I’d stayed at my observation post too long, so I flew down Memorial Drive, my thoughts grimly fixed on that scumbag drug dealer. I was halfway to the Boston University Bridge before I shook myself out of it, and noticed that the elm leaves were edged with gold, and high clouds filtered the sunlight into fine visible rays. With breathtaking suddenness, the road reared up and flashed a spectacular view of Boston’s church steeples, brownstones, and skyscrapers. It still gives me goosebumps after all these years.
On crisp autumn days, no city compares to Boston, especially when you sneak up on it from the Cambridge side of the Charles. It’s the river that makes the magic, frames the city with a silver band. Today the Charles was flat as glass, except for two single sculls cutting the water, gliding toward the M.I.T. boathouse. The skyline is a jumble downtown, but off to the right the Hancock and Prudential towers guard the Back Bay. At the top of Beacon Hill, the gold dome of the State House caught a shaft of sunlight and beamed it back in my eyes, forcing me to look down and pay attention to the road.
They say fish swim in the Charles River these days. You no longer have to race to the doctor for a tetanus shot if you fall off your sailboat. Ever since I came to Boston to live with Aunt Bea after my parents died, they’ve been saying people would be able to swim in the Charles in five more years. Then five more years. Then five more.
It looked like I might have to wait that long at the foot of the B. U. Bridge. Cars honked, drivers swore, but to no avail. The college kids were back in town, in sufficient numbers to take the right of way by force. When the swarm of students finally parted wide enough for my car to pass, I took the curve onto Park Drive and followed the Riverway out to where it turns into the Jamaicaway. The road traces Olmsted’s chain of city parks, and it’s got twists and turns enough to delight a former cabbie. I drove it too fast, but then everybody does. Unlike everybody else, I stayed in my lane.
Left at the Jamaica Pond boathouse. Right on Centre Street. I followed the tracks of a trolley line that hasn’t run in God knows how many years. Jamaica Plain’s a real part of Boston, a neighborhood, a nontourist section of town. I remember Centre Street lined with shoe repair shops, laundries, mom-and-pop convenience stores, and restaurants with counters where the regulars stopped for eggs, bacon, and political arguments on their way to work.
Now Centre Street has florists, at least I think they might be florists. One had two pink lilies plunked in a single vase by way of window display. Another, fearful of garish overstatement, featured a single spray of orchids. I counted three croissant bakeries, four small shuttered restaurants with hand-lettered menus, two shoe boutiques. The signs of gentrification.
Where will all those young urban professionals get their shoes resoled?
Give me an address anywhere in Boston and I can find it cold. Margaret Devens had started to babble directions over the phone, but I’d shut her down. Cabbies know.
I took a right onto a quiet residential street of big old Victorians; a few weary down-and-outers with chipped aluminum siding, some newly pastel-painted numbers with geranium-filled window boxes. Big houses for big families. Most of the Boston Irish who’d escaped the Southie slums made a beeline for the elegant South Shore suburbs, but some, particularly the ones with city government ties, headed for areas of Jamaica Plain like this one. Lace-curtain Irish, it must have been once, with a lively parish church, and houses bursting with kids. Now, most of the better-decorated places looked like they’d been sliced into separate apartments, probably condos. They didn’t look as luxurious as the dream townhouses my cat and I were invited to view at Cedar Wash, but I bet the price tags were pretty steep.
When I saw the white Victorian monster on the corner, I stopped wondering why Margaret and Eugene hadn’t exchanged many confidences. If just the two siblings lived at number 19, they could use separate floors and never meet. They’d need two phone lines so they could call each other in case of emergency.
There must have been money in the family once, to buy that house. There’d have to be some left over, to pay the property taxes, refresh the gleaming white paint, keep the sloping lawn neatly manicured, the yews and azaleas trimmed.
Well, Margaret had a stash of crisp hundred-dollar bills.
And Eugene drove a hack.
One thing about Jamaica Plain, you never have much trouble parking. I pulled the Toyota to the curb smack in front of the Devens house.
A walkway of concrete squares and grass rectangles tempted me to hopscotch up to the porch. I controlled myself in case my client was peering from behind one of the window shades.
The front door wore a polished brass knocker in the shape of a pineapple. I ignored the doorbell for a chance to get my fingerprints on its bright surface. It clanged a bold satisfying note.
I waited awhile, humming a tune Paolina had taught me, something that named a lot of animals in Spanish, then tried the bell. I could hear it buzz and echo inside. I rang again, hollered Margaret’s name.
Damn. I checked my watch. Eleven-twenty. I’d spent longer than I meant to in Cambridge, but surely Margaret would have waited an extra twenty minutes.
Well, maybe she’d forgotten. She was old, after all. Maybe she was at church, or visiting some neighbor, gossiping over coffee while I shivered in the chill. Just for the hell of it, I turned the front door handle and gave the door a push. It opened easily and I stood there gaping.
City people lock their doors.
“Margaret!” I called again, yelling it loudly, as much to warn anybody in the house of my approach as to get a response. My hand reached reflexively for the gun on my service belt, the way it used to when I entered unsecured premises as a cop. As a private operator, I leave guns alone if I can help it.
I always remember what Humphrey Bogart says in that old movie when he takes the gun away from the punk: “So many guns, so few brains.”
The foyer was big and cool, with wooden floorboards worn mellow. No quick sand-and-polyurethane job here. Only care, years of care—the kind my Aunt Bea had lavished on her Cambridge home—gave it that warm sheen. The wallpaper was one of those old grass-papers, in a faint beige. A worn octagonal Chinese rug colored the center of the floor. Overhead, a multiarmed chandelier hung low enough to menace.
The foyer had four escapes: three archways, the back one smaller than the right or the left, and a steep flight of beige-carpeted stairs. I turned left toward what must have been the living room, and stopped with my jaw hanging wide.
Stuffing erupted from an overturned couch. Someone had slashed three huge X’s in the flowered upholstery and done his best to turn the sofa inside out. A wooden end table was cracked, baring pale wood under a dark finish. An amputated armchair leg stuck out of the shattered leaded glass door of a curio cabinet. A pile of smashed crockery lay at the base of one wall. It looked like someone had hurled Margaret’s treasures against the wall for the pleasure of hearing the crash and tinkle.
I swallowed and shoved my hands automatically into the pockets of my jeans so I wouldn’t be tempted to right a chair, smooth a torn cushion.
Margaret.
As I opened my mouth to call her name, I heard footsteps, heavy running steps, and the slam of a screen door. Back door, side door, how the hell did I know? I ran out front, stared right and left, saw nothing, no one. I raced down the narrow walkway to the back of the house. Somewhere, a car engine roared to life and tires screeched on pavement. Through a stand of lilac bushes, I caught one glimpse of a hurtling dark van. By the time I’d vaulted Margaret’s back fence, it was gone.
Margaret.
I ran back to the house, calling her name, but my voice cracked and I don’t think I got much in the way of volume.
I started searching, careful where I put my feet. The destruction was even worse in the kitchen—canned goods, cereal, flour, emptied in a pile in the middle of the floor.
This didn’t look like robbery. It looked like vengeance. Or war.
I found her in the dining room, crumpled in a corner, her flowered dress rucked up under her, a big white apron half covering her face. A trickle of blood oozed from one corner of her mouth. I put my ear to her chest, and felt the rise and fall of her breath. I don’t think I could have heard a heartbeat. Blood was rushing in my ears, screaming.
I touched her shoulder, spoke her name, both more roughly than I intended. My hand was shaking, and I realized my teeth were clenched tight with anger. Anger at the chaos, at the broken useless dishes. Anger at myself, for not arriving moments earlier, not preventing this. Anger at my helplessness, as I knelt by my client’s battered face.
“It’s okay, Margaret,” I said softly, once I could force the words between my dry lips. “Don’t try to move. I’ll be right back.”
The jack was ripped out of the wall, so I ran across the street and used a startled neighbor’s phone. I know a number that gets a faster response than 911. Mooney’s number.
“You’re going to be fine,” I crooned in Margaret’s ear, straining to hear the wail of the ambulance. I touched her hand. It felt cool and dry. It moved, curling limply around my own, tightening. She moaned, or maybe she tried to say something. I put my head close to her lips, but I couldn’t make out any words.
All I could think of was Aunt Bea, and the way her hand gripped mine in that awful hospital room just before she died. I heard a voice whispering in the still room, and it was mine, begging Margaret to hang on, hang on.
If Eugene Devens was responsible for this, I would find him. I would find him all right.