Sergeant Duffy was as rare as a blue lobster in the trap. Of all the feet on the beat or detectives behind a desk, he was one of the few shields who didn’t want to see me dead or maimed for what I’d done to his beloved department. He’d feign bravado and sling insults at me in person, if and when I showed up at the precinct house, but beneath the bluster he believed I’d done the right thing years ago.
Six-two to my five-ten in the right pair of shoes, Duffy had forty pounds on me, and that was after I’d acquired the freshman fifteen from my sedentary life as a landlord. The man kept his hair buzzed short like a marine, scalp visible. He was what we called Blonde Irish when we were kids. Duffy’s father was Irish, which endowed him with the reddish hair and the pasty pallor of our tribe, while his mother, a German, left him with the fair highlights and a Teutonic sense of law and logic.
Something had moved the freckles on his face for him to call me.
I was curious. I was apprehensive. I was also professional.
I chose a pencil from the cupholder on my desk. I poked and pulled numbers on the rotary phone in front of me. Each numeral on the dial moved a fraction of a circle until I released it and sought the next digit. I rather enjoyed the hypnotic sound, the metallic swoosh in my ear. Seven numbers I walked, and seven steps of Zen serenity I enjoyed while I waited for the voice.
“Duffy here.”
“You called.”
“I did,” Duffy’s voice dropped, and I understood why.
His desk in the lobby made him as unavoidable as the fare collector inside the booth at South Station. Every cop in and out of 154 Berkeley Street saw Duffy and experienced his largesse. The man enjoyed no privacy.
“What can I do for you, Sarge?”
“Where are you calling from?”
“What’s this about?”
“A job for you.”
I told him I was in my office on Washington Street.
“Can you be on the corner of Tremont and School?”
“King’s Chapel side of the street or Parker House?”
“Parker, in say, ten minutes. I’ll send over a car.”
“If you think I’m stepping into a cruiser, you’ve got another—”
Before I left my office with my hat, I relocated the .38 from my holster to the pocket of my winter coat. I trusted Duffy. I didn’t trust any flat foot he was sending to fetch me. King’s Chapel would be on my right while I waited for Duffy’s ride. Next to the Chapel is where Puritan governors were buried, along with hundreds of souls, including Mary Chilton, the first woman off the Mayflower, and Elizabeth Pain, whose headstone inspired Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. The Burying Ground was Boston’s first graveyard, and my mother taught me the distinction between a cemetery and the marble orchard. Both housed the dead, but only one of them had a house of worship next door.
I was thinking about the boneyard because I could picture the scene, me as a footnote in a guidebook for tourists on the Freedom Trail. The driver would time the opening of the passenger door in sync with the sounds of the Green Line passing below the Burying Ground—the creaks, whines, and shudders of the subway cars to coincide with the crack of a gunshot that would leave me dead on the pavement. The other scenario would be a drive-by that included a Tommy gun stuck outside the car window. The salvo of lead would claim me and a chunk of mortar from the Parker House behind me.
The hotel invented the Boston Cream pie, the Parker roll, and the word scrod. Both the famous and infamous have stayed at the Parker. While in town for his brother’s performance, John Wilkes Booth practiced with some pistols at a shooting range nearby a week before he assassinated Lincoln. Malcolm Little, before he became Malcolm X, had worked there as a busboy, and Ho Chi Minh was a baker on the premises. There’s a joke that we might’ve never lost all those lives in Vietnam if someone had paid Uncle Ho well.
Cars rushed up and down Tremont, that long stretch of road from Government Center through the center of Boston and skirted the edge of the Common, and wandered into the South End and Mission Hill before it ended in front of a hospital in what used to be Hanlon Square but is now called Brigham Circle.
I spotted the car and thought, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
Green as an avocado, the car, whose exhaust coughed and contaminated the air, coasted to the curb and stopped. I dipped my head down and said through the window on the passenger side. “Pinto?”
“Get in and don’t say a word.”
I occupied the seat, closed the door, and sat there as we rolled down Tremont and stopped at a red light. The light couldn’t change fast enough. I called Pinto Pinto because he drove a Ford Pinto. He still looked the same. The same bad clothes. The same bad imitation of Columbo in a rumpled suit. I couldn’t put him and Duffy in the same room, no less in the same sentence. Pinto was no cop, but we had history. With the Commissioner gone, I had assumed Pinto had found himself a politician or some other wonk on the Hill who could play rock to his barnacle. Never would I or could I have imagined him and Duffy.
The light changed. We rolled. He talked. “The name is Pedro Gonzalez.”
“Who is Pedro Gonzalez?”
“A person of interest. I’m taking you to him.”
“You want me to interview him then? Where is there?”
“City Hospital.”
“A suspect handcuffed to a bed?”
“Mr. Gonzalez is in the morgue, and he didn’t die of natural causes.”
“Dead makes for a tough conversation. You want me to find out how he got that way?”
“There’s something for you under the armrest.”
I lifted leather and saw the fat fish of an envelope.
“Now I can pay all those parking tickets for the car I don’t own.”
“Always the wise guy,” Pinto said. “It’s a grand in small bills, tens and twenties.”
“You do know of a department within the BPD called Homicide, don’t you?”
“The BPD was told to stand down on Gonzalez’s death.”
“Politicians?” I asked.
Pinto shook his head. “Feds, and they made it clear to Brass, who in turn told the Rank and File not to lift their noses for a scent and to keep their paws off the case file. You can guess the rest.”
I already had. I wasn’t a cop, and the Feds wouldn’t expect me on the case. The only thing is they were aware of my existence because of a dead auditor, in my recent past. I’d worked a blackmail case for a former flame whose husband had a wandering eye and whose fingers had a habit of lifting money that wasn’t his. A federal auditor grew suspicious, was on the trail, and ended up dead.
“Has Duffy forgotten about me and the Braddock case?”
“You’re worried about that auditor?” Pinto shook his head. “Duffy doesn’t think you have anything to worry about.”
“How nice of him. Enlighten me as to why not.”
“First off, different kind of Fed in town. The auditor was a Treasury Man. These guys are FBI and DEA, on some kind of task force,” he said. “It’s when—”
“I know what a task force is.” My hand had moved from my pocket and the .38 in it to my jaw. I’d been grinding my molars listening to Pinto. “When I find something, I’ll call Duffy.”
“No, you call me.”
“You?”
“My number is inside the envelope. Duffy is convinced the Feds bugged the phones.”
It’s a cold day in Bailey’s Ice Cream Shop when both the mob and the police believed Uncle Sam eavesdropped on their conversations. Pinto stopped the car in front of City Hospital. He stared through the windshield. “This is you. Get out.”