Murder Suicide (7 page)

He knew something else about Billy, because he knew it about himself.  When you are the target of a brutal father, that brutality leeches into your own psyche.  Conservation of energy rules the mind as it does the planets.  Absorbing a man’s rage means literally that.  You can either feel it and fight to cleanse yourself of it, or you can try to ignore it, in which case it will grow stronger and stronger, until — whether through depression or aggression — it commandeers every corner of your soul.

As Clevenger waited in the truck for Billy, his mind wandered back to Grace Baxter.  He thought of calling her to make sure she planned to keep her appointment.  But he worried she would keep him on the phone, and he had been trying to focus completely on Billy when they were together.

Billy came out of the place in full teenage regalia, wearing a black, Aéropostale T-shirt baggy military style pants worn off his hips and Nike high tops, unlaced.  His three silver hoop earrings were back in his left ear.  His beaded, leather choker was back around his neck.  He walked with a swagger that was put on, like a kid playing a tough guy in a movie.

He got in the truck, stared straight ahead.  "Thanks for picking me up."

"No problem."

Clevenger backed out of his space, stared down Broadway, headed for Route 99 and the back roads to Chelsea.

"I broke up with Casey," Billy said.

Billy had been with Casey Simms the past two years, a seventeen-year-old from Newburyport, an hour up 95 North.  Clevenger wondered whether announcing the breakup was his way of explaining why he lost his cool in the ring.  "I didn’t see that coming," Clevenger said.  "You two seemed to be getting along."

"She’s getting clingy, all of a sudden.  Crazy jealous."

"All of a sudden.  Any idea why?"

"She’s a girl," Billy said, without taking his eyes off the road.

"You okay with it?  The breakup?"

"Sure."

That was about as much access to Billy’s emotional life as Clevenger was getting lately.  "Does breaking up with her have anything to do with you going after that kid after Donovan called the fight?"

Billy shrugged.  "I didn’t hear him."

Clevenger looked over at him.

"Really," he said, glancing at Clevenger.  "I know what you’re thinking.  I was projecting my frustration with Casey onto Nick.  But I’m not about to blame my behavior on that unconscious dynamic."  He turned to Clevenger and smiled his most winning smile.  "In other words, I should have been listening, and I take full responsibility.  You good with that, Doc?"

Billy always had a way of making light of his troubles.  But Clevenger couldn’t take them so lightly.  "If you go deaf on Donovan again, you’re out of there for a summer, Champ," Clevenger said.  "If you respect the sport, great.  If it’s an excuse for a rumble, skip it."

"Got it," Billy said, turning back and staring through the windshield again.  Fifteen, twenty seconds passed in silence.  "You gonna get the case of that guy in the alleyway at Mass General?  Now they’re saying maybe he didn’t blow himself away, after all."

"Who’s saying that?"

"A reporter on the radio.  I caught it while I was warming up."

Clevenger had given up on trying to keep Billy in the dark about his forensic work.  He didn’t think it was particularly healthy for him to focus on violence, but he didn’t think it was particularly healthy for him to grow up with a father keeping his occupation a secret, either.  And maybe if Billy saw him working with the police, he would be more inclined to respect the law.  "The Boston Police Department hired me today.  They want me to help them figure out if Snow committed suicide or not."

"Cool," Billy said excitedly.  "What do you think?"

"It’s too early to think much of anything."

Billy nodded to himself.  "The guy was supposed to get his brain operated on, right?"

"Right."

"Could he have died?"

"That’s always a possibility with neurosurgery."

"Then no way did he off himself."

Clevenger looked over at him.  "Why not?"

"Because, like they say, freedom is having nothing left to lose.  You can
always
kill yourself, dude.  If you think you might die anyhow, why to roll the dice?  Maybe you never wake up.  Or maybe you wake up and feel better — like a whole new person."  He paused.  "I used to wish for that.  Didn’t you?"

"To wake up a new person, or not to wake up?"

"Both.  Either.  Whatever."

Clevenger looked over at Billy, who made real eye contact with him for the first time since he’d gotten in the truck.  He had a way of coming close all of a sudden.  It felt good when that happened, but it didn’t happen often, and it never seemed to last.  "Yes," he admitted.  "Either."

"And didn’t you once tell me most depressed people feel the shittiest in the morning?" he asked.

"A lot of them."

"That’s because when they get out of bed, they’re still exactly who they were the night before.  But this guy was having his
brain
cut up.  Anything could have happened."

There was real simplicity and real logic in what Billy was saying.  Snow had been trying to break free, to leave his life behind and begin anew.  With suicide always an option, wouldn’t he at least wait to see how surgery turned out for him?  As an inventor, wouldn’t the chance to reinvent himself be intoxicating?  "That’s a very interesting way to look at it," Clevenger said.  "You may be right."  His gut told him to move on.  He really didn’t want Billy dwelling on murder or suicide.  "Back to Casey," he said.  "You really have no idea why she’s so worried about you with other girls?"

"I’ve been hanging out," Billy said.  "It’s nothing like she thinks."  He stared straight ahead again.

That was about as far as Clevenger figured he was going to get.  "We can talk later," he said.

"Yeah," Billy said.  "Later’s good."

Chapter 6

5:20
P.M.

Billy stayed at home just long enough to grab some food — then took off to meet a few friends.  That left Clevenger in the two-thousand-square-foot loft they shared, its wall of towering, arched windows framing the Chelsea night, dominated by the river of headlights flowing over the upper deck of the Tobin Bridge into Boston, steam from a nearby twenty-story smokestack billowing through its green, iron skeleton.

Beneath the bridge were two square miles of tenement houses, factories and brick row houses that had played host to wave after wave of immigrants who rolled into Chelsea like it was a second womb — enrolling their children in her schools, registering for benefits at the Social Security Administration on Everett Avenue, learning to speak the language, getting their first jobs in her gas stations and liquor stores and warehouses — then being reborn, moving up and out to more affluent towns like Nahant, Marblehead and Swampscott.

Clevenger turned on the computer he kept on an antique pine desk facing the windows.  He wanted to do his own search on John Snow, Collin Coroway and Snow-Coroway Engineering.  And he wanted to find out what he could about Grace Baxter.  While he waited for it to reboot, he walked to Billy’s doorway and looked into his room.  His weight bench and barbells sat in the middle of it.  A mattress was pushed against one wall.  A couple hundred CDs and DVDs were stacked along another.  Clothes spilled out of his closet.  He smiled at a photograph taped to the closet door — him and Billy, the day Billy had moved in.

Most of the time, parenting a troubled teen — even one as tough as Billy — felt surprisingly good.  It structured Clevenger’s existence, the way being responsible for another human being can.  And Clevenger’s psychiatric training helped him deal with the fact that life with Billy could make him feel isolated and angry, because it reminded him of his own hellish adolescence, his own sadistic father.

The part of parenting Clevenger was least equipped for was the fact that raising a teenager really
was
isolating.  You focused a lot of your time and energy on one other person — a person who wasn’t your friend, who wasn’t supposed to help you through your bad days or bear your lousy moods.

Clevenger was finding out how alone you could feel in the room next to your child, even when you loved that child as much as he loved Billy.  And he couldn’t make the loneliness go away in the easy ways he once had.

Take women.  Clevenger had had love affairs during the past two years, including an on-again, off-again relationship with Whitney McCormick, the FBI’s chief forensic psychiatrist, who had worked the Jonah Wrens case with him.  But he couldn’t abandon himself to romance, even with her, even though she still appeared in his dreams.  He couldn’t pour himself into a woman and dissolve his anxieties in a haze of passion.  Giving your son the very decided impression he was your main focus in life meant going to sleep and waking up by yourself.  It meant managing love affairs like part-time jobs.

And then there was his on-again, off-again love affair with alcohol and drugs.  He had found it less stressful to stay sober for himself, one-day-at-a-time, than to make that commitment in the name of raising a healthy child.  Because a slip now and then was at least thinkable when the only person you were likely to hurt was yourself.  If the pain got too intense, you knew you could turn it off, even if you had to pay for it in spades down the road.  Now, with Billy’s future linked to his own, with the fact that taking a drink would mean that Billy’s father was a
drinker
, Clevenger could never touch the stuff.  He was wedded to reality, no matter how painful that reality became.

He thought again of what John Snow had been preparing to do, his plan to free himself from his tangled neurons — and, quite possibly, from all entanglements.  On the one hand, the idea was intoxicating.  Snow could have lived the unfettered life of a stranger in a distant land, with no obligations to anyone, no guilt over past sins, nothing defining or limiting him.  On the other hand, the question had to be asked how much Snow’s freedom would have cost the people who considered him part of
their
life stories,
their realities?
  With him gone, could they ever resolve the dramas in which he had been an actor, or would they be burdened by them forever?  And should that be his concern?  Are any of us free to the extent that we are free to move on completely?

What would it do to Billy if Clevenger were to decide that their emotional bonds — positive and negative — were null and void, that they had no future together, and not even a shared past?  Would Billy be able to survive the abandonment?  Would he be able to hold all the love and fear, trust and resentment that had been theirs together?  Or would their sheer weight crush him?

Was Snow’s plan to leave an act of self-preservation, an act of destruction, or both?

The phone rang.  Clevenger walked back to his desk and answered it.  "Frank Clevenger."

"Bad news," North Anderson said.

"What?  Where are you?"

"The office.  I just got a call from Mike Coady.  The police responded to a 911 call from 214 Beacon Street.  George Reese, Grace Baxter’s husband."

"God, no," Clevenger said, thinking she had murdered him, or tried to.  His legs felt weak.  Baxter had given him a glimpse of her desperation, and he had made the wrong decision, letting her go home, instead of committing her to a locked psychiatric unit.  "How bad?" he asked.

"The paramedics worked it hard, but they never had a chance.  Body’s been there quite a while, probably a couple hours."

Clevenger managed to ease himself into his desk chair before his legs gave out.  "How did she kill him?"

"How did she..." Anderson started, then stopped.  "The husband is fine, Frank."

Clevenger’s mind couldn’t — or wouldn’t — add up the facts to come up with the awful answer.  "I don’t understand."

"It’s Grace," Anderson said.  He was silent a few seconds.  "She killed herself."

Clevenger closed his eyes.  He saw Baxter walking to her car at the shipyard, tears streaming down her face.  He looked out into the Chelsea night.  "How?" he managed.

"It’s not a pretty story."

"Are they ever?"

"This one..."

"Just tell me."

"She went into the master bath and sliced her wrists, then her throat.  Then she stumbled into bed and bled out."

"Who found her?"

"Her husband.  She was supposed to meet him at the Beacon Street Bank for a cocktail party.  A fund-raiser or something.  She never showed up.  He came home looking for her."

"Did she leave a note?"

"Yeah.  Coady didn’t say what was in it."

"Can you meet me over there?" Clevenger asked.  Part of his reason for wanting to go was that Grace had been his patient, if only for one session.  The rest of his reason was that two lovers had died within several hours of each other.  One possibility was murder-suicide — that Grace Baxter had killed John Snow, then killed herself.  But there were other possibilities.  He wanted to see where Grace had died, take a look at the layout of the place, whether there were signs of a struggle.

"I should tell you they also found a piece of paper on the night stand with your name and number on it, along with her appointment time for tomorrow.  I guess the husband knows she was in to see you today.  He’s looking for someone to blame."

"He won’t have to look hard for me.  I’ll be at 214 Beacon in fifteen minutes."

"See you there."

Clevenger left a note for Billy, then drove into Boston.  He know psychiatrists lost patients, just like other doctors did, that some psychiatric illnesses were fatal.  And he knew he had heard everything the law said he needed to hear from Grace Baxter — her contract not to harm herself or anyone else.  But his mind kept replaying the forty minutes or so they had spent together, kept going back to when he had asked her whether she intended to strike out at her husband.  Why hadn’t he dwelled on the real danger — that she would do herself in?  Why hadn’t he felt that risk in his gut?

He found a space on Beacon and jogged three blocks to number 214, a stately bowfront of two-hundred-year-old brick, with wide, granite steps and a pair of black, wrought iron lanterns framing a high-gloss crimson door.  Two officers stood in front of the steps.  Three cruisers and North Anderson’s black Porsche Carrera were parked out front.