Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

“So, Karen?”

His eyes filled for a moment and he blew air out through his mouth in a loud push. “Oh, Christ, she broke my heart. All our hearts. She lived for David. Anyone who saw them for two seconds knew that. And when David was hurt, she died. It just took her body four months to follow.”

We sat in silence for a bit, and then I handed him back the letter to the insurance company. He held it lightly in his hands and stared down at it. Eventually he smiled bitterly.

“No ‘P,’” he said, and shook his head.

“What’s that?”

He turned the letter in his hands so I could see it. “David’s middle name was Phillip. When we started this company, all of a sudden he signed his name with a big ‘P’ in the middle. Only on company documents and company checks, never anything else. I used to say the ‘P’ was for ‘pretentious,’ rag his ass a little bit about it.”

I looked at the signature. “But there’s no ‘P’ there.”

He nodded, then dropped the letter in the drawer. “I guess he wasn’t feeling particularly pretentious that day.”

“Ray.”

“Yeah?”

“Could I have a copy of that and something you have with his signature that does have the ‘P’?”

He shrugged. “Sure.” He found a memo David had written and signed with a wide, looping “P.”

I followed him to a grimy Xerox machine, and he placed the letter under the lid.

“What’re you thinking?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure yet.”

He pulled the copy out of the tray and handed it to me. “It’s just a ‘P,’ Mr. Kenzie.” He made a copy of the memo, gave it to me.

I nodded. “You got something with your signature on it?”

“Of course.” He led me back to the desk, handed me a memo he’d written and signed.

“You know what the trick to forgery is?” I said as I took the memo and turned it upside down.

“Good handwriting?”

I shook my head. “Gestalt.”

“Gestalt.”

“You see the signature as a shape, not a collection of singular letters.”

Carefully, under his overturned signature, I used a pen to copy the shape I saw above the pen point. When I finished, I turned it around, showed it to him.

He looked at it, opened his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. “That’s not bad. Wow.”

“And that’s my first try, Ray. Think what I could do with practice.”

I called Devin again, woke him up.

“Any luck with Ms. Diaz?”

“None. Chicks, man, you know?”

“I can’t get Detectives Thomas or Stapleton to return my calls.”

“Stapleton was one of Doyle’s golden boys, that’s why.”

“Ah.”

“You could see Hoffa having coffee in a diner, and Stapleton wouldn’t take your call.”

“Thomas?”

“She’s less predictable. And she’s working solo today.”

“Lucky me.”

“Yeah, well, you Micks. What can I say? Hang on. Let me find out where she is.”

I waited two or three minutes, and then he came back on the line. “You owe me, or do I even have to mention that?”

“It’s a given,” I said.

“It’s always a given.” Devin sighed. “Detective Thomas is working a death-by-stupidity in Back Bay. Go to the alley between Newbury and Comm Ave. ”

“Cross blocks?”

“ Dartmouth and Exeter. Don’t fuck with her. She’s hard-core, man. Eat you, spit you out, and never even break her stride.”

Detective Joella Thomas stepped out of the alley at the Dartmouth Street end and crab-walked under some crime scene tape, stripping off a pair of latex gloves as she went. As she slid out from under the other side of the yellow tape, she straightened from her crouch and snapped one glove clear of her fingertips, shook the white talc off her ebony skin. She called to a guy sitting on the bumper of the forensics van.

“Larry, he’s yours now.”

Larry didn’t even look up from his sports page. “He still dead?”

“Getting more so.” Joella pulled off the other glove, noticed me standing beside her, but kept her gaze on Larry.

“He tell you anything?” Larry turned a page of the paper.

Joella Thomas rolled a Life Saver from side to side in her mouth and nodded. “Said the ‘afterlife’?”

“Yeah?”

“Ain’t nothing but a house party.”

“Good news. I’ll tell the wife.” Larry closed his paper, tossed it into the van behind him. “Fucking Sox, Detective, you know what I’m saying?”

Joella Thomas shrugged. “I’m a hockey fan.”

“Fucking Bruins, then, too.” Larry turned his back to us and foraged in the forensics van.

Joella Thomas started to turn away, then seemed to remember my presence. She rolled her head back slowly in my direction, looked at me through the dusky gold lenses of her rimless sunglasses. “What?”

“Detective Thomas?” I proffered my hand.

She gave the fingers a quick squeeze and squared her shoulders so that she was facing me.

“Patrick Kenzie. Devin Amronklin may have mentioned me.”

She cocked her head and I heard the Life Saver rattle against a back tooth. “Couldn’t come by the station, Mr. Kenzie?”

“I thought I’d speed things up.”

She placed her hands in the pockets of her suit jacket, leaned back on her heels. “Don’t like being in a police station since you brought down a cop, that it, Mr. Kenzie?”

“The cells do seem that much closer.”

“Uh-huh.” She stepped back as Larry and two other forensics cops walked between us.

“Detective,” I said, “I’m real sorry an investigation of mine led to the arrest of a fellow-”

“Blah, blah, blah.” Joella Thomas waved a long hand in front of my face. “Don’t care about him, Mr. Kenzie. He was old school, old boy network.” She turned toward the curb. “I look old school to you?”

“Anything but.”

Joella Thomas was a slim six feet tall. She wore an olive double-breasted suit over a black T-shirt. Her gold shield hung from black nylon cord around her neck and matched the gold of the three hoop earrings in her left earlobe. The right lobe was as bare and smooth as her shaven head.

As we stood on the sidewalk, the deepening heat and morning dew rose off the pavement in a fine mist. It was early Sunday morning and the yuppies’ Krups coffeemakers were probably just beginning to percolate, the dog walkers just arriving at the doors.

Joella stripped off a twist of foil on her roll of Life Savers and removed one. “Mint?”

She extended the roll and I took one.

“Thanks.”

She placed the roll back in the pocket of her suit jacket. She looked back in the alley, then up at the roof.

I followed her gaze. “Jumper?”

She shook her head. “Faller. Went on the roof to shoot up during a party. Sat on the edge, spiked, and looked up at the stars.” She pantomimed someone leaning too far back. “Must have seen a comet.”

“Ouch,” I said.

Joella Thomas tore off a piece of her scone and dipped it in her oversize mug of tea before sliding it onto her tongue. “So you want to know about Karen Nichols.”

“Yup.”

She chewed, then swallowed a sip of tea. “You worried she was pushed?”

“Was she?”

“Nope.” She sat back in her chair, watched an old man toss small pieces of bread to some pigeons outside. The old man’s face was pinched and small and his nose was hooked so that he looked a lot like the birds he fed. We were in Jorge’s Cafe de Jose, a block from the crime scene. Jorge’s served nine different types of scones, a variety of fifteen muffins, squares of tofu, and seemed to have cornered the market on bran.

Joella Thomas said, “It was suicide.” She shrugged. “It was clean-death by gravity. No signs of struggle, no scuff marks from other shoes anywhere near the place she jumped from. Hell, it doesn’t get any cleaner.”