Pedro Gonzalez died in a coffee storehouse, gunned down while he was manning a broom. His killer left no evidence, not even the bullet inside him. He’d cleaned up after himself, collecting the single casing from the one shot it had taken to kill the janitor.
It’s another cold morning, and I’m standing on a bridge on Summer Street. South Station is to my far right, several warehouses on my left, but before me is a vein of water that smells as dirty as it looked. Black. Greasy. The drink reeked rancid as lard in the pantry gone bad. Foot traffic moves behind me and, for a second, I fear what might happen to me when the gent in the suit on his way to work behind me lights the cigarette between his lips. We’ll ride the fireball into the sky together like Icarus and never reach the sun.
The stench was filthy and obnoxious, as was the Harbor, and so was everything around Pedro’s demise. Some clip joint was paying him three bucks an hour, according to the pay stub in his pocket. Better than minimum wage. Most people scored less than that from the daily grind to pay the rent and bills. I figured he worked nights, and the bump in pay represented shift differential or extra pay to look the other way at whatever happened at night on the waterfront. Those kind of arrangements never ended well for the help. Pedro had worked the graveyard shift into the graveyard.
These buildings on my left were built during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and completed before we entered the First World War. You can tell them apart by whether they had windows or not. The more fenestrated the building, the more likely it was used for manufacturing or as a factory. Workers needed something to watch while they slaved at whatever the sweatshop made, and the shop boss probably used the same portals to toss the slackers out to the street below. Human Resources and Workers Comp didn’t exist then. These buildings were timbered and utilized plank floors. Pedro’s building did not.
His building was tall and, from the look of it, fireproof. Whether the frame was steel or reinforced concrete didn’t matter, the giveaway was the building lacked windows. Fewer windows meant fewer openings for fire. Whoever owned the building now had inherited secrecy by day and privacy at night. Nighttime along the water, in this section of Boston where nobody lived, was perfect for all the creatures of the night, whether they were rats or walked upright.
I watched for a while. The place was as dead as Pedro. There was no movement. No commerce. No deliveries, not even from a mailman. Instinct told me that more than coffee was stored inside the building. Lights affixed to the sides pointed to a loading area near the water. The distance between the door and the edge of the pier was short, lucrative, and required a crew to move whatever was inside of those crates of coffee. Someone other than Juan Valdez, the Coffee Man, had come to town. There weren’t enough creamers, sugar packets, or stir-sticks to keep up with the quantity of bean that moved around Pedro’s death scene.
Coffee came in bulk containers by ship, sometimes by plane, but whoever ran this operation wasn’t concerned with cost efficiency. They’d do multiple deliveries, around the clock, under the cover of night. I looked downward and to my right and saw a sliver of Dorchester Ave, which was perfect for the supervisor if he sat inside his car, the heat on and binoculars with night-vision on his dashboard.
JC had shown me photos of the crime scene. There were coffee grounds on the floor, around Pedro Gonzalez, and on his clothes and shoes. He lay dead on a concrete floor. There were no pallets or crates in the frame, so either nothing had been delivered that night, or it’d been moved the same night. When I’d looked at the dead man’s check, it wasn’t FICA that had caught my attention. It was the symmetry of the names for employer and client.
Consolidated Connections paid Pedro, and a line item above all the deductions for state and federal taxes identified the client as Consolidated Coffees.
Consolidated Anything told me enough. Consolidated Connections was either an empty office in Post Office Square, or it was voices and shadows behind pebbled glass and a locked door. Nobody knocked on the door, and nobody answered the phones that never rang.
Consolidated Connections and Consolidated Coffees were like seashells held to each ear. It would take an army of auditors, genealogists, and psychics to hear who owned the two companies.
I look down at the sick water. I think of possibilities, of suspects, and I arrive at one pronoun and two sinister antecedents. Fort Point Channel was north of South Boston, and there lived my fellow Irishmen, and not a one of them in all their triple-deckers was intelligent enough to create dummy companies, or open-minded enough to hire a Hispanic. For the level of sophisticated operation before me, I’d look north, elsewhere, as in the North End, where certain people with lots of vowels in their names liked their coffee short, dark, and strong; their profits, wide and green.
Walking down Summer Street under a sullen sky towards town, I contemplate lunch at the South Street Diner. I checked my watch, and there was a fifty-fifty chance that Delano might’ve claimed our table facing Kneeland Street. Like a Cole Porter song, the joint hopped to the beat, open before-hours and after-hours, seven days a week. Night and Day.
Delano had been a regular since he worked for a newspaper on Harrison Ave. We did make it a point to meet now and then. Delano has known me the longest of anyone in my life, and I’m the one constant in his life. What friends he had, he lost when a trumped-up charge of an improper relationship with a graduate student sabotaged his career. She wasn’t his protégé, and their relationship had been consensual. Appearances and allegations were enough for women to be hanged in Salem, and they had been enough to throw the esteemed professor of Classics out the door.
Delano rebounded, hustled his bustle, and secured a job with Boston’s other newspaper, The Herald. The paper had experienced more name changes than Elizabeth Taylor, but it was the workingman’s rag, and Delano rode a desk and sharpened a red pencil as Assistant Copy Editor. Occasionally he ghosted an article.
I stepped into the diner. The eatery had begun as a boxcar for factory workers in the Leather District and Newspaper Row, and then it became the locus for the theatre crowd, the nexus for gunrunners for the IRA, and the place for guys seen in the movie The Friends of Eddie Coyle, gathered around the table and planning their next misdeed.
Waitresses look up. One of them I’d dated before Bonnie, and we were past my not calling her post-coitus post factum, though she still liked to toss zingers my way, as if they were horseshoes. I took off my jacket.
Moments after I’d ordered coffee, I heard the tinkle of the bell over the door and felt a stiff breeze. In walked Delano, as if he had read Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Men’s Edition. Gone were the topcoat, tweed jacket, shirt, sweater, and bowtie of Mr. Peabody. He looked the part of someone who got up and went around the block, inspired by the latest issue of Runner’s World at the newsstand. He was wearing a nylon tracksuit.
He saw me and raised his hand.
I waited. I understood the appeal. Light on the wallet, unlike tennis and golf, running was democratic, and the price included endorphins for the misery in motion. It was the one fad in recent years that Delano seemed to enjoy—and he had seen his share of them. He’d escaped the crusade to save the environment and had not bought a bike, opting for public transit instead.
Everyone blamed the Hippies for everything. While Delano admired some of their beliefs and traced the inspiration for free love to the utopian community in upstate New York in the last century, he was quick to point out their heroes in social thought also believed in eugenics.
“Shane, what a pleasure.”
“Professor.”
Delano unzipped his jacket. I half-expected steam to escape with the zipper’s descent. He pulled off the headband and sat down, asking the waitress for a cold glass of water and whether the chili was fresh. She said that it was and disappeared to find him a pitcher of ice water.
I asked how he was, and he said that he was enjoying life in his modest apartment over Sylvia’s restaurant. When I asked him how he reconciled soul food with fitness, he said that he ran several times a week and chased away the calories on a rowing machine in his room. As he talked, I watched him remove pills from a small box from his pocket. I was worried that he had some health issues that I was unaware of
“What are those, Professor?”
“A multivitamin, thanks to the sage advice of Dr. Irwin Stone, and these other ones are for a man of a certain age.” He identified them, from left to right. “Children’s aspirin for the heart and Di-Gel.”
“Di-Gel?” I said.
“That pill is for gas, since I plan to have chili.”
“Two-for-one. You save the environment on gas emissions, and you’re kind to whoever is behind you for the run back to the office. Anything else?”
He tapped his side again, “Almost forgot, Alka-Seltzer.”
The waitress and former fling stepped up to our table. She poured us two waters and asked us for our order. Delano requested chili. I asked for a BLT and inquired whether wheat bread was an option. My question was met with a sneer and the snide remark, “For wheat, you’d have to go to Cambridge.”
“White bread will do.”
“Excellent choice,” she said and seized my menu.
“You haven’t lost your charm with the ladies,” Delano said. “Speaking of which.”
He revisited our last conversation. He’d wanted to know when Bonnie and I planned to marry. Delano, for all his acumen, was a man of his generation. A woman married her first love, and a man worked a job to support her and the roof over their heads. Anything short of that was promiscuity, the end of civilization, and as apocalyptic as one of Hal Lindsey’s books. I replied that we both enjoyed living in sin because it was far more interesting. I said, why ruin a good thing? Our few acquaintances were divorced or separated. He commented on the lack of commitment these days. Rather than respond, and say freedom was better than misery, especially if children were involved, I steered the discussion elsewhere. I asked what was new at the office.
“I’m working on a memorial article on James Hoban. You’ve heard?”
“I have.”
Our food arrived. The diner prided itself on fast service, a tradition much appreciated since patrons often ate during the lunch hour, and their bosses watched the clock and calculated the cost of every minute past the hour. I looked down at my plate and saw that my bacon was limp instead of crisp. The waitress gave me the look. I didn’t dare test her repartee.
Delano placed a napkin on his lap. “Are you working a case?”
“I am.”
“Hope it isn’t for that hoodlum.”
“I’m working on something else for someone else.”
After a spoonful of chili, he asked, “Left or right side of the street?”
“All a matter of which direction you’re walking. Homicide case, if you must know.”
Delano spooned chili, and I crunched lettuce and toasted Wonder bread. I asked how The Herald would treat Hoban, as a hero or a provocateur, and whether they’d run the same picture of him.
“Of course, they’ll include the picture.” Delano said he was visiting the State House after lunch for the negative. “As I understand it, that picture of him was taken at some fancy schmancy place. It’s Hoban and wealthy patrons in suits, standing around. You can see the pool or hot tub behind them, and verdant vistas beyond it all. Conspicuous wealth is vulgar.”
“You didn’t approve of Hoban, did you?” I asked.
Dangerous men were safest when they were dead, he had once taught me in class. All the great men and women in history were flawed individuals. He added that the memorial in the paper would be fair but measured. According to Delano, Hoban would be praised for his bravery in Vietnam, admired for his return to grace after the battle with the bottle. Any criticism would be withheld since his policies would never come to fruition due to his death. There would be no Kennedy Question, as he liked to call it. No ‘what would Camelot have been for Our Republic had the Brothers Kennedy survived and not endured the same fate as the Brothers Gracchi of Rome?’
“I wouldn’t say I disapproved of the man.”
“Then what is it, Professor?”
“What he advocated made sense, but it was too much too soon.”
“Mental health services for veterans is too soon?”
Delano countered. “Veterans from World War II and Korea seemed to manage.”
“It was a different kind of war. Unconventional, in every sense of the word, including combat.”
“But it was an unpopular war, Shane. Policies are a matter of perception and timing.”
“Dare I ask, what perception? That we dropped acid and smoked dope, that we killed babies and old men and women?”
Delano stopped eating to glare at me. “You know what I’m saying.”
“I don’t know, tell me.”
I had pushed aside my BLT and watched him shovel pinto beans.
I stacked another log onto the fire. “Is there ever a good time?”
“I’ll give you an example,” he said. “Hoban pushed for a free-needle exchange. The perception is that will condone IV drug use.”
I shot back. “Say the same politicians who won’t fund methadone.”
“To the public, methadone is another word for heroin. It’s still a needle in the arm.”
“Newsflash, Cronkite. Needles aren’t cheap. Ask diabetics. An exchange might not be a bad idea. Think of what it would do to lower the rate of hepatitis. Ever consider that?”
The spoon clanged against the dish under his bowl of chili.
“I’m telling you what people think, not what I believe. This is a conservative town, Shane. Look at me.” He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands up and down his trim physique.
“What about you?”
“I’m irrelevant.”
“Irrelevant? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I have neither money nor power, and the last time I was relevant in this society was when I was fifty, if I was lucky. It’s worse for women. To be old is to be invisible. Take my jogging, for example.”
“You run, so what?”
Delano leaned forward. “I taught you to examine history. It took until the late twentieth century to kill Jim Crow in this country and to change the law on miscegenation. That’s the society we live in. As for something as mundane as running, it wasn’t until ’67 that this town allowed a woman to register and run in the Boston Marathon, and when she ran in the damn race, do you know what they did to her?”
I looked down at my plate in shame. I didn’t answer. I knew the answer. Men, including a race official, had attacked Kathrine Switzer. Delano had worked up a head of steam and had ironed me out. I listened to what I deserved.
“I lucked my way into a job. The other geezers my age aren’t so lucky. They’re cutting pills in half, so their medications go the distance, and they’re splitting the can of tuna with their cat, assuming their arthritis isn’t acting up so they can use the can opener. Now, I need that Alka-Seltzer.”
I felt guilty. I ate the rest of my BLT with zero enthusiasm. I signaled to the waitress for the check. I would pay, the least I could do for Pheidippides across the table from me. The first Greek to run the first marathon died. Delano had championed me when no one would, so I could get an education and survive in this world. I had no olive branch to offer the man, so whittled the last of the twig and asked him, “Anything else new at The Herald?”
“Usual dose of fear and anxiety for the masses. There’s an upcoming article on drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“This year’s cocaine is last year’s heroin.”