It was closer to one o’clock the next afternoon when I finally walked in the door of my apartment in the North End of Boston. Mister Shit the cat raised his head from his sleeping place on the arm of the couch and looked at me. He was so excited to see me, he dropped his head and went right back to sleep.
I put my bag in the bedroom, kicked off my shoes, got a cold beer out of the fridge and picked up a big stack of mail on the kitchen counter. I took it back to the couch and began to sift through it, separating the bills from the junk. There were no envelopes containing checks. There rarely are.
I went to put my drink down on the end table and saw a little paperback book resting there. I almost just ignored it, putting my drink down on it as a coaster substitute, when I noticed the title.
Baby’s Journey: The Steps to Motherhood.
I picked it up and began to read. It was quite interesting, what with the illustrations showing the size of a tiny fetus at four weeks, eight weeks and twelve weeks. And lots of information about exercise and nutrition and sleep.
I was still reading at three, when Mary Jane and Victoria came bounding in from their day at school. They were both laughing at something as they came through the door, saw me, and came running over for a group hug.
Mary Jane noticed me holding the book, my thumb stuck in it halfway through, keeping my place. It was the chapter about all the wonderful changes to a woman’s body that could be expected to happen from the tenth through the twentieth weeks of gestation.
“Oh, crap,” she said. “I wanted to tell you in person.”
“We’re gonna be a mommy!” Victoria shrieked, loudly enough to cause Mister Shit to jump off the arm of the couch in alarm and run away into the bedroom to hide under the bed. A part of me wanted to go with him.
“You mean…” I started to speak, but found I was suddenly breathless. Mouth was dry. Felt a little dizzy.
“You are not going to faint on me, Hacker,” Mary Jane said sternly. “I won’t have that. You’re in this with me up to your fetlocks, so buck up.”
“I…” I tried speaking again. “I’m …”
“You’re gonna be a daddy!” Victoria shrieked again, and began jumping up and down. “Hacker’s a daddy! Hacker’s a daddy!”
Mary Jane grinned at me. “Surprised?” she said.
“Just a bit.” I finally managed a complete sentence. But my mind was spinning away again, eleventy thousand different thoughts competing, trying to fight their way through to the vocalization part of the brain.
I finally gave up. I dropped the Mommy book on the floor and grabbed my wife in an embrace that threatened to go on forever.
“Easy, big boy,” she said finally, after a long, long while. “I’m hugging for two, now.”
“Is that why you were puking every morning like clockwork?” I asked.
“My man, ace detective,” she said with a smile.
“When did you find out?”
“I saw my OB/GYN about ten days ago,” she said. “I knew before you went west, but I decided to wait until you got back. Didn’t want you stumbling around out there like a zombie.”
“When are we due?”
She laughed a little at the editorial ‘we.’ “I don’t know when you’re due, but I expect to be squeezing your little brat out of me sometime near the end of September.”
I shuddered. “I think I’m going to puke, now,” I said.
“Are you going to collapse at the first sight of blood?” she asked.
“There’s going to be blood? Nobody told me there was going to be blood.”
“You’d better finish that book,” she said. “The good stuff happens at the end.”
“The Vickster seems pleased,” I noted.
Mary Jane laughed. “She’s been busy composing names this week,” she said.
On cue, Victoria came bounding into the room. She held a lined notebook and a pencil.
“How’s this?” she said. “Abena Adelaide Hacker. That’s if its a girl, of course.”
“Abena?” I said.
“It’s from Ghana,” she told me. “We’ve been studying the nations of Africa in school this month.”
“Well, I suppose it’s better than Idi Amin Hacker,” I said.
“Silly,” she said. “That’s a boy’s name.” She skipped off back to her room.
I looked at Mary Jane. “Do we know what sex it is?”
She shook her head. “Another month or so. I have an ultrasound scheduled for mid-March. You can come with me and see for yourself.” She paused. “There shouldn’t be any blood.”
Hacker, ace golf writer, now signed up for ultrasounds at the OB/GYN. Yeah, I thought, that qualifies as change.
By April, the book was mostly finished. I shipped off what I had to an editor in New York, and she began sending me back chapters with her notes and suggestions. Most of them were very good. The publisher had found an art director who was laying in the old timey photos. When the Masters rolled around the second week of the month, we had more than three-quarters of the manuscript finished and ready to send off to the printer.
It felt more than a little weird not to be going down to Augusta for the annual flower show and golf tournament, but I managed to gut it out. I remembered the stories of Lincoln Werdell, the golf writer who had covered the first forty years of the Masters for the New York Times. The year after he finally retired, he had called down to Augusta National to see if he could get a press pass to come back and say hello, or good-bye, to all his fellow writers, the pros he had covered, and the members he had befriended over the years.
“No,” the club had written back. “Working press only.”
Such sweet, sweet people. I didn’t even try to get credentialed, knowing their response would begin with “F” and end in “you.” Despite all I did for them!
Instead, we went and had Sunday dinner with Carmine Spoleto out in Milton. It was his birthday, more or less, so the house was once again filled with a bevy of happy, noisy family. Everyone seemed thrilled to learn that Mary Jane and I were expecting, even though there was absolutely zero Spoleto bloodlines in our little growing buglet. Mary Jane spent most of the afternoon getting hugged by every woman in sight, and I endured more than a few semi-painful congratulatory whacks on the back. I think there’s a lot of passive-aggressive genes in big Italian families.
As at Thanksgiving, Carmine eventually led me into his study, shutting the door against the cacophony going on outside. He poured us each a small glass of brandy.
“Salute,” the old man said, raising his glass at me. “It is an honorable thing to have a family,” he said. “My own son, may he rest in peace, was not an honorable man, but he redeemed himself when he created our Victoria. He lives on through her, and that is how it should be.”
I did not mention that I hoped to whatever God was listening that Victoria did not retain a single characteristic in her own life and personality that recalled that small-time hoodlum, whose life skills included pistol whipping, loan sharking, prostitute running and general lowlife-edness. I didn’t say that, but I thought it.
“How is your book coming?” he asked.
“Almost finished,” I said. “It will be officially launched at the U.S. Open in California in June. There’ll be a big party. You should come out.”
He smiled and waved his hand. “Thank you,” he said,” “But I think my traveling days are over,” he said. “But I am happy for your success.”
We chatted for a bit about Mary Jane and her teaching position, and about how Victoria was doing in school. He cocked his head and looked at me.
“How are things in Cali?” he said. “I trust you haven’t run into any trouble out there?”
I laughed, a little ruefully.
“Well, there was a murder when I was out there last time,” I said.
He clucked his tongue, a sound that seemed to mean Oh, really? Do tell. His eyebrows went up.
�
�Officially, they say it was a suicide, but I think someone killed the kid,” I said. I explained briefly what had happened.
“Diletante,” Carmine said, sipping his brandy and sneering just a bit. “Amateur.”
“How’s that?”
“If you need someone to be dead, you make him dead,” he said. “You don’t go fooling around with pushing men over cliffs in silly little cars. Two shots to the head is faster and less trouble. The one who did this is not a killer. He is pretending.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, nodding my agreement. “But now there’s a twist. Maybe more than one.”
“With you, Signore Hacker, there is always one of these…what did you call it? … twists,” he said, a smile playing at the corners of his lips, eyes dancing. “What is it?”
I told him about the death of J.J. Udall and the arrival of the letter from Mike Newell, claiming to be his heir. And how Strauss had asked me to find the letter writer. And how I had discovered that the letter wasn’t from an heir, but was blackmail.
“And you found him,” Carmine said, his eyes narrowed.
“I did.”
“But you didn’t tell this Strauss that you found him.”
I blew out a breath. “No,” I said, “I didn’t.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know who to trust,” I said, and realized that I was admitting this to myself for the first time.
“And why is that?”
“Well, there’s a lot of money at stake,” I said. “And then there’s the letter thing. The letter I was shown was all about claims of a mystery heir. But the girlfriend of the letter writer says it was more of a direct attempt at blackmail. This Charley Sykes guy supposedly found out about something illegal going on and probably asked for money to keep quiet about it.”
“And so he was killed,” Carmine said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think that’s what happened. So why would Jake Strauss give me a fake letter?”
“Because he is the killer, and he wants to find the others who know, and have them killed as well,” Carmine said. “And he thinks you can find them. Which you have.”
“But did the letter go to Jake Strauss?” I wondered. “Or did it go to one of the surviving owners? Like Harold Meyer, who probably stands to benefit the most. Maybe Meyer gave Strauss a fake letter. Or maybe Meyer told Strauss to make up the story about the heir. Maybe Meyer had Sykes pushed off that cliff.”
“Or maybe it was someone else entirely,” Carmine said.
“But who?”
He shrugged. “You tell me this company of the rocks …”
“Pebble Beach,” I said, smiling.
“…Whatever…” he waved his hands. “This company you say is worth many millions of dollars, no?”
“It is indeed. Add in the real estate and it’s probably more than a billion dollars.”
“That is millions of reasons for someone to kill,” he said. “I have seen men murdered for much, much less. But there is another problem I see.”
“What?”
“This Pebble company, it is worth a lot. But here is the thing. You cannot easily take cash out of a company like that. Even if the worth of all the property is, say, two billion dollars, how does one take that money away?”
“Legally? You’d sell the property,” I said.
He smiled.
“And then what happens?”
“You have to find a buyer. Who has the money or can borrow it,” I said.
“And then?”
“The sale is recorded, money changes hands, the government comes in and takes it’s share. State, local, federal …”
“In other words, lots of paper,” Carmine said. “Lots of documents. Having lots of documents is not good if you are trying to steal the money. Also, little pieces of the whole are taken off … three percent for him, eight percent for her…pretty soon, the two billion is less. Pretty soon, it is all gone.” He sipped his brandy and smiled. “That is not a good plan for someone trying to pocket the money.”
“How would you do it?” I asked.
“Ah,” he said, “That is a good question.” He paused, thinking. “Do you know the town of Nahant?”
“On that little spit of land on the causeway off Lynn on the North Shore?” I said. “I know where it is. Can’t say I’ve ever been out there.”
He waved his hand dismissively.
“Non importante,” he said. “There used to be a bar and restaurant out there, called Rick’s Place. Opened many years ago by my friend, Enrico Corvo. He was a great man, Enrico. Came over here from Napoli after the war against the fascisti. Started his bar, married a fine woman, raised his family. He had three boys, I forget all their names. I am growing old, and my memory is not as it was. In any case, Enrico died, as we all must. His three sons could not decide what to do with his place, this Rick’s Place, on the beach in Nahant.”
He paused, thinking. “They came to me and said ‘Zio’—they called me uncle because I was close to their father—they said ‘Zio, we cannot decide what to do with our father’s business. We cannot agree on how to proceed so that we are all happy. Help us, please, Zio.’”
He smiled at me. It was the smile of a hungry lion just before he leaps upon the back of the helpless wildebeest: feral, pitiless, determined. And doing just exactly what it was put on earth to do.
“That very night,” Carmine said to me, “There was a fire at Rick’s Place. My friend’s bar burned to the ground. It was a total loss.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Yes,” the old man said. “Terrible. And yet, they had the insurance, because my friend Enrico was smart in the ways of the world and of the men who live in it. And the boys were able to split that money up into portions for them all, even some for their sisters. And so, it was not so terrible in the end. In a way, it was a blessing.”
“Did they rebuild the bar?”
Carmine Spoleto reached over and patted my knee.
“Of course not,” he said. “None of those boys wanted to own a bar. Enrico had made sure they all had their education. They had all made their way in the world, far from the little town of Nahant, and the little business that their father had started. To them, the business was a problem, not an opportunity. They wanted the money, not the place itself. I helped them understand that. They were very happy, in the end.”
I thought about that silently for a while. Carmine had taken none of the insurance money for himself after torching the business. That wasn’t how it worked. Instead, the three brothers knew that one day, they would get a call from their Zio Carmine, either from him personally or from one of his capi, and they would be asked to perform a little favor. Drive a car up to Gloucester and leave it there. Or purchase some blankets and pots and pans for a safe house. And the boys would do it, automatically and gratefully. Just as they would send Zio Carmine a nice card on the Feast of St. Joseph, or light a candle in memory of Carmine’s late wife on her saint’s day. That was how it worked.
“I’m not sure I understand how that story relates to the situation at Pebble Beach,” I said finally.
He shrugged. “They don’t care about the business, my dear genero, they care about the money. I soldi.”
At the beginning of May, I was invited to a lunchtime get together with some of my former colleagues at the Journal. A weep and greet if you will. I wasn’t all that excited about attending, since weeping has never been my strong point, and there weren’t all that many of my former workers I missed that much. The ones I really regretted not being able to see and talk with again were the ones who were dead.
But Mary Jane told me I needed to go.
“Maybe some of them miss you,” she said. “Stop thinking of yourself first in everything.”
She was probably right. And against the remote possibility she was wrong and I had a bad time, I could always come home and blame her rampaging hormonal influenza. Sil
ently, of course, since I do not have an advanced death wish.
So I put on some clean pants and a semi-pressed shirt on the selected day and began walking over to the Quincy Market, a place the city fathers had helped renovate a few decades ago, turning what had been a row of rat-infested warehouses, empty and crumbling next to the once-horrible elevated highway that had split downtown Boston, a highway replaced by the Big Dig, which had enriched generations of labor bosses and politicians. It was now a nice tourist attraction filled with food shops, cafes, restaurants and shops, all in the shadow of Faneuil Hall, where historical things had once happened. Of course, in Boston, historical things had once happened on virtually every street corner, which the city fathers had wisely decided not to memorialize with lots of signs and plaques. John Quincy Adams Spat Here in 1789!
I came out of my building. It was one of those sunny but raw spring days in Boston. The wind was out of the northwest, which means it was coming straight down from Canada, crossing Lake Erie where it picked up enough moisture to pack a punch, and then whistled straight across New York and New England in relentless cold gusts. Winter was over, but not by much, even here in May.
I set off at a brisk pace, thankful I had put on my windbreaker, did a few zigs and zags through the neighborhood streets and was strolling down Hanover when I noticed … no, felt … someone behind me. So, at the next storefront window, I stopped, looked inside, then spun around fast.
Standing there, looking at me stupidly, was Mike Nelson. He had to stop suddenly to avoid running into me. His face reddened. He was wearing jeans, a thick sweater and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap. The latter item did nothing to help him blend into the background. Not in this town.
“Well, well, well,” I said. “Fancy running into you here on the mean streets of Boston. You wouldn’t be following me, would you?”
“I … no … I mean …” he stammered. “Hacker, I need to talk to you.” He finally got the words out.
An Open Case of Death Page 17