Port Mortuary (2010)

morning. The sun and the glare are so intense, my eyes water.

“His bias.” Her voice sounds behind me, on speakerphone. “He’s never been fond of Johnny or particularly nice to him, would make tactless comments to him in front of the others. Things such as ‘You need to look at me when I’m talking to you instead of at the goddamn light switch.’ Well, as I’m sure you’re aware, because of Johnny’s unusualness, his attention gets caught up on things that don’t make sense to others. He has poor eye contact and can be offensive because people don’t understand it’s just the way his brain works. Do you know much about Asperger’s, or has your husband…”

“I don’t know much.” I don’t intend to get into what Benton has or hasn’t told me.

“Well, Johnny gets fixated on a detail of no significance to anyone else and will stare at it while you’re talking to him. I’ll be telling him something important and he’s looking at a brooch or a bracelet I’m wearing, or he makes a comment or laughs when he shouldn’t. And Dr. Fielding berated him about laughing inappropriately. He belittled him in front of everyone, and that’s when Johnny tried to kick him. Here this man has however many degrees of a black belt someone can have, and my son, who weighs all of a hundred and forty pounds, tried to kick him, and that was when he was forced to leave the class for good. Dr. Fielding forbade him from ever coming back and threatened to blackball him if he tried to take lessons anywhere else.”

“When was this?” I hear myself as if I’m someone else speaking. “The second week of December. I have the exact date. I have everything written down.”

Six weeks before Mark Bishop was murdered, I think, dazed, as if I’m the one who has been kicked. “And you suggested to Dr. Fielding—” I start to say to the phone on my desk as if I’m looking at Mrs. Donahue and she can see me.

“I certainly did!” she says excitedly, defiantly. “When Johnny started babbling his nonsense about having killed that boy during a blackout and that their tae kwon do instructor did the autopsy! Can you imagine my reaction?”

Their tae kwon do instructor. Who else is she referring to? Johnny’s MIT friend, or are there others? Who else might Fielding have been teaching, and what could have caused Johnny Donahue to confess to a murder Benton believes he didn’t commit? Why would Johnny think he did something so horrific during a so-called blackout? Who influenced him to the extent he would admit to it and offer details such as the weapon being a nail gun when I know for a fact that isn’t true? But I’m not going to ask Mrs. Donahue anything else. I’ve gone too far; everything has gone too far. I’ve asked her more than I should, and Benton already knows the answers to anything I might think of. I can tell by the way he’s sitting in his chair, staring down at the floor, his face as hard and dark as my building’s metal skin.

18

I hang up the phone and stand before my curved wall of glass, looking out at a patchwork of slate tiles and snow punctuated by church steeples stretching out before me in the kingdom of CFC.

I wait for my heart to slow and my emotions to settle, swallowing hard to push the pain and anger back down my throat, distracting myself with the view of MIT, and beyond it, Harvard and beyond. As I stand inside my empire of many windows and look out at what I’m supposed to manage if the worst happens to people, I understand. I understand why Benton is acting the way he is. I understand what has ended. Jack Fielding has.

I vaguely remember him mentioning not long after he moved here from Chicago that he had volunteered at some tae kwon do club and couldn’t always be available to do cases on weekends or after hours because of his dedication to teaching what he referred to as his art, his passion. On occasion he would be gone to tournaments, he told me, and he assumed he would be granted “flexibility.” As acting chief during my long absences, he expected flexibility, he reiterated, almost lecturing me. The same flexibility I would have if I were here, he stated, as if it was a known fact that I have flexibility when I’m home.

I remember being put off by his demands, since he’s the one who called me asking for a job at the CFC, and the position I foolishly agreed to give him far surpasses any he’s ever had. In Chicago he wasn’t afforded much status, was one of six medical examiners and not in line for a promotion of any kind, his chief confided in me when we spoke of my hiring Fielding away from there. It would be a tremendous professional opportunity and good for him personally to be around family, the chief said, and I was deeply moved that Fielding thought of me as family. I was pleased that he had missed me and wanted to come back to Massachusetts, to work for me like in the old days.

And the irony that should have infuriated me, and one I certainly should have pointed out to Fielding instead of indulging him as usual, was this notion of flexibility, as if I come and go as I please, as if I take vacations and run off to tournaments and disappear several weekends each month because of some art or passion I have beyond what I do in my profession, beyond what I do every damn day. My passion is what I live every damn day, and the deaths I take care of every damn day and the people the deaths leave behind and how they pick up and go on, and how I help them somehow do that. I hear myself and realize I’ve been saying these things out loud, and I feel Benton’s hands on my shoulders as he stands behind me while I wipe tears from my eyes. He rests his chin on top of my head and wraps his arms around me.

“What have I done?” I say to him.

“You’ve put up with a lot from him, with way too much, but it’s not you who’s done anything. Whatever he was on, was taking and probably dealing… Well. You had a brush with it earlier, so you can imagine.” He means whatever drugs Fielding might have used to saturate his pain-relieving patches, and whatever drugs he might have been selling.

“Have you found him?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“He’s in custody? He’s been arrested? Or you’re just questioning him?”

“We have him, Kay.”

“I suppose it’s best.” I don’t know what else to ask except how Fielding is doing, which Benton doesn’t answer.

I wonder if Fielding had to be placed in a four-point restraint or maybe in a padded room, and I can’t imagine him in captivity. I can’t imagine him in prison. He won’t last. He will bat himself to death against bars like a panicked moth if someone doesn’t kill him first. It also crosses my mind that he is dead. Then it feels he is. The feeling settles numbly, heavily, as if I’ve been given a nerve block.

“We need to head out. I’ll explain as best I can, as best we know. It’s complicated; it’s a lot,” I hear Benton say.

He moves away, no longer touching me, and it is as if there is nothing holding me here and I will float out the window, and at the same time, there is the heaviness. I feel I’ve turned into metal or stone, into something no longer alive or human.

“I couldn’t let you know earlier as it became clear, not that all of it is clear yet,” Benton says. “I’m sorry when I have to keep things from you, Kay.”

“Why would he, why would anyone…?” I start to ask questions that can never be answered satisfactorily, the same questions I’ve always asked. Why are people cruel? Why do they kill? Why do they take pleasure in ruining others?

“Because he could.” Benton says what he always does.

“But why would he?” Fielding isn’t like that. He’s never been diabolical. Immature and selfish and dysfunctional, yes. But not evil. He wouldn’t kill a six-year-old boy for fun and then enjoy pinning the crime on a teenager with Asperger’s. Fielding’s not equipped to orchestrate a cold-blooded game like that.

“Money. Control. His addictions. Righting wrongs that go back to the beginning of his time. And decompensating. Ultimately destroying himself because that’s who he was really destroying when he destroyed others.” Benton has it all figured out. Everybody has it figured out except me.

“I don’t know,” I mutter, and I tell myself to be strong. I have to take care of this. I can’t help Fielding, I can’t help anyone, if I’m not strong.

“He didn’t hide things well,” Benton then says as I move away from the window. “Once we figured out where to look, it’s become increasingly obvious.”

Someone setting people up, setting up everything. That’s why it’s not hidden well. That’s why it’s obvious. It’s supposed to be obvious, to make us think certain things are true when maybe they aren’t. I won’t accept that