Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“You two didn’t get along.”

“No. He was a bully. Everyone who knew him feared him, and most hated him. He had no friends.”

“Yet you seem to be his opposite.”

“How so?”

“Well, people like you. Sergeants Amronklin and Lee are very fond of you, Lief took an instant liking to you, and from what I’ve learned of you since I took this case over, you’ve formed very strong bonds with people who are such polar opposites as a liberal newspaper columnist and a psychotic weapons supplier. Your father had no friends, yet you are very rich with friends. Your father was a violent man, yet you don’t seem to have an uncontrollable propensity for it.”

Tell that to Marion Socia, I thought.

“What I’m trying to figure out here, Mr. Kenzie, is if Alec Hardiman made Jason Warren pay for the sins of his mother, maybe you’re being set up to pay for the sins of your father.”

“Which is fine, Agent Bolton. But Diandra had a direct effect on Hardiman’s incarceration. So far, though, there’s no link between my father and Hardiman.”

“Not one we’ve uncovered.” He leaned back. “Look at this from my perspective. This all started when Kara Rider, an actress, contacted Diandra Warren using the alias Moira Kenzie. That wasn’t a mistake. That was a message. We can assume, I think, that Arujo put her up to it. She then points fingers at Kevin Hurlihy and by implication, Jack Rouse. You make contact with Gerry Glynn, who worked with Alec Hardiman’s father. He points you toward Hardiman himself. Hardiman killed Charles Rugglestone in your neighborhood. We also assume that he killed Cal Morrison. Also in your neighborhood. Back then, you and Kevin Hurlihy were kids, but Jack Rouse ran a grocery store, Stan Timpson and Diandra Warren lived a few blocks away, Kevin Hurlihy’s mother, Emma, was a housewife, Gerry Glynn was a cop, and your father, Mr. Kenzie, was a fireman.”

He handed me an 8X11 map of the Edward Everett Square, Savin Hill, and Columbia Point neighborhoods. Someone had penned a circle around what constituted St. Bart’s parish—Edward Everett Square itself, the Blake Yard, JFK/UMass Station, a stretch of Dorchester Avenue beginning at the South Boston line and ending at St. William’s Church in Savin Hill. Within the circle, someone had also marked in five small black squares and two large blue dots.

“The squares are?” I looked at him.

“Approximate locations of the residences in 1974 of Jack Rouse, Stan and Diandra Timpson, Emma Hurlihy, Gerry Glynn, and Edgar Kenzie. The two blue dots are the murder sites of Cal Morrison and Charles Rugglestone. Both the squares and dots are within a quarter square mile of each other.”

I stared at the map. My neighborhood. A tiny, mostly forgotten, hardscrabble place of three-deckers and faded A-frames, cubbyhole taverns and corner stores. Outside of the occasional bar brawl, not the type of place that called much attention to itself. Yet here was the FBI shining a national spotlight down on it.

“What you’re looking at there,” Bolton said, “is a kill zone.”

I called Angie from an empty conference room.

She answered on the fourth ring, out of breath. “Hey, I just came through the door.”

“Whatcha doing?”

“Talking to you, ya pinhead, and opening my mail. Bill, bill, bill, take-out menu, bill…”

“How was Mae?”

“Fine. I just dropped her off with Grace. How was your day?”

“The guy with the goatee’s name is Evandro Arujo. He was Alec Hardiman’s partner-in-life in the joint.”

“Bullshit.”

“Nope. Looks like he’s our guy.”

“But he doesn’t know you.”

“This is true.”

“So why would he leave your card in Kara’s hand?”

“Coincidence?”

“Fine. But Jason getting killed, too?”

“Really, really, big coincidence?”

She sighed and I could hear her rip into an envelope. “This doesn’t make total sense yet.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Tell me about Hardiman.”

I did and then I took her through my day as she ripped open more envelopes and said, “Yeah, yeah,” in a distracted tone which would have annoyed me if I hadn’t known her well enough to know she could talk on the telephone, listen to the radio, watch TV, and cook pasta while carrying on a half-conversation with someone else in the room and she’d still hear every word I said.

But halfway through my story, the “yeahs” stopped and I got nothing but silence, and it wasn’t a rapt silence, it was a thick one.

“Ange?”

Nothing.

“Ange?” I said again.

“Patrick,” she said and her voice was so small, it seemed to have no body attached to it.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I just got a photograph in the mail.”

I stood up from the chair so quickly I could see the lights of the city jerk and slant and spin around me. “Of who?”

“Of me,” she said. Then, “And Phil.”

25

“I’m supposed to be afraid of this guy?” Phil held up one of the photos Angie’d taken of Evandro.

“Yes,” Bolton said.

Phil flapped the photo in his hand. “Well, I’m not.”

“Believe me, Phil,” I said, “you should be.”

He looked at all of us—Bolton, Devin, Oscar, Angie, and myself, packed into Angie’s tiny kitchen—and shook his head. He reached under his jacket and pulled out a pistol, pointed it at the floor and checked the load.

“Jesus, Phil,” Angie said. “Put it away.”

“You got a permit for that?” Devin said.

Phil kept his eyes down, the roots of his hair dark with sweat.

“Mr. Dimassi,” Bolton said, “you won’t need that. We’ll protect you.”

Phil said, “Sure,” very softly.

We waited as he glanced back at the photo he’d left on the counter and back to the gun in his hand and fear began to seep out his pores. He looked at Angie once and then back at the floor and I could tell he was trying to process it all. He’d come home from work and been met outside his apartment by Federal agents who took him over here, where he was informed that someone he’d never met was determined to stop the beating of his heart, probably within the week.

Eventually he looked up from the floor and his normally olive skin was the color of skim milk. He caught my eye and flashed his boyish grin, shook his head as if we were somehow in this together.