Darkness, Take My Hand Read Free Page A

Diandra’s, and tried to gauge their relationship. I’d never known him to date a woman and always assumed he was gay. Whether true or not, I’d known him for ten years and he’d never mentioned a son.
    “Who’s Jason’s father?” I said.
    “What? Why?”
    “When a child’s involved in a threat,” Angie said, “we have to consider custody issues.”
    Diandra and Eric shook their heads simultaneously.
    “Diandra’s been divorced almost twenty years,” Eric said. “Her ex-husband is friendly but distant with Jason.”
    “I need his name,” I said.
    “Stanley Timpson,” Diandra said.
    “Suffolk County District Attorney Stan Timpson?”
    She nodded.
    “Doctor Warren,” Angie said, “since your ex-husbandis the most powerful law enforcement officer in the Commonwealth, we’d have to assume that—”
    “No.” Diandra shook her head. “Most people don’t even know we were married. He has a second wife, three other children, and his contact with Jason and me is minimal. Believe me, this has nothing to do with Stan.”
    I looked at Eric.
    “I’d have to agree,” he said. “Jason has taken Diandra’s name, not Stan’s, and he has almost no contact with his father outside of a birthday phone call or Christmas card.”
    “Will you help me?” Diandra said.
    Angie and I looked at each other. Hanging out in the same zip code as people like Kevin Hurlihy and his boss, Jack Rouse, isn’t something either Angie or I consider healthy. Now we were being asked to cruise right up to their dinner tables and ask them to stop bothering our client. What fun. If we took Diandra Warren’s case, it would go down as one of the more patently suicidal decisions we’d ever made.
    Angie read my mind. “What,” she said, “you want to live forever?”

2
    As we left Lewis Wharf and walked up Commercial, the schizophrenic New England autumn had turned an ugly morning into a glorious afternoon. When I woke up, a breeze so chilly and mean it seemed the exhalation of a Puritan god was hissing through the cracks under my windows. The sky was hard and pale as baseball leather, and people walking to their cars on the avenue were hunched into thick jackets and oversized sweaters, breath steaming around their faces.
    By the time I left my apartment, the temperature had risen into the high forties, and the muted sun, trying to push through the sheet of hard sky, looked like an orange trapped just beneath the surface of a frozen pond.
    Walking up Lewis Wharf toward Diandra Warren’s apartment, I’d removed my jacket as the sun finally broke through, and now as we drove back to the neighborhood, the mercury hovered in the high sixties.
    We drove past Copp’s Hill, and the warm breeze sweeping off the harbor rustled the trees overlooking the hill and several handfuls of burnished red leaves crested the slate headstones and fluttered down onto the grass. On our right, the stretch of wharfs and docks glinted under the sun, and to our left the brown, red, and off-white brick of the North End hinted of tile floors and old open doorways and the smells of thick sauces and garlic and freshly baked bread.
    “Can’t hate the city on a day like this,” Angie said.
    “Impossible.”
    She grasped the back of her thick hair with one handand twisted it into a makeshift ponytail, tilting her head toward the open window to catch the sun on her face and neck. Watching her with her eyes closed and a small grin on her face, I was almost prepared to believe that she was completely healthy.
    But she wasn’t. After she left her husband, Phil, left him in a bloody heap retching off her front porch, payment for having tried to batter her body one time too many, Angie passed the winter in the mist of an increasingly short attention span and a dating ritual which left a succession of males scratching their heads as she abandoned them without notice and moved on to the next.
    Since I’ve never been a paragon of moral virtue, I couldn’t say much