by David Daniel
“But why be practical?”
“Truthfully, Raz—” She stopped. “That came kind of naturally. Do people call you that?”
“A few have lived.”
She gave away another short smile. “Seriously, it’s a hurting world. Every one of us can do something to make it better. Yes, there are days when I grow weary. I’ll be thirty-two in a few months. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been at this forever. But what are my alternatives? Lounge around the ancestral manor and send out for Chateaubriand?”
“These ancestors—they interviewing for a replacement?”
She tilted her head. “You’re a tough man to have a serious conversation with.”
“I had a serious conversation over dinner last night. Nothing kills appetite quicker.”
She was looking at me in a way that happens between people once in a while, when the superficialities have proven needless. “You’re funny, Alex.” She paused. “I like the sound of that better.”
I realized I did too; like I liked her smile. The food came. The appetite was hitting on all cylinders tonight. The swordfish was moist and sweet and almost as enjoyable as watching Ada Stewart in her bib cracking a big lobster. She wasn’t of the new generation of women whose idea of eating hearty was a rice cake and a club soda. When we finished, we ordered coffee, and the waiter offered complimentary cordials. My friend Nan Crawford came over and slid into the booth beside me. She is one of those people who are completely without guile. She steps in, pushing her hip and large breasts against you, moving right into your space—though it isn’t a come-on or a threat; Nan is just a warm life force.
“Rasmussen,” she said, “you’re a wonder.”
“They’re hoping to get De Niro to play me in the film version,” I said. I introduced her to Ada.
“I ought to put you on retainer as a scout,” Nan told me. “A million thanks for sending Cassie Samms.”
“You like her?”
“To put it mildly. I’d have started her on the spot. I even offered her a bonus, but she said it was only right to give notice at the laundry. So she’ll start in two weeks. And I’ll still give her the bonus.”
The three of us chatted about how hard it was to find good help, and the general decline of the West, until the desk clerk came and Nan had to go straighten out a reservation mix-up.
“You’ve got a friend,” Ada said to me.
“When this place first opened, I helped Nan catch an employee who had sticky fingers. It was going to be hard to get around the union, and harder to get the kid to stop. One of the meat cutters is Lebanese, with an Old World sense of justice. I arranged for him to catch her in the till and threaten to take her hand off with a meat ax if he caught her again. The girl’s a night clerk now and taking management courses at the university.”
“Under the tough shell,” Ada said, “you’re a softie.”
I winked. “So was that crustacean you just devoured.”
We had another cup of coffee, then walked out into the indigo twilight. I drove her back to the DSS office and waited as she got into a little silver-gray Celica. She rolled the headlights on and waved. We drove off in different directions.
I cruised back through the city, out Bridge Street, and crossed the river. Back on the other shore was what once had been a mile-long span of mills before arson and urban renewal had cut it by half; but the huge brick structures were still impressive. The last tinge of day lacquered the long rows of windows, and lights winked in the easy-flowing water. Peaceful. I put Sinatra in the tape deck and took the long way home.
11
AT SEVEN A.M. the heat was a mocking promise. I had sweated through my T-shirt before I’d run a mile of the paved trail along the river. I could hear grasshoppers complaining from the weeds where the dew had already dried. As I approached the turnaround point at two miles, where another nest of condominiums had been slapped up, I noticed a wiry man in a nylon sweatsuit standing next to a small blue pickup truck parked beyond the barrier. He had his arms and knees slightly bent, and was posed like a lawn statue. As I neared, he relaxed and looked my way. Like-minded fools, trying to sweat on a hot morning, we waved to each other. When I made my turn, he said, “Hey, Mr. Rasmussen?”
I looked again and recognized the man I’d met yesterday afternoon at the DSS office, Ada’s coworker.
“Walt Rittle,” he said to refresh my memory.
I stopped and went over. Our hands made a wet grip.
“Hot enough for you?” he said. It was the kind of heat that brought the clichés, but who had the energy to be original? “You run down here a lot?”
“Just enough to keep the corpuscles from gridlocking,” I said.
“I know what you mean. I do a little t’ai chi.”
That’s what it was, I realized now.
“God knows you need something when you’re a chair-borne ranger most of the day,” he said.
“Were you in the paratroops?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Jeezum, you are a detective.”
“So are you.”
“Huh? Oh, Ada told me. Hope she wasn’t giving anything away.”
“She’s paying the bills.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I did a hitch with the Eighty-second Airborne. Then the lightbulb went on and I realized no way was I going to be able to keep up with all those lean tough kids. What about you?”
“Strictly a grunt, the draftee tour.” I braced on the tailgate of his truck and leaned into a stretch. There was a tow-bar welded to the bumper with a faded tennis ball covering the ball hitch where I put one foot and bent the other knee.
“I used to think the Army was everything a man could want,” Walt Rittle went on. “Three squares a day, a roof over your head, and you got fucked every day—pardon my French.” His amiable grin faded. “Actually the service cost me my marriage. And then half my pay in alimony. I got out.”
“Social work’s easier?”
“I’m older and wiser.” He winked. “So, how’s that Bhuntan Tran business coming?”
“I’m older anyway.” Generally I’d have left it at that, but it was possible Ada was too close to the case for any objectivity. Information is where you find it. “Walt, did you ever work with Tran too?”
“I knew about him, of course. He was well thought of in the Asian community. I never actually met him.”
“Any opinion on the idea that he was a coke hound?”
“That’s a tough call. Aside from what I read? I’d say no. But this here’s America, where anything can happen.”
We chatted another few minutes without settling the debate over heat versus humidity, then went back to just sweating.
* * *
By nine o’clock a haze hung thick over the city like a foretaste of what it was going to be like when we’d burned our final bridges. I could smell fluorocarbons as I got out of the car. Lady Earth was a big, loyal, good-hearted woman whom we’d been slapping around for a long time, but you could see her starting to sullen. It was there in the snap of her storms, the grumble of an earthquake, the steady burn of heat that scorched crops and killed cattle. She was turning, and if we didn’t make up somehow, soon, she’d be gone for good. Under my suit coat my shirt was as sticky as a congressman’s palm, and ozone stung my eyes as I climbed the steps of the JFK Civic Center.
Ed St. Onge stood before the window air conditioner, his arms spread like wings, gazing out.
“You won’t get far,” I said.
He turned. “You oughta call before coming.”
“I was in the area.”
He closed the door himself and moved back to his desk, parked a haunch and fingered his moustache. “So?”
I gave him a photocopy of my typed notes and filled him in on some of what I’d been doing the past two days. I asked if the cops had learned anything about the person Claire Azar saw coming out of the woods behind Tran’s house.
“Neighbor on the next block says he spotted a small white car driving slowly down Pra
ther Street that night. He didn’t catch the make or how many people were in it. Late model, sporty, he said, white wheel covers. No one else saw or heard diddly. That five grand you say someone gave Tran—could be the dough was for toot.”
“I thought about that, but it doesn’t fit the picture I’m getting.”
“Maybe you’re getting the wrong picture.”
“With my powers of ratiocination? Reminds me, you forgot to tell me whether the M.E. found any drugs in Tran’s system.”
“And you’re going to forget the answer.”
“My memory isn’t what it used to be.”
“Clean,” he said.
I looked at him. “Doesn’t that shake loose your theory?”
“I give a shit if Tran was using. I think he was dealing.”
I frowned. It wasn’t anything I’d come across yet, but the discrepancies bothered me. If Tran was clean, as most of what I’d found so far seemed to say, where had the coke come from? Planted? And the money? “If not,” I said, “and if the pro theory holds, the burn had to be for something else.”
“What else?”
“A wrong done somebody? These people have a strong sense of personal honor. Feuds can go on a long time.”
St. Onge scowled. “How about mistaken identity? They all look alike to me.” He fanned out a match and huffed smoke.
“What’s the matter, Ed?”
He spread a hand. “The Tran case is one of five I’m working. Count ’em. This damned heat…”
He glanced past my shoulder toward the closed door where a disembodied voice had drifted by.
“And the Ogre?” I said.
He met my eyes. “Yeah, maybe.”
One of us—I couldn’t remember who anymore—had come up with the handle. Droney had been a decent cop once, a long time ago, and had made his bones; but he’d soured. He had more moods than a teenage girl, most of them bad, and you never knew which he was in. The result was you trod carefully, alert for tripwires. “What’s his problem?” I asked. “His yes-men telling him no?”
“He’s a junkyard dog the last couple days. All over my back. Some of his pals next door are getting mentioned in a federal probe.”
“Horrors. Dishonesty at city hall?”
“Go ahead, be smart. You don’t work here.”
“Redundant is what I’m being. And you’re being something else. Abstruse? Is that a good word for the day?”
His cigarette smoldered, smoke ribboning thinly up to where currents from the air conditioner stirred it into the general station house funk.
“So where does the Tran case stand?” I asked.
He jabbed the butt out in his ashtray, freeing his hands to talk. He thumbed his chest. “My turn to wax literary. It’s nearing the end of the term and report cards are due. You see half a dozen apples in a bowl, a bright shiny mac on top, down to a shriveled little crabapple on the bottom. Which one do you put on the teacher’s desk?”
“Justice is blind,” I said.
“I’m talking realities. You worked here once.”
“Tran was just a refugee, not a pillar of the city, not even a good ordinary American with a name like Comtois, or O’Bannon … Sarantopoulos or Grabowski.”
“You know that’s not my view.”
I did know. It wasn’t even the view of the department, which on balance was a fair organization. But there are behaviors that get institutionalized and it’s nobody’s fault and everybody’s. St. Onge was on the home team. That’s where his first loyalty lay. I said, “The cooperation we talked about the other day still good?”
“The investigation isn’t closed, the effort’s just in other places at the moment. I’ll still try to help you out.”
“It’s ‘try’ now,” I said.
“What do you need?”
“How about showing me—”
He cut me off with a hand. There was a rap and the door opened. Gus Deemys, looking cool and dapper in gray-green Italian silk, stepped in. Seeing me he stopped and glanced at St. Onge. “Interrupting something?”
“What’s up, Gus?” St. Onge asked.
“Hancock on these?” Deemys waved some paper and came over and handed it to St. Onge. “No rush.” As he started back he slid me a look with raised eyebrows. “I saw your wife the other day. Riding in a Rolls Royce. Joel Castle’s car, I think.”
I met his gaze with silence. He smiled it off and moved to the open door. When he got there he stopped. “Hey, I’d probably roll for a Rolls myself.”
Possibly he had already turned away and didn’t see me, or maybe I was moving that fast. I caught one unconstructed shoulder of suitcoat in my right hand and a narrow lapel in the left and wheeled him around. The silk tore. He gave a startled gasp, and his head clocked the glass brick wall. My knee paused a tender half-inch from putting him into the Greater Lowell Boys’ Choir.
“Hey! Cut it!” St. Onge rushed over.
Not quick enough. Francis X. Droney filled the doorway of his office diagonally across the hall.
I gave Deemys’s lapel another twist, then let go. He shoved my hands away and tugged his jacket into place like a cheerleader whose skirt had been ruffled by a fresh halfback, but he said nothing.
Droney’s gaze had scanned the scene and come to rest on me. “The fuck you doing here?” he said.
Droney and I went way back; but I didn’t want to get into it. I already felt bad for pulling St. Onge along. I shook my head. “Nothing.”
A barrel-torsoed man with a ruff of hair the color of rusted steel, Droney had on brown slacks which broke on his shoes like muddy waves and one of the pilled half-sleeve Dacron shirts he wore year-round, with a tie as wide as a city councillor’s smile. His laser stare didn’t waver. “You’re a coin-op cop now. What were you after?”
“Nothing,” I said again.
I started toward the door, but he barred me. “Hold it, Coin-Op. I asked you a question. What’re you here for?”
I sighed. “I was lodging a complaint,” I said. “Someone stuck chewing gum on my office doorbell. It rings all day.”
He gnawed on that for a nanosecond, then scowled at St. Onge and Deemys, who looked only beaten. I noticed that the bar that held his tie in place was a miniature pair of gold handcuffs. He looked back at me. “It don’t matter shit what you were doing,” he said, “’cause none of this is going any farther. I guaran-fucking-tee it.”
“Further.”
He blinked. “What’d you say?”
Drop it, an inner voice said. “‘Farther’ is for literal distance,” I said. “You meant ‘further.’”
Droney’s heavy jaw worked, like that of an ox masticating bitter grass. Finally something twisted his mouth. A smile. “I liked it better the last time you were in my office. Yeah, remember that?”
I wasn’t likely to forget anytime soon. Droney and a few others had been there. There’d been pain in some of the faces, but not Droney’s. He’d enjoyed himself. “I remember.”
“Good, good. Because if you interfere with an investigation … you even show your sorry-ass face around here again, I’m going to ride over you like a dump truck. You got a few people to vouch for you before—” his glance cut St. Onge in “—so you managed to wangle a peeper’s license. Big deal. I’ll see you get squeezed faster than a pimple. I know people in Boston.”
“Like you know people next door?”
He rocked a little, heel to toe, gripping the belt cinched over his hard-fat stomach and letting his heat cool through a tiny smile. He’d been a three-pack-a-day man for a lot of years and his teeth were stained like the porcelain of an old urinal. “I don’t like you, mister,” he said finally. “I never did.”
“Damn! I hope I can get a refund on that Dale Carnegie course.”
“Keep it up, hot shit.”
But I was through. My control was unraveling. I wanted out of there.
Droney said, “The matter’s shut. This isn’t going any far—” I saw him hesitate “—anyplace but
here. And don’t give me that shit you don’t work for me, you got a client paying you. Get in my way, I’ll sling your sorry ass so high you’ll need a step ladder to tie your shoes.”
“I can’t picture that.”
“You wish.” He skewered me with the stare. “You don’t like it, you can kiss my rosy pink ass.”
I caught St. Onge’s look of warning and should have taken heed, but Droney and I had already crossed the line both of us had known we’d have to cross sooner or later.
“Point to a spot, Francis,” I said. “From where I’m standing, you’re all ass.”
I walked away slower than I thought I could.
12
THE MORGUE FOR Middlesex County was in East Cambridge, a three-story cube of red brick with limestone lintels over peeling dark green sashes that looked like they hadn’t been opened in forty years. People who ran such places were always fussy about flies. Fortunately, they weren’t as careful about visitors.
A girl with shoe-polish–black hair and a matching leather tie on a white shirt sat at a desk with a television set the size of a ring box perched on it. Without ungluing her eyes from the screen, she said, “All My Children. Help yiz?”
“Why don’t you videotape it at home,” I said, “so you can go blind in peace?”
She popped her gum and looked up. “Kiddin’ me? Then I’d have to wait’ll I got off work to see what happens. Anyways, nighttime’s party time.”
It filled you with hope for America’s future. “Is the big fellow still here?” I didn’t remember his name, so I let my arms describe him.
“Al LaRosa. He’s here.”
“That settles a bet. A buddy of mine told me Al had gone on some weird diet and was riding Thoroughbreds at Suffolk Downs.”
Nothing fazes them. Having grown up on soaps and MTV, they’ve seen it all. The gum kept popping. “No, he’s here. You want to see Al?”
“Please.”
* * *
It was an echoey staircase of glazed firebrick and pipe railing sweating in the heat. Unless the place had changed, left at the bottom would take you into cold storage and the smell of strong disinfectant, and lamps that made shadows jump in the corners every time you turned. It hadn’t. I saw the tin-sheathed double doors with their counterweights and umpteen coats of green paint. The dead don’t need windows. I was happy to turn right.