Prayers For Rain Part 30

It was a late afternoon in January when I left Angie's. The city was stripped of color. I slipped on the ice and grabbed the trunk of a black tree to steady myself. I stood with my hand on the tree for a long time. I stood and waited for something to fill me up again.

Eventually, I moved on. It was getting dark and colder and I had no gloves. I had no gloves, and the wind was picking up.

"You heard about Karen Nichols," I said as Angie and I walked under sun-mottled trees in Bay Village.

"Who hasn't?"

The afternoon was cloudy, marked by a humid breeze that caressed the skin, then sank into the pores like soap, and smelled of thick, sudden rain.

Angie glanced up at the thick ma.s.s of gauze and bandage over my ear. "What happened, by the way?"

"Someone hit me with a lug wrench. Nothing broken, just very badly bruised."

"Internal bleeding?"

"There was some." I shrugged. "They flushed it out in the emergency room."

"Bet that was fun."

"A ball."

"You get beat up a lot, Patrick."

I rolled my eyes at her, pushed the conversation away from my physical abilities or lack thereof.

"I need to know more about David Wetterau."

"Why?"

"You referred Karen Nichols to me through him. Correct?"

"Yeah."

"How'd you come to know him in the first place?"

"He was starting a small business. Sallis & Salk did his background checks for him and his partner."

Sallis & Salk was the company Angie worked for now, a monster high-tech security firm that handled everything from guarding heads of state to installing and monitoring burglar alarms. Most of their operatives were ex-cops or ex-Feds, and all of them looked really good in dark suits.

Angie stopped. "Where's your case here, Patrick?"

"There isn't one, technically."

"Technically." She shook her head.

"Ange," I said, "I have reason to believe that all the bad luck that happened to Karen in the months before she died wasn't accidental."

She leaned back against the banister of a wrought-iron railing fronting a brownstone. She ran a hand through her short hair, seemed to sag in the heat for a moment. In the old-world tradition of her parents, Angie always dressed up for church. Today she wore cream-colored, pleated linen pants, a white sleeveless silk blouse, and a blue linen blazer she'd removed as soon as we'd started walking.

Even with the hack job she'd done to her hair (and, okay, it wasn't a hack job; it was actually quite attractive, if you hadn't known her before), she still looked six or seven steps above tremendous.

She stared at me and her mouth formed a perfect oval of unasked questions.

"You're going to tell me I'm crazy," I said.

She shook her head slowly. "You're a good investigator. You wouldn't make something like this up."

"Thanks," I said softly. It was a bigger relief than I'd expected to have at least one person not question the sanity of my investigation.

We started walking again. Bay Village is in the South End and is often derisively called Gay Village by the h.o.m.ophobes and family-values crowd because of the predominance of same-s.e.x couples in the neighborhood. Angie had moved here last autumn, a few weeks after she'd left my apartment. It was about three miles from my Dorchester neighborhood, but it might as well have been on the far side of Pluto. A close-knit few blocks of bowfront chocolate brownstones and red cobblestone, Bay Village is planted firmly between Columbus Avenue and the Ma.s.s Pike. As the rest of the South End becomes ever trendier-the galleries and mochaccino houses and L.A. deco bars sprouting like ragweed, and the residents who salvaged the whole area from urban decay during the seventies and eighties getting pushed out by transplants looking to buy low now and sell high next month-Bay Village seems the last remnant of bygone days when everyone knew each other. True to its reputation, most of the people we pa.s.sed were gay or lesbian couples, at least two-thirds out walking dogs, and they all waved to Angie, exchanged a few h.e.l.los and comments on the weather, a tidbit of neighborhood gossip. It occurred to me that this was far more like a true neighborhood than any I'd been in recently in the city, including my own. These people knew each other, seemed to watch out for each other. One guy even mentioned that he'd shooed off two kids he'd noticed eyeing Angie's car late last night and suggested she get a Lojack system. Maybe I was missing some greater subtlety, but this seemed the epitome of the family-values concept, and I wondered how those good Christians ensconced in the sterility and affectation of the suburbs saw themselves as poster children for the whole ideal, yet couldn't tell you the name of the family four houses over on a bet.

I told Angie everything I knew so far about Karen Nichols's final months-her steep drop into alcohol and drug abuse, the letters forged in her name and sent to Cody Falk, my certainty that Cody hadn't been the one to vandalize her car, her rape and arrest for solicitation.

"Jesus," she said when I got to the rape part, but otherwise she remained silent as we wound our way through the South End and then crossed Huntington Avenue and walked along the expanse of the Christian Science Church Headquarters with its glimmering pool and domed buildings.

When I finished, Angie said, "So why are you interested in David Wetterau?"

"That's the first strand that was pulled. That's where Karen's unraveling began."

"And you think he may have been pushed into traffic?"

I shrugged. "Normally, with forty-six witnesses, I'd doubt it, but given that on that particular day he wasn't supposed to be anywhere near that particular corner, and now with these letters someone sent to Cody, I'm pretty sure someone was going out of their way to destroy Karen Nichols."

"And drive drive her to suicide?" her to suicide?"

"Not necessarily, though I'm not ruling it out. For now, let's just say I think someone was determined to destroy her life in increments."

She nodded and we sat on the edge of the pool, and she idly ran her fingers through the water.

"Wetterau and Ray Dupuis set up their film equipment supply company, and Sallis & Salk ran checks on all of their employees and interns. They all came out clean."

"What about Wetterau?"

"What about him?"

"Did he check out?"

She glanced at her reflection in the gla.s.sy water. "He hired us."

"But he wasn't the money man. He drove a VW, and Karen told me they'd bought a Corolla because they couldn't swing a Camry. Did Ray Dupuis ask for a background check on his partner?"

She watched a ripple flow from her swaying fingers. "Yeah." She nodded, eyes still on the water. "Wetterau checked out, Patrick. With flying colors."

"Is there anyone at Sallis & Salk who does handwriting a.n.a.lysis?"

"Sure. We have at least two forgery experts. Why?"

I handed her the two samples I had of Wetterau's signature-one with the "P" and one without.