A Drink Before the War Read online

  Simone said, “You take anything from my fridge?”

  “No,” I said, “but I think I may have mistaken it for the toilet last night. I was really tired. Do you keep vegetables in the toilet?”

  She brushed past me into the kitchen. Jenna looked at me and shook her head. She said, “Bet you were real popular in the second grade.”

  “Good humor has no age limit,” I said, and she rolled her eyes.

  Simone had a job, and I’d debated all night whether I should let her go to it. In the end I figured Simone hadn’t shown any homicidal tendencies toward her sister that I’d noticed, so I was pretty sure she’d keep her mouth shut.

  As we stood on the porch watching her drive off, I said, “Does this Socia guy know about Simone?”

  Jenna was working her way into a light cardigan even though the temperature was already on a steady cruise toward the seventies at eight in the morning. She said, “He met her. Long time ago. In Alabama.”

  “How long since she moved up north?”

  She shrugged. “Two months.”

  “And Socia definitely doesn’t know she’s here?”

  She looked at me like I was drugged. “We both be dead now, Socia knew that.”

  We walked to my car and Jenna looked at it as I opened the door. “Never grew up totally, did you, Kenzie?”

  And I’d once thought the car would impress people.

  The drive back was as boring as the one up. I had Pearl Jam’s Ten playing, and if Jenna minded, she didn’t say anything. She didn’t talk much, period, just stared out at the road and kneaded the bottom of her cardigan with her thin fingers when they weren’t occupied with a cigarette.

  As we neared the city, the Hancock and Prudential buildings rising up in pale blue to greet us, she said, “Kenzie.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever feel needed?”

  I thought about it. “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Who by?”

  “My partner. Angie.”

  “You need her?”

  I nodded. “Sometimes, yeah. Hell, yeah.”

  She looked out the window. “You best hold on to her then.”

  Rush hour was in full swing by the time we got off 93 near Haymarket, and it took us close to half an hour to move the mile up onto Tremont Street.

  Jenna’s safety-deposit box was in the Bank of Boston on Tremont, across from the Boston Common at the Park Street corner. The Common runs back in a mall of cement here, past two squat buildings that serve as the Park Street T-station entrances, past a gaggle of vendors and street musicians and newspaper hawkers and winos. Crowds of businessmen and women and politicians walk briskly up the walkways where the Common turns green again and rises in a slope to the steep steps that climb to Beacon Street, the State House towering overhead, its gold dome looking down on the minions.

  It’s impossible to park on Tremont or even idle there for more than thirty seconds. A platoon of meter maids, imported from the female Hitler Youth shortly after the fall of Berlin, roam the street, at least two to a block, pit bull faces on top of fire hydrant bodies, just waiting for someone stupid enough to stall traffic on their street. Say, “Have a nice day,” to one of them and she’ll have your car towed for being a smart-ass. I turned onto Hamilton Place, behind the Orpheum Theater, and parked in a loading zone. We walked the two blocks to the bank. I started to walk in with her, but she stopped me. “An old black lady going into a bank with a big young white boy. What they going to think?”

  “I’m your gigolo?”

  She shook her head. “They going to think you’re the law, escorting the nigger who got caught doing something. Again.”

  I nodded. “All right.”

  She said, “I didn’t go through all this just so I could run on you now, Kenzie. I could have climbed out a window last night, that was the case. So, whyn’t you wait across the street?”

  Sometimes you got to trust people.

  She went in alone, and I crossed Tremont and stood near Park Street Station, in the middle of the mall, the shadow of Park Street Church’s white spire falling on my face.

  She wasn’t in there long.

  She came out, saw me, and waved. She waited for a break in the traffic then came across the street. Her stride was full, her purse held tightly in her hand as she came across the mall. Her eyes had brightened, brown marble with flames glowing in the center, and she looked much younger than the picture I’d been given.

  She came up close to me and said, “What I got here is a little part of it.”

  I said, “Jenna—”

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s something, believe me. You’ll see.” She glanced up at the State House, then looked back at me. “You prove you’re ready to help me on this, show what side you’re on, and I give you the rest. I give you…” Her eyes lost their fire and filled; her voice stuck like a worn clutch. “I give you…the rest,” she managed. I hadn’t known her for more than twelve hours, but I had the feeling that whatever “the rest” was, it was bad. Tearing her apart from the inside out.

  She smiled then, a nice soft one, and touched her hand to my face. She said, “I think we’re going to turn out all right, Kenzie. Maybe the two of us get some justice while we’re at it.” The word “justice” came off her tongue as if she were trying to taste it.

  I said, “We’ll see, Jenna.”

  She reached into her purse and handed me a manila envelope. I opened it and extracted an eight-by-eleven black-and-white photograph. It was slightly grainy, as if it had been transferred from another type of film, but it was clear. There were two men in the photograph, standing by a cheap chest and mirror, drinks in their hands. One of them was black, the other, white. The black guy I didn’t know. The white guy was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and black socks. His hair was brown, the gray that would consume it in a tin sheath, still a few years off. He was smiling tiredly, and the picture seemed old enough that possibly he’d only been Congressman Paulson at that point.

  I said, “Who’s the black guy?”

  She looked at me and I could tell she was sizing me up. The wet ass hour, as it were, deciding if she could trust me. I felt like we were in a pocket—the crowds of people hurrying past us, not really there but existing on a matte screen behind us, like in an old movie.

  Jenna said, “What’re you in this for?”

  I was considering my answer when something familiar moved out of the screen to our right, heading for our pocket, and I recognized it as if I was underwater—a blue baseball cap with yellow stitching.

  I said, “Get down,” and had my hand on Jenna’s shoulder when Blue Cap set himself into his stance and a hammering metallic chatter drilled the morning air. The first burst of bullets slammed through the front of Jenna’s chest as if it wasn’t there, and I ducked as they blew past my head, still trying to pull her down as her chest jerked forward at all sorts of angles. Blue Cap had his finger pulled back on the trigger and the gun at full auto, the metal stitching slicing from Jenna’s body to the cement, coming around in an arc for me. The crowd in the mall had turned into a stampede, and as I cleared my gun from its holster, someone trampled my ankle. Jenna’s body crashed down on top of mine, and cement chips shot off the ground into my face. He was firing more methodically now, trying to get around Jenna’s body to hit mine. In a moment, he’d just begin firing into her body again, and the bullets would pass through it as if it were paper and punch their way into mine.

  Through the blood in my eyes, I could see him raising the Uzi up over his head, then bending it in at an angle, the muzzle a white flame. The line of bullets jackhammered toward my forehead and stopped suddenly in a white cloud of cement dust. The slim clip dropped from the gun toward the pavement and he had another one slammed home before it hit the ground. He pulled back on the bolt and I leaned out from under Jenna’s body and fired.

  The magnum went off with a harsh whoomp and he flipped into the air sideways as if he’d been broadsided by a truck. He came
back down onto the pavement and bounced, the gun skittering out of his hand. I rolled Jenna off me, wiped her blood from my eyes, and watched him try to crawl to his Uzi. It was eight feet away and he was having a hard time covering the distance because his left ankle was almost completely obliterated.

  I walked over and kicked him in the face. Hard. He groaned and I kicked him again, and he went out.

  I crossed back to Jenna and sat on the cement in a growing puddle of her blood. I lifted her off the pavement and held her in my arms. Her chest was gone and so was she. No last words, just death, splayed out like a broken doll at the edge of the Boston Common at the beginning of a new day. Her legs were askew, and the curious vultures were coming back for a second look now that the shooting was over.

  I pulled her legs together and tucked them under her. I looked at her face. It told me nothing. Another death. The more I see, the less I know.

  No one needed Jenna Angeline anymore.

  11

  Like the Hero, I made the front page of both newspapers. Some rookie photographer was in the crowd when the shooting started, and once he’d cleaned the mess out of his underpants, he came back.

  I’d walked back to Blue Cap by this time and picked up his Uzi by the sling. I slid it over my shoulder and squatted down beside him, my head down, magnum in my hand. That’s when the photographer took his shots. I never noticed him. One shot showed me squatting by Blue Cap, a strip of green and the State House beyond us. In the extreme right foreground, almost out of focus, was Jenna’s corpse. You could barely notice her.

  The Trib carried it in the bottom left corner of page one, but the News plastered it completely over the front page with a hysterical black headline across the Statehouse—HERO P.I. IN MORNING GUNFIGHT!!! How they could print “hero” with Jenna’s corpse lying in plain view was just beyond me. I guess LOSER P.I. IN MORNING GUNFIGHT didn’t have the same ring.

  The police showed up around that time and hustled the photographer behind a hastily set up sawhorse. They took my gun and the Uzi and gave me a cup of coffee and we went over it. And over it.

  An hour later I was at headquarters on Berkeley Street and they were deciding whether to book me or not. They read me my rights in English and Spanish while they figured out what to do.

  I know quite a few cops, but none I recognized seemed to be taking part in this investigation. The two guys who had been assigned to me looked like Simon and Garfunkel on a bad day. Simon’s name was Detective Geilston, and he was short, neatly dressed in dark burgundy pleated trousers, a light blue oxford with a roll in the collar and cream crisscross stripes. He wore a burgundy tie with a subtle blue diamond pattern. He looked like he had a wife and kids and CD accounts. He was Good Cop.

  Bad Cop was Garfunkel, or Detective Ferry as they called him around the station. He was tall and lanky and wore a drab brown two-piece suit that was too short in the arms and legs. Underneath he wore a wrinkled white shirt and a dark brown knit tie. Mr. Fashion. His hair was strawberry blond, but a wide bare patch ran up the middle now and the bushy remains shot out from the sides of his head like a cleaved afro.

  They’d both been friendly enough at the crime scene—giving me cups of coffee and telling me to take my time, take it slow, relax—but Ferry started getting more and more pissed off the more I kept answering his questions with, “I don’t know.” He got downright nasty when I refused to tell him who had hired me or exactly what I was doing with the deceased. Since I hadn’t been booked yet, the photograph was folded and tucked into the ankle of one of my high-tops. I had a feeling what would happen if I gave it up—a formal inquiry, maybe a few nasty details about Senator Paulson’s lifestyle, maybe nothing at all. But definitely no arrests, no justice, no public acknowledgment of a dead cleaning lady who’d only wanted to be needed.

  If you’re a private detective, it helps to be nice to cops. They help you out from time to time and vice versa and that’s how you build contacts and keep business thriving. But I don’t tolerate animosity very well, especially when my clothes are saturated with someone else’s blood and I haven’t eaten or slept in twenty-four hours. Ferry was standing with one foot on the chair beside me in the interrogation room, telling me what was going to happen to my license if I didn’t start “playing ball.”

  I said, “‘Playing ball’? What, do you guys have a police cliché manual or something? Which one of you says, ‘Book him, Danno’?”

  For the thirtieth time that morning Ferry sighed deeply through his nostrils and said, “What were you doing with Jenna Angeline?”

  For the fiftieth time that morning, I said, “No comment,” and turned my head as Cheswick Hartman walked through the door.

  Cheswick is everything you could want in an attorney. He’s staggeringly handsome, with rich chestnut hair combed straight back off his forehead. He wears eighteen-hundred-dollar custom-made suits from Louis and he rarely wears the same one twice. His voice is deep and smooth like twelve-year-old malt and he has this annoyed look that he gets just before he buries an opponent with a barrage of Latin phrases and flawless elocution. Plus, he has a really nifty name.

  Under normal circumstances, I’d have to have won the lottery to afford Cheswick’s retainer, but a few years ago, just when he was being considered for partnership in his firm, his sister, Elise—a sophomore at Yale—developed a cocaine problem. Cheswick controlled her trust fund, and by the time Elise’s addiction had blossomed into an eight-ball-a-day habit, she’d depleted her yearly allowance and still owed several thousand more to some men in Connecticut. Rather than tell Cheswick and risk his disappointment, she made an arrangement with the men in Connecticut, and some pictures were taken.

  One day Cheswick got a phone call. The caller described the photos and promised they’d be on the desk of the firm’s senior partner by the following Monday if Cheswick didn’t come up with a high five-figure sum by the end of the week. Cheswick was livid. It wasn’t the money that bothered him—his family fortune was huge—it was the advantage they’d taken of both his sister’s problem and his love for her. So concerned was he for his sister that not once during our first meeting did I get the feeling it was the jeopardy to his job that angered him, and I admired that.

  Cheswick got my name from a guy he knew in legal aid, and gave me the money to deliver with the express demand that I bring back all photos and negatives, and an absolute assurance that this would stop here and now. Elise’s debt, I was to tell these men, was paid in full.

  For reasons I can’t even remember anymore, I brought Bubba along for the ride when I went down to Connecticut. After finding out that the blackmailers were a rogue group with no connections, no real muscle, and absolutely no juice with any politicians, we met two of them in a Hartford high-rise. Bubba held one guy by his ankles out a twelfth floor window while I negotiated with the guy’s partner. By the time Bubba’s victim had voided himself, his partner had decided that yes, one dollar was a very fair settlement price. I paid him in pennies.

  Cheswick has been returning the favor to me by representing me gratis ever since.

  He raised his eyebrows at the blood on my clothes. Very quietly he said, “I’d like a moment alone with my client, please.”

  Ferry crossed his arms and leaned in toward me. “So fucking what,” he said.

  Cheswick yanked the seat out from under Ferry’s foot. “So fucking get out of the room now, Detective, or I’ll slap this department with enough false arrest, harassment, and unlawful detainment citations to keep you in court until long after you’ve reached your twenty.” He looked at me. “Have you been Mirandized?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course he’s been fucking Mirandized,” Ferry said.

  “You’re still here?” Cheswick said, reaching into his briefcase.

  Geilston said, “Come on, partner.”

  Ferry said, “Hell no. Just because—”

  Cheswick was looking at the both of them flatly, and Geilston had his hand on Ferry’s arm. He sa
id, “We don’t mess with this, Ferry.”

  Cheswick said, “Listen to your partner, Detective.”

  Ferry said, “We’ll meet again.” Professor Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes.

  Cheswick said, “At your inquest, no doubt. Start saving now, Detective. I’m expensive.”

  Geilston gave one last tug on Ferry’s arm and they left the room.

  I said, “What’s up?” expecting he had something private to tell me.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said. “I just do that to show them who’s boss. It gives me a woody.”

  “Swell.”

  He looked at my face, at the blood. “You’re not having a good day, are you?”

  I shook my head slowly.

  His voice lost its levity. “Are you all right? Really? I’ve heard snippets of what happened, but not much.”

  “I just want to go home, Cheswick. I’m tired and I got blood all over me, and I’m hungry, and I’m not in the best of moods.”

  He patted my arm. “Well, I have good news from the DA then. From everything he’s heard, they have nothing to charge you with. You are to consider yourself released pending further investigation, don’t take any sudden trips, blah, blah, blah.”

  “My gun?”

  “They keep that, I’m afraid. Ballistic tests, etcetera.”

  I nodded. “Figures. Can we leave now?”

  “We’re gone,” he said.

  He took me out the back entrance to avoid the press, and that’s when he told me about the photographer. “I confirmed it with the captain. The man definitely took pictures of you. He strings for both papers in town.”

  I said, “I saw them hustling him out of there, but it didn’t register.”