The Dorchester Five

by Peter Manus

  I’m still pondering this new development as I sit down in Archives in front of the Dorchester Five vid. I watch Petrianni and D’Amante earn their five minutes. The speed at which that crowd materialized around that bug was probably the most startling part about it. You don’t see the old lady at all, as the vid starts with the bug in mid U-turn and a much younger C. Wilkins Morley stepping out in the street with his hands spread. Rocco thrusts himself in, playing rough, and within the minute you got Terence D’Amante jumping up on the hood, screaming at the kid through the windshield, and a bunch of guys shoulder-ramming the side doors with a crowd of screaming lunatics wedged around them foaming for blood and guts.

  Bruno Myeroff, also one of the Five, distinguishes himself by stepping up with a brick to smash a window, then reaching inside to try to get the door open. Guess his angle was that it might be fun for the crowd to take apart the driver and not just the car. Bruno’s the one the press dubbed “the college student,” but that label’s deceiving. He’s a beefy guy with a dyed blond skullcap of hair and a studded dog collar around his neck, a sleeveless jean jacket and chains everywhere. Apparently he was from money, going through an acting-out stage. Simon Love, the final defendant, is barely noticeable, but if you do focus he comes off like a strung out longhair. Maybe he got arrested because he was there to clean up when the squad cars swarmed in.

  The bug flips more easily than I’d have thought. Crowd goes bananas—chills me to the core, watching them cheer as yellow smoke boils from the interior. There could be no doubt in any person’s mind that the driver is going to die or suffer serious injuries. Morley seems to be trying to climb up onto the vehicle, ignoring the flames. It’s impossible to guess what’s going on in his head, but I want to think he woke up and got what was going down. All of this I’m describing to you, Zoey—we’re talking one minute and forty-two seconds. That’s the amount of time it takes for a crowd of human strangers to join together for an impromptu slaughter.

  At around this point the cameraman turns round to film the circle round the old lady. More screaming here, with a keening tone to it. Shrill, though, and a lot of fists shaking in the air. If I were a cynic—and I am—I’d say these creatures were doing their part to add fuel to the fires. You don’t see the old lady, the dead one, for a moment. Whole thing ends abruptly, as it seems like the guy doing the filming starts getting hassled himself.

  I watch it three times. Not sure why—something fascinating about the horror of it all. Just to pretend I need to sit there, I try to make out what D’Amante is screaming through the windshield before he spots Myeroff and scrabbles over the roof of the bug at him, probably after his brick. Whatever he says ends pretty clearly with “ass man.” That part he managed to enunciate. It’s what comes before that’s a garble. I get “hollered you, hollered you, no Chopin disco, ass man,” with varied repeats. I dutifully write it down, agreeing pretty readily that classical études should never be laid over a four on the floor beat, but does that seem even a little helpful? I’m thinking not.

  Returning the vid, I lay my jotting on the counter. Janai glances at it.

  “This is what one of the guys is saying. I can’t make it out except like this. Care to play?”

  She’s skeptical, but her day job’s a bore, so she gives it a minute. “Well, ‘hollered you’ is like ‘I told you this in no uncertain terms earlier.’” Then she looks up. “Lemme get this. This is like ghetto talk, so you figure the black girl in the evidence cage going to be all over it?”

  She has a point. I blink a couple of times, then say, “Actually, my idea was to stick it in front of every BPD employee I come across. I…didn’t think.”

  She kind of smirks, and something tells me my blush is the most effective part of the apology. “Yeah, well, lucky thing you got to me first. I don’t what this stuff about Chopin and disco is, but sometimes these gangs got their own code going on, right? Then he calls him an ass man, probably just to insult him and not really as part of what he’s saying.”

  “As in ‘not a tit man?’” I say. “Seems a little off topic, doesn’t it?”

  She stares at me, then says, “I’m going to retract that ‘black girl’ thing I laid on you a little earlier. You come to me directly when you need to translate some street talk, and we'll keep you from embarrassing yourself unduly, hmm? So, like you say, an ass man might be a guy who prefers what’s in the trunk to what’s up the rack.” She points to each of the areas on herself—and she has quite the example of each. “But in a situation you might call unfriendly, it would probably be more a comment that the guy wants to get with other guys, like that he prefers a guy’s back door over lady parts?”

  Again, I feel the blush. “I’m grateful for the explanation. Thanks, truly, Janai.”

  She looks satisfied. At the very least, she’s got a story to tell all day. While I’m signing out she says, “Weird, isn’t it though? Two of those guys dead, space of two months.”

  I agree, finish signing out, and am actually leaving the cage when the dime drops. I catch the door just before it clicks. “Uh, Janai?”

  She’s walking away. Turns halfway back with a major hip shift. “Honey?”

  “How do you know about the second one?”

  “Oh, I was upstairs when they were getting the call, so I just overheard. But I know it’s all supposed to be quiet, so I won’t be telling a soul.”

  I shake my head. “Tell about who? What’s supposed to be kept quiet?”

  Her turn to look quizzical, then she realizes I don’t know. Fortunately her recent vow of secrecy doesn’t include me. “City Councilman C.W. Morley got himself murdered. I mean, that’s why you’re looking at this here, right?” She gestures with the video.

  I stare. Then I nod a couple of times, nothing much else coming to me. When I go, I move fast. No idea what I left Janai thinking, but if she’s confused, she’s not alone.

  FOURTEEN

  Marina Papanikitas’s Personal Journal

  Major breakthrough time, Zoey. Does not feel triumphant, though. Feels like I was blind to the obvious for one major beat too long. Ready for some psychic-babble? Sometimes I think the bloody premmies and the bloody vishies actually inhibit my perceptiveness. I’m so busy trying to normal up and be less in tune with my baggage that I get in my own way. Harry’s feeling some pain himself. Gets all businesslike and surly—that’s his tell.

  So after I leave Harrison Ave with the news on Wilkie Morley, Harry and I get over to the guy’s North End address. Naturally, Harry had reported our Dorchester Five coincidence—the D’Amante and Petrianni murders—to the Super last night, but we should have done so before our road trip south. Fact is, we didn’t want to be told not to head to Rhode Island. Now with Morley murdered, someone’s going to have to take some heat, and it doesn’t take a premmie for me to predict who.

  Morley’s final home is just another residential building living its normal weekday life—quiet but for some distant vacuuming and the occasional dog walker jangling through the lobby. We hit the intercom and—oh what fun—it’s Dick Farnham. Asks Harry what we’re doing there, like he’s weighing whether to buzz us in.

  “Covering your ass,” I say. It’s my tone that makes him hit the buzzer.

  Upstairs I brush past Farnham and also sidestep Landis Pomerance, his partner and overall a decent cop. The crime scene is up some slatty stairs and I sense a need to see it—my premmie thing’s bouncing off the walls of my skull, and this time I’m not resisting. The place is very much a pad, with a platform bed and halogens dangling from wires. Someone’s burnt an ugly hole in the velour coverlet and the sheet below—still smells like melted plastic fibers. There’s another odor, kind of chalky, that’s about to become lost evidence. I pull it into my lungs as if to save it. Sitting open at the foot of the bed is a carved chest covered in Far East designs—elephants, owls, snakes, maybe dragons, all chipped into the wood. Pile of once-folded linens sags next to the thing, looking freshly dumped. Someone has half
-pulled some duct tape from where it must have been used to seal the chest’s rim, all the way round. Now it dangles from the gaping mouth of the thing. Body’s gone, of course. One of the lab guys, a lanky Hispanic kid with his hair shaved in a pattern, I half-recognize. He’s working with powder and a brush over by one of the built-in nightstands. Got his headgear on, including monocle. He blinks at me like a curious cyclops, then gets back to work.

  “Who found it?” I ask, glancing into the chest. Cedar inside, very solid. Looks like some fluid’s pooled at the bottom.

  “Wife came over this morning when some staffer called to say he hadn’t shown for work. Didn’t notice the tape at first. She actually sat there, wondering about the bedding. Took the Super some time to convince her that Morley’d already been dead some hours and that he hadn’t suffocated while she sat on top of him.”

  I glance down into the living area. Harry’s talking with Landis, behind the hand like a couple of sideline coaches. Techies are brush-working the sliders and some surfaces in the living area. Jack Finlayson, Boston’s Police Superintendent for about a year now—Super Jack, just between you and me and H.P.—is looking solicitous, even from above, as he hovers down a ways behind a big-shouldered woman. She’s dressed in a grey sheath with a stylish sheen to it and a matching short-sleeved jacket. Hair brown-red and semi-relaxed, coifed just the right amount. Expensive all around. “That is what I said, Jack,” she’s saying, “and therefore it is what I meant.” Expensive and coiled, ready to lash out.

  “Any idea when he was killed?” Lab kid’s name comes to me a beat late. “Sterns?”

  He takes a second to catch on that I’m talking to him, then shoots me a glance and snorts as he goes back to his task. “Foster,” he says. “Wasn’t in full rigor when they lifted him out but he was heading that way. They had a hard time.”

  “Big guy,” I muse. “Must have taken a lot of doing to fold him into that thing.”

  Foster pauses, looking at his work. He sighs. “Wife touched a lot of stuff.”

  “So, Pop. Anything we can help you with?” Dick Farnham has trailed me up there. Guy grates on me. It’s a competitive profession, sure, but so’s car sales, and it always strikes me that Dickie should have set his star on that one. Right now he’s jumpy that we’re homing in on his action—wants to be the one standing behind Finlayson at the press conf. Used to make dyke jokes all the time, trying to persuade me he was cool. If any one of them had been funny, honest to God I’d have laughed.

  I walk down the stairs with him, trying to sound like I can stand him. “Someone suffocates a man in his hope chest? I mean, what?”

  “Crazy,” Farnham answers, pretending to think we’re just shooting the bull.

  “Let me guess—he was naked?”

  “Not quite,” Farnham confides.

  I get his hint just before we emerge into the condo’s entryway. “Condom?”

  He hesitates, then nods. “Should yield a sample.”

  “Yeah, except the lady doesn’t care about our having her DNA or she wouldn’t have left it on him. The fact that she used sex to get at him doesn’t mean she’s dumb.”

  We emerge from the stairwell. I’m unhappy to see that Finlayson and Morley’s wife have made their way toward the door. And, apparently, overheard my last remark.

  “And just where does that get us?” Morley’s wife challenges me. “Do tell.”

  Super Jack tries to throw an introduction between us, but she’s not having it. She’s also not repeating herself. She stares me down, her lower lip trembling in anger.

  I keep it simple. “Appears there was a woman involved,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “Excuse me, are you saying you’re sorry for me?” She steps across the space between us and slaps me one across the face. Woman’s got a healthy wallop, too. Lets it go like a nun from the old days. “You think you going to hide the nasty facts from me, like wifey doesn’t know what her husband got himself up to? I can spot someone trying to hide something across a busy courthouse, lady. Don’t you ever soft pedal anything to me. You got it?”

  Jack goes to intervene but I shake my head once, sharp. Let her get it out of her system.

  “I got two girls to tell that their daddy got murdered last night. What do you think of that, detective, huh? I got a public out there that loved this man and counted on him to make a future for them—it’s me who has to face their disappointment now. You think I need handling? That what you think?” She includes the room with a glance. Well, she certainly has everyone’s attention.

  I clear my throat, give her what she wants. “Evidence indicates he’d been copulating shortly before it happened.”

  “You damned right it indicates that,” she says. “So what do you think, detective? From the gut. Was the lady just some diversion, or did she do the deed?”

  Jack’s signaling from behind her, but I keep my eyes on her eyes. I swallow. “From the gut? She did it.”

  She nods firmly. “You betcha,” she says. Then she steps back, still full of energy, her hands on her hips. She sways back and forth, kind of jauntily, as she assesses me. “So let me catch you up. Lady calls herself Julie Moreau, puts herself across as a freelancer. Jack’s got her so-called résumé, but it’s bogus. So you want to know what’s puzzling me next?”

  I keep it simple. “Yes, I do,” I say.

  “How is some woman going to shove a man like my husband down into that chest, huh? Man weighed two-sixty. And don’t tell me something stupid like she could have rolled him off the bed, because that chest lid would be in the way and there weren’t any signs of that thing being moved. That’s carpet up there, right? So what do you think now, lady cop, huh?” She breathes down a bit, at least it seems so from how her nostrils go from flaming to hot air.

  I look across at her, thinking about Donna’s mystery hit man. Is there muscle behind some black widow’s Dorchester Five spree? Time to keep it simple, though. “I could have got him in that chest if I’d decided to.”

  She nods angrily, glancing around at the men as she shifts to her other hip. “I could have, too, my friends. If I had a mind to, I could have lifted some damned fool, too.”

  She moves in a circle, pointing the spiked fingernail at each one of us. “So now that we’re all finally talking, let’s talk about something else. Terence D’Amante got murdered two months ago. Man’s a convicted felon and a known gang member with countless personal enemies, but the media is all over dredging up the Dorchester Five, trying to flog that old nag one more time. And does it occur to any of you fine protectors of the peace that maybe some hater out there might try getting at the other African-American defendant from back then?”

  She’s aiming it at me, but Jack answers from behind her. “I spoke to the councilman’s people just last night about that. They assured me they’d spoken with Wilkie. He promised to talk soon, but his message was that he saw no indication, Claire, that the D’Amante killing had any connection with the old incident. You just said it yourself—D’Amante was a man with a lot of violence in his past.”

  I notice that Jack says nothing about Rocco, although he must have in his call to Morley. Nor did he make clear that last night’s call was the first conversation about a potential threat to Morley. Claire Morley is definitely in a “shoot the messenger” mood.

  “Well, now you got your indication,” she says, not bothering to turn to Jack. “The two black men involved in the Dorchester Five incident are dead. A woman’s involved. Calls herself Julie Moreau and poses as a freelancer who writes fluff about living in France—sounds mighty white to me, but what do I know?” She pauses to nod firmly as she wipes a fleck of spittle from her lip, then aims her closer around the room. “So now that we’ve settled all that, let’s find the bitch. And Jack?” She points at me. “That one. She’s the detective on my husband’s case. Got it?”

  In the elevator, Harry goes to talk and I raise a palm before he can say it. “She was right,” I say. “But we’re even slower t
han she thinks. Why the hell didn’t we tip Jack about Petrianni first thing yesterday, Harry? Morley wouldn’t have been tough for Jack to get to.”

  Harry shrugs. “What was there to tell?”

  “Could have saved his life,” I say stubbornly.

  Harry’s equally stubborn, and also has logic going for him. “It’s only Morley’s death that gives us a pattern. Until this morning, two wildly differing killings in two states meant nothing but two more guys who moved in dangerous circles—very separate dangerous circles—got themselves murdered. Claire Morley’s dealing with her own shock in the way she knows how. Give us a break.”

  “Look, Harry, we are not your ‘just the facts’ kind of detectives,” I argue.

  “Occasionally, however, they get in the way.” I go to respond, but Harry plows ahead. “Especially when they’re missing.”

  I don’t like the idea of letting us off the hook, but then neither does Harry. He’s just doing it because I took the brunt of it upstairs. “So what do we do?”

  “I laid the pattern on Pomerance, complete with the lady angle.”

  “Reminds me. We got a guy angle now, too. Creepy vibe. Drives an older Mercedes.”

  “Umm?”

  “Donnalinda gave me a jingle. Funny thing is, I think we better heed.”

  “Duly heeding. We will update Pomerance. He’ll consult with Big Jack and my guess is someone will be making some phone calls very soon to Dorchester defendants number four and five. Incidentally, as thanks for all our work, Landis made it crystal clear that Morley’s death makes the whole serial threat part of his case, and not our thing. Took pains to point out that Claire Morley, strong-willed as she may be, isn’t running the BPD.”