After using the bathroom, I thought I'd try to burn off those feelings and clear the mind for business. I stuck my head out the kitchen window to gauge the temperature. Too warm for the new hooded sweatshirt I'd bought, a quarterbacks hand muffler as front pockets against the coming arctic winds. Instead, I pulled on running shorts, a cotton turtleneck, and a T-shirt over the turtleneck. Before lacing up the Brooks HydroFlow running shoes, I reached for some tube socks and the knee brace I now have to wear on my left leg.
Downstairs, I crossed Beacon to the Fairfield Street pedestrian ramp over Storrow Drive. Heading upriver along the Charles, I used the macadam paths that had recently, and stupidly, been divided into "travel lanes" by a white, broken line painted down the center. There were a dozen guys in dark pants and yellow T-shirts, some picking up trash and bagging it, others cutting brush and piling the branches near a nondescript minivan. If you're not a river regular, you probably wouldn't notice that during summers, the landscapers are male and female teens wearing orange tops, while the fall and spring folks are all older men in yellow ones. Reason? The younger workers constitute summer help from the city schools, the older workers, trusted inmates from the county jail, with the guy who tries never to leave the driver's seat of the minivan a uniformed sheriff's officer there to guard them.
Our tax dollars at work.
Passing the Boston University railroad bridge a mile later, I thought I had the situation with Nancy under control. I'm dense about some things, and somehow I'd badly misjudged her reaction to my taking Alan Spaeth's case. She'd let me wonder about it for a day or two before calling to explain what I'd missed and then bury the hatchet. Seemed reasonable, if regrettable, and as I turned at Western Ave to head back downriver, I moved on to organizing my day.
I'd have to start in South Boston, either with Lieutenant Robert Murphy on the homicide itself, or with Vincennes Dufresne, the owner of the boardinghouse where Spaeth used to live and his alibi witness might still. Weighing things, it seemed to me that Murphy was less likely to be in, but easier to reach, and the earlier I visited the rooming house, the sooner I might find Michael Mantle.
I finished my run with a sprint of a hundred yards or so from the Mass Ave bridge back to the Fairfield ramp, feeling a lot better than I had starting out.
After one shower and two English muffins, I changed into a blue suit, white shirt, and quiet tie. Downstairs, I got behind the wheel of my silver Honda Prelude, the last year of the original model. Twenty minutes later, I found Vincennes Dufresne's boardinghouse in Southie, a few blocks from where East Broadway ends at Pleasure Bay. The neighborhood is mostly blue-collar and virtually all white, a questionable legacy of the desegregation crisis two decades earlier.
The rooming house itself was a wooden four-decker on a block of threes, so it stood out like the gawky kid in a class photo. At one time maybe a forest green, the paint on the clapboard had weathered from salt, sun, and snow to a streaked and peeling olive drab. The trim around the bay windows stacked on either side of the centered portico also needed painting, and the concrete steps leading up to the front door y were crumbly at every trod edge. If you could read a book by its cover, the only thing holding the place up would be the party walls shared with its neighbors.
At the entrance, a sign block-printed on a pink five-by-eight note card was tacked above the bell. The sign read:
THE CHATEAU
NO TRESPASSING
NO SOLICITING
NO SHIT
My kind of place.
I pushed the button and heard a sound inside like a dentist's drill. I let up, waited a minute, and hit it again. Same noise. I was an inch away from a third try at the button when something heavy bumped against the door from the inside. The wood creaked loudly on its hinges and opened.
The man in the doorway stood about five-six and blinked blearily. His black, curly hair was as long on his eyebrows as on his head, which hadn't seen a comb yet. The mustache had bars of red through it, hooking over and covering his upper and lower lips like hundreds of narrow, curved claws. He hadn't shaved yet, either, the black stubble on the pale cheeks, jaw, and neck as riddled with red as the mustache. The man wore a strappy T-shirt over brown pants cinched a little too high. Once the eyes stopped blinking, though, they were dark and full of fire, with enough crow's-feet at the corners to make me push his age up ten years from the thirty-five I'd originally thought.
He said, "You got a name?" a vestigial accent softening some the consonants.
"John Cuddy."
"Let's see some ID, eh?"
I took out the leather folder with the laminated copy of my license in it. The man looked down through the plastic, cocking his head to squint, as though his eyes didn't focus straight-on. Then he looked up at me. "Private means you're not a cop."
The accent now sounded French-Canadian. "Right."
"And not cop means you got no official business with my place, and I don't got to talk with you."
My place. "Vincennes Dufresne?"
His eyes didn't like that. "So?"
"It's just that you have a choice. You can talk to me here and now, or we can subpoena you in for a deposition, have you sit around a law office downtown for a day or two."
His eyes liked that even less. "Now you sound like a lawyer, eh?"
"I'm working for one."
"Lawyers. When they swim, you can see their fins breaking the surface."
"Meaning you think of them as sharks."
"Worse. You give a shark a hunk of meat, he eats it, maybe leaves you alone. A lawyer, you give him a hunk of meat, first he eats you, figuring he can always go back for the meat."
If we weren't on the Chateau's front steps, I thought the owner would have spit. "Tell you what, Mr. Dufresne. How about you ask me inside, and that way everybody saves some time with the lawyers?"
He cocked his head a different way, shifted his lips to the right, and turned without shutting the door on me. I followed him into a dimly lit foyer, then left through a freshly painted door.
And into a different world.
Framed movie posters from the forties were mounted on walls soaring ten feet to molded plaster fretwork around the perimeter of the room. A three-tiered chandelier anchored the middle of the space, with delicate, antique chairs and buried, carved tables straddling a tiled fireplace. The floor was hardwood, sanded and polyed to the point that it shone like the mirror over the mantel.
I thought, "time-warp." but kept it to myself. Dufresne settled himself into a Louis-the-Someteenth chair and motioned me toward the more substantial couch. "Not what you'd expect from the street, eh?"
"Not exactly. Where'd you get all this?"
"My mother." Dufresne motioned to one of the posters behind him, showing a waist-up portrait of a man with slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin mustache leaning against a woman with high cheekbones and a hairdo that could have coined the term "wavy." From their expressions, they were facing the difficulties of a postwar world with desperate courage. "Best role she ever had, B-movie with Zachary Scott that went no-where fast. The posters are hers, the furniture what she got from divorcing husband number three."
The name "Danielle Dufresne" appeared in lettering next to and the same size as “Zachary Scott" on the one poster, in the first or second line of supporting cast for the rest. “She was in a lot of films."
"Films." Dufresne looked at me a little more carefully.
"That's what she called them. Not 'movies,' or ‘flicks,' or 'bombs,' which half of them were. 'A movie, Vincennes, is what a salesman takes of his vacation so he can bore the neighbors; a film is a work of creative art.' And then more bullshit after that."
"Being in films make her happy?"
"No, but that don't make her different from anybody else on God's earth, eh? She didn't have the talent of an Ingrid Bergman, and she couldn't lose enough of her accent to be anything but the ‘French girl! " Then Dufresne seemed to remember he hadn't invited me over for a seminar on the cine
ma. "What's a lawyer interested in me for?"
"Not you. Alan Spaeth."
"I should have known." Dufresne dropped his head, making me notice he was wearing old-style bedroom slippers, those leather scuffies that sell well only before Father's Day. "What an asshole."
"You didn't care for him."
"I should have booted Spaeth out the first night he was here."
"Why?"
"You told me at the door, I let you in, we can save some time. It'd take days to give you everything on him."
"How about just the high points?"
"High points? There weren't any. Guy looked down on the Chateau like it was a flophouse, but I still had to chase him every Friday for the weekly." Dufresne waved, his hand seeming to take in everything outside his sitting room. "I grant you, most of the guys living here are down on their luck, one way or the other. Oh, a couple of them just got old, nursing pensions but without any family to give them something to do, something to live for, you know? The rest are like Spaeth, divorce squeeze. Or drunks trying to dry out, druggies trying to kick the monkey."
"How'd you get into the business to start with?"
Dufresne cocked his head a different way. He seemed to have a variety of positions to convey emotion without words.
"Divorce myself. Why I feel sorry for guys like Spaeth, I suppose. The wife got everything but my mother's furniture, and I had to live somewhere. My divorce lawyer—may he burn in hell—had a friend who owned this place, was retiring to Florida. That sounded good to me, so I come see the Chateau—it wasn't called that then, ‘the Chateau' is my name for it account of my mother, she always was talking about living in one instead of some third-floor walk-up."
Dufresne took a breath. "Well, this was twenty years ago, and I was thirty years young. Somebody else'd said, 'Go run a resort hotel, up in New Hampshire or Maine for the Quebecois, want to come down to the States on their vacation.' But I didn't have enough money from the divorce for a real 'resort,' and when I went to this talk some 'expert' was giving on bed and breakfasts, all he kept saying was the three gotta's."
" 'Gotta's'?"
"Yeah. He said, you wanna run a B&B, you gotta be clean, you gotta be friendly, and you gotta—I loved this—you gotta 'exceed the expectations of your guests'. Well, that sounded to me a lot like being married, which I already knew I wasn't crazy about, eh? So I said fuck it and bought this place with a mortgage like the White House oughta have and found out my own three gotta's."
"Which are?"
"Gotta pay me, gotta pay me, gotta pay me."
Dufresne laughed, a honking sound that contrasted with the way his accent smoothed over some of his consonants. "So here I am, a Frenchy in an Irish neighborhood, running a welfare hotel for deadbeats."
He seemed to run down, and I decided to build slowly toward Michael Mantle, the alibi witness. "About Spaeth?"
Dufresne seemed to look at me for the first time, a new angle for the cocked head. "What about him?"
"I'd like to see the man's room."
"It ain't his anymore."
"The one he used to rent, then."
"There's a viewing fee, eh?"
The fourth gotta. "How much?"
"I go by the amount of time I spend. So—"
“—Twenty bucks for twenty minutes, if that."
Dufresne said, "Let's see it."
I dug out my wallet, handed him the bill. He stood up and led me out of his sitting room to the corridor and a central staircase.
As we topped the first flight, I could see four room doors, all closed. Labored, wheezy coughing came from behind the one nearest the steps. "He all right in there?"
"No, he's dying in there." Dufresne glanced over his shoulder toward the door. "Hank's got emphysema. Some day he's gonna stop coughing, and I'll be cleaning his lungs off the floor along with everything else."
"Did Hank know Spaeth?"
"No."
"You sure?"
"Spaeth wouldn't go near him. Scared Hank had something contagious."
We climbed to the third floor, Dufresne stopping at the first door on the right of the staircase. "Your asshole used to be in here."
Dufresne didn't have to use a key because the old-fashioned glass knob twisted in his hand. Entering the room, I could see carved foot and headboards, the same polished hardwood floors as downstairs, and wallpaper that was separating only a little in one corner from a water stain browning the ceiling plaster.
"Nice room," I said, meaning it.
"You rent from me, you get your money's worth." Dufresne gestured at the floor. "Every time somebody moved out, I'd do over his room. The floors, the walls. Bring up furniture from the basement, restore it with sand-paper and varnish. Got through twelve of the fourteen before I realized I'd never make my money back."
"Fourteen?"
"Right. Four per floor on two through four. Just a pair of roomers on the ground floor."
"Because you have the other half of it."
"Like you saw, eh? My bedroom's in the back of the parlor we were in."
Parlor. That's what it'd felt like, too.
I walked around the room Spaeth had told me about. However nice, it was only twelve-by-twelve, one window on the back wall and a simple overhead light. A nightstand with no drawers stood on one side of the bed, a bureau with no mirror on the other.
I pointed to the closed door on the window wall.
"Bathroom?"
"Closet. Bathroom on this floor's next to the kitchen."
"So, four renters share the hopper and shower?"
"And sink. Some of them'll try to brush their teeth in the kitchen, but I stop that pretty quick."
"Why?"
"You let them use the kitchen for bathroom stuff, pretty soon they're pissing in that sink, too."
I looked at Dufresne, then went to the closet. Empty, musty.
Turning back to the room door, I saw a dead bolt on it, an old keyhole lock under the knob. "You give the roomers keys to those?"
"The ones I got keys to."
"Including this room?"
"Yeah, but tell you the truth, the locks are so old, just about everybody's is like a master key for all of them."
Which meant that Spaeth's story about somebody stealing his gun wasn't so crazy. But given what Spaeth had said about Dufresne's attitude on firearms, I thought I ought to hold that until after I asked about the alibi witness.
"You said the man with emphysema didn't know Spaeth. Anybody else here friendly with him?"
"With Spaeth, eh?"
"Yes."
"Just the Mick."
Here we go. "Irish guy, you mean?"
"Hey, no offense. I mean, you're Irish, too, right?"
"Grew up about ten blocks from here."
"Ten blocks? You might know him, then. With his whole name and all."
"Who?" I said, innocent.
"This barfly named 'Mickey Mantle,' like the baseball player."
"Never had the pleasure"
"You ever go to the Quencher?"
God, that took me back, all the way to high school. The drinking age in Massachusetts was supposed to be twenty-one, and it was enforced everywhere except for private homes or college campuses. And at the Quencher, a dive with benches in the booths and the smell of stale smoke and fresh urine in the air. The owner was named Victor, an older guy from Poland, though there were photos around the bar of him as a younger man, in the circus and very muscular.
Dufresne said, "The Mick claims it was dimeys at the Quencher got him started on the brew."
It was possible. You could get served there if you had proof of being at least eighteen. Construction workers would mob the bar after they left the job sites, buying a round of "dimeys"—a six-ounce glass of beer that cost a dime—for any kids in the place.
Dufresne shook his head. "Only thing is, I know a lot of guys say they had their first beer at the Quencher, but not all of them became boozers."
"This Mantle really likes th
e stuff?"
"Likes it too much. Half-lit, funniest guy you ever been around. Anybody'll talk to him, even women. And the things he comes out with. You know there's this new Irish cable channel?"
"I've caught it a couple of times."
"Well, the Mick, he sees some kind of music show on the screen at a bar, then hears about this Portuguese guy over in Somerville who's on a hunger strike till they carry a Portuguese channel, too. The Mick says to me, 'Hey, Vinnie, you got to have a rent strike till they give you a French channel.' "
The honking laugh. "See what I mean?"
"Funny." I said, guessing you had to be there.
"Yeah, but that's only when he's half-lit." Dufresne shook his head again. "All the way drunk, the Mick's a fucking mess, days at a time."
"Could we check his room, too?"
A cocking of the head I thought I recognized. "Viewing fee's double when somebody's still living there."
I gave Dufresne the forty, and he moved diagonally across to the front room on the other side of the staircase. He fished around for a while in his side pocket, coming out with a key that turned in the lock right away.
I said, "Handy you had that with you."
"This?" He held it up. “This isn't the Mick's key. I had the locksmith come in, make me a real master." Dufresne twisted the glass knob, and we entered a bay-windowed front room that was bigger than Spaeth's, maybe fifteen feet square. The walls were painted instead of papered, but similar furniture and floor. However, the sheets on the bed lay filthy and unmade, the air smelling like the Quencher in high August. I wasn't surprised that nobody was there.
Dufresne frowned. "Fuck, it's no better than last week."
"Last week?"
"Yeah. I had to help him up the stairs one night. The Mick's a carpenter, makes good money when he works. But he's been on and off the benders for over a month."
The only towel I saw in the room was heaped on the floor by the bureau. I walked over to it and bent down. Bone dry.
"You remember which day last week?"
Dufresne cocked his head a new way. "That I helped him? Monday or Tuesday, maybe?"
The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy Page 4