THE FOURTH WATCH (55 page)

Walter looked at the man for a moment, then
opened the envelope.

"That corner booth just opened," the man said.
"Let's grab it."

Walter put a ten-dollar bill down on the bar
and carried the envelope with him to the table. They slid in
opposite each other. A waitress appeared and took their drink
order. The man put a business card down on top of the envelope.
Walter fished some reading glasses out of the pocket of his topcoat
and picked it up. It said simply:

E. David Compton III, Private
Investigator

Nothing else. No address. No phone number. But
it was elegant card stock.

The waitress brought their drinks and put them
down on napkins emblazoned with

the 99 Horseshoe. When she was gone Walter
said, "Well Mr. Compton ... "

''Leo.''

Walter looked at the card again.

The man took a drink from his beer bottle,
ignoring the glass and pointed with the neck of it at the envelope
and arched an eyebrow.

Walter opened the envelope and pulled out a
stack of 5x7 glossy photographs. The first one was of Deputy Chief
Matte Genetassio and Police Lieutenant Scott Madigan standing on
the stairs outside of Police Headquarters. Madigan's hands were
open in gesture. He appeared to be talking. Genetassio had his
hands in his pockets, the collar of his three-quarter length coat
turned up against the cold, listening.

''Huh,'' Walter said. Nothing unusual about
cops talking to one another. He flipped the photo over. On the back
it said: Worcester Police Dept., Lincoln Square entrance, 12/07/00,
9:46am. Two days ago. Walter put it face down on top of the
envelope and looked at the next photo. It was a picture of Lt.
Madigan sitting in a blue Caprice sedan looking out the
drivers-side window through binoculars. Walter flipped it over. It
said: 12 Bell Pond Ave., Worcester, 12/07/00, 11:11 am. Walter
blinked and looked up at E. David Compton III. "That's my address,"
he said.

'Leo' nodded. ''I don't know if your phones are
bugged, but they are following you." He pointed at the photo. "He's
outside now. In the parking lot. We're watching him. I gotta go
before he comes in, or sends someone in here and sees us together.
I think you'll find the rest of those interesting. The guy in the
last picture is a guy named Salvatore Moltinaldo. He's some kind of
financial guy, with offices in the city. We're checking him out."
He took another pull on his beer, stood up and shrugged his way
into a tan barn-coat. "We'll be in touch," he said.

Walter opened his mouth to say something, but
the man was gone. He looked back down at the photo, then put it on
top of the first one. The next one was of Genetassio and Madigan
again, this time sitting at a table against a wall behind a pitcher
of beer and a pizza. There were other tables in the foreground. On
the back it said: Romeo's Pizza, 44 Highland Street, Worcester,
12/07/00, 1:20pm. Must be talking about what he didn't see at my
house, Walter thought. The next picture was of Genetassio and Ellen
Whorley, well dressed, sitting with drinks at a linen covered
table, bland art on the wall behind them, heads close together,
neither smiling. Walter flipped it over. The Old Timer's
Restaurant, Church Street, Clinton, 12/07/00, 4:15pm. The last
photo was of Genetassio again, this time with a square built,
Hispanic looking guy, close cropped salt and pepper hair, hands
folded on the table, food and drink between them. On the back it
said: With Salvatore Moltinaldo, Whimpy's Bar & Grille, The
Fenway, Boston, 12/07/00, 9:10pm. Walter slid the photos back into
the envelope. They were not self explanatory, to his way of looking
at things. He took a long pull on his beer and waited, watching the
door to see if Madigan was going to come through it. After half an
hour of nothing he left.

*****

I HAVE THIS
thing that happens to me now when I'm almost awake, but not
quite, still in that half-sleep place where the mind begins to
climb out of its dreams, but can't quite take charge of the
physical being that it controls. It started after I came out of the
coma. My body is paralyzed, unable to respond to the commands of my
mind. Lamps come on behind my eyelids, and in the brightness of the
light a broken script, indecipherable, swirls before me. There are
words there, and in my mind I know they contain a message of
extraordinary importance. The letters of the words are not whole,
they are fragmented and drifting, and without relationship to one
another, but I know that if I can only pull them together, they
will tell me a truth so profound that all the worries of my life
will fall away. I feel that if I trust the light, give myself
completely to it, it will flow the letters and words together, and
I will know this truth.

But then, against my will, I feel my mind
clenching and straining in it's hunger for the wisdom crouched
there just beyond it's reach, and the harder it struggles, the more
rapidly the light dies and the fragments scatter. I try to stop my
mind from hunting in this place, but I can't, and it goes on
yearning until the lamps go out and the message fades to black, and
I wake in utter frustration. Ever since I learned of the death of
Carolyn Whorley, in that storm of gunfire outside The Copper Wok,
my need to know the secret contained in that drifting, illusive
script has become so powerful that I wake bathed in sweat,
regretful of my return from the world of dreams.

*****

I LEFT THE
hospital on December tenth. It had snowed ferociously the
night before. Bare trees stood cold and skeletal against the dome
of the sky. A white sun soared high above, bathing the snow in a
sunlight so brilliant that I had to wear dark glasses against it.
Jack picked me up in the Jeep just after noon. A nurse rolled me to
the exit in a wheel chair, and I shuffled from there to my ride, my
atrophied muscles still tight despite the week of physical therapy
I'd endured since waking up. They screamed as I climbed into the
Jeep.

The roads were a mess. Men and women, dressed
in work clothes, dug at cars buried to their door handles by city
plows. Pickup trucks with yellow Fisher blades on them prowled the
parking lots of businesses closed down by the storm. Snow blowers
roared in the neighborhood driveways and sanders growled up the
hills flinging their gritty mix on the slick roads. The radio said
we got ten inches, but when its drifting with the wind across
roadways, or plowed into mountains up against telephone poles, ten
inches of snow looks like ten feet.

It was a short ride from the Medical Center to
my place and we rode it in silence. The ache of Carolyn's death was
almost unbearable. I felt a deep guilt that Jack told me was
senseless. He seemed to be right, but she was dead and I was alive.
The cops had come to the hospital and questioned me about the night
of the shooting. It was thorough but perfunctory. In the end Matte
Genetassio came to my room and shook his head at the absurdity of a
world gone mad.

Gangs, he told me, what can you do?

Bullshit!

My driveway had been plowed, my walks sanded,
my patio cleared, and my deck and steps shoveled. Someone had been
busy on my behalf. Jack hit the garage door opener as we pulled
into the driveway, and eased the Jeep into the garage under my
house. The door rattled down behind us.

"You okay to climb the stairs?" Jack asked as
he opened the driver side door.

''Nah, I think you'll have to carry me." I
deadpanned..

The house was clean and warm. There was a
Christmas Tree in a stand in the corner by the picture window where
we always set it up. There were bowls of pine-cones, evergreen and
red berries on the tables. There was tinsel and lights, wreaths and
candles. Everything was shining and immaculate.

And empty.

It had been a long morning being probed by
doctors and dressed by nurses, and signing endless forms for
administrators who scowled at their computer screens before
reluctantly releasing me. I was slowly getting my strength back,
but I was dog-tired and needed a nap. Jack wanted to help me, but I
waved him off and pulled myself up the stairs to my bedroom. I laid
down on top of the covers and drifted off to sleep.

It was almost six o'clock when I opened my eyes
in the dark. Something smelled good. I crabbed my way down the
stairs and found Jack working with skillets and pots. ''Hey,'' I
said.

"Hey."

"What are you still doing here, and what's that
you're cooking?"

"One, I don't have a car, so how am I gonna get
home, two ... "

"Take the Jeep," I said, ''you don't have to
hang around."

"Nope, I'm staying. Alex and Walter are coming
over tomorrow. One of them will run me home. And two, this is apple
chicken with peppers and onions and we're gonna have it over wheat
pasta."

"Yeah?"

"Yep, good for ya. I wanted to go with red hot
Portuguese sausage and mad dog chili, but the doctors thought it
might kill you." He was smiling.

I watched him scraping the chicken and veggies
together in the pan, and thought about what an extraordinary friend
he was.

"What's happenin' with the Carolyn thing,
Jack?"

He looked up from his work and I was caught
again in his calm and powerful eyes. He went back to stirring his
mix and said, "Let's wait to talk about that with Walter and Alex,
huh?"

We had dinner at the kitchen table in front of
the sliders that looked out on the lake. A golden moon rode high
above it in the dark night. It's glow was soft. The stars were like
ice chips against the black-sea of the sky. The lake had partially
frozen but was not yet solid and had not yet been visited by
snowmobiles, or cross-country skiers or ice fishermen. It wouldn't
be long. Snow devils whirled and disbursed and whirled again on its
surface in the cold wind.

''I couldn't get in front of her in time," I
said more to the lake than to Jack. ''I saw the guy's face, I saw
the window going down and the gun coming out and I ... " I held my
head in my hands and felt my eyes filling.

"Common, Kato ... "

"No. She came to me for help." I looked up at
him. "She was right. They killed the old man. They killed
her."

"Okay," he said quietly.

The wind sounded like screaming voices against
the glass.

"I gotta go to bed."

*****

BUT THERE WASN'T
going to be much sleep. I tossed and rolled in the bed
clothes, and my tight muscles throbbed. I'd drift off, and in my
dreams see the window sliding down, and the gun barrel coming out,
and the wound opening in Carolyn's neck like a kiss, then I'd jerk
up out of it and stare at the ceiling until the next, short burst
of darkness took me.

Sometime in the middle of the night I limped
down the stairs and poured myself a glass of milk and stood looking
at myself reflected in the slider-glass. I looked like a ghost.
White, hollow-eyed, gaunt. But there was anger building inside me,
and somehow it was helping me heal.

Outside the sky was ink black. The moon threw
cold, blue bars of light on the snow. I felt it in my bones.
Carolyn's death was so thick in my throat that I couldn't swallow.
I poured the rest of my milk out in the sink and climbed back up
the stairs and went into my room. When I was younger, I used to
target shoot at an Auburn gun range with a cop friend of mine. I
still had the gun. It was a long-barreled .22 Smith & Wesson
revolver. Not exactly a cannon, but a good weapon. I hadn't touched
it since Annie's death. I didn't trust myself not to stick it in my
mouth. I dug it, and a box of shells, out from under the sweaters
in Annie's cedar chest. I slipped it out of the bag and took off
the trigger lock. It was well oiled and felt good in my hand. I
loaded it slowly, then put it on the nightstand next to me and
turned off the light and crawled into bed.

37

MARY SHEENEY SLID
a brown clasp folder across her desk to Alex
Andreason. Her beautifully furnished office was on the sixth floor
of an old brownstone building on Tremont Street, and her windows
looked out on the cemetery known as the Granary Burying Ground. The
Granary is the third oldest cemetery in the United States, and many
of the Fathers of the Revolution are buried there, including Paul
Revere, Sam Adams, John Hancock and Crispus Attucks, who is buried
in a common grave with the other four victims of the Boston
Massacre. It was blanketed with snow, and up and down Beacon Hill
the buildings were adorned with Christmas lights.

Mary was sixty years old now, but still a
handsome woman. Not the legendary beauty she was rumored to have
been in her youth, but elegantly turned out. Her hair, once long
and flaming red, was now stylishly cut and more of a bottled
auburn: her figure was now trim, where once it had been sultry and
alluring; her eyes were intense where once they had been
smoldering, but still sea-green and flecked with brown - feline,
predatory. There was more make-up these days, but it was
perfect.

The Sheeney Group was among the best private
investigation organizations in the world. Mary had started it
sixteen years ago when she retired from the State Department after
twenty years of service to her country. If there had been an
attendance list at her retirement party it would quickly reveal to
anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the United States
intelligence community, that this woman was not the second tier
diplomatic attache that her job title implied. Along with her
colleges from the State Department - including several present and
former Ambassadors - were past and present CIA Bureau Chiefs, FBI
Special Agents and Military Intelligence Officers.