Robert B. Parker's Kickback

by Ace Atkins

  “Vermeer,” she said. “Always wanted to go to Amsterdam.”

  “It’s nice,” I said. “But a friend bought them at an exhibit at the Fine Arts Museum.”

  “One day.”

  “When the kids are grown?”

  “Shit,” she said. “I got grown kids and grandbabies. And I got a sorry-ass pension and a sadder retirement.”

  “At least you love your work.”

  “Some days,” she said. “When you make things right.”

  “Doesn’t last long,” I said.

  “Never does,” she said. “Only live for the moment. Order is an illusion.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Probably some dead white man.”

  I smiled at her. She smiled back. Our first meeting at the university seemed eons ago. “Would you like some coffee?”

  She shook her head and reached into a large black leather purse for a reporter’s notebook. She took her time flipping to the right page before glancing up at me. “You mentioned the judges were living beyond their means?”

  “Yep.”

  “So I took that as a clue,” she said. “I checked out the property records of how much they paid for their homes.”

  “So did I,” I said.

  “Nice digs,” she said. “Almost a mil for Scali. Two-point-five mil for Callahan.”

  I leaned back into my chair and set my feet onto the edge of the desk. The features section for the Globe lay spread out where I’d left it. Arlo & Janis. “Perhaps they have family money?”

  “Maybe,” Iris said. “Each house in the name of their wives.”

  “Maybe it’s a statement.”

  “Or maybe they’re hiding something,” she said. “So I checked into both of them. Victoria Scali and Barbara Callahan own a travel agency in the city. With another office in Tampa.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So the wives are more successful than the men.”

  “Do you want me to explain my second husband?”

  “Do I want you to?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Last I heard, the son of a bitch was living in Costa Rica.”

  “Maybe the women are a tax dodge?”

  “The business is small,” she said. “But they keep an office in a high-rise off Atlantic.”

  She read off the address and the name of the business. Being a trained detective, I wrote both down. “Okay,” I said.

  “I guess it doesn’t mean much.”

  “Or maybe it means everything,” I said.

  “How do we know?”

  “I’ll work some investigatory magic,” I said, feigning my Liberace movements on the keyboard. Or more likely Dave McKenna.

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  I nodded. “Keep pushing till I piss someone off.”

  “You’re coming back to Blackburn,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Wild horses couldn’t deter me.”

  “It ain’t the wild horses I’m worried about,” she said. “It’s the Blackburn PD and Scali’s goons.”

  “If something happens to me, do you promise to write a glowing obit?”

  “If only the paper had the space.”

  Are you okay?” Dillon said.

  “I’m fine,” the boy said.

  “You don’t look fine,” Dillon said. “And you were talking to yourself when you were asleep.”

  “I’m cold is all,” he said. “I just can’t quit shaking.”

  The boy lay curled under the single sheet, teeth chattering. Dillon had come down from the top bunk and pulled up a chair. He’d remembered seeing Dillon after he went to the infirmary and walked back to the pod. No one spoke to him but Dillon. He heard some of them whispering about what had happened to Tony Ponessa. A lot of them talking revenge.

  “You whipped that guy’s butt,” Dillon said.

  “He started it,” the boy said.

  “And you finished it, too,” Dillon said. “Nobody thought that was going to happen.”

  The boy felt his teeth chattering as he curled tighter into a ball. Dillon disappeared onto the top bunk and brought down a blanket and a pillow. The boy hadn’t earned either yet.

  “Take it.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I don’t need it,” Dillon said. “I’m not the one sick.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Is that what they told you?” Dillon said. They were the only two in the bunk room, all the other boys down on the first floor of the open pod watching TV. He could hear the tinny sounds of the television and the murmur of kids talking. “They’re bullshit.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “That son of a bitch made you swim out in the harbor, for fuck’s sake,” Dillon said. “What did you think was going to happen? Your damn skin had turned blue when they finally pulled you out. You nearly choked out on that cold water.”

  “Yeah?” the boy said, laughing. “But I got the stick.” The laugh turned into a cough.

  Dillon stood and reached out, feeling the boy’s head. When the boy looked up at Dillon’s face he wasn’t pleased with what he saw. Dillon was now yelling for the guards, telling them they needed to get in here, now.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “Jesus, you’re going to get me killed.”

  “They don’t want to treat you because they’d have to admit what they’ve done. Guard!”

  “I’m okay,” the boy said, shaking.

  “Get the fuck in here,” Dillon said, yelling. “Guard!”

  “I’m fine,” the boy said, wrapping himself in the warm blanket as tight as he could. If only he could get warm.

  30

  I met Jake Cotner the next afternoon inside the Blackburn cotton mill museum. I paid my six-buck admission and walked inside the weave room, the old looms shaking, long ropy belts turning spindles hung from the ceiling. I couldn’t tell if they were actually making stretches of fabric or if the mechanizations were for show. Either way, the machines made a lot of noise and radiated an impressive pulse of energy. The mill room stretched out as far and wide as a gridiron. A couple of old-timers in overalls roamed the floors, checking the belts and century-old machines. I looked for Lyddie, but it must’ve been her day off.

  Cotner wore the same letterman’s jacket as before with his jeans and work boots. The jeans had been cuffed a couple inches. I didn’t know kids did that anymore, but the look suited him, as did the buzz cut. He was standing at the protective rail, watching the machines hammering in the big open space. I walked up next to him. In all the noise, I’d surprised him, and he flinched a bit when I touched his back.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Nope,” I said. “Just Spenser.”

  “Mr. Spenser.”

  “Just Spenser.”

  “Can we make this fast,” he said. “I can’t get in any trouble. I didn’t mind meeting with you the other day, but now, you know, with all that crap with Beth. You know. Well, I just don’t want to get arrested or something.”

  “Have you spoken to Beth?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Cops talk to you?”

  He shook his head.

  One of the old guys was on a ladder, threading the belt back through a spindle. He looked like he’d done this maybe a thousand times before and could rework the loom in his sleep. He had on thick glasses and a red bandana tied around his neck. He used the bandana to wipe the back of his neck like prospectors in old Westerns.

  “How about Ryan?” I said. “Did he find her?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “He said Beth was leaving town. Her mom made her. She has family down in Plymouth. I think she’s going to switch schools and everything. What the hell happened?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think the cops made a deal with Beth
to make her drug charges go away.”

  I nodded. The old man stepped off the ladder and flipped a switch, and the weaver started working again. At closer inspection, I could see that the loom was real, actually fashioning a broad piece of white cloth. Outside the towering industrial windows were three other identical brick mills. The whole town of Blackburn was built on the idea of industry, nestled by the river, with man-made canals dug throughout the town, intersecting and powering the mill. I took off my hat and dried off the melted snow.

  “You’re a smart kid,” I said.

  “Doesn’t get me much at my job.”

  “You could go back to school.”

  “When?” he said. “My old man kicked me out.”

  “There are ways.”

  “I’m nineteen years old,” he said. “I got six thousand dollars of credit card debt and I’m a month late on my rent for me and my girlfriend. I ain’t going back to school.”

  “When I dropped out of college, I joined the Army.”

  “My dad would love it if I joined the Army,” he said. “But I don’t really like people shooting at me.”

  “That is a downside,” I said.

  “Did you like the Army?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But some of it I enjoyed very much.”

  “You think the cops are going to arrest me?” he said. “They came after Beth and then you.”

  “You think she told them about you and Ryan?”

  “That’s why Ryan wanted to talk to her,” he said. “He was worried about the same thing. But she swore to God she didn’t say anything about her introducing us to you. As far as they know, she just talked about problems with some kid named Yates.”

  “Dillon Yates.”

  “That’s him,” he said. “You know him?”

  “He’s the reason I’m here,” I said. “Scali sentenced him like he sentenced you and Ryan. And it looks like a whole lot of other kids in Blackburn.”

  “He’s a total dick.”

  “That’s a given,” I said. “But he’s become a wealthy one at that.”

  We walked down the empty row blocked off with rails to a hallway and then turned up a flight of steps. You had to go up the steps to get off the floor and then through the museum to get out of the building. I was pretty sure you had to exit out of the gift shop after being dazzled with the romance of the Industrial Revolution. I wondered if they had a pinup calendar of the mill girls of the 1890s.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Beth shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I don’t think she had a choice.”

  “Sure she did.”

  “She’s seventeen,” I said. “And adults were pulling her in to say that either she tells the story they want her to tell or else she’s going to prison.”

  “I hate this place,” he said. “It’s become the crappiest city in the state.”

  “I think it was destined to be that way.”

  “Yeah?”

  We stood alone in the middle of wide displays of black-and-white photos of workers standing by their looms. Women who’d come from Canada to work night and day in the mills, eat at the mills, live at the mills. “Probably always been pretty crappy,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of figure this stuff out as I go along.”

  “What if they put you in prison?”

  I laughed. “That won’t happen.”

  “How do you know?” he said. “They can do whatever they like. You go against them and you’ll end up in Walpole. My uncle is in Walpole now. But he should be. He killed a guy.”

  I shook my head. “But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You think that freakin’ matters?”

  “Scali and Callahan and these cops pick on kids because they can’t fight back,” I said. “They target kids from families without money. Or families who don’t even speak English. They’re cowards. Besides, unlike most kids, I have a very good attorney.”

  Jake nodded. We walked through the historical displays or fabric, wooden spindles, and mannequins wearing very uncomfortable-looking uniforms of old. A light sleet tapped on the floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside, Hawk was waiting for me in a nice warm car he stole for the day.

  “Jeez,” he said. “For your sake, I hope your attorney is tough.”

  “The judges better start wearing cups under their robes,” I said. “She knows right where to hit them.”

  31

  You get this thing figured out, babe?” Hawk said.

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Now we can head back to Boston and have dinner at Rialto. I hear Jody has a special with scallops tonight.”

  “Haw.”

  “Or we can kick around Blackburn a bit,” I said. “See what’s shaking.”

  “Might get both of us in the clink.”

  “That’s why we are incognito,” I said. “Forward thinking to steal this luxury vehicle.”

  “I didn’t steal it,” he said. “Borrowed it from one of my neighbors.”

  “I always knew that was the way it worked on Beacon Hill,” I said. “Just take the closest car. Wouldn’t want anyone inconvenienced.”

  “May have a fresh car, but we do stand out.”

  “Hard to be this handsome.”

  “And be this big and black,” Hawk said. “If you hadn’t noticed, I kind of put the black in Blackburn.”

  I smiled. Hawk started the car. It was a nice car, leather seats, push-button ignition. The engine ran so quiet, I couldn’t even tell it was running. Hawk’s taste was exquisite. He wore black leather gloves and a matching cap. I had on my trusted Navy peacoat and Dodgers cap. The day was cold and gray, and about perfect for a field trip to an old mill town.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Both judges are in court. Let’s drive up to Lawrence and I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “How you make my heart pitter-patter,” Hawk said. “Lunch in Lawrence.”

  “Better than sticking around here,” I said. “And then we’ll head back and see what’s going on with Callahan and Scali.”

  “You don’t think the cops on the lookout for you?” he said. “Probably watching both houses in case you show up.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or perhaps they believe they’ve taught me a lesson.”

  “Don’t they know your forehead is four inches thick?”

  “Trade secret,” I said, knocking on my brow.

  We drove up to Lawrence, had a nice lunch, and returned to Blackburn by late afternoon. We followed Scali home. We drove past the Callahan place. I checked out Beth Golnick’s place, but no one was home. We drove back to Boston.

  The next morning there was a hard snow. We headed back to Blackburn.

  Again, nothing.

  The third day was indeed a charm. Hawk had grown tired of our routine, no more pleased with sojourns to Lawrence than he’d been spending the day in Blackburn. We followed Scali as he left the courthouse, and this time he did not return home. He crossed the half-frozen Merrimack and took I-93 south. Hawk hung a few cars back. Hawk could follow a car down a back highway in Arizona without anyone noticing. And in traffic, he could really work his hidden art. On the third day, we had a third car. This one was a Lexus.

  “You ever think about stealing a Hyundai?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  “You people really do like flashy cars.”

  “Almost stole me a pink Cadillac,” Hawk said. “We could drive around Blackburn blaring some Curtis Mayfield from the speakers.”

  “Anytime.”

  “Okay,” Hawk said. “Where’s Scali headed now?”

  Scali braked to a quick stop and took an illegal and very sloppy U-turn. But I guess when you’re a local and crooked judge, you can make a few traffic infractions. He headed
back a block or two north on I-93 and pulled into the parking lot of the IHOP.

  “Aha,” I said.

  “Been here before.”

  “Yep.”

  “You eat here?”

  “God, no,” I said.

  “Good,” Hawk said. “’Cause there’s a limit to the shit I’ll do for you.”

  Hawk found a parking spot with a good vantage point in a neighboring parking lot. He killed the lights but kept the engine and the heater running. The radio was tuned to a local jazz station. Mingus and his Pork Pie Hat.

  “Now what?”

  “We see who shows up,” I said.

  “You private detectives sho’ do have some powerful smarts.”

  A few minutes later, the honorable Judge Callahan showed up in a Lincoln and met up at the table with Scali. And twenty minutes later, a thick, beefy guy in a zipped leather jacket and jeans hopped out of a tow truck and walked inside to take a seat at the table. He looked to be in his forties and had a disreputable nose and close-cropped black hair.

  “You know him?” Hawk said.

  “Nope.”

  “I do.”

  “Jackie DeMarco?”

  “None other, babe.”

  The men read off their menus, snapped them shut, and all laughed together at the table. “Pals,” I said, turning on the windshield wipers to clear away the ice.

  “Warms a man’s heart,” Hawk said.

  32

  I met Sheila Yates and Megan Mullen the next day at Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Harvard Square. We sat inside, huddled around a small table in the very back. I drank coffee with only a little sugar and abstained from the scones and muffins they sold. As I sipped the nearly black coffee and watched others devouring sugary pastries, I marveled at my restraint. Had we been at Kane’s in Saugus, all bets would be off.

  “They’re going to let your son go,” Megan said.

  Megan Mullen removed her ski hat and set her leather satchel on the floor. A lot of people were crammed into the space. It was eighteen degrees outside. The windows were all frosted and a lot of snow and ice had been tracked inside.