Back Bay Blues

by Peter Colt

  “Hey, Watts.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will you tell me how they did it? You know, the technical details?”

  “Why?”

  “I liked her. I wasn’t in love or anything, but it is a pretty shitty way to die. I have a little experience in that sort of thing.... It might point me in the right direction.”

  “Roark, what the hell does it matter?” Maybe it was that her eyes were easy to look at or that her manicured hand was on the only part of my arm that didn’t ache, but I told her. I told her everything. Everything except the gold. Gold does funny things to people. I told her a little bit about my Vietnam experience.

  “Roark, you are in over your head. I think they’re professionals and if you don’t back off, they are going to kill you.” The slasher movie face in the mirror was ugly and grew uglier as my smile widened.

  “No, Watts. I don’t think so. I may not look like it, but I am kind of a professional, too.” I knew I was going to kill them. Whoever planted that bomb . . . they were going to die by my hand.

  Watts had squared it with the dicks from BPD. I would go in after lunch and leave a statement. She insisted upon walking me across the street and back to my apartment. The door was still unlocked, and she insisted upon checking the apartment. She moved lightly from room to room with her .38 held down at her side.

  “Okay, Roark. Lock up behind me and be careful. Call me if you find out anything.” She put a card down on my table, but she knew I wasn’t going to call. I locked up behind her. Thuy’s bulky coat was still hanging on the peg by the door. I pulled it to my face to smell her. I went to the couch with it and sat down.

  Something in the pocket hit my shin. It was heavy. It turned out to be a tiny Colt 1908, a small .25 ACP that was good at tabletop ranges and fired a round that gave the humble .22 a boost in its confidence. There was almost no bluing left on this one; it was a patina of almost brown. There was a round in it and another six in the magazine. It was well oiled. The pocket had been altered so that it was also a holster for the .25 Colt. The rounds were brass, and the bullets copper, the tips of which looked like they had solder in them. It was a spy’s gun, tiny and only good up close. Someone had modified the bullets, and that scared me. Putting a drop of mercury in a small hollow point and then covering it with solder or lead had very, very bad results for the recipient.

  I started to wonder what else was in the coat. I started to feel it with two hands, crushing cloth, sliding, crushing, sliding. I found them in the collar. There was something hard, and when I pulled at the loose stitching, it came apart. Inside were two canvas strips. I pulled them out; each held ten gold coins. They were blank . . . and all gold. All in all, I found twenty coins. It was her escape kit. One-ounce gold coins. In today’s market, they were worth maybe ten thousand dollars.

  Gold was always part of the escape kit. Coins could be sold or bartered anywhere. That is why we gave them to our pilots and to our Special Forces guys in Vietnam. That and a blood chit, a piece of map paper with a U.S. flag on one side and on the other a promise to pay ten thousand dollars for the safe return of the bearer of the chit. Thuy’s coins came out of a U.S. aviator’s survival kit; I knew that much.

  Chapter 13

  When I woke up in the morning my head hurt, and I wished it was a hangover. The cut on my forehead wasn’t bad. I couldn’t face shaving, but a hot shower and a new large Band-Aid on my forehead set me mostly right. Coffee and some rye toast helped. I still didn’t have any cigarettes. My clothes from the night before were in a heap on the floor. They smelled of acrid smoke and blood, and I just pitched them in the trash.

  I spent an hour on the phone with the insurance company wondering if the ringing in my ears would ever go away. In the end, I told them to call the police and they agreed to contact BPD. They said they would get back to me.

  I dressed in gray slacks, a light blue shirt, a Harvard club tie I had no right to wear but I liked the colors, and a blue blazer. I had recently read a Spenser novel, so I was trying to dress more like him. I even threw on burgundy loafers. He was a spiffy dresser and a lot tougher than I would ever be. I put the Colt Commander on my right hip and dropped the .38 in the left pocket of my raincoat. While I might have been paranoid before, now I was pretty sure that someone was trying to kill me. I wasn’t really keen on that.

  Outside, it was cool, but spring was in the air. However, I live in Boston, and snow wasn’t out of the question until mid-April. There was a scorch mark on the pavement and lots of broken auto glass. I wanted to throw up but turned toward town and did what they had taught me in the army: put one foot in front of the other. I was sore but found that after a couple of blocks I was loosening up. Moving was easier than sitting on my ass feeling bad about things.

  I stopped at the first convenience store for a pack of Luckies. I bought two so I wouldn’t run out. Outside, I lit the first one and took a deep drag, the smoke welcome in my lungs and the nicotine working its magic. Across the street I saw a cream-colored T-bird. I pointed my index finger at it, thumb cocked, the universal sign for a gun. He peeled out with a roar. We understood each other. We were on the same sheet of music now. It only took me a beating, a blown-up car, and a dead girl to get on theirs. What can I say—I have always been a slow learner.

  Police headquarters hadn’t changed much. The desk sergeant was another one straight out of Central Casting. This one looked at me and, in a brogue that was only partly affected, said, “Jesus, Mary, and feckin’ Joseph, are you here to report your own feckin’ murder?” He said fuck like an Irishman.

  “No, someone blew up my car. Sadly, I wasn’t in it. Some ten-year-old in a blue suit with a tin star said I had to come talk to a dick.” When I tried really hard, I could sound like a tough guy in a movie.

  “Feckin’ town. This is Bahstin, not feckin’ Belfast. It’s not right, blowin’ up a man’s car. All right, you’d be Roark, then. I call one of our twelve-year olds in a suit to come talk to you.” I was pretty sure that I liked him. He was the type of sergeant you would hope would come to your call when I was a cop. Ten minutes later, a red-headed cop with big hands and thick wrists poking out of his Jordan Marsh suit jacket came to get me. He didn’t say anything to me in English, but communicated with a series of grunts that approximated speech. It was like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. At least he didn’t feel the need to hug me, squeeze me, or name me. A small mercy given my current state.

  He took me up to the detective bureau and took my statement. Then he wasted an hour of my life asking me stupid questions. I answered them as best as my bruised patience would allow. Then he had me sign my statement, which didn’t say much more than my car blew up with Thuy in it. When he was done, I was told to go see Captain Johnson.

  His office hadn’t changed. He hadn’t either. It had only been a few days since I was last here. He was wearing a gray suit this time, with a lavender shirt and paisley tie that made my head hurt. The butt of the revolver was still sticking out of his waistband.

  “Roark, are you okay?” He looked at me with genuine concern.

  “About as good as can be expected under the circumstances.” It was a lie we both wanted to believe.

  “Roark, is anything else in my city going to blow up?” He was serious. Boston cops can put up with shootings, stabbings, riots, etc. but they seem to draw the line at explosions. No one wanted Boston to turn into Belfast.

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  “Why a bomb in the car?”

  “It was convenient. I was away, and the car was parked on the street. It was easier than breaking into my place or waiting to gun me down. They were being lazy.”

  “Any idea who it was?” I had to give him credit—he was good at his job. After talking to the mental midget earlier and being questioned by him now, I wanted to share my theories with him. I wanted to talk to him.

  “Nothing but theories right now.”

  “Such as?”

  �
��I was in the army for a while, or I once followed a cheating husband. He was a demo guy who had blasted granite in New Hampshire for the new highway.”

  “Are you telling me this has nothing to do with the dead Vietnamese guys you were looking at?”

  “Nope.” I technically wasn’t telling him anything.

  “How come the FBI isn’t all over this? Your car gets blown up, a Vietnamese woman is in it, and other than the agent last night no one is interested.”

  “Captain, I don’t know what to tell you. That is the FBI for you.”

  “And what about the shady-ass mob lawyer friend of yours? He have anything to do with this?”

  “I haven’t talked to him in two years, almost three. Pretty sure he is off the list of suspects.”

  “All right, Roark. If you think of anything, you call me.” He handed me a business card. I took it and told him I would. We stood and shook hands, and I made my way out of BPD headquarters to the street.

  I shook a Lucky out of the pack and lit it as I walked away from police headquarters. I needed time to figure a couple of things out. I needed a new car, and I had to try to make sense out of what happened and why. People don’t just blow up your car for no reason. Not in Boston, they don’t. Maybe in Providence or Hartford, but Boston is a civilized town.

  I walked with my hand in my pocket on the butt of the. 38 snub nose. No one was following me, and I didn’t see any cream-colored Fords. I checked windows and tied my shoes a lot and doubled back, and no one was following me. Maybe they didn’t care.

  I walked back to my office. The weather hadn’t shifted either way. The sun was shining, but it wasn’t really all that warm. My head hurt. Actually, my whole body hurt in one form or another. In the past few days, I had been beaten up and blown up. Years ago, I was blown up, shot, and burned. I shuddered to think of what the future was going to hold.

  Mr. Marconi saw me coming, and there was an espresso correctto waiting for me. He looked at me and said, “Is it the communists?” He thought that the Red Brigades were always after me.

  “Not this time.” No, this was the other side. The sambuca tasted like warm licorice, and I thanked him and headed upstairs. I walked down the corridor to my office door, the one with my name written on the frosted glass in gold lettering. I had my keys out, and my hand froze. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  In Vietnam, we were once moving down a trail, and something didn’t feel right. Our point man was a Montagnard. He had seen something and halted us. I moved up to him. “What’s wrong?” I whispered. He looked at me and then the trail. “I don’t know, Trung Si, I just know that something is wrong.” We rested on our haunches for five minutes, and then he pointed to something on the jungle floor. “There,” he whispered, his fishy breath hot near my ear. “That leaf, it is wrong.” One leaf, the size of a playing card, was upside down. We carefully and slowly brushed dirt, twigs, and leaves out of the way, revealing a trip wire that led to four 155mm artillery shells. If he hadn’t spotted it, we would have been blown to smithereens.

  This time it wasn’t an out-of-place leaf. It was scratch marks. There were scratches, fresh scratches, on the face of my lock. Someone had picked it recently. It is very hard to pick a lock without leaving scratch marks. I eased the key in and slowly turned it, listening for noises that sound out of place. I opened the door a crack and looked top to bottom, while still carefully holding the door. I almost missed it, a piece of monofilament fishing line running across the path of the door a few inches from the floor. It was clear and made of some sort of plastic. Someone had booby-trapped my office door with a trip wire.

  I had seen a spy movie where the hero carried a small mirror on a telescoping handle. He used it to check under and around things, even up a lady’s dress at the end. Mine wasn’t government issue. I had swiped it from the dentist. Most of the time, it stayed at home, but after the exploding VW Karmann Ghia trick, it seemed like a nice thing to have with me.

  I slid it in the door near the fishing line. I rotated it until I saw the grenade taped to the leg of one of my front office chairs. By the looks of things, someone had straightened the cotter pin. A professional would have replaced the delay fuse with one from a smoke grenade. Instead of a three to five-second delay, it would go off right away. It was a simple way of doing things: tape a fragmentation grenade to something, straighten the cotter pin, tie fishing line to the ring, run it across the door, stick the excess through the door above the hinge and pull the slack tight, tie it off to the hinge itself, and clip off the excess line. If I was right and opened the door normally, the door would have pushed the line, pulling the pin out, and I would have been blown up, solving someone’s Andy Roark problem. I was starting to think that someone really didn’t like me. I hadn’t been this popular since I was in Vietnam.

  I pulled the door closed and locked it, just to be safe. I went downstairs to Marconi’s. He loaned me a pair of scissors without asking any questions. He was pretty much convinced that I was crazy. I unlocked the door and opened it a crack. The fishing line was taut. I held the door handle tightly with my left hand and then took out the dental mirror. The cotter pin was in place; there were no other surprises that I could see. I took a deep breath and took Marconi’s scissors out. They were stainless steel, German, and more at home in a sewing kit than defusing booby-trapped office doors.

  I took another breath, held it, and slid the partially open scissors through the opening of the door. The scissors were on either side of the fishing line. I let my breath out, inhaled, and snipped the fishing line. The cotter pin stayed in place, and the grenade spoon stayed on. I breathed a couple of long, deep breaths. I pushed the door open slowly. There were no other trip wires. I used my Buck knife to bend the cotter pin ends back so it wouldn’t come out as easily. I cut the tape on the grenade and dropped it in my raincoat pocket.

  I took off my coat and hung it on the tree. I then spent the next hour methodically checking my office for more surprises. I used the tip of my Buck knife probing here and there as I worked my way slowly from the office door to the door of my inner office. When I was fairly certain that it was safe, I went and retrieved the grenade from my coat pocket. I opened the door to the large safe; it had come with the office. I unscrewed the fuse from the grenade body and put both in the safe. Without the fuse to set it off, it was essentially ugly sculpture.

  It was a smoke grenade fuse. Smoke grenade fuses initiate upon being pulled, no delay unlike normal grenade fuses. That was how we made hasty booby traps out of grenades.

  The grenade was an M26 fragmentation grenade. It was an olive green, lemon-shaped hunk of death and maiming. It weighed a pound and was filled with six ounces of Composition B explosives. The metal was scored inside to ensure it would create a lot of fragments. Within fifteen feet of it going off, you were probably dead. Out to a hundred, you were going to be wounded. I still had scars from the small pieces of shrapnel from grenades the Viet Cong had thrown at me.

  The grenade body itself had little flecks of orange where it had rusted a little. The stenciling on it was in English, the stampings on the fuse body also. This grenade had originally been an American grenade. That wasn’t surprising—we had made literally millions of them in World War II and Korea. Now this one had ended up literally at my door.

  I picked up my phone and listened to the dial tone. I thought I heard little clicks and put it down. I took out the hand grenade and screwed the fuse in. I got my raincoat and dropped the grenade in the pocket. I returned Marconi’s scissors to him.

  “Mr. Marconi, did I have any visitors today?”

  “Clients, Andy?” Sometimes Marconi ended up with them if I wasn’t around.

  “Or workmen, anyone?”

  “Today, no, but a couple of days ago, yes, there was the guy from the phone company. Then a little while after him a Chinese came by. The phone company man went to the cellar and then to your office.”

  “And the other guy, the Chinese?”
/>   “He had a briefcase and a bad suit. Not a sharp dresser, like he got his suits at the church bazaar. He went up to see you. He didn’t wait long, five minutes, maybe ten.”

  “Okay, thanks. Oh, hey, can I have one of these?” I motioned to one of the paper bags that he sent takeout in. It had his logo on it.

  “Of course. Please.”

  “Thank you.”

  I slipped the grenade into the bag. Marconi’s eyes got big.

  “Andy, is that what I think it is?”

  “It sure ain’t no meatball.” I walked out.

  Chapter 14

  When I got back to the apartment, there was nothing waiting for me: no bombs, no grenades, no Chinese, Vietnamese, or men from Ma Bell. I took the Colt .25 and unloaded it. I put the gun, its magazine, and the loose round in a small paper bag that I put in the bigger Marconi’s bag. I wrapped tape around the spoon of the grenade as an extra precaution. The gold coins in their canvas sleeves went in my pocket. The germ of a plan was forming in my head.

  I took the bag from Marconi’s and left. I used the back stairs and popped out a block away from the scorched area where the Ghia had blown up. I walked through the streets at a moderate pace. No one was following and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Near the Greyhound station at the edge of the combat zone, not far from L.J. Peretti’s, was an antique store that I knew that dealt in rare books and coins. I had done some work for them when someone had tried to put the bite on them.

  The manager saw me and led me to the back room. He poured me a small snifter of cognac and had one himself. He was born in Germany but became an Austrian after the war.

  “Mr. Roark, what can I do for you?”

  “I would like to convert these to dollars.” I put the strips of coins on his desk. He picked them up and looked at them. I picked up the cognac and sipped it. It was a German cognac that was popular among the Special Forces soldiers and their German wives at Fort Devens. Devens was an hour northwest of Boston. Once in a while, I would go to the Class Six store, the army’s version of a liquor store, and bring him back some.