A Town Called Malice Read online

  Like most couriers, Charlie gets paid by the run. The busier he is, the more money he makes. Only lately it’s been hard not to notice the shrinking direct deposits into my account, technology killing me softly; a glut of competition driving down prices and forcing some of the other smaller services to either fold or merge. I hadn’t realized business was so slow that Charlie couldn’t afford to keep a roof over his head.

  “And if that’s not enough.” Martha, exhibiting the caution of a vegan forced to handle a pissed-off lobster, reaches into the top drawer of her filing cabinet and gently places an oil-stained paper bag into my hands.

  “What the hell,” I say. From its metallic smell and unbalanced weight I recognize what I’m holding without having to look inside.

  “It fell out of one of the bags when I started to move them.” Martha starts gnawing the inside of her cheek, a stress habit I’m pretty sure she is unaware of. “That’s why I left the rest where they are. I want that thing out of here, Zesty. I’m serious. Is it loaded?”

  I unfurl the bag to pull out a smoky blue-black 9mm Beretta, holding the short, almost rectangular barrel facing down and away from Martha. I turn my back to her, engage the safety, which is off, slide the chamber, and pop a full fifteen-round clip out of the butt end above the waffled grip, a little more familiar with guns than I’d like to be. The barrel and slide are freshly oiled, my smudged prints visible where I’ve touched it. The light in the room is poor, but I can see where the serial numbers have been scraped off, the rough indentations darker where oil has pooled and attracted dust and dirt.

  “What am I supposed to do with this, Martha?”

  “I don’t know, Zesty. And I don’t really care. It’s his service gun, right?”

  “I suppose.” Considering that my brother, Zero, could walk into a couple corner markets in Mattapan or Dorchester and come out lugging an expired gallon of milk and a freshly loaded Stinger rocket launcher, I know enough not to believe all the weapons manufactured for our recent wars are accurately accounted for.

  “Are they even allowed to bring that home after they serve?”

  “I doubt it. Not with PTSD and the suicide rate what it is.” There’s also the scraping of the serial numbers to consider, which I don’t mention to Martha, preferring not to freak her out any more than she already seems to be. With most people who are on the verge of hyperventilating, you tell them to breathe, just breathe. With Martha I’m about to tell her to gnaw on something when she tosses some of the espresso beans into her mouth, reading my mind again.

  “You think Charlie has PTSD?”

  It’s hard to imagine Charlie wouldn’t have PTSD, considering he was one of only three survivors from his unit when his M2 Bradley rolled over an IED so packed with explosives it blew a six-foot doughnut hole through the personnel carrier’s protective under-armor and lifted the vehicle airborne. Charlie and I have spoken a few times about his experiences in Iraq, but I could tell we only scratched the surface of his time there, much the same way I don’t open up much about my upbringing: my radical mother, who’s been in the wind for over twenty years, and my father, who’s now suffering in silence through the late stages of Alzheimer’s, but whose checkered past has already caught up to me once and nearly killed me.

  In the handful of times Charlie has crashed at my place in Union Park, I’ve witnessed him twitching violently in his sleep, heard him crying out names and warnings, the endless loop of that day in Iraq replaying under sealed lids. But I’ve never brought attention to this, never spoken at length with him about his loss or injury, that side of his life reserved for a veterans group I know he attends every couple of weeks or so, the meetings sometimes followed by a night of heavy drinking and brawling among his jarhead buddies, who light it up in some of the darker watering holes in town.

  Honestly, it’s an invitation I’m thankful not to have received, having once witnessed the intensity of their displaced rage during a show at the Paradise, the bouncers having to rely on Boston’s Finest to restore some semblance of order as they got into it with half a dozen BU chuckleheads who thought it was a good idea to thank them for their service with a political lecture on the nature of American imperialism.

  Has Charlie ever watched me sleep? Has he seen me replaying the dream of Gus that I can’t seem to shake, felt some form of kinship—the Damaged Goods Club?

  I doubt I’ll ever ask him, preferring to keep my internal battles to myself; Martha pried it out of me only because somehow, to her, my head is transparent. Maybe I really should wear a helmet. Or at the very least, a pair of sunglasses to hide my tell-all eyes. Still, the question: What to do with the gun?

  “I’ll lock it up in one of the lockers,” I say.

  “No. You will fucking not. I want that thing out of here. And I’m not trying to be harsh, but that goes for Charlie, too. This is an office, Zesty, not a home.”

  “One thing at a time, Martha. I’ll talk to him, see what’s going on. He’s still got a job; things can’t be that bad, right?”

  “No?” Martha tosses another handful of beans into her mouth. “What do you hear?”

  “Only your bicuspid blenders,” I say.

  “Exactly. The phones have been dead, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “My wallet’s noticed. When I sit down I can hear it scream.” I shoot her a grin. “But the summer’s over. People get lazy soon as the first frost hits the air. It’ll start picking up.”

  “And if it doesn’t? There’s not enough work for the two of you if you’re planning on coming back full-time. How long you think you can keep Charlie on?”

  “You tell me. I just deliver shit; you’re the one who knows my real numbers.”

  “Well, they’re not good. And I don’t know what Charlie was paying for rent in Medford, but it couldn’t have been close to what you’re shelling out for your Union Park digs.”

  Charlie had grown up in Medford, a working-class suburb roughly five miles from Boston, his commute by bike no more than a thirty-minute ride across Somerville and Cambridge to our Berkeley Street side-alley address. But the reverberations of the Big Dig have been felt in every town within hailing distance of the city’s borders, skyrocketing rents and property taxes pricing longtime residents out of neighborhoods they’d lived in their entire lives.

  “So?” I say. Charlie’s predicament isn’t an isolated one, but what could I do about it?

  “Zesty, I’m not sure you’re even making your own rent this month. And didn’t Zero have to co-sign your lease for you?”

  “Your point being?”

  “That alone you can’t even get a roof over your head in this town. Zesty, I know I sound like a cold-ass bitch, but you’re going to have to cut Charlie loose. You can’t afford to keep him.”

  “I can’t do that, Martha,” I say, shaking my head. Charlie, like Martha, gets paid entirely off the books. If I let him go he won’t even qualify for unemployment. And while he probably has access to health care through the VA and maybe some form of pension, I’m pretty damn sure the benefits won’t amount to much in this gilded city. Is Charlie my responsibility? He’s a grown man and makes his own choices. But he’s also my friend and that’s got to count for something.

  “Okay, a discussion for another day then,” Martha concedes, digging a finger deep into a molar to wedge the remnant of a bean free.

  Good to the last crunch.

  “But get rid of that fucking gun; I don’t care if you have to bury it.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” I drop the gun back in the paper bag, place the bag in the main hold of my pack, and store the clip in a separate front pocket lest they get tempted to mate. Zero has the Magilla of all safes in his office. I can stash the Beretta there until I get a chance to speak to Charlie and hopefully before he notices it’s gone missing.

  “Well then, to end on a high note…” Martha riffles Post-its stuck to the side of her computer and peels one off. “I got a call this morning from an outfit named…”r />
  “Solarte Associates.” I read the Post-it, squinting at the chicken scratching of a Kenmore Square address.

  “Lady I spoke with sounded eager but wants to meet first.”

  “Never heard of them,” I say. “You?”

  “No. From what I can tell it’s some kind of corporate security firm, consultants maybe, I don’t know. Their website looked like it was designed by a ten-year-old.”

  “Perfect. Send Charlie to ink them. Win-win.”

  “Nice try. She asked for you personally. Seriously, Zesty, I don’t have to tell you how hard new clients are to come by. Make time to go over there. Like now.”

  “All right.”

  “And act professional. You wearing deodorant?”

  “I got it.”

  “Fine. So…” Martha, recognizing the point of diminishing returns, shifts gears to rattle my gift bag of espresso beans. “To what exactly do I owe this honor?”

  “Consider it a bonus for a job well done.” I snap my messenger bag closed, but don’t hear it, a wave of hot static washing over me, causing me to wince.

  “You’re paying me in coffee beans now?” Martha, a witness to this show on my face before, lays down the beans and hits a couple of keys on her computer.

  “It’s called the barter economy.” I dig my thumb into the raised scar over my right brow, trying to disperse the electric shock of guitar feedback that follows the static. “Everybody’s doing it.”

  “In that case, take it to Verizon. They’re about to cut us off.”

  On the computer, a file titled Radio Zesty pops on-screen and when Martha opens it, a running account of my internal playlist appears, a veritable who’s who of mostly obscure and generally forgotten Boston bands, some slightly better known Motown-era soul outfits, and a slew of New Wave and ska acts like XTC, The Jam, The Clash, English Beat, and Squeeze. Only a handful of the Boston bands listed so far had risen beyond local fame—The Cars, Morphine, the Pixies—the majority having only reached big-fish-in-a-small-pond status; maybe for a short time popular enough to eke out a living doing what they loved, which was possibly payment enough.

  There are dates noted beside each song along with a number indicating how many times my internal DJ’s repeated the record; Martha is fond of searching for patterns where none exists, trying to make some sense of my auditory mix. I’m not organized enough to maintain Martha’s level of record keeping and honestly, I don’t really see the point. I’m just thankful not to be punished by a daily dose of New Kids on the Block.

  Martha, her fingers hovering expectantly over the keyboard, waits for me to identify the band and I do.

  “It’s The Neighborhoods,” I tell her, the frying pan sizzle lifting for a heavy thunder of drums, Dave Minehan coming in over the top belting:

  This year I’m gonna get it right

  Up from the bottom

  I will find a light

  It’s the title track from their album Fire Is Coming, Martha adding it next to “The Prettiest Girl,” a song that came damn close to making The Neighborhoods a household name beyond Boston.

  “And hey, look at that,” I point out, probably too loudly, as a phone begins to ring. “The power of positive thought.”

  Only problem, it’s Detective Wells calling.

  THREE

  Solarte Associates occupies a second-story high-ceilinged suite in an old building with all the attendant details and wear: thickly painted crown molding and baseboards framing the outer room, a little chipped and worn in spots, revealing a kaleidoscope of previous color schemes beneath. The floors are hardwood, wide planks, badly gouged in places, beautiful. Cheaply framed R. B. Kitaj and Frida Kahlo prints hang on the walls, mismatched chairs tilting insolently beneath each one, front legs lifted off the floor, like juvenile delinquents. A battered oak desk, solid as a thirty-year mortgage, faces bow front windows looking out over Kenmore Square and a thin side slice of the iconic Citgo sign above the BU Barnes & Noble.

  Whatever Solarte Associates is selling, it must sell itself because according to Martha, their website isn’t exactly an oracle of information, the desk is littered with glossy pamphlets advertising a cleaning service bearing a Roxbury address, and the shiny silver Solarte Associates door plaque tells me nothing new beyond the fact that they can afford a shiny silver door plaque. One thing for sure: They didn’t plow their money into security. The downstairs door was ajar when I arrived and I didn’t have to buzz to get in.

  There’s nobody manning the desk now, no chair there to suggest anybody does, but it’s easy to imagine someone perched there through the years watching Kenmore Square morph from the enticingly seedy, slightly dangerous hub of the Boston music scene to the generic shopping plaza it’s now become. Boston’s a city populated by ghosts. In Kenmore Square they rattle pocket chains and sport leather, Levi’s, and Doc Martens. Where the Rathskeller once stood, they howl loudest.

  My father had been part of that local music scene. Before he’d begun to carve out his living at the poker table, he’d managed a number of Boston rock bands, none larger than Mass, whose self-titled debut LP immediately garnered the attention of Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager, who’d caught a show at the Living Room in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti had just been released and was already sitting at the top of the charts when Grant tapped Mass to open for them at the Boston Garden and then continue on as the opener for the remainder of the tour. It was the sort of break every band dreams of and Mass had the talent to capitalize on it. Only when tickets went on sale during a brutal February cold snap, Garden security made the mistake of letting fans inside the normally restricted advance ticketing areas and all fucking hell broke loose. The mob rushed the turnstiles, went all Spider Man on the catwalks to snatch the Celtics and Bruins championship banners, brawled and bloodied the Bruins ice rink in their best imitations of Derek Sanderson and Gordie Clark, and stole every souvenir they could pry out of the old building.

  Zeppelin, not even on the East Coast at the time, was banned from the Garden for five years; even my father’s deep connections in the mayor’s office were unable to sway the city council to vacate their hamfisted ruling. In a fit of rage, Grant cut Mass off the tour and it was Game Over after that. Mass took the fall for the Zeppelin ban, and fan backlash had them booed off of every stage in the 617 area code. And shortly after that cruel twist of fate, Mass’s golden-piped lead singer and songwriter, Karl Klaussen, stumbled out the door after a show at New York’s famed CBGB and has never been seen or heard from again.

  Of all the bars that have come and gone in Boston, and there have been many—the Channel, Chet’s, Bunratty’s, just to name a few—it’s the Rat I miss most. On nights my father couldn’t find someone to watch over Zero and me, he would rouse us from our sleep and haul us to the roving poker games he hosted, on the rare occasion playing, but on most nights just dealing the cards and taking a cut—usually 10 percent—of the initial buy-in.

  By the late 1970s, poker was how my father carved out his living, walking that razor’s edge of legality in a racially and ethnically divided city that couldn’t seem to make up its mind as to which direction it was headed—the provincial and segregated East Coast backwater that the bussing issue exposed on the national level or the modern liberal metropolis it’s become.

  My father’s game was hardly the only place in town where you could risk your money over cards—Chinatown had pai gow and blackjack in its numerous backroom gambling dens, the North End carrying their own social club versions—the city awash in illegal book and gambling joints. But what set my father’s game apart was its neighborhood neutrality, the multiple locations he’d rotate through, mostly music clubs and restaurants after-hours, purposely staying out of the ethnic strongholds that would have required tribute payments to the powers that be, a slice of the action my father couldn’t afford to give.

  It was an invitation-only affair. They played poker, but often the game was more Camp D
avid than Las Vegas, the green felt docket of his octagonal table a place where business deals were struck, arrangements made or reparations paid, alliances forged or severed without the fear of imminent reprisal. Which is to say, nobody got shot at my father’s poker games or suffered a blackjack to the back of the neck, pockets turned out and emptied after a winning night.

  My father garnered citywide respect for his poker skills and twice that for his silence, his eyes never betraying judgment of the powerful men who would look into those impenetrable eyes, dark as a sealed vault, and unburden themselves of their sins.

  I’ve often wondered how my father was able to manage this weight, to listen to the venal acts and impulsive misdeeds of men who were beyond the reach of the law but felt the overwhelming need of confession. Wondered how he didn’t let the darkness that spilled out of these men corrupt his own heart; unbalance the ethical scales he always taught Zero and me to be mindful of, though never blinded to the opportunity to lay a finger and tip those scales when the right time presented itself.

  There will come a time, my father always preached to Zero and me, there will always come a time. You just have to recognize the moment and act.

  Maybe it was my father’s seeming neutrality that empowered him because nobody truly knew where his loyalties lay, how he was able to operate freely in a city where the boundaries were so clearly drawn, where nobody operated without tribute or consent from city hall or the various Mob bosses who controlled their slices of the city pie.

  My former landlord, in the days before he evicted me from my Thayer Street loft, told me this story: His father, he claimed, had gambled in my father’s game. And lost. As he also lost on the greyhounds at Wonderland, the ponies at Suffolk Downs, the NFL betting cards available in just about every neighborhood bar and corner grocery, and probably anything else he could wager on—two squirrels crossing the fucking Boston Common, for all I know.