Loose Change: The Case Files of a Homeless Investigator

by Sean Huxter

“Seriously. You're in the clear. I just wanted you to know.” He turned to the two officers behind him and the one that had blocked my exit. “It's ok, I got it. Thanks, officers.” The uniformed cops walked a circle around me and left the alley.

  “So that's it?” I said.

  “No, that's not it, but you're in the clear at least. We still don't know who did it, but we know where and we know how. That's a start.”

  I slumped down to my knees and breathed.

  “Sorry I suspected you, but look, I had every reason.”

  He was right. I'da suspected me.

  “Fingerprints taken at your house after you called the police in 1998 were definitely a match for the victim. We know he was one of two who broke into your house, beat and sexually assaulted your wife

  and your daughter, fourteen at the time, and stole some valuable art items.”

  He knew it all. All these years on the street I never told a damn soul what happened that night. At least not all of it. I figured if I kept it inside it was like it never happened. Even Old Fernie doesn't know that my wife and child were raped in front of me while I was ratchetstrapped to the stair bannister. No one knew that except the Police, and they could never catch the bastards who did it. And now one was dead.

  “Yeah. Look, I'm truly sorry... for what happened. And I want you to know I read the case file. The cops on the job at the time really did put in the effort. They just had so little to go on. They even kept an eye out nationally for the sale of any of the art that you reported missing. Eventually the case went cold. These things happen.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Turley stood with me for a long time. I eventually felt the adrenaline leave my body, and I was ready to collapse from exhaustion. Turley finally started walking away down the alley towards Arlington leaving me with a job to do.

  “Turley!” I shouted.

  He turned. “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You're welcome.”

  “And...”

  “Yeah?”

  “You might want to go back to Berkeley Restorations and have another look 'round.

  “Why?”

  “'Night, Detective.”

  I turned and went back to my dumpster, but not for the night. Not yet. I had somewhere to go.

  Chapter 10 I dragged my exhausted carcass up to Beacon Hill, found the address of Mr. James Huntington and knocked on the door.

  Some time later I could see through a draped glass door-front, a man approaching. He pulled aside the drape. He didn't like what he saw and began walking back to what he had been so rudely interrupted from.

  “Mr. Huntington, it's about the statuette we cleaned for you!” He stopped abruptly, turned slowly, and came back to the door.

  Now I like to think of myself as a basically honest man. I'm on the streets and sometimes it's hard to feed myself, but I never steal. I often walk through the open-air market in behind Faneuil Hall, which is full of fresh produce, but I have never swiped as much as an apple. I pay my way, thanks in part to my newspaper sales and an occasional influx of money from nosing around in other people's problems. But I have a confession to make. When I was poking through Berkeley Restorations I did steal something. A business card. But hey, it's like they want you to have those anyway, so it wasn't really stealing.

  I held up the stolen card to the door's glass window and the man read it. He opened the door.

  “Mr. Huntington?”

  “Yes, I am he.”

  “It's about the statuette. The golden dryad. We did a cleaning job for you.”

  “Yes...” he said, hesitantly.

  “I've come because I discovered a slight problem with the statuette, and I think I can clear it up.”

  “Ok...”

  “May I come in?”

  He took another long look at me, and I confess that I didn't look much like a reputable art restorer, but then what does a reputable art restorer look like? If you've read the Lovejoy series by Jonathan Gash, the title character is an art divvy, a diviner, and he basically looks like a tramp. I could be cast to play him any day.

  “Certainly.” He stood aside and I entered.

  There in the corner of his living room stood the lovely dryad on its ebony base. Its gold luster was magnificent. It really was a beautiful work.

  “Yes, you see,” I began, “my assistant did some of the cleaning and I am embarrassed to say that he did not as thorough a job with the polishing as I would have done, and I'm here to rectify the situation.” I glanced around the room hoping to see a clock. I didn't. Do people even have clocks on walls anymore? It's all smart phones these days. Do people even wear watches anymore?

  “Mr. … Sorry, I didn't catch your name...”

  “Dyson. Ted Dyson.” I told him the name on the card – one of Mosley's employees. So for now I was Ted Dyson, specialist in gold cleaning.

  “Mr. Dyson. What can I do for you?”

  “If you don't mind, I'd like to finish the job. It will only take a few minutes with my trusty cleaning solution,” I pulled from my pocket a cloth rag and a small bottle of minty breath spray that had a very generic looking label. What? It's not like we can all shop at name-brand stores.

  “Uh... sure... I don't see the harm. But I wasn't... dissatisfied with the cleaning.”

  He was acting somewhat suspicious, but then he was talking to a strange man he had never met before who had insinuated himself into his house containing some priceless art.

  I examined the statue and pretended to appraise its lackadaisical polish. “Tut, tut, tut... Terence did a poor job on the shoulder and the underarms. Lazy man. I must apologize for his less-than-professional effort, Mr. Huntington. Still, I'll only be a few minutes...” I began whistling as I sprayed the golden statue with the minty breath spray and began rubbing it with the cloth rag.

  I picked the statue up and it came clean off the base. I pretended that was natural. Of course it should have been fastened tightly to the base. Under the statuette I saw several cylindrical plugs that were most decidedly not gold. I put the statue back as if that was exactly how it should be. And I had discovered the motive.

  “I think that more or less does it, Mr. Huntington. I appreciate your patience and your indulgence, and again I apologize for the unprofessional work of my colleague. I will certainly be having words with him tomorrow morning.”

  I turned to leave and was confronted with a pistol inches from my face.

  “How stupid do you think I am, Mr Dyson?”

  “Pardon me?” I said, trying to look shocked and affronted.

  “Shut up. You think you can pretend you don't know I killed your boss, but I already know you know, or you at least suspect. Well you're right. I killed the son-of-a-bitch. No one cheats me out of thousands of dollars and gets away with it! Oh, it was such a clean job, I almost didn't suspect, and I wouldn't have if I hadn't dropped the statuette trying to place it on its pedestal stand.”

  “Look, Mr. Huntington, I'm not...”

  “Shut up. Your boss was a crook, Mr. Dyson. I saw what he did to that statuette. Do you know that it's pure solid gold? Of course you do, you work in art restoration.

  “I'm not stupid. I weighed the piece when I got it back. I'm wise to these tricks. And do you know what? It weighed exactly the same as when I brought it in for cleaning. So you see he almost got away with it.

  “But then I dropped it and the base snapped off. That's when I saw the drill holes in the body of the statuette filled with cheap lead, and because lead weighs less than gold, some holes were drilled into the ebony base and filled with lead to compensate. I mean this statuette weighed exactly the same, but now contains

  thousands of dollars less gold! Fucking thief!”

  I was looking for clocks again, desperately. How much time had passed since I saw Turley? I was really counting on Turley being as diligent as I always suspected he would be. It shouldn't take him long to find the hidden room, since I left the panel wide open, and th
e address... where the hell was he?

  Before I could take another breath there was a knock on the door.

  “Mr. Huntington! Detective Turley, Boston Homicide. Could you please open the door?”

  Huntington shoved the pistol into my nose. “Don't make a fucking sound. I'm going to the door and I'm going to get rid of the cop.”

  He turned and I reached back and toppled that precious gold statuette which hit the ground with a godawful racket with me close behind. Turley looked into the window and saw me on the floor.

  “Mr. Huntington, I'm coming in!” He began to kick at the door. Huntington turned his pistol to the door and got a shot off before Turley burst in and shot Huntington clean in the chest.

  Huntington fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Turley kicked the gun away from his dead hand and ran to me. He kneeled and said “You ok?”

  “I am. Better get your boys in here.”

  “Already on their way.”

  “You'll find Mosley's fingerprints all over that statuette. That and a close examination of the statuette will provide your motive.”

  “But you, you're not hurt?”

  “I'm fine. What the hell took you so long?”

  Chapter 11 I was sitting with Turley in his office which he shares with three other junior detectives. It was late at night and we were alone. Turley had opened a beer and offered one to me. I declined, regretfully.

  “You're partly responsible for this badge,” he said, pointing to his new detective shield. “Sure, I passed the exam, but what really got me in was the serious collars I was bringing in. For a beat cop to bring in murderers, drug dealers, international war criminals, well... let's say that got their attention. I have you to thank for it.”

  “Glad I could be of help,” I said.

  “Doing a search on the vic's fingerprints led us directly to a cold case. There was no identification, but his prints were filed in the database. He's evaded identification for years. I found this in the locker.”

  He pointed to an aged white file box with hand-printed Sharpie writing on the label. “Recognize the name?”

  I did.

  “I read through your case, and you can probably understand why I suspected you for this murder. And let me tell you straight up. Looking at this box, if I were in your shoes I'da fucking done it, and slept better at night knowing I did.”

  “Sure, but you were wrong.”

  “I know. I'm sorry.”

  “I mean yes, I read Loose Change every chance I get, but I wouldn't have connected that bad, blurry photo. When I finally saw it, you helped put the photo into context and that's when I recognized the guy. By then he was already dead, and I think I'm glad he was, otherwise I'd be out there now tracking the bastard down so I could kill him myself.”

  I stared at the box on Turley's desk. I bet I knew every slip of paper in there, and I knew what they all said.

  Turley tapped the evidence box on the lid. “This isn't the whole story is it?”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “So tell me the rest.”

  “You know most of if, if you've read that file.”

  “Yes, but it doesn't explain what happened after. There's no new information, nothing's been added to it since the case went cold back in early 2001 or so. But I know you, at least a little. I know that this can't be the only reason you're... you're where you are.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you gonna tell me the rest?”

  “Ok.”

  I paused. Man, I hadn't done this in a long, long time. But I figured I'd just tell it like it was and it'd be out there. No emotion. Just facts.

  “Lisa, my daughter, she was 14. She tried to pretend it never happened, you know? Just kept going. Or so we thought. Then one day I saw the cuts on her wrists. Light cuts, but cuts nonetheless. Tresa and I panicked a bit, and then we talked to the psychiatrist about putting her in care for a while, someone to watch her, and for her to get extensive therapy. Things were going fine, or so we thought. The doctors reported good progress. Then she came home and over a period of a few months we could see improvement in her demeanor. She smiled more. She started going to movies again, with us. Then one night she took a full month's supply of her tranquilizer. Tresa found her in her bed the next morning.”

  “Damn.”

  “I bet that's not in that file.”

  “No it's not.”

  “That's when the real marital troubles began. You probably know not many marriages survive the loss of a child, especially an only child. Tresa pulled away from me – away from her life. She pulled back from her friends, her parents had both died in the past few years, she had no family close. I suggested therapy and she just said 'That sure helped Lisa.' I let it go.

  “Me, well, I don't know how I got through. Lisa was my delight. I used to take her everywhere. We'd laugh together, play together. Until she was about 12 a night didn't go by that I didn't read to her. She loved it. Sometimes we'd read alternating sentences or paragraphs to each other. Reading and laughing. That's what I remember most.

  “We used to love the Egyptian wing of the MFA. She loved to play on the Make Way for Ducklings statues, and sit on the Tortoise and the Hare, even as she grew older. I couldn't imagine life without her. It never occurred to me that I would ever have to.

  “But when she died, I grieved in my own way, which was not visibly. I'm sure from the outside it looked cold. But I didn't know of another way.

  “One day I went to school as usual. I'm on the road by 6:30am. I had a normal day teaching and then came home. Tresa was in the bath. I opened the door and saw her in the tub, with a bottle of red wine on the edge, and hundreds of photos of Lisa taped to the walls. A huge mosaic of her beautiful, futile childhood in one gestalt image. Lisa at the Swan Boats, Lisa at the Duckling statues, Lisa at the playground. I guess Tresa had fallen asleep in the tub. She spilled some of her wine too. Clumsy of her. I tried to wake her, but the water was cold, and she was cold. And there was too much wine in the water. The bottle was only half-empty. But the tub was completely red.

  “I called the paramedics and the police came and sealed off the room, the Crime Scene people pored over our house, looking for whatever. I was questioned as a person of interest. Naturally. Until they could confirm Tresa killed herself I was a suspect. It didn't take long to rule it a suicide.

  “Then came the day of the funeral. The ceremony would be in an hour and I took my sweet time walking around my house having a look at it. One last look, I knew. I walked out the front door and never looked back. I didn't even go to the funeral. I walked street after street with no plan except one – never to look at that house again. It was paid for and it was nothing to me but an empty building.

  “If you're looking for details of the next year, I'm going to have to disappoint you. I don't remember much of it, not until I met Old Fernie who knocked me about and told me to get the fuck on with it - that I had to

  live . He was right but I couldn't handle it. It was not far into September 2001 that life showed me that there were worse things. There were things people had to go through that were just as bad as what I had to, or worse. That Tuesday I got off the drugs, stopped drinking and just got on with it. And I've been getting on with it ever since.”

  Turley was silent, his back to me.

  “So...” I said, trying to fill the silence.

  Nothing.

  “Turley? You gonna add this to the file before you put it back in the cold case locker?”

  He turned around and looked at me with a look I almost didn't recognize. It was as if he couldn't speak. Then he did.

  “I think I'll keep this box in here with me for a while.” 3441 days sober

  Chapter 1 Some days you just don't even want to get out of bed. For me that means a sodden bedroll that even my blanket and tarp can't keep dry. In Public Alley 437 behind Newbury Street, Boston winter days are to be endured, not enjoyed. Even propped up on a wooden palette which keeps the bedrol
l off the wet pavement, the snow and slush reaches it and it soaks through. There's very little to look forward to during days like this.

  Except good coffee.

  Keeping my feet dry is trying on these days but a smart purchase of a good pair of lightly-used waterproof boots from a thrift shop earlier in the winter helped. That and my neoprene parka were useful in keeping me fairly dry despite this miserable weather. You'd think being winter, this cold, it would have the decency to snow but no, not in Boston. Here it rains. Cold, cold rain that, if it had any integrity at all, would turn to snow. Instead it comes down as splashes of icy slush.

  So I walked. I know where the best coffee is, and it's nowhere near Boston Common; it's in the North End, and that meant walking past the Common, past Government Center, around Faneuil Hall and through Quincy Market. Not that many years ago it would have been a challenge to navigate over to Cross Street, most of it being barred by plywood and rats, under the ugly green elevated highway.

  The Big Dig. One of the most expensive urban renewal project in the country's history, and likely the most corrupt. Its aim, to get rid of that elevated eyesore and put it underground, replacing it with a strip of public park. It took more than a decade but now we finally reap the benefits. Crossing over to Hanover Street is now a pleasure, even on crap days like this.

  My destination: Caffé Victoria. Best latté in Boston that I've found. And it doesn't cost you an expensive restaurant meal. About once a month I use my earnings from selling Loose Change to treat myself. You can walk into the place from two separate entrances in summer. Between the two entrances is a stairway down to a cigar shop. I mean this was

  old Boston. The café - or should I say caffé - was founded nearly a hundred years ago, and it looked like nothing had changed since then. Old copper espresso machines still decorate the place and they sell gelato and pastries to go with their coffee.

  I shook the rain off myself and took a seat at a table. This one had a brass plaque with an Italian family name on it, and was in the middle of the older section. Sometimes I sit and wonder if some wiseguy's going to come in and stare at me until I move to a different table, but that's never happened - yet.