Robert B. Parker's Damned if You Do

by Michael Brandman

  “What is it you think you’re doing?”

  “Having myself a little look-see.”

  “You’ve been warned about that.”

  “Everyone seems so peaceful, Binky.”

  “Didn’t the district attorney’s message have any meaning for you?”

  Jesse didn’t say anything.

  “Answer me, sir.”

  Jesse looked at him.

  “I have a good mind to throw you out of here,” Morrow said.

  “I beg to differ,” Jesse said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t think you have a good mind.”

  “Quit screwing around, Stone,” Morrow said. “Get out of here. You can be certain you’ll be hearing from our lawyers.”

  “Why are these patients lying around in a stupor,” Jesse said.

  “No one here is in a stupor.”

  “You mean they just suddenly fell asleep like that? Or do you suppose a Hogwarts team descended and cast a spell on them?”

  “I asked you to leave,” Morrow said, pointing to the elevator.

  Jesse leaned over and whispered in Morrow’s ear.

  “You won’t get away with this, Binky.”

  He reached over and pinched Morrow’s cheek. Hard. Morrow slapped Jesse’s hand away and began to massage his cheek.

  Jesse smiled at him.

  Then he turned to Chuck Dempsey, who shied away from him.

  Jesse looked at them both. Then he headed for the elevator.

  • • •

  He was back at Golden Horizons the following morning. His Explorer was parked across the street, and he sat in it, sipping coffee and watching.

  He heard the approaching roar of oversized engines before the two red fire trucks actually appeared. They were swiftly followed by the captain’s sedan.

  The convoy pulled up in front of the main building. A handful of firefighters jumped down from the trucks. Captain Mickey Kurtz emerged from the red sedan. The men gathered for a moment, chatted briefly, then went inside.

  Prior to entering the building, Captain Kurtz stopped and looked around. When he spotted Jesse in the Explorer, he pointed to him and grinned. Then he, too, went inside.

  Jesse was in his office when Molly entered carrying a sheaf of papers that she dropped on his desk.

  “What’s this,” he said.

  “Faxes. Looks like some kind of violations reports.”

  “Fire Department violations?”

  “Yes.”

  “At Golden Horizons?”

  “Appears to be.”

  “Wow,” Jesse said.

  He began paging through the papers. There were more than fifty violations listed, ranging from smoke detector and sprinkler issues to safety concerns, such as the improper storage of hazardous materials.

  Also cited were building code violations, fire alarm violations, faulty wiring, improper insulation, unclean furnaces, fire door violations, outdated boilers and stoves, and heating system violations.

  He placed a call to Captain Mickey Kurtz.

  “Thorough enough for you,” Kurtz said when he picked up the call.

  “I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that inspection,” Jesse said.

  “Dr. Morrow was none too happy.”

  “Binky?”

  “His closing remarks included the pronouncement, ‘Bugger off, shitbag.’”

  Jesse smiled.

  “How difficult will it be for him to rectify these violations,” he said.

  “Difficult. He has forty-eight hours to correct the alarm and sprinkler conditions. He has five days after that until we inspect him again.”

  “And?”

  “If he fails that one, we can close him down.”

  “How tragic,” Jesse said.

  “Place is a mess,” Kurtz said. “Alan Hollett will have himself a field day out there.”

  “He shows up tomorrow,” Jesse said. “As head of Buildings and Safety, he’s sure to rattle their cages.”

  “We’ll keep the pressure on.”

  “Thanks, Mick.”

  “My pleasure,” Kurtz said, and hung up.

  Sister Mary John’s phone call caught Jesse in his cruiser, on his way back to the station.

  “Sister,” he said.

  “I’ve got a frightened girl here, Jesse. I think you need to see her.”

  “Okay. When?”

  “Now.”

  “Right now?”

  “This girl is getting ready to bolt. I don’t know how long I can keep her.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  • • •

  Sarah McCarthy, if that was even her real name, was a plain-looking girl, possessing a fright of frazzled red hair that cascaded haphazardly past her face, surrounded her neck, and stopped just short of her slender shoulders. She looked at the world through dull green eyes that were rife with fear and suspicion. She was buxom and thick-hipped. She had on a hooded gray Red Sox sweatshirt worn over loose-fitting blue jeans. She nervously sipped coffee from a mug. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, but she was burdened with sadness and seemed far older than her years.

  Sarah, Sister Mary John, and Jesse were alone in the conference room of the Church of the Holy Mother. They sat grouped together around a sturdy wooden table that had been old even in the previous century. Sunlight streamed through stained-glass windows, bringing with it a small measure of warmth.

  “Yeah,” Sarah McCarthy was saying to Jesse, “I know Thomas Walker.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “Son of a bitch held me prisoner, that’s how. He’d fuckin’ kill me if he got the chance.”

  Unconsciously, Sarah started to chew on one of her fingernails. Jesse noticed that all of them had been bitten, some to their nubs. The one she was working on now was bloodied.

  “I was with this Crip, T Ricky,” Sarah said. “One night he took me to meet some big-deal guy who turned out to be Thomas Walker. Before I knew what was happening, T Ricky was gone and me and Thomas were smoking weed and blowin’ cocaine and I wound up staying with him for a while.”

  “For how long?”

  “I’m not really sure, ’cause Thomas got me onto smack and time became a blur.”

  “You were mainlining heroin?”

  “Not mainlining, sniffing. Enough to get high but not so high that I couldn’t do what Thomas wanted. He’d get real mad at me if I didn’t do what he wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  “I was hooking.”

  “Thomas put you out on the street?”

  “No. Not the street. He put me in a house somewhere and had me doing maybe ten, twelve guys a day.”

  Sarah lowered her eyes.

  “After a while, it got to be pretty humiliating,” she said. “Thomas disappeared, but he kept me and some other girls locked in the house. The guys in charge never let us out. If any of us acted up, they’d smack us around. It was pretty scary.”

  “But you escaped.”

  “Yeah. I knew I’d die if I didn’t. So I stopped using the smack, but I never let on. They’d bring it around and give it to me, but I wouldn’t use it. I’d flush it down the john. I got myself straight. I stayed cool and waited for my chance.”

  “Thomas?”

  “He never came around anymore. I heard about him, though. Him and his girls.”

  She came upon a particularly irksome hangnail and began biting it aggressively.

  “Do you know any of their names,” Jesse said.

  “Who?”

  “His girls.”

  “Nah. Well, maybe. T Ricky once said something about a girl called Janet. Or Janice. Something like that. Said she was Thomas’s latest squeeze.”

  “Did you ever see this girl?”

  “No.”

  “But he told you her name.”

  “Yeah.”

  “T Ricky was the boy who introduced you to Thomas.”

  “Yeah. He’d come around to see me sometimes.
He felt bad about what had gone down with me. He liked me, see. He was the one helped me get out of there.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “Last night he came to visit me real late. After everyone had gone to bed. He told me that one of the guards had left the kitchen door unlocked for him. Said that’s how he got in. So after he left, I went downstairs to see for myself.”

  “And?”

  “It was unlocked. Just like he said. So I walked right through that door and got the fuck out of there. I made my way home, where my wonderful parents proceeded to throw me right back out. I had heard about Sister MJ, so I came here.”

  After she was done with her hangnail, Sarah looked at Jesse and said, “I know Thomas is out there looking for me. He’ll kill me if he finds me. Make an example of me for the other girls. I have to get out of here.”

  “The church has gathered some money to send Sarah to California,” Sister Mary John said. “She has a cousin in Los Angeles who told Sarah she could stay with her.”

  Jesse looked at her. Then he looked at the sister.

  “How can I help,” he said.

  “You could get her to the airport safely.”

  “When does she want to go?”

  “Now,” Sister Mary John said. “She’s booked on a four-o’clock flight.”

  Jesse looked at Sarah.

  “What will you do in California?”

  “Stay straight. Look for a job. Try to forget about the shit that went down here.”

  “And?”

  “Survive, I hope.”

  The dynamic duo,” Special Detective Leonard Handel said to Jesse as they walked together through the Public Garden. The day was warm and clear. The garden’s pathways were crowded with Bostonians grateful for the chance to once again turn their faces toward the sun.

  “That’s what you call Clarice and Thomas,” Jesse said.

  “In my lighter moments,” Handel said.

  Handel was a member of the Boston PD’s elite vice squad, a veteran of twenty-plus years on the force. He was a burly man in an ill-fitting suit, one he had purchased prior to having put on an additional thirty pounds.

  “Thomas Walker,” Jesse said.

  “Scumbag number one,” Handel said. “An ego the size of Ethiopia.”

  “And he’s the king?”

  “Not hardly. Everything flows upward. Directly to Gino Fish. He’s the king.”

  “I thought Gino wouldn’t touch prostitution.”

  “Gino likes to believe that his hands are clean. Makes it easier for him to go to church on Sunday. But despite his avowed contempt for what he calls human trafficking, that contempt doesn’t extend to the proceeds. They flow further upward through Gino’s enterprises, straight into the coffers of the national organization.”

  “So what’s gone wrong?”

  “Thomas Walker is what’s gone wrong. When the new mayor had us turn the heat up on the street walkers, the girls were forced to go indoors. Thomas misjudged things. He thought he could just rent a bunch of houses and operate them uncontested. But we were always onto him and he had to change locations frequently. We made some very significant busts along the way. And we hassled his customers big-time. Business dropped off, and Gino got pissed because the drop-off was noticed at the national level.”

  Spotting an empty bench at the edge of the garden, Handel pointed to it and sat. Jesse joined him.

  “So what happened,” Jesse said.

  “Fat Boy Nelly is what happened.”

  “I met that guy,” Jesse said.

  “You met Fat Boy Nelly?”

  “I did.”

  “How in the fuck did you do that? This kid doesn’t meet anybody.”

  “Thomas Walker introduced us.”

  “Thomas Walker introduced you to Fat Boy Nelly?”

  “He did.”

  “Lemme tell you something about this Nelly guy. He’s one of the more interesting characters in the story. He came out of nowhere with a very smart head on his shoulders and started making deals with the kids who were managing the street for Thomas Walker. He offered them better money. Once Nelly got his toehold, there was no stopping him. Turns out that he’s some kind of technological whiz kid who’s got big plans for bringing the sex trade into the twenty-first century. Computerization is his mantra. He’s not a believer in the snatch-’em-and-drug-’em way of doing business. His recruits are handsomely paid and well treated. They’re free to come and go. He’s the opposite of Thomas Walker, and he’s earned himself a whole bunch of fans in high places.”

  “And Thomas?”

  “No match for this kid. He’s too old-school. Strictly cash and carry. He’s also a bit slow on the uptake, if you get my drift. My guess is that if he hasn’t already read the writing on the wall, Clarice has.”

  “And?”

  “She’s playing it very close to the vest.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She created Thomas. Nobody knows him better. But he’s been corrupted, and the irony is he did it to himself. Does the expression ‘too big for his britches’ ring a bell with you?”

  Jesse smiled.

  “My guess is she’s already figured out how she’s gonna go forward without him.”

  “You mean if he were to become unexpectedly dead.”

  “You’re a whole lot swifter than you look,” Handel said.

  “You think?”

  “I know that you won’t pay the slightest bit of attention to my suggestion, Jesse, but I’m going to risk it anyway. Stay the fuck out of this. You don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.”

  “That’s very good advice, Lenny,” Jesse said.

  “I know it’s very good advice. But will you take it, is the question.”

  “Stay tuned,” Jesse said.

  Jesse located a Martha Becquer living in east Paradise, in a small tract house adjacent to the railroad tracks.

  “Chief Stone,” she said when she opened the door. “Whatever brings you here?”

  He looked at her more closely. She was a small, weathered woman, wearing a flowered kimono over black sweatpants and a faded T-shirt.

  “I know you,” he said.

  “By another name,” she said. “Greeley. I used to be married to Dick Greeley.”

  “You’re Janet Greeley’s mother.”

  “I am, although we both now go by the name Becquer. My maiden name.”

  “Janet Greeley. That’s who she was.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t quite place her.”

  “Janet?”

  “Yes.”

  Jesse stood distractedly on the porch for several moments.

  Then Martha said, “Would you like to come in?”

  “What? Yes. Please.”

  She ushered him through a small, cramped living room into a kitchen that opened onto a tiny backyard that abutted the train tracks. Carefully tended flowerbeds and a small vegetable garden were both just coming into bloom.

  Jesse took a seat in the breakfast nook while Martha prepared a fresh pot of coffee.

  “Do you want to tell me why you’re here,” Martha said. “Is it something to do with Janet?”

  “You’ll have to forgive me. I didn’t make the connection between the names.”

  “Nasty divorce.”

  “I see.”

  “So?”

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  “About Janet.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s in some kind of trouble,” Martha said.

  Jesse sat silently for several moments.

  Then Martha said, “She’s dead, isn’t she.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “No positive ID has been made yet,” he said. “But I now believe that it’s her.”

  “How?”

  “She was killed.”

  “Killed how?”

  “She was murdered, Martha.”

  “Oh my God.�
�

  Martha turned away and appeared to shrink into herself. When Jesse got up to comfort her, she gently pushed him aside.

  “Give me a minute,” she said.

  She opened the kitchen door and stepped into the yard. Jesse watched as she wrapped her arms around herself and stood quietly for several moments. Then she wiped her eyes with a corner of her kimono, took several deep breaths, and returned to the kitchen.

  “Where is she,” Martha said.

  “At the Paradise coroner’s office.”

  “How did she die?”

  “She was stabbed. Once in the heart. Mercifully, it was quick.”

  Martha looked away. She took two coffee mugs from a shelf in her china cabinet. She placed them on the stove.

  “I don’t know what to say. I guess I’ve always expected a visit like this.”

  “I didn’t realize that it was her,” Jesse said.

  “How could you have. It’s been years.”

  “She was what then, twelve?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doping. She was one of the girls who were doping.”

  Martha nodded.

  “I had this feeling that I knew her,” Jesse said.

  Martha poured the coffee and joined him in the breakfast nook.

  “The doping incident was just the beginning,” she said. “She wasn’t a stupid girl. She wasn’t venal. In fact, she was quite clever. Smart, even. It’s just that she was seriously misguided.”

  “I remember having a number of discussions with those girls about the perils of drug usage. I thought I’d gotten through to them.”

  “Actually, you did. At least as far as Janet was concerned. She never had any kind of drug issues again. She still ran with the bad girls, but her problems weren’t drug-related.”

  They sipped their coffee in silence for a while.

  “I’m assuming that you want me to identify the body.”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ride with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know if I could face it alone.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll go change. I’ll only be a few moments.”

  “Take your time,” Jesse said.

  Martha viewed the body, covered except for her face, through a window, where it rested on a catafalque in the adjoining room. She quickly confirmed that it was Janet.