by John Philpin
“Tell me about Theresa,” I said.
“She was fifteen, tall for her age, dark hair, brown eyes. She was wearing gray shorts and a Celtics shirt, thirty-three, Larry Bird’s number.”
I considered telling her where she could find Theresa. I did not.
“The man who took Theresa took my sister,” I said.
“Felix, the abductions are six years apart. A white car? Who keeps a car six years, especially an American car? And a red-haired guy? Boston probably has more than most cities.”
“Use your sources,” I told her, and left it at that.
But I knew.
Now on TV, I watched a police captain named Newhall at a different podium, this one emblazoned with a police shield. “We’ve all had a rough twenty-four hours,” he said. “It doesn’t help that we’ve got the worst snowstorm since seventy-eight going on out there. This will work the way it always does. I can tell you some things, I can’t tell you others.”
He itemized the body count and was fairly accurate about who killed whom. They did not know the name of the man who killed Sable.
“We have eleven members of the group known as Vigil in custody,” Newhall said. “Felix Zrbny remains at large at this time.”
Newhall sounded like Broderick Crawford inHighway Patrol. At large. Ten-four. Cops on the alert. What did that mean? Cops are paid to be aware.
“We have had no cooperation from Vigil. We have questioned the acknowledged leader of the group. Mr. John Jay Johnson, also known as J-Cubed, also known as Dermott Fremont, has refused to assist us with this investigation.”
A small insert appeared on the screen, a file video of the man who was all Js. He was cuffed, and cops led him into a courthouse. He turned as he walked through the door. I saw him in profile—his prominent nose, his brush-cut red hair—precisely as I had seen him in his white car when he grabbed Levana.
RALPH RETURNED AT ONE P.M.
He fished through the large pocket that extended across the bottom of his sweatshirt. He produced rolls, slices of ham and cheese wrapped in a napkin, and a small piece of white cake.
“If you don’t want the cake,” he said.
I pushed it across the small table to him, cracked open a roll and stuffed it with ham and cheese.
“Marty Fenwick’s got a pool going about when they catch you,” Ralph said. “Five dollars a date. The first ten days got covered right away. Only a couple of guys figure you’ll last longer than that.”
“You want to make some money?”
Ralph barked his short laugh. “I got no money to make money with.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a twenty from Deputy Finneran’s bills. “Make a side bet,” I said. “Day after tomorrow.”
“You ain’t staying, Felix?”
“You want to go with me?”
“Oh Jesus no.” He stuffed cake into his mouth. “I ain’t going nowhere.”
“It’s like it was before, Ralph. I know what I have to do.”
“They’re gonna stick you in Walpole this time,” he cautioned.
“I know who killed my sister,” I told him. “I think I know why everything got so fucked up out there last night.”
“You gotta make things right,” he said with a nod as tears formed in his eyes. “You got to finish up.”
“And you’re going to make some money,” I said, tossing the twenty at him, “maybe enough to get a new TV, one of those small color ones.”
He yanked himself away from whatever he was thinking and switched on the TV. “I want to hear what they’re saying before I go back to work.”
I ate my makeshift sandwich.
“They’re showing Riddle’s Bar,” he said.
I stuffed a second roll with ham and cheese and joined Ralph on the edge of the cot. “You know where that place is?” I asked.
“Terry used to go out eight stops on South Huntington, then she had to walk two blocks on Centre Street. I don’t know what direction. There’s J-Cubed.”
This time the video showed Vigil’s leader climbing out of a full-size white Ford and entering the bar. “He’s bald,” I said.
Ralph stared at the screen.
The next sequence showed Lucas Frank standing in front of my house. “Why did he go there?”
“To find out about you.”
“Who’s that with him?”
“An ex-cop named Waycross. You killed his wife, Felix. Don’t you remember?”
“No,” I said. “He looks nothing like he did fifteen years ago when he arrested me.”
“He figure in this deal?”
“He did what he had to do.”
“Felix, when are you going?”
“Tonight.”
“It’s still snowing out there. Jesus. Two feet and more coming.”
“It slows down the world,” I said. “Ralph, did you ever figure that maybe you should have been in Walpole?”
He shrugged. “The docs said I was crazy.”
“Do you think you are?”
I could not tell whether Ralph was considering my question or immersing himself in the police press conference. “I think maybe I was,” he said finally. “Now I think I’m just getting old.”
I had questions about my own mind. “How do you think that cop feels?” I asked, pointing at Captain Newhall.
He hesitated. “He’s doing his job.”
“He sounds tired, maybe angry.”
“He probably didn’t get much sleep.”
I tried a different approach. “When Terry used to visit, how did she feel about coming here?”
He continued to watch TV. “Sometimes she made good connections from the streetcar to the bus. Sometimes not so good. She didn’t like the smell of this place. Mostly, she came and she went.”
“Didn’t it bother her to visit you here? Didn’t she wish you were outside?”
“Nah. She always figured I’d get around to killing her.”
RAY BOLTON SAT AT HIS DESK. HE LOOKED as bad as I felt.
“There’s coffee,” he said.
I poured a cup and sat opposite him. “Stallings,” I said.
“That’s right. You wanted to look at the file.”
He yanked open a drawer and hauled out two file folders. Combined, they were three inches thick. For an abduction and suspected homicide, that’s nothing.
“This is it?”
“That’s one of the reasons this case bothers me. Middle of the afternoon, sunny day, heavily populated area, plenty of traffic, pedestrians, a uniformed cop in a cruiser a block away, a furniture company repossessing a sofa across the street, and nobody saw anything.”
I flipped open the top folder and paged through summary sheets until I found the case log. Each action taken during an investigation is entered chronologically in the log; officers append supplementary reports and exhibits later in the case file. The document has a language and shorthand all its own.
The R/O, reporting officer, was A. Hirsch, the first officer on the scene. “1500. Met by neighborhood residents (see list below), and witness, Margaret (Maggie) Winship, 13YO-F, W, Br/Br, 95, 5-3. V: Theresa M. Stallings, 15YO-F, W, Br/Br, 105, 5-6. APB radio, 1504. Assigned case number 0019438-88.”
Hirsch’s narrative followed. Maggie Winship was in shock, sitting in the middle of the basketball court surrounded by neighbors. It was just as Bolton had said. Winship could not talk, and nobody else had anything to talk about.
“The log doesn’t include who called this in,” I said.
“Adult female,” Bolton said with a sigh. “She called on a direct line to one of the desks in Homicide. Never said who she was. There’s a separate sheet later in the narrative.”
The report of the initial event in this investigation appeared as an appended item, a one-paragraph afterthought.
“Why do you insist on calling this chronological case filing?”
“We’ve been through this, Lucas,” he said.
“With the exception of the log, the s
heets are appended when they’re completed, not in accordance with the investigation’s own timeline. I was looking at reports yesterday that had calls made from the Dayle residence days after she was dead, and from the Waycross residence hours after she was dead.”
“I think the first time you pointed out log inconsistencies to me was twenty-five years ago in your kitchen.”
“Didn’t do any damn good,” I grumbled, reading the one-paragraph insert. “Were these direct phone lines to the investigators’ desks public information?”
“They’re not in the book, but they’re printed on our business cards.”
“The location where she was grabbed is two blocks from Ashmont Station.”
Bolton nodded. “Like I said, a heavily populated area.”
“The detective who took the call, A. Garcia …”
“Andrea. She’s with Baltimore P.D. now. The call came in on her line.”
“Had she been investigating anything out there in the previous year?”
“I’d have to look it up. What are you getting at?”
“If she had a case that required her to be in Dorchester, and she conducted any interviews, she’d leave her card.”
Bolton spun around to his computer, tapped the keys, and waited. “The Levesque shooting in May that year. Dorchester Avenue. That was Richard Hamden’s case. Let’s see. Garcia assisted. They wrapped it in three days.”
He attacked the keyboard a second time. “She talked to a dozen people out there.”
“Work from Dorchester Avenue back to the playground,” I suggested.
“It’s got to be this one. Adele Robbins. Fuller Street. Lucas, this is one hell of a long shot.”
“You want to clear the case, right?”
“You think there’s a connection to Levana Zrbny.”
I shrugged. “It’s just a hunch.”
I wish that I had kept count of the number of times I have flown by the seat of my pants. A hunch, intuition, a somewhat informed visceral sense of connectedness or meaning, often directed my work.
“I’ve got Vigil arraignments to deal with,” Bolton said, “and it’s still snowing. I can get to this in a couple of days.”
“This is a mild winter at Lake Albert,” I said, pushing myself from the chair. “If you don’t have any objections, I’ll head out to Dorchester.”
“Wait. That reminds me.”
He grabbed a sheet from his in-basket and pushed it across the desk. “That’s a formal complaint,” he said.
I skimmed the first few lines. “Who’s William Hennesy?”
“He manages Riddle’s Bar.”
“Willy?” I read more. “I’m surprised. That’s fairly accurate. I’ll take care of this.”
“Lucas, you’re lucky that got kicked up to me. You have to respond to that in seven days.”
“A misunderstanding,” I said.
“Did you fire the gun?” Bolton’s hands shot into the air. “Don’t answer that.”
“Willy and I will have a good chat over a couple of mugs of Guinness,” I said, folding the complaint and stuffing it into my pocket. “You get anything on that second car parked at the courthouse?”
“Media,” Bolton said.
“Fremont said there was a second car.”
“That wasn’t it. We have the plate number.”
“Registered to whom?” I asked.
Bolton shuffled through papers. “I don’t have it yet.”
“Let me see it before you stuff it into your allegedly chronological file.”
THE SNOW WAS HEAVIER THAN IT HAD BEEN the previous night, but the wind had died. Visibility and drifting were less problematic. Unlike many of the Dorchester side streets, a plow had visited Fuller Street.
Adele Robbins lived on the top floor of an asphalt-shingled three-story walk-up. The smell of eggs frying in butter greeted me in the hallway, grew stronger on the second floor, and faded on the third. I tapped on the door and waited, listening to TV noise from elsewhere in the building.
When the door opened, I looked down at a wizened, white-haired woman, less than five feet tall, weighing perhaps ninety pounds, and holding a cocked .44 caliber handgun.
She peered over the top of her half glasses and asked, “What the fuck do you want?”
I glanced from the weapon to her eyes, then back to the menacing artillery. “My name is Lucas Frank,” I began.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she snapped.
“I want to ask you a few things about Theresa Stallings, the young girl—”
“I know who she is. You’re no cop.”
“I work with the police,” I said quickly.
“Why’d it take you eleven years to get here?”
“You called Detective Garcia,” I said.
“Of course I did. I told that twit what I saw out my window. She put down the phone and went off somewhere. That call was my damn dime. You got a gun?”
I do not recall a time when I have lost control of an interview so efficiently and quickly. “Yes,” I said.
“Good. I got one, too. Mine’s out and the hammer’s back. You remember that.”
“I will,” I said, wondering what I had gotten myself into.
“Now you walk to that window and take a look,” she said, backing into her apartment and pointing with her left hand.
Her living room was a virtual library of word puzzles—paper volumes of crosswords, anagrams, acrostics, cryptograms. Classical music drifted softly from her radio.
“May I push the curtain aside?” I asked.
“You can’t see if you don’t.”
I looked at the playground—down forty feet, across an alley, and over a chain-link fence. “You saw what happened that day,” I said.
“That’s what I tried to tell the cop. Then I waited. They were going to different places on the street, asking questions. They never knocked on my door. That woman had been here before, asking me about a shooting on the avenue. She never came back.”
“I’d like to know what you saw that day,” I said.
“Now I’m gonna tell you that. Then you’re gonna get out of here. I was sitting in that chair by the window, working on one of my mammoth crosswords. I needed a nine-letter word for wailing that started with a C.”
“Caterwaul?”
“Smartass. I looked out when I heard the kids playing. That annoys some people but I like it, knowing the kids are out there with a basketball and not somewhere taking drugs. The red-haired bastard parked at the end of the alley. He’d been showing up for a week. I saw him do the same thing three times. He’d park, sit, get out of the car for a smoke, go back in, and the whole time he watched those little girls. The day it happened, he must’ve been following them, because he pulled in right after they got there. This time he didn’t bother watching, he didn’t have his smoke. He walked into that playground, grabbed the Stallings girl, dragged her to the car, and drove off. The whole thing was over in less than a minute.”
Adele Robbins was telling me more than she realized. This guy had stalked Theresa Stallings, selected her ahead of time, and chose his location with care. He had done this before. Self-assured, confident, prepared—he was an experienced abductor.
“Can you describe him?” I asked.
“You waited eleven years to get here,” Robbins said, “don’t you get impatient with me. I don’t guess heights, and I don’t guess weights. Red hair I know when I see it. Cut short. He wore blue jeans every time I saw him. That last day, he had on a light blue shirt. Before you ask me about his car, I’m gonna tell you. White, like I said. They change so often, I don’t know makes, but it was a big car, American, four doors. And before you ask me the license plate, I’m gonna give it to you.”
She yanked open a drawer. I waited for her to produce a crumpled and yellowed slip of paper with a partial number. Instead, she lifted out a Massachusetts license plate.
“I didn’t like the way he watched those kids,” she said. “One day when he park
ed down there, I took my canvas shopping tote and a screwdriver and went out like I was doing my shopping. I crossed the street, went up a ways, then crossed back and came up behind the car. He was leaning against the front fender, smoking his cigarette, and I ducked down and took that off.”
She gave me the plate. “You got three questions left, right?”
I looked at her. This was her show.
“Did I know who he was? Had I seen him before? Have I seen him since?”
I smiled. “That about covers it.”
“I don’t know who he was. I never saw him before. I saw him one time since, two years ago in Jamaica Plain. I was visiting my brother. I was on the bus and I saw him getting into a car on South Huntington Avenue. It was a white car, but not the same one I took that plate off. It happened real quick. His red brush cut was gone. He was bald.”
“Am I allowed to thank you?” I asked.
“No. Just get the hell out.”
THE CRIMINAL PSYCHIATRIC UNIT, A 1930S-vintage brick institution, loomed behind ominous stone walls topped with razor wire. I found the visitors’ parking lot and hiked through the snow to the main entrance.
Although it is considered a treatment facility, CPU had the appearance and feel of a prison. The primary reasons for the unit’s existence were to provide residential evaluations—what we used to call thirty-or sixty-day papers—of violent offenders to the courts, and to house those convicted of their offenses but deemed insane. I have never understood the distinction since one institution is much like another, and there were probably as many legally sane patients here as there were legally insane inmates in Walpole.
Six of one, half dozen of the other, I thought as the door clicked and I emerged from the locked sally port into a large, rectangular lobby.
I stopped to allow a determined young man in bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers to pass. He stopped abruptly, shouted “Nelson,” thumped himself soundly on his chest with both fists, then continued his focused trek across the lobby.
I headed for a cubicle that housed the only other person in sight.
Her nameplate said she was Beck. Short for Rebecca? Or Ms. Beck? She wore a pink volunteer’s smock and was close in age, but fortunately not disposition, to my friend Adele Robbins.
