A Town Called Malice Read online

  “What?”

  “Nah, no way, Zesty.” Wells metronomes his finger before me. “All the weed you smoke, your short-term memory’s not that good. Maybe Tehran’s ‘Midnight League’ series you’d remember because you’re a hoops junkie and that was your man Darryl’s crowd. You went home last night and paged through Tehran’s bylines.”

  “So what if I did?” And I did.

  The story had kicked up some dirt for a bit, but from what I could tell, nobody in the DA’s office was particularly keen on rattling sabers with the chamber of commerce or the real estate board or whoever was making money on these multimillion-dollar deals, some of which, no doubt, ended up in some politician’s reelection coffers and kept Boston’s wheels spinning.

  “Maybe it was your Vladimir Putin joke that set them off?” Wells swings for the fences.

  “All right. No más. You’ve made your point. What’s Ms. Tehran working on now?”

  “That’s a pretty astute question, Zesty. Only what makes you think I would know?”

  “Well, if it wasn’t a date, either she was working you for something or…” I hold out my hands.

  “Or what?” Wells leads with a pugnacious chin.

  “Nah, fuck it. I can see you’re pissed already. I’m not putting it into words.”

  But if Tehran wasn’t working Wells, then the inverse applied: which would qualify as an unusual arrangement, for a reporter to be so compromised. But then again, the same could be said for Wells. A cop who leaks without approval from the bosses risks working in blue until time immemorial. Though Wells had likely looked pretty sharp in uniform, too. Probably took the waist in a couple of inches to sit just right on his narrow hips.

  “Why can’t Tehran and I just be friends?” Wells dials down the resistance but holds my gaze, those liquid eyes impenetrable, like a gravity pool with a plexiglass cover.

  “I don’t know, Detective. But work with me here a minute: Who would you rather listen to, Barry Manilow or Barry White?”

  Wells allows the fissure of a grin to cross his face, blinks once, and the lid to the pool is gone. At the corner a dark van pulls halfway onto the curb and parks, the engine idling. The man sitting on the passenger side looks at us for a beat, reaches into the glove compartment, and screws something together on his lap and out of our sight line. Wells, who had picked up his coffee, sets it back gently on the saucer, his other hand slipping idly inside his unbuttoned jacket. There’s an audible metallic clink that comes from inside the van followed by a soft pillow of marijuana smoke drifting out the window, which mingles with the aromas of fresh-ground coffee and hot baking bread.

  It’s the Zesty Meyers holy trinity of desire: weed, coffee, warm pastries. I do my best not to drool. Wells picks up his cup again, shoots his cuff, and glances at his expensive watch.

  “You got somewhere you gotta be?” I ask.

  “No.” He smiles. “And no Barrys.”

  “Okay then.” Game on. “Prada or Louis Vuitton?” I rub my hands vigorously.

  “Really, Zesty? Prada. By a mile.”

  “The Y on Huntington or Equinox Back Bay?”

  “I’m flattered you think I work out.” Wells flexes, throws a kiss toward his biceps.

  “Skip it. What suit is that guy wearing?” I tilt my head to a slim blond man being walked by his fox terrier down Shawmut Ave.

  “Mmm, that’s hard. From the cut and fabric I’d have to say John Rocha.”

  “You made that up. I don’t even know who that is.”

  “I pity you.” He looks like he means it.

  “All right, onward: Bette Midler or Barbra Streisand?”

  “Bette Midler.” No hesitation.

  “Cocteau Twins or Ministry?” Wells’s face draws a blank. “Skip it.”

  “Judy Garland or Marlene Dietrich?”

  Wells laughs loudly. “What, is your gaydar down or something?”

  “Not usually.” I shrug.

  “It matters to you? One way or the other?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “So why ask?”

  “I dunno.” I shrug indifferently. “Styling tips?”

  “At this point you’re beyond help.”

  “Harsh.” I mug a face. “Perspective, then.”

  “How so?”

  “You’d know better than most. People seeing different things even when they’re looking at the same thing.”

  “Are we looking at the same thing, Zesty?”

  “I’m just looking at you and Anitra Tehran. Am I off-base saying maybe there’s a little quid pro quo going on?”

  “That what you and Darryl call it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Come on, Zesty, why is it we always have to do this dance? You had to get clearance to get on Darryl Jenkins’s visitation list and you sign a logbook every time you check in. Darryl might be inside but we know he’s still got sway, Cedrick and Otis keeping it warm for him until he gets out.”

  “Keeping what warm? Darryl lost his corners when he went down. By the time he gets out, he won’t even recognize his own neighborhood.” Darryl’s Roxbury like Charlie’s Medford, too close to the city to ward off what people with deep pockets always refer to as “progress.”

  Darryl had seen it coming, too. He fears no man, but it’s hard to fend off Starbucks and Whole Foods when they’re attacking on all fronts.

  “Darryl didn’t lose anything. You know damn well that play he made was to get out of the corner game. He just rode the wrong horse. You don’t think I know your old pal Sam Budoff sold his little franchise to Darryl before he got locked up?… What’s with the face? You still got those records spinning in your head?”

  “Yeah.”

  Wells knows the drill and contents himself with his coffee, waiting for the song to settle into a less painful groove, a new local single for Martha’s list coming in loud and clear: Tribe’s “Joyride (I Saw The Film).” Another Boston band that at one time looked poised to hit the big-time.

  I saw the film said that’s the life for me

  Forsake the mundane for some instability

  So sue me

  Now you’re hiding upstairs

  And now I’m not so sure

  What is all this for?

  “You good?” Wells breaks the silence when he sees me dancing in my seat. “So, Sam Budoff…?”

  Sam Budoff was a veritable one-man wrecking crew to the misguided notion that MIT was solely a nerd paradise, having achieved near-legendary status for brewing up small-batch recreational hallucinogens out of his Charles Street apartment. He wasn’t a drug dealer per se, seeing as he never made money on his product except to recoup costs, but he had turned a nifty profit when he sold his formulas to Darryl’s lieutenants, Otis Byrd and Cedrick Overstreet, a deal I’d brokered for a little goodwill among lunatics.

  Oh you’ve done it now haven’t you haven’t you

  How many times I didn’t unfold you

  Look at your face I hardly know you

  Oh I’m in it now up to eyebrow

  Oh I’ve done it now haven’t I

  Oh me thinking you’d be my joyride

  I’ll be lucky just to survive

  Had Otis and Cedrick started cooking? Was Sam helping them? Rarely have I had the opportunity to tell Wells the truth, so I roll it around on my tongue for a moment to see what it tastes like.

  Bland. “I don’t know anything about it.” It tastes bland. But it’s all I have to offer. “Is that what this is about? Last I talked to Sam he’d moved back to campus to finish his dissertation.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Bulimic coeds and toga parties?” More likely because MIT had a ten-year limit on completing doctorates and he figured a move back to the dorms would be torturous enough to motivate him to complete the work before the university cut the cord.

  “Zero move him?” Wells has his pad out now. Focus, I tell myself, but it’s hard as the song blasts and fades,
blasts and fades, the volume knob like it’s come under the control of a two-year-old spinning dials.

  “Sure.” I force myself to sit still and stare at Wells, a look he returns in spades. “I hooked him up.”

  “Everything he had went into a single dorm room?”

  “I have no idea. I wasn’t on the crew.”

  “He take out a storage unit?”

  “Same answer.” The song evaporates. “For all I know he had a killer yard sale. What’s with all the Sam questions?”

  “Nothing, really,” Wells says, but the pad stays out, says something different. “Due diligence. I’m just crossing names off a list.”

  “What list? You’re working a body?”

  “What I do.”

  “Who?”

  Wells, no doubt remembering all the good times we’ve shared, mulls his options before answering, “Rambir Roshan.”

  I shake my head. The name means nothing to me.

  “Really?” Wells doesn’t buy it. “Mass Ave. Bridge a couple of weeks ago? Roshan went to MIT.”

  And Anitra Tehran had covered the story. It was one of the other articles I’d paged through last night. But Roshan’s name still doesn’t mean anything to me on a personal level; the day he was killed is memorable only because the Boston and Cambridge police departments had sealed the Harvard Bridge (as it was formally named but never called) at both ends, the only vehicles on scene the mobile lab tech units and squad cars from each department. Essentially, the entire bridge became a 364-smoot-long crime scene, uniforms and detectives walking up and down the span collecting evidence, while a police boat tacked below redirecting kayaks and scull crews from Harvard, BU, and MIT, which all kept boathouses on the Charles River.

  The Mass Ave. Bridge was a major thoroughfare between Boston and Cambridge and closing it created gridlock that reverberated through both cities for the entire day; Charlie and I ran off the chain with package deliveries that would have normally fallen to DHL or FedEx. Beyond that, I hadn’t followed the case, but the Globe gave Anitra Tehran a front-page byline, which wasn’t surprising considering the central location of the crime and the victim coming from a prominent university. Anitra Tehran had then followed up with a profile of Rambir Roshan, an economics major on scholarship at MIT from Mumbai, India, but that looked to be the extent of her coverage up to this point.

  “What’s Rambir Roshan got to do with Sam?”

  “Probably nothing. His name came up cross-referencing class rosters. Roshan was the TA in a class Sam had taken.” Wells consults his pad. “Poker Analytics and Theory. Sounds like something you might be interested in.”

  “It’s MIT,” I say. “It sounds like math.”

  “I’m told it’s the hottest class on campus, taught by a professor named Yuki Fuji. There’s even a lottery to get in. I guess blackjack’s fallen out of style.” Wells is referring to the MIT card-counting crews that had formed years ago, their exploits glamorized in a best-selling book and popular film. “If Budoff reaches out to you, tell him to give me a call, pronto.”

  “What, now I’m your messaging service? You can’t get ahold of him?”

  “Apparently he doesn’t own a cell phone.” Wells pockets the pad. “But you could have told me that, right?”

  True.

  Sam always carried a touch of justified paranoia from his chemistry days.

  “I’ve also left messages at his dorm, but if he’s picked them up, he’s not returning my call. MIT police knocked on his door, but he hasn’t been around.”

  “Since when?”

  “Why, you worried?”

  “You’re the one asking about him.” I pause to think for a moment before speaking again, something I rarely do. “You telling me MIT doesn’t have cameras in the dorm lobbies?”

  “They do.”

  “So…”

  “Private sandbox.” Wells shakes his head. “They’re not sharing and they get to make up the rules. Student privacy and all that jazz.”

  “Their chief’s not some former Boston cop you can back-channel, pull some strings on?” Sitting on a bloated pension and padding it with another fat salary to watch the kids play Ultimate Frisbee and break up heated arguments over the merits of the Star Wars prequels.

  “No, she’s not.” And therefore he couldn’t compel MIT to cooperate because while his inquiry might be part of a murder investigation, Sam probably falls short of a person of interest and I’m guessing nobody’s come forward to file a missing person’s report.

  In the past, it wasn’t unusual for Sam to go off the grid for a few weeks at a time. Only why now? And with his dissertation deadline looming.

  “Should I be worried?” I ask Wells. “Actually, scratch that. I don’t care. It’s none of my business.”

  “That’s an unusual attitude for you, Zesty. You got something you want to tell me, or am I going to have to find out the hard way?”

  “Are you serious?” I throw up my hands defensively. “I’ve only talked to Sam a couple of times since he found his way back to the womb and he never mentioned this Roshan kid to me or even that he was back taking classes. And as far as last night goes, in the handful of times I’ve visited Darryl he’s never mentioned Ms. Tehran and I don’t know a thing beyond what I saw, or more accurately, didn’t see last night.”

  “I’ve heard you say something like that before, Zesty.”

  “Yeah, well, I had my reasons then, but this is totally out of my wheelhouse.” I pick up my cup to finish my coffee, a mess of grounds sloshing around the bottom. I lean over and peer into Wells’s ceramic mug. It’s as clean as his conscience.

  Fucking typical.

  “You talked to everyone inside Nick’s already?” I mumble through the grinds.

  “Getting there. And running background checks, but it’ll take some time. Only you keep forgetting, I’m not on that thing.”

  “So then why am I here?”

  Wells takes a deep breath, lifts the fedora off the empty seat where he’d set it down, runs his fingers along the inside band, and twirls the hat in his hands. He parts his lips as if he’s about to say something and then seals them again in a frown. All this while watching me with baleful eyes, but also taking in a gay couple holding hands, a long-limbed brunette going all sex Gumby to pick up her fallen yoga mat, a couple of black guys unloading boxes from the back of a truck parked on Shawmut Ave. Wells’s leg shakes beneath the table. He tugs on one earlobe, his face pinched as if a bitter pill is lodged halfway down his throat. This is a new Wells, one I’ve never seen before; maybe human after all.

  “I need a favor,” he finally says.

  SIX

  I pick up the second shift watching Martine Andino, stationing myself at the corner of Clarendon and Stuart streets, kitty-corner from the Loews Hotel, where Andino had registered. The Loews has the distinction of being the last Italianate Renaissance building built in Boston, meaning there was granite involved and plenty of it. It also happens to be the previous Boston Police headquarters and though it had undergone a major reinvention it still maintained vestiges of its colorful past—a set of blue globes flanking the long perp walkway out front and a pair of thirteen-foot-tall brass exterior doors kept as shiny and polished as Zdeno Chára’s Norris trophy.

  The big changes came on the inside, where the interior had been gutted and renovated: a restaurant with strung lights and sunken outdoor seating where the holding cells had been; two floors added to the original seven. On the second floor, four municipal seals were set within ornate box balconies guarded by a set of flinty-eyed stone eagles. And just in case you didn’t pick up on the context clues, the words “Boston Police Headquarters” were still carved into the space between the first and second floors.

  Welcome to today’s Boston. Blink once and the Freedom Trail will have sold the naming rights to New Balance, the JFK Federal Building will be converted into a Pottery Barn, the John Adams Courthouse into an Apple store.

  And maybe aside from the occasio
nal murder of someone like poor Rambir Roshan, major crime in Boston is going out of style. This trend keeps up, Wells and Brill will soon be sharing a soup line with Charlie.

  They sure won’t be sharing it with anybody who can afford the Loews. Which tells me either Andino has money to burn or scored one hell of a Groupon. Not that I’m complaining. The hotel’s only a few blocks from my office and just a quick cut down Public Alley 32, where there’s a Flour Bakery where I can coffee-up regularly and use the bathroom.

  “Wow, on time and everything.” Solarte spooks me, materializing out of the foot traffic and looking every bit the tourist, a Nikon camera hanging around her neck and holding a question mark of pink cotton candy drooping off a paper cone. A matching pink Cheers cap is pulled low on her head, shading her eyes. She’d warned me I wouldn’t see her coming. Either I was off my game or she was just that good.

  “Listen, it should be pretty straightforward.” Solarte tilts a sideways bite off the cone, editing the punctuation. “Andino doesn’t have any reason to think he’s being followed and certainly not by someone who looks like you. Nice bike.” Solarte makes a face toward my Trek hybrid locked to one of Boston’s four billion NO PARKING signs. It actually is a nice bike, but I’d purposely grimed it up some so as not to attract a thief’s discerning eye. There are entire crews in Boston who do nothing but city-rove with blunt tools separating bikes from poles before reselling them on the cheap or shipping them out of town. It’s practically a rite of passage to have your bike stolen in this town. Just as it is to crash it; not so much a matter of whether, but when; a carelessly flippered car door or personalized front bumper out there waiting for everyone.

  Welcome to Boston. Get yourself a T pass.

  “Are you fast enough on that thing to follow a car in case he grabs a cab?”

  “Do pigs fly?”

  “No.” Solarte looks at me blankly.

  “Then I’m bad at metaphors. But if you look closely you’ll see I took the training wheels off.”

  “You bring another shirt like I told you?”