“Three names,” Tim Fox said, avoiding Fat Eddie’s eyes. “We nailed the names of the guys whose voices are on her answering machine. Plus we picked up some good leads and a couple more possibles.”
Fat Eddie’s gas was back. He blinked and shifted his bulk in his chair.
“First caller is definitely the photographer,” Fox said. “One of her clients.”
“He’s the kraut, sounds a little loose in his loafers,” Phil Donovan said. He was sitting in the chair facing Vance’s desk, one leg over the other and a grin on his face, like he was having a beer at a buddy’s house, waiting for the football game to start on TV.
“Name’s Posner, the photographer.” Tim Fox flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Siegfried Posner, Ziggy for short. Runs a studio off Summer Street. He was her biggest client. Does a lot of work for ad agencies, here and out of New York.”
“Siegfried,” Donovan sneered. “Shit.”
“The other voice, besides McGuire’s, belongs to her husband, guy named . . .” Tim Fox turned a page. “Steve Peterson. Her sister recognized it. He runs some kind of plumbing supply outfit on Lansdowne. They separated four, five years ago, never got divorced.”
“But she used her maiden name,” Fat Eddie said.
“Always did, even when she was married to this schmuck,” Donovan said. “An original feminist. You know, one of them broads hates men so much they wanta be one?”
“And McGuire’s the third voice,” Vance said.
“Best lead of the bunch.” Donovan curled a lip and poked a thumbnail at something between his teeth.
“What other names do you have?” Fat Eddie asked.
“Some boyfriend,” Donovan said, inspecting the tip of his thumb. “Weiner, the landlord, says he met him a couple a times. Thinks they split up last month. He remembered this guy was smooth, a lot of talk. He’s some big advertising dude. Gave his card to Weiner, said maybe they could do something together to promote his gallery. His name, the ad guy, is Hotchnik, Marty Hotchnik.”
“You talked to them yet?” Vance asked.
“I covered off the ex-husband,” Donovan said, taking over now, not letting Fox jump in. The black detective turned away, his arms across his chest, to stare out the window. “He admits he called her ’cause he was pissed at her. Apparently she promised to loan him some money or something and then welshed on it. He blew off some steam and went home to boink his common-law over in Cambridge. Soon’s we leave here we’re talkin’ to the kraut and the ad guy.”
“What else do you know?” Fat Eddie said.
Donovan uncrossed his legs and stood up, his hands in his pockets. “McGuire’s ex-wife says her sister was pumping some rich guy, got his own company. Sounds like this heavy-duty dude made her think she might be over her head on this one.”
“No name?” Fat Eddie raised his eyebrows.
“No,” Tim Fox said, turning from the window. He was annoyed at Donovan. Micki Lorenzo had given the information about the businessman to Fox in confidence and Donovan was spreading it around like he had unearthed it himself.
“When’s the funeral?” Fat Eddie asked. “The victim’s?”
“Tomorrow.” Donovan was up and pacing the floor. “We’ll have an ID car, get everybody on tape. All laid on.”
“What about the guy she was afraid of?” Vance said. “The one the art gallery owner told you about?”
“Can’t find a thing,” Tim Fox said. “Looks like she was the kind of woman who could piss off men pretty easily. But there’s nobody special we know about. Except her ex-husband.”
“And McGuire.” Fat Eddie pointed a finger at Fox.
“McGuire’s a non-issue,” Fox said.
Donovan exhaled noisily in disgust at his partner’s comment and Tim Fox glared at him.
“How can you say that when he and the victim knew each other and he made a threat on her life the evening she was murdered?” Fat Eddie demanded.
“She wasn’t blackmailing McGuire,” Fox said. “For one thing, the guy’s broke. For another, there’s nothing to put him at the scene. Nothing at all. Whoever did her, he’d be splattered with blood, there’d be something to tie him back to the victim.”
“Maybe he didn’t do her himself,” Donovan suggested. “Maybe he got somebody to off her for him.”
“That’s a fucking crock,” Fox said. He took two quick paces toward the door and stopped to stare angrily away from Donovan and Vance toward an empty corner.
“Hey, you gotta admit, McGuire’s not exactly hangin’ out with Eagle Scouts,” Donovan said. “He’s mainlinin’ something and he’s dealing with pushers, hookers, pimps, known felons. . . . You don’t think he’s got the connections?”
“It’s crap,” Fox said. “Total crap.”
“McGuire’s warrant’s suspended,” Fat Eddie said to Fox. “Only suspended. If I were you, I wouldn’t dismiss McGuire quite so fast.”
“Crap,” Fox repeated, walking to the door, seizing the knob, slamming it shut behind him.
Donovan spread his arms, palms up, and shrugged his shoulders at Fat Eddie. Then he shook his head and followed his partner out of the captain’s office and down the corridor to the cubicle he shared with Fox.
McGuire was clumsy with chopsticks and he had splashed too much fiery Vietnamese pepper sauce on his shrimp and noodles. Chewing his food, he looked around the storefront restaurant. The lighting was harsh and glaring, the tabletops were worn Formica and, except for two women dental students from Tufts University, he was the only Caucasian in the restaurant.
He had become a regular patron because he enjoyed the taste of the food and because it was both healthy and inexpensive. The restaurant, whose name McGuire had never bothered to learn and never would have been able to pronounce anyway, sold no beer. But Chet’s, a working-class bar on Tremont near Essex certainly did, and after paying the small Vietnamese waitress whose face shone when she smiled, McGuire set off unsteadily through the door and into the gray afternoon chill.
He paused in the doorway of an empty pornographic movie theater, scooped two small tablets from his jacket pocket into his hand and swallowed them. The warm damp fog bank in his head, he knew, would linger for a few hours yet.
It had been twenty years since Martin Griswold crouched in the corner of the kitchen in the Dorchester apartment and watched his father shoot his mother. Martin Luther Griswold had squeezed his nine-year-old body against the wall at the first explosion of his father’s rage and when his father withdrew a large and very ugly black pistol from his heavy topcoat and aimed it carefully at the woman who lay on the floor holding her head in both hands and crying, Martin swallowed once and forced himself to keep his eyes open, told himself that what was about to happen was natural and expected. His father fired two shots into Martin’s mother. Then he returned the gun to his pocket and bellowed through the door at neighbours who wanted to know what in hell was going on in there, telling them to shut up and mind their own business, and walked to the refrigerator for a beer.
Martin remained in the corner, wedged against the side of the battered cupboard, and watched his father drink two Miller High Lifes while the blood from his mother’s body ran toward Martin Luther Griswold in small crimson rivers.
“That’s what you gotta do when they fuck wid you,” his father said to Martin when he had finished his first beer, for his father had known of Martin’s presence all along. “They fuck wid you, they give you no respec’, you teach ’em. One way or ’nother, you teach ’em.”
When he finished his second Miller High Life, Martin’s father rose to his feet and tossed a five-dollar bill in the boy’s direction. “Go buy yourself a pizza, some thin’,” he said and left the room. “’Member what I tol’ you.”
Martin never saw him again.
After waiting for the sound of his father’s footsteps to fade beyond the din of the television set in the next room, Martin walked carefully around his mother’s body and followed the same path his father had taken down the stairs and out into the summer air. He walked to a nearby park where he sat for an hour while dusk gathered and he wondered what to do.
Then he ordered two slices of double cheese and pepperoni and a large Pepsi from the takeout on the corner and went back to the park to eat it.
When he returned home the blood on the floor had hardened and dried. A neighbour stuck her head out the door of her apartment. “The hell goin’ on there?” she asked Martin. “You all right?”
Martin said he was all right.
“Your mother all right?”
Martin said she was dead.
When the cops left, some social worker took Martin to a children’s shelter and later to a foster family in another neighbourhood. Martin remained there until he was twelve years old, stood five and a half feet tall, and weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds.
Martin Luther Griswold became simply Grizzly. And Grizzly, when he was fourteen years old, chased a teacher from the classroom, swinging a brass fire extinguisher in his hand and threatening to bury it in the teacher’s skull.
Grizzly became a street person, scamming whatever was available, sometimes wondering what happened to the man his mother called her husband, who told Grizzly he should think of him as his father.
Didn’t make a helluva lot of sense to Grizzly. Man sleeps with a woman, doesn’t make him her husband. Woman’s got a kid, doesn’t make her man the kid’s father.
They arrested Grizzly for the first time when he was sixteen after he organized a pay-off three-day gang rape of a fifteen-year-old girl who had told Grizzly she loved him, keeping her tied up in a back alley shed and charging local kids five bucks a go. Some adults came around too, fathers of some of the boys who were Grizzly’s customers, grown men who heard about it while he kept the girl there. They slipped Grizzly the money, went inside the shed, came out maybe five minutes later, the young boys laughing and talking, their fathers and their fathers’ friends skulking away in shame. For three days Grizzly fed the girl, slapped her when he had to, and made a pile of money.
Until somebody squealed.
Grizzly spent two years in a reformatory where he acquired enough formal education to expand his street smarts.
Nobody had more street smarts than Grizzly. When Grizzly learned about marketing in prison, when he grasped the concept of keeping both demand and prices high, he rose head and shoulders above everybody else when it came to dealing narcotics.
“Make it scarce an’ you makes it valuable,” he told Django once. “So you wanta sell, you sell the scarce stuff, hear me?”
Django nodded but he didn’t understand completely. The more you sell the more you make, he believed. If something’s scarce, there ain’t much of it so how can you sell more? Didn’t make sense. But disagreeing with Grizzly made even less sense.
“You always gotta be either the first on the street or the last on the street sellin’ your stuff,” Grizzly added. “Guy in the middle don’t make shit.”
Django nodded again. It’s safer in the middle, Django wanted to say. But he didn’t.
The first man Grizzly killed was a street tough named Bones, a bully who claimed to have downtown connections and who made the mistake in a bar one night of reaching across Grizzly to stroke the breast of a girl Grizzly was with. It was a year after Grizzly came out of reformatory.
When Grizzly raised an eyebrow at Bones, the older man slapped Grizzly’s face with one open hand and showed him a knife in the other. “Don’ say a word, pussy,” Bones sneered, and Grizzly nodded and slid off the stool, leaving Bones laughing and groping and the girl crying in fear.
Ten minutes later Grizzly returned with a .357 Magnum revolver inside his jacket. Bones had his arm around the girl and when Grizzly walked up to him, Grizzly said, “Show me yo’ knife.”
Bones said, “You got one?”
Grizzly said, “No.”
Bones said, “Knew it. Pussies don’ carry steel.”
Grizzly took the gun out and shot Bones through his left eye. Then he turned the gun on the girl and shot her too. Twice.
“She shoulda left,” Grizzly said when he told a friend about it the next day. “She shouldn’ta been there so long.”
No one in the bar could identify Grizzly. None of the investigating police officers felt the incident was worth more than a day’s investigation.
Only fools challenged Grizzly again. And they only challenged him once.
Grizzly finished his whispered conversation behind the bar with Dewey and returned to the table where Django and the Gypsy waited.
Dewey was more than the Flamingo’s bouncer. He was also assistant manager, talent scout and Grizzly’s bouquet man. Bouquet men profited from drug sales but never carried, never used, never sold the product themselves. They functioned as conduits of information and directors of traffic. When sweeps occurred and arrests were made, Dewey and the handful of other bouquet men would be questioned and released for lack of sufficient evidence. “Come out smelling like a bouquet of roses,” one of them had boasted, and he and others were dubbed bouquet men from that day forward.
Now Grizzly settled his massive black bulk in the chair between Django and the Gypsy. “Heat’s on,” he said, watching the tiny stage set against the far wall of the room. He extended an arm to the Gypsy, his index and middle fingers spread in a V sign. His lidded eyes remained on the small brown girl who was prancing back and forth across the stage, strutting her stuff in a long green satin skirt open on one side all the way up to her tiny waist. The Gypsy quickly pulled a pack of Camel Lights from a pocket of her red and black plaid woollen shirt.
“Heat?” Even when sitting, Django moved with the music, his shoulders swinging, his head bobbing, like a featherweight boxer watching for a jab, waiting for an opening. “Hell, ain’t no heat,” Django laughed. “World’s colder’n a witch’s tit. No heat at all. Put your peeker out the door, Grizz, it be a chocolate popsicle faster’n Sienna up there can aim her money-maker at you.”
The Gypsy placed a Camel Light between Grizzly’s waiting fingers and he transferred the cigarette to his mouth. “That her name?” he asked, still watching the stage. “Sienna?” He leaned toward the Gypsy who had the match already lit and was applying it to the end of the cigarette. “Nice name for a little gal like that.”
Sienna whirled once and dropped the satin skirt to the floor of the stage revealing a gold G-string and slim legs.
Grizzly drew in a deep breath of cigarette smoke and nodded.
Beside him the Gypsy studied her glass of beer, her face a mask.
“Who feelin’ heat?” Django asked. His eyes darted from Grizzly to the stage and back again.
“People I know.”
“Same people I know.”
“Not the same. Special people. People you don’t know ’bout, you don’t wanna know ’bout, hear me?” His voice softened. “You know this little girl, this, what’d you call her?”
“Sienna. From the islands. One a them itty-bitty places named after them saints down there. Thomas or John or Ralph.”
“Ralph? There a St. Ralph?” Grizzly looked at Django with interest.
“Sure. Church gotta name saints just like you and me get named. What, Grizz, you think the pope, he gonna pick a new saint and he say, ‘We callin’ this next sucker number two-five-eight’? They name ’em, the saints.”
“After who?”
Django shrugged.
“Tell you one thing,” Grizzly said, shifting the cigarette to a corner of his wide mouth. “They ain’t never gonna be no St. Django.”
Django erupted in laughter. “Whoa, darlin’!” He slapped his thighs and bent from the waist. “I’m doin’ my part to make it a fact, I surely am.” The small brown girl was prancing in long strides around the perimeter of the stage. Her hands were busy at one hip, unfastening her G-string. “I surely am.”
Grizzly held his breath until the stripper removed the last piece of fabric covering her body. Then he exhaled slowly and spoke softly, watching the girl promenade in her nakedness. “Wait out the heat. Gotta wait out the heat, monkey.”
“Hear you, Grizz,” Django nodded.
“We be like that little gal up there, you know. What her name again?”
“Sienna, darlin’. She Lady Sienna.”
Grizzly grunted and took his eyes from the woman to inspect the tip of his cigarette. “Not as pretty, understand. Not as pretty as that little thing. But we be as naked, you hear me talkin’?”
Django nodded, his face clouded.
“We don’t carry nothin’ for nobody ’til it cool again, understand?” Grizzly swung his massive body to Django and leaned to look directly into the small man’s eyes. “Special not for that cop friend of yours, hear me?” His breath smelled like a musty room and Django sat back in his chair. “Tell me you hear me talkin’ to you.”
“The Jolt, he all right,” Django said. He avoided Grizzly’s eyes. “Don’t be askin’ me to leave the Jolt dry. . . .”
“I be talkin’ to you all this time and you ain’t started listenin’ yet,” Grizzly said. “I ain’t axin’ you to dry the man up. I tellin’ you, you hear me?”
Django watched Sienna doing knee-bends at the edge of the stage where men gripped long-necked bottles of beer and stared back at her with open smiles. “I hear you, Grizz,” he said. “Hear you.” He bit his lip, looked around, tried to stay cool, then he said, “Other guys, Garce ’n’ Drew, them guys, they dry too?”
“What you wanta know for?” Grizzly shot back. “None a your damn business. I say you dry, you dry.”
Django sat back in his chair. Garce and Drew, he only met them a couple, maybe three times, they were dealers for Grizzly, Grizz liked to keep everybody separate, nobody get together on a conspiracy against Grizzly, no sir.
“You do like I tell you?” Grizzly said.
“No question, Grizz,” Django said. “Never any question ’bout it.”
Grizzly grunted and sat back in the chair, his eyes on Sienna again. “Little brown girl nice,” he said to no one in particular. “But Billie, she still the best ’cause she like it up there, you know? Don’t she like it up there?”
“Oh, she do,” Django agreed. “She like to show her jewels all right.” He was no longer moving in his chair and his face was glum. “Can see she like it.”
The Gypsy played with her fingers, her eyes downcast.
The sports channel was running a replay of last night’s hockey game and the Bruins were again getting their asses kicked; this time by the hated Rangers, a reprise of organized chaos traced on the screen of the television set above the noisy, smoky bar. The inept play and repeated miscues of the hometown team generated shouts of derision, cries of anguish and peels of sardonic laughter from the patrons, nearly all men, virtually all of them out of work and low on hope.
McGuire slouched at a table in a rear corner next to the washroom door, a half-finished glass of beer in front of him. The rim of the glass was chipped and the beer was flat. Men in soiled caps passed McGuire on their way to the urinals and many offered him a curt nod, acknowledging him not as a friend but as a regular patron of Chet’s, almost the same thing. Two weeks earlier one of the regulars recognized McGuire and had spread the word that he was an ex-cop, and for a few days the patrons withheld their greetings. But it soon became evident that ex-cops have every bit as much to lose as ex-truck drivers, ex-welders and ex-mechanics, and eventually they accepted the common bond although they still moved past McGuire warily. None chose to sit with him and offer to buy him a beer, or cadge enough money from him for a draft and a hamburger.
McGuire swallowed another Demerol. He waited for the fresh wave of relaxation and numbness to creep through him. It would displace the tension in his body, dissolve the furrows between his eyes.
Soon, he lied to himself. Soon he would turn things around, get himself organized, go back to the Bahamas . . .
He lowered his head to his hand, rested it there.
They almost killed him.
They would have left his body rotting among the mangroves or being flayed apart in the surf. He heard them discussing it between the blows of the heavy boots striking his back, his groin, his head, talking about it in the casual tones of shade-tree mechanics pondering a reluctant car engine.
“Take the son of a bitch out past the reef, throw him in.” That was Charlie, Patty’s husband, the industrial mineral king from Chicago.
“We can work him over a little more, you give us the word.” The taller of Henshaw’s two employees who had flown down with their boss on a chartered jet that afternoon drew his foot back and drove it into McGuire’s side, and pain like a rapier shot through McGuire’s abdomen.
“You start her up, Mr. Henshaw, take us out to deep water and we’ll drop-kick the prick over the side.” The smaller man, the more vicious of the two, seized McGuire’s hair and yanked his head up. “See what happens when you fuck around where you shouldn’t, asshole?” he spat in McGuire’s face.
The yacht was anchored in the middle of the harbour. Music drifted across the water from the bar of the Horizon Club where McGuire had promised to meet Patty Henshaw and where, half an hour earlier, the taller of Charlie Henshaw’s men had found him sitting on a bench at the water’s edge. “You McGuire?” the man asked and when McGuire nodded he said, “The missus wants you to join her on board.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “I got a whaler over near the dive shop to take you across.”
“Who are you?” McGuire asked.
“New crew member in from Man O’ War Cay for the week,” the tall man replied. He thrust a calloused hand at McGuire. “Name’s Unsworth. Came down from Chicago last month and lucked out. Got a crew job’ll take me through the summer.”
McGuire followed Unsworth, stepping aboard the motorized flat-bottomed skiff to join Patty Henshaw, the shattered wife of a domineering and abusive husband. For the past two weeks she and McGuire had been a diversion for each other, McGuire living alone in a cabin overlooking the harbour, Patty spending the winter aboard Savarin, her husband’s eighty-five-foot yacht.
“This boat and me are the same thing to Charlie,” she once smiled at McGuire. “We both wait down here for him to climb on and enjoy himself.”
As soon as McGuire stepped aboard, Charlie Henshaw and the other man emerged from a cabin, Henshaw with a brass chain wrapped around one fist, the smaller man beside him and one step behind, his teeth gleaming in a broad smile, and the beating began.
“Get up!” Henshaw screamed at McGuire when the small man offered to throw McGuire overboard in deep water. “On your feet, you scum-sucking bastard!”
McGuire pulled himself to his hands and knees, retched once and rolled onto his back.
“Pull him up,” Henshaw muttered and Unsworth, his back to the low railing, rolled McGuire facedown on the deck and gripped his collar, yanking him to his feet. McGuire held back, waiting for Unsworth to apply more strength and when he did McGuire flew at him. Surprised, Unsworth stepped aside, prepared to deflect a punch, but McGuire continued his forward motion and dove over the railing and down, through the darkness and the soft Bahamian air, into the water.
A couple from Maryland, sailing with their children for a year through the Caribbean, pulled him aboard their boat and called the police. But beyond transporting McGuire to hospital in Nassau, the police offered him no assistance and asked him no questions. Two officers arrived at his hospital bedside three days later to give McGuire the alternative of being charged with robbery and attempted rape aboard the Savarin or accepting immediate deportation to the U.S. upon his release from hospital.
“We have witnesses sworn to testify against you,” one of the Bahamian police officers told him. “You will receive a fair trial, of course, but I would caution you against such a choice. Should you be found guilty, as I believe you would be, you would face several years in jail.”
In hospital while his ribs mended and his bruised kidneys healed, the doctors prescribed meperidine for McGuire’s constant pain; within weeks the drug became his deliverance from agony and his entry into a world of peace and solace where he could escape not only the pain but himself. Upon his release he was deported to Miami where he sold his possessions and sat for two days at sidewalk cafés in Coconut Grove, squinting against the sunlight and the pain.
In downtown bars he made enquiries, then a cabbie drove him as far toward Liberty City as the driver dared to go, and a block further along he met two men who offered him ’ludes and codeine and heroin and crack, and he chose the codeine, buying a hundred capsules from them, and returned to Coconut Grove.
The release from the pain was a freedom he had never experienced, and the agony fell from him like discarded clothing that he stepped out of on an empty beach. For the next few days he smiled and drifted and when he was mugged by three teenagers who took his watch and gold ring he smiled again because they had not found his capsules hidden in a small plastic bag in the crotch of his underwear.
A week later the pills were gone and he returned to Liberty City. But the men were not to be found. He asked a street vendor where they were and the vendor said, “Dead,” and shrugged and pushed out his bottom lip.
McGuire called Ollie and Ronnie Schantz who wired him enough money to return to Boston. The pain was back and when the doctors at the Mass General walk-in clinic refused to renew his drug prescription, he sought and found sources as he had in Miami, settling on Django, the compact black man with the withered left hand who dispensed codeine and meperidine and who heard the rhythm of the saints in every phrase spoken to him, responding with smiles and laughter.
McGuire leaned back in the chair, his hand gripping the glass, his eyes closed. On the television screen the Bruins intercepted a pass and the men in the bar abandoned their sense of loss and defeat and cheered the hometown player who broke through the Ranger defense to glide across the ice and flick the puck into the far corner of the net with a deft wrist shot, the perfect play making those in the bar feel like winners for a precious few moments, lifting them above their own lost lives.
Boston’s Summer Street boasts no major tourist attractions nor is there evidence that Paul Revere’s horse ever carried the patriot over its cobblestones or that British regulars performed unspeakable acts of violence against innocent colonists. But it remains one of the oldest thoroughfares in the city and the short distance from its beginnings near Filene’s in the heart of the shopping district to the ancient docks on Fort Point Channel is a journey that extends backwards, from the city’s present adversities to its past glories.
Fort Point Channel, a finger of fetid water extending south from Boston Harbour proper, is lined with rotting docks and rusting railway lines, virtually all that remains of the city’s former role as a major east coast seaport. The docks are ugly and dangerous, long past any hope of repair and restoration.
But not the massive hundred-year-old buildings that line Summer Street in the docks area. Built a century earlier as manufacturing plants and warehouses set conveniently close to the rail and shipping terminals, most have had their red brick exteriors sandblasted and their interiors converted into offices and studios for architects, lawyers, wholesalers, advertising agencies and other professionals whose working environments are assessed as keenly as their talents.
“What’s a guy who takes pictures want to be down here for?” asked Phil Donovan, emerging from the gray Plymouth parked at the curb. He looked up at 270 Summer Street, six stories high and constructed of yellow brick.
Without replying, Tim Fox led the way into the building, staring at the directory for a moment before pressing the elevator button. “You read Doitch’s report?” he asked his partner.
“Big deal,” Donovan said. “Takes a doctor to say she died because she got the shit beat out of her.”
“Important thing is the time,” Fox said. “It throws everything off. If she’d died right away we’d have a fixed point, we’d know when the guy was there. Now all we have is a window. Doitch said she could have lived three, four hours, maybe more, maybe less. Makes it tough to call it down.”
The elevator arrived and the door slid open silently. Fox stepped in first. “We put this one away, either we’re geniuses or we have horseshoes up our asses,” Fox said. “Fourth floor.”
Donovan pushed the button. “You know the best way we can get lucky on this one?” he sneered.
Fox looked at him blankly.
“Put the squeeze on your buddy McGuire.”
Tim Fox stared at Donovan until the younger man, still grinning, muttered something under his breath and turned away.
The cool gray walls of the building’s upper corridors were broken by a series of evenly spaced white doors. Suite 403 featured double doors with the words Posner Studios traced in black strips of photographic film. Fox and Donovan entered, Fox leading the way.
They emerged in a small cluttered alcove with a reception desk, two chrome and leather sofas and a display wall lit by chrome track lighting and hung with framed advertisements for food products, clothing, appliances, restaurants and luggage. Directly ahead stood another set of white doors. One of them was ajar and through the opening they could hear a woman shouting in a vaguely European accent, her words echoing within a large and empty space.
“I tell you and I tell you but you are never listening to me, Ziggy!” the woman was screaming. Something shattered like glass on a concrete floor.
Donovan looked at Fox, his eyebrows arched.
“Chill, Chill.” The voice from within the studio was male and German, passive and patronizing in contrast with the woman’s.
“Well, I’ve had it! This time I’ve really had it!” The woman was approaching the reception area, the sound of her high heels marking her advance with a staccato beat. “I spend all morning looking for just what you want and it’s not good enough. It’s never good enough! You are so stubborn. . . .”
The door flew open and the woman, whose face was screwed into an angry frown, glanced from Fox to Donovan in surprise. In less time than it took her to blink, a wide smile had replaced her frown. “Hello,” she said brightly. “Were we expecting you?”
She was somewhere south of fifty and her heavy body was wrapped in a dark brown shapeless dress that might have been a monk’s robe. The plainness of the woman and her dress was offset by an excess of gold: heavy gold chains around her neck, gold rings on most of her fingers, dangling gold earrings, gold-framed harlequin glasses perched in front of narrow brown eyes and a gold-edged cap on one incisor that gleamed brightly when she smiled. The gold theme was continued in the short bobbed hair, more brass than gold, that framed her face. She was a woman intent on extending what little natural beauty she might have possessed in her youth through her middle age.
“We’re here to see Mr. Posner,” Tim Fox smiled in return. He held his detective badge in front of him and she leaned forward to study it.
“It’s about Heather, isn’t it?” the woman said flatly.
Fox nodded. Donovan was peering through the open doorway into the massive studio beyond.
“Ziggy didn’t do it, you know,” the woman said. “He’s the gentlest man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“And your name is?” Fox asked.
She extended an undersized hand to him. “Jill Beauchamps,” she said. “I am Ziggy’s partner and assistant.”
“You gotta see this,” Donovan said from the open door. “They got enough equipment in here to light the Garden for a Celtics’ game and a camera the size of a Honda, all to take a picture of a plate of bagels.” He looked back at Tim Fox and Jill Beauchamps, the woman smiling indulgently at him. “A plate of bagels, for Christ’s sake!”
“I was a client of Heather’s, yes.”
Ziggy Posner sat cross-legged in powder-blue coveralls on a low stool in a corner of the cavernous studio, a long-stemmed crystal glass of red wine resting on the palm of one hand, steadied by the other. He was perhaps forty-five years old and his body was slim and athletic. His long hair was silvery-straw in colour; a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard set off an angular face ready to break into a shy smile without notice. Softening his harsh German accent was a docile voice that seemed incapable of rising in anger.
“You talked to her answering machine the night she was murdered,” Phil Donovan said. He was fingering a strip of exposed film retrieved from the floor, and he rolled it back and forth between thumb and forefinger as he spoke. Tim Fox sat facing the back of a folding metal chair, his arms crossed, letting Donovan lead the way, watching the photographer’s reactions.
“Yes, yes, I did.” The photographer bent his head and smiled. “Heather, she could be demanding at times. You ask Chill and she tells you, yes?”
“Explain demanding,” Donovan said.
“She would make promises and expect me to keep them.” The photographer raised the glass to his lips but continued speaking. “She would tell an advertiser, a magazine, somebody who wanted something, she would say, ‘Ziggy will have it for you tomorrow if it takes him all night,’ yes? Then she would tell me, she would say, ‘I work hard for you, now you work hard for me,’ but she would forget that I am an artist, I take my time.” He sipped the wine.
“You ever go to her place on Newbury?”
Posner sampled the wine again and nodded. “Sometimes, when I must, yes.”
“You ever hear Heather talk about a man named McGuire?”
A telephone rang somewhere in the far corner of the studio.
“Who?” Posner asked.
“McGuire. Guy named Joe McGuire,” Donovan said.
“No, I hear of him, I think, but I don’t know where.”
Jill Beauchamps was speaking loudly into the telephone, her harsh voice echoing back from the other side of the studio.
“You ever process any infrared photos for her?” Fox asked.
Posner looked down and smiled sadly into his glass. “Yes, I make those pictures for Heather. I know what it is she is doing. I develop the film, I make the contact sheets for her. But I don’t look at them, not close. I look at them the first time and I know what she is doing and I say never again will I look. And I give her back everything, film and prints, yes? Because she sends me lots of work, I am her favourite she tells me, and without her I don’t get so much work, yes?”
“What’s the big deal about infrared?” Donovan asked.
“It is so that no one knows,” Posner said. “She has an infrared flash near the camera. In the dark no one knows when it is on. You cannot see it, the light. Only the film sees. The men, they are surprised.”
“Did you take any pictures in Charlesbank Park a few weeks ago?” Tim Fox asked.
Posner turned to face Fox. “Yes, I take photographs there. For a fashion advertisement. I remember, it was very cold that day and Heather was there for some reason, I do not remember why.” He frowned into his glass. “I remember now, yes,” he said, nodding his head. “The photography was for an advertising agency and the man from the agency, I hear he was a very good friend, a boyfriend maybe, of Heather’s. That is why she is there. Otherwise Heather would leave me alone to work.”
Tim Fox flipped through his notebook. “His name Hotchnik?”
The photographer nodded again. “Yes, Hotchnik.”
“What’s he like?” Donovan asked.
Posner arched his eyebrows and tilted his head to one side. “He is not so bad, yes? Not so bad.”
“Do you remember Heather mentioning anybody else—” Donovan began, but before he could finish Posner snapped his fingers.
The click-click-clicking of Jill Beauchamps’s heels was approaching.
“That is where she mentions his name,” Posner said. “This McGuire man. He is sitting on a bench watching us and she talks to him and she comes back laughing . . .”
“Ziggy!” Jill Beauchamps called in a pleasant sing-song voice.
“. . . and calls him names, some names. She is glad to see him and says he deserves to be there on a park bench. And then she says—”
“Ziggy, it’s Saatchi and Saatchi on the phone,” the woman interrupted, ignoring the glares from Fox and Donovan. “I have to talk to you, it will take just a minute.”
Posner looked at Fox who nodded.
“What does she say?” Donovan asked.
Posner rose and set his wine glass carefully on top of the stool. “She tells me she must be careful with this man. She must be careful with him because she tells me and everyone else there, she tells us he is very mean and very violent, they never like each other, he would kill her if he got the chance. That is what she says. ‘He would like to kill me if he had the chance.’”
Posner excused himself and followed Jill Beauchamps across the studio floor, the woman leaning her body toward his to whisper in his ear.
“Bingo.”
Tim Fox looked over to see Donovan holding one hand thumb up and grinning back at his older partner.
Hunched over their glasses and long-necked bottles of beer, the men gave only passing notice to the white-haired woman who entered Chet’s and stood in the doorway wearing a plain dark woollen coat, a red kerchief on her head, her dark eyes snapping from side to side, working their owner’s gaze deep into the recesses of the smoky room. Then the eyes ceased their movement, the woman’s chin rose and she began walking purposefully toward the table in the far corner.
“Gotta be a pissed-off wife,” one of the men at the bar muttered. “Somebody’s gonna catch hell.”
Men both younger and older than the woman stepped aside in deference as she swept past them like a ship of state, neither pausing nor looking to either side until she reached the table in the corner where she pulled a chair out, sat herself on it and stared silently at the man across from her whose eyes were closed, his face relaxed, his lips toying with a smile.
When he opened his eyes and saw her he showed no surprise and only a hint of pleasure. “Hello, Ronnie,” McGuire said.
The woman softened her severe expression for the first time since entering the bar. “Hi, Joe,” Ronnie Schantz replied.
“Want a beer?” McGuire asked.
“You know I don’t.”
“Right. You’re here for the ambience.”
“No. I’m here for you.”
McGuire turned his head away. “Oh, shit,” he said, because he knew this woman well enough to understand that she would never leave without him.