The Sleepless Read online

  ‘How’re you doing, Irving?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘Slow but sure,’ said the investigator, with an asthmatic wheeze in his voice. ‘We’ve found seven different clothing fibres so far, and enough hair to stuff a mattress. Plus candle wax, cigarette ash, nine cigarette butts, several needles and skewers, burned book-matches, and fish hooks.’

  Thomas nodded. The essence of cloves was beginning to make his eyes water, but his stomach was beginning to rebel against the stench of putrescence, and he didn’t dare to take the handkerchief away from his face. From under his shirt came an audible growl, and Irving looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Just hungry, that’s all,’ said Thomas. ‘I didn’t have any breakfast.’

  ‘Very wise,’ Irving replied. ‘The first thing I did when I got here was to hurl up three cups of coffee and a double order of scrambled eggs.’

  Thomas looked back at Kurylowicz and Kurylowicz said, ‘It’s okay, sir. I don’t have anything else to show you right now. You must have plenty of other stuff to be getting on with. I’ll prioritize this one, and have it on your desk as soon as I can.’

  There was a detectably patronizing edge in Kurylowicz’s voice. What kind of a homicide lieutenant couldn’t bear the smell of death? But Thomas was too relieved that he could go to worry about reprimanding him. And anyway, it would have been pretty damned ludicrous, trying to pull rank with a clove-filled handkerchief in front of his face.

  ‘All right, Kurylowicz. Good work. Sergeant Jahnke’s going to stick around in case you need anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ asked Kurylowicz.

  Thomas took the handkerchief away from his mouth, and took a breath in preparation to repeating himself. But the sickly-sweet smell that immediately filled up his nose and his lungs was so thick that he couldn’t say anything at all. He gave Kurylowicz a Columbo-like salute with his hand, and left the bedroom.

  ‘Everything all right, sir?’ Jimmy the patrolman called after him, as he hurried down the stairs.

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His mouth was flooded with warm, salty saliva, and his stomach was going into spasm.

  With his hand clamped over the lower part of his face, he walked at top speed through the hallway, glimpsing jumbled images of those vase-shaped Victorian nudes, and a hatstand, and his own white face in a mirror beside the door, like speak-no-evil being hotly pursued by hear-no-evil. He took the front steps three at a time, and then he was out on the sidewalk in the warm morning wind, taking one deep breath after another.

  Detective Jaworski had been talking to one of the patrolmen across the street. He came over and asked, solicitously, ‘Are you okay, lieutenant?’

  ‘No, I’m not okay,’ Thomas told him. ‘I’m very, very far from okay.’

  Detective Jaworski reached into his pocket and produced a new pack of Marlboro. ‘It’s the worst one I ever saw. Even worse than that family on Otis Street, you remember that one?’

  Thomas tried to light the cigarette that Detective Jaworski had given him, but couldn’t. Eventually Detective Jaworski steadied his hand for him, and he lit it, and took in a deep lungful of tobacco smoke.

  ‘You were lucky to puke,’ he said; and meant it.

  Detective Jaworski said, ‘All those scars. All those burns. What do you think, some kind of cult killing? Maybe Satanists, something like that?’

  Thomas glanced back at the house. ‘It’s still far too early to say. We have to find out who she is, first; and how she was tortured; and exactly how she died.’

  ‘You know what you said to me the first day I joined homicide?’ remarked Detective Jaworski. ‘You said that homicide was only another kind of theft; except that a murderer was stealing somebody’s time instead of their property.’

  ‘I said that?’

  ‘Sure. I thought it was such an incredible way of looking at it, that’s why I remembered it. You said, find that stolen time and you’ve found your murderer.’

  ‘I really said that?’

  ‘Sure,’ nodded Detective Jaworski, with an eager grin.

  ‘What did I mean by it?’ asked Thomas.

  Very slowly, the grin faded from Detective Jaworski’s face. ‘You meant – well, you meant – kind of like – if somebody takes that time, you know – and if you can find it again – well, you kind of – ‘

  Thomas laid a hand on Detective Jaworski’s shoulder.

  ‘You don’t know what it means, I don’t know what it means. If I ever talk such bullshit again, you have my permission to pour coffee down my shirt.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Detective Jaworski, amazed. Then, ‘Yes, sir. Whatever you say.’

  He went home at a quarter past three. He knew that he had a long night ahead of him, and he wanted to make sure that Megan had everything she needed. He manoeuvred his Caprice into the awkward downsloping driveway in front of their apartment building, and opened the door carefully so that he wouldn’t scrape it on the concrete retaining wall.

  He was climbing the steps between the beds of fluttering geraniums when the glass front door opened and Mr No-vato the super came out, in his blue cotton coat and splashy green necktie, looking more than ever like Placido Domingo’s less-talented brother. Close-up, he smelled of garlic and lavender and something that Thomas couldn’t quite pin down, maybe cheese.

  ‘You’re going to be long, Mr Boyle?’ he asked, and you didn’t have to have a PhD in sociology to detect the course that the conversation was going to take.

  ‘Twenty minutes tops,’ said Thomas.

  Mr Novato looked over his shoulder at his car. ‘It’s just that you block the driveway for everybody else.’

  ‘If anybody else wants to use the driveway, all you have to do is call me, and I’ll move.’

  ‘Well ... I don’t know, Mr Boyle. It’s against the fire regulations, you know, for any vehicle to block the driveway.’

  With huge self-restraint, Thomas said, ‘Read my lips, Mr Novato. I am a police officer involved in a major homicide investigation. I am going to leave my car right where it is. If anybody wishes to use this driveway for any legitimate purpose during the next twenty minutes, then I shall cheerfully move it.’

  ‘I don’t want no trouble, Mr Boyle.’

  ‘You don’t want no trouble?’

  ‘That’s what I say, Mr Boyle, I don’t want no trouble.’

  ‘If you don’t want no trouble, Mr Novato, the answer is easy. You don’t say no more.’

  Thomas went inside, leaving Mr Novato standing where he was. Thomas liked almost everything Italian – food, music, wine, fashion – but he had taken an immediate dislike to Mr Novato when they had first moved here three years ago, and Mr Novato had done nothing to change his opinion. He was bureaucratic, lazy, and creatively stupid. If Thomas hadn’t occasionally needed Mr Novato’s help in lifting Megan into the car, or to take messages, or to keep a special eye on Megan when he was away, he would have protested to the owners months ago, and had him canned.

  Well, maybe not canned, but carpeted. Even irritating Italian supers had to make a living.

  Thomas pushed the elevator button for 3 and the doors closed. For the first time in weeks, he felt really tired. He felt as drained and as empty as if he had stayed awake for two nights running; his vision blurred, his hearing stuffed with cotton wool, his sinuses blocked but dry. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the mirrored wall as the elevator carried him upstairs.

  He opened the door to apartment 303 and called, thickly, ‘Megan!’ He took off his coat, hung it on the crowded peg in the hallway, next to the framed print of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the view of Lough Oughter, and then went through to the living-room. There she was: sitting in her wheelchair by the window, looking out over Commercial Street and the North End Playground, writing in her notebook. Russet-haired, freckled, green-eyed, with a tip-tilted nose and the slightest hint of an overbite. She was wearing a white short-sleeved blouse, and – as always – a crucifix around her neck.

  He c
ame over and kissed her. ‘How was the therapy?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh ... same as usual,’ she said, closing her notebook and setting it down on the table. ‘Same as usual’ meant ‘painful, tedious and ultimately hopeless’. ‘Dr Saul gave me a new painkiller.’

  He dragged over one of the two upright dining-chairs that stood on either side of the china cabinet, and sat down next to her. Since she had become wheelchair-bound, he hardly ever sat in armchairs, because they were always too low, and they made him feel as if he were lounging in comfort while Megan had to suffer the rigidity of a back brace.

  ‘This is going to be a tough one,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should stay with Shirley for a while.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m all right. Sometimes I like to be alone.’

  ‘But I’m going to worry about you. You know that.’

  She touched the back of his wrist and stroked it with her fingertip in an absent-minded, circular motion. ‘You never used to worry before. Why should you worry now? I’m just as capable.’

  ‘You’re more capable,’ he told her. ‘But this is one of those investigations that’s going to need hours of overtime, maybe nights away from home.’

  ‘Oh, you do fuss so much,’ she said, with a sudden bright smile. ‘I have my television. I have my music. I have my cookbook.’

  ‘Maybe Shirley could stay here.’

  ‘Maybe Shirley doesn’t want to stay here.’

  He looked at her directly and warmly, and couldn’t help smiling, too. ‘You stubborn Irish colleen, you.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not so stubborn, really,’ she said. ‘I just value my independence.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said; and had a sudden flash of that anonymous girl, hogtied with razor wire, lying face down on that blood-rusted bed. And smelled that smell.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Megan.

  ‘Nothing,’ he told her.

  ‘It’s a bad one, isn’t it? This case you’re handling.’

  ‘It’s – ah – yes, it’s a bad one. I don’t think I really want to talk about it.’

  ‘It might help, Tommy. It always has before.’

  He lowered his eyes. ‘I don’t think so, Megs. Not this time.’

  She stopped stroking him and clutched his wrist tight. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  ‘Not now, please.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  To his own surprise, he suddenly discovered that he was crying. He sat upright on his dining-chair face-to-face with Megan and tears ran down his cheeks. He had never cried over a homicide before, not for the victim, not for himself. But here he was, weeping like a child, the first time in seventeen years.

  ‘If you could see what they did to her – ,’ he sobbed. He bent his head and Megan put her arms around him and stroked his hair and shushed him. ‘I don’t understand how they could have –’

  She held him tight against her bosom and kept on shushing him, her wheelchair creaking slightly as she rocked him and stroked him. She had often wondered when this would happen, when he would finally break down. She had seen him so many times with his eyes like stones, keeping it all inside of him; or staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, biting his lips. She always knew when it was a bad one, a woman or a child, or something particularly brutal. He smoked more and never sat still and stared out of the window with all the ferocious bewilderment of a caged animal.

  ‘Tell me,’ she soothed him.

  He sat up straight, smeared his eyes with his fingers, then the back of his hand. ‘I can’t. I have to understand it first. Right now, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all. It doesn’t fit in with anything I know. It’s out of my experience. It wasn’t domestic. It wasn’t yummies. It was so strange. It was like finding a sharkbite victim in the middle of town.’

  Megan knew what he meant by ‘yummies’. It was the acronym that Mike Barnicle on the Boston Globe had devised for ‘young urban maggots’, a permanent underclass of angry young black and Hispanic men, long on ammo, short on hope, and hell-bent on destroying themselves and each other with Uzis and crack.

  ‘Do you want me to fix you something to take for tonight?’ Megan asked him. ‘I bought some of that Genoa salami you like.’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘I’ll pick up a hot dog if I’m hungry.’

  ‘Are you sure? How about something to eat now? A rarebit? A quick chicken sandwich?’

  Again, he shook his head. He could still smell that terrible stench of decayed flesh. In fact, he could almost taste it. If he ate anything now, he was sure that he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between cheese and chicken and corpse.

  ‘I’ll be fine, really.’ He nodded toward her notebook. ‘Come on ... let’s not talk about me. Let’s forget about homicide for five minutes at least. How’s the cookbook going?’

  ‘Oh, it’s going really well! Gina called me just before I went out, and she gave me this wonderful recipe for steamship roast.’

  ‘Is that going to be tomorrow night’s dinner?’

  ‘I have to try them out.’

  He reached across and squeezed her hand. ‘You know I’m not complaining. I’m the best-fed man on the force.’

  Megan smiled; and he loved her smile. Ever since her accident, he had loved her more than ever, although he was always a little afraid to say so, in case she thought he was saying it out of pity, instead of genuine affection. He had realized, too, that if he told her he loved her too enthusiastically, she would begin to suspect that he was having an affair – or feeling like having an affair, or that he had met a woman who had caught his eye.

  He loved her and he knew that he would never stop loving her, but there was always the wheelchair, and always the therapy, and always the pain. Once she had ski’d and swum and jogged and danced and worked out. Then, three years ago, she had gone to the farmer’s market in the Webster Street parking lot in Brookline – and, happy and rushed, stepped off the kerb. A fully-laden farm truck had hit her and run over her back. Thomas had been sure she would die.

  Of course, she hadn’t died – although she had been irrevocably paralysed from the waist down. She had told him, just once, that she would have preferred to have died; but having said it once, she never said it again, and after that she had simply tried to make the best of things.

  Thomas never could have imagined before Meg’s accident what a struggle it was to have a paralysed wife in a world made for people who could walk. Even the most inconsequential shopping trips had to be carefully planned in advance (where would they park? what about stairs and escalators? what about revolving doors? were there any restrooms?). The day they first went out together, Thomas discovered the nightmarish fact that more than two-thirds of the civilized world had suddenly became inaccessible to them.

  Their close friends – their police-department friends – had mostly stayed by them. But their social life had gradually dwindled away, until they counted themselves lucky if they were invited out twice a year. Even Meg’s sister Joan and her cheerful husband Ray hardly ever asked them over to Framingham any more. Who really wanted to have a woman in a wheelchair drawn up to the dining-table? And hardly anybody accepted their invitations, either. Megan could still cook like an angel, but guests always seemed to squirm with embarrassment when she brought in the pot-roast on a special board across her wheelchair handles. As if that made it taste any different.

  Thomas didn’t have time to be bitter about it. He was too busy dealing with grisly homicides and shopping and trying to make a life for both of them. He had never burst into tears before today. He had asked himself more than once if life was fair; but he had never answered.

  He stopped at the Newmarket parking lot on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Newmarket Square. It was four o’clock and the afternoon was oppressively humid. The sky was bright but blurry with cloud, and the traffic sounded muffled. There was a strangely dreamlike quality about humidity like this: as if everybody was walking around in a surrealistic movie, busy for the sake of bein
g busy.

  He parked his car, fastidiously locked it, and walked across to the steaming hot-dog cart that had been angled into an awkward space between an ageing Lincoln and a Winnebago plastered with National Park stickers. Ezra ‘Speed’ Anderson was already lifting out a hot-dog for him, and smothering it with all of his special sauces. In Speed’s thumbprinted sunglasses Thomas saw two dwarfish images of himself approaching, and stretching out a lens-curved arm.

  ‘One Speed Dog, coming up,’ said Speed, laconically. ‘You look like you could use some nutrition, lieutenant.’

  Thomas pulled off a couple of bills and paid him. ‘I’ve got a bad one, that’s all.’

  ‘World’s a sick place, lieutenant.’

  Thomas took a bite of his hot-dog. Speed’s sauces were rich enough and spicy enough to obliterate the taste of death. He chewed and he didn’t feel hungry but he kept on chewing just the same.

  ‘You think I should open a chain?’ asked Speed.

  ‘What for?’ asked Thomas. ‘This cart of yours is one of the Hub’s greatest culinary treasures. You want to spoil it all by opening a chain?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Speed. ‘Sometimes I dream of untold riches.’

  Thomas said, ‘Life is untold riches. You don’t need more than that.’

  Four

  Michael said, ‘I had that nightmare again.’

  Dr Rice had been playing star solitaire. He looked up over his crescent-shaped eyeglasses, his lips tightly drawn together, but he didn’t reply. He was waiting for Michael to tell him which nightmare, because there were several. There was the nightmare about the mortuary and then there was the nightmare about the L10-11 opening up, like a sow with a ripped-open belly, and then there was the nightmare about the trees blossoming with human hands, and the girl who was only half a girl.

  And others – some of them graphic and canonical, others mysterious and obscure, jolting terrors without names or faces. Michael Rearden was a mess: a cat’s-cradle of traumas and terrors and hideous experiences, played and replayed and replayed, until every thread in his psyche was stretched to the point of snapping.