[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
how to use words.
“What did you just say?” she managed eventually.
“You heard me.”
“Yeah, but…” She turned in her seat, looked straight ahead
for a moment. Then she turned to the middle-aged black
woman sitting in the seat beside her who’d been following
our conversation since we got on the plane without any
pretense to be doing otherwise.
“I heard him, honey,” the woman said, knitting what ap-
peared to be a small beaver with lethal-looking needles. “Loud
and clear. Don’t know about all this aura bullshit, but I heard
that part just fine, thank you.”
“Wow,” Angie said to her. “You know?”
“Aww, he ain’t that good-looking,” the woman said. “He
maybe rate a ‘gee’ but he don’t rate no ‘wow,’ seem to me.”
Angie turned back to me. “Gee,” she said.
“Go on,” the woman said to me, “get back to telling us
about this slut made you coffee.”
“Anyway,” I said to Angie.
280 / DENNIS LEHANE
She blinked, closed her mouth by placing the heel of her
hand to her jaw and pushing up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back to
that.”
“If I wasn’t, you know—”
“In love,” the lady said.
I glared at her. “—with you, Ange, yeah, I would’ve been
a dead man in there. She’s a viper. She picks guys—almost
any guy—and she gets them to do her bidding, whatever
that may be.”
“I want to meet this girl,” the woman said. “See if she can
get my Leroy to mow the lawn.”
“But that’s what I don’t get,” Angie said. “Guys are that
stupid?”
“Yes.”
“What he said,” the woman said, concentrating on her
knitting.
“Women and men are different,” I said. “Most of them
anyway. Particularly when it comes to their reactions to the
opposite sex.” I took her hand in mine. “Desiree passes a
hundred guys in the street, at least half of them will think
about her for days. And when she passes, they won’t just
go, ‘Nice face, nice ass, pretty smile,’ whatever. They’ll ache.
They’ll want to possess her on the spot, melt into her, inhale
her.”
“Inhale her?” she said.
“Yes. Men have a completely different reaction to beautiful
women than women do to beautiful men.”
“So Desiree again is…?” She ran the backs of her fingers
up the inside of my arm.
“The flame, and we’re the moths.”
“You ain’t half bad,” the woman said, leaning forward and
looking past Angie at me. “If my Leroy could talk that sort
of sweet bullshit you talk, he’d have gotten
SACRED / 281
away with a lot more than he did these last twenty years.”
Poor Leroy, I thought.
Somewhere over Pennsylvania, Angie said, “Jesus.”
My head came off her shoulder. “What?”
“The possibilities,” she said.
“What possibilities?”
“Don’t you see? If we invert everything we thought, if we
look at things from the perspective of Desiree being not just
a little screwed up or slightly corrupt, but a black widow, a
machine of relentless self-interest—then, my God.”
I sat forward. “Run with it,” I said.
She nodded. “Okay. We know she put Price up to the
robbery. Right? Right. And then she gets Jay thinking about
getting that money back from Price. She plays the opposite.
You know, ‘Oh, Jay, can’t we be happy without the money?’
but of course, inside, she’s thinking, ‘Take the bait, take the
bait, you fool.’ And Jay does. But he can’t find the money.
And then she realizes where it is. And she goes there, but
she doesn’t get caught like she said. She gets the money. But
now she’s got a problem.”
“Jay.”
“Exactly. She knows he’ll never stop trying to find her if
she disappears. And he’s good at his job. And she has to get
Price out of the way, too. She can’t just disappear. She has
to get dead. So…”
“She killed Illiana Rios,” I said.
We looked at each other, my eyes as wide as hers, I’m
sure.
“Shot her point-blank in the face with a shotgun,” Angie
said.
282 / DENNIS LEHANE
“Could she have?” I said.
“Why not?”
I sat there thinking about it, letting it sink in. Why not,
indeed?
“If we accept this premise,” I said, “then we’re accepting
that she’s—”
“Totally without conscience or morality or empathy or
anything which makes us humane.” She nodded.
“And if she is,” I said, “then she didn’t just become that
way overnight. She’s been that way for a long time.”
“Like father, like daughter,” Angie said.
And that’s when it hit me. Like a building had fallen on
me. The oxygen in my chest swirled into a vortex created by
a single instant of horrifying clarity.
“What’s the best type of lie in the world?” I asked Angie.
“The type that’s mostly true.”
I nodded. “Why does Trevor want Desiree dead so badly?”
“You tell me.”
“Because he didn’t set up that murder attempt on the Tobin
Bridge.”
“She did,” Angie said in a near whisper.
“Desiree killed her mother,” I said.
“And tried to kill her father.”
“No wonder he’s pissed at her,” the woman beside Angie
said.
“No wonder,” I repeated.
34
It was all there to see in black-and-white for anyone who
had the right information and the right perspective. With
headlines such as THREE MEN CHARGED IN BRUTAL SLAYING
OF MARBLEHEAD SOCIALITE, or ALLEGED THRILL-KILL TRIO
ARRAIGNED FOR CARJACK KILL, the stories quickly fell off
the front page when the three killers—Harold Madsen of
Lynn, Colum Devereaux of South Boston, and Joseph
Brodine of Revere—entered guilty pleas the day after the
grand jury’s decision to indict.
Angie and I went straight from the airport to the Boston
Public Library in Copley Square. We sat in the periodical
room and scrolled through microfilm of the Trib and the
News until we found the stories, then read each one until we
found what we were looking for.
It didn’t take long. In fact, it took less than half an hour.
The day before the grand jury met, Harold Madsen’s attor-
ney had contacted the District Attorney’s Office with a pro-
posed deal for his client. Madsen would enter a plea of guilty
to first-degree manslaughter for a sentence of fourteen to
twenty years. In exchange, he would finger the man who
had hired him and his friends to kill Trevor and Inez Stone.
283
284 / DENNIS LEHANE
It had all the makings of a bombshell, because up to this
point, no mention had ever been made of the murder result-
ing from anything but a botched car theft.
CARJACK KILLER CLAIMS: IT WAS A HIT, the News screamed.
But when the man Madsen claimed had hired them turned
out to have died two days after Madsen’s arrest, the DA
laughed them out of his office.
“Anthony Lisardo?” Assistant District Attorney Keith Si-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]