At home we exited from the car and walked up the flagstone steps. I put my arm around her shoulder.
"Nothing bad happened," I said. "And Janice is okay."
"Sometimes I just get mad-"
But she didn't finish her sentence, because I had opened the front door and we were staring inside at our living room. Chairs were overturned. The sofa was shredded and hanging open like a disemboweled cow. Pictures were off the walls. Mary's desk was apart and all its contents spread over the room.
"Charlie!"
I walked through the dining room. Compared to the living room it was almost untouched. They had broken no china, yet all the pieces had been shifted in the cabinets. The silver, worth perhaps thousands of dollars, had been extracted and tossed in a heap. But none of it appeared to be missing. Same story in the kitchen. My study was a wreck, with its desk in the same condition as Mary's. They'd hit every room, and obviously spent time and effort in each in direct proportion to the room's capacity for concealment. I was boiling mad, but inwardly relieved that nothing had been taken.
I was still thinking this when I entered the darkroom; then my heart sank. It wasn't a total wreck; it was just gone. The enlargers were still there. But the cameras were gone. All gone. The two multidrawered Shaw-Walker metal cabinets were gone. Twenty years' worth of negatives, our life on Elm, gone. Mary found me leaning against the bench. She told me later I looked like I was ready to sink right through the floor.
"Good Christ," I groaned, "I wish they'd taken anything but that. The paintings, rugs, stereo stuff, jewelry… even the cameras can be replaced. But not those negatives."
"That cardboard box, Charlie. That little box with Tom's front teeth inside. That's what they were after."
"And dammit, if I'd left it on my study desk where they would have found it right away, they wouldn't have done all this."
"Where did you leave it?"
"In Brian's office, for safekeeping. Safekeeping! And look!"
Mary crinkled up her face a bit and her eyes got shiny. The corners of her mouth turned down.
"Oh no," I said. "This is something to get upset about, but not to cry over. You don't cry over property; you cry over people. You cry over Roy Abernathy, not stuff like this."
Roy Abernathy was a thirty-three-year-old father of four who, a year and a half ago, had noticed pain in his right testis. In the space of fourteen months he had been transformed from a strong carpenter into a moaning, panting, babbling, ninety-four-pound, shriveled sack of agony. As a registered nurse, Mary had performed the post-mortem care on what was left of him while Moe Abramson had done his best to arrest the avalanche of despair and depression in his now institutionalized wife. The children were fast changing from floating, speechless zombies of shock into truants and thieves.
So much for the Abernathy family. It's just one of those minor incidents that makes it a wee bit tougher to put on the spruce duds of a Sunday morning.
Mary let out a low moan and came apart at the seams. Now why did I have to mention Roy Abernathy? But perhaps it was best to have her cry. I walked her downstairs and we sat on the ruined couch together. I wondered. If there was a plan to the Great Going On, was what had just happened to us retribution for my clutching those luscious globes of flesh? And then a little self-hatred and guilt went into the stew pot along with the disaster and the horrendous, pyrotechnic trauma and injustice delivered to the Abernathys.
And I realized life had outdone itself. The needle had now fallen below boring. It was all the way down into the Dead Zone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"Everybody should believe in somethin'," mused a dejected Sam Bowman as he hefted the jug of Cutty Sark and poured himself a magnum load. "I believe I'll have me another drink."
It was two in the afternoon the following day. We were having a powwow in the Adams kitchen. If you could call it a powwow. I couldn't. It looked more like a wake. I opened a bottle of Bass by ale while Joe set the Krups machine to growling and produced cappucinos for Mary and himself. Kevin O'Hearn took the whisky jug from Sam when he was finished and gave himself a double-barreled slug, then returned to fiddling with the little Sony television, tuning in a soap. Brian Hannon was smoking one of my Montecruz coronas and sipping a Sprite. O'Hearn eyed the soft drink with disdain.
"Don't you want some Cutty, Brian?"
"Yes I do, Kevin. But if I had some, then I'd have more and more and more. Then things would go blank and I'd disappear and you wouldn't see me for months, and I'd wake up in an ash can in Panama City. So I'm having a Sprite."
"Oh. Had it bad eh?"
Brian's big balding head swiveled like a gun turret and two streams of pungent smoke cascaded out of his nostrils.
"How many people have you known who've had alcoholism good? Hmmm?"
O'Hearn returned to his soap, and Brian to his Sprite and stolen cigar. Brian's story, replete with fled wife and kids, wasn't a happy one. This somewhat accounted for his rather acerbic wit and sarcastic humor. But a nicer guy never lived. Except Moe.
"Okay Doc, we hand it to you. That makes two in a row. You're batting a thousand. So spill. How'd you know they'd burn Sam's safe?" Brian interrogated me.
"Didn't. Like I told Sam, just a hunch."
"Good hunch," returned Brian. "You got any more hunches?"
"Yeah, like on the Sox game Sunday?" asked O'Hearn.
"They just about done it to me," said Sam, tossing off the last of the amber fluid. "They just about broke me down now. Kill my partner, break open my place. S'all ruint now."
He shook his handsome head slowly. He was dressed in a cream-yellow Windbreaker. His hands and forearms were veiny, his chin clean and taut. Tiny little white pinpricks of whisker showed on his nut-brown jowls where he hadn't shaved- the reverse image of my Calabrian brother-in-law, who patted him, softly on the back.
"C'mon, guy," said Joe. "Remember, the damage done to the office and safe is all covered. Covered well. You'll/lose a coupla hundred, max. Thanks to Doc here you took the cash out and stashed it at Nissenbaum's. Good thing too. You had no proof of it at all. It was just a giant-sized hunk of petty cash, right? You wouldn't have gotten a dime on it, I'll bet. But it's safe, so don't worry."
"What I gonna do for a partner?"
We all stared at the table and sighed. There was a lull in the talk, which added further to the gloom. Mary asked Joe about Johnny Robinson's car.
"They towed it four blocks away in the dead of night to a deserted garage, which is where the Lowell police found it. The rocker panels had been ripped off, seat upholstery torn open-"
"And they also, what did they do, burned up Sam's safe? What do you mean, burned?" asked Mary.
"They broke into Dependable's office- came in through the roofand burned the safe, honey. Burned it," I said, lighting a pipe.
"See, Mare," said her brother, "there are several basic ways to open a safe without the combination. The famous one is by cracking it, or moving the lock dial delicately back and forth until the tumbler-pins fall into place. Then the safe can be opened. This is a great method, but it takes infinite skill and hours of time. Most crooks nowadays have neither. Also, the old pintumbler safe locks have been replaced by disc locks and other sophisticated stuff. It's almost impossible to crack a safe anymore. Now Sam's safe is- was- an old pin-tumbler Mosler. It could be cracked, but it would take a long time and it's in an exposed position. That leaves the other methods: peeling, blowing, punching, and burning."