A Town Called Malice

by Adam Abramowitz

  My dad loved Steve Grogan. But probably for all the wrong reasons: The man could take a beating. And then come back the next week and do it all over again.

  The hood on Tehran’s sweatshirt is up, her face framed in blue shadow from the computer glare. Wisps of her long hair fall out of the dark recesses of the hood down past her clavicles.

  “Nice place.” A car’s headlights sweep the café and Tehran flinches at the computer. “I’m impressed by the twenty-four-hour access.”

  “Don’t be. They have this plan.” Anitra recovers quickly and looks up from whatever she was pecking at. “If you can prove ten percent of your body weight is made up of their pecan sticky buns, you get keys to the kingdom.” She double-points down to her thighs, flips her hands into a double thumbs-up. “Mission accomplished.”

  “I think you need a new mirror,” I say. Or a better therapist. Women truly are amazing creatures. I don’t doubt for a minute they’re smarter than men, but they pick themselves apart like ravenous wolves. Men can be total disasters but rally their souls over one or two redeeming features and then take it to the bank. I’m no different: long thick hair, strong legs.

  If Anitra Tehran is smiling at my remark, her face is too far back in the oversize hoodie for me to see it.

  “How come we’re not meeting at the Globe offices?”

  “I know, it was a longer ride for you to come here. I’m sorry. How about a sticky bun for nourishment. I smell the first batch out of the oven now.”

  So could I. It smelled like heaven if heaven was fifteen hundred calories’ worth of caramel, pecans, and cinnamon. It also smelled like an evasion.

  “How about you answer the question instead?”

  The hoodie nods multiple times, but doesn’t speak. Dorchester Avenue isn’t entirely deserted even at this late hour. Occasionally somebody walks past the shop or the headlights of yet another car swings the corner onto Dorchester Avenue, sending a quick swipe of light into the store so I can read the outrageous prices marked on a giant chalkboard. Dorchester was another neighborhood under siege, the Boston Renaissance spreading its golden touch to every far-reaching corner of its once parochial hoods. Good for some. Bad for others. Not a lot of room in the middle.

  The passing light also lets me see the reason Tehran chose a sweatshirt large enough to house the entire New England defensive secondary. She’s wearing a Kevlar vest beneath it.

  “You’re scared,” I answer for the reporter when she says nothing. “And hiding. There not a lot of people you can trust, Ms. Tehran?”

  “I trust you,” Tehran counters.

  “Why? You don’t know me.”

  “Because Batista said I could. That you were loyal. Possibly crazy, but loyal.”

  “Is that all he said?”

  “No.” She grins perfect teeth. “He also said you were as predictable as a game of pinball played on the deck of the Titanic.”

  “Really? Then he’s terrible at similes because that would imply imminent disaster.” Or maybe that’s exactly what he was trying to tell her.

  “Why did you call me, Zesty?”

  “Why are you wearing a Kevlar vest?”

  “Somebody shot at me. Through my apartment window.”

  “Another warning?”

  “No.” Tehran scrunches up her face, tilts it to the ceiling to lock in the tears that I heard in her one-word response. “Batista said I was lucky. And he’s right. I moved just as the shot came.”

  So much for the parked Boston Police cruiser as a deterrent. I take the thumb drive out of my bag and lay it on the counter face-up so she can read her initials on it.

  “What’s that?” Tehran leaves the drive where I placed it.

  “It’s called a thumb drive and—”

  “Zesty, please.” Tehran’s voice is small.

  “I’m just a messenger,” I tell her. “Can you push back the hoodie a little so I can see your face?”

  Tehran hesitates before doing what I ask, the hoodie essentially propped on the ponytail she’d tied her hair back into. There are bags under her eyes and not a trace of makeup. The small cut she’d sustained on the sidewalk of Nick’s Comedy Stop somehow makes her more attractive than when I first saw her.

  Some people have all the luck. My facial scars and black eyes just make me look like I’d lost every fight I’ve ever been in.

  “Who gave this to you?”

  I tell her, reading her face to see whether the name means anything to her; the real reason I wanted her hoodie pushed back.

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “I know,” I say. “But sooner or later you’d have come across his name or Detective Wells would be forced to give it to you.”

  “Why would Batista give me anything? Oh, I get it.” Tehran works her tongue angrily over her teeth. “You think I’m fucking him.”

  “That’s your business,” I say. “But let’s not pretend there’s not some kind of reciprocity going on between the two of you. One that neither of you want the powers that be to know about. Isn’t that why we’re meeting here and not the Globe offices? Budoff’s just a name on Wells’s list that he’s trying to cross off for the Rambir Roshan murder, but he can’t find him.”

  “And you did?”

  “Not exactly.” I give Anitra Tehran the short version of Sam’s pharmaceutical past and our long-standing arrangement if things ever went south for him. I also tell her of the connections Wells made between Roshan and Sam, the courses that intersected at MIT and the internship at Kirilenko Labs. I keep the nearly million dollars’ worth of poker chips to myself.

  “So what’s with the drop site if your friend’s out of the business?”

  “Old habits. I was just playing a hunch.” And Sam had played his hand the same way. “You think you know what’s on that drive?”

  “No. But we’ll see in a minute.” Tehran plugs the drive into the computer and hits a few keys, her face fully lit by the ghostly blue-green computer screen. “You’re right about me and Wells.” She continues as we wait for it to load. “Not the fucking part, but as a source. That’s why we were at Nick’s. You thought it was a date? The dress and heels? I was actually coming from a fund-raiser when I called him. I had the sense I was being followed and it scared me because I’ve learned to trust my instincts. He picked me up and we went to Nick’s just because. Pure coincidence you were there.” Tehran squints at the screen. “This drive is from Rambir Roshan’s computer. Did you know that?”

  “No. Did Wells spot anyone following you?”

  “He didn’t pick anything up.”

  But then came the Molotov cocktail. Which means whoever Anitra Tehran felt was tailing her must have been pretty adept at it because Wells, though outwardly looking as if all he did was peer into mirrors to check his hair, was as perceptive and tuned-in as anybody I’d ever met.

  “You know they identified the body parts they pulled out of the harbor,” Tehran tells me. “It’s what’s left of Oleg Katanya. Batista said you were up to speed on his connection to Rambir Roshan. The poker chips he was carrying?”

  “I am. Are you working on anything besides the Roshan killing? Or do you have any reason to think that an old story might be blowing back on you?”

  “You mean the real estate series, don’t you? Aside from Eastern Europeans everywhere, I don’t see a solid connection, just a bunch of loose threads.”

  I agree with Tehran, who pulls the hoodie back up as a car pulls to the curb. After a moment, a woman dressed in baker’s whites gets out and heads toward the side door. Tehran leaves the hoodie up.

  “This is all tied in somehow to Rambir Roshan, only I don’t know which tree I’m shaking is the one that’s causing the problem.”

  “A problem? Is that what you call being shot at and firebombed?”

  “A big problem?” Anitra Tehran shrugs bravely. “Anyway, MIT was the logical place for me to start since Roshan’s got no family in the States. But the university really just gave me boiler
plate, citing student privacy rights, university protocol. MIT wants to have it both ways. They’d prefer the coverage of Rambir Roshan’s murder just disappear, but they also want to have it publicly stressed that he was killed off campus.”

  “By like a quarter of a mile.”

  “Still, they didn’t want the publicity to rub off on them in any negative way.”

  “Who’d you get to talk to?”

  “From MIT? Some PR flack, administrators. Campus police, but they only gave me the numbers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Statistics. Student safety, citations, on-campus arrests, break-ins. They’d have you believe the campus was Shangri-La and it probably is. Usually.”

  “Location, location,” I say.

  “Endowment, endowment,” Tehran counters. “Do you know where MIT ranks on the national endowment list as of this year?”

  “Not first,” I say, that spot perennially belonging to Harvard, hovering at about thirty billion dollars. But I knew that MIT wasn’t that far behind and is easily the largest landowner in Cambridge, a decade’s worth of property buying expanding its reach into every neighborhood, which included where the Western Front once stood. The value of that land and everything else MIT’s sucked up is worth billions now.

  “Right. Harvard’s first and MIT is somewhere around fifth with about fifteen billion.”

  “Okay, so the geeks and the preps have more money than God. What’s your point?”

  “I’m saying that they have a large interest in protecting what they have and they have a mechanism in place that makes getting a straight answer almost impossible.”

  “So they don’t want an investigative reporter digging around on a murder case. Makes perfect sense to me. Spook the kids. Spook the big-pocket donors who send their kids.” I smile. “But you’re digging anyway.”

  “As best I can. It’s what I do.”

  “But not with the blessing of your editorial board.”

  “I’m not sure how I’d characterize it. Nobody’s pulled me off the story, but they’ve made it clear they want me to stay clear of any MIT angle.”

  I don’t have to ask why. The cities of Boston and Cambridge both feed at the trough of the multiple educational institutions within their borders. These schools, both small and large, attract massive federal government research money, which powers the humming job engines of the city, which in turn attracts businesses who recruit the best and brightest graduates. Even the housing cycle of leases is dominated by the student and school schedules, the bulk of them renewed every September; Zero’s crews triple in size for what we call Hell Week at the tail end of August, with trucks leased from as far away as Maryland to accommodate crews running eighteen-hour workdays. If you can handle the strain, there’s thousands of dollars to be made, cash on the daily from these moving jobs. And that’s just one business among thousands that rely on schools like MIT to prime the cash pumps. So what’s one dead Indian kid worth on their ledger?

  “And the MIT campus police force is no joke,” Tehran continues. “Every time I show up, there’s somebody there to escort me around, make sure I have access.”

  Enabling them to keep tabs on what questions Tehran’s asking and what she knows. So where has she been? To Rambir Roshan’s graduate housing unit. To the campus gym, where he worked out, the dining halls he ate in, the classes he took, the professors who taught him. The sum total being that he was a model student with a knack for coding, highly intelligent and motivated enough to land himself the TA spot in the poker analytics class taught by Yuki Fuji, who according to Tehran was something of a rock star on campus, as far as professors go.

  “I’m sure you’d get a kick out of her class.” Tehran taps her keyboard momentarily as the light on her screen changes. “Poker being your family thing? So many students sign up for her poker analytics class, they hold a lottery for entry. And the classes are still big enough to warrant Huntington Hall, which seats over a hundred students. Roshan was Fuji’s TA for both semesters last year. Usually they rotate another grad student in, but Roshan stayed for a double.”

  “How unusual is that?”

  “Enough for me to talk to her.”

  “And?”

  “She said Roshan was the only one capable of handling the workload the way she needed it done, due to the size of the class. So she kept him on.”

  “Makes sense. Didn’t have to retrain anyone for the job, take extra time to show them the ropes.” When I have to train someone I just hand them a walkie-talkie and implore them not to get killed. Mostly because I need the Motorola back.

  “Sure,” Tehran agrees.

  “She must have been pretty upset about Roshan, right? Professionally, personally. They must have spent a fair amount of time together.”

  “She played it pretty tight, but no judge, everybody copes different, right?” Tehran takes her eyes off the screen and tilts me a long look from deep inside the cover of her hoodie, like she’s trying to find something on my face. I’m pretty good at this game, but after a while it makes me uncomfortable.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing.” Tehran’s eyes move back to her screen. “I was just thinking.”

  “That Professor Fuji was hiding something?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just not getting much from MIT. I guess what you’re seeing is frustration.”

  “Okay, so let’s say there’s nothing there,” I propose. “What else have you got that’s worth sending a warning via Molotov cocktail and then following up with a sniper’s bullet through your window?”

  “Therein lies the problem. I don’t know. I’ve also been to Kirilenko Labs. You know, Roshan never actually finished his internship.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He was fired.”

  “For what?”

  “HR said he was unreliable. Either showed up late or not at all. Or didn’t complete the work he was assigned. Sometimes his supervisor would find him asleep at his terminal or they’d check on him and he’d be playing online poker. Did you read my last piece?” Tehran asks.

  “I did.” There had been no mention of MIT getting in the way of an investigation or withholding information. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t much to the column at all.

  “Were you able to read between the lines?”

  “That your editors have you on a tight leash when it comes to MIT?”

  “Not exactly, but close enough. Nobody’s come out and told me to go soft. We do good work and if I can confirm everything I write, I know they’ll run it. But at the same time, nobody wants to be responsible for jumping the gun, portraying this city as unsafe for anybody, especially foreigners with all the money international students bring in.”

  “And has Wells had the same luck you did?” Meaning, did the badge get him into places Anitra Tehran couldn’t go?

  “I think we’re in the same boat. Unless he’s holding out on me. All he claimed to get was Roshan’s course schedule, interviews with faculty and some kids in the housing unit where he lived. They have their own police force just like every college campus, but these guys are serious and even cop to cop, pretty tight-lipped.”

  “Like they’d already gotten their marching orders,” I say. “You think Wells is telling you everything?”

  “Probably not. He held Sam Budoff’s name,” she points out. “But he did tell me that when the MIT police searched Roshan’s room after they IDed the body, something was missing. Let’s see how sharp you are: What would be the one indispensable item you figure would be in every kid’s room who went to MIT?”

  “That’s easy,” I say. “A bong.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I dunno,” I try again. “A computer?”

  “Right. Two days before Roshan was killed, there was an attempted break-in at his place, Ashdown House. Campus police made an arrest on the spot.”

  “Who reported the break-in, Roshan?”

  “Nope. He hadn’t been seen for a couple of
days at that point.”

  “He was reported as missing?”

  “No. From the people who were willing to talk to me, I heard it wasn’t unusual for Roshan to disappear for a few days at a time. Obviously someone was looking for something.”

  “You get a name on who was arrested?”

  “You ready for this? Oleg Katanya.”

  “And he was busted with Roshan’s computer?”

  “No. The rooms are tiny; it’s not like there’s space to effectively hide a laptop.”

  “Did you find out where Roshan would disappear to when he went ghost?”

  “See, there’s the interesting thing. Foxwoods, Vegas. Once even to Macau.”

  “Jesus, that’s halfway around the world. You confirm this with anybody else?”

  “Some of the other students in his housing unit. But it was like pulling teeth. None of the internationals would talk. Scared of compromising their scholarships, I think. Maybe they’ve been warned.”

  “But someone talked. And Wells confirmed it?”

  “Yes. He backtracked and spoke to the airlines and Roshan was racking up the frequent flier miles to Vegas. Always paid in cash so it took some doing to track the info down. Also because he used different driver’s licenses, never traveled under his name except for the Macau trip.”

  “Because he needed a passport for that.”

  “Exactly. Wells got hold of the domestic airline footage and it was him on multiple occasions. He even flew out to Vegas for a day, tracked Roshan’s movements and hotels under those names he used.”

  I wonder what he learned. The casinos were pretty tight-lipped regarding personal data on high rollers and it might take a court order to shake that information out of the money tree. But the poker chips seemed to indicate that Roshan had done well. How else would he acquire them? And then give them to Sam for safekeeping.

  “But you’re what, holding on to these nuggets until you piece things together for a bigger story? Or is it a little more complex, like sitting on the story about Brill moving the body on the bridge? And in return Wells keeps you in the loop on the investigation.”