HESTER
Hester jaywalked across the street and glanced over her shoulder. Angela gave a thumbs-up, and Hester pulled open the heavy oak door and stepped into the warmth of the pub, which was still packed with the Thursday night dinner crowd. The smell of grills and fryers and beer taps wafted over her as she scanned the bar area for “Charming Bob” O’Duggan, whom it took a moment to locate. In the last decade, Bob’s midriff had expanded, and his hairline had receded, but his eyes still sparkled blue. Hester took a seat two stools down from him. “Whisky, neat,” she said to the bartender. “Make it a double. French fries too.”
The bartender left the tab in a glass. Hester drank down half the whisky, in part for show, and in part for liquid courage. She was used to questioning people, to getting into their heads, but the thought of interrogating an interrogator thrilled her, even as it filled her with dread. Bob would see right through her if she wasn’t careful. She waited for the fries to arrive, before saying, “Keeps me from getting blotto,” right into her glass.
Bob took her in at once. He had the skills to know she wanted to start a conversation, and she hoped he was self-aware enough to know it wouldn’t be about sex.
He smiled. A rosy splash covered his nose and cheeks, but shadows of his legendary charm still showed. “I can help you get blotto,” he said. “What’re you drinking?”
“Johnnie Walker.”
“Red or black?”
“Blue, if you’re buying.”
“We’ll stick with red.” He nodded at the bartender, who poured another shot.
“You a cop?” Hester asked.
“That obvious?”
“I can spot ’em. My father was a cop.” Before she even knew the words had formed, they spilled out of her mouth. “Maguire. About your age. Did you know him?”
“You couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a Maguire at the station,” Bob said. “What’s his first name?”
Hester was shocked to suddenly realize she didn’t know Morgan’s father’s name. “He lived in Southie,” she said.
Bob had had a few already, and he was out of practice, but his eyes cleared with her evasion.
“That don’t help,” he said.
“He was shot on the job. When I was eleven.” Hester did the math in her head. “In 1993.”
Bob finished his beer and signaled for another. “I knew him,” he said. “Good guy. Lots of kids. He had jet black hair, like you, but his wife was a redhead. All those kids were carrottops, not a black Irish in the lot.”
Hester laid her phone on the bar, ready to text Angela.
“You don’t look like you grew up in Southie,” Bob continued. “Not the old Southie. And besides, Steve died in ninety-four, not ninety-three. Get your facts straight.”
Steve. Steve Maguire. Hester saved that one for later. “I’m being nosy,” she said. The truth could be a tool in the most surprising times. “My husband, he’s the Maguire. He doesn’t like to talk about where he grew up. I look for tidbits whenever I meet a cop who may have worked with his father. You can give me more of the story than an obituary.”
Bob studied his glass, and Hester wondered if she’d lost him.
“I didn’t know the guy that well,” he said. “He was one of those cops who wanted to make detective, but, you know, the force changed. . . .”
He paused, letting Hester fill in the gaps herself. Women, people of color. Cops, like Angela, who were on the outside.
“I made detective right before the door closed,” Bob said. “I think Steve kept hoping his turn would come.”
“What happened to him?”
“Now you’re testing my memory. I don’t think they caught the guy who did it. It happened in Roxbury.”
Another pause to allow Hester to fill in her own details. To some people Roxbury meant home. To certain people, to the Bob O’Duggans of this world, it was shorthand for dangerous.
“Neighborhoods change,” she said. “I mean, look at Southie.”
“Yuppies.”
“I work in Jamaica Plain. Over on Amory.”
“You wouldn’t have seen me there after dark, not till recently,” Bob said, in a way that made Hester think of her conversation with Angela in the car, about Stan being on the inside.
Hester was on the inside too—something she often forgot—and she used that status here in a way Angela couldn’t have. “It’s nice now,” she said. “The school has a new campus there.”
Bob seemed to pick up on her lead. “What’re you doing over there?” he asked. “What school?”
“I’m a librarian. At Prescott University. They opened a new building there.”
“That’s not us!” Bob said.
“The place is lame,” Hester said. “The library is a shelf of books, and some days I don’t talk to a student. I’ve been looking for a new job since the day I started.”
“That school always stunk,” Bob said.
Hester let the comment hang between them for a moment. She swirled a wad of fries through ketchup. “You ever met the people who own the place? The Matsons? They’re a piece of work. And I hear things. That they pay off the mayor and have deals with the zoning board. How else could they buy up half the city?”
“It’s more than that,” Bob said.
Hester drank down the last of her whisky. “I should hit the road,” she said.
She went to put on her coat.
“I worked a case with that family,” Bob said. “Saw them up close.”
“The college president is all over the place,” Hester said. “I wish my dad had owned a college. And I hear her mother doesn’t leave the house.”
“Jennifer Matson,” Bob said. “Used to be in the papers all the time, when there were society pages. She was pretty. She and her husband went to all that swanky shit. But that was before. It wouldn’t surprise me if she went off the deep end after everything that happened.”
“With Rachel?”
Bob sobered up.
Instantly.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, swinging off his stool with surprising dexterity and blocking Hester’s exit.
“Back off,” she said.
She’d dealt with enough drunks in her life to handle Charming Bob, and she wasn’t ready, yet, to call in the cavalry. “Tell me about Rachel,” she said. “What happened?”
“You should keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you.”
“Bobby,” the bartender said, “pick on someone your own size.”
“You worked the case,” Hester said. “Cleared it too.”
“Sure, I worked it. And there was nothing to find.”
“If there was something to find, what would you have looked at?”
Bob pulled a few twenties from his wallet and tossed them on the bar. “Take your best guess,” he said, and then sauntered out the door and into the night air like a man trying his best to appear sober.
Hester followed a few moments later.
“Well?” Angela asked.
“Bob’s an angry old man,” Hester said. “Racist. Sexist. All of it. But it went well.”
“Good. When I saw him stumbling off, I thought it had gone another way.”
“Well, April Fool’s,” Hester said. “It went pretty shitty. I think I blew our cover.”