I met Happy Eddie on the second floor of Faneuil Hall just before noon the next day. The rectangular room was dark and hushed, the balconies swagged with tri-colored bunting, the small wooden stage flanked by the flag of the Commonwealth and the Stars and Stripes. The high-backed seats, more like church pews than auditorium chairs, were empty except for the one in which I sat. The noise of shoppers filtered up from below, the ching-ching of electronic cash registers.
Outside, high puffs of cloud dotted the bright sky of a clear winter’s day. It hadn’t rained in the past twenty-four hours, but I’d skirted puddles on the pavement, the residue of the flooding operation. Icy water had erupted in such a sudden rush that even a suicidal attempt to detonate the explosives had failed. Two men in addition to Jason O’Meara aka Kendall Heywood had emerged, gasping and soaked, from the storage shed on the Horgan site to be taken into federal custody without a shot fired.
I’d chained the door of the tiny apartment, hadn’t budged till Leonard Wells’s booming voice sounded the all-clear. I never took my eyes or my gun off the man on the floor until after he’d been surrounded and cuffed. When I finally realized I could lower my weapon and my guard, I thought Wells might have to oil my joints like Dorothy did for the Tin Man. Spent, I sank into a chair near the windows. The blinds were up, the faded curtains open. A seagull veered over a panoramic view of the roofs of old and new Boston, church spires and weathervanes, clock towers and skyscrapers, the distant gleam of the ocean. High-powered binoculars rested on the sill.
A brief search of the apartment yielded three rifles, two automatics, a box of grenades. I was grateful I hadn’t known about the grenades. O’Day stood at attention like a soldier, refusing even to give his name.
A federal smoke screen quickly engulfed all proceedings. Yes, the FBI had taken several fugitives into custody. The MBTA offered sincere apologies for the derailment that had forced them to temporarily shut down Government Center Station. Jaded Bostonians were hardly surprised by the closing and shocked by the apology. Unexpected groundwater near Commercial Avenue and State Street would cause yet another delay in the Dig’s much-delayed schedule.
Eddie looked his age and more, climbing the stairs slowly, wearing a rumpled charcoal suit. His eyebrows lifted when he saw me, but he didn’t speak till he’d seated himself, tugging at an imaginary crease in his pants.
“Hey,” he said, “you okay?”
“Yeah. Tired. I thought I’d sleep for a week, but I can’t seem to.” I kept having the same dream: First the fire was at my house, a copycat inferno from my last case, and then its location would shift in the magical way of dreams and the fire would be here, in this building, and I could see the blazing spire tilt from the window in O’Day’s flat, see people running, hear them scream.
“Gerry’s clear,” Eddie said. “He didn’t shove the guy off the scaffold.”
“O’Day confess, or Kendall Heywood?”
“They found traces of blood in the storage shed that hid the tunnel entrance. Looks like Fournier never left the site the night he died.”
“But somebody punched his time card.”
“O’Day hasn’t admitted it yet, isn’t saying shit. But Gerry’s covered. Alibi, and a good one. Not that I’d a blamed him, what I know now. Makes me wonder what’s the good of the friggin’ hotline, what kinda creeps use it for what kinda reasons.”
“You thought there was something fishy about the call from the get-go, Eddie. Give yourself credit.”
He shifted on the seat. “You thought I was on the take.”
“Eddie, I—”
“Maybe I was, a little bit, not for money, ya know, but for friendship. Leo Horgan and I go back and I’d a hated to lose a friend over something like this. Hard to keep friends when you’re always looking at ’em, judging ’em.”
Tell me about it, I thought. If Eddie hadn’t pushed me, I might have avoided seeing the change in Sam. I would have tried hard not to notice.
“You’ll be ready for another assignment, say, Monday?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“Bridge?”
“Lower, Eddie. Solid ground.”
Dana Endicott had entered from the other side of the hall, looking small and lost. I’d been keeping an eye out for her. I waved and Eddie’s eyes followed.
“You didn’t tell me you were working for somebody else,” he said, “but seems like it worked out.”
A dog that didn’t come to the site anymore, a secretary worried she might have injured it, my little sister demanding a finder’s fee for landing me a client. Their plan could so easily have worked, a building shattered, people killed and maimed. I sucked in a deep breath. The dream was a dream, the wooden bench was solid.
Dana wore a slim cranberry-colored skirt and matching jacket under her long black coat, mid-heeled pumps. She looked like a wealthy banker after a Wall Street crash, exhausted, depleted. She shook hands with Eddie, managing a weak smile until he excused himself and his footsteps faded on the stairs.
“Veronica?” I asked.
It had been touch and go all night, nine hours in the operating room, and afterward sudden bleeding that had required an immediate return to the operating theater, a second three-hour session. Walters’s bullet had missed her spine by less than three-eighths of an inch.
“Alive,” she said. “I sit and talk to her when they let me. I know she probably can’t hear me but I keep talking, telling her Tandy’s okay, Krissi’s okay, Krissi’s dog is okay. And I hired a lawyer. Not the family lawyer. The man you suggested.”
“Haggerty. He’s good.”
“I’d rather hire a woman.”
“Haggerty’s good.”
“I can’t stay. They say she’ll pull through, but—I wanted to thank you, but I want to be there.”
“I’ll drop by later.”
“Do you think she’ll have to go to prison?”
I shrugged. Once it gets to a jury you never know.
“Would you testify? If it comes to that?”
I could say she’d been a prisoner when I found her. I could describe the look in her eyes when Walters raised his rifle, her refusal to watch Krissi Horgan die. I nodded.
When she stood to go, Dana shook my hand warmly.
As far as the Feds knew, Walters’s dying words, belatedly understood, tipped me that O’Day was involved. After all, returning a kid to her parents, the best job a PI gets, is no good if the kid comes back to a broken home, and Gerry Horgan hadn’t impressed me as the kind to forgive and forget. I hoped Liz Horgan would get her kinks out, but I wasn’t about to detail them for the FBI. Nobody deserves that. And Walters wouldn’t deny the tale.
I watched Dana disappear down the stairs to mingle with the shoppers and the sightseers and the working stiffs who had twenty minutes for lunch.
In 1805, Charles Bulfinch, leading architect of his day, doubled the width and height of Faneuil Hall without changing its basic design, increasing the number of stalls from three to seven. The “Bulfinch interior,” installed on the second floor, has hardly changed since. The third floor holds the museum and armory of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, an outfit dating back to 1638, their memorabilia, their charters, their weapons, mementoes of the rabble-rousing days when the oratory spread from the hall to the streets and fanned revolutionary flames.
Due to the unfortunate groundwater backup, the Patriot’s Day forum had been postponed, rescheduled. I thought I might attend, occupy a dark wooden bench, listen for echoes of the ancient fire-breathing speeches.
A group of schoolchildren, fourth-graders, maybe fifth, streamed in, unbuttoning their coats, dropping gloves and hats, giggling as their harried teacher ordered them to sit. A uniformed Park Ranger approached to begin the half-hourly historical talk, and I stood.
“Hey, I don’t mean to chase you away.” The ranger, a gap-toothed twenty-year-old, smiled.
“I’ll come back another time.”
I had kind of a date. I’d been offered a tour of the still-draining tunnel by Leonard Wells, alias Leland Walsh. There were rats, he’d promised.