It was enough to make him throw out his old theory. He’d assumed Renee Lewis had called up the mob, got in touch somehow with Langello’s crew, asked them to keep her in hiding from D’Anton. Mob version of witness protection, like Jordan had said. With the smiley man sent out to run interference, prevent her from being found.
But it was simpler than that, obviously. They had the same therapist. Renee Lewis and Mikey Langello, both seeing Dr Davin. He could picture them in that flower-themed reception area with its leather furniture, the whole place devoid of stress. Show up open-minded with a sharing sort of attitude, maybe you start chatting to people. Small talk about all those flower paintings, and then one thing leads to another. Coffee, wander along Beacon Street, and before you know it, you’re leaving your husband. Moving up to Boston to be with an Italian mob guy, albeit one who’s getting himself squared away for seven hundred dollars an hour, or whatever people had to pay for the privilege of a leather waiting area with an iPad on the counter.
He walked down to the Back Bay subway station. Actually, they didn’t call it the subway in Boston. It was called the T, and your MetroCard was good for nothing. You needed a CharlieCard, or a CharlieTicket. That was the downside to traveling outside New York: having to learn these different systems, different rules. He liked to move through the world with a certain fluidity and confidence, operate out of reflex. There was an irksome inefficiency about standing there looking at the route map, deciding what color line he should be on. But he got it figured out. He took the orange line and then the red down to Fields Corner, and from there it was only a short walk, ten minutes, over to Bloomfield Street.
The address from the clinic led him to a two-story white clapboard place with a chain-link fence across the dirt yard, and a flag hanging from a pole above the porch. There were a lot of flags on this street. It seemed to be a flag kind of town. He stood there for a minute, just watching. No one at the windows. No car in the driveway. The fence was low enough he could step across it without opening the little gate, and he crossed the yard with its dreary flowerbed below the porch-front balustrade and creaked up the steps and rang the bell. Silence inside. Down the street, a dog had started barking, as if wired by cosmic error to the button.
‘Hey.’
Behind him.
He turned and saw a woman on the porch of the house across the street. Fiftyish and saggy. Clothing torn and hair manically tousled, as if her home were subject to some horrendous micro-climate.
She said it again: ‘Hey.’
Marshall didn’t answer.
‘She doesn’t need anything. Don’t be trying to sell her shit.’
She had a cigarette sloping out one side of her mouth, the barrel wagging in ferocious amplitude with her speech.
Marshall said, ‘I’m not selling anything.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not selling anything.’
She spread her hands. ‘So what’re you doing?’
The door opened, and he turned back to face it, saw a woman maybe eighty years old standing there with a walking frame.
Marshall said, ‘Hello. Sorry to intrude. I’m looking for Michael Langello.’
She stood holding on to the walker, shaking a little, very stooped. ‘He’s not here.’
From behind him: ‘Harriet, don’t let him sell you anything. You don’t need anything they want to sell.’
Marshall said, ‘I’m not selling anything. I’m just trying to find Mr Langello.’
‘What’s he done?’
‘Do you know him?’
‘What’s he done?’
‘A woman’s missing. I need to know if he’s seen her.’
She nodded solemnly. Her hair was dead white, hanging dead straight to her shoulders, as if trying to match the geriatric limpness of everything else. She said, ‘Are you a good man?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I said, Are you a good man?’
‘I think so.’
‘You think so.’
From behind him again: ‘Harriet, I’m gonna come over.’
‘No, don’t worry. I’m just talking to the man.’
‘What?’
The old woman closed her eyes. ‘I said I’m just talking to the man. Don’t trouble yourself.’
‘Don’t let him sell you anything.’
Marshall said, ‘I’m not trying to sell you anything.’
The eyes opened. ‘Who told you Mikey’s here?’
‘This is the address he gave his doctor.’
‘Right, well.’ She stood straighter, blue veins standing out in her hands. ‘This is his mother’s house. I’m his mother.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
She reversed away from the door carefully with the walking frame. ‘You’re the first person I’ve talked to this week. Come in for a moment.’ She shunted forward a fraction and then back again, trying to get herself turned around in the hallway, and he thought of Benny in the SUV, trying to maneuver on that narrow road in the middle of the night.
She said, ‘Give a lady five minutes and I’ll see you on your way.’ She looked across her shoulder at him. ‘Follow. That’s it. Shut the door after you.’
She led him to the kitchen. Outdated but immaculate. Dull metal bench with a metal faucet, brutishly practical. Like a wash station at a morgue. The refrigerator had a big chrome handle on it, as if repurposed from a Buick. Magnets all over it, advertising every conceivable service. She found a packet of cigarettes and a lighter on the counter, put a cigarette in her mouth and fired herself up. Every tendon in her hand straining as she flicked the wheel.
‘Sit down. No one likes an awkward stander.’
He sat down at the little Formica table, and she joined him. ‘Who’s the woman. The woman you said’s missing.’
‘She’s from New York.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Might want to give folks more detail than that. If you’re trying to find her.’
‘Her name’s Renee Lewis.’
‘And who are you? That you’re looking for Renee’s gone missing.’
‘My name’s Marshall.’
‘Police?’
‘Ex-police. I was with NYPD.’
She worked on that with a few nods. ‘Known a couple Lewises in my time. Knew a Carol Lewis, and I knew a Lewis Tennant. Never met a Renee. Not once.’ She looked at him. ‘But you think my Mikey has.’
‘Maybe. I just want to ask him.’
‘All right.’ In the slow nod and distant gaze Marshall saw a sad desire to avoid details.
She said, ‘He moved up here, I thought that’d mean I see him all the time. But I don’t. He’s even got a man brings me groceries. Won’t even do that himself.’ She pointed at the window. ‘You see that window?’
Marshall looked over. The window above the sink. ‘Yeah. I can see it.’
‘The catch is broken. It needs a new catch. I said to him, I told him to come down and see to it. I said, don’t send someone down. Come do it yourself and talk to your mother at the same time. He comes down, this is two months ago. He comes down and he takes the old catch off, but he doesn’t have a new catch to put on.’ She pointed at him with the cigarette. ‘That’s the catch. If you know what I mean. Anyway. That’s as far as he got and he hasn’t been back. I went over to Dodson’s, I bought a catch myself. You know how long it takes to walk over there, with this thing? The frame?’
‘Quite a while, I imagine.’
‘Yeah. You’re imagining correctly. Took me an age. And it won’t even fit. Goddamn me if you can get it on there, in the holes.’
Silence. She sat smoking, looking at him.
Marshall said, ‘How about this.’
She leaked smoke. ‘I’m listening.’
‘I fix your window, you tell me how to find your Mikey.’
She nodded. ‘I was thinking something along those lines.’ She rose shakily. ‘I’ll put coffee on. The thing I bought, it’s under the sink there. And if you look in the workshop, there’s tools and everything. Arthur had all sorts.’
He found the window catch in the cupboard under the sink. It was a standard sill-mounted bracket with a lever handle that could move through ninety degrees. According to the packet: TWO #8 SCREWS INCLUDED! A minute later he identified the problem. The existing screw holes on the lower sill were set too close. The pitch was out by maybe an eighth of an inch.
She said, ‘Yeah, that was the other goddamn thing. You ever seen a screw like that? Jesus Christ.’
Marshall said, ‘Yeah. It’s a square drive.’
‘Nonsense is what it is. How you take your coffee?’
‘Black with a little cream.’
‘Black with a little cream. All right.’
She showed him the stairs to get down to the workshop. He took the screws with him. A portion of the subfloor had been dug out to create the necessary headroom. There was a workbench with a vise and a circular saw, and a pegboard with various tools. An old chest of drawers filled with screws and nails in various lengths and gauges. Sitting on the bare dirt around the excavation were neon lights daisy-chained with multiplugs and extension cord. Marshall flipped the switch at the bottom of the stairs, and the lights all blinked on in hesitant sequence. Pale glow, and a faint sizzle of electricity. It looked like the mouth of some cross-border smuggling route. He dug through drawers, and amongst the decades-old detritus, he found a torn and empty packet of #8 hex head nuts. Then a minute later he found an actual nut. He wound it onto one of the latch screws to check the gauge, and then found a square-tip screwdriver that fit the screw head. He took needle-nose pliers and a rat-tail file off the pegboard and went back upstairs. It was a ten-minute job with the file to open up the right-hand screw hole on the aluminum sill, working it hard on one edge to create an oval. He lined up the handle bracket again, making sure the widened hole would accommodate the necessary screw pitch, and then he dressed the hole smooth as best he could with the tip of the file.
‘You’re a man knows what he’s doing.’
‘Some of the time.’
He drank the coffee she’d made him, and then he went outside to finally attach the new handle, standing below the open window to see the underside of the sill. Fiddly, damp-fingered work. He fixed a screw through the widened hole first, driving it through the bracket and then onto the nut held steady with the pliers. Then he jiggled the handle bracket until he’d lined up the second hole, and homed the screw.
He went back inside and the woman said, ‘There. You missed your calling.’
Marshall pulled the window closed and tested the latch. ‘See how it’s got two settings there on the lever? You can have it fully closed, or you can have it a fraction open for air.’
‘Yeah. I ain’t a total idiot.’
He sat down at the table again and lined up his tools. File, pliers, screwdriver. She sat watching him, smoking.
‘What are you going to ask him?’
‘I don’t know yet. I’ll think about it while I’m heading over.’
She smiled at that. ‘You’re a truth-dodger. But you fix a good latch, I’ll give you that.’
Marshall smiled.
‘Whatever you’re gonna say to him, you ask why he hasn’t come to visit his mother. All right?’
‘All right.’
‘Lady shouldn’t have to look beyond her own blood and family to find a good man. Here.’ She reached behind her for a scrap of notepaper on the counter and passed it to him. ‘Wrote it down for you.’
One of the fridge magnets was for a cab service. Marshall used Mrs Langello’s phone to make the call, and then waited for it at the curb, twenty minutes all up, the woman across the street coming outside every ninety seconds or so, telling him no one around here wanted to buy what he was selling.
The address the woman had given him was for Maple Street in Cambridge, and it was a forty-minute ride getting up there. A beautiful old neighborhood. Two- and three-story homes on generous sections, grand and dripping oak trees on both redbrick sidewalks. Mikey Langello’s place was an upmarket version of his mother’s. Two-story New England clapboard on a large section with a rich, well-tended lawn. White stone driveway, and a white picket fence in place of chain-link. A vine-covered pergola covering a redbrick path from the mailbox to the front door. The rear of the property was sectioned off with a vine-covered wooden fence.
‘Timed it well, bro. Gonna rain soon.’
‘Yeah, I think you’re right. Thanks for the ride.’
He paid the guy with the last of Little Marco’s cash, and stood watching the house from the sidewalk as the cab pulled away up the street. No discernable change since he’d arrived. No face at a window, no twitching blind. He walked quietly up the redbrick path, the yard sweetly garden-scented and damp with a mist just strengthening to rain. No buzzer at the front door. He knocked, and then listened to silence. He knocked again, looked around carefully in the alcove for signs of surveillance. A little buttonhole lens above the lintel. He knocked again, and tried the handle. Locked. Marshall checked the street briefly, and then went around the side of the house. The fence had a gate that accessed the rear yard. He reached over and found the latch and let himself through, closed the gate quietly behind him and walked around into the rear yard.
There was a redbrick patio with a metal table and chairs, and an outdoor fireplace in such distressed condition it could have been the chimney of an original dwelling, since demolished. Pretty flowerbeds all along the perimeter fence, and a black plastic compost bin over in a corner.
Renee Lewis was walking from the bin to the house. She was carrying a metal bucket, and she dropped it when she saw Marshall. She raised her hands as if to cover her mouth, but then held them at her sides. Fists clenched, as if clinging to her own composure. Jaw clenched too, and her nostrils flaring as she breathed.
She said, ‘Do it.’ Eking it out through locked teeth. She shut her eyes. ‘Get it over with and goddamn you.’
He saw himself for a moment as she had: tall and grim and coat-clad. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not here for that.’
She opened her eyes. ‘Did D’Anton send you?’
Marshall shook his head. ‘He’s looking for you, though.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m a friend of Ray Vialoux’s. I was, anyway.’
She swallowed. She was attractive. Shortish and heavy, but with the sort of smooth and balanced features that would probably remain ageless until she hit seventy.
Marshall said, ‘Who else is in the house?’
She swallowed again. Throat muscles slender and precise. ‘He’s out. He’ll be home soon.’
Meaning Langello.
Marshall said, ‘I’m not here to hurt you. But we’re going to sit down. And you’re going to tell me everything.’