The Wrong Man

41

Sally looked across at Hope. They were in their bedroom, and only a single bedside table lamp threw wan yellow light across the room.

“I can’t let you do this,” Sally said.

“I’m not sure you have a choice,” Hope said with a small shrug. “I believe the decision has been made. And anyway, it’s probably the least dangerous part of the whole enterprise.” This was a lie, but how much of one, Hope was unsure.

“Enterprise?”

“For lack of a better word.”

Sally shook her head. “A bomb goes off in a marketplace, and we call it collateral damage. A surgery goes wrong, we call it complications. A soldier gets killed, he becomes a casualty. Seems to me that we live on euphemisms.”

“And what about us?” Hope asked. “What word would you choose for the two of us?”

Sally frowned. She walked over to a mirror. Once upon a time she had been beautiful. Once upon a time she had been vibrant. She barely recognized the person staring back at her. “I guess the two of us don’t know what the next day will bring. Uncertainty. There’s a word.”

Hope felt a crease of emotion. “You could say you loved me.”

“I do. It’s just myself that I no longer love.”

They were quiet while Sally looked down at her sheets of paper.

“We do this, you know, and everything will be different.”

“I thought the point was to restore everything to the same as it was before.”

“Both,” Sally said stiffly. “I think it will be both.”

She picked up a handwritten series of instructions from the top of the pile. “This has to go to Ashley and Catherine. Do you want to come with me when I speak with them? Actually, no, don’t. If you’re not there, they can’t ask you any questions.”

“I’ll wait for you here.” Hope lay back on the bed, crawling beneath the comforter, feeling a shiver run down her back.

Sally found Ashley and Catherine in Ashley’s room.

“I have some requests for you guys. Can you do the things listed here-it’s not too much-without asking any questions? I need to know.”

Catherine took the list from Sally’s hand, read it through rapidly, then handed it over to Ashley.

“I think we can do that,” she said.

“I wrote out a script and I’m giving you a disposable cell phone that I’d like you to lose after you contact him,” Sally said. “You can ad-lib, of course, but you need to get the main point across. Do you see that?”

Ashley stared at the words on the page and nodded. “Do you think-”

“Sounds like the start of a question,” Sally said with a wry smile. “The point is, you must, I repeat, you must, sell O’Connell on this trip. He has to be made to do this. And, it seems to all of us, anger and jealousy and perhaps a little indecision is precisely the concoction that will encourage him. If you can find a better set of words, by all means use them. But the end result absolutely must be the same. Do you get that? Hope, your father, and I will be counting on that. Can you act this part, Ashley, honey? Because much will ride on your powers of persuasion.”

“Much of what?” she asked.

“Ah, another question. And it won’t get answered. See there at the bottom. Bunch of phone numbers. I don’t expect you to be able to memorize them all, but it is essential that by the end of the day, this paper, and everything else, be destroyed. That’s it for now.”

“That’s it?”

“You’re being asked to play a part. Just like you requested. But what the final act is, you are not being told. And what you are being asked to do limits, shall we say, your exposure. Catherine, I’m counting on you to see this through. And to accomplish the other elements on that list.”

“I don’t know that I like this,” Catherine said. “I don’t know that I like acting in the dark.”

“Well, we’re all in uncharted territory here. But I need to be one hundred percent sure about our roles.”

“We will do what you ask. Although I don’t see-”

“That’s the point. You don’t see.”

Sally paused in the doorway. She looked over at Catherine, then to her daughter. “I wonder if you understand how much people love you,” she said cautiously. “And what people might be willing to do for you.”

Ashley didn’t reply, other than to nod her head.

“Of course,” Catherine injected, “the same might be said for Michael O’Connell, which is why we’re all here.”

Scott sat in the Porsche and dialed O’Connell’s father on the cell phone that Sally had provided for him. The line rang three times before the man picked it up.

“Mr. O’Connell?” Scott said with a businesslike tone.

“Who’s this?” The words were slightly slurred. A two-beer, maybe three, tone.

“This would be Mr. Smith, Mr. O’Connell.”

“Who?” A momentary confusion.

“Mr. Jones, if you prefer.”

O’Connell’s father laughed. “Oh, yeah, hey, sure. Hey, that e-mail you gave me didn’t work. I tried it and it came back undeliverable.”

“A slight change in procedures precipitated by necessity, I assure you. I apologize.”

Scott assumed that the only real reason that O’Connell’s father had a computer in the first place was to easily access pornographic websites.

“Let me give you a cell phone number.” He quickly read off the number.

“Okay, got it. But I ain’t heard shit from my boy, and I’m not expecting to.”

“Mr. O’Connell, I have every indication that things might change. I believe that you might hear from him. And, if so, please call that number immediately, as we discussed previously. My client’s interest in speaking with your son has, shall I say, increased in recent days. His need has, shall we say, grown more urgent. Therefore, as you can easily see, his sense of obligation to you, if you were to make that call, would be substantially more than I initially guessed. Do you understand exactly what I’m saying?”

O’Connell hesitated, then said, “Yeah. I get lucky, the kid shows up, and it’s gonna turn out even better for me. But like I say, I ain’t heard from him and I ain’t likely to.”

“Well, we can always hope. For everyone’s sakes,” Scott said as he disconnected the line. He leaned his head back and reached for the electric window switch. He felt as if he were choking. He was almost overcome with nausea, but when he tried to vomit, he could only cough dryly.

He breathed in rapidly and looked down at the yellow sheet of paper that Sally had given him, with its list of tasks. There was something deeply terrible about her ability to organize, and to think with mathematical precision about, something as difficult as they were about to do. For a moment, he could feel his temperature rising again, and a vile, bilious taste in his mouth.

All his life, Scott believed, he had performed on the periphery of importance. He had gone to war because he knew it was the defining moment of his generation, but then he had stepped back and kept himself safe. His education, his teaching, were all about helping students, but never himself. His marriage had been a humiliating disaster with the sole exception of Ashley. And now, here he was in middle age churning his way through the days of his life, and this threat was the first moment when he was being asked to do something truly unique, something outside all the careful boundaries and limitations he had placed on his life. It was one thing to act like a boisterous father and say, “I’d kill that guy,” when there was really little chance of that happening. Now that their plan to cause a death was in place and starting to grind its gears inexorably forward, he wavered. He wondered whether he could do more than merely lie.

Lying, he thought. That I’m good at. Plenty of experience.

Again he looked at the list. Words were not going to be enough, he knew.

Another wave of nausea threatened his stomach, but he fought it off, put the car in gear, and headed first for the hardware store. He knew, later, perhaps at midnight, he had to make a trip to the airport. He did not expect to sleep much in the hours to come.

It was midmorning, and Catherine and Ashley were the only people remaining in the house. Sally had departed, dressed as she would for her office, other clothing stuffed into her briefcase. Hope, as well, had left the house as if nothing were out of the ordinary, her backpack thrown jauntily over her shoulder. Neither of the two women had said anything to Ashley and Catherine about what the day held.

And both Catherine and Ashley had seen a furtiveness in their eyes.

If Sally and Hope had slept much the night before, it was lost in their tense gestures and short-tempered words. Still, they had both moved with a singleness of purpose that had almost set Ashley back. She had never seen either of the two women behaving with such steel-eyed and iron movement.

Catherine came in, breathing hard. “Something is clearly afoot, dear.” She held her yellow legal paper with instructions in her hand.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Ashley said. “God damn it. I can’t stand being outside, trying to look in.”

“We need to follow the plan. Whatever it is.”

“When has any plan that my parents have come up with ever really worked out?” Ashley said, although she realized she sounded a little like a petulant teenager.

“I don’t know about that. But Hope generally does exactly what she says she’s going to do. She’s as solid as a rock.”

Ashley nodded. “Thick as a brick. After the divorce, my dad used to play that for me on his tape deck and we would dance around the living room. Common ground was hard to find, so he would start blasting all his sixties rock and roll. Jethro Tull. The Stones. The Dead. The Who. Hendrix. Joplin. He taught me the Frug and the Watusi and the Freddy.” Ashley suddenly looked out the window, unaware that her father had recalled the same memory days earlier. “I wonder if he and I will ever dance again. I always thought we would, you know, just the one time, when I got married, when everyone was watching. He would just swoop in and we’d do a turn or two and everyone would clap. Long white dress for me. Tuxedo for him. When I was little, the only thing I wanted was to fall in love. Not a sad, angry mess, like my mother and father. Something more like Hope and my mother, except there would be a really, really good-looking, smart guy involved. And you know, when I would say this to Hope, she was always the first to tell me how great it would be. We would laugh and imagine wedding dresses and flowers and all the little-girl things.” Ashley stepped back. “And now, the first man to say he loves me and truly mean it is a nightmare.”

“Life is strange,” Catherine said. “We have to trust them that they know what they’re doing.”

“You think they do?”

Catherine saw that in Ashley’s right hand she held the revolver.

“If I get the damn chance…” Ashley said.

Then she pointed at the list. “All right. Act one. Scene one. Enter Ashley and Catherine, stage right. What’s our opening line?”

Catherine looked down at her list. “First thing is the trickiest. We have to make sure that O’Connell isn’t here. I guess we’re taking that walk outside.”

“Then what?” Ashley asked.

Catherine looked down at the paper. “Then it’s your big moment. It’s the bit your mother underlined three times. Are you ready?”

Ashley didn’t answer. She was unsure.

They got their coats and walked out the front door together. Ashley and Catherine paused, standing on the front stoop, staring up and down the block. It was all family-neighborhood quiet. Ashley kept her fingers gripped around the pistol handle hidden deep in her parka pocket, her index finger rubbing against the trigger guard nervously. She was struck with the way her fear of Michael O’Connell had made her see the world as so many threats. The street where she had spent much of her childhood playing, as she shuttled between her parents’ two houses, should have been as familiar to her as her own room upstairs. But it was no longer. O’Connell had changed it into something utterly different. He had sliced away everything that belonged to her: her school, her apartment in Boston, her job, and now the place where she had grown up. She wondered whether he really knew how much genius existed in his evil.

She touched the gun barrel. Kill him, she told herself. Because he is killing you.

Still scanning the neighborhood with their eyes, Catherine and Ashley proceeded slowly up the street. Ashley wanted to invite him to show himself, if he was there. Halfway down the block, despite the rain, she removed her knit ski cap. She shook her head, letting her hair fall to her shoulders, before stuffing the hat back upon her head. She wanted, for the first and only time in months, to be irresistible.

“Keep walking,” Catherine said. “If he’s here, he will show.”

They sidled down the sidewalk, and from behind they heard a car start down the street. Ashley clutched the pistol and felt her heartbeat accelerate. She barely breathed in as the sound increased.

As the car drew abreast of them, she pivoted abruptly, swinging the weapon free and spreading her feet as she crouched into the shooting stance that she had practiced so diligently in her room. Her thumb slid over the safety switch, then to the hammer. She exhaled sharply, almost a grunt of effort, and then a whistle of tension.

The car, with a middle-aged man behind the wheel, rolled past them. The driver didn’t even turn; his eyes were checking addresses on the opposite side of the street.

Ashley groaned. But Catherine kept her wits about her. “You should put that weapon away,” she said quietly. “Before some nice stay-at-home mother spots it in your hand.”

“Where the hell is he?”

Catherine didn’t answer.

The two of them continued slowly. Ashley felt utterly calm, committed, ready to pull out her weapon and end it all with a rapid-fire answer to all his questions. Is this what it feels like to be ready to kill someone? But the real O’Connell, as opposed to the ghostlike O’Connell who had lurked just behind her every step for so long, was nowhere to be seen.

When they’d patiently made it around the block and sauntered back to Sally and Hope’s home, Catherine muttered, “All right. We know one thing. He’s not here. He has to be somewhere. Are you ready for the next step?”

Ashley doubted anyone could know the answer to that until they tried.

Michael O’Connell was at his makeshift desk in a darkened room, bathed in the glow of the computer screen. He was working on a little surprise for Ashley’s family. Dressed only in his underwear, his hair slicked back after a shower, techno music pouring through the computer’s speakers, he tapped his fingers on the keyboard in rhythm with the electric chords. The songs he listened to were fast, almost out of control.

O’Connell took delight in having used some of the cash that Ashley’s father had given him in the pathetic effort to buy him off to purchase the computer that replaced the one that Matthew Murphy had smashed. And now, he was hard at work on a series of electronic sorties that he believed would make for significant trouble in their lives.

The first was to be an anonymous tip to the Internal Revenue Service suggesting that Sally was asking her clients to pay her fees half by check and half in cash. There is nothing, Michael O’Connell thought, that the tax people hate more than someone trying to hide big chunks of income. They would be skeptical when she denied it, and relentless as they pored over her accounts.

This made him laugh out loud.

The second was designed as an equally anonymous tip to the New England offices of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency alleging that Catherine was growing large quantities of marijuana on her farm in a greenhouse inside her barn. He hoped the tip would be enough to get a search warrant. And even if the search turned up nothing-as he knew it would-he suspected the heavy hand of the DEA would wreck all her precious antiques and memorabilia. He could picture her house strewn with her items.

The third was a little surprise that he’d planned for Scott. Surfing around the Internet, using the log-on Histprof, he had discovered a Danish website that offered the most virulent pornography, prominently featuring children and underage teenagers in all sorts of provocative poses. The next step was to buy a phony credit card number and simply have a selection sent to Scott at his home. It would be a relatively simple matter to tip the local police to its arrival. In fact, he thought, he might not even have to do that. The local police would probably get a call from U.S. Customs, whom he knew monitored such imports into the States.

He laughed a little to himself, imagining the explanations that Ashley’s family would try to come up with when they found themselves enmeshed in all sorts of bureaucratic red tape, or sitting across a table in a bright, windowless room from either a DEA agent, an IRS agent, or a police officer who had nothing but contempt for the sort of smug middle-class folks they were.

They might try to blame him, but he doubted it. He just couldn’t be sure, which held him back. He knew that pressing the proper keys on his three entries would undoubtedly leave an electronic footprint that could be traced to his own computer. What he needed to do, he thought, was break into Scott’s house one morning while he was teaching and send the request to Denmark from Scott’s computer. It was also critical to create an untraceable electronic path for the other tips. He sighed. These would require him to travel to southern Vermont and western Massachusetts. Inventing screen personae wasn’t a problem, he thought. And he could send the tips from computers either in Internet cafés or local libraries.

He leaned back in his chair and once again laughed out loud.

Not for the first time, Michael O’Connell wondered why they thought they could compete against him.

As he was grinning, working over each of these unpleasant surprises for Ashley’s parents and family in his head, the cell phone on his desk corner rang.

It surprised him. He had no friends who would call. He’d quit his mechanic’s job, and no one at the school where he was occasionally taking classes had his number.

For a second, he stared at the small window on the outside of the phone that gave the incoming identification. He saw only a single heart-stopping name: Ashley.

Before giving me the detective’s name, she had made me promise to guard my words.

“You won’t say anything,” she had said. “You won’t tell him anything that will set him on edge. You must promise me that, or else, forget it, I won’t give you his name.”

“I will be cautious. I promise.”

Now, in the waiting room of the police station, seated on a threadbare couch, I was less sure of my capabilities. To my right, a door opened and a man about my own age, with salt-and-pepper hair, a garishly pink tie around his neck, a substantial stomach, and an easygoing, slightly twisted smile on his lips, emerged. He stuck out his hand, and we introduced ourselves. He showed me back to his desk.

“So, how can I help you?”

I repeated the name I had given him in an earlier phone call. He nodded.

“We don’t get too many homicides around here. And when we do, they’re usually boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife. This was a little different. But I don’t get your interest in the case.”

“Some people I know suggested taking a look at it. Thought it might make a good story.”

The detective shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that. I will say this, it was a hell of a crime scene. A real mess. Sorting through it was quite a task. We’re not exactly Hollywood Homicide in here.” He gestured around the room. It was a modest place, where every bit of equipment, including the men and women who worked there, showed the fraying of age. “But even if people think we’re all dumb as logs, eventually we were able to figure it all out.”

“I don’t think that,” I said. “The dumb as logs part.”

“Well, you’re the exception, rather than the rule. Usually folks don’t get the big picture until they’re sitting across from one of us in handcuffs, we’ve got ’em nailed six ways to Sunday, and they’re looking at doing some serious prison time.”

He paused, eyeing me carefully. “You’re not working for a defense attorney, huh? Someone who jumps into a case and tries to find some mistake that they can crow about in an appellate court?”

“No. Just looking for a story, like I said.”

He nodded, but I wasn’t sure he completely believed me.

“Well,” the detective said slowly, “I don’t know about that at all. It might be a story. But it’s an old one. Okay. Here you go.”

He reached down beneath his desk, brought up a large accordion-style file, and opened it on the desk in front of us. There were a stack of eight-by-ten color glossy photographs, which he spread out on top of all the paperwork. I leaned forward. I could see debris and ruin were strewn throughout the pictures. And a body.

“A mess,” he said. “Like I told you.”