So Like Sleep (25 page)

“I should have seen it coming, kid.”

How?

“The kind of man that Sam Creasey was, the way he talked with me about Texas justice, the camera guy letting on that Creasey had checked the videotapes personally that morning …”

Lean down.

I bent over, still a little rocky from Clay’s competent sapping a few hours earlier. The afternoon breeze was cool, but when the wind stopped, the air had that faint oven glow that made summer seem imaginable, even close.

It’s not your job to keep guns out of courtrooms. Or to keep people who have them from using them.

“Funny, I told Marek something like that. That it wasn’t my job to see him hang, just so long as I got my client off.”

How is William taking all this?

“Not too well when I saw him. He’s pretty upset over the ride the system’s given him.”

It’s not hard to see why he’s bitter. Do you think he’ll come through all this?

“I don’t know. Maybe if Murphy took some more personalized interest in him.”

Like a role model?

“Yeah.”

Don’t you think that maybe William has had enough of authority-figure role models? His brother, Marek …

“Me.”

She tried to laugh. It’s hard to think of you as either an authority figure or a role model.

“I guess I think of me as something else too.”

And what’s that?

“A Sam Creasey. Just a little luckier.”

Creasey must have thought he didn’t have anything left to live for. You do.

“Yeah.”

I was just outside the cemetery gates and onto the sidewalk when I became peripherally aware of a red car slowly drawing even with me. I reflexively slid my right hand inside my jacket and back to my empty right hip. I hadn’t remembered my gun when I’d picked up the car after court. I could feel more than see the driver leaning over and rolling down the passenger-side window.

Then a wonderful voice said, “When I heard what happened at Middlesex this morning, I thought you’d come here.”

I let out a breath and walked over to the Honda. Nancy Meagher smiled at me. Her hair was shorter, but everything else seemed the same. Which meant great.

“Good to see you again,” I said.

“You too. How about a lift home?”

“My car’s just a block away, and besides, I live way over in Back Bay.”

Nancy smiled wider. “No, dunce. I meant a lift to my home.”

I opened the door and climbed in.

Turn the page to continue reading from the John Cuddy Mysteries

A
BREEZE ON A
Thursday in June rustled the papers on my desk, but I was holding the only two pieces of afternoon mail that mattered. The first arrived in an envelope with the distinctive royal blue logo of the Boston Police, a reminder of my appointment at the department’s pistol range the following Monday morning. In Massachusetts, you have to reapply every five years to retain a permit to carry a firearm, and in Boston that means requalifying on the targets. It’s a good rule, and I called a friend of mine who’s a police chief in the small suburban town of Bonham to see if he could meet me at his facility to practice. He and his wife were going away for the weekend, but he left word with the officer on duty to let me in on Saturday.

Next I read the annual form letter from the licensing section of the Department of Public Safety. It advised me that pursuant to General Laws, Chapter 147, Section 22,
et seq.
, my present ticket as a private detective expired in forty-five days. Between now and then, I had to submit the enclosed application for renewal and accompanying paperwork.

I glanced over the renewal, my head telling me it was easier to fill it out now, my heart saying I was a little tired of playing with forms today. The liquid crystal on the cheap digital clock showed only 3:10, and my head won out.

Next to “Legal Name in Full,” I block-printed “John Francis Cuddy.” Above “Date of Birth,” I told the truth. For residence, the Back Bay condo I was renting; for business address, the Tremont Street office with two windows and a door in which I was writing. The form for your original license has spaces to list similar prior employment, for me just the military police and the claims department of Empire Insurance. Neither form has a line for marital status, which saved my having to specify “widower.”

I dated and signed the renewal, attesting separately to the truth of the statements and my honor as a taxpayer. Drawing a check for the $500 annual fee (and remembering when it was only $400), I called my surety company, getting their promise to send me a continuation of my $5,000 posted bond in exchange for another hundred bucks of premium. Then I went to the wall and took down my current license from the “conspicuous place” where the law requires it to be displayed. After my previous apartment/office had been hit by arson, I’d had to apply for a replacement certificate. Next to “Reason for Needing Replacement,” I’d written “Burned out.” Then I’d decided that sounded psychologically questionable and substituted “Destroyed by fire.”

I turned the metal frame from Woolworth's glass-side down on my desk and niggled free the stubborn cardboard backing. I slid the license out and carried it down the hall to the nice receptionist in the CPA firm. She reminds me of aunts who bake cookies, and she photocopied the license for me when none of the accountants was looking.

Returning to my own office, I gathered up the junk mail that had blown off the desk in the draft I’d caused opening and closing the door. I put the original of the license back in the frame and on the wall. Paper-clipping the renewal to the rest of the documents, I dropped the package on top of the in box to await the bonding company’s certificate.

This time, the clock said just 3:45. On a Thursday in June. A warm one at that. I thought about dialing Nancy Meagher at the district attorney’s office, but I was already seeing her for dinner at her apartment in South Boston. We’d been back together, in my sense of the word, for only a few weeks, and I didn’t want to push it. I also thought about driving to Southie a little early, but I’d visited the cemetery the day before, and Beth’s hillside was just five blocks from Nancy’s building.

I decided to lock up and go for a walk. Out into the sunshine across from the Park Street subway station at the corner of the Common. Past Old Granary Burial Ground, resting place of Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, where rubbings from the gravestones had to be prohibited because the copying also eradicates. Through Government Center, the utilitarian tower of the McCormack federal building in stark contrast to the massive, award-winning City Hall designed by I.M. Pei. And down into Quincy Market, Boston’s refurbished waterfront, which has served as a model for a dozen such projects elsewhere.

The market area was vibrant as ever, the pillared and domed center building and cobblestoned walkways teeming with upscale urbanites drinking at the outdoor cafes and downscale tourists engaged in a perpetual feeding frenzy. You can hardly blame the tourists, given the variety of delights tactically placed around each corner they turn. Souvlaki stands, raw bars, fried dough counters. Mixed fruit on a stick, frozen yogurt atop a cone, shish kebab in a pita pouch. All elaborately festive and apparently successful, until you notice that a chocolate chip cookie costs as much as a loaf of bread in Omaha and that very few visitors wearing J.C. Penney shirts are toting bags from the tiny designer shops crammed into ten-by-twenty stalls.

I appreciate what the market area has done for the city, but I can take it only in small, infrequent doses. At least the folks there that afternoon were laughing and alive, which was more than I could say for many of the people I’d been around lately.

“What’s that?” I said, looking down at the kitchen floor.

Nancy Meagher closed the apartment door behind me. “A friend of mine wanted to adopt a dog, so I went up with her to an animal shelter in Salem. When I saw this little fella, I knew there was something missing in my life.”

The tiny kitten, a gray tiger with too-big paws and ears, just stared up at me.

Nancy said, “Don’t you want to know his name?”

“I could never see naming something that doesn’t come when you call it.”

“Oh, John. You’re going to love him. Isn’t that right, Renfield?”

“Renfield?”

“Yes. Ring a bell?”

“Not quite.”

“In the Dracula movie with Bela Lugosi, Renfield is the Englishman who goes mad and begins eating small mammals for their blood.”

I watched Renfield and wiggled my foot. He licked his chops and pounced, sinking his front claws and teeth into my sock, playing tug-of-war with the spandex.

“Why don’t you two go into the living room. White wine okay?”

“Fine.”

I dragged Renfield into Nancy’s bay-windowed parlor and settled onto one of her throw pillows. Prying his grip off my foot, I hefted him in my palm. He was about the size and weight of a brandy snifter. He blinked at me once, then started gnawing on my thumb.

Nancy came in with our drinks. “Getting acquainted?”

“I think he senses you’re running low on parakeets.”

She set the glasses down and picked up a Ping-Pong ball. She tapped it with her fingernail, which got Renfield’s immediate and undivided attention. Then she tossed it onto the hardwood floor at the edge of her rug. Renfield sprang from my hand and hit the ground with all legs pumping, catching up to the ball and whacking it till he and the ball skittered out of sight into the kitchen.

I reached for my drink and Nancy raised hers. We clinked as she said, “To a fresh start.”

We cruised through the next half hour on simple, almost domestic small talk. I helped make a salad to go with the swordfish in the broiler, and we ate at her kitchen table. There was a persistent but erratic scratching at my pants cuff, like a determined novice lineman trying to climb his first telephone pole.

“Is it all right to feed him from the table?”

She smiled. “Softening already?”

I picked up a morsel of swordfish the size of my pinkie nail. “Just thinking of my wardrobe.”

As soon as Renfield saw the treat, he sat up and begged. Well, as much as a cat will beg. I lightly dropped the food onto his nose, his pupils focusing crazily as he tentatively swatted and then gobbled it. I repeated the drill twice more.

“Why are you putting the food on his nose?”

“I like watching his eyes cross.”

“Great,” she said around a bite of tomato. “If the behaviorists are right, in two months I’ll have a Siamese.”

We finished dinner and moved into the parlor, dawdling over the rest of the wine as we watched the evening news. About halfway into the broadcast, the male anchor warned that the following scenes might not be suitable for young children. After a pause short enough to retain viewers but not long enough to shoo any kids out of the room, the female anchor introduced the videotape of a courthouse shoot-out involving me a few weeks before.

Nancy started to get up. “I’ll change it.”

“No.”

She looked at me questioningly.

“No, Nance. I want to see it.”

The video was disjointed, the camera operator near the witness stand obviously and understandably jumping and bumping the tripod as the gunfire erupted. The tape showed the situation from an angle I hadn’t had in person.

Nancy said, “You’re studying it, aren’t you?”

I kept my eyes on the screen, the station rolling the footage in Sam Peckinpah slow motion. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“To see if there was anything I could’ve done, anything I missed.”

“So you’re better next time?”

“In a manner of speaking.” The program dissolved to a commercial. “Think it’s crazy?”

“Yes. And no, I guess. I do the same thing after a trial, whether I get a conviction or not. I rerun the case in my head, to see if I can spot something I can use again. What I can’t see is how you can do it when you were so emotionally involved.”

“I can’t explain it in words. It’s more like I don’t feel the emotion now, the incident separates from the lesson.”

Nancy nodded, but I think less from being persuaded than from wanting to close the subject. To avoid her own similar memories of a wintery night in the graveyard around the corner. Instead she came over to me, resting her head on my shoulder.

I said, “You know, you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years.”

She moved her face very slowly, left to right, nuzzling me softly just above the collar. “I’d like to be more than that.”

I tilted my head back just enough to see her. Bangs of short black hair and freckles sprinkled just right against a field of widely spaced blue eyes. “If our luck holds out, I think you’re going to be.”

“Would the smart money be on tonight?”

I sighed, and Nancy went back to my neck, where she pecked me once and said, “I didn’t think so.”

“Nance—”

“No.” She pulled away, a little sheepish. “I’m sorry, I keep doing that. I meant that no, I understand. I was just looking for a status report, not trying to put on any pressure.”

“I know. And I appreciate it.”

She put both her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “Boy, I just hope we’re both worth waiting for.”