Billy Povich: Loot The Moon Part 8

Billy squeezed Brocks shoulder. "Who knows what the h.e.l.l he meant?" he said. As his mouth spoke the gentle lie, Billy offered the young man a silent oath to track down The Man, who had paid a shooter to kill Brock Harmonys father and Rhode Islands best judge.

ten.

The train lurched to motion and rolled from an underground bunker near the State House in downtown Providence, heading south on rails parallel to the highway, into the early-morning headlights speeding up Route 95 toward the city. The six-car electric Amtrak coach ground down the tracks with a mesmerizing hum. The steel wheels made a tooting toy horn noise in the curves. The train motored past the windowless backsides of warehouses, under bridges scored by graffiti, past the stacks of used tires piled behind auto body shops that tried to make a good impression from the front. Martin opened his newspaper. The sun rising over his left shoulder made a natural reading lamp. People staggered like drunkards down the aisle toward the cafe car. Commuters on their way to Manhattan read spreadsheets and magazines, or walled themselves behind their BlackBerries or their iPods. This was an eclectic group in this car, Martin thought, judging by the tones on their cellular telephones, which cried for attention with rock music, circus themes, and the opening bars to the theme from Hogans Heroes.

Martin had been too nervous for breakfast. Now his empty stomach churned. He found himself at the obituary page. He scanned quickly to be sure there was n.o.body he knew, and then he settled into the obit of a retired family doctor.

... he was the first sight on this earth for more than six thousand newborns, delivered with calm, with expertise, and with dry wit and contagious poise that gave even first-time fathers the confidence to cut the cord ... .

Martin smiled. Though the obituaries were unsigned, he knew Povichs writing when he saw it. Everybody was a hero in a Billy Povich obit, because Billy had an eye for what set regular folk apart. That was what also made him a good investigator. An a.s.signment to type obituaries on the overnight s.h.i.+ft had been a demotion for Billy, a hint from his editors that his services were no longer required. Instead of sulking, Billy had embraced the job. He didnt type obituaries all night, he wrote them. His writing gave the paper a depth of soul it never had before.

Outside the windows, smears of green whipped alongside the train at more than a hundred miles an hour. Greater Providence is so congested, a native to the city can forget how much of the state still feels rural and unspoiled. In South County, the forest opened around the train, and the land pitched gently across miles of perfect green turf farms. Huge diamonds of black earth marked the summer harvest, where the land would be rested and then seeded again. The houses grew larger and farther apart as the train pushed south, over the Pawcatuck River into northeastern Connecticut. For miles, the train hugged the seacoast, traveling a narrow right-of-way between million-dollar estates on the right and the still waters of Long Island Sound on the left. The land met the water at a bulwark of rust-colored boulders and smooth cordgra.s.s that was now more tan than green, as its color faded with the summer. Cabin cruisers neatly filled the slips of private marinas that dotted the inlets.

The train slowed here to highway speed.

Martin leaned his forehead on the window and appreciated the view. A wooden dock, bleached silver by the elements, reached into the water. An overturned aluminum rowboat rested upon the dock, and a stately great blue heron, its beak a stiletto, rested on the boat. A seascape artist could have made use of this view.

If only I were a painter, Martin thought. Instead of a G.o.dd.a.m.n lawyer who could not ignore a question that pestered him.

He wiped his wet palms on his pants. From his coat pocket he pulled a single sheet photocopied from Gil Harmonys two-hundred-page last will and testament.

Section 167, perpetual maintenance of Midtown condominium.

What the heck was this about?

Gil had commuted to New York by train eight times per month to teach cla.s.s, so it made sense he would buy a condo for the two nights each week he stayed in the city. He had plenty of money. Why deal with hotels?

But why would the judge establish in his will a generously funded trust to continue to pay condominium fees, and "to maintain the apartment in its current condition in perpetuity"?

The condo may never be sold nor rented, the will commanded. Just maintained. In its current condition. Well, what the h.e.l.l was its current condition? And why would a dead man need a condo?

Martin reminded himself he was obsessing about four lines tucked into an enormous doc.u.ment that dispersed tens of millions of dollars to charitable causes around the Western world and in Africa.

Christ, why cant I just let it go?

He was reminded of what Mr. Thybony, Gils executor, had said on the phone.

Let it go, Marty. Let it go.

Martin had called only for an explanation, not to challenge the paragraph on behalf of his clients, June and Brock Harmony.

Thybony had stonewalled him. "Its in there because Gil wanted it that way," he had said.

But why?

"Let it go, Marty. Let it go."

On Gils video, Martin remembered, the judge had called Ken Thybony the keeper of his secrets.

The condos address was not in the will, but property deeds are public records, and Gils deed had been filed in the county recorders offices. The unit was on the twenty-seventh floor of an anonymous forty-story high-rise. Gil Harmony had owned the condo for two years.

In the marsh to Martins right, acres of salt meadow hay bloomed deep purple. The two-foot stalks had been combed erratically by the wind like a head of cowlicks. On the edges of the marsh, white birch grew in clumps of four or five. The train pa.s.sed beaches, sliced through forest that hung overhead to make a tunnel, and sailed over blond fields of wild wheat.

Another train appeared from nowhere. It pa.s.sed in the other direction with a sudden hiss, in less than two seconds on parallel tracks.

Thats the trouble with trains, Martin thought. Once youre aboard, theres no way to chicken out and turn back.

If his imagination could have supplied one reasonable explanation for that section of Gils will, Martin would have saved a hundred dollars in train fare and stayed home. He had promised himself hed jump the train at one of the scheduled stops if he could come up with some explanation. If Gil had died of a heart attack or in a car accident, this trip would have been easier to skip. But in a murder, no possible clue was too obscure to leave unexamined.

Martin was going to have to knock on the door.

The train left the marshlands and plowed through suburbs, stopping briefly in New Haven, where the concrete buildings near the tracks were crumbling, as if they had been gnawed by some immense steel-jawed monster. The train stopped again in Stamford, overlooking a junkyard with water views, near office towers that grew fatter as they got taller. On the south side of Stamford, civilization overtook the forest; cultivated gardens squeezed out the wild woods. As the train approached New York, plants were confined to reservations inside chain fences.

The sky darkened as the spires of Manhattan came into view. The train crossed the East River on a bridge high above a lonely tug pus.h.i.+ng a barge loaded with yellow storage containers. Martin pulled his suit coat tightly around himself, like a straitjacket. The city looked like a bed of nails. He feared what he would find there. Or that he would find nothing at all, no clue to who paid for the hit on his mentor. Or, even worse, that he would somehow learn that he was wrong, and that Gil Harmony had died in a robbery, as a random victim. Wrong place, wrong f.u.c.king time. Randomness upset Martin. Randomness would mean there was no grand plan for everyone, that fate played no role in our lives, and that nothing happened for a reason. That there is no G.o.d. Randomness meant there was no right or wrong, and that the term justice was shorthand for pus.h.i.+ng paper through a courthouse bureaucracy. He s.h.i.+vered in his coat.

On his third step outside Penn Station, a raindrop struck Martins nose. No, it cant rain now. He walked as far as the curb before the clouds unleashed a ferocious downpour. All around him, travelers instantly whipped open black umbrellas like gunslingers with oily quick draws. Who had said anything about rain today? Martin felt like the only person in Manhattan without an umbrella. The first ten cabs he tried to hail ignored him.

Screw this. The apartment was twenty-five blocks away. He turned up his collar, hunched into the slanting rain, and walked. This was the loudest rain he had ever heard, a relentless pounding on cars and streets, on the metal roofs of newspaper stands, and on the stretched fabric of thousands of umbrellas. It was the kind of rain that inspired a man to build an ark.

He was quickly soaked straight through his lucky Boston Red Sox silk boxer shorts, which his militant vegan wife would no longer allow him to keep in the house because, she had decided, they represented the ruthless exploitation of the silkworm. Rainwater gushed along the curbs in little rivers that flowed hard enough to churn tiny white rapids. Martins socks were soaked and he didnt bother to try to hop the puddles. Pa.s.sing cars threw sheets of water over pedestrians. The rain soaked Martins beard and plastered the hair haphazardly against his neck. He pa.s.sed a junk store selling umbrellas for forty dollars each, and marveled at the proprietors moxie.

Finally, he found Gil Harmonys condominium building. The doorman didnt want to hear Martins conspiracy theories about a murdered judge, or any long-winded narrative about a will in probate court in Providence, Rhode Island. Martin finally just paid off the G.o.dd.a.m.n doorman. Pocketing enough cash to buy a market-rate umbrella, if he had wanted, the doorman discreetly stepped aside. The buildings lobby had been done in art deco cream and black, with a pink marble floor partially hidden by a monstrous round braided rug. Good G.o.d, how hideous. Alone in the elevator, Martin leaned his head against the bra.s.s doors and watched the drips run off his sports coat. His waterlogged clothing conformed to his body like a wetsuit, and Martin realized his potbelly made him look like he was in the third trimester. As he wondered if the bribe he had paid the doorman was tax deductible, the elevator opened to a pair of decorative rubber plants in ceramic pots, and a long white hallway full of doors.

His feet squished down the hallway. Wet, cold, and fearful he was on a fools errand, Martin thought that nothing on earth could have made him more miserable.

Then he knocked at the late Gil Harmonys condominium.

The door flew open almost instantly. A woman appeared. She was short and broad-shouldered and a little paunchy, with Caribbean skin and a long brown ponytail highlighted with strokes of gold.

"Yeah?" she demanded, and gave him a look-over. "Oh Lord, what the h.e.l.l happened to you?"

Martins hands smoothed his sopping coat. "Its raining," he blurted. "Im looking for ... is this two seven one six?"

"What do you want?" She had a slight Spanish accent. "I get all the magazines I need."

A voice from deeper in the apartment called out, "Ma? Is that Zach?"

"No, it aint," she yelled back, and then looked to Martin for some explanation.

"Im a friend of Judge Gilbert Harmony," Martin stammered.

"Gils dead."

"I know that, Im ... may I ask who you are?"

"Im his wife."

eleven.

Her name was Nelida and her fabric softener smelled like Christmas trees. Martin huddled on a three-legged barstool in her kitchen and watched his linen suit, s.h.i.+rt, socks, and lucky Boston Red Sox boxer shorts tumble in her professional-style clothes dryer. She had lent him a long white terry-cloth robe, with a ta.s.seled gold rope for a waist belt, and the letters GH embroidered in scarlet script over the breast pocket.

Gilbert Harmonys robe.

Im his wife.

She chopped scallions on a maple cutting board. Martin watched her from behind. She wore steep wedge sandals, a loose pair of dark knee-length gauchos, like something a stylish cowgirl might wear to a rodeo, and a clingy patterned top in muted southwestern colors. Her weight s.h.i.+fted from one foot to the other and Martin noted the easy pivot of her hips.

She was not Gil Harmonys wife, exactly, she had explained to Martin, after hustling him into the apartment and demanding he strip his wet clothes in her bathroom. For two years, she and Gil had enjoyed something of a common-law arrangement, two nights a week. She was around thirty-eight, he guessed, about twenty years younger than her lover. Martin liked how she moved: smooth and precise, like a dancer.

Her kitchen was mostly white, with Corian countertops, stainless-steel appliances, and a tremendous copper hood over the stove. Six bottles of wine, all reds, dangled in a wire rack suspended from the ceiling, next to a hanging rope of garlic and a cl.u.s.ter of dried parsley. She dropped a handful of scallions into a pan of hissing hot olive oil.

Martin cleared his throat. "You dont have to feed me," he said.

"You said you had not eaten. So youll have an omelet." She turned down the blue flame under the pan and stirred the scallions with a wooden spoon. "No more arguing with me."

Fine, then. No more arguing. He was starving and his mouth watered at the scent of home cooking.

There was no reconciling this woman, this apartment, even the robe, with the judge Martin had known in Providence. So he stopped trying. The woman was real; therefore, Martins long-standing image of Gil Harmony was false. Or at least incomplete and in need of a rewrite. Martin imagined Gils voice in his head. Even the Const.i.tution had to be amended, Marty.

Nelidas silence as she cooked for him made Martin feel even more naked inside Gil Harmonys robe. He attacked the quiet. "Im sorry, um-for your loss." The words came out like a question and Martin regretted saying them.

"A loss unlike I have ever known," she confirmed. Her dainty eyebrows rose and fell, agreeing with what she had spoken. She poured yellow egg batter from a mixing bowl into the pan, and then turned the heat down again. She looked at him. "A loss for you, too. He was your friend."

"And mentor," Martin said, eager to reach common ground with her.

She suddenly snapped the spoon in his direction, pointing to him. "No sausage in this omelet, right? You dont eat meat."

Martin could not help a laugh. "Im not supposed to eat eggs, either, but I cheat. How could you know that?"

She shrugged and carelessly tested the omelet with the spoon. "Gil told me that if anything ever happened to him, youd be the one from Providence to find me," she said. "Youd represent his wife, of course. And Gil figured that n.o.body else would be particular enough to find this apartment hidden in his paperwork."

"Gils partner, Ken Thybony, knows about you," Martin guessed.

She shrugged. "I have met Ken in Gils company so he knows I exist. Whether he knows that Gil and I were to be married as soon as Gil left his first wife, I couldnt say."

He was struck that she referred to June Harmony as Gils first wife. Would he really have left June? And scandalized his name in Rhode Island? That seemed inconceivable, though Martin had to remind himself he did not know his friend as well as he thought. He summoned the courage to ask, "When was he planning to leave?"

She folded the omelet and then clanked a metal lid over the pan. "Give the egg a few more minutes to set," she said.

"Smells great."

"He would have left as soon as the time was right," she informed Martin, though she did not look at him. Was she embarra.s.sed at stealing a husband? Or did she doubt her own story? "I didnt push him to leave, because his son was still in their house in Rhode Island. That was okay. I knew I had Gils heart."

Martin was too polite to cross-examine over her alleged hold on Gil Harmonys heart. Maybe she was right; maybe she knew him better than anyone. Or maybe she had bought the same easy lie as every other comatta since Moses carried the bad news about adultery down from the mountain.

"Gil was already in semiretirement," she said. "He was working to add a third cla.s.s to his university schedule here in the city so that we could have another evening together each week. Once he left the bench completely in Rhode Island, he would have moved here and this would have been our home." She gestured to the cabinet above Martins head. "There are plates in there."

Martin was loath to move around in the robe. He held the edges of the garment in place and spun on the stool. On the inside of the cabinet door he discovered an eight-by-ten photograph that s.n.a.t.c.hed his breath.

The picture of Judge Gilbert Harmony had been taken at a ball game. He sat in the bleachers, beaming under a navy blue Red Sox cap. Nelida sat to his left, in the blue and orange cap of the New York Mets. She grinned in the picture; her chin pressed to his shoulder and she hugged his arm.

Martin had not doubted Nelidas story about the affair, and the robe had been confirmation enough, but he was stunned by the irrefutable proof of Gil Harmonys secret life.

At least shes not a Yankees fan, Martin thought.

She caught him staring at the photo and explained, "It was taken last year."

"A lovely shot," Martin said, admitting the truth. They look happy. "Who took it?"

"My son, Jerod."

Martin noticed the empty seat next to Gil in the photo. So this had been a family outing to the ballpark. He pulled a plate from a stack. He stopped himself before he asked aloud why she kept such a lovely photo hidden from view. Of course, he realized, it was tucked away so no visitor would see it accidentally. Never having had his own affair, Martin a.s.sumed this was standard infidelity procedure.

She took the plate from him and eased the omelet onto it. She added a fork and a twist of orange and handed the meal to Martin. She scrubbed the pan as he ate. He wondered, How much did she love the judge? Enough to slide alone into her empty bed five nights a week, knowing that Gil would be in bed with June? She seemed genuine, but there were a lot of great actors in the world. What if she loved him too much to share anymore? He watched her arms flex as she washed the dishes. She was a forceful, direct person. What if she had demanded that Gil leave his wife, and he had refused?

Suddenly, Martin recalled what Gil had said to June on the video.

I didnt intend for it to happen, all this hurt youre feeling. Some things are, well, just larger than ourselves.

Of course. Seemed so obvious in hindsight. Martin had a.s.sumed at the time Gil was apologizing for somehow crossing fate and getting killed. Gil must have figured June might learn about the affair, maybe even that Martin would discover the mistress.

Hmm, so he didnt intend for it to happen? Small comfort in that. Some things are larger than ourselves ... sounded like a confession of love. Maybe he did intend to marry Nelida, or at least he did the day he made the tape.

He finished the food and left the plate on the counter. "Brilliant," he announced.

She smiled with satisfaction at his empty plate.

"Tell me," he asked, probing something that bothered him. "Why did Gil warn that I might find you, should something happen to him? Was he expecting something to happen?"

Her face darkened with dread and her hands began to twist a dish towel into a rope. She started to speak, but paused, and then turned toward footsteps coming from the hall and asked, "Are you going out?"

A young man of about twenty poked his head into the kitchen, gave the mostly naked lawyer on the barstool an up-and-down inspection, and answered, "Im going to Zachs."

"I thought he was coming here."

"I screwed up. Im late."