Deep Pockets

by Linda Barnes

  “Just said private heat. Carlyle?”

  “Carlotta. Doughnut?”

  He glanced at me with speculative eyes. Sometimes I tend to read too much into expressions, but I thought he was probably wondering whether I was sleeping with Kevin Shea. Mostly, it’s just how cops think. I repeated the doughnut offer.

  “I dunno. I eat that, I’ll have to spend an extra hour at the gym.”

  “We’ll walk while we eat. One cancels the other.”

  He nodded. “What you got?”

  He took glazed and so did I, just to keep him company. It’s not like a doughnut’s a bribe; it’s more of a relaxer. It helps to eat while you talk, loosens up the speaker.

  We walked half a block, each getting used to the other’s pace. He was shorter than I was, but he kept up. His boots were polished, his uniform starched and pressed. A man with long dreadlocks gave us a wide berth, and I remembered how it was when you walked around in uniform.

  “That guy looks like a fucking drug bust on the hoof,” the rookie offered.

  “Yeah. Works the high school.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My sister’s at Rindge.”

  “Kids won’t fucking tell you the time of day.”

  Rookies have to hold their own, and one way they do it is with their mouths. Fucking this, fucking that. I’m a tough guy and don’t you forget it. I remembered the drill. Hell, I used to talk the talk.

  I said, “Kevin tell you what I’m interested in?”

  “Kevin never asked me to cooperate with private heat before. You special or something?”

  “Bet your ass I am. April third, you caught a fire.”

  “That boathouse shit.” He chewed his doughnut and admired his reflection in the CVS window.

  “You remember the call?”

  “Thing is, why should I tell you about it?”

  “Kevin Shea’s a good guy to work for, you think?”

  We walked for a while. I didn’t want to interrupt his internal debate. It wasn’t an easy call. Sure, Shea may have told him to cooperate, but did he mean it? Was it some kind of test? Would the whole business come back and bite the rookie in the ass?

  “You like working private?” he asked.

  “Sure. Best part’s the pension,” I said with a straight face. “You gonna tell me about it, or am I wasting my time?”

  “It’s old,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You work for fucking Harvard?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody’s saying anything’s fucking wrong with how the department handled it, right?”

  “Right.”

  He stared at me, like he was trying to decide how big a lie I was attempting to put over on him. “I brought my incident book.”

  “We can get to that later if you need to check details, but I’d rather just hear what you saw, what you did. I don’t expect total recall.” I put a faint challenge into my voice.

  “Don’t underestimate me. I’m fucking good.” He broke into a sudden grin.

  “You from around here?”

  “East Cambridge, born and bred.”

  So we talked “Who do you know?” shit for a while. Since I grew up in Detroit, my local repertoire’s limited, but I’ve picked up a lot of Cambridge lore from living here, talking to cops and firefighters. He accepted another doughnut, which I took as a good sign.

  He remembered the fire.

  “Hell, wish I didn’t fucking remember,” he said. “Freezing to death, like these bums do in winter, that’s not so bad. You go to sleep, like, you don’t feel the pain. But burns, shit. I burned my hand once, bad, when I was a kid. Christ, I’d been an animal, I’d have chewed the fucker off. You’d think a kid going to fucking Harvard—I mean, how can you be so goddamn unhappy, you’re smart enough to get into fucking Harvard in the first place?”

  I could have told him smart didn’t mean happy, but I didn’t want to stop the flow. We’d walked as far as the Main Street cutoff by the firehouse. We sat on a bench and I offered him the doughnut box again. This time, he took chocolate. He was going to have to spend a whole day at the gym to atone.

  “You want specifics?”

  “Whatever you got,” I said.

  “Okay. It’s April third. I pulled graveyard eleven/seven, and the beef comes in early morning—I can get the exact time—after a goddamn boring shift. I’m in a car with Eddie Daley. You know Daley?”

  “No.”

  “It gets back I said he’s an old fat fart, I’ll know it came from you.”

  “It won’t come back.”

  “Well, it was up to him, we’d a missed the call. Came in as a fire, so we’re backup; the fire guys are on it. It’s dark, confusing, but things are okay. We block the street ’cause they gotta run the hose off a hydrant the other side of Mem Drive. The Harvard cops are all over it, and you know what they’re like, former fucking Green Berets, think we’re nothing but fucking trash.”

  “Uncooperative.”

  “Trained to keep that dirty laundry off the line. We go to a disturbance call at Harvard, the U cops get there first, they’re flushing dope down the johns.”

  “They get in your way?”

  “Nah. The place is just makeshift, made of wood. I remember thinking maybe bums got in, you know, find a fucking place to sleep. Light a candle, things go up. Like that warehouse fire in Worcester killed all those firefighters.”

  “You figure somebody’s inside?”

  “Nope. But the fire boys decide they better go in, case a bum got in, and by then the place is really burning and they can’t get in, except for one team, and they think somebody’s in there, but the captain calls them out ’cause the roof’s going. Turns out she made a regular—whatchacallit—funeral pyre in there, accelerants and shit.”

  “But how did you make it as a suicde?”

  “Didn’t then. Treated it as a fucking supicious death. By the fucking book.”

  “Somebody could have set the fire.”

  “You think we’re too fucking dumb to figure that? We talked to people, talked to her boyfriend. The guy’s trying to be stand-up, but he’s crying like a baby.”

  Her boyfriend. My client told me he was out of town. “Who?” I said. “Name?”

  “Benjy? Yeah, Benjy somebody.”

  “You can look it up later.” He was giving me good stuff, slipping into present tense, reliving it instead of just reporting it. I didn’t want him to stop.

  “Somerville boy—those Harvard babes can’t stay away from the locals, ya know? Yeah, well, he fucking knew she was feeling down. She tried to break it off with him, told him she didn’t want to fucking see him anymore. We traced her final evening. Had good luck with that. She goes to the gas station on Mount Auburn, the one at Aberdeen, gives ’em a story about running out of gas, buys a couple gallons. We got a good ID. Man, she didn’t even have a car. Plus, she left a note. They usually do.”

  “How do you leave a note in a burning building?” Maybe that’s what was bothering me.

  “Left it at her dorm. Shoved it under this woman’s door. Miranda somebody. Starts with a G.”

  Miranda Gironde, the resident adviser.

  “So you treated it like a homicide?”

  “Right up till the pieces started falling into place, saying she did herself. You know, maybe if we didn’t find a note. Maybe if we didn’t find out about how she bought the gas. I mean, the way it played, she douses herself with gasoline and lays down naked on this thing—whachacallit, the kids have ’em—a fucking futon. Lights a match. Fuck, you think nothing bothers you after awhile, drunks beating kids, puking in the backseat, but this one bothered me.”

  I wondered how long before he wouldn’t feel anything at all.

  “Smelled like roast pig,” he said. “Didn’t want to eat anything grilled for a while. The smoke just bit at the back of your throat. I thought maybe I’d be a fireman once, but man, I don’t know how they fucking do it. That’s not how I want to end up
. You get shot, hey, you get shot; they can still fix you up for a nice funeral. You’re not a crispy critter.”

  He was already getting the humor right.

  “I need the name of the boyfriend, the next of kin, the people you interviewed.”

  I could see that he wanted to deny me the information. Then I could see him think about Shea, about having Shea owe him one.

  Benjy Dowling was the boyfriend. Not a student, Somerville address. I’d already spoken to Miranda Gironde at Phillips House. A Jean St. Cyr was in the mix, and sure enough, she was the roommate. The next of kin was Albert Farrell Brinkman, a Swiss businessman. They’d spoken to him by phone; he was elderly and unable to travel.

  I said, “Who made the ID? The boyfriend?”

  “Wasn’t much to ID. One of those where the morgue asks if you’ll please send a photo. Two choices: dental records, DNA. Took awhile, with the goddam reporters all screaming for the ID. Hell, we had to find the kid’s great-uncle in fucking Switzerland.”

  “Next of kin send the dental records?”

  “ME would know. I don’t have it. Christ, those Harvard stiffs are lucky she didn’t do it in the dorm,” Burkett said. “Man, you send your kid to Harvard, you think she’s gonna be with high-class kids. Imagine, sending your kid to Harvard, she rooms with somebody burns down the whole goddamn dorm?” He had a ring on his finger. Married. Maybe with a kid, a little girl he had dreams for.

  “Other than the boyfriend, who was upset by the news?”

  “Woman at the dorm, one found the note, she took it hard, but she coulda been scared for her job. She was shocked, you could tell, but not as shocked as she might have been. Shit, I don’t know. Everybody deals with their shit differently, you know what I mean?”

  I knew what he meant.

  “Anything feel—I don’t know—off about it?”

  “Other than a kid killing herself for no reason, you mean?”

  “Note say anything about being pregnant?”

  “Nope.”

  “Remember it?”

  “Don’t have to. I wrote it down.” He thumbed through a well-worn spiral pad. “It said she was unworthy, something about being unworthy to be there. Here it is. Three fucking sentences and out: ‘Unworthy as I am, I apologize to those who tried to help me. Time to delve for deeper shades of meaning, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry, but I simply can’t go on.’”

  Delve for deeper shades of meaning? What the hell was that about? This was her life, not some freshman class in literary criticism. Ladies and gentlemen. A litle sarcasm there? An acknowledgment of class differences?

  I said, “So, you’re okay with it being suicide?”

  “Hey, not just me, Carlyle. I didn’t make the fucking call. The ME, the arson guys, we all did our job with this one.”

  “Hey, I’m not saying you didn’t.”

  “Finished?”

  “What I mean is, are you satisfied with it being called a suicide?”

  “Satisfied? What the hell’s that mean, lady? A kid’s dead, I’m not fucking satisfied. Look, I gotta go. My partner’s gonna think I dumped him.”

  I gave him the rest of the doughnuts to give to his partner as a peace offering. Then I studied the names I’d scrawled in my notebook. Benjy Dowling, shaken-up boyfriend. Jeannie St. Cyr, former roommate.

  Who did you trust with your love letters, Denali?

  I flipped a mental coin.

  CHAPTER 8

  I wiped glazed-doughnut sugar off my fingers and glanced at my watch. Leaving my car in the lot behind Pearl Art, I walked up Mass Ave, skirting the Yard, passing the Fogg Museum and slipping between the ziggurat-topped Graduate School of Design and magnificent Memorial Hall. I might have found a parking space closer to McKay Hall, behind the Science Center, but it was doubtful at best, and I enjoyed the walk. One thing about a university town, people walk. Some folks in Cambridge and Boston consider cars an abomination; they don’t even know how to drive.

  The ones who do drive, most of them don’t have a clue, either.

  I found a convenient tree to lean against and waited for Jean St. Cyr, Jeannie, the roommate, the dark girl with the notebook on her belly and the questions in her eyes, who’d told nasty Gregor she couldn’t meet him at eleven because she had a class at McKay. Across Oxford Street, a scrawny student tried to launch a kite despite an almost-total lack of breeze and an abundance of trees and telephone wires. I watched him fail over and over, wondered if it was a class experiment in futility.

  I was starting to think I’d missed her, when I caught a glimpse of a girl speeding across the grass, her backpack flung across one shoulder, wearing a raggedy tight red T and bleached jeans. She saw me at the same time and stopped in her tracks, glancing quickly from side to side like a cornered animal.

  I moved, and she ran like a deer.

  She darted around the Science Center and made for the Yard. She was fast and agile, but hampered by the crowd near the gate. I was gaining, shoving kids out of the way, pushing past a clot of robed priests. She raced through the gate, sprinted to the right, away from the crowd, toward Memorial Church and Robinson. She was weighed down by her backpack, hampered by short legs and clunky shoes. She tripped and almost went down, regained her footing, and charged ahead.

  I was on her heels, close enough to hear her pant. I didn’t waste breath ordering her to stop. What the hell was I gonna do if she didn’t, shoot her? I put my head down and ran hard, ran till I could grab her shoulder.

  At my touch, she sank to the ground, like a stone plunging to the bottom of a pond. She was gasping for breath and crying. In a minute, I’d have a full-blown incident on my hands: Hey, lady, what the hell you trying to do to that girl?

  “It’s okay,” I assured the closest hoverers. “My friend’s okay. Just give her some space.” There were murmurs of concern, but no one intervened; I don’t look like a bruiser. I knelt beside her, inhaling the scent of fresh-mown grass, and put what must have looked like a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  She wasn’t going anywhere, and I wanted her to know it. Running makes a suspect look guilty as hell. Maybe I’d guessed right on whom to question first, the boyfriend or the roommate.

  “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God.” Defenseless, out of breath, out of guts, tears rolled down her cheeks. My sympathetic side felt like patting her on the back. I kept it in check and waited till the crowd dispersed. Then I grabbed her chin and tilted her face so I could see into her dark eyes.

  “You needed the money? Is that why?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Or did you want to teach the bastard a lesson?”

  “What the—”

  “You’ve got Denali’s letters, don’t you?”

  “I don’t have any of your stuff, honest!” She started wailing again, and a new audience began to gather, eager for a show. I helped her to her feet, careful never to release my grip. Her eyes were wide and staring; I wondered if she was taking some kind of dope.

  “Come on, Jeannie,” I said gently. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Speak gently, it disarms folks. Call somebody by their name, people assume you know them. No, Doris, don’t butt in. It’s not like it’s some stranger trying to abduct a kid. Abductors know it; they always use a name.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” She was too breathless from running to summon any volume. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t. Oh God.” If I hadn’t been holding her, she’d have fallen to her knees again. “It’s all my fault. Everything’s my fault.”

  If she collapsed, the guy in the rimless glasses was definitely going to come over and make a stink. She seemed so painfully young, so pathetically scared, I could hardly buy her as a blackmailer.

  “Have you eaten today?” I asked.

  She shook her head no. See, there it is; I’d tell Paolina.

  I half persuaded, half dragged her to Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, a Harvard Square institution where the waitresses have seen everything, breakups
and hysterics, drug ODs and marriage proposals, would-be grooms dropping to their knees on the saggy linoleum. After manhandling her into a booth near the rest room, I ordered a Pepsi for me and a breakfast burger for her, a glass of milk, as well.

  By God, I’d make somebody drink milk.

  “I’m missing class. It’s, like, finals review.”

  I’d blocked her exit, sitting next to instead of across from her. To escape, she’d have to crawl under the table.

  “I’m Carlotta,” I said, “by the way.”

  She ducked her head like a turtle retreating back into its shell. “Jeannie.”

  “So how’d you get to be Denali’s roommate, Jeannie? Luck of the draw?”

  Nothing in these easy questions to cause another outbreak of hysterics. Her eyes slid sideways as she considered her plight. I had custody of her backpack. I had her socked into the booth. I was bigger than she was and I could run faster. She stared at me as if I were the matron of some terrifying prison camp.

  “I guess they figured we’d have something in common. Like we were both freshmen, both hoping to be psych majors, interested in education.” Her voice was small and hiccupy.

  “Both in Professor Chaney’s class?”

  She responded almost eagerly, anything to shift the topic away from Denali. “Isn’t he, like, wonderful? Like most of the lectures, with his TA, it’s like she drones and we take notes, but when he comes in, everybody wakes up. It’s like this big challenge, like he wants to hear what we think.”

  The waitress plunked dishes on the table; I was happy to let Jeannie prattle on about Chaney.

  “Like this one class was about like who should get medicated? Like if we medicate students who are behavioral problems, instead of finding other ways to cope, what are we saying? I mean, I totally believe in all that chemistry shit. My mom, she’s like depressed for no reason, and I figure if they could just like give her a blood test and readjust her serotonin, she’d be way happier. But Chaney wanted us to think about who we’d do that for, and why we’d do it, and whether we’d do it if the kid wanted it, or if the parent wanted it, or if the school wanted it. Like it might not be such a great thing after all.”