by Robert White
We had no phone to call Cooney, so I did a little recon of the streets. Looked for ways to disappear fast if we had to. Noted traffic patterns and streets where harm might come first. I had a hundred spiral-bound street maps lying all over the backseat of the car, indispensable to my surveillance, and I dug Boston out of the pile.
Finally, we took a walk and found a small restaurant squeezed between two office buildings near the hospital. An Afghani or Pakistani couple owned it and he took our order while she went into the kitchen to prepare the food. Ingrid asked me if I liked curry. I said I’d never had it before. She smiled like that time I caught her playing with the silent butler.
I found a pay phone and dialed Cooney again.
“Who the fuck do you know anyway, Haftmann?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Jesus Christ, I got the head of VCU telling me with a lot of winks and nods to give you a hand on this one. The CID commander had his arm twisted too. Even Dooley, that prick of an assistant state’s attorney, is bowing like a fucking Chinaman. Just who the fuck are you?”
“You know somebody named Booth?” I asked.
“No. Who’s he?”
“A fed. I asked him to intercede for me. I’m in a little trouble back in Ohio right now.”
“Whoever he is, he’s got real muscle. So OK, big shot, what do you want from me?”
“Right now, I’ve got a phone number I want you to check for me.”
When you’ve got a lucky streak, you have to ride it. I knew Booth wasn’t the type to blow hot and cold; it seemed I had a temporary reprieve. But right then Cooney’s words had none of the hostility he sent down the wire; they were the governor’s words announcing a stay of execution to a man who’s been shaved and cinched into the chair with the electrode plates slapped onto his greased skin.
As Jack used to say before a long stakeout, it was time to begin the beguine, so I called the Globe and had them place the ad in the following day’s paper.
Then we waited.
Chapter 9
Ingrid brought me the paper. I had taken some Tylenol 3’s I was saving up for the inevitable migraine and overslept by an hour. I must have fallen asleep playing solitaire because some cards fell to the floor getting up from the couch. A jack, a ten of spades, a red queen were face up. Looking for my fortune but seeing nothing.
In the paper, I found it, the finished quotation from II Corinthians, 14:
For what fellowship do righteousness and lawlessness have?
Or what sharing does light have with darkness?
If the material in Gallatine’s briefcase made any sense at all, it had to do with this simple code. The quotations I found in the briefcase were Corinthians, so I didn’t stray from it in case this was his assigned patch of the bible for summoning the Boston High Priest of Phineas. Unless Gallatine tipped him some other way, he would assume Gallatine placed the ad, his answer completing the quotation would appear the next day, and the contact via phone would proceed. I had the number, but I did not know whether a certain time was appointed for the call itself. That too could be important, but there was nothing in Gallatine’s briefcase to infer a specific time after the ad appeared.
I called Cooney again and got him. “What now, Haftmann?”
“I gave you something to check for me, remember?”
“Oh yes, fuck me, I forgot. Seems these damned homicides keep interfering with my important gopher assignments.”
“C’mon, Cooney, what the fuck, give. Did you do it or not?”
“It’s the lobby phone of a little publisher next door to Houghton Mifflin—”
Got you. You motherfucker, got you now, going to put my gun in your mouth, you slimy fuck. . .
“Haftmann? Listen up, we need to talk. Come down to the precinct—”
“Thanks, Detective. I’ll be in touch.”
“Haftmann, God damn you—”
“What is it?”
“You better not be running no vigilante bullshit in this town—” Click.
Adios, Cooney. See you when I see you.
I had the maps, two bags of quarters, the plan, but not much time— the time between the paper hitting the streets and the phone call to the Beacon Street publisher next to Houghton Mifflin. If there was a fallback contact, I didn’t know it, and the killer would become suspicious. I patted her hand, told her not to worry: “Just call every hour. If anyone picks up, remember, you’re not to say a word. I’ll be watching. You know what to do then?”
“I take a cab back and wait for you to call me.”
I drove south on Charles. Her hands were twisting a scarf around.
“That’s right. It may be a while before you hear from me, OK?”
“Yes, I understand. I will wait for you.”
“That’s right. You’ll be fine. I’ve left you some money. Just wait by the phone.”
She said nothing more. The noon traffic was intense in the eighty-degree heat. Cabbies leaned on their horns and pedestrians scattered like fish. My hands shook on the wheel. The smoke from my tailpipe was more visible and darker; if oil was getting mixed in the gas, this clunker wasn’t going to make it much longer. I wanted to toss up one of those mindless prayers to the gods, but there was such a rage inside me I felt like choking. I nearly missed the Tremont intersection because the flow of traffic from Boylston sent me into the wrong lane. I took the turn anyway and heard the caterwaul of horns erupt behind me: Fuck them.
We drove north up Tremont east of the Commons. The park was filled with people walking in antlike clusters down the center of some of the most important acreage in American history. Vendors were hawking items at them from every direction. I took Tremont right to the end: Beacon Street. I showed Ingrid, off to the right atop the crest, One Beacon Street: the stately firm of Houghton Mifflin publishing company. Next door, like a tagalong sibling to a big brother, was the specialty book publishing firm of Fabrice. A pair of names etched in a silver framed plate above the massive oak door said: Nigel and Bob Fabrice, Props. The brass kickplate at the bottom looked spitshined to a high polish.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s where I’ll be.”
I drove down Beacon past the gold-domed state house, past the statues of poets inside the iron gates—“Look,” I said, pointing to a black marble statue of Quaker woman with knitting needles in her lap. I didn’t have to read the inscription to know she probably earned her distinction by swinging from an oak tree across the street; we drove past the row the mansions with their names chiseled into the stone. The rulers of nineteenth-century America once lived on this street—the financiers, industrialists, magnates, empire-builders. The same ones who ran America today.
I looked at her. Thus endeth the Haftmann tour of Boston’s blue-blood district.
I hit the brakes hard. There, right there. A battered-looking pay phone just inside one of the park’s entrances, one of the few left in the age of cell phones. Not a thousand yards from the top of the hill.
I jammed the tire into the hillside curb and walked her past a bas-relief of a Civil War scene honoring Major Robert Gould Shaw who led his all-black 54th Regiment into the Civil War. I jotted down the phone number in my notepad and gave it to her. I handed her one bag of quarters and a sack of food I had picked up at the corner deli.
“It may be a long while now,” I said. “Just do what I said, and everything’ll work out.”
She took the bags and reached up to grab me by the shoulders to pull me down to her; then she gave me a hurried kiss on the lips.
“Be careful,” she said.
“You too.” I walked up the hill.
The building was bigger than I thought; it looked like a German castle transplanted from the Rhone Valley. It had two opposing turrets with crenellated edges on the towers and gadroons beneath the oval windows. Out front, the massive square columns with Corinthian pilasters made an imposing view if it weren’t for the soot-blackened capitals, which looked as though the building had
been scorched in a fire. Apparently the architect had changed his mind in the middle of construction and opted for Romanesque over Gothic.
I saw a pair of protective gargoyles leaning down toward the sidewalk. I was tempted to put a scuff mark on the kickplate but didn’t. I found myself in a long corridor with small offices leading off on both sides. There were names and titles stenciled on the pebbled glass. This corridor widened into a triangular-shaped area with elevators and paneled doors with brass knobs and led toward a wide marbled stairway. A curved walnut desk with ornate images of gods and goddesses frolicking while shepherds piped to their goats occupied the large space beneath a massive curved stairs. Oil paintings hung on the staircase walls—dour men, a few with long white beards. The Fabrice patriarchs, I guessed.
A young woman with red hair in a French twist sat behind it and talked on the phone; a large plaque that said INFORMATION on it occupied the front of the desk. The first call was scheduled for noon.
I found a men’s room just around the corner. The lobby consisted of vending machines and a telephone built into the wall. NO LOITERING placards were placed near the machines and above the phone. The public would not be expected to go beyond this point. I had a story, but I was saving it. I saw no security people. Even shaved and passable in my best clothes, I’ve never been inconspicuous; it wasn’t going to be long before someone came along and enquired about my business in the building. As lunch hour approached, people were milling about from all directions; secretaries appeared from the stairways and elevators greeting one another and making plans for lunch. It was enough to cover me for a while. Five minutes to noon. I took a seat in the lobby and opened a magazine and stared into it.
The phone rang. Ten rings. No one seemed to notice it in the confusion. No one answered it.
Twelve-thirty. The same thing. I waited five minutes and called her back.
By one o’clock, most of the secretaries and typists had returned to work. The young woman behind the polished walnut desk looked up at me again. I nodded and smiled at her. This time she didn’t smile back. The phone went through its ten rings and even with one good eye, I could see several people in the vicinity pause to take note of it. At one twenty-five, a man with a bald spot like a tonsured monk came out of an office to flirt with the receptionist. She had said something about me to him because he turned and stared at me for a moment before he returned the conversation to his real interest. I heard her voice go up a couple octaves and they both laughed at something he said. I got up, stretched and yawned, looked at my watch, and then walked into the men’s room. I paused inside the door to listen. The phone rang. On the eighth ring it was picked up.
I came casually out and saw the man with the red suspenders saying “hello” several times into it and then hang up. He walked back to the receptionist’s desk and resumed his flirtation with her. I took my seat.
She called over to me, “May I help you, sir?”
“No, thank you, Miss. I’m just waiting for someone.”
I returned to the magazine as nonchalantly as I could. I felt the .38 snug against the middle of my back with the two-inch barrel digging into my spine. A hard place to reach but also very hard to spot and easy to miss on a light pat-down. I had wrapped several rubber bands around it to keep it from moving or sliding down. I knew Red Suspenders was looking at me. A few moments later, he went upstairs, singing off-key, and the sound echoed around the stairwell. He called down to her, “I’ll call you tonight, hon. Give security a buzz meanwhile, OK?” She must have nodded because I heard nothing.
A snatch of buried memory came floating back with his oafish singing: Nor in thy marble vault shall sound/ My echoing song. Words I heard in a literature class in my only semester of college before aborting and joining the police academy in Columbus. What was it called? Carpe diem. Seize the day. I thought of Annaliese inside a stainless steel drawer in a room smelling of putrefaction and disinfectant. Then I thought of Micah putting on her game face for court.
Two o’clock, two thirty. The ten rings. Nothing.
At two forty-five I left the building so that I might not be confronted by the security guard ambling toward me from the far end of the corridor. At two fifty-eight I was back in my chair in time. The receptionist looked up from the man she was speaking to and stared in my direction. I pantomimed a routine with my watch and shrugged as if to say, my appointment had been neglected. She seemed to buy it. The rings came and went. I never looked up from the crossword puzzle I appeared to be doing.
Three thirty. The phone rang again. The receptionist looked at it through each ring as her forehead creased in wrinkles. She got up and walked off. While she was gone, a woman with gray hair and eyeglasses dangling from a silver chain on her chest walked over to her desk and dropped off a stack of papers. I tried to be helpful and mentioned that the young woman had just stepped out. The woman scowled and went into an office.
Four o’clock, the rings. I called Ingrid back and after she hung up, pretended to be in conversation with a business associate. Whether the charade helped or not, the receptionist stopped staring at me. But her resolve to ignore me broke at the half-hour calling because she launched herself from her desk, banging a leg against the corner of it, muttered Shit in passing me and caught it on the fourth ring.
“Who is this, please?” she said.
I only smiled up at her, but she gave me a look that said she understood there might be a connection between me and this incessantly ringing phone. I flashed her a big grin: “Shall I rip it out of the wall for you, Miss?”
That got a thaw in the chill, and she said, “I snagged my skirt.”
I clucked my tongue in sympathy.
Sweetheart, he’d bash your pretty face in too.
The workday was ending at five. I was thinking of words to say to Annaliese’s mother. I needed something to make my own resolve stiffen, but I could think of no stick large enough to lash to my drooping spine for the day’s failure.
At four-forty-five, after downing another cup of the liquid filth extruded by the button marked COFFEE on the machine, I watched the activity in the hallway pick up as people began closing offices and preparing to leave. One more time and then we would be back tomorrow. I was trying to think of something more convincing for the young woman for tomorrow’s vigil when two girls emerged from a nearby office, and I overheard one of them say she couldn’t wait for the day to end because someone named Baldwin was finally starting his vacation tomorrow. I got up to follow them, preparing the story of Mr. Baldwin’s and my prior relationship in mind and was ready to blurt out an introduction when I heard the lobby phone ringing its last toll. It stopped on the third ring.
Red-haired missy is going to be a real problem . . .
I turned back and made my way about twenty yards when I heard a man’s voice saying hello. The suddenness of it almost made me totter on the parquet floor as I made my way back to the lobby as unobtrusively as possible. Approaching the receptionist area, I saw her regarding whoever must have answered the phone, and as slowly as I could manage, I swiveled my neck to take in the man who just then turned so that his back was to me. Which one, I wondered. Someone being a Good Samaritan or someone just tired of a ringing phone, or a killer of young women who happened to be a member of a secret religious society with its roots in antiquity?
Fucking-A, Jack, old ghost and mentor. Everyone wants to see what’s behind door number three.
He was between thirty-five and forty, about six feet, two hundred, short hair streaked with gray at the temples, dressed like a successful professional, an attaché case between his legs. His suit was charcoal grey, pinstripes, his loafers looked like those expensive ones as soft as butter. Holding the phone too long . . . Either he knows I’m behind him or— no, not that—she’s talking to him . . .
“I see,” he said. Then he said it again. Then he said, “That’s very interesting.” And then he replaced the receiver and slowly reached down for his case. He turned down the op
posite corridor from mine. I was not going to lose him if it meant tackling him inside the building and gouging out his eyes with my thumbs. No security guard challenged me as I followed out to the parking lot and down across spacious concrete steps into the late afternoon sunshine.
His walk was casual but brisk, with that shoulders-back, heel-and-toe action athletes affected. The saliva in my mouth had dried, but I had remembered to piss right after the 4:30 call. I slipped my hand around to my back and dug the gun out of my belt. I tucked it into my pants packet and caressed the safety. My mind was emptying of thought, just letting go. There was no time to call Ingrid to ask her to explain that bizarre conversation, but I had to be sure this was the killer before I blew him away. I told her that if there was any way to kill him so that she could watch, I would do it, but if not, she would have the satisfaction of knowing her daughter’s killer was no longer breathing oxygen.
Save one bullet for me, Thomas, I beg you.
He strolled down Beacon with me fifty yards and closing on him from across the street. He was already past the Shaw monument and would be coming up on Ingrid at the pay phone any second.
What the fuck had she said to this man? I crossed the street at a forty-five degree angle right at the park entrance where Ingrid was standing. I watched him approach her, stop just abreast of her, say something, and walk on. I crossed the street at a jog and cut down the entrance where Ingrid was standing near the phone. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, “What did you say to him?”