Before I left Meridian Street, I asked to use the phone. I said it was a local call and offered her the change in my pocket to pay the toll. She huffed, said nothing, and twisted the phone around, so the rotary dial faced me. She was kind enough to provide me with a pad of paper and a sharpened pencil.
While I was dialing, I thought about making small talk, about seven numbers’ worth. I decided against it because the corners of her lips were downturned and formed a permanent frown. In the sepia days of her youth, the phone was called an Ameche, and a caller had to give an exchange to the operator to make the connection.
While the line rang, I would’ve told her that on Court Street, right here in Boston, Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call. Bell was an instructor at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. Seems ironic to me that the man would deprive Antonio Meuci of his voice. The Italian had invented the phone first but was unable to pay the fee to file the paperwork at the Patent Office. The Scotsman could and did.
Dot answered. Her Ohio accent was the difference in saying carmel instead of caramel. I asked whether there were any messages, and she said there was one. “And it includes the letter V,” she said.
My heart jumped a beat. “The message, please?”
“Bill says V works until two pm.”
She gave me an address and more. Bill had included field notes, such as what Vanessa looked like and what kind of hat she was wearing. He’d detailed classes she was taking. Vanessa was a fan of Romantic poetry, though not the kind Rod McKuen wrote. I wrote all of this down. I thanked Dot and hung up.
Not that I was prone to paranoia, but I tore off the top two sheets from the pad. I didn’t want to risk the chance that opposing counsel would send his own investigator over. I wasn’t about to have another PI resort to the old Encyclopedia Brown trick of using the pencil to shade the canvas and read an impression of my writing. The last thing I needed was a DA tracing the address to a mafioso’s nephew and try to build a case with an Erector set.
It was time to ride the rails of public transportation, from the Blue Line to the Red Line.
Vanessa attended Tufts University, a college on the rise in research and reputation and whose campus straddled the border of Medford and Somerville.
Medfa, as the natives called it, was once a meadow along the Mystic River and Indian territory until the white man’s smallpox decimated the indigenous Pawtuckets. The meadow became a field, the field a town, and the town a city in the late nineteenth century. Medfa, or as I call it, the ‘Mistake along the Mystic,’ was home to some colorful and dubious history. The Royall family, the owners of the last slave quarters in the Commonwealth, bequeathed a generous parcel of land to Harvard, which used the proceeds from the sugar trade to create Harvard Law School. There was another notorious tidbit of history, a Hollywood connection, as in a dark-haired girl named Elizabeth Short lived in Medford before she lit out west and found fame and misfortune as the murder victim, the Black Dahlia.
Five miles outside of Boston, Slumerville was home to several slices of notoriety, another connection to the west coast. Bernie McLaughlin, a crime boss in Charlestown, had asked ‘Buddy’ McLean, the founder of the Winter Hill Gang, to straighten the curtains on two of his guys for beating up his brother after a party. Seems brother George was handsy with someone else’s girl. McLean refused, saying that Little George deserved the beat-down. The offended McLaughlin set out to avenge his brother. He tried to kill McLean and failed. McLean responded by hunting McLaughlin down and shooting him dead in front of a hundred witnesses on Halloween Day in ’61.
The streets of Charlestown and Somerville ran red for four long years. The Italians in the North End were unhappy with all the unwanted media attention and impatient with Irish promises of peace. They told McLean to resolve the matter. The hostilities ended on of all days, Halloween in ’65, when one of the Hughes Brothers clipped McLean in front of the movie house, as if he were Dillinger coming out of the Biograph Theatre. Howie Winter took over the Winter Hill Gang and made peace with the Italians in the North End.
The Hollywood footnote to this story is that when McLean was arrested on the day he’d killed McLaughlin, a young bookie named Alex ‘Bobo’ Petricone was pinched with him on suspicion of murder because he was standing next to the shooter. Bobo made bail and fled west for an extended ‘vacation,’ where he took acting and speech lessons to rinse himself of the Bahston accent from West Ender actor Leonard Nimoy. Nobody in the Winter Hill Gang or any of the mobsters from the North End knew his whereabouts until they saw Bobo on the silver screen as the actor Alex Rocco playing Moe Greene in The Godfather.
Professors Row is the aorta to the heart of the university, and I was sitting on the address for Capen House.
Vanessa exited the building at five minutes past the hour. She was on the move, and I hoped she’d lead me to Sal and not to a lecture hall where some dull professor of poetry would spend forty-five minutes trying to convince his students that Wordsworth meeting Coleridge in 1795 was the significant literary event of the eighteenth century. I didn’t want to sit in the back of the room where I would resist the temptation to heckle him and say that day occurred in the nineteenth century, as in Christmas Day in 1806, the day Coleridge walked in on Wordsworth in bed with his sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson.
I hung back about eight feet behind Vanessa. The last time I’d seen her, she was lean and eighteen, sorting out her weapons in the armory. She has since moved from the meow to the purr. She walked proud and fierce, loyal to the cause and wearing the beret of the Black Panther Party.
She turned the corner. All that swagger and bravado notwithstanding, she was unaware I was following her. I waited until she’d inserted the key into the lock to the front door of the apartment complex before I called her. She looked at me. She said my name in a way that was both recognition and a question. “Shane Cleary, is that you?”
“Can we talk inside?”
“We wouldn’t be alone.”
“I was counting on that.” I rubbed the sides of my arms. “C’mon, it’s cold out here.”
She unlocked the front door and invited me in. She used another key for the lobby door, and a third, to open the mailbox. She said her apartment was on the third floor. I climbed the stairs behind her. Vanessa looked over her shoulder, “You’re wondering if I’m still with Sal, aren’t you?”
“I know you are. The two of you sent postcards from around the world.”
“My uncle John send you?”
I do my best not to disclose a client’s identity. We stood in front of the door to her place. This expedition was turning into a trip down the Panama Canal with a door, a key, and another lock. Each question seemed like a station where my answer paid a toll. Her eyes widened with realization.
“His uncle hired you?”
“Nothing is what it seems.”
“The hell it ain’t.”
“I’m not the one who sent the postcards, including one postmarked from Somerville. Now, unlock the door, Vanessa. We need to talk.”
“Sal is inside.”
“Excellent, because he’s part of the we in our conversation.”
Sal must’ve heard the bolt thrown because the happy face that accompanied his, ‘Happy you’re home, babe,’ hit the floor and disappeared into the shag carpet when he saw me. I could see him plotting his escape, but it would be his luck to bounce off the hard glass of the sliding doors to the balcony. I held my hand up and sounded like something out of a TV soap. “I just want to talk.”
He relaxed, and I sized up the room. Vanessa was a college student in a nice pad without any roommates. This wasn’t dorm housing, with furniture that’d last into the next century. University housing bought surplus, and the only thing they tossed out at the end of the school year was the mattress because nothing could remove the smell of booze, cigarettes, and bad sex.
Vanessa and Sal were living the life, enjoying all its pleasures, from cooking meals every night to paying the bills every month. Theirs was a spacious private apartment, and no shoebox, which led me to my next thought of who paid the bills because Sal was home waiting for her like a house husband.
Vanessa tossed the beret, unshouldered her purse, and unbuttoned her jacket. She said she’d make us something to drink. She insisted. “Name your poison?”
I answered, “Bourbon, if you have it.”
“We have it. Excuse me.”
She sashayed out of the room, her one-suit hugging her curves. In her absence, Sal turned traditional on me. “Before you get the wrong idea about Vanessa and me.”
“I already have the wrong idea, and it has nothing to do with her or you. A question for you?”
“What?”
“How do you afford this place? She’s a student, and you’re…I don’t know what you are, but it’s looking like the Life of Riley in here. Her aunt and uncle think you two are rock stars on a world tour.”
Vanessa returned with our drinks. She handed me a bourbon, neat. Sal received a dark drink I couldn’t identify, so I asked him what it was, and he said, “A Godfather.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“It’s Scotch and Amaretto.”
I thanked Vanessa and asked her to give us the room. “No, I stay right here,” she said and
plopped down on the couch next to her beau. I looked around their digs again. The place was tricked out in the latest from the warehouse showroom of J. Homestock’s in Dedham. The color palette was cozy and warm. The only thing missing was the Duraflame log in a Malm fireplace.
I sat opposite them, sunken in the Cadillac comfort of some unknown material. I looked at her and then him. I asked her, “What is your major?”
“Skip it, Mr. Cleary, and say whatever it is that you came here to say.”
I was insulted. When we had first met, Vanessa had rubbed against me in all kinds of ways that didn’t warrant ‘mister.’ Mister left me feeling old and soiled.
“My next question is for Sal. This love nest here will make your uncle either think you have some angle of your own or, worse, that you’re working with the Winter Hill Gang.”
“You’re out of your mind, man.”
“Am I? Are you in with the Winter Hill Gang or not?”
“And why would you think that?” he asked.
“You’re living in their territory.”
“Nothing to do with them, I swear.”
“Good answer, kid,” I said and eyed the décor. “Explain this place to me.”
“I’m in love with Vanessa. Why wouldn’t I live with her?”
“Of all places, why Somerville?”
“Simple answer,” he said. “Tufts accepted her.”
Sal’s cheeks were flushed, and not from the potent cocktail. The kid was street tough but green with interrogation. He’d never been collared, and I now understood why the old mafiosi waited outside of the precinct house when one of their own was sprung after their first sit-down with the police. It was a rite of passage, another loss of virginity. I leaned forward.
“I’m going to ask you two questions, and I want you to think before you answer me.”
Sal was young and cocky. “You threatening me?”
“Think before you answer me, kid.”
“Don’t call me kid.”
“It’s what you are.”
Sal sipped some courage. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”
“Let me set you straight, Sal. You, and the entire menagerie of wise guys at your uncle’s social club, don’t know what I’m capable of. I come from a far darker place than any of them have ever experienced, and I’m probably the only one who can stop you and her from getting killed, and the Winter Hill Gang is the least of your worries. Two questions.”
“Fine, what’s your first question.”
“How do pay for this place?”
“Legit investments and savings pay for the pad and for her tuition.”
“Legitimate?” I asked.
“I can show you brokerage statements and the stamped passbook from the bank.”
I nodded. “Okay, next question. Answer is either a Yes or a No. Canada?”
“What about Canada?”
“Calabrians and their crew. Yes or no?”
He said, “It’s not that simple.”
“Okay, let’s break it down. Were you approached in Montreal?”
“Yes.”
“Make any kind of deal with them?”
“No.” Now, Sal leaned forward. “I would never do that to my uncle.”
“He needs to know that, Sal.”
“Like I said, it’s not that simple.”
“Yes, it is. You sit down with the man, and you tell him the truth. He’ll believe you because silence is not a conversation. Silence is an admission of guilt to the man, Sal, so, yes, it’s that simple.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Okay, why not?”
“Because I don’t want the same life as him, and he doesn’t know it.” He tilted his head, indicating Vanessa. “Because of her.”