5
What we presume about strangers when we first meet them is often correct. The guy sitting beside you at a bar, for example, who wears a blue shirt, has fingernails caked with dirt, and smells of motor oil, you can safely presume is a mechanic. To assume more is trickier, yet it’s something we all do every day. Our mechanic, we’d probably guess, drinks Budweiser. Watches football. Likes movies in which lots of shit blows up. Lives in an apartment that smells like his clothes.
There’s a good chance these assumptions are on the mark.
And just as good a chance that they’re not.
When I met Karen Nichols, I assumed she’d grown up in the suburbs, came from comfortably middle-class parents, spent her formative years sheltered from dissension and mess and people who weren’t white. I further assumed (all in an instant, the span of a handshake) that her father was a doctor or the owner of a modest, successful business, a small chain of golf shops, perhaps. Her mother was a homemaker until the kids went to school, and then she worked part-time at a bookstore or maybe for an attorney.
The truth was that when Karen Nichols was six years old, her father, a marine lieutenant stationed at Fort Devens, was shot by another lieutenant in the kitchen of Karen’s home. The shooter’s name was Reginald Crowe, Uncle Reggie to Karen, even though he hadn’t been a blood relation. He’d been her father’s best friend and next-door neighbor and he shot her father twice in the chest with a.45 as the two sat having Saturday afternoon beers.
Karen, who had been next door playing with the Crowe children, heard the shots and came rushing into her home to find Uncle Reggie standing over her father. Uncle Reggie, seeing Karen, promptly put the gun to his own heart and fired.
There was a picture of the two corpses that some enterprising Trib reporter had found in Fort Devens ’s files and published in his paper two days after Karen leapt to her death.
The headline above the story read: SINS OF SUICIDE-WOMAN’S PAST HAUNT PRESENT, and the story reenergized water-cooler conversation around the city for at least half an hour.
I never would have guessed Karen, at six, had been such a close witness to horror. The house in the suburbs came a few years later, when her mother was remarried to a cardiologist who lived in Weston. Karen Nichols, from that point, grew up untouched and unchallenged.
And while I was pretty sure that the only reason Karen’s death received any news play whatsoever stemmed more from the building from which she chose to jump than any curiosity regarding her need to do so, I also think that she became, for a moment, a morbid reminder of the ways in which the world or the fates could mangle your dreams. Because in the six months since I’d seen her last, Karen Nichols’s life had been on a slide steeper than a fall from the Eiger.
A month after I’d solved her Cody Falk problem, her boyfriend, David Wetterau, had tripped while jaywalking during rush hour on Congress Street. The trip hadn’t been much-a fall to both knees that tore a hole in one pant leg-but while he was down, a Cadillac, swerving to miss him, had clipped his forehead with the corner of its rear fender. Wetterau had been comatose ever since.
Over the next five months, Karen Nichols slipped ever downward, losing her job, her car, and finally her apartment. Not even the police could ascertain where she’d lived her final two months. Psychiatrists popped up on the news shows to explain that David Wetterau’s accident coupled with her father’s tragic death had snapped something in Karen’s psyche, cut her loose from conventional cares and thought processes in a way that ultimately contributed to her death.
I was raised Catholic, so I’m well versed in the story of Job, but Karen’s string of bad luck in the months before her death bothered me. I know luck, both good and bad, runs in streaks. I know bad streaks often run a long, long time, with one tragedy perpetuating the next, until all of them, major and minor, seem to be going off like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July. I know that sometimes bad shit simply happens to good people. And yet, if it started with Cody Falk, I decided, then maybe it hadn’t stopped on his end. Yes, we’d scared him witless, but people are stupid, particularly predators. Maybe he’d gotten over his fear and decided to come at Karen from her flank, instead of head-on, destroy her fragile world for siccing Bubba and me on him.
Cody, I determined, would need a second visit.
First, though, I wanted to talk to the cops investigating Karen’s death, see if they’d tell me anything that could help keep me from dropping in on Cody half-cocked.
“Detectives Thomas and Stapleton,” Devin told me. “I’ll reach out, tell ’em to talk to you. Give it a few days, though.”
“I’d love to make contact quicker.”
“And I’d love to take a shower with Cameron Diaz. Neither’s going to happen, though.”
So, I waited. And waited. I eventually left a few messages and bit back on my urge to drive over to Cody Falk’s and beat answers out of him before I knew the proper questions to ask.
In the middle of all the waiting, I got restless and copied down Karen Nichols’s last known address from her file, noted from the newspaper accounts that she’d been employed in the Catering Department of the Four Seasons Hotel, and left the office.
Karen Nichols’s former roommate was named Dara Goldklang. While we spoke in the living room she’d shared with Karen for two years, Dara ran a treadmill facing the windows as if she were in the final lap of a track meet. She wore a white sports bra and black spandex shorts and kept looking back over her shoulder at me.
“Until David was hurt,” she said, “Karen was barely here. Always over at David’s. Pretty much just picked up her mail here, did some laundry, took it to David’s for another week. She was moony over that guy. Lived for him.”
“What was she like? I only met her once.”
“Karen was sweet,” she said, then followed that almost immediately with: “Does my butt look big to you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t look.” She puffed her cheeks as she ran. “Come on. Look. My boyfriend says it’s getting big.”
I turned my head. Her ass was the size of a crab apple. If her boyfriend thought it was big, I wondered on which twelve-year-old he’d seen a smaller one.
“Your boyfriend’s wrong.” I sat back in some kind of red leather beanbag thing supported by a glass bowl and base. It may have been the ugliest piece of furniture I’d ever seen. It was definitely the ugliest I’d ever sat in.