“A punk. A damn vulture picking on people who’ve already been victimized.” Marino goes on to use other descriptive words and phrases that don’t bear repeating, but the gist of what he says is true.
Rand Bloom is a thug whose bread and butter is harassment. While we don’t know for a fact that he’s been spying on me, I suspect he’s been doing it since Johnny Angiers died in the woods six weeks ago. It could explain why Bloom was in my neighborhood this morning parked close to my house, and I think of the glint of light Benton saw from the backyard.
Possibly it was Bloom. He or maybe someone associated with him may have been spying or taking photographs of Benton and me during a personal moment to violate my privacy, to gather intelligence, to publicly embarrass. I can only assume the intention is to make sure it’s not worth my while to defend what I determined about Angiers’s death, and then I think of something else.
“What exactly went out over the radio about Nari’s murder this morning?” I ask.
“The address and that Angelina Brown, a resident in the house, saw a man collapsed on the driveway. I’ve got the transcript if you want to see it. Just sent to me,” he adds and I wonder sent by whom. “When we stop I’ll forward it to you.”
“Did you hear the calls?” I ask.
“I was in the gym and didn’t have my radio. Machado reached me by phone. After taking his sweet time. Why?”
“If Bloom was monitoring his scanner he would have heard any calls and recognized the address. He may have been only a couple blocks away. Certainly he was when you and I drove past his truck.”
“He wasn’t in it,” Marino points out. “We don’t know where the hell he was.”
“If he were near my house he might have seen you pick me up. Did anything go out over the radio about that?”
“When I left my place I radioed that I was ten-eight, responding to Farrar Street.”
“Did you in any way indicate you were picking me up and bringing me to the scene?” I ask.
“No. But it was out there that we had a ten-thirty-five.”
“A major crime which generally means a homicide. If Bloom heard that, he had an idea what was going on. He may have been watching my house, especially since he somehow knows I’m supposed to be on vacation in Florida. Now it’s really interesting for him. He gets to see if I respond to Nari’s crime scene or if maybe I’m too busy doing other things.”
I envision Benton’s arms around me, kissing me. But I don’t mention it. I think about Lucy buzzing the house, flying low enough to agitate trees and rattle windows. My mind rapidly sorts through any number of scenes that I wouldn’t want photographed and made public.
“Why would he bother?” Marino asks.
“My guess is he’s looking for anything at all that might impeach me. It doesn’t take much if you plant the right detail and it goes viral on the Internet. I’m no good to anyone if I’m not perceived as credible.”
“If what you’re saying is true he’s more industrious than the damn CIA.”
“I’m puzzled by Machado though,” I have to say. “If he’s so competitive with you then why did he bother to call you while you were in the gym?”
“He knew he’d get there first, have a huge head start working the case. It’s like inviting someone to a party late and then ignoring them so they feel like shit. These days he does anything he can to make me look bad and to make himself look better.”
“It appears he also was sending you information as he got it, at least for a while,” I point out.
“Not him. It wasn’t him doing it.” Marino doesn’t tell me who but I have a feeling I know.
The commissioner is Marino’s ally, and that bodes poorly for Machado and tells me something else. Gerry Everman has a problem. I have a feeling he’s using Marino to take care of it. My seven-story titanium-skinned building is up ahead, squat with a domed glass roof, and I wonder which members of my staff have waited for me and how I can graciously sidestep socializing and indulging in cannolis. There isn’t time.
“I suspect that Bloom assumed when you responded to Dorchester and requested a Boston PD backup that I would show up too,” I add. “He had just passed us in his pickup truck. You slowed down to let him go by and I have no doubt he saw us. Then he would have heard you radio the dispatcher to run his plate.”
I’m sure I’m right and wish I weren’t, and I’m certain the ruthless insurance investigator has an arsenal of dirty tricks I’ve yet to see. What else has he photographed? What other details of my personal life has he learned, and what will turn up on the Internet? Does he work alone? Who else is he involved with? He tailed Nari and photographed a drug deal, it seems. Maybe Bloom has drug connections.
There’s no telling what he’s into but he must deal with a lot of claims that have to do with real estate. Injuries and deaths in residences, in office buildings and on construction sites. Has he conspired with Mary Sapp before now and what about the Patty Marsico case, the Realtor murdered last Thanksgiving in Nantucket? It occurs to me that everything we’re dealing with right now has happened in the past seven months.
“Why would Bloom go to so much trouble?” Marino turns off Memorial Drive onto a side street that leads to my back parking lot.
“To work on me, to wear me down,” I answer. “Clearly I’m a problem for him in ways I don’t realize.”
“He may be a problem in ways we haven’t realized too,” Marino says. “I’m going to show you something.”
HE NOSES THE SUV in close to the tall black security gate at the back of my bullet-shaped building.
“Obviously he knows about the kid,” Marino says as we stop in front of the tall black privacy fence barricading my parking lot, a host of big antennas and satellite dishes on the MIT rooftops surrounding us. “You remember him?”
He moves his phone close so I can see a photograph of a skinny young man with long red hair, black sweatbands and shoes, black tennis shorts and shirt. He’s midflight slamming a tennis ball behind his head, birddogging a lob before it bounces twice, a Roger Federer kind of move, probably a photograph from a news story. Leo Gantz. I almost can’t believe it.
“The one you threatened this morning?” In fact I’m incredulous.
“Using a leaf blower right there next to Bloom’s pickup truck,” Marino says.
I think back to the insinuations the insurance investigator made to Mary Sapp. There’s the not so trivial problem of why Joanna really quit her job, he said and it was obvious he knew about the fifteen-year-old boy’s accusations.
“Good God,” I mutter. “He knows about Leo because at some point he talked to him.”
“You got that right and trouble’s brewing. Gerry just sent me this picture and asked if he looked familiar, if I’ve seen him around Cambridge. Apparently Leo does yard work in Cambridge, Somerville, in your area. Gerry said Machado’s going to call me with an update, that the information needs to come from him.” When he says that, I know what’s happening.
The commissioner has information but is insisting Machado be the one who shares it with Marino. It’s a setup, an old bureaucratic ploy. If you want a problem person off the case or out the door make him the messenger of his own bad news. Then the troops don’t go after their leader. Whatever has happened, Gerry Everman has no intention of taking the blame. Sil Machado is about to quit or get furloughed, which is the same as being fired except it won’t stop him from finding another job somewhere. In fact, the commissioner will probably recommend him.
“You going to open this thing?” Marino asks.
We’re sitting before my shut gate of black high tensile steel, its pales terminating in triple-pointed splayed spear tips that are a visual deterrent if nothing else. I open the car door and it’s not the first time I’ve forgotten that Marino doesn’t have a remote control. He no longer works for me or has keys or a fingerprint scanned into ergonomic locks, and I enter my code. The black metal gate lurches awake. It begins sliding open on its track. I get bac
k in the SUV.
“I’m still trying to adjust.” I open the glove box.
“I didn’t leave yesterday. It’s been over a year.” He loves to think he’s missed.
“And you worked for me for more than a decade.” I pull out the bag of pennies. “Old habits die hard.” That’s as much as I’ll say about how I’m personally handling his not being my head of investigations anymore.
I’ve never told him that some early mornings I still find myself pausing by his old office to see if he wants coffee.
“Your spot’s empty. You mind?” He drives past employee cars and white vans and crime scene trucks, not waiting for permission.
“These need to go to Ernie.” I indicate the pennies Benton packaged as evidence. “Or if you initial them I’m happy to take care of it.”
“Shiny like new even though they’re nineteen-eighty-one. I think we know why.”
“What we need to know is who,” I reply.
“You got a Sharpie? The date on them must mean something,” he says.
“Or we’re supposed to think it does.”
He initials the Baggie and hands it back to me. I look at seven pennies too bright to be so old. The person who placed them on my wall knows exactly how to hurt me.
MY PARKING PLACE IS designated by a 1 painted white on blacktop directly to the right of the massive rolling bay door, heavy-duty welded steel, flat gray with no windows. Usually it’s retracted when the weather is nice, and next to it is a pedestrian door, also metal with no windows. I scan my left thumb to open the biometric lock.
I detect cigar smoke and Lysol as Marino and I enter a brightly lighted space big enough to hangar a jet, and I’m surprised by the Ferrari, Tour de France blue, the same color as Lucy’s helicopter. It’s parked in the middle of the epoxy-sealed concrete floor, and I’ve not seen it before but there can be no question whose it is. The process of elimination is simple when something costs more than most people’s houses. I wonder why she hasn’t mentioned her latest acquisition to me. My niece has been distant of late. Extremely busy, she says. Mostly we’ve traded voice mails.
“Maybe she got you a birthday present,” Marino says.
“She did. A book.” A first edition of Gaetano Savi’s Flora Italiana, but I don’t go into detail.
“A book? That’s all?”
“It was plenty.”
Lucy gave it to me early, on Mother’s Day, because I love gardens, especially Italian ones. I’ve spent many hours lingering over the beautiful illustrations, remembering places Benton and I have been, the Villa d’Este and the Villa Gregoriana in Tivoli, the Borghese in Rome, the courtyards in Puglia on the Adriatic Sea.
“But not this, not a Ferrari. She wouldn’t,” I answer Marino literally, and the nonskid floor is damp, the odor of disinfectant stronger as we walk through.
“Afternoon!” Rusty and Harold call out cheerfully from the far end of the bay, putting out their cigars, saving what’s left of them for later. “Happy birthday, Chief! Except you’re still here? When you going to Florida?”
“At the moment I have no idea,” I raise my voice and it echoes inside the empty concrete space.
They’re sitting in a corner to the left of the door that leads inside, the table covered with a red and yellow vinyl French country cloth centered by an arrangement of silk sunflowers, very Van Gogh and washable with a hose. I spot the white pastry box next to the Keurig on top of the hobbled stainless steel surgical cart, a wheel permanently stuck, sweeteners and powdered creamers in a bowl near a big steel sink. Several blue plastic chairs and a pitcher with a water filter have been added to what’s come to be called La Morte Café, out of the way of biohazard traffic although it’s really not the best idea to consume beverages or food in here. But people do. I’m guilty of it.
We eat, drink and smoke and let the fresh air and sunlight in when we can, when it’s not raining or frigid winter. Life struggles to assert itself in a place of death. Downtime in the bay is a way to cope after ugly scenes and autopsies. I miss smoking because it allowed me to check out for a few minutes. I take a coffee or tea now instead. I chat with staff. Sometimes I sit here alone to clear my head.
“You don’t need to put out your cigars for my benefit.” I say it to Rusty and Harold every time, and it doesn’t matter.
They always behave like children caught in the act.
CHAPTER 20
DON’T MIND IF I DO.” Marino lights a cigarette. “And how are Cheech and Chong today? Miss me yet?”
With his long gray hair and funky clothes Rusty could pass for an old hippie but Harold in his proper suits and ties certainly couldn’t, and neither of them looks Hispanic. Right now they’re covered up in protective white Tyvek. I notice the stainless steel two-body carrier parked against a wall, the gallons of Lysol disinfectant, Dawn detergent and a nontoxic degreaser on the top tray.
My attention lands on a wooden handle with its large steel head that’s missing its mop and a six-gallon yellow bucket with a wringer. The gray melamine storage cabinets are closed and shiny, the red biohazard trash cans emptied and as I get close to the Ferrari I see that there are water spots all over it. Unusually elongated, a four-seater with titanium rims and beefy gray calipers, it has a long sloping nose and a roomy boot. The grille and prancing horse are blacked out. I peer through a tinted window at a lot of carbon fiber and quilted Cuoio leather.
“It sounds like Mach two when she cranks it up.” Rusty raises his voice. “A roomy backseat, six-hundred-and-fifty horsepower and all-wheel drive. She can haul passengers in the snow in that thing.”
Lucy’s idea of a practical car I suppose, and it occurs to me that she must have been planning to pick up Sock in it. That seems a long time ago but it’s not been six hours since the ground beneath me opened like a trapdoor. I’m still free-falling with no idea what might happen next except I have a feeling the plans won’t include a vacation in Florida, not tonight, not in the morning. I haven’t heard from Benton since I called him about Machado, and I wonder what Lucy is doing and if she’s made progress on the computers from Farrar Street.
“What was the problem in here?” I ask because I know there was one.
I walk to the table as Rusty and Harold pluck half-smoked cigars out of a Bruins ashtray.
“You sure you don’t mind?” they both say at once.
“I never do and don’t know why you ask. I’d smoke cigars but I’d inhale.”
“You learn to roll the smoke around in your mouth like a fine wine.”
“If it’s smoke I guzzle. It’s not about learning, which is why I stay away. Lucy probably won’t thank you for getting water on her car but she shouldn’t park that in the bay,” I add. “Why did she?”
“Maybe because you weren’t here,” Rusty says.
“I’m a school principal now?”
“She’s lucky if it’s only water that got on it,” Marino says.
“We told her it was a bad idea just like we always do,” Harold replies.
“She never listens,” Rusty says. “Probably because the bay seems normal to her. I’m guessing her garage at home is about this size. Well, I hope the inside of her car doesn’t stink to high heaven. It was damn awful in here a while ago and some of it was just inches from the tires.”
“A leaky body bag,” Harold explains, and he and Rusty tend to talk in counterpoint like a Gregorian chant. “The seventy-three-year-old lady who rigged up her car with a hose, killed herself with CO? She lived alone and did it in the garage.”
“The case from Brookline,” I recall.
“She wasn’t found for a while. Nothing makes you want a cigar more than a decomp. It’s not true you get used to it.”
“Doesn’t bother me. I don’t even notice.” Marino opens the pastry box and picks out a cannoli to prove his point. “Peanut butter? Where the hell’s the chocolate chip?”
“The same funeral home we’ve had trouble with.” Rusty sips a coffee in a cheap paper cup, surplus mi
litary Bryce buys in bulk. “They use the crappiest bags I’ve ever seen. They all leak like a faulty bladder sling. A steady drip all the way into the cooler.”
“Stunk up the entire bay and the receiving area. Not to mention the cooler.”
“Let me guess. Meadows Mortuary.” Marino taps an ash and bites into the cannoli, flakes of pastry drifting to the floor.
“I don’t know what to do about it,” Harold says. “We’ve even tried supplying them with our pouches but they don’t bother using them.”
“Probably turn around and sell them on eBay. Same old, same old.” Rusty directs this at Marino. “Nothing’s changed since you left except I don’t mind coming to work now.”
“What you do about it”—Marino talks as he chews, licking his fingers, wiping them on his sweatpants—“is transport the damn bodies your lazy ass selves and then you don’t have the problem. Instead of sitting here drinking coffee and smoking cigars and eating pastries.”
“The cannolis are for the Chief. Nobody made a trip to Mike’s with you in mind.”
“Very kind of you,” I reply.
“To give credit where it’s due, it was Bryce’s idea and he picked them up.”
“And I’m most appreciative. Maybe later?”
“This makes how many cars she’s got?” Marino points the cannoli at the Ferrari.
“I’ve lost count,” I reply.
“Can I make you a coffee?” Harold asks me, and by now I know who was waiting here until I got back. “I’m talking to the Chief and not to you,” he says to Marino.
“No thanks. Not right now,” I reply as I notice there are only four cannolis in the box, five before Marino helped himself.
Harold, Rusty and Bryce were throwing a small party. I’m touched.
“I don’t drink your swill.” Marino is done with the pastry and back with the cigarette.
“We’re not offering.”
“Be careful or he’ll give you a parking ticket.” The joke is always the same. “He’ll arrest you for littering or disturbing the peace.”
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