The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

John

  The logbook and the diamond ring had been sent to me by a dead man.

  Chapter Two

  The house was silent. Most houses are in the middle of the day. But the stillness in the McTavish home went beyond the quiet respite between the morning hours when a family disperses, and the evening hours when they drift back together again. There was a towering void in this house, a desperate emptiness made more achingly obvious by the raft of family photos that filled the walls and the shelves. I had felt it the week before when I’d been there for the wake, and I felt it now as I watched Mae stare at the diamond ring her husband—her late husband—had sent me, holding it close to her face with a hand that trembled in short, subtle bursts.

  “It can’t be real,” she said. “This isn’t real.” Her voice was solid, but her rhythms seemed speeded up and her speech pattern on fast-forward. She was talking about the ring, but she could just as easily have been talking about the sudden and horrible turn her life had just taken. “Is it real?”

  “I took it to a jewelry store this morning,” I said. “It’s worth almost twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “No. No, there’s no way. This wasn’t his. Where would John get something like this?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. You’ve never seen it before?”

  She shook her head and handed the ring back. I set it back in the tissue paper nest on the low coffee table at our knees. Next to it was the lump of a logbook that had proved at least as baffling to her. She started picking at the nubby upholstery of her durable plaid couch, as if there were something encrusted there she had to remove. “The police are saying it was drug related.”

  “Drug related?”

  With an abruptness that startled me, she stood up and, as if I wasn’t even there, resumed the task I had obviously interrupted by knocking on her door. With brittle efficiency, she moved about the small den gathering her children’s toys from the floor. A plastic dump truck, odd-shaped wooden puzzle pieces, two Barbie dolls—one without any Barbie clothes. She scooped them all up with a jerky, kinetic intensity that made my own springs tighten.

  “I thought it was a mugging, Mae.”

  “Nothing was stolen from him.”

  “Okay, but where do they get drugs?”

  “They said he was in Florida trying to pull off some kind of a drug buy. Can you believe that? My John, Saint John the Pure, in on a dope deal. If they knew him, they could never think that.”

  I had to agree. If anyone had asked me—which they hadn’t—to list all possible motives for John’s murder, no matter how long that list, drugs would have been at the bottom. His contempt for drug dealers and drug abusers was well known. He had actually turned in one of his union brothers at the airport for smuggling dope, an act of conscience that had not endeared him to the other union brothers. Even the ones that had no use for drugs had less tolerance for rats.

  “Is that it? It’s not a mugging so it must be drugs?”

  “I think they have more they’re not telling us. And he also called here early Tuesday morning and told Terry to lock all the doors and not to let us out of his sight until he got home on Tuesday.”

  “John did?” I didn’t know if I was having trouble following her because she was moving and talking so fast, or because it was such astonishing information. As far as I had known, John’s death had been a tragic and random murder in a city known for that sort of thing. “Did he tell him why he was so worried?”

  “He said he would explain when he got back. The police say that’s all part of the drug thing. That the people he was supposedly involved with have been known to threaten families.”

  She stood in the middle of the room. With all the toys put away, she looked anxious and panicky, desperate for something to do with her hands. Then a bright thought seemed to break through. “I’ll make coffee.” She took off, straightening the rug and scooping the remote control from the floor as she left the room.

  Before I left the den, I took one last look at the gallery of photos—the living, loving chronicle of what had been this family’s life in progress—and searched out John’s face. In a few of the pictures, mostly the posed shots, he wore the serious expression I had known. Thick-necked and determined, he had always looked to me like an Irish laborer from the early nineteen hundreds who could have just as easily raised the steel towers for the Williamsburg Bridge as loaded cargo for Majestic Airlines.

  But in most of the pictures, especially in the candid shots with his children, John was a different man. The weight of responsibility that had so often hardened his face was gone. The guarded expression he wore on the ramp was nowhere to be seen, and I saw in those photos, maybe for the first time, a man who was open and confident and comfortable in his role as husband, father, teacher, and protector. I saw the man he’d wanted his children to see.

  I walked into the kitchen. The table was set with three Scooby-Doo placemats. They still had toast crumbs and jelly stuck on them.

  Mae was moving purposefully from cabinet to counter and back to the cabinet again, where she stopped long enough to take down two cups. “How do you take your coffee?”

  “I’ll take tea, if you have it. How are your kids doing?”

  “Kids are strong. I look at them and I wish I could be that strong. I’m jealous sometimes because there are three of them. They have each other.”

  “What about Terry? Is he helping you?”

  “Terry is not doing well. He was just getting over the accident. This I don’t think he’ll ever get over. He needs to get help, and he won’t. He worries me.”

  Just what she needed. Three small children to worry about and John’s kid brother, too.

  I dropped my backpack on one of the kitchen chairs. The non-Scooby end of the table was stacked high with papers and folders and files. One of the piles had slipped over, and the top few pages were in imminent danger of jelly stains. My intention had not been to riffle through Mae’s private papers, but the one on top caught my attention. It was a photocopy of a Majestic nonrevenue pass coupon, the kind employees use when they travel. This one had the date and the destination filled in—March 5, flight 888, BOS to MIA. And it had John’s signature. It was a copy of the coupon John had used to go on his doomed trip to Florida. The return trip information was blank.

  Poking out beneath that was a receipt from a hotel in Miami called Harmony House Suites. It was also dated March 5. Then a pad of lined paper with a quarter of the pages wrapped over the top. The page left on top was filled with a task list. Some items were crossed out. Most weren’t. The tasks still left to do included Thank you notes for funeral, copies of death certificate to insurance co.s, change beneficiaries. Everything related to the funeral was crossed off. There was a separate category titled MR. AND MRS.—REMOVE JOHN’S NAME. Underneath was listed bank accounts, parish directory, safety deposit box, retirement accounts. All the details and loose ends left over when one life that is inextricably entwined with so many others is abruptly ripped out by the roots. Toward the bottom was a shorter list. Rental car. Cell phone. Harmony House Suites.

  I started to put the pad back on the pile when a couple of loose papers fell out.

  One was a flight manifest for flight 887 from Miami to Boston for March 6, what I assumed would have been John’s return flight home. It showed the names of all passengers on board, along with standbys and crew. John’s name was there, but there was no seat assigned, which meant he had called reservations to put his name in the standby queue, but hadn’t made the flight.

  Mae was at the sink washing the cups we hadn’t used yet. “Mae, John was listed on a flight to come home?”

  “Flight 887 on Tuesday morning,” she said. “He called Monday night and said he’d be home on Tuesday, but we didn’t hear from him. At first I wasn’t worried because those flights out of Miami are so full you can get stranded for days waiting for a seat and I was sure he was going to walk through the door any minute and when he didn’t I thought… I was sure h
e’d driven over to see if he could get one out of Fort Lauderdale. But he never called. Tuesday afternoon I was getting antsy. Tuesday night came and went and no John and I was really freaking out on Wednesday morning when still we hadn’t heard and then Wednesday afternoon they called and told me he was dead.”

  The sound, sharp and sudden, cracked the quiet in the kitchen. Crockery against porcelain. It was loud and unexpected and made my heart shudder. I looked up to find Mae staring at me, and for a second I thought it was because I’d been prying, digging through her papers. But then I realized she was waiting for me to offer some adjustment, some correction to her recounting of events that would have changed the way it had all come out. When I couldn’t, she turned back to the sink.

  The cups hadn’t broken. They rolled around and knocked against each other under the stream of running water. “He believed it was always on him to put things right,” she said. “He shouldn’t have even been down there. Some people just aren’t worth the effort.”

  “Is that why he went down there? To put something right?”

  “I am so angry with him.” The muscles across her back tensed. “I hate him for going down there. I hate that he left me here to raise these three babies all by myself.” She dropped her head and reached up to touch her forehead with damp, shaking fingers. Her tears began to drop into the sink. “I hate him.” I could barely hear her the last time she said it. She sounded as though she was afraid I would.

  The steam began to billow up from the hot water that was still running. I turned it off, then reached down for the cups in the sink. For a moment we both held them. Her skin was red and warm from the hot water and I thought she might have actually burned herself. If she had, she showed no signs of feeling it.

  Then she let go. “I don’t really want any coffee,” she said. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  She walked to the table but could not bring herself to sit without stacking the placemats—crumbs and all—and taking them to the sink. When she returned, she started straightening the papers.

  “This information about John’s trip,” I said, pulling out a chair, “is it for the police?”

  “The cops don’t want to know any more than they already know. No, it’s for me.” She sat, finally, with her hands in her lap and one leg pulled up underneath her in the chair. “I get these ideas. Just questions I want answered.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what was so important that he had to go see Bobby Avidor.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s an old… I won’t call him a friend because he’s not. He’s an acquaintance from the neighborhood. We all knew him. He’s a maintenance supervisor at the airport in Miami. That’s who John went to see.”

  “A maintenance supervisor for Majestic?”

  She nodded as she reached for one of the stacks of papers. “I’ve got his phone number here somewhere. Not that it’s doing me any good. He won’t return my calls. Not Terry’s either.”

  I watched her flip back through the used pages of the lined pad, searching for the number. “Do the police know about him?”

  “They said they already talked to him. He wasn’t any help.”

  “Why won’t he call you back?”

  “I don’t know. Because he’s one of those people who is just not worth it that John wouldn’t give up on.” After she’d flipped all the way back to the front of the pad with no luck, she pitched it onto the middle of the stack where it sat with its top pages curling from the bottom. She stared after it. “I’m not any good at this. I never have any time. I think I just want to know—”

  We both heard the commotion at the same time. The back door opened and Terry McTavish was there, leaning on his cane, and trying to squeeze through without letting the family’s big yellow Lab into the house.

  “Turner, get back,” he snapped. “You can’t come in here.”

  Turner whined and pushed his big nose into the tight opening, maneuvering for leverage. He kept trying until Terry’s cane fell through the door and onto the kitchen floor with a loud thwack. It startled the pooch for an instant, long enough for Terry to box him out with his good knee and slip through. He slammed the door shut from the inside, then stood unsteadily, catching his breath, braced by one hand still on the doorknob.

  The sight of him, of what he had become, still shocked and disturbed me. Before the motorcycle accident, Terry McTavish had been a smaller, more compact version of his older brother—sturdy, solid, and one of the few men who could match John’s torrid pace on the ramp. Now, with one leg shortened and twisted like a dead branch, the most he could do was count stock at a local hardware store. It had been a stunning physical transformation. And when he turned toward me and I saw his face, I knew what Mae had said was also true. What the Harley hadn’t crushed in him, his brother’s murder had. His eyes looked dead.

  The cane had fallen at my feet. I picked it up and offered it to him. “It’s good to see you again, Terry.”

  He barely acknowledged me. Mae reached out for his hand as he wobbled into her radius. “I thought you were working.”

  “They didn’t have enough gimp work today.”

  She reached her other hand up and held his in both of hers. “Stay here and talk to us. Miss Shanahan has something to show you.”

  He pulled away. “I’m going upstairs.”

  “It has to do with John,” she said. “I think you’ll want to see it.”

  “I don’t want to see anything having to do with Johnny, Mae. I told you that.” His tone seemed flat and lifeless, like the expression in his eyes. But there was something else. Hard to grasp, but there. A hard, thin thread of warning.

  Mae either didn’t hear it or chose to ignore it. “Sit down and talk with us for a few minutes.”

  He turned slowly around his cane. “Why can’t you let him rest in peace?”

  She blinked up at him. “Because I don’t think John was in Florida doing a drug deal, Terry. And I know he won’t rest in peace as long as anyone thinks he was. Especially his children.”

  Her purpose may not have been to provoke him, but that last thought acted on him like an electric cattle prod. His face flushed and the words spewed out as if shot from a fire hose. “It doesn’t matter what we think. When are you going to figure that out? If the cops say he was selling dope, then that’s what it’s going to be because they are the ones in charge and they can say and do whatever they want and there’s nothing we can do about it because I’m a gimp who can’t even drive a car, and you’ve got three kids to take care of, and we don’t have any goddamned money.” He paused to take a couple of rasping breaths and his gaze landed on me. “That’s what it means to be in charge, doesn’t it, Miss Shanahan?”

  It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation—one that caught me totally off guard. I wouldn’t have called Terry a company man when he’d worked for me, but he had valued his job, he had respected the work, and he had never been anything but polite and cordial to me.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Terry.”

  “Everything bad that’s happened to this family started when Johnny decided to help you. Once he took your side, everything went to shit.”

  “Terry”—Mae’s tone was sharp—“stop this.”

  “We’re working people, Mae. All we’ve got is the union. All we ever had was the union. She cost us their support, and after they turned on us, we never had a chance.”

  Mae let out a long impatient sigh, and I knew they were touching on a subject that was not new. “John was his own man and he made his own decisions. If you don’t like what he did, blame him. And stop blaming me for not giving up.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you could be helping me, Terry. You could be making phone calls, talking to the detectives. There might be people up here in Boston you could talk to. You could be doing something besides sitting upstairs in the dark with the curtains closed.”

  “You are never going to figur
e out what happened in Florida from the kitchen table in Chelsea.”

  “I don’t accept that.” She swallowed hard. “And John never would have given up on you.”

  Terry paled. His face showed such a naked display of rage and betrayal and disappointment and grief that I felt like an intruder just looking at him. They were slashing deeper and deeper, and I knew these were two people who cared for each other and who had both cared for John. There was so much pain there, in both of them, but it was the fear that I felt more. The room was so full of it, it was hard to breathe. It made me scared. Scared that life could turn out like this for anyone. I wanted to do something. I wanted to fix it.

  Terry’s arm came up and the cane came up and I thought toward me so I scrambled out of the chair, almost knocking it backward. With one vicious slash, he swept everything that was on the table onto the floor.

  Mae looked as if he’d just shattered her best wineglasses. On purpose. And then I thought she might take his cane from him and beat him over the head. But in the end, she slumped back in her chair and just looked tired.

  “We will never know what happened to Johnny, Mae. We will never know. And all your little phone calls and notes and questions are not going to change it. We’re fucked. Johnny’s fucked. That’s just the way it is.”

  Then he went upstairs, presumably to sit in the dark with the curtains closed. We heard every awkward step as he climbed the stairs. It took him a long time.

  The papers were scattered all around me. I got down on my knees and started to gather them.

  “Don’t do that,” she said, with a voice like lead. “I’ll get them later.”

  I ignored her because that was what she was supposed to say, and kneeled down to gather the pages because that’s what I wanted to do. Eventually, she crawled down next to me and started to help.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s not himself.”

  “I know that.” Not even close. People had always commented on how much alike the brothers had been. But what I had always enjoyed most about Terry were the differences. Terry had always had a sweeter disposition than John, a lighter hold on life, and a more spontaneous core. It was a contrast I had attributed to the difference between being the protector and the protected. And now Terry’s protector was gone.