Charlesgate Confidential

by Scott Von Doviak

  “That’s crazy,” I said when she’d finished.

  “What’s crazy is the fact that those paintings were probably never here in the first place.”

  “They were here,” I said. “That’s why I came back.”

  “What?”

  “After all that happened, Game 6, Shane holding that gun to your head—”

  “Forget it. I told you.”

  “No, this is what I’m trying to tell you. I knew they were gonna kick me out of here. That was a no-brainer. So I’m sitting outside the RD’s office waiting for the axe to fall. And I’m looking at this framed poster of Uncle Sam on the wall. You remember that?”

  “Oh yeah. It was kind of creepy.”

  “It was. And it always seemed out of place to me. Like it was something left over from an earlier era. Like someone found it in the basement, thought it was cool and hung it on the wall.”

  “Sure.”

  “So it occurs to me that just because Shane and I had gone through everything in the stables didn’t mean we’d gone through everything that had ever been in the stables. Right? So anyway, Torres calls me into his office and reads me the riot act. He tells me I’ve got forty-eight hours to find a new place to live. Late that night, two or three in the morning, I sneak back down. Take the poster down off the wall. It’s got an old-fashioned frame with a wooden backing held on by a couple of screws. I unscrew the backing and take it off. And there behind the poster is this sheet of canvas. I peel it back as carefully as I can. It’s been there a long time, and crumbs of paint are sticking to the back of the Uncle Sam poster, but there’s no mistaking what it is. The Concert by Vermeer.”

  “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Yeah. So I roll it up, tuck it under my arm, put the poster frame back together and hang Uncle Sam back on the wall. I take the painting upstairs and stick it in a duffel bag. I take it with me when I move off-campus.”

  “Where did you end up going?”

  “This guy Sprague, an ‘occult expert’ I’d interviewed about the Charlesgate. He lived in the Bay Village. I’d called him when I was desperately trying to get Shane off my back, and he returned the call while I was packing. I happened to mention I was looking for a place to live, he had a spare room he wasn’t using, so I ended up finishing out that semester and the next living there. Aside from the occasional noisy séance, it was fine.”

  “So what did you do with the painting?”

  “I wasn’t sure what to do. I definitely wanted to leverage it into something positive, career-wise. I mean here I’d done it: I’d cracked the case the FBI and the BPD never could. I’d proved that Shane’s story was true. I thought, this is my ace in the hole. As long as I’m the only one who knows about it, I’m the only one who can tell the story.”

  “But why not just turn it in for the reward? Five million bucks, you could write your own ticket for whatever kind of career you wanted.”

  “Believe me, I thought about it. A lot. For one thing, I’d only found one of the paintings. A dozen others were still missing. So I wasn’t even sure if the reward would apply. Also, the whole story of me and Shane and the…incident in the ballroom, all that had all just been in the news. The cops were already not too happy with me and if I suddenly turn up with this stolen painting…who knows, maybe they file charges against me.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I went to the Gardner museum. I went to the gift shop and bought a poster of The Concert. A full-size reproduction. And a frame. I slipped the real thing into the frame, right behind the poster, and I hung it on the wall.”

  “Cheeky.”

  “Cocky. Disrespectful. Tempting fate. But what the fuck, still kind of funny, right? I didn’t think it would be there long. Just until I figured out how to use it to my advantage. But I never figured it out. During my senior year I got an internship with the Post-Gazette, this little weekly newspaper in the North End. At first I was just helping set the type, running errands, but then they started giving me little writing assignments. Covering community meetings, stuff like that. I met some interesting characters, let’s put it that way, and some of them liked to talk. One night I’m covering one of those meetings, and when I come out, my car is gone. I’m all bent out of shape, I mention it to one of my new friends, he says he’s going to make a call. Twenty minutes later a tow truck pulls up and sets my car down. A guy gets out and hands me an envelope with a thousand dollars in cash in it. ‘Sorry, kid. My mistake.’ A couple drinks later, my new friend is telling me all about this scam a couple local guys—non-connected guys—are running out of the Boston parking enforcement division. They tow your car. You call about it, they have no record in the system. You report it stolen. A few months later you get a letter in the mail telling you your car has been crushed into a cube because you never claimed it from the tow yard. And they’re charging you for the crushing fee. You call and read them the riot act—‘you told me you had no record of my car, yada, yada’—they deny it, they don’t care. They never crushed it. They’ve got their own chop shop, they ran your car through it months ago and it’s gone without a trace, sold for parts.”

  “Nice.”

  “So armed with this information, I talked to a couple of other new friends who confirmed the story. No one goes on the record, but I’ve got three sources naming names, so I’m ready to run with it. The Post-Gazette wants nothing to do with it. The Herald, though, they’re all over it. I broke the story and got the byline, the Feds investigated, and a bunch of crooks went to jail. Trust me, no one has ever been so happy to have their car towed.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Right? Anyway, you don’t need me to rehash my whole career for you. Suffice it to say that I was never in a position where I absolutely had to make a decision about The Concert. A couple years later I’m working the police beat in Hermosa Beach, California. I befriend this one cop who decides he wants me to tell his story about infiltrating this criminal surfer gang. That became Zuma Nine, my first book. Then I did Army of Angels and that hit the best-seller list. Somewhere in there I was married for about five minutes to a woman who deserved better. In fact, that’s the only thing we ever agreed on. A couple books later I’m in Australia, researching the Outback Ripper for Deadsville. And I just…never came back.”

  “Until now.”

  “Yeah. Until I saw that report about Woodward being murdered. Here we are in 2014 and people are still killing each other over these paintings stolen almost seventy years ago. I feel responsible. Like if I’d turned The Concert in back then, none of this would have ever happened.”

  “I disagree. In fact, I’d say it’s exactly the opposite.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Say you returned the painting, the story hits the news. Now everyone knows there are at least a dozen Gardner paintings still out there. Every crazy in town would have descended on this building, believing they were in here somewhere. Imagine this place with a hundred Shanes running around. Someone would have definitely gotten hurt. We all would have had to move out.”

  “Wow. You’ve got this whole alternate universe mapped out.”

  “I’m just telling you. If one of those paintings turns up after so many years, it’s going to set off a frenzy.”

  “Well, maybe. But it doesn’t matter. The painting isn’t mine. It belongs back in the Gardner. In fact, the gears are already turning. I’ve got a lawyer negotiating with the Gardner and the FBI as we speak.”

  “Negotiating what? Your share of the reward?”

  I laughed. “No. I don’t need the reward, I don’t want it, and I don’t think I’m entitled to it. I just want to make sure there are no legal repercussions. They get The Concert back free and clear as long as I have complete immunity from any charge they can dream up. I mean, I didn’t steal the thing, but I was in possession of stolen property for more than twenty-five years. It’s just a precaution against the cops or the feds ever finding out I’m the one returning the painting. Right
now only two people know: you and my lawyer.”

  “Well, I appreciate your trust. But are you seriously not going to take credit for this? Write a book about it?”

  “Oh, I’ll write a book. To be published posthumously. I don’t want to be the center of a story like this while I’m alive. I get enough attention as it is.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “Hey, I’m grateful. I’ve lived a charmed life in a lot of ways. The marriage didn’t work out so well, but these things happen.”

  “Indeed they do.”

  “So this cop you were seeing. Any chance of patching that up?”

  “Absolutely no chance.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “Don’t be. It’s better this way. He’s got a kid and he should be in her life. That was never my goal.”

  “Cheers to that. Keeping our carbon footprint to the bare minimum.”

  “Exactly. Hey, Tommy, I’m gonna ask you a question and I want you to be honest.”

  “At this point, what choice do I have? Shoot.”

  “You had the hots for me in college, didn’t you?”

  “You’re goddam right I did.”

  She smiled. “I could tell.”

  “I never had a shot, did I?”

  “Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

  We both laughed. “I didn’t think so.”

  “Things change, though.”

  “Yeah? I wonder about that. Sometimes I’m not sure anything has changed. Downstairs with you guys earlier, it was like no time had passed at all.”

  “I know what you mean. But we’re both different people now, aren’t we?”

  “I guess we are.” I checked my phone. “Christ, it’s 2:30 in the morning. I better go. It’s a five-hour drive to the ancestral manse tomorrow.”

  “The T stopped running hours ago.”

  “I better call a cab.”

  “I’ve got plenty of room. You’re welcome to stay.”

  “Really?”

  “I should warn you, I strangle people in my sleep.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “So how about one more glass of wine?”

  “How about?”

  She poured off the rest of the bottle. I heard a far-off siren. Across the Pit on the fourth floor, a light went out.

  “So when do you fly back to Oz?”

  “That’s an open question. But I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yessss?”

  “The murder condo down the hall. Has that been sold?”

  “Not as far as I know. What with it being the murder condo and all. Why?”

  “I was thinking. If I’m going to write this book, the posthumous one, what better place to do it than right here?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll call the realtor tomorrow. That is, if you don’t mind having an old friend for a neighbor.”

  “I’d love it. Now we just have to convince Murtaugh, Brooks, the Rev…”

  “And Purple Debbie!”

  She laughed. “And Purple Debbie to move in. Then we can all live in the past.”

  “Yeah. But honestly, I don’t want to live in the past anymore. I feel like I’ve been doing that all along. Hanging onto something I should have let go a long time ago.”

  “In that case, I’m not sure this is the place for you. A lot of ghosts in Charlesgate. I don’t know if you’ve heard.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard. But I never did believe in ghosts.”

  “Well then you better not sleep on the couch. My poltergeist friend tends to rattle around in the wee hours.”

  “That’s too bad. I’m kind of a light sleeper.”

  She stood and gestured inside. “Well, I’m going to bed. It’s the first door on the left as you go inside. I believe you boys used to call it the Love Room.”

  “No ghosts in the Love Room?”

  “No ghosts at all. Whenever you’re ready.”

  She left me alone on the roof deck. I thought back to a long ago night standing in the park across the street, Jackie holding my arm above her head, announcing to anyone who would listen that I was the guy who saved Charlesgate. I never was that. But maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe all those dreams over the years weren’t a haunting from the past but a premonition of the future. Charlesgate and I were reunited at last, and maybe our best days were still ahead of us.

  I finished my wine and tossed the empty glass into the Pit. I heard it shatter in the dark distance. A light went on across the way.

  AFTERWORD

  On March 18, 1990, thirteen works of art, including Vermeer’s The Concert, were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston by two men dressed as police officers and wearing fake mustaches. This really happened, although obviously it did not happen on June 16, 1946 as it did in these pages. My version of the Gardner heist is a highly fictionalized variation on the real event. I could have made up a fake museum and some phony priceless artwork, but what would be the point? Call it creative license, but for the record let me make it clear that Jake and Shane Devlin, Joey Cahill, and Dave T are all completely fictional characters who definitely did not rob the Gardner. (As of this writing, the case remains unsolved, but on May 22, 2014, the FBI announced that credible sources had confirmed sightings of the stolen artwork.)

  The Charlesgate is a real building in Boston’s Back Bay, and its history roughly conforms to the outlines described in these pages. It opened in 1891 as a luxury hotel in the Hub of the Universe. The Depression hit it hard and it was allegedly taken over by the Mob. From 1947 to 1973 it was a women’s dormitory for Boston University. For the rest of the 1970s it was a tenement populated by drug addicts and devil worshippers. Emerson College purchased it in 1981. I lived there from 1985 to 1988. Not a week goes by that I don’t dream about it. Many of my friends claimed they’d seen ghosts within its walls. I never did. In fact, I never did any of the things depicted in this novel. I certainly never purchased a fake Maine driver’s license from a classmate for the purpose of illegally purchasing alcoholic beverages. Who would believe such a thing?

  The Jimmy Fund, the charity for which Rodney and his frat brothers held a casino night on October 25, 1986, is a real organization supporting Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, raising funds for adult and pediatric cancer care. Check them out at http://www.jimmyfund.org.

  I’d like to thank Philip Freeman, Andrew Osborne, and Stephen Lewis for reading an early draft of this novel and offering invaluable feedback. Special thanks to my editor Charles Ardai, whose boundless enthusiasm for this project is matched only by his sharp critical eye for detail. Last but not least, I’d like to thank the Boston Red Sox for breaking the curse in 2004 and winning it all again in 2007 and 2013.

  Today the Charlesgate is, in fact, a high-end, very expensive residential condominium. I can’t afford to live there. Please tell all your friends to buy this book.