A Town Called Malice Page 7

  I did. It was one of Zero’s Zen Moving Company shirts and I’d placed it in a plastic bag to protect it from Charlie’s oily Beretta. I’d briefly considered tossing the gun into the Charles River but didn’t want to pollute the water, seeing how they’d cleaned it up to the degree that some people actually chose to swim in it. When I was a kid, if you fell into the Charles, they’d administer last rites and name a disease after you.

  I’d also considered burying it, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last couple of years it’s that nothing stays buried in Boston for long.

  “If you think Andino’s seen you more than once, change your shirt. Little things help.”

  “Like a cotton candy beard?” I point to Solarte’s pink chin.

  “Exactly.” Solarte lifts the camera from around her neck. “I don’t need you to go all Annie Leibovitz on me. Just take one or two wherever he goes. If he meets with anyone snap them, too. You don’t have to bring me the chip, just upload the pictures and send them to me. You know how to work this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any questions?”

  “Yeah. How come you don’t have a frosted glass door and a really hot secretary I can trade quips with?”

  “Wow.” Alianna Solarte puffs out her cheeks. “Darryl really wasn’t exaggerating. I actually did have a secretary for a while.”

  “Hot?”

  “It was my daughter.”

  “So that’s a yes.” I smile.

  “Nice try,” Solarte deadpans. “Keep it in your shorts.”

  “No, really, you have a daughter?” I try not to sound too interested, but I’m riding a cold streak to end all cold streaks and you can’t do much better than an intro from Mom.

  “A couple, in fact.” Solarte opens her wallet, flips past her PI license to a picture of two girls who look to be in their twenties and have the same dark hair and serious eyes of their mother. They also share the same small nose and high cheekbones. One of them has a tattoo that starts somewhere behind her ear, snakes around the side of her neck and down toward the cleavage of her open shirt: dragons, flames, and other amusement park staples.

  “Is that one single?” I point to the girl with tattoos.

  “You like ’em like that?” Solarte arches her brows.

  “I was just kidding. I’m sure they’re both great.”

  “They’re both a pain in the ass. Marinette, with the tattoos? Runs around with fools and fuck-ups. Couldn’t even hold down the job I gave her. And her baby sister, Marisol? She’s at John Jay, criminal justice major. Go figure.”

  “I’ve got a brother,” I say. “We’re pretty different, too.” But then I realize Solarte probably already knows that.

  “Andino’s in there right now, but I doubt he’ll make an appearance tonight. The man wore me out. You’ll see when you look through the pictures. If anything about them jumps out at you, let me know. If he shows himself, stay with him until he returns and you think he’s hit the sack. See that eagle statue? His room is three windows right above it. He doesn’t have a car. At least not parked with the hotel. You got this?”

  “I was born to waste time,” I boast.

  “Find something else to be proud of. Call me when you knock off. I won’t answer, but it’ll give me an idea of when I should pick him up again tomorrow.”

  “What about the camera?”

  “Hold on to it. In the morning, upload the pictures and email them to me. I already emailed the ones I took. You’ll have to watch both entrances, he could come out either one.”

  I do as I’m told, clicking through the pictures Solarte had taken, Andino getting around like she’d said—Newbury Street, the Fenway, Harvard Square, Porter Square, Broad Street downtown—but seemingly without much purpose, always alone, and insulated, I get the feeling somehow, or at least well versed in the art of selective attention as crowds surge and pass around him.

  I catch him stepping out of the hotel at around eight thirty and watch him smoke a cigarette and chat amiably with the valet. After which he descends the stairs and sits on the sunken patio beneath the strung lights and eats something. Once he’s finished with that, he walks once around the block as I circle counterclockwise on my bike and I see him reenter the hotel through the Berkeley Street entrance. I forget to take any pictures, but then again he didn’t really go anywhere.

  As far as I can tell, nobody comes to visit him. The light in his room goes on five minutes after he returns and off around midnight and I cruise the few blocks into the South End.

  Finally, easy money.

  SEVEN

  I cruise Berkeley all the way to Washington, hang a right and meander past the Gothic Cathedral of the Holy Cross, an anchor of this South End neighborhood for over a hundred years. Without purpose I loop around to Harrison Ave. and before I know it, drift onto Thayer Street, something that feels like unfinished business always drawing me back to my former street.

  Why is it, I ask myself, bumping over the cobblestones, that every time I return to Thayer, I expect it to be as I remember it, as if the Art Deco streetlights hadn’t been installed, the high-priced galleries and million-dollar condos hadn’t replaced the rough industrial loft I used to live in and the illegal after-hours clubs I used to frequent? Why do I keep stalking my past as if expecting to come across something different, as if the city hadn’t changed from someplace I called home to where I’m now just a barely tolerated visitor who can’t afford the views? What can’t I see that everybody else sees clear as day?

  My former homeless neighbor, Albert, isn’t in his loading dock. But to my surprise, as I cruise back through the neighborhood and up Worcester Street, Detective Brill is sitting on the stoop of number 34, bright construction lights shining in the first-floor brownstone apartment, the windows propped open and a heavy toxic smell like turpentine mixed with crack cocaine drifting through, nearly overpowering Brill’s trademark cigar, which smokes between his thick fingers like a sixth appendage.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Look who it be.” Brill screws the cigar into his mouth, makes it glow, and looks at his watch. I’ve only seen Brill in a suit, the kind that comes out of the cleaner’s pre-wrinkled, so it’s jarring to see him in a pair of blue jean overalls with the clasps undone, the front folded down and hanging like a Labrador’s panting tongue. A fine white dust covers his three-day beard and thinning hair, giving him a look that falls somewhere between Old Man Time and a powdered cruller. A filthy surgeon’s mask hangs around his neck.

  “I’m here with a request from the neighborhood board,” I say. “Either close those windows so they can’t smell the bodies under your floorboards or douse the cigar. You’re lowering property values.”

  “In this Shangri-La? Now you know that’s some bullshit, Zesty. Hell, black people could move here and prices still goin’ up. To what do I owe this pleasure?” Brill glances at his watch again. “At this time of night?”

  “Young and carefree,” I say. “I don’t expect you to understand. What’s with the reno? Isn’t this your cousin’s building?”

  When I’d first met Brill, it had been established that he’d grown up here on Worcester Street, taken in by an uncle who used to run a popular blues club on Mass Ave. that my parents had frequented. For a time my father had lived across the street and there was a picture in his rented Brookline home now, my dad seated with a trio of tuxedo-clad, long-haired, wild-eyed white guys mixed in with a dozen or so black men in suits and fedoras, a group of neighborhood children squatting at the bottom of the stairs. Brill was one of them.

  It was just the first of many crossed paths between them, a closer acquaintance formed when Brill started working at his uncle’s bar, even as my mother was wanted by the FBI for a bomb she’d set off on the Harvard campus. The explosive was rigged to go off well before the scheduled start of class. My mother’s compatriots had wanted to send a bloodier message, but she considered herself an activist, not a killer, and wasn’t down for that. At least it looked that
way until shit got real with Bank of Boston.

  “It’s my building now,” Brill says.

  “You moved out of Newton?” I’m surprised. It seems like only yesterday Brill was extolling the virtues of a fenced-in yard, grass between his toes, and a morgue-like silence after 8 P.M.

  Brill glows the cigar and releases a slow curling wave of smoke that drifts out the side of his mouth. From inside his windows I can hear Ella Fitzgerald scatting shing-dinga-biddly-boom-boom-ah (or something close to that) on a cheap boom box. I look up to the second floor, two windows covered with grime and one of them broken, through which I can see boxes and construction materials piled high to the ceiling. Same deal on the third floor, but with sheets hung poorly for window shades, the building otherwise obviously vacant.

  shing-bada-biddly-boom-boom-dip-diddly-ah, Ella sings.

  The outside bricks are in dire need of repointing, some of them sticking out like hand grips on a rock climbing wall, the window frames rotting from the outside in like junkie teeth.

  “Cut the bullshit, Zesty. I know Wells sent you here to check on me. So here I am. You still a messenger, right? Deliver this: Tell him to go fuck himself.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Glad to know you guys have maintained an equilibrium. Only now I’m just plain curious: What’s the deal?”

  “With what?”

  “Everything, I guess. The move. Wells asking me of all people to check on you.”

  Brill huffs and spits to the curb. “He didn’t tell you?” He’s got his detective face on now, his hound dog eyes running me over, taking in every detail.

  I throw out my hands palms up.

  Brill actually grunts a hu-rumph and says, “Turns out suburbs wasn’t my thing.”

  “What part of it?” Uninvited, I lean my bike against his scrolled iron fence, which also needs sanding and repainting. “The lines at Cumberland Farms? Or not enough black people for you?”

  “Funny thing, it wasn’t even racial.”

  “No?” Probably because Newton and the other nearby suburbs are liberal hotbeds where the only color that matters is green: fat annual checks cut to the United Negro College Fund to help assuage the guilt of de facto segregation.

  “So what was it, then?” I point to the stoop and Brill nods acquiescence, letting me take a seat. Ella has been replaced by someone I don’t recognize but she’s damn fine. “Who’s that singing?”

  “You don’t know?” I shake my head. “New girl named Adele.”

  “She’s good.”

  “White girl, too. Not as raw as Amy Winehouse, though.”

  “Not many are.”

  Brill nods solemnly. “Lotta things went into the move, actually. First being, it was classic dog out of the pound. It’s hard to explain. Almost like it was too nice out there. Like I kept looking around feeling like I was living in some Pleasantville-type shit. That make any sense to you?”

  “It does.” And it had the familiar ring to what Zero often preaches: When things are going well, it’s just the cosmos delaying the punch line. Arguably not the healthiest worldview, but maybe some people really are better suited to living with a keen skepticism, sleeping with one eye open. “Only I think the analogy’s ‘fish out of water.’”

  “It’s what I said it was. Bull in a Chinaman’s shop.” Brill mangles another idiom but I don’t correct him. Wells had told me that Brill had been acting strangely lately and he’d wanted my take on it.

  I try to recall my father’s first sign of slippage but it’s hard to pinpoint because he’d long practiced his form of benign stoicism, his ink-black liar’s eyes concealing every tell. But I have little doubt that my father’s first response when he recognized something wrong within himself was to try and reason with the disease, negotiate the narrative of his loss. Here’s what you can have, he’d tell the plaque building up on his brain: I’ll give you my entire West End childhood, throw in Scollay Square, the Gershwin catalog, and the ’75 World Series on top of that. The wife stays. Zero and Zesty. Did he believe enough in a higher power to pray? Or to curse the heavens? Of that I have no idea.

  But Wells confiding in me and not another cop makes perfect sense. If Brill was coming loose at the screws, there’s no telling what the BPD response might be. Desk duty followed by an early retirement? A hustle out to pasture? I’ve been through the Alzheimer’s wringer and contrary to my mouth always in motion, I know how to keep secrets. After all, I’d learned from the best.

  “The worst part was,” Brill’s voice drags me back to the block, “I’d get invited to these dinner parties, all neighborly, I have to go, right? And what do white people talk about?”

  White people talk about their jobs, What do you do? the opening line in that world. On the other side of the tracks it’s usually Who you with? And you’ll find out pretty quick if you’re at the wrong party.

  “So let me guess, you’d tell them you’re a homicide cop and the room would go all cold on you?”

  “See, that’s the thing. Total opposite. They’d be all hot and bothered wanting to know the grimy details. What the blood smelled like, how many holes did the vic have in him. Some of the divorced gals? They were rubbing their legs like crickets they were so excited having me up in their plush living rooms, all blood and no stain.”

  “You mean they were too far removed from it?”

  “Bingo. From the real shit of it. People crying so hard they’re puking in the street. You know what I’m talking about, you been there. The hood closing up right quick, everyone all I din’t see nuthin’, I don’t know nuthin’, Detective, knowing damn well they’re just going to take care of shit themselves.”

  “You didn’t tell them that part?”

  Brill sucks his teeth hard. “Let’s just say they weren’t moved.”

  “So how many holes did Rambir Roshan have in him?”

  Brill screws the cigar back into his mouth, pulls it to a Chernobyl glow, and releases a massive cloud of smoke that obscures his face. “Now why in hell you want to know something like that?”

  “Sam Budoff,” I say.

  “What about him?”

  I wave at the smoke between us. Not because it bothers me, but to get a better look at Brill’s face. Detectives, in general, are pretty decent poker players and the men and women who played in my father’s games—always at the invitation of someone higher up the food chain—had the requisite skills to do well. The vice cops were particularly skilled, though openly despised for their hit-and-run tactics, maybe winning a few dollars before calling it quits, disrupting the flow and evading the long-game traps and feints the real sharks were setting.

  The homicide cops didn’t fare as well. Even as their large amateur stacks were erected—maybe the result of a good run of cards, some righteous moves, even—they were always targeted for a methodical dismantling because as a group, if there was one massive hole in their game, it lay in their obsessive pursuit of a hand that needed to be released. The homicide players, almost to a man, were keen observers of others but could hardly recognize their own faults and weaknesses; they stuck around too long and often got burned.

  Detective Brill isn’t a natural liar, he’d just picked up the skill later in life. Only he isn’t lying now. Budoff’s name didn’t figure into the Roshan murder as far as Brill knew. Or perhaps Wells’s concern for his partner isn’t unfounded, things slipping his mind. Or am I missing something here, a rift grown between the two men, Wells using me to draw Brill’s ire, prick him like a thorn?

  I let him in on Wells’s Sam inquiry, which draws a laugh at my expense. “So he called you? And I’m supposed to be the one that’s lost his damn mind? What else he lay on you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So he didn’t tell you I was suspended?”

  “No.” But that at least partially explains why he’s up at one in the morning working on the building. And didn’t know Wells was on the hunt for Sam. “Congratulations. What for?” I could just as easily have said, Who did you piss
off now?

  “Nah, I’m not getting into it with you. You so interested, read the papers.”

  But I had. At least the stories Anitra Tehran had written and there was nothing regarding Brill’s suspension. And I’d seen the photographs, the overhead shots of a fedora and a cigar-chomping detective on the Mass Ave. Bridge. Brill had been on the Roshan case, or at least on the scene, and now he wasn’t. What had he done?

  That, I didn’t know, but I can tell he realizes he screwed up with the mention of the papers and tries changing the subject. “I heard about the bombing at Nick’s.”

  “I wasn’t that bad.”

  “Double bombing,” he follows up without cracking a smile and I hit the imaginary snare for him. “Hell of a coincidence he found you there, don’t you think?”

  “He wasn’t looking for me,” I correct him. “He was on a date of some sort.”

  “Who with?”

  “You know Anitra Tehran, the Globe reporter?”

  “She was there?” Brill narrows his eyes and begins to chew the corner of his lip, the flavor apparently not to his liking. “Yeah, that was no date, that fucking idiot.”

  “You got suspended over something related to the Rambir Roshan case.” I leave the question mark out of my voice.

  “They tell you that?”

  They. As if the two of them were working together. I hadn’t been sure, but I figure it for gospel now. So what had compelled Tehran not to write about a veteran homicide detective removed from duty on a high-profile case? Why sit on it?

  Which brings me back to the Nick’s bombing. If it was meant as a warning for either Wells or Tehran to back off the Roshan murder, it was way too early in the game; Wells was still knocking on doors and pursuing low-return leads like Sam Budoff. Maybe even desperate, considering he’d called on me to point him in the right direction. Wells didn’t have shit. Which means Tehran had the same. And Brill was sidelined, at least officially. So who was brazen or stupid enough to go after a cop and a reporter?

  “Hard to discount the Eastern European angle.” I throw a line into the night and let it sink in. A silvery cloud slides across the moon like a slow wink as Adele gives way to Irma Thomas singing “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand).” It’s hard to disagree with her.