She nodded. “It didn’t register at the time, but now, yes, it does seem a bit odd. It wasn’t a Belmont accent, it was Revere or East Boston or…” She looked at me.
“Or Dorchester,” I said.
“Yes.”
“A neighborhood accent.” I closed my notebook.
“Yes. What will you do from here, Mr. Kenzie?”
“I’m going to watch Jason. The threat’s to him. He’s the one who feels ‘stalked,’ it was his picture you received.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to limit your activities.”
“I can’t—”
“Keep your office hours and appointments,” I said, “but take some time off from Bryce until I have some answers.”
She nodded.
“Eric?” I said.
He looked at me.
“That gun you’re carrying, you know how to use it?”
“I practice once a week. I’m a good shot.”
“It’s a little different shooting at flesh, Eric.”
“I know that.”
“I need you to stick as close as you can to Doctor Warren for a few days. You can do that?”
“Certainly.”
“If anything happens, don’t waste time trying to get a head shot or put one in some attacker’s heart.”
“What should I do, then?”
“Empty the gun into the body, Eric. Six shots should put down anything smaller than a rhino.”
He looked deflated, as if his time spent at the gun club had just been revealed for the futile exercise it usually was. And maybe he really was a good shot, but I doubted anyone who attacked Diandra would be wearing a bull’s-eye in the center of his forehead.
“Eric,” I said, “would you walk me out?”
He nodded and we left the loft, walked down a short hall to the elevator.
“Our friendship can’t get in the way of how I do my job. You understand that, don’t you?”
He looked at his shoes, nodded.
“What’s your relationship with her?”
He met my eyes and his were hard. “Why?”
“No privacy, Eric. Remember that. I have to know what your stake is here.”
He shrugged. “We’re friends.”
“Sleep-over friends?”
He shook his head and smiled bitterly. “Sometimes, Patrick, I think you need a little polish.”
I shrugged. “I’m not paid for my table manners, Eric.”
“Diandra and I met when I was at Brown working on my doctorate and she was just entering the graduate program.”
I cleared my throat. “Again—are you two intimate?”
“No,” he said. “We’re just very good friends. Like you and Angie.”
“You understand why I made the assumption.”
He nodded.
“Is she intimate with anyone?”
He shook his head. “She’s…” He looked up at the ceiling, then back at his feet.
“She’s what?”
“She’s not sexually active, Patrick. By philosophical choice. She’s been celibate for at least ten years.”
“Why?”
His face darkened. “I told you—choice. Some people aren’t ruled by their libidos, Patrick, hard as that concept may be for someone such as yourself to understand.”
“Okay, Eric,” I said softly. “Is there anything you’re not telling me?”
“Like what?”
“Skeletons in your closet,” I said. “A reason why this person would be threatening Jason to get to you?”
“What’re you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything, Eric. I asked a direct question. Yes or no is all that’s required.”
“No.” His voice was ice.
“Sorry I have to ask these questions.”
“Are you?” he said and turned and walked back to the apartment.
6
It was close to midnight when I left Diandra’s, and the city streets were quiet as I drove south along the waterfront. The temperature was still in the mid-fifties and I rolled down the windows on my latest hunk of shit and let the soft breeze cleanse the musty confines.
After my last company car suffered a coronary on a bleak, forgotten street in Roxbury, I found this ’86 nut brown Crown Victoria at a police auction my friend Devin, a cop, had told me about. The engine was a work of art; you could drive a Crown Vic off a thirty-story building and the engine would keep chugging long after the rest of the car had shattered into small pieces. I spent money on everything under the hood and I had it outfitted with top-of-the line tires, but I left the interior the way I’d found it—roof and seats yellowed by the previous owner’s cheap cigars, back seats torn and spilling foam rubber, broken radio. Both rear doors were sharply dented, as if they’d been squeezed by forceps, and the paint on the trunk was torn off in a jagged circle that revealed the primer underneath.
It was a hideous eyesore, but I was reasonably certain no respectable car thief would want to be caught dead in it.
At the traffic light by the Harbor Towers, the engine hummed happily as it guzzled a few gallons of gas a minute, and two attractive young women crossed in front of the car. They looked like office workers: Both wore tight but drab skirts and blouses under wrinkled raincoats. Their dark panty hose disappeared at the ankles into identical white tennis shoes. They walked with just a hint of uncertainty, as if the pavement were sponge, and the quick laugh of the redhead was a bit too loud.
The brunette’s eyes met mine and I smiled the innocuous smile of one human soul acknowledging another on a soft, quiet night in an often bustling city.
She smiled back and then her friend hiccupped loudly and they both fell into each other and laughed uproariously as they reached the curb.
I pulled away, slid onto the central artery, with the dark green expressway girded above me, found myself thinking I was a pretty odd guy if a smile from a tipsy woman could still lift my spirits as easily as it had.
But it was an odd world, too often populated with Kevin Hurlihys and Fat Freddy Constantines and people like a woman I’d read about in the paper this morning who’d left her three children to fend for themselves in a rat-infested apartment while she went on a four-day bender with her latest boyfriend. When child welfare officials entered her apartment, they had to pull one of the kids, screaming, from the mattress his bedsores had fastened him to. It sometimes seemed in a world like this—on a night when I was filled with a growing sense of dread about a client who was being threatened for unknown reasons by unknown forces whose unknown motives couldn’t possibly be good enough—that a smile from a woman shouldn’t have any effect. But it did.