The Big Dig

by Linda Barnes

  “He’s wondering if the teamsters are working a scam.”

  “And you figure they’d give me the nod. Dirt hauling?”

  “Selling dirt.” I deliberately used the same phrase Fournier had used on tape.

  “Dirt as in what?”

  I raised an eyebrow. The way Eddie’d presented it I’d only considered dirt, plain old dirt, Boston clay, the stuff that comes out of the ground.

  Sam said, “You got your dirt as in shit. Brown heroin. I know guys call that dirt.”

  Street lingo changes fast. Brown heroin used to be called Mexican shit.

  “I’ve heard nitro and fertilizer called dirt,” he added. “Makes a big bang.”

  “You’re full of possibilities, Sam.”

  He smiled. “Glad to hear it.”

  My mind was ticking. Selling dirt … I hadn’t really considered other meanings. Could be dirt as in information. As in blackmailable info.

  “Anything you can tell me, Sam? So I don’t veer off in the wrong direction. Anything about, say, Norrelli?”

  “Nothing having to do with our business, Carlotta. I’m not your field guide to the mob anymore.”

  “If dead rats turned up on a site, would that mean anything to you?”

  “Like I said, I respectfully refuse to answer.”

  I’d heard the rumors. They didn’t need further confirmation, not with the two restless-eyed goombahs seated at the bar, nursing tall colorless drinks that were probably soda water.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard. My dad hasn’t been well.”

  I swallowed tequila. He was in the organization now. No longer a Mafia son, but one of them. The two suits at the bar weren’t there for decoration. They were watching the heir, guarding the boss. Making sure nobody threatened the boss.

  I felt the change like a hard knot in my gut. And I knew I’d been right about avoiding champagne, in spite of the longing.

  I’m a cop’s kid. I always will be. There are places I don’t go.

  Chapter 16

  Morning dawned as cold and gray as a margarita hangover. I sat up in bed in forgot-to-set-the-alarm-clock panic, then lay back down and stretched. It was Saturday and while other sites worked weekends, the Horgan site was generally quiet. Sometimes, Marian had told me, specialty crews were brought in at odd hours, and if there was a crunch, all schedules went by the board, but today the site would be especially silent. With burial arrangements still incomplete, Fournier would be waked this afternoon.

  If his death were considered an unlikely accident, chances were I’d recognize a few guests at the funeral home. Cops attend wakes; cops attend funerals, though I’ve never heard of a perp, overcome by grief, confessing graveside. That’s not why they go.

  I’d seen the light in Fournier’s watery blue eyes, heard the urgency in his voice, but by the time homicide gets brought in, it’s too late for the cops to meet the victim, shake hands, inquire about passions, loves, hatreds. Eulogies humanize the victim. Friends and family—who comes to the funeral, who doesn’t, how big a turnout—tell the cops about the victim, but some cops don’t drop by to learn about the victim at all. They come to recharge their batteries, rededicate themselves to the job, to justice or vengeance or both.

  When a person disappears, like Veronica James, there’s no wake, no funeral. A few get immediate publicity, a news-flash hue and cry, a search, printed flyers, yellow ribbons. Most are gone for weeks, months, before anyone raises the alarm, and then there’s no general panic, just paperwork. In some countries, people routinely disappear. Off to prison, to the gulag, to the provinces. In Chile, so many people disappeared for so many years that they became a cause célèbre: Los Desaparicidos. Gone without a trace, some of them tossed alive from army transport planes over the South Pacific.

  Paolina knows that if she disappears I’ll find her. But here’s a thought that keeps me up nights: If I disappear, who’ll look for me? I used to assume it would be Sam.

  We’d talked late into the night and while the subject had shifted, we’d done most of the dance to the tune of working for someone else. He’d spoken obliquely; I still didn’t know whether he considered himself to be working for his father or working for his father’s thing, for the mob. I wasn’t sure it made a difference.

  I was working for Eddie and wondering how far I could trust him. To his credit, he’d told me up front that he was biased, that he wished the Horgans well. But was he acting on their behalf to blunt my efforts? If Spike’s search revealed that someone on-site had a criminal record, would Eddie tell me or withhold the information? He had manpower, a web of associates to trace paper trails, but could I trust him to deliver the goods?

  I wondered whether he’d managed to grab the tape off Fournier’s answering machine, taken it, along with the other tapes to the FBI lab. Would he tell me that Fournier didn’t have an answering machine, used one of those movie-star-taped greetings? Would I believe him if he said he found the tape mysteriously erased?

  I got up and stood in front of the closet, considering what to wear to the wake. I didn’t want to overdo it—I’d hardly known the man—but I didn’t want to seem disrespectful, either. I selected a navy skirt and jacket, a white blouse that didn’t need ironing, and hung my great-aunt’s locket around my neck.

  I left a note on my refrigerator/message board, asking Roz to heat up the computer and determine the financial status of the Horgans and their company, with an emphasis on what would happen to the company in the event of a marital split. With her weird hair and tattoos, I think twice before sending her into the field, but there’s no doubt she has an effect on men, so I also assigned her the task of finding the EMTs who’d rescued Fournier. Eddie had said he’d find out whether Fournier had spoken to them. Roz would find out. I could compare and contrast.

  Roz is the computer wiz, but I’m not that bad myself. Before leaving the house I ran a little search of my own. I’d already done some checking on Dana Renee Endicott, but my primary goal, I’ll admit, had been to determine her solvency. Now I delved for background, employment, a bigger picture. As the only daughter of Franklin and Emily Farr Endicott, her pedigree was as elite as any show dog’s. Educated at private schools and academies, she had passed the bar in ’92 and currently sat on the board of Smith College, three major corporations, and four charities. She tended to stay out of the newspapers, while her parents were relentlessly photographed at every society gathering in New York. Franklin and Emily sat on twice as many boards as their daughter. Emily was an officer of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

  When Eddie called to tell me the autopsy had been delayed, I told him I’d spoken to my contact, but heard no relevant tales. I wondered if he knew Sam had taken over for his dad, if every damn cop and private op in the city knew.

  Fournier’s not an Irish name, but the funeral home was O’Hara’s, a three-storey white clapboard in Southie big enough to be mistaken for a church. It must have housed a huge family in bygone days; now urns flanked the wooden door and the foyer was hushed with heavy carpet.

  Come by and pay your respects, sign the book, spend a moment in the long candlelit room with the dark closed coffin. But the real deal was two blocks south, around the corner, and down a few steps to Mikey Finneran’s Pub, closed to all but family and friends of the deceased.

  Mikey’s was jammed by the time I entered, although the crowd was less dense on the far side of the bar. Like most nighttime places—movie theaters, dance clubs—it looked eerie in the afternoon, off-kilter, faintly wrong. Sunlight shone through the streaked windows and warred with the overhead lighting. I spotted Marian, short black suit and pink blouse, twenty paces away, stopped to grab a beer at the bar before working my way over to her.

  Some of the mourners had come straight from work, in jeans and flannel shirts. The family had let it be known that workboots were fine, no offense taken. Workboots went with the worn red-leather bar stools, the weathered wood paneling. I glanced around for a likely girlfrien
d, ex-girlfriend, a woman in whom Fournier might have confided. I picked out several older women at a back booth, aunts or family friends, severely clad in black, wondered what they thought of the boisterous crowd, the smoke and music, the chatter and laughter. Three women in tight sweaters seemed to have places of honor at the bar, but I didn’t see the sadness of a young widow in any of their faces, and went on scanning the crowd. The serious mourners might be absent, too worn by their hospital-bed vigil to manage such a gathering.

  Leland Walsh, reflected in a mirror, chatted quietly with Harv O’Day. I couldn’t spot Liz Horgan, but her husband moved purposefully from group to group, resting a hand on a man’s shoulder here, an arm, a back there, nodding his head in sympathy before moving on. I heard general complaints about the site, specific ones about the weather.

  “Fuckin’ concrete cracked like peanut brittle.”

  “Hands so cold, couldn’t fasten rebar worth shit. So whatchya gonna do?”

  A fiftyish bantamweight ordered a shot of tequila, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the next thing his crew unearthed was the fuckin’ mummy’s tomb.

  A younger man laughed, said the weirdest thing they’d dug up so far was that Colonial woman’s privy. Loaded with cherry pits, too, and whaddaya think of that?

  “Stomachache, for sure. I heard Jody Fargo found half a boat. Lumber from a boat, anyways.”

  I set my beer down and lit my first cigarette of the day. A boat wouldn’t be so odd. Much of downtown is built on landfill, the place-name the only remnant of former landmarks like Fort Hill—the fort dismantled, the hill dumped in the bay to enlarge the town. Archeologists still worried that Colonial artifacts might be unearthed and unwittingly destroyed by Dig workers. Like most citizens of the Commonwealth, I’d been unaware that Massachusetts had such a thing as a state archeologist until teams began panning for gold along the Dig route. I knew the Horgan site was near the Mill Pond and Paddy’s Alley, the most thoroughly excavated and examined archeological sites thus far.

  “Way things are going around here, we’re probably sittin’ on an ancient Indian burial ground.”

  “Indians are over on Spectacle Island. Here we just got that Colonial shit.”

  “This site ain’t got the mummy’s curse, it’s got the Horgan curse.”

  “Hey, shut it. I worked other Horgan sites and they never had no curse.”

  A man in a denim workshirt mounted a bar stool and banged his glass with a spoon till the crowd quieted. He offered a series of toasts to Kevin Fournier, and there was much clinking of lofted glassware.

  Marian, at my shoulder, said, “Hey, it’s nice you came.” Her sheer blouse was the same shade as her glossy lipstick.

  “You look terrific,” I said.

  “You don’t think the blouse is too much?”

  The body was too much, but I wasn’t about to say so. “Hey, you know if Fournier ever got a chance to talk to Mrs. Horgan?”

  She shrugged. Blouse and body rippled.

  I said, “He seemed upset that morning, you know, about not being able to talk to her.”

  “Yeah, well, he asked me for her home number, but I told him he was out of line.”

  “Is his family here?” I asked.

  She tiptoed and craned her neck. “I don’t think so. Not yet. I mean, they chose the spot—Gerry’s buying the booze—so they ought to come. It’s not a big family—mother, father, couple of aunts, on his mother’s side, I think, and a brother overseas, in the army. I’m not sure if he’s on the way or what. Some of these guys must be army buddies.”

  Army and construction. No wonder the boys outnumbered the girls. Marian moved on and so did I. Nodding to familiar faces and unfamiliar ones, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the bar. Not much chance of anyone recognizing the woman with the mouse-brown hair and glasses. Maybe my profile, caught just right.

  I kept moving purposefully, eavesdropping. Most of the one-liners I overheard had nothing to do with Fournier or his death or the Dig. I heard about a great deal on a used Toyota four-by-four, a girl who’d do damn near anything for twenty-five bucks. I heard about a guy got hit by a truck, but he was gonna be fine, shoulda looked where he was going, that haul road behind the South Boston Postal Annex was a death trap and no mistake.

  I didn’t see any obvious cops, and I didn’t make any of the construction workers for undercovers. I was renewing my search for a grieving girlfriend when Horgan’s baritone caught my ear, part of a trio, with Harv O’Day, the site super, and a muscular man I’d seen near the trailer. Horgan’s voice was aggressively loud. I edged closer, but it seemed I’d missed the meat of a heated argument.

  “Hey, maybe it got misfiled. You ever think of that? Happens all the time.” The muscular man was trying to oil the waters, make peace.

  O’Day muttered, “Could have, Dennis, I suppose,” in a conciliatory tone.

  “Sure,” the man called Dennis said. “Your girl’s thinkin’ about her hair, her nails, her boyfriend. That’s what happened. You two make up now. Hey, come on, Gerry. He didn’t mean nothing by it, for chrissakes.”

  Horgan, aware of the attention of the crowd, seemed embarrassed. “OSHA and everything, it’s fuckin’ making me crazy, Harv. Guess I was outta line. Sorry.”

  Instead of clasping his outstretched hand, O’Day glared and walked away. I thought the boss was going to go after him, spin him around, turn the disagreement into a brawl, but Dennis quickly moved in and ordered another round of drinks. I thought I could probably paste a name to him. Dennis Marcantonio was a masonry sub-contractor whose smaller trailer abutted ours.

  O’Day’s charge led him close. “Hope you don’t think I misfiled anything,” I said.

  “Crowded here, huh?” The wiry man’s cheeks were flushed, but his voice was level.

  “Problems?” I wondered what grievance he harbored against Horgan, or vice versa, whether alcohol had primed the dispute.

  O’Day thumped his glass down on the bar. “You’re a temp, right?” I wondered if he meant I should butt out. I nodded, a look of earnest sympathy on my face. O’Day should know whether Fournier had punched the time-clock the morning he’d been found.

  “What agency sent you?” he asked.

  “Franklyn Mellors.”

  “Yeah, well, Horgan says you do good work, but don’t count on edging out Miss Marian.”

  “There’s enough work for both of us, maybe a third, if the company lands another contract.”

  “There’s always work, and look at everybody, drinking it up, taking it easy. Plenty of these guys barely spoke to Fournier. You hardly even met him. No discipline, that’s what it is. Carelessness and no damned discipline.”

  “You saying Fournier was careless?”

  He lowered his voice. “Man’s dead. I ain’t gonna speak badly of him.”

  “I heard he wasn’t wearing a hard hat.”

  “Yeah, well, what does that tell you about a man? Carelessness and no damned discipline.”

  With that, he made for the exit, edging his way through the crowd. Damn. I could have stopped him and tried to learn more about the time card, but I doubted whether anyone had punched in or out for Fournier with O’Day staring at the clock. And O’Day wouldn’t admit he’d been away from his desk, not to a mere temp. I wondered why he’d asked about my status. If he checked on me at Franklyn Mellors, I’d come up roses; Eddie had a deal with them. I wished I’d overheard his argument with Horgan from the beginning, knew what had been misfiled.

  Leland Walsh appeared on my left and asked if I could use another beer.

  I nodded. “O’Day and Horgan were really going at it. You know what it was about?”

  “Sounded like it was about you. You the girl who can’t file?”

  “Want to hear me recite the alphabet? Frontwards? Backwards?”

  “Some other time.” A black leather jacket buttoned over a black tee made him the best-dressed man in the room. “Carla, right?”

  “I heard you
were at the hospital. Do you know if the doctors found anything—any reason for the fall?”

  “Reason?”

  “I don’t know. Like if he had a stroke. You know, the way drivers do sometimes. Crash through a red light, ram into a tree.”

  “Drivers in their eighties.”

  “Maybe there was something wrong with his shoes. Or his balance.”

  “Or his luck. You always need a reason when somebody dies?”

  “I prefer a reason.”

  He smiled. “Like when somebody gets lung cancer, you want to know did he smoke?”

  I tapped out my butt in an overfilled ashtray. “Got a light?”

  “Maybe.” He fished in his pocket and his face changed. “Damn. Hang on, I’ll find you some matches—”

  I got a flash of gold as he closed something in his fist. “There’s a pack on the bar. What’s that?”

  “He gave me this, Kev did, a few days ago. Some kinda good luck charm and I wish to hell he’d kept it.”

  “He must have wanted you to have it.”

  “Well, it wasn’t like he was giving it to me, more like he wanted me to hold onto it for a while.”

  I held out my hand. “Can I see?”

  He opened his, displaying but not offering a flat gold oval with a tiny round hole at one end. It could have hung on a chain as a pendant. It reminded me of an army dog tag. There was a design, in color, maybe enamel, on one side. He flipped it over before I could make out much beyond a deep red star.

  “Only thing I can do with it now is give it to his mother—or toss it in his grave.”

  He stuck it back in his pocket and before I could ask to examine it more closely, Marian was there, fluttering at my shoulder.

  “Lee, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am. Carla, honey, gotta run. See you Monday.”

  “You’re leaving?” Gerry Horgan was still at the bar, and I’d have thought nothing but his departure could have lured Marian away. She was in her element, aglow, working the room.

  She pursed her lips. “I thought Lady Liz would make an appearance, but no, I’m gonna have to truck all the way out to the house. It’s in my job description, general gofer, message delivery, on- and off-site. She raced out last night without signing this contract thing that’s gotta be signed, sealed, delivered this afternoon or it’s down the toilet. All the fucking way out to Brookline, or sign it myself, I guess.”