The Wrong Man Read online

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.

  He leaned his head back, listening to the sound of the subway train, a curious kind of music hidden in the unrelenting noise of metal against metal.

  It was a little before five in the morning when Michael O’Connell made his next-to-last stop. He picked a station more or less at random and rose up out into the last darkness of the night into the area around Chinatown, near the downtown financial district. Most of the stores were shuttered and closed, and the sidewalk was empty. It did not take him long to find a pay phone that was operating, and he shivered against the chill. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, giving him an anonymous, monklike appearance. He worked fast. He didn’t want a lazy patrol car making a last sweep through the narrow streets to spot him, stop, and ask questions.

  O’Connell deposited fifty cents and dialed Ashley’s number.

  The telephone rang five times before he heard her sleep-groggy voice.

  “Hello?”

  He paused, just to give her a second or two to fully awaken.

  “Hello?” she asked a second time. “Who is it?”

  He remembered a cheap, white portable phone by the side of her bed. No caller ID, not that it would make a difference.

  “You know who it is,” he said softly.

  She did not reply.

  “I told you. I love you, Ashley. We are meant for each other. No one can come between us.”

  “Michael, stop calling me. I want you to leave me alone.”

  “I don’t need to call you. I’m always with you.”

  Then he hung up the phone, before she had a chance to. The best sort of threat, he thought, wasn’t stated, but imagined.

  It was almost dawn when he finally made it back to his apartment.

  Perhaps a half dozen of his neighbor’s cats were milling about in the hallway, mewling and making other annoying sounds. One of them hissed when he approached. The old lady who lived across from him owned somewhere more than twelve cats, perhaps as many as twenty, called them all by a variety of names, and set out food dishes for the occasional stray that happened by. Owned, he thought, was a relative term. They seemed to come and go pretty much as they pleased. She’d even put an extra litter box in a corner of the hallway to accommodate their needs, which gave the corridor a thick, unpleasant smell. The cats knew Michael O’Connell and he knew the cats, and he didn’t get along with any of them any better than he did with their owner. He considered them strays, a step above vermin. They made him sneeze, and his eyes water, and were forever watching him with feline wariness whenever he entered the building. He didn’t like it when anyone or anything paid any attention to his comings and goings.

  O’Connell aimed a kick at a calico who strayed within his reach, but missed. Getting sluggish, he told himself. The result of a long but exciting night. The calico and companions skittered away as he unlocked his apartment door. He looked down and saw that one, a black-and-white with an orange streak, lingered momentarily near the food dish. It must be new or else stupid not to take its cue from the others, who kept their distance from him. The old woman wouldn’t be up for an hour, maybe longer, and he knew her hearing was getting pretty shaky. He glanced down the hallway for a moment. None of the other tenants seemed to be stirring. He could never understand why no one else complained about the cats, and he hated them for it. There was an old couple, from Costa Rica, who spoke poor English. A Puerto Rican man who, O’Connell guessed, supplemented his machinist’s job with an occasional B and E occupied one of the other apartments. Upstairs were a pair of graduate students, who occasionally filled the hallway with the pungent smell of marijuana, and a gray-haired, sallow-faced salesman who preferred to spend his extra hours weepy and immersed in a bottle. Other than complaining about the cats to the superintendent—an older man with fingernails encrusted with years of dirt, who spoke in an accent that was indecipherable, and who clearly hated to be bothered with repairs—O’Connell had little to do with any of them. He wondered if any of the other tenants even knew his name. It was all just a quiet, dingy, unimpressive, cold place, either an end for some or a transition for others, and it had an impermanence that he liked. He looked down, as he opened his door, and wondered whether the old woman actually kept track of her cats. He doubted that she had an accurate count.

  Or that she would miss one.

  He rapidly bent down and seized the black-and-white roughly around the midsection. The cat squealed once, clawing at him in surprise.

  He looked down at the sudden red scratch on the back of his hand. The thin line of blood was going to make what he had in mind much easier.

  Ashley Freeman lay back in her bed.

  “I am in trouble,” she whispered out loud.

  She remained that way, barely moving until the sunlight moved steadily through her window, past the frilly, opaque shades that gave the room a little-girl feel. She watched as a shaft of daylight moved slowly along the wall across from her bed. Some of her own works were hung there, some charcoal drawings done in a life-figure class, one of a man’s torso that she liked, another of a woman’s back that curved sensuously across the white page. There was also a self-portrait that she’d done, which was unusual in that she had only drawn half of her face in detail and left the remainder in obscurity, as if it were shadowed.

  “This can’t be happening,” she said, again out loud, but this time a little louder.

  Of course, she noted inwardly, she didn’t know what this was. Not yet.

  I called her later that day. I didn’t bother with pleasantries or small talk, but just launched into my first question: “Exactly where did Michael O’Connell’s obsession come from?”

  She sighed. “That’s something you need to discover for yourself. But don’t you remember the electricity of being young and coming unexpectedly across that singular moment of passion? The one-night stand, the chance encounter. Have you gotten so old that you can’t remember when things were all possibility?”

  “All right. Yes,” I said, perhaps a little too hastily.

  “There was only one problem. All those moments are more or less benign, or, at the very most, simply embarrassing. Red-faced mistakes, or moments you keep to yourself and never mention to another soul. But that wasn’t the case this time. Ashley, in a moment of weakness, slipped once, and then, abruptly, found herself enmeshed in a briar patch. Except a briar patch isn’t necessarily lethal, and Michael O’Connell was.”

  I paused, then said, “I found Will Goodwin. Except his name wasn’t Goodwin.”

  She hesitated, a small catch in the words that slowly came over the phone line. “Good. You probably learned something important. At the very least, your understanding of Michael O’Connell’s, ah, potential should have grown through your meeting. But that’s not where it all began, and it’s probably not where it all ends, either. I don’t know. That’s for you to figure out.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “I have to go. But you understand, in a way, you’re at the same point Scott Freeman was, before things started to get…well, I’m not sure what the right word is. Tense? Difficult? He knew some things, but not very much. Mostly what he had was an absence of information. He believed that Ashley might be at risk, but he didn’t know how, or exactly where or when, or any of the things that we first ask ourselves when we pe
rceive a threat. All Scott Freeman had were several disturbing items to wonder about. He knew it wasn’t the start and he knew it wasn’t the finish. He was like a scientist, thrown into the middle of an equation, trying to guess which way to go in order to find an answer.”

  She paused, and for the first time I felt a bit of the same chill.

  “I have to go,” she said. “We’ll speak again.”

  “But—”

  “Indecision. It’s a simple word. But it leads to evil things, does it not? Of course, so can being foolishly decisive. That’s more or less the dilemma, isn’t it? To act. Or not to act. Always an intriguing question, don’t you think?”

  5

  Nameless

  When Hope came through the front door of her house, she instinctively clapped her hands twice. She could already hear the sound of her dog’s paws as he rushed from the living room, where he spent much of his time staring out the front picture window, waiting for her to return home. The sounds were utterly familiar to her: first the thud, as he leapt down from the sofa that he wasn’t allowed on when there was an actual human around to tell him no, then the scrabbling noise that his toenails made against the hardwood floor, as he slipped and pushed the Oriental rug out of position, and finally the urgent bounding, as he headed to the vestibule. She knew enough to put down any papers or groceries in anticipation of the greeting.

  There is nothing, she thought, in the entire world that is as emotionally unencumbered as a dog’s greeting. She knelt down and let him cover her face with his tongue, his tail beating a steady tattoo against the wall. It is a truism for dog owners, Hope thought, that regardless of what else is going wrong, the dog always wags its tail when you come through the door. Her dog was of oddly mixed parentage. A vet had suggested to her that he was the clearly illegitimate offspring of a golden retriever and a pit bull, which gave him a shortish, blond coat, a snubby nose, a fierce and unmitigated loyalty minus the nasty aggressiveness, and a degree of intelligence that sometimes astonished even her. She had acquired him from a shelter where he’d been shunted as a puppy, and when she asked the shelter operator what the pup’s name was, she’d been told that he hadn’t been christened, so to speak. So, in a fit of slightly devilish creativity, she’d called him Nameless.

  When he was young, she’d taught him to retrieve wayward soccer balls at the end of practice, a sight that never failed to amuse the girls on whatever team she happened to be coaching. Nameless would patiently wait by the bench, silly grin on his face, until she gave him a hand signal, then would bolt across the pitch, rounding up each ball and pushing it with his nose and forelegs, racing back to where she waited with a mesh bag. She would tell the girls on the team that if they could learn to control the ball at speed the way Nameless did, then they would all be all-Americans.

  He was far too old now, couldn’t see or hear as well, and had a touch of arthritis, and collecting a dozen balls was probably more than he could handle, so he went to practice less often. She did not like to think about his ending; he’d been with her as long as she’d been with Sally Freeman.

  She often thought that if it had not been for Nameless the puppy, she might not have succeeded in her partnership with Sally. It had been the dog who had forced Ashley and her to find a common ground. Dogs, she thought, managed that sort of thing pretty effortlessly. In the days after the divorce, when Sally and Ashley had come to live with her, Hope had been greeted with all the impassiveness that a sullen seven-year-old could muster. All the anger and hurt Ashley felt had pretty much been ignored by Nameless, who had been overjoyed at the arrival of a child, especially one with Ashley’s energy. So Hope had enlisted Ashley in exercising the puppy with her, and training him, which they did with mixed results—he was adept at retrieving, clueless when it came to the furniture. And so, by talking about the dog’s successes and failures, they had reached first a détente, then an understanding, and finally a sense of sharing, which had broken through many of the other barriers that they’d faced.

  Hope rubbed Nameless behind the ears. She owed him far more than he owed her, she thought. “Hungry?” she asked. “Want some dog food?”

  Nameless barked once. A stupid question to ask a dog, she thought, but one they certainly liked to hear. She walked into the kitchen and grabbed the dog bowl off the floor, as she began to think about what she might prepare for Sally and herself for dinner. Something interesting, she decided. A piece of wild salmon with a fennel cream sauce and risotto. She was an excellent cook and took pride in what she made. Nameless sat, tail sweeping the floor, anticipating. “We’re the same, you and I,” she said to the dog. “We’re both waiting for something. The difference is, you know it’s dinner, and I’m not sure what is in store for me.”

  Scott Freeman looked around and thought about the moments in life when loneliness appears completely unexpectedly.

  He had slumped into an aging Queen Anne armchair and stared out the window toward the darkness creeping through the last October leaves on the trees. He had some papers to correct, a class lecture to prepare, some reading he needed to do—a colleague’s manuscript had arrived in the day’s mail from the University Press and he was on the peer-review panel, and there were at least a half dozen requests from history majors for advice on course selections.

  He was also stymied in the midst of a piece of his own writing, an essay on the curious nature of fighting in the Revolutionary War, where one moment was endowed with utter savagery, and another, with a kind of medieval chivalry, as when Washington had returned a British general’s lost dog to him in the midst of the battle of Princeton.

  Much to do, he thought. Out loud, to no one except himself, he said, “You’ve got a full plate.”

  And in that moment, it all meant nothing.

  He considered this thought and realized instead, it might all mean nothing.

  It depended upon what he did next.

  He looked away from the fading afternoon light and let his eyes scour across the letter that he’d found in Ashley’s bureau. He read each word for the hundredth time and felt as trapped as when he’d first discovered it. Then, he mentally reviewed every word, every inflection, every tone, in everything she had said to him when he’d called her.

  Scott leaned back and closed his eyes. What he had to do was try to imagine himself in Ashley’s position. You know your own daughter, he told himself. What is going on?

  This question echoed in his imagination.

  The first thing, he insisted to himself, was to discover who’d written the letter. Then he could independently assess the person, without intruding on his daughter’s life. If he was skillful he could reach a conclusion about the individual without involving anyone—or, at least, not involving anyone who would tell Ashley that he was poking around in her private life. When, as he hoped was true, he discovered that the letter was merely unsettling and inappropriate and nothing more, he could relax and allow Ashley the freedom to extricate herself from the unwanted attention and get on with her life. In fact, he could probably manage all this without even involving Ashley’s mother or her partner, which was his preferred course of events.

  The question was how to get started.

  One of the great advantages of studying history, he reminded himself, was in the models of action that great men had taken through the centuries. Scott knew that at his core he had a quiet, romantic streak, one that loved the notion of fighting against all hope, rising to desperate occasions. His tastes in movies and novels ran in that direction, and he realized there was a certain childish grace in these tales, which trumped the utter savagery of the actual moments in history. Historians are pragmatists. Cold-eyed and calculating, he thought. Saying “Nuts” at Bastogne was remembered better by novelists and filmmakers. Historians paid more attention to frostbite, blood that froze in puddles on the ground, and helpless mind- and soul-numbing despair.

  He believed that he’d passed on much of this heady romanticism to Ashley, who had embraced his storyte
lling verve and spent many hours reading Little House on the Prairie and Jane Austen novels. In part, he wondered, if this might be at least a little bit of the basis for her trusting nature.

  He felt a small acid taste on his tongue, as if he’d swallowed some bitter drink. He hated the idea that he’d helped to teach her to be confident, trusting, and independent, and now, because she was all those things, he was deeply troubled.

  Scott shook his head and said out loud, “You’re jumping way ahead here. You don’t know anything for certain, and in fact you don’t even know anything at all.”

  Start simply, he insisted. Get a name.

  But doing this, without his daughter finding out, was the problem. He needed to intrude without being caught.

  Feeling a little like a criminal, he turned around and went up the stairs of his small, wood-framed house, toward Ashley’s old bedroom. He had in mind a more thorough search, hoping for some telltale bit of information that would take him beyond the letter. He felt a twinge of guilt as he went through her door and wondered a little bit why he had to violate his own daughter’s room in order to know her a little better.

  Sally Freeman-Richards looked up from her plate at dinner and idly said, “You know, I got the most unusual call from Scott this afternoon.”

  Hope sort of grunted and reached for the loaf of sourdough bread. She was familiar with the roundabout way that Sally liked to start certain conversations. Sometimes Hope thought that Sally remained, even after so many years, something of an enigma to her; she could be so forceful and aggressive in a court of law, and then, in the quiet of the house they shared, almost bashful. Hope thought there were many contradictions in their lives. And contradictions created tension.

  “He seems worried,” Sally said.

  “Worried about what?”

  “Ashley.”

  This made Hope put her knife down on the plate. “Ashley? How so?”