Now You See Her

by Cecelia Tishy

  “You were just having an off day, right, Brenda dear? You didn’t mean to reflect badly on the Renaissance, not a bit.”

  She reaches for her pay envelope. He holds it back. A few lunch customers linger in the dining room. He says, “Whatever the misunderstanding, we want to make it right.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be a tattletale,” I say. “A bad day, am I right, Brenda? I know deep down you appreciate working at a distinctive Boston landmark restaurant. You wouldn’t for a minute intend to criticize. How about this: let me treat you to a dessert, if your good manager here will permit. I see a few patrons lingering. We can both sit down for just a bit.”

  “I don’t have time. I came for my check.”

  “Oh? My goodness, and to think, I’d planned to urge our book club to hold the Midsummer Night’s Dream banquet dinner here.”

  “Brenda, could you give our customer twenty minutes? I’ll bring you both a slice of strawberry cheesecake. And here’s this week’s check.”

  We sit at a far table with the cheesecake. Her eyes are pure fury, her jaw clenched. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s a pressure point moment, Brenda. I need information on Alan Tegier. He was in treatment for his skin. Did he talk about it?” She pockets the check and presses fork tracks in the cheesecake. “Don’t waste my time, Brenda. What about the acne?”

  “He said something once, in a general way.”

  “Did he ever mention Dr. Bernard Dempsey?”

  “Dempsey?” She shrugs. “I don’t remember.”

  “Think hard. Did he talk about injections? Experimental treatment?”

  “No. Are you some kind of cop?”

  Ignore the question, Reggie. Press ahead. “I understand Alan’s personality changed shortly before his death. Did you notice any dark moods? It’s a simple question: any moods?”

  “I didn’t see much of him the couple months before he died. He didn’t work much for Ambrosia.” She rakes at the strawberries on the cheesecake and avoids my gaze. “You know how they found him?”

  “I do.”

  “It’s horrible. Hard to believe something like that could happen to a friend.” She puts down the fork. “But yeah, he got moody. He had plenty to be moody about.”

  “Like what?”

  “He was stressed-out.”

  “From work?”

  “Different things. You know about his jobs, the rug cleaning?” I nod. “One thing led to another. It really got to him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She swipes a gooey strawberry with her finger and licks it. “How about that ten from yesterday? From on the table?”

  “Sorry, Brenda, it expired when you left the deli. What about Alan’s moods?” She bites her lip. “Or do I show up at your station every shift you work here, lunch and dinner, day in and day out? Believe me, I’ll do it.”

  “That’s a threat?”

  “It’s a promise.”

  She sighs, frowns, bites a cuticle. “Alan was a great bartender. He got first call. The months before he died, he cleaned rugs at night. He’d leave a cocktail buffet gig and work straight through till morning.”

  “Offices?”

  “Mainly, he cleaned at a fancy high-rise. He was making good money, but he got to be a gofer for a certain guy. He was on the guy’s payroll. It was do this, do that, not one minute to himself. The last time I saw Alan, he was real tense. He said the red Mustang wasn’t worth it.”

  “What’s the name of the high-rise?”

  She pauses. “It was L-something.”

  “Not Eldridge.”

  “Hey, yeah, Eldridge. That’s it.”

  I’m on the edge of the seat. “Brenda, the man Alan worked for, who was it?”

  “I don’t know. He said the guy was all about hell and damnation. Fancy words for hell, old-fashioned.”

  “Dante. The Inferno.” She looks blank. “Did you tell any of this to the police?”

  “I went to the memorial service, not the police.”

  “The police didn’t question you?”

  “Nobody did.”

  “The man who talks about hell, he’s the night manager at Eldridge.”

  “Managers,” she says with a huff. “They get you one way or another.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I’m working on “Ticked Off,” waiting for a callback from Devaney to urge the police to question Brenda Holstetter. The phone rings. I say, “Frank,” and hear a familiar, unmistakable voice cry, “Regina!”

  “Tania?”

  “He’s furious. Didn’t I tell you this would happen? He’s never been so angry. He won’t let me out of his sight. I’m watched every minute.”

  “By your husband?”

  “The blazer men. Watch them, they wear body armor.”

  “From Eldridge? The staff?”

  “They could be watching you too. I had to call. Don’t worry, this won’t be traced. I bought a phone card.”

  “Tania, where are you?”

  But the line is dead. “Biscuit, here, girl.” I want the dog with me as I walk to the front window and peer outside. It’s early afternoon, and Barlow Square is quiet. It’s less than twenty-four hours since the cheesecake talk with Brenda, and I’m impatient for a callback from Devaney, who’s gone silent on me. The only person visible is the pipe-smoking man in the argyle sweater who lives across the square. I watch him walk up the block and cut between two cars recognizable as my neighbors’. Trudy’s van is directly across the median. My Beetle is two blocks away, not a bad distance in the street parking game we all play here in the South End.

  Biscuit whines, and I take her in my arms. My head is jammed from the dander allergy on top of this cold. The dog and I both look out. The sun is high, the afternoon shadows just beginning to stretch out. Glare blocks the visibility through several windshields, but it seems hardly likely that Jeffrey Arnot’s enforcers would stake out my home in a parked car on my block.

  Was Tania simply hysterical? “Biscuit, let’s go outside.” I grab her leash and put on a jacket, and we walk around the square. I stride boldly. The sun feels good. Everything looks normal, not a blue blazer in sight. At the corner, a hefty man with thick brown hair rolls up the sleeves of his tan flannel shirt and reaches under the hood of his curbside station wagon. His tools lie on a pad on the walk. I tug the leash and step around. We circle back in about twenty minutes, all okay. The flannel shirt man is buried in his car’s engine compartment, practically mooning the sidewalk.

  How does a person know she’s being watched? By hunch? Intuition? By echoing footfalls? I fill Biscuit’s water bowl and finish “Ticked Off,” this week’s topic the public nuisance of humming, whistling, and singing aloud. I tap the e-mail “send.”

  Devaney still hasn’t phoned back. I decide to go to the Boston Public Library. “No, Biscuit,” I say at the door, “you can’t go this time. Doggies aren’t allowed in the library.” No one follows me as I walk down public streets that are filled with plenty of pedestrians.

  At this hour of the day, the BPL main reading room feels like a church. Call this my Mission Unfinished. This dreary head cold, you see, goads me. It’s a pale echo of the icy arctic episode with Tania, that whiteout blizzard days ago in the muggy, hot June twilight. The polar-white paint of Jeffrey’s limo can explain the incident only to a point. It does not account for the bone-chilling cold that clutched me in its icy grip. It does not account for the chill that Meg and I felt that first night, nor Igloo Sue, nor Brenda’s remark on the sudden cold drafts. The Marlborough house harbors secrets, and another bout of research might pry them loose.

  But it’s not to be. For genealogy, I’m directed to the Social Science department, where I find a catalog system worthy of CIA codes. “I’m looking for the full date of death of Edmund Wight, who died in 1888. The funeral was held on March 20.” A pleasant young librarian with a whippet waist pulls a microcard and helps me load a machine that throws a gloomy image roughly comparable
to the first TV broadcast in 1939.

  “Can you read it?” he asks.

  The eye chart from hell. “Barely.”

  He shows me how to focus, and I have a momentary flashback to high school biology when the amoeba was nowhere to be seen under the microscope. But in minutes, I find the death date— March 17, 1888.

  “Wight died of the grippe and bronchitis,” I say to the librarian. “I’m looking for specifics. I want to know what happened in Boston on March 17.”

  In the high-ceiling Newspaper Room, I’m offered microfilm reels of historic dailies, the Boston Evening Traveller, the Boston Daily Advertiser, the Boston Evening Transcript, the Boston Daily Globe. It’s as if March 17, 1888, never happened, because every one of these papers was consumed with the aftermath of a days-old monster snowstorm. “Crippled” and “paralyzed” are the words for the entire East Coast from Washington, D.C., to Maine on March 11 to 13. “Everywhere horse cars were lying on their sides, entrenched in deep snow, jammed together in every conceivable position… The city’s surface was like a wintry battlefield.”

  It was the nineteenth century’s version of a multivehicle interstate pileup. The storm, it seems, began on Saturday night, March 10, and the next morning Bostonians awakened to a meter of drifting snow. Some managed to reach their places of work and commerce on Monday but were trapped by the day’s driving snowfall. In the Boston Evening Transcript is a post-storm feature on “Heroic People and Hat Chasers” who braved the blizzard with impromptu outerwear. “A few men pulled a pair of woolen socks over their shoes and then covered their legs with leggins.” But the snow and cold were relentless. On Tuesday it continued to snow, temperatures dropped well below freezing, and wind speed reached seventy miles per hour. Fallen telegraph wires marooned each seaboard city. Up and down the coast, four hundred people died.

  This stops me. This is not mere historical curiosity but circumstantial evidence. The newspaper accounts make it clear that Edmund Wight was probably one of the storm victims, a casualty of this blizzard of 1888. The weekly Monday Club dinner was his responsibility. He probably set out in good faith on Monday from Marlborough Street, and then hours later struggled back toward the Back Bay in driving, drifting snow. Exhausted, Wight most likely took sick from his exertion in the storm. Grippe and bronchitis are diseases brought on by chills. Let’s say he made it back to Marlborough, took to his bed, failed to respond to the beef tea and toddies and plasters doubtless administered. His strength ebbed, and he died on the seventeenth of March, buried on the twentieth. He wouldn’t actually have died in the storm, but from it, of it.

  My own arms and neck suddenly prickle, my teeth chatter as I shiver. Not from picturing myself in the blizzard, but from a thought. If I am right, the piece of cloth in Tania’s chestnut casket connects with Edmund Wight. If I’m right, the cloth remnant pulled from the rafters is an actual relic of the storm. It’s the remains of Wight’s improvised outerwear. It marks his desperate effort to protect himself from the blizzard that brought on his death.

  If I’m right, the stiff, filthy rag signals the spirit of Edmund Wight continuing in the Marlborough house. It has spoken to me, telling me that Wight is both ice-cold and deeply disturbed. The disturbance, of course, could come from the guilt of a man who engineered Charles Dehmer’s death in the coach “accident.”

  Guilt alone, however, would not express itself in smashing the Arnots’ valuables. The breakage means anger and hostility. The house is haunted. Edmund Wight’s ghost is there. The Bostonian is furious, and a ghost has no deadline. Outside of time, it can rage into perpetuity. No wonder the Marlborough house goes on the market so often.

  The summer hour with the Blizzard of ’88 has been a historic distraction, an interlude while I await Devaney’s call. It might prove useful for Meg, but my task now is to exit the library and walk to Barlow Square on high alert to detect surveillance.

  Exiting the library on Boylston, I duck panhandlers and cross the granite library plaza. At the Copley T stop entrance, a man with thick brown hair pauses and disappears down the steps. My heart stutters. He’s the guy working on his car on my block this afternoon.

  Isn’t he? Isn’t the tan shirt the same? Commuters jostle and swirl down the T station stairs. He’s gone. I should have scrutinized more carefully the facial features of the sidewalk mechanic.

  Or maybe I’m just imagining things, chilled from the library episode. As for the walk back, forget it. My plans are suddenly changed. I’m heading for the precinct house on Harrison Avenue. I’ll walk there and sit myself down and wait for Devaney and refuse to budge until he comes out.

  At Columbus, I wait for the walk sign, and nobody halts behind me. On to Kneeland, where I mix in the pedestrian flow, an odd lot of walkers and dogs and vehicles. A horn sounds, a German shepherd barks. Everyone is minding their own business. Young women with gym bags alight from a van and enter a social center. Their laughter is lovely, like flowers. I make a left and find myself the sole pedestrian on the sidewalk as I climb the steps of the fortress of a precinct house on Harrison.

  “Detective Devaney is not available? Then I’ll be happy to wait.” The desk sergeant’s nod is indifference itself. Her nameplate says “V. Ramirez,” and her hair glows with henna highlights set off by the blue of the uniform. She turns back to her computer screen, and I sit against a far wall in one of the plastic chairs that bump the lower back. The clock says 5:38. Uniformed cops come and go without a glance in my direction. I spend twenty minutes with a well-thumbed USA Today, then go to the water fountain, mostly to remind Sergeant Ramirez of my existence. She doesn’t look up. From the plastic chair, I call Devaney on my cell phone and leave the message that, unlike Elvis, I haven’t left the building. It’s 6:17 p.m. My stomach grinds and growls.

  “Well, Reggie.”

  “Well, Frank. I should’ve brought a sleeping bag.” By now, it’s 7:02. With his jacket over his shoulder, his catsup red tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled, Frank Devaney looks like a man stuck at a roadblock. When I say, “I wanted to catch you in person for a few minutes,” he grunts. “I walked here,” I add. As if foot power means anything. “It’s important, Frank. I have a message.”

  “A psychic message?” I shake my head. “Then how about tomorrow?”

  “This won’t wait. How about right now?”

  We go into a stuffy side room with a Formica table scarred with cigarette burns. I sit. He straddles a chair. “Okay, what’s up?”

  “Two things. A woman who worked catering jobs with Alan Tegier has important information for the police. Brenda Holstetter. She’s a server at the Renaissance restaurant off Stuart Street. Frank, why aren’t you writing this down?”

  Reluctantly, he makes a note. “What else?”

  “The witness who says he was with Alan Tegier at the poolroom the night he disappeared is a notorious liar. His name is Rudy Cavitch. He’s a local legend in Woburn.”

  “So you’ve been to Woburn.”

  “And to Chestnut Hill to the Dempsey house. I think Bernard Dempsey is involved in Tegier’s murder. Possibly his wife’s death too.”

  Devaney gnaws a knuckle and studies my face. “So correct me—you did actually feel psychic vibes at Dempsey’s house?” I shake my head no. “How about Woburn? Not at Tegier’s house?”

  “Don’t insult me, Frank. I talked with Alan Tegier’s stepmother. Alan was enrolled in Dempsey’s secret medical trial for severe skin problems. Dempsey injected him and swore him to secrecy. The injections affected his state of mind. He became withdrawn and moody.”

  “Which doesn’t make it criminal.”

  “Advent Tissue Science must be investigated. Dempsey has a corrupt past. He was involved in a laboratory scandal. Data was falsified. And there’s more: the restaurant server, Brenda Holstetter, says Alan Tegier cleaned carpeting at night at Eldridge Place. Frank, he worked for Carlo Feggiotti.”

  “Feggiotti… the guy who’ll spring Faiser?”

  “You don’t
seem interested.”

  Devaney crunches two Tums and says “appetite suppressant” as if I don’t know it’s dinnertime. “Not to insult you, Reggie, but there’s too much CSI and New Detectives and God knows what. It’s nuts. Everybody’s a detective.”

  Against better judgment, against judgment itself, I hear myself blurt out, “Okay, listen to this. Sylvia Dempsey knew Jordan Wald. She introduced him at the Newton Home and Garden Alliance.”

  I could lip-synch Devaney’s comeback. “A garden club that invites the politician responsible for environmental laws in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—am I supposed to investigate that too?” He tugs his open collar and starts to rise. “Reggie, let me drive you home.”

  I am silent all the way from the precinct house to Barlow Square. “Frank, that station wagon…I may have been followed by a brown-haired man who worked on that car.”

  “The Olds?” Its hood is half raised. Devaney double-parks, and we get out. A hammer lies on the pad on the walk. The brown-haired man is nowhere around. Frank leans to see the VIN number. “I’ll run it through the DMV and NCIC.” In minutes, he makes calls and says, “It’s clean. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Who’s the owner?”

  “Oh no. No, you don’t. No more going to knock on strangers’ doors. Reggie, you’re going way too far. You gotta pull back.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and faces me with a kindly gaze. “Take my advice, get some rest. Walk in the Public Garden. Go to the museum and look at the impressionists.”

  “Monet’s water lilies won’t solve murders.”

  “That’s the point. Look, we’re grateful for the tip about the lying Woburn witness. We’ll definitely look into it. But I’m going home now. My new slow cooker is turning shoulder chuck into boeuf bourguignon. You take care. I mean it. Take care.”

  It’s nearly 8:00 p.m. when I walk Biscuit down the block and see that the Olds front passenger door is open. Two thin legs with pointy black oxfords stick out toward the sidewalk. Then he sits up, this evening’s Olds mechanic. He’s a wiry, short, sallow man in a gray T-shirt and black pants. He picks up a wrench and nods as I pass, then pats Biscuit with a hand whose nails are spotless. A mechanic without one drop of grease under his nails?