“Namestnikov was one of the old thinkers, brutality for every problem.”
“You mean like burning whores?”
“That. And there are at least a half dozen murders linked to him, but nobody will testify.”
“So what’s the new way of thinking?”
“Technology. Insurance, mostly Medicare fraud.”
“Katanya was arrested trying to break into Rambir Roshan’s student housing,” I say. “Ashdown House on campus.”
“How the fuck you know that?” Brill says and then sees it. “You’ve been talking to Tehran, too.” He turns and points his cigar emphatically at Wells. “That’s on you. Like Zesty wasn’t enough of a pain in the ass the first time around.”
“Since when has the Russian Mob been a player in Boston?” I ignore Brill’s compliment and direct my question to Wells, who has taken back the photographs, blowing at the dusty fingerprints Brill left.
“Low level about ten years.” The photographs go back into the envelope. “And you can thank the Big Dig for that. The Dig brought opportunity. Construction, paving, steel. And that means unions. A lot of these Russians had experience on large-scale dam operations in the Ukraine, something called the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan. But it’s mostly been white-collar crimes like I said, and some gambling, high-end prostitution. We think murder for hire, but not in Boston. Miami mostly. Down south. Atlanta. New Orleans. That’s Nikita Kucherov’s thing. Along with his driving he provides security for Antti Voracek.”
“What Wells is trying to tell you is the Russians are big believers in not shitting where they eat. And they have the ability to blend in if they don’t open their mouths to talk. And anyway, in a city with so many people from someplace else, they usually don’t get much of a second look.”
“That sounds to me like code-speak for they’re white,” I say.
“Sharp.” Brill points his cigar at me. “Give Advil a headache, but sharp.”
“And Jewish,” Wells adds. “These psychopaths. That’s a wrinkle most people can’t wrap their heads around. But mostly they’re just Russian.”
“Which means what?”
“You ever seen the babushkas at the market, Zesty? They’ll cut you in line, snatch the last apple out of your hand, play bumper car with their carriages and send you flying. They have that mentality still and no reservations about doing it. Even when there’s plenty to go around.”
“They make up their own rules is what Wells is telling you. Whatever does the job or sends the appropriate message.”
“Like shooting a reporter?” I suggest.
Brill and Wells look at each other. Eyebrows up for Brill. Lips turned down for Wells. In their relationship, that’s the face of an agreement.
“Zesty, you missed your calling. So what’s with Katanya breaking into Roshan’s place? Obviously he was looking for something and now both of them are dead. You got any theories on that?”
“Talk to Anitra Tehran,” I say.
“I already did,” Wells says. “She’s got something for me to look at, maybe account numbers, maybe something more that ties Roshan to the real estate deals she covered.” Wells runs through the list of Monopoly names on the files that Tehran couldn’t penetrate.
Brill shrugs. “What are they? And how’d she get ahold of them?”
“She wouldn’t say.” Tehran has kept her word she’d leave Sam’s name out of this mess for as long as it was possible. “But I’m about to go in and try to find out. There are two geeks arriving at headquarters who are not very happy with me right about now. And speaking of geeks. Sam Budoff?”
“Nada.” The lie rolls easily off my tongue. Wells can give me the stank-eye as long as he pleases but I’m to the untruth what a zombie is to the undead. The only thing the detective will catch in my eyes is his own reflection.
“Well then, I’m off.” Wells looks about, appraising our work. The walls will be up by the end of the morning. Brill had salvaged and sanded some molding from a house in Mattapan and we’ll be putting it up soon, too. All the exposed brickwork around the windows and above the fireplace mantel have been stripped of paint, the first coat of sealant giving them a shiny reddish coat that stands out beautifully in contrast to the light marble fireplace and the metal barn door on the sliding track.
In a couple of hours dawn will break outside the open windows with a view of the shade trees lining the street and the other turn-of-the-century townhouses that have already been restored to their original beauty.
“Place is coming along.” Wells nods approvingly.
“Too bad you can’t afford it,” Brill replies, his back turned to his partner, getting in the last word. Only, when he wheels back around to see how it landed, Wells is gone, not even his footprints left in the fine snow-white drywall dusting.
TWENTY-NINE
Alianna Solarte pulls up in front of Buttery, where I’m waiting with a couple of coffees and two plain croissants. A familiar-looking blonde who’s never given me the time of day actually looks at me from her outside corner seat. Probably because I’m out of my biking gear and dressed in dark Levi’s, weathered chocolate brown Doc Martens, and a navy sweater with a black cashmere scarf. Or maybe she’s impressed I’m back two days in a row and could afford not one, but two coffees, a sure sign of prosperity if ever there was one.
Solarte is of the same mind. When I sit, she dips her head below her visor and says, “Wow, you can afford this place? I must be paying you too much.”
Actually, Brill had paid me two hundred dollars in cash and had fronted me another three to lock me in for the rest of the week as we had to coordinate the timing with the plumber he’d scheduled.
As I move a manila file aside so I don’t crush it, Solarte starts navigating the neighborhood and doesn’t need me to guide her as she catches 93 North, against traffic. We make our way to Chelmsford in only twenty-five minutes before entering Billerica, a mostly working-class suburb that’s also, inevitably, showing signs of new money: larger-house construction next to modest ranches and colonials, a Starbucks in what was once strictly Dunkin’ Donuts Land.
“Remind me again why you wanted me with you on this?” I’m still groggy from only a few hours of sleep and just one cup of coffee. If Solarte doesn’t drink hers soon, I’m going to guzzle it, the red lipstick smudge on the lid not scaring me one bit. Solarte is dressed almost identically to me, minus the savoir faire of the scarf.
“I figured I’d get you out of your biking gear, show you the ropes of an investigation.” When Solarte smiles, tiny cracks show around her eyes. “Let you watch a master at work.”
“You’re training me?”
“Opportunity knocks, baby, but it rarely begs. Don’t you think it’s high time you picked up a couple new skills?”
“Gee, Mom, I don’t know.”
“Now that shit, you better cut out.” Solarte jabs at my head but keeps her eyes on the road. “Read what’s in the file and tell me what you pick up.”
I open the file to a couple of stock photographs of Homicide detectives Peter Polishuk and Eric Nichols and leaf through the pages of Solarte’s handwritten notes. There are two addresses written down, one of them in Billerica. “We’re going to visit the detective who worked the Camilla Islas case,” I say.
Polishuk is retired. His partner, Eric Nichols, deceased. Stint in the military, tail end of the Vietnam war, graduated Holy Cross after he’d already become a cop.
“You put this file together, it’s not official.” I shuffle papers. “These guys seem to have a pretty good clearance rate, but I don’t know. What’s a good batting average for a homicide?”
“A thousand. Easy, tiger.” Solarte snatches her coffee as I start to reach for it.
“Obviously the Islas case set them back a few digits. Can’t solve them all, right?”
“Nope. You can only try.”
“Polishuk and Nichols tried?”
“Like you said, the file’s not official; this is just what I was able
to dig up.”
“Well, obviously, the case was never solved. And we know, officially, it doesn’t exist. And with BPD, once you’re out, you’re out?” I say.
Solarte looks at me long enough with her eyes off the road to get her Official Boston Driver Scorecard. “There something you want to say to me, Zesty?”
“Yeah. Brakes!”
Solarte deftly swerves around the mail truck pulled halfway over to the side of the road. “Tell me more.” She motions to the open file.
I look at the photographs again. They’re pretty standard professional head shots with a BPD blue background, Polishuk with a look on his face that’s somewhere between an uncomfortable eighth-grade grin and a mug shot scowl. He’s large through the shoulders with no-nonsense eyes and a straight-up crew cut, big ears, and a sunburned nose.
Nichols is a dead ringer for Art Garfunkel if you’d stretched the singer out on a medieval rack and elongated his features—parabola chin, butter popcorn hair.
The back of Polishuk’s picture is dated 1996, which would put him probably somewhere in his mid-fifties then. Judging by the lines around his eyes and mouth, it looks like he’s forgotten how to smile. Is this the fate of all Homicides? Does Wells realize that all his exfoliating creams and spa treatments will be for naught when the final score is tallied? Or will he be the first to buck the trend, age like George Clooney, and buckle knees well into his seventies?
“Married and divorced. Couple of kids,” I drone on. “Must be in their forties now.” Simple math. “The file’s pretty thin. No offense.”
Solarte snorts and turns the wheel sharply. “And I was just about to give you the rest of my coffee. Okay. We’re here.”
“Here” is a long driveway off the main road, a thick line of pine trees blocking the northern edge, the steep descent bringing us into an unexpected pocket of serenity, marshland and a wave of silky milkweed to the south, a deep woods on the eastern edge. The house itself is modest, vinyl sided, made to seem larger by the attached screened-in porch that looks out over the marsh and tiered variegated shrubbery that had been planted along the walls and stairs fashioned from four-foot-long rectangular granite blocks that must weigh close to five hundred pounds apiece. Large black solar panels are attached to the roof.
There’s a grassy yard that rounds to the side of the house ringed by mature elm or something that isn’t just pine, a large fenced-in garden to the left of where we parked, a few late tomatoes still coloring the vines. A brick path meanders through a garden somehow still retaining its mix of blue, orange, and white flowers. What’s probably an old well is covered by a square of treated pine and held in place by a five-foot cut piece of rusted train track sitting diagonally across the wood to keep it in place. Metal sculptures fashioned from discarded appliance parts hang like mobiles in the trees. Pottery overflows with cuttings from other plants I don’t see growing in the garden out front. A sign to the left of the front door reads 1876 and it takes me a moment to realize it’s referencing the date of the house’s construction, not the address.
“Do you hear that?” My question stops Solarte’s cocked fist at the door. She’s already stabbed the doorbell twice to no avail.
“What?”
I look around the property. There’s not another house within view. If there’s traffic above on the road, I can’t hear it. A squirrel dashing through the trees snaps a twig, which pops like a firecracker. A soft breeze brings the smell of lavender and the hollow knocking of wooden wind chimes somewhere close but out of view.
“Nothing,” I say. “I just haven’t heard this kind of quiet in a long time. It’s nice, right? Even the air feels different. Those flowers,” I point to the garden, “shouldn’t still be in bloom.”
“If you say so. I’d go crazy here. What the fuck…” Solarte nearly falls through the doorway as a man opens the door wide and reaches for her at the elbow to keep her upright.
“It doesn’t work,” he says, releasing her. “Or to be more specific, I’d detached it because I can hear whenever anyone pulls into the drive. Please, come in. And I’m sorry, I don’t mean to rush you, but I forgot when you called earlier that I had something else scheduled for this time. I can only give you a few minutes.”
Polishuk looks nothing like his photograph. In fact, he looks like Ansel Adams, the famous Yosemite photographer, if Adams also went to a lot of Grateful Dead shows and favored rounded John Lennon eyeglasses. He’s balding in front but his hair is long and tied in a gray ponytail behind him. A tangle of white beard covers most of his face and his eyes seem lighter through the glasses; not in that milky cataract sort of way, but as if there’s something that’s been lifted out of the dead-pool darkness that had shown in the stock photographs. Solarte sees this change, too, and makes a gesture with her hands that’s halfway between a question and an open invitation for a hug.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Polishuk leads us into the living room. “I get some version of this whenever someone who I haven’t seen in a while from back in the day stops by. Which isn’t often.”
“You have to admit, it’s quite a change.” Solarte looks around. The room is filled with plants, built-in bookcases crammed with novels and ornithology guides and books of bird photography, a wood-burning stove in good working condition with a glass door on blackened hinges. Wide plank glossy floors reflect a vaulted dark cedar ceiling about twenty feet high at its apex, two domed skylights bringing in twin columns of natural light that cross in a giant X in the center of the great room. Percussion instruments are hung in a row on a crossbeam—maracas, tambourines, triangles. On the surface of a cherry antique roll-top desk are two color photographs in matching frames. Most likely his grandkids; they look too new to be his own children. Sliding glass doors offer a view of the grassy backyard and a small pond with lily pads and pink lotus flowers floating on the surface. “What can I tell you,” Polishuk responds after a measured moment. “When I left the force, I just decided to be me; let the freak flag fly.”
“You’d been holding it in?” Solarte is genuinely puzzled but I totally get it. Sometimes people put themselves in a box and that’s where they stay forever, defined by what they do for work or the familial responsibilities that bind them to others—spouse, children, parents. Genuine metamorphosis, a true shedding of that first skin, is a rarity, at least in my experience, likely because it doesn’t come easily; only to those who dare to take that risk and walk through that fire, navigating the ultra-thin tightrope between narcissistic selfishness and outright courage. Or maybe it’s not that complicated; if you can lay your head on a pillow and sleep at night, that’s all there is to it, fuck everybody else.
Whatever the case happens to be with Polishuk, it looks genuine and it’s a good reminder, for me anyway, that we only stop evolving when we allow others to define us. Now stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
“I can’t say it was that conscious a decision, Ms. Solarte. It’s just something didn’t feel a hundred percent right with me, like I was constantly keeping something at bay. Throughout my entire career.”
“Huh.” Solarte grunts.
“I didn’t know what it was at the time. Now I do. Ms. Solarte—”
“Alianna.”
“Alianna. As you know, I can tell you’d been a cop once, so you know what I’m talking about. It’s not just a job, is it?”
“No.”
“It’s a way of being.”
“Yes.”
“And if you’ve never been a cop, say like this young man…”
“Zesty Meyers,” I introduce myself and we shake hands, Polishuk with a slight tilt of his head indicating the name is ringing a bell to him.
“Like Zesty,” Polishuk continues. “Then you never fully realize how the job doesn’t just define you, but becomes a part of everything you do, from where you decide to sit when you’re in a restaurant, to how you look at people, question their motives. You don’t look like a private investigator, Zesty. Where’d you get that
shiner?”
“I’m a bike messenger.” I kill two inquiries with one answer.
“Ah, interesting.” Polishuk looks like he’s trying to conjure something up from the back of his mind, but then gives up. “What can I do for you, Alianna? Like I said, I only have a few minutes.”
“Then I’ll get right to the point. I’m looking into the disappearance of Camilla Islas.”
“You mean her murder.” Polishuk’s smile fades. “She was declared dead in 1983. That’s a long time ago.”
“Yes,” Solarte says.
“And if I remember right, I heard her father died in a car crash in eighty-six and her mom of cancer in ninety-three, a few years before I retired.”
“That’s correct.”
“And she had no other relatives in the country, her parents were Mexican immigrants. Illegal, in fact, not that it had any bearing on the case. We let them be. They’d suffered enough. We live in less welcome times now, don’t we?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“So it’s thirty-plus years later and you’re looking into her murder. Why?”
“You mean who hired me?”
“That would be a start.”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
“Really? Well then, I’m afraid that’s just as well because now I have to go.” Polishuk gestures to the door like a practiced maître d’. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Solarte doesn’t budge. “Your memory can’t be that good.”
“Excuse me?”
“To remember when Camilla Islas’s parents died. I doubt that information was ever added to the cold case file.” Solarte smiles painfully, like a tooth is bothering her. She takes a deep breath. “What I’m saying is, for all your Trappist monk appearance, your beautiful and secluded home, you never let go of the Islas case. How could you? She haunted you, didn’t she?”
Polishuk looks at Solarte for what seems like a long time before nodding to himself. “Why don’t you have a seat, Alianna, Zesty. Can I offer you some tea?”
Solarte and I decline the tea but take a seat on the couch as Polishuk putters around in the kitchen before pulling over an old platform rocker with new upholstery. He sets the tea down on a small table and I notice tiny waves starting to move inside the mug as he’s about to speak, followed by the ceramic rattle of the cup on saucer, the entire house starting to tremble lightly, a few of the percussion instruments—maracas, tambourines—coming to life on their own and then, as if guided by an invisible conductor, joined by the tinkling of glasses in the kitchen, faint at first, and then the entire orchestra drowned out by the thundering passing of a train just beyond where we’d parked the car.
A Town Called Malice Page 21