Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(57)

“You think Connie Hall had him killed?”

“I think that being close to Connie Hall can be deadly. And I know that I do not want him and his racist friends in my town. I know the Jews are weird, I get why some people think they aren’t good neighbors. But they deserve to live in peace. That’s my job. That’s my chief’s job.”

“Does he see it that way?”

Van almost smiles. “Good question, Rebekah. Good f*cking question. You didn’t hear this from me, but you can look it up easy enough: Connie Hall is Chief Gregory’s stepbrother.”

“How is that possible?”

“What do you mean?”

“How’d he get to be chief if he’s related to a … criminal?”

“Being related to a criminal’s not a crime,” he says. “Ever hear of Whitey Bulger?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Big-time mobster from Boston. They say he killed, like, thirty people over the years. His brother was a state politician. Got reelected I don’t know how many times. People believed he was on the right side of the law.”

“Was he?”

“Who knows,” says Van. “Nobody ever caught him doing anything illegal.”

“But he had to know what his brother was doing.”

“You’d think so,” he says. “Chief’s dad married Connie’s mom back in the seventies. From what I’ve heard, Chief’s dad was a real bastard. Drank too much, beat his mom when he was little, which led to the divorce. Chief had a lot of experience with cops coming to the house and having to pry his dad off his mom. I think he thought of the guys as heroes. So he joined up. Connie went the other way, and since they have different last names and live in different counties not that many people know. But the State Police have never heard of Pessie Goldin, and the thumb drive with my pictures from the scene is gone from our evidence room.”

“Do you think he … did something with it?”

“I don’t pretend to know what he did. But I know he didn’t pass the information along like he said he would. And if he told Connie that someone saw his truck in Roseville, that could be very dangerous for whoever that person is—or whoever Connie thinks that person might be. I’m guessing you probably don’t want to tell me who your source is, but you should make sure they know what’s going on. Connie’s not a reckless man. He’s not going to make noise until he needs to. But now that Pessie’s name is the paper, if he’s connected to her death, he’ll be watching.”





CHAPTER NINETEEN





AVIVA


“He’s not here,” said the woman at the jail when I called to be put on the visitors’ list.

“What do you mean he’s not there?”

“I mean he’s not here anymore. He’s been transferred.”

“Transferred where?”

“You have to call the DOC for that. All I can see is that he left here two weeks ago.”

It took three days of phone calls to find out that Sammy was at a state prison almost 150 miles away. Isaac got on the computer and looked up the visiting procedures and we made a plan to drive there the next week. I dreamt of Sammy in a cage of animals. Shirtless, bleeding, swinging at them, exhausted and outmatched, knowing it was only a matter of time until he was torn to pieces. At the prison, a man escorted the visitors in the waiting room through a metal detector and a set of heavy sliding doors. We sat down in a booth and Sammy came out. There was glass between us; we spoke through telephones.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I had to do it, Aviva,” said Sammy. He had a poorly stitched-up cut above his eye and a chipped front tooth. He seemed smaller, somehow, and he couldn’t sit still. He looked around constantly, like he was waiting for someone to jump on him. The man attacked him once, he told us, whispering into the telephone. When he tried again, Sammy was ready with a weapon made from springs in his bed.

“But why did they send you away? You were defending yourself!”

“They don’t care,” said Sammy.

“How long will you have to stay here?” I asked.

“They added four years to my sentence,” he said.

“Four years!” I must have screamed because the guard came immediately.

“Calm down, ma’am,” he said, standing above me.

I began to cry. Isaac took the phone and told Sammy we would come back as often as we could. He told him not to forget that we loved him. That Pessie loved him. That we did not blame him, and that we would be here when he came home.

Sammy got paroled three years later, just before Thanksgiving. It had been more than two years since I’d seen him. The last time I visited he told me not to come back. He said it was better if he didn’t think about anything outside prison while he was inside. He said it made him weak. I didn’t argue. I did not like seeing him in there. I did not like the way his voice sounded, and the way he couldn’t seem to look me in the eyes anymore. He was getting bigger—from lifting weights, he said—but all those muscles did not make him seem stronger. It took days, sometimes more than a week, to clear my mind of the way he looked in that jumpsuit, his skin gray, his eyes rimmed with red. I had to take more pills and drink more wine to sleep than was good for me. I could not stop imagining all the things that could happen to him—that were happening to him—in there. The crushing loneliness; the fear. The shame of where he was. The secret of who he was.