A Town Called Malice

by Adam Abramowitz

  “So how come he was never picked up for it?” I try to punch a hole through Brill’s reasoning but the logic is hard to argue with; for a hot minute there Mass did look like my father’s ticket to another life.

  “He was questioned.”

  Until the FBI stepped in and declared him off-limits and then redacted whatever was in the file. My mom was also on the FBI’s radar at this point for the Harvard bombing and her Central American political work, but not yet topping their chart for the Bank of Boston, which would come nearly a decade later. My dad was a credible suspect with something to lose. With a lot to lose.

  And as expected, Mass’s album dropped like a nuke on the Boston airwaves and Grant signed them as the opener for the Zeppelin tour. And then Lady Luck kicked Klaussen and my dad square in the balls.

  “Was my dad ever a suspect in Klaussen’s disappearance?”

  “For like a hot minute. But see, on that there was no angle, no profit motive.”

  Like, say, with Tupac, who cut a shitload of songs that were never published and who’s sold more music dead than alive, breathing life into all those conspiracy theorists who think Tupac is still kicking, lounging on some remote island and drinking coconut juice out the crack of some Tahitian model’s ass. Not something I’d believe for a second if Klaussen hadn’t made his own return out of history’s dustbin.

  “You really think that’s Klaussen you heard at the Hacienda earlier?”

  “I’m telling you. I know it was.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, Zesty, then you’re getting played like a motherfucker. Because there’s no way Alianna Solarte brought your ass in on this without knowing who Klaussen was. That lady’s twisting your spokes for real. So the question you got to ask yourself is what the fuck is she really after? And one other thing. Aside from the redacted file on your dad that wasn’t worth shit, everything else tied into Camilla Islas was gone and that includes the murder book.”

  “What murder book? You said it was a missing person’s case.”

  “It was. But after seven years, Camilla’s parents had her declared dead, as was their right under Massachusetts law. So it became a homicide.”

  “Why would they do that?” For an older person who might have a life insurance policy to collect on, it would make sense, but I doubted someone as young as Camilla Islas had anything like that and her parents had nothing to gain except funeral costs.

  “Closure, maybe,” Brill surmises. “Though I don’t know how a piece of paper would give that. Somewhere in their hearts they’ve probably still got that gnawing pain not really knowing brings.”

  “Or maybe to kick-start a murder investigation,” I say. “I’m assuming it went into a cold case file?”

  “Sure. But that’s what I’m telling you, Zesty. There is no cold case file on Camilla Islas. No evidence box, no murder book, not that there’d be much in it considering she just Houdinied out. And as you already know from experience, when BPD moved from Berkeley Street, they also digitized all the old files, but there’s nothing in those files, either. As far as BPD is concerned, Camilla Islas never existed and anything that connected her to Klaussen or your dad is a Popsicle on a summer’s day. You want to memorialize Camilla Islas, you might as well just write her name and ‘RIP’ on the stick and hammer it into the ground. Fuck Karl Klaussen. That girl is gone. Ain’t no second acts in American life once you’re buried in an unmarked grave.”

  NINETEEN

  Brill and I knocked off at about five in the morning and he paid me a hundred dollars, bringing my three-day total to six hundred bucks, nontaxable, which in Massachusetts is like forty thousand gross. I was awash in cash and bruises I didn’t even know I had until I got home and showered, collapsing onto the bed and the exploded marshmallow stuffing of my pillow. The cat had been at it again. Like I said, he’s got a nose. Probably dug the Marshalls receipt out of the trash and went to town.

  By the time I lock my bike up outside Buttery it’s two in the afternoon, the kind of crisp New England fall day that convinces you to start boxing up the summer gear, the college girls hustling around the streets wrapped tight in their Law & Order sweaters, shiny as Honeycrisp apples.

  I bring my coffee outside even though it’s chilly, but in a ceramic mug this time to get a taste of how the other half lives. The coffee tastes the same. What had been a Laundromat for as long as I can remember across the street is undergoing a major reinvention, a giant plate glass window being crane-fitted into the frame, allowing me to see my reflection among the lounging class. I look good in dark plate glass windows. Always have. In fact, much better than the reflection of one of Moreno’s men, who I catch clocking me from a stoop about thirty yards away.

  Interesting. Maybe a little worrisome. But not enough to stop drinking my coffee and dipping a scone so dense you could drop anchor with it. From a safety standpoint I’m not particularly worried about him, but I don’t really know why he’s following me. I don’t have anything that belongs to these people, they have my stuff. Obviously, they know where I live, but they aren’t sending me a direct warning or he’d make himself more conspicuous.

  Losing him certainly won’t be a problem when the time comes, especially if the tricked-out Honda double-parked in front of the stoop is his. All it’ll take is one quick wrong-way cut up a one-way street and then it’s sayonara, sucker.

  Not yet, though. Somebody has left a copy of the Globe on a nearby table and I pick it up and leaf through it. My coffee seems hotter than normal, a small cloud of steam rising off of it. Maybe it’s the ceramic mug. Moreno’s man looks a little cold, possibly a little envious. Once in a while I pick up the mug with both hands, take an extended joyous sip, and scrunch my shoulders like they do in the commercials right before reaching climax.

  The Sox have lost their last game of the season, kicking off the long wait for spring and Hope Eternal, all eyes now turning to the Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins, pretty much in that order. One day, the stars will align, all the pro clubs will win a championship in the same calendar year, and the entire city of Boston will drop dead with a smile on their face.

  Rambir Roshan, who was killed two weeks ago, didn’t bring a smile to anybody’s face, according to Anitra Tehran’s reporting in her Metro Region follow-up piece that offers up no mention of a Russian/Ukranian connection to poker clubs or real estate, of a pimp and drug dealer named Oleg Katanya or his boss Jakub Namestnikov. And though I can’t make out the faces of the plainclothes detectives inside the yellow-taped cordoned-off crime scene photo, one’s wearing a fedora and the other looks grumpy, even from a distance.

  But I do learn that Rambir Roshan was discovered by a jogger at a little past four in the morning and that by five eighteen, the twenty-two-year-old second-year MIT graduate student from Mumbai, India, was moved off of the 182nd smoot point, where he’d died, exactly halfway between Cambridge and Boston across the Charles River, give or take an ear.

  The story was essentially a rehash of Tehran’s original reporting with the added official response from MIT and coverage of the joint Cambridge/Boston mayoral news conference that was held to reassure citizens of the safety of the two respective cities. They had numbers to back it up, too. And though initially it was unclear who would take jurisdiction over the case, I know that it fell to Brill and Wells, though Brill was now forced to the sidelines.

  I put the paper back where I found it and adjust my seat so I can keep Moreno’s man in my periphery, the plate glass window now flush in its frame. When I ditch him, I feel pretty crafty about it until I’m locking up my bike outside Solarte’s office and spot Elvis loitering across the street, making himself about as inconspicuous as a traffic cone in a garden of tulips.

  When I whistle at him, he gives me the finger. I don’t think he’s telling me I’m number one. I’m sure he would have much preferred to grab his crotch, but considering the shot I gave him yesterday, it was probably out of commission. Was it only yesterday? Time sure flies when you’re ge
tting the shit kicked out of you and working three jobs.

  TWENTY

  I have to be buzzed in downstairs this time, but the door between the waiting room and office is already open. Karl Klaussen sits in a chair beside Alianna Solarte’s desk, almost facing the windows to Kenmore Square. Solarte sits where she’d sat a couple of days ago, her face neutral but unworried. Her camera is on her desk. Charlie’s gun is nowhere in sight.

  “Fuck you.” I point at Solarte. “And fuck you, Andino. You both got some ’splaining to do.”

  Screw political correctness.

  “Have a seat.” Solarte sighs heavily and I have to remind myself that I own today’s indignation, tired of being lied to.

  “No. I don’t need a seat. I need some straight answers. You know who this is, don’t you?” I point a finger toward Klaussen, who’s dressed himself up for this meeting, a chocolate brown suit, white shirt, and lemon yellow tie. Up close I realize how red and dark he really is, almost like burnt ochre. And Solarte’s right about the facial surgery, his skin pulled tight against high narrow cheekbones, shiny, like armor. I can smell the clove cigarette smoke embedded in the suit and a fresher version, likely an open pack somewhere in his pockets.

  “Initially, no, I didn’t,” Solarte says, looking at me full-faced. “But I suspected as much. Considering what he’d asked me to do.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “What Ms. Solarte is saying, Zesty, is that I’d hired her. Essentially, you’ve been working on my behalf.”

  “Following you around?” I shake my head. “No, that doesn’t sound right.”

  “Well, deception breeds mistrust. I should have been more forthcoming with Ms. Solarte about what I was trying to accomplish.”

  “You mean, like telling her who you really are?”

  “That would have been a start. But it’s complicated. I had to be cautious coming back to Boston.”

  “Yeah, why’s that?”

  “Ms. Solarte can explain. At least why you’ve been pulled into this. I hadn’t asked for you to be included, though I have to admit it was a shrewd move on her part. And it is good to see you, Zesty. Obviously we’ve never met; I was long gone before you were born but your father and I were close once.”

  “What Klaussen’s saying,” Solarte cuts in, “is that I brought you in because your father is involved. How come you don’t look surprised?”

  “You know who Lady Gaga is?”

  “Of course.”

  “Poker face,” I say.

  And because at one time it was taken for granted that my father was the place where secrets went to die, never to see the light of day. Until Alzheimer’s set in and the Big Dig followed and the bodies and lies everyone thought would stay buried forever started churning toward the surface like weeds cracking through cement. Devlin McKenna might have been my father’s biggest and most dangerous secret, but it doesn’t mean it was his only one.

  “So get to it,” I say to Solarte. “You brought me in because you suspected Andino was Klaussen, but you weren’t sure. If you were right, you figured I’d flush him out and be able to connect you to my dad?”

  “Pretty much. Had I been able to go directly to your father, I would have kept you out of it and just gone straight to him,” Solarte continues. “But the advanced stage of his Alzheimer’s makes that a no-go, correct?”

  “My father’s all out of words,” I say.

  “And Zero presents his own complications, no?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “I’m assuming you’re familiar with the story surrounding my disappearance, Zesty?” Klaussen offers me a sad little smile.

  “It’s a Boston rock and roll legend.”

  “Yes. If you believe such things.”

  “You’re telling me there was more to it?”

  “Isn’t there always?”

  “And it involves my dad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me guess.” I take a measured pause to work on my timing. According to Hank, a lot of comedy boils down to tragedy plus time. Your girlfriend dumping you is painful when it happens. Funny when you hear the guy she left you for gave her an STD. “He helped you disappear.”

  Both Solarte’s and Klaussen’s eyebrows jump in synchronized revelation to what was essentially a guess, but one that makes perfect sense. When the time had come for my mother and Rachel Evans, one of her accomplices in the Bank of Boston robbery, to disappear years later, my father pulled it off without a hitch. Like he’d done it before. Like he’d had practice.

  “Yes, exactly.” Klaussen appraises me with something that looks like renewed interest and grudging respect. I’ve had this happen before. It’s that Siddhartha moment when somebody realizes I might be more than just the stuff of romance novel covers.

  “And now you’re back,” I say. “Looking for what? To do what?”

  “Like I said, it’s complicated. But essentially I’m looking for a woman.”

  “You mean Camilla Islas,” I say, shock registering in both their eyes but something more wary coming into Solarte’s, like she’d just realized she’d been misreading my cards all along and was about to pay for the mistake.

  “How do you know that?” Klaussen’s first to find words.

  “Nah, I’m the one asking questions here. You think Camilla Islas is in Boston?”

  “I know she’s in Boston.”

  “Yeah, how’s that?”

  “Because I killed her,” Klaussen says, looking for some sort of tell in my eyes. “And your father helped me cover it up and get rid of her body.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  We’ve left Solarte’s office and walk up the spine of Commonwealth Avenue under the canopy of elms and past the life-size bronze statue of the former Argentinian president Domingo Sarmiento, who looks serious, but no more so than Klaussen, who’s wrapped a black scarf around his neck against the chill.

  “Let me start with this, Zesty, to put your father into perspective for you because I’m not sure how much you really know of your dad’s early years and what he did prior to your mother coming onto the scene.”

  The wind picks up and the leaves become like birds scattering around us and it occurs to me that this part of Boston, the part that has always had money, is the rare Boston avenue mostly unchanged since Klaussen had been here last and that with every faltering step he is moving backward in time into a city that has stood still in his mind and songs.

  The old Boston, the part that has the generational coin—Back Bay, Beacon Hill—exists as fortresses that, for the most part, have rebuffed change, their leafy Charles River views protected by a phalanx of high-powered lawyers or the timely designation of historic districts, their boundaries preserved with cold hard cash.

  In these rarified buildings, change happens behind closed doors and most people who occupy the middle rungs never really get to see the opulence inside. It’s the people at the bottom who know: the maids and cleaning crews, the invisible army of underpaid concierges and doormen, the two-minute visits by messengers, or the one-day assaults by white-gloved moving crews, minor actors who move about the hardwood floors, the gleaming stainless steel appliances, and the Italian marble countertops like barely tolerated intrusions.

  The only intrusion we have now is Elvis walking gingerly about twenty yards behind us, where I feel his eyes boring into me and keep getting this sensation that he’s coming up fast to stab me in the back.

  “Is something bothering you, Zesty?” Klaussen picks up on my discomfort.

  “Yeah, can you get rid of Elvis or at least have him walk in front so I can see him?” I’d offer him my bike but I doubt the seat would be comfortable.

  “Nestor makes you nervous?”

  “Very.”

  “Then your instincts are good. Only I can’t tell him to leave, he’s been told to watch for me.”

  “Care to explain that?” Solarte says.

  “Only if I must.”

  “You must if you want me a
nd Zesty to keep working for you. Obviously what you’re trying to get at is something a little more delicate than what Moreno’s people can handle, maybe something you don’t even want them to know about.”

  “This is true. They watch, but they don’t know exactly. I’ll clarify over lunch, but first I’d like to explain to you, Zesty, how far back I go with your father.”

  “Why?”

  “Because context matters. April fourth, 1968. That date mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah.” It means that if Mr. Callahan, my old history teacher, were around, I could prove I was paying attention even while trying to sneak a peek down Sue Woodward’s shirt. “It’s when MLK was assassinated,” I say. “Is this going to be on the quiz?”

  “Sure,” Klaussen says, and in that one word I hear his Boston accent return to him in spades, either a sign his guard has slipped or he’s allowing Solarte and me to see behind the curtain of his tanned and tattooed Aztec façade. “Obviously a major day in history, but it’s also the very day your father became a player in city hall. Really, he’s never told you any of this?”

  “No.” The admission stings. Does Zero know this story?

  “James Brown was scheduled to play the Garden the night King was killed and tickets had already been sold. It was getting on to early evening and word had spread about the assassination and right away some of the neighborhoods started heating up.”

  “You mean the black neighborhoods.” Solarte probably doesn’t need the clarification, but if Klaussen is intent on painting us a picture, I wanted to make sure he followed the numbers.

  “Black, mixed.” He shrugs the admission. “Roxbury, Mattapan, the South End. People were angry, buildings were already burning in Newark; soon they’d be burning in Watts. Back here things were getting dicey, too many spots for the police to cover, and the way Boston was built, all the old buildings, carved up even more at this point into rooming houses, all jammed together, it wasn’t going to take much for this city to end up in flames. Kevin White was the mayor then and Barney Frank, who’d later become Congressman Frank, was his right-hand man.