The unquiet poetry of the early dinner clatter at the Busy Bee diner in St Mary's, yet another last stand of old-time Boston, marked by the bilious cartoon of a plump bumble bee on a bubble-molded styrene sign and its smug antiquity of mid-century stoicism. The Bee was where the working-class holdovers of two generations ago splurged on specials within their fixed incomes and passed the afternoon with coffee and cigarettes till closing. It was a warm, cheap, dim coffee place with all the gray, starchy food you could eat for money short enough to take you back to the depression, if that was the time when you thought you were truly alive. Steel, plastic, Formica, painted plaster—no clever touches, no soft strategic lights, just a simulacrum of the harsh institutional glare of fluorescence the average patron was used to.
The welfare office, the unemployment office, the VA. The mixed, conflicted smells of the full spectrum of failure boiled up big in the air just like steam from the pots that produced the fare on which the Bee's elder frumpy patrons desultorily dined before having landed there and no doubt grew up with.
Pies and cakes like cardboard imitations were displayed on pedestals under glass on the main running service counter, as if from a museum of pop culture or post-modern fake. But they were dead real.
Patrons smoked in booths marked by “Thank you for smoking here” signs and honked a gambler's tough bravura in the face of unshakable losses, talking sports, politics, pop culture, but with names like Ted Williams, James Curley and Bette Davis dropped, instead of Nomar Garciaperra, John Kerry or Gina Davis. Laughter was a cigarette cackle, phlegmatic with coughing.
There was an odor lurking beneath as collective as human sweat: the bruised, exhaled hopelessness of oxidizing alcohol. The predictable human mist at the low end.
There was one grim looking younger man sitting there who barely stood out, almost shapeless in his coat and hat, hunched slope-shouldered over the counter as if drunk himself.
He was anything but.
“Careful young fella, you don't burn ya self with coffee. It's scaldin' hot.”
He gulped it, heedless of the waitress, another ancient part-time pensioner.
The waitress pouted her slack, heavily lipsticked mouth into an oval, which twisted up jowls dyed pink with rouge under wiry fire-orange hair that might have been a cancer-sufferer's wig, if gray roots weren't readily visible under her paper hat. Her expression was tortured.
“I told ya, it'll scald ya!”
The man drained his cup and gestured for more. “I won't feel it, much less taste it.”
She left the overheated pot on the counter in front of him with a sigh and gesture of weary disgust. Even in such a small matter, she was simply unable to carry the weight of any authority, be the one who was finally right because situations always nullified her. Even in telling a customer what to do for his own good, this happened. It was always going to happen. It made her sick.
A washed out, shapeless gray woman in a yellow nylon windbreaker wearing thick, rimless glasses whose stems were wide and a ghostly pale blue plopped down next to Null. She smoked a long white cigarette—100 millimeters at least—freshly lit.
“I didn't know they still made Virginia Slims,” said Null.
“They do if you know where to get them.”
“I never knew it made a difference.”
“Everything makes a difference, Mr. Null.”
“I'm still working that one out, but for the sake of argument, okay?”
She stood up and reached beneath the counter for a cup and saucer like an old hand, poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot the waitress left, and took a swallow. The cup and saucer smashed down on the Formica top as several nearby patrons flinched aside while Null sat, unmoved. She brought her fuscia-nailed fingers to her lips and rocked her head from side to side, choking.
The waitress raced over, tossing her cigarette aside to sparks on the floor, slopping a brownish wet rag over the pool of coffee and bone-white cup shards. She did the cleanup in a nervous fury. “I warned ya! I told ya! But ya wouldn’t listen! Oh, no, don’t know good advice when you hear it!” She grumbled self-righteous vindication as she wiped the counter, then slammed a mop to the floor, cursing gravely. Trivia, for her, had long ago achieved the scale of epic drama in the ever-narrowing bottleneck of a mostly un-decanted life.
“I near choked to death!”
“It's just coffee.”
“I burned the tongue out of my mouth.”
“You're talking fine now.”
Her answer was an exaggerated, wet cough into a cluster of counter napkins.
Null shot a look at the waitress that told her clearly it would be best for her to leave. Something told her not to ignore this. Something told her to go.
The eyes.
There was an unfeeling fixity in the eyes.
It was the look that telegraphed blows to follow—a target lock of expedient intent. She saw this in the eyes of a score of husbands and boyfriends in the past. The instant of dead focus.
She moved fast.
“I'm used to the pain. I've had it all my life. Why—”
“Be grateful for it. It's a good reminder.”
“Oh?” She arched white eyebrows wryly. “A reminder of what, then?”
“Your humanity,” he said with a hint of a wheeze.
“I can worry about that when I'm dead.”
“Yes. It's more of a concern then. Less of a worry.”
“Talk sense.”
“The punks you wanted pushed got pushed.”
The puffy, wrinkled, gray-tinged face hardened and lost the faintest trace of old-age feigned bewilderment. “How hard they get pushed?”
Null slurped boiling coffee with blistered lips. “Under the earth, is how hard.”
“Thank Jesus! Thank the lord and God love you, Mr. Null.” Her voice was a steady soft hum, void of drama.
“I'm not so sure being loved by God is a good idea.”
“You have a better one?”
“Yes. Pay me.”
“You want the money now.” She was emotional now, a little shocked.
“Is there a better time?”
“Maybe you could wait until my next month's check comes?”
“That wasn't the agreement.”
“No, but we didn't really talk nitty gritty, did we?”
“But it was to be paid upon completion.”
“How do I know they're dead?”
“Do you want me to describe how each one died? I can go into detail here.”
“No, that's alright, you don't have to.”
“We didn't discuss an amount, you know.”
Her eyes took on a shrewd cast. “We settled on what's fair, didn't we?”
“Yes.” Null met shrewd eyes with dead eyes. “We did, in fact. So I'll leave it to you.”
She leered for a moment, then relaxed. “Good. Well, then.” She settled comfortably on her stool. “Maybe I can settle up today after all.”
“You have no choice. One way or another, this transaction has to be completed. Today. There's a zero balance to reach that I won't delay.”
It was as if she had fallen back with the full weight of her age right then, making a show of reaching for her purse, fumbling through her wallet for cash.
“You restarted the unfinished cycle begun back in Park Street Station 26 years ago. So, it's only fair that I let you figure out what's fair. After all, Jimmy the Broom's killers have finally gotten what was fair. So now it's your turn. But if it's wrong, Mrs. Durgin. If you do it wrong, and be sure I'll know if you do, I can promise you right now that you'll be getting what's fair.”
“You can't threaten me.”
“I'm not. But you brought death back into play, Mrs. Durgin. Cheat death and death will recover what's owed. Every time. Without exception. Often immediately.”
He sipped loudly from his cup, eyes frozen open.
“In this case, immediately.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Null?”
“I'm stating, Mrs. Durgin, in no uncertain terms, that if you get the amount for this job wrong, I'm going to have to push you under the earth so that you can join Punch Slothropian, Dimmy Greco and Nimrod Stassen as part of the balance owed to zero out the account. Jimmy too. We don't want to forget him. Do we?”
“So, you'll what then? Kill me?”
“Easiest and quietest would be to break your neck then leave expeditiously as you collapse. They won't be worrying about me. You'll be presumed a stroke victim. More tricky would be a quick pop from the Glock and a non-hasty goodbye. The pooling blood would rule out stroke and things would have to move much faster. There'd be less of a window to slip through. Still, worked right, it could turn the trick just as smooth, I think. The pop isn't very loud, it might take you a second or two to slump over and, once again, I'll blend right in if I don't get excited. And I never get excited. These are the best options I could come up with so far, based on setting and equipment.” He looked up at her and said in the exact same tone: “Coffee? I think it's cooled down some now.”
He offered her the pot, and she looked away.
“I can show you more than one gun, if you want. I seem to pick them up easily. You could say I was a collector. What do you think?”
She responded with a fan of hundreds held like a stud poker hand in nacreous-veined, spindly fingers. The fan wavered with the trembling of her withered arm.
Null took the hundreds, counted attentively. “You were supposed to laugh, you know.”
Her face was stony, ashen.
He drew the Glock, let it hang by his leg by a flap of his coat so she was just able to see it. Mrs. Durgin stopped breathing.
Null touched her shoulder, uncocked the Glock and holstered it. Her once powder-dry face now glistened with a light sweat. “I think that's close, give or take,' he said, fingering a plastic covered menu and considering it as one considers a technical manual. “It's just about a fair price.”
“Just about?” Mrs. Durgin had gone pale with fear.
“Close enough, Mrs. Durgin. Close enough.”
“You're telling me I was wrong?”
“Yes, you had to be, but if you were too wrong then it would have been too bad.”
“I don't understand.”
“You were always wrong, Mrs. Durgin. You were led to be wrong and could only cope by doing further wrong—”
“And two wrongs don't make a right, right? I heard that. Oh, you got it all worked out alright.”
“It isn't that they make a right. It's that, when met head on, they make nothing at all. And that was the purpose of this—to make nothing of two wrongs. Do you see?”
“I see,” she mumbled, backing away.
Null ignored her, finished off the coffee, kept his eyes forward.
Mrs. Durgin slipped awkwardly out the door backwards, nearly falling over another customer as he tried to enter and she was pushing herself out.
Null gestured for the authoritative fiery-haired grand waitress and when she dragged herself before him, he presented the empty coffee pot and bored into her forehead with lifeless eyes. He said: “I'll take one of the specials. Any one of them will do. Any one at all.”
“Let go of it, you say? Just give it up?”
“Your pain is not some perfect masterpiece. Don't treasure it.”
The office was spare, as if the interim quarters for a civil servant, not a psychologist specializing in post trauma therapy.
“Aren't you being a bit pop cultural, Doctor Funambule?”
“Should I quote Heinz Kohut to make the point? You're an MSW, Kay. That would be superfluous. I'm not playing subtextual games with you. What's plain is you're harboring old misery. You need to distance yourself from it.”
“Look, Doctor, it isn't that I won't let go of it—it won't let go of me.”
“That's you being poetic. The truth is the only life your pain has is the one you give it.”
“No, you don't understand. My pain has a life independent from mine because it's the pain of my husband and children—actual, living people!”
“Kay. I can call you that, yes? Okay. Kay, listen, your husband and children died twelve years ago. Presumably, all their pain died with them.”
“No, their pain has a life, and the life is in me.”
“Guilt, and loss, Kay. Things you should let diminish over time, not nurture.”
“Loss is increased over time, not diminished. Guilt just means I care.”
“Caring about the dead is ineffectual, Kay. Care about the living. Dumping all your emotional effort into a crypt is hardly what we could call life-affirming.”
“I've had it up to here with your pseudo-zen, snobby pop Buddhism peace-and-contentment-find-your-center-Tao-of-Pooh horse-puckey! Not everything ends for the best, not everyone has a god-given right to well-being and sometimes, Doctor, the very best answer one can come up with for the good of all is to blow some dumb fuck's brains out and that's all there is to it. Sometimes, it just happens to be the goddamn will of heaven when you have to push the cluck off the roof instead of bringing him in.”
“Angry and violent, Kay.”
“You oughtta know why.”
“You're drinking again, aren't you?”
“Takes the edge off.”
“Try meditation rather than medication.”
“Touché, Doctor. What's the point? I'm not an alcoholic.”
“But of course you are, Kay, and if you don't do something about it I'll have to write you up for detox.”
“No, I'll take another meeting or something. I don't need another write up.”
“You've used alcohol so often and so long that you've developed the physical dependency, but you didn't have it at the start, did you? Your drinking was about need, a driven choice. That you lack the history or genetic predisposition is neither here nor there. I think if we could get rid of your emotional need to drink, the physiologic consequences would be rendered nil. You're drinking as an analgesic, yes?”
“No. I drink to lose myself and let the pain and sorrow overtake me. When I drink, I can meet my guilt head on.”
“That's honest. Why can't you meet it without alcohol? Inhibitions?”
“Yes. I can't get at it directly. It's with me all the time, but hiding, lurking—”
“Making you do things you don't want to, perverting action into punishment?”
“Exactly. But when I'm drunk it can't touch me—”
“But you can touch it.”
“Right again.”
“Tell me how it happened. The break in, the slayings.”
Boyd's cheeks flushed and she jerked up from her chair, thrusting her index finger at Funambule. “You're a fucker, you know that? A real piece of work!”
“Sit down, Lieutenant, and try to relax.”
“The fuck I will.”
Funambule leaned forward, shaggy faced, sodden eyed, salt and pepper hair a mass of balding cowlicks and beard unevenly shorn and dotted with healing razor injuries. He was short, chubby, wearing an ill-laundered Brooks Brothers sky-blue shirt and khakis way too tight in the waist for his burgeoning paunch. His pant cuffs rode up, exposing mismatched navy and black socks. “Kay, let's calm down and be honest with ourselves here. You relive this every day in every empty moment. It replays like bad streaming video in your head when you sleep, hangs over you every morning like an iron weight of penance when you drag yourself out of bed. What possible difference could it make if someone like me heard the story just once out your thousands of replays?”
“You know the story, Doctor, which is why it pisses me off.”
“If I hear it from you it might help me find something not in the file. I don't think these people get all the nuances, do you?”
“No,” she choked back.
“They say the devil is in the details, Kay. Let's see if we can grab the son of a bitch by the tail.”
She slumped back down in the chair and exhaled: “Fine.”
“This was about a client from the Ruggles Projects.”
“Yes. Drug addict in a methadone program, standard stuff. Anselm something.”
“You know his name.”
She spoke it and coughed. “He was bright, funny—
had a spark. I used to think that mattered. I used to think a lot of things I don't anymore. Anyway, I tried to get him into City Year, the urban Peace Corps deal we also used to launder the more promising youth offenders for college. It started out as middle-class awareness building and wound up as a class conduit for successfully rehabbed youth offenders.”
“You took a special interest.”
“I bought him books, lunch sometimes. He was a charming boy straight out of the razored womb of Tartarus, the Alma Lewis Projects on Ruggles, Boston's Cabrini Green. Crackwhore mother, OG gang-banger father—pride of Roxbury. All standard stuff. I helped him get his GED. Tutored him, in fact.”
“And he repaid you how?”
She turned aside her head and brushed away a tear. Quietly, she said, “Don't make me.”
“You want to tell me—it's a way of shining a light on the shadows. Some things die in the light, so try it.”
“Bullshit . You just want me to re-experience it!”
“No, Kay, I want you to de-experience it. Make it a story, make it no longer real and immediate. It's not about becoming closer to the incident, it's about distance, limitation. Modify it as a story and you make it smaller, not larger. You control it, despite your feelings.”
“Okay.” Boyd lost her hard edge for a moment, her face now somehow vulnerable. “You're right. I'll be in total control when I cry.”
“That's true,” said Funambule without irony.
Then came the stolid silence wherein the doctor waited patiently.
It was a hoarse whisper. “Long, rain, day.”
“Just a bit louder, Kay?”
“It was a long, rainy day. Too long, busy. I took a pill before bed—Vicodin—to relax.”
“Similar to heroin, yes.”
“Yes,” she sighed and Funambule made notes. “I was zonked, listening to the rain. Cutbacks had made the caseloads insane, and Bush One was continuing the same cuts started by Reagan and made worse later by Bush Two. I was making less money and my husband was pulling an all-night on-call at Boston City. The kids were asleep. My four-year-old, Ariel, and the baby, Morty -
“You didn't get much time off with him.”
Her eyes welled. “No, thanks to the Republican power lock. We were in debt hiring a nurse/nanny to take care of him during the day, which was still better than four people making it on a resident's income. Anyway, it was late—we lived in a townhouse on Park Drive then, not much then, worth a fortune now—and I was dead, dreaming, hallucinating.”
“But you really weren't.”
“No, it was real. There was a hand on my mouth, buck knife to my throat. Anselm was standing over the bed, laughing, obviously stoned. ‘Now bitch you gonna really help out papa Anse, yo,” is what he said. I looked next to me and Ted was there petrified, sitting up straight, his mouth open, not making a sound. One of them had him by the balls through his pajamas. He was still—trying not—to wake me.” She paused and breathed unsteadily. “The three of them took us out into the den. Anselm forced Ted on his knees and demanded he give him oral sex. Ted refused, and he punched his face bloody. I was paralyzed, knife to my ribs. They were laughing as my daughter watched this, trying hard not to cry and failing, Ariel. She wasn't thinking of the huge K-bar military knife at her throat anymore. She was busy watching her father humiliated and murdered. After Ted gave them everything, the money, my few jewels, his heirloom pocket watch and diamond fob, Anselm gutted him like a pig in four moves, prison cuts. I thought stupidly, How weird, when this kid had only been in juvie Bootcamp, not Walpole or even MCI Concord, for God's sake. Where the hell did he pick that up?”
She coughed to mask flowing tears, which failed entirely. Funambule scribbled, taking no apparent notice.
“They raped me. I let them. I did it to save my daughter. I did it for her, and for Morty the baby. And I failed.” She let room silence vie with her frustrated sobbing. She screamed it then: “I failed!”
Dr. Funambule scribbled on.
“It was in slow motion, how he moved that lean, muscular arm with the K-Bar knife right across my beautiful daughter's neck. And I watched him without moving. Watched him do it.”
“Tell me what he did.”
“Cut, my, off.”
“Take your time, Kay.”
She broke down, carried by the force of her tears, loud and strong. She stood and riveted angry eyes on Funambule. “He cut my daughter's head off!”
“It's in the file, Kay. I know. What happened then?”
“The room spun and I was going out, losing consciousness, I was sure of it.” Funambule offered tissues and she refused them. “But he was laughing, goofing around with his crew, that fucking monster. Playing with my daughter's head. I don't know what I felt or could feel, but I elbowed the one holding me in the crotch and dove for Anselm. To kill him, anyway I could. That's all I knew. He had to die and somehow, weak little mommy me was going to do it. I had to. I was all that was left. I was the only one. I lunged at him, took a punch in the face and still kept on going—managed to grab him by the throat with one hand while he tried to break my other arm. I bit him. He responded by stabbing me with the full length of the blade of the K-bar knife in the side, but I didn't feel it. He tried to pull it out, but I saw how he gutted my husband with it when he yanked it clean and eviscerated him. I broke his fingers before he could yank it out. He fought me off with everything he had, smashed my nose, ruptured my trachea, dislocated my shoulder, but I held on and took him through the window with me, both hands around his neck, squeezing, clawing.”
Funambule waited for her to break the silence.
“We landed hard together, like in a falling dream when your heart skips a beat. I tore his throat out before we landed. I killed him before we both died. How about that? The little liberal social worker, the do-gooder!”
“What about the baby?”
“That's in the file too.”
“But you need to say it.”
“Yeah. I need to say it.” Now she took a tissue and wiped her eyes. “That's what just what I fucking I need—to tell you out loud that they took my four-month-old baby and crushed him to death in my goddamn trash-masher! That's what I need!”
“That's right,” said Funambule, putting his clipboard on the desk and interlacing his fingers. “And by doing it, what happened? Here we are, talking. Your eyes are wet and your nose is running and your heart is racing, but you're here in the moment with me. Nothing else is really happening. You aren't seeing any of what you were talking about, but you remember disconnected images. What you see is me here in this room, and yourself, and the present.”
And it dawned on her that he was annoyingly, irritatingly right. Telling the story was beginning to make her callous to it, like it was some grisly anecdote involving someone else. Some of its power was gone. Guilt flooded her at the thought that she might become hardened to her own experience—to what she owed the love of the dead. She began to speak but found herself weeping instead. Funambule stood up, gave her the box of tissues and let her fall into him, into a sweaty, therapeutic bearhug.
“Kay, getting over what happened to you doesn't mean you don't honor those who died any less. It just means a commitment to your own life coming before your commitment to the dead. It's possible to blend the two, make them exist harmoniously.”
He embraced her firmly, and she cried with grateful abandon into the blue rumpled material of his Brooks Brothers suit. Her shoulders rose and fell in the passion of her tears and Funambule swayed back and forth, comforting her.
“You've done better than you know, Kay,” he soothed.
“I know,” she replied hoarsely, reached around Funambule's ample backside and deftly cuffed both his chubby wrists in her Smith and Wesson high security cuffs. “I do fine no matter what.”
He backed off, nearly falling over his desk, struggling reflexively against the cuffs. “What do you think you're doing?”
“I'm placing you under arrest, Doctor. What do you think you're doing—molesting another traumatized woman?”
“Kay, this is just an anger response to your grief—”
“No, Doctor, this is an anger response to your crimes.” She pressed a beeper clipped to her belt and immediately the door to Funambule's office was kicked in by a gun-toting Detective Bim Hundertwasser followed by officer Grant Monad.
“You rang, Ma-dame?” honked Bim.
“I'm alright you two so holster the weapons. This boy's only dangerous for traumatized women on too much Zoloft.”
“Geeze, Kay, why'd you even bother bringing us along at all?” Monad said with mock innocence. “Want we should give him a game of pinball on the way down to the unit?”
“Whatever works, Grant,” she said, pushing the confused and off-balance Dr. Funambule forward so that he was clumsily bent over his own desk. She kicked his legs apart and mirandized him briskly.
“But you're OC!” he whined.
“True. But sometimes I do favors for major crimes.”
“I'm not a major criminal.”
“Don't underestimate yourself, Doctor.”
“This really sucks!” Funambule whined in a near falsetto when she was done. She pulled him up from the desk hard, then pushed him toward Detective Hundertwasser so that he nearly fell over. Hundertwasser pushed him into Monad who pushed him back. His glasses flew off and his face was the color of aged steak tartar set in a popover so puffed up it was ready to explode. He wheezed as Hundertwasser grabbed him to keep him from caroming about. “This—just—sucks!”
Boyd approached him and patted his sweat-dotted face. “No, Doctor. What sucks is that, while being a serial rapist, you're really a terrific shrink. What a fucking waste.”
“Fuck you!” he seethed.
Boyd gave him a sympathetic kiss on the cheek and mussed his hair. She whispered, “Still, all-in-all, you wanna know something?”
“What?” he barked in a spasm of rage.
“I think you actually helped me.”