Charlesgate Confidential

by Scott Von Doviak

  “Bye, Mr. Donnelly!” Jackie waved as the door slowly shuddered closed.

  “Art, my dear! Art!”

  The door closed and the elevator began its spastic journey skyward.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Charm. Like she said. Jesus, this elevator is disgusting.”

  He was right. The floor was stained with moldy remnants of a thousand drunken nights. The walls were carved from floor to ceiling with graffiti ranging from “Keep cool, Diamond Dogs rule” to “Dyslexics Untie!”

  “It wasn’t disgusting in your day?”

  “It was a different kind of disgusting. Last time I was in this elevator, someone was trying to kill me.”

  “Well, if it would make you feel at home…”

  The elevator squeaked to a halt and the door opened. A couple of stoners were waiting to board.

  “Holy shit,” said the scruffier one. “It’s JFK. I told you he was alive.”

  “Dude, are you JFK?”

  “Kennedy?” said Shane. “No. But I was there on the grassy knoll. You know, the puff of smoke? That was me.”

  “Whoa. That’s fucked up, dude.”

  I pushed Shane out of the elevator and the stoners boarded. The door closed behind us.

  “I see you’ve kept up with the Kennedy assassination theories.”

  “I told you I had a lot of time to read. Tell you the truth, I knew a few people who might have taken a shot at him.”

  “Let’s put that on the back burner. You said you wanted to start on the eighth floor, here we are.”

  “This is where it all started for me. The road to hell. I told you about Dave T’s poker game. It used to be right here, every week. Right down the hall there. All kinds of wiseguys would meet here, Irish, Italian, Polack, whatever. It was a neutral place guys could play cards and leave their worries behind. Well, my brother and I, and our cousin Pat, young and dumb, we thought we could make a name for ourselves ripping it off. I think we saw it in a movie or something. Didn’t really work out that way, though.”

  Shane started walking toward a half-opened door just down the hall on the right.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just give me a second.”

  “Hey, don’t go in there! Come on!” But it was too late. He was halfway through the door before I caught up to him.

  “The stone giant stands between you and the goblin king’s treasure,” someone inside the room was saying. “Roll for initiative…oh. Hello there.”

  “How are you fellas doing? You playing craps?”

  I squeezed into the doorway beside him. Five nerds were sitting on the floor, all staring up at Shane, a handful of multisided dice in the middle of their circle.

  “Uh, no,” said a tall, pale fellow in a Dracula cape, shuffling through a stack of graph paper. “D&D.”

  “D and D? That’s some kind of sex thing, right?”

  “It’s Dungeons and Dragons, grandpa,” I said. “Sorry about this, guys. I was just giving my grandfather here the guided tour and he wandered off.” I made an apologetic gesture I hoped conveyed the message, “Old people, right?”

  “Dungeons and Dragons? You sure this isn’t a sex thing?”

  “It’s a fantasy role-playing game, sir,” said the Dungeon Master.

  “Isn’t that what I said?”

  “Come on, grandpa. Sorry, guys. Enjoy your game.” I pulled Shane away from the door and back toward the elevator. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Relax, kid. I just wanted to get a look at the room. That’s where we robbed the poker game, except it’s a lot smaller now. There’s a wall right where the middle of the table used to be.”

  “Yeah, because when they turned this place into a dorm, they subdivided all these rooms. I mean, they obviously gutted the whole place. I don’t know what you think you’re looking for.”

  “There’s plenty of hiding places in this building, kid.”

  “So you know where they are, the paintings? You hid them somewhere?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I see. So what are you envisioning here, exactly? I mean, let’s assume for the sake of argument these paintings were hidden in here somewhere back in 1946. Wouldn’t someone have found them when they were renovating the place? Like some contractors came in here to strip the building bare and they find some Rembrandt tucked behind a couch, you don’t think they would have turned it in for the reward?”

  “The kind of people who would have been hired to clean this place out wouldn’t know a Rembrandt from a finger painting. They sure as shit wouldn’t know anything about a reward some museum was offering. Look, maybe they threw it away. Maybe they took it home and hung it over the fireplace. But I’m betting there’s a pretty good chance that kind of shit went into storage somewhere, and it might well be right here in the building. Maybe they’re planning to auction it all off someday, but obviously that hasn’t happened or the paintings would have been discovered by now.”

  “I’m sorry, but it just sounds really sketchy to me.” I hit the button for the elevator. “Look, we made a deal. I would sign you into the building and you’d give me a story I could use. I fulfilled my end of the bargain. Now why don’t you tell me your whole story so I can write my article?”

  The elevator arrived. Shane glanced left, then right, then grabbed me by the throat and shoved me into the elevator cab. It was embarrassingly easy for him to overpower me. He was in his sixties, but he’d spent four decades pumping iron in Walpole and I was a soft college boy. The door closed behind him and he held me pinned against the back wall.

  “Let me explain something to you, kid. I can play the sweet ol’ grandpa if I have to, but I am not your grandpa. I didn’t kill my cousin or that cop like they said, but that doesn’t mean I never killed nobody. This may be a joke to you. You’re a young college boy, probably never wanted for much, and you think the world is just waiting to reward you for your genius. Maybe it is. But I had more than half my life taken away from me. I got no time left to fuck around. You think I ran into you by chance at the bar? No, I was watching this place. I saw you come out and I followed you there. If it wasn’t you, it’d be someone else. But you’re in this with me now to the end. One way or another.”

  I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. I was losing consciousness toward the end. He finally released me and I slumped to the floor. Someone had summoned the elevator and it cranked back to life.

  “We square?” he said.

  I coughed for maybe fifteen seconds and finally managed a nod. He extended his hand. I took it and he hauled me back to my feet. I was still catching my breath when the elevator opened into the lobby. The Rev was waiting there.

  “Hey, man,” he said.

  Shane Devlin grinned. “How are you? I’m Tommy’s grandfather. I’m a lobster fisherman from Maine. We’re all very proud of him.”

  MAY 5, 2014

  Coleman was a half-hour late meeting Nicholas Woodward at Grendel’s. His day job had kept him in court longer than expected testifying about a triple murder he’d handled eighteen months earlier and for which he’d stayed up all night giving himself a crash refresher course. By the time he arrived, Woodward was already seated at the bar with his customary glass of Cabernet.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Not a problem. I know you’re a busy man.”

  “I was a little surprised to hear from you again.” Coleman shrugged off his coat and hung it on the back of the barstool, then took a seat.

  “Yes, I can imagine. Last time we met, I told you I was here to participate in a documentary on the Gardner robbery. As it turns out, the funding has fallen apart and Ms. Klein will not be continuing with the project. Fortunately, my air travel has already been paid for, as has another week of lodging at the Charles Hotel. I don’t intend to let this opportunity slip away. This will be my last chance at cracking the Gardner case and I could use all the help I can get. I thought we might come to an agreement.”


  “What kind of agreement? Miller High Life, please.”

  “It’s not about the money for me, not anymore. This is my white whale, so to speak. Solving the Gardner heist would be the capper on my career. If you would be willing to work with me over the next week, and if we were able to crack the case, I’d be willing to split the money on terms favorable to you.”

  “Like…?”

  “What if we split it sixty-forty in your favor?”

  “Three million for me? I could live with that. But I need to know: How serious are we? Is it really worth our time?”

  “There is no guarantee, of course. But if we pool our resources, I believe we have a shot. I’ve solved a few seemingly insoluble cases in my day.”

  “So tell me about that. I mean, how do you catch these guys? Is there a black market for stolen art or something?”

  “No, that’s a popular misconception. People assume there are wealthy Arabian sheiks with palaces festooned with the great stolen art pieces they’ve purchased on the sly. It’s the Dr. No fallacy. The truth is, most art collectors won’t touch a work they know to be stolen. What’s the point? You can’t display it for your friends if it’s known to be hot merchandise. Occasionally lesserknown pieces slip through the cracks and are resold to museums, but that’s becoming a rarity in our modern age. However, this case, as we know, dates back to the 1940s. It’s possible the art has changed hands many times since then.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No. Because the more people who know the whereabouts of the art, the greater the odds someone will talk. Especially with such a large reward at stake.”

  “So why do you think these paintings were stolen in the first place? I mean, if it’s such a hassle to unload them?”

  “Despite what I just told you, I believe this to be a rare case in which the thieves had a buyer lined up to purchase the works, probably through a third party. And the reason I think so is because a list of the stolen artworks was found on the body discovered on the scene. The list doesn’t match up exactly with the missing items, but it’s close enough to signal that those thieves knew what they were looking for.”

  “So there really might be some wealthy sheik or James Bond supervillain with a lair full of stolen art?”

  “Possibly. But as you already know, I believe there to be a much stronger possibility that the art never left Boston. That it may still be here to this day.”

  “I think so, too. As you probably know from your favorite prime-time cop shows, unsolved homicide cases are never closed. They just go cold. And as a Boston homicide detective, I have access to the files on those cases, including the file on one Maurice Levine, street name Dave T.”

  “The man found dead at the Gardner that night.”

  “Exactamundo. Now, the file is thin. The murder weapon was a straight-edged razor, no fingerprints. No witnesses, obviously, aside from a security guard tied up in the basement who heard screams and gunshots. This guy Levine had a clean record, but was evidently known to associate with the criminal element. The file contained a few interview transcripts with wiseguys of the time, none of whom offered up any helpful information. Another man found dead in a car across the street, a Joseph Cahill, he did have a rap sheet. Presumably he was the wheelman. The security guard gave a description of two other men dressed in Boston police uniforms, such descriptions ultimately proving unhelpful. I could try to reinterview him, except he passed away five years ago. That’s the big problem we’re up against here. Odds are everyone involved with this nearly seventy-year-old crime is dead or close enough.”

  “So we have nothing to go on. Nothing we didn’t already know.”

  “Well…not so fast. See, these cold-case files are crossreferenced chronologically. Sometimes the passage of time allows us to look back and see patterns that weren’t necessarily apparent back in the day.”

  “You have my attention.”

  “Turns out June 15, 1946 was a busy night in Boston town. Three other homicides were reported within an hour of the Gardner job. Two men were found in the trunk of a Crown Imperial at South Station, one of them a transit cop. And a pimp named Dryden was found dead. In the Charlesgate.”

  Woodward’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

  “Yep. It was initially reported as a homicide by the responding officer. Within twenty-four hours the investigating homicide detective had cleaned the case off his desk by determining the death was accidental. The coroner backed him up.”

  “How did Dryden die?”

  “He fell from the sixth-floor stairwell. Or maybe he was pushed. A witness questioned on the scene reported hearing an argument between Dryden and another individual immediately before this ‘accident.’ But no second person was ever found or even looked for, and the witness disappeared. Best I can tell from the file, she was a hooker working out of the Charlesgate under an assumed name, Dorothy Gale. That would be the girl from The Wizard of Oz lands her house on the witch.”

  “Quite. So no connection between these cases was ever made?”

  “Well, look at it from the homicide cop’s point of view. He’s got this major shitstorm going down at the Gardner, he gets called over to the Charlesgate. Some piece-of-shit pimp took a header off the stairs and the only one saying it wasn’t an accident is one of his whores. I’m thinking they didn’t take the word of a working girl too seriously back in ’46. No, all this guy is thinking is, how can I get this case off my desk as quick as possible so I can get back to the real business at hand. Really, he’d have no reason to believe there’s any connection to the Gardner thing. If anything, this was some altercation between a john and the pimp, and why bother devoting significant resources and time to something like that?”

  “I suppose that makes sense. But what about the bodies discovered at South Station?”

  “What about them?”

  “Was anyone ever charged with that crime?”

  Coleman flipped through his pocket notebook. “Yeah. A Shane Devlin of Somerville. Served forty years for the deuce, released in ’86. Maybe you recognize the name.”

  “From Donnelly’s Berkeley Beacon article.”

  “One and the same.”

  “So one of these dead men in the trunk was…”

  “His cousin, Patrick Egan. Donnelly wrote in his article that Devlin told him Egan had been killed by this Dave T after the two of them plus Devlin’s brother robbed T’s poker game.”

  “And the transit policeman?”

  “Who knows? Wrong place, wrong time, probably. But Devlin told Donnelly he didn’t do these murders, but did rob the Gardner.”

  “Information he shared with no one at the time.”

  “Right. Devlin never breathed a word about the Gardner heist. All we have is hearsay from Donnelly’s article. And my brothers in blue never took it seriously at the time.”

  “They must have looked into Donnelly’s allegations, no?”

  “Just to cover their asses, sure. But clearly they never found any evidence.”

  “If they questioned Donnelly at the time, would there be a transcript?”

  “There should be. I’ll have to come up with some kind of plausible reason to have it pulled. Let me think on that.”

  Woodward slapped the bar three times, smiling. “This is exciting. We may actually have a lead after all this time. So what’s next?”

  “I’ve got a call in to the Charlesgate’s management company. On the pretext of looking into the Rachel O’Brien murder, I’ve asked them to put me in touch with the contractor that gutted the place and converted it into condos. On the off-chance these paintings were stashed away in some hidden passage or storage room, maybe these guys moved them without knowing what they were.”

  “Excellent.”

  The opening riff of the Standells’ “Dirty Water” cranked to life. It was the Red Sox victory song and it was Coleman’s ringtone. He reached for his phone and saw his partner’s picture on the screen. “Excuse me, I’ve got to
take this.”

  “Of course.”

  Coleman walked away from the bar and answered the call. “Hey, Carny. Whassup?”

  “I dunno, Coltrane. Maybe you can tell me why I’m getting follow-up calls from the Rhode Island staties?”

  “Uh…well, that’s gotta be about a lead I’m following up on our Charlesgate whodunit.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for keeping me in the loop.”

  “Carny, I figured it was bullshit.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You requested any info they had on a Charles White of Middletown?”

  “Right, the guy from the Emerson alumni office who suddenly quit his job.”

  “Well, they have some information. Pretty fresh, too. They’ve identified a John Doe they found dead behind a Dunkin Donuts, just off 95 in Pawtucket almost two weeks ago. He’d been burned to a crisp in a dumpster fire. Staties just got the DNA test results back this morning, and lo and behold, it’s this very same Charles White.”

  JUNE 16, 1946

  The world faded in and out for Jake Devlin. One moment he was back in the hold of the Arisan Maru, gasping for air through unbearable heat and stink while men dropped dead around him. The next he was back on the docks of Boston, waiting for dawn to come. His fingers were sticky with blood from pressing against the wound in his left arm. Dark and fog enveloped him. He took a deep breath, hoping the salty smell of Boston Harbor would keep his senses alert, keep him from slipping into unconsciousness. He heard a police siren in the distance. It got closer until it got farther away.

  He guessed it was 4:30 in the morning. A little over four hours earlier, he’d been sitting in a car with Shane and Dave T and the driver, Cahill. They were parked across the street from a museum he’d never visited. He and Shane were dressed as cops. Dave T explained the plan.

  “You two are going to knock on the front door. When the security guard answers, you’re going to tell him you’re responding to a disturbance call. I’ll be crouching out of sight until he lets you in. As soon as he does, I come up behind you with this gun. And I’ll be holding this rope in the other hand. You two will take the guard down to the basement, tie him up and shove a rag in his mouth. You won’t try anything funny. Why would you? We’re going to make a lot of money together. But if for some reason you don’t want to do that, remember that I have this gun. The guard won’t have one. He’s a kid. They don’t take security serious here. After tonight, they will. We all understand each other?”