“Holy shit.” Alianna white-knuckles her fists by her sides, looking poised to spring off the couch and sprint outside to safety as if it had been an earthquake.
“It’s the Chelmsford Line commuter rail. This house was the former stationmaster’s depot, which is why it’s so close to the tracks,” Polishuk explains, preempting the question as the echo of the train fades. “At one point in its illustrious history it was also home to a chapter of the Hell’s Angels.” He shrugs elaborately, as if to say even a house can lead multiple lives. “You’re right and wrong about me and the Islas cold case, Alianna. Camilla did haunt me like every other case I didn’t solve. But to some degree Camilla more than most.”
“Why her?” I figure if I’m actually in training, I might as well get a question in.
“Because the whole case was screwy from the get-go. Though we never found Camilla’s body we had solid suspects, circumstantial evidence, not necessarily a definitive motive, but enough to get a prosecutor involved, bring charges before a grand jury.”
Suspects. More than one. My heart starts hammering in my chest, a heat rising up in me. Is this really why Solarte brought me along, to expose me to the truth of my father? To confirm Brill’s and Karl Klaussen’s version of events, as if I needed to hear my father’s misdeeds from the horse’s mouth to believe them?
“So what happened?” I say, my voice shaky to my ear, but not enough for Polishuk to pick up. Or maybe he was just that far out of practice.
“Well, Karl Klaussen you must know about. He just disappeared. Either took a runner or maybe he was killed himself. I never got a chance to find out.”
“Why?” Solarte and I speak as one, look at each other. I’m tempted to follow up with one, two, three, jinx! you owe me a Sprite, but the moment seems too fraught for that.
“Because as me and Nichols, my partner at the time, started to piece things together, we got called in to the chief of detectives’ office and that,” Polishuk makes a washing motion with his hands, “was the end of that.”
“You were pulled off the case?” I needed to hear the words again. “Why?”
Polishuk just shakes his head.
“Okay then.” Solarte picks up my line. “How about by who? Chief of detectives isn’t high enough on the food chain to make that kind of call.”
“We were never told. But it didn’t take a genius to figure it came from the Boston field office of the FBI. I knew some stand-up people in the Bureau then, and they told me to let it go, that we were wading into some shit that was over our head and to leave things alone.”
“You mean leave William Meyers alone?” I say.
“Now how the hell would you know that?” Polishuk rears back in astonishment. “I know for a fact that’s not in any file you could get your hands on. Matter of fact, you can’t even get your hands on the cold case file or you wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
“Will Meyers is my father,” I say.
“Like hell he is.”
“And he’s got Alzheimer’s,” I say. “Bad. I can’t really trust that anything he says is real.” Not that he’s talking at all anymore, but Polishuk doesn’t need to know that.
“So fuck him,” Polishuk spits. “He deserves it.” His eyes are wild, the darkness that had shown in his file photograph pooling and then draining just as quickly as he looks beyond me, to the pond outside and the reeds swaying gently in the breeze. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that,” he says softly, meeting my eyes. “The sins of our fathers.”
I accept his apology with a nod. “You’re convinced my dad was a suspect in her killing? How? I mean, I’d heard the motive ascribed to him, protecting Klaussen and Mass’s album release. But Camilla Islas was a junkie, I’m sure you knew that, her and Klaussen. Maybe she ODed. Or maybe they’d planned on disappearing together. She’d gone first and then Klaussen met her and they walked off happily ever after into the sunset.”
Though of course I knew that scenario wasn’t true. Because it was Klaussen who had hired Alianna Solarte to reignite the investigation, though not for the same reason Polishuk would want it resumed. Aside from Klaussen’s assertion that he just wanted to give Camilla Islas a proper burial in time for Día, was there something else he might be after that Solarte and I just weren’t seeing?
“What did my father have to gain by getting rid of Islas?” I move on, Solarte just content to sit back and watch me now, maybe filling out some trainee evaluation form in her head.
“It’s not so much gain as it was to lose,” Polishuk says. “Your father had too much on the line, too much invested in Mass. It was Camilla who got Klaussen hooked on smack. I mean, he was no choir boy, it was Boston rock and roll in the 1970s, but prior to Camilla there was no indication he was a drug addict. After? They were Boston’s Sid and Nancy. Courtney and Kurt. Pick your era. Mass had just come out with their album, just landed that gig to open for Led Zeppelin, right? They were going to be bigger than fucking Aerosmith. Bigger than The Cars. But your dad knew none of it would happen if Klaussen kept on the path he was on, a full-blown junkie. So he gets rid of Camilla. Maybe with Klaussen. And that would have been his mistake. Klaussen was losing his shit, probably getting weak, maybe even wanted to confess. Every time Nichols or I went to interview him, your father was there, or had Klaussen lawyered up. I remember going to a show at the Channel to keep an eye on him and people were throwing shit at the stage, booing him through the entire set. I’ll give him his due, Klaussen was no pussy. He waded right into that crowd and took on a whole pack of meatheads. Got his ass kicked and the bouncers were slow to break it up, too. If I was a betting man, I’d wager the house your father decided to cut his losses and get rid of Klaussen, too.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not what happened.”
“How do you know?”
I look at Solarte before I answer. Your call, her silence says.
“Because I know my father,” I say, but the words sound trite as soon as I utter them. How much do any of us really know anybody, especially our parents, whether they disappear all at once like my mother or one piece, one memory at a time like my father, that Alzheimer’s boulder rolling downhill and picking up speed every day? And of course, also because Klaussen was still alive and strumming, though I wasn’t about to tell Polishuk that, at least not yet.
“Truly, Zesty.” Polishuk regards me like a wounded bird that’s fallen out of his nest. “What I said about your dad and his Alzheimer’s … I’m sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought.…”
“The FBI.” Solarte stirs from her corner.
“Yes. Thank you. Klaussen was gone and as I said, the focus moved to your father and that’s when the FBI warned me and Nichols off through the chief. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have to remind you of the FBI and their entanglements with McKenna and the Boston Mob of those days.” Polishuk snaps his fingers and points at me. “I read about you in the papers, not that long ago? You were somehow involved in the McKenna hunt.”
“I was,” I say. But if all he knew came from the papers, then he didn’t know much. But he did seem to intuit that was the extent of what I was willing to say about it.
“That’s some heavy burden for any young man to carry around.”
“Family is family” is all I say to that, leaving the metaphorical messenger allusions alone.
“Understood. Well, aside from Klaussen and your dad, there were really no other leads. Camilla worked at Spit, which was a dance bar on Lansdowne Street. We pretty much checked everybody out there. She was also dealing some coke to support her habit, no surprise, but it was small-time. She wasn’t connected. But you didn’t just come for stories and conjecture from an old man. So what can I do for you, Ms. Solarte? Alianna.”
“I was hoping to look at the cold case file.” Solarte locks Polishuk in the tractor beam of her vision.
“You know it’s against departmental regulations to make copies of files,” Polishuk says.
“Okay,” Solarte says. “I
still want to see it.”
“I’m afraid you can’t.”
“You mean you won’t let me.”
“I know who you are, Ms. Solarte. But you don’t work for IAD anymore. When I say you can’t, I mean that you can’t, in the literal sense. Ten years ago I was living in Arlington, in the house I grew up in, actually. My mom had recently passed and I was sorting through her things. I’d moved in to take care of her during her last years. There was an electrical issue and the house burned down. With all the files in it. Everything.”
Which explains the lack of pictures anywhere in Polishuk’s house except for those two on his desk.
“That’s really what it took for me to be here. To be this.” Polishuk tugs on his wild man beard, flips his silver ponytail.
“You lost everything,” Solarte says.
“That’s right. All the files, the badges, the old uniform…”
“And started clean. No dead girls, no past failures and regrets.”
“It was the best”—the house begins to shake again, the rattle of glass—“thing that ever happened to me and when…” Polishuk’s lips continue to move, but everything he says is drowned out in the long rumbling of the train as it thunders by and we sit and look at each other waiting for it to pass, for the tranquility and calm and quiet to return to the room. But whatever it was that Polishuk had spoken, he must have decided it wasn’t important enough to repeat and so we just continue to sit there in the silence, in the thick warm crossbeams of light from the skylights as a galaxy of dust gently undulates in the air. I swear, if I closed my eyes for ten seconds, I could fall asleep right here sitting up, it’s that peaceful.
Instead, we all rise and shake hands and Solarte says, “I’m happy you’ve found this place, Peter, it is beautiful here. I just don’t know how you live with that noise.”
“What noise?” Polishuk creases his face with a modest smile and winks at her. “Give it time, Alianna,” he adds. “That’s all it is. Time. You’d be surprised at what fades away. I actually don’t even hear it anymore. Any of it. Any of them.”
THIRTY
Yuki Fuji’s Poker Analytics and Theory graduate-level course is still popular enough to be held in Huntington Hall, which offers stadium seating, the security attendant giving only a perfunctory once-over to the students entering the classroom and not picking me out of the crowd even though I wasn’t carrying a laptop or a trillion dollars in student debt. Or maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit. For all I know the guy at the desk was the next Spenser for Hire and I just looked that smart out of my biking gear.
It was nice to pretend, though. As kids, Zero and I would often skip school and meander through college campuses, marveling at the tidy and organized otherworld maintained for a class of young people who appeared to know what they wanted from life and had the means and good fortune to incubate their dreams in a place that shielded them like a force field.
Zero and I would speak of this as we leaned in shoulder to shoulder to share a clove cigarette or the last of a roach, and though we were seeing the same things, we had completely different takes on it.
While I maintained an idealist’s view of college campuses—an occasional pause of study among Ultimate Frisbee, keg parties, and coffee shops—I also had legit respect for the steady grind it must have taken some of the kids to be there. They couldn’t have all waltzed in on the backs of tutors, essay mills, test-prep factories, and their parents’ legacy status.
Zero, in contrast, saw nothing but a zoo of privilege. To him, the ivy-covered walls, the hovering security, was nothing but evidence of a machine that feigned meritocracy but was as insular and guarded as any criminal organization. Zero’s young anarchist’s brain seethed at the seeming ease with which these young people glided through life blissfully unaware of the bumpers set up in their lanes to make sure that they knocked over the pins lined up before them.
At this point in our lives, our mother was long gone, her once sporadic and unpredictable communiqués dwindled to nothing, the vanishing point arriving as a silent pinprick of pain that we never discussed. Did my father speak to Zero of our mother in those days? I had no way of knowing. We each occupied a different space regarding our relationship with him, though Zero shared more of his outlook on life, his distrust of the system, his cynicism.
My father’s silence after our mother disappeared must have frustrated the FBI as they bugged our phones, and then showed up periodically as another political contemporary of hers was either freed from prison or published a book, the public infatuation regarding her actions and disappearance always resurrected on the anniversary of the Bank of Boston heist.
The vanishing point was so much closer at home, our father’s nocturnal poker schedule, games that we no longer attended as we grew older, creating a distance between us; we were basically on our own and left free to play our own hands. We often played them wildly, Zero relishing his barroom brawls, our father’s connections effortlessly getting us into bars and clubs even though we were underage and looked it.
When Zero started his moving company, the bulk of his early jobs were student moves, the two men and a truck variety. They were quick, relatively small hauls in or out of campus housing, or first apartments, generally speaking a step up for these young customers who rarely tipped and who confirmed Zero’s early beliefs regarding the incubation of wealth and privilege. These customers treated Zero as he suspected they would. As if he were barely there at all and at most a curiosity, their rare brush with an authentic blue-collar world.
It must have stung Zero in those early days, though he would never admit it; every few months another tattoo was added, an armor of color going up on his skin and something harder settling in. Or maybe that’s just my way of looking at him, trying to read his down cards. Even preparing for our father’s death without me was another layer between us; not a word spoken, only the prayer for the dead filtering past his lips and giving him away.
“Why does MIT offer a course on poker?” Yuki Fuji must be wearing a small microphone that blends into her long black dress because I can’t see it, her confident voice flooding out of the speakers filling the hall while her graduate teaching assistant, a short kid in an MIT hoodie with the starched button-down collar peeking out at the neck, works the PowerPoint, eager as a DJ spinning records. A few of the students had actually applauded her entrance as she appeared through a side door, stage right.
“Well, for starters, nobody wants to be a donkey,” she says and a couple of predictable eey-yaws filter out of the crowd.
A donkey in poker parlance is somebody who thinks they know the game because they’ve played in house games and won some money, maybe even been anointed king or queen of their small poker world, but would get eaten alive by experienced professionals.
“And because you’re sitting here, because this grand institution of learning has invited you to pursue your passion, you chose this class because you thought it would be fun. And it will be.” Yuki Fuji smiles slyly. “But when we talk poker, what we are really talking is risk assessment as the type practiced in the business and finance world, where most of you will undoubtedly end up. We’re talking a basic stoicism which many of you will probably never actually master, and by which I mean poker face. Why won’t you master it? Because your alumni predecessors have shattered your attention spans by making you screen addicts.” At this, Fuji’s TA clicks a button, the screen projecting a mathematical formula I’m likely the only one in the audience who doesn’t have a clue what it means. “Expected value is identical in poker as it is in math,” Fuji says as students squirrel their fingers over their keyboards, taking notes. Or order shit off Amazon.
“And this,” Fuji says, as a slide with a curved line graph appears behind her, “is where calculus comes in.”
And here I totally lose her, though a number of young men start shifting in their seats like she’s gotten to the gospel, their dicks gone rock hard at the mention of calculus.
I try to picture Sam in this class. Undoubtedly he would have understood the math, but I’d never seen him play poker and not once had we ever talked about the game.
“Any questions thus far?”
There were, mostly mathematical in nature; they could have been talking another language. I wait my turn then raise my hand.
“Yes?” Fuji points at me.
“This is all pretty interesting but I have to note you didn’t say anything about the human element. I’m wondering how you think all these sexy math formulas will work when they’re thrown off by what you haven’t mentioned, which is bluffing.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to castigate you, but you need to pay closer attention … your name?”
“Zesty.”
“Zesty,” she repeats, as most people do initially. Which you’d think would annoy me but doesn’t as I’m always curious to see what condiment they’ll relate my name to. “Bluffing is exactly what I’ve been talking about for the last ten minutes.” She winks at me and the curved line graph goes up again, followed by what could be Einstein’s theory of relativity, followed by who the fuck knows; it might be the magic formula for getting into a coed’s pants, in which case I really should be taking notes. The graduate assistant is practically dancing now. Maybe he’s seen this impending dressing-down before and it’s about to get hot in here.
“It just looks like game theory to me,” I say. “Not real life.”
A Town Called Malice Page 22