The Wrong Man Read online

  She felt adrift. She did not particularly enjoy her part-time job at the museum, helping to catalog exhibits. It was a stuck-in-a-back-room, stare-at-a-computer-screen sort of job. She was unsure about the art history graduate program she was waiting to hear from and thought sometimes that she had fallen into these fields only because she was adept with pen, ink, and paintbrush. This troubled her deeply because, like so many young people, she believed that she should only do what she loved, and, as yet, she was unsure what that might be.

  They had left the bar, and Ashley pulled her coat a little tighter against the evening chill. She realized that she should probably have been paying attention to Will. He was good-looking, attentive, and might just have a sense of humor. He had an odd, loping stride at her side that was disarming and, probably, on balance, was someone she might consider more carefully. But, she recognized, as well, that they’d been walking for nearly two blocks and only had fifty yards to go before they reached the door to her apartment, and he had yet to actually ask her a question.

  She decided to play a small game. If he asked her something she thought interesting, then she’d give him a second date. If he only asked whether he could come upstairs with her, then he was going to get dropped.

  “So you think,” he said suddenly, “that when guys in a bar argue about baseball, they do so because they love the game, or because they love the argument? I mean, ultimately, there are no right answers, there is only team-based loyalty. And blind loyalty doesn’t really lend itself to debate, does it?”

  Ashley smiled. There was his second date.

  “Of course,” he added, “Red Sox love probably belongs in my advanced abnormal-psychology seminar.”

  She laughed. Definitely another date.

  “This is my place,” she said. “I’ve had fun tonight.”

  Will looked at her. “Maybe we could try a slightly quieter evening? It might be easier to get to know each other when we’re not competing with raised voices and wild-eyed speculation about Derek Jeter’s predilections for leather whips and outsized sex toys and the orifices where they might be imaginatively employed. Or deployed.”

  “I’d like that,” Ashley said. “Will you call me?”

  “I will indeed.”

  She took a single stride up onto the first step to her apartment, realized that she was still holding his hand, and turned back and gave him a long kiss. A partially chaste kiss, with only the smallest sensation of her tongue passing over his lips. A kiss of promise, but one that implied more for days to come, although not an invitation for that night. He seemed to get this, which heartened her, for he stepped a half pace back, bowed elaborately, and, like an eighteenth-century courtier, kissed the back of her hand.

  “Good night,” she said. “I really did have a nice time.”

  Ashley turned and headed into the apartment building. Between the two glass doors, she turned and glanced back. A small cone of light stretched from a bulb above the outer door, and Will stood just on the back side of the wan yellow circle, which faded quickly in the encroaching rich black of the New England night. A shadow creased his face, like an arrow of darkness that sought him out. But she thought nothing of this, gave him a small wave, and headed up to her place feeling the natural high of possibility, pleased with herself for not even considering a one-night stand, the hookup that was so popular in the college circles that she was just on the verge of emerging from. She shook her head. The last time she had given in to that particular temptation had been truly awful. She had been reminded of it earlier when her father had called out of the blue. But, just as quickly, as she hunted for the key to her apartment, she dismissed all thoughts of bad nights past and let the modest glow of this night fill her.

  She wondered how long it might take for Will-the-first-date to call her and become Will-the-second-date.

  Will Goodwin lingered in the darkness for a moment after Ashley had vanished inside the second door. He felt a rush of enthusiasm, a devil-may-care kind of excitement about the evening past and the evening to come.

  He was a bit overwhelmed. The girlfriend of a friend, who had passed on Ashley’s number, had informed him that she was beautiful and bright, if a bit mysterious, but she had exceeded even his fantasies in each regard. He thought he’d just managed to avoid the “boring” tag by the narrowest of margins.

  Hunched over against a quickening breeze, Will stuck his hands deep into his parka and started walking. The air had an antique quality to it, as if each shiver it delivered were no different, passed down exactly the same with the same October chill that had sliced through generations who had traveled the Boston streets. He could feel his cheeks starting to redden from the night’s determination, and he hustled toward the subway stop. He covered ground quickly, long legs now eating up the city sidewalk. She was tall, too, he thought. Almost five ten, he guessed, with a model’s lithe look that even jeans and a baggy cotton sweater hadn’t been able to conceal. He was a little astonished, as he dashed between traffic, crossing the street midblock, that she wasn’t inundated with guys, which, he supposed, probably had something to do with an unhappy relationship or some other bad experience. He decided not to speculate, but to simply thank whatever lucky star had put him in contact with Ashley. In his studies, he thought, everything was about probability and prediction. He wasn’t sure that the statistics he assigned to clinical work with lab rats could necessarily apply to meeting someone like Ashley.

  Will grinned to himself and went bounding down the steps to the T.

  The Boston subway, like that of most cities, has an otherworldly feel to it, when one passes through the turnstiles and descends into the underground world of transit. Lights glisten off white-tiled walls; shadows find space between steel pillars. There is a constancy of noise, as trains come, go, and rumble through the distance. The outside world is shut away, replaced with a kind of disjointed universe where wind, rain, snow, or even bright warm sunshine all seem a part of some other place and time.

  His train arrived, making a high-pitched, screeching sound, and Will boarded quickly, along with a dozen others. The lights in the train gave everyone a pasty, sickly look. For a moment, he speculated about the other passengers, all either wrapped up in a newspaper, buried in some book, or staring out blankly. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes for an instant, letting the speed and sway of the train rock him a little like a child in his mother’s arms. He would call tomorrow, he told himself. Ask her out and try to engage her on the phone a bit. He sorted through subjects and tried to imagine one that would be unexpected. He wondered where to take her. Dinner and a movie? Predictable. He had the sensation that Ashley was the sort of woman who wanted to see something special. A play perhaps? A comedy club? Followed by a late-night dinner at some place better than the usual burgers-and-beer hangout. But not too snobbish, he imagined. And quiet. So, laughter and then something romantic. Maybe not the greatest plan, he thought, but reasonable.

  His stop arrived, and he bounded up and out, moving quickly, but a little haphazardly, as he rose through the station, out to the street. The Porter Square lights sliced through the darkness, creating a sense of activity where there was little. He hunched over against a blast of cold wind and worked his way out of the square, down a side street. His own place was four blocks distant, and he worked his memory, trying to decide on the right restaurant to take her to.

  He slowed when he heard a dog bark, suddenly alarmed. In the distance, an ambulance siren broke through the night. A few of the duplexes and apartments on the block had the glow of television screens lighting up windows, but most were dark.

  To his right, in an alleyway between two apartment buildings, Will thought he heard a scraping sound, and he turned in that direction. Suddenly he saw a black shape rushing toward him. He took a step back in surprise and held up his arm to try to protect himself and thought that he should cry out for help, but things were moving far too quickly, and he had only a single moment filled with shock and fear
, and the vaguest of terrors because he knew something was coming at him fast. It was a lead pipe, and it swung through the air with a swordlike hiss, bearing inexorably down on his forehead.

  It took me nearly seven hours over one long, eye-straining day, to find Will Goodwin’s name in The Boston Globe. Except that it was a different name, under the headline POLICE SEEK MUGGER OF GRAD STUDENT, and ran in the local section, near the bottom of the page. The story was only four paragraphs and had precious little information, beyond that the injuries suffered by the twenty-four-year-old student were serious and he was in critical condition at Mass. General Hospital after being discovered by a passing early-morning pedestrian who spotted his bloody figure abandoned behind some aluminum garbage cans in an alleyway. Police were requesting assistance from anyone in the Somerville neighborhood who might have seen or heard anything suspicious.

  That was all.

  No follow-up either the next day or in the subsequent weeks. Just a small moment of urban violence, duly noted, registered and then, just as quickly, forgotten, swallowed up by the steady buildup of news.

  It took me two more days working the telephones to get an address for Will. The Boston College Alumni Office said that he had never finished the program he was enrolled in and came up with a home address out in the Boston suburb of Concord. The phone number was unlisted.

  Concord is a lovely place, filled with stately homes that breathe of the past. It has a green swath of town common with an impressive public library, a prep school, and a quaint downtown filled with trendy shops. When I was younger, I took my own children to walk the nearby battle sites and recite Longfellow’s famous poem. The town has, like so many in Massachusetts, unfortunately let history take a backseat to development. But the house where the young man that I had come to know as Will Goodwin was an older place, early-colonial farmhouse in nature, less ostentatious than the newer homes, set back from a side road, some fifty yards down a gravel drive. In the front, someone had clearly spent time planting flowers in the garden. I saw a small plaque, with the date 1789, on the glistening white exterior wall. There was a side door that had a wooden wheelchair ramp built up to it. I went to the front, where I could smell the nearby hibiscus blossoms, and knocked gingerly.

  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.”

  4

  A Conversation That Meant More Than Words

  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 con
struction 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.