“Ah,” I said. “Even I’ve heard of him.”
“About the only attorney more powerful than your own, Patrick.”
It was the first time I’d heard my name pass from her lips. It had a disconcertingly sweet effect, like a warm hand pressed to my heart.
“How do you know who my attorney is?”
“Jay talked about you once.”
“Really?”
“For almost an hour one night. He looked on you like you were a little brother he’d never had. He said you were the only person in the world he truly trusted. He said if anything ever happened to him, I was to come to you.”
I had a flash of Jay sitting across from me at Ambrosia on Huntington, the last time we’d seen each other socially, and he was laughing, a heavy Scotch glass half filled with gin held up in his manicured hand, his perfectly coiffed hair darkening one side of the glass, exuding the confidence of a man who couldn’t remember the last time he’d second-guessed himself. Then I had another flash of him being carried from Tampa Bay, his skin puffy and bleached white, his eyes closed, looking no older than fourteen.
“I loved Jay,” I said, and the moment the words left my mouth, I didn’t know why I’d said them. Maybe it was true. Or maybe, I was trying to see what Desiree’s reaction would be.
“So did I,” she said and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. “And he loved you. He said you were worthy of trust. That all sorts of people, from every walk of life, trusted you completely. That’s when he told me Cheswick Hartman worked pro bono for you.”
“So what do you want from me, Miss Stone?”
“Desiree,” she said. “Please.”
“Desiree,” I said.
“I want you to, I guess, watch my back tomorrow night. Julian should be with my father when he goes to One Federal, but just in case anything goes wrong.”
“You know how to bypass the alarm system?”
“Unless he’s changed it, and I doubt that. He’s not expecting me to try something this suicidal.”
“And these…heirlooms,” I said for lack of a better word, “they’re worth the risk?”
She leaned forward again, grasped her ankles in her hands. “My mother wrote a memoir shortly before she died. A memoir of her girlhood in Guatemala, stories about her mother and father, her brothers and sisters, a whole part of my family I never met and never heard about. The memoir ends the day my father came to town. There’s nothing in it of any great importance, but she gave it to me not long before she died. I hid it, and it’s become unbearable to think of it still lying in that house, waiting to be found. And if my father finds it, he’ll destroy it. And then the last piece of my mother that I have left will die, too.” She met my eyes. “Will you help me, Patrick?”
I thought of the mother. Inez. Bought at fourteen by a man who thought anything was for sale. And unfortunately, he was usually proven right. What kind of life had she had in that big house with that crazed megalomaniac?
One in which, I guess, her only refuge was in taking pen to paper and writing about the life she’d led before that man had come and taken her away. And who to share her most precious inner world with? Her daughter, of course, as trapped and soiled by Trevor as she was.
“Please,” Desiree said. “Will you help me?”
“Sure,” I said.
She reached across and took my hand. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Her thumb ran up the inside of my palm. “No,” she said. “Really. I mean it.”
“I do, too,” I said. “Don’t mention it. Really.”
“Are you and Miss Gennaro…?” she said. “I mean, have you been…for very long?”
I let the question hang in the ten inches of space between us.
Her hand dropped away from mine, and she smiled. “All the good ones are taken,” she said. “Of course.”
She leaned back in her chair and I held her gaze and she didn’t look away. For a full minute, we looked at each other in silence, and then her left eyebrow arched ever so slightly.
“Or are they?” she said.
“They are,” I said. “In fact, one of the last good ones, Desiree—”
“Yes?”
“Dropped off a bridge the other night.”
I stood up.
She crossed her legs at the ankles.
“Thanks for the coffee. How’re you getting to the airport?”
“I still have a car Jay rented for me. It’s due back at the downtown Budget tonight.”
“You want me to drive you and drop it off?”
“If you don’t mind,” she said, her eyes on her coffee cup.
“Get dressed. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Angie was still sleeping so deeply I knew the only alarm clock that could wake her would be a hand grenade. I left her a note, and Desiree and I went out to her rented Grand Am and she drove toward the airport.
It was another hot, sunny day. Same as every other one I’d seen since arriving. At around three, I’d learned from experience, it would rain for half an hour, and things would cool for a bit, then the humidity would steam off the earth to follow the rain, and it would be brutal until sundown.
“About what happened back in the room,” Desiree said.
“Forget it,” I said.
“No. I loved Jay. I did. And I barely know you.”
“Right,” I said.
“But, maybe, I dunno…Are you aware of the pathology of many incest and sex abuse victims, Patrick?”
“Yeah, Desiree, I am. Which is why I said to forget it.”
We pulled onto the airport roadway and followed the red signs for the Delta terminal.
“Where’d you get your plane ticket?” I said.
“Jay. He bought two.”
“Jay was going along with this?”
She nodded. “He bought two,” she repeated.
“I heard you the first time, Desiree.”
She turned her head. “You could be back here in two days. Meanwhile, Miss Gennaro could get some sun, see the sights, relax.”
She pulled up at the Delta gate.
“Where do you want to meet us in Boston?” I said.
She stared out the window for a moment, her hands on the wheel, fingers tapping lightly, her breathing shallow. Then she rummaged through her purse, distracted, and reached in the back for a mid-sized black leather gym bag. She wore a baseball cap over her hair, turned backward, a pair of khaki shorts, and a man’s denim shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Nothing special, and she’d still put cricks in the necks of most men she passed on the way to her plane. As I sat there, the car seemed to shrink around us.