Frame-Up Read online

  We stepped outside while the boiling seawater put a glowing red coat on those sublime crustaceans. Within ten minutes a call that was saturated in the flat, North Shore accent brought us back inside. We left with a heavy brown paper bag that was too hot to touch except at the folded top.

  The three-quarter moon lit a path to a rocky plateau just above the cove. Terry opened the bag and laid out the four gleaming red creatures. She took a seat on the rock with her legs tucked under her and looked up at me.

  “Well, Mr. Lawyer-Man, are you a New Englander or a tourist?”

  I answered the challenge by half-reclining with the lobsters between us. Let the games begin.

  I let her make the first choice and watched as she began the ritual dissection practiced as an art form by anyone born east of Connecticut.

  When I realized that her lobster was in the hands of an artist, I began my own ritual with one of the most succulent specimens I had ever engaged in battle.

  When that first lobster was history, we both drew a deep breath and lay back on the warm rock that insulated us against the cool east wind that had come up off the ocean. We had smiles that locked onto each other, and the world of Benny Ignola and Dominic Santangelo and even John McKedrick seemed almost not to exist.

  There were long minutes without conversation that would have been difficult with anyone else. I felt as if we were climbing to the top of a roller coaster for that first plunge into something more than a restrained friendship.

  Terry was the first to sit up.

  “Are you still in the game?”

  I nodded, and we took our leisure in each devouring the second lobster. When that last morsel of claw meat passed into memory, I stretched back and lay against the rock and just let the taste linger. Terry moved over and sat next to me. I could feel her warmth as a shield against the ocean breeze. Both felt pleasant and comforting.

  She looked down at me and just nodded. I nodded back, and I think we were both saying, “This is good.”

  Maybe too good. I felt stung by a ripple of guilt. John was back between us. She saw it, and I could sense the pain flow from me into her. I sat up, and I wanted to hold her and comfort her and tell her it’s all going to be all right. But John was there, and I couldn’t do it. She was two inches away from me, but it felt like a mile.

  Terry was the first to summon the courage to face it.

  “Michael, I want to ask you a question you don’t have to answer. It’s probably out of line.”

  I felt a door slightly open, and every nerve froze with anticipation of what might be on the other side. There was no choosing the moment. This was it. I pushed the door the rest of the way open.

  “Nothing’s out of line, Terry. Go ahead.”

  “Where are we going, Michael? I wouldn’t ask, but I think we’re at a fork in the road. I don’t want to take the wrong road alone.”

  I knew what I wanted to say, but I could still feel the ghost of John between us.

  “Can I ask you a question I have no right to ask?”

  “I wish you would, Michael.”

  “Was John in love with you?”

  Terry looked away to the bobbing dots of skiffs and sailboats at anchor beyond the cove. When she looked back, the moonlight caught tiny trails of moisture at her eyes. Her voice was soft but clear.

  “You’re asking the wrong question, Counselor.”

  I was at a loss for a moment until I felt a ray of light burst through my mind.

  “Were you in love with John?”

  The tears had stopped, and she looked at me directly.

  “No. Not like that.”

  She had broken a barrier, and the rest flowed more easily.

  “John and I had been old friends. We got together again just a little while before his death. He was terribly distracted by whatever was going on that last week. He couldn’t share any of it with me. I don’t know what he had in mind for the future. He never got to tell me. I don’t even know if it included me.”

  She stopped, and I needed one more answer. I had to know that I wasn’t robbing John of something he might have had, for whatever sense that makes. She must have seen the question in my face, because her look said, “Ask it.”

  “If it did include you, would you—”

  The words caught in my throat, but she answered it anyway.

  “No. I didn’t feel that way about John.”

  For the first moment since I’d seen Terry at John’s funeral, I felt free to let John go to his new world. I didn’t know what to say, but words turned out not to be a problem. However it happened, we were in each other’s arms, and for some reason, the tears of both of us flowed through that first kiss.

  We stayed for countless minutes alone on that rock plateau, holding on to each other as if we were really holding onto a gift that had just been given to us. Time suspended, until the moment when I realized that we were not alone.

  Whether a twig snapped, or a pebble fell, or whatever, something spun me around to face a shadow the size of a bear at the edge of the rock ten feet behind us. When it climbed onto the rock, it took human form. There was no light on the features, but it just stood there staring.

  There was a heavy wheeze in the rapid breath that came from lugging that bulk up the slope.

  The best I could do was. “What do you want?”

  The voice was guttural and hard.

  “You’re a smart-ass, aren’t you?”

  The world we’d left was back like gangbusters. I could see nothing but a shape, but I knew in my bones that it meant to kill us.

  “I don’t know what your problem is with me, but the girl is out of it. Let her go.”

  Through the wheezing I heard, “First you. Then I’ll take care of the girl.”

  The tone was even more chilling than the words. The hulk moved farther onto the rock, and a tiny beam of light picked up the barrel of a handgun.

  It was time to be cool and count options. The first thought was to charge him in the gut. One look at that frame and I realized I’d have better luck moving Mount Rushmore. That left just one option with no time to take a vote.

  I grabbed Terry’s hand and dove backward off the rock bluff. We spilled through the air for a brief eternity. We hit the packed sand of the beach a dozen feet below with a double thud — first me and then Terry on top of me. I landed flat enough to absorb the impact. Terry came down elbow first and caught me square in the right eye socket. I think it was shear willpower that kept me conscious.

  I remembered hearing two shots fired while we were falling. I expected more any second from above.

  I pulled Terry as close to the base of the rock as we could huddle. I listened for sounds above to hear which side he might be coming down. There was nothing.

  When I knew Terry was able to move, I led her on hands and knees next to the rock. It was fifty-fifty either way, so we went to the left toward a stand of dune grass. I waited for a wisp of cloud to douse the moonlight before we made the scramble into the tall grass. Once we made cover, I left her hidden and worked my way through the grass up the sandy bank. I took a wide sweep in the hopes of coming up behind him.

  My right eye was swollen nearly shut from the impact of Terry’s elbow. I needed the light of the moon to grope my way up the craggy rocks. At the same time, I needed to move in darkness as cover against the next shot.

  The motion was slow in bursts of climbing, broken by long pauses splayed against the rock when the rays of moonlight through broken clouds would find me out.

  At some point, I was overcome with panic at the thought that he might be moving down the bank on the other side of the rock, leaving nothing between him and Terry. It seemed reckless but necessary to scramble to the back of his rock to get a fix on his position and head him off before he could reach her.

  The in-and-out cloud cover helped in a way, but I was mostly moving blindly. Every few steps I seemed to run into an unexpected jutting of rock that would tear skin from an arm or leg. I tried
to stifle any involuntary noises, but at one point I fell headlong across a face of jagged rock. The sound was out of me before I could squelch it.

  I had lost the cover of silence, so there was no point in stealth. I stood upright and ran the last short quarter-circle to come up behind him. I was sure I’d be walking into open gunfire, but there was no other way.

  When I reached the back edge of the rock, I was astounded to see the shape of him still stretched out on the rock ahead of me. He had the gun in his right hand, and he was focused on the stretch of beach below. I had no idea why he had hadn’t fired at the sound I made when I fell. Maybe he was too locked onto the beach below, or he just couldn’t hear. Whatever the reason, I rode the hope that he had no idea that I was behind him.

  The cloud moved, and the cold light of the moon covered the three of us. If Terry moved, he’d have her in his sights. She had no way of knowing what was going on above her. That meant she could get up and become a running target at any moment.

  Time was not on my side, and neither was my size against a human tank with a gun. The only things I had going for me were speed and surprise.

  I felt around the ground behind me until my hand touched a dead branch the size of a baseball bat. It was not much against what sounded like a thirty-eight, but under the circumstances, it seemed to come from my guardian angel.

  I was no Navy SEAL, but much as I hated it, what had to be done, had to be done. I took a silent deep breath and counted. When I hit three, I drove like a linebacker on a blitz. My right foot slipped and I wound up driving my right knee into the rock. The pain forced a sharp sound out of my lungs that he couldn’t miss. Before he could spin his bulk around with the gun, I put every ounce of energy into my left leg and dove the six feet to the target. My body hit the solid mass of his body, and I swung the club at his head with everything I had left. I could hear the shatter of wood and bone. I rolled off of him and held my breath. He lay still and cold.

  I took a few seconds to let the pain in my knee stop screaming. There was no motion beside me. I called Terry, and she scrambled up to the rock beside me.

  We made our way back to the Rockport Police Headquarters. I explained what had happened, and two officers followed us back to the rock ledge. As we approached it, I half expected to find nothing there. Either he’d have crawled away or it was just a nightmare to begin with.

  No such luck. The officers went out ahead on the rock and scanned the body with their flashlights. They bent down and checked it over from head to foot before one of them came back to where I was standing. He called me aside and spoke in a low tone.

  “Mr. Knight, this didn’t happen the way you said it did.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood his meaning.

  “Why would I lie? I told you I probably killed him. He fired two shots at us. The gun was still in his hand. He was waiting for us to move.”

  The officer took me up toward the front of the rock.

  “In the first place, Mr. Knight, his gun hasn’t been fired. In the second place, you didn’t kill him, at least not the way you said.”

  My look of confusion and silence said it all. He took me closer.

  “Look at this.”

  He shined the flashlight on the gaping wound in the back of his head where my club had crushed his skull. Oddly enough, there was practically no bleeding from the open hole. He lowered the beam of his flashlight to the back of the dead man. The light picked up two clear bullet holes in the center of his back between his shoulder blades.

  “My bet is the coroner’ll find that he was dead sometime before you hit him.”

  I sat down on the rock to try to pull the pieces together. Who could have fired the two shots that saved our lives? I was too tired to think. I heard the voice of the officer bringing me back.

  “Mr. Knight, I’d like you to see if you could identify him.”

  He rolled the body slightly and shone the light on his face. I went numb when I realized I was looking at the fireplug-shaped gangster I had taken off of his watch at South Station.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I woke up the next morning with one eye swollen completely shut. It was the color of a rare tuna steak. Terry’s elbow had the clout of a weapon of mass destruction.

  As I shaved, I swapped questions with the Cyclops in the mirror. How did the fireplug identify me, let alone find me? Bigger question — who was pushing his buttons, and whoever it was, why me? Whatever happened to that wonderful old adage, “The lawyer always goes home”? Biggest question of all — what was the button pusher’s next surprise?

  Through all of those disturbing negative questions, one positive question popped up. How did I acquire a protector kind enough to put two slugs into the fireplug where they’d do Terry and me the most good, and at the same time — no small matter — save me the whipping I’d be taking from my conscience for taking a human life.

  It was nine-thirty a.m. I decided to reach Mr. Devlin by phone at his apartment before he left for Sunday Mass. He filled me in on his meeting the previous day with our client Peter. Since most of the world was under the salubrious assumption that Peter was dead, and his actual whereabouts were kept to a need-to-know circle, which, for the moment, did not include me, all contact was through Mr. D.

  As I imagined, his meeting netted a goose egg. Peter could have been a great deal more helpful if he had actually been guilty of bombing John’s car. As it was, he knew less than we did.

  When Mr. D.’s news ran out, it was my turn. He asked about what I was now willing to admit was an actual date the night before. I could hear a paternalistic grin in his voice when he asked. He was like a parent waiting up till I came home.

  The grin dropped when I told him about diving off a rock to avoid a double murder accented by a likely rape, bullets flying from heaven knows where, and the smashing of an already dead gorilla’s skull like a piñata.

  “My God in heaven, Michael, can’t you go on a simple date like anyone else? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, fine, Mr. Devlin.”

  “And the girl?”

  “Terry was all right when I left her last night. I had Tom Burns put a man outside her apartment just in case. I’m going to call her right now. I’m certain he was after me, but I want to be sure she didn’t get sucked into the game.”

  “That must have been one hell of a first date. Michael, this game is getting out of hand. We need to reestablish the rules. I want a meeting with Santangelo.”

  “I want to be there.”

  “Let’s make it noon.”

  “Monsignor Ryan’s church?”

  “I’ll set it up.”

  Our unlikely little foursome — Mr. Devlin, Monsignor Ryan, Mr. Santangelo, and myself — gathered in Monsignor Ryan’s study. This time, the burning discontent was on our side. Mr. D. had me recount the events of the past couple of days, with heavy emphasis on the attack the previous night by the fireplug from South Station. My left eye, which was practically glowing in the dark, gave a nice emphasis to the story.

  I covered the facts and left the follow-up to Mr. D.

  “This crap must cease, Dominic. I’ll do everything I can for Peter, but I’m not going to lose this boy over it.”

  I don’t know about the others, but I heard the word “boy” as carrying a lot of the word “son.” I’d begun to believe against all odds that Mr. Devlin had actually begun thinking of me that way, whether consciously or not. That conceit so filled my heart that, right or wrong, I knew I’d never let go of it.

  I watched the lines deepen on Santangelo’s face. I’m sure he took Mr. Devlin’s meaning, but something far deeper and more personal seemed to be weighing on him. I’m sure he saw the threat to me as an equal threat to his own life, and perhaps more to the heart, the life of his son. But there seemed to be something even beyond that.

  “Who is this man, Dominic? You heard Michael’s description. Is he one of yours?”

  Mr. Santangelo spoke quietly. He measured his words c
arefully. He seemed to be suppressing pain rather than the truth.

  “Yes. As you say, one of mine.”

  “Why, Dominic? I know it wasn’t under your orders.”

  Mr. Santangelo just waved his hand as if the very thought was an impossibility. We all knew that he owed us more than that, so we waited. We gave him long seconds that dragged into a minute to get control of what he must have been thinking.

  When Mr. Santangelo spoke, it was muted by what appeared to be deep sorrow.

  “This man … How do I explain? Vito Respa. He was also like a son in a different way.”

  Mr. D. started to speak, but Mr. Santangelo held up a hand.

  “Please, Lex. It’s important that I say this.”

  Mr. D. nodded and gave him the silence he wanted.

  “I have to go back. My grandfather was a very powerful man in his region of Sicily. He had workers for his property, and he also had soldiers for protection from his enemies. This man, Vito Respa, was the son of one of his workers. Vito was, what can I say? mentally slow.

  “About fifteen years ago, there was a rape of a young girl in my grandfather’s village. My grandfather’s enemies spread the word that Vito had done it. He was arrested. These enemies spread the word that my grandfather would buy Vito’s freedom. One thing led to another and a mob formed in the square. You have to understand the Sicilian’s pride, especially in matters of dishonoring a daughter of their town. With the help of a few inciters, the mob was ready to storm the jail and take Vito.

  “My grandfather was home alone when he heard about it. He went to the town square, this little old man on a cane. He climbed up on the platform, and everything went quiet. I heard this from people who were there.

  “Picture this old man facing that mob alone. He never raised his voice. He never made an open threat. He just raised his cane and one by one he pointed at each of the men in the mob and spoke his name. ‘Aldo Baldini, Antonio Presotti,’ and so on. That’s all. One by one they went away. When they were all gone, he went home.