Black Diamond

by John F. Dobbyn

  Mr. D. gave it three seconds of pondering before dialing the number of the district attorney. Another twenty seconds and he had Billy Coyne on the line.

  After the usual banter, Billy arranged for an interview with our client, Hector, the following morning in police headquarters at Government Center. The unusual rigmarole to see our client was caused by the D.A.’s decision to hold him out of the general jail population in protective custody. She still chose not to disclose the reason, and Billy was bound by her orders.

  It was nearly eight that evening when I left the Prudential Center Legal Seafood restaurant. With a nerve-wracking night ahead, I succumbed to the fortification of a baked stuffed lobster so sinfully good that it should have been called “Illegal Seafood.” I had two hours before leaving to pick up Colleen for a meeting with the devil in the Park Street subway. It being Monday night, there was only one place on earth this creature of habit would spend it.

  The little row of circular stairs that led from the darkness of Beacon Street near the golden domed State House into the deeper darkness of one of Boston’s hidden jewels was for me like a passage from the helter-skelter world into semiparadise. Two feet inside of Big Daddy Hightower’s jazz club, I could feel the fractiousness of the outside life ebbing and the magic of Daddy’s stand-up driving bass coaxing harmony and joy back into my soul.

  With the exception of a tired ten-watt bulb on the miniscule bandstand, there is scarcely a ray of illumination to be found in the club when the musicians are playing. It’s deliberate on Daddy’s part to keep conversation during the sets to zero.

  After five years’ worth of Monday nights, I can find my favorite stool at the bar by the Braille method. I’ve never reached a full sitting position before my favorite barkeep, Sam, has placed three fingers of that liquid gold called Famous Grouse Scotch over three ice cubes within an inch of my expectant grasp. This night was no exception.

  I had used my cell phone on the way over to call Terry O’Brien, one of the three nonfamily people on earth whom I rank above my Corvette—Lex Devlin and Big Daddy being the other two. I left a voice mail asking if she’d like to meet me at Daddy’s if she had the time. I knew her chores as fashion consultant for Filenes would keep her at work until sometime later.

  Meanwhile, about an inch into the Grouse, I felt an enormous presence slide in next to me at the bar, and a hand that could palm a watermelon resting on my shoulder.

  “Must be Monday night, Mickey. Who needs a calendar with you around?”

  “Hey, Daddy. You were really cooking up there. Who was with you? That sax sounded like Sonny Ammons.”

  “Good ear, son. Yeah, Sonny’s in from Chicago. Got a gig at Dizzy’s in New York. He always passes through here.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Yeah, well, only one thing missing. I want to hear that piano that reads my mind. Let’s get it on before Sonny leaves.”

  If I had a reason to decline, it could not have withstood the giant arm that lifted me off the barstool and guided my feet to the stand. I had met Sonny on his previous swing through Boston. He, like every major league jazz musician, holds a pedestal in his mind for Big Daddy and the swath he cut in the New York scene in the days of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the other musical behemoths.

  Daddy deposited me on the piano bench and wrapped himself around his stand-up bass. Sonny came back up, sax in hand. Daddy gave us a full ten seconds to renew acquaintances before he started a driving introduction on the bass that you could feel in your stomach. I recognized the tune, and the three of us launched into our own conception of Ellington’s marvelous “It Don’t Mean a Thing.”

  We found ourselves on the same wavelength and cruised through nine or ten choruses before Daddy brought us back down to earth. I had been so totally absorbed that I didn’t notice an auburn-haired goddess led by Sam to a front row table. That little ten-watt bulb cast a beam that reflected off of a gleaming white smile and two lips that blew a kiss in my direction. After nearly six months of dating, the sight of Terry O’Brien was still like plugging my heart into an electric socket.

  Daddy waved to her and said, “You can have him in ten minutes, Terry.” She smiled and waved to Daddy, whose size could belie the romanticism in his heart. He took us so smoothly into “There Will Never Be Another You” that it would have brought tears to writer, Mack Gordon’s eyes—as it did to Terry’s.

  We were into the final chorus, when one of the customers, a man of about Daddy’s height, if not proportions, came quietly up to the stand and slipped a note with a request on the piano in front of Daddy. It happens from time to time, although deep-rooted jazz fans generally know that jazz is such a personal mode of expression that they avoid requests and leave the selections to the mood of the musicians.

  Daddy glanced at the note and nodded to me. I picked it up when I had a free hand. It caught my attention because it was a request for a little-played but exquisite tune by Frigo, Ellis, and Carter called “Detour Ahead.” It also had my name on it. When I opened the note to the inside, there was a message printed in large letters to compensate for the lack of light.

  Mr. Knight. When the set ends, stay on the stand. I’ll escort Ms. O’Brien out the back door. Better if you’re not seen together. Wait for me. Important we leave together. (TDB)

  I’d have been completely flummoxed but for the “TDB,” which meant he was one of Tom Burns’s men. I had to assume that Tom had put him on me at the request of Mr. Devlin. Beyond that, I was in a disturbing state of ignorance.

  We finished the song we were playing, and I watched as the tall man came up behind Terry. He whispered something to her that brought a look of total dismay in my direction. He overcame hesitancy on her part by lifting her out of the seat by the elbow. They walked together toward Daddy’s office in the back of the club. His whispering as they walked seemed to freeze her inclination to look back at me on the stand, where I sat with a similar look of dismay.

  The lights in the club came up a tiny degree between sets. A number of these cloak-and-dagger incidents involving me over the years had reduced the shock value to Daddy. He gave me a look, not of puzzlement, but simply inquiring what he could do to help save my imperiled posterior this time. I gave him a “Who knows” shrug, and sat there.

  In about thirty seconds, the tall man was back, taking my arm with a rock-hard left hand to keep me close while we made our way through the tables to the front door.

  I assumed we were making a straight line for the street until he suddenly veered toward the bar. He grabbed a fistful of the back of the jacket of a small red-haired man with a weasely looking face sitting at the bar. He lifted the little man bodily off the seat and scarcely let his feet touch the floor on the way up the stairs and into the chill of Beacon Street.

  We turned right and marched up the sidewalk like two puppets in the hands of a puppeteer. When we reached my Corvette parked at the curb, the big man let go of his left-handed grip on me and held out his hand.

  “Key!”

  I obeyed the command and handed it over. The tall man hit the unlock button and pulled open the driver’s side door. He shoved the little man into the seat, pushed the key in the ignition, and stood back.

  The little man sat there with every drop of blood drained from his reddish complexion. Even clutching the steering wheel, his hands were shaking violently.

  The tall man leaned into his face. “Start the car.”

  The little man was frozen.

  “Start the car, you little weasel.”

  He gained enough control to just shake his head.

  The big man reached across his chest and gripped the key. One twist would have started the engine. The little man grabbed the massive forearm with his quivering fingers and pleaded to the point of practically sobbing.

  The big man grabbed a fistful of the front of his jacket, lifted him out of the car with one motion, and deposited him on the sidewalk. He put his lips next to the little man’s ear.
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  “Fix it. And then, by heaven, you’ll start it.”

  The big man kept a grip on the tail of his jacket while he followed the little man to the front of the car. He gave the little man slack enough to lie on the street in front of the car and disengage a metallic-looking device with wires from under the engine. He handed it to the big man, who redeposited him in the driver’s seat.

  “Now start it.”

  The little man could hardly get a grip on the key with his quivering fingers to give it a twist. When he finally managed it, the faithful Corvette engine sprang to life.

  The big man hauled him out of the car and plastered him against the hood while he ran his hands quickly through his pockets. He pulled out a wallet and rifled through it one handed, pulling out a driver’s license with his teeth. He took a wad of folding money out of another pocket and flipped through it until he found something of interest. He held it up to show me that inside of a role of American bills was a wad of ten euro notes.

  His final plunge into the rear pants pocket produced a passport. The big man handed it to me. I saw that it was issued by the Republic of Ireland.

  The big man turned back and lifted the little man off the hood of the car with two hands and held him close enough to whisper, “Who sent you?”

  Sweaty beads covered the small man’s forehead that had gone from bleached white to crimson red. No words came out. He just shook his head violently. The tall man put his lips practically on the ear of the small man.

  “That question was for you, you cowardly little rat. Who sent you to do his dirty work?”

  Through all of his shaking, the little man found a voice with a heavy Irish accent. “I can’t. Please. Whatever you do to me is nothing to what he’d do to me. I can’t.”

  The tall man kept his grip while he looked to me. “He’s probably right. What’s your pleasure, Mr. Knight?”

  I was still recovering from the thought of what would have happened if I had just bumbled out of the club and started the car myself. I walked up next to the small man, who was still held by my tall rescuer. I said in the calmest voice I could muster, “You’ll deliver this message to whoever the hell sent you. Are you listening?”

  He looked from the big man into my eyes. I was comforted to see that the look of fear had not diminished.

  “Memorize this and say it to whoever it is verbatim. ‘I don’t give a damn about anything but getting that child back. Unharmed. You have nothing to fear from me or the girl’s mother as long as we get her back.’ Did you get every word of that?”

  He nodded vigorously with a hint of relief in his eyes and looked back at the man who still had him in his grip. I pulled his attention back with a rap on the shoulder.

  “That’s half of it. Here’s the rest. ‘If that girl is harmed in any way, you’ll have trouble you can’t even imagine.’ Have you got that message? All of it?”

  His head was nodding affirmatively with every ounce of energy he could muster.

  “Then deliver it. You’re on borrowed time, little man. Use it well.”

  When the big man’s grip eased, he got his legs under him and ran down Beacon Street like he was training for the Irish Derby.

  Tom Burns’s man handed me the little weasel’s driver’s license. He looked around to be sure we hadn’t picked up any spectators. He gave me the best piece of advice I’d had since kindergarten. “Try to stay out of trouble, Mr. Knight.”

  I dearly wished I could follow it, but I knew it was not in my future.

  I got into my Corvette, thanking God and the tall man that it was not scattered all over Beacon Hill, and me with it. I checked the passport and driver’s license before starting up. If they were legitimate, the little man was Padraig Noonan of 412 Gardner Street in Dublin. The spider’s web had just expanded across the Atlantic, and still no sighting of the spider.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Colleen was halfway out the door when I pulled up in front of the house. Even the tunnel traffic on the way back to Boston was light at ten thirty at night. We parked in a garage on Boylston Street. I walked her to the top of the long escalator at the entrance to the Park Street station of the MBTA.

  The bells of the Park Street Church sounded eleven o’clock exactly. What I was about to do went against every alarm in my system. I could hear the ghosts of John Hancock, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and, for the love of Pete, the real Mother Goose, all keeping vigil in the Old Granary Burial Ground next door, warning me against it. I agreed with their forebodings, but it still seemed the better part of valor to follow the directions of the kidnappers to the letter. That meant sending Colleen into the pit alone.

  I handed her the briefcase holding ten thousand dollars. My final words were, “Just wait down there. Let him come to you. I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  I watched the long down escalator swallow her up, while I stood frozen at the top, looking into the small illuminated area visible below and listening for any sound.

  Four and a half minutes went by after Colleen disappeared from my view. I was pacing with antsiness, when the interminable silence below was split by a gunshot. I ran three steps at a time down the moving stairs. A third of the way from the bottom, someone passed me in a long black raincoat and black brimmed hat running the steps on the up side of the escalator. He was holding the briefcase. My first impulse was to jump the divider and tackle him. The second impulse a fraction of a second later overruled the first. Get to Colleen.

  As the black raincoat flew past me, I could see no face, but a voice hissed out the words, “You bollixed it, Knight. You’ve yourself to blame.” The accent was Irish, but the voice was not Scully’s.

  It took all my willpower not to try to run him down. My first priority was still Colleen. When I reached the bottom, I looked to the left. She was slumped against the wall. I got to her in three seconds. It was actually a relief to hear her sobbing. I lifted her up.

  “Are you hurt, Colleen?”

  All I could hear through the sobs was, “He said we’ll never get her back.”

  “What else?”

  She just shook her head and sobbed against my shoulder. I looked around for some hint of what went wrong. I caught a glimpse of a gray sleeve on the tiny counter of the information booth across the room at the foot of the escalator.

  I left Colleen just long enough to run to the booth. The sleeve belonged to the MBTA uniform of a man slumped between the seat and the wall. He was a man in his thirties with dark black hair, a small goatee, and a red oozing hole in the center of his forehead.

  I could feel my legs begin to weaken. I rested my head against the glass for just a moment to pull it together. The picture suddenly opened up. He shouldn’t have been there. At that time of night, the MBTA leaves the booth unmanned. That was why they had set the time at eleven.

  The man in the booth had to be one of Tom Burns’s men. Mr. Devlin must have alerted Tom. The man was there to keep an eye on Colleen so she wouldn’t be totally unprotected. The man in the raincoat must have taken him by surprise.

  I phoned Tom. It seemed best to let him notify the police rather than get into a question-and-answer session with them when there were no answers I felt comfortable giving.

  There was a bottomless empty, drained feeling in both of our hearts as I drove Colleen home in silence. Whatever hope had buoyed her up was gone. I had no idea whatever of any next step that could inspire one drop of optimism.

  The next day, I met Mr. Devlin at police headquarters for a session with our client Hector Vasquez. We had to press on with the preparation of a defense, first because of our commitment to the client, but a close second, because I still had a notion that the fixed race and Erin’s kidnapping were part of the same plan. The only factor I couldn’t allow myself to compute was the possibility—or likelihood—that Erin was now more of a problem to them alive than otherwise. The kidnapping had escalated to murder, the murder of Danny Ryan. That wouldn’t go away with the return of Erin. She was now exce
ss baggage.

  Billy Coyne met us and took us to an interrogation room. He left us alone with Hector. Mr. D. gave me the lead.

  “Hector, we’ve got to pull some things together. Let’s start with the big one. Who was behind the fixing of that race?”

  Hector forced a blank look on his face. “I don’t know anything about a fixed—”

  “And we could say ‘Poor Hector. He’s just a little innocent lamb caught up in a big meat grinder.’ We could leave here with a head full of bullshit and almost guarantee you a life sentence. You couldn’t give the prosecutor a better gift than our trying this case with our heads in a dark place.”

  I had his attention, but still no words flowed.

  “Understand the rules. Whatever you tell us in this room can go no further. You have the attorney-client privilege. And you’ve got something better than that. You’ve got Mr. Devlin’s and my word that it will never get out.”

  He looked from one of us to the other with an expression I couldn’t read.

  “What, Hector? Speak.”

  He looked down at his folded hands on the table and just shook his head.

  “Listen to me. I spoke with Vinnie Hernandez and Alberto Ibanez. They say it’s time to get this monkey off your backs. I think they can get the other jockeys to go along. But someone’s got to make the first move. Given the circumstances, it should be you.”

  I think I touched something that set off a debate in his mind. He still looked down, but his face showed the struggle that was going on inside. His words were just mumbled.

  “You don’t know what’s going on.”

  “No, I don’t. But I seem to be taking one hell of a pasting finding out.”

  He looked up and saw the face scabs from my meeting with Scully.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ve learned so far. Paddy Boyle is everyone’s hero and King Rat at the same time. I get the idea he’s some kind of Irish godfather in South Boston. He’s got a thug named Scully who does some of his dirty work. I think he’s the one who has all of you jockeys in his pocket so he can call the outcome of a race before it’s run. That’s what I think. But I don’t know it, so I can’t use it to find out who knocked Danny out of the saddle. I’m assuming it wasn’t you, which is giving you one hell of a benefit of the doubt. Now I need a little give on your part. Your turn.”