The Heaven Stone Page 9

  I circumnavigated several blocks then drove back to the office. I eased into the lot and stowed the car behind Lenzi’s Catering and S & N Cab. As I shut off the motor I automatically scanned what I could see of the lot behind me in the rearview. A few weak bulbs mounted on the building wall painted the rutted pavement and old brick with splotchy light. But it was enough.

  Inconspicuous as the QE II at a fish pier, the Lincoln was backed into a fence that bordered the canal. I thought I could make out the shadowed driver behind the steering wheel. There was no front tag to be seen, which meant the car was Mass-registered. I considered getting out of there, betting that the Bobcat could smoke the big car in the downtown maze. I didn’t move. Whoever it was back there was patient. He had returned here on the chance that I would too. He would catch up sooner or later.

  Taking it slow, as if I had not seen a thing, I climbed out. My hand wanted to shake a little as I poked the key into the slot and locked the door. My shadow fell across the asphalt as big as I wished I were. Juiced with adrenaline, I turned and bolted toward the Lincoln.

  The driver had been lulled for a few seconds, but now he shoved open his door, and I saw the big sloping head, the heavy shoulders as he turned to climb out, and I made the call.

  I hit his door flat-palmed and shoved it back, jamming him in. The fist he threw over the top of the open window frame had iron in it and struck sparks as it skated across my skull. The interior lights strobed with the uncertain forces on either side of the door, and I had only a winking impression of the man’s face, but it was enough. I got a dizzy sensation of peering back through the mists of time. The man was brutish and jut-jawed, with a thatch of dark hair over an inch-high forehead, beneath which glinted tiny eyes as cold as stones.

  That was all the character study I had time for. Someone was behind me. I swung around to see who, but what I saw instead was a blaze of light, as if a flashbulb had gone off in my eyes. Then the rutted alley rose to meet me.

  14

  GROGGILY I BLINKED the world into focus. I was in the back seat of the Lincoln, going east on 133. The courtesy lights in the doors were on. The caveman was at the wheel. The little guy who owned the last face I remember seeing sat in the back with me, a block away in the opposite corner. He had on a wide-shouldered sportcoat with lapels you could hide a violin behind. He had a mashed beak and shiny scar tissue at the hairline. He hadn’t gotten that face sitting in an office. A name started coming to me now—Oscar something. Not de la Renta. He had been a jockey. I thought I knew something else too, but I could not snatch it.

  My headache was up around eight on the Excedrin scale. I fingered the back of my skull to see if any gray matter had oozed out, but surprisingly there was only a small bump.

  “Hey, you started the hand jive,” Oscar said. His voice was a gnarly sound, like chicken bones in a Disposall. With a face and clothes like that, what did I expect? “If you’da been at your crib or your office in the first place, none of this woulda happened.”

  Not Handlin, either, or the little gold guy they handed out in Hollywood.

  “But you weren’t either place, so we said the hell with it. We was goin’ for a drink, when I spot your shitbox in front of the gook joint. You got cute by the cop station, yeah, but I figured you’d show back at your office—beats spendin’ time in that dump you live in.”

  “Him I saw,” I said, nodding at the driver. “Where were you?”

  He grinned. “Drainin’ the dragon. Lucky for you. He woulda used his fists, not a sap.”

  I knew where the pain without the big knot had come from. Maybe I had got the better deal at that. The guy hunched at the wheel gave me serious doubts about human evolution. Hair thatched down his neck into his shirt. I could not see much face in the rearview except for a rectangle of reflected light that lay across it like an inverse burglar’s mask. I remembered the B.C. brow and the stony eyes. He drove the Lincoln with mitts clamped at ten and two on the wheel, never moving them, tilting his whole torso left or right when he made a turn. He didn’t have to make many. We kept on 133. I tried to grab the other thing Oscar reminded me of, but couldn’t.

  “Well,” I said, shifting position to get more comfortable, “the night’s young. Where to?”

  Oscar pinched at his nose and looked out.

  “Not even a hint?”

  Silence.

  “You still a member of the horsey set?” I asked.

  It was the one-sided conversation dentists get good at. I didn’t mind; it kept my mind off the pain enveloping it.

  “I’m only going to say this once,” I said, “I don’t fool around on the first date.”

  Oscar turned to me. “Shut it.”

  After awhile we crossed I-93 and passed the Sheraton Rolling Green hotel, and soon B.C. slowed the Lincoln and bulldogged it left onto a road that went through moonlit woods for a half mile before it opened into meadow. A shimmer of mist hung over the high grass, and fireflies winked in it. The road was a cul-de-sac, empty except for a single large house which sat on a turnaround at the end. It was of a modern design, jutting and glassy, ringed with small ground-lights which, in the kilowatt glow flooding out from the house, seemed redundant.

  We pulled into a driveway. Just before B.C. killed the headlights, I saw a three-bay garage at the end. In the middle drive, as distinctly sleek as a hundred-thousand-dollar Dumpster, sat a royal blue Rolls. That’s what reminded me of what I had forgotten before … and told me where we were.

  Oscar motioned me out. We walked up a flagstone path toward the house. It was certainly a different piece of heaven than any I had been in lately. The air bore the spice of roses, and except for the snitch of sprinklers showering a side lawn, the only sound was the whip-poor-will of a nighthawk.

  My guide opened the front door of the house, and we stepped into a broad atrium with a gleaming marble floor. Whole trees grew out of copper planters you could have cooked missionaries in.

  “It’s not much,” I said, “but it’s home.”

  Oscar led me across the foyer to a room at the left. It was lit by little spots washing over large, gilt-framed paintings that would have been old when Whistler was still playing at his mother’s knee. They made a nice contrast with the modernity evident everywhere else—like the entertainment center hogging the wall we had come through. I would not have blinked to see a chorus line come legging out, waving top hats and singing. Instead, a glass door at the back slid open and Joel Castle stepped in.

  He was in a Speedo swimsuit, a towel slung around his neck, his muscular chest pebbled with droplets of water. His hair was wet, and in the muted light it sprang in little corkscrews from his head like brass shavings.

  “What took you?” he asked Oscar.

  “He wasn’t in the first time, Mr. C. So what happens? We spot him, right? We wanna talk. Next thing you know, he gets cute, we hadda tag him—but he started it.”

  Castle frowned. Stepping past Oscar with no further acknowledgment, he looked at me with concern. “Are you all right?”

  “Never better. In a dark alley,” I said, “some guy who looks like he takes heartworm pills comes at you, you don’t stand around exchanging business cards.”

  Now he gave me the frown, then turned to his man. “Get out. I’ll talk to you later.” Oscar left as quietly as a cat. “I apologize for that,” Castle said. “Sit down. Drink?”

  “Water.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Perrier then.” When someone else is buying, go top shelf.

  At the gadget wall he poked buttons, and piano music began issuing into the room, as cool and soft as meadow mist. Bill Evans, if I had to guess. I found my way into an armchair of chrome and nubbled gray fabric, before which was a low table spread with copies of GQ and Antiques. Castle tonged rocks into a pair of crystal glasses, poured sparkling water into one and scotch into the other. Cutty Sark. He handed me the water. I wondered if Lauren was here in the house, but somehow I knew she wasn’t. “Long wh
ile,” Castle said. “Cheerios.”

  “Wheaties.”

  It had been a long while. I had not remembered that toast until just that moment. The last time we used it we had been sitting in a graveyard drinking Harvard Ale, too young to be drinking it in a bar.

  “I’ll be right back,” Castle said and went out.

  Joel Castle and I had known each other in that long-ago fifteenth summer that screenwriters envision in perpetual soft focus. Ours was a grittier light, that of old Lowell, and we were just hanging out and just avoiding trouble. He was Joey Costello then, with a dentist for an old man and more pocket money than the families of the rest of us had in the bank combined. And money was where he got his ideas: cruising up to Hampton Beach in his dad’s Eldy ragtop and paying some stewbum to buy the beer, or to Mass. Ave. in Roxbury where the hookers on the street corner fooled with us, knowing we were just kids wasting their time and ours. But time was something we’d had a lot of then.

  When we hit high school, his new friends were people I did not need to know, people for whom kicks was whiskey and the first marijuana I’d ever heard of. We drifted apart, and a few years later, while Costello was pledging Kappa Sig, I was invited to Uncle Sam’s G.I. party. Joey beat the draft the same way Joe Namath had: with knees you could only play football on.

  Later I found out that higher ed had lasted only two terms before he was out the door, on the streets, bouncing. Always his old man’s net was there though, to catch him when he bounced too far. In the end, having had the luxury of being a screwup ten years longer than most people, he settled into legitimacy. He took his patrimony in a lump sum. The name got changed to Castle, now appearing on marquees all over eastern Mass as Castle Cleen Dry Cleaners, in by nine, out by five, all work guaranteed spotless. It had worked for him. Now his friends were congressmen and Boston TV personalities and pro athletes. Not gumshoes working out of their hats. I hadn’t had a drink with him in a lot of years. The Harvard brewery had turned belly up two decades ago, and now time was something he measured on the slim gold Daniel Mink watch on his tanned wrist.

  “Better get to it,” I said when he reappeared, freshened and wearing a silk robe in the same blue as the Rolls outside. “Nostalgia only goes so far.”

  “Still the joker.” But he didn’t smile. “I spoke with Lauren today. She was pretty upset by the conversation you two had the other evening.”

  “She seemed pretty happy through most of it.”

  He sat opposite me. “It was her idea to see you. I figure you’re owed no special treatment. All’s fair. But she insisted on telling you.” His shoulders rose and fell under the blue silk. “I’m happy when she’s happy.”

  “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

  “I wanted us to talk.”

  “Something wrong with the telephone?”

  “I don’t like dealing with people’s tape machines. They’re dehumanizing.”

  “I was thinking something like that about B.C. and Oscar.”

  “They’re my chauffeur and my personal assistant.”

  “That’s like calling brass knuckles a gum massager.”

  Joey frowned. “He used brass knuckles?”

  “A sap.”

  That relieved him a little. Possession of knucks is higher on the crime scale; my head did not make the distinction, though.

  “That’s the difference between an ex-jockey and an ex-boxer,” he said.

  “And here I thought it had something to do with their shorts.”

  Castle wasn’t amused. “They were only supposed to pick you up. I apologized already. Are you going to press charges?”

  I made a sour face and he nodded thanks. “Anyway, we’re not here to discuss me or my employees. It’s Lauren I’m concerned with, and in spite of it all, I think you are too.”

  I swallowed fizzy water from cut crystal. In the dark meadow beyond the glass walls, fireflies glowed, or maybe it was the reflection of LEDs from all the hi-fi gear. “I guess I don’t get something,” I said, setting the glass down on Jeff Goldblum’s face on the cover of GQ.

  “What’s that?”

  “Beyond the obvious—why Lauren?” I slid my gaze around the big room, the bolted beam ceiling, the accent-lighted paintings, the carpets, back to the diamond chips that caught the light and winked like stars in the little gold planetarium on his wrist. “Why not a starlet, or a model, some lollipop who fits the picture you’ve painted yourself into?”

  He said, “You don’t get it, do you.”

  “Clue me, I’m slow.”

  His brown eyes, which had stayed as cool as coat buttons, took the room tour like mine just had. “I’ve been there,” he said. “That stuff’s fantasy. I want for real.”

  What was I going to say? That Lauren wasn’t?

  “When I met her,” he said, “it was a New Year’s Eve dinner party, a quiet evening. She was down. The hostess is a mutual friend, thought people might cheer Lauren. It didn’t work.”

  I could credit what he was saying. Lauren and I had talked before the holidays, so I knew she was feeling the split. There was no Santa Claus for either of us last winter, but she insisted that we keep it that way.

  Castle said, “I guess at first it was a challenge to try to get her out of her depression. Not just that, that sounds impersonal. Obviously I was attracted to her. She’s beautiful. We talked several times on the phone, finally she consented to meet me for dinner. She wasn’t impressed. I knew that first night I’d never have to buy her.”

  “You couldn’t,” I said.

  He nodded. “I’m tired of women who if you drove up in a Ford wouldn’t give you the time of day, but they see a big car, they’re pulling your fly down.” He tasted his scotch. “Anyway, it was all on the up and up, and as winter started to fade, her spirits began to lift. I don’t know that it was even me. It was just a good feeling to be with her as she came back up. I’d never really felt that … empathy before. I’m a late learner, Alex, you know that.”

  I peered at Jeff Goldblum through the bottom of the glass. He looked good with a monocle. “Maybe we both are,” I said.

  “Anyway, by then I’d fallen in love with her.”

  “Even though she was still married.”

  “Wake up, Rasmussen. I know how things stand.” He waved a hand. “There was no bullshit. It happened. For her too.”

  I had to take that one. Lauren had changed: she was happier.

  “Now I’m ready,” Castle said. “For what everyone else has had right along, I’m ready.” He drained his glass and, ignoring the cork coaster, set it on the table with a clack. I hoped it would leave a ring. He said, “I don’t want to see her caught in the middle of anything ugly.”

  Though I had done a lot of it in my time, I still hated losing. “What if I said no to her?”

  “Maybe I’d try to persuade you to say yes.”

  “Send along the tag team?”

  “How about an offer of something you could use.”

  He had brass, I had to give him that. It was hard not to like Castle, golden boy that he was, but I had a pretty good head start, and an ache in the back of my neck that was trying to root down to my feet. I stood up. “You can hang onto your checkbook. The papers are already in the works.”

  He rose too. His hair had dried in little licks and points like a laurel wreath cast in bronze. “Would you care for a real drink—a nightcap?”

  Just like that. Business taken care of, we were friends now. A half-dozen smart remarks turned to sand on my tongue. “A ride to the city will do.”

  The chauffeur took me. The silence all the way back to Lowell was welcome.

  15

  IT WAS LATE to be at the office, but I was not going to sleep for awhile. I adjusted the gooseneck lamp. Using the edge of the desk, I tore several sheets of paper into quarters. The desk was good for that. It had belonged to the Army recruiter across the street. I used to see him standing in there behind the posters in his dress greens, looking out through the
plate glass in the wistful way barbers used to in the sixties. Then the Rambo-Ronbo duo made war glamorous again and suddenly every lonely kid who had ever mooned over the Daisy air rifles on the backs of comic books and felt he had something to prove joined up. The government took an old aircraft carrier out of mothballs for the recruiter’s new desk, and I bought this and the three-drawer file cabinet as a twofer, both the wishful brain-gray that’s big in public offices. It was right for this office too. And a good straightedge to boot.

  A different man would have been in Atlanta right then, or Tampa, or Tombstone, working on the foundation of a new life with his family. He’d be using the late hour to address envelopes so he could get his résumé off in the morning’s mail to headhunters and human resource managers. Finally he would tiptoe in to peer at his sleeping babes before kissing his wife good night and snuggling up in the darkness, hanging on in that posture which is like a fetal curl, praying there were no hairline cracks in the foundation.

  I took my paper slips and began to write bits of what I knew about the Tran case on each one. It was a lot briefer task than writing what I didn’t know. I dealt them into small piles by category across the naked desktop.

  Sometimes making lists works, or free-associating into a tape recorder. Occasionally I get an idea while I’m sweating out a five-mile run. Tonight I played solitaire. For suits I had: Tran as seen by others; details of the murder; Tran’s jobs; the person the Azar woman saw crossing Tran’s yard; drugs.

  On another slip of paper I wrote: “Suoheang Khoy.”

  I gathered the hands and reshuffled them, added a few cards and dealt again.

  The murder details pile was both the biggest and the easiest to put aside. Since the police investigation was ongoing, physical evidence was their domain. It was possible they had held out on me in other ways, and I had no way of knowing that. Likewise, the piles relating to Tran’s jobs and acquaintances were not tricky. He had been a hard worker and was, by most accounts, amiable and competent.