Back Bay (51 page)

Katherine Pratt Carrington watched the forlorn, black-shrouded figure, and she wanted to cry too. In the
Titanic
lifeboat, she had seen shock evolve into grief. In this cold room, with its soot-darkened wallpaper, its worn furniture, its obsessive neatness, she saw despair. Peter Rulick was dead, and his wife’s life had ended.

Billy Rulick stood suddenly, marched across the room, and opened the door. He was telling Katherine to leave.

Katherine looked at Billy. His eyes were angry, not the eyes of a child. She smiled tenderly and tried to run a hand through his black hair. She thought that her touch might bring the warmth to his face. He stepped back defiantly.

Katherine turned and headed for the door.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” It was Jack’s voice.

She stopped and looked back.

“If Miz Rulick don’t want this stuff, maybe I’ll take it, if it’s all right with you.”

“Does your mother accept charity?” asked Katherine.

“No, ma’am. I’ll just tell her I stole it.”

The Carrington house on Beacon Hill was warm and quiet. Isabelle was taking her afternoon nap. Jeffrey was sprawled in front of the fireplace with his crayons and paper.

From the windows of her bedroom, Katherine Pratt Carrington watched the snow falling gently on the city—on the Common, the Back Bay, the South End, on the distant hills of Brookline. Snow stretching to infinity. Fresh snow covering every roof in Boston. It did not discriminate. It made the city look like a village in Vermont.

How deceptive it was. How different were the worlds beneath the snow. How little one person could do to change any of it, even the life of a single boy. Her impulse had been good, but she knew that charity could never remake her city. And no matter what she did, she could never do enough. She took her quotations from
Paradise Lost
and placed them in the living-room safe.

Katherine Pratt Carrington forgot that some people are born with enough stubbornness and strength to survive anything. Maybe she couldn’t help the fatherless little boy, but the little boy would help himself.

Billy Rulick stayed in school, but he took any job he could get in the afternoons. He swept floors. He cleaned toilets in a flophouse. He ran numbers for the local bookie. When his family was hungry and couldn’t buy food, he stole it. When they were cold and had no coal, he stole it. He forgot his despair. He survived.

And on Saturday mornings, Sadie Ferguson loaded his pockets with liquid death and expanded her business. On Saturday afternoons, Billy Rulick sat with Jackie Ferguson in the Madison Hotel and listened to an old man’s stories of buried treasure and the Back Bay Pratts.

K
atherine Pratt Carrington had been complaining to her nurse all day about the pain. When the doctor came to her bungalow, she gave him every symptom he asked for.

“Have you noticed blood in your bowels? Coal-black stools?”

“Yes.”

“No, she hasn’t,” said the nurse.

“What about red blood?”

“That, too.”

“I haven’t seen it,” said the nurse.

“They’re my stools,” answered Mrs. Carrington.

“Where is the pain?” asked the doctor.

“All over.”

“You have no temperature. Do you feel nauseated?”

“Yes.”

“She hasn’t vomited,” said the nurse.

The doctor put his hands on her stomach. They were ice-cold. “Relax.”

She hardened every muscle.

“Relax,” he said again.

“I am.”

He frowned. “We’d better take a few pictures. Get her over to X-ray.”

The nurse, Mrs. Drexel, put Katherine Pratt Carrington in a wheelchair. Mrs. Drexel had once been a gym instructor, and she was as strong as a man. Except for the dress, she looked like a man. “I know you’re not sick. You just want attention.”

Katherine Carrington said nothing.

Mrs. Drexel rolled the wheelchair out of the bedroom, across the small sitting room, and out the door of the bungalow where Katherine Pratt Carrington had been living since her grandson’s funeral. Mrs. Drexel nodded to the bulky young man by the door. He was one of two private orderlies who kept visitors away from Mrs. Carrington. He was reading
Penthouse
and waiting for the next shift.

The Lynnewood Manor looked like a resort hotel, and only the rich could afford to end their lives there. Dozens of private bungalows, shaded by elms and maples, were scattered across the manor’s two acres. The lawn was dotted with old people in robes and pajamas, giant pastel flowers soaking up the June sun. A black wrought-iron fence kept the world out and the occasional wanderer in. Ribbons of clean, bright concrete wound across the lawn and connected the central building to the bungalows. The central building was an old Victorian mansion, all turrets and porches, balconies and bay windows, which had once been the home of a New England shoe manufacturer. The Lynnewood Manor offered full medical care, game rooms, cable television, and, for the healthier guests, shuffleboard and swimming. Katherine Pratt Carrington hated it.

The X-ray technician read the doctor’s instructions and helped Katherine onto the table. After she took the X-rays, she told Katherine to stay on the table while she made sure the pictures came out.

For the first time in a week, Katherine Carrington was alone with a telephone. She jumped off the table and ran to the wall phone in the technician’s booth. After dialing four digits, she heard the operator’s voice. She hung up and dialed nine. This time, she got an outside line. She prayed that Evangeline was home.

It was eight o’clock. Fallon and Evangeline were still in bed. Instinctively, Fallon reached for the telephone when it rang him awake.

Evangeline grabbed his wrist. “It may be my mother. I’d rather not have to explain you so early in the morning.” She reached across his chest and picked up the telephone. “Hello?”

“Get me out of here.”

“Grandmother! Where are you?” Evangeline sat up in bed.

“Lynnewood Manor, bungalow sixteen, I can’t talk anymore. Lynnewood Manor. And be careful. They have me guarded.” Katherine was back on the table before the technician returned to the room.

Evangeline found the address of the Lynnewood Manor in the phone directory. The home was in a rich bedroom community about an hour north of Boston.

Fallon drove. He had been waiting for a chance in the Porsche, and Evangeline trusted him enough now to give him the keys. But instead of heading across the Back Bay to the Mystic River Bridge, he drove toward South Boston.

“Where are you going?” asked Evangeline.

“If you look behind you—and don’t—you’ll see a black Oldsmobile. I suppose it’s followed us before, but this is the first time I’ve noticed it.”

“Who’s in it?”

“It must be one of the guys Ferguson was talking about last night.”

“One of Soames’s men?”

Fallon nodded.

“Why would they be following us?”

“Apparently they didn’t believe we fell for their story yesterday.”

Fallon pulled the Porsche into a large storage yard near the MBTA car barn in South Boston. A ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire ran all around the yard, and a sign above the gate read “Fallon and Son Construction Company.” A rundown shack, once the office of a used-car lot, sat in the middle of the yard. Behind it was a work shed, and scattered all about was the equipment of a small construction company: mortar mixer, compressor, scaffolding, planks, bags of limestone and cement covered by a tarpaulin, piles of plywood and scrapwood, pallets of bricks and blocks, a railcart the Fallons used when they did a job in the subways, and a frontloader that converted into a snowplow in winter. Tom Fallon believed in owning his own equipment. Peter Fallon thought that his father was a packrat.

Peter parked the car behind the shack and went in the back door. It was a tiny room—two metal office desks, a filing cabinet, a space heater for winter, and a Playmate calendar on the wall. Danny was reading the sports section behind one desk. Sheila was opening mail behind the other. Although there was little to do, she came in every morning to answer phones, type, and help out in the office.

“Morning, Dan,” said Peter. “Where’s the old man?”

“Off lookin’ at a job. Where the hell did you come from?”

Peter pointed out the door. “From that Porsche.”

Danny saw Evangeline sitting in the car. He whistled softly.

“I’ll trade the Porsche for your Chevy.” Peter held out the keys. “Just for the morning. You can take Sheila for a long spin, but only if she puts on the kerchief in the glove compartment.”

“What the hell is going on here, Peter?”

Fallon gestured toward the window, but he did not go near it. “You see a black Olds out there?”

Danny glanced out. “The Cutlass?”

Peter nodded. “I’m trying to lose him.”

“You in trouble?” asked Danny seriously.

Peter didn’t want to explain. “The guy in that car used to be Evangeline’s boyfriend.”

“Evangeline.” Danny said the name very slowly. He liked it.

“Do me a favor and take him on a little tour of Southie. Then Evangeline and I can get away.”

“That’s real romantic, Peter,” said Sheila.

Danny flipped his keys to his brother. “Anything so my little brother can get laid.”

Evangeline looked the other way as her Porsche sped off. Fallon watched it head back toward the expressway with the Oldsmobile a short distance behind.

“If anybody up at that place is expecting us, they won’t be looking for a brown Chevy.”

Peter and Evangeline swung past the Lynnewood Manor an hour later. A large visitors’ parking lot descended in several tiers down from the main house. The only entrances were through the central building or the service gate, where trucks, doctors’ cars, ambulances, and hearses passed regularly. Fallon did not stop or pull into the lot. He had already decided that he would go in on foot, avoiding the reception area or the guardhouse at the service gate.

“Why don’t we just go in?” asked Evangeline.

“The guy in the black Olds proves they still don’t trust us. They’re probably watching for us at all the main entrances.”

“So what? I don’t see why we can’t just walk right in. I’ll talk to her doctor, or we’ll talk to the people in administration, and we’ll get her out. She’s a responsible adult. They don’t have the right to keep her in there.”

“If she’s still in shock, she isn’t responsible. Who’s the executor of her will?”

“Her daughter Isabelle.”

“Then Isabelle has probably been appointed temporary guardian, and from what I’ve seen, Isabelle is on your uncle’s team.”

Fallon watched a bus stop in front of the nursing home. Six people got off. Two were black, one Puerto Rican, three whites. The women wore white dresses, and none of them looked as though they lived in the neighborhood. They crossed the street and the parking lot and went in a side entrance on the basement level of the main building. The midday shift was arriving for work.

Fallon drove the car around the block and back to a bus stop a mile or so away.

“What are you doing?” asked Evangeline.

“I’m going in alone.”

“We came here to see my grandmother, Peter.”

“If she’s guarded, it’s going to be hard enough for one person to get near her.” He looked Evangeline up and down.

She was wearing an expensive pink blouse, gold neck chain, and Brass Buckle jeans. Fallon had stopped at his apartment for a clean shirt and jeans after borrowing his brother’s car.

“I might be able to get in the workers’ entrance, but you don’t really make it as a member of the proletariat.”

She decided to let him follow his instinct.

Fallon got off the bus in front of the Lynnewood Manor along with three nurses, a Puerto Rican man and a white teen-ager who were complaining to each other about the work load for the kitchen help, and a black man dressed like an orderly. Fallon fell in behind the kitchen workers and put his head down.

“Yeah,” said the teen-ager, a pimply kid with stringy hair and a bad set of adenoids. “They get real pissed when their tea ain’t hot.”

“They bitch at me today, man, I tell ’em the bus is late,” said the Puerto Rican.

“What if Lard-Ass Loughlin bitches?”

“Ah, I tell her to suck me off, man.”

They both laughed.

Fallon decided that if he could get past the entrance, he would
follow them to the kitchen. From there, he might have a good chance at Katherine Carrington.

Keeping at the edge of the group, he walked around the side of the main house to the narrow flight of stairs which led to the workers’ entrance. He felt his hands beginning to sweat. He wiped them on his shirt. He hoped he didn’t have to answer any questions at the door, because he could feel his voice tightening in his throat. He walked down the stairs which led to the cellar and stepped into the air conditioning.

A private security guard sat by the time clock. He was reading the racing form, and he did not look up. Fallon thought about slipping past, but he did not know where he was going. He had to stay with the kitchen workers, who continued to complain as they punched in. Fallon took a time card from the rack and pushed it into the clock. The guard raised his head from the paper, but Fallon didn’t miss a beat. He finished punching in, and by the time he put the card back, the guard was again trying to pick the daily double. Fallon realized that the guards weren’t waiting for him.

He turned and walked through a pair of swinging doors which led to a new stairwell. He heard the voices of the kitchen men below him. He followed. At the bottom of the stairs, he stepped into another corridor. He was in a subbasement which had been dug when the house was remodeled. At the end of the corridor were swinging doors that led to the kitchen. Two rooms opened onto the corridor, and Fallon could hear the voices of the kitchen workers coming from the room on the right.

He walked down the corridor and looked into a workers’ coatroom. There were pegs on the wall, benches and folding chairs scattered about the room.

Fallon stepped in and said hello.

The pair eyed him suspiciously at first, thinking he was another boss. Then Fallon took a white coat off one of the hooks and put it on.