The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  The Warriors were on a 12-0 run, and there didn’t seem to be much hope. Besides, I’d lost the thread. I didn’t know any of these players. I reached up with the remote and clicked it off.

  For a while I sat on the bed and stared at the phone. Eventually, I was staring not at the phone but into the corner of my room where I’d left Ellen’s box of personal momentos. I hadn’t touched it since the night we’d bolted from her house. I’d started to a couple of times—Dan asked about it almost once a day—but over the weekend I hadn’t wanted to be reminded. After Lenny’s call on Monday, I wasn’t sure I wanted to open it up at all. I knew that if I did, I’d find out all kinds of details about Ellen, the odd and unique ones that would turn her into a person to me. If I opened that box, Ellen would come out and sit in the room next to me and talk to me and I’d get to know her and pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to put her back.

  I stared at the phone a little longer. Stood up. Paced around. Wished I had brought work home with me. The second time I looked at the box, it was already too late. I went to the corner, picked it up, and hoisted it onto the bed. Before opening it, I laid my hand over it, palm flat, pausing for a moment before disturbing the contents. Then I lifted the lid and began.

  Dan had tossed in the mail he’d found at the house, and it was right on top. It was a large stack until I took out all the coupon flyers and catalogues. What was left was a couple of bills and a plain postcard. Not much different from my own mail. According to her bills, Ellen had paid a fortune to heat that big house, and she was a frequent purchaser of cable pay-per-view movies, the single woman’s best friend. At the Marblehead Athletic Club she’d charged the same bagel and cream cheese at the juice bar three days a week, every week, in December. Four times in the month, once a week on Mondays, she’d been charged fifty dollars for something coded PT, which I took to mean personal trainer. I started to put it back into the envelope when I noticed the date of her last session—January 5. It was the day she died. Seemed strange to work out, then go home and hang yourself. A phone number was provided on the invoice. I put it aside to call sometime when it wasn’t the middle of the night.

  The last item, the postcard, had looked like junk mail because of the computer-generated address label, but the single line of type across the back identified it as something far more interesting. “Have been unable to contact you by phone,” it read. “Please call me.” And it was signed by none other than Julia Milholland, the mystery woman with the old-Boston name. Whoever she was, she was persistent. And discreet. Not only had she never left a clue in her multiple phone messages, the front of the card was blank. No title, affiliation, or company name, but there was a return address on Charles Street. I put it with the health club invoice.

  The rest of the box was filled with Ellen’s ubiquitous hanging files with colored labels, which is not how I stored anything personal. I thought the one labeled letters was promising, but I didn’t get too far into the newsy notes from Aunt Jo and chatty letters from high school and college chums before realizing that what I needed was a box of letters from Ellen.

  She’d kept a stack of photo ID’s, mostly from school, work, and health clubs. I remembered seeing Ellen at a few company functions and meetings. I knew what she had looked like, but this was the first time I’d seen a picture of her. She had chin-length red hair and hazel eyes. She had high cheekbones that came down to a rather square jaw. She wasn’t pretty in the classic fashion model sense, but she was attractive in an unusual way. She didn’t smile much, it seemed, at least not in the photos. I lined them up in chronological order and watched her age all the way up to the last one taken in Boston. The first was a Florida State driver’s license issued on her sixteenth birthday. I stared at it for a long time before I was satisfied there was nothing in her smile, nothing in her eyes to portend a life already almost half over.

  If people can be defined by the things they keep and the things they let drift away, for Ellen, so specific in everything she did, it would be particularly true. Nothing was in that box that hadn’t meant something to her. What surprised me was that they meant something to me, too. Mass cards for the deceased, some with the last name Shepard, reminded me of a worn leather box my mother had kept in the basement, filled with old family photos, black-and-white, stiff with age. It reminded me of a picture I’d found in that box of my mother on her graduation day from a Catholic grade school in St. Louis. She was squinting into the camera, wearing a shy smile. It was the first time I’d ever seen my mother as a girl. I stared at that picture forever. She’d looked hopeful, something I’d never seen in her in real life. It was the first time I’d understood that she had been young once, that she had lived a life before me, one that didn’t include me.

  Ellen’s rosary was in a velvet pouch with a First Holy Communion label stitched in gold. I hadn’t thrown mine away, but I hadn’t kept it, either. I didn’t know what had happened to it. This one was tiny and delicate, made for eight-year-old hands with mother of pearl beads and a simple gold crucifix. I hadn’t held a rosary in so long, I’d forgotten what it felt like.

  Her birth certificate was there from a hospital in Dade County, Florida. When I pulled out an unlabeled file in the back, a news clip fell onto the cotton sheets. When I turned it over, I was confused for a moment because the woman staring back from the brittle, yellowed newsprint could have been a seamless addition to the chronology of Ellen’s ID photos. It could have been Ellen in middle age. But it was a photo of her mother, and this was her obituary.

  Anna Bache Shepard had died when she was forty-eight years old. She’d been survived by Joseph T. Shepard, her husband of nineteen years, and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Ellen. Services were held at Christ the King Catholic Church in Miami Shores. I read the clipping a second time, wondering why she’d died so young, but there was no cause given. I understood why after I’d read the only other document in the file, her death certificate. Ellen’s mother had committed suicide. She’d hanged herself.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The phone finally rang—at 5:14 A.M. At some point during the night, very late, I’d leaned against the headboard, put my head back to rest, and fallen into a dreamless sleep. When I opened my eyes, the lights were still on, the contents of Ellen’s box were spread across my bed, and Anna Bache Shepard’s death certificate was still in my hand.

  “You weren’t sleeping, were you, Shanahan?” Dan used his louder-than-normal car phone voice, and the line crackled.

  “Are you on your way home?” I swung my feet to the floor and stood up to stretch, my spine popping in three places. My left arm was asleep, dead weight hanging from my shoulder. It began to tingle as I shook it.

  “I’m just pulling into the parking lot of your hotel. I’ll meet you downstairs in two minutes.”

  We made a good pair, the two of us, waiting in the lobby for the coffee shop to open. Dan sat forward on a low couch, knees bumping the faux-marble table that held his notes. His soft, faded jeans somehow stayed up without the benefit of a belt. His white cotton dress shirt was open at the collar and filled with those tiny wrinkles you get from wearing your clothes around the clock. He had the same wrinkles under his eyes.

  “Like I told you last night,” he said, “it was Little Pete Dwyer and Terry McTavish beating the crap out of each other. Both of them got hurt, and neither one will say what happened.” He glanced up and caught me stifling a yawn. “Shanahan, if I’m the one who was up all night, how come you look like shit?”

  “I was with you in spirit,” I said, remembering the puffy-eyed, slack-haired visage in my bathroom mirror this morning. I’d been tempted to wear my sweatshirt with the hood up, drawstring pulled tight. Instead, I’d put my hair in a ponytail, washed my face, and declared myself presentable. “How bad were the injuries?”

  “Terry’s got a big bruise on the side of his head and a broken hand. From what I hear. Little Pete’s got stitches over one eye, but I never saw him. My dumbfuck shift supervisor took his st
atement, drove him to the hospital, and let him go home from there. Lazy bastard. He didn’t even do a substance test.”

  “Fighting isn’t necessarily enough for probable cause.”

  “He could have used aggression for probable cause. That’s what I did for Terry. I had him pee in the bottle when I took him to the hospital to get his hand set. I can tell you right now, though, it’s going to come back clean. Terry McTavish is a Boy Scout.”

  “What do their statements say?”

  “Little Pete claims self-defense all the way.” He leafed through his file, found the page he wanted, and pulled it out. “Says he was walking across the ramp when Terry jumped him from behind and threw him to the ground. That’s it. Except for the fact that he’s a lying sack of shit.”

  “What’s Terry’s story?”

  “He doesn’t have a story. I spent all night trying to crack him. All I could get him to say was he had a good reason to do what he did, and he shouldn’t lose his job over it.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “None that are talking.”

  “Do you think—” I stopped and glanced around the lobby. The desk clerk was in the back, and the lone bellman was across the floor out of earshot. Still, I lowered my voice. “Maybe this has something to do with your drug-smuggling theory. Terry could have stumbled into something, and now he’s afraid to say what.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve been asking around, some of my off-the-record sources. The ones who will say anything swear there’s nothing like that going on at Logan at the moment. I don’t know if that’s the truth, or if it’s because Little Pete is involved, but I’m getting nothing on drugs. Dead battery.”

  “What does your gut tell you about last night?” I was learning that Dan was always in close communication with his gut.

  “I think Little Pete was drunk last night, and whatever happened came out of that.”

  “Drunk during his shift?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Little Pete’s a drunk?”

  “I thought you knew,” he said.

  “How would I know that?”

  “It’s common knowledge.”

  “Not to someone who’s been here two weeks.”

  He shrugged. “Sorry, boss.”

  I had a bad feeling, the shaking, rolling, want-to-throw-up seasick feeling I always got when I heard about airport employees drinking on the job. I could just see Little Pete Dwyer careening around the ramp devoid of motor skills, around airplanes, in a forklift or a loader. God forbid he should smack into an engine or punch through a fuselage. God help us all if he did it and never told anyone. “How big is his problem?”

  “More like everyone else has a problem, because when Little Pete’s drunk, he’s mean as hell. He hit a guy in the head with a hand-held radio once because the guy changed the channel on the TV.”

  “Why is he still working here?”

  “That particular time, Lenny made a deal and brought him back. The guy he hit went on permanent disability.”

  “Why would Lenny bring him back? If he’s as truly self-serving as everyone says, I wouldn’t expect him to take that kind of a risk.”

  “I told you about the deals, and Lenny’s made a lot of ’em to protect this kid. Every time he gets into trouble, they send him to rehab. He’s been twice.” Dan was drumming his pencil, eraser end, on the table, making a noise that seemed loud in the quiet lobby. “I can’t see Terry jumping anyone,” he said, “but I can see it the other way around, with Terry the one who was defending himself.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s a chance in hell he’ll tell us what happened.”

  “No. The Dwyers and the McTavishes hate each other. But still, Terry’s not going to rat out a union brother and get him fired.”

  “Would he give up his own job to protect a drunk? Because if I have to get rid of them both to get Little Pete off the ramp, I will.”

  “With what I’ve got now, you’d have a hard time busting Little Pete. With no test and no witnesses, I can’t prove he was under the influence, and without a statement from Terry, I never will.”

  “How about this? We keep them both out of service while we conduct our investigation and do some interviews. If we can prove Little Pete was drinking on the job, we get rid of him for good. At a minimum, we can force him back into rehab. In the meantime, maybe Terry reconsiders his story.”

  “If he doesn’t?”

  “Then screw him. I don’t care about the union and the brotherhood and all that crap. If he’s comfortable letting a drunk work next to him on the ramp, he deserves to be gone, too.”

  “If it comes down to him losing his job, we might see one or two of the decent guys come forward. The McTavishes have a lot of support around here, which we’re going to need. I have to tell you, if you terminate Little Pete, you’re going to start a war.”

  “Are you suggesting we leave him out there?”

  “I’m just telling you the facts, boss. That’s my job.”

  I sat back in the cushy, crushed velvet love seat and considered my limited options. That seemed to be the drill here—separate the bad options from the worse options and pick one. “Can you handle a backlash on the ramp if we end up terminating?”

  “Like I said, the guys like Terry and his brother’s got some influence. I think we can ride it out. But it won’t be much fun.”

  “I’ll bring Angelo back. That might take some of the pressure off. It’ll certainly get Lenny off my back. What do you think?”

  “It’s about goddamned time. You’ve been talking about doing it since you got here.”

  We both turned as we heard the sound of the doors sliding open. The coffee shop was open for business. I reached for the file I’d brought down from my room, stood up, and stretched again. I couldn’t seem to get all the kinks out. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you breakfast. I’ve got something else I need to talk to you about.”

  Dan was staring out the window. If it had been summer, he would have been gazing at a lush, terraced courtyard, a carpet of flowering plants, and a swimming pool. But it was darkest January, the floodlights were on, and instead of a shimmering, turquoise blue surface, he was staring at a heavy brown tarp covered with winter’s debris. In his hand was the death certificate for Ellen’s mother. When he finally spoke, his voice was as blank as his face. “She never said anything about this to me.”

  “I don’t think she told anyone,” I said. “Not anyone at work, anyway. You’d have to think if someone knew about it, they would have spoken up. It wasn’t in her personnel file.” I scanned the obituary again. “Ellen was fourteen when this happened. It had to be painful for her to talk about.”

  When he didn’t respond, I didn’t know what else to say, so I drank my orange juice. It was canned, but tart enough to wash away the taste of going to bed too late and getting up too early. The only other patron in the coffee shop, a blonde woman, sharply professional in a sleek suit and sleeker haircut, sat across the floor at a table by herself. We both looked at her when she sneezed.

  “Someone knew,” he said, turning back to the conversation, his eyes bright with the energy of a new theory.

  “Someone knew what?”

  “Whoever killed her knew about the mother’s suicide. That’s why he hung her, to make it look like she killed herself, too. Don’t you see that?”

  I was about to answer when the waiter arrived. As he served us, I sat back and marveled at Dan. He was either so deep in denial he couldn’t see straight, or the most resilient man I’d ever met. Maybe both. The other possibility was that Lenny had been telling the truth, that this unnatural obsession of his was driven by the deepest guilt. “Dan, you have the ability to take any set of facts and form them to support your own theory. Don’t you see that? I don’t understand why you’re being so obstinate about this.”

  “I told you—”

  “I know,” I said, “she was a good boss and your friend and you’re loyal, but
this is getting a little absurd. Look at that death certificate and think about what it means.”

  He picked up his fork and poked at his four runny eggs, a side of pancakes, three strips of soggy bacon, and a stack of toast. The spread looked like something he’d usually enjoy, but not today. He put the fork down. “Okay, what’s your theory?”

  “Dan, I didn’t know Ellen, so all I can do is draw my conclusions from the facts. She came to Boston from staff with a sterling reputation and lots of enthusiasm. She took on a job here for which she wasn’t qualified. After thirteen months of trying as hard as she could to turn the station around, she wasn’t any further along than the day she arrived. She might have even lost ground. And she was being harassed in the most contemptible way for trying.”

  He was staring at his eggs.

  “It seems to me that something went really wrong for her, Dan. The police have no evidence of murder. Ellen was being treated for chronic depression. She didn’t have much in her life besides her job. She was used to being successful, and when it looked as if she might fail in Boston, maybe she felt that her whole life was a failure. It can feel that way sometimes, believe me. And now we find out that her mother killed herself.”

  I picked at my breakfast, too. The oatmeal with brown sugar had sounded better than it tasted, and I was getting depressed just watching the way Dan was hurting and thinking about Ellen’s situation. I abandoned the gummy substance in my bowl and went to the all-liquid breakfast of orange juice and milk. I waited a few uncomfortable moments for a response. When nothing was forthcoming, I went right to the bottom line. “Lenny called me yesterday and asked us to back off this thing, Dan. Maybe it’s time.”