Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

It was almost nine and the streets were filled with morning commuters. She reached the entrance to the skyscraper and followed the stream heading in through the revolving doors. She found the directory to the right of the security desk. She went through the As and saw no Alden Minerals. Went through the Bs and saw nothing she’d consider germane to her quest. But in the Cs, there it was — Cotter-McCann, the venture capital firm Glen O’Donnell had mentioned. It wasn’t a guarantee, but it was certainly a fair assumption that Brian had come here that day to meet with representatives of Cotter-McCann and sell off a part of his mining interest.

She exited the building and walked back a block to the central branch of the Boston Public Library. She passed through the McKim building into the Johnson building where the computers were and set to researching Cotter-McCann’s acquisition of an interest in Alden Minerals. There wasn’t anything on it save one tiny item in the business digest section of the Globe, which must have been the source of Glen’s information because it told her nothing new.

She clicked off and looked up Baker Lake, worked her way to a satellite map, click-click-clicked the zoom icon until she could discern the only abodes in the area, eight roofs in the northeast corner of the lake along the Canadian border, three more she almost missed peeking out a bit to the west of the eight. She printed several images of the region, zooming out a little bit more each time, until she was satisfied she had a reasonable representation of the area. She retrieved the pages from the printer tray, quit all applications, cleared her history, and left the library.

Just before Haiti, Rachel had done a story for Little Six on the tax breaks the Commonwealth was offering to lure Hollywood film production to Massachusetts. In order to assess the economic effect of the tax breaks on the local economy, she’d interviewed Hollywood studio execs and statehouse reps on Ways and Means as well as local actors, location scouts, and one casting director. Her name was Felicia Ming. She was a jaded gossip, as Rachel recalled. She and Rachel had met for drinks a few times in the months before Rachel left the country for Port-au-Prince. They’d fallen out of touch after that, but Felicia had sent her a few kind e-mails after the meltdown and Rachel still had her contact info in her phone.

She called her standing outside the library and asked her how she’d track down an actor starring in a local production.

“Why are you trying to find him?”

Rachel tried a version not far from the truth. “He got into a drunken tiff with my husband in a bar the other night.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“I just feel bad. He got the worst of it, and I want to apologize to the guy.”

“Was this fight over you, honey?”

Rachel hoped her instinct was right on this one. “It was, I’m afraid, yeah.”

“Somebody’s making a comeback, ” Felicia Ming said. “You return to this world with us, honey, and you make them crawl to you.”

Rachel forced a chuckle. “That’s the plan.”

“What company is he working with right now?” Felicia asked.

“The Lyric Stage.”

“What’s his name?”

“Andrew Gattis.”

“Give me a sec.”

While Rachel waited, a homeless guy walked by with his dog. Rachel recalled the night Brian forfeited his coat to a needier soul in the park. She gave the dog a pat and the homeless guy ten bucks and Felicia came back on the line.

“He’s at the Demange. It’s corporate housing in Bay Village.” She gave Rachel the address. “Want to grab a drink soon? Now that you’ve rejoined the living?”

Rachel actually felt bad about lying. “I’d love to.”

Twenty minutes later, she stood on a sidewalk in Bay Village and rang his doorbell.

When his voice came through the intercom it was groggy. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Gattis, it’s Rachel Delacroix.”

“Who?”

“Brian’s wife.” The pause that followed was so lengthy she finally said, “Mr. Gattis, you there?”

“I’d like you to go away.”

“I won’t.” The calm force in her voice surprised her. “I’ll wait down here until you have to come out. And if you slip out the back, I’ll come to your performance tonight and cause a scene in the middle of it. So, let’s—”

The door buzzed and she grabbed the handle and entered the building. It smelled of Lysol and linoleum in the lobby, Indian food as she climbed to the second-floor landing. A woman passed her leading a huffing French bulldog on a leash, the dog reminding Rachel of something you’d get if a pug impregnated a wombat.

Gattis was waiting in the doorway of 24, his stringy gray hair yellowed by nicotine. He tied it back into a bun as he led her into the apartment. It was a simple layout — kitchen and living room to the right, bedroom and bathroom back to the left. The window at the back of the living room opened onto a fire escape.

“Coffee?” he said.

“Sure. Thanks.”

She took a seat at a small round table by the window and he brought them each a cup of coffee, put a carton of creamer and a bowl of sugar between them. In the morning light, he looked even worse than the drunk she’d met Saturday night. His skin was scaly and pink and blue veins had erupted along the sides of his nose like electric bolts. His eyes swam.

“I have rehearsal in an hour and I have to shower, so we’re going to have to move this along.”

She sipped her coffee. “You and Brian were actors together.”

“Caleb too.” He nodded. “Brian had more raw talent than I’ve ever seen before or since. We all knew he’d be a star as long as he didn’t find a way to fuck it up.”

“What happened?”

“Couple things, I guess. He had no patience. And maybe, I dunno, he didn’t respect it because it came so easy to him? Who knows? He was angry, I remember that. Charming and angry. Cut quite the romantic figure in that regard. Chicks were fucking crazy about him. No offense.”

She shrugged and drank her coffee. Say what you would about Andrew Gattis, he made good coffee. “What was he angry about?”

“Being poor. Brian had to work . I mean we were dawn to dusk at school. We had acting classes and improvisation classes and improvisational movement classes. We had dance and playwriting and stagecraft and directing classes. Voice class, speech class, and something called Alexander Technique, which taught command of the body so you could use it as an instrument, you know? Morph it to your will. All that work was no joke. You’d get to six o’clock, your eyes would be shutting and your muscles screaming and your head throbbing. You’d go to bed or you’d go to the bar. Not Brian, though. Brian would go to work until two in the morning. And then right back at it at seven. Most of us were in our mid-twenties so, shit, plenty of energy, but even at that age we wondered how he did it. Then all that work added up to nothing anyway when he got kicked out.”

“He was kicked out of Trinity?”

Gattis nodded and took a long chug of coffee. “I look back now and I think he was probably popping a lot of speed or doing blow to keep up his pace. Either way, he was getting edgier and edgier during our second year. We had this one professor, real to-the-manner-born dilettante douchebag named Nigel Rawlins. He was one of those break-you-down-to-build-you-up kind of teachers, but I always suspected he didn’t really know about building anyone back up, he just liked to break them down. He was notorious for getting students to drop out. He built his rep on it. One morning he went after the only student there who was poorer than Brian. This kid had Brian’s bare pockets but not his talent, not a tenth of it. Anyway, Nigel Rawlins, one morning they’re rehearsing a scene set in a men’s room, right? And this kid’s got a monologue about unclogging a toilet — that’s all I remember about it to this day; I think it was a student piece — and the kid, he’s just not selling the scene. He’s fucking gassing it, to be quite honest. Which is setting Nigel off. He tore into that kid for being a shit actor and a shit human being, an embarrassment as a son and a brother, a source of shame to anyone unlucky enough to have him as a friend. He’d been on the kid for months, but that morning he was the fucking Terminator. Kept coming and coming. The kid pleads for him to stop, but Nigel gets stuck in this rage-loop about how the kid is a log of shit covered in hair that’s clogging the drain and it was Nigel’s job to plunge him the fuck out of the class before he dragged everyone else into that clogged toilet with him. So Brian, man — I mean, nobody ever even saw him leave the stage — but when he came back he had an actual plunger in his hand, not the fucking stage prop, and it was dripping with piss. He flipped Nigel on his back and he fitted that plunger over his mouth and nose and he just started... plunging. Once Nigel managed to push his head off the floor, grab at Brian’s legs, and Brian punched him so hard in the center of his face, you could hear it in the back row of the theater. And Brian went back to plunging and plunging and fucking plunging Nigel’s face until Nigel passed out.” He sat back and drained his coffee. “They kicked Brian out the next morning. He hung around Providence for a while, delivering pizzas, but I think it grew too embarrassing, ya know, handing over pies and taking sweaty bills from people you used to party with. He lit out one day and I didn’t hear from him again for, I dunno, nine years.”