John Katzenbach: The Wrong Man

Sally took a deep breath and silently wondered the same thing.

“Has she mentioned anything to you? About anything like this?” Scott persisted.

“No.”

“You’re her mother. Wouldn’t she come to you if she was having some sort of man trouble?”

The phrase man trouble hung in the space in front of her, glowing with electric anger between them. She didn’t want to respond.

“Yes. I presume so. But she hasn’t.”

“Well, when she was here visiting, did she say anything? Did you notice anything in her behavior?”

“No and no. What about you? She spent a couple of days at your place…”

“No. I hardly saw her. She was off visiting friends from high school. You know, off at dinner, back at two a.m., sleep to noon, and then paddle around the house until she started all over again.”

Sally Freeman-Richards took a deep breath. “Well, Scott,” she said slowly, “I’m not sure that it’s something to get all that bent out of shape about. If she’s having some sort of a problem, sooner or later she’s going to bring it up with one of us. Maybe we should give Ashley her space until then. And I don’t know that it makes much sense to assume there’s a problem before we hear that there is one directly from her. I think you’re reading too much into it.”

What a reasonable response, Scott thought. Very enlightened. Very liberal. Very much in keeping with who they were and where they lived. And, he thought, utterly wrong.

She stood up and wandered over to an antique cabinet in a corner of the living room, taking a second to adjust a Chinese plate displayed on a stand. A frown crossed her face as she stepped away and examined it. In the distance, I could hear some children playing loudly. But in the room where our conversation continued, there was nothing other than a ticktock of tension.

“How, precisely, did Scott know something was wrong?” she asked, repeating my question back to me.

“Correct. The letter, as you quote it, could have been almost anything. His ex-wife was wise not to jump to conclusions.”

“A very lawyerly approach?” she demanded.

“If you mean cautious, yes.”

“And wise, you think?” she questioned. She waved her hand in the air, as if dismissing my concerns. “He knew because he knew because he knew. I suppose you might call it instinct, but that seems simplistic. It’s a little bit of that leftover animal sense that lurks somewhere within all of us, you know, when you get the feeling that something is not right.”

“That seems a little far-fetched.”

“Really? Have you ever seen one of those documentaries about animals on the Serengeti Plain in Africa? How often the camera catches a gazelle lifting its head, suddenly apprehensive? It can’t see the predator lurking close by, but…”

“All right. I’ll go along with you for a moment. I still don’t see how-”

“Well,” she interrupted, “perhaps if you knew the man in question.”

“Yes. I suppose that might help. After all, wasn’t that the same problem facing Scott?”

“It was. He, of course, at first truly knew nothing. He had no name, no address, no age, description, driver’s license, Social Security card, job information. Nothing. All he had was a sentiment on a page and a deep-seated sensation of worry.”

“Fear.”

“Yes. Fear. And not a completely reasonable one, as you point out. He was alone with his fear. Isn’t that the hardest sort of anxiety? Danger undefined, and unknown. He was in a difficult situation, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Most people would do nothing.”

“Scott, it would seem, wasn’t like most people.”

I remained quiet, and she took a deep breath before continuing.

“But, had he known, right then, right at the beginning, who he was up against, he might have been…” She paused.

“What?”

“Lost.”

The tattoo artist’s needle buzzed with an urgency that reminded him of a hornet flying around his head. The man with the needle hovering over him was a thickset, heavily muscled man, with multihued, entwined decorations creeping like vines up both arms, past his shoulders, and swirling around his neck, ending in a serpent’s bared fangs beneath his left ear. He bent down, like a man considering a prayer, the needle in hand. He stooped to the task, then hesitated, looking up and asking, “You sure about this, man?”

“I’m sure,” Michael O’Connell replied.

“I never put a tat like this on anybody.”

“Time for a first, then,” O’Connell said stiffly.

“Man, I hope you know what you’re doing. Gonna hurt for a couple of days.”

“I always know what I’m doing,” O’Connell answered. He gritted his teeth a little against the pain and leaned back in the tattoo parlor chair. He stared down and watched as the burly man began to work over the design. Michael O’Connell had chosen a scarlet heart with a black arrow driven through it, dripping blood tears. In the center of the pierced heart, the tattoo would have the initials AF. What was unusual about the tattoo was the location. He watched the artist struggle a little. It was more awkward for him to put the heart and initials on the ball of the sole of O’Connell’s right foot than it was for O’Connell to keep his leg lifted and steady. As the needle pierced the skin, O’Connell waited. It is a sensitive location. Where one might tickle a child or caress a lover. Or step on a bug. It was the location best suited for the multiplicity of his feelings, he thought.

Michael O’Connell was a man with few outward connections, but thick ropes, razor wires, and dead-bolt locks constricted him within. He was a half inch under six feet in height and had a thick, curly head of dark hair. He was broad through the shoulders, the result of many hours lifting weights as a high school wrestler, and trim through the waist. He knew that he was good-looking, had a magnetism in the lift of his eyebrows and the way he sauntered into any situation. He affected a kind of carelessness about his clothing that made him seem familiar and friendly; he favored fleece over leather so that he would fit in with the student population better and avoided wearing anything reminiscent of where he had grown up, such as too tight jeans or T-shirts with tightly rolled sleeves. He walked down Boylston Street toward Fenway, letting the midmorning breeze wrap itself around him. It had a suggestion of November in its breath, swirling some fallen leaves and debris off the street into a small whirlwind of trash. He could taste a little of New Hampshire in the air, a crispness that reminded him of his youth.

His foot hurt him, but it was a pleasant pain.

The tattoo artist had given him a couple of Tylenol and placed a sterile pad over the design, but he had warned O’Connell that the pressure of walking on the tattoo might be hard. That was all right, regardless how crippled he might be for a few days.

He wasn’t far from the Boston University campus, and he knew a bar that opened early. He limped along, making his way down a side street, hunched over a little, trying with each step to measure the shafts of electric hurt that radiated upward from his foot. It was a little like playing a game, he thought to himself. This step, I’ll feel pain all the way to my ankle. This step, all the way to my calf. Will I feel it all the way to my knee, or beyond? He pushed open the door to the bar and stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, smoky interior.

A couple of older men were at the bar, seated with bent shoulders as they nursed their liquor. Regulars, he thought. Men with needs defined by a dollar and a shot glass.

O’Connell moved to the bar, slapped a couple of bucks down on the counter, and motioned to the bartender.