Don’t bother, sweetheart, Boyle thought, and hit her across the skull with the poker. He hit her a second time smack on the forehead, and she fell back silent.

  Mancuso, lowering his head like a young bullock, charged suddenly, roaring aloud as he came across the floor, and his skull struck Boyle in the chest. Boyle was thrown against the wall and lost his balance, sliding on one of the silver trophies on the floor, going down on his ass and striking out furiously with the poker, catching Nick Mancuso on the kneebone and feeling it snap under the force of brass. The kid crumpled and fell, hugging the knee to his chest and gasping with pain.

  Boyle rose and stood over him. ‘You stupid fucker,’ he said.

  He hit him time and again with the poker, working up a frenzy, a crescendo of rage, and then it wasn’t just this kid he was beating to pulp, it was everybody who’d ever crossed him, everybody who’d interfered with his life, everybody and anybody who’d acted against him to his detriment: judges, lawyers, cops, social workers, professors, psychiatrists, counselors, Hugh – especially Hugh – and the world, the fucking world. Up and down and up and down, brass rising and falling, the kid’s face mashed potato, welts rising on his body, and the choir singing full-throated in Boyle’s ears, He will awake no more, oh, never more, and up and down, and on and on, the brass stick whacking cartilage and bone and ligament. No refuge! No appeal! Just metal hot in his hand and speed roaring through his system and the abysses of the sky and the wild earth and the kid bleeding and bleeding on the floor.

  Breathless, elated, Boyle dropped the poker, which fell without any sound that he could hear.

  38

  Samsa encountered the reporters as soon as he entered City Hall. Linda Kisminski from Channel 5, Vic Sebley from Channel 7, some print journalists, cameramen – jackals snapping around him.

  ‘Is there any more info on this confession?’

  ‘Can you name the guy?’

  ‘Any chance of an arrest soon?’

  Flustered, Samsa said he had no comment to make, it was too soon. Standard guff and the reporters wanted more. A flash popped, a video camera was pushed toward his face, Kisminski shoved a microphone in front of him, and Vic Sebley – sleek and bow-tied – was trying to get close. Samsa shoved his way past, but they came after him, hunting in a pack.

  ‘Just tell us the name of the guy.’

  ‘Is he guilty or is he not guilty? What’s the feeling in the department?’

  Samsa, crowded and hassled, repeated what he’d already told them.

  Vic Sebley said, ‘Come on, Greg, give us something we can get our teeth into. Throw us a hunk of meat.’

  ‘If you’ll be good enough to excuse me.’

  Linda Kisminski, persistent and fizzy as ever, followed him. ‘Greg, be a sweetheart, give me something I can use? What’s the skinny?’

  ‘Jesus, Linda,’ Samsa said. ‘Later, later. Don’t you guys ever listen?’

  He made it to the top of the stairs that led down to the department offices. He descended without looking back, although he could hear the usual complaints the frustrated pack always made when they had to pull in their claws: ‘It’s like the Kremlin used to be around here at times. You can’t squeeze a cent’s worth of info out of anyone.’

  He wondered how news of the confession had leaked anyhow, but it was fruitless to speculate. News always seeped out of the department. It had always been that way. The only surprise was that Ryan Pritt’s name hadn’t yet been revealed.

  He went toward his office, pausing to tell Billy Fogue to have Pritt escorted to the interview room. He stood in front of the fan a few moments, opened the top button of his shirt, loosened his necktie, and thought about the journalists and how they snooped, digging away at the topsoil, scratching until they’d reached the place where the skeleton was interred. And then they exhumed it, they picked at the bones. They were all investigative reporters these days. They never left anything alone.

  A scary prospect.

  He was thinking about Darcy, wondering if he should call her and tell her there was no chance he’d be back before very late. But she’d have guessed that by now. He looked at his desk clock. Seven twenty-two. In the course of one long ruined day he’d depleted his bank account and stolen drugs from the evidence room, and in his hip pocket he carried a photograph that could destroy him. The other material from Boyle he’d already ditched, tearing it into tiny strips and flushing it down the toilet and watching it swirl away like the pieces of a jigsaw that had never been designed for assembly. And this last print, tightly folded in his pocket – he’d do the same thing with that.

  The last print. If there was another one, if Boyle even so much as tried to put the bite on him again, he’d kill him. Regardless of consequence. You couldn’t go on living with this palpitating menace. It was like existing in a freezing fog, waiting for an avalanche. But what would the death of Boyle accomplish? It wouldn’t dissipate the fog. The avalanche, threatening and amorphous, would still be hanging in a precarious icy mass above him.

  Still, the idea of emptying his gun into Lee Boyle’s skull was tempting. He imagined the weapon bucking in his fist. But he wouldn’t feel it, he’d be in that place where violence consumed everything.

  Fogue put his head round the door. ‘Pritt’s ready.’

  Samsa left his office and walked down the corridor to the interview room, where Ryan Pritt, smoking a cigarette, was seated at the table. A uniformed cop called Levine was also present, a young guy new to the department.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ Pritt said.

  ‘Hello, Ryan,’ Samsa said. He pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘Checked out my story?’ Pritt asked. He looked and sounded cheerful. He might have been asking an innocuous question: Seen any good movies lately?

  ‘We’re working on that, Ryan,’ Samsa said. ‘We’d like to look at your car. We have to check everything. You understand that.’

  ‘Sure,’ Pritt said.

  ‘Where can we find the vehicle?’

  ‘My car’s in the garage at home, Lieutenant. The obvious place for it.’ Pritt crushed out his cigarette.

  ‘We need to run a few tests on it. Fingerprints and stuff.’

  ‘You’d be wasting your time,’ Pritt said.

  Samsa glanced at Levine, who had an impassive face. Of course we’re wasting time, Samsa thought. We’re going through this routine because it’s necessary, not because it’s useful, not because it has anything to do with truth. We’re doing it for the benefit of Levine here. For Al Brodsky. For the department. Checking ‘facts’ that exist only inside your head, Ryan.

  Pritt said, ‘See, I didn’t use my own car to pick up the girl. I hear these stories about vice cops taking down license-plate numbers of cruisers for possible prosecution. I don’t know if they’re true, but it’s crazy to run risks when you don’t need to … I stole a car.’

  Risks, Samsa thought. This from the guy who refused to wear a condom with a hooker. ‘You stole a car?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, borrowed is how I think of it. I do it every time I go down to that neighborhood.’

  ‘You remember the make?’

  ‘No, I don’t. American, but I don’t recall the brand.’

  ‘Where did you steal it?’

  ‘A street downtown. Primrose, I think …’

  Samsa asked, ‘Where did you leave it after?’

  ‘Back where I found it.’

  ‘You returned it to the same spot?’

  ‘Why not? I couldn’t just abandon it. It was bad enough stealing the thing in the first place.’

  ‘Even in your panicky state of mind, you pulled yourself together enough to return the car to the same place?’

  ‘I was thinking more clearly then. I was over the initial shock of what I’d done.’

  Yeah, Samsa thought. Naturally. ‘You remember anything about this car, Ryan? Color? How the interior looked? Anything like that?’

  ‘Black leather seats, I think. Not genuine leather. Naugahyde. I think the car was dark brown.’

  ‘A brown American car with a black interior.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  A brown car, black interior. A car with no unusual identifying features, no singularities. A car that couldn’t be tracked down. A car that existed in Pritt’s dream world, the same place where he’d killed a hooker and was overwhelmed by guilt.

  ‘The thing is, Ryan, if we can’t locate this auto, how can we be sure you picked up this girl? You see what I’m saying, don’t you? The car, in all likelihood, would provide corroborative evidence. Without it … I don’t know.’ Samsa heard an echo of Boyle’s deep voice. I’d grab this sucker’s confession with both hands, man.

  ‘Try to remember anything you can about the car,’ he said. This mockery. He had to believe in it. In his heart, in the fiber of himself.

  ‘The fact I can’t remember the goddam car doesn’t affect my confession,’ Pritt said, looking stubborn, jaw thrust out a little way. ‘Look, I came in here of my own free will, I want to make a statement none of you guys seem prepared to take. I killed the goddam girl, Lieutenant. It’s plain and simple. What more do you want?’

  Samsa strolled around the room. This was being handed to him on a plate, for God’s sake. Pritt knew enough basic details about the death of the girl to be convincing, and the car was way out there in the wild blue yonder. And the confession was a document that would bestow a kind of normality on his life. Just thinking this made him feel cowardly, shrinking inside himself, a husk of a person.

  You could be pragmatic about it. You could tell yourself that it made no sense for an experienced law-enforcement officer to trash his career and his usefulness on account of one misjudgement. It was a waste. You could go on and on, until you were inextricably lost in elaborate justifications.

  But there was a bottom line. And it was silence. A big silence. You’d get your broken tooth fixed, the bruise would fade, you’d go on seeing Eve, maybe you’d even fall in love with her, who could say? But there would always be the big silence. There would always be that sense of balancing on the head of a pin, that fear of ultimate discovery. Even if he wrote down Pritt’s confession himself he’d feel the dead girl’s presence for the rest of his life.

  He walked back to the table and stared at Pritt. ‘Why the fuck are you doing this, Ryan?’

  ‘If you don’t want my confession, get me somebody that does. Get me that guy Brodsky.’

  ‘You want to see your name in the papers, Pritt? Is that it? A little notoriety? A splash on the evening news? Or are you so fucked-up in your head you don’t know what the hell you’re doing? Tell me about all the little pills you pop. Have they seriously disrupted your reality?’ He was aware of Levine just then, and wondered how the young cop felt to see his lieutenant lose his cool so easily.

  ‘I don’t need this,’ Pritt said calmly. ‘Maybe it’s you should be taking the pills. What is it with you anyhow? You don’t want me to be guilty?’

  Samsa leaned across the table. This is the place where you’re all tangled up. Accept the confession. Don’t accept it. Let Pritt walk out a free man. And then what reasons do you give to Brodsky and the department? What do you say? He was unconvincing, Al. I couldn’t hold him.

  Why was that, Greg? Why was he unconvincing?

  Because. I decided so. Call it instinct. A hunch, Al.

  Pritt was standing now. ‘Get me Brodsky,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s just relax, Ryan, what do you say?’

  ‘You’re the one who’s uptight, not me.’

  ‘I shouted, okay, I didn’t mean it,’ Samsa said.

  ‘I guess this is a high-pressure kind of job,’ Pritt said. ‘Things get you down. I know about pressures, believe me.’

  Samsa’s eyelids felt heavy. He was beginning to fade in and out. He said, ‘What I want you to do is think really hard about all this, Ryan. Concentrate. See if you can remember any details about the car. Even the smallest thing could be useful. Meantime, I’ll discuss the situation with Chief Brodsky. Then we’ll see.’

  See what? he wondered. It was just something to say, words you tossed out. He smiled at Pritt and walked to the door. ‘Levine will take you back to your cell, Ryan. We’ll talk again later.’

  Samsa went out into the corridor. He walked a few yards, paused a moment to drink from a water fountain. Bending to the spout, he closed his eyes and imagined himself drinking from a mountain stream, the air around him chill and clear and his heart filled with the joy of being, and if he opened his eyes he’d see mountains, deep green valleys, a hawk circling freely and full-winged in the sky. But the water tasted of the chemicals the city treatment-plant pumped into it.

  He splashed his face, let water spill down his shirt, then went back to his office. He’d phone Darcy now, check in on her. The good father. He reached for the phone and was halfway through punching the numbers when Al Brodsky appeared in the doorway.

  Samsa put the handset back. Brodsky tossed a sheet of paper on the desk. Samsa picked up the sheet, which was pale-blue and flimsy, the kind used in the department for telephone messages. He stared at the handwriting and somehow couldn’t get beyond it to the message it contained, as if the meaning of the words were imprisoned within the letters.

  ‘Life’s a fucking bitch sometimes,’ Brodsky said.

  39

  Darcy rode the bus into the city. She got off near the Greyhound station, a grubby neighborhood, full of drifters and panhandlers. She was wolf-whistled a couple of times, a few ‘hey, babes’. Her black linen skirt was short and her white off-the-shoulder blouse revealed maybe a little too much. She thought her make-up made her look nineteen or twenty.

  She crossed the street and walked a few blocks to a bar called Chang’s. The sun was beginning to set, the sky hazy.

  She knew absolutely nothing about him – what he did for a living, his background – yet here she was strolling toward a bar where she’d arranged to meet him. You’re out of your head. It had seemed such a damn good idea at the time because Nick had been argumentative after school, getting on her nerves, nagging at her about the next step in their relationship, like it was a goddam ladder you climbed. Wasn’t she ever going to ‘come across’, ‘put out’ – phrases she thought sexist and cheap, especially when they were delivered in a wheedling tone of voice designed to make her feel guilty for not fucking him.

  ‘I’m a guy, I have needs, you don’t seem to understand that, what are you, like this professional virgin?’

  ‘Yeah, well I have needs too, Nick,’ she’d said. ‘And you’re not exactly meeting them either. You think with your dick.’

  ‘I love you, Darcy’ – like that smoothed over all the cracks.

  Then Nick had driven away in his small rasping car and the house had begun to feel like a tomb. There was no sign of her father, as usual, and she was bored, boxed in. And then she’d played piano for a time in a listless manner before she’d decided, Oh, just do it, go ahead, pick up the telephone. Get out of this rut, this funk, this big empty house.

  Face it. There was something interesting about him. She couldn’t say what exactly. He was an adult, and Nick – Nick was a big horny kid. This flattered her to some extent, sure. But it wasn’t just flattery, because that alone wasn’t enough to have brought her downtown to meet a stranger.

  Sit with the clones. Conform. Be like everyone else.

  Now that was the real turning point. He couldn’t have known he’d thrown down a completely irresistible challenge when he’d said that. Until that moment she’d been quite prepared to step on the bus and ignore him, but he’d really stung her with those comments. And when he’d shoved his phone number into her hand she’d known there and then she’d call him.

  Conform, she thought. You just don’t know me, whoever-you-are.

  She’d never been in a bar before, didn’t have ID, wouldn’t be served. The whole thing would be mortifying. She hesitated on the sidewalk.

  Then he appeared in the doorway. ‘Coming in or not?’ he asked.

  ‘I wasn’t sure this was the right place,’ she said.

  ‘There’s only one Chang’s,’ he said. He put a hand on her elbow, steered her inside the crowded bar, edged her through the throng to a table at the back of the big room. She was conscious of pink plaster flamingoes all over the place and the smell of his aftershave and the way his silk shirt shone.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’

  ‘Oh … rum and Coke?’

  ‘Uno momento.’ He went to the bar. She watched him force his way through. She barely had time to scan the room – which was filled with some business types, a few overdressed girls, groups of young men – before he came back carrying two drinks.

  ‘Bacardi okay?’

  ‘Sure. What’s that you’re drinking?’ His glass contained a red-yellow liquid.

  ‘A Suffering Bastard. Which translates into, you drink too many of these and you wake feeling embalmed. You look lovely by the way.’

  The compliment embarrassed her. She wasn’t going to say anything in response, though. Hadn’t she read somewhere that it was a mark of maturity when you knew how to accept praise with graceful silence? She’d go with graceful silence.

  ‘A full-born beauty, new and exquisite, quote unquote.’

  ‘Shelley,’ she said.

  ‘I’m impressed.’

  He pushed a pack of Camel Lights across the table. She took one, and he lit it for her with a Zippo. She wondered what would happen if somebody she knew walked in, a friend of her father’s, say, or even her father himself. Oh Christ. She tasted her drink, made a face.

  ‘Don’t like it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s strong.’ An unsophisticated response. She shouldn’t have said anything. ‘It’s good though.’

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ he said.

  ‘There’s only my father. My mother died a year ago.’

  ‘That’s too bad. How did she die?’

  ‘She killed herself. You won’t mind if I don’t really want to talk about it?’

  He looked genuinely sympathetic. ‘What does your father do?’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33