by Peter Manus
Harry waits until we’re almost back up to town before breaking the silence. “Look, uh, you still in the mood to be nosy?”
I consider. “You know something? I am pretty reliably in a nosy mood.”
“Because I’m thinking that if we take the Mass Ave exit, we can slide right over to where Terence D’Amante got shot.”
“Well, we chewed up half the day dabbling in other people’s cases across the state line. Might as well polish off the afternoon catching some friction here at home.”
I do a little GPS-ing while H.P. maneuvers us from highway to city streets. It’s almost growing dusky when we find ourselves on the front stoop of one Neva Deunoro, the newly minted single lady, once girlfriend of the recently murdered Terry D’Amante. Girl lives pretty deep in the urban hood, by which I do mean to imply that the cement park across the street from her window doesn’t strike me as a real estate plus. Quiet, though—I find myself wondering how startling the noise of a single gunshot would be to the folks lurking behind all the drawn shades. We’re just about to give up on Neva’s buzzer in the vestibule when the outside door opens behind us and a young woman starts in. Her hair’s skinned back and she’s pulling a laundry cart. Clothes trim and tidy. All that makes an impression, but the thing you really notice—what everyone cannot help but notice when Neva Deunoro comes into sight—is that the girl is drop-dead gorgeous. Tawny eyes, dark brown skin, full untouched lips, high forehead without a flaw—who knows what makes her features come together the way they do, but she is a nymph among mortals. Moves well, too. After barely a glance at me and Harry, she lifts her hand and flicks a finger gracefully back and forth at our faces, then over her shoulder.
“Get your goddamn cop asses the fuck out my building,” she says.
“You Neva Deunoro?” We display our creds.
“No, I ain’t. Now get.”
“Just want a word with you, Ms. Deunoro. Won’t take much of your time.”
“Yeah, you got that shit accurate because we already finished. Now get the fuck out the way. I got shit to do, and it don’t include talking to no fuckin’ cops.”
She squares off as if ready to pull her cart through us.
“Look, you want to make this fast or play it your way?” Harry says. “If you’re worried about the message we’re sending with our car idling at the hydrant, fast seems smarter.”
She jams a hand in a pocket and whips out some keys, then steps forward and thrusts them. I swear I almost react defensively, but she’s going for the inner door. “Fast ain’t fast enough,” she says through her teeth, slamming over the threshold with her cart. Her place is the one by the front door. Otherwise we’d have had the fun of being cussed all the way up the stairs.
We enter, and Harry shuts the door behind us. The apartment isn’t bad—decent rug, couch, TV, couple of framed prints. Girl likes pastels. There’s a blanket on the couch and a kid’s book on the floor, looking recently abandoned. Everyday Math for 1st Grade, I read upside down. Neva shoves the cart out of her way, leans over by a table where she seems to smack something down, then turns around, arms folded over her still fastened jacket.
“Well?” Before we can talk, she seems to hear a noise, and looks off to the side, where a pair of heavy sliders block our view of the next room. A kid’s curious eye and a bit of skinny torso barely appear between the doors. “No,” Neva says. The child disappears.
“Look, we’re sorry to intrude like this. We’ll keep it brief,” I try.
She walks across to the sliders and bangs them closed, then stands with her hands behind her on the door handles. “What do you want?” she says.
“Terence D’Amante was shot to death on your front steps a couple of months ago.”
She freezes—just for a beat—then goes natural again. “That supposed to be news?”
“You want to tell us what you know about it?”
“Already talked to them other cops. You get it from them. That it?”
“We’re here to get it from you,” I say. “You home at the time?”
“Yeah. I didn’t see nothing.” Her eyes narrow. “What’s different?”
I’m willing to give in order to get. “There’s been another death. Someone associated with Terence.”
She considers this a moment—I sense a breath of relief. Why? She maintains the ’tude, but now it’s more of a front than genuine hostility. “So? That supposed to make me remember something I didn’t know in the first place? ’Cause it don’t.”
Her eye seems to catch sight of something, and she walks across the room to lower the shade so that it covers a small amount of windowpane that may have been showing. She stands up again. “I don’t know nothing about what he was up to. He was in prison. I wasn’t.”
“Didn’t you visit?”
She looks at me like I’m crazy. “I don’t visit prisons.”
“Wasn’t he the father of your child?”
“What’s that to you?”
“Answer the questions, you want us out of here,” Harry sticks in.
She’s cowed, at least for the moment. She lowers her eyes, then nods.
“I mean, that’s what he was coming here to see, right? His kid? Maybe you, too?”
She shrugs. “We wasn’t in contact,” she says vaguely.
Something occurs to me. “You mean he’d never seen the child in eight years? He was coming to see his child for the first time?”
She gives me a defiant eye. “Man want to see my child, man keep his ass out of prison. Simple, right?”
“Ever meet Rocco Petrianni?” Harry throws at her.
“No.” Not curious, either.
“I ask because he used to live around here.”
She stares. “So?”
“You remember the Dorchester Five?” I offer.
“What about it?”
“Rocco Petrianni was one of the Five, like Terence D’Amante was. Petrianni was murdered a couple of nights ago.”
She wants to say something dismissive, but she holds it back and just stares us down.
“You there, that day when they turned over that car?”
“No,” she says.
“You must have been a kid. What are you now, twenty-two, three?”
“I was eighteen at the time,” she says defiantly.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Harry says.
“I was eighteen years old, mister. I was working at the youth center over there, wasn’t I? You think them sisters is gonna hire underage?”
“Oh, so you were working over at St. Brigid’s, where it happened?”
“I just said so, didn’t I? That don’t mean I was in the street that day.”
“Just trying to get the lay of the land,” says Harry. “So, look, you say you weren’t in touch with Terence, but did you know he was getting out?”
She nods reluctantly.
“And you knew he was coming over as soon as he got out,” I prod her.
“Yeah. I knew.”
“How’d you know?”
She sighs impatiently. “He told me.”
“Thought you weren’t in contact.”
She fixes me with a look. “He phoned me up and he said he’s getting out and he’s coming over to see his kid. You want to call that being in contact, go ahead.”
“He offer support?”
“I didn’t want nothing from him, that’s for sure.”
“Why not? Could he be violent?”
She scoffs. “What he go away for, all the peace and love he spread round the world? We done here? I told you before, I got shit to do.”
Harry takes out a card. She doesn’t move so he sticks it between the doorjamb and the wall. “You think of something that might help us locate whoever killed the father of your child, you call.” He pauses and she doesn’t respond. “Thank you for your time.”
“One more thing,” I say, turning back. “You think there’s any way it could have been a woman who killed Terence?”
She just stares at me for a beat, unblinking, just like earlier. For a second, it’s like she’s frozen. Then she walks forward, as if the silent moment hadn’t happened, to shut the door. “Talking about a .38, one bullet behind the ear, through the brain,” she says. “Yeah, that’s good. It’s likely a woman who did that to him.”
Harry and I share a chuckle as he wheels us back toward town. “Fricking goose chase all around,” I sum up the day.
“Fricking goose chase we’re not assigned to, might add,” Harry points out. “Wonder what she was lying about, though. Think she knows who killed him?”
I shrug. “Absolutely. Just not sure that anyone on this side of the law’s any closer to prying it out of her by virtue of the fact that you and me spotted the fact that she knows.”
“True enough.” He nods in agreement. “Interesting fact, though?”
“Throw me anything, partner. I’m a drowning detective.”
“Terence D’Amante was a dark-skinned guy. And Neva Deunoro I would call a woman of rich color.”
“Agreed,” I say.
“So how come the little boy who peeked in at us was white?”
“You saw the kid?”
“Just a glimpse. Blonde. Skinny. Bright blue eyes.”
I think. “Maybe she babysits.”
Harry does his sideways smirk. “That picture she turned flat soon as we went in?”
“Didn’t see. Her body was in the way.”
“Guess I had all the good angles. Same kid,” Harry says. “Little younger, little blonder.”
“Huh,” I say. “No wonder they weren’t at the window waiting for daddy that night.”
“Maybe daddy was already home.”
“Woah. So the kid’s father whacks the old boyfriend just before he can see for himself that Neva hasn’t been true all these years?”
Harry shrugs. “More to the point is whether she was true before he went in, back when she was his girlfriend. It’s not her he was coming to see. It’s his son he’s been counting on for eight years.” He turns the car into the lot at the precinct and kills the engine. “At any rate, time to make sure Jack’s clued in on the fact of two Dorchester defendants biting it within months.”
“Not that either of them was on a life path that promised a ripe old age.”
“That’s a point. And with D’Amante’s death starting to smell domestic, there’s even less of a pattern. But I got a feeling Jack may want to check on the others, particularly the city guy. At the very least, give him a heads up that the media’s about to pick this up and run with it.”
I think awhile. “You know, what’s got my panties in a twist is that we abandon our case and go hunting in Rhodie for the day because we sense a connection with the D’Amante killing. But what we come back with is nothing much in common between the deaths of D’Amante and Petrianni, and instead, a couple of glaring similarities between those of Petrianni and Becker.”
“Such as?”
“Well, they’re both kind of splashy, as far as murders go—cinematic, you might say.”
Harry shrugs. “If Becker wasn’t a suicide, I’ll grant that.”
I look at him. “Becker wasn’t a suicide.”
He considers. “Maybe I’ll grant that, too.”
“And then there’s this woman who cuts through both stories, the apathetic broad with a pout and a thing for yester-Euro fashions.”
“There was a woman with Becker. Left prints and DNA on that coffee glass like she’s out to make sure we know she’s got no priors. Down in Rhodie, we don’t even know if the lady with Rocco ever made it to his office.”
“Yeah,” I muse. “What really strikes me is that in both cases, the descriptions of the lady herself make it sound like she could go pretty incognito if she chose to. McD, Donnalinda, and Penny all seemed to be saying that this was a woman you might not notice if she hadn't affected a certain look.”
“True enough,” Harry concedes. “Doesn’t really add up to much.”
I sigh. “I totally agree. Just can’t shake it out of my gourd that it will.
NINE
I am Nightingale—
I decide to take on an accomplice.
I spend the evening in the room I have rented in a house in Dorchester. My landlady is black and widowed, like Oleander, but the similarities end there. Tati seems to spend a lot of time screaming and laughing into the phone and thudding on her stairs with a dry mop, although the stairs do not seem particularly clean as a result of this attention. She often sings while she works, gospel, out of tune. The house is Victorian. My room is directly off the front entry, at the base of a long, straight stairway with an ornate banister. My room may have been meant originally to serve as a parlor. A short hallway that once connected this room to some rear area of the house has been walled off, and the resulting alcove serves as the closet. In my room is a bed, a rather fanciful velvet armchair, several additional pieces of furniture, and a fireplace in which sits a gas heater that may or may not work—I have not attempted to use it. I leave the doilies where they are so that Tati will not feel justified to go hunting for them when she peeks in my room, which I am certain that she does from time to time when I am out; I am quiet, which piques her curiosity. But she learns nothing from my room. Indeed, aside from my clothes in the closet and my wigs in their boxes under the bed, I have made no impression on this little overcrowded space. I keep my money locked inside a travel case atop the closet, in which I have also stowed my cyanide-laced lozenges. I keep the key to my case on my person at all times. All my private information—this diary I write and the music I listen to through ear pods—I store in the little portable device that I purchased for myself the day I left Southie for the last time.
Before tonight, I have never been upstairs, as I use a bathroom just off the kitchen, so small that the rust-trimmed shower stall fills half of it. I always wash late at night after Tati has retired to her own room. She must hear the pipes sing, but she never comes down, realizing that I value my solitude. I leave my rent money sealed in a cheap envelope on the front foyer table, in cash, once a week on rent day. To Tati, I am an actress who has run away from someone and is not looking to recover just yet from whatever pain this someone inflicted on me. I heard her once, talking on the phone, saying the words “actress with some love problems, looks to me. That kind of hurt take its own sweet time mendin,’ in truth it does.” So she is not unworldly, and not altogether wrong about me. I gave her the name Julie Truffaut.
In spite of my inattention to the household, I have noticed that Tati seems to enjoy gabbing with her other lodger. You would not think that this other lodger would be talkative, but apparently he listens. He is a skinny hipster with skin so white that his lips appear to be suffused with blood and his eyelids, both top and bottom, caked with soot. He smokes tiny brown cigarettes and often heads in the direction of the T, walking very straight with his collar up and his arms pressed against his sides, his eyes cast down like a teenage girl. When Tati converses with him, here or there in the house, I can hear pauses in her chatter, but until this evening I have never heard his voice. Tati refers to him, when she gossips with other ladies on her stoop, as “the young man with the ferret whut smokes the weed.” He carries the ferret on his shoulder, nestled under his matted hair, and appears to take it to work with him, if indeed he works.
Until today I have had few thoughts about this lodger and certainly no curiosity about where he happens to be quartered in the house. But now it has occurred to me that he can help me, so I sit at the window, smoking—Tati is wise to recognize that in order to rent in this neighborhood one has to accept the pedestrian sins of the transient loner. For something to do, I watch the side gate of St. Brigid’s, across the intersection from my window, as it fades into the dusk. The rhododendrons are clustered thick around the path up to the mangy rectory, so first it is the entrance to the youth center that is blotted out by the falling night. Next, the cement path recedes into the blackness, merging with t
he weedy undergrowth that lines the gate. Soon even the gate itself is barely discernable against the leaves that crowd through its bars.
It is a messy intersection in which accidents occur with regularity. Cars roar by, some blaring the music, more than a few skidding through the red light with an irreverent squeal of the tires. Drivers curse and occasionally expectorate loudly into the street. At one point, gunshots or noises very like them echo through the air and are ignored by all. Eventually the lodger appears from the direction of the train, walking his narrow walk, arms tight to his side, knees brushing one another. Strapped over his torso in the diagonal style of the day is a sort of rucksack in which I suspect roosts a portable computer. His face is a colorless dagger. He glances at neither male nor female that passes him as he makes his way. I drop my curtain and move to the bed. When he enters, I listen to the noise of his steps pacing up the long bare stairway. I picture his boots, black leather with large rubber heels and side buckles, and attempt to discern the direction that he takes when he reaches the top.
After giving him a bit of time, I pull on a pair of leggings and a fleece sweatshirt and slip my bare feet into a pair of padded flip-flops. I put on my glasses. I do not need these glasses, but I do not want to frighten my accomplice in any way. I walk quietly up the stairs. All is dark; the hallway is quite long with stairs leading up into the gloom at the far end. Muted television noises—shrieks of fright and jarring music—come from one room. The sound should make me feel nostalgic, but I feel nothing. I spot a door with a half-light striping the floor at its base. I knock quietly with my knuckles. There is a murmur from within, and I twist the knob.
His room is oblong, with windows all along one wall and shingling opposite, as if it were an upstairs porch that has been at some point insulated against the cold. He is sitting at a desk of sorts—a smooth board resting on some sort of supports—with the light from his computer screen full on his face and no other lighting in the room except for the glow of his cigarette. Directly across from the door is the single bed, unmade. He has shed the coat, but nothing else, including his scarf and boots. His eyes are set narrowly and he does not display surprise or interest at the fact that I have appeared in his room; in fact he barely glances over before returning his eyes to his screen.