So the guy says, “I come from Charlie K.”
And Stack is so confused he thinks, What is that, a Chinese restaurant? but just as well doesn’t say that, or anything. The man at the door’s impatient and thrusts the box at him. It’s medium heavy. Stack struggles to hold it.
“Charlie,” the man says, lowers his voice.
“Charlie Kinsella.” Leaning on the K, what Maud would call a plosive, almost ending the word with an s, which she’d call a sibilant. “Keep it very safe. A day. Maybe two. Be here. Stay with it.”
When the guy’s gone, Stack is so rocked he’s merry and he makes a black joke to dead Barbara.
“Can I open it?”
God only knows what’s in the box he stays inside with, missing his doctor’s appointment, until the same man comes back for it. He knows what’s in it. He doesn’t know what’s in it either.
The following year, Maud’s admitted to every college he’s ever heard of. She’s got the National Merit Scholarship and financial aid up the gazoo — the guidance counselor at the classy Catholic school helped arrange this. In the end, she picks the college in Amesbury, one of the top liberal arts schools in the country.
It is a great relief to Stack that so much aid is being supplied because it is all unbelievably expensive. And beautiful Maud wants clothes and presently, over her freshman year, will want other things that college girls have, and money for travel and so on.
One day there arrived the man himself, Charlie Kinsella.
“Listen, Eddie, I just wanted you to know we know you got expenses, and we really thought, This man helped us and we should help him. Because I know you’re a guy who thinks, you know, and I don’t understand half the fuckin’ words you say, it was the same with Barbara, God rest her soul — educated — and the kid’s gonna be more so, right? So we wanna help.”
“I… I’m good, Charlie. Seriously, brother, I’m good. We’re good.”
Kinsella shows no sign of leaving. He looks very assured in his new clothes. He’s very assertive.
“We want to give you something. We want yez to take it.”
“Really, Charlie, I don’t want anything.”
Charlie K. makes a pained face. As one on the horns of a dilemma.
“Um,” he says, “I don’t lie to the people I work with. Everybody knows that. They know that. Never.”
“Right,” says Stack.
“Anyweez,” he says in a rollicking fashion, “I gotta be able to tell them we helped you out. You see what I mean?”
As much as to say, Stack thought, that there was no way around it.
Stack was reduced to shaking his head, as in no. Kinsella let him understand that the “something” offered was cash. “Nobody’s,” Kinsella said, which Stack inferred to mean unmarked. It was nowhere to be seen on that visit. But Stack mercifully would have no more of such packages or of the unspeakable Charlie until — until now, Maud dead.
What had happened was this. Maud’s college career indeed called for more expenses than might have been foreseen. Charlie Kinsella had a son, Michael, from his first family with Stack’s sister Gerry. Michael practiced law in Florida and might one day be a young champion of conservative forces in that state. The attorney administered a fund for the purpose of paying whatever expenses Maud Stack incurred during the term of her education and the years of her setting forth in the world. The bills and such were passed along and Michael Kinsella wrote checks to meet them in order that Maud not be denied the full enjoyment of the opportunities presented her by a fine education at a world-famous seat of learning.
Now here was Charlie suggesting some fuck saw it wrong.
“Would I know anything, Charlie?” Stack asked. “Would something come from me? What could I say, for God’s sake!”
He saw that his protestations had convinced Charlie and also curled his lip very slightly.
“Sure, Eddie,” Kinsella told him with a punch on the arm. “Yer a standup dude.”
19
LIEUTENANT LOU SALMONE saw her for the first time on the pathologist’s table at the hospital. The spoiled beauty of the young woman laid out there moved him in ways he could not have written down and would never dream of trying to express. The ambient smells were those usual to an autopsy room, and the mixture of mortified humanity and disinfectant somehow conveyed a judgment. The table on which she lay was made of stainless steel. It was a calamitous fall from grace. Bad luck, sure, but you could see and breathe punition and guilt. It made you suspect that what they said might be true, that somewhere in time, maybe ages before, somebody must have done something to make this happen to people the way it happened to cats and dogs.
The wise guys always pointed out how you had to have at least two people to have a murder. A famous person had said, “Character is fate.” This was the wise-guy version: A person had made a mistake, they liked to say, and somebody had to pay. They didn’t give a damn about justice, only about restoring their version of the natural order. The victim was always at a disadvantage, being dead and so often unsightly.
The kid had been lying half in the road, half on the sidewalk, her upper body wrapped to the neck in sky-blue plastic, her head turned at an impossible angle, legs twisted under, one tapering to a boot, the other stocking-footed. Everything about her position on the sidewalk had been incompatible with life. Deeply dead, she had looked.
Deeper dead now, naked on the table beside where Salmone stood. A yoke supported her neck, to hold her head up to the light. It looked distinctly like a temporary expedient to keep her facing the inquiries of the breathing world before what remained of her was put aside.
The examining pathologist was a short, neat man called Dr. Patel. Her ID, what old-time cops called an aided card, stated the victim was Maud Mary Stack, a student at the college from New York City who lived on campus. According to Dr. Patel’s preliminary record, she was six feet tall, weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, was well nourished and athletic. The hospital pictures of the corpse showed Maud’s pale freckles. The EMTs had cleared small traces of ethanol vomitus from her mouth. Her blood alcohol content was.20. Fluorescence revealed no semen on her body or her clothes.
Maud’s belongings were in a plastic evidence bag but would not give evidence of much. She had credit cards, a driver’s license, a New York MetroCard. Forty-six dollars in bills and coins. No cell phone, which was strange. There was a worn birthday card in her jeans pocket with no signature. On it was a single line in what would prove to be Maud’s handwriting: “Dear heart, how like you this?”
“Her neck was broken,” Patel said. “Skull fractured. Practically all the ribs on the left side. Vertebrae. Internal damage, so she won’t be an organ donor.”
“Freakin’ destroyed,” Salmone said.
“So how fast was this driver going?”
“What do you think?”
Patel shrugged and smiled faintly. “Nobody saw this car?”
“None of the witnesses gave much of a description. Just that it was big and fast.”
“Well,” Patel said, “the state is sending a guy down who does traffic deaths for a living. Sometimes he can make a case for a match between a specific vehicle and a specific injury without blood or tissue. For what it’s worth.”
“Tell the state’s guy to look for wounds or bruises might result from an assault,” Salmone said. “She was in an altercation just before the car hit.”
“I don’t know about that. She was knocked all up and down the street, against steps and gates, et cetera. He’ll have a look.”