Brothers and Bones (32 page)

“Hello?”

“Charlie?” It was Jessica, and it felt really good to hear her voice.

“It’s me,” I said.

I heard her draw a deep, shuddery breath. “Thank God you’re still okay.”

“So far, so good.”

I waited for her to say something more. I kept waiting. Finally, she said, “I’m scared, Charlie.”

“I’m a little nervous myself, Jess.”

She paused, perhaps gathering her thoughts, then said, “Please, Charlie, please, please, please turn yourself in. I just got off the phone with Daddy again and he said that you really need to—”

I interrupted her. “I’m sorry, Jess, but if you called me back just to tell me to turn myself in, you wasted your time. I’m not going to do that. I can’t. If I do, I’m finished.”

“I didn’t,” she said in a small voice.

“Didn’t what?”

“I didn’t call just to tell you that. I also called to tell you that I think I still love you.”

“You think?”

“Well, it’s not easy, is it? There’s a lot going on. They’re saying horrible things about you. No one has a doubt about your guilt.”

“Do you?”

“I guess. A doubt, anyway.”

“And you think you still love me.”

“I think I do.”

“But you don’t believe me.”

“No, Charlie, it’s not that. I’m just not completely sure, to be honest. If you did what they say you did, if you killed Angel in cold blood, could I still love you? I don’t know. You wouldn’t be the man I thought you were. And Daddy tells me that the evidence against you is rock solid. But you say you didn’t do it—”

“I didn’t.”

“I just don’t know what to believe right now. It’s too much all at once. I want to believe you but it’s hard, really hard right now. My father…everyone…it’s just too much. But I think, Charlie, I
think
I believe you. And I think I still love you. That’s all I can say right now. That’s the best I can do.”

I smiled. It was enough for now. God, I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed to hear her say that. “I love you, too. And no doubt about it for me.” I paused. “Jessica, I’m going to beat this. I’m going to get my life back and we’ll start building a real life together. You and me. No more waiting. We’ll get married, buy a house, have kids, the whole thing. Because you were right the other day, we need to move forward.
I
need to move forward. I should have done so long ago.” I realized I was babbling like an idiot, so I closed my mouth. Jessica said nothing, which hurt a little, but I understood. “Anyway,” I said, a little more in control of my mouth and mind than I’d been five seconds before, “I want you to know how much you mean to me, Jess, how much I love you, even if I haven’t always shown it. You’re the most important thing to me, and we’ll get our life back, our future. I swear to you.”

I meant what I said. For thirteen years my focus was my work and my secret obsession was the mystery of my brother’s disappearance. I hadn’t even realized how much Jessica’s love and support meant to me over the past six years. But I fully realized it, finally, at that moment.

Jessica was quiet for a few seconds, then she sniffed again. “Well, Charlie, that really is why I called, to tell you that I still love you…well, I think I still do…but I have to say that if you really do love me as much as you say you do and if you don’t want to hurt me, then you’ll turn yourself in. You can’t last out there. Something bad will happen to you out there.”

“I’m not turning myself in, Jessica. I do love you, more than I ever realized, but I’m not.”

After a long pause, she said, “Okay. I can see I won’t get anywhere with you on this. Do what you have to do. But promise me this. If you fail at whatever you’re trying to do, if you can’t find whatever you’re trying to find, if you hit a brick wall and have no other options, you’ll turn yourself in. No going down—” I thought I heard her stifle a sob. “No going down in a blaze of glory, no spending years on the run. You’ll turn yourself in and give my father a chance to help you. You know how good he is, Charlie, what a good lawyer he is, how many important friends he has. He can help you. He can.”

“I don’t think he can, Jess, I really don’t.”

“Promise me, Charlie,” she pressed. “When you hit that wall, you’ll call the police.”

“Okay, Jess. I promise.” I didn’t even know if I was lying. I didn’t think about it. I just know she needed to hear it and it was hurting her not to hear it, so I said it.

“Thank you,” she replied.

I was about to tell her I loved her once more and then hang up when a thought came to me. “Hey, Jess?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s okay that you told Angel about Bonz. I’m not mad. I was at first, I think, but I’m not now. I forgive you.”

She sniffed. I think she’d started to cry. “I told Angel what?”

“About Bonz. The homeless guy I told you about at the charity dinner.”

“I never told Angel anything about that. You made me promise not to.” She sounded genuinely confused.

“Jess, it’s okay. I’m not angry. A little disappointed, I guess, but I’m not mad.”

“Charlie, I’m telling you, I didn’t tell Angel anything about that.”

“You must have.”

“I didn’t,” she insisted.

“Okay. Forget about it. I have to hang up now. Do me a favor, all right?”

“All right.” She sounded uncertain.

“Try your hardest to believe in me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “Charlie, please be careful.”

“I will. I love you, Jess.”

“I’m pretty sure I still love you, Charlie.”

I closed Randy’s cell phone.

Bonz looked over at me but said nothing as he drove us toward downtown Boston. I was confused. I didn’t know what to think about whether Jessica had told Angel about Bonz. She seemed sincere. I wanted to believe her, but…
t
here was just no other way for Angel or anyone else to know about Bonz. I’d never discussed him in my apartment, which apparently had been bugged for years. And Bonz had dragged me out of there the first time he came there, instinctively not wanting to talk indoors. I even seemed to recall something he said during his ranting and raving that night, something about how “they” can listen indoors. And there was no way one of the private investigators followed as Bonz led me on the merry chase through Chinatown. I didn’t see how anyone could have known about Bonz unless Jessica… But why would she lie? Two reasons that I could see. First, she felt bad about it, suspected that her carelessness, despite my telling her to keep Bonz a secret, might have set into motion all that had happened to me since the last time I saw her. Second, she was lying because, somehow, she was involved. Maybe Siracuse had paid her or blackmailed her somehow into spying on me, like he seemed to have done with Angel. Maybe Jessica had never been in love with me. Or maybe she had been, and maybe even still was, but Siracuse threatened her, scaring her badly enough to betray me. So she told Angel—who she knew was secretly working for Siracuse—about Bonz.

No. That was absurd. If it was indeed Jessica who told Angel about Bonz, she’d done so without malice toward me. Maybe she was worried about me getting involved with someone like Bonz and she was seeking Angel’s help in protecting me somehow.

But she swore to me that she hadn’t told Angel, hadn’t told anyone, about our conversation. She wanted me to believe her. Maybe I should, I thought. After all, I was asking her to show faith in me. Couldn’t I do the same for her?

Still, how could Angel—and therefore Siracuse—have known about Bonz? How could Siracuse have known to have Angel pick that fight with me, then go to my apartment to be unwittingly sacrificed by Grossi to frame me? I didn’t know what to think. Old Charlie would have believed her, I thought. Should New Charlie? More importantly, should I have been concerned that I was starting to refer to myself in not just one but two third persons? I bet Dr. Fielding would have had something to say about—

Holy shit.

I looked at my watch. I turned to Bonz. “What day is it?”

“Today?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“I don’t know what fucking day it is. I haven’t needed to worry about what day it is for thirteen years. Let’s see—”

“It’s Monday, right?”

“Could be. Yeah, I think so. Why?”

“Because I know where we’re going next.”

THIRTY-FOUR

On Monday nights, and Monday nights only, Dr. Patrick Fielding would see patients in the evening. Then he’d take every Tuesday off during the fair-weather months to go fishing. I’d seen numerous photographs in his office of him posing with various catches over the years to prove it. I had no idea what he did with his Tuesdays during the rest of the year and I didn’t care. All that mattered to me at that moment was that he saw patients into the evenings on Mondays, and today was Monday. His last patient of the night would arrive at eight o’clock, which would have the session ending around 8:50. My guess was, seeing as it was the end of a longer-than-normal day for him, he’d leave shortly after his last patient did. So Bonz and I left the sleepy-eyed motel snitch’s Firebird a few blocks away and waited in the shadows of a closed chiropractor’s office on Milk Street, directly across the street from Fielding’s offices.

If I was right and Fielding had been the one to tell Siracuse or his people about Bonz, then Fielding might know something useful. More than likely he didn’t, but he was the only non-Mafia link we had to Siracuse and the tape—other than Randy Deacon, who hadn’t been able to give us anything.

At five minutes after nine I saw the lights go off in Dr. Fielding’s top-floor offices. Three minutes later he left his building with briefcase in hand. Twenty seconds later his face was pinned against an alley wall while Bonz breathed threats into his ear.

Milk Street is a relatively quiet commercial street just off Congress Street, which is a main drag but which quiets down considerably after the business day ends. At this time of night, Milk Street was deserted, a fact which Bonz noted for Fielding’s benefit.

“Doctor,” Bonz said, “I don’t wanna hurt you, but I will.”

“I don’t want you to hurt me, either,” Fielding wheezed under the pressure Bonz was applying to the back of his head, forcing his face against the rough brick wall in front of him. “Take whatever you want.”

“We want information.”

“What kind?”

“I need answers, Dr. Fielding.” Those were the first words I’d spoken. Bonz had yanked the good doctor into the dark alley so quickly that Fielding had no idea I was behind him.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“Let him go, Bonz.”

Bonz did and Fielding turned slowly, nervously smoothing out his wrinkled Boston Celtics sweatshirt. When he saw me, he looked confused. He took in the ugly bruises that still hadn’t faded on my face, and my platinum-blond buzz cut, and recognition slowly dawned in his eyes.

“Charlie?”

“Hello, Dr. Fielding.”

Fielding’s eyes then went to Bonz, widened a just little at whatever he saw in my companion’s face, and then turned back to me.

“You’re in some trouble, Charlie,” Fielding said, “and it seems you’re only making it worse. I think you should walk straight to the nearest police station and turn yourself in. Surely you know it will make it easier on you in the end.”

“I’m hearing that a lot lately.”

“It’s good advice.”

“I’m through taking advice from you. I didn’t kill anyone, Dr. Fielding.”

“Well, then you have nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah,” Bonz said, “because
that’s
the way things work.”

“I only meant,” Fielding continued, “that the smartest thing you could do—”

Bonz interrupted him. “The smartest thing
you
could do would be to shut the fuck up unless either Charlie or I tell you to speak. You got it?”

Fielding looked at Bonz. He studied him. As a psychiatrist, Fielding was trained to read people. What he read in Bonz must have been a little frightening, because he frowned suddenly and nodded.

“Charlie,” Bonz said, “we don’t have time to waste. Be quick.”

I turned to Fielding. “I’ll cut to the chase, Dr. Fielding. Some bad people are after me. They want something they think I either have or can get for them. And they set me up for murder.”

He nodded. That’s all, just nodded. He didn’t even hint that anything I described could have been in my head. He didn’t do the same old song and dance about me being paranoid. And I suddenly realized why.

“You knew,” I said. “You knew I wasn’t paranoid. You knew I was being followed all those years, yet you convinced me I was nuts.”

His silence was his confession.

“Why?” I asked.

Fielding remained silent.

“You should answer him, Doc,” Bonz said. “Take
my
advice on that.”

Fielding looked from Bonz to me. “I was told to make you believe that your feelings of being watched were the products of a delusional mind. The fact was, by the time you first came to see me you’d been followed for, I think, more than a year. You already believed you were paranoid. My job was to reinforce that belief so you wouldn’t suspect the truth.” Before I could say anything, Fielding added, “I did the best I could to protect you, Charlie. I refused to prescribe drug therapy for you, even though you asked me whether we should try it, given our apparent lack of progress over the first few years.”

“You always said my case was mild,” I said. Fielding nodded. He had repeatedly pointed out to me that individuals suffering from more serious forms of paranoia are often preoccupied to the point of severe distraction that might impinge upon a person’s ability to function well in society, they read negative or even sinister meanings into others’ innocuous remarks, they bear irrational grudges, and often harbor groundless suspicions of infidelity in their partners. I suffered from none of these symptoms. He used the fact that they didn’t develop in me as evidence that our therapy was, to a large degree, successful. It worked, at least to the point of preventing me from switching psychiatrists. Besides, I’d really thought we were making progress. The feelings of being watched decreased over time. I knew now, of course, that Siracuse had begun to relax over time, to feel safe, safe enough to have Randy Deacon and his team of private investigators follow me less and less. What this did, of course, was increase my confidence in Dr. Fielding and my belief that I was improving.