Deep Pockets

by Linda Barnes

  If Chaney had done it, brilliant Chaney, Harvard’s own Chaney, wouldn’t the man have arranged an airtight alibi? Used someone else’s car? Sure, if he’d planned it, but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d been following Dowling, waiting to make his rational approach, and then there he was, Dowling, blissfully unaware, crossing the street. In a sudden moment of rage and entitlement, Chaney might have gunned the motor, put an end to his tormentor.

  If Chaney hadn’t done it, who had? If he had a guardian angel, I figured he or she existed in solidly human form, not nemesis but accomplice. Had the guardian angel followed me? Had Chaney hired not one but two?

  If Chaney had done the hiring, why Chaney’s car? Rage and entitlement didn’t cut it there, not with a proxy. A man smart enough to hire a proxy killer wouldn’t let the killer use his car.

  I yawned and blinked, sleepy after all. The scotch had done the trick. If Leon had just stayed upstairs, not been so damned nosy … Now there was nothing upstairs but tangled sheets on an empty bed, the scent of a man.

  I recalled the sour smell of dirty clothes in Dowling’s apartment, walked through it room by room in my memory. If I’d entered knowing the tenant would soon be dead, would I have seen it differently? The flat was messy, yes, but was it the mess of a slob, or had someone else searched it before me? Where was Dowling’s checkbook, his bank statements? Where were his tax receipts? Why were the blackmail letters so easy to find? Had they been left on the desk deliberately, to give the cops a link to Chaney?

  I regretted the unexamined locked garage. I’d decided to go for it another time, to pull a nighttime breakin if necessary. Now time seemed to have run out.

  As long as the cops didn’t connect the victim with the owner of the car, it would stay a hit-and-run investigation. They’d dust for prints on the recovered car, but they wouldn’t be surprised to find Chaney’s. Don’t kid yourself: a hit-and-run can be treated in different ways. A homeless man goes under the wheels, that’s one thing. A politician midcampaign, that’s another. The victim always matters. If cops had found the blackmail letters in Dowling’s apartment, they’d be on Chaney like ants on sugar.

  “Burn them,” he’d said.

  I didn’t burn them. I’m too much a cop at heart to destroy evidence. On the other hand, I didn’t want any cop to be able to walk in and take them. I know people who have secret hidey-holes, safes behind switch plates, in baseboards, under the floor. I have a good place, too.

  I reread Chaney’s love letters. So much trouble for so few words. “Darling Denali, you make me feel like a teenager, like a bridegroom, like a gigolo, evil and pure, darling Denali.” Nothing new, no secret code. Simple passion, rising heat. I put each back in its envelope, enclosed them in a plastic bag.

  My cat’s Kitty Litter tray comes apart. I cleaned and emptied it, stuffed the plastic bag between the two halves, and rejoined them invisibly with duct tape. I don’t know a whole lot of people who would search a Kitty Litter tray. And even if someone did search this one, he wouldn’t find the love letters in among the litter. Wouldn’t even realize the two halves came apart.

  Good thing T.C., my cat, can’t talk. After the cheap canned-tuna scraps I’d doled out that week, I knew he’d turn me in if he could. Before I closed my eyes, I wondered how Chaney was sleeping, if he was sleeping. And that led me to another thought, just a wisp of memory and query before sleep dragged me down. Why hadn’t his wife given him an alibi?

  CHAPTER 15

  I didn’t sleep long and I didn’t sleep well. I kept waking abruptly, flipping the pillow, searching for a cool spot against my cheek. It wasn’t just the musky smell of the sheets that made me regret Leon’s absence; I regretted the reason he’d left. I’d been angry at Chaney, the messenger who’d brought bad news at a bad time. Running straight to me after a visit from the cops was pure stupidity on his part. I’d been furious, and that fury, deprived of its rightful target once Chaney’d made tracks, homed in on Leon like a guided missile.

  You learn from your mistakes. Oh yeah, sure you do, and I was getting to be damned good at recognizing them, too, after committing them.

  Did I dream? I don’t remember. I ran over the facts of the case until they became a shopping list, a rote exercise. I couldn’t leave Dowling’s death alone. It was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking at, a sore spot in my mouth that my tongue couldn’t leave untouched. I rolled out of bed, knowing that whether the cops treated the hit-and-run as a traffic accident or a homicide made no difference. I couldn’t ignore it. I had to know. If I’d fingered a man for a killer, I needed to know. How can you learn from your mistakes if you don’t even know which mistakes you’ve made?

  I showered and dressed in khakis and a cotton shirt Paolina had unexpectedly and kindly ironed. Not part of our deal, any more than making her breakfast was for me. Over coffee and toast, I listened to the news but learned nothing. After breakfast, I searched the bushes for the newspaper. The delivery guy must be a hot prospect for the Sox pitching rotation. His velocity is terrific, as demonstrated by the broken branches on the rhododendrons, his location erratic.

  Dowling was relegated to a small boxed item inside the “City and Region” section, which used to be called “Metro” before the news execs realized they needed to boost their circulation beyond the city limits. Page two, upper right side, part of a column of disparate items headed “New England in Brief.” The subhead read “Police seek witnesses in hit-and-run.”

  Boston police requested that witnesses come forward to assist the police in identifying the motorist responsible for the death of a pedestrian. The victim, identified as Benjamin Dowling, 30, of Somerville, was hit while crossing the Birmingham Parkway at approximately 1:00 a.m. The vehicle was traveling west at a high rate of speed. No skid marks were found at the scene, indicating the driver may have been unaware of the pedestrian’s presence in the roadway. Anyone with information should call the hit-and-run hot line at 1-800-555-9687.

  Three things: First, they’d made the identification quickly. That was understandable. The fingerprint database grows daily, and Dowling was in the system, courtesy of a felony conviction. An easy make. Second, the Globe hadn’t run with the professor’s car. I wondered if the cops were certain his was the hit vehicle. They’d need to do paint comparisons. Still, if he’d worked for a lesser university, his name might have appeared in print. Third, the location was intriguing. The Birmingham Parkway is a short loop of heavily traveled highway between the Mass Turnpike and Soldiers Field Road. Not much pedestrian traffic in the area. I wondered where Dowling had been headed—on foot.

  Maybe the Herald was more informative. I was getting ready to go out and liberate a copy from a neighbor’s shrubbery when the phone rang. I picked it up quickly, thinking it might be Leon.

  “Hey, babe.” Gloria’s rich contralto filled the air. “I just wanna know Leroy’s in the clear.”

  They say that if you go blind, your other senses sharpen, try to compensate for the eyes. That may be an old wives’ tale, but Gloria’s ears and eyes both seemed to grow more acute when her legs quit on her. She takes in two or three different radio stations while watching TV. She listens to police scanners while dispatching cabs. She makes connections quickly and surely.

  I’d eliminated the possibility of Leroy as masked avenger between 4:00 and 4:05 this morning. Leroy would have run down Dowling in a New York minute if I’d asked, no question. Would he take the initiative? Maybe. But for Leroy to somehow grab the car of the man I was working for—no way. I mean, how the hell would he know I was working for Chaney? Leroy’s not the most curious of spirits, nor is he exactly unobtrusive. If he’d been spying on me, I’d have seen him, the neighbors would have seen him, and the cops would have seen him. He’s huge.

  “No problem,” I said, “but I’d appreciate it if you and Leroy wouldn’t mention yesterday’s outing.”

  “What outing is that?” I could hear the grin in her voice.

  “And repaint the van.”


  “Already done. You follow the guy?” she asked. “You know who did him?”

  I liked the way her mind worked, automatically assuming that a smart investigator like me, once interested in Dowling, would have kept him under tight surveillance. I only wished I had. I worked the conversation around to what she’d heard on the police band last night.

  “Scanner?” she said. “Whoa, busy, busy night.”

  “With?”

  “Hang on a sec.” I listened while she sweet-talked a customer waiting for a belated ride to the airport. She came back to my question without missing a beat. “Night fulla shit, mostly false alarms. I dunno, you’d think kids wouldn’t pull that shit anymore, too busy shootin’ up the high schools. But last night, they were at it for sure, phonin’ in lies.”

  “The hit-and-run the only fatality?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything else in D-Fourteen? B and E’s?” D-14 is the police designation for Allston-Brighton. It’s a big chunk of town, but most calls run to underage drinking. With parts of BU and all of BC within its boundaries, keg parties take up a lot of response time.

  “Liquor store holdup, but that was C-Six.” Area C-6 is Southie.

  “They call for a tow at the hit-and-run scene?”

  “Ambulance, no tow.”

  You’d think she had it written down, but I knew it was just there in her memory. I’d asked because I was wondering about the location of Dowling’s black TransAm.

  “Cabbies talking about the hit-and-run?” I inquired, knowing cabbies talk about everything.

  “Heard they found the hit car. Owner says it was stolen, but he hadn’t gotten around to reporting it yet.” I could almost see her shrug her vast shoulders. “Heard he’s a big shot.”

  Talking to Gloria cleared the fog from my brain. After I hung up, I had another cup of coffee and refigured my mission. I wasn’t going to investigate just to assure myself I hadn’t fucked up and set Chaney on Dowling’s trail. Guilt is an overriding theme in my life, but I try not to let it upset my sense of balance.

  I’d done my job. I’d succeeded. I’d retrieved Chaney’s love letters, Dowling was dead, and the threat of further blackmail was nil. But if the cops found that Chaney had done the deed, I’d be out a substantial fee. Therefore, I needed to prove Chaney hadn’t done it.

  If I’d had a badge to thrust in her face, I’d have gone to visit Chaney’s wife, demanded to know why her husband wasn’t sure she’d provide him with an alibi. I couldn’t imagine her consenting to speak with me without some form of coercion. I spent some time thinking about what I could use, then decided to go for a source who’d talk to me no matter what.

  “Garnowski, J.” was how Dowling’s parole officer had been listed. I’d worked with Jake Garnowski for only a few months at the end of his cop career, but I’d absorbed his legend. Garnowski wasn’t dumb so much as he was lazy. And he wasn’t lazy so much as he didn’t give a shit. Man hadn’t read his morning dispatches in twenty years. I phoned, and, bingo, he was eager to meet for lunch. Chances were that he wouldn’t know Dowling was dead. And if he did know, chances were that he wouldn’t care.

  The tone of his voice on the phone suggested that he remembered me. I decided on a complete change of wardrobe because I remembered him. I chose a low-cut white tank top and formfitting jeans, wore my hair loose and curly.

  Jake is old school. He used to be a cop and he used to be a crook. By the time he got booted from the department, he had enough political clout to win a probation officer’s slot. After all, he’d never exactly been convicted of a crime. He knew where too many bodies were buried to be threatened with arrest.

  Before I left the house, I debated calling Leon and apologizing. I postponed it. I was busy. Besides, I’d already said it once. I hate to apologize.

  Garnowski had certain requirements in a lunch place. You had to be able to smoke, which left out a lot of choices. You had to be able to drink hard liquor, which left out a few more. The food had to be American-American. So we were into bars, dark, boozy-smelling places called Whitey’s or Smokey’s or Joe’s, with menus featuring beef stew, hamburgers, and meat loaf. My mouth watered in anticipation; I imagined my arteries hardening into pipelike rods.

  I pulled the car into a genuine parking slot, thanked the traffic gods, fed the meter. My quarter didn’t register. I carry a slip of paper in my backpack with “Meter Broken” written across the front in large letters. I sighed as I hunted it out and placed it under the windshield wiper once again. Boston meters ought to have a push-button dispenser, out of order signs on demand.

  Kelly’s Bar and Luncheonette was filled with workmen from the as-yet-and-possibly-forever-unfinished Big Dig. Garnowski was already at the bar, wearing a worn plaid shirt, soiled khakis, and work boots. I always thought that another requirement for a Garnowski place was that it be staffed by some of his former parolees. He always got great service. I’m not sure whether he paid.

  He was a big man and getting bigger, growing soft around the middle, with meaty arms. He looked like he used to box, used to throw his weight around, still could if he were motivated. He also looked like a drinker, with a shot and a beer already in place in front of him on the bar.

  I ordered a beer. I didn’t want one this early, but Garnowski was of the old school, like I said, and if you didn’t drink with him, you were not one of the guys, and that went double for women in law enforcement.

  “Ya look good.” There are plenty of men who can say that in greeting and it’s okay; not a leer, just a greeting. With Garnowski, the words were accompanied by a searching glance, tip to toe, with a long stop at breast level, then a glance around the room to see if the other members of the herd fully appreciated his drinking companion.

  “You, too,” I said, staring at his mountainous gut. “Want to move to a table?”

  “Sure. Joe, bring us a couple burgers. Cheese?”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised he’d offered me the choice.

  “Heavy on the fries,” he added. “She’s paying.” That was for the audience, too. Let the guys know that the broad paid to talk to the big man. Garnowski barely made the height requirement as a cop, and some of the shortest ones are the nastiest.

  We shot the breeze awhile, parking, traffic, the Dig, the graft, the usual bullshit. Then Jake wanted to know if it was true I was dating some black FBI guy, and what the hell had happened between me and Gianelli. Was I ratting him out with the Feebs? I wound it around to Benjy about the same time the burgers came.

  “The thing about Benjy, he isn’t a bad guy.”

  Garnowski used the present tense when describing Dowling, which was good. His eyes gave nothing away, but I was pretty sure that if he did know Benjy was dead, he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from springing it on me.

  I nodded. None of the guys in jail are bad guys, you listen to them tell it.

  “He’s the kind,” the parole officer went on, “if he’d lived a nice suburban life, he’d never a seen inside. Typical hard time growing up—no father, no money, kinda bright, but never smart enough.”

  Benjy was attracted to easy money, he explained. He’d work harder for crooked money than most guys would work for straight pay. Benjy liked the life, the irregular hours, the hanging out, the bragging, the womanizing. He actually used that word, womanizing.

  “He was like a magnet for trouble. Except not a magnet—what am I trying to say here? He was like one a them metal filings. A crime magnet would come along and yank Benjy clear across the state. That’s how he is. Always waiting to feel the tug, always ready to fly across the floor. There’s a lot of crooks out there, and I’m pretty sure one a them will get to Benjy again.”

  Since he was talking about Benjy as if he had a future life in crime, I was careful to do the same. “You’d be surprised if he was heading something, doing something on his own?”

  “If Benjy was doing something on his own, it would be ripping off the poor box at a stone-broke parish.”


  “He get any education in jail?”

  “You kidding? Even in this Commie state, we don’t coddle ’em anymore. Used to be you could walk outta the can with a fucking college degree. All Benjy coulda learned was how to boost a better car.”

  “He make friends in jail?”

  “Assholes and jerks.”

  “Ganged up?”

  “Not that I heard, but he was buddies with a guy named—lemme see, another one of mine, a Freddie Church, only he never went in one, get it? Never went in a church. Now, I been a good guy. Loose lips and all that. Never can say no to a pretty woman, and you gals all take advantage of me.”

  He’d raised his voice for the audience, which made me want to slam my boot heel on his instep. He didn’t just talk to pretty women; Garnowski talked to everybody. He drank and he talked, and it was a wonder he was still gainfully employed. Somebody must have owed him big time.

  “Why ya wanna know about Benjy? What’s he done?”

  “Boring old due-diligence shit.”

  “As in a job?” He gave me the eye. He didn’t like it when women swore. Drinking was fine, because then they might let him score, but swearing—well, that wasn’t ladylike.

  I said, “What kind of jobs would he be likely to take? Restaurant work?”

  “Nah, he hated that shit, said they were all grab-ass places. Worked cleaning buildings, mostly. Janitorial, but had trouble getting jobs, keeping them, too.”

  “You know where he’s working now?”

  “Nope. He’s offa my list. Did his time, paid his price.”

  “How’d he get caught?”

  “Couldn’t leave well enough alone. Ya know, that’s another one of Dowling’s sins. He’s always—whatchacallit?—gilding the fuckin’ lily, ya know. Has to do you one better. He and a buddy rob a place, he’s got to take it on himself to beat the shit outta the manager. Makes the manager remember the robbery a whole lot better, that much pain. Then when the cops question him, he’s gotta give ’em all these details that they can check, tell he’s lying like a rug. Can’t shut up. Gotta go you one better. Ambitious, but can’t leave well enough alone.”