which I had felt all along was going to be promising. But all I can see in the darkening evening are dazzlingly lit billboards for the New England Aquarium and Prince Spaghetti Sauce.
I am wrestling with the heater to get it to stop fogging up the windows. I have been waiting forty minutes to enter the Sumner Tunnel, watching hunks of soft ice picked up by the windshield wipers and carried lazily upward then sliding down into long melting peninsulas. If I were working the case with Donnato we’d be making jokes about this freaky weather, cozy in the warmth of the car like a pair of lovers sneaking away for the weekend; even the thought makes me burn with embarrassment as the traffic suddenly lurches forward.
The tunnel itself is no erotic experience but a narrow, claustrophobic gas chamber at the end of which is an incomprehensible tangle of overpasses that trick me into a blind detour through a neighborhood of weathered three-decker houses dominated by huge oil tanks. I get back on the overpass, panic when I see signs for Cape Cod and get off again, only to find myself in Chinatown. Finally I pull into a gas station and call Special Agent Lester “Wild Bill” Walker at the Boston field office, who tells me to stay put. He’s there in twenty minutes, climbing out of a green government car, a big man wrapped in raincoat and knit wool cap, coming toward me through the silvery falling globs of ice illuminated by my headlights like some kind of Eskimo dream bear. As I roll down the window he extends a gloved hand, the most welcome hand I ever shook, and that one gesture—my bare palm in his leathery paw—makes it clear how unprepared I really am for this trip.
“Where are you staying?”
“The Sheraton.”
“Follow me.”
He gets back in his car and we drive out of there. In a few minutes we are somewhere deep inside the business district, an untouched pocket of downtown where every building is not a skyscraper or cutesy renovated warehouse but an old brick factory or granite-faced office building. You can easily imagine, a hundred years ago, Portuguese fishermen selling haddock from pushcarts and scriveners arriving before dawn to calculate the earnings of great banks and behind those huge mullioned windows Irish girls stuffing mattresses in flurries of goose down. Commerce thrived along this crooked lane as it will tomorrow morning and for the next one hundred years, but tonight the street is utterly empty, utterly dark, except for the misty rose-colored fight of sodium vapor street lamps coming through the freezing rain.
“This ain’t the Sheraton, Wild Bill.”
We have parked a block apart and met on a street corner. I am keeping a hand on my purse, inside of which is the .357 Magnum.
“Thought we’d get something to eat,” he says.
The street is deserted and pitch black. Not an open liquor store. Not a lighted coffee shop.
After the long flight and the insane drive through the butt end of Boston, I am thoroughly disoriented except for one thing: I am here to nail Randall Eberhardt.
“I don’t have time for sight-seeing.”
But Lester is already striding ahead. He opens a door. Now I notice a smoky storefront window with people moving behind it. We enter warmth and cigarette smoke and a noise level equal to a commodities exchange.
It is a large bare room with a big old mahogany bar, dusty brass fans, a wall of mirrors that reflects the downtown crowd. Briefcases are lined up beneath laden coatracks. Everybody—male and female—is wearing a suit. I take off my raincoat and hang it on a peg. In my navy blues with the skirt primly brushing the top of the knee I look like every other female attorney and stockbroker there. I like the feeling. The convivial talk, the good, clean smell of whiskey make me feel very present, ironically more present than in my usual life in Los Angeles, where it takes all your energy just to stay on the grid. But there is another difference: in Los Angeles I live with the feeling of constantly being judged. Here nobody is watching. The relief is so profound that after five minutes of standing among this crowd of friendly strangers, my neck starts to relax all by itself, miraculously as loose and easy as a newborn babe’s.
Lester buys us Bloody Marys and we shout at each other until an overweight woman with pocked cheeks and teased yellow hair takes him by the arm, kisses him on the lips, and leads us to a table, upon which are a pair of plain salt and pepper shakers, an ashtray, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce. We both switch to vodka martinis and are immediately presented with a platter of freshly shucked clams. I decide to forget about jet lag.
Lester is an old warhorse who’s been around since Hoover, which is why they assigned him to this case. He’s through chasing gangsters. A background check on a Harvard doctor is just his speed. On an assignment like that you can stay loaded all afternoon. I realize when he’s on to a second vodka martini before we have seen menus that the reason he likes this place is not the authentic pressed tin ceiling but that it is far enough from Government Center so no agents are likely to come here and he can self-destruct in peace.
Red faced, it seems an effort for him to reach across his beefy chest to an inner pocket of a moss green plaid wool jacket and remove two sheets of folded paper.
“Think I’ve got what you need here.…” Smoothing them with shaky hands. “This Van Hoven gal.”
He pauses to lick his lips and take a kiss of vodka; yes, they are close friends.
“Everybody else says the same thing about Eberhardt—nice guy, smart, good athlete, good doc, that sort of crap. But this Van Hoven gal really has a hard-on for him. Says he ruined her life.”
“Is she good?”
“She’s a music student, plays the violin for chrissake.”
He gives me a strained smile: “Come on, Ana. I wouldn’t have drug you all the way to Boston if I didn’t think she was good.”
“I’ve got a lot riding, that’s all.”
“I’ve been doing this for a number of years, Ana. Don’t worry. I won’t let you down.”
I think of his big hand rescuing me from the freezing night.
“Anything on your computer about Eberhardt?”
“Criminal checks negative. No malpractice suits. A regular boy scout. In fact in 1985 the guy flew on a mercy mission to some damn famine in Africa.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t turn into an asshole,” Walker suggests encouragingly.
“Any background on his wife? Could she be tied up in this? Pushing drugs, spending his money?”
“What I got on his wife is that she’s a nurse. That’s how they got together, over at the New England Deaconess Hospital. Both local kids, grew up here. Except he’s Cambridge upper-crust WASP and she’s shanty Irish, no offense.”
“Why should I be offended?”
“Sometimes I put my foot in it. Thought you might be Irish.”
“No … but a lot of people think so.”
“Armenian?”
“Spanish, actually.” I feel myself blush. “Half and half.”
“A Spanish señorita. Or,” continuing at his courtliest, “shall I call you señora?”
“Señorita.”
He nods. For no reason at all, we toast.
When the waiter appears, Wild Bill tells him, “The señorita will have fish and chips,” which makes me cross my arms on the table, lay my head down, and laugh.
• • •
We are very drunk. The air is clear but a sheet of ice has formed on top of the sidewalk. We grip each other’s arms as we slide toward our cars. I am feeling a lot of affection for Wild Bill, dyed black hair and all. It takes me a while to maneuver out of the parking space, and when I do I discover that the road has glassed over as well. The green car is waiting for me at the corner of the deserted street, red taillights wreathed in white steamy exhaust. I smash right into it.
Wild Bill climbs out. “This is a government vehicle!” His arms fly up and back down to his sides. Then he shakes his head and skates back inside, slams the door, and we begin our slide across Boston. It feels like I am going sideways. There are wrecks at every intersection. The AM radio blasts an old Rod Stewart song, “Maggie May,” out the open windows and the heater is turned up to broil. I am reckless. I know nothing about this city except that it is complex beyond imagining. There are millions of beds in this city like cocoons in a butterfly colony and inside each one is a unique individual with a unique history about to be born or replicate itself or die except for me: I don’t have a bed, I think with boozy self-pity, skidding to a lopsided stop at a light on a corner before a row of darkened redbrick town houses. Behind one drawn parchment shade there is a warm light. Maybe there, in a room I will never see, in a city I know nothing about, a mother is awake nursing a child and the child is at peace.
Certainly not my mother, and not me. She was there, in the house, but vague.
What the hell was she doing?
I demand to know in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. The question arises, righteous and crystal clear.
Why don’t I remember being held by my mother or soothed by her, why was I always alone in my room, listening to
her
cry?
Because she didn’t want to have me, comes the self-righteous response. She was a teenager and pregnant and her lowlife boyfriend split. She was weak and couldn’t cope with having a half-breed brat. Only Poppy was strong enough to love me.
When we get to the Prudential Center, Walker waves his gloved fist out the window of the now battered and bruised government vehicle and heads off. I plunge into some mammoth underground garage and rise up again carrying my suitcase to a lobby like every other in America, then rise even further to a room with a stunning view of the city, hard white lights and provocative red ones; sitting down at a desk, inebriated, reaching for the phone instinctively, unreasonably, selfishly, from unutterable loneliness for the only one who loved me, dialing 8 for long distance and then the number where my grandfather lies asleep in the icy cold bedroom of the condominium in Desert Hot Springs, California, longing to wake him from his deep stillness and bring him back to me, but the phone rings emptily many times and I cannot.
I force myself to drink three glasses of water and strip down to my underpants before sinking into the thick soft mattress where I pull the sheet, blanket, and heavy bedspread over my shoulders and dream about the helicopter.
I am outside the Santa Monica police station holding my grandfather’s big warm hand. Everything is colored red by sunset light, like looking through the orange wrapper of a Charms lollypop. The President’s helicopter is landing in a storm of fine orange chalk, its huge belly pressing down on us—I am terrified that we are going to be crushed. The chopper touches down and JFK climbs out, floating along the steps, not waving, very sober, something is wrong. He is wearing a dark suit. His face is dead white and his head is mangled by bloody gunshot wounds. He is a walking corpse.
Beneath the heavy coverings I wake up frozen stiff, mummified by fear. The dream is not about JFK. It is about my father, bloodied and dead.
• • •
Wild Bill Walker and I are sharing a bench in a playground on the northwest corner of the Cambridge Commons. It is hard to tell which direction is northwest at nine in the morning with a hangover. I circled the park several times until sighting a big galoof sitting alone, looking like a bum with his big raincoat and cap, and realized that must be him. As we waited there under leaden overcast skies I began to envy that cap and the heavy black shoes with thick gum soles.
Claudia Van Hoven had insisted on meeting here instead of her place or anywhere else. She told Wild Bill she has a tiny apartment and her husband, a graduate student, works at night, sleeps during the day. With the baby, she told him, it’s hard enough.
The playing fields are bald stretches of half-frozen mud. I turn my face into a wet wind. We have now been waiting almost an hour and a half during which I have heard every detail of Wild Bill’s radiation treatments for prostate cancer five years ago.
Finally I stand restlessly. “This is fucked.”
“She’ll show.”
“Let’s go to her house.”
We are already through the iron gate of the park when I look back and see a slight woman in a long dark coat with a trailing red scarf wheel a stroller across the puddles and into the playground.
“That’s the lady,” Walker says with relief. “Told you she was good.”
We approach and shake hands all around. Claudia Van Hoven smiles brightly. She is younger than I am, early twenties, young enough to have smooth uncrinkled skin around the eyes.
“Have you been waiting long?”
I glance at Wild Bill, who I know would say nothing.
“We got here at nine,” I tell her.
Claudia looks worried. “What time is it now?” She checks her watch and makes a pained frown, as if just realizing she had lost something. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”