by Ace Atkins
“So no school, no real psychiatric care,” I said. “They must have some terrific cultural activities.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dillon said, grinning. “We got to hum a little while we picked up shit on the beach.”
“Dillon,” Sheila said.
“What else can I call it?” he said. “We were on garbage detail. We cleaned up the beach every day until we had two sacks full of the stuff. Sometimes we’d add in seaweed and crap to make it all go faster. They didn’t really care about the cleanup. It was just busy work. Everything we did was about checking the box. School, the doc, recreation time. Even the food. I wasn’t exactly expecting great stuff, but I wouldn’t feed a dog the kind of stuff they dished out.”
“My dog has gourmet tastes.”
“Well, your dog wouldn’t last on Fortune Island,” he said. “It’s not a place to live. You just sort of exist. It makes you feel like you’ve been put on hold, and nobody gives a shit anymore. I know that’s not true. I know everything my mom was doing. But they want you to believe that you’re nothing and no more important than the crap that washes up on the beach.”
I nodded. Iris kept writing down notes. Sheila started to cry a little. She told us she’d already found a new place for them to live. They’d never come back to Blackburn. Ever.
“Did you meet other kids like you?” I said. “Given a sentence for a minor offense.”
“How long you got?” Dillon said.
“Long as you want to talk,” Iris said. She had on severe black-framed glasses that gave her a serious and focused look. Not that Iris Milford had ever been a wallflower.
“Listen,” Dillon said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. I’ll tell you everything that happened to me. My mom and I already talked about it. If I shut up, then people like Judge Scali have won. I’m not ever going back to that school and we’re moving out of this town. But I have a favor to ask, Mr. Spenser.”
I nodded.
“I met a friend out on the island who had it a lot worse than me,” Dillon said. “He’s from Blackburn, too, but a senior. He was a wrestler and a real good guy. I knew who he was before the island but we really didn’t know each other. He did something real stupid but not violent. He got sent to the island and when he was there he wouldn’t get with the program. I respected him for not letting the guards beat him down.”
“What’s his name?”
Dillon told us.
“How can we help?”
“If you don’t get him off that island they are going to freakin’ kill him,” Dillon said. “These guys, the guards, they don’t give a shit. Sorry, Mom. But they don’t. They’ll shoot him and throw him into the harbor and no one will ever find him. I’m worried they may have already done it.”
“Why him?”
“Because the kid won’t quit,” Dillon said. “They can’t break him. And the guards don’t know how to handle it.”
I lifted my eyes at Iris. She was taking notes. She met my eyes and just shook her head.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell us all you know.”
Sometime in the morning, before the other kids were up, Robocop kicked the boy awake. He told him to get dressed and follow him to the security check. This time Robocop didn’t watch him dress. The boy did as he was told and soon he was following the man down a rutted path to the docks. There were two small boats teetering in the lights where two guards unloaded boxes and set them into the back of a small pickup truck.
“What?” Robocop said. “You need a fucking invitation?”
The boy walked to the boat, where a fat man in an MCC uniform handed him a heavy box. He loaded it onto the truck and kept on with the boxes until they were gone. The truck drove off. The boy was sweating under his clothes. He stood alone with Robocop on the long, weather-beaten dock. They could see the outline of Boston’s lights clear from where they stood. He thought about what he’d told Dillon Yates, and for a half a second he thought about jumping and trying to swim. But then he saw the jagged pieces of ice and the high breaking waves on the beach.
“Okay,” the boy said. “What now?”
“Follow me.”
Never be alone with the guard.
“I don’t like being out here.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“You have to have other guards around,” the boy said. “That’s the rule.”
“Someone will come back.”
“I want someone now.”
The man wore an old Army jacket and a black ball cap. He hadn’t shaved and the whiskers on his chin looked dirty. From across the boat, he could smell the alcohol on the man’s breath.
“Sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“I said sit down,” Robocop said. “Or do you want to go swimming again?”
The boy sat. The boat rocked up and down, unstable on the two lines tethering it to the dock. He caught his breath, feeling the sweat under his clothes and the tight frozen feeling on his face. He wiped his nose. He looked far across the harbor of Boston.
Robocop lit a cigarette. A deep purple light shone from over the old trash mounds beyond the pods. The guard blew some smoke into the wind. He scratched the back of his neck. The cold silence, the rocking of the boat, made the boy feel uneasy. He wanted to get back to the pod and join the others. Dillon was gone.
He heard a new boy was coming in today.
“There’s no reason we can’t be friends,” the man said. He spoke the boy’s name. “Wouldn’t you like that?”
The boy shrugged. The man smiled and turned his head over the edge of the boat and spit. The boat rocked some more. The man rested his arm on his thigh, tight and immovable in the silence around them.
He smoked down the cigarette, tossed it into the harbor, and walked over to the boy.
The boy stiffened. The man, bony and now reeking of booze, sat down next to him. There was no space between them. The boy moved over. The man laughed. He offered the boy a cigarette. And the boy shook his head.
“No reason not to be friends.”
“What do you want?”
“Good to have a boy in charge,” he said. “You know. Like Tony.”
“Then keep Tony in charge.”
“Can’t have that.”
“Why?”
“’Cause he’s weak,” the guard said. “He’s not like you. You showed him up.”
The boy swallowed. His hot breath turned to smoke in the cold harbor air. The guard smoked some more and then reached into the pocket of his dirty coat. He pulled out a pint of whiskey and put it into the boy’s hands. “This makes things easier.”
“I don’t want things to be easier.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “You do.”
He didn’t wait a beat before grabbing the boy by the scruff of the neck and sticking the neck of the bottle into the boy’s mouth. He felt the hot burn of the booze in his throat as he tried to knock it away. The man suddenly thought he’d had enough and yanked the bottle back. He laughed some and took a swig. The boy wiped his chin.
The boat kept on rocking. Somewhere on the other side of the harbor, people were going about things in Boston. Having normal lives. Doing normal things.
“It makes it easier,” the guard said. “The thing about you? I see you’re a lot like me.” Robocop swallowed a bit more and tucked the whiskey bottle into his oversized Army coat. The boy looked to the boat steps, the hard line of the ropes trying to keep everything close to the dock. The rope squeaked and ached with the pressure.
“Come on,” Robocop said. “I ain’t so bad.”
The older man reached out and touched the boy’s knee. He then gripped the back of his neck, squeezing hard with his big fat hand. The boy recoiled, jumped up, and jackrabbited off the boat. He leaped over the steps and onto the beaten dock. He tripped and fell, caught on a loose n
ail. But he was up again. You never stayed down.
Robocop yelled obscenities at him. He ran after him, off the dock, and onto the shore. The older man threw the bottle at him and it shattered in a million pieces. The boy was on the path toward the pods and then decided to break away and run toward the South Shore and into the grouping of trees weirdly rooted in the old landfill.
He ran fast, tried to keep his breathing under control. You kept moving. You didn’t stay down. You kept moving.
He couldn’t hear the yelling anymore.
There was only the wind breaking and fluttering the bare limbs of the trees and the crashing of the harbor surf. Jesus Christ. He was dead. The guy would kill him.
46
After Iris and I compared notes, I drove back to Boston. Iris was working on a story about conditions on Fortune Island while I followed the money trail from Bobby Talos Jr. to the pockets of Judge Joe Scali. Since I’d left Tampa, I had tried to get in touch with Sydney Bennett outside Ziggy Swatek’s office. I had left three messages at her Boston office and two at her home number. I said I had something important to tell her, knowing being told you were on a hit man’s punch list was something best done in person. I was pretty sure Hallmark didn’t make a greeting card for that purpose.
I tried again. The call went right to voice mail. Being a persistent investigator, I drove to her office in Brookline. Ziggy Swatek kept his Boston office in the heart of Brookline Village. The building was decidedly less grandiose than the beer-can building and was located on the second floor of a short brick building on Harvard Street.
I bought a corned-beef on rye at Michael’s and ate while I watched. I knew her car tag and her car, parked five spaces away. I didn’t really get bored until three hours later. The sandwich was gone, as were the chips and a pickle. I used my branch office, the closest Dunkin’, for the facilities and bought a coffee.
I listened to “Here and Now” with Robin Young. I watched the world stroll by in their heavy coats and ski hats. A woman in a white puffy coat and blue jeans walked a high-strung black Lab on a red leash. The woman had on aviator sunglasses and had a blond ponytail that fell the length of her back. The Lab bounded and jumped, grabbing the leash with its mouth, wanting to take the lead.
After nearly four hours, Sydney Bennett emerged from the office building, waited for traffic to pass, and then crossed Harvard Street to her car.
I waited until she’d backed out and then started mine. I followed her west on Route 9 for fifteen to twenty minutes. I kept a decent distance away from her Lexus, although she had no reason to know my vehicle. I kept out of sight more as a professional courtesy than anything.
I still had some cold coffee and drank it. I turned off the radio and turned on the windshield wipers, as it had started to rain. The rain was cold, the day was gray and miserable, and soon the roads would turn to ice. But I felt comfortable back in my native habitat.
Traffic was slow and sluggish as we passed the Brookline Reservoir. I knew she wasn’t headed home. I had her address in an apartment in the South End. I had resigned myself to the fact that I might be spending the day in Framingham or Worcester when she pulled into the Chestnut Hill Mall. Again, familiar turf. Susan had propped up the gross national product of Guatemala in those hallowed halls while I’d drunk beer at Charley’s.
Sadly, Charley’s was no more. And lately Susan had preferred dragging me around Copley Place.
Sydney parked near one of the Bloomingdale’s that bookended the mall. Since I was well versed on the turf, I knew this was the one that sold women’s clothes. I was good, but blending into the intimates collection might prove difficult.
I waited until she disappeared inside and then followed. I was dressed differently than I was when we met in Tampa. I wore a leather jacket and a ball cap. I wore the ball cap down low to obscure my face. I tucked my hands in the pocket of the jacket and walked with my head down. I strolled inside and spotted her right off in the ladies shoes department.
I hung back with Ralph Lauren. I pretended to shop as if I were shopping for Susan. I would never shop for Susan. She once told me my taste seemed more fitting for Gypsy Rose Lee. I thumbed through a rack of herringbone jackets. I became immersed in a stack of navy silk blouses. I was about to move on when a perky sales clerk wandered up to me and asked if I’d found anything.
“Do these come in a double XL?”
“Men’s section is at the other end of the mall, sir.”
“Darn,” I said. “And I was starting to feel so pretty.”
When I looked up, Sydney Bennett was gone. I made my way through the shoes and into cosmetics and spotted her just as she stepped out of the store into the rest of the mall. It was a weekday and the mall crowd was thin. Even with Susan, my patience with shopping lasted only a good twenty minutes.
Not far from the Bloomingdale’s entrance, Sydney had stopped to check messages on her phone. There was a grouping of leather furniture nearby, close and comfy to keep you prisoner in the mall with the offer of Wi-Fi. As she tucked the phone into her purse, I stepped up next to her.
“Hello,” I said. “Again.”
She did not look in the least bit surprised. I think I’d have been more pleased if I’d actually startled her. She might have been easier to work with if she wasn’t sure what to say or do. But there was a reason she was second in command to a huckster like Ziggy Swatek.
“I have nothing to say.”
“‘Then follow me and give me audience.’”
“Is that a quote?”
“Yes.”
“By whom?”
“You’d rather not know,” I said. “It might lead to suspicion.”
“I am already more than suspicious, Mr. Spenser,” she said. “You followed me here.”
“Yes.”
“Because you believe I will tell you something about my client?”
“No.”
“Then why else?”
Two old women in small pink ball caps wandered by, hoisting packages in old frail fists. They sat down at the little grouping of leather seating, ruining our private place to talk, and complained about their poor, aching feet.
“Perhaps we can go elsewhere,” I said.
“I have nothing to say,” she said. “And frankly, I am—”
“Do you know the name Ray-Ray Barboza?”
“No,” she said. “Why should I?”
“Or perhaps Raymond Barboza,” I said. “I believe Ray-Ray to be his professional name.”
“What kind of professional?”
She looked annoyed and impatient, and reached into her purse for her phone. She looked at its screen and then back at me. She typed out something and then replaced the phone. She looked even more lawyerly today, wearing a fitted navy pin-striped suit with a pearl-colored silk top under a heavy blue wool coat. Her leather boots were tall and seemed like they may have been designed by the Luftwaffe.
“If you click your heels together, I bet those things make a hell of a racket.”
She turned to leave. I touched, not grabbed, her arm.
“Jackie DeMarco isn’t a nice man.”
“Is that what you came to tell me?”
“He feels you may be working with the Feds.”
“Yeah, right.”
“And he hired Mr. Barboza to make sure you would stay quiet.”
“That’s a lie.”
She turned up her small chin to look at me. She might’ve been pretty in another place and under another circumstance. It’s hard to find beauty when someone looks like they just might clock you with their purse.
“I don’t know if you’re working with the Feds,” I said. “But you know what Talos and the judges are doing with those kids is wrong. You didn’t sign on to work with a creep like Judge Scali.”
“You draw a lot of imaginary lines, Mr. Spenser.”<
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Her mouth twitched a bit, and as in the Tampa office, her words had little starch. She just upturned that little chin and shook a little. I placed a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go somewhere,” I said. “I’ll tell you all I know, and then you can make up your own mind.”
I waited for the purse to clock me with all the ferocity of Ruth Buzzi. Instead, she simply nodded.
47
I told Sydney Bennett all I knew at the Café Vanille inside the mall.
She drank coffee and listened. Although the dark chocolate croissant looked terrific, I knew it was just a fancy donut. I had coffee, too. I was within a few pounds of my target two hundred and ten.
“I’m supposed to believe the word of a convicted killer.”
“No,” I said. “Only believe me. I think you got a queasy feeling about this whole business long before we met.”
She was silent. She stirred her coffee for the umpteenth time.
“Even if I had concerns about a client, I would be disbarred for speaking with you.”
“Perhaps.”
“Not perhaps,” she said. “Absolutely.”
“What if you only told me about the judges,” I said. “You said they aren’t your clients. I have a pretty good idea on what the DeMarcos are all about.”
“Oh,” she said. “Do you?”
She said it condescendingly, with a sharp edge. I shrugged and let the words hang there for a moment. I took a sip of coffee to keep my mind working to decide on what my mouth should do next. I nodded. “I knew Jackie DeMarco’s old man,” I said. “I knew the guy who sold him out and sent him to prison, too. Over my many years in this business, I’ve had the dishonor of meeting a thousand guys like Jackie. Jackie does for Jackie. I doubt he’s even conflicted about it.”
“You don’t even know my client.”
“Jackie will steal, rob, and cheat until he creates his own noose. I’m more concerned about two men who swore an oath to uphold the law. You lead me in the right direction and I walk away.”