Murder in the Charlestown Bricks: A Dermot Sparhawk Crime Novel

by Tom MacDonald

  “Question number one,” she said. “Why are you asking me to check the fingerprints? Why didn’t you ask the Homicide team working the case, or the DA’s office?”

  “I can’t because I didn’t get a warrant for the prints,” I said. “I just want to know if they match.”

  “And you think the prints are related to the Murray murder, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct,” I said. “But I also have a personal reason. A car deliberately ran down my girlfriend. She’s at Mass General in a coma.”

  “Oh, my God that’s terrible. I am so sorry. Is she going to be okay?”

  “We won’t know until the swelling in her brain goes down.” I looked away, fighting tears, composed myself and continued. “Cheyenne wasn’t the intended target. I was. The driver mistook her for me.”

  “That’s awful. Why were you the target?”

  I finished my Coke. “I think the man who ran down Cheyenne is the same man who killed Gertrude Murray.”

  “I’ll have to think about this, Dermot. No promises.”

  “Thanks, Kiera.”

  “I assume you brought the evidence with you,” she said.

  “The prints are on the paper bag inside this bag.” I handed her a plastic shopping bag that contained everything. “I would bet the house that the prints on that bag will match the prints at the murder scene.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. I’m still not sure I’ll run them.” The barman came over and Kiera waved him away. “You’re asking me to take an awfully big risk, you know. I have a family to think about now.”

  “I know you do. If you can’t do it, I understand.”

  Kiera grabbed the bag and left Doyle’s, and I watched the start of the Red Sox game. A scrub called up from Triple-A Pawtucket jogged to the mound in the top of the first inning. No doubt the manual scoreboard operator had the yellow number plates ready.

  51

  I visited Cheyenne in the hospital and for the first time since the accident she was awake. My heart filled with joy, and I smiled and leaned over the bedrails and kissed her but she gave no response. Maybe she was still out of it. I asked her how she was feeling, and in a monotone voice that held no emotion, she said she felt terrible.

  “I can’t walk. I can’t use my right arm. According to the doctors, I’m lucky to be alive.” Her eyes looked to the ceiling, and she talked as if I wasn’t there. “I’ll be spending the next year in a rehabilitation hospital in Arizona, so they can teach me to walk again.”

  Avakian’s face came to me as she described her pain, and my lust for revenge nearly erupted. I would kill him. “I’ll go with you to Arizona and support you every step of the way, Cheyenne. I’ll take care of you.”

  “No.” She strained for a Kleenex box on the table but couldn’t reach it. She couldn’t reach the box. I pulled out a few tissues and passed them to her. She dabbed her eyes and said, “I’m going to Arizona alone. I need time away from you.”

  “Away from me?” What was she saying? “Why? What are you saying? I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Dermot, I really do. But I need to be alone for this.” She cried.

  “Can’t we get through this together?”

  “No, no, we can’t.” She sniffled and shook her head as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I love you, but I can’t do it. I cannot live with the uncertainty.”

  “What uncertainty? What do you mean?”

  “Please let me finish.” She rubbed her swollen forehead. “You have no idea what you’re like, do you? You’re a good man, but there is something about you that attracts danger. More than that, you don’t just attract danger, you confront it. You never walk away from it. This isn’t easy for me to say.” She breathed deeply. “I will always love you, but I can’t be with you right now. When I saw that car bearing down on me, I knew it had something to do with you. I’m not saying it was your fault, because it’s not, but the car hit me because of you — I know it did. And I can’t live that way. I have to say goodbye, Dermot.”

  Goodbye? No way!

  “Cheyenne, I know it was my fault. Let me fix this, I can fix it. It will never happen again. I’ll stop being a private investigator.”

  “No, Dermot, that would kill you. You would resent me if you stopped. You’re a lone wolf, and you need the excitement, and I understand that, but I can’t live that way.”

  A nurse came into the room and told me that I had to leave, that Cheyenne needed her rest. I walked out to the corridor.

  What the hell just happened?

  Inside the parking garage, while sitting in my car, I gasped for air. In college I played in a game against Notre Dame and got the wind knocked out of me. This was worse. I didn’t sob at Notre Dame. How could she end it like that? The snap of a finger, poof, finished. Didn’t our love mean a damn thing to her? I wanted to die. The top truss of the Tobin Bridge would do it. A swan dive onto a concrete pier. No splash. A perfect ten. That would teach her.

  After I caught my breath and stopped crying, the finality of the loss began to sink in, the outcome of it, too. It was back to the solitary life for me, a life of gray days and empty nights, a life of monotony, a dull life, a life where you settled for less, because you knew you deserved less.

  As I drove to Charlestown, I thought about the night Cheyenne got hit. We made love and basked in the afterglow and talked about our future. She said she wanted to show me something that was out in the car, and threw on my BC football shirt and her cowboy hat. I offered to get it for her, but she said no. She went to the car herself, and she got run down. I never should have let her leave the bed.

  All because she wanted to show me something in the car.

  The next thing I knew I was in front of my house, home but lost, and I boiled inside as reality set in. I was a fool. I had duped myself into thinking I deserved a woman like Cheyenne. What a nitwit. At that moment I made a vow to myself. I vowed I would never get close to a woman again. I would never put a woman in danger like that again.

  Laden with hatred and overcome by grief, I climbed the stairs to my apartment and went inside to the bedroom. When I reached to click on the fan I saw my college football helmet on the shelf, sitting next to the All-America plaques and the Butkus Award. With all the accolades and honors and trophies, why did I feel like such a loser? I crammed the gold helmet on my head, snapped the chinstrap, chomped the crusty mouth guard, and glared through the gray bars of the facemask.

  Grunting like a wild boar in the forest, I dropped into a three-point stance, bulled my neck, and exploded into the wall, ramming my head through the horsehair plaster. I replanted my feet, spit out grout, snorted dust, and rammed it again. Slats cracked and noise rumbled in the framework. I backed up five feet and ran at it again and again, leading with my head, seeing stars when I hit beams. I kept ramming until I burst through the wall and tumbled to the parlor floor, and I rammed until the entire wall was flattened to a scrap heap.

  I lay atop the rubble crying, my teeth gnawing the mouth guard, my heart destroyed. I banged my head on the floor, adding to the constellation of stars spinning in my brain. If I had a speck of integrity, I’d have done it without the helmet.

  52

  “You’re lucky it wasn’t a weight-bearing wall,” Harraseeket Kid said, looking at the destruction. “Buck thought a plane hit the house.”

  “I forgot about Buck.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Kid said. “A splinter could’ve gouged out an eye.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “You broke the studs and furring.” He studied my eyes, moving closer. “Maybe you should go to a doctor, see if you have a concussion.”

  “I’m fine, Kid.”

  “I still think you should see a doctor. You might need brain surgery — to put one in.”

  “Cheyenne left me,” I said.

  “What?
”

  “She ended it.”

  “Fuck.” Kid unexpectedly embraced me. “No wonder you snapped.”

  “She said I was dangerous.”

  “You are dangerous, but in a good way,” Kid said. “You defend the little guy from the lowlifes out there. Scumbags don’t listen to nice talk.”

  “Cheyenne nearly died because of me.” I crunched through the ruins and went to the window and looked to the bridge. “I can’t blame her for moving on.”

  “This is bad.” Kid looked at the wreckage. “I’m worried what you might do.”

  “I’m cool, Kid, nothing to worry about.”

  “Yeah, real cool.” Kid pointed at the kitchen table. “You have a gun?”

  “It’s not loaded.”

  “That’s a military-issue forty-five,” he said, apparently impressed. “That’s a hell of a side iron. Where did you get it?”

  “It belonged to my father,” I said. “He took it from a dead second lieutenant in Vietnam.”

  “It’s a classic.” Kid ejected the magazine. “I’ll clean it, make it good as new.”

  “Don’t waste your time. If I use it at all, I’ll use it as a prop.”

  “A prop?” He examined the scuffed magazine and blew on it. “You’re not going to point an empty gun at someone, are you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t do that, Dermot,” Kid said. “A gun should always be loaded, especially if you aim it at a man. I’ll refurbish it and load it.”

  “Do whatever you want.”

  Kid told me that he’d clean up the room and start the renovations. I tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted, saying that he liked that kind of work. I was too tired to argue. I gave him some money to get started.

  “I won’t replace the wall,” he said. “I’ll frame it out in pine and make it an open-air room, like the yuppies on the hill.”

  The next morning the doorbell rang. Standing on the front porch with her red hair blowing in the breeze was Kiera McKenzie. I let her in and led her up to my apartment, not my smartest move.

  She looked at the mess and said, “What happened?”

  “I’m remodeling.”

  “Really?” She stared at the flattened wall. “Remodeling, huh?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m sure it is.” She eyed the football helmet, with a chunk of plaster sticking out of the cage. “Interesting choice of tool.”

  “What have you got, Kiera?”

  “Plenty,” she said. “I found two sets of useable prints on the bag. One of them belonged to the wino, Jonas Q. Sherman, who is in the system for vagrancy and various misdemeanors. The other one belonged to you.”

  “Me?” I was surprised by this. “How do you know it belonged to me?”

  “Your soda glass,” she said. “I smuggled it out of Doyle’s for elimination prints. You’ll be happy to know you’re not in the system. More importantly, you’re not the murderer.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “The third set of prints, which most likely belonged to Mr. Avakian, was too smudged to use against the partial at the murder scene.”

  “No problem, I’ll get another set off him.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “I stuck my neck out once, I won’t do it again.”

  “I didn’t mean to put you in the middle.”

  “Sure, you did,” Kiera said. “That’s why you called me, and that’s okay, but you’ll have to find another way to nab Avakian.” She paused. “I thought of a way you can get him.”

  “How?”

  “Find the car.”

  “What car?”

  “The car that hit Cheyenne,” she said. “His prints will be on it, or his DNA, or something to tie him to the crime. There always is.”

  “How am I supposed to find the car? I don’t even know what it looks like.”

  “You’re the private detective, Dermot, you figure it out.” She picked up her briefcase and smoothed her pleated skirt. “By the way, how is Cheyenne doing?”

  “She’s awake.”

  “That’s good news. I’d love to meet her someday.”

  “Sure, someday,” I said.

  I walked Kiera out to her car and waved goodbye as she drove away. I thought about what she said. If I could find the car that ran down Cheyenne, I could nail Mr. Avakian for the murder. I thought about it some more, and I knew how to find it. It would be ugly and illegal and could land me in jail, but I knew how to find it.

  53

  The next day I went to Little Mystic Channel and found Rod Liveliner fishing against the railing. His Igloo cooler contained two whopping stripers, which explained the broad smile on his leathery face.

  “You’ll be eating good tonight,” I said. “They must weigh twenty pounds each, lunkers, as you say.”

  “Once in a while they wander into the shallows.” He reeled in the line. “I know you’re not a fisherman, Dermot.”

  I leaned next to him on the railing.

  “That favor you mentioned, is it still on the table?”

  “I pay my debts,” he said, “and the debt I owe your father is a lunker and a half.”

  “I thought you’d say something like that.”

  “What’s the favor?” he asked.

  I told him what I needed.

  At midnight I went to Avakian’s Market and waited in a dark alley behind the building, where his car was parked. The lights in the store went off and Avakian came out, accompanied by the geek who’d replaced Bianca. The geek was boasting about the great job he was doing, and Avakian was nodding with approval, making the kid feel good. I put on a ski mask and took out the forty-five, pulled back the slide and let it snap. Avakian turned. I aimed the gun at his head. The geek stood frozen. I told him to screw, and he ran like hell out of the alley, with his arms and legs awkwardly pumping. I told Avakian to get in the car.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “Is it money? Do you want money?”

  “Give me the keys,” I said. “Shut up and get on the floor in back.”

  He got in face down. He begged me not to shoot, cried and slobbered, and said he had a family. I drove down Terminal Street and out to the Mystic Piers, which was vacant in the late hours of the night. I steered behind a derelict warehouse and parked at a rotting wharf, where Rod Liveliner was waiting in a boat. I tooted once. Rod put on his hood.

  “Get out of the car,” I said to Avakian.

  “What are you doing?”

  I put a stocking hat on his head and pulled it down over his eyes, blindfolding him, and we boarded the boat.

  “If you touch that hat, I’ll shoot you,” I said.

  “I won’t, I won’t.”

  Rod and I removed our ski masks. The cool air felt good on my face. Rod gave me an apprehensive look, as if to say I hope you know what you’re doing. I had assured Rod that nothing bad would happen, that I would take Avakian at gunpoint with an empty gun, guaranteeing he wouldn’t get hurt. Rod wasn’t convinced, but he acquiesced. I also told Rod that my goal was to scare Avakian to the point of pissing his pants, so that he would tell us where the car was located, the car that hit Cheyenne. After that, we’d bring him back to the dock unharmed.

  “What do you want from me?” Avakian’s voice muffled through the hat. “Whatever you want, it’s yours.”

  I guided Avakian to the rear of the boat and sat him on the deck. Rod shifted into gear and moved out from the dock. He piloted through the harbor, passing the Coast Guard station and Castle Island and Boston Light, taking us out to open waters. As we churned farther from shore, an aura of serenity took hold of the boat, a quiet I didn’t expect. The rippling surf and soothing breeze fostered a mood of tranquility on board, as if nature were abetting the crime. The combination of kidnapping and calmness struck me as odd, a fatalist
ic mismatch that couldn’t last, as if portending disaster, but I knew everything would be fine if we stuck to the plan.

  The cityscape of Boston soon disappeared from view, and an hour later all signs of land were gone. Rod churned on. He told me that the boat was fitted with twin 250-horsepower outboard engines, and that we had plenty of fuel in the tanks, enough to go for hours. The time passed slowly and the motors roared. Rod yelled over the noise, “We just passed the nautical three-mile line.”

  “Nautical mile three?” Avakian said. “What does that mean?”

  “Be quiet,” I said, pressing the gun on his forehead. Avakian shit himself, and something inside of him flipped. He started talking gibberish, talking in a disjointed mantra of syllables, like a man speaking in tongues. None of it made sense. His words blended with the other sounds, with the waves and wind and engines, and I began to question the wisdom of my plan. What was I thinking? I joined Rod at the wheel and said, “This is stupid. Turn around.”

  “We’ve come this far. Let’s see it through.”

  “Avakian shit himself.”

  “So what,” Rod said. “Nothing bad’s gonna happen. He’ll tell us where the car is, and we’ll bring him back safely. And then you make an anonymous call to the police, telling them about the car. It’s simple.”

  After a long period of time Rod yelled out, “Stellwagen Basin.” He sounded like a train conductor announcing a station. “We’re here.”

  “Kill the engines,” I said.

  Rod and I put on ski masks. I removed Avakian’s stocking hat. He opened his eyes and focused on the gun in my hand. I dragged over an anchor and tied the rope around his waist.

  “What are you doing?” Avakian said. “Please don’t do this.”

  “It’s a new interrogation technique,” I said. “I ask a question, you answer it. If I don’t like the answer, I dump you into the ocean. Do you understand the ground rules?”