The Wrong Man

7

Scott didn’t hear from Susan Fletcher for forty-eight hours, but when he did, he almost wished he hadn’t.He had busied himself the way all academics do, going over his upcoming spring-semester syllabus, designing the structure of several lectures, catching up on some correspondence from various historical societies and inquiry groups. And, in actuality, he hadn’t expected a rapid response from Susan Fletcher. He knew he had put her in an awkward position, and a part of him half-expected a blistering phone call from Ashley, along the Why are you butting into my private business? line, and he didn’t really have much of an answer for that question.

So he let the hours pass without allowing himself to feel overly anxious. There was no profit in being nervous, he told himself, when he caught his eyes wandering toward the black telephone waiting silently on the edge of his desk.

When it finally did ring, he was startled. At first, he did not recognize Susan Fletcher’s voice.

“Professor Freeman?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Susan…Susan Fletcher. You called me the other day…about Ashley.”

“Of course, Susan, I’m sorry. I didn’t expect you to call back so soon.”

This was untrue, of course. He’d hoped she would be prompt.

She hesitated, and Scott heard a catch in her throat. “Is something wrong?” he asked, his own voice betraying him slightly.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I can’t be sure.”

“What about Ashley?” Scott blurted out, then immediately regretted switching the focus away from the troubled tones he heard in Susan’s voice.

“She’s okay,” Susan said slowly. “At least, she seems to be okay, but she does have a problem with some guy, like you suspected. At least, I think she does. She didn’t really want to talk about it.”

Each word came timorously, almost as if she thought someone was listening in.

“You sound uncertain,” Scott said.

“I’ve had a difficult couple of days. Since I saw Ashley. In fact, that was the last good thing. Seeing her.”

“But what happened?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. Everything. I can’t tell.”

“I’m confused. What do you mean?”

“I had an accident.”

“Oh my goodness,” Scott said. “That’s terrible. Are you okay?”

“Yes. Just shaken up. My car is pretty messed up. But no broken bones. Maybe a little concussion. I’ve got a great big welt across my chest and it feels like my ribs were bruised. But other than being sore and disoriented, I’m okay, I guess.”

“But what…”

“The right front tire flew off. I was doing close to seventy…no, maybe a little more, close to eighty, and the front tire came detached. I was really lucky, though, because I felt the car start to swerve, and the front end started to shimmy, and so I pounded on the brakes. I was decelerating fast when it actually came off. Then I lost control.”

“My God…”

“Everything was spinning around, and there was all this noise. It was like someone was screaming in my ear, and I could feel this hyperalertness because I knew I couldn’t do anything about what was happening. But I was really lucky. I hit those collapsible barrier things, you know, the big, yellow barrel types that are filled with sand to cushion the impact.”

“The wheel came off?”

“Yeah. That’s what the trooper told me. They found it a quarter mile back down the road.”

“I’ve never heard of that before.”

“Yeah. Neither had the trooper. Nearly new car, too.”

Scott paused, and there was a small silence.

“Do you think…” He stopped.

“I don’t know what to think. One minute I was flying down the highway, the next…”

Again he was silent, and after a moment Susan spoke softly.

“I was going so fast because I was scared.”

This word caused Scott to listen. He remained quiet throughout Susan Fletcher’s recital of the evening with Ashley. He asked no questions, not even when he heard the name Michael O’Creep, which was the best that she could recall. Things were jumbled in Susan’s memory, and more than once he could hear frustration in her voice, as she struggled to get details right. He guessed this was the result of her mild concussion. She was apologetic, but this, Scott thought, was unnecessary.

She did not know if anything that had happened to her related in any way to Ashley. All she knew was she went to see her and then things that terrified her had taken place just as soon as she’d hugged her friend good-bye. She was fortunate to be alive.

“Do you think that this guy that Ashley’s involved with had anything to do with what took place?” Scott asked, unwilling to believe in a connection, just filled with a nervousness that he couldn’t quite describe.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably just coincidence. I don’t know. But, I think,” Susan said, almost whispering, close to tears, “that if it’s okay with you, I won’t be calling Ashley for a little while. Not until I get my act back together again.”

Scott hung up the phone thinking that he had a choice of possibilities: nothing. Or maybe the worst thing he could imagine.

We were meant for each other.

He tried to swallow, but his lips were completely dry.

Ashley moved down the street rapidly, as if her pace on the sidewalk could keep up with the thoughts crowding her head. The phrase You’re being followed hadn’t really fully formed in her consciousness, but a lingering sense of something being out of order dogged her. She carried a small bag of groceries in her arms, and her backpack was stuffed with art books, so she felt a little awkward every time she paused and let her eyes cruise around the street, trying to assess what was making her feel so unsettled.

Nothing that she could see was in the slightest out of the ordinary.

The city is like that, she thought to herself. Out in her home in western Massachusetts, things were a little less cluttered, and so, when something was out of place, it was a little more apparent. But Boston, with its constant flow and energy, defied her ability to see when something had changed. She felt a little hot, as if the temperature around her were rising, which confused her, because the opposite was true.

She swept the street with her eyes. Cars. Buses. Pedestrians. The same view that she was familiar with. She pricked up her ears. The same steady hum and beat of daily life. She did a small inventory of her senses and found that none were registering anything that would prompt the small electric currents of anxiety that she felt.

And so, she ignored the sensation.

She set out, at a quick march down the sidewalk, turning off the main roadway onto the side street where her apartment was located midway down the block.

There is a pretty clear distinction in Boston between apartments for students and apartments for people with actual jobs. Ashley was still in the student world. The street had an acceptable shabbiness, a little extra grime that to young eyes seemed to add character, but to those who had left it behind only spoke of impermanence. The trees planted in small swaths of grass seemed a little stunted, as if they didn’t get enough sun. It was an indecisive street, much like the people who lived there.

Ashley lurched up to her place, balanced the grocery bag on her knee, and undid the door. She felt a sudden exhaustion as she closed the door behind her and locked it.

Ashley looked around, pleased no more dead flowers were waiting for her.

It took her less than five minutes to put the granola, yogurt, spring water, and salad fixings away in the small refrigerator. She found a bottle of beer in the crisper and opened it, taking a long swig. Then she went into her small living room, relieved to see that no messages were on her answering machine. She took another drink, told herself that she was being a little foolish, because there were any number of people she did actually want to hear from. Certainly she hoped that Susan Fletcher would follow up on their dinner. And then there was the hope that Will Goodwin would call for that second date. In fact, as she went through a mental list, she thought that it was truly dumb to allow Michael O’Connell to isolate her. And, she told herself, she’d been pretty straightforward with him the other day, and maybe that would be the end of it.

The more she replayed the conversation in her mind, the more it took on a forcefulness that it probably didn’t deserve.

She kicked off her shoes, slid into her desk chair, punched on her computer, and hummed to herself as it booted up.

To her surprise, more than fifty new e-mails were waiting for her. She looked at the addresses and saw that they came from virtually everyone that she had in her electronic address book. She moved the cursor over the first, from a coworker at the museum, a girl named Anne Armstrong, and opened the e-mail. Ashley leaned forward to see what her acquaintance had to say. Except the e-mail wasn’t from Anne Armstrong.

Hello, Ashley. I’ve missed you more than you can imagine. But soon we will be together forever, and that will be great. As you can see, there are fifty-six e-mail messages after this one. Do not delete them. In them is important information that you will need.

I love you more today than yesterday. And tomorrow I will love you even more.

Forever yours,

Michael

Ashley wanted to shriek but no sound could rise through her throat.

At first, the garage owner was not particularly eager to help.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, wiping greasy, oil-stained hands on an equally filthy rag. “You want to know something about Michael O’Connell? Tell me why.”

“I’m a writer,” I said. “He figures in a book I’m working on.”

“O’Connell? In a book?” The question was followed by a short burst of forced laughter. “Must be some sort of crime story.”

“That’s right. It’s some sort. I’d appreciate any help.”

“We get fifty bucks an hour here to fix your car. How much time do you think you’re gonna need?”

“That depends on how much you can tell me.”

He snorted. “Well, that depends then on what it is you want to know. I worked side by side with O’Connell the entire time he was employed here. Of course, that was a couple of years back, and I haven’t seen him in a long time. That’s a good thing. But, hell, I was the one that gave him his job, so I could tell you some stuff. But then, I could also be fixing the transmission on this Chevy, too, you get what I mean?”

We had circled around my question, and I thought we would find ourselves nowhere in a couple of minutes. So I reached into my back pocket, grabbed my wallet, and rapidly counted out $100. I put this down on the counter in front of where I was standing. “Just the truth,” I said. “And nothing that you don’t know firsthand.”

The man at the garage eyed the money. “About that son of a bitch, sure.” He reached out his hand, and like some hard-bitten character in a million Hollywood potboiler movies, I placed my palm down on the money, holding it on the counter. The mechanic grinned, showing white teeth with gaps.

“One question first,” the man said. “You know where O’Connell is now?”

“No. Not yet. But I’m going to find him sooner or later. Why?”

“He’s not the sort of guy I necessarily want to piss off. Come looking for me with questions of his own. Like why I talked with you in the first place. He’s not someone you would want asking you those types of questions. And unhappy about it, too.”

“I’ll keep this conversation confidential.”

“Those are big, fine words. But how do I know, Mr. Writer, that you’ll do what you say?”

“I guess that’s the chance you’re going to take.”

He shook his head, but at the same time eyed the money. “Bad odds. Especially where that guy is involved. Wouldn’t want to be trading peace of mind for a lousy hundred bucks.” He took a moment, muttered, “Screw it,” under his breath, then shrugged. “Michael O’Connell. He worked here for about a year, and after about two minutes I made damn sure that he worked the same shift that I did. I didn’t much want him stealing me blind. He was the smartest bastard that ever changed some spark plugs in here, that’s for damn certain. And very cool, too, about how he stole money. Mean and charming as hell, all at the same time, if you can imagine it. Like you would hardly know it when you got taken. Most of the guys that I hire to pump gas in this place are either college kids trying to make a little extra money, or guys that couldn’t pass one of the mechanics certification courses at the big dealerships, so they end up here, instead. Either they’re too young to know how to steal or too dumb. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t answer that question, but took a long look at the gas station owner. He was probably close to my own age, but too much time underneath a car in the summer heat and winter frost had given him creases around the eyes and at the corners of his face. Smoking, too, hadn’t helped, and he took the moment to stick a cigarette between his lips, ignoring his own NO SMOKING sign prominently displayed on the back wall. He had a way of speaking directly toward me, but twisting his head slightly, so that it seemed as if whatever he said came out sideways.

“So, he started working here…”

“Yeah. He worked here, but he wasn’t really working here, you get my drift?”

“No. I don’t.”

The gas station owner rolled his eyes. “O.C. put in the hours. But fixing old carbs and doing inspections wasn’t really his thing. Not exactly where he figured his future lay.”

“What was?”

“Well, replacing a perfectly good fuel pump with a rebuilt one was. Then selling the good one and pocketing the difference. Taking an extra twenty bucks in cash from whoever walked in to make sure some old clunker passed its Massachusetts State emission test was another. Whacking a front ball joint with a hammer and then telling some Boston College kid they needed a new set of brakes and an alignment was.”

“A scam artist?”

The mechanic smiled. “That was it. But you’re just scratching the surface with O’Connell.”

“Okay, what else?”

“He took computer courses at night, and he was into every damn thing you could do with a laptop. The boy was a regular fountain of knowledge. Credit-card fraud. Identity theft. Double billing. Telephone cons, you name it, he had a handle on it. And in his spare time, he used to scan every damn website, newspaper, magazine, whatever, looking for new ways of stealing. He used to keep folders filled with clippings, just to keep himself up-to-date. You know what he used to say?”

“What?”

“You don’t have to kill someone to kill them. But if you really want to, you can. And, if you really know what you’re doing, ain’t nobody going to catch up with you. Not ever.”

I wrote that down.

When the gas station owner saw my pencil scratching across the notepad, he smiled, and he reached out and took the money off the counter. I let him pocket the $100. “You know what the damn stupidest thing was?”

“Okay, what?”

“You’d think that a guy like this would be looking for some big score. Trying to find a way to get rich. But that wasn’t exactly it, with O’Connell.”

“What was it, then?”

“He wanted to be perfect. It was like he wanted to be great. But he wanted to be anonymous, too.”

“Small-time?” I asked.

“No, you’re wrong. He knew he was going to be big. Ambition. He was strung out on it, like it was some sort of drug. You know what it’s like to be around some guy who’s just like an addict, but it ain’t cocaine up the nose or heroin filling up his veins? He was drunk all the time with all sorts of plans. Always getting ready for the big deal. Like it was just waiting for him out there somewhere and he was closing in on it. Working here, whatever he did, it was just a way of passing time, filling in the blanks, all along the path. But it wasn’t exactly money or fame he was interested in. It was something else.”

“You parted ways?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to end up getting used whenever the hell he figured out what he was going to do. But someday he was going to take down something. You know what they say, ‘The end justifies the means.’ Well, that was O’Connell. Like I say, the boy had big ideas.”

“But you don’t know-”

“Don’t know nothing about what happened to him. Saw enough, though, to keep me pretty scared.”

I looked at the mechanic. Scared didn’t seem as if it would normally be a part of his vocabulary. “I don’t get it,” I said. “He scared you?”

The garage owner took a long drag of his cigarette and let smoke curl up around his head. “You ever meet somebody that’s always doing something different from what he’s doing? I don’t know, maybe that don’t make sense, but that was O’Connell. And when you called him on it, when you called him on anything, he would look at you with this way where he just stared right like you weren’t there, and he was taking down something about you and putting it somewhere, because someday he was going to find a way to use it against you.”

“Against you?”

“One way or the other. He was just the sort of man, you just didn’t naturally want to get in his path. Stand to the side a bit, that would be okay. But get in his way, or get in the way of what he wanted…well, that would be something you’d want to avoid.”

“He was violent?”

“He was whatever he needed to be. Maybe that was what was so scary about him.”

The man took another deep, deadly inhale of the smoke. I didn’t ask another question, but he added, “You know, Mr. Writer man, here’s a story. Once about ten years ago, I was working here real late, you know, two, three in the morning, two kids come in, next thing I know, I’ve got a big, shiny steel nine-millimeter stuck up in my face, and one kid is yelling ‘Motherfucker this’ and ‘Cocksucker that’ and a whole lot of ‘I’m gonna bust a cap in your face, old man’ type bullshit, and I thought, truly and honestly, that was going to be it, that he was going to do it, while his goddamn partner cleaned out the register, and I ain’t particularly religious, but I was muttering every Our Father and Hail Mary I could think of, ’cause this was the end, no doubt about it. Then the two kids took off, with hardly a word, left me laying on the floor behind the counter needing a change of underwear. You get the picture?”

I nodded. “Not pleasant.”

“No, sir. Not pleasant at all.” He smiled and shook his head.

“But what did O’Connell have to do with that?”

The man shook his head slowly and exhaled.

“Nothing,” he said carefully. “Not a single damn thing. Except this: Every time I ever talked to Michael O’Connell and he didn’t say nothing back, just listened and looked right at me that way he had, it reminded me of looking into that black hole of that kid’s pistol. Same feeling exactly. There weren’t no time I talked with him that I didn’t wonder if what I was saying meant I was gonna die.”