Bosstown

by Adam Abramowitz

  What the fuck? I shrug, regretting the movement as pain shoots down my spine into my lower legs. I feel the static behind my eyes before I hear it. Black and white dots, needles, something sizzling in a cast-iron skillet.

  “Can you describe the woman?” Brill gives me something else to focus on.

  “Huh?”

  “The one gave you the envelope?”

  “Yeah, sure.” I take my time doing it, working the details.

  “I get the picture.” Wells interrupts my poetic flow, turns to Brill. “You getting all this?”

  “I underlined the word hot,” Brill says. “Twice.”

  “She tell you what you were carrying?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t ask?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t care?”

  “Long as it’s not ticking,” I say, which happens to be the truth. My job is simple. People call me to pick things up and deliver them. What I’m hauling across town is none of my business.

  “Was there anyone else in the office when you got there?”

  “No.”

  “See the whole thing?”

  “Yes. No. Some doors were closed.”

  “So how do you know you were alone?”

  “They had a party last night, and she said she was the first one in.”

  “Can anyone besides the girl confirm your being at the office?”

  “There was a doorman. He saw me in and out.” Did I sign a register at the front desk? I can’t remember.

  “But nobody in the office?”

  “Not that I saw. There was some confusion on her part whether I was picking something up or dropping off.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  I explain to the detectives what I’d already explained once that morning: I’d been covering for Gus; our assignments are farmed out from our shared office off Berkeley.

  “So it’s not your regular run,” Brill says.

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, you show up, the place is a mess, nobody knows if anything’s coming or going. This sort of thing happen a lot?”

  “More than I’d like.” Especially in some of the larger firms where the chain of command isn’t so clear and there are more rules than Parliament. Corporate confusion is not entirely without an upside, though: Reception lounge surfing is where I hone my chat-up skills.

  “So what then?”

  “She left for a few minutes, made a call to clear things up.” Could she have given me the wrong package by mistake?

  “She tell you that? That she was going to clear things up?”

  “Something to that effect. One of you gonna tell me how any of this will help you find who ran me over?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute. How do you know the girl dialed out? Maybe she was checking with someone in another part of the office.”

  “I saw a line on the phone light up.”

  “Maybe someone was calling the office.”

  “The phone didn’t ring. Why’s this so important?”

  Wells ignores my question. “So what were you doing while she was on the phone?”

  “Guzzling office coffee.”

  “Yeah?” Both detectives stir to attention.

  “Decaf,” I say.

  “Jay-sus!”

  “Tell me about it.” I really do blame everything on the coffee. The day I can’t outsprint a Buick across a busy intersection is the day I hang up my toe clips.

  “And this was what time, did you say?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t wear a watch.”

  “Sure. Who wants to be bothered with all that responsibility?”

  Brill: “And where did you say the package was going?”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “So where was it going?”

  I think about that for a longer moment, until it becomes a string of moments and starts hurting my head. I can picture the envelope, but the address is a complete blank. “I don’t know,” I say, finally.

  “You don’t know?” Wells has to gather an errant bubble before he can continue. “You pick up a lot of packages and not know where the hell they’re going? What, you just pick a spot, drop them off?”

  I don’t bother answering because there’s nothing to say. I must’ve had a notion where I was headed when I tripped my way out of one Black Hole before falling into a deeper, darker one. Only now I can’t remember a thing. Shades of things to come? Is this how my father felt when Alzheimer’s crept inside his head, throwing a murky veil over the little things first? The car keys. The wallet. Whose deal is it? Setting the stage for the darker hours ahead. Did he lie in bed and wonder what was happening to him, chalk it up to stress, irregular hours, sketchy company? Doubtful. Far likelier, my dad’s first response was to try and strike a bargain with the disease, broker a deal as he’s always done.

  Okay, here it is. You can have the car keys, the parking spot, and the wallet. I’ll throw in all of Yastrzemski’s at-bats, the comparison to Williams’s statistics, the lyrics to “Sea of Love,” and the time I played cards with Sinatra in Vegas.

  Leave me my children’s names.

  Wells tires of waiting me out. “Besides the money, what else were you carrying when you got hit?”

  I recite the short list, omitting the Altoids tin with a couple of loose joints I had knocking around.

  “And you think, what, someone ripped off your pack when you went down?”

  The pain from my last shrug reminds me to answer the question verbally, though I’m finding it hard to concentrate, another signal breaking through the static.

  “Hey, Zesty, you all right?”

  Sure, Detective. It’s been twenty-four hours since I’ve had a real cup of coffee, and in that time, I’ve been run over, lost a wad of cash that doesn’t belong to me, had my best bike twisted into a Dalí sculpture, and been given the equivalent of baby aspirin for my troubles. And oh yeah, I have no health insurance and a DJ’s spinning records in my head. Things are great. Thanks for asking.

  “What?”

  “Was there anything in the package besides the money?”

  “How should I know? Didn’t we go over this already?”

  “You ever deliver for Black Hole before?”

  “No.”

  “Been to their offices before this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Inside the building?”

  “Maybe a few times. One of you gonna tell me what’s going on here?”

  “Just a couple more questions. So aside from the cash, there’s no reason anyone would want to steal your bag, right?”

  “Because it’s there?”

  “Or try to hit you?”

  “Deliberately, no.”

  “Because you’re there?” Brill says, without any mirth behind it.

  “In this city?” I shake my head slowly, wince through a set of high-pitched frequency. The room starts to tilt.

  “Ever been hit before?” Wells re-ups another brick of Bazooka, meticulously refolding the wrapper and placing it in his front pocket; likely a crime-scene habit—a place for everything and everything in its place. If I had to guess, his childhood home was an unholy mess, rusted cars littering the yard, rags for clothes, pale-skinned and anemic kids everywhere.

  I lean forward, hooking the loose signal—bass and saxophone—a familiar tune filtering through. If the detectives think my movements are strange, they don’t say so.

  “Sure. Probably a half dozen times if you count getting doored. Boston drivers have a reputation to uphold, wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone.”

  “Occupational hazard?” Brill says smiling.

  Like bullets for you, I think but don’t say. Only this is the first time my job included a grilling from a couple of homicides, and frankly, I’ve grown tired of it.

  “Detectives, I don’t mean to be rude, but let me point out I’m the fuckin’ victim here. You want to write me a ticket for littering, jamming traffic, get on with it alr
eady and then go look for who ran me down.”

  Brill: “You trying to tell us how to do our jobs, Zesty?”

  “I’m just figuring maybe you got better things to do with your time than add to my headache.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “I dunno, if BPD’s got you double-timing robbery-homicide, you could always go to Roxbury, Mattapan, count real dead bodies or something.”

  “Bodies everywhere.” Wells steps toward me into what my brother, Zero, would describe as my personal space. “Don’t have to go to the Berry to find one.”

  Zero’s always been big on personal space, and there’re more than a handful of people walking Boston’s streets with missing Chiclets who’ve had the misfortune of finding that out the hard way. Myself, I’ve always carried a more flexible bubble around my person. Spatial boundaries aren’t nearly as sacrosanct to me, something the detective either seems to intuit or just doesn’t give a flying fuck about.

  I’m not claiming to be a Zen master, but patience I happen to have in spades, a trait my father always claimed was my strongest poker upside, this ability to ride the game’s unpredictable rhythms, absorb the bad beats and amateur river pulls without going into full-tilt mode, to basically survive and wait for Lady Luck to rescind her temporary and fickle crush on somebody else.

  So I’m hardly rattled with Wells’s hot breath on my face, and anyhow, if it had a color it would be pink, and I happen to like pink (another reason Zero thinks I’m half gay). I don’t back away. Partly because any movement is painful and partly because I’m getting clear reception for Morphine’s Mark Sandman coming in over the top of a wounded saxophone on the opening notes of “Cure for Pain.”

  “Good for you, then,” I tell Wells, my chin still pointing toward my chest. “Why don’t you get out of my face and go play with one.”

  “Well, see, Zesty.” Brill’s cigar nearly takes out my eye as he steps between us. “That’s the thing. We already got us a body. And a few of the bills you lost this morning too. Let me show you something.” Brill produces two photographs and extends them to me. “You recognize this man?”

  I look at the first picture, the type you might see on a license or company ID, cropped just to get the image from the chest up. The man in the photograph has close-shorn blond hair, thin bloodless lips, and weak eyes that seem to be avoiding the camera’s direct stare. He’s wearing a gray uniform with WELLS FARGO stitched above his right breast pocket. The second photograph is of the same man in the same uniform, except in this one he’s slumped against the rear wheel of an armored truck, his head tilted at an odd angle toward his shoulder. One eye is open but vacant, and there’s a bloody hole where his other eye should be. The front of his uniform is soaked in blood, a Rorschach splatter on the truck behind him, the picture taken while thick drops of gray matter still seemed to be sliding off the center splat.

  I take a deep breath and give the detectives a long, hard look, vaguely aware that I’ve begun to rub the photos together like red-hot hole cards burning my fingertips. Though the detectives seem an odd pairing, what they share is the same implacable faces of overworked and underpaid cops everywhere, men and women sent out to do jobs nobody else really wanted or was capable of doing. I knew the look well enough—the cement-grinding jaws always chewing on a thought or angle, the cynical brows, doubting lips, and liar’s eyes—I grew up around these types of faces. They are the faces of lowered expectations.

  I squeeze the pictures one more time, Brill and Wells waiting patiently, their feet flat on the floor, eyes dull now with seeming disinterest. They are the city’s dogs, and they don’t expect a bone from anybody. And they certainly don’t get one from me.

  “No,” I lie to them. “I don’t know this guy.”

  TEN

  Leila Markovich sits in the cratered cushions looking like she’s fallen into a deep hole, the gun, a black .45 semiautomatic with a beavertail grip and carbon steel finish, on her lap now. Will knows how it feels to hold a gun like this in his hand. This knowledge is something he’d gladly trade in for something else, only his dementia isn’t a menu of deletions and substitutions, allowing him to pick and choose what stays or goes.

  “I spoke with Zero,” Leila Markovich says. “He told me it wasn’t the best time to see you. Only I couldn’t wait, it’s moving too fast.”

  “Zero,” Will says.

  “Your son.”

  “Yes. I have two sons. Zero and … and…”

  “Zesty,” Leila Markovich says.

  “Yes. Zero and Zesty. They’ll be home from school soon. Who did that to your face?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  “It happened after I turned myself in. He still had influence then, people who feared him, even inside those walls. You know I’ve been in prison, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Somebody cut you with a razor?”

  “There were two of them. These are only the scars you see. There are more of them on my body. I wasn’t supposed to survive.”

  “But you did.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  Yes. But that doesn’t mean as much as it once did. After all, everybody’s here.

  “And the people who did this to you?”

  Leila Markovich conjures a thin smile, the only smile she can manage with what’s left of her lips. A smile that sparks something else Will remembers about this woman, something that reveals her answer before she speaks it. Yes, Leila was always very dangerous. Beautiful and dangerous. And now her beauty is gone. So what does that leave?

  “I killed them both,” she says.

  “In self-defense,” Will says, and when Leila Markovich says nothing else, he adds, “To survive.” Because Will knows a little something about dying to survive too.

  “Perhaps,” Leila says, looking through him to someplace far away, her fingers twitching on the gun. “You might say that.”

  ELEVEN

  I catch a cab out in front of the hospital, the driver a gritty pug of a man, a city street version of Old Salty—seen it all, driven all over it. In fact, he could be one of Boston’s last white cabbies, but it doesn’t say that on the ID posted between the double-thick wall of cloudy Plexiglas that separates us.

  “Charles Street,” I tell him, easing back into spider-cracked leather.

  “Which way?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I tell the cabbie. “I got money to burn.”

  We take Brookline Avenue past Simmons College, cross Park Drive, and roll into the Fenway, ramping Storrow Drive inbound, the sun-kissed Charles River sliding past my open window. There are a handful of joggers and rollerbladers circling the Charles, but they pass each other in opposite directions without incident. A man with two Labradors hurls a stick into the river, a flock of geese giving way as the dogs belly flop in hot pursuit. Traffic is light, the sky an endless expanse of open blue, and a Wells Fargo guard by the name of Collin Sullivan isn’t enjoying any of it because five days ago, somebody put a bullet through his head.

  The robbery had been the breathless lead-in on every local newscast—Boston loves itself a good armored car heist—and I’d read the Globe coverage in passing but don’t recall whether the article named Sullivan as the guard who was killed. What I do remember is the truck was hit during its first drop of the day, the solitary shot that killed Sullivan coming only after his gun and the shotgun belonging to the guard riding the box had already been surrendered. The money was then loaded into a green Ford pickup that was found an hour later torched and empty down a steep embankment on the Jamaica Plain side of Franklin Park.

  Beyond that, I know diddly, including why Wells and Brill would question me about Sullivan, whom I knew only in passing from working for Zero’s Somerville-based moving company, a second job I sometimes take on when things are slow and I’m having a hard time making ends meet. Do the detectives know Sullivan moonlighted for my brother? I didn’t get that vibe, since Zero’s name didn’t come up during questionin
g, but I’m not enjoying the six degrees of separation whittled to five, and if history’s any guide, where there’s money and trouble, odds are my brother’s somewhere in the mix.

  Salty curls off Storrow, a red light idling us around the bend from the Charles Street Jail. Of course, CSJ isn’t a jail anymore—Boston taxpayers get awful ornery when inmates are afforded prime river views—it’s been converted into a luxury hotel where rooms with steel bars cost extra, I shit you not. Slip the bellhop a fifty, he’ll be happy to rake a billy club as you drift to sleep, give you that authentic jailhouse vibe.

  As the cab cuts into the curb in front of the Sevens pub, I unfold Andrew Jackson and slip him into the cash slot, Salty glancing at the bloody bill before staring at me red-faced in the mirror.

  “You didn’t know Jackson was a hemophiliac? It’s all I have. Keep the change.”

  Sam Budoff greets me swaying atop the landing of his four-story limp-up, an uneven skyline of black hair sprouting from his scalp at ridiculous angles, a paean to excessive Dippity-do and pillow-generated static electricity.

  “I know you’re confused,” I tell him as he squints toward the skylight. “But what you’re experiencing is called daylight. You work last night?” Which, in Budoff’s case, means dragging his heels toward the longest-running doctoral thesis in MIT history. One day Sam will look back at grad school and think, The finest ten years of my life.

  “Did some testing.” Sam ushers me in with a quick glance down the stairwell, a symphony of locks clicking into place behind me.

  One might assume Sam’s work had taken place at the MIT labs, but I wouldn’t wager money on it. The kitchen’s open-ended dividing counter is littered with beakers and Bunsen burners, a long hose running from the sink into a small hole drilled into the center of the refrigerator door. In the middle of the studio, two ping-pong tables have been pulled together and are covered with an assortment of beakers, burners, microscopes, and a digital scale. In lieu of a living room, an undersize couch sits centered between two street-facing windows, stacks of newspapers propping a telescope that can spot naked women on Mars.

  “You want coffee, I presume.”

  I do want coffee, and as I wait for it, I aim the telescope onto Charles Street, traffic bottlenecked to Charles Circle behind a black Pathfinder double-parked across the way. As I open the window for some air, someone across the street parts a set of curtains and does the same. I wave but don’t get a response. I suppose it’s because I’m not on a boat. People always wave to other people on boats. Except in Boston Harbor. In Boston Harbor they give you the finger.