Boston Noir Read online

  BOSTON NOIR

  BOSTON NOIR

  EDITED BY DENNIS LEHANE

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors' imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  (c) 2009 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Boston map by Sohrab Habibion

  ISBN: 978-1-933354-91-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922932

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

  edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir(India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurelien Masson

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Trinidad Noir, Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana Lopez & Carmen Ospina

  Copenhagen Noir (Denmark), edited by Bo Tao Michaelis

  Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat

  Indian Country Noir, edited by Liz Martinez & Sarah Cortez

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd & John Byrd

  Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Mumbai Noir (India), edited by Altaf Tyrewala

  Orange County Noir, edited by Gary Phillips

  Philadelphia Noir, edited by Carlin Romano

  Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom,

  Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I: FEAR & LOATHING

  LYNNE HEITMAN

  Exit Interview

  Financial District

  DENNIS LEHANE

  Animal Rescue

  Dorchester

  JIM FUSILLI

  The Place Where He Belongs

  Beacon Hill

  PATRICIA POWELL

  Dark Waters

  Watertown

  PART II: SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET

  DANA CAMERON

  Femme Sole

  North End

  BRENDAN DUBOIS

  The Dark Island

  Boston Harbor

  STEWART O'NAN

  The Reward

  Brookline

  JOHN DUFRESNE

  The Cross-Eyed Bear

  Southie

  PART III: VEILS OF DECEIT

  DON LEE

  The Oriental Hair Poets

  Cambridge

  ITABARI NJERI

  The Collar

  Roxbury

  RUSS ABORN

  Turn Speed

  North Quincy

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  TRIBALISM & KNUCKLEHEADS

  No matter what you may hear to the contrary, noir is not a genre defined by fedoras, silver streams of cigarette smoke, vampy femme fatales, huge whitewall tires, mournful jazz playing in the gloomy background, and lots and lots of shadows. Nor is it simply skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy people, a kind of trailer park opera. One could argue that what it is, however, is working-class tragedy. Aristotle, when he defined tragedy, mandated that a tragic hero must fall from a great height, but Aristotle never imagined the kind of roadside motels James M. Cain could conjure up or saw the smokestacks rise in the Northern English industrial hell of Ted Lewis's Get Carter. In Shakespeare, tragic heroes fall from mountaintops; in noir, they fall from curbs. Tragic heroes die in a blaze of their own ill-advised conflation. Noir heroes die clutching fences or crumpled in trunks or, in the case of poor Eddie Coyle, they simply doze off drunkenly in a car and take one in the back of the head before they have a chance to wake up again. No wise final words, no music swelling on the soundtrack.

  Eddie Coyle is a good example here because if there's a more seminal noir novel of the last forty years than The Friends of Eddie Coyle, I don't know of it. And more than just being a seminal noir, it's also the quintessential Boston novel. It captures the tribalism of the city, the fatalism of it, and the outsized humor of people who believe God likes a good laugh, usually at your expense. Boston is a city that produces guys--or, in the city's vernacular, knuckleheads--who once stole the replica of a cow that sat in front of a Braintree steak house. The cow weighed what a car weighed, and yet these knuckleheads had the industry to get it onto a pickup truck, drive it back to South Boston, and deposit it in the middle of Broadway. They did this solely so they could then call the Boston Police Department and ask them to respond to a "beef going down on Broadway."

  In Boston something doesn't simply hurt, it hurts "like a bastid." Pisser is a noun that means something funny, but pissa is an adjective (and sometimes an adverb) that equates unequivocal greatness, although it's often equivocated with wicked, as in, "Big Papi hit a wicked pissa homa against the Yankees. Musta hurt them like a bastid."

  So we have our distinct humor and our distinct accent and our distinct vocabulary. All of which--sadly, possibly--is now endangered by progress. Because one can't ignore that Boston has been beset by a new class war of late, one you'll see reflected in the stories herein. It's a war of gentrification. As the city continues to lose its old-school parochialism and overt immigrant tribalism, it's also losing a lot of its character. Whether that's a bad thing or a good thing is up for debate, but what can't be argued is that it is, in fact, happening. South Boston is no longer dominated by buzz cuts and bar brawls; these days, Charlestown's only "code of silence" pertains to failing to tell people about a new restaurant on Warren Street because you don't want to have to start waiting for a table. The Italian tongues of the North End are being
phased out by voices questioning why there's no Crate & Barrel beside the Paul Revere House. It's a less violent city now than it ever was, but a beiger one too. I have no doubt the old Boston will rear its head with pride and fury for a long time to come, but I admit to feeling loss when I walk through Kenmore Square these days and see only a kind of soft-rock version of what it used to be. That's the paradox of the new Boston--what's lost has, in many cases, been taken; what's left is what people can't sell. Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times, so the changing times instead roll over them.

  Often a noir hero or antihero doesn't die from being rolled over. But he might prefer he had. The Machine frequently leaves him crushed, attenuated, castrated. No art form that I know of rages against the machine more violently than noir. Hip-hop, arguably, but noir refuses to indulge in hip-hop delusions of grandeur or self-aggrandizement. Noir rages without much hope, certainly without romanticism or wish fulfillment.

  But Boston gives noir the strain of humor you never expect, which comes at you from directions you could never predict. The guys who placed that stolen cow in the middle of Broadway would fit perfectly in the pages you're about to read. The journey ranges from a pitch-black discourse on sin in John Dufresne's "The Cross-Eyed Bear" to a haplessly absurd kidnapper in Jim Fusilli's "The Place Where He Belongs," from the deliciously strange relationship between a black divorcee and a white escaped convict in Patricia Powell's "Dark Waters" to Don Lee's chilling meditation on questions of identity and self in "The Oriental Hair Poets," to a carload of knucklehead armed robbers tooling around North Quincy in Russ Aborn's "Turn Speed." And those are just half of the wonderful stories in this collection.

  One of the recurrent themes of noir has always been the search for home. Not home in the physical sense--though that does happen--but in the irrational, emotional sense. The heroes and heroines of noir are usually chasing something they couldn't hold even if they caught up to it. Some part of them understands the futility of this chase even as another part clings to the need for it. This is probably why, if only to alleviate the pain of waiting, they chase something else in the meantime--a lover, a bank job, the murder of an inconvenient spouse. Yet the home being searched for in these pages might be Boston, and the journey to find it--however fruitless that goal may turn out to be--is as rich and varied, as hilarious and sad, and ultimately as engaging as the city itself.

  Dennis Lehane

  Boston, MA

  July 2009

  PART I

  FEAR & LOATHING

  EXIT INTERVIEW

  BY LYNNE HEITMAN

  Financial District

  It had been one of those weird sticky cool summer days in downtown Boston, the kind that are as hot and humid as they're supposed to be until the breeze blows in off the water and all of a sudden it's freezing cold and the air stinks of salt and fish and brine. Sloan hates days that start out one way and then turn into something else. They make it harder to dress for work. She had spent most of last night trying to decide what to wear to the office today. Around 3 a.m., she'd settled on the pink summer-weight St. John knit instead of the blue Tahari because Mother loves the St. John. Says it makes her look svelte. Too bad Mother won't get to see that she's wearing it for her big day. She tugs the skirt up around her waist, but it sags back and settles on her hip bones. This suit has never really fit, and the dark blue Tahari would have hidden the bloodstains better.

  The steady churning of the helicopters grows louder. Sloan flattens against the wall and peeks out into the night from behind one of Trevor's fancy Japanese shades. With the interior lights blazing, all she can see is her own reflection staring back. More than once she has wanted to rip those silly shades from Trevor's windows because who has an office on the thirty-seventh floor and covers up the view? Tonight, as flimsy as they are, she is glad to have them.

  Her stomach cramps hard and doubles her over. She slides to the floor, which is where Trevor lies faceup, staring at the ceiling with the same look of surprise he died with. Sloan had never seen anyone die, not before today, but she's been to plenty of funerals. She always assumed that the way you look in the casket is the way you looked when your life ended. But she's had time to ponder this and it's now making sense to her. Once you're dead, you're dead. The light goes out and there is no time, no spark, no thought or impulse left to change the expression of absolute terror or disbelief or regret--whatever you were feeling the moment the bullet entered your brain and blew half of it out the gigantic hole in the back of your skull.

  Her cell phone erupts in what had been until today her favorite Bach sonata. She taps the earpiece. "You said I had twenty minutes."

  "You do, you do. I'm not trying to rush you. I'm just sayin' it doesn't mean we can't do it in less. Or that we can't spend the twenty minutes talkin'."

  "I need that time. I need to think. I need..." It burns where the earpiece's hook has irritated the layer of soft skin around the top of her ear. These things were never meant to be worn for five straight hours.

  "Talk to me, Sloan. What's going on up there?"

  She wishes she could see her hostage negotiator, but she doesn't know where he is. He can somehow see her, though. She's sure of it. Thinking about him watching over her makes her feel calmer, but he has the frustrating habit of asking the same questions over and over.

  "I think you know, Officer Tarbox, that what's--"

  "When did we switch back to Officer Tarbox?"

  "What's going on in here, Jimmy, is the same thing that's been going on for the past five hours, and you promised me another half hour ten minutes ago."

  "I'll keep my word. You know I will. Have I let you down any? Have I lied to you even once? No. I'm just checking in to see how you are. I want to know that you're okay and that everything's still on track. If we're not talkin', I don't know what's goin' on."

  "You just want to know how Beck is."

  "How is Beck?"

  She glances over at Cornelius Beckwith Nash III, graduate of Exeter, Yale School of Drama, and Harvard Business School; Olympic rowing team alternate and scratch golfer; lead manager on the biggest portfolio of the growth team at Crowninshield Investment Management Company. Yet as impressive as he is, she's not sure any of those experiences have prepared him for being lashed to a chair for five hours with a telephone cord and computer cables. He's also sitting in his own sewage, which can't be comfortable, but it was his own fault for coming into the office to investigate instead of running the other way. He'd soiled his pants almost the second he'd walked in. Between that and Trevor's brains on the wall, the room smells worse than any paddock she's ever been in. But you can put up with anything, Sloan has learned, if you have to. You just can't put up with it forever.

  "Beck is fine."

  "Good. That's good. Can I talk to him?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Because she doesn't want to hear any more about little Max and littler Ian and if she takes off Beck's gag, all he'll do is cry about how his sons need him and how they'll miss him, and she already knows everything she needs to know about little Max and littler Ian. They go to Fessenden, spend summers on Nantucket eating watermelon, and will one day grow up to be strapping blond boys of privilege from the finest business schools who, given the chance, will pass her by. Just as their father had. But she doesn't like it when Officer Jimmy is not happy with her, so she gets up from the floor keeping her knees closed and turned gracefully to the side, heads over to Beck, takes off the earpiece, and holds it in front of him.

  "Make some kind of noise."

  The corners of Beck's mouth are split and caked with blood and dried spit where his $200 Zegna tie-gag is pinching. She knows he can moan--he's been doing it on and off for hours--but right now he seems comatose, frozen with his eyes open.

  She shakes the earpiece. "Do it." But he doesn't and now she has to figure out how to make him. She hates the idea of touching him. The gun would be good for that. It's to
o heavy to carry around, so she keeps putting it down. Right now it's on Trevor's desk. But Beck is reading her mind. Before she even moves, he rolls out a few dry croaks and she wonders if the back of his throat is somehow pasted to the front.

  "See?" She fits the earpiece back on her ear. "He's fine."

  "All right," says Jimmy the officer. "That's good. Now we need to start talkin' about how to resolve this thing. We're at this five...going on six hours here, and you still haven't told me what you want."

  "I was supposed to have half an hour to think about it and you only gave me ten minutes."

  "You know we can't let this thing drag on forever." Only he says forevah. For all the things she likes about Jimmy Tarbox, the one thing that grates is his accent. "Let's talk about how to get you and Beck out of there without anyone else getting hurt. Let's figure this out together."

  Sloan's stomach has settled, which means she can fall back into pacing the comfortable loop that runs between the conference table and the bookshelves, past the leather couch, the grandfather clock, and Beck, behind Trevor's desk, along his wall of photos, and back to the corner where the two walls of windows meet. Trevor is still wearing his raincoat and holding the handle of his soft leather briefcase in his right hand. Falling backwards, his left arm had hooked over one of his conference table chairs and pulled it down on top of him. His right leg is bent underneath him. He looks like a chalk outline. She steps over his head to get back on course.