Random Road Read online

  At first Danny’s request was cordial. ”Hey, dickhead, I wanna sit down. Get outta my spot.”

  Kevin answered with equal grace. “Screw you. I was here first.”

  Danny reacted like any kid who was older, bigger, and stronger than the rest of his classmates. He got up close to where Kevin was sitting and, without warning, shoved him hard with both fists, slamming them like hammers into Kevin’s chest. The smaller boy pitched backwards off his perch and dropped with a solid thud to the ground.

  Danny laughed and sat down on the wall. He gloated, “Nice of Kevin to save my spot…he kept it nice and warm.”

  Kevin struggled to his feet, embarrassment and pain in his eyes. I was amazed at how it quickly faded, replaced with blind rage. He brushed the dirt off the seat of his jeans and walked angrily around the end of the short stone wall, planting his feet directly in front of the bully. Before either of them had a chance to say another word, Kevin balled up his fist, reared back, and punched Danny under his left eye.

  I’d fully expected the bully to fall over backwards, very much like Kevin had only seconds before. But instead, Danny Allan remained in place, looking surprised. Then he rubbed the reddening area under his eye and stood up, easily demonstrating that he was a full head taller than Kevin.

  The bully’s thin lips split into a grin that sent a cold shiver down the back of my neck.

  Without another word, the carnage began.

  Kevin did his best to cover up and block the damage that Danny’s huge fists inflicted. He even attempted to land a wild punch or two of his own. But, in seconds, Danny had battered and bashed Kevin’s face badly enough that one eye was purple and almost swollen shut and his nose looked to be at an odd angle, most likely broken. Blood flowed freely from Kevin’s nostrils and down onto his shirt.

  I kept hoping that Kevin would just fall down. Maybe then, mercifully, Danny would quit beating on him.

  But in front of a growing mob of kids screaming with gleeful bloodlust, Kevin stood there and took it, vainly trying to ward off the blows. Over and over, he kept getting hit while I watched like it was a bad dream you can’t wake up from.

  Little more than a target, Kevin stood his ground. Weeks later Kevin told me that, for him, beating Danny didn’t mean kicking the crap out of him, not that there was a snowball’s chance of that happening. It meant not losing to him.

  No matter what Danny Allan did, he couldn’t knock Kevin down.

  Mr. Wordin, the vice principal, appeared from thin air and grabbed Danny’s collar, pulling him away from the mauling. “What’s going on here? Who started this?”

  Pointing at Kevin, the bully honestly answered, “He hit me first.”

  “That true?” Mr. Wordin snapped, so angry that his bloodshot eyes bugged out like a Saturday morning cartoon character’s.

  An exhausted Kevin swayed side-to-side, his eyes nearly closed, a steady stream of blood from his nose splattering to the ground around his sneakers. When he sighed and nodded yes, it broke my heart.

  Without thinking, still holding my paper bag lunch, I stepped up and stated emphatically, “But that’s not the way it happened. It was this boy who started the fight.” I pointed defiantly at Danny Allan.

  I recall hearing everyone in the crowd take a collective gasp of air, shocked at my courage. Who is this girl who dares to challenge Danny Allan, the bully with the vicious temper and the vengeful fists?

  At least that’s how I want to remember it.

  The reality was that the school door had already been unlocked, the bell was ringing, and the other kids were already drifting into their classrooms. Mr. Wordin ignored me completely and hauled both boys off to the principal’s office for further interrogation and eventual detention.

  But Danny Allan had heard me.

  That boy would become my sworn enemy until we reached the tenth grade, right about the same time he discovered the joy of drinking beer, smoking dope, and nailing cheerleaders. Then he just forgot who I was.

  But, unfortunately before that happened, Danny Allan would hurt me horribly, a pain that’s never gone away to this very day.

  Kevin, however, would become one of my best all-time friends, right up until we graduated from high school.

  And then, attending colleges hundreds of miles apart, we lost touch.

  ***

  But here he was, in the basement of the Sheffield Unitarian Church. It took me a minute to recognize him. Of course he was taller than I remembered. I’d forgotten that by the end of high school Kevin had grown to the point that he was even taller than me. His hair was shorter now. Most of it was still brown, some of it was starting to go silver, and it was cut close enough to his scalp that you could easily see the widow’s peaks of his receding hairline. His eyes were still as blue, but they seemed tired, like he’d seen a lot of things he’d just as soon forget.

  I smiled when I saw that he’d never gotten his nose fixed. At the time of the fight, his Dad was out of work and they didn’t have insurance so Kevin never saw a doctor. When it healed, his nose had a slight, angular crook to it. It was nothing ugly…it made him unique and ever so slightly asymmetrical. As a matter of fact, I always thought it made him look kind of cute in a rugged sort of way.

  He was wearing a blue cotton work shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and a pair of well-worn jeans. His face had enough lines and creases to give him character, and he was wearing the look that I’d seen a lot when we were kids. It was Kevin’s “I wish I were anywhere but here” expression.

  Because this was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, we were supposed to be anonymous, so I resisted the urge to run across the church basement and give him a hug. Seeing him again after so many years made my heart skip a couple of surprising beats.

  He stood along the far wall, his arms folded, face intent as he listened to the speaker. I’d come in late and he hadn’t seen me sneak in, which allowed me to study him with impunity.

  I’d obviously missed the coffee, doughnuts, serenity prayer, and opening words from our host. We were already into the portion of the evening in which people got up and shared how well they were doing in their struggle with booze. I was still pretty new to AA and had yet to be one of those folks who would proclaim their first name, admit to being an alcoholic, and then tick off the number of weeks, days, hours, and minutes since they’d last ordered a vodka rocks.

  This was the very first time I’d been to this particular chapter. I’d been attending the Westport AA meetings. Westport’s a pretty affluent town and I was hoping that maybe it had a better class of drunks. In the end, I decided to try this group because it was closer to where I live.

  About forty people sat in metal folding chairs or, like Kevin, stood along the cinderblock walls. They formed a kaleidoscope of diversity; alcohol doesn’t care about gender, age, or race. Some wore ties, their sport coats slung over the back of their chairs. Some, like Kevin, wore denim work clothes. Everyone was concentrating on the speaker—a man at the front of the room in his mid-thirties, with a thick head of dark hair and pale blue eyes. He was handsome in a boyish way, but he was a big man, a little over six feet tall with the solid, chiseled musculature of a weight lifter

  He said his name was Jim and stated that he was an alcoholic. The entire room, including me, answered in unison, “Hello, Jim.”

  “I been sober for over a year…” he started, then sighed. After a lengthy pause, he continued, “…until yesterday.”

  Jim stared down at his shoes, clearly ashamed. The room was tomb-silent.

  “Yesterday would have been my tenth wedding anniversary, except about a year ago my wife left me for another man.” He fell silent again, then continued, “No, that’s not honest. She left me because I’m an alcoholic. When I drink I get stupid and when I get stupid I hurt people.”

  Now I could quite clearly see tears welling in his eyes. “So yesterday I
got out our wedding album and I watched our wedding video. When my wife left, she didn’t care enough to take them with her. Thinking about our wedding day made me realize just how lonely I am, how much I miss her. I wanted a drink so damned bad.”

  When he next spoke, his voice had dropped to almost a whisper. “So I bought a bottle of Jack and didn’t stop drinking until it was gone.”

  While he talked I watched his hands clench into fists and unclench, over and over. His hands were massive. Unfortunately, I’ve been on the receiving end of angry fists and I was certain that man’s hands could do some real damage.

  “And then I wasn’t sad anymore.” His voice still low. “I was angry. I wanted to hurt somebody. I wanted to hurt my wife and I wanted to hurt the man she married. I wasn’t in my right mind. I wanted to hurt ’em bad.”

  I was startled by how threatening his voice had become.

  A second man suddenly stood up, about three rows back. He was tall and wore a closely cropped beard, his head shaved to the scalp and his eyes as blue as the speaker’s. He wore a gray tee shirt that said Jesus, take the wheel.

  The man said, “But he didn’t. He didn’t hurt anyone because Christ took him by the hand and guided him back to the road of righteousness.”

  Everyone turned to look at the new speaker.

  The big man at the front of the room nodded in agreement and took a deep breath of contrition. “I’ve got my brother here with me now, and he’s a minister, and he and I prayed over it, and we know it’s all gonna’ work out. I’m sober now. Today. And with the help of the Lord, I’ll be sober every day for the rest of my life.”

  As he walked back to his seat, he paused to shake hands and listen to words of encouragement. When he got to his seat, his brother hugged him.

  I’d only been doing AA for about a month, but the stories were running together in a dark blur of regret, tragedy, and endless pain. Nobody was here because they were tired of having a good time. They were here because they’d caused someone else unforgivable suffering.

  I looked over at Kevin, wondering what his story was.

  How did you get here, Kevin?

  If I’d thought I’d find out that night, my hopes were dashed by the intrusive, high-pitched twitter of my cell phone. Glancing guiltily around me, I faced a room full of annoyed stares. A slight jolt of electricity snapped in my chest as I noticed Kevin looking directly at me, his mouth slightly open with a grin of recognition and amused surprise.

  Stepping into the hallway, I recognized the number on caller ID. “What do you want?” I snarled.

  “The wife is out of town, you want dinner?”

  “I haven’t heard from you in a month.”

  “It’s been complicated.”

  I heard the anger in my own voice as I hissed, “Don’t call me again.” I hit the End Call button, stalked out of the church, and promptly forgot about Kevin Bell. Then I stopped at the liquor store, drove home, and killed the better part of a bottle of Absolut.

  Chapter Three

  The incessant chirping of my cell phone felt like an ice pick digging around behind my retinas. I kept my eyes closed and tried hard to ignore it.

  When it finally, mercifully stopped, I slowly opened my eyes to see Tucker, my Yorkshire terrier, sitting on the pillow inches away from my face. Little more than two bright, shiny eyes tucked into a ball of brown and gray fur, Tucker wagged his tail furiously and licked at my cheek.

  The vodka from the night before had left its usual cruddy taste in my sand-dry mouth. A humming nest of angry bees buzzed furiously around in my throbbing head. I reached up and lifted the cell phone off my headboard.

  The caller ID said it was someone from my office. Reluctantly, I listened to the voice message. It was brief. “It’s Laura, give me a call.” Laura Ostrowski is the daytime copy editor at the newspaper.

  The digital clock on the cell phone told me it was a little after nine. Since my shift doesn’t start until three, it was way too early to be awake.

  I hit the return call button and put a hand over my eyes to mitigate the daylight punching its way past the curtains into my bedroom. “Hey, Laura, what’s up?” The smoky, low timbre of my own raspy voice surprised me.

  “Nice job on the Connor’s Landing story.”

  “Thanks. How did Casper play it?”

  “Six columns, top of the page. It’s a hell of a piece. The Associated Press picked it up, CNN too. Charlie told me that all the morning news programs were quoting your story.”

  Even hungover, I felt that strange thrill in my stomach, the one you get when you’re the lead dog on a story everyone wants a piece of. I hadn’t felt it in a long, long time.

  “Hear anything more from the cops?”

  “Not yet. I’ll give ’em a call after I’ve had a cup of coffee.”

  I was waiting to hear what she wanted. Laura simply didn’t have it in her DNA to call for a little chitchat.

  Finally she got to it. “I heard from the prosecutor’s office that Jimmy Fitzgerald’s going to cop a plea this morning.”

  Jimmy Fitzgerald is the son of Henry Morris Fitzgerald, the owner of Regius Opus, a hedge-fund firm in Greenwich. At nineteen, Jimmy is a child of extreme privilege. Reared in the spacious, velvet halls of Gold Coast mansions, educated at the most expensive private schools in New England, promised a monster trust fund that kicks in at twenty-one, the boy quite literally had it all.

  And then he killed someone.

  He and a friend had raided the old man’s wine cellar and cannon-balled about four thousand dollars’ worth of rare Pinot Noir. While they were chugging the finest wine that Napa Valley has to offer, they were also smoking high-end Jamaican cannabis.

  Having exhausted their supply of ganga, they decided to slum it, hopping into Jimmy’s Porsche to fly on down to Sheffield and purchase another couple of ounces.

  At the same time, Elena Bermudez had just finished her shift as a checkout clerk at Shop-Rite and was crossing the street to reach the bus stop. She was late and didn’t want to miss her ride. She needed to start dinner for her three children.

  When Jimmy hit her, he was going nearly sixty miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone.

  He was charged with leaving the scene of an accident, driving under the influence, and manslaughter. The young man hadn’t spent an entire night in jail before a hyper-priced attorney sprung him on a quarter-million dollars bail.

  “Cop a plea, huh? What’s that got to do with me? Audrey’s on that story.”

  “Audrey slipped getting out of the shower this morning and threw out her back,” Laura explained.

  I glanced over at Tucker looking back at me expectantly, tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth. He was waiting patiently for me to walk him. “I didn’t get to bed until late,” I whined. “There isn’t someone else on the day shift that can cover this?”

  Laura ticked off her list of disasters. “Eric’s getting a root canal, Don’s on vacation, Anthony’s in Westport covering the regatta, and Ann is on the mayor’s speech. I’m out of available bodies and you owe me a favor.”

  I sighed. “I need to take my dog for a walk and grab a shower. What time is the Jimmy Fitzgerald Show taking place at the courthouse?”

  “Ten-thirty. If you hustle, you can do all of that and still grab a cup at Starbucks.”

  “All right, I’ll do it. Hey,” I interjected, clearing my throat, “have you heard anything more on the Home Alone Gang?”

  “Not since they did the ‘twofer’ a couple weeks ago.” Her answer was terse. “Everyone thinks they’ve already blown town.”

  The Home Alone Gang was a sophisticated group of cat burglars who’d broken into more than a dozen mansions in the most expensive burbs of Fairfield and Westchester counties with startling regularity. A week and a half ago, they hit two houses on the same night at almost the s
ame time. One was in Wilton and one was twenty miles away in Ridgefield. The last time I talked with Mike Dillon about them, he theorized that they were showboating for a grand finale before leaving the state for fresh pickings someplace else.

  Ah well, it was good ink while it lasted.

  “Hey, Genie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Staying straight?”

  I massaged the side of my throbbing temple while I assured her. “Like an arrow.”

  “You said you were up late.”

  “I was at AA.”

  “And that went late?”

  “Last night it did,” I lied.

  The pause on the other end of the line seemed to last forever. Finally, Laura said, “Okay. See you when you get here.”

  Tucker got his walk and I took my shower. I spent longer than I should have trying to cover my hangover with Visine and high-end makeup and, yes, still had time to buy a latte that I carried into the courthouse. My ice-pick headache had subsided into a dull throb as I sat toward the front of the room and pulled my tiny recorder out of my purse. Then I waited.

  I don’t like covering courtrooms because they’re arenas of greed, complaints, whining, tragedy, and despair. Besides, they never stay on any kind of reasonable schedule.

  If you’ve ever been called for jury duty, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Something that should take anyone else about thirty minutes to accomplish, attorneys and judges can stretch out into a hellish eternity.

  Plus the wooden seats are hard. They don’t just punish the guilty, they punish everybody.

  At about eleven o’clock, Jimmy Fitzgerald showed up in court with his lawyer. The kid was easily six feet tall, looked like he knew his way around a gym, had spiky, stylish hair that appeared deceptively disheveled, and wore a dark gray suit that probably cost several thousand dollars special-ordered from London.

  Walking in with him was Jimmy’s attorney. Stephen Provost was shorter than his client, around sixty years old, had a full mane of silver hair, and wore a pair of tiny, steel-gray glasses perched on his patrician nose. His suit looked almost as expensive as Jimmy’s.