Howard Shrier - Boston Cream

When Jenn got out of the bath, I got her to lie down in the bed farthest from the door and she was soon asleep. When her breathing had settled into a constant rhythm, I went online and booked three seats on the first Toronto flight I could find for the next morning. Once the bloodbath at Halladay’s was discovered, and Daggett’s body in particular identified, the cops would want another word with me. Jenn too. She and I needed to get back on Canadian soil; once we were there, they couldn’t make us come back to Massachusetts without a lot of delays and paperwork. We’d have time to rest and heal ourselves. To align stories and prepare affidavits. To try to forget the horrors we’d seen and committed. Who knew how that would go? We’d regret the work David Fine would never do and the lifelong pain his family was in for, but if we were smart, we’d also make ourselves remember the lives we had saved. Who knows who else Daggett would have killed along the way if he’d kept at his grisly business?

After I booked the flights, I waited for Ryan to get back. I didn’t want Jenn to find herself alone if she woke up. We didn’t say anything to each other when he came in. I just took the car keys from the counter where he’d put them down and left the room. I still had one thing to do tonight. Maybe the hardest of all.

Ron Fine’s room at the Marriott overlooked Copley Square, where far below crowds of people made their way in and out of bars and restaurants. He was wearing a white dress shirt, no tie and dark grey slacks. The fringes of his tzitzis hung down below his belt.

“They’re saying he’s been dead more than thirty-six hours, but they won’t release the body yet,” he said. “By our custom he should be in the ground already. But the state police are in charge, because it appeared to be a killing for hire, and they say it’ll be at least another day or two, maybe more. And if they mention an autopsy again, I swear I’ll blow my stack. I mean, whoever killed David blew his head off. What is there to autopsy?”

Looking at this broken, grieving man, I felt ever deeper shame and guilt over David’s death and how I’d used his body. All I said was, “Nothing.”

“Nothing. Not a thing. Which, by the way, seems to sum up your contribution. According to Gianelli, you were nowhere to be seen the last two days. You ignored messages. Changed hotels. Left it to him to call us. Maybe I put too heavy a burden on you, Jonah, telling you Hashem wanted you to find my son, but you accepted it, didn’t you? You accepted my money. Was there anything you did to earn it?”

His fists were bunched and his jaw muscles clamped together; his eyes hard and flat.

“There were things …” I said.

“What?”

“That I couldn’t tell Gianelli.”

He stepped closer, looking like he was considering taking a swing at me. “What are you saying? You’re not cooperating fully with the investigation?”

“There are things he cannot know.”

“How can you hold anything back? My son is dead.”

I closed the space between us and put my hand on his arm. It was tensed as though he were gripping a racket.

“So is the man who killed him.”

“What!”

“You remember what my brother told you about me? That I don’t let go? I didn’t, Ron. Neither did Jenn. We saw it through to the end.”

He gripped my arms, both of them, and stared deeply into my eyes. “What exactly are you saying?”

“Is there anything to drink in your room?”

“That’s what you want, a drink?”

“Please, Ron. Pour us both one.”

He found an airline-size bottle of Scotch in his mini-bar and handed it to me. He took nothing for himself.

“There’s a lot I can’t tell you yet,” I began. “And even more that I can’t tell Gianelli.”

“Why?”

“Crimes were committed. By me. And a man whose help I enlisted.”

“And as a result the man who killed David is dead,” Ron said.

“Yes. His name was Sean Daggett. He’ll be all over the news tomorrow.”

“He killed David himself?”

“No. He hired whoever did.”

“And you know why.”

“Yes. He was selling organs on the black market.”

“And David was involved in this?”

“Very briefly. And completely against his will. He wanted to report Daggett to the police, but Daggett struck first, tried to abduct him. Made him run.”

“And you won’t tell the police any of this?”

“I can’t without incriminating myself. Just know that Daggett and his men are dead.”

“Did you kill him, Jonah?”

My neck muscles tightened as if a giant hand were bunching them together. “A sequence of events that he himself set in motion ran its natural course.”

“And that’s all you have to say?”

“For now.”

“How can you expect me to leave it at that? What do I tell Sheila?”

“That’s up to you.”

“Knowing the man is dead-that he’ll never come to trial-I don’t know what to feel. My first hope was always that you would find David alive and well and bring him home. My last hope, I suppose, was that if you didn’t, and someone was held responsible, that I would attend every day of their trial and put on public record what a life they had wasted. I’ll never get the chance to do that now. I feel very conflicted.”

I couldn’t tell him how I felt without telling him more than he could know. All I could offer was the lame, “What had to happen happened.”

“None of us knows what has to happen, Jonah. That’s the exclusive province of Hashem.”

“I just wanted you to know that no one got away with killing David.”

“Of course they did.”

Ron walked over to the mini-bar, knelt in front of it and took out a bottle of Scotch, unscrewed the cap and drank about half of it down. Then he sank heavily into a club chair. “What I’ll always wonder,” he said, “is why Hashem wanted David to come to Boston. I mean, I know why David wanted to come. ‘It’s the hub,’ he’d say. ‘The hub of medical research.’ This was where he was going to make his mark. One of the last times I spoke to him, he told me the donor in the first-ever kidney transplant had passed away. He had given a kidney to his twin brother back in the fifties, in Boston, just up the street from Sinai. David said, ‘Dad, can you imagine the courage it took to donate a kidney when it had never been done before?’ ”

“David had more courage than you can imagine,” I said, thinking of how he’d protected Sandy Lerner on the beach.

“More than you can tell me now,” he said.

“Yes.”

He drank down the rest of the bottle and stared at the fridge as if deciding whether to have another. “You know Micah still doesn’t know his brother is dead? I wanted him to come down here with me and help me get the body home. But he’s off work for the weekend, out at some cabin without cellphone reception, playing guitar with his friends. That’s what I’m left with now, Jonah. A pot-smoking hippie who plays dumpy coffee houses. David is gone and Micah is left.”

Everyone counts, I wanted to say. Even we second sons, who sometimes disappoint our parents, frustrate them as we fail to live up to the achievements of our dominant older siblings. I sipped my drink and watched Ron’s face contort in grief, his chin puckered and shaking, eyebrows pulling down, tears falling anyway. I could only imagine what my mother would go through if Daniel died prematurely and she was left with just me. Would she howl and curse God for taking away the great lawyer and family man, leaving only the bachelor with the rent-controlled apartment and undistinguished life?

He doth bestride the world like a colossus , Cassius said of Caesar, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves .