“Here we go,” he said.
As he said this, another unmarked cruiser gunned up Mount Vernon Street and jammed on the brakes behind the FBI sedan, which sat behind the police van. A man in a shirt and tie, carrying a sport jacket over his shoulder, got out and walked determinedly into the crowd.
“Fed or cop?” I asked.
Sweeney put his glasses down and looked over at me like I had just fallen face-first off a beaten-up turnip truck.
“He’s carrying his jacket,” he said loud, his voice soaked with aggravation. “Of course he’s a cop.”
As if to prove the point, the cop in question grabbed the federal warrant, read it for all of nine seconds, and handed it back. Immediately, he began jawing with the FBI ringleader.
Do they have free refills here on the large sodas?
Then came another car from the other direction. Two guys wearing their jackets—Feds, I’d hazard a guess—got out and walked into the crowd. People were pointing fingers, raising voices, gesticulating wildly.
Sweeney said, “You mind me asking why you give a damn about this murder?”
“Can’t tell you,” I replied. “Not because I can’t tell you, but because I don’t really know. I think it’s connected to something else, and this whole scene confirms my beliefs.”
Interesting as all this was, it wasn’t getting me what I needed, which was to find out if Hilary Kane could have in some way been connected to the heist. And if she was, then did my story in that morning’s paper get her murdered? It was nearing noon. I had a lot of work to do, and the sands of time were pouring through the hourglass of life.
“I’m going over,” I said, putting my hand on the door handle.
“You’re what?” Sweeney asked me this loudly, but he was more amused than upset.
“Public street. I’m allowed.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure.”
With that, I opened the door and stepped out. We were about ten cars down from the action, so nobody took any notice. I walked down the middle of the street toward the assembled crowd, which now consisted of precisely six FBI agents and three Boston police detectives, not to mention the two patrol officers who were at that moment pulling up in a cruiser, though I guess I just did. I had a legal pad in my hand and a pen in my pocket.
“Possession is nine-fucking-tenths of the law, and we’ve got it.” That was the Boston PD detective in the necktie, fairly shouting his lucid analysis into the reddened face of the FBI ringleader.
“The other tenth is this warrant, and that fucking trumps it.” That was the FBI agent, providing his equally lucid response.
Several of the underlings on both sides of the warrant divide looked over at me warily as I approached, probably wondering if yet another agency was about to get involved.
I gave them my most sheepish, party-crashing smile and said, “Morning. I’m Jack Flynn from the Record. Just trying to get the lay of the land out here.”
I heard an FBI agent, the late-arriving supervisor, mutter, “Fuck.” Two of the other well-dressed agents cut me off as I continued to walk, such that we were chest to chests.
I caught the gaze of the Boston supervisor, who gave me some sort of knowing look, and already, without knowing why, I was on his side.
“We’re going to have to ask you to leave,” an FBI agent, one of the guys in my face, said.
“Ask away,” I said, “but unfortunately, until I get some information, I don’t think I can really go.”
He didn’t take too kindly to that and said, “Get the fuck out of here.”
My tax dollars at work. I’m trying to remember what the good faculty at the Columbia School of Journalism advised in these situations. Of course, since I instead matriculated at the School of Hard Knocks, I had absolutely no idea.
So I said, “Sir, it’s a public street.” I said this dismissively, as if I was running out of patience, and I was. I was.
“It’s a crime scene.”
“The crime,” I replied, “occurred down the street, in the parking garage. The only crime going on here are all the bad haircuts.”
Actually, I didn’t really say that last part, not because it wasn’t true, but because if I did, I probably would have been the recipient of a deserved haymaker from this antsy agent hanging all over my space. What I did say, though, was, “The only crime going on here is the waste of public energy.”
“Move!” he screamed, drill-sergeant style, right into my ear, so that I could feel not only his bad breath, but his warm spittle, on my lobe.
I ignored that too, hard as it was becoming, and called out to the ringleader and the late-arriving supervisor, “Can I get your names, please.”
They looked at each other. The boisterous agent in front of me didn’t know what to do next. I knew, and he did too, that one push, and he’d be working the switchboard of the FBI’s field office in Omaha.
The two supervisors traded nervous glances. It’s part of the majesty of this great profession that we can make men bearing arms afraid. The senior FBI agent turned to the ranking cop and said, “We’re going to follow you to headquarters.”
The cop snorted and replied, “Well, you sure as hell ain’t getting in.”
And just like that, in seconds, actually, everyone jumped into their cars and drove off. Suddenly, I was standing in the street all by my lonesome. I walked back toward my car and said to Sweeney, “Please, call me Henry Kissinger.”
He got out, wide-eyed and said, “What in the hell did you say?”
“I told them my name and asked them theirs.”
He laughed. I added, “Come on, we have work to do.”
He followed me silently to the front door of the apartment building. We both saw four mailboxes, meaning one apartment on each floor. He pulled some tiny device out of his pocket—for all I know, it might have even been a key—and had me inside the front door in a matter of about three seconds. We walked up to the second floor, and he used the same tool to unlock the door to Hilary Kane’s condominium. This was illegal, this break-in, and nothing I found in this search could be used in print. But someone was playing dirty with me, I feared, so I needed to play dirty back.
“Get out of here before you get in trouble,” I said to Sweeney at the door. “I have my phone on vibrate. Call me if a cop or Fed is trying to get in.” He nodded, turned and silently walked down the flight of stairs.
And I opened the door in search of my own worst fears.
Chapter 7
T he first thing that struck me was the light, loads of it, pouring through the back windows, splashed across her rumpled queen-size bed, speckled across the dark hardwood floors that were casually draped with discarded clothes. The second thing to strike me was the airiness of it all. The apartment, from front to back, from side to side, was wide open, like an artist’s loft, no walls, except in a far, rear corner where I assumed the bathroom must have been.
This was unusual for Beacon Hill. Apartments here are usually closed and cramped and dark as the night in the middle of the afternoon, and the architecture usually ranges from the uncreative to the dowdy. This one was stylish even, chic, and I liked the owner immediately. Apartments and houses can do that. They have a reflected personality, an ability to acquaint and comfort. Having never actually met her, I already knew that Hilary Kane was my kind of woman. Actually, check that. She was much too good for me.
I called out, “Hello,” the single word, happy at its core, just drifting into the vacant air of the room. I thought to myself what a shame it was that she couldn’t answer. Of course, if she could, I’d be facing imminent arrest, so I guess I wasn’t in any great position to complain.
The entry was in the middle of the apartment. To my right, the back end, was where she slept, so noted because that’s where the aforementioned bed was, with a soft down comforter tossed haphazardly on top of it, as if she had overslept that morning and rushed into a day that would unknowingly be her last. I walked back into her
bedroom area and looked at the fashionable clothes that lay about the floor—a pair of stretch jeans, a few flimsy tank tops, some rayon running pants—and shoes, everywhere, shoes, various types of clogs and boots and sneakers and high heels, some pointed and refined, others chunky and rugged. What is it about women and their shoes?
I wandered over to her small desk a few feet from her bed, painted white, and saw from the dust marks where the confiscated computer monitor had been. Various papers sat in careful piles, likely placed there by the uncharacteristically thoughtful police. About eight or ten framed photographs sat on a shelf on the desk—mostly women friends smiling into the camera, often arm in arm, at various celebratory events. Three photographs were carefully tipped over, turned down on their faces. I reached out a hand to grab one of them, to see the image, when a jolt went through my arm—Sweeney’s vivid warning: “Look but don’t touch, not unless you’re wearing these gloves.”
I yanked his latex gloves out of my back pocket and pulled them on, golf-glove style. I felt somewhere between ridiculous and ominous, but the alternative—winding up arrested and hauled into court to explain my actions and plead an innocence that wasn’t really mine—was enough to prod me on. I picked up one of the photographs and held it in my hand.
It was of a man, reasonably handsome, with blue eyes and a strong chin and a full head of black hair that tumbled down onto his neck. He wore a blue blazer and he stood on what appeared to be a dock hanging over somewhat churlish seas. This picture could have been torn out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue. He carried the classic look of an ex-boyfriend—a little too smug, far too pleased with himself, in total, not a keeper, not for someone with the style and taste of Hilary Kane.
My suspicions were confirmed when I picked up the second picture, this one of the same guy, his hair a little shorter, a too-cool formless sweater covering his torso with a white tee shirt showing underneath. He was wearing a pair of perfectly faded jeans, sitting on the front steps of what appeared to be an extraordinarily expensive house, a mansion even, that I immediately suspected was that of his parents.
But he’s not what caught my breath short. It was her, Hilary. She was sitting one step beneath him, and his arms were wrapped affectionately around her neck. I wanted to punch him in the head.
To say she looked beautiful would be like saying that eagles know how to fly. Yes, on one very simple level, it’s true, but it gets nowhere near the glorious heart of a wondrous reality. She was blonde, with soft hair that no doubt flowed like silk down beyond her shoulders. I wouldn’t know, because in the moment of the photograph, she had it pulled back in a casual ponytail that highlighted the perfect lines of her chiseled face. Her features were small and sharp, except for her eyes, which were big and grayish-blue. She was wearing an old baseball-style undershirt, navy blue arms, baggy, down to her elbows, and a white body. She had on jeans that were smudged with dirt on both her knees. She wore a controlled smile on her face, her lips pursed, as she looked upward as if trying to see her boyfriend who lurked above, though not really. She had on worn track sneakers. In sum, I think I was in love.
But onward. I put both photographs down, my heart now even heavier with the events of the day and the suspicions of the moment. I picked up the papers on the desk and flipped through them, looking for any clue as to her employment. But mostly they were old bills and flyers. I checked through her two desk drawers, looking, perhaps, for a pay stub or an ID card, but there was nothing of any worth inside. I began walking out toward the living room part of the sun-splashed loft when something on the floor caught my eye. It was just a corner of white paper, wedged behind the desk. I hunched down, pulled on it, and was suddenly holding another photograph, this one an image that stunned me.
Oh, it was nothing vulgar or pornographic or even remotely compromising. Black Hair wasn’t even in it, thank God. I was sick of him already. What it showed was the mayor of Boston standing with his arm around Hilary Kane, various clingers-on in the background, at some ribbon cutting ceremony somewhere. Scrawled across the bottom of the picture were the words, “To Hilary, the best lawyer at City Hall. With all my gratitude, Mayor Harkins.”
A couple of points worth making here. First, what kind of jug-head calls himself “Mayor” even to his own staff? At least he doesn’t have the title “Special Mayor.” Second, it obviously meant that she was in the employ of the city, probably as a lawyer in the corporation counsel’s office. Third, it might well indicate that the reason the FBI was investigating her death was because the Feds were probing the mayor on some other issue and were searching for a link to the Kane murder.
All of it was interesting, but not terribly conclusive. Still, the nagging got louder, almost to the point of shrillness. The photograph in my gloved hands was one of those pictures that only politicians and their pathetic groupies love. Hilary Kane obviously wasn’t one of them, given that it had slipped unnoticed behind her desk. She probably never missed it, forgot she had ever even had it, or maybe she had even tossed it toward the trash can and hit the rim. It was meaningless, to her and any normal-thinking person.
But not now. Now it was an important clue that I held in my own sweaty hands. Now it broached some terrifying questions. Now it whispered truths that I couldn’t quite hear. I came here because my very refined reporter’s instinct told me that Hilary Kane was in some way linked to the Gardner Museum heist. This picture indicated that I might well be right.
But when does intuition give way to facts? When does fear turn to anger? Did I cause someone to die? And not just anyone, but did I help end the life of the young and beautiful Hilary Kane, for reasons that I didn’t yet know?
I tucked the picture back behind the desk precisely where I had found it, happy—though that’s probably not a good description of the moment—to have it out of my hands. I picked up another photograph on the desk, this one of Hilary and two other women with remarkably similar features—one about her same age, the other older, no doubt a sister and their mother. They were standing outside of this very building, not posed, but candid. Each of them had a box of some sort in her hands, probably on the day Hilary moved in. I suspected that the lazy no-good boyfriend was the one behind the camera, his way of sneaking a break.
I looked hard into Hilary’s eyes, big and blue-gray, dazzling, knowing. She was a smart woman; you could tell that from even the quickest glimpse. She had that same somewhat practiced smile on her naturally beautiful face. Her hair was pulled back. She wore a tank top and a pair of short-shorts showing legs that were long and carefully formed.
I shook my head. I put the picture back down. I cursed, and the sound of my own voice jolted me from my dark reverie. Well, my voice and the faint rattle of a key in the door on the other side of the room.
With no great embarrassment do I confess to being relatively new at this whole burglary venture, though it does seem that whenever I commit one, Hank Sweeney is somehow involved. This time he apparently let me down in his role as chief scout. The plan had been for him to ring me if anyone was coming into the apartment. My phone, set on vibrate, hadn’t moved.
No time to assess blame. I placed the picture on the desk and bolted for the nearby bathroom door, the only place to take shelter in the entire apartment unless I were to have done the clichéd hide-under-the-bed thing, but it was probably packed with more shoes under there.
I got into the bathroom and pushed the door halfway shut just as I heard the apartment door open and a set of jangling keys pulled from the lock. The lights were off in the medium-size bathroom, but sunlight poured through the one window, showing a fashionable design in tile and slate. The sleek, black slate was in the walk-in shower, beyond the pristine glass doors. I mean, I’ve soaked the Record for enough $300-a-night hotels to give me a some fair standing as a designer, and I never came across anything this nice.
I slowly, silently pulled off the rubber gloves, so as to look slightly less menacing to whoever happened to catch me in there, and shoved them int
o my back pocket. I glanced out the window to see if there was a balcony, a fire escape, anything that would allow me to get out, but there was barely even a ledge. So I pushed my head closer to the door and listened to what was left in the proverbial store.
There were footsteps, somewhat light, like that of sneakers, moving across the floor away from the bathroom, toward the front of the apartment. It sounded like just one pair, which was a good sign, better, anyway, than half the homicide unit or a bunch of bruisers from the FBI. Why, I wondered, hadn’t Sweeney called?
Then silence. Nothing. Just dead air that lasted several minutes long. I wanted nothing more than to peer through the opening of the door to see who was on the other side. Short of that, I wanted to call Sweeney out on the street and ask him who the flying hell had just come by on his watch. But I couldn’t risk either. I was, in fact, in the act of committing what I think must be a felony—breaking and entering. I’m sure the Feds could add a host of other charges to it as well, like tampering with evidence, just to name one of the bigger ones.
All of which is to say, I remained still and silent and wondering. I strained so hard to hear any foreign, unusual sounds that I felt like Colin Montgomerie on the first tee of the U.S. Open. My senses, on hyperalert, caused me to take in just about every little detail of the bathroom.
On the vanity, she had a container of facial cleanser, a couple of bottles of moisturizers, a tube of some sort of hair product that was something other than mere gel, and a bunch of what I believe younger women call scrunchies—elastics to pull back her hair, in various shapes, colors and sizes. There was a bar of plain old soap, a tube of Colgate toothpaste, a single toothbrush in a white cup, and a floss dispenser. The only makeup I saw was a cylinder of lipstick. This was, as Aretha Franklin might say, a natural woman.
Still, on the other side of the door, silence. I inched closer to the opening, but didn’t dare take a look. I heard the cry of a baby far outside of the bathroom window, and beyond that, the distant sound of a siren, probably that of an ambulance. But inside this apartment, just the unsteady sound of my own breathing, and even that I tried to keep quiet.
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