Box Nine (36 page)

Without thinking, Lenore lets her body go into a series of too-practiced motions. She extends her leg across both of her brother's, then reaches around him, gets a grip on his belt and shirt, and trips him to the kitchen floor. He goes down with the force of a much heavier guy. His stomach takes the full impact of the fall, but his chin manages a good whack on linoleum. And it doesn't end there. She's on his back, a knee into the small of his back, a full armlock around his throat so that his head and shoulders are arched uncomfortably backward.

She interrogates him through gritted teeth, forgetting, as quickly as he did, about the events at the post office, the rental box and its contents.

“What were you doing in my apartment last night, asshole? Where do you come off breaking into my apartment? Spying on me. Spying, sneaking around, spying on me, watching Fred and me, spying, spying—”

She hears herself repeat the word and breaks off both the hold and the questions. She remains on his back for a second, trying to slow down her mind, trying to make sheer will revoke the Lingo. But her mouth continues to dry up and the words continue to come, nonstop, one after another. She doesn't let them out. She bites her lips together, closes and opens her eyes.

He shakes her off his back and rolls onto his side. She sees his mouth moving, but doesn't hear a thing. She wants to say,
I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, I didn't …

But instead, she reaches behind her back, grabs the doorknob, pulls the back door open, and runs around the house to the car. She cranks the engine and wheels into the street, turns on the radio, and ups the volume.

A talk-show host is ranting on, a diatribe about a recent spate of unrest at the Harrington Projects in Bangkok. She starts to drive and talk back to the radio, bringing short pockets of air to the lungs between words. She hears her speech begin to lose definition, become slightly garbled, not like the soft consonant-dropping of a deaf person, but almost the opposite, like she's enunciating too much, like she's become some Jerry Lewis imitation of a kamikaze pilot, all harsh, chopping sounds from overtaut mouth muscles, and all at a sickening speed.

The words start to pile up like a record-breaking freeway crash, the front of one adjective slamming into the rear of the next noun. And though her jaw and throat both already ache, she knows there won't be any stopping for some time.

ItwaslessthanhalfaQhowmuchdamagecoulditdoandforhowlong …

Chapter Twenty-Eight

P
eirce unlocks her apartment door and steps inside, weaves a bit, puts a hand against a wall to steady herself. After a minute, she closes and locks the door behind her, shuffles out of her jacket and shoes, and moves into the bedroom. She leaves all the lights off and stands still at the foot of her bed, quiets her breathing, strains to hear any foreign sounds, any suggestion of noise.

And though she hears nothing, she takes her service revolver from her bag, moves to the closet, pulls back the hammer on her gun, and yanks open the closet door. She fans the line of her hanging clothes with the nose of the .38, then eases the hammer back down into its cradle, moves back to the bed, and feels the strain of suppressed weeping start to well behind her eyes.

She puts her revolver on the nightstand, takes the microrecorder from her bag, and throws the bag into the darkness in the corner of the room. Then she tosses the recorder onto her pillow and takes off all her clothes.

She steps up to the TV set, turns it on, and turns the volume all the way down. She sits back down on the edge of the bed, folds her arms across her chest, and wedges her hands up into her armpits, tries to concentrate on her breathing. She manages to hold back tears by staring at the image on the screen in front of her: a man and a woman, seated at an anchor desk, crisp sheets of paper held tautly in their hands, vague, pleasant looks on their faces, an occasional nod of the head. What can they possibly be talking about?

She thinks if she still had the revolver in her hands she'd put a bullet into the picture tube, fill the room with blue-white fireworks of spitting electric current. The thought gives her some control and she smiles at herself, leans forward and turns off the TV, pulls back the covers, climbs into the bed, picks up the tape recorder, and turns it on.

It's eleven-fifteen, Victor. Forty-five minutes to go. I'm glad the day's almost over. I'm in bed, Victor. Alone. pitch-dark. My lousy little apartment that you had the nerve to call quaint that one time. Remember that one time, Victor? Mr. Mayor? You remember that one lunch hour when I couldn't stand the desk in your office anymore? When I'd go back to work with my hair all smelling like Lemon Pledge? And you took the big chance of a lifetime and actually drove, in public, in my Honda, back to my place and you took so long making sure all the doors were locked and curtains pulled down that we ended up having about five minutes to jump on each other. You went back to City Hall happy, Victor. But I spent the rest of the day writing a report on some pathetic Bangkok bust, frustrated to hell, uncomfortable. Story of this whole thing with you and me. I just turned off the TV, thank God. I can't take it anymore—the eleven o'clock news. I can't stand it. These people sit behind this long desk and look into the camera and tell these horrible stories every night and then smile or nod or sort of shake their heads very slightly. Like their telling about this thing, this horror, has made sense out of it, has summed it up and put it in the past. And the thing is, I see everything up close. I'm a goddamn cop, for Christ sake. And so far I can take it in Bangkok. I can do the job. But I can't take it on TV anymore. You figure it out, Mr. Mayor. You're the brain here. You're the guy that makes the city work, right? And now something's bugging you, Victor? And you can't just come out and tell me what it is. You can't have me down to one of your little stale-donut lunches in your Lincoln Town Car, driving down the expressway, donut crumbs all over the lapels of your grey banker's suit, talking with your mouth full, telling Charlotte everything you know about your enemies on the City Council. Councilor Searle's tax problems. Councilor Adams's questionable relatives. And then we'd park in the rubble of old Gomper's train station and you'd always have to comment about how much room there was in the Town Car. Weren't you ever afraid of someone pulling into the station someday? Some prospective developer checking out the place? Or maybe that just added to the excitement for you. I would've rather been back here at my place. [
Pause
] I've been doing a hell of a lot of thinking. Last week someone, Richmond maybe, although it seems too witty to come from Richmond, anyway, they said to me, “You know what a detective's first priority is?” and I bit and said, “What?” and they said, “Pray for confessions,” and I laughed and then caught on that the joke wasn't over yet and they said, “You know what a narcotics detective's first priority is?” and I bit again and they said, “Pray for a mute suspect.” And I laughed, I put on the good laugh. That laugh you told me once you thought was exciting and to this day I take that to mean erotic, though I have my doubts. I think I'm a little drunk, Mayor Welby. What do you think Richmond's joke means? That everybody gets a little filthy when the money's that easy? Or does it mean something else? Something obvious I'm just not picking up on here? Richmond said you told him that joke. [
Pause
] I couldn't stop and turn off my brain on the ride home from the Synaboost lab. Your little tape recorder job has done something to me that I've been fighting since day one as a narc. This little Panasonic cinched it. I'm full-blown paranoid now. And as much as I reject it, I can't help feeling that this is the most [
pause
] what's the word, appropriate, the most appropriate view of my life right now. Maybe from now on. I think maybe I'm paying the exact price, the perfect price, for hooking up with you, Victor. The funny thing is, I'm ready to fink on myself. At the beginning, right after that briefing with Lehmann and Dr. Woo there, you told me this would be the investigation within the investigation. But as an investigation this whole thing has been an absolute and total failure. I gathered information for you, Victor. I found out little scraps of information. We both think, thought, I thought, that that's all you have to do. There are just two steps—you go out and, with a trained eye, a logical eye, you pick up scraps, clues, links, anything pertinent, then you bring it all back home and piece it together in ways that fit and when you're done you step back and look and you've got the whole, big picture. But this Lingo thing hasn't worked that way, has it? Nothing really led to anything else. For me it just seems to be spreading out more instead of closing in, coming together. [
Pause
] Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm burned out and I've lost any skill I had in this line of work. That's a real possibility. I'd almost rather that be true than think that … [
Long pause
] Victor. Victor, I've always thought that people read mysteries for a good and simple reason. Because they confirmed, good word, confirmed, they confirmed a way of looking at life. In general. A positive way. Even through all the pages of bloodshed and lies and betrayals and corruption, if you pay attention and follow the link and clues, you come up with the truth. [
Pause
] I am loaded, Victor. No doubt about it. Bed spins. I'm going to have to run for the john any second, I think. Driving home from the lab tonight, coming down the hill from the airport, this is all the stuff that was going through my head. I'm praying, I'd like to pray, that this feeling I have right now, aside from the bed spinning, this feeling that I need to look over my shoulder, won't last. And I'm scared to death that it will. That I'll feel this way from now on. That no one can be trusted. That nothing will make much sense. For me, the problem with this case was that there were too many possibilities and my brain couldn't seem to discard any. Instead, it kept adding more. On the drive home, down that endless airport hill, I kept thinking of other people. You got me started. I was thinking that any one of my brother detectives, sister detectives, you know, that they could be involved. That Lehmann, Mr. Closed Mouth, Mr. Arrogant, that he could be on both sides of the fence. The brilliant Dr. Woo could be behind the whole thing, murdering the Swanns, stealing the drug formula. I even thought it could be you, Victor. The mayor. The guy who knows everyone, controls everything. Why not Victor Welby? Could be Victor Welby. Or any combination of people. [
Pause
] I know it's only been a day, Victor, but what a goddamn day. I'm out of it. I'm off the investigation within the investigation. I'm done. I'm no good to you. I haven't found anything out. I need some sleep. Long day. I'm too tired to talk anymore. I'm

[
End of tape
]

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I
t's dusk before she feels free of the drug's effects. She'd driven north, passing out of her native state and jumping on and off all the eerie New England highways that were cut through solid granite hills. The highways have smooth rock walls running on either side of them, rising up thirty feet high so that nothing can be seen but the road ahead. Over a period of time, they can cause a subtle claustrophobia. Lenore noted this as a secondary concern.

For lunch, she'd grabbed french fries from a drive-through burger chain visible from the road. By dinner, she felt safe enough to stop in at a small, lazy diner in a town she'd never heard of. She ordered soup and tea with milk, thinking this would soothe a nervous system so pushed beyond its liberal limits that a shutdown was not out of the question.

By seven, she's back in Quinsigamond. She drives by the green duplex, but finds it in darkness. At ten, she's still seated in the Barracuda, staring up at the back of the Hotel Penumbra, waiting until the top floor's lights go on. She thinks about writing some kind of note and securing it to the steering wheel. An apology to Ike, begging him to forget the past week, maybe the past year, stating flat out her inability to explain both last night and this morning.

She thinks about leaving several notes: Instructions on what to do with any of her belongings that Ike doesn't want. A word of encouragement to Shaw and Peirce. Advice to Zarelli to accept his shortcomings and learn to find pleasure in his family again. And something for Fred. What could she say to Fred?

The possibilities make her too uncomfortable to continue, so she scraps the note idea entirely and climbs out of the car. The Magnum is in the trunk, but she's still got the .38 strapped near her ankle. She walks around the block to the front of the building and stops at the revolving door as a parade of Cortez's women file out for the evening. They're all dressed like it was Halloween and everyone chose the same costume.

Looking through the doors into the lobby, she sees Jimmy Wyatt trying to act stone-faced to the last of the women's comments. When he sees Lenore, his hand instinctively jumps to the inside of his biker jacket, but when she doesn't move, it stays there. They stare at each other for a while until she feels he's assured she's not an immediate threat, that this isn't some bizarre assault, then she pushes her way inside.

She gives Wyatt a small smile, tries to make it look like she's been unsuccessful at suppressing it. She holds her arms out and up slightly, like a bored version of halting for the police. But he's not biting. Nothing about her being inside the hotel is going to be playful. His eyes are narrowed on her. She looks away from him to the rest of the lobby. It's been restored beautifully. Everywhere there are Ionic columns shot through with veins of deep green marble. The lobby has a wonderful, slightly freezing feel to it. There's a small rise of three stairs beyond Wyatt that opens out into an empty rest area where people once checked in at the front desk and then waited for the elevators. Huge Persian rugs of dark reds and greens cover the marble floor that's been worn into shallow bowls in spots. Against the walls are couches and chairs, foreign-looking, experiments in furniture that went wrong. And hung above them are these out-of-place pastoral paintings hung in ornate thick gilt frames.