At first — and I should probably be embarrassed to admit this — I almost didn’t recognize her voice.
“Hey, Jack,” she said. That was followed by a long pause. “I’m back in Boston,” she continued. I was still somewhat confused at this point, sitting at my desk, listening to my messages before Vinny Mongillo and I headed out into this great city in a bold attempt to change its fate.
“I’m a little bit ashamed,” she said.
That’s when it struck: it was the elusive Maggie Kane — my fiancée, or again, maybe that’s ex-fiancée, or perhaps it’s simpler to just describe her as my would-be wife, the woman I had been planning to marry a week before, until the morning I wasn’t. We were supposed to be splashing around in the Hawaiian surf right about now, sharing frozen strawberry daiquiris at a swim-up bar, relentlessly having sex in our overpriced room as a sea breeze drifted through the open French doors.
Her voice started to waver at this point. “I feel awful,” she said. “I feel stupid. I feel so bad about what I’ve done. And Jack, I’m really lonely.”
I squinted in confusion, through the haze of the Kimberly Mays and Jill Dawsons and Lauren Hutchenses that had so recently left this world, wondering what it was that Maggie had done. Okay, yes, she ran out on our wedding day, fled not only our relationship but the state, climbing aboard a jet that landed in Atlanta, leaving me figuratively and literally behind. Of course, I’d never gotten the chance to tell her that I fled as well; I just didn’t make as big a physical spectacle of it as she did. I’d like to think I’m a reasonably subtle guy, was probably never more so than when I called off my wedding without actually telling anyone — the bride-to-be included.
“Is there any chance we can talk?” she asked. She was doing this thing that she always used to do, which was basically carrying on an entire conversation on my voice mail, asking questions that I wasn’t on the line to answer, giving answers to questions that I wasn’t on the line to ask. Like so much else in a relationship, when she first used to do this shortly after we met, I thought it was enormously adorable and often sexy. Now I just found it annoying, even if it was slightly comforting to hear the familiar sound of her voice.
“Jack, I know how furious you probably are. You completely have the right. I panicked. I did a shitty thing. I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life, for what I just did to the rest of my life, and more important, for what I did to you.
“But Jack, can you please, please let me talk to you for a little while, face-to-face.” She began crying here — sobbing, actually. She fell quiet for a moment, apparently trying to compose herself. I heard her sniffle, and could all but see her wipe the back of her right hand across both her cheeks the way she used to do at the end of our occasional arguments. “Jack, please call me back.”
Another long pause, another sniffle, then, softly, “I’m so, so sorry for all this.”
And click.
“Maggie, it’s okay, I wasn’t planning on going through with it either.” That was me, talking into the dead air on the phone where Maggie Kane’s voice had just been. I wondered if I would ever tell her that. I wondered if we’d ever even get together. I supposed I should have wondered where and when and how it all went so wrong, but I didn’t, and can’t completely explain why not, not even to myself. So instead I pressed 3 and heard a woman’s voice say, “Message erased, next new message.”
The rather clipped voice of a middle-aged man came on, carrying something of a Western twang.
“This is Sergeant Wit Jackson of the Las Vegas Police Department public relations division, returning a call to Jack Flynn.” He left his number, told me to have a good day, though it didn’t sound like he particularly cared if I did, and hung up the phone.
I listened to a couple more messages from guys with names like Gray and Stone from television magazine and tabloid shows, and that was that.
I clicked off that line and onto another, the fresh dial tone filling my ear. Meantime, Vinny was standing at his desk, staring at me, making a twirling motion with his right index finger, his way of telling me that it was time to go. Subtle he was not.
I had time to return one call. Maggie Kane or Wit Jackson. Wit Jackson or Maggie Kane?
I called Wit Jackson. Don’t ask me why, though if anyone had, I’d probably have answered that I didn’t have the time I’d need to have the conversation with Maggie that I’d want to have. Or maybe I just liked the name Wit because it reminded me of myself. Good answers. But what’s the real answer? I don’t know the real answer.
Wit picked up the phone halfway through the second ring and we exchanged greetings. He asked, “What’s a reporter from a hotshot Eastern newspaper want to know about our sandy little city?”
Sandy. Desert. Las Vegas. Get it? Wit was really living up to his name.
I laughed out of politesse, then turned my questioning toward Bob Walters’s death, saying that I was trying to determine a cause of death and whether an investigation was under way. I could hear Wit typing into a computer, and then silence as he was undoubtedly reading something on the screen.
He said, “Cause of death determined to be head trauma from a fall down a flight of stairs at his house.”
“Suspicious death?” I asked.
“Apparently not,” he replied, then added, “Sometimes an accident is just an accident.”
And sometimes not. But I didn’t say that.
I asked, “Anything else of note from the death scene?”
For the first time, Wit sounded somewhat suspicious. He asked, “What’s your interest in some old retiree living out his years in the sun?”
“Former member of the Boston Police Department — a homicide detective, and a damned good one,” I said. “I’m just making sure he’s well tended to in death.”
Wit seemed to appreciate that, as I suspected he would. He said, “Well, it looks like there was a pair of eyeglasses, broken, found near the body of the deceased at the bottom of the stairs.” He fell quiet again, probably reading from the screen. I heard him press a button a couple of times, like he was scrolling down. Then he said, matter-of-factly, “And there was a single key on a small key ring retrieved from the bottom step. The assumption is that he was carrying it downstairs.”
A key. His eyeglasses. An accident really may have been an accident. Bob Walters might have forced himself out of bed after I left, struggling down the stairs to get something that was locked away before I returned. And he fell. But what was it?
I asked, “Sergeant, off the record, can you share next of kin?”
“Well,” Wit responded, “it’ll be in tomorrow’s obituary anyway. He leaves a wife, Patricia. And I’ve got here a Deirdre Walters Hayes, a daughter who lives in the area.”
“Number?”
And he gave it to me — Deirdre’s telephone number. Boston PD should be so kind. I hung up with sincere thanks.
When I looked up, Vinny Mongillo was standing over me, a king-size box of Junior Mints in one of his oversize hands, a small reporter’s notebook in the other. The box of candy, I noted for no particular reason, was larger than the pad.
“Let’s go,” he said. “And bring your A-game. This is no time for us to choke.”
Choke. Strangler. Get it? Neither did I.