The three of them were quietly pleased by what they were hearing. John Gregory hadn’t been in Vermont very long, and yet not only had Massi not been surprised to hear of him in that context, but they’d all heard how he said “again” when Johnny’s name had first been mentioned. They seemed to be on the right track.
“Yeah,” Lil followed up. “I know what you mean. I’m kinda that way, too.”
Santo attempted a seductive leer. “I bet. What’d you say your name was?”
“Lil.”
He nodded. “Pretty. Did I say you were pretty, too?”
“You did that, yeah.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
Lil was momentarily nonplussed. “Where?”
“Vermont.”
She and Joe laughed. “That’s a long trip, Santo,” she said. “No-Johnny’s back in town for a visit. To check on you, among other things.”
“Oh-right.” Massi sighed, not unhappily, and rested his head against the seat cushion, sliding down a bit to get comfortable.
“Tired?” Lil asked him.
“A little. How much money are we talking about?”
“I don’t know, but Johnny said he owed you a lot for all the good times you had together.”
Massi smiled and closed his eyes. “Good times.”
“With more to come,” Lil intoned soothingly. She touched Joe on the shoulder and indicated in the mirror for him to take a right onto Bloomfield.
Santo Massi lapsed into sleep, mercifully for Lil, who could only go so far with such small talk. Also, they had a way to go yet, and she’d been slightly nervous about how to keep him adequately entertained during the trip.
They were headed to what her task force squad, and in fact most of the prosecutor’s office, had once called home: the abandoned campus of the Essex County psychiatric hospital, a huge and sprawling ghost town of old brick buildings scattered across hundreds of acres of currently prime, rolling, and ready-to-be-developed real estate.
Fifteen minutes along, she tapped Joe’s shoulder again and murmured, “Take the next driveway to the right.”
It was enough to stir Massi from his slumber. He sat up and blinked groggily out the windows, just as Joe drove them through the campus entrance, immediately losing the commotion of a crowded and bustling Bloomfield Avenue to the contrasting darkness and isolation of the empty hospital grounds.
“Where are we?”
Lil patted his arm. “You never been here? It’s a little bit of country we got right in the city. It’s cool.”
On that level, she was correct. At its peak, the century-old complex was a completely self-contained community, shut off from its environs, with a separate power plant, golf course, swimming pool, fire department, and a layout suggesting a sylvan retreat far from the troubles of the surrounding world. Closed for over a decade, the center hovered between decay and a faintly chilling sense that all its ghosts might still be lingering. This impression was only enhanced by the surrounding blackness, offset but feebly by the moonlight shifting through the trees and the sweep of Joe’s headlights across the peeling, gap-windowed faces of a parade of gloomy buildings.
Understandably, it was enough to fully revive Massi’s earlier suspicions.
“I don’t like this. What is this?”
Willy gave up his earlier soft touch. He turned in his seat, purposefully placed his left arm on the edge of the seat so its ghoulish, sticklike profile was in full relief, and said, “A place for a quiet conversation, far from anyone and anywhere.”
His eyes now wide, Massi looked from one of them to the other. “What do you want? I haven’t done anything. Where’s Johnny?”
“Up ahead,” Lil instructed Joe. “Next one on the left.”
Joe had already driven by some of the larger institutional buildings and was now amid a semicircle of ochre-colored brick homes, set even farther back among the trees. According to Lil, these were the former staff residences where the county had housed the various task force squads in the years immediately following the hospital’s closure. Like some cast-aside movie set, these houses were still endowed with lawns and shrubs and even visiting deer who would emerge from the woods by the dim light of dusk.
But it was also ghostly quiet and empty and looking the worse for wear, and offered to someone with Massi’s darkening imagination only the promise of grim tidings and pain.
He began to twist in his seat. “Who are you guys? What do you want from me?”
“Would you believe we’re cops?” Lil asked, displaying her badge.
If her hopes had been that this would increase his paranoia, it worked.
“No, I would not,” Massi exclaimed, now convinced he’d been kidnapped for the proverbial ride of gangster lore. As the car slid to a stop, he grabbed the door handle and yanked on it several times, his entire body heaving with the effort.
“Let me out. I don’t know anything.”
“We think you do, little man,” Willy argued.
Massi’s eyes welled up. Despite what he’d just been told, his panic was now in control.
“Don’t kill me. Please. I mean, maybe I do know something. I just don’t know what you want. But I wanna help. I really do.”
Lil reached out suddenly and grabbed his flailing wrist, bending it over painfully and freezing him in place. He arched his back and began stuttering, “Ow, ow, ow.”
“Calm down,” she said quietly. “We’re going into that house.”
She worked him backward out of the car and handed him over to Willy, who switched to an armlock as Lil dug the building’s keys out of her pants pocket. Joe killed the engine unhappily and joined the three of them on the front stoop. Even given the success of Lil’s plan so far, he hated being a part of this.
Massi was simply repeating in a small, plaintive voice, “Oh, please, oh, please.”
Lil opened the door and ushered them into a small, dusty hallway, lit only by what moonlight managed to seep through the dirty windows alongside the front entrance. She led the way into a side room and backed off, her job done. This was Joe and Willy’s interrogation. It was time to become merely the escort.
In the filtered half-gloom, Willy steered Massi into the room’s middle and hooked an upright chair with his foot and dragged it over.
He sat Massi down hard in it and stepped back so their quarry could see all three of them standing before him, their faces shrouded in darkness but their body language clear.
Massi was weeping by now, his alcohol-and-drug-racked mind succumbing to the terror of finally being on the receiving end of the kind of interview he’d only nervously witnessed before. His brain filled with the pleas and screams and crying of those memories, he fell from the chair onto his knees and held his clasped hands out to Willy in supplication. “Just tell me what you want. I’ll tell you everything. I swear I will.”
Joe watched him with his throat dry. He’d seen such scenes before, in combat long ago, when military officers applied whatever they deemed necessary to get what they were after. Of course, none of that would happen tonight. Even having lost the argument, he was in fact running this interrogation and was thus guaranteed that all of Massi’s terror would be entirely self-induced. Nevertheless, it was unsettling not only to see this pathetic man’s disintegration but to realize how it stimulated in Joe an unwelcome, unpleasant, but undeniable adrenaline rush. As a far younger man, he’d been more like Willy Kunkle than he liked to admit, and had put people through the wringer simply because he didn’t have the patience to pursue the truth less violently.
For a moment, wrestling with all this, it was all he could do not to leave the room. Instead, he chose to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, hoping some rationalization would help later on.
Feeling like a hypocrite, he stepped forward, crouched down, and took Massi’s hands between his own, in a grotesque parody of a priest receiving confession.