“Shoot,” I say, sitting up and drawing out my handkerchief and holding it up to my lip. Houdini comes over and stands in front of me, bouncing back and forth, growling tenderly, and I hold out my hand, let him sniff it.
“He’s lying,” I tell the dog. Why would Nico have told some story about me having a prison-break plan? Where would Nico get a vehicle?
The problem is, a person like this guy doesn’t have the brains to lie. A person who really thinks that the United States government somehow, over the last half decade, secretly constructed a warren of habitable bases on the dark side of the Moon, that we would have dedicated that level of resources toward mitigating the risk of a 1-in-250-million event.
It’s weird, I think, struggling to my feet. My sister is too smart for this nonsense.
I wipe my mouth on the back of my sleeve and start to lope back to the car.
The thing is, she really is. She really is too smart for this nonsense.
“Huh,” I say. “Huh.”
An hour later I’m down in Cambridge, in the sunken plaza across from Harvard Yard, where there’s a group of ragged college-age homeless kids in a drum circle, and a couple of hippies dancing, and a man selling paperback books from a shopping cart, and a woman in a halter top on a uni cycle, jugging bowling pins, singing “Que Sera Sera.” A very old woman in a silver pantsuit is smoking a marijuana cigarette, trading it back and forth with a black man in thrift-store fatigues. A drunk snores loudly, sprawled across the steps, his lower half soaked with urine. A Massachusetts state trooper keeps a wary eye on the scene, his big mirrored sunglasses propped atop his ranger-style hat. I nod at him, a fellow policeman’s nod, but he doesn’t nod back.
I cross Mt. Auburn Street and find the little green kiosk with the boarded-up windows. I still have no idea where Alison Koechner works, and there is no one answering the phone at the old number, so this is all I’ve got: one place I know she goes a lot.
“Well, well,” says the Coffee Doctor in his hat and beard. “If it isn’t my old nemesis.”
“I’m sorry?” I say, narrowing my eyes, looking around at the dark room, empty but for me and the kid. He puts his hands up, grins. “Just kidding, man. Just something I say.” He points at me with both hands, a big boisterous two-finger point. “You look like you could use a latte, friend.”
“No, thank you. I need information.”
“I don’t sell that. I sell coffee.”
He bustles around behind his counter, swiftly and efficiently, inserting the conical base of the portable filter into the espresso machine and pulling it out again, a light ka-chunk. He levels off the ground beans, tamps them down.
“I was in here a couple days ago.”
“Okay,” he says, eyes on his machine. “If you say so.”
The paper cups are still lined up along the counter, one for each continent, step right up and place your bets. North America has only one or two beans in there—Asia a handful—Africa a handful. Antarctica remains in the lead, overspilling with beans. Wishful thinking. As if the thing would just plow into the snow, snuff out like a candle.
“I was here with a woman. About this tall, short red hair. Pretty.”
He nods, pours milk from a carton into a metal jug. “Sure.” He sticks a wand into the jug, flicks a switch, it begins to foam. “Coffee Doctor remembers all.”
“Do you know her?”
“I don’t know her, but I see her a lot.”
“Okay.”
For a moment I lose my train of thought, entranced by the frothing of the milk, staring along with the Coffee Doctor into his jug, and then he flicks the thing off with a sharp, birdlike movement, exactly at the moment before it would have foamed over.
“Ta-da.”
“I need to leave her a message.”
“Oh, yeah?”
The Coffee Doctor cocks an eyebrow. I massage my side, where the assailant’s gun barrel has left me with a patch of tenderness, just below the ribs.
“Tell her that Henry was here.”
“I can do that.”
“And let her know that I need to see her.”
“I can do that, too.” He lifts a white ceramic demitasse off a hook and fills it with espresso, layers in the foamed milk with a long-handled spoon. There’s a kind of genius at work here, a delicate sensibility being applied.
“You didn’t always do this,” I say. “Coffee, I mean.”
“No.” He keeps his eyes on his work, he’s got the demitasse cradled in his palm and he’s delicately jostling it, conjuring a pattern of dark coffee and cloudy foam. “I was a student of applied mathematics,” he says, and very lightly inclines his head to indicate Harvard, across the street. He looks up, beaming. “But you know what they say,” he concludes and presents me my latte, which bears a perfect and symmetrical oak leaf in milk foam. “There’s no future in it.”
He’s smiling, and I’m supposed to laugh, but I don’t. My eye hurts. My lip is throbbing where I got punched.
“So, you’ll let her know? That Henry was here?”
“Yes, dude. I’ll tell her.”
“And please tell her—” You know what? At this point, why not? “Tell her Palace needs to know what all this Jules Verne moon-shot hokum is covering up. Tell her I know there’s more to this, and I want to know who these people are, and what it is they want.”
“Wow. See, now, that’s a message.”
I’m pulling my wallet out of my pocket, and the Coffee Doctor reaches up and stills my hand.
“No, no,” he says. “On the house. I gotta be honest, friend. You don’t look so good.”
3.
Detectives must consider all possibilities, consider and weigh each conceivable set of events that might have led to a crime, to determine which are most likely, which might prove to be true.
When she was murdered, Naomi was looking for Peter’s insurable-interest files because she knew I was intrigued by them, and she was helping me in my investigation.
When she was murdered, Naomi was looking for the files to hide them before I could find them.
Someone shot her. A stranger? An accomplice? A friend?
For one hour I’m driving back from Cambridge to Concord, an hour of dead highway and vandalized exit signs and deer standing tremulously along the lip of 93 North. I’m thinking about Naomi in the doorway of my bedroom, Monday night. The more I think of that moment, the more certain I become that whatever she had to tell me—whatever she started to say and then stopped—it was not merely sentimental or interpersonal. It was relevant to the mechanics of my ongoing investigation.
But do you stand in the moonlight half-dressed and tell somebody one more thing about contestability clauses and insurable interest?
It was something else, and I’ll never know what it was. But I want to.
Normally, when I arrive at CPD headquarters on School Street, I park in the lot and enter through the back door that leads to the garage. This afternoon for some reason I go around to the front and use the main door, the public entrance, which I first walked through when I was four, maybe five years old. I say hey to Miriam, who works at the desk where my mother used to work, and I go upstairs to call Naomi Eddes’s family.