I said, “He’s a retired cop, Boston PD. I’m visiting from Boston.” There wasn’t a lie in either sentence.
The same cop put his hand on my shoulder and said, “There was an accident this morning —”
Before he could finish, the front door opened one more time. This time, a paramedic backed out lugging a stretcher, which seemed to take forever getting through the door. They came slowly down the steps. I strained my eyes. There on the stretcher was Mrs. Bob Walters, her eyes open and blinking, her lips moving, nothing more than incoherent blather coming from her mouth. I hung my head in sadness — for Bob Walters, for the victims he couldn’t help in Boston, and yeah, a little bit for this reporter who didn’t get the full benefit of his knowledge.
The young cop was still talking. “He was very frail, as I’m sure you know. He fell down the stairs sometime this morning. The mailman saw him through the front door on his daily delivery and called 911. By the time we got here, he was dead.”
Fell down the front stairs.
I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year. That’s what Walters had said to me less than two hours before. He didn’t suddenly get out of bed and try his luck hobbling around the house. He wasn’t anywhere near the stairs under his own power. He didn’t fall by accident.
And I also knew something else: his wife had been too drunk to get herself upstairs, drag him out of bed, and push him. She probably wanted to do just that. She probably spent entire days dreaming of this scenario. But it didn’t happen like that, not here, not this morning.
Of course, I couldn’t tell the cops any of this. If I had, they probably would have thought I was some sort of kook — the word that Mac Foley had used to describe the Phantom Fiend. And if they didn’t, they would have wanted me to go downtown to answer questions, and as anyone who knows anything about Vegas knows to their core, you never want to go downtown. Especially me, especially now, when I needed to get back east to deal with the new case of Kimberly May.
So I solemnly nodded to the young cops and told them thanks. I got back in the car and carefully navigated around the emergency vehicles and the coroner’s van, which was also pulling out. I thought of Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens and Kimberly May, and wondered what their lives were like before they didn’t have them anymore. I thought of that poor man, Joshua Carpenter, mourning his wife in the Public Garden, wrong time, wrong place, and now he too was dead. And Bob Walters, just an old retiree with a lot of regrets and a reservoir of knowledge that he had been waiting forty years to share. I got almost all of it, but not enough.
I drove off toward the airport. Success and failure seemed inextricably intertwined, as if good and bad were forever linked. I wondered if most of life was like that, and feared that maybe it was. I had to get back to Boston to figure out how to separate the two.
19
I was in San Francisco International Airport when I saw her. Specifically, I was sprawled across a chair in one of those generic lounges with the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the departing and arriving planes, waiting for my connecting flight to Boston, because the only nonstop out of Vegas with any available seats was the red-eye, and civil people, it must be said, don’t fly on red-eyes. My shirt was untucked. My hair was mussed up. I had circles of worry and exhaustion under my sky-blue eyes. I had my cell phone plastered to my ear, listening to Vinny Mongillo explain that he had once again proven himself to be the world’s most tenacious and talented reporter by producing, in a mere three hours, Paul Vasco’s entire criminal record, his incarceration history, and, most notably, his most recent release date, which, not by coincidence, happened to be six months before. He also had Vasco’s current home address, a nugget of information he said would cost me dinner at a major Boston restaurant or, better yet, a private club, for him and the state bureaucrat who provided it. I couldn’t even imagine how much fun that would be.
When I was done with the requisite congratulations, promises, and thank-yous, Mongillo said, “Now let me tell you about Kimberly May.”
And that’s when I saw her, sauntering down the airy walkway amid a cluster of humanity that had apparently disembarked from the same plane and were heading for the exits and for wherever else after that — great hotels, bad motels, overseas flights, the warmth of home, the stone-cold reality of a failing marriage. Wherever. I noticed first the achingly familiar walk, the swivel of the hips, the fit of her jeans, the way her long brown hair swished back and forth. Then I saw the unmistakably beautiful shape of her face, the deep-set eyes, and the perfectly proportioned nose. All those people walking by, maybe a hundred a minute at least, and my eyes naturally fell on her. I swear to God, you could see the person you truly loved in a pitch-black room.
And not that I’d make too big a deal of this, but there must have been eighty people sitting in the waiting area for the flight to Boston, and out of all of us, her look naturally came to rest on me. So she came walking over, calm and casual, unflustered, as if I’d been her destination all along, like something prearranged, not in the slightest bit surprised to see me. She had an overnight bag slung over her shoulder and a computer satchel in her hand. She placed them both on the floor, sat down in the empty seat beside mine, and said in that somewhat husky voice, “Come here often?” And then she smiled that crinkle-eyed smile that I don’t think has ever fully left my thoughts, or, in my more honest moments, my hopes.
It was Elizabeth Riggs, a woman I once thought I’d marry and probably should have married, but never did, mostly because, I’ve come to convince myself, she came into my life at exactly the wrong time.
She knew her line was weak, and so did I, but I let her off the hook with the following pale little offering of my own: “Only when I’m flying.”
I remained slung across my chair, my neck supported by the top of the backrest. She reached out and touched the side of my face with her hand — no hesitation, no qualms, no forced display of formality. It’s just what came to mind or body, so it’s what she did.
Her touch, by the way, was warm and soft, casual yet luxurious, like a cashmere blanket flung across an aging couch. I wanted to wrap myself in it, to take shelter from the cruel world in it. Instead, I took her hand in mine, kissed it once, and placed it back against my cheek. Given how attractive she was, anyone who was watching, and there were probably more than a few people who were, would have assumed that we had been lovers for a long, long time. And in some odd way, they were right.
“So I get to the building about ten seconds ahead of the first screaming patrol car…”
That was Vinny again, his voice still coming into the forgotten phone that remained absently against my ear. I said, “That’s terrific. Call you back in a little while.”
I flipped the phone shut and said, “That was Vinny.”
She nodded, her gaze hanging on mine in a spell of silence. She said, “You look good.”
I didn’t.
“So do you,” I said.
She did.
Her hands were now resting on her thighs. I asked, “Where are you coming from?”
“LA. I was down there visiting a friend for a couple of days.”
A friend. There used to be a day not so long before that I knew every one of her friends and she knew every one of mine. Times, quite obviously, change, and a friend in this case could mean absolutely anything.
She asked, “Are you heading back to Boston?”
I nodded. We looked at each other again, undoubtedly both racking our overwhelmed brains for more banal questions.
They write songs about these kinds of encounters, particularly bad songs, actually. Wasn’t there an especially awful one about a pair of former lovers who ran into each other on Christmas Eve in a grocery store, or some similarly regrettable time and place, shuffling their feet in the frozen foods aisle as they tried to stem the flood of memories?