Parisian hooker’s on Bastille Day.
“How come he listens to you?” Vanessa said.
“He can hear the tension in your voice. It’s making him nervous.”
“Yeah, well, I got reason to be tense. He’s a dog, what’s he got to be tense about-missing a nap?”
I put a hand on the back of her neck, kneaded the muscles and tendons between my fingers. It was as stiff and gnarled back there as one of the tree trunks.
Vanessa let out a long breath. “Thanks.”
I kneaded the flesh some more, felt it starting to loosen a bit. “Keep going?”
“As long as you can.”
“You got it.”
She gave me a tiny smile. “You’d be a good friend, Patrick. Wouldn’t you?”
“I am your friend,” I said, not sure it was true, but then, sometimes just saying something plants the seed that allows it to become truth.
“Good,” she said. “I need one.”
“So this guy who hit you?”
Hard pebbles sprouted under the skin at the back of her neck again.
“I was walking up to the door of a coffee shop. He was apparently waiting on the other side. The door was smoked glass. He could see out. I couldn’t see in. Just as I reached for the door, he slammed it open into my face. Then he just hopped over me as I was lying on the pavement and walked away.”
“Witnesses?”
“Inside the coffee shop, yeah. Two people remembered seeing a tall, slim guy wearing a baseball cap and Ray-Bans-they couldn’t agree on his age, but they both knew what kind of sunglasses he wore-who stood by the door, looking down at a leaflet in his hand.”
“Anything else they remember about him?”
“Yeah. He wore driving gloves. Black. Middle of the summer, guy’s wearing gloves, nobody finds him suspicious. Jesus.”
She stopped to light her third cigarette of the walk. Clarence took that as his signal to go off the path again and sniff a pile of shit left by another dog. Probably the primary reason I’ve never owned a dog is because of this colorful aspect of their personalities. Give Clarence another thirty seconds, he’d try to eat it.
I snapped my fingers. He looked up at me with that slightly confused, slightly guilty look that to me is the most defining characteristic of his species.
“Leave it,” I said, again relying on recollections of Bubba for my tone of voice.
Clarence turned his head sadly and then wiggled his butt away from it, and we all resumed walking.
It was another dull August day, humid and clammy without being particularly hot. The sun was somewhere behind slate clouds and the mercury hovered in the high seventies. The bicyclists and joggers and speed-walkers and Rollerbladers all seemed to be moving past us through a jungle of thin, transparent cobwebs.
Along this stretch of the river path, small tunnels cropped up every now and then. No more than sixty feet long and fifteen wide, they formed the bases of the footbridges that led pedestrians over from the other side of the Soldiers Field Road/Storrow Drive split. Walking through the tunnels, stooping slightly, felt like walking through a child’s fun house. I felt huge and a bit silly.
“My car was stolen,” Vanessa said.
“When?”
“Sunday night. I still can’t believe this has been only a week. You want to hear about Monday through Thursday?”
“Very much.”
“Monday night,” she said, “someone managed to slip past building security and throw the main circuit breaker in the basement. Power was off for about ten minutes. No big deal unless your alarm clock is electric and fails to go off in the morning and you end up being seventy-five minutes late for opening arguments in a fucking murder trial.” A small gasp escaped her lips, and she bit down on it and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.
“Tuesday night, I come home to a series of pornographic recordings on my answering machine.”
“Guy’s voice, I assume.”
She shook her head. “No. The caller had placed the phone up to a TV playing pornographic movies. Lots of moaning and ‘Take that, bitch,’ and ‘Come in my face,’ shit like that.” She flicked her cigarette into the damp sand to the left of the path. “Normally, I guess I’d have shrugged it off, but I was starting to get a feeling of dread in my stomach, and the message total was twenty.”
“Twenty,” I said.
“Yup. Twenty different recordings of porno movies. Wednesday,” she said with a long sigh, “someone pickpockets my wallet from my bag as I eat lunch in the courtyard of the federal courthouse.” She patted the bag slung over her shoulder. “All I have in here is cash and whatever credit cards I was smart enough to leave in the drawer back home because they’d made my wallet bulge.”
Just to my left, Clarence suddenly stopped and cocked his head high and to his left.
Vanessa stopped, too weary to pull him forward, and I stopped with her.
“Any activity on the stolen credit cards before you noticed they were gone?”
She nodded. “At a hunting and fishing store in Peabody. A man-the fucking clerks remember he was a man, but they never noticed he was using a fucking woman’s credit card-purchased several lengths of rope and a buck knife.”
About 150 yards ahead of us, three teenage boys broke from a tunnel on Rollerblades, their feet slashing expertly back and forth in front of one another, bodies low, arms swinging in tandem with their feet. It looked like they were talking shit to one another, laughing, goading one another on.
“Thursday,” Vanessa said, “I got hit with the door. Had to walk back into court with an ice pack on my nose and ask for an emergency continuance until Monday.”
An ice pack, I thought, and gingerly touched my jaw. Wesley should have his own patent on the things.
“This morning,” Vanessa said, “I start receiving phone calls about mail that never arrived at its destination.”
Clarence let out a low growl, his head still cocked, body a single tensed muscle.
“What did you just say?” I looked away from Clarence and hard at Vanessa, my body beginning to tingle with the connection Angie and I had kept missing.
“I said some of my mail never reached its destination. No big deal, unto itself, but piled on top of everything else.”
We stepped to the side of the path as the Rollerbladers approached, their skates hissing off asphalt, and I kept one eye on Vanessa and one on Clarence, because he’s been known to take off without warning after anything moving faster than he can.
“Your mail,” I said, “didn’t get through.”
Clarence barked, but not at the Rollerbladers; his nose pointed up and far off, down toward the tunnel.
“No.”
“Where’d you mail it from?”
“The mailbox in front of my building.”
“Back Bay,” I said, stunned it had taken me this long to see it.
The first two kids whizzed past us, and then I saw the elbow of the third one rise. I reached for Vanessa and pulled her toward me, saw the flash of a grin on the kid’s face as he dropped the elbow and grabbed the strap of Vanessa’s bag.
The kid’s speed, the force of his pull, and the way I’d twisted Vanessa’s body awkwardly toward me combined to create a mess of bad balance and flailing limbs. When the bag was ripped from Vanessa’s shoulder, she instinctively tried to grasp it, her arm going back and twisting up as I put my foot out to trip the kid, all of this happening in less than a second before Vanessa was wrenched back forward again, slamming into me and knocking me over onto my back.
The kid’s skates left the ground and flew over my reaching fingers, and Vanessa dropped the leash as her hip slammed off the pavement and her abdomen slammed into my knee. I heard the air leave her in a burst, cut off a yelp of pain from the impact of her hip, and the kid looked back over his shoulder at me as his skates returned to
