"Especially when your stocks are in the gutter," Anderson said.
I thought of Bishop's Gatsbyesque rise out of Brooklyn, all the distance he had put between himself and the poverty and hunger he had faced as a child. If his cash crunch made him feel he was headed back there, he might do anything to keep his inflated sense of himself alive-even kill Brooke and Tess. He might even convince himself that their lives would have been worthless with a disgraced, bankrupted father. Why not sacrifice them to the greater good, let their blood transfuse the rest of the family?
Some people do that kind of strange calculus when they feel besieged, whether the panic is rational or not. I once testified at the trial of a man who had murdered his wife because, he said, she was overly domineering toward him and the couple's two daughters. He believed they would all be better off without her, even if it meant his spending his life in prison. After pretending to leave for work one day, he circled back home and stabbed her thirty-six times. He went grocery shopping as she lay bleeding and unconscious on their bed. He filled the refrigerator and tidied up his kids' rooms. He wanted them to feel a little more organized amidst the impending chaos-his arrest, his wife's funeral, his trial. Then he put on a fresh shirt and pair of slacks, called the police, and confessed what he had done.
A nineteen-year-old man I evaluated was upset that his cousin-a South Boston gang member who disliked blacks-had been stricken with leukemia. To fuel the cousin's recovery, he approached a fourteen-year-old black boy in Roxbury and emptied four bullets into his chest. "I was sort of doing what my cousin would do, kind of like that might bring him back," the man told me.
Strange calculus, indeed. And none of it surprises me, anymore-certainly not after what 1 was to learn about the Bishops.
Anderson and I made it to the Brant Point Racket Club just after 2:00 p.m. There was enough activity in the place that we attracted little attention as we located Garret's locker.
I had a moment of trepidation after North put the key in the lock. "Hold on," I said.
Anderson stopped and looked at me. "What?"
"We're following Garret's road map without a thought. Any chance this thing could be rigged?" I said.
Anderson looked at me askance. "Like, with explosives?"
I shrugged.
"I guess there's a chance." He turned the key and pulled the door open, partway. "I think it's slim." He grinned. "You've been hanging with the paranoids too long. You need to take some time when this is over."
"No kidding," I said. But I didn't think the symptoms of my patients at MGH were rubbing off on me. More likely, the vector was my feeling deceived by Julia, my worry over what else might be hidden in her closet.
Garret's locker was a window on his soul. A single racket was angled against two walls of the lower compartment, but there were none of the accouterments favored by tennis fanatics-no lambskin glove, no athletic tape, no sweatbands, no Bolle glasses, not even a pair of sneakers. The back wall of the lower compartment was wallpapered with very competent black-and-white photographs of Nantucket. There were shots of the harbor, the Commons, dunes, beach.
"The kid can use a camera, if these are his work," Anderson said, admiring the images.
"They're beautiful," I said. I lingered on the photographs for several seconds, then my gaze moved to the locker's upper compartment and the dozen or more old books haphazardly stacked there-works by Kafka, J. D. Salinger, Steinbeck.
Anderson took out a paper bag and used it to cover his hand. A plastic bag might cling to the bottle and rub away fingerprints. He glanced at the books. "Garret loves the classics," he said.
"There are worse escapes than photography and literature," I said, thinking of my own.
He reached past the books to the back, right-hand corner of the top shelf, where Garret had said the nortriptyline bottle would be hidden in a tennis ball can.
I realized we might be on the brink of evidence that would help exonerate Billy. The excitement of that possibility dulled the pain in my back, at least for the moment. Maybe it was my own strange calculus, but I felt as if I had the chance to discharge a debt I had been carrying for years-what I owed Billy Fisk and the cosmos and, ultimately, myself for losing that decent young man to suicide. And no doubt I felt that another debt was about to be satisfied. If Win Bishop were ultimately exposed as a murderer, part of me would feel I had paid back my father what I owed him: trial, conviction, and sentencing for stealing my boyhood.
"Got it," Anderson said, bringing down the tennis ball can. He used a piece of tissue to open the lid, then dumped the nortriptyline bottle-one of those typical orange-brown plastic affairs-into his bagged hand. He turned the bag inside out, securing the bottle inside it. "If Win's fingerprints are all over this, and Billy's aren't," he said, "the old man will wonder a long time why he didn't toss this over the cliffs." He smiled. "You were heading to Boston, anyhow. Why don't we bring the bottle to the State Police crime laboratory? I could grab prints off it right at the station, but I'd rather get it done by the experts."
Anderson arranged for a chopper to fly us directly to the crime lab in Boston. I was glad to be headed in Julia's direction-and fast-not only to confront her about the letter Claire had shown us, but also to protect her from Darwin, who would have arrived in Boston hours earlier. The latter motivation was the stronger of the two. Even with her shining more brightly as a suspect, even with my new doubts about what, if anything, our "love" really meant to her, I felt moved to rescue her. She was the most powerfully seductive woman I had ever met.
While we were in flight, Anderson radioed the New York City Police Department to arrange a computer transfer of Bishop's fingerprints, first logged when he was arrested during 1980 for the restraining order violation. We didn't expect Darwin to deny handling the prescription bottle, but we didn't want to take any chances with documentation; evidence can disappear at the worst possible moments, especially evidence against an influential suspect.
Billy's prints had been stored by the U.S. Department of Immigration and were already part of the investigation file. Anderson was carrying a set with him.
We met with Art Fields, director of the crime lab, who agreed to let Anderson and me watch the testing. Fields is a short, bulky man of about sixty, with bushy black eyebrows and a permanent mischievous smile that looks as if he's just heard a witty, off-color anecdote. "What are we looking for?" he asked Anderson.
"The main question is whether Billy Bishop's prints are on the bottle," Anderson said. "If not, then one big piece of evidence points away from him as a suspect."
"Is this kid slow, or something?" Fields said. "Mentally, I mean."
"No," I said. "He's extremely bright."
"He couldn't think to wear gloves?" Fields asked.
"Of course he could," Anderson said, "but his prints are all over the crime scene: the window and window frame he boosted himself through, the twins' room and cribs, even the antique desk he stole five grand out of. He left a note, too. It starts to stretch the imagination to think that his only effort to avoid detection would be slipping on a pair of gloves when he poisoned the baby."
"I don't think it would stretch Captain O'Donnell’s imagination," Fields said. "He's certain the boy is guilty. And he's pretty sharp."
"Certainly seems to be," Anderson agreed, obviously wanting to avoid a conflict.
Fields smiled even more widely than usual. "Very political of you," he said to Anderson. "Personally, I can't stand the fucker."
Anderson chuckled. "That makes two of us," he said. He looked at me. "Maybe, three."
"What bothers you about O'Donnell?" I asked Fields.
"I'm a pathologist, not a prosecutor," he said. "I go after facts, not any particular slant on them. I don't get convinced that blood just has to be on a piece of clothing. If I find it, I find it. If I don't, I don't."