John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

A slender woman, gray-haired, but not yet grandmotherly, opened the door.

“Yes, may I help you?” she asked.

I introduced myself, apologized for showing up unannounced, but said that I was unable to call ahead because of the unlisted number. I told her I was a writer and was inquiring about some crimes that had taken place a few years back in the Cambridge, Newton, and Somerville areas and wondered if I might ask a few questions about Will or, better yet, speak with him directly.

She was taken aback, but did not immediately close the door in my face.

“I don’t know that we can help you,” she said politely.

“I’m sorry if I’ve taken you by surprise,” I replied. “I just have a few questions.”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t…,” she started, then stopped, looking out at me. I could see her lower lip start to quiver, and just the touch of tears glistening in her eyes. “It has been…,” she tried, but then she was interrupted by a voice from behind.

“Mother? Who is it?”

She hesitated, as if uncertain precisely what to say. I looked behind her and saw a young man in a wheelchair emerging from a side room. His skin had a bleached, pale look, and his brown hair was a tangled, unkempt mass, stringy, long, and falling toward his shoulders. A Z-shaped, dull red scar on the upper right side of his forehead reached almost to the eyebrow. His arms seemed wiry, muscled, but his chest was sunken, almost emaciated. He had large hands, with elegant, long fingers, and I thought, as I looked at him, that I could see hints and whispers of whom he once was. He rolled himself forward.

The mother looked at me. “It has been very hard,” she said softly, with surprising intimacy.

The rubber wheels on the chair squealed when he stopped. “Hello,” he said, not unpleasantly.

I gave him my name and quickly explained that I was interested in the crime that had crippled him.

“My crime?” he asked, but clearly didn’t really expect an answer, because he rapidly gave one himself. “I don’t think it was all that special. A routine mugging. Anyway, I can’t tell you all that much about it. Two months in a coma. Then this…” He waved at the chair.

“Did the police ever make an arrest?”

“No. By the time I woke up, I’m afraid I wasn’t too much help. I can’t remember anything from that night. Not a damn thing. It’s a little like hitting the backspace key on your keyboard and watching all the letters of some piece of work disappear. You know it’s probably somewhere in the computer, but you can’t find it. It’s just been deleted.”

“You were coming home after a date?”

“Yes. We never connected again after that. Not that surprising. I was a mess. Still am.” He laughed a little and smiled wryly.

I nodded. “The cops never came up with much, huh?”

He shook his head. “Well, a couple of curious things.”

“What?” I asked.

“They found some kids in Roxbury trying to use my Visa credit card. They thought for a couple of days that they might have been the ones that mugged me, but it turned out they weren’t. The kids apparently just found the card near a Dumpster.”

“Okay, but why…”

“Because someone else found my wallet with all my ID-you know, driver’s license, BC meal card, Social Security, health care, all that stuff, intact in Dorchester. Miles away from the Dumpster where the kids found the credit card. It was as if whatever was taken from me was scattered all over Boston.” He smiled. “A little like my brains.”

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“Now?” Will looked over at his mother. “Now, I’m just waiting.”

“Waiting? For what?”

“I don’t know. Rehab sessions at the Head Trauma Center. The day I can get out of this chair. Not much else I can do.”

I stepped back and his mother started to close the door.

“Hey!” Will said. “You think they’ll ever find the guy that did this to me?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “But if I find out anything, I’ll let you know.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a name and an address,” he said quietly. “I think I would like to take care of some matters myself.”

Crime, Michael O’Connell thought, is about connections.

If one doesn’t want to be caught, he reasoned to himself, one must eradicate all the obvious links. Or at least obscure them so that they are not readily apparent to some plodding detective. He smiled to himself and closed his eyes for a moment to let the rocking of the subway train soothe him. He still felt an electric surge of energy throughout his body. Beating a man gave him a curiously peaceful sensation, even while he felt his muscles contract and tighten. He wondered if physical violence was always going to be this seductive.

At his feet was a cheap blue canvas duffel bag, the strap loosely wrapped around his arm. In it were a pair of leather gloves, a second pair of rubber latex surgeon’s gloves, a twenty-inch piece of common plumber’s pipe, and the wallet belonging to Will Goodwin, although he hadn’t yet had time to learn the man’s name.

Five items, O’Connell thought, meant five different stops on the T.

He knew he was being overly cautious, but told himself that a devotion to precision would benefit him. The pipe was undoubtedly marred with blood from the man he’d beaten. So were the leather gloves. He guessed that his clothes also contained traces of material, and maybe his running shoes, as well, but by midmorning he would have run everything through several hot-water cycles at the local laundromat. So much for microscopic links between the man and himself. The duffel bag was destined for a Dumpster in Brockton, the lead pipe for a construction site downtown. The wallet, after he’d removed the cash, would be abandoned in a trash barrel outside a T stop in Dorchester, and the credit cards would be scattered around some streets in Roxbury, where he hoped some black kids would pick them up and start using them. Boston was still divided by race, and he guessed that those kids would get blamed for what he’d done.

The surgeon’s gloves, which he’d used beneath his leather gloves, could safely be discarded on the way home. Especially if he tossed them into a waste basket not far from Mass. General Hospital, or Brigham and Women’s, where even if they were spotted, they wouldn’t attract any special attention.

He wondered whether he had killed the man who had kissed Ashley.

There was a good chance. His first blow had caught him up around the temple, and he’d heard the bone crack. The man had dropped fast, slamming back against a tree, which was lucky, because it muffled the sound as he had tumbled over. Even if someone had overheard something, curiosity pricked, and looked out the window, both he and the man who’d kissed Ashley were obscured by the trunk of the tree and several parked cars. It had been an easy matter to drag him back into the shadows of the alleyway. The kicking and punching had taken only a few seconds. A burst of savagery almost like a sexual climax, unrelenting, explosive and then finished. As he shoved the unconscious body behind some metal canisters, he’d removed the man’s wallet, rapidly packed his homemade weapon into the duffel, and, moving quickly, cut through the darkness back to the Porter Square subway station.

It had been incredibly easy. Sudden. Anonymous. Vicious.

He wondered for an idle second or two who the man was. He shrugged. He didn’t really care. He didn’t even need to know his name. Within an hour or two, the only possible thing that conceivably connected him to the man he’d left in the alleyway was asleep in her own apartment, unaware of anything that had taken place that night. And when she did become aware, she might go to the police. He doubted it, but the chance, even if slight, existed. But what could she say? In his pocket was a ticket stub for a movie theater. It wasn’t much of an alibi, but it covered the time when the kiss had taken place and would be enough for any policeman who wouldn’t believe her in the first place, especially after the wallet or the credit cards showed up all the way across town.