“Your dad had done some outreach work for White, knew the Boston ward bosses and how the city ran, had already started to frequent the black jazz and blues clubs, so he was known in the neighborhoods where you wouldn’t see a lot of gringos. Orchard Park projects, Robert Gould Shaw House. Anyhow, a call came in that a bus carrying about a dozen white people was surrounded by a mob on Blue Hill Avenue and Barney Frank asked your dad to go with Dan Richardson, Chuck Turner, neighborhood activists I’m sure you don’t know, to try and defuse the situation. Which they did.
“But the pattern was basically repeating itself all over the city and worst of all, you had thousands of young blacks streaming toward the Boston Garden for the James Brown show, only the Godfather of Soul was holed up in his hotel room refusing to play. He wanted the show canceled.”
“Can you blame him?” Solarte says.
“No, of course not. But try to picture thousands of angry, heartbroken young black men locked out of the Garden, their tickets not being honored, the city already a tinderbox on the verge of exploding. It was the perfect storm to reduce this city to ashes.”
Like had happened a hundred years before that, only minus the racial component, when over seven hundred buildings burned downtown in a raging blaze that could be seen lighting up the sky by ships as far away as the coast of Maine.
“Mayor White dispatched Frank to convince Brown to perform and try to create some kind of Kumbaya miracle, but he flat-out refused until your dad was brought in to talk to him. William never told me what he said to Brown to convince him, but Brown agreed to go on, with one caveat.”
“Which was what?”
“The man wanted to be paid in advance.” This kernel produces a giant grin on Klaussen’s face. “I mean, the music business back then was a racket. And Brown? He was the highest paid act in the game. Highest paid colored act, anyway. The man wanted his money up front, but that’s not how the Garden operated and they had their own legitimate worries about a riot starting inside if they let people in. So now White’s got James willing, but no money to pay the man.”
“Really?” Solarte says, incredulously. “Boston back then and there’s no slush fund they could pull it out of?”
“Of course there was,” Klaussen responds. “But again, it’s all about timing. The slush fund had just been tapped out. This was the cash that Zesty’s dad and I would run into the neighborhoods and distribute to all the mayor’s outreach programs. A cut for the ward bosses, a cut for the activist groups, a cut for the street players. This was old-school politics and it happened in every neighborhood, Southie, Charlestown.…”
Though I had no doubt those bags were a little heavier, the denominations higher, for the all-white neighborhoods.
“So what does my dad do?” Had he threatened James Brown in some way or made him some kind of promise that went beyond money?
“Well, things get a little fuzzy here because as you know, your dad plays it pretty tight. But the public story, what little there is of it, goes something like this: Back in the late 1950s when Boston was headed toward municipal bankruptcy and was really turning into a shithole, a group of bankers and industrialists got together and formed a semi-secret consortium called the Vault. At least that’s what the press called it when they got wind of it.
“And don’t misunderstand, this group didn’t get together to save the city. Their goal was to put a mechanism in place for them to administer the wreckage after it failed and profit from it. But by the time of the MLK assassination, the Vault had taken on a few new, more liberal members, the founders of Filene’s, Jordan Marsh, CVS. Hell, if you wanted to wipe out the ruling classes of Boston, one bomb under the table at Locke-Ober, where they sometimes convened, would have done the trick.”
Only nobody had taken the shot, and the old-money roots just grew stronger, the neighborhoods became more insular and segregated, the white flight that had prompted Brill’s foray into salvage and restoration creating another level of class divide that the Boston Mob, in all its iterations, feasted on for decades. This was the city my father cut his teeth on and became a player in.
Does he remember any of it?
We cross Commonwealth at Gloucester Street and walk north toward Newbury, Nestor still behind us but far enough away to be out of earshot.
“Your dad accompanied the mayor to the Vault and made the pitch. He was quite a persuasive man; that I know firsthand. The Vault coughs up thirty thousand dollars, which wasn’t even half of what Brown’s going rate was, and remember, back then, that was a shitload of money. But it was enough up front to convince him to perform with the rest of the cash promised for later.”
“And the city survived,” Solarte says. “Finally, a happy ending.”
“Not if you’re James Brown.” Klaussen laughs bitterly.
“Let me guess,” I say. “The Vault stiffed him for the remainder.”
“You got it. Only that’s not the end of the story. Your dad had promised Brown his money, probably looked the man square in the eyes and swore he’d come through. And what’s your dad’s reputation been all these years…?”
He was a man of his word. Someone who could be trusted with secrets, take the weight and keep his lips sealed. That was the public view, though the truth, of course, was far more complicated. Neither Solarte nor I have to say aloud what my father’s reputation was built on for Klaussen to continue.
“I don’t know how, but your dad got Brown the rest of his money a couple of days later. He kept his word. And the black community knew about it, too. Knew the Man had stiffed the Godfather of Soul and William Meyers had come through. Why do you think your dad was so welcome in all those neighborhood joints, that jazz club he loved on Mass Ave., Slade’s on Washington, where the whitest thing that walked through the door was the newspaper?”
“I just thought it was his threads,” I say, wondering if Klaussen’s version of my dad’s all-access pass had been passed down to Darryl and his men, who all grew up in Roxbury.
We turn off Gloucester down Public Alley 431 and through the blue-and-white-tiled side door of Casa Romero, Boston’s oldest and most expensive Mexican restaurant. The restaurant is empty, that sweet spot in between dining hours, but a few Spanish words from both Solarte and Klaussen bring smiles from the staff and a table.
We order and as a round of Cokes is delivered, my phone rings and I see it’s Detective Wells calling. “Hold on,” I answer it, stepping out the door, Nestor resolutely guarding the alley at the corner on Gloucester Street. I don’t offer to order him any food. He doesn’t offer to watch my bike.
“What?” I say.
“Sam Budoff.” Wells dives right in. “Does he have any tattoos?” I could hear car doors shutting behind Wells, the busy chatter and squawk of walkie-talkies, the sound of something like crime scene tape blowing and flapping in the wind, and metal pinging against a pole.
“Where are you?” I say, a cold chill running through me.
“Never mind that. Just answer the question.”
“Sam’s got a tree, a pine tree on his forearm, a bunch of birds on his wrist. You’re on the waterfront,” I say.
Wells curses under his breath.
“What do you have?” I say.
“Listen, Zesty—”
“What do you have?” I grind through my teeth.
“A body.” The wind in his phone sounds like a gale. “With tattoos.”
“You pulled it out of the water?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s not enough face to make an ID?”
“Might be,” Wells answers. “If I had a face. So far I only have parts. Torso. Legs. A hand without fingers. Sam have any tattoos on his chest?”
“No.”
“Well, if the legs go with the torso, then it’s not Sam Budoff. I’m no Mr. Potato Head expert but I think they go together.”
“Sam still hasn’t gotten ahold of you?” I briefly contemplate telling Wells about the nearly million dollars in poker chips
I took out of Sam’s storage unit, but hold on to that play, seeing how I’d just brought Zero into the mix.
“No.”
“Did you know he got himself a job at a place called Kirilenko Labs?”
“No. But they sound familiar. What do they do?”
“Cyber-security firm. They’re a big deal, I guess. Did you know Sam had those kind of skills?”
“Wells, he’s a fucking genius. He probably even knows how to put one of those little ships inside a bottle. So?”
“He’s been a no-show for two weeks with the flu. They even sent him chicken soup.”
There’s a long pause on the line but that’s okay because another song’s coming in between my ears and it’s a good one, “Shoulda Woulda Coulda” by Beverley Knight.
“You know what your problem is, Zesty?”
“Speak up,” I say, probably too loudly, Nestor looking up suddenly from his reverie at the corner. “Beverley Knight’s killing it!”
“You think you’re slick, but you’re not.”
“Now you’ve really lost me.”
“I served Zero up with a search warrant this morning.”
“For what?”
“Sam Budoff’s storage unit. Office records. Zero’s safe. Funny how there’s no security cameras in Zero’s warehouse. I wonder why.”
“No, you don’t. Zero open the safe for you?” Exposing whatever it was he didn’t want Jhochelle to see? Where he might have stashed Sam’s nearly million dollars in poker chips?
“Funny you asked that. Your brother’s wife says Zero’s out of town on business. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Cain and Abel,” I answer.
“Which one are you again?”
“You get in the safe?” If he did, it wasn’t through Jhochelle.
“As if. I forgot to bring a big enough can opener, if one even exists. Meanwhile, your sister-in-law sicced her celebrity lawyer Andrew Tetter on us, challenging the access to the safe, so we’re waiting on a judge’s ruling.”
Wells surprises me with a genuine laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Well, we can’t get in, but we can hold the safe to make sure the contents aren’t tampered with.”
“You mean move it? Are you out of your mind? That thing weighs, like, three thousand pounds. You notice that section of the floor is reinforced concrete?”
“I got that. And supported by a metal girder from the garage level below. That’s why I’m laughing. Obviously the thing has to go through the window, right? Out back where that lumberyard is. I called Brill and told him to check them out, actually. They have some wide-plank flooring there that’s unbelievable. Expensive as hell, too.”
“You know why that is?”
“What the market will bear, I’m assuming.”
“It’s more than that. Most of the wood’s salvaged from underwater, rivers in Pennsylvania, Carolina, even as far as Oregon. It’s the logs that sank as they used to float them down to the mills. These trees are a couple hundred years old, perfectly preserved. These guys dive and attach these massive fucking balloons to surface them, dry them out, and then cut them. It’s expensive as a motherfuck but they set the rate, the stuff’s so rare.”
“That’s pretty interesting,” Wells admits. “The moving business so slow that Zero’s moonlighting for them?”
“What?” I don’t get what he’s saying, but then I do. The diving equipment in Zero’s office that Jhochelle kept deflecting. But Zero wasn’t working for anyone; he made plenty of money with the moving company and whatever other irons he kept in the fire that I wasn’t keen on knowing about.
More likely, one of the lumberyard divers was working for Zero. If so, doing what? Something recent; that seaweed on my sneaker had been fresh. “Zero wouldn’t work for them,” I dispel Wells’s notion. “They’re always at each other’s throats about parking and noise and whose garbage belongs to who.”
“That’s also the impression I got. But what I was laughing about before is those ZZ Top–looking dudes who we called to come move the safe.”
“You called Death Wish Movers?” Death Wish are specialists of the heavy lift, things that need to be hoisted by crane through windows or skylights dismantled to the frame—pianos, safes, giant sculptures. Their T-shirts are like Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket, a rare and prized item you can only acquire if you work for them or hire them out, and they are damn expensive since the work is so specialized.
“Honestly,” I say, “I’m surprised they took the job. Those cats and Zero are pretty tight.”
“Yeah they are. They showed, only with two cases of Sam Adams and no crane. They just wanted to see what was going down and what we’d do about it. Good times.”
There’s another long pause before Wells says, “Brill told you about Oleg Katanya, Namestnikov, and the poker chips on Roshan.” It isn’t a question. “He tell you about the suspension, too?”
“Yep,” I half lie. He’d told me he was suspended. He didn’t tell me why. And I don’t bother asking Wells because he’d no sooner give me details than show me his down cards if we were heads-up in a poker game with all the chips stacked in the middle.
“Fuck me,” Wells castigates himself sharply. “I knew this was a shitty idea. I literally looked at myself in the mirror and said to myself, Batista, this is a shitty idea. What else he tell you?”
“I’m having lunch,” I say. “What do you want?”
“Like I said, Budoff’s still off the reservation.”
“And he took the same class as Roshan, we already established this.”
“Yeah, well, there’s another connection. Roshan interned at Kirilenko. Sam got him the in.”
“So what. That’s how shit works in this city. Sam’s in trouble for this?”
“No, but you are for removing whatever was in that box in his storage unit.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My lie to Wells comes easily because I’ve had the practice.
“That’s pretty good, Zesty. Are you looking at the cue card or did you memorize that? Whatever. Least I know it’s not Sam fillets we fished out of the harbor. So what’s your take on Brill?”
“Grumpy as ever,” I say. But what he’s really asking is whether I’d noticed any of those miscues Zero and I had seen with my father and chalked up to late nights and sketchy company, a mind full of secrets that started leaking through the fissures of his brain.
“I just think he’s suffering from a case of nostalgia,” I offer up my diagnosis. “Heeding the siren song of the old neighborhood. You ever hear that calling?”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s a Boston thing.” Wells isn’t from Boston. Actually, and as far as I can tell, he isn’t from anywhere. Doesn’t seem to affect his work, though. He is a fine homicide detective in a city that sometimes naps and if the dead speak to him, the Boston accents don’t seem to throw him off. “If I hear from Sam I’ll let you know right away.” I lay it on thick.
“Will you really?”
“Sure,” I lie again. “But only if you tell me why Brill was suspended.”
“I’m assuming you read Anitra Tehran’s follow-up piece today, seen the pictures.”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, if you looked real close at that overhead shot, you see how the body was, like, smack dab in the middle of the bridge, prompting the question of whose jurisdiction the crime scene fell under. It was literally halfway between Boston and Cambridge. A couple of Homicides from Cambridge accused Brill of salting the crime scene, moving the body a couple smoots to the Boston side.”
“Did he?”
“You’ll have to ask him, he got there before me. Anyhow, he ends up getting into it with these guys, Powers and McGowan, punches McGowan in the face and breaks his nose. The brass worked it out between them, Brill gets suspended, but I keep the body, catch the case.”
And none of that ends up in any of the stories Anitra Tehran wrote
for the Globe. So that seals it; likely the two of them worked something out. Maybe he keeps her in the loop with the investigation and she holds on to the story about Brill contaminating a crime scene, which would get him tossed from the force if it went public.
Wells took a big chance, sticking his neck out there for his partner and compromising himself like that. And if I’m right, Tehran is also compromised because she’s sitting on what would be a major story and keeping it from her editors.
Welcome to Big City Poker, everybody in the game holding cards and checking on the first round, waiting to see who’ll make the first move to risk some chips into the pot.
Actually, that’s not right. Somebody had made moves: the firebombing at Nick’s Comedy Stop. Rambir Roshan’s murder. I believe in coincidences but not in the form of bullets and Molotov cocktails. Not with a reporter and homicide investigator looking into the same things; Russian and Ukrainian names popping up everywhere so soon after Tehran’s real estate exposé.
“This stays between us,” Wells says, unnecessarily. “And I still want you to keep an eye on Brill. I need him in my corner, but if he’s going to come out of this with his job and pension intact, he needs to steer clear until I put this thing to bed. You hearing me, Zesty? I’m bouncing things off the old man only because I know that if I don’t, he’s going to go after Katanya and Namestnikov himself. Not only is he not authorized to do it, but these people will kill him in a heartbeat. Keep an eye on the old crank. By now you should be good at this kind of thing.”
TWENTY-TWO
The food is on the table when I return, Klaussen and Solarte already digging in.
“Did I miss grace?” I say.
“By a mile.” Solarte winks at me as I slide into a chair beside her. I could have sat next to Klaussen but his guitar case occupies the seat beside him and anyhow, Solarte’s much smaller, giving me plenty of elbow room. I can tell she’s not happy with the seating arrangement, her back to the door, which would force her to crane her neck every time someone came into the restaurant. Only nobody comes into the restaurant. Maybe it’s the off hour. Possibly it’s Nestor and his violent pompadour.
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