Robert B. Parker's Kickback

by Ace Atkins

  “I miss the tulips,” she said. “And anything green.”

  “I miss the swan boats,” I said, “baseball, and short skirts. Not necessarily in that order.”

  Pearl’s tongue lolled from her mouth. I tried to keep my tongue in place. I found it more dignified.

  The night was full on, streetlamps blooming yellow light over snowbanks and skeletal trees. We made our way across Arlington, down Marlborough, and finally back up to my apartment. Once upstairs and inside, I opened the refrigerator and found a six-pack of Abita Turbodog. Susan and Pearl drank water.

  “How’d it go in Blackburn, kiddo?” she said, leaning her fanny against my kitchen counter. She removed her hooded sweatshirt to reveal a snug-fitting black exercise top. As always, I felt a familiar surge zap through my chest. She noticed the staring and smiled, her teeth very even and white, her delicate face flushed from the cold wind.

  “I was greeted with open arms,” I said. “Everyone couldn’t be more helpful. I pointed out the error of their ways and all charges against the kid were dismissed.”

  “Uh-huh,” Susan said. “They ran you out of town on a rail.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But I heard they’re prepping the rail.”

  “Administrators seldom see the error of their ways,” she said. “Why do you think I ditched the guidance-counselor gig?”

  “Because you longed to be a shrink with a fancy Ph.D.?”

  “I liked the kids,” she said. “The administrators mostly sucked.”

  I sat on a bar stool and stretched out my leg, pulling up the sweatpants to examine the new scar. “I won’t get much help,” I said. “This judge who sentenced the kid is pretty popular among the yokels. They think he’s keeping down the juvie crime.”

  “Is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe he’s just an asshole?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “You can’t overturn a decision based on the guy being a jerk,” Susan said. “I’ve worked with a lot of kids in that system. The judges have a free hand. You just hope they’re fair.”

  “My client believes there’s something hinkier than just the judge being an a-hole,” I said. “She thinks there’s a conspiracy up there.”

  “About what?”

  “She doesn’t know,” I said. “She just knows a lot of kids are being railroaded through this system.”

  “Are you being paid on this?”

  I took a deep breath. “My fee hasn’t been discussed.”

  “You did recently get a nice paycheck from Kinjo Heywood,” she said. “You can afford to do one off the books.”

  I stood and filled a pot with water to boil. I’d had red beans with andouille sausage simmering in a Crock-Pot all day. I added rice to the water when it boiled, then I started to chop green peppers and onions. My chopping was quick but masterly. I placed a baguette from the Flour Bakery in the oven.

  I opened a second bottle of Abita, interspersing sips of beer with a glass of water. I pulled out some plates and opened a bottle of sauvignon blanc for Susan. I put an old Louis Jordan album on the turntable.

  “While you slave over the stove, I’ll freshen up,” she said.

  “A truly modern relationship.”

  “Would you rather me cook?”

  “We each have our talents.”

  Pearl trotted into the kitchen. “And the baby’s?” she said.

  I tossed a hunk of baguette into the air. Pearl caught it.

  “Kitchen detail,” I said.

  “And mine?” Susan said.

  “Besides helping the depressed, the neurotic, and the true wackos of Boston and Cambridge?”

  “Yes.”

  “How graphic would you like me to get?” I set down the knife, walked up close, and wrapped my arms around her small waist. Susan whispered things into my ear that would have made a fleet of sailors blush. I held her tighter.

  We kissed as the rice simmered, and until I felt a buzzing in my pants. Susan laughed.

  It buzzed again. Susan stepped back as I reached for my cell. She disappeared into my bedroom. I read through a text message and set the phone down.

  “First day of school and I’m a big hit,” I said, yelling to the bedroom. “Young girls already texting me.”

  “Should I be jealous?” Susan said.

  “Only if I take my letterman’s jacket out of mothballs.”

  “Do you even own a letterman’s jacket?”

  “Of course,” I said. “She wants to meet tomorrow.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “She refers to Dillon as her BFF.”

  “Maybe someone is trying to set you up.” I heard the shower start to run.

  “Of course.” I sipped the beer and listened to Louis sing. “But there’s only one way to find out.”

  He stayed fifteen days in Lawrence before two cops in a black van drove him to the Blackburn courthouse. They forced him to change into an orange jumpsuit, shackled his wrists, and led him up a back stairway and into a small courtroom with a tall ceiling. Every word and every move seemed to echo off the wooden walls. He was told to sit down in the front row and shut up. He turned to see his dad standing in the back row. His dad wore a suit. He didn’t even know his dad had a suit.

  Up on the bench was the judge, a short, Italian-looking guy with black hair and wearing a black robe. He didn’t seem big or tough. The judge had on a Patriots Super Bowl cap and laughed it up with two bailiffs who wore guns. The judge spoke low, but something he said really set off the two men. They laughed hard.

  He looked back to his dad. His dad caught his eye and nodded back.

  Maybe he’d fixed the thing. Maybe his dad had called one of his cop pals and all this would go away. What he wanted more than anything was a shower and McDonald’s. He’d had dreams last night about a double cheese and fries.

  He looked down the row at the other kids brought in. He didn’t see Tim, which was strange. Tim had been with him at Lawrence and then gone. He figured that they wanted to keep them separate, make sure they couldn’t connect their stories like cops talked about on Law & Order.

  The shackles and orange jumpsuit made the boy depressed and humiliated. He wanted his street clothes back.

  The judge took off his Pats cap, showing a long strand of black hair plastered to his pale scalp. He nodded to a bailiff, who told everyone to rise. The room was very quiet and hot, smelling of a stale furnace. The judge flipped through some folders, his eyes never looking at all the faces crammed into the courtroom. Not nervous. Just seeming not to care. He wore the kind of glasses that had a purplish tint and would turn full dark in the sun.

  The boy hunched his shoulders and looked down at his hands. He waited for his name to be called. He was a big kid, big for his age, but today he felt small.

  It was Wednesday, and he’d already missed two weeks of school. He wondered what his friends would say. What his wrestling coach would say. This was senior year, and he couldn’t have something like this in his file. Everything had to be perfect for a scholarship.

  He never expected the room to be so crowded and so hot. He grew hungrier. More kids were led inside wearing orange jumpsuits, boys and girls. All of them with bound wrists. Some of the new kids’ names were read before his. He figured it took nearly three hours before his name was called.

  He stood, looked back to his dad. But his dad had disappeared.

  He looked to the bench and the doorway he’d entered. His dad was gone.

  The bailiff pushed him along until he stood before the judge. Judge Scali looked down from on high at the boy. He rubbed his face as he considered the papers in front of him.

  “You go to Blackburn?” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said.

  “Did you come
and hear me speak in the fall?” he said. “Or were you skipping school?”

  “I heard it,” the boy said. “You came to our auditorium.”

  “And what did I say?”

  “Stay off drugs?” the boy said. Some kids snickered behind him and Scali shot them a mean glance.

  “What else?”

  “Stay out of trouble,” the boy said.

  “Or what?”

  “You didn’t give second chances.”

  The judge smiled. His glass lenses a deep purple. “That’s right,” he said. “And so you rode around in a stolen car and then tried to rob an old man?”

  “No, sir.”

  Scali shook his head. He breathed deeply. He looked to a bailiff and shook his head like the boy made him sick. “Are you telling me the police are lying?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I know the police in this town,” Scali said. “I never even met you. You’ve been charged with car theft and attempted robbery. Do you understand your charges?”

  The boy looked back behind him for his father. He searched each side of the courtroom but couldn’t find him.

  “Look at me,” Scali said. “Listen to me.”

  The boy nodded.

  “I want you to listen good,” Scalia said. “I’m going to give you a break here today.”

  The boy felt like he could breathe. He nodded to the judge.

  “You may not appreciate it now,” he said. “But in ten years, you’ll remember this day as the one that turned your life around.”

  The boy’s mouth was made of cotton. He couldn’t swallow.

  “I’m sentencing you to eighteen months at the MCC camp on Fortune Island,” he said.

  The boy wanted to speak but the words wouldn’t come. He felt the bailiff’s big hands on his biceps, pulling him away from the bench.

  “Next case,” Scali said, already forgetting him.

  5

  I was back in Blackburn bright and early the next morning. I bought some corn muffins and a regular coffee at Dunkin’ and sat in my Explorer with the engine running and the heat on high. Downriver, the Merrimack’s black water moved slow and sluggish under the thinnest sheen of ice. “By June our brook would run out of song and speed,” I said between bites of muffin.

  Not much later, a girl walked in front of my SUV. She was tall and, like many tall teenage girls, slumped in a self-conscious way. She had a longish nose, not much chin, and stick-thin legs. She wore a puffy silver coat, blue jeans, and tall rubber boots. Her hair was a light blond with a black streak blowing across her face. When I got out, I recognized her from the hallway yesterday. I had nearly run over her.

  She nodded at me. “You work for Dillon’s mom?”

  “I do.”

  “And you wanted to find out why that moron arrested him for nothing?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  We stood in the shadow of the old mill, beside a city park with a snow-covered amphitheater. I asked her if she’d like to sit in my truck where it was warmer. Nothing like a middle-aged man trying to talk a teenager into his car. Even as the words came out of my mouth, I felt like a creeper. All I needed was to start keeping candy in my pocket.

  “I’m already late for school.”

  “I can drive you.”

  “I’m okay,” she said. The girl held a battered purple backpack loose in her hand and hung there for a moment, seeming not to know what to say. She had a dark complexion with black eyes. The blond hair was probably fake but the streak was the original color. She shook a little in the cold wind.

  “You fished my card from the trash?” I said.

  “That asshole ran off to talk to Waters just as soon as you left.”

  “He looked as though he needed the exercise.”

  “Last year he broke into my best friend’s locker and found a half-pint of gin,” she said. “They arrested her and I haven’t seen her since. She was sent to some camp for girls. They make them raise vegetables and sing songs.”

  “A lot of that going around?”

  She nodded. She looked around as if the trees had ears. She peered up into the empty windows of the endless mill that probably coaxed her ancestors over away from the potato famine. The girl shifted her feet and squinted at my face, hands deep into the pockets of her puffy coat. She pulled the long streak of black out of her eyes. I wondered how much it cost to have all but one streak dyed or if she’d done it herself. Probably herself.

  “How many?”

  “How many what?” she said.

  “Kids are getting sent off?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe ten, twelve from my grade. I know there are a lot of others. No one wants to make a big deal about it. You’re afraid to even open your mouth. You get labeled as a problem and they’ll ship you off.”

  “What about probation?”

  “Haven’t you heard,” she said. “No second chances in Blackburn. You get arrested and you’re done. Not just in school, but your whole life. You’re a freakin’ criminal.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “You won’t get in trouble,” I said. “I just don’t know what to call you.”

  “Beth.”

  “Beth what?”

  “Beth Golnick.”

  “Okay, Beth Golnick,” I said. “You sure I can’t give you a ride?”

  She looked at her cell phone and then back at me. “You could let me out at the gas station, down the street.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Wherever you like.”

  We got into my Explorer and circled out of the lot. I adjusted the vent and the girl placed her hands in front of the blower. The wind had been sharp over the river. We drove along Central into the downtown and then turned toward the high school.

  “Dillon was my friend,” she said. “He didn’t deserve this. He was just joking. He should have gotten detention, not sent to that prison.”

  “Why do you think they sent him?”

  “To scare us,” Beth said. “They want to control our whole lives. They can’t stand it that they can only tell us what to do at school. They want to watch everything we do at home, too.”

  “Why don’t the parents do something?”

  “They’re afraid,” Beth said. “All the grown-ups around here have their own problems. They’re scared to speak up. I mean, a lot of them are Cambodian or Vietnamese and don’t even speak English. Some are from South America. My older brother, who’s like six years older than me, said they had some real trouble with gangs and drugs when he was in school. He says it’s different now. Better.”

  “And now the school is abusing their power?”

  “The school and the police.”

  “They’re together in this?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Of course.”

  “Can you give me the names of some kids who’ve been sent away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you find out?” I said. “It would help me to help Dillon.”

  “Umm,” she said. “I can ask around.”

  I drove through Blackburn, keeping the girl talking, but it wasn’t long until the school came into view. I spotted the gas station down the road and slowed beside the pumps. The gas station, like most things in the town, hadn’t changed much in fifty years. The place advertised fuel with a red neon mule that said IT KICKS!

  “You know,” she said. “You’re wasting your time.”

  “How so?”

  “Newspaper wrote something about all this last year,” she said.

  “And?”

  “And nothing,” she said. “Shit happens. Nobody cares.”

  “I care.”

  “About Dillon, ’cause you’re paid,” she said. “What about the others?”

>   “One kid at a time.”

  6

  A big metal sign for The Star still advertised the newspaper from the top of the city’s tallest building. But the building had long been condemned and The Star had relocated to a redbrick storefront several blocks away. An antique printing press sat dusty behind a plate-glass window surrounded by framed front pages of Extra editions: Victory Over Japan, Man Walks on Moon, Nixon Quits, and the October when the Curse Was Reversed.

  I doubted the paper was printed anymore. If it was, it was probably the size of a Bazooka Joe comic. I walked inside to find anyone who was left.

  The ceiling was high and the walls were exposed brick. There were maybe a dozen desks, all empty except for two. A young white man and an older black woman sat staring at laptops. The white kid hopped up and approached the front desk. He wore a wrinkled blue dress shirt and a loose black tie around his skinny neck. Hip.

  “News?” I said.

  He seemed disappointed that I didn’t want to take out an ad. Maybe if all went well with this case I could open a branch office in Blackburn. The kid jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Over there,” he said.

  The woman was heavyset but not fat, with a very short Afro and enormous gold hoop earrings. Her blouse was red and long-sleeved, with a keyhole cinch at the top. Black slacks and black boots. She looked to be in her late fifties or early sixties, with a bit of gray showing up in her hair. She wore canvas braces on her wrists and loosened them as she leaned back from her typing.

  I smiled at her. She barely glanced up at me.

  I told her I was an investigator from Boston. “I understand you worked on a piece about Judge Scali last year.”

  “Mmhm,” she said.

  “I understand he’s got quite a reputation,” I said.

  “Mmhm.”

  “Nice weather we’re having.”

  She looked over the top of her reading glasses and pulled off the wrist braces. She tilted her head, staring at me as if I’d come to the wrong place. I just smiled back. Friendly old Spenser, community watchdog.