“Be careful, Patrick. Okay?”
“Careful of what?”
“Of everything, Patrick. Everything.”
I gave her what I’m sure was a quizzical look and she nodded at me as if we shared a secret, and then she ducked into the bar and was gone.
8
My father, even before he entered the arena himself, had been active in local politics. He was a sign holder and a door knocker, and the bumpers of the various Chevys we’d owned throughout my childhood and adolescence had always borne stickers attesting to my father’s partisan loyalty. Politics had nothing to do with social change to my father, and he didn’t give a shit what most politicians promised in public; it was the private bonds that drew him. Politics was the last great tree house, and if you got in with the best kids on the block, you could roll the ladder up on the fools below.
He’d supported Stan Timpson when Timpson, fresh out of law school and new to the DA’s office, had run for alderman. Timpson was from the neighborhood, after all, a comer, and if things went right, soon he’d be the guy to call when you needed your street plowed or your noisy neighbors rousted or your cousin put on the union dole.
I vaguely remembered Timpson from my childhood, but couldn’t completely separate where my own recollection of Timpson differed from the one I’d seen on TV. So when his voice filtered through my phone receiver, it seemed strangely disembodied, as if it were prerecorded.
“Pat Kenzie?” he said heartily.
“Patrick, Mr. Timpson.”
“How are you, Patrick?”
“Just fine, sir. How about yourself?”
“Great, great. Couldn’t be better.” He laughed warmly
as if we’d shared a joke I somehow missed. “Diandra tells me you have some questions for me.”
“I do, yes.”
“Well, fire away, son.”
Timpson was only ten or twelve years older than I was. I wasn’t sure how that made me son.
“Diandra told you about the photo of Jason she received?”
“She sure did, Patrick. And I got to tell you, it seems a bit strange.”
“Yes, well—”
“Personally I think someone’s playing a trick on her.”
“Pretty elaborate trick.”
“She told me you dismissed the Mafia connection?”
“At the moment, yes.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Pat.”
“Is there anything your office is working on, sir, which could have caused someone to threaten your ex-wife and son?”
“That’s the movies talking, Pat.”
“Patrick.”
“I mean, maybe in Bogotá they go after their district attorneys on personal vendettas. Not in Boston. Come on, son—that’s the best you can do?” Another hearty laugh.
“Sir, your son’s life may be in danger and—”
“Protect him, Pat.”
“I’m trying to, sir. But I can’t do that if—”
“You know what I think this is? I’ll tell you the truth, it’s one of Diandra’s crazies. Forgot to take his Prozac and decided to make her nervous. You look over her patient list, son. That’s my suggestion.”
“Sir, if you’d just—”
“Pat, listen to me. I haven’t been married to Diandra in almost two decades. When she called last night, that’s the first time I’d heard her voice in six years. No one knows we were ever married. No one knows about Jason. The last campaign, believe me, we were waiting for the issue to be raised—how I left my first wife and baby boy and have maintained very little contact. Guess what, though, Pat? It never came up. A dirty political race in a dirty
political town, and it never came up. No one knows about Jason or Diandra in relation to me.”
“What about—?”
“It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Pat. Tell your father Stan Timpson said hi. I miss that old guy. Where’s he hiding these days?”
“Cedar Grove Cemetery.”
“Got himself a groundskeeper job, did he? Well, got to run. Take care, Pat.”
“This kid,” Angie said, “is an even bigger slut than you used to be, Patrick.”
“Hey,” I said.
Our fourth day of following Jason Warren and it was beginning to feel like tailing a young Valentino. Diandra had stressed that we not let Jason know we were tailing him, citing a male’s reluctance to let anyone else control or alter his destiny and Jason’s own “formidable” sense of privacy, as she called it.
I’d be private too, I guess, if I averaged three women in three days.
“A hat trick,” I said.
“What?” Angie said.
“The kid scored a hat trick on Wednesday. That officially puts him in the hound hall of fame.”
“Men,” she said, “are pigs.”
“This is true.”
“Wipe that smirk off your face.”
If Jason were being stalked, the most likely suspect was a jilted lover, some young woman who didn’t much appreciate being a notch on a belt, the number two of three. But we’d been watching him almost nonstop for over eighty hours and we’d seen no one following him but us. He wasn’t hard to find either. Jason spent his days in class, usually arranged a nooner in his dorm room (an arrangement he seemed to have worked out with his roommate, a stoner from Oregon who held bong parties every night at seven when Jason was out of the room), studied on the lawn until sunset, ate in the cafeteria with a tableful of women and no men, then hit the bars around Bryce at night.
The women he slept with—at least the three we’d seen—all seemed to know of one another without jealousy. All were somewhat of a type, too. They wore fashionable clothing, usually black, with even more fashionable rips in them somewhere. They wore tacky costume jewelry which—given the cars they drove and the soft imported leather of their boots, jackets, and knapsacks—they presumably knew was tacky. So un-hip as to be hip, I guess—their ironic postmodern wink at a hopelessly out of touch world. Or something. None of them had boyfriends.
They were all enrolled in the School of Arts and Sciences. Gabrielle majored in literature. Lauren majored in art history, but spent most of her time playing lead guitar in an all-female ska/punk/speed metal band which seemed to have spent far too much time taking Courtney Love and Kim Deal seriously. And Jade—small and lean and self-consciously foul-mouthed—was a painter.