by Linda Barnes
CHAPTER 6
JFK Memorial Park is a manicured swath of green behind the school of government, studded with stately oaks and elms and separated from the riverbank by Memorial Drive. I sat on a bench and waited for Chaney in the deepening twilight.
When I suggested we meet near the scene of the fatal fire, he hadn’t reacted one way or another, simply mentioned the bench at the northwest edge of the park, far from streetlamps. I wondered if he’d met Denali here, near Phillips House, near the boathouse where she’d studied and rowed and died.
Suicide. No wonder I’d been twice referred to the dean.
Earlier generations may have achieved identical suicide rates at prestigious colleges, but times were different then. Shamed families drew the drapes to shut out the sunlight and wondered how they’d failed, while friends and neighbors met silence with silence. Parents never dreamed of accusing universities of negligence, never hired attorneys. I’d spent my waiting-for-Chaney time at Widener Library, doing some research: Six students had killed themselves over the past ten years at MIT. I hadn’t found a number for Harvard, but I was aware of two current lawsuits, one at MIT, one at Princeton. The MIT lawsuit concerned a girl who’d set herself ablaze in her dorm room. Denali would have read about her death in the papers, seen the gruesome TV coverage.
I hadn’t seen Denali’s death on TV. I’d been away. I’d found the relevant articles in the on-line archives. The Herald got the scoop; its initial piece gave credit to both a staffer and a correspondent. “Fatal Fire in Boathouse” was brief, a narrow column, a single paragraph. The timing must have been tight, deadline looming.
Cambridge: A fatal fire engulfed an addition to the Weld Boathouse in an early-morning blaze. The wooden structure was totally involved when firefighters from Ladder Company 7 responded. The unfinished structure was presumed empty, but after the blaze was extinguished, firefighters searching the premises discovered a body. The victim has not yet been identified.
The next day’s Herald article was front-page stuff, titled “Student’s Body in Boathouse.” The same two reporters shared credit for the longer piece. At first believed to be that of a transient, the badly burned body removed from yesterday’s boathouse blaze is now thought to be that of a Harvard student rower. The name of the victim is being withheld pending confirmation of identity and notification of next of kin.
This article also said that the boathouse had been donated to Harvard by the George Walker Weld family in 1906. It gave the name of the construction company responsible for renovating and expanding the boathouse, and included a defensive quote from an electrical contractor. Another quoted source was Capt. Ed Flowers. I knew the name; he was the Cambridge fire marshal and the chief arson investigator. He said the nature of the blaze made it suspect.
Suspect meant multiple points of origin, use of an accelerant. Captain Flowers was the same man who’d investigated the blaze at my house. He was thorough and honest. Also nasty and suspicious. He’d assumed I’d set my blaze to collect insurance.
I thumbed through my spiral notebook. According to my client, Denali was an orphan and had no close relatives. I wondered how long it had taken the police to locate the next of kin. There was nothing in the next day’s Herald. The Globe offered nothing new. Then, another single paragraph in both papers: The word suicide was modified by the adjective suspected. Denali Brinkman’s name was given, along with a badly focused photograph of a racing shell. The woman rower, caught midstroke, was identified as the “college suicide.” Her blond hair caught the breeze. Her face was a pale blur.
There was no follow-up in either paper, and I assumed the heavy hand of Harvard. How many names on how many mastheads owed allegiance to their alma mater? How many others hoped their children would one day be granted admission?
Suicides sometimes occur in waves, in epidemics of terminal despair. In South Boston one summer, young men hung themselves, jumped from high places, swam so far out into the bleak ocean that swimming back was not an option.
I waited eight minutes before Chaney approached from the opposite end of the park, passing behind the fountain, his dark sunglasses catching the last glare of the setting sun. I realized I was thinking of him by his last name, no longer giving him his honorific title. He wore his raincoat and a shapeless hat with the brim tugged low. If I’d been a cop, I’d have rousted him on suspicion.
He sat on the same bench, but at the other end, as though he didn’t know me. “This is extremely inconvenient. Have you found him already?” He spoke while staring straight ahead, a man who’d seen too many spy movies.
I slid over on the bench, refusing the gambit. “You didn’t mention that your girlfriend killed herself. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“I don’t see how it’s relevant.” His face gave nothing away. Maybe he’d worn sunglasses so I couldn’t read his eyes.
“You tell me the facts. I decide if they’re relevant.”
“The only thing that’s relevant is the blackmail.”
“What about the blackmailer’s motivation? Would you call that relevant?”
“No one could hold me responsible for Denali’s death.”
“The thought never crossed your mind?”
He swallowed. “I don’t have to defend myself to you.”
I nodded. He didn’t have to defend himself to me and I didn’t have to work for him. Money had gone into my checking account, but it wasn’t a one-way street.
He crossed his legs and arms defensively and stared off at a distant group of soccer players, kicking a ball near a keep off the grass sign. The JFK fountain is a granite square. The water flows constantly, an endless sheet of glass, running over carved excerpts from the assassinated president’s speeches.
Many wealthy conservative donors wanted Harvard to have nothing to do with memorializing the dead president. They refused the honor of having the Kennedy Library sited at Harvard. When there was talk of refusing to name the government school in his honor, the liberal city of Cambridge took action, changing the name of the street on which the school was located to John F. Kennedy Way, so that it would be associated with his name whether or not Harvard sought the distinction.
“I was stunned when I heard,” Chaney murmured. “Stunned.”
An elderly man walked a yellow Labrador down the curved path. Chaney waited until he was out of earshot.
“Listen to me. What we had was not the stuff of drama. What we had was a … a sexual thing.”
“You know what she said and what she did, but not what she felt or what she thought.”
“Her heart was not engaged. She broke it off with me.”
“You said—”
“That was vanity.”
“It was a lie.”
He was silent for a while, but I didn’t prompt him. I studied the granite memorial fountain and waited. It didn’t look anything like a wishing well, too square and modern, but I caught the glint of pennies at the bottom. Tourists toss them instinctively; a fountain means pennies, wishes, keeping the kids quiet a moment longer.
“I never felt like I knew her,” Chaney said. “It was one of the things that fascinated me. Basically, people are easy to read. Kids are; students are. There isn’t as much infinite variety as you think when you’re young, or maybe this place attracts certain types. I’ve seen so much ambition, so much ego, so much self-regard. Denali was interested in me, and not many of them are. I found it flattering. I don’t kid myself; I’m no Einstein. I’m already old-fashioned. Most of the stuff I believe in, the kids deride. They don’t want to know about educational theory; they want to know about drugs, quick fixes.”
He was trying to figure out why she’d dropped him, not why she’d killed herself. I waited, hoping he’d speculate about that.
“She said once that early death ran in her family. That was the only time I remember her using the word death. I never imagined she was considered ending her own life.”
“What do you mean, ‘early death ran in
her family’?”
“She— I don’t see how this is—”
“Let me decide what’s relevant.”
“Her mother died when she was a child. Leukemia, I think, a sudden, virulent death. Her father died before she was born. She had no family, and the tribe was reluctant to raise her.”
“The tribe?”
“Her mother was an American Indian, from one of those small Northwest tribes. Her father was Swiss, but she didn’t learn that until much later. She had no brothers or sisters. She never went hungry, but there wasn’t much kindness in her life. She didn’t even know her father’s name.”
“It’s not Brinkman?”
“His first name. The tribe never spoke it. He must have done something, displeased someone. She’d never even seen a photograph of him. She never talked much about her life, but every once in awhile— She was well traveled.”
“How did a poor kid from an Indian tribe get to be so well traveled?”
“The woman who raised her made a lot of money from gambling casinos. They traveled together at first. There was a falling-out, but by then Denali rowed, and her rowing took her places. She’d done things you never hear about in Cambridge. She’d lived in the desert and worked on a ranch. In Switzerland, she met her great-uncle on her father’s side, an old man, and he told her her father’s name.”
I wondered whether the great-uncle was the elusive next of kin.
“Harvard must have been quite a jump.”
“She did well in my class.”
“Did you know she didn’t get along with her roommate?”
“No.”
“Did you know she was living in a half-built addition by the side of the boathouse? With no heat?”
He swallowed. “I didn’t know. It’s not like I picked her up at her front door.”
“Why did she break it off?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Did she find someone else?”
“No!”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. I—”
“Was she pregnant?”
“What?”
“Could she have been pregnant?”
He took off his sunglasses, and his eyes were fierce. “You’re saying you think she killed herself rather than bear a black man’s child? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying she might have thought she had no way out.”
“This is Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is the fucking twenty-first century. You’re telling me she wouldn’t have had an abortion.”
“Some women won’t. If she had religious—”
“If she had religious scruples, she probably wouldn’t have killed herself. What you said bordered on racist, that she’d rather die than—”
“Don’t put that on me. I might as well call you a sexist pig for not understanding that for some women, ending a pregnancy is not just a medical prodecure, but I’m not going to take that way out.”
“You want a way out?”
“I want it clear: I wasn’t hired to investigate a suicide.”
“I don’t want you to. I want you to handle the blackmailer. Will you do that? Look, I made a mistake. I slept with a student. If I were white or she were black, I might be able to weather the storm, but I can’t, not with my department head against me.”
I didn’t say anything. The light was going out of the sky.
“Don’t people deserve second chances?” he asked.
A good question, I thought. But irrelevant. Who the hell gets what they deserve?
“Call me as soon as the blackmailer makes contact.”
I left him sitting on the bench.
CHAPTER 7
Paolina spent the night, so no Leon, not that I could have questioned him about his buddy, the professor. This whole business of her spending the night started as a cover story when Paolina’s family moved out of the Cambridge projects. They wanted to stay in the city, but the areas that used to be cheap turned gentrified and high-priced, so they wound up in a tiny house in Watertown. Paolina used my address to continue at the local high school. She started sleeping over occasionally, when band practice ran late, or if she pulled a detention.
Then Marta found a part-time job as a bar hostess, and one of her friends agreed to stay with Paolina’s younger brothers two nights a week. We institutionalized Paolina’s occasional nights over. So far so good; Paolina seems to get along better with her mother the less she sees her.
She’d never had her own room before. I’m no great shakes at decorating, but I can paint. She’d wanted pink, but I’d balked at the girlieness of it all, and we’d settled on a deep rose. I was taken back by her choice of decor. Her walls are plastered with the usual magazine pics of rock stars, but the main focus is a huge poster of Medellín, Colombia, stuff of her heritage and her fantasies. Her drug lord Colombian father may or may not still live in Medellín. I doubt it. The government’s been trying to capture him so long, he’s probably left the country. The poster echoes the warmth of the walls, with spectacular blue skies, fields of lush flowers, green cordilleros.
She never makes her bed. Not being a big bed-maker myself, I don’t care.
The next morning, I got up early and made breakfast for my sister, even though it isn’t part of our deal. My fault; our “deal” was made in ignorance. I didn’t appreciate the dating complications. I didn’t suspect the nutritional complexities. When she assured me she’d handle her own meals, I didn’t understand that meant skipping breakfast, skipping lunch, eating takeout pizza for dinner when and if she and her pals could scrounge up the bucks. I’m not a nutrition nut; far from it. I eat junk food, love it, in fact, but breakfast is a time when your mother, or a reasonable substitute, puts food on the table.
Hey, how could I be so rebellious if I weren’t a traditionalist at heart?
Orange juice, toast, scrambled eggs. I tried to give her a glass of milk, but she glared till I made coffee. She pours so much milk in it, it’s practically healthy anyway.
It’s been an uphill battle since we met, when Paolina was seven and I was still a cop. I miss the scrawny seven-year-old, the feisty ten-year-old, but I doubt I’ll miss the fifteen-year-old with the pout and the overlipsticked mouth, the one who assures me that all the kids talk like that and who wants to know the fuck’s my problem. This morning, she ate in a blur, left her dishes in the sink, and was gone before I could object to her tank top. Why her mother lets her buy clothes like that, I don’t know.
Well, yes, I guess I do. Her mother dresses the same way. Marta, married twice, abandoned twice, four kids, no skills, considers the landing of a male meal ticket the be-all and end-all of life. Probably coaches Paolina in the proper tightness of clothes. And glories in Paolina’s body, seeing her daughter’s curves as golden lures.
I drank my coffee slowly. I hadn’t gotten a hint as to where Denali Brinkman might have stashed her love letters. I hadn’t learned her roommate’s name, but I’d taken the precaution of writing down every name that appeared on a Phillips House mailbox. The girl, Jeannie, if she lived there and wasn’t just visiting to watch TV, was probably J.P. St. Cyr.
I needed to find out who was using the letters to blackmail my client, but my mind kept veering back to the fire. In the light of a new day, I found myself curious about exactly what had happened at the boathouse shed the night Denali Brinkman died.
The private-eye business is all about trading favors. It’s about who you know and what they know—and what you can offer in return. I know Cambridge cops; more particularly, I know a sergeant who’d know what I wanted to know—namely, who’d responded to the fire at the boathouse—and I was in a position, due to a favor from a previous encounter, to ask. Kevin Shea gave me a song and dance, flirted lamely, and stalled around, but we both knew he’d kick up the name in the end, and he did.
I got dressed in a hurry, briefly debated between the T and the car, decided on the car. The risk was parking tickets, the
benefit freedom, and I wasn’t sure where I’d be headed after the cop house.
Central Square’s station house is surrounded by funky ethnic restaurants and slightly seedy stores. The neighborhood gets better; the neighborhood gets worse. Right now, it’s on an upswing. You can pay four grand a month for a three-bedroom apartment on Inman Street, and dine in splendor at Centro, an upscale Italian eatery entered through a dive called the Good Life.
Central Square is my stomping ground. I play volleyball at the Y, hang at the Plough and the Stars, eat at the Green Street Grill. I was never a Cambridge cop—Boston all the way—which means that fewer people hate me at the Cambridge cop house. They know me mainly as a PI, and most don’t want to get too close, due to the natural antipathy between those who like to keep secrets and those who want to know the details.
I stopped by Dunkin’ Donuts and got a dozen to go, half glazed, half chocolate. I’d just eaten a healthy breakfast, sure, but I’d only eat the doughnuts if Officer Danny Burkett wasn’t interested, and the number of cops uninterested in doughnuts is minimal.
I held the fragrant white box against my right hip and paced the corner of River and Green, across the street from the main entrance, waiting for Burkett to make an appearance. I sniffed the breeze and caught spices from the Indian place down the block. Kevin had described Burkett as a rookie and a hotshot, and I could see that from the way he walked, the bold stride, the purposeful gait. He was close to six feet, fresh-faced and eager. He wouldn’t want to damage his rep being seen with a private eye. On the other hand, Kevin outranked him, and he’d want to do his sergeant a favor. So he was in a bind. I watched him as he glanced around. Probably Kev had said tall redhead and left it at that.
“Officer Burkett?”
He made the connection and a faint blush tinted his cheeks.
“Shea didn’t mention I was a woman?”