“Pretty much,” I said.
He pursed his lips, exhaled slowly. “You got me then. I know what I just told you about Jason and that’s about it. I’d like to say who he is or isn’t with total certainty, but I’ve been at this long enough to realize that no one truly knows anyone else.” He waved his hand at bookshelves crammed with criminology and psychology texts. “If my years of study have taught me anything, that’s the sum total.”
“Deep,” I said.
He loosened his tie. “You asked my opinion of Jason and I gave it you, prefaced by my belief that all humans have secret selves and secret lives.”
“What’re yours, Eric?”
He winked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
As we walked into the sunlight, Angie slipped an arm through mine and we sat on the lawn under a tree and faced the doors through which Jason would exit in a few minutes. It’s an old trick of ours to play lovers when we’re tailing someone; people who’d possibly see either one of us as incongruous in a given place rarely give us a second glance as a couple. Lovers, for some reason, can often pass easily through doors the solitary person finds barred.
She looked up at the fan of leaves and limbs in the tree above. Humid air stirred yellow leaves against brittle pikes of grass and Angie leaned her head into my shoulder and left it there for a long time.
“You okay?” I said.
Her hand tightened against my bicep.
“Ange?”
“I signed the papers yesterday.”
“The papers?”
“The divorce papers,” she said softly. “They’ve been sitting in my apartment for over two months. I signed them and dropped them at my attorney’s office. Just like that.” She moved her head slightly, resettled it in the space between my shoulder and neck. “As I signed my name, I had the distinct feeling it was going to make everything much cleaner somehow.” Her voice had grown thick. “Was that how it was for you?”
I considered how I’d felt sitting in an attorney’s climate-controlled office, bundling and bagging up my short, barren, ill-conceived marriage by signing on a dotted line and folding pages neatly three times before sliding them into an envelope. No matter how therapeutic, there’s something pitiless about wrapping up the past and tying a ribbon to it.
My marriage to Renee had lasted less than two years, and it had been over in most respects in under two months. Angie had been married to Phil over twelve years. I had no conception what it was like walking away from twelve years, no matter how bad many of them had been.
“Did it make everything cleaner and clearer?” she said.
“No,” I said, pulling her tight. “Not at all.”
12
For another week, Angie and I tailed Jason around campus and town, up to classroom and bedroom doors, put him to bed at night, and rose with him in the morning. It wasn’t exactly a thrill a minute, either. Sure, Jason led a pretty lively existence, but once you got the gist of it—wake, eat, class, sex, study, eat, drink, sex, sleep—it got old pretty quick. I’m sure if I’d been hired to tail de Sade himself in his prime, I’d have tired of that too by the third or fourth time he drank from a baby’s skull or arranged an all-night fivesome.
Angie had been right—there was something lonely and sad about Jason and his partners. They bobbed through their existence like plastic ducks on hot water, tipping over occasionally, waiting as long as it took for someone to right them, and then back to more of the same bobbing. There were no fights, but no real passion, either. There was only a sense of them—the whole group—as flippantly self-aware, marginally ironic, as detached from the lives they led as a retina would be from an eye which no longer controlled it.
And there was no one stalking him. We were positive. Ten days and we’d seen no one. And we’d been looking.
Then, on the eleventh, Jason broke his routine.
I’d had no information on Kara Rider’s murder because Devin and Oscar wouldn’t return my calls, and from newspaper accounts I could tell the case had reached an impasse.
Following Jason kept my mind off it initially, but by now I was so bored I had no choice but to brood, and the brooding got me nowhere. Kara was dead. I couldn’t have stopped it. Her murderer was unknown and free. Richie Colgan hadn’t gotten back to me yet, though he’d left a message saying he was working on it. If I’d had the time, I could have looked into it, but instead I had to watch Jason and his band of studiously feckless groupies bleed the brilliance out of a magnificent Indian Summer by spending most of their time in cramped smoky rooms dressed in black or nothing at all.
“He’s moving,” Angie said and we left the alley we’d been in and followed Jason through Brookline Village. He browsed at a bookstore, bought a box of 3.5 diskettes at Egghead Software, then strolled into The Coolidge Corner Theater.
“Something new,” Angie said.
For ten days, Jason had never varied substantially from his routine. Now he was going into a movie theater. Alone.
I looked up at the marquee, knowing I might have to follow him in and hoping it wasn’t a Bergman film. Or worse, Fassbinder.
The Coolidge Corner leans toward esoteric art films and revivals, which is wonderful in this age of cookie-cutter Hollywood product. However, the price for this is that you do get those weeks when The Coolidge runs nothing but kitchen-sink dramas from Finland or Croatia or some other frigid, doom-laden country where all the pale, emaciated inhabitants seem to do is sit around talking about Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or how miserable they are instead of talking about moving someplace with more light and a more optimistic class of people.
Today, though, they were showing a restored print of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. As much as I like the movie, Angie hates it. She says it makes her feel like she’s watching it from underneath a swamp after taking too many Quaaludes.
She stayed outside, and I went in. One of the benefits of having a partner at a time like this is that following someone into a movie theater, particularly if it’s only half filled, is risky. If the target decides to leave halfway through the film, it’s hard to follow without being conspicuous. But a partner can pick him right up outside.
The theater was almost empty. Jason took a seat near the front in the center, and I sat ten rows back to the left. A couple sat a few rows up on my right, and another lone person—a young woman with squinting eyes and a red bandana tied around her head—took notes. A film student.