Boston Noir

“When he pushed the envelope across the desk, he gave me one of his looks where he cocks up an eyebrow. ‘I think you’ll be very pleased with that.’” She tries to capture not just his accent, but his condescending tone. “I just sat there with this pain in my stomach and a horrible sensation running up and down my back and I thought…I really thought I was just going to die sitting right there waiting for him to tell me.”

“You sound like you were in shock.”

“But he just stood there, still in his raincoat, doing one of those things where you glance at your watch without wanting someone to see that you’re doing it.”

“Prick.”

“Then he said, ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ and I said, ‘I didn’t get it, did I? I didn’t get MD.’ He looked at me and I could see what he was thinking right on his face. You bitch. You ungrateful little cunt. I know that’s what he was thinking because I’ve heard him say that word before and he wasn’t even trying to hide it, how much he hated me. How much he loathed me for not letting him go home or to the cigar bar or…wherever. That’s when I knew.”

“What did you know?”

“That I was never going to get MD.”

Sloan pushes herself up from the floor, but falls back against the window. Her skirt comes all the way up her thighs as she tries to find her balance. No food for almost two days. No water since early afternoon. The heat. It’s all starting to catch up with her and she’ll pass out soon. She finally makes it to her feet.

“No matter how good I was, no matter how much money I made for them, they were going to keep telling me I was this close and to hang in there and that next year would be my year. And then next year would come around and they’d promote someone like Beck because they like Beck and they can talk about golf with him.”

One by one, she pulls the shades down.

“What are you doing up there, Sloan. What’s going on now?”

Maybe she’s memorized this room, because how else can she walk across the office through the dark without bumping into things? She finds the gun on the standing desk.

“Talk to me, kid. I need to hear you.”

“Trevor told me he had this wired. He told me there was no way I wasn’t getting it, that this was my year. When I reminded him of this, he said, ‘Who can fathom what goes on behind those closed doors? Certainly I can’t. One answer goes in and a different answer comes out. It’s damn confounding, damn confounding, but you can’t take it personally.’”

“He’s still a prick, but what are you doing?”

“That’s when I started to think about it. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to grab him by his tie and squeeze until his head popped off, which wasn’t a real option. But I did have the gun.”

“Do you have the gun now?”

“You know how you just said that if one thing had gone differently yesterday, maybe none of this would have happened?”

“Yes.”

“It was Sunday. The thing that happened. I had to use the gun on Sunday in Millbrook. It was still in my travel bag. I forgot to take it out, so there it was.”

Officer Jimmy says nothing for a few seconds. “You didn’t hurt anybody out in Millbrook, did you?”

The tears come again. She tries to hold them back-she’s never cried in front of anyone-but it’s no use, and then she’s wailing into Officer Jimmy’s ear. “The only one who got hurt out there was me.”

She’s standing behind Beck now, looking over his shoulder at Trevor’s framed photos on the wall. There’s a light from somewhere, because she can see it clearly, the one he was most proud of: Trevor with Nick Price. The first time she’d ever heard of Nick Price was the first time she’d been in Trevor’s office, the day of her first interview. The pro golfer, he’d explained, patiently filling in the unfortunate gaps in her knowledge. “Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet” is what he’d said. Later she’d learned that it was what he said to everyone who came into his office. Price had written in bold black strokes across his own red shirt, To Trevor, Keep your head down, my friend. All the best, Nick.

Sloan couldn’t hear anything, too much noise outside, but she could see Beck struggling. He couldn’t see her, but he must have sensed her standing behind him with the gun. “He won the British Open,” Sloan says, repeating to Jimmy what Trevor had said to her at just the wrong moment, in just the wrong tone. If he had just taken off his raincoat…

“Who did?”

“I was sitting in my chair completely devastated. I couldn’t stand to look at Trevor, so I looked past him and I must have been staring at Nick Price and it occurred to me that Beck had gotten MD.” Her hands shook so much she had a hard time releasing the safety. “I didn’t get MD. Beck did. That’s what they were talking about. That’s what they were laughing about.”

“I’m hearing you, Sloan, but you have to slow things down. Do me a favor and take a breath. Please.”

“I’ve decided what I want, Jimmy.”

“Tell me.”

“I want you to mix my ashes with Rowan’s.”