LEE FARRELL AND I were in a small conference room at the new BPD headquarters at Schroeder Plaza. At least I thought of it as new, even though they’d moved here more than twenty years ago. But it still made the old place on Berkeley Street where my father used to take me when I was a little girl look older than the Old North Church.
I had given Lee my statement about my meeting with Callie at the mall. Now we were drinking coffee that he’d made from the Keurig machine in the corner. If I told my father they made coffee now at Homicide that didn’t taste like embalming fluid he would surely see it as another sign of the apocalypse.
Lee was wearing a V-neck sweater, plaid shirt, tweed jacket, and khaki pants. Frank Belson had always looked the part of Homicide cop in an old-movie way, right down to his raincoat and cheap cigars. Lee Farrell looked like a Brooks Brothers ad.
“Anybody see or hear anything?” I said.
“We’re doing the normal canvassing,” he said. “But it was a park in Southie on a cold winter’s night. I think they just pulled up on William Day Boulevard, dumped her, left.”
“She said she lived over near Old Colony,” I said.
“I sent somebody to the address she had on her driver’s license,” Lee said. “Nobody saw anything unusual there, either. No one can remember the last time they saw her going in or out.”
“You say she’d been beaten up,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Like somebody was trying to get something out of her?” I said.
“Could be that,” Lee said. “Or could be an, uh, assignation gone wrong.”
“She didn’t decide to go back to her old life a few hours after talking to me about it,” I said.
“Just not ruling anything out at this point,” he said. “Kind of a policy around here.”
“She said she didn’t know where Lisa might have gone,” I said.
“Doesn’t mean that was true.” He sipped some coffee. “Who knew you were meeting with her?”
“Tony knew,” I said.
“Would Tony have a tail on you?”
“Maybe,” I said. “He still trusts me about as much as I trust him, which is as far as I could throw you.”
“Easier with me now that I’ve slimmed down,” he said.
“I talked to him after I talked to Callie,” I said. “But I made it clear she hadn’t told me anything useful.”
“Maybe he thought she was being less than forthcoming,” Lee said. “Or that you were.”
“So he tries to beat the truth out of her and then shoots her dead and dumps her in that park?” I said. “How does that make any sense? He could have done that when he talked to her himself.”
“Or she told somebody else she had talked to you,” Lee said.
“But who?”
“Might your new friend Jabari come into play here?” Lee said.
“What could Lisa or Callie know that would be worth him killing Callie over?” I said. “I know Jabari’s got skin in this game. But that makes no sense, either, unless there’s a connection between Lisa and Jabari beyond what he’s told me.”
“If you find out, let me know,” Lee said. “For now, I have no reason to talk to him.”
“What about Tony?” I said. “You talking to him?”
He smiled. “Oh, yes,” he said.
“If Lisa got herself jammed up between Tony and Jabari, maybe Callie ended up in the same place,” I said.
“Like they say in the movies,” Lee said, “just when you’re out, they pull you back in.”
“Godfather III,” I said.
“Godfather three hours of my life I can never get back,” Lee said. He gestured at my foam cup. “You done with that?” he said. I nodded. He took my cup and his and tossed them in a wastebasket next to the door. My father was fastidious that way, too. Maybe it was a cop thing, liking things neat, even though it had never been that way with me when I was on the job.
Farrell disappeared around the corner. When he came back he was wearing his topcoat and had mine draped over his arm.
“Let me drive you home,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I’ll feel better if I see you all the way into your house,” he said. “For now, you’re the last person who saw my vic alive.”
We got into his Land Cruiser and took two rights and a left onto Forsyth and then we were on Storrow. We talked more about Callie on the way, and the lawyer who’d dumped her when he found out the truth about her past.
“You gonna try to find the lawyer?” I said.
“Lawyer named Dan who took a yoga class somewhere in Back Bay,” Lee said. He grinned. “Piece of cake.”
When we got to River Street Place I asked if he’d like to come in for one drink. As a matter of fact, he said, he would, and left the car directly in front of my front door. I told him he wasn’t supposed to park there, that if there was nothing on the street you were supposed to park around back. He reminded me that he had police plates and was here on official police business, carrying a gun and everything.
I’d asked Lee to dog-sit Rosie plenty of times, so it was more like a reunion between them once he was inside. Lee said he’d take her out. I asked if he wanted whiskey or wine. He said he’d have what I was having. I said it was a whiskey time of night, and broke out the bottle of Midleton that Richie’s dad had given me for saving his life.
We sat on the couch, Rosie on Lee’s lap.
“You know you can’t blame yourself for this,” Lee said.
“Like hell I can’t,” I said.
“The choices she made, she made a long time ago.”
“I brought her into this.”
“Could have been random, what happened tonight.”
“You said she didn’t have her phone with her?” I said.
He shook his head. “My guys didn’t find one at her place, either,” he said.
“So whoever killed her took it,” I said.
“She either told them what they wanted to know and they killed her anyway,” Lee said, “or they decided to kill her after she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give them what they wanted.”
I drank some Midleton and put the glass down hard on the table, startling Rosie.
“Fuck,” I said.
“She wasn’t your friend, Sunny,” Lee said.
“She only talked to me because Tony made her,” I said. “In a way, it’s like he was running her until the end.”
He finished his whiskey and kissed me on the cheek, lifted Rosie off his lap, and got up off the couch.
“If you need any crime-fighting tips,” I said. “Feel free to call.”
“I got this,” he said.
“Belson always welcomes my input,” I said.
“Like hell he does,” Lee Farrell said.
He left. I locked the door behind him and set the alarm. Then, despite my best intentions, I poured myself one more glass of whiskey and put Ben Webster and Oscar Peterson on the sound system and listened to the two of them chase each other around on “Bye Bye Blackbird.”
I thought about Lisa and Callie and all the men they had known in their lives. I thought about the men with whom I had been romantically involved in my own life, before and after Richie, and all the men I’d gone up against in my work. I thought about all the ones at whom I had pointed my gun to resolve conflict, and wondered how many times women like Lisa and Callie had wished they had a gun in their own hands to resolve a conflict with some john.
I finished the last of the whiskey, took the empty glass into the kitchen, shut off the music and all the lights downstairs, and picked up Rosie, as glad as ever that my dog was a babe, just like me.
Even if I wasn’t feeling like much of a babe tonight.