“Whadda you want?” he said.
“I’m looking for Mr. Donagan.”
He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “He lives upstairs.” He started to shut the door.
“Wait, Mr. Sandella. Please.”
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Sandella, I’m Eddie Donagan’s lawyer. I need to see him. He might be in trouble.”
The old man’s face broke into a broad, gap-toothed grin. “It’s no surprise. He no pay his rent, he in trouble, you bet.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Never see Eddie. He come and go, you know? Just when he pay his rent. He come downstairs, bring me wine and money. He a good kid, Eddie. But he no pay rent, two weeks. Two more weeks, Eddie out ona street.” Sandella looked me up and down. “No lawyer stop me. I kick him out, he no pay.”
“You saw him two weeks ago?”
Sandella hesitated, then opened the screen door that separated us and stepped out onto the stoop. He thrust his face close to mine. He smelled of tobacco and garlic. “I see Eddie six weeks ago, mister. Last time I see Eddie, when he pay his rent. I have a month advance from when he take his lease. When it gone, Eddie out ona street.” He cocked his head at me. “What all you people want Eddie for? He a good kid. He do something bad?”
“Somebody else was here?”
Sandella nodded solemnly. “Sure. Cops was here. Coupla weeks ago. I tell them same thing. Eddie no here. They make me go upstairs, let them in. They look around, they leave, no Eddie.” The old man chuckled. “Eddie disappear, huh?”
“Would you take me upstairs?”
Sandella hooded his eyes and gazed beyond me. I took my wallet from my hip pocket and extracted a twenty. I folded it twice and pressed it into his hand. He didn’t look at it, but shoved it quickly into the pocket of his baggy pants. He turned and went back inside. A moment later he came back to the door.
“Come on. This way.”
I stepped into the narrow foyer. Sandella unlocked a door and led me up a dark stairway. At the top he unlocked another door and we entered Eddie Donagan’s apartment. There were two rooms—a large kitchen, and a smaller room where a narrow bed, a bedside table, and a bureau were the only furnishings. Two ajar doors revealed a small bathroom and a closet as well.
The place smelled like a dirt-floored cellar—damp, musty, unused. A film of dust covered every surface. Some dishes were stacked in the sink. There were two empty beer bottles on the table in the kitchen. I opened the door of the small yellowed refrigerator. It was practically empty—catsup, salad dressing, mustard, beer. There was a bowl half full of blue mold. I couldn’t tell what it had originally been. I closed the door quickly against the odor of rot and decay it emitted.
Sandella was standing by the doorway watching me. I turned to him. “Do you mind if I look around for a little while?”
He shrugged. “Help yourself. He’s not here. Close the doors when you go.”
Sandella left. I went back into the bedroom and sat on the bed. On the bedside table stood a lamp and an old clock radio. The alarm was set for nine-thirty. In the drawer I found a framed picture of Jan and E.J. when E.J. was about two. They were both smiling. E.J. had a bushy head of curly red hair and freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose. Jan’s hair was longer then. She wore it loose, a set of dark parentheses around her heart-shaped face. There was a bottle of Excedrin and a handful of coins in the drawer. That was all.
I rummaged through his bureau. All the drawers were packed with clothes, none too carefully folded. In one corner of the room was a big plastic trash bag. It, too, contained some clothes. In the closet I found a couple of suits and sports jackets, half a dozen dress shirts on hangers, and several pairs of shoes on the floor. In a cardboard box on the shelf were some sweaters. In the back was a scarred leather suitcase.
I wandered back into the kitchen and sat in one of the two chairs at the table. The room smelled of fried onions, rotten fruit, and burned cooking oil. The ceiling was gray and cracked. The wallpaper was stained and greasy. Some place for the guy who had once been the best pitching prospect in the American League to end up.
On the wall beside the refrigerator hung the telephone. I went to it and lifted the receiver. I got a dial tone. When I replaced the receiver I noticed that several phone numbers had been scribbled on the wallpaper beside it. Most of them had been written in pen. A couple were in pencil. It looked as if Eddie might have jotted them down while talking on the phone. Some had faded and smudged on the greasy wallpaper. A couple looked recent. I recognized Sam Farina’s. Two of the numbers were mine—one my office and one my home phone. There were half a dozen others. I jotted them down into my appointment book.
Off the kitchen was the bathroom—a cracked porcelain sink, a toilet, and an old-fashioned tub with feet like lion paws. On the sink a squeezed-out tube of Crest lay curled like an empty snakeskin. Beside it a ratty toothbrush was propped up in a plastic glass. The medicine chest held a razor, a dispenser of Gillette Platinum blades, a can of Rise, another bottle of Excedrin, a stick of Old Spice underarm deodorant, a bottle of English Leather, and a box of Band-Aids. I dumped the pills out into my hand. They were all Excedrin tablets. I put them back into the bottle, returned it to its place, and closed the door.
I took a can of Eddie’s Schlitz from the refrigerator and sat again at the table. Eddie’s apartment told me two things: no one had lived there for a long time, and Eddie hadn’t packed before he left. He had neither paid Sandella in advance nor cancelled his lease. He had not disconnected his telephone.
He had just left.
I closed the doors behind me. Downstairs I rang Sandella’s bell, and when he came to the door I thanked him. He shrugged and said, “No lawyer gonna stop me, mister. Two more weeks, he’s out. I got a cousin wants the place. I like Eddie, he no make trouble, but he’s out ona street.”
“That’s certainly your right, Mr. Sandella,” I said. “I agree with you. If Eddie doesn’t come back and pay you, you give it to your cousin.” I took one of my business cards from my pocket and handed it to him. He glanced at it and hooded his eyes again. I found another twenty and held it up in front of his face. “If you hear anything from Eddie, call me, will you? Just so there won’t be any trouble for anybody.”
Sandella took the money and shoved it into his pocket. “I’m supposed to call the cops, too.”
“That’s okay. Call them, too. Just don’t forget me.”
Sandella looked more closely at my card. Then he smiled at me. “I call you, Mr. Coyne. The cops, they don’t give me nothing. I call you first.”
16
JULIE WAS ON THE phone when I got to the office. It was nearly noon. She made a big exaggerated “Oh, it’s you!” face at me, which I ignored. I continued on into my office, slamming the door behind me. A moment later I heard her knock.
“Come in,” I growled.
She opened the door and stood there, frowning at me.
“Just don’t say anything,” I said. “I know exactly what time it is, I know I have a busy law practice, I know old Mrs. Bartlett is thinking of finding a nice staid old firm that will pat her arm and say, ‘There, there,’ and at this point I don’t give a fat shit. I’ve been up since three.”
“Have you had a pleasant morning, otherwise?” she said sweetly.
“No. I haven’t. And no, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine with me. Call Mr. Stern.” Julie shut the door behind her. I sighed and walked back out into the reception area, where she was hunched over her typewriter. I touched the back of her neck. She shook off my hand.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She turned to look up at me. “You don’t need to apologize to the hired help, Brady. It would just help if I knew you weren’t going to be in, and if you wanted me to consult with your clients, or what. You’re the boss. I’m not complaining.”
“Things came up. Bad things.”
“You don’t have to tell me.�
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“Why don’t you take the afternoon.”
“I’d rather have tomorrow. Okay?”
“Sure. Fine. Tomorrow’s Friday. We’ll just close up the shop for the day. I could use a day off myself.”
She smirked at me, but refrained from commenting on the time I had been taking off lately. “I’ll have to change a couple of appointments,” was all she said.
“That’s okay. Do it.”
“Brady, really. Your clients—”
“I know, I know. I’ll take care of them. What did Stern want?”
“You think he’d tell me?”
I squeezed her shoulder. “No. Not Stern. I’ll go call him.”
Back at my desk I lit a Winston and took my appointment book from my jacket pocket. I stared at the six telephone numbers I had copied from the wall in Eddie Donagan’s apartment. Then I picked up the phone and punched out a number.
“Mr. McDevitt’s line,” answered Charlie’s secretary, a little dumpling of a lady who looks like her picture should be on the label of a can of apple pie filling.
“Shirley, you gorgeous creature,” I said. “How can Charlie get any work at all done with you sitting there to distract him?”
She giggled. “Talk like that will get you a sexual harassment suit, Mr. Coyne. Hold on a minute, I’ll get him for you.”
A minute later Charlie came on the line. “Hey,” he said. “You wanna go golfing?”
“Sure. Sometime. Right now I need a favor.”
“What’s it worth?”
I paused, pretending to calculate. “How about scallops at the Union Oyster House?”
“With good wine?”
“The house white.”
“Sold,” said Charlie. “Listen. We really gotta get out.”
“Last time we played, I seem to recall, I lost my shirt,” I said.
He chuckled. “Speaking of that, did I tell you about this guy I know, Carl, who lost his boat?”
“I’m really not in the mood, Charlie.”
“Carl’s got this nice little eighteen-foot sloop,” he said, ignoring my protest. “Moors it on the Annisquam River right in front of his house. Carl loves his boat. He’s always down there polishing the brass, scraping and varnishing and swabbing it out. Anyhow, he goes down to the dock after supper a couple of nights ago and his boat’s gone. Carl is very upset, as you can imagine.”
“Um,” I said.
“So he goes wandering around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, asking everybody if they’ve seen his boat, and, of course, they haven’t, but they’re neighborly types, so they invite Carl in for a quick snort. Which Carl doesn’t turn down. A few hours later he has paid a visit to just about everyone on the river, and he’s feeling no pain. Finally his wife looks out the front window, and there’s Carl, with his arms around the flagpole on the front lawn. She goes out and says, ‘Carl, what in the hell are you doing?’ And Carl looks at her and he says, ‘My boat, my boat. I found my boat.’”
I lit another cigarette and waited.
“You there, Brady?”
“I’m here,” I sighed.
“Carl’s wife told me about it,” Charlie continued. “Know what she said to me?”
“What’d she say, Charlie?”
“She says to me, she said, ‘Poor Carl. He still doesn’t know his mast from a pole in the ground.’”
“Is that a true story?”
“As God is my judge,” he said solemnly. “So. What can I do for you that’s worth scallops at the Union Oyster House?”
“I’ve got some phone numbers. I need names.”
“Local?”
“All but one. That’s a 413.”
“That’d be Western Mass. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Give ’em to me.”
I read the six telephone numbers to him. He repeated them to me. “It’ll take me a couple of hours. Okay?”
“Fine. Listen. One more thing. Can you check with your fellow federal employees over at the Medford Post Office and see what they’re doing with the mail of a guy named Eddie Donagan? Can you do that?”
“Donagan the ballplayer?”
“Right. The ex-ballplayer.”
“Give me the address.”
I gave it to him, and we hung up. I swiveled my chair around, stared out the window for a minute, then turned back to my desk. I found the number for the Shawmut County Bank branch in Medford, tapped it out, and was finally connected to somebody named Mr. Marley.
“My name is Edward Donagan,” I said, crossing my fingers. “I have a question about my checking account.”
“Certainly, sir. May I have your account number, please?”
“Ah, jeez. I left my checkbook home. You can look it up, can’t you?”
“Well, normally…”
“Listen,” I said. “I think you guys have screwed up my account, okay? I think someone’s been writing checks on my account, or else you guys are taking money out of my account, because it don’t seem to add up, see, and if they are, or you are, then you’ve got trouble. So just look it up for me, will you? I want to know all the checks you think I’ve written in the past three weeks, and what my balance is. Okay? I don’t want to have to bother my lawyer.”
“How did you spell your name again, sir?”
I spelled “Donagan” for him, and he put me on hold. I lit another cigarette and waited. I was just stubbing it out when Mr. Marley came back on the phone. He sounded quite jovial.
“According to our computer, Mr. Donagan, you have written no checks on your account since the seventh of July.”
“Let’s see,” I said. “That was a little more than three weeks ago, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Which check was that? The last one.”
“New England Telephone. Twenty-two dollars and forty cents.”
“Okay. And what’s my balance?”
“Seven hundred and thirty-six dollars and nineteen cents.”
“No other checks?”
“No, sir.”
“What about deposits?”
“Your last deposit was on the second of July. Five hundred and eighteen dollars and seventy-one cents.”
“Right. My paycheck. That’s it, huh?”
“Yes, sir. That’s it.”
“Hm. Guess I was wrong. My mistake, I guess. Well, thanks, anyway.”
“Any time, sir. Glad to be of assistance.”
I pondered the information Mr. Marley had given me for a moment, then called Stern.
“Coyne,” I said when he answered. “You called?”
“Keeping our bargain,” he said. “You keeping your part?”
“Sure. I’m here at my office being an attorney. What do you have?”
“Couple of things that might interest you. First, you remember one of the names on that list the Mikuni girl gave you, the ballplayer, Halley?”
“Sure. Bobo Halley.”
“Just thought you might want to know that he was drummed out of baseball. Gambling.”
“Gambling,” I repeated, “No kidding.”
“Yeah. They decided to cover it up. I guess he was tight with some bad boys in Detroit. Owed them some money. Suspicion that he might’ve thrown some games.”
“What do you make of that?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “We checked the other guys on the list and there was nothing like that with them. I talked to the cops who investigated Halley’s death. All they could say was he’d had a few drinks when he cracked up.”
“Hmm,” I said, pretending that was all news to me. “What was the other thing? You said you had a couple of things.”
“The other thing is, I decided to send one of my guys through Donagan’s apartment.”
“Good idea.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“Of course,” I said, “you know the cops have already been there.”
“Like hell they have. This is my case. No cops do anything without my say so.”
; “Well, according to the landlord, two cops were there two weeks ago.”
“And just how in the hell do you know that, Coyne?”
I didn’t answer.
“You keep playing Dick Tracy, Coyne, you’re gonna wind up with some big holes in you, know that? Understand, I’m not worried about you particularly. I just don’t want this case fucked up. You’re interfering with an FBI investigation, and I’m about ready to have you locked up. I mean it. You are pissing me off, Coyne. So you went to Donagan’s apartment. I suppose you handled everything and moved stuff around and left your fingerprints everywhere.”
“Look, I don’t see how—”
“Butt out, Coyne.”
“Okay. You’re right. I’ll be a good boy.”
“Sure. And I’m gonna swear off Cutty Sark, too.” I heard him sigh. “Look. Do you want to cooperate with me on this, or what?”
“Sure I do.”
He sighed again. “Yeah, well anyhow. I’m gonna have Travers get Donagan’s description out, see if we can find him. They’re good at that kind of stuff. Better than you. So you can relax, okay? We’ll take it from here. Nice work, and all that shit.”
“Okay. I hear you.”
“Of course,” he said, “you’re probably right.”
“How’s that?”
“Donagan’s probably dead.”
It was close to three hours later when Charlie McDevitt called me back. “You got paper and pencil?” he said. “You want to write these down?”
“I’m all set. Go ahead.”
“Okay. The 5081 number’s in Billerica. Name of Suzanne Anders.” He spelled it for me, and gave me the street address. “Next, 2170’s the number for the office at the Herman’s store in Burlington. That’s at the mall. Okay? And 2663 is someone named Anthony Sandella in Medford, forty-six East Street. Now this one here, Brady, this makes me wonder what you’re up to. This 9957 is in Dorchester. It’s for Bond’s Variety Store. You know about Darryl Bond?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Well, Darryl Bond’s a bookie, among other things. Not a nice man. Likes to break people’s thumbs.” He hesitated. “You’re not planning to talk to Darryl Bond, are you?”
“You seem to be implying, in your usual circumspect manner, that perhaps it might not be a wonderful idea.”
Follow the Sharks Page 15
