My office is my house; my house is my office. My Great-aunt Bea left me a three-storey Victorian within walking distance of Harvard Square that does double duty with room to spare. The mortgage is history, all paid off and a good thing, too, because the sky-high property tax more than makes up for it. My last case, the one in which I got shot, took its toll, but the structural damage from the fire has finally been repaired. I repainted the interior walls myself.
I decided to give Miss Prada-bag half an hour, then change into sweats and head over to the gym. I was pouring myself a Pepsi when the bell rang.
Three rings means the doorbell is for Roz, my third-floor tenant, housekeeper, and sometime assistant, a post-punk artist with alien hair, a pierced left nostril, and tattoos in unusual places. When I heard no encore to the single bleat, I put down my glass and reversed my steps.
The woman made no comment as I ushered her down the single step from foyer to living room. I like to think she didn’t notice the sparse decor, but she was probably too well-bred to mention it. I wasn’t too well-bred to take a guess at her age. Thirty, give or take five years, with beautiful skin, the kind that’s never been outdoors without sunscreen and a wide-brimmed hat.
The living room used to have a velvet sofa, a high-backed rocking chair, an Oriental rug—all courtesy of Aunt Bea—but I haven’t gotten around to replacing them. My big rolltop desk was ruined as well, but at least I have a substitute, even if it is a slab of oak that started life as a door. With black legs under one side and a filing cabinet under the other, it’s serviceable, not elegant. For a client chair, there’s a canvas butterfly job on loan from my bedroom.
I invited her to sit.
“I appreciate your time.” She sank gratefully into the chair and then I waited while she opened her mouth, closed it, clasped her hands, and finally came out with, “Your sister is charming.” Earlier I’d noticed her clothes. Now I observed the small neat features in the perfectly oval face, the glossy brown hair, the sprinkle of freckles across the otherwise patrician nose.
“She can be.”
“Such lovely eyes.” Her voice, which was probably pleasant enough when she had control of it, sounded high and tight, almost tinny. “I know I said an hour of your time, but, well, I made a few calls. My attorney speaks well of you.”
I lifted an eyebrow.
“Arthur Goldman says you’re honest and you don’t give up easily.”
I knew Goldman. I wasn’t sure about his honesty, but what the hell, he was a lawyer so it didn’t count. If he was her lawyer, she numbered her bundle by the millions, not the hundred thousands.
“I want to hire you.”
“To find the person you were asking about at the vet’s office?”
Light glinted off three heavy rings, none of them on the telltale third finger of her left hand. “Listen, I’m not a fool. I’m not given to dramatic displays. I went to the police first, but the officer seemed to think it was none of my business. I really don’t know where to begin—”
“It’s Miss Endicott, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry.” She plunged her hand into the side pocket of her bag, leaned forward, and handed me her card. Thick and creamy, with raised dark print, it said Dana Renee Endicott, and hadn’t come from the cut-rate printer with whom I do business. It gave a Beacon Street address, a local phone number, and nothing so vulgar as a place of business. “Call me Dana. Please.” She tried to reposition her slender body comfortably in the sprawling chair and I made a note to replace it sooner rather than later.
“So, who’s missing, Dana?”
“A young woman. Veronica James.”
If I’d been considering taking the case, I’d have scrawled notes on a yellow legal pad. I wasn’t, so I simply listened. “And she is?”
“I suppose Veejay has been my tenant for almost two years, although I don’t think of myself as a landlord. I live on upper Beacon, one of those old brownstones. It’s been in my family for—oh, generations. It’s too big for me, but I haven’t wanted to split it up—and sometimes through charity work, I meet potential tenants—roomers, you might call them. At times, the place is almost a halfway house, but right now, there’s only Veronica. And the dogs.”
Slivers of upper Beacon Street brownstones, converted to condos, go for seven figures, often eight. An Endicott with her own upper Beacon Street manse defined what Bostonians mean when they say “old money.” Coupled with the “charity work” reference, the pricey attorney, and the kind of clothes I can’t afford at rock-bottom reductions in Filene’s Basement, chances were I’d fulfilled a fantasy and encountered a living, breathing philanthropist.
“I met Veronica at a fund-raiser,” she said. “We talked, the way you do at those things, and it turned out she was looking for a place downtown. I trusted her on sight, and I don’t do that with many people.”
Did I look more trustworthy with brown hair rather than red, wearing secretarial garb instead of sweats or jeans? She was silent for so long I thought I’d have to prompt her. I didn’t want to; I like to hear the way people talk, silences and all.
“Maybe I ought to begin with Friday.” I stayed quiet, not wanting to disrupt the pictures behind her faraway brown eyes. “On Friday, I saw her just as I was coming home. She was holding a duffel bag and wearing her backpack, I think, and she waved, and told me she was going to visit her parents, and that she’d be back Sunday night. She knew I was supposed to travel on Monday, knew I was counting on her to take care of the dogs.”
It was Tuesday; if we were talking about last Friday, five days had elapsed.
“I have three dogs, two golden retrievers and a chocolate Lab, and Veronica’s Norwegian elkhound, Tandy, makes four. That’s why I know something’s wrong. Veronica would never have abandoned Tandy.”
Five days in a Beacon Street brownstone with three canine pals didn’t sound like abandonment to me.
She said, “If Veejay’s going away for the weekend, or if I plan to be out of town—I travel quite a bit; I sit on several boards—often I’ll lend her a car. She doesn’t have her own, but she does drive, and I have a Jeep and a car. I was planning to use the Audi, so I offered her the Jeep.”
“She took it?”
“I offered it.”
I nodded and said nothing, but I was thinking that the cops must have gotten a charge out of that one.
“I haven’t seen or spoken to her since. I had to cancel my trip to Baltimore. I tried to file a missing-persons report, and I know what the policeman said is true—she’s a grown-up; she can go where she likes—and I don’t begrudge her the Jeep, but she would have called. And she would never have left Tandy behind.” The woman bit her lip and went silent.
I waited, but this time she’d turned to stone and I had to prompt. “Is there anything else?”
“Several things. I called her parents. I’m—I snooped,” she said emphatically. “I don’t feel good about it. I—Veronica left her date book—there are addresses in it, and phone numbers.”
“Smart move,” I said reassuringly. “Exactly what I would have done. Called her parents.”
“She hadn’t been there.”
“Changed her mind?”
“Hadn’t been expected.” Dana stared down at her manicured nails. “I know. You’re thinking that if she lied about where she was going, she might have lied about how long she’d be gone.”
I was thinking that she might be having such a good time, she’d lost track of it.
“Her parents … Her mother. I don’t know. She seemed so odd, so vague. I couldn’t connect with her at all.”
I nodded.
“And then, well, I checked Veronica’s appointments. She didn’t write much down, and then a lot of it I didn’t understand. But she did have an appointment with Aronoff last Friday. I guess she didn’t show up.”
“But you saw her after that.”
“Well, yes, but this whole week was blank, and I thought she might have said something, talked to someone, mentioned her plans—You can see I’m floundering here.”
“Does Veronica have a boyfriend?” I asked.
Dana shrugged.
“Does she date a lot?”
“If you mean is she out all hours, I don’t keep tabs on her. But she impressed me as a steady, reliable person.”
Who disappears with vehicles not her own. I should have stopped asking questions, fobbed her off with a bland reassurance, or sent her to somebody else, but I was curious. If I hadn’t been working for Eddie, I’d have been downright intrigued. “Do her parents live far away?”
“It could have been an impromptu visit, a sudden decision to go see them, is that what you mean? They’re north of the city. Near Lowell. Tewksbury, I think. Do you think she might have had some kind of accident? It’s not an old Jeep, but it’s broken down before. She doesn’t have a cell phone.”
There’s not a lot of deserted highway between here and the New Hampshire border. If she’d driven into a ditch someone would have noticed. Still, there are ponds, frozen ponds this time of the year. They’re bleak and cold and sometimes call out to the would-be suicide.
“Was she depressed?” I asked.
“God, no. I don’t think so. Do you think I ought to call hospitals? I mean, she might have gotten into an accident. She could be hurt. I—I’m usually competent. I handle crises; I don’t fall apart. And now I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried the police. What am I supposed to do? Put her picture on a milk bottle? Hang posters on trees as if she were a lost pet?”
“Slow down. Take a deep breath.”
She made a visible effort to pull herself together. “I’ll pay you to find her, whatever it costs, whatever it costs and more. A bonus. Anything. I’m worried that something terrible has happened, something vile.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-one.”
I remember twenty-one. Working on a divorce, my parents dead. My soon-to-be-ex-husband probably gave up wondering where I spent my nights. Wasted on cocaine, he probably never noticed I was gone.
The rich woman’s tenant could be off on a one-night stand that turned into a dirty weekend that blossomed into a full-fledged affair. If so, she wouldn’t thank anyone for reminding her that she had obligations in the real world. The tenant could have stolen the landlady’s car. The cops might not encourage a missing persons beef on a woman who’d taken off under her own steam with packed bags, but they’d file a stolen car report quickly enough.
On the other hand, unlikely things happen. Maybe this Veejay, this Veronica James, was the rare street-crime victim, snatched at random, luckier than most in that she knew someone willing to start the machinery in motion, an angel eager to foot the bill.
If I’d been planning to take the case, I’d have filled pages of my legal pad with information about Veronica James, from her middle name to her current job, her hobbies, her friends. As it was, I started wondering whether I could handle this case and Eddie’s stuff as well. The thing about working for Eddie, I had fairly regular hours, and early ones, too. I don’t need much sleep. It was tempting. The woman looked good for some serious dough.
“Want my honest opinion?” The phone rang before I got a chance to find out whether she did or not. If I’d been working for her, I’d have let the machine pick up. But I already had a job, so I answered and got an earful of Happy Eddie. I gestured excuses to the elegant woman in the butterfly chair, and carried the receiver into the kitchen for a little privacy.
“So, Eddie, what am I looking for?”
“It’s kinda routine.”
“Come on. I haven’t been with you long enough to do routine. Nothing around the Dig looks routine to me.”
He hesitated, more uneasy with this assignment than he’d been with the others, more uneasy and less forthcoming.
“Eddie,” I said. “Give.”
“Look, you oughtta know, I ain’t neutral on this one. I’ve known Gerry Horgan mosta his life, knew his dad. By me, the Horgans are the kinda people give builders a good name. I think what the IG’s got hold of here is some jerk tryin’ to black their eye, ya know? Jealousy. Business shit. Who knows? They’re up for new contracts, so some asshole tries to screw them over on the hotline.”
Back when the inspector general was getting terrible press, his office initiated a special Dig-fraud hotline for the general public, made a big fuss about it. You call; we investigate.
“Caller says stuff’s walking off the Horgan site,” Eddie went on.
“Petty theft? That wouldn’t necessarily involve the principals.”
“It would make them look bad, like they don’t know what’s going on under their noses.”
“No ID, I suppose?”
“Didn’t leave a number. But he said he might call back.”
Designed to encourage whistle-blowers, the hotline also enables anonymous cranks. Rewards are offered for information leading to arrests. No names required, but most callers give an identifying seven-digit number they’ll need to repeat if and when the time comes to collect. Sometimes no identifying number is given. The IG likes to think such callers operate from the noblest motives. Me, I wondered whether the Horgans had done any firing lately.
“It’s a complaint and we gotta follow up,” Eddie said.
“And Horgan just happened to need a secretary? He fire his? She make the complaint?”
“Caller’s definitely a guy.”
“So much for that.”
“Carlotta?” Eddie sucked in a deep breath. “I was wonderin’. Maybe you could help me out here.”
There was something in his voice that made me lean against the kitchen counter and brace myself.
“This ain’t about the Horgans. It’s more a general thing you could maybe find out for me. Ya know, where there’s heavy construction, there’s rumors. About, ya know, the mob, about, like, uh, mob involvement.”
Here it comes, I thought, and suddenly I knew with cool certainty why the bastard had hired me. Because I used to be with a guy named Sam Gianelli. Used to. And the Gianelli name is so identified with the Boston mob that the fact that my lover—ex-lover—Sam Gianelli, youngest son of mob underboss Anthony Gianelli, has never been a player, never been a North End soldier, is something nobody, but nobody believes.
“You could maybe just keep your ears open,” Eddie muttered.
I punched the button to cut the connection, took a deep breath, drank a glass of cold water. Then I went back to my living-room office and enthusiastically accepted Dana Endicott’s case. If Eddie hadn’t pissed me off I might not have taken it. But I figured it this way: He didn’t tell me everything when he hired me. Okay. So I wouldn’t tell him everything, either. And a little high-priced moonlighting would go a long way toward dispelling my anger. I’ve never been a Mafia moll and I don’t like being taken for one.