“I’ll be the tall guy with a confused look on his face,” I said. She didn’t laugh. Nobody was laughing at my jokes these days. “I’ll be wearing a maroon Boston College shirt with gold eagles on the sleeves.”
VII.
At eight o’clock I pulled into Caffé Bella on Route 28 in Randolph and went inside, or at least I tried to go inside. The place was jammed and it was only a Tuesday night, not usually a big night for the restaurant trade. A tanned, platinum-haired bartender who could have posed for Victoria’s Secret asked me if I wanted something to drink. I wasn’t thirsty but I wasn’t stupid, and I told her I’d have a Coke. She smiled and poured it and slid it to me on a cocktail napkin.
I was still drooling into my glass when another woman, who had no shot at Victoria’s Secret, approached me holding a martini glass in her hand. Her wiry brown hair and pug nose went perfectly with the brown freckles that dotted her face. She had a buxom build, the body of a woman who enjoyed all of life’s appetites.
“So you’re the guy that ran the ad.” She gulped some martini and tongued an olive into her mouth. “You said you were tall, but you didn’t say you were a giant.” She jerked her head. “This way, we can sit at the bar.”
We sat on barstools away from the door. She raised her empty glass, and the Victoria’s Secret bartender mixed her another one. My new friend said to me, “Did you bring the cash, because I’m not saying a word until I see the cash. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I’ve been gypped before.”
I took an envelope from my pocket. “I have it right here.”
“You said two thousand.”
“Was it two?” I took the $100 bills from the envelope. “I thought we said three, my mistake.”
I counted out ten hundreds and put them back in my pocket and laid the remaining hundreds on the bar, all twenty of them. She plucked one at random and handed it to Victoria, who held it under a black light and signaled it valid with a tilt of her head.
“Your money’s good,” she said. “That’s my friend Angel. She checked it for me.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“I already told you, no names.”
“Okay, okay, no names.”
I swallowed some Coke along with some pride and looked at the restaurant’s trendy décor, its burgundy beams and wainscoting, its white stucco walls and ceiling. Two busboys cleared a path, and a waitress carrying a tray of food followed closely behind them. When she saw an opening, she shot through and delivered the food to her waiting customers. The whole thing played out like a power sweep. Angel, the intoxicating bartender, dropped the certified C-note back on the stack.
“Are you hungry?” I asked my informant. “How about dinner?”
“Does it come out of the two grand?” she asked.
“My treat, I insist.” I smiled at her.
“In that case dinner sounds good.” Without opening the menu, she said to the bartender, “I’ll have the yellowfin tuna carpaccio and another martini.” Her glass was still half full. “Make it with Bombay Sapphire this time, extra dry, two olives.”
Angel said to me, “You should get the mozzarella salad as an appetizer. It’s not on the menu, but I’ll put it in for you.”
I said yes to the mozzarella salad. I would have said yes to crawdads fried in motor oil if she recommended it. For the main course I ordered the hardwood grilled pizza with sausage and onions. I handed my canary the reward money and said, “Tell me about the man in the sketch. Where did you see him?”
“I won’t say where I saw him, because I saw him where I work.” She waited for me to protest. I gestured for her to continue and she did. “I won’t drag work into this, because I need my job.”
“Why don’t you just tell me about him?”
She sipped her drink and contemplated where to begin. It took two more swigs before she found her bearings.
“He was Irish, off-the-boat Irish, and so were the other two men.”
“What other men?” I asked.
“The men with him, they were Irish, too. I could tell from their accents, their brogues, whatever. I think they came from another part of Ireland. They sounded different than the guys we usually get, kind of gruffer.”
My mind collated the data. She knew the bartender at Caffé Bella. She worked at a place frequented by Irish immigrants. Restaurant workers belong to a fraternity of sorts. They hang out together. Irish immigrants know where to find each other over here. They go to the same pubs. Caffé Bella was south of the city, so she probably worked at a bar or a restaurant in Dorchester or South Boston or possibly Hyde Park. I thought further. Irish joints are cropping up in Quincy Square, too. Hell, she could be working anywhere.
“What did the other two men look like?” I asked.
“One of them was big, not as big as you, but big.” Her fresh drink arrived, and not a moment too soon. “He was bald-headed with dark hair on the sides. I thought he looked familiar at first, like maybe I saw him before, but I didn’t. He was the leader.” She picked up her glass and put a dent in the drink. “You could tell by the way they listened to him, he was the leader.”
“And the other guy?”
“Oh, him.” Her throat blushed. “He was a redhead. He had a red mustache and bright green eyes with brown flecks, handsome and a really nice guy.” She drank a mouthful and turned away. Her head jerked back to me. “Are you looking for him, too?”
I’d hit a nerve and I didn’t want to lose her. “I just want to know about the guy in the sketch.”
“Why are you asking about him?”
Ah, what’s the difference, tell her.
“He shot me,” I said. “In self-defense I killed him.”
“You killed him?” She put her glass on the bar and stammered. “He’s dead? I can’t believe you killed the kid.”
“I had no choice.” I turned to face her. “He was going to kill me.”
She stared at me, her eyes bulging. “If he’s dead, why do you care about him?”
“I have my reasons.” I could see that she wanted more, so I gave her more. “He shot me twice and then he tried to blow my head off.”
“Oh, my God.” She drained the martini. The olives sat on the bottom of the glass, stranded. “What do you mean he tried to kill you?”
“He pressed a gun against my head.” I finished my Coke. “I slapped his arm and the shot missed.”
“How did you kill the kid if he had a gun?”
“I hit him with a rock,” I said. “Two times I hit him. The blows fractured his skull and killed him. I called the police. An ambulance took me to MGH. I suppose they took him to the morgue.”
“So the cops know about you.” She seemed to be relieved by this fact. “When I saw the composite I almost called the police, but I didn’t, because I didn’t know anything about him, you know, the kid in the sketch.”
Angel delivered the new martini and said, “You didn’t tell me he was so good-looking, Delia.”
“Shit, Angel, I told you not to say my name.”
I chuckled. “Don’t worry, Delia. I just want information.”
“That’s not the point,” she said.
The food arrived and the conversation died down. The pizza tasted like it came straight from Rome, Italy. I didn’t come up for air until I’d wiped out every crumb. I wasn’t alone in my gluttonous attack. Delia dug in with equal ferocity, matching my eating rampage, bite for bite.
“Let me ask you something,” Delia said, pushing away her clean plate and setting aside the tools of the trade, her knife and fork. “You placed that ad in the paper, and the ad said two thousand, so why pretend it said three?”
“I thought an extra grand might motivate you,” I said.
“Motivate me?” She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m willing to buy
more information,” I said. “For example, if you were to tell me where you work, I might feel compelled to give you the extra thousand.”
“Sounds more like bribery than motivation.”
“Think of it as a bonus payment.”
“Give me a second to consider this so-called bonus payment.” Her body seemed to relax, maybe from the martinis. Her jaw seemed to sag, maybe from chewing, and Delia started to spew. “I waitress at the Blarney Stone, six nights a week I’m there.”
“In Fields Corner?”
“Yeah, Dorchester,” she said, beginning to slur. “The redhead’s name is Mac.”
“Do you know his last name?” I asked, wanting more.
“He just said Mac.”
“What about the other two guys?” I asked. “Any names?”
“They didn’t tell me their names.”
“Did they say where they were from or why they were here in Boston?”
“They ordered drinks and drank them,” Delia said. “They didn’t tell me anything, except what they wanted to drink.”
The flow of info stopped just as quickly as it had started. I asked her a few more questions, drilling for additional ore, hoping the gusher hadn’t run dry, but nothing new came to light. There didn’t seem to be any point in hanging around, so I handed her the extra thousand and got off the stool.
“Thanks for your help,” I said. “If you think of anything else I’d appreciate a call. Something might occur to you, you never know.”
“No dessert?” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not every day I get to eat at Caffé Bella and I want dessert.”
“How thoughtless of me,” I said, climbing back onto the stool. “Order dessert, Delia, whatever you want.”
“What about you? I don’t want to eat alone.”
I told the bartender I’d have whatever Delia was having and a cup of coffee.
VIII.
At noon the following day I drove to a donut shop in South Boston, where Dorchester Avenue, Fifth Street, and A Street all run together. The reason for the trip, to meet the second caller I judged legitimate. He told me he’d be wearing a black Bruins cap, which wouldn’t distinguish him much in Southie, but it was enough. I spotted him at the counter the moment I walked in.
He was sipping black coffee and reading the Daily Racing Form when I approached him. I stood right next to him, but he didn’t look at me, even though I loomed in an obvious way. He flipped the page and kept reading. I cleared my throat like a lawnmower. He took a pencil from behind his ear and drew a faint star next to one of the horses and then he erased it. Now I was getting interested in his selection process, so I ordered a Coke and watched him. He underlined a horse named River of Dreams in the third race at Suffolk Downs, jockey Eddie Pollis, owners Preskenis and Collins. He kept underlining it until the pencil wore through the page. I thought of betting River of Dreams myself, but I had enough vices to deal with. I gave up and waited him out.
“You a cop?” he asked, looking up at me.
“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m Santa Claus and I’m here to give you an early Christmas gift if you tell me about the man in the sketch. If you can tell me anything that’s even remotely useful, I’ll give you two grand. Sound fair?”
“Two grand always sounds fair to me,” he said. “He wasn’t a man, he was a kid, maybe eighteen, and he was stewed silly when he got into my cab.” He doffed his Bruins cap, showing a comb-over of yellowish hair. The part started an inch above his ear, with the side hair brushed across the dome. It was the best argument yet for baldness. “I drive a cab in Fields Corner, been driving there since the seventies. I usually pick up customers at the supermarket and drive them home with their groceries.”
“Tell me about the kid,” I said, trying to guide him to the point of the meeting.
“There’s not much to tell. He came out of the Blarney Stone, got into my cab, and said he wanted to go to Charlestown. So I said fine, I’ll bring you to Charlestown. So I’m driving up Dot Ave and he tells me to pull over, he wants a jug of poteen. That’s what he called it, poteen. Poteen is an Irish concoction made from—”
“I know, I know, hooch made from potatoes,” I said, hoping to avoid a treatise on poteen. “Please continue.”
“So I pull over and the kid goes into a package store and comes out with a pint of rye, no bag. He cracks it open and takes a belt. And then he asks me if I want a belt, and I said no thanks, I gotta drive.”
I asked him which package store the kid went to, he told me, and I continued. “You said he was drunk when he got into your cab.”
“The kid was blotto.” The cabbie drank some coffee. “He had an Irish brogue. I could barely understand him, partly because of the brogue, partly because he was so drunk. But it was more than that. There was something about the kid. I don’t know how to put it exactly, but he seemed off-kilter.”
“What do you mean by off-kilter?” I asked. “Could you elaborate?”
He put down the cup and rubbed his jaw.
“The kid seemed scared. He was trying so hard to act tough, that he seemed scared. Does that make sense? Maybe it was the booze.”
“Maybe he was drinking because he was scared,” I said. “Maybe that’s why he was hitting it so hard.”
“I see that a lot in my job. A guy gets liquored up and all of a sudden he’s as tough as Tyson.” He laughed and shook his yellow head. “Then you see him the next day and he’s back to normal, except for the black eye and scraped knuckles.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said, just to say something. I handed him the envelope of money. “Is there anything else you can tell me about him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did anything unusual happen, anything out of the ordinary?”
“There was one thing.” He opened the envelope and peeked inside. “Instead of taking the Expressway to Charlestown, he wanted me to take Boylston Street. I told him it was out of the way, that it’d run up the meter, but he didn’t care. He wanted Boylston, so that’s the way I went.”
“Did he tell you to stop anywhere along the way?” I asked.
“He didn’t tell me to stop.” He put away the envelope. “But as soon as I turned onto Boylston he told me to slow down.”
“Near the Hynes Convention Center?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Then what happened?”
“Then nothing. After we slowed down at the Hynes he told me to go to Charlestown.” He put the Bruins cap back on his head. “So I merged onto Storrow Drive and drove over the Prison Point Bridge to Charlestown.”
“Where did you let him off?” I asked.
“Hayes Square, in front of the church,” he said.
“And what time was that, roughly?”
“About nine-thirty, give or take. I remember because the Sox were getting clobbered and I knew the game would be getting out late.” The old railbird folded the racing form and tucked it under his arm. “I was trying to factor in the ballgame traffic, in case I got a fare to Kenmore Square later that night.”
“Makes sense.” I read the mailing label on the racing form. “How did he pay the fare?”
“What do you mean?”
It didn’t seem like a hard question.
“Did he use cash, a credit card, how did he pay you?” I said.
“Why do you care how he paid? I mean, what difference does it make?”
He was holding back, so I tried a different angle.
“Thanks for your help,” I said. “I’ll ask the cab company how the kid paid the fare. What company do you work for again?”
“Hold it, don’t do that.” He face twitched. “Don’t call my company.”
I sat next to him and leaned on the countertop, so that my face was level with his.
&nb
sp; “Do you think this is a game? Why do you think the police ran the sketch in the newspaper? They ran it because the kid is dead. I don’t want to get you into hot water, but I want to know what happened that night.”
“The kid is dead?” The cabby kneaded the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t know he was dead. Look, I don’t want to get in any trouble.”
“How could you get in trouble?” I asked him.
“Shit, what the fuck did I get myself into?” His eyes looked away. “What an idiot I am. I never should have called you.”
“Tell me what’s going on, Mr. Randell.” I pointed to the mailing label. “I’m not leaving until I find out.”
“I didn’t figure you’d leave, didn’t figure it for a second.”
“Just tell me what happened and I’ll be on my way.”
He picked up his coffee cup and put it down, and then he shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his own stupidity.
“I didn’t log the fare.” He looked around the coffee shop and then back at me. “I never called the dispatcher. Can we keep this between us? I could get fired for something like this, and who knows what the cops might do to me.”
If he never reported the fare, the cab company would have no record of his trip to Charlestown, hence, nothing to tell the police if they were asked about it.
“It’s between us,” I said.
Everything the cabbie told me matched Delia’s version of events. Funny thing, if he had simply told me that the kid had paid in cash, his secret would have been safe.
IX.
The next two days proved fruitless. During that time, three people called about the reward money, all saying they’d met the man in the sketch. When I asked them when they met him, two of the callers told me they met him after he was already dead. When I pointed this out to them, they both hung up. The third caller said that she spoke to him at a séance in Brockton, in an apartment building behind Marciano Stadium, making her the most credible witness of the bunch.
Another day passed with no calls. I was getting antsy, marking time, impatiently waiting for fate to deliver her prize. I needed information, anything to get me reignited, but nothing was coming in. How could I make something happen? I considered going to the séance in Brockton, recognized the sarcasm in the thought, and decided to go to an AA meeting instead. I knew of one that started in twenty minutes in East Boston, a group called McClellan’s Felons, named for Bull McClellan, an Eastie cop who would empty the drunk tank and bring the sots to meetings. He took my father once. I got into my car and headed for the Callahan Tunnel.
The Revenge of Liam McGrew: A Dermot Sparhawk Mystery Page 8