by JJ Partridge
She rose from the bed and smoothed its cover. Her manner said expiation was over and her voice was icy calm. “You have a telephone number and your suspicions but he didn’t murder her. He has an alibi and you have your answer. Whatever happened to that girl Friday night has nothing to do with us.”
She stepped into the hall. I followed. At the top of the stairs, we awkwardly paused for the other to proceed. Behind her, the door was ajar to an empty room, newly and brightly painted in yellow, with a stenciled border of balloons and stars in red and white, and a Picasso clown print on the wall. She saw my glance and moved quickly to close the door. Her face came close to mine when she said, “Don’t bring more pain to my daughter. Let the police find their murderer and let my daughter have her memories. Surely, she deserves that much out of life.”
I couldn’t frame an answer so I didn’t reply. I passed by her and went down the staircase, retrieved my jacket and fedora from the living room, and tucked my evidence into the case. I saw Reinman’s photograph on T.R.’s dust jacket with new eyes. The angle of the photographer’s light shadowed a part of his face, accentuating his high cheekbones and filling in the cleft in his chin, giving him a too-clever, saturnine expression. I covered the photograph with a magazine.
Mrs. Cabel remained at the top of the stairs when I closed the door behind me. On the sidewalk, I paused, not knowing if I should feel relieved, compromised, or manipulated. There was her Stella Dallas melodrama to it all, the protection of a daughter at all personal costs. I looked up at the dark blue door and its brass knocker. Inside, I had expected surprise, defensiveness, protest, even anger. I hadn’t expected her overwhelming need to smash the reputation of Carl Reinman or to expatiate a hatred that had been mute for too long.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
When I got home, my emotional tank was on empty.
I worked out for an hour, hard, until the sweat poured off me and my muscles felt like liquid, my brain focused only on the next push and pull. Then I shot pool for twenty minutes, beginner exercises because I didn’t have any concentration left and I needed to shove Annie Sullivan and Lavelle Williams, Carl Reinman and Ms. Cabel, Tramonti, Sonny and Puppy Dog, Jesse Kingdom and The Stalker, into a separate folder of my mind.
Getting on with a Saturday routine seemed best for my psyche. I got dressed, plunked the fedora on my head, and took the Mini Cooper up to Federal Hill to Gasbarro’s for wine and the political wisdom served up by owners Lom and Marco. Plied with a glass of an aged vin santo and a plate of cantucci, I listened to the give and take of the father and son with customers who arrive from all parts of the city and beyond for the best in Italian wines and raucous political conversations. The chatter revealed that Sonny had scored points in his verbal barrage against the demonstrators, the University, and Kingdom, although the sloppy plowing job brought complaints.
I left the wine shop unhappy with the gossip but with a good variety of Chiantis and two Barolos, as well as a Capezzana vin santo, and went on to Whole Foods at University Heights for groceries, sundries, meat, and fish and Wayland Square to pick up dry cleaning. The streets were virtually clear of snow although huge puddles filled intersections; the end of the parking ban brought out cars that angled into the streets, making their side mirrors likely casualties to the growing traffic. It was now past noon, the temperature was in the high fifties, and the sun was playing hide and seek behind rapidly moving, puffy clouds. Instead of heading home, I drove to Jimmy’s.
Jimmy’s wife, Maria, had the lunch trade and joined me at the counter facing the open kitchen for a few minutes of conversation over a bowl of her renowned Portuguese kale soup with chiarco and red wine, with a basket of hard crusted bread. We chatted about food, politics, the Patriots, and Young Jimmy bringing in more talent for pool exhibitions. I was about to leave, with my check paid and fedora on, when Tramonti’s voice came from behind us. Maria looked up, greeted him, and excused herself. His usual driver, a thickly built cop in his thirties with a dark complexion and slicked-back hair, wearing a green, satiny Celtics jacket, stood next to Tramonti and stared down at me with toothy interest.
Tramonti slid into the nearest booth and beckoned me to follow. Reluctantly, I did. Ugh. I don’t need this right now.
“Loci, get yourself something to go,” he said. “I’ll only be a few minutes.” Loci reluctantly sauntered to the counter and spun the stool around to face the kitchen.
Tramonti’s face was tired, with shadows under his eyes.
“I saw your car in the lot. Tuttle called me last night about the Sullivan girl’s bankbook and the abortion, and her old man’s stupidity ..., and what were you doing Thursday night with that punk Williams! I warned you not to …!” His eyes widened when he turned to my roughed-up face. “What the hell happened to you!”
I knew I couldn’t expect much sympathy so he got the condensed version. From his less than pained expression, I realized that not only hadn’t Franks mentioned the assault, he had placed Williams with me, maybe as a place of refuge. Did Tramonti think I had intervened again? He didn’t ask questions and didn’t let me finish.
“Goddamn it, Algy! If you had pressed assault charges, I could have held on to him! Why are you being such a first class pain-in-the-ass about this scumbag?”
That sat me back in the booth. A first class pain-in-the-ass! After what I’ve done! Because of me, her bank account and abortion had surfaced! Annie Sullivan’s murder should now get a by-the-book investigation. I had given the police ..., Tramonti ..., credibility!
“Listen to me,” he said through clenched teeth. “Get this in your stubborn head. My bet, and it’s a good bet, is Williams snuffed her. His alibi stinks, even if our fainthearted AG says we still don’t have enough to arrest him until the DNA test gets back. And Williams has got Franks, so Lavoie won’t let us hold him on the drug counts. But if you’d pressed charges, I could have held him on an assault charge since he’s on bail ....”
When my face didn’t register wide-eyed shame, he jammed a cigarette into his mouth. I said, a little too snidely, “No smokes, remember.”
Those black eyes reacted with anger. He waved the cigarette in my face, then put it on the table. “You have no clue what this is all about. Hector Flores. Remember that name? Williams’s boss? He runs the biggest drug operation in Rhode Island, right into New Bedford and Fall River, all out of a bar in Olneyville. As vicious as they come. Part of the Medellin cartel. Direct connections to Colombia and San Juan. The junk is flown in, the mules drive it up here from New York, and he spreads it around.”
I didn’t react so he used his large hands for emphasis and thrust his face closer to mine.
“Flores is scum, Algy, worse than scum. Murders without a second thought. Uses the street gangs for runners and to get rid of competition. We’ve been trying to get at him for years. Your boy’s got his own string of sellers—gangs don’t blend in on the East Side, it’s all quick hand-offs on the street—and he sells enough to deal with Flores’s second-in-command, an hombre by the name of Manuel Hones. They call him “the Cutter” for reasons we don’t have to get into. If we could get to Hones, we might bring Flores down. We got the state police and the DEA all over this!”
He was really working himself up while I was getting pretty damn defensive.
“Flores and Hones gave Williams his alibi, two of Flores’s girls, the kind of crud who hear nothing, see nothing, remember nothing most of the time. They’d do anything for a hit of crack, or anything else Flores has got. Now do you get it? With Anne Sullivan, we’re looking at murder one as a charge. Even if he didn’t do it, we’ve got leverage with Williams at the very least. We could get the Cutter. We might get Flores!”
His harangue, in a nutshell, was: Algy, you are a jerk messing up an important investigation. He wanted to sweat Williams; I could have delivered him up but didn’t. It was my fault that Williams wasn’t giving up Hones and Flores. It had little or nothing to do with Annie Sullivan.
“None of
my business. Your guys screwed up a murder case. They’re so convinced it was Williams or The Stalker that they let one of their own conceal evidence. Now you tell me that getting Williams isn’t about the murder. I thought this had been screwed up because of plain old crassness, bureaucratic bullshit, and incompetence. Maybe I was wrong!”
Tramonti raised his hand to my face with two fingers a few millimeters apart. “I owe you this much. It’s remotely possible somebody else had an interest in her. The autopsy is a mess, nothing to indicate an abortion. Maybe it got deleted; maybe somebody was doing somebody a favor. We’re checking on it now. She could have been stashing the money for Williams. Maybe he was holding out on Flores which would not be a good idea, by the way—”
“So what happens if you don’t make an arrest?”
“What?”
“If you don’t get Williams and it’s not The Stalker? For the murder, I mean. When does it all go stale?”
Suspicion grew in his eyes. “No statute of limitations on murder, you know that. Cold case after a year. That ain’t going to happen. We’ll get Williams ..., whomever ...,” and he stopped, as anger splashed across his face. “What aren’t you telling me!” and slammed his hand on the table top, loud and hard enough for customers to turn in our direction. Loci got up off his stool but a wave off from his boss sat him down.
Tramonti managed to keep his voice low and in control even as he lapsed into his tough guy cadence and shook his finger at my face. “Just listen to me for one fucking minute! This is a murder investigation. You don’t get any special dispensation. You can’t withhold information!” My deadpan made him apoplectic. His hands went high over his head. “Christ, why do I bother! You never pay attention to anyone. At least press charges! If we pick up Williams, I can hold him long enough to check on the money. That ought to make you happy!”
If only he hadn’t added that parting shot. It triggered hubris and resentment and I lost any thought of coming clean as to Carl Reinman and his connection to Anne Sullivan. I had been consistently right and constantly ignored, I was the guy who delivered the bankbook evidence, I made her abortion an issue, I got beat up, I had to deal with Jerry Franks, I had Nadie on my case, and now had the burden of dealing with a mother’s guilty secret, all of this resulting in being chewed out by my best friend!
It took two deeps breaths for me to say quietly, “Let me think on it,” and I was out of the booth so fast that Tramonti barely had time to smother his profanity.
* * *
I drove home, put my purchases and clothes away, opened a Sam Adams, and settled down in the lounger to watch Carter at Yale on ESPN 2. I caught it before halftime, Carter with a surprising two-touchdown lead, and used the break for another beer and a plate of crackers, Thompson seedless grapes, salami, and jalapeno cheese. Before the second half, I surfed channels with the remote.
“... And in this racist society, the police are the defenders of the power structure which keeps our black brothers and sisters from enjoying their inalienable human rights.” It was an intense Reverend Jesse Kingdom, framed by huge blowups of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela. I checked the channel; it was the cable local access station. The LCD clock in the DVD read two fifty-five; the program was near its end.
The interviewer sat across a low table from Kingdom. “Your methods, which I would call ‘confrontationally-aggressive’, are not appreciated by a lot of folks in this town. I guess they’re not ready for your message.”
“They weren’t ready for Frederick Douglass. They weren’t ready for Martin Luther King. They weren’t ready for Malcolm X. They weren’t ready for Jesse Jackson. They haven’t been ready for anybody until that somebody got in their faces!” I thought, I’m getting a preview of tonight! “What we’ve got to do is to be in their faces. We’ve got to let them know that they can’t intimidate us, treat us like animals, that the brothers and sisters won’t take it anymore in this town. If that requires militancy, so be it. If it requires confrontation, so be it.”
The camera moved in for a closeup and Kingdom’s scowling face filled the screen.
“What happened Thursday, the arrests of students and other folks, was reprehensible. Disgraceful! What Providence has to realize is that this police case is only the beginning. We’re going after everybody and everything that harms people of color. All poor people.” He turned from the interviewer and looked into another camera. “We know that there are people who hate us and we know that there are people who will support us. I’m looking for support. I’m ready for action.” The camera faded back so that Kingdom, his large mouth set in a line, was framed in the background picture of Malcolm X.
“Final questions. What happens if there are no convictions? What do you propose to do?”
“Well,” Kingdom replied, drawing out the word, “I expect that they will be convicted because I believe they are guilty. But if there is another miscarriage of justice, if the system again doesn’t work, then I don’t know what’s going to happen in the black neighborhoods. I don’t know how the people will contain the rage which they will feel. But, I predict the city will never forget it, if it goes down that way.”
He said it so calmly that a shiver ran down my spine.
As the credits rolled on the screen, Jesse Kingdom remained stern-faced. That Jesse Kingdom ... tonight ... could bring chaos to our campus. Would Danby’s decision unleash a torrent of anger? Would it be his last as President of Carter University?
I touched the power button. My interest in the game had been trumped by Jesse Kingdom’s threat. I pulled on a wool sweater and went out through the kitchen to the patio for some needed fresh air. Within the patio’s walls, the snow had been reduced to smudges of white under dull ivy leaves and the yellowish stalks of late blooming flowers. Jet vapor trails were drifting high in the pale blue above me, with waves of clouds forming in the southwest. A fresh, cold breeze rose from off the Bay and a flock of juncos landed in the oak next to the garage and began a chorus of twitters. I tucked my hands into the back pockets of my slacks. I knew I was on overload and decided to walk it off.
I got as far as Prospect Park, a block down Congdon Street, which at this time of year is two acres of faded grass, spindly maples, oaks still clutching some dead leaves, and scattered wooden benches in need of repair; patches of snow covered shady spots and a couple of lumps and a raggedy scarf were all that remained of snowpeople. True to its name, it not only has a great “prospect” of the downtown, its views also included the harbor, the City Hospital complex, and the entire south side as well. With the warm temperature, I was surprised that, except for a persistent terrier busy marking every shrub, the park was deserted.
I walked past a granite pergola that covers a twice life-sized marble statue of Roger Williams, his hands blessing the city he founded three and a half centuries ago, to the wrought iron railing that keeps kids and college drunks from a thirty foot tumble down to Pratt Street. The city which stretched out before me looked as though it was primping for a tourism video: shimmering rivers winding through the snow covered parks to the blue-gray Bay, a brace of starkly outlined high-rise buildings in downtown, the bulk of the Mall over the gleaming train tracks and ribbon of river, and the white, seemingly touchable, marble State House. An attractive, buoyant, parochial, and tribal city, I thought, a survivor and full of itself in its self-proclaimed renaissance, with Sonny, Puppy Dog, and McCarthy types in control, and far too few stand-up people like Tramonti with the determination to find solutions for its problems.
The terrier barked at an incautious pigeon, igniting a chain reaction of yips and barks from up and down Congdon Street. I looked up at Roger Williams. Somewhere in the ancestral chain, he was there, with his stubborn single-mindedness that took a swampy, mosquito-ridden salt river and tidal cove and turned it into a settlement of crusty, hardworking, and independent freethinkers. Was he the source of our family’s stewardship thing and my urge to finish whatever I began? So boss, what do I do? Choke on
my pride and call Tramonti? Or, let it all play out without me?
Then and there, I knew I had to be satisfied with a private sense of accomplishment. I had been right about Anne Sullivan and Reinman. Chalk one up for me! Williams would get a fair shake on the murder charge—even if his drug connections would put him at risk—because the hush money and the abortion would hang out there. Chalk up another one! Pine wouldn’t like it but I would resign the executorship. The old lady would wonder if I was going to keep her secret. I would unless Williams was going down and I had to come forward. Okay, not a chalk up, but ... something.
* * *
Gusts of cold wind pushed at my back all the way to the house. I went downstairs and played eight ball against myself for an hour and then watched a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western on AMC. When the DVD’s clock read a minute past six, I switched to the early news.
Against a photo montage of what was obviously Thursday’s confrontation, the weekend anchor, his dark blazer with a monogrammed 11 on its vest pocket, intoned “... And now a Channel 11 EyeWitness exclusive. While President Charles Danby of Carter University and the Reverend Jesse Kingdom may appear to live in two different worlds, in fact, they have been friends since their early childhoods in Philadelphia. Channel 11 has learned that Kingdom, the outspoken and controversial leader of W.A.R., We’re Against Racism, and Danby have been in close contact since Danby’s arrival here in Providence last May. Kingdom’s alliance with University student groups has been a matter of growing public concern, according to Providence Mayor Arthur Russo who has denounced Kingdom’s college allies as ‘campus crazies.’ Thursday’s riot and arrests involved Carter students. With the University and the City butting heads over a host of issues, sources have told Channel 11 News that Mayor Russo is intending to press his plan to have the University’s property tax exemption revoked. Tonight, Reverend Kingdom is scheduled to address a rally of students at Carter despite the delivery of what has been called a ‘death’ threat against him. All of this comes against the backdrop of the continuing menace of The Carter Stalker who has committed six Saturday night assaults this fall and may be implicated in the murder last weekend of a former student.” He blinked and continued, “In other news, ....”