“Maybe.” I could do the same thing now in our glorious New Boston except it would be called All the Places I’ve Struck Out tour. And the list would be too long to fit onto one shirt.
The remaining locations aside from Leavitt & Peirce were all connected in some way to the Boston music scene of the early eighties, the address on Newbury Street the former site of Syncro Sound, a recording studio owned by The Cars and where a number of Boston bands recorded albums. Between them and Rick Harte, who ran Ace of Hearts Records just a couple blocks away, it became the epicenter of the Boston recording scene.
So what did it all add up to? Our man Martine Andino was taking a musical stroll down memory lane, lamenting the passing of time and the sea change that had come to Boston? Conducting a one-man reunion tour, walking himself back in time like my father did on the daily without even having to leave his couch.
Was Andino communing with ghosts, looking for something he’d lost along the way? I don’t have those answers, but I’ll let Solarte know what a fabulous job of sleuthing I’ve done and maybe she’ll make more sense of Andino’s movements and his connection to Arturo Moreno, since she’s the one who knows what all this is really about.
Am I curious? Sure, but chasing after the past isn’t a luxury I have right now. The temperature’s dropped precipitously since yesterday’s high of sixty-five. The Sox have left town to play out the string on a disappointing season, the highly anticipated Rauschenberg Retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts has been canceled, and word on the street is Seiji Ozawa had just been bypassed for a Grammy by the New York Phil again, the Beacon Hill muckety-mucks wicked pissed about that and ready to lay someone the fuck out.
And as I’d predicted yesterday, the phones had started ringing, business picking up as the chill set in, Martha having spent most of her day barking addresses into the Motorola and sending Charlie out to terrorize pedestrians and make tiny talk with receptionists from Back Bay to Faneuil Hall.
And as I wheel toward Brill’s apartment on Worcester, the midnight streets blurring in my speed-induced periphery, the song I didn’t realize I’d been waiting for drops onto the turntable of my brain and everything becomes crystal clear.
I hadn’t heard a Mass song in years, but I was hearing one now, Karl Klaussen’s wounded howl on the opening notes of their local hit “Never Again,” his anguish as stark and real as that of those blues singers my dad loved so much.
It was a voice that could have been the voice of a generation, the kind that only took one note to etch into your memory where you’d been and who you were with when you first heard that song. And it was the voice I’d heard singing Spanish odes to Mexican cartel kingpins tonight at the Hacienda in Jamaica Plain; not a fucking doubt in my concussion-scrambled mind.
Karl Klaussen, the dark prince of Boston rock and roll, was alive and kicking. And that lying motherfucker was back in town.
SEVENTEEN
Brill had kept himself busy in the last twenty-four hours. There’s a large Dumpster brimming with debris parked directly in front of his stoop and he’d taken down walls to the studs and widened a doorway between the large high-ceilinged living room and what could be a formal dining room. Same deal in the kitchen, where he’d torn out all the cabinets and trashed the old dishwasher and fridge, their grime-chalked outlines still visible on the hardwood floor like the markings of a double appliance homicide.
“Goddamn,” I say, peering in from the front entrance foyer, the canvas-tarped staircase leading to the second floor littered with antique copper and glass doorknobs, carved hardwood moldings, light fixtures, and balusters. “What’d you do, rob Restoration Hardware at gunpoint?”
Brill knows I live at pace, looks at me, taking in my black eye and bruises, and asks me no questions.
“That big barn door there and the rigging I got from a salvage place in Dorchester called Olde Bostonian. Rest of this stuff I’ve been collecting piecemeal for years. There’s more upstairs on the second floor.”
“How much more? Like enough to rig the whole building?”
“At least.”
“You kept all this shit in Newton?”
Brill shakes his head. “Storage.”
“From where?”
“Crime scenes mostly.” Brill removes a fleck of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, challenges me with a look.
“Murder scenes?” I try to keep any judgment out of my voice, but my mind conjures images of blood spatter on marble, hardwood floors, crystal doorknobs.
“Some.” Brill dials it back. “But I started collecting when I was still in uniform. Kept adding to it over the years.”
“I’m surprised the department let you,” I say. Unless they didn’t know about it until now. Was this what had finally caught up to Brill and kicked him to the sidelines?
“Wasn’t a secret.” Brill shrugs noncommittally. “None of it was evidence or like part of a case. It was just … there.”
“What neighborhoods we talking about?” As a mover and messenger I’ve been inside of some of the swankiest houses and apartments this city has to offer, and in terms of quality, craftsmanship, and materials the items lining Brill’s stairs—now that they’ve been repaired, polished, stripped, and sanded to their original beauty—are in every way their equal.
“Come on, Zesty, don’t play stupid. You grew up around these parts. What neighborhoods historically carry the bulk of violent crimes in this town?”
Brill was talking mainly about the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, places that at the turn of the twentieth century were still considered the suburbs and became home to a large Jewish community who had settled there after moving out of Boston proper when the inner-city population swelled with immigrants from other distant shores. As in places like Brookline and Newton, the Jews of Boston built stately Victorian homes and synagogues in thriving neighborhoods, only by the early sixties changes in transportation, politics, and social unrest prompted a panicked exodus into the true suburbs far beyond Boston’s borders and turned these neighborhoods into its revolving door. First came the Irish followed by an influx of southern blacks and then a wave of immigrants from Caribbean nations into an aging housing stock that was too expensive to repair, and neglected by landlords, except to subdivide into smaller spaces that housed far too many people.
“I’d see these places all boarded up or abandoned or I’d be called to clear squatters out of them, junkies,” Brill tells me. “And I’d be looking at carved balustrades with five coats of paint, marble fireplaces, pressed-tin ceilings, stained glass. Beautiful craftsmanship camouflaged in filth. Sometimes in blood. A lot of these houses were crime scenes, a lot of them burned down. That’s why they got so many empty lots getting built on in the Berry today.”
“If you got the coin,” I say.
“Sure. But twenty years ago? Shit, you take an overhead shot, some of those streets looked like Leon Spinks’s grill when he smiled, gaps everywhere. So whenever the city was about to step in, tear a place down, I’d chalk my name and the demo crews knew to call me. I’d throw them a few dollars, load up the cruiser. Same goes for the firebugs, the cats getting paid by absentee landlords to go in and torch the places. They’d double up and give me a call, too, because word got around. I mean, what was I supposed to do, call the Arson Squad, arrest them? They hadn’t done anything yet. And if it wasn’t them, it would be someone else. Didn’t know what I was going to do with all the stuff at the time, but it felt wrong, all that history just disappearing. It’s cost me some money storing it all these years, but here we are, full circle. Maybe we got something in common after all, Zesty.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Sometimes the sky just falls and we gotta move out from under. But hey, doesn’t mean we have to turn our backs on where we came from, right? After all, what’s that saying? The past is a terrible thing to waste?”
We work for a while and then we get the barn door out of the hall and lean it against the expose
d brick wall where I’d chipped off most of the paint. Here and there were still some dirty white or gray patches that the wire brush seemed to only tattoo further into the brick.
“I actually like it.” Brill runs his fingers over a couple of the spots. “It’s got a nice vibe to it, like you sealed in some history. Leave it. Whatever rich-ass motherfuckers I rent this place to don’t like it, they can live somewhere else.”
“I thought you were taking this floor.”
“I’m talking about upstairs. Gonna hit the same layout for each space.”
“You sure you want people above you? Why don’t you take the third floor?”
“I’m not getting any younger. Anyhow, Boston Ballet School’s just down a ways, I’ll rent it to a couple of dancers. They don’t eat nothing, move like angels. I won’t hear a damn thing. Tonight’s goal is to get that barn door hung on its rail. How are you with power tools?”
“I’m Jewish,” I remind Brill.
“And here I thought I’d hired one of the original day laborers. Didn’t your people build the Pyramids?”
“Move away from the brick wall,” I tell Brill. “I don’t need the competition.”
“That what your eye and bruises are all about, competition? I saw your bike’s in one piece. Who you pissing off now?”
“I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you.”
“Go ahead, try me.”
I do. And when I’m done, Brill says, “You’re right, I don’t believe you.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, for starters, Klaussen being alive is like a thousand-to-one shot.”
“I heard him,” I say, shaking my head. “Granted, he doesn’t look like the pictures I’ve seen of him but it’s been over thirty years and Solarte said he’d had some expensive surgery done too.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the other reason I don’t believe it. You do any background on Alianna Solarte before she roped you in?”
“No. You know her?”
“She tell you she used to be a cop?”
“I figured it out.”
“She tell you she worked Internal Affairs?”
“No. Why’s it matter?”
“Doesn’t to me.” Brill shrugs. “But she took down a lot of dirty cops about six, seven years back. Worked undercover with some Vice guys wired into some of the construction crews that had contracts with the Big Dig. Some state police, some local.”
“So?” I didn’t see Brill’s point. “She did her job?”
“Yeah. Some thought maybe too well.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It got messy. Supposedly this crew was stockpiling cash, drugs from raids, skimming seizures. They knew they couldn’t spend; they were looking ahead. To get access, each one held some kind of key, like a piece to a puzzle so they could only get at it together. Well, she took a bullet during a raid that had all the markings of a setup, like the crew had been tipped she was IAD. Her Kevlar had been messed with, only she’d swapped it out with one of her own and lived to tell the tale. Barely. Only when the hammer came down and these guys started turning on each other, most of the stash was gone. Someone had figured out a way in without the others.”
“They think she took it? How?”
“Not something I know. But those cops were tight, even lived on the same street, some of them. Funny thing is, with the stash raided the thing that sealed the case against most of them wasn’t even Solarte’s testimony. It was the swimming pools done them in.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Shit used to go missing off the Big Dig sites on the regular, you ought to know something about that.”
It’s true. When the Dig was just getting ramped up and the residents of the lofts on Albany, Thayer Street, Harrison Avenue—mostly artists, musicians, messengers—realized they were going to get forced out soon, they would sometimes vandalize the heavy digging equipment or hot-wire a digger and deposit it in the Bay. Sometimes brawls even erupted between the construction crews and residents. But all of it backfired and actually sped up the inevitable evictions, the police called in to bring the peace, the fire marshals on their heels to ring up violations and board up lofts that weren’t zoned for residential living. City hall got in the mix and if they weren’t all the way in the developers’ pockets, they were at least somewhere in the linings, and worked their way up the creases.
“Still don’t get the pools,” I say.
“One of the big-ticket items that went ghost were these imported Italian aqua blue tiles they were going to inlay the Ted Williams Tunnel with. Artisan-level-type shit, about a million dollars’ worth. Never solved. Well, traffic reporter’s up in the copter one day, notices a string of pools in Swampscott, just like a side comment.” Brill poorly mimicks a white announcer’s voice: “Gorgeous sunshine up here, perfect day to sit by these amazing blue pools that I’m looking at, over so-and-so street in Swampscott.”
“The tiles from Teddy Ballgame Tunnel.” I put together Brill’s story. “All the pools belonged to the cops?”
“Not all. They off-loaded some of the tile to their neighbors.”
“At discount, no doubt. All the cops went to prison?”
“No. Some turned and got Wit-Proed out. Only the marshals know where they’re at now. One ate his gun. A couple were smart enough to plan an exit ticket in case shit went south.”
“Solarte?” I say.
“Disabled out, I guess. She sure as shit didn’t make any friends. I’m actually surprised to hear she put a shingle out in these parts. She’s from New York originally. And people around here got long memories.”
“So what is it you remember about Klaussen makes you so sure it’s not him back from the dead?”
“You mean, what do I remember about your dad back then, don’t you? You’re a cagey motherfucker, Zesty, always talking between the lines. Well, all right, but you’re not gonna like what I got to tell you.”
“Take your best shot. After McKenna, what the fuck could be worse?”
Brill stops what he’s doing, and gives me the full measure of his detective hound dog face, and takes his time doing it. “Klaussen wasn’t the first,” he says finally.
“Wasn’t the first what?”
“To disappear.”
EIGHTEEN
Brill changes the CD to Marcus Roberts’s Gershwin for Lovers, the opening piano notes like drops of rain from a heavy predawn sky.
“I was just coming into my second year as a patrolman. Your dad used to bring Klaussen into my uncle’s joint on Mass Ave., give him a little blues education, taste of the other side of the tracks. Klaussen had a steady girl then. I don’t remember her name. But she had a drug problem, I remember that.”
“Why’s that stand out to you?”
“Well, you know the rules my uncle had. Heavy hitters checked hardware at the door, didn’t tolerate nothing but weed. I caught her shooting up in the bathroom and had to kick her out. Messy. Blood-on-the-walls-type shit. Your dad didn’t argue the point. I think he was embarrassed, even.”
I ask Brill how he came to that conclusion.
“Was a while before I saw him again after that. Could’ve just been busy, managing Klaussen and the band, riding the wave of that song, looking like they were going to hit it big. Then the girl disappears.”
“What do you mean disappears?”
“Just that. Poof.” Brill brings his hands together, a white cloud of dust exploding into the air. “Gone. Parents filed a missing-persons report. Camilla Islas.” Brill snaps his fingers. “That was her name. Parents lived just outside Davis Square.”
“They think something happened to her? They know she was a drug addict?”
“They knew. And they pointed fingers, too.”
“Klaussen.”
“Of course. It usually is the boyfriend. And he was an addict, too, at this point.”
“Was the album out yet?”
“It was. But it was the single that was eating up the loc
al airwaves. You telling me you don’t know all this?”
“The music part only. Nothing about the girl. What kind of name is Islas?”
“Mexican. Spanish. Klaussen himself was at least part Mexican or Native American or something.”
“You’re full of shit,” I say.
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s no fucking way you’d remember all these details from so long ago.”
“Is that what Wells told you, that I’m slipping? Anyhow, who said from so long ago? When that whole McKenna shit went down me and Wells pulled up everything we had on your family, especially since our local Feds weren’t so eager to share. I’m just remembering shit from two years ago.”
“And Klaussen’s name was in my dad’s file?”
“See, that’s where things got mighty interesante. Klaussen’s name is in there but most everything else was redacted. Someone had blacklined the shit out of that file.”
“Meaning what?”
“Come on, Zesty, don’t play coy. You know the FBI was protecting McKenna as long as he was ratting out the Italians. Your dad was so tangled up with McKenna, that shit with your mom, they were protecting him, too.”
“From what?”
“What do you think? He covered Klaussen like a blanket. Anything Klaussen did, your dad knew about or was there. If Klaussen killed his—”
“Why would Klaussen kill his girlfriend?”
“Why does anyone?”
“So you’re telling me Klaussen was a suspect and that automatically made my dad a suspect?”
“I don’t blame you for being upset, Zesty, but it’s not that far-fetched.”
“Nah, fuck that!” I’m heated now. “My dad wouldn’t have any motive to want her gone. What, because she embarrassed him at your uncle’s joint? That’s fuckin’ bullshit.”
“No, you’re just spitting lightning because you’re emotional. Your dad had plenty of motive. The single was on fire and the album was about to drop heavy. Everybody knew how big Mass was going to be. Your dad had his golden goose to protect and Camilla Islas was like a cancer firing on the lymph nodes. Your dad had every reason to get rid of her.”
A Town Called Malice Page 13
