“Yeah.”
“It was kinda surreal.”
“How so?”
“Well, they don’t make women like Karen except in the movies.”
“Are you saying it was an act?”
“No. I was just never sure when I was with Karen if she knew who she was. If she’d worked so hard at becoming an ideal that she lost the person inside of her.”
“And once David was hurt?”
He shrugged. “She held on for a while, and then she cracked, man. I mean, it was horrible to see. She’d come in here, and I’d want to ask for her license to make sure I was dealing with the same person. She was drunk mostly, high. She was a fucking mess. It was like-what happens to you when you live your whole life like a movie, and the movie ends?”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s like those child actors,” he said. “They play a part as long as they can, but they’re fighting a battle against hormonal evolution and they can’t win. One day they wake up, they’re no longer kids, they’re no longer movie stars, there’re no parts out there for them, and they drown.”
“So, Karen?”
His eyes filled for a moment and he blew air out through his mouth in a loud push. “Oh, Christ, she broke my heart. All our hearts. She lived for David. Anyone who saw them for two seconds knew that. And when David was hurt, she died. It just took her body four months to follow.”
We sat in silence for a bit, and then I handed him back the letter to the insurance company. He held it lightly in his hands and stared down at it. Eventually he smiled bitterly.
“No ‘P,’” he said, and shook his head.
“What’s that?”
He turned the letter in his hands so I could see it. “David’s middle name was Phillip. When we started this company, all of a sudden he signed his name with a big ‘P’ in the middle. Only on company documents and company checks, never anything else. I used to say the ‘P’ was for ‘pretentious,’ rag his ass a little bit about it.”
I looked at the signature. “But there’s no ‘P’ there.”
He nodded, then dropped the letter in the drawer. “I guess he wasn’t feeling particularly pretentious that day.”
“Ray.”
“Yeah?”
“Could I have a copy of that and something you have with his signature that does have the ‘P’?”
He shrugged. “Sure.” He found a memo David had written and signed with a wide, looping “P.”
I followed him to a grimy Xerox machine, and he placed the letter under the lid.
“What’re you thinking?” he asked me.
“I’m not sure yet.”
He pulled the copy out of the tray and handed it to me. “It’s just a ‘P,’ Mr. Kenzie.” He made a copy of the memo, gave it to me.
I nodded. “You got something with your signature on it?”
“Of course.” He led me back to the desk, handed me a memo he’d written and signed.
“You know what the trick to forgery is?” I said as I took the memo and turned it upside down.
“Good handwriting?”
I shook my head. “Gestalt.”
“Gestalt.”
“You see the signature as a shape, not a collection of singular letters.”
Carefully, under his overturned signature, I used a pen to copy the shape I saw above the pen point. When I finished, I turned it around, showed it to him.
He looked at it, opened his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. “That’s not bad. Wow.”
“And that’s my first try, Ray. Think what I could do with practice.”
7
I called Devin again, woke him up.
“Any luck with Ms. Diaz?”
“None. Chicks, man, you know?”
“I can’t get Detectives Thomas or Stapleton to return my calls.”
“Stapleton was one of Doyle’s golden boys, that’s why.”
“Ah.”
“You could see Hoffa having coffee in a diner, and Stapleton wouldn’t take your call.”
“Thomas?”
“She’s less predictable. And she’s working solo today.”
“Lucky me.”
“Yeah, well, you Micks. What can I say? Hang on. Let me find out where she is.”
I waited two or three minutes, and then he came back on the line. “You owe me, or do I even have to mention that?”
“It’s a given,” I said.
“It’s always a given.” Devin sighed. “Detective Thomas is working a death-by-stupidity in Back Bay. Go to the alley between Newbury and Comm Ave. ”
“Cross blocks?”
“ Dartmouth and Exeter. Don’t fuck with her. She’s hard-core, man. Eat you, spit you out, and never even break her stride.”
Detective Joella Thomas stepped out of the alley at the Dartmouth Street end and crab-walked under some crime scene tape, stripping off a pair of latex gloves as she went. As she slid out from under the other side of the yellow tape, she straightened from her crouch and snapped one glove clear of her fingertips, shook the white talc off her ebony skin. She called to a guy sitting on the bumper of the forensics van.
“Larry, he’s yours now.”
Larry didn’t even look up from his sports page. “He still dead?”
“Getting more so.” Joella pulled off the other glove, noticed me standing beside her, but kept her gaze on Larry.
“He tell you anything?” Larry turned a page of the paper.
Joella Thomas rolled a Life Saver from side to side in her mouth and nodded. “Said the ‘afterlife’?”
“Yeah?”
“Ain’t nothing but a house party.”
“Good news. I’ll tell the wife.” Larry closed his paper, tossed it into the van behind him. “Fucking Sox, Detective, you know what I’m saying?”
Joella Thomas shrugged. “I’m a hockey fan.”
“Fucking Bruins, then, too.” Larry turned his back to us and foraged in the forensics van.
Joella Thomas started to turn away, then seemed to remember my presence. She rolled her head back slowly in my direction, looked at me through the dusky gold lenses of her rimless sunglasses. “What?”
“Detective Thomas?” I proffered my hand.
She gave the fingers a quick squeeze and squared her shoulders so that she was facing me.
“Patrick Kenzie. Devin Amronklin may have mentioned me.”