Deep Pockets

by Linda Barnes

  “Excellent. What does he say?”

  “The cops got something in the mail, an anonymous communication.”

  The other shoe, I thought. “What?”

  “I’m not sure I have it exact, but it was something like ‘Find out why Chaney paid Dowling five thousand dollars to keep quiet about their relationship.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Shit.” I scrawled the words on the back of an envelope.

  “Well, it’s nonsense, of course,” Geary blustered. “I can’t—”

  “It means the cops will go to his bank,” I said. “They’ve probably already been there.” The point of the damn pencil broke with an audible snap.

  “But—it is nonsense, isn’t it?”

  “Look, Chaney said you could get him out on bail.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do it. Get over to the Brighton station and make a stink. If he’s charged, get him out of there. Did you get me the accident report?”

  “What?”

  “The accident report on Dowling. I left a message.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I have it here. If you come and—”

  “Messenger it over.”

  “All right.”

  “And then get over to Brighton.”

  “But I have an eleven o’clock meeting with—”

  “Cancel it. Wilson needs you. Hey, wait! Are you still there? Good. I need something else. Details about a lawsuit. The defendant is Harvard. Yeah, that Harvard. Brinkman was one of the plaintiffs until yesterday.”

  “Who’s Brinkman? What does this have to do with springing Chaney?”

  “You’re supposed to cooperate with me, remember? I can call Harvard’s Legal Services and ask who the plaintiff’s attorneys are and get the runaround all day. You can use whatever pull you’ve got, professional courtesy, whatever, and find out in ten minutes.”

  “Possibly.”

  “I’m sure you can. Then get me in to see whoever’s representing Brinkman and the others against Harvard.”

  He gave a long-suffering sigh. “When?”

  “As soon as you can. Call me on my cell.”

  “Okay.”

  “And send the messenger, and get Chaney out.”

  “Yeah, sure.” The line went dead.

  I pressed the button, bit my lip, and stared at the silent phone. I wasn’t surprised by Geary’s call. If Chaney was being set up, the initial frame hadn’t taken. I’d removed the blackmail notes from Dowling’s apartment before the cops arrived. Now another incriminating tidbit had been dangled in front of their noses.

  Leon made a noise. He stood in the doorway. I had no idea how long he’d been there, how long he’d been listening.

  “Wilson,” he said. “That was about Wilson Chaney, right? Come on, don’t tell me it’s none of my business. He’s a friend.”

  I placed the pointless pencil carefully on the desk. “Leon, what can I say? He may be your friend, but he didn’t ask for your help. He came to me. Not as a friend. How am I supposed to help him by blabbing, when he came to me for confidentiality?”

  “He’s in trouble.”

  “Go see his wife, ask her how he is.”

  “Margo doesn’t like me.”

  Score one for you, I thought. “How long have you been Wilson’s friend?”

  He pressed his lips together. “Notice I’m not asking why it’s any of your business.”

  “If you don’t want to say, fine with me.” The tension was back, thick as the night we’d argued. I felt like I had as a child when my dad would force too much air into party balloons. “Stop,” my mom and I would beg, hands over ears, waiting for disaster, for the balloon to burst and my father to curse the cheap balloons, the shoddy goods. Why the hell didn’t he blow them up to the proper size, quit before they burst? Last night’s gentle caresses seemed like they’d happened weeks ago, months ago, with a different man.

  Abruptly, Leon relaxed. He took four steps into the room, sank into the canvas butterfly chair across from my desk. “We’re old neighborhood, me and Wilson, back in Philly. We’re Oxford Circle boys, and old OC is not a nice place. Amazing the two of us are where we are, since most of the guys we palled around with are probably doin’ ten to twelve.”

  “Chaney’s smart,” I said. “So are you.”

  “Takes more than smart. Takes lucky, too. And Wilson—I don’t know—he’s smart, but he’s dumb.”

  “How so?”

  “Smart in school, you know? Couldn’t touch him in school. But dumb with people sometimes, dumb with women, for sure.”

  I’d met my client’s wife. “The two of you stayed in touch?”

  “Nah, but I looked him up when I got transferred here. My old aunty Beth, she keeps tabs on Chaney, always holding him up to me like some kind of god. ‘Chaney’s at Harvard and you’re a flatfoot; too bad you didn’t make good like your friend Wilson.’ That’s why I don’t call Aunty Beth more often. But it’s not Wilson’s fault. He doesn’t behave like that. He knows I remember him when. He likes to get together, talk about old times. His family, once they stayed with us four, five months. We shared a room like real brothers when their place burned down.”

  I didn’t show my interest on my face or in my voice. “How did that happen?”

  “I don’t remember. I’m not even sure I ever knew. Electrical fire, I think. Space heater or something. We all used space heaters back then, landlords turned the heat off so early. Why?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Carlotta, let’s go out for breakfast. Charlie’s Kitchen’s good.”

  “I don’t have time, Leon.”

  “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “When I’m hungry, I’ll find something.”

  He glanced in the direction of the kitchen. “I wouldn’t guarantee that.”

  “If I don’t find anything, I’ll skip it. Nobody starves to death missing one crummy meal.” God, I sounded like Paolina. “I know I’m not the perfect housewife; it’s not my goal in life.”

  “What is, babe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where’s this thing of ours going? Where you wanna be ten years from now? Do you wanna wake up in the morning with one cracked egg in the fridge?”

  “I’m sorry, Leon, but this conversation’s going to have to wait.”

  “That’s what I keep hearing. It’ll have to wait. I’ll have to wait. I’ll have to bide my time till you’re ready. You call the shots.”

  “Leon, I’ve got a client in trouble. I have to make calls.”

  “Yeah, well, I can play that, too. I have to go to work, and it’s always something important. It’s the goddamn FBI!”

  He turned on his heel and I heard the front door slam. Christ, we might as well be married, I thought. Damn. You need time for a relationship, time to build it, time to nurture it, and nurturing has never been my strong suit.

  Fuck that, I thought, and I don’t use those words often, even in my head. It’s a guy’s curse, equating lovemaking with violence and anger and all the things I don’t normally choose to bill it with. Fuck that. I do fine nurturing Paolina. Maybe it’s pretense that has never been my strong suit. I took a sip of coffee that was too damned hot. Oh, pretense was my strong suit when I married. I played sweet and patient and understanding when Cal didn’t come home till four in the morning. I played grateful when he’d spend the night at home. I was all the things I thought he’d want a wife to be, and none of it was enough. Now, jaded veteran that I am, I want someone who wants me for who I am, and damned if I’m going to pretend to be interested in eating scrambled eggs when I’ve got a client heading for a cell.

  I sipped the coffee more cautiously. Leon had abandoned the other three cups on the counter, hadn’t even taken his own. I called the fire department’s dispatch center in Boston and, passing as a journalist, one of my favorite ruses, found that there was no general rash of fire alarms, although there had indeed been false alarms the two nights in question. I never asked
about those two nights directly, just keyed my questions to other events, school vacations and the like, until I got the information I needed.

  “You use the same instant ID the police department uses, right?”

  “Yes, the number comes up on our screen when you make the call.”

  “But that hasn’t cut the number of false alarms?”

  “It cuts the number that kids make from mama’s phone. But people still yank the call boxes. And we can’t get a trace on cells and mobiles.”

  “Thanks.”

  Two sets of false alarms … I admit it: I was starting to wonder not where my investigation would lead but where it should have begun. I’d been hired to stop the blackmail, but was the blackmail the first crime in the series? I’d had trouble imagining Denali’s suicide from the get-go, and now it seemed like part of a pattern. Two deaths—and I knew Benjy Dowling’s death was no accident. So what did that make Denali Brinkman’s? Arson? Murder? Dowling, the man whose emotional testimony had helped the cops settle on suicide, was dead. Yes, the medical examiner had agreed, but Boston’s MEs have a spotty reputation. It was years ago, yeah, and times have supposedly changed, but one once wrote “natural causes” on a mobster with a garrote still embedded in his neck. The ME might have seen what he thought he was supposed to see, primed by the police report and the recent MIT suicide by fire.

  I phoned a source in the ME’s office and arranged to buy some information. I thought about the gas station on Mount Auburn Street, about the pump jockey identifying Denali as the woman who’d requested gas for her stalled car. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Could it have been another woman? Could Denali have been tricked into playing the scene? Maybe it was the black TransAm that had run out of gas. Maybe Dowling had arranged it so that he’d stay with the vehicle, waiting for help, and she’d go for the gas. If Dowling had killed his girlfriend, had someone killed him, seeking revenge?

  I considered the matter as I scrounged for food. Who cared about Denali Brinkman? Chaney came to mind. Great. Suspect number one: my client. I was hungry, damn it, and there was nothing to eat in the house. I hated it that Leon was right about the way I lived, but what the hell gave him the right to criticize? Another phone call or two and I’d hit the Central Square Dunkin’ Donuts, play volleyball, smash hell out of a round, unfeeling ball till my anger died.

  I yanked open my desk drawer, pulled out the receipt I’d found crumpled in Dowling’s filing cabinet. Graylie Janitorial Services. I recalled the unmarked coveralls on the back of his door. A phone number was printed neatly at the top of the small yellow sheet, along with a Medford address. I dialed.

  It rang and rang, six times, eight times. I thought every modern business had an answering machine, but I guess not. I was about to hang up, when a voice came on the line, a semihysterical woman’s voice, heavily accented. I gave my name, but she didn’t let me go on.

  “Please, you call back later, no? I leave this line open, no? For la polícia. Oh, madre mia, they say they call right back. You call later, sí?” Click. A dull, empty hum echoed in my ear.

  I checked the address again. Medford’s not far, and I decided I wasn’t hungry after all.

  CHAPTER 23

  With caffeine pulsing in my veins, I wanted to move, to drive, to get to Graylie Janitorial Services as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to wait for a messenger to make it from Geary’s Kendall Square office to my North Cambridge home. It’s no more than a ten-, eleven-minute drive, given good traffic, but that’s a thing Bostonians are seldom granted; plus, Geary might have consigned the envelope to a cabbie. The cabbie—if I knew cabbies, which I did—would pick up a passenger along the way. They’re not supposed to, but they do.

  I yelled upstairs, and, hallelujah, Roz was home and awake enough to promise she’d listen for the bell and sign for the police report.

  I considered the hour and the traffic, decided on the Alewife Brook Parkway, winding through East Arlington to the Mystic Valley Parkway and into the working-class city of Medford. I turned right on Forest Street, crossed the Mystic River into Medford Square, better known to townies as “Medfid Squayah.” The address put Graylie Janitorial Services on a mixed block, half residential apartments, half small businesses. It was a squat square building with fresh blue paint and a discreet sign on a tiny patch of lawn. There weren’t any police cars parked in front, and I took that as a good omen. I grabbed my jacket, slipped it on, skipped the pumps. The semihysterical woman hadn’t sounded in any condition to criticize my choice of footwear.

  I rang the bell, and there she was, a tiny woman with a round face and long dark hair caught in a single braid. She looked like a china figurine, a statue of the suffering Madonna.

  “I called earlier,” I said. “I’m a detective.” Two truths; both statements honest. I am a detective. I had called earlier. Two truths can constitute a lie, but I didn’t feel obliged to explain that to the woman as she muttered welcoming words in Spanish.

  “Oh sí, you come at last, you look. I don’t know yet what is missing, what is gone, but I call.”

  She was thirty, I figured, maybe less, her skin impeccable porcelain. Not a wrinkle, but that may have been because she was plump. Honduran or Guatemalan, probably, with black eyes round as stones. She didn’t ask for ID, and I found myself nodding, encouraging her misapprehension without coming right out and impersonating an officer.

  “I go in already,” she said, waving her hands. “Ai, I know I shouldn’t, but I do. When I see the lock broken, I must go like a strong wind blows me there.”

  “Comprendo, señorita.”

  The simple Spanish called forth a rush of speech so rapid, I had to use both hands and voice to stop the flood. “Mas despacio, por favor.”

  She slowed down. “I am so stunned, I don’t even think, but maybe there’s someone still inside.”

  “Do you want me to check?” I asked in Spanish.

  She shook her head. “No es necessario.”

  She’d gone inside; she couldn’t help herself. She hoped she hadn’t done the wrong thing, going in, even starting to straighten up, but it was as if she were on automatic pilot. That was the work she did: You saw a mess, you cleaned it up. And she hadn’t thought to put on rubber gloves, although she understood all the ladrones did now; all the thieves wore gloves.

  While she was speaking, she opened the door wide and stepped into a ten-by-twelve-foot office that had been turned upside down. The two desks were toppled, the drawers extracted and shaken until empty. Posters that had been on the walls were on the floor. Potted plants displayed their roots and the potting soil had been dumped on top of file folders. The shaken woman hadn’t gotten far with her cleaning.

  “Look,” she said. “Madre de Dios. Who does such a thing? Ai, beasts, not humans. Pigs. It makes me sick.”

  “What’s your name?” My Spanish runs to things like that, basics.

  “Pardon. I should tell you, no? I am Fidelia Moros Santos.”

  “And you work for Graylie?” I didn’t give my name, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Is no Graylie. Is my business, no? I don’t have the English so good, but I am here many years. A citizen, no? I am owner, but I am clever, no? I think, who comes to a business with a name like Moros Santos? Only maybe the women who want a clean house cheap, but I do more. I clean for the big companies. They like more English, no?” She folded her arms under heavy breasts and awaited my approval.

  I smiled. “You made up the name?”

  “Sí. I have a man here speaks good English, works for me. I have him for answer the phone. When Anglos know there is an Anglo in the office, they are more happy. They don’t care who owns, just they need to know someone understands good English. I understand good, but I sound not so good.”

  “You sound fine,” I said.

  “Look. Look what they do. Animals.” She held up a mound of disordered receipts much like the one I’d salvaged from Dowling’s drawer. I should have identified myse
lf, asked her whether she remembered the client who’d paid her for services on at least two occasions, shown her his photo, but she was eagerly leading me around the room, pointing out the outrages visited on her office. In addition to the two dismembered desks, pillows had been tossed off a saggy couch. Magazines and papers were strewn across the floor. A file cabinet was upended, one corner dented.

  “Did you keep money here?” Something seemed wrong, but I couldn’t yet pin it down. If you break into a business, you go for cash; you go for a safe. Maybe kids had broken in, but there was no gang insignia, no graffiti, no shit smeared on the walls.

  “Not so much, no. A little only for when one of the crews goes for coffee, maybe. In a gray metal lockbox.”

  “I don’t see it,” I said.

  “Is gone,” she agreed.

  All the time we were talking, I kept one eye on the window, an ear open for the sound of an approaching patrol car. The Medford cops wouldn’t come racing down the street, sirens screaming and lights flashing. An over-and-done-with B and E at a small business is not a bank robbery in progress. Before they came, I needed to work the conversation around to the receipt and what Benjy Dowling had purchased from a cleaning company.

  “We ought to wait for a crime-scene team,” I told the woman gently. “I saw a doughnut shop across the street. We could wait there and talk. You look like you could use some coffee. And I could use a doughnut.” I doubted the Medford cops would call out a crime-scene team for such a small-potatoes crime. I just wanted out of there before the cops came.

  “That’s so sweet,” she said. “You’re no like a cop at all.”

  Inwardly, I cringed.

  “I no can lock the door,” she protested.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Just close it. We can see it from the window.”

  She needed to find her bag, which she’d put down somewhere in her panic, and now she couldn’t remember even which bag she’d brought to work that morning. Ai, she moaned over and over. What would she do about the crews that were to work the next shift? She’d come in early because she had to do all the office work this week, what a mess, how hard it was to be alone in a crisis. She went on and on, until I found her bag and led her across the street to a coffee shop that must have been spanking new in the fifties and hadn’t changed since. Round vinyl stools poked up from the warped linoleum flooring. The counter faced cases of doughnuts that hadn’t been made within the past four hours. I hoped they’d been made sometime that week.