A Town Called Malice Read online

  Brill finds it hard to disagree with me. “Be foolish not to.” He swallows the hook.

  EIGHT

  Detectives Wells and Brill might run a Tom and Jerry routine in public but the men are close as brothers.

  “And you think Roshan’s connected to Eastern Europeans, Russians? How?” I ask.

  “Poker.”

  “The MIT poker analytics class?” I don’t get it.

  “That’s the angle we were working. The Nick’s bombing last night was the tactical error that confirmed it. Even the street gangs, the Mob—what’s left of it—know better than to go after a cop and a reporter. Whatever Tehran dug up, this level of response is something new.” Rare emotion, something close to fatherly concern, shows on Brill’s face. “The Roshan kid for sure was involved in something.”

  “And you know that because?”

  “He was shot at close range, for one.” Brill taps me low on the sternum, leaving a white plaster dust mark like a bullet hole on my shirt. “But at an upward angle. Burn marks and fiber analysis indicated three different types of threads and only one of them belonging to Roshan.”

  “So Roshan maybe knew the shooter,” I say. “It would explain the closeness?”

  “Possibly.”

  “So the other two fibers came from the shooter?”

  “Right. Liner, coat thread. Right through the pocket.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “What, you forgot already? World’s greatest Homicide.”

  “No, really, how?”

  “Fuck you, Zesty,” Brill says, but his eyes are smiling. “Coat was tossed off the bridge into the Charles. At first a Northeastern crew thought they got a floater. When they saw all the activity on the bridge, they pulled it out and handed it over.”

  “Okay, so not a random shooting. Still don’t see Russians, though.”

  “Neither did we. Until we get Mr. Roshan to the ME’s office and they find a couple of poker chips inside his Reebok socks, Reebok kicks.”

  Buy local, die local, I think, a cold chill running up my spine. It’s not the usual trigger for my cranium-dwelling DJ to spin another record, but I already hear the opening notes of the New Models’ “Permanent Vacation” dropping loud and clear.

  “The chips were from the poker analytics class? That’s really why Wells was grilling me about Sam.”

  “That’s a negative.” Brill’s smile has all the wattage of a Steven Wright joke. “The MIT class is all theory, probability, risk management. Whatever you get when pi sticks his dick in the theory of relativity. They don’t actually play the game.”

  “So from a casino? Foxwoods?” I pick the nearest legalized den of bad carpeting.

  “Not casino chips, but professional grade.”

  “So Paulson’s, then.” Paulson has been the supplier of choice to most of the Vegas casinos for decades, their manufacturing process an expensive and highly guarded secret to prevent counterfeiting. What look like painted strips at the edges and sides of the chips are actually compression-molded color embedded into the chip. Did Sam find a way to re-create these chips? Did Rambir Roshan?

  Brill sucks his teeth hard. “Maybe I am slipping. Of course you know something about poker chips.” Brill looks at me too long and too hard. “So go ahead, Zesty, you’ve come this far. Those chips on Roshan, who do you figure they belong to?”

  Zero, what have you done now? I think, but don’t say. In fact, I say nothing at all, a rarity that blesses Brill with a rare laugh.

  “See, that’s what we thought, too. We catch a body, poker chips, shades of the Meyers clan, right? Only Zero’s not running anything except his moving company, far as we can tell. He’s not in this. Which is good for you, looks like it might be bad for Budoff, and just got even worse for Anitra Tehran.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Those chips on Roshan are house chips from a poker club across from the Stockyard, that longtime joint by the Mass Pike.”

  “I know it.” The original Boston Food Co-op my mother had co-founded was just a couple blocks away. “Who runs it?”

  “Ukrainian mob.”

  “That still Russia?” Geography and geopolitics were never my strong points.

  “Close enough. Same tactics. The place is managed by a guy name of Oleg Katanya, sometimes goes by Mikhail Sergachev.”

  “You learn this before or after your suspension?”

  “Common knowledge if you in the game.” Brill wasn’t talking about poker now. “Katanya runs the day-to-day operations, worked his way up from drug dealer to pimp, possibly a hitter. He’s got ties to Russian organized crime in Brighton Beach, considered something of a psychopath even by New York standards.”

  I ask Brill what someone has to do to earn that distinction.

  “Word was one of his whores had been holding out on him. A hundred here, a hundred there, nothing major, but he found out about it. One night he pulled all his girls off the street, put them in a van, drove them out to the Brooklyn railyards.”

  “Do I have to hear the rest of this?” I ask Brill.

  “Yeah. Because knowing how you like to stick your nose in places it doesn’t belong, I want you to understand what you’re dealing with here. Katanya doused this girl—and by the way, she had a kid, that’s why she was setting money aside—in gasoline and put a match to her. Made the others watch while he kept peeling off fifties and throwing them into the flames.”

  “Scary.”

  “Jewish.” Brill widens his eyes.

  “That fuckin’ supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Whoa, take it easy, Zesty.” Brill uncharacteristically retreats a step. “I hit a nerve?”

  I suppose he did. I’ve never been a particularly devout Jew, haven’t practiced any of the customs or traditions since childhood, but I’d retained a finely tuned ear for the anti-Semitic aside, which has always drawn a sharp Pavlovian reaction that I’ve never quite gotten a handle on. My father would have been disappointed in my shop-window transparency.

  “This Oleg Katanya, he’s moved to Boston full-time?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Poker club’s his?”

  “No. Katanya answers to a guy by the name of Jakub Namestnikov. Higher up the chain.”

  “How high?”

  “Think like the equivalent of a capo. Runs his own crew, pays tribute to the Boston boss, Antti Voracek.”

  “Never heard of him,” I say. “Is Namestnikov or Voracek someone who Tehran might have pissed off with her real estate articles?”

  “Not in any way we could connect. The Ukrainians are just starting to fill the vacuum now that the Italians and Irish have been neutered. It’s still mostly entry-level shit: narcotics, prostitution, protection rackets. These penthouses and condos that Tehran wrote about are top-shelf multimillion-dollar deals. The poker club and all that other stuff pales in comparison.”

  “You’re saying it might be a coincidence?”

  “What I’m saying is Roshan doesn’t make sense in the scheme of things. Only those poker chips didn’t get into his socks by accident.”

  Hiding them there as if he wanted to leave a message behind for someone to follow. But who? And why? Did Rambir Roshan know he was in danger? And if he did, why did he take the meeting on the Mass Ave. Bridge, assuming he wasn’t just flat-out ambushed?

  “You know for sure Roshan was playing in Namestnikov’s club?”

  “Not really. The chips were all we got. By the time we came knocking, the place had shut down. And it looked like in a hurry, too. Poker tables, the bar, the liquor, everything was still there. Custom-made stuff, expensive.”

  “Sounds like they’re running. But why? You guys don’t have shit or you wouldn’t even be talking to me.”

  “Too true. And besides the chips there was no Roshan/Ukraine connection. And like I said earlier, the way he was killed doesn’t have the familiar markings of their type of hit. Russians would have put one in his grill and probably just disa
ppeared him.”

  “Public spot, though, smack dab in the middle of the bridge. That’s pretty Russian, isn’t it? Makes a bolder statement.”

  “Debatable.”

  “Cameras on the bridge?”

  “Boston end only. Big Brother’s not welcome in the People’s Republic of Cambridge.”

  And I am with them 100 percent. Next thing you know Boston will rig cameras onto every street corner and my mailbox will start blooming radioactive-colored moving violations for riding on sidewalks and cutting up one-way streets.

  “We looked through the Boston tape and there wasn’t anything there. As for Namestnikov, from what we can tell, he doesn’t own any property here. Doesn’t appear to be on that level yet or he’s done a good job concealing it. Anyhow, now we can’t find him or Katanya. It’s like they were never here.”

  So who threw the Molotov cocktail last night?

  “Is Tehran considered a legitimate target?”

  “You’re talking to the wrong guy, Zesty. All I know is after last night Wells requested a uniform to park out front of her place, make their presence known.”

  “Where’s she live?”

  “Thacher Street.”

  “That’s the North End,” I say. “How’s the cruiser going to find a parking spot?”

  “It must be a disease.” Brill shakes his head.

  “It’s timing,” I say. “I’m still working on it.”

  “It’s more than that,” Brill counters. Maybe he’s right.

  “So what’s Wells doing now?” I ask.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “He’s not keeping you in the loop? And what was that suspension about again? When’d it kick in?” I take one last stab at it.

  “Nah, I’m not getting into it with you. You so interested, ask the Dynamic Duo. But I’ll tell you, the pair of them together, that’s some bullshit, though.”

  “Okay.” I let it drop. “So what’s with all this?” I throw a thumb behind me to the brownstone.

  “Timing.” Brill shrugs off his cop armor, takes a seat beside me. “The siren song of home. Whatever you want to call it. My uncle passed a while back and left the building to my cousin, Charles. Only, last couple of years he’s been taking equity out of the place, supposed to be fixing it up.…”

  I look at the building, peer up and down the street. It’s the only sore spot on the block. “What he do with the money?”

  “What do you think?” Brill looks at me sideways.

  “I was giving him the benefit of the doubt,” I say, but from well-kept brownstone to derelict in just a couple years suggests drugs or gambling.

  “Tenants started complaining, stopped paying rent after a while and he had a mess of violations, fines piling up. These buildings are solid but they need to be maintained. Roof was leaking. Wiring was old. Tenants had enough, finally moved out. ’Course, then he turned around and rented to people he shouldn’t have and it was all downhill after that. People squatted, started stripping it to its roots, copper wiring, fixtures. I only found out about it because the Precinct Fourteen blues kept getting called by the neighbors. Long story short, those crooks disguised as a bank, Wells Fargo, was about to foreclose and I stepped in. Sold the Newton house in, like, five minutes and here I am. Didn’t Zero tell you?”

  “Tell me what? Nobody tells me shit, obviously.” Brill just sits there grinning at me. “Aw no, you can’t be fucking serious,” I groan.

  “Why not? Friends and family discount.” Brill twitches me a wink. “Your man Sid and the Rabbi there are a trip.”

  “Who?”

  “Did a fine job, too, for a bunch of ex-felons. Anyhow, I don’t have much in the way of value to steal so I figured it was winner-winner-chicken-dinner for me either way. If they ripped me off I’d finally have something on Zero that stuck.”

  “Brilliant,” I say. “You tip them?”

  “I was supposed to tip them?” Brill leans back a little and releases some smoke to hide behind, but I can still see him. And while his mouth isn’t moving, something behind his eyes is. He’d tipped the movers. I’d bet my life on it.

  “Place doesn’t look habitable.” I gaze up at the building. “You actually staying here?”

  “Making do. Joined the Y for showers. Walking that tiny hamster track over the basketball court. Even saw your sorry ass clanking jumpers couple weeks ago.”

  “Must have been an off day,” I say. “Happens about once every leap year.”

  “Right.” Brill looks at his watch again, grumbles an anatomic impossibility under his breath.

  “You expecting someone?”

  “Supposed to have a work crew come in do a couple things.”

  “At this hour?” I say incredulously.

  “Shee-it. The way this city’s going, people working practically round the clock to make it happen.”

  “So what, your crew, they’re on black time?” I say.

  “Zesty, you are one racist motherfucker.” Brill laughs, using the rail to pull himself to his feet. “Though I gotta respect you for being so up-front with it.”

  “I was just kidding.” I smile.

  “I know. So was I. I don’t respect you at all.”

  “Oof.”

  “And anyhow, my guys are Guatemalan. You speak Spanish?”

  “I know trabaja means ‘work,’” I say. “That’s about it.”

  “Yeah, my crew, we talk in hand signals. They’re probably just stuck at their main job up Beacon Hill or maybe found deeper pockets. Either way…” Brill extinguishes his cigar by smudging it into the granite stoop, the ugly mark joining a dozen other stains where he’d obviously done it before, which would necessitate a power wash later. Only I don’t say anything about it. If Brill’s foray into construction is anything like what I experienced trying to fix up my old loft on Thayer Street and make it livable, his project will cost twice as much as he thinks it will and take three times as long to complete.

  “What about it?”

  “What about what?”

  “You don’t look to be in a hurry to go anywhere. In the mood for some trabaja?”

  “For you? Hell no!”

  “Come on, boy. I’m paying cash money under the table. You ever take lead paint off of bricks?”

  “Nope.”

  “I find that hard to believe. I’ve heard your material before.” Brill uses two fingers to form a gun and shoots me dead. “Come on, Zesty. Don’t be so hardheaded. I’ll shine a couple lights, set you up in front of a wall and let’s see what happens.”

  NINE

  Zero’s Zen Moving Company is on Beach Avenue in Somerville, a thin side street in a commercial zone with auto body shops, warehouses, and scrap-metal yards whose footprint keeps shrinking as MIT, Tufts, and Harvard keep buying up property nobody else can afford. There’s an industrial laundry at the northern end of Beach that perpetually kicks out massive clouds of steam that smell like a dog’s peed-on blanket and when the wind blows just right, cotton-thick shrouds drift about the warehouse bricks, transforming the narrow avenue into a spooky film set replete with beggar extras—homeless men and women rattling their scrap-metal-laden shopping carts into and out of the mist.

  The Zen Moving Company garage door is rolled open, the parking bays empty—a good sign—meaning all of Zero’s pirate crews are on the job and out of trouble, at least for the time being. Along the southern wall, Erector Set shelves are stocked with enormous pallets of flattened Zen-logoed cardboard boxes, giant containers filled with straps, bands, blankets, and tools. Portable metal storage bins form the wall directly across, stacked and secured until the owners request delivery to their new digs. Or not. Sometimes people just stop paying the storage fees, choosing a clean break over their old possessions, and are never heard from again.

  Sam Budoff still had his bin with Zero, marked with his name, the roll-top door sporting a fist-size padlock like all the others. Zero provides the locks. The renter receives the only key. They lose it
—and they tend to lose it—Zero charges them an exorbitant fee to clip the lock though he employs a half-dozen guys who could pick the thing in their sleep.

  There’s a weight bench set up in the large room that leads to the back stairs up to Zero’s office, reject couches, chairs, and love seats horseshoed around it as if watching someone lift heavy objects after working all day lifting heavy objects were somehow spectator-worthy. Maybe it is, considering the bar’s stacked with enough iron to suggest the last person who’d been lifting was either Zero, Sid, or King Kong.

  Make no mistake, raw strength in the moving business is crucial, but the sought-after skills are endurance and the patience to manage the stress of the people relocating, having the insight to gauge where the customer is emotionally during this major transition—good times or bad. Nobody moves for nothing; it’s just too much trouble.

  Zero is particularly adept at this, another poker skill spun into positive action, though he rarely jumps in on moves anymore. Same goes for Sid, though most of his time these days is devoted to looking after my father and coordinating the other men who rotate in and out of my dad’s rented Brookline home, providing him with the twenty-four-hour care and supervision he now requires, his Alzheimer’s long ago obliterating his circadian rhythms and rendering sleep mostly obsolete.

  Sid is gentle and infinitely patient with my dad, probably on account of his own experiences with a father who suffered from dementia, though it wasn’t diagnosed as such thirty years ago.

  “It was a race between booze and a fucked-up brain,” Sid once confided in me. “And the booze lost. He would have done us all a favor if he’d chugalugged Drano instead.”

  I remove seventy-five pounds of iron from each side of the bar and lie flat on the bench. I can still smell the diesel exhaust hovering just under the ceiling thirty feet above me, but it doesn’t seem to bother the pigeon that hops along one of the steel beams and swells with a cooing chuckle as it sees what I’m up to.