Prayers For Rain

5

What we presume about strangers when we first meet them is often correct. The guy sitting beside you at a bar, for example, who wears a blue shirt, has fingernails caked with dirt, and smells of motor oil, you can safely presume is a mechanic. To assume more is trickier, yet it’s something we all do every day. Our mechanic, we’d probably guess, drinks Budweiser. Watches football. Likes movies in which lots of shit blows up. Lives in an apartment that smells like his clothes.

There’s a good chance these assumptions are on the mark.

And just as good a chance that they’re not.

When I met Karen Nichols, I assumed she’d grown up in the suburbs, came from comfortably middle-class parents, spent her formative years sheltered from dissension and mess and people who weren’t white. I further assumed (all in an instant, the span of a handshake) that her father was a doctor or the owner of a modest, successful business, a small chain of golf shops, perhaps. Her mother was a homemaker until the kids went to school, and then she worked part-time at a bookstore or maybe for an attorney.

The truth was that when Karen Nichols was six years old, her father, a marine lieutenant stationed at Fort Devens, was shot by another lieutenant in the kitchen of Karen’s home. The shooter’s name was Reginald Crowe, Uncle Reggie to Karen, even though he hadn’t been a blood relation. He’d been her father’s best friend and next-door neighbor and he shot her father twice in the chest with a.45 as the two sat having Saturday afternoon beers.

Karen, who had been next door playing with the Crowe children, heard the shots and came rushing into her home to find Uncle Reggie standing over her father. Uncle Reggie, seeing Karen, promptly put the gun to his own heart and fired.

There was a picture of the two corpses that some enterprising Trib reporter had found in Fort Devens ’s files and published in his paper two days after Karen leapt to her death.

The headline above the story read: SINS OF SUICIDE-WOMAN’S PAST HAUNT PRESENT, and the story reenergized water-cooler conversation around the city for at least half an hour.

I never would have guessed Karen, at six, had been such a close witness to horror. The house in the suburbs came a few years later, when her mother was remarried to a cardiologist who lived in Weston. Karen Nichols, from that point, grew up untouched and unchallenged.

And while I was pretty sure that the only reason Karen’s death received any news play whatsoever stemmed more from the building from which she chose to jump than any curiosity regarding her need to do so, I also think that she became, for a moment, a morbid reminder of the ways in which the world or the fates could mangle your dreams. Because in the six months since I’d seen her last, Karen Nichols’s life had been on a slide steeper than a fall from the Eiger.

A month after I’d solved her Cody Falk problem, her boyfriend, David Wetterau, had tripped while jaywalking during rush hour on Congress Street. The trip hadn’t been much-a fall to both knees that tore a hole in one pant leg-but while he was down, a Cadillac, swerving to miss him, had clipped his forehead with the corner of its rear fender. Wetterau had been comatose ever since.

Over the next five months, Karen Nichols slipped ever downward, losing her job, her car, and finally her apartment. Not even the police could ascertain where she’d lived her final two months. Psychiatrists popped up on the news shows to explain that David Wetterau’s accident coupled with her father’s tragic death had snapped something in Karen’s psyche, cut her loose from conventional cares and thought processes in a way that ultimately contributed to her death.

I was raised Catholic, so I’m well versed in the story of Job, but Karen’s string of bad luck in the months before her death bothered me. I know luck, both good and bad, runs in streaks. I know bad streaks often run a long, long time, with one tragedy perpetuating the next, until all of them, major and minor, seem to be going off like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July. I know that sometimes bad shit simply happens to good people. And yet, if it started with Cody Falk, I decided, then maybe it hadn’t stopped on his end. Yes, we’d scared him witless, but people are stupid, particularly predators. Maybe he’d gotten over his fear and decided to come at Karen from her flank, instead of head-on, destroy her fragile world for siccing Bubba and me on him.

Cody, I determined, would need a second visit.

First, though, I wanted to talk to the cops investigating Karen’s death, see if they’d tell me anything that could help keep me from dropping in on Cody half-cocked.

“Detectives Thomas and Stapleton,” Devin told me. “I’ll reach out, tell ’em to talk to you. Give it a few days, though.”

“I’d love to make contact quicker.”

“And I’d love to take a shower with Cameron Diaz. Neither’s going to happen, though.”

So, I waited. And waited. I eventually left a few messages and bit back on my urge to drive over to Cody Falk’s and beat answers out of him before I knew the proper questions to ask.

In the middle of all the waiting, I got restless and copied down Karen Nichols’s last known address from her file, noted from the newspaper accounts that she’d been employed in the Catering Department of the Four Seasons Hotel, and left the office.

Karen Nichols’s former roommate was named Dara Goldklang. While we spoke in the living room she’d shared with Karen for two years, Dara ran a treadmill facing the windows as if she were in the final lap of a track meet. She wore a white sports bra and black spandex shorts and kept looking back over her shoulder at me.

“Until David was hurt,” she said, “Karen was barely here. Always over at David’s. Pretty much just picked up her mail here, did some laundry, took it to David’s for another week. She was moony over that guy. Lived for him.”

“What was she like? I only met her once.”

“Karen was sweet,” she said, then followed that almost immediately with: “Does my butt look big to you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t look.” She puffed her cheeks as she ran. “Come on. Look. My boyfriend says it’s getting big.”

I turned my head. Her ass was the size of a crab apple. If her boyfriend thought it was big, I wondered on which twelve-year-old he’d seen a smaller one.

“Your boyfriend’s wrong.” I sat back in some kind of red leather beanbag thing supported by a glass bowl and base. It may have been the ugliest piece of furniture I’d ever seen. It was definitely the ugliest I’d ever sat in.

“He says I need to tone up my calves.”

I glanced at the muscles in the backs of her calves. They looked like flat stones bulging under the skin.

“And get a boob job,” she puffed. She turned back toward me so I could glimpse the orbs under her sports bra. They were about the size, shape, and firmness of two regulation baseballs.

“What’s your boyfriend do?” I asked. “Physical training?”

She laughed, and her tongue fell over her lower lip. “Puh-lease. He’s a trader on State Street. His body is for shit, like he’s got a little Buddha under his abs, stringy arms, ass starting to sag.”

“But yet he wants you to be perfect?”

She nodded.

“Seems hypocritical,” I said.

She held up her hands. “Yeah, well, I make twenty-two-five as a restaurant manager, and he drives a Ferrari. How shallow of me, right?” She shrugged. “I like the furniture in his condo. I like eating at Cafe Louis and Aujourd’hui. I like this watch he bought me.”

She held up her wrist so I could see it. Stainless steel and sporty, and maybe ran a grand or more, all so you could be perfectly accessorized while you worked up a sweat.

“Very nice,” I said.

“What do you drive?”

“An Escort,” I lied.

“See?” She wagged a finger over her shoulder at me. “You’re cute and all, but your clothes, that car?” She shook her head. “Ah, no. Couldn’t sleep with a guy like you.”

“Wasn’t aware I’d asked.”

She swiveled her head back in my direction, stared at me as fresh dots of perspiration broke out on her forehead. Then she laughed.

I laughed back.

What a hoot it was in there for thirty seconds or so.

“So, Dara,” I said, “why’d Karen lose her place in this apartment?”

She turned away, stared back out the window. “Well, it was sad, right? Karen, like I said, was sweet. She was also kinda, well, naive if you know what I mean. She had no practical reality touchstones.”

“Practical reality touchstones,” I said slowly.

She nodded. “That’s what my therapist calls them-you know, the things we all have that ground us, and not just people but tenants and-”

“Tenets?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Tenets,” I said. “Tenants are people who live in your building. Tenets are principles, articles of faith.”

“Right. That’s what I said. Tenets and principles and, you know, the little sayings and ideals and philosophies we hold on to to get us through the day. Karen didn’t have any of those. She just had David. He was her life.”

“So, when he got hurt…”

She nodded. “Hey, don’t get me wrong, I understand how traumatic it was for her.” Her back had picked up a sheen of perspiration that made her skin glow in the afternoon sun. “I was filled with sympathy. I cried for her. But after a month, it’s like, Life Goes On.”

“That would be a tenet?”

She looked over her shoulder to see if I was fucking with her. I kept my gaze even and empathetic.

She nodded. “But Karen, she just kept sleeping all day, walking around in yesterday’s clothes. Sometimes, you could smell her. She just, well, she just fell apart. You know? And it was sad, broke my heart, but again, like, Get Over It.”

Tenet number two, I figured.

“Okay? I even tried to hook her up.”

“On dates?” I asked.

“Yeah.” She laughed. “I mean, okay, David was great. But David is a vegetable. I mean, hel-lo! Knock all you want, nobody’s home anymore. There are other fish in the sea. This ain’t Romeo and Juliet. Life is real. Life is hard. So, I’m going, Karen, you got to get out there and see some guys. A good lay maybe would have, I dunno, cleared her head.”

She looked back over her shoulder at me as she pressed a button on the treadmill console several times and the rubber belt below her feet gradually slowed to the pace of geriatric mall-walker. Her strides became longer, slower, and looser.

“Was I wrong?” she asked the window.

I let the question pass unanswered. “So, Karen’s depressed, she’s sleeping all day. Did she miss work?”

Dara Goldklang nodded. “That’s why she got shitcanned. Blew off too many shifts. When she did go in, she looked wrung-out wet, if you know what I’m saying-split ends, no makeup, runs in her stockings.”

“Heavens to Murgatroid,” I said.

“Look, I told her. I did.”

The treadmill wound down to a full stop, and Dara Goldklang stepped off, wiped her face and throat with a towel, drank some water from a plastic bottle. She lowered the bottle, lips still pursed, and locked eyes with me.

Maybe she was trying to get past my clothes and the car she thought I drove. Maybe she was looking to slum, clear her head via the method to which she seemed accustomed.

I said, “So she lost her job, and the money started to run out.”

She tilted her head back and opened her mouth, poured some water in without her lips ever touching the bottle. She swallowed a few times, then lowered her chin, dabbed her lips with a corner of the towel.

“She was out of money before that. There was something screwy with David’s medical insurance.”

“What kind of screwy?”

She shrugged. “Karen was trying to pay some of his medical bills. They were huge. It wiped her out. And I said, you know, a couple of months not paying rent is all right. I don’t like it, but I understand. But the third month, I said, you know, she had to go if she couldn’t come up with it. I mean, we were friends and all-good friends-but this is life.”

“Life,” I said. “Sure.”

Her eyes widened to coasters as she nodded at me. “The thing is, life, right? I mean, it’s a train. It just keeps moving, and you have to run ahead of it, okay. You stop to catch your breath too long? It runs you over. So, sooner or later, you have to stop being so other-centered and Look Out for Number One.”

“Good tenet,” I said.

She smiled. She walked over to the ugly chair and lowered her hand toward me. “Need help getting up?”

“No, I’m fine. Chair’s not that bad.”

She laughed and her tongue fell over her lower lip again, like Jordan ’s when he’d drive for a layup.

“I wasn’t talking about the chair.”

I stood and she stepped back. “I know you weren’t, Dara.”

She put a hand at the small of her back, leaned into it as she took another sip of water. “And the problem,” she said in a singsong, “lies, ah, where, exactly?”

“I got standards,” I said as I walked to the door.

“About strangers?”

“About humans,” I said, and let myself out.