THE FIRE THIS TIME
THE FIRE THIS TIME
A novel
by
S. FREDERIC LISS
Adelaide Books
New York / Lisbon
2020
THE FIRE THIS TIME
A novel
By S. Frederic Liss
Copyright © by S. Frederic Liss
Cover design © 2020 Adelaide Books
Published by Adelaide Books, New York / Lisbon
adelaidebooks.org
Editor-in-Chief
Stevan V. Nikolic
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For any information, please address Adelaide Books
at [email protected]
or write to:
Adelaide Books
244 Fifth Ave. Suite D27
New York, NY, 10001
ISBN-13: 978-1-953510-07-5
For A, J, and J
with the prayer the world they grow up into
will not be the world depicted in this novel
CONTENTS
Part I - Maddie Devlin
Prologue - April, 1981
Chapter 1 - Friday, April 10, 1981
Chapter 2 - Saturday, April 11, 1981
Chapter 3 - Sunday, April 12, 1981
Chapter 4 - Monday, April 13, 1981
Chapter 5 - Tuesday, April 14, 1981
Chapter 6 - Wednesday, April 15, 1981
Chapter 7 - Friday, April 17, 1981
Chapter 8 - Erev Pesach, Saturday, April 18, 1981
Part II - Mabi
Chapter 9 - Easter Sunday, April 19, 1981
Chapter 10 - Monday, April 20, 1981
Chapter 11 - Tuesday, April 21, 1981
Chapter 12 - Wednesday, April 22, 1981
Part III - The Fire This Time
Chapter 13 - Thursday, April 23, 1981
Chapter 14 - Friday, April 24, 1981
Chapter 15 - Saturday, April 25, 1981
Chapter 16 - Tuesday, April 28, 1981
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Oh, maybe then you all shock a little too easily. Jews are heirs to greater shocks than I can possibly deliver with a story . . .
Nathan Zuckerman as quoted by
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer,
Fawcett Crest Books,
New York, 1979, p. 134
PART I
MADDIE DEVLIN
PROLOGUE
APRIL, 1981
That venomous spring a massive high pressure system stalled over Georges Bank and Canada’s Maritime Provinces lifting the jet stream north of the Saint Lawrence River, trapping a five-hundred-year heat wave over the northeast United States, a heat wave that lingered like a fever incubating a last illness. In Boston, a radio station ran a contest–first prize central air conditioning–to the listener who found the sidewalk that fried an egg the fastest.
The contest was a sham. No sidewalk ever got hot enough to fry an egg. Experiments in Death Valley where such heat was as common as a carpet of flowers after an early spring rain had proven that. There would be no winners. But, there were losers. Victims of heat stroke backlogged hospital emergency rooms, overflowed mortuary embalming tables, or braved the pollution of Boston’s beaches.
Many blamed the heat for the events of that miasmal April recounted here. Others blamed God or Satan. Boston’s Jews blamed the city’s mayor, Charles F. Sullivan, Jr. The city’s Irish blamed the Jews; its African-Americans blamed the whites. Everyone blamed somebody; nobody blamed themselves.
CHAPTER 1
FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 1981
-1-
Attorney Mary Ann Devlin, Maddie to everyone but the judges before whom she appeared every day, tried to persuade herself it was too hot to do her daily calisthenics, Royal Canadian Air Force Exercises, Level 5, on the three or four days a week she did not run five fast miles along the Charles River, outrunning the druggies and derelicts who often showed up on her client list in the Criminal Session of the Boston Municipal Court.
Maddie’s salary as a public defender with Suffolk County Legal Services did not allow the luxury of membership in an athletic club with state-of-the-art equipment, autocrats masquerading as exercise leaders, and a swimming pool to stretch the long muscles of her back and legs. Dues at the YWCA, as low as they were, were also out of reach. She purchased her running shoes, factory seconds of the brands worn by the Boston Marathon’s elite runners, on the grey market from a pushcart hidden among the produce stalls in Haymarket. At her age, halfway between thirty and forty, she was thin, but softly firm, with her mother’s auburn hair, an oak leaf in autumn which had just peaked. If beauty lay in the genes, hers–like Trish Devlin Sullivan’s, like Katie Devlin’s, like all the Devlin women’s–was her birthright. Her beauty, however, did not extend to her voice. Aged by circumstance, it was shrill and shaky like that of an opera singer no longer able to hit her notes; a voice so perfect in the court-room, so mood breaking in the bedroom.
Maddie dug the TV remote out from the pile of unread magazines beneath her night table–The New Yorker, The Economist, Vogue–to feed her craving for things not found in the world she grew up in, and clicked on the morning news. Framed in black bunting, nine-year-old Bumper Sullivan’s boyish face filled the screen, a school photo, wearing a white shirt and clip-on tie that sagged from one collar. His hair swooped across his forehead; his smile was a shade shy of a smirk. In a halting voice, the announcer recounted how Bumper’s bloodless body had been found by his father, Mayor Charles Sullivan, in the library of the Capablanca Chess Club the previous evening.
“According to high-level sources in the police department,” the announcer continued,” a skull-cap belonging to Avram Levy, also a member of the Club, had been found near the body. Levy is in custody and his arraignment is scheduled for this afternoon.”
Maddie gasped. Her lungs felt on fire. Ever since her daughter’s death thirteen Aprils ago, April had been her cruelest month. Now it would be Trish Sullivan’s as well. Elizabeth Devlin Gloucester, Bumper Devlin Sullivan, never cousins in life because of their age difference, now cousins in death. She counted to ten, then counted to ten again. At last, her heart rate moderated and she breathed more easily.
She removed the mouth guard she wore so she would not grind her teeth in her sleep–hundreds of dollars to keep perfect a smile she rarely had occasion to use. She picked up the phone. The dial tone jarred her and she hung up. Trish had not called when Elizabeth died, had not attended her wake or funeral. Bumper’s death tempered Maddie’s grudge, but not the realization that Trish would not welcome her call. The sins of generations past victimized them both, making present day sins unnecessary.
A photo of Avram Levy’s skull-cap replaced Bumper’s picture on the TV screen. Maddie applied her lawyer’s mind to the scant information offered by the report. She rummaged through her bag of defense attorney tricks and treats to make sense of what she had just seen, had just heard. She played these mind games because an ancient litigator whose nose and ears bristled with the hair of experience once told her visualization was the key to being a successful trial lawyer. It worked in her professional life, if not her personal.
Leaking this information–Levy’s name, the photo of the skull-cap–to the press was not the style of the Suffolk County District Attorney. He held his cards so close to the vest the dirt on his hands and fingers smudged his white dress shirt. Mayor Charlie was too calculating to finger Levy before the public had processed the murder of his son
and none of his underlings had the balls to do something like this on their own. Jewish votes and Jewish money were essential to Charlie’s U.S. Senate campaign. High-level sources in the police department, the news anchor had said. It had to be the highest, Police Commissioner Dante Ugolino. But, why?
Maddie ticked off potential explanations on her fingers, each a negative. Ugolino wouldn’t do it to scare off the defense bar because the best made their reputations and fortunes winning high-profile unwinnable cases. Nor to calm the community because the disclosure was too inflammatory. Nor to incite anti-Semitism, even though it would. A mistake? Ugolino was too foresighted, too farsighted.
Maddie stopped counting on her fingers as two possible explanations came into focus. Ugolino was laying the foundation for justifying a cursory police investigation of Bumper’s murder. The police had their man, so why bother? Maddie could offer a multitude of reasons why the police should bother–the possibility Levy didn’t act alone being the most obvious, the possibility the skull-cap was a plant by the killer to mislead the police the second most obvious. Or, Ugolino was generating pretrial publicity that would make it impossible to impanel an impartial jury in Boston, sucker-punching the average defense attorney to move for a change of venue.
Maddie had tried cases in rural Massachusetts, Franklin and Berkshire Counties, and Worcester County north of the city. Jews were scarce in those parts of the state. Blue-collar workers, farmers, older people with traditional values and strong bonds to their ethnic communities as well as their churches–older people who had been brought up to believe Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion–filled the jury pools. Those people would focus on the obvious–the skull-cap beside the body–and ignore whatever smoke defense counsel would blow. The case would be decided, the guilty verdict rendered, before the lunch break on the first day of deliberations.
Years of trying cases in the Criminal Session of Suffolk County Superior Court had taught her that Levy needed a Boston jury drawn from a pool large enough to include liberal Democrats, the college educated, a white-collar jury with teachers, engineers, business owners, accountants, people who would listen and assess the evidence rather than be swayed by emotion or prejudice. It only took one, one out of twelve. Her trial experience also made it clear to her that Ugolino had outfoxed the defense bar. He wanted to deep-six a thorough police investigation to force the defense to do the police’s job on the defense’s nickel. He wanted the change of venue and he was doing his best to finesse the defense into requesting it.
But, why? The prosecution’s case must have a weakness. A set of fingerprints that didn’t match Levy’s. A break in the chain of custody. A piece of physical evidence “lost” in the police department evidence room. Or, planted at the crime scene. Ugolino was not beneath corrupting a crime scene, something every experienced defense attorney knew but could never muster sufficient evidence to prove. Too obvious, these weaknesses. Pre-trial discovery would alert defense counsel to them. No, it had to be something so subtle, yet so fatal, only one in a thousand defense lawyers would figure it out. It was the kind of challenge she thrived on and succeeded at more often than not.
Maddie tried to infer what the weakness was. Less than twelve hours had elapsed since Bumper’s murder, since Mayor Charlie had found Bumper’s body. Logic said it had to be tied into something Charlie did before the police arrived, before the police tape cordoning off the crime scene went up. Corrupting the crime scene was one explanation; removing evidence another. With or without consulting Ugolino first? Maddie loved conspiracies. The more implausible, the more she loved them. Her secret vice, alien abductions.
No, as much as this was her kind of case, she wouldn’t represent Levy, if asked. She never represented homicide defendants accused of killing a child or any defendants accused of abusing a child, a preference the director of Suffolk County Legal Services had respected to date when assigning cases.
The camera zoomed in on Avram Levy’s name embroidered in the lining of the skull-cap. The spidery stitching reminded Maddie of the way her ma had embroidered her name in her church dresses. Ma had mothballed those dresses for the granddaughter she yearned for, but Maddie had unpicked the embroidery and donated the dresses to a charity which shipped used clothing to missions in Africa. At the time, Maddie thought seeing her dresses walking down the street would decimate whatever remnant of her fragile psyche had survived Elizabeth’s death; but, now, years later, she regretted acting in such haste. She rolled to her side, her head resting on an arm. Hair covered her cheek. On the television, the newscaster, now perky, moved on to a story about the possible postponement of the Boston Marathon if the heat did not moderate.
Maddie clicked off the television, eased out of bed, and rested her elbows on the window sill. The street was quiet, empty except for the heat waves rising off the pavement. The streetlight opposite her bedroom window hummed softly like a fluorescent light beginning to wear down. It was six in the morning. After Elizabeth’s death, it had taken months, years, for her to reset her internal alarm clock, seven months before she first slept through the night rather than awaken for the 3:00 AM bottle, two years before she slept through it regularly. Habits and routines were another form of grieving; giving them up, a way of letting go. Which was not the same as forgetting. Or forgiving.
-2-
The phone rang as Maddie washed her breakfast dishes. Half a pink grapefruit. A slice of whole wheat toast, dry. A cup of coffee, black, French Press brewed fresh each morning, coarse ground Kenyan coffee beans, the one luxury she allowed herself. On this morning, she sought solace in a second cup. Since her da had passed, calls before work were rare, usually a solicitation on behalf of a police or fire relief fund where most of the money went to the company raising it and a penny or two trickled down to the widows and children desperate for money. She thought about letting the phone ring, but she had been trained to answer a ringing phone just like dogs had been trained to respond to a bell by that Russian whose name she didn’t remember. In college, she had taken a psychology course to satisfy a science distribution requirement and hated every minute of it. Now, after eight years in the court-room, she knew more about ins and outs of the human mind than Professor Whatever-His-or-Her-Name-Was.
“Maddie,” George Harriman said. “Bumper . . . ”
“I know, Uncle George. I saw it on TV.”
Detective George Harriman. An uncle by affection, not blood, who had always been there for Maddie. Her da’s best friend, their friendship originating in catechism class at St. Dymphna Catholic Church and forged on the beaches of Guadalcanal during World War II, a friendship so strong it survived George’s moving back and forth between the two branches of the estranged Devlin family, an envoy with diplomatic immunity, a friendship which in spite of its strength was unable to reunite what had cleaved asunder two generations before. And, so, he had stopped trying.
“Was Ugolino the high police source?” Maddie asked.
“You should go to Bumper’s wake,” Harriman said.
“Why does he want a change of venue? Did Charlie corrupt the crime scene? Was the skull-cap a plant?”
“Trish needs your help.”
“Ugolino’s as obvious as the fat hanging over his belt.”
“Maddie!” Harriman’s voice had the snap of a frustrated beat cop trying to control an unruly crowd. “Trish needs you.”
“She wasn’t there for me when Elizabeth died. She wasn’t there for me when I asked Charlie to add the Elizabeth Fund to the list of charities city employees could contribute to through a payroll deduction and he told me to go fuck myself. She wasn’t there for me when Ugolino vetoed Boston cops taking the Elizabeth Fund’s course in child abuse prevention and you and the union forced him to approve it. So, why should I be there for her?”
To honor her daughter’s memory, shortly after her death Maddie had founded the Elizabeth Fund, a charity to provide support to victims of child abuse and to educate the public on the problem, a problem that
received little or no attention in the press. Michelle Furey, an attorney recommended by a law school classmate of Maddie’s, had donated her services to form a charitable corporation under Massachusetts law and to qualify it as a charity under the Internal Revenue Code so that contributions were tax deductible. Furey had declined an invitation to join the board of directors. Maddie had not believed Furey’s “standard policy” explanation and replaced her as the Fund’s attorney.
“You’ve been through it,” Harriman said.
“What about Father Curry? I’m not her savior.”
“Talk to her. For her sake and yours.”
“I tried. Bumper’s First Communion. I reached out to her. You know what happened.”
Aunt Katie Devlin had happened. Katie had imported the Devlin blood feud from Dublin to Boston and enforced it with the enthusiasm of a nun sowing the fear of God in the minds of impressionable children.
“Maybe,” Maddie said, “if there’s a time Katie’s not there.”
“That’s the same as saying no.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
“No, it’s all you’re willing to do.”
“You have a nice day, too.”
It would serve Trish right, Maddie thought as she dried her breakfast dishes, if I represented Levy. Still, she had made a promise to Elizabeth’s memory, a promise more important to her than payback to Trish’s side of the family.
-3-
While commuters crawling along the Southeast Expressway listened to radio talk shows whose ratings fluctuated with how inflammatory the hosts and callers were, three men drenched the Passover matzoh offered for sale by a West Roxbury supermarket with pig’s blood. The Boston Superintendent of Schools locked down the high school in Roslindale after fights broke out between Catholic and Jewish students, Catholic and Jewish teachers. Everywhere, people heard footsteps; yet, when they looked over their shoulders they saw only shadows.
The Fire This Time Page 1
