John Finn

by Vincent McCaffrey

  “The story about the pumpkins.”

  I was confused. “How could I have ever lied about pumpkins?”

  She smiled again. “It was my favorite story. You told it once a year before Halloween. Remember? Susannah and Sarah both thought it was your best. . . About the Colonial farmer named John who was the first to learn how to grow great big orange pumpkins out of the puny squash the farmers had gotten from the Indians. He was so proud of his effort, he tried to keep all the seeds to himself. And he bragged at the size of his pumpkins. And this made the Puritan preacher warn him that pride goeth before a fall. And indeed—you always said ‘indeed’ at that part in the story, and we all laughed when you said it that way” Matty’s voice deepened to imitate my own, “the next year, as the Fall approached, the local Indians saw his wonderful crop and they stole most of them in the night. And the farmer had almost nothing. You always made your long face then and we always laughed again. . . And so, the following year, as the pumpkins ripened to a deep orange, farmer John got a bright idea, and he chose the ugliest of the pumpkins and cut horrible faces into them and put candles inside of them to scare the Indians away. But someone from the village saw the carved pumpkins with their blazing grimaces before the Indians did and told the Puritan preacher, and the preacher thought the devil had possessed the man’s pumpkin patch and all the townspeople came out and beat the poor man’s pumpkins to a pulp.” Matty grinned at me and shook her head. “You used to shake your head with the sadness of it. We laughed at that too. . . And again, the poor farmer had nothing for all his work. But then, when they learned the truth, and realized what they had done, they took pity on farmer John, and shared their own crop with him. And farmer John, in frustration, and with nothing else to offer, gathered the scattered seeds from the ground amidst the smashed pumpkins and gave them to the other farmers in return. And the next year they all grew farmer John’s pumpkins, and that was how the first Jack O’ Lanterns were born.”

  I told her, “I had forgotten most of it. But how was that a lie?”

  “You told us it was true. I think we all believed it was true. Until I wrote the story for a history class assignment in the eighth grade. The teacher told me is was all made up. It was a lie.”

  “But it was a ‘story.’ The story was true! The facts may not have been true but the story was.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You are hopeless.”

  I might be that but I wasn’t going to let her formulate her own plans now. I pulled a blank index card out of my pocket and wrote a short note of excuse and handed it to her.

  ​I said, “Here is a good proper lie. It says you were sick this morning. Leave this with Miss Henderson at the principal’s office. I’ll drive you over and you can at least make your afternoon classes. Besides, your mother’s waiting. We should get going.”

  ​She said, “Geez.” She used to say it just to parody me. Now she says it more than I do. Then she sighed.

  ​“How do you know Miss Henderson’s name? You never know any of my teacher’s names.”

  ​I shrugged. I admitted the one simple fact I knew. “She’s blonde.”

  ​I guess what I’m saying is it’s curious how the mind works. Certain images stick in the brain while others are forgotten.

  That morning I had to be up and gone pretty early, before the sun was cutting up Mass Ave to Porter Square. I was headed out to Concord to see a guy who does the April 19th re-enactments every April. He has a great collection of odd facts about that time. But I never made it. That was too bad, because I’m told he knows more off the top of his head than most historians have managed to get into a book on the subject. But I had to cancel.

  Garbage cans were out on the curb for pick-up, piled high and blocking the sidewalk, so I was walking in the street as I approached my old Ford Explorer. With the sun at that angle, the fact that I hadn’t gotten the old beast to a carwash in three or four months was pretty clear. There was a nice patina of city crud at the lower margins. Yet right there, just below the driver’s side door, was the smear of a hand print as if somebody had gone under my Explorer on their back. Only car mechanics go under on their backs, and I hadn’t seen one since before I had last been to a carwash. Maybe a year.

  And the image that suddenly came back to mind was Fabian Lugano on his back going after the gun a couple of nights ago. With that I remembered Connie’s story about the radio talk show guy, Denny Doyle.

  ​It was the beginning of a busy morning.

  ​First, I called Burley. Woke him up. Told him to check the bottom of his little pickup before he turned the key. Then I called the Cambridge Police and told them there was likely a bomb under my car. The woman asked me how I knew. I told her she’d have to take my word for it. She said I’d be charged for a false report if they came out and didn’t find anything. I told her that was not a cost I would be bothered about paying for and gave her the details.

  ​Fifteen minutes later a single guy shows up in an unmarked car. Not very talkative. He has a pole with a mirror on it. It takes him three minutes. He gives me a dirty look and calls in his report. Burley called back then to tell me his Ranger was clean. And ten minutes after that a bomb squad arrives from the State Police.

  ​An hour after I left my apartment to go to Concord, I’m in East Cambridge at the station there talking to a detective. There is a state trooper hanging in as well, and then, not long after that, Detective Wise shows up from Boston.

  ​Essentially, I tell them all the whole story. Everything. At least three times. That is including what I know now about Des and my run-in with Fabian Lugano. At this point it’s not going to do me any good to be keeping secrets.

  ​Their general assessment is that I played a stupid hand. I have to agree. The idea that Fabian Lugano would keep anything to himself was dumb. And I now have to agree with them—it was damned lucky I saw the imprint of somebody’s hand there in the dirt on the bottom edge of the car otherwise I’d be dead—and worse, if I had shown up later in the day, some innocent passerby could have been killed as well.

  ​Three hours after I left my own door, I was on the street again. This time I was with Detective Wise. He offered to drive me over to McGuire Security in Dorchester. The police had impounded my car, so I was in need of wheels. He also informed me that there were no fingerprints from my car. Whoever set the explosive was probably wearing rubber gloves.

  The next step as far as I was concerned was to talk to Connie and then to Denny Doyle. Doyle was on the air at that moment, so I listened a bit to the radio while I waited in Connie’s office. I had a job to work for Connie later in the day, so I knew he’d give me a loaner. I was re-reading a year-old copy of Sports Illustrated when Mary Ellen called. She told me then about Matty not showing up at school. And then when Connie showed up, he gave me an earful too.

  I was already contrite, so I just listened. I wasn’t going to strengthen my case by arguing. After fifteen minutes or so, he ran out of steam and simply gave me the keys to one of the cars and Denny Doyle’s off-air number.

  Doyle is an impatient bastard. He wants everything in short clips. That’s the way he writes his column for the paper as well. My suspicion is he does less writing than editing and simply writes down what people tell him and then reports it if he can get a second source. In this case, I didn’t have another source. I just had Higgins. But it was a good line of inquiry and my hope was that Doyle himself might have another angle on it.

  He says, “But you can’t prove anything because your best witness is missing, and the perpetrators want you dead and aren’t likely to testify against themselves. Does that sum up the situation?”

  I say, “No. We have a lawyer for a major Boston firm who is acting as a middleman supplying dope to other lawyers so that he can ride his own habit for free. I think that’s the story. The missing girl is a side bar for you, I know. It just happens to be why I’m pursuing it. That’s all.”

  Doyle says, “There’s somebody like that in almost e
very big outfit. Especially the lawyers. It’s common corporate culture. I can’t pick fights with every evil-doer in town. I wouldn’t live long enough to eat a last meal.”

  I say, “This involves Norris.”

  He says, “Norris is involved in lots of things.”

  I remind him, “He tried to kill you.”

  Doyle pauses. “You know about that? So, you know he missed. And he hasn’t tried again. Maybe he won’t try again with you either. Maybe he’ll figure the warning was enough.”

  I say, “Is that how you feel about it?”

  He says, “The way I feel is that I want to live long enough to see a few of these guys in prison. But in case you haven't noticed recently, I'm not blonde anymore. What hair I have left is gray. I just want the chance to eat a few more plates of fried clams now before my arteries close up. And I don’t want to spend my time in litigation. I’ve napped enough in courtrooms over the years. I don’t like wooden benches. My back isn’t up to it anymore. What I want is enough information to hand it to the cops and let them do the hard work. I want the easy part. I want to sit in the peanut gallery and make faces at them while they perjure themselves. I need a little triangulation on this.”

  All I could do then was drive out to Arlington and see if I could help find Matty, which thankfully I did.

  23. Bayonets and violins

  ​Marge Parker called first thing and told me to come by for something. She wouldn’t say what. I hadn’t started to write yet, so I went right over.

  She answered the door with the bayonet in her fist and a good scowl on her face. Just the way Doddie would have done it. He liked a little dramatic emphasis. The trouble was, Doddie stood about five foot eight and had a baby face. Marge really knew how to scowl.

  “Doddie was gonna give this to you as a memento for a story he said you were working on. It was supposed to be a Christmas present, but I thought you should get it now before my sons dig into Doddie’s things in the garage. The rest of the collection is going to be sorted for auction.”

  This is Doddie, all over. He couldn’t just give me the frigging bayonet. He had to make a moment out of it.

  I sat with her for an hour then and drank a cup of coffee. When she’s not scowling, Marge looks like my fourth-grade math teacher. She’s a Polish blonde gone steel grey, with powder blue eyes. She told me a couple of stories about Doddie that I didn’t know. Good stuff. Then I went home and tried to refocus on my writing. But that didn’t go as well.

  At least Detective Wise called me before he rang the bell. This was just before noon and I had given up trying to write by that time. I had emptied my dirty clothes out of the laundry bag earlier, looking for a pair of socks I could wear over to see Marge, and when Wise phoned me from the street outside, it had given me nearly enough time to clear things up.

  ​Detective Wise is about my height. Almost exactly. We could be brothers. But he’d be the one in better shape and I’d be the one with more hair. It brings to mind the comment somebody made to me recently about my looking like a cop. I guess that’s true. But I had not really thought about the similarities before.

  ​He stepped in far enough to let me close the door behind him but not much further. He seemed more than a little interested in what he saw. His eyes hit the radio and moved on before nodding toward the Van Gogh print.

  ​“Are those the feathers you told me about?”

  ​It was a quick observation. I had not told him about sticking them in the picture frame, just the part about first meeting Desiree when she came looking for me after I refused to return them to the bartender.

  ​I nodded back and turned down the radio. WGBH was playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto and I had it running a little loud to drown out the noises of a crew digging a hole for a cable in the street.

  I tried to be polite. “Coffee?”

  ​“Sure. Ya got cream and sugar? I’m partial to hot coffee ice cream. . . What are you working on?”

  ​Most of the books and photocopies of the various pieces I had collected concerning my little story about the Mary Andrews murder were piled on any flat surface close enough to reach without getting up from the table where I was using my daughter’s laptop. Now, the general picture was suddenly clear to me. I was a slob. This is not exactly true, but the appearance of things was undeniable. Several articles of dirty clothing, including a pair of undershorts, had fallen on the floor from the laundry bag, where I had missed them in my haste to clean things up.

  ​I looked him in the eye. “You married?” I knew he was. It was rhetorical. He held up his left hand. I nodded. “This is what happens when you live alone. It’s why you want to stay married.”

  ​Wise gave me the courtesy of a smile. “Can I sit down?”

  ​I pulled a stack of papers off the second chair and then poured his coffee. “What can I do for you?”

  ​His eyes were still scanning the room. “Nothing. I just dropped by for a chat.”

  ​I said, “Sure.” There was probably a note of skepticism in my voice.

  ​He protested my tone. “True. I’ve got nothing. I’m working a couple of other cases right now and this one is at the bottom of the heap. Sorry. I thought maybe that fertile brain of yours might have stumbled on something. Some thought that wouldn’t go away. A detail out of place, maybe.” He fingered some sheets of paper on one pile at the edge of the bed. “What’s this? ‘Biomechanics of knife stab attacks.’ What’s that about?”

  ​It was one of several articles I had found concerning stab wounds. “For the novel I’m writing. It concerns an actual person—Mary Andrews—a young woman who was stabbed to death along with a boy and then thrown down a well.”

  His face had frozen. This is not an exaggeration. Wise maintains a fairly stolid front most of the time, but his eyes have a good Irish twinkle to them and there are lines there you can read. For just a moment there was a sort of Madame Tussaud’s wax look to him that made me smile.

  He said, “When was this?”

  The idea of what might be turning in his brain entertained me. I drew it out. “Thursday night, I think, . . April 19th, 1775.”

  With one hand I pulled Doddie’s bayonet from out of the coffee can where I keep my pencils and pens. I’d dropped the sharp end in there when I got home from seeing Marge. The end that would fasten to the rifle had the look of a rusty scrap of metal. The other end, Doddie had cleaned down to the blade and this gleamed with a rather lethal edge.

  A twinkle showed first in his eye before the expression changed. It reminded me of my father.

  “This actually happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “By writing a novel?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded his own doubts and took his first sip of coffee. “Perfect. Thanks. I needed that. And a little Beethoven. Sharpens the wits. I was out of the house this morning at 5:00 am on a call in the South End. It already feels like a long day.”

  Most people can’t identify the Beethoven Violin Concerto, cop or not. And he didn’t let me know that titbit without a reason. He was scoring his points. I decided to take the initiative. “Sure then, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

  He said, “Try me.”

  I started in on a few loose ends. “Did the Portuguese cops in Evora have anything to say?”

  His head nodded as if to say yes, but he said, “Nothing. But that she was there.”

  “Did you ever talk to Mrs. Adams?”

  “Yes. She was in Texas with Mr. Adams during October and November. Didn’t leave.”

  “Even though he did?”

  “As far as we can tell.”

  “And Mr. Adams.”

  “He was home that weekend. With Mrs. Adams.”

  “Sure. Have you heard anything from La Jolla?”

  He raised his eyes on that. “Yes. I found the place Miss Perry used to go to. ‘Co
ttage on the Sea.’ Sounds very nice. She hasn’t been there in at least three years.”

  That was something. I said, “What is your intuition telling you now?”

  He sipped his coffee once more and thought that one over.

  “Intuition isn’t worth shit. You know that. It tells you something’s wrong, but it doesn’t tell you what. I’m with her mother on that. I think something’s wrong. That’s all.”

  “The credit card?”

  “She hasn’t used it again.”

  “How about her boss, Higgins?”

  “Nothing there. We can’t harass him.” Wise put his coffee down and picked up the article Becky had written about the Mary Andrews murder from the table, his eyes scanning. “Wasn’t this in the papers a while back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your other lady friend, Dr. Sawyer, she’s involved with it, right?”

  I nodded.

  He smiled, “Interesting work. I remember it now. I read that story in the papers. You never know when one murder might be connected to another around here. The professor thought it was a bayonet that killed them, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You ever handle a bayonet?”

  “Yes.”

  He stood. “Sure you have. You were in the Army. You hold the rifle like this—” he raised both arms up with his right hand holding an imaginary stock above and behind his head in demonstration. “Or like this.” His right hand dropped to his waist with his left hand extended at shoulder height, fingers parted as if holding the weapon. “I imagine it was a little different in those days. With muskets. But still.”

  “Right.” I knew where his mind was going.

  “So why were the wounds from so low beneath? In both cases. As if the musket were held from well below the waist?”

  It was a good question. And muskets were longer than rifles. I was stupid for not asking it myself. I think he saw some part of that recognition on my face.

  “So you think it was not on the rifle when it was used. It’d been removed. They used it like a knife. From below. That would take a strong hand.”