Brill had kept himself busy in the last twenty-four hours. There’s a large Dumpster brimming with debris parked directly in front of his stoop and he’d taken down walls to the studs and widened a doorway between the large high-ceilinged living room and what could be a formal dining room. Same deal in the kitchen, where he’d torn out all the cabinets and trashed the old dishwasher and fridge, their grime-chalked outlines still visible on the hardwood floor like the markings of a double appliance homicide.
“Goddamn,” I say, peering in from the front entrance foyer, the canvas-tarped staircase leading to the second floor littered with antique copper and glass doorknobs, carved hardwood moldings, light fixtures, and balusters. “What’d you do, rob Restoration Hardware at gunpoint?”
Brill knows I live at pace, looks at me, taking in my black eye and bruises, and asks me no questions.
“That big barn door there and the rigging I got from a salvage place in Dorchester called Olde Bostonian. Rest of this stuff I’ve been collecting piecemeal for years. There’s more upstairs on the second floor.”
“How much more? Like enough to rig the whole building?”
“At least.”
“You kept all this shit in Newton?”
Brill shakes his head. “Storage.”
“From where?”
“Crime scenes mostly.” Brill removes a fleck of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, challenges me with a look.
“Murder scenes?” I try to keep any judgment out of my voice, but my mind conjures images of blood spatter on marble, hardwood floors, crystal doorknobs.
“Some.” Brill dials it back. “But I started collecting when I was still in uniform. Kept adding to it over the years.”
“I’m surprised the department let you,” I say. Unless they didn’t know about it until now. Was this what had finally caught up to Brill and kicked him to the sidelines?
“Wasn’t a secret.” Brill shrugs noncommittally. “None of it was evidence or like part of a case. It was just … there.”
“What neighborhoods we talking about?” As a mover and messenger I’ve been inside of some of the swankiest houses and apartments this city has to offer, and in terms of quality, craftsmanship, and materials the items lining Brill’s stairs—now that they’ve been repaired, polished, stripped, and sanded to their original beauty—are in every way their equal.
“Come on, Zesty, don’t play stupid. You grew up around these parts. What neighborhoods historically carry the bulk of violent crimes in this town?”
Brill was talking mainly about the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, places that at the turn of the twentieth century were still considered the suburbs and became home to a large Jewish community who had settled there after moving out of Boston proper when the inner-city population swelled with immigrants from other distant shores. As in places like Brookline and Newton, the Jews of Boston built stately Victorian homes and synagogues in thriving neighborhoods, only by the early sixties changes in transportation, politics, and social unrest prompted a panicked exodus into the true suburbs far beyond Boston’s borders and turned these neighborhoods into its revolving door. First came the Irish followed by an influx of southern blacks and then a wave of immigrants from Caribbean nations into an aging housing stock that was too expensive to repair, and neglected by landlords, except to subdivide into smaller spaces that housed far too many people.
“I’d see these places all boarded up or abandoned or I’d be called to clear squatters out of them, junkies,” Brill tells me. “And I’d be looking at carved balustrades with five coats of paint, marble fireplaces, pressed-tin ceilings, stained glass. Beautiful craftsmanship camouflaged in filth. Sometimes in blood. A lot of these houses were crime scenes, a lot of them burned down. That’s why they got so many empty lots getting built on in the Berry today.”
“If you got the coin,” I say.
“Sure. But twenty years ago? Shit, you take an overhead shot, some of those streets looked like Leon Spinks’s grill when he smiled, gaps everywhere. So whenever the city was about to step in, tear a place down, I’d chalk my name and the demo crews knew to call me. I’d throw them a few dollars, load up the cruiser. Same goes for the firebugs, the cats getting paid by absentee landlords to go in and torch the places. They’d double up and give me a call, too, because word got around. I mean, what was I supposed to do, call the Arson Squad, arrest them? They hadn’t done anything yet. And if it wasn’t them, it would be someone else. Didn’t know what I was going to do with all the stuff at the time, but it felt wrong, all that history just disappearing. It’s cost me some money storing it all these years, but here we are, full circle. Maybe we got something in common after all, Zesty.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Sometimes the sky just falls and we gotta move out from under. But hey, doesn’t mean we have to turn our backs on where we came from, right? After all, what’s that saying? The past is a terrible thing to waste?”
We work for a while and then we get the barn door out of the hall and lean it against the exposed brick wall where I’d chipped off most of the paint. Here and there were still some dirty white or gray patches that the wire brush seemed to only tattoo further into the brick.
“I actually like it.” Brill runs his fingers over a couple of the spots. “It’s got a nice vibe to it, like you sealed in some history. Leave it. Whatever rich-ass motherfuckers I rent this place to don’t like it, they can live somewhere else.”
“I thought you were taking this floor.”
“I’m talking about upstairs. Gonna hit the same layout for each space.”
“You sure you want people above you? Why don’t you take the third floor?”
“I’m not getting any younger. Anyhow, Boston Ballet School’s just down a ways, I’ll rent it to a couple of dancers. They don’t eat nothing, move like angels. I won’t hear a damn thing. Tonight’s goal is to get that barn door hung on its rail. How are you with power tools?”
“I’m Jewish,” I remind Brill.
“And here I thought I’d hired one of the original day laborers. Didn’t your people build the Pyramids?”
“Move away from the brick wall,” I tell Brill. “I don’t need the competition.”
“That what your eye and bruises are all about, competition? I saw your bike’s in one piece. Who you pissing off now?”
“I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you.”
“Go ahead, try me.”
I do. And when I’m done, Brill says, “You’re right, I don’t believe you.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, for starters, Klaussen being alive is like a thousand-to-one shot.”
“I heard him,” I say, shaking my head. “Granted, he doesn’t look like the pictures I’ve seen of him but it’s been over thirty years and Solarte said he’d had some expensive surgery done too.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the other reason I don’t believe it. You do any background on Alianna Solarte before she roped you in?”
“No. You know her?”
“She tell you she used to be a cop?”
“I figured it out.”
“She tell you she worked Internal Affairs?”
“No. Why’s it matter?”
“Doesn’t to me.” Brill shrugs. “But she took down a lot of dirty cops about six, seven years back. Worked undercover with some Vice guys wired into some of the construction crews that had contracts with the Big Dig. Some state police, some local.”
“So?” I didn’t see Brill’s point. “She did her job?”
“Yeah. Some thought maybe too well.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It got messy. Supposedly this crew was stockpiling cash, drugs from raids, skimming seizures. They knew they couldn’t spend; they were looking ahead. To get access, each one held some kind of key, like a piece to a puzzle so they could only get at it together. Well, she took a bullet during a raid that had all the markings of a setup, like the crew had been tipped she was IAD. Her Kevlar had been messed with, only she’d swapped it out with one of her own and lived to tell the tale. Barely. Only when the hammer came down and these guys started turning on each other, most of the stash was gone. Someone had figured out a way in without the others.”
“They think she took it? How?”
“Not something I know. But those cops were tight, even lived on the same street, some of them. Funny thing is, with the stash raided the thing that sealed the case against most of them wasn’t even Solarte’s testimony. It was the swimming pools done them in.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Shit used to go missing off the Big Dig sites on the regular, you ought to know something about that.”
It’s true. When the Dig was just getting ramped up and the residents of the lofts on Albany, Thayer Street, Harrison Avenue—mostly artists, musicians, messengers—realized they were going to get forced out soon, they would sometimes vandalize the heavy digging equipment or hot-wire a digger and deposit it in the Bay. Sometimes brawls even erupted between the construction crews and residents. But all of it backfired and actually sped up the inevitable evictions, the police called in to bring the peace, the fire marshals on their heels to ring up violations and board up lofts that weren’t zoned for residential living. City hall got in the mix and if they weren’t all the way in the developers’ pockets, they were at least somewhere in the linings, and worked their way up the creases.
“Still don’t get the pools,” I say.
“One of the big-ticket items that went ghost were these imported Italian aqua blue tiles they were going to inlay the Ted Williams Tunnel with. Artisan-level-type shit, about a million dollars’ worth. Never solved. Well, traffic reporter’s up in the copter one day, notices a string of pools in Swampscott, just like a side comment.” Brill poorly mimicks a white announcer’s voice: “Gorgeous sunshine up here, perfect day to sit by these amazing blue pools that I’m looking at, over so-and-so street in Swampscott.”
“The tiles from Teddy Ballgame Tunnel.” I put together Brill’s story. “All the pools belonged to the cops?”
“Not all. They off-loaded some of the tile to their neighbors.”
“At discount, no doubt. All the cops went to prison?”
“No. Some turned and got Wit-Proed out. Only the marshals know where they’re at now. One ate his gun. A couple were smart enough to plan an exit ticket in case shit went south.”
“Solarte?” I say.
“Disabled out, I guess. She sure as shit didn’t make any friends. I’m actually surprised to hear she put a shingle out in these parts. She’s from New York originally. And people around here got long memories.”
“So what is it you remember about Klaussen makes you so sure it’s not him back from the dead?”
“You mean, what do I remember about your dad back then, don’t you? You’re a cagey motherfucker, Zesty, always talking between the lines. Well, all right, but you’re not gonna like what I got to tell you.”
“Take your best shot. After McKenna, what the fuck could be worse?”
Brill stops what he’s doing, and gives me the full measure of his detective hound dog face, and takes his time doing it. “Klaussen wasn’t the first,” he says finally.
“Wasn’t the first what?”
“To disappear.”