The Wrong Man, Page 3

  So, he shrugged. He spun and stared at the man at the bar a few feet away.

  “What’re you looking at, you old fuck?” he asked angrily.

  The man refused to make eye contact.

  “You want another drink?” the bartender demanded.

  O’Connell could no longer see the man’s hands.

  He laughed. “Not in a shit hole like this.” He rose and exited the bar, leaving the men behind in silence as he passed through the door. He made a mental note to come back sometime, and felt a surge of satisfaction. There was nothing, he thought, nearly as pleasurable in life as moving to an edge of something, and teetering back and forth. Rage was like a drug; in moderation, it made him high. But every so often it was necessary to truly indulge; to get wasted with it. He looked down at his watch. A little after lunchtime. Sometimes Ashley liked to take a sandwich out onto the Common and eat beneath a tree with some of her art class friends. It was an easy place to keep an eye on her without being seen. He thought he might just wander over and check.

  Michael O’Connell first met Ashley Freeman by happenstance, some six months earlier. He was working as a part-time auto mechanic at a gas station just off the Massachusetts Turnpike extension, taking computer technology courses in his free hours, making ends meet by tending bar on weekends in a student hangout near BU. She had been coming back from a weekend ski trip with her roommates when the right rear tire had shredded after hitting one of Boston’s ubiquitous potholes, a common enough winter-season occurrence. The roommate had nursed the car into the station, and O’Connell had replaced the flat. When the roommate’s Visa card, maxed out by the weekend’s excesses, had been rejected, O’Connell had used his own credit card to pay for the tire, an act of generosity and seemingly Good Samaritanism that hadn’t been lost on the four girls in the vehicle. They were unaware that the card he used was stolen and had readily handed over their addresses and phone numbers, promising to collect the cash for him by midweek if he would just swing by and pick it up. The new tire, and the labor to install it, had come to $221. None of the girls in the car had understood for an instant how ironically small a sum that truly was, to allow Michael O’Connell into their lives.

  In addition to his good looks, O’Connell had been born with exceptionally sharp eyesight. It wasn’t hard for him to pick out Ashley’s outline from beyond a block’s distance, and he sidled up against an oak tree, maintaining a loose surveillance. He knew that no one would notice him; he was too far away, there were too many people walking by, too many cars passing, too much bright October sunlight. And he knew as well that he had been lucky to develop a chameleon-like ability to blend into his surroundings. He thought that he should really have become a movie star, because of his capacity to always seem to be someone else.

  In a run-down dive of a bar, catering to alcoholics and fringe criminals, he could be a tough guy. Then, just as easily, in Boston’s massive student population, he could appear to be just another college kid. The backpack, filled to bursting with computer texts, helped form that impression. Michael O’Connell thought he maneuvered expertly from world to world, relying at all times on the inability of people to take more than a second to size him up.

  Had they, he thought, they would have been scared.

  He watched, easily picking out Ashley’s reddish blond hair from the group. A half dozen young people were sitting in a loose circle, eating lunch, laughing, telling stories. Had he been the seventh member of that group, he would have turned quiet. He was good at lying and making up believable fictions about who he was, where he’d come from, and what he’d done, but in a group, he always worried that he would go too far, say something loose and unlikely, and lose the credibility that was important to him. One-on-one, with someone like Ashley, he had no trouble being seductive, creating a need for sympathy.

  Michael O’Connell watched, letting rage grow within him.

  It was a familiar sensation, one that he both welcomed and hated. It was different from the anger he felt when he was readying for a fight, or when he got into an argument with a boss at any number of the occasional jobs he held, or with his landlord, or the old lady who lived next door to his tiny apartment and who bothered him with her cats and leery-eyed stares. He could have words with any number of people, even come to blows, and it was to him next to nothing. But his feelings about Ashley were far different.

  He knew he loved her.

  Watching her from a safe distance, unrecognized and unobserved, he stewed. He tried to relax, but could not. He turned away because watching was too painful, but then, just as quickly, he twisted back, because the pain of not looking was far worse. Every laugh she emitted, tossing her head back, her hair shaking seductively around her shoulders, every time she leaned forward, listening to someone else, was agony. Every time she reached out and, even in the most inadvertent of motions, let her hand brush up against another’s—all of these things were like ice picks driven deep into his chest.

  Michael O’Connell watched and for nearly a minute believed he could not breathe.

  She constricted his every thought.

  He reached down into his pants pocket, where he kept a knife. It wasn’t the Swiss Army multiuse-type knife that could be found in hundreds of backpacks throughout Boston’s student universe. This was a four-inch folding knife, stolen from a camping goods store in Somerset. It had heft. He wrapped his hand around the knife and squeezed it tightly so that, although the blade was concealed within the handle, it still bit into his hand. A little bit of extra pain, he thought, helps to clear the head.

  Michael O’Connell liked carrying the blade because it made him feel dangerous.

  Sometimes he believed that he traveled in a world of about-to-bes. The students, like Ashley, were all in the process of turning themselves into something other than what they were. Law school for the soon-to-be-minted lawyers. Medical school for the ones who wanted to be doctors. Art school. Philosophy courses. Language studies. Film classes. Everyone was part of becoming something. On the verge of joining.

  He wished, sometimes, that he’d enlisted in the army. He liked to think that his talents would have translated well into the military, if they could have seen past his difficulty taking orders. Perhaps he should have tried the CIA. He would have made an excellent spy. Or contract killer. He would have liked that. A James Bond type. He would have been a natural.

  Instead, he realized, he was destined to be a criminal. What he liked to study was danger.

  From a block away, he saw the group begin to stir. Almost in unison, they rose, brushing themselves off, unaware of anything other than their immediate halo of laughter and happy talk.

  He moved forward, following slowly, not closing the distance, mingling with other people on the sidewalk, watching until Ashley and the others walked up some steps and into a building.

  Her last class ended at four thirty, he knew. Then it would be over to the museum for two hours of part-time work. He wondered if she had plans for that night.

  He did. He always did.

  “But there’s something I don’t exactly get.”

  “What’s that?” Her reply was patient, like that of a teacher with a slow child.

  “If this fellow…”

  “Michael. Michael O’Connell. Nice Irish name. Boston name. Must be a thousand of them from Brockton to Somerville and beyond. Makes one think of altar boys carrying incense, and choir practice, and firemen in kilts playing bagpipes on a brisk and cold Saint Paddy’s Day.”

  “That’s not really his name, is it? This is a part of the puzzle, correct? If I were to follow up, I wouldn’t find a Michael O’Connell, would I?”

  “You might. You might not.”

  “You’re making this a little more difficult than it has to be.”

  “Am I? Isn’t that for me to judge? I might be presuming that there will come a point when you’re going to stop asking me questions and head out on your own, because you’re going to want to know the truth. Already
you know enough, at least to get started. You’ll start comparing what I’ve said against what you can find out. That’s the point of telling this. And making it a little difficult. You called it a puzzle. That would be apt.”

  Her voice was direct. If she meant to be coy, it didn’t register in her words.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s move forward. If this fellow Michael was really heading towards some sort of fringe life, working his way up the petty-crime ladder, where did Ashley fit in? I mean, she would have had a pretty good read on this guy in two seconds, right? She’d been well educated. She must have attended classes or gone to lectures about stalkers and that sort of man. Hell, there’s even a segment on them in the state’s high school health textbook. It’s alphabetical, so it comes right before STDs. So she would have picked him out rapidly. And then done whatever she could to extricate herself. You’re suggesting a sort of obsessive love. But this guy O’Connell, he sounds like a psychopath, and—”

  “A psychopath in training. A nascent psychopath. A psychopath wannabe.”

  “Yes, well, I can see that, but where did the obsession come from?”

  “Good question,” she answered. “And one that should be answered. But you would be unwise to think that Ashley, despite her many strong qualities, was properly equipped to deal with the sorts of problems that Michael O’Connell presented.”

  “True enough. But what did she think she was involved in?”

  “Theater,” she replied. “But she just did not know what sort of production it might be.”

  3

  A Young Woman of Ordinary Ignorance

  Two tables away from where Ashley Freeman sat with a trio of friends, a half dozen members of the Northeastern University varsity baseball team were hotly arguing the relative virtues of either the Yankees or the Red Sox, engaged in a loud, frequently foulmouthed assessment of each team. Ashley might have been perturbed by the over-the-top noise, except that having spent many hours in student-oriented bars over her four academic years in Boston, she had heard the debate a multitude of times. Occasionally it ended in some pushing or maybe a quick exchange of blows, but more often just gave way to cascading torrents of obscenities. Often there were fairly creative suppositions about the bizarre off-hours sexual practices of the players on either the Yankees or the Red Sox. Barnyard animals figured fairly prominently in these sexual inventions.

  Across from her, her friends were in a passionate discussion of their own. The issue was a show over at Harvard of Goya’s famous sketches of the horrors of war. A group of them had taken the T across town to the exhibit, and then wandered, unsettled, through the black-and-white drawings of dismemberment, torture, assassination, and agony. It had struck Ashley that while one can always tell the citizens from the soldiers in the drawings, there was no anonymity in either role. And no safety, either. Death, she thought, has a way of evening things out. It crushes spirit without regard to politics. It is unrelenting.

  She shifted about in her seat, a little uncomfortable. Images, especially violent images, creased her deeply and had done so since she was a child. They lingered unwelcome in her memory, whether they were Salome admiring the head of John the Baptist in a gruesome Renaissance rendition, or Bambi’s mother trying to flee the hunters who pursued her. Even the campy killings of Tarantino’s Kill Bill unsettled her.

  Her de facto date for the evening was a lanky, long-haired BC psychology graduate student named Will, who was leaning across the table, making a point, while trying to narrow the distance between his shoulder and her arm. Small touches were important in courting, she thought. The slightest of shared sensations might lead to something more intense. She was unsure what she thought of him. He was clearly bright and seemed thoughtful. He’d shown up at her apartment earlier with a half dozen roses, which, he said, was the psychological equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card; it meant he could say or do something offensive or stupid and she would likely forgive him at least once. A dozen roses, he said, would have been too many; she would likely see through the artifice of it all, whereas half that number at least held out some promise as well as some mystery. She had thought this was funny, and probably accurate as well, and so she was inclined to like him initially, though it wasn’t long before she started to sense that he was perhaps just a meager bit too full of himself, and less likely to listen than he was to pronounce, which put her off.

  Ashley pushed her hair back from her face and tried to listen.

  “Goya meant to shock. He meant to thrust all the reality of war into the faces of the politicians and aristocrats who romanticize it. Make it undeniable—”

  The last words of this statement were lost, overcome by a burst from the nearby table: “I’ll tell you what Derek Jeter’s good at. He’s good at bending over and…”

  She had to smile to herself. It was a little like being trapped in a uniquely Bostonian version of the twilight zone, caught between the pretentious and the plebeian.

  She continued to shift about in her seat, maintaining a neutral distance that neither discouraged nor encouraged Will, and thought about how she had always been wildly unlucky in love. She wondered whether this was merely something that would pass, like so many moments growing up, or was, instead, a predictable vision of her future. She sensed that she was on the edge of something, but of what, she was unsure.

  “Yes, but the dilemma with shocking and showing the true nature of war through art is that it never stops the war, but gets celebrated as art. We flock to see Guernica and we revel in the depth of its vision, but do we really feel anything for the peasants who were bombed? They were real one day. Their deaths were real. But their truth is subordinated by art.”

  This was Will-the-date speaking. Ashley thought it a wise observation, but, at the same time, one that a million politically correct college kids would have made. Ashley glanced over at the loud baseball players. Even alcohol-fueled, their argument was exuberant. She felt a twinge of doubt. She liked sitting at Fenway with a beer. She loved wandering through the Museum of Fine Art. For one long second she wondered which of the two arguments she really belonged in.

  Ashley stole a sideways glance at Will, who she guessed was thinking that the fastest way to seduce her was with all sorts of pompous intellectualisms. This was standard graduate-student thinking. She decided to confuse matters for him.

  Ashley shoved her seat back abruptly and stood up. “Hey!” she shouted. “You guys, where you from? BC? BU? Northeastern?”

  The table of baseball players quieted immediately. Young men being shouted at by a beautiful girl, Ashley thought, always gets their attention.

  “Northeastern,” one replied, half-standing, making a small bow in her direction, with a Far Eastern sense of courtesy, a decorum mostly lost in the rowdy bar.

  “Well, rooting for the Yankees is just like rooting for General Motors or IBM or the Republican Party. Being a Red Sox fan is all about poetry. At some crucial point, everybody makes their choice in life. Enough said.”

  The boys at the table exploded with laughter and mock outrage.

  Will leaned back, grinning. “That,” he said, “was succinct.”

  Ashley smiled and wondered if he wasn’t all that bad after all.

  When she was young, she thought it would be better to be plain. Plain girls, she knew, can hide.

  Right at the start of her teenage years, she had gone through a dramatic phase of opposition to just about everything: loud, stamped-foot disagreeing with her mother, her father, her teachers, her friends, wearing baggy, sacklike, earth-colored clothing, putting a streak of vibrant red next to a streak of ink black in her hair, listening to grunge rock, drinking harsh black coffee, trying cigarettes, and longing for tattoos and body piercings. This phase had lasted for only a couple of months, just long enough for it to come into conflict with just about everything she did in school, both in the classroom and on the athletic field. It cost her some friends, as well, and it made those who did remain with her a littl
e wary.

  To Ashley’s surprise, the only adult who she’d been able to speak with in any modestly civil fashion during this portion of her life had been her mother’s partner, Hope. This had surprised her, because a large portion of her inwardly blamed Hope for the breakup of her parents, and she had often told friends that she hated Hope because of it. This untruth had bothered her, in part because she believed it was more what her friends wanted to hear from her, and she was unsettled by the idea that she might comply with their perceptions for that flimsiest of reasons. After grunge and Goth, she had gone through a khaki-and-plaid preppy stage, followed by a jock stage, then a couple of weeks as a vegan eating tofu and veggie burgers. She had dabbled in acting, delivering a passable Marian the Librarian in The Music Man, written reams of heartfelt diary entries, fashioned herself at various times into Emily Dickinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Carry Nation, with a touch of Gloria Steinem and Mia Hamm. She had worked building a house for Habitat for Humanity and had once gone along with the biggest drug dealer in her high school on a frightening visit to a nearby city to pick up a quantity of rock cocaine, an event that had turned up on a police surveillance camera and prompted a call from some detectives to her mother. Sally Freeman-Richards had been furious, grounded her for weeks, shouted at her that she’d been extraordinarily lucky not to be arrested, and that it would be hard to regain her mother’s trust. Separately, Hope and her father had reached more benign conclusions, talking more about adolescent rebellion, with him remembering some pretty stupid things that he had done while growing up, which had created some laughter, but had mostly reassured her. She didn’t think she was consciously setting out to do dangerous things in her life, but Ashley knew that on occasion she engaged in a risk or two, and that she was fairly charmed to have avoided true consequences up to that point. Ashley often thought she was like clay on a potter’s wheel, constantly turning, being shaped, waiting for the heat blast from some furnace to finish her.