I looked at Eric, his hand on Diandra’s, and tried to gauge their relationship. I’d never known him to date a woman and always assumed he was gay. Whether true or not, I’d known him for ten years and he’d never mentioned a son.
“Who’s Jason’s father?” I said.
“What? Why?”
“When a child’s involved in a threat,” Angie said, “we have to consider custody issues.”
Diandra and Eric shook their heads simultaneously.
“Diandra’s been divorced almost twenty years,” Eric said. “Her ex-husband is friendly but distant with Jason.”
“I need his name,” I said.
“Stanley Timpson,” Diandra said.
“Suffolk County District Attorney Stan Timpson?”
She nodded.
“Doctor Warren,” Angie said, “since your ex-husband
is the most powerful law enforcement officer in the Commonwealth, we’d have to assume that—”
“No.” Diandra shook her head. “Most people don’t even know we were married. He has a second wife, three other children, and his contact with Jason and me is minimal. Believe me, this has nothing to do with Stan.”
I looked at Eric.
“I’d have to agree,” he said. “Jason has taken Diandra’s name, not Stan’s, and he has almost no contact with his father outside of a birthday phone call or Christmas card.”
“Will you help me?” Diandra said.
Angie and I looked at each other. Hanging out in the same zip code as people like Kevin Hurlihy and his boss, Jack Rouse, isn’t something either Angie or I consider healthy. Now we were being asked to cruise right up to their dinner tables and ask them to stop bothering our client. What fun. If we took Diandra Warren’s case, it would go down as one of the more patently suicidal decisions we’d ever made.
Angie read my mind. “What,” she said, “you want to live forever?”
2
As we left Lewis Wharf and walked up Commercial, the schizophrenic New England autumn had turned an ugly morning into a glorious afternoon. When I woke up, a breeze so chilly and mean it seemed the exhalation of a Puritan god was hissing through the cracks under my windows. The sky was hard and pale as baseball leather, and people walking to their cars on the avenue were hunched into thick jackets and oversized sweaters, breath steaming around their faces.
By the time I left my apartment, the temperature had risen into the high forties, and the muted sun, trying to push through the sheet of hard sky, looked like an orange trapped just beneath the surface of a frozen pond.
Walking up Lewis Wharf toward Diandra Warren’s apartment, I’d removed my jacket as the sun finally broke through, and now as we drove back to the neighborhood, the mercury hovered in the high sixties.
We drove past Copp’s Hill, and the warm breeze sweeping off the harbor rustled the trees overlooking the hill and several handfuls of burnished red leaves crested the slate headstones and fluttered down onto the grass. On our right, the stretch of wharfs and docks glinted under the sun, and to our left the brown, red, and off-white brick of the North End hinted of tile floors and old open doorways and the smells of thick sauces and garlic and freshly baked bread.
“Can’t hate the city on a day like this,” Angie said.
“Impossible.”
She grasped the back of her thick hair with one hand and twisted it into a makeshift ponytail, tilting her head toward the open window to catch the sun on her face and neck. Watching her with her eyes closed and a small grin on her face, I was almost prepared to believe that she was completely healthy.
But she wasn’t. After she left her husband, Phil, left him in a bloody heap retching off her front porch, payment for having tried to batter her body one time too many, Angie passed the winter in the mist of an increasingly short attention span and a dating ritual which left a succession of males scratching their heads as she abandoned them without notice and moved on to the next.
Since I’ve never been a paragon of moral virtue, I couldn’t say much to her without sounding like a hypocrite, and by early spring she seemed to have bottomed out. She quit bringing warm bodies home and started to participate fully in case work again, even fixed up her apartment a bit, which for Angie meant she cleaned the oven and bought a broom. But she wasn’t whole, not like she used to be.
She was quieter, less cocky. She’d call or drop by my apartment at the oddest hours to talk about the day we just shared. She also claimed she hadn’t seen Phil in months, but for some reason I couldn’t fully explain, I didn’t believe her.
This was all compounded by the fact that for only the second time in all the years we’ve known each other, I couldn’t always be there for her at a moment’s notice. Since July, when I met Grace Cole, I’d been spending whole days and nights, sometimes full weekends, with her whenever we could get time together. Occasionally I’m also enlisted into babysitting duty for Grace’s daughter, Mae, and so I’m often beyond the reach of my partner except in the case of an absolute emergency. It wasn’t something either of us ever really prepared for, since as Angie once put it: “There’s a better chance of seeing a black guy in a Woody Allen movie than seeing Patrick in a serious relationship.”
She caught me watching her at a light, opened her eyes fully and looked at me with a tiny smile playing on her lips. “Worrying about me again, Kenzie?”
My partner the psychic.
“Just checking you out, Gennaro. Purely sexist, nothing more.”
“I know you, Patrick.” She leaned back from the window. “You’re still playing big brother.”
“And?”
“And,” she said, running the backs of her fingers along my cheek, “it’s time for you to stop.”
I lifted a strand of hair out of her eye, just before the light turned green. “No,” I said.
We stopped inside her house long enough for her to change into a pair of cut-off denim shorts and for me to take two bottles of Rolling Rock from her fridge. Then we sat out on her back porch listening to her neighbor’s over-starched shirts crack and snap in the breeze and enjoyed the day.
She leaned back on her elbows, stretched her legs out in front of her. “So, we have a case suddenly.”
“We do,” I said, glancing at her smooth olive legs and faded denim cut-offs. There might not be much good in this world, but show me anyone who has a bad thing to say about denim cut-offs and I’ll show you a lunatic.