The Wrong Man

23

He reminded himself to remain calm.

This was difficult for Michael O’Connell. He generally functioned better on the edge of rage, where streaks of fury colored his judgment, reliably steering him into places where he was comfortable. A fight. An insult. An obscenity. These were all moments that he enjoyed almost as much as he did when he was making plans. There were few things, he thought, more satisfying than predicting what people would do, then watching them do it, just as he’d imagined they would.

He had observed Ashley’s furtive dash from her building to the taxi, noting the cab company and identifying number. He wasn’t surprised that she was going somewhere. Running came naturally to people like Ashley and her family, he had told himself. He considered them cowards.

He called the dispatcher for the cab service, gave the taxi’s ID number, and said he’d found some prescription glasses in a case that the young lady had apparently dropped on the sidewalk. Was there any way he could return them to her?

The dispatcher had hesitated for a moment while he went over his log of radio calls.

“Ah, I don’t think so, fella.”

“Why not?” O’Connell had asked.

“That trip was to the international departures terminal at Logan. You might as well just chuck ’em. Or drop ’em in one of those eyeglasses-for-charity boxes you see.”

“Well,” O’Connell said, trying to make a joke, “somebody’s not gonna see too many sights in wherever they’re going on vacation.”

“Tough luck for her.”

That was an understatement, Michael O’Connell thought, seething inwardly.

Now he was perched a half block from her apartment, watching three young men move boxes out of her apartment building. They had a midsize U-Haul truck double-parked in the street outside, and they seemed to be hustling to get the job done and get on their way. Once again, O’Connell told himself to remain calm. He shrugged his shoulders to try to loosen the tension that had built up in his neck, and he clenched and unclenched his fists a half dozen times, trying to relax himself. Then he slowly sauntered down the block toward where the three young men were working.

One of the boys was carrying two boxes of books, with a lamp precariously balanced on top, when O’Connell arrived at the front stoop. The boy was a little unsteady under the weight.

“Hey, coming or going?” O’Connell asked.

“Just moving out,” the boy replied.

“Let me grab that for you,” O’Connell said, reaching out for the lamp before it fell to the sidewalk. He had an electric sensation as he wrapped his fingers around the metallic base, as if the mere touch of Ashley’s belongings were the same as stroking her skin. His hand caressed the lamp, and in his mind’s eye he recalled precisely where it had been in the apartment, on the bedside table. He could sense the light throwing an arc over her body, illuminating curves and shapes. His breathing accelerated, and he almost felt dizzy when he handed it to the moving boy.

“Thanks,” the boy responded as he wedged the lamp unceremoniously into the truck. “Just got the damn desk and the bed and a rug or two to go.”

O’Connell swallowed hard and gestured toward a pink bedspread. He remembered that one night he had kicked it aside, before bending over her form. “This isn’t your stuff?”

“Nah,” the boy responded, stretching his back. “We’re moving a professor’s daughter’s stuff. Getting paid pretty well.”

“Not bad,” O’Connell said slowly, as if biting off each word, working hard to keep anything other than idle curiosity out of his voice. “This must be the girl that lives on the second floor. I live down there.” He gestured toward a couple of other buildings. “She’s pretty hot. She leaving town?”

“Florence, Italy, the man says. Got a scholarship to study.”

“Not bad. Sounds like a good deal.”

“No shit.”

“Well, good luck with the stuff.” O’Connell gave a small wave and continued walking. He crossed the street and found a tree trunk to lean against.

He breathed in rapidly, letting an icy cold compulsion build up inside him. He watched Ashley’s furniture disappear into the back of the truck and wondered if what he was watching was really happening. It was like standing in front of a movie screen, where everything seemed real, but not. A taxi driver with a fare to Logan International Airport. A trio of college kids packing and moving on a quiet Sunday morning. A private detective with an address in Springfield taking his picture from a car parked across from his own apartment. Michael O’Connell knew it added up to something, but precisely what, he wasn’t yet certain. He was sure of one thing, however. If Ashley’s folks thought that buying her a plane ticket would get her away from him, they were genuinely mistaken. All they had managed was to make things far more interesting for him. He would find her, even if he had to fly all the way to Italy.

“No one steals from me,” he whispered to himself. “No one takes what’s mine.”

Catherine Frazier pulled her fleece jacket a little closer and watched her breath like smoke curl in front of her. The night air had an edge that predicted the evenings to come. Vermont is like that, she thought, it always gives a warning about what is coming, if one is only careful enough to pay attention. A cold taste of the dark sky on her lips, a sensation of numbness on her cheeks, above her a rattle of tree branches, a thin edge of ice on the ponds in the morning. There would be flurries in the next few days. She made a mental note to check her store of split wood piled up behind her house. She wished she could read people with the same accuracy as she did the weather.

The Boston bus was a little late, and instead of waiting inside the bowling alley and restaurant where it made its stop before heading on to Burlington and Montreal, she had stepped outside. Bright lights made her strangely nervous; she was more comfortable in shadows and fog.

She was looking forward to seeing Ashley, although, as always, she was a little nervous about how precisely she was to refer to her during her visit. Ashley wasn’t her granddaughter, nor was she a niece. She wasn’t related through adoption, although that was closest to what she was. Vermonters, as a rule, rarely butted into anyone else’s business, having that Yankee sensibility that the less said, the better. But Catherine knew that the other ladies of her church, and the folks behind the counter at the general store, the Ace Hardware, and other places where she was well-known, would have their questions. Like many in New England, they all had fined-tuned radars for any small act that suggested hypocrisy. And something about welcoming her daughter’s partner’s child into her home, while silently but obviously condemning that relationship, put some feelings on edge.

Catherine put her head back and let her eyes sweep over the canopy of night sky. She wondered if one could have as many conflicted feelings as there were stars in the heavens.

Ashley had been a child when she had first entered Catherine’s life. She remembered her first meeting with Ashley and found herself smiling in the darkness at the memory. I was wearing too many clothes. It was hot, but I had on a woolen skirt and sweater. How silly. I must have seemed like I was a hundred years old.

Catherine had been stiff, almost arch, stupidly formal, holding out her hand for a handshake, when she had been introduced to the eleven-year-old Ashley. But the child had disarmed her immediately, and so, in some respects, what truce she had with her own daughter, and the civility she displayed outwardly toward her daughter’s partner-Catherine hated that word; it made their relationship seem like a business-stemmed from her affection for Ashley. She had attended raucous birthday parties and dismally wet soccer games, watched Ashley play Juliet in a high school production, although she hated it when the character Ashley played died on the stage. She had sat on the edge of Ashley’s bed one night while the fifteen-year-old had sobbed uncontrollably at the breakup with her first boyfriend, and she had driven fast, far faster than ordinary, to get to Hope and Sally’s home in time to snap pictures of Ashley in her prom dress. She had nursed Ashley through a bout with the flu, when Sally had been preoccupied with a court case, sleeping on the floor next to her, listening for her breathing throughout the night. She had hosted Ashley when she’d shown up, camping gear in tow, with a couple of college friends, heading toward the Green Mountains, and entertained her at dinner in Boston on a couple of happy occasions and one truly wonderful time in the bleacher seats at Fenway, when Catherine had found an excuse to go to the city and had offhandedly called, although she had inwardly known that seeing Ashley was the real reason for the trip.

She pawed at the gravel in the parking lot, waiting for the bus, and thought to herself that life had not delivered to her the grandchildren that she had wanted and expected, but instead fate had delivered Ashley. She believed that in the first moment that she had met Ashley, and the child had peered out shyly and asked, “Would you like to see my room? Maybe we can read a book together?” that she had entered into a wholly different realm, where Ashley was exempted from all the disappointment and difficulty that Catherine and Hope experienced.

“Damn it,” Catherine said out loud. “How late can a bus be?”

In that moment she heard the wheezing noise of a big diesel engine, slowing to make a turn, and she saw headlights cutting across the darkness of the parking lot. She stepped forward quickly, already waving her arms above her head in greeting.

Sally’s secretary buzzed her and said, “I have a Mr. Murphy on the phone who says he has some information for you.”

“Put him through,” Sally said.

“Hello, Mr. Murphy. What have you got for me?”

“Well,” he said, speaking in a world-weary, cynical tone, “not as much as I can get, and will get, assuming you want me to continue, but I was figuring that you’d want an update sooner rather than later, given the, ah, personal nature of this particular inquiry.”

“That would be correct.”

“You want the bottom line? Or details first?”

“Just tell me what you know.”

“Well, I don’t think you’ve got too much to worry about. You’ve got something to worry about, that’s for sure, don’t get me wrong, but let me put it this way: I’ve seen worse.”

Sally felt a surge of relief. “Okay, that’s good. Why don’t you fill me in?”

“Well, he’s got a record. Not a real long one, and not one with a whole lot of red flags, if you know what I mean, but enough to be concerned.”

“Violence?”

“Some. Not too much. Fights, that sort of thing. No weapons that I can see from the charges filed against him. That’s good. But it can also mean he just hasn’t been caught.

“Look,” Murphy continued, “this guy O’Connell seems like a bad guy. But I’ve got the feeling that he’s a lightweight. I mean, I’ve seen his type a million times, and with a little no-nonsense pressure, they fold up like a stack of chairs. You want to put up the cash, I can arrange for a couple of my buddies and me to go pay him a little visit. Put the fear of God into him. Make him understand that he’s screwing around with the wrong sort of folks. Maybe help him to understand that a different approach to life will be healthier for him, all around.”

“Are you saying threatening him?”

“No, ma’am. And I would certainly not advocate violence in any regard.” Murphy paused, letting those words sink in, and letting Sally understand that he was saying exactly the opposite. “Because that would be a crime. And, as an officer of the court, I know, Counselor, that you would never hire me to injure someone. No, ma’am. I understand that. What I’m saying is that he can be, ah, intimidated. That’s it. Intimidated. All well within the absolute letter of the law. As you and I understand the law to be. But something that definitely will make him think twice about what he’s doing.”

“That’s a step maybe we should consider.”

“Be happy to. Won’t cost too much, either. Just the usual per diem and travel for me. A little something for my, ah, companions.”

“Well,” Sally said, letting a little hesitancy creep into her voice, “I’m not sure that I’m too comfortable with involving anyone else. Even friends whose, well, whose discretion in these sorts of matters you have confidence in. Especially a state policeman who might be forced, at some much later point, to testify in court, ah, truthfully. I’m just trying to think ahead here. Get a grasp on future eventualities and possibilities. Need to cover all bases, so to speak.”

Murphy thought all lawyers failed to understand the lines between reality as it took place on the street and what was subsequently described by utterly reasonable people in the cool tones of a court of law. These were distinctions lost on almost all of them. Sometimes bloody distinctions. He sighed a little, but hid it from his voice.

“You make a good point, Counselor. But my guess is that I could handle this part of the, ah, arrangement, on my own, without involving anyone currently in a law enforcement job. If that was what you wanted.”

“That would be wise.”

“I should go ahead, then?”

“Why don’t you design an approach, Mr. Murphy? And we’ll go from there.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

The telephone line went dead in her hand. Sally sat back in her chair feeling unsettled at the same time that she was reassured, which, she understood, was a complete contradiction.

It was a typical urban cemetery, tucked into a neglected corner of the small city, with a black wrought-iron fence surrounding it. My eyes swept the rows of gray headstones marked with name after name. They grew in stature as they marched up the slope of the hill. Simple slabs of granite gave way to more elaborate shapes and forms. The messages carved on the gravestones grew more elaborate as well. Lengthy testimonials to BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER or DEVOTED FATHER. I didn’t think Matthew Murphy, from what I already knew of him, was likely to be interred beneath horn-playing cherubs.

I started to walk up and down the rows, feeling my shirt stick to my back, and a thin line of sweat break out on my forehead. Right about the time I was about to give up, I saw a single, modest headstone with the name MATTHEW THOMAS MURPHY above a set of dates. Nothing else.

I wrote down the dates and stood for a moment. “What happened?” I asked out loud.

Not even a wisp of breeze or a ghostly vision replied.

Then I thought, with more than a small twinge of irritation, I knew who could answer that question.

There was a filling station a couple of blocks from the cemetery with a pay phone. I plugged some coins into the machine and dialed her number.

I didn’t identify myself when she picked up the line. “You lied to me,” I said, irritation in my voice.

She paused and I heard her take a deep breath. “How so? Lie is such a strong word.”

“You told me to go see Murphy. And I find him not in some office, but in a graveyard. Turning himself into food for earthworms and maggots. Seems like a lie to me. What the hell is this all about?”

Again she hesitated, measuring cautiously. “But what did you see?”

“I saw a grave. A cheap headstone.”

“Then you haven’t seen enough.”

“What the hell else was there to see?” I demanded.

Her voice was suddenly cold, distant. Almost wintry. “Look harder. Look much harder. Would I have sent you there for no reason? You see a slab of granite with a name and some dates. I see a story. ”

Then she hung up the phone.