We lit a fire nearby and shared hits off a massive joint while sitting on the plain pine coffin Zero made himself and stored out of sight behind the giant bins in his garage. The ground was cold and hard and we worked it with pickaxes and shovels, ignoring the tractor in the barn nearby. We worked into darkness, the western hills outlined in a sky of pink during the final moments of light. The digging and hacking brought on blisters and blood. It felt like penance. It felt right. When we were done, we planted a small maple above him. The Rabbi said the Mourner’s Kaddish because for all our preparation, we weren’t ready then.
According to Zero, we’re ready now. We make the short walk to the temple together. When the time in the service comes, we fulfill our obligations as sons, bow our heads, and say the words.
FORTY-FOUR
I ring the doorbell at 34 Hall Avenue on a cold day in February, the sun shining bright and hard, causing the accumulated snow to melt off the rooftop and drip into clear sharp icicles that hang off the front porch like a predator’s glass teeth.
I didn’t ride my bike. Too cold for that. I don’t think I’ll ride again in winter if I can avoid it. Charlie can take the frigid shifts. Actually, he can take whatever shifts he decides since he’s now a vested part-owner of Mercury Couriers. He’ll have to get himself a new dispatcher, though. Solarte, who’d driven me and chooses to wait in the car, has installed Martha at her front desk, business picking up with recommendations that must be coming from Wells and Brill, though neither one has said a word about it.
Camilla Islas answers the door stepping directly out of a time machine. By all rights she should be nearly sixty years old but looks somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties.
“Zesty?” she says and notes my confusion. “I’ll go get my mom. Come in. Have a seat.”
Of course. Camilla Islas was pregnant when she disappeared.
“So,” Camilla Islas says, sitting before me on a chair across from the couch. “What can I tell you that you don’t already know?” The real Camilla Islas looks her age, gone thin, not soft the way some women do, but without the ravages I’d expected of a former heroin addict and alcoholic. Her hair is thin but dark where gray hasn’t settled in, Islas not vain enough to color it. Or maybe she’s just accepted what comes with age, wearing her hair as she’s worn her new name and new life all these years.
“You can tell me what to call you,” I say. “I still think of you as Camilla.”
“So then call me Carrie, please. Camilla’s been gone a long time.”
“Okay. This visit’s kind of more for my own closure than anything else, Carrie. You don’t have anything to fear from me. I really just want to know about my father. Can you start with my father?”
She does. “Your father was a great guy. I’m sorry to hear of his passing, about the Alzheimer’s. God, he lived, though, in those early days. Those were such crazy times, Zesty. In so many ways. Boston was a rock and roll hotbox, dangerous, thrilling, the city so different than it is now. I don’t know why I’m so nostalgic about it, really. Boston would have killed me if it wasn’t for your dad. Your dad sacrificed for me. Everything.”
“How?”
“I was a full-blown junkie when Mass’s album dropped. You could always find me at the Rat or the Channel, working at Spit, wherever there was music and cocaine and then finally heroin. All of a sudden it was heroin everywhere, and me and Karl we were hooked on it and on top of the world. My boyfriend was going to be the next…” Carrie looks off into the distance, maybe into the past, a small pool gathering in her eyes but not dropping.
“William, your dad, managed Mass, as I’m sure you know, and he’d done everything right with them, kept them humming even as the band began to fight among themselves as soon as they started headlining and the girls came and the drugs. It was a scene. Your dad kept them tight, cut that album that Zeppelin heard and loved. It was all right there in front of them. Even with the backlash over the whole Zeppelin ban, your dad understood it was just a local rumble and as soon as they got out on the road, as soon as the rest of the country heard them, they’d still break it big. Karl was that good. The Dark Angel of Boston, they called him. The Quantum Mechanic of Cool.”
“And you were pregnant with his baby.”
“I was. A strung-out junkie with a child growing inside her. I knew I had to get out, but I didn’t have the strength and Karl was heading in the opposite direction. And losing control. Your dad was the one who figured a way to get me out, but he knew it had to be a forever plan. I don’t know how he came up with the paperwork, the new passport, and Carrie Chalmers’s birth certificate, but he did.”
I knew how. His city hall, law enforcement, and FBI connections ran deep, my father possibly already a conduit of information for the Feds, working both sides of the street while dodging traffic in the middle.
“And he faked your death.”
“We’d planned it for the night of that show on the Cape. It wasn’t hard. We shot up after the show in the van but mine was diluted next to nothing. And Karl had more than usual, your dad saw to that. He risked giving him a hotshot, too much, but Karl was a horse. The rest was easy. Your dad drove us into the marshes off of East Boston, near Logan Airport. I can still hear the planes in my head so close above us, their great white bellies with the blinking red lights. It was very cinematic, I suppose. I was wrapped in a sheet with a needle in my arm and Karl was in a stupor, thrashing around in the reeds, throwing up. I just got up and walked away to the car your dad had left earlier with keys in the tire well. I got behind the wheel and drove off into a new life. Your dad put the sheet in the hole, covered it as Karl puked up his guts, and that was that.”
Only it wasn’t. Karl Klaussen and my father came under investigation as my father had suspected they would and he had planned for. He convinced Klaussen he was going to go down for Camilla’s murder and spirited him away to Mexico and relied on his FBI contacts to protect him from Homicide Detectives Peter Polishuk and Eric Nichols.
“Your father sacrificed the record deal he could have signed with Mass, the name he could have made for himself in the music business. Your father loved music!” Carrie laughs and shakes her head. “And what a dancer! God, he was a crazy man!”
“But you broke the deal you had with him,” I say. “You came back.”
“That was his doing, too. The first time.”
“The first time?” I’m confused. But then I’m not. “Hold on, what year did you come back the first time?”
“Nineteen eighty-six.”
The year of her father’s funeral.
“And then my mother got sick.”
In 1993, the year the file went missing from Boston Police headquarters. Stolen by Peter Polishuk. Because my father brought Polishuk and Carrie together to show him that she was still alive. To explain to him what he’d done and why. So in turn, Polishuk stole the cold case file, either disposed of it himself or it really did burn in his house fire. He took his own public hit for not solving Camilla’s “murder” and eventually retired. No wonder Polishuk was a happy man. He actually got a corpse back. As a homicide detective, I imagine it can’t get any better than that.
“And when your mother got ill in ninety-three you and your daughter came back to town and you took care of her until she passed. But kept your new name and identity.”
“It was so easy, Zesty, it was crazy. The whole neighborhood had flipped and there were practically no neighbors left who knew me, who knew my story.” Except for the old lady across the way who Solarte and Klaussen initially dismissed as confused.
“As long as I kept out of the club scene and away from the bars, nobody knew who I was. And anyhow, even the clubs changed, a whole new generation came in. And now I’m just an old and forgotten rock and roller. I get a kick out of it, actually. I’ll go out to eat and my waitress will have a sleeve of tattoos, a nose stud, thinking she’s living that rock and roll life, and she’s like ‘More tea, dear?’ like I’m just some
old hag who’s probably never even smoked a joint. Never lived. She has no idea. None at all.” Camilla Islas brightens. “But how many people can say they visit their own grave every once in a while, Zesty? Not many, I’m sure. Really, no idea. Nobody has any idea at all.”
And the same goes for Karl Klaussen, who finished up his real estate chores for his petrol-siphoning boss, maybe even buying up a few condos in the same buildings that the Russian billionaires were purchasing, those vacant dark apartments looking out over the New Boston like dark unblinking eyes, while everybody scurries around below just trying to carve out a living.
Alianna Solarte took Klaussen’s money and declared it the cleanest cash she’d ever earned. If Carrie Chalmers wanted to let Karl know he had a daughter and hadn’t played a role in killing her, it was up to her to decide where and when to deliver that news.
My job was done.
Unless you count spinning records for Anitra Tehran as work, which I sometimes do, her lack of knowledge of the Bosstown Sound always astounding me, and a reporter yet. But in the dark, in the night, the needle hissing on its final groove, forgotten and ignored, Anitra whispers to me as I hover above her on my forearms, our hips pressed together, her hair fanned out in a halo around her head; bright gold-flecked eyes piercing the cover of night, she whispers, “I know what you did for me.”
And rises to my lips like smoke.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With sincere gratitude for my children, Sam and Antonia, for showing great patience with Zesty, who dominated too many conversations and took up more than his fair share of space inside my head. Two more engaging, funny, insightful, tolerant, and open teenagers could not possibly exist on this planet.
To my mother, Devora Abramowitz, always the first reader and my go-to for wisdom and perspective.
To my father, Martin Abramowitz, for his humor and positivity in tough times.
To Rhoda Grill, warrior for justice.
To Blake Voss, dad number two, always there.
To Yosef and Susan, because they’re the people who make this world a better place for others.
To Uncle Carl and Aunt Margie Abramowitz, who set the gold standard for love and devotion.
To Samantha Zukergood and Karen Richardson, for their keen editing eye, attention to detail, and patience with a writer who stretches deadlines.
To Tom Foley, family via friendship, always there when I need him.
To John Lockwood, last of the true renaissance men.
To Debra Stern, Bruce Tanner, Jamel and Terri Scott, Jerry Lester, Lorice Townsend, Harvey Zuckerman, Mailyn Irizarry, and the rest of my Amani family.
To Chris Remediani, who knows what it takes.
To Martha Pitts, way smarter than me.
To Meg Ruley and Rebecca Scherer of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, who make things happen.
In loving memory of my grandparents, Jerome and Lillian Gleich and Israel and Rose Abramowitz.
To the Monday-night poker crew: Eddie Brill, J. R. Havlan, Hank Gallo, Pat Dixon, Costaki Economopoulos, Dave Freed, Jacob Grill-Abramowitz, et al.; still no better place to hold a losing hand.
ALSO BY ADAM ABRAMOWITZ
Bosstown
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ADAM ABRAMOWITZ grew up in Allston and Boston’s South End, working as a courier, bartender, doorman, and longtime mover at Nick’s Cheap and Friendly Moving Company. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts–Boston, Adam currently teaches in Mount Vernon, New York. He splits his time between New York City and Northfield, Massachusetts. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Acknowledgments
Also by Adam Abramowitz
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press
A TOWN CALLED MALICE. Copyright © 2019 by Adam Abramowitz. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from the following:
“Fire Is Coming” words and music by David Minehan. Copyright © 1984 Minimum Music BMI. All rights controlled and administered by David Minehan. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of David Minehan.
“Joyride” words and music by Greg LoPiccolo. Copyright © 1991 by Pimiento Music Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Lonelyhearts” written by Thomas Hauck © 1980 renewed. Olex Music. Used with permission, All rights reserved.
“When Things Go Wrong,” words and music by Robin Lane and J. Cipolla. Copyright © 1978 by Leeds Music Corporation, New York, NY. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Cover design by James Iacobelli
Cover photograph © Jeff Penny / Getty Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Abramowitz, Adam, author.
Title: A town called Malice: a novel / Adam Abramowitz.
Description: First Edition.|New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.|“Thomas Dunne Books.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2018037705|ISBN 9781250076304 (hardcover)|ISBN 9781466887701 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Gangsters—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction.|Bicycle messengers—Fiction.|GSAFD: Mystery fiction.|Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3601.B7312 T69 2019|DDC 813’.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037705
eISBN 9781466887701
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First Edition: March 2019
A Town Called Malice Page 30
