Back Story

by Robert B. Parker

  “Ah is descended from generations of proud warriors,” Hawk said.

  “Oh, God,” Susan said. “You’re not going to give me some kind of Shaka Zulu rap, are you?”

  Hawk grinned at her.

  “All of whom were scared,” he said.

  “Like you?”

  “Sho’.”

  Pearl came over smelling of fresh earth and put her head on Susan’s lap. Susan stroked her automatically.

  “But . . . ?” she said.

  Hawk and I looked at each other.

  “When I was boxing,” I said, “people would occasionally say to me, ‘doesn’t it hurt to get hit like that?’ And of course it did. But if I couldn’t put up with the pain, I couldn’t be a fighter.”

  Susan nodded.

  “I know,” she said. “You’ve explained it before.”

  “Repetition is an excellent learning tool,” I said.

  “Of course, I’m not talking about you, anyway,” Susan said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m scared, and I don’t want to be.”

  “You get used to it,” I said.

  “I wish I didn’t have to,” Susan said.

  I shrugged. “I can’t sing or dance,” I said.

  “I know.”

  Pearl moved over to Hawk and pushed her head under his hand to be patted.

  “You folks barely talk,” he said, smoothing Pearl’s ears. “One of you say something cryptic, the other one say, ‘I know.’ Pretty soon you be speaking in clicks.”

  Susan smiled at him. “Yes,” she said softly.

  “Nobody gonna kill us,” Hawk said.

  “They never have,” Susan said.

  38

  So far it was a good day. No one had attempted to murder me. The weather was bright and pleasant. I had finished Tank McNamara and was reading Arlo and Janis. There was two-thirds of a large coffee and a second corn muffin beside me on my desk. Hawk, with a sawed-off doubled-barreled shotgun next to him on the couch, was reading a book about evolution by Ernst Mayr. I had the window open behind me, and the bright summer air smelled clean coming in.

  When I finished Arlo and Janis, I called Rita Fiore at her office.

  “I need a favor,” I said.

  “Your place or mine,” Rita said.

  “Not that kind of favor.”

  “It never is,” Rita said. “What do you want.”

  I told her.

  “Easy,” she said. “I’ll send a paralegal up to Essex County.”

  I thanked her and hung up and broke off half of my corn muffin. Suddenly Hawk dog-eared his page, put down his book, and picked up his shotgun. My office door opened. It was Epstein with a thin black leather briefcase under his arm. Hawk put the gun down and picked up his book. Epstein glanced at Hawk, glanced at the sawed-off, came to my desk, and sat in a client chair.

  “That Hawk?” Epstein said.

  “Yes.”

  Epstein turned in his chair.

  “I’m Epstein,” he said.

  Hawk nodded. Epstein turned back to me.

  “Malone was part of a surveillance team on Sonny Karnofsky, back in the early seventies, when the bureau was trying to put Sonny away.”

  “Anyone else on the team?”

  “Malone was the youngest. Everyone else is dead.”

  “So he knew Sonny,” I said, “from a long time ago. That’s true of almost everyone in the cops-and-robbers business in Boston.”

  “It’s better than finding out he didn’t know him.”

  “They ever get Sonny?”

  “No. But from what oral history I’ve been able to collect, Malone was occasionally seen in Sonny’s company.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s all I have on Malone. Clean record. No hint of impropriety.”

  “How about Sonny?” I said.

  Epstein took a folder out of his briefcase and opened it.

  “Born Sarno Karnofsky, no middle name, in Hamtramck, Michigan in 1925. Married Evelina Lombard in 1945. Had a daughter, Bonnie Louise, born 1945. Did street-thug work in Detroit in the early forties, moved here the same year his daughter was born. You want his rap sheet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Worked here for awhile with Joe Broz, then split with Broz and, by 1965 had his own outfit,” Epstein said and grinned. “The rest is history.”

  “Only in America,” I said. “You got anything else salient?”

  “Abner Fancy,” Epstein said. “That salient enough?”

  I could hear him struggling to keep the self-satisfaction from his voice. And failing.

  “What about Abner?” I said.

  “Did time in Massachusetts. Cedar Junction. Armed robbery.”

  “When?”

  “Was in from 1961 to 1965.”

  “It was Walpole then. When did he get out?”

  “What month?”

  “Yeah.”

  Epstein looked into his folder. “Paroled February second,” he said.

  “So he had a PO.”

  “He did, but we can’t find him. For crissake, Spenser, this was nearly forty years ago.”

  “Got the parole board hearing records?”

  “In the folder,” Epstein said. “Seems to have been a model prisoner.”

  Epstein put the folder on my desk. “You know anything salient I should know?”

  “You know everything I know,” I said.

  “Let’s keep it that way,” Epstein said.

  “You bet,” I said.

  Epstein glanced at Hawk without saying anything, hesitated for a moment, then left.

  Without looking up from his book, Hawk said, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

  “I never got in trouble keeping my mouth shut,” I said.

  “Sonny got a daughter named Bonnie whose mother’s maiden name was Lombard,” Hawk said.

  “I thought you were reading.”

  “Super Bro,” Hawk said. “I can read and listen.”

  “It would be a spectacular coincidence,” I said, “if Bonnie Louise Karnofsky were not Bunny Lombard.”

  “If Sonny live there back then.”

  “I’m working on that,” I said.

  “Rita?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ought to give in to her one time,” Hawk said.

  “And tell Susan what?”

  “Line of duty,” Hawk said.

  I shook my head. “Maybe you need to step in,” I said.

  “Man, I got to do everything for you?”

  “Almost,” I said.

  39

  According to his prison sheet, Abner Fancy had been born out of wedlock in Boston in 1940. He was living in the South End when he was arrested, on Canton Street in the years when it was somewhat less rarified. There was no indication in the record that he was a problem while he was doing his time. The parole board, when they paroled him, took note of the fact that he had taken every class he could in the Taft prison-outreach program and appeared serious in his attempts to improve himself.

  While I was reading Abner’s folder, Rita Fiore called me.

  “House at Seventeen Ocean Street in Paradise was purchased in 1961 by Sarno and Evelina Karnofsky for one hundred twelve thousand five hundred dollars,” she said.

  “Bada bing,” I said.

  “Bada bing?”

  “Bada bing!”

  “I gather this information is useful to you,” Rita said.

  “It is,” I said.

  “So you owe me?”

  “I do.”

  “I want lunch,” Rita said.

  “I could send some over,” I said.

  “I want to eat it with you, you sonova bitch, so I can ply you with strong drink until you succumb.”

  “Oh hell,” I said. “Everybody does that.”

  “Monday,” Rita said. “Noon. Lock Obers.”

  “A debt is a debt,” I said.

  “You are one sweet-talking dude” Rita said and hung up.

  “Bo
nnie is Bunny,” I said to Hawk, “is Bonnie Louise Karnofsky.”

  “Sonny live there early enough?”

  “Bought the place in ’61.”

  “And when his daughter goes to college, she don’t want to be the daughter of a hooligan,” Hawk said. “So she use her mother’s maiden name.”

  “And either Bonnie got morphed into Bunny,” I said. “Or Daryl remembered it wrong.”

  “So where is Bonnie/Bunny now?” Hawk said.

  “Alumni directory still has her living with Sonny,” I said.

  “She’d be how old now?” Hawk said.

  “Late fifties,” I said.

  “Christ, how old is Sonny?”

  “Late seventies,” I said. “I have to do all the math for you?”

  “I concentrating on saving your life,” Hawk said. “Can’t do that and math, too.”

  “You’re easily confused,” I said. “We could go out and ask her whereabouts.”

  “Sure,” Hawk said. “Sonny be glad to tell us.”

  “Okay, so we put that plan on hold,” I said. “She must have had friends in college. Maybe I can find one that’s kept in touch.”

  “Lotta phone calls,” Hawk said. “Could have Epstein pick her up for questioning.”

  “If he can find her,” I said. “Fifty’s kind of old to be living at home. And if he does find her, he hasn’t got anything to hold her on. And if she has got something to hide, as soon as Epstein lets her go, Sonny will ship her off to Zanzibar, and nobody will find her.”

  “We could stake out the property,” Hawk said. “See if we see her.”

  “We could,” I said.

  “ ’Course, if we don’t see her, it won’t mean she isn’t there,” Hawk said. “Just mean she hasn’t come out while we there.”

  “And if we do see her, how will we know it’s her,” I said.

  “And maybe Sonny a little more alert to stakeouts than your average suburban dad,” Hawk said.

  “And since he’s trying to kill us anyway . . .”

  “There you go saying ‘us’ again.”

  “All for one and one for all,” I said.

  “Don’t that suck,” Hawk said.

  40

  We settled for a lot of phone calls.

  Of the 3,180 students that entered Taft in the fall of 1963, 954 of them were from greater Boston. The alumni directory had addresses for 611. At the rate of one minute per phone call, it would take me ten hours to call them all. If I didn’t go to the bathroom. On the assumption that she would have more girlfriends than boyfriends, I went through the list again and winnowed out 307 female names.

  “You wanna make some of these calls?” I said to Hawk.

  “No.”

  “Maybe I’ll be lucky,” I said. “Maybe she was pals with Judy Aaron.”

  “You got one chance in three hundred seven,” Hawk said.

  “I thought you didn’t do math.”

  “I do when I want to,” Hawk said.

  “They’ll chisel that on your headstone,” I said.

  I picked up my cordless phone and leaned back and put my feet up and began. Most of the calls took longer than a minute. Who was I again? Why did I wish to locate Bonnie Lombard? Was I authorized by the university? This was compensated to some extent by the people who hung up on me or who weren’t home. Still, I’d been at it almost three hours when I talked to Anne Fahey.

  “Bonnie? Sure, I remember Bonnie.”

  “May I come and see you about her,” I said.

  “Sure. You got my phone number, does that mean you got my address?”

  I read her address to her.

  “That’s it. When do you want to come?”

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Maybe I can rummage around, find some pictures or something. Should I do that?”

  “Anything you have would be helpful,” I said.

  Anne Fahey lived in Sudbury, in a very large house of the kind that Susan called McMansions. There were Palladian windows and a number of roof peaks and an assortment of architectural conceits, all overlooking a vast lawn devoid of ornamentation.

  Anne herself was a handsome woman in her fifties, with a lot of curly silver blond hair and a strong, graceful body. I introduced myself.

  “And this is Mr. Hawk,” I said. “My driver.”

  Hawk would be more easily mistaken for Santa Claus than someone’s driver, but Anne smiled widely as she held the door open, as if she were unaware of my small deceit. We went into the front hall and then to the living room on the left. It appeared that, having spent far too much for the house, they had nothing left to furnish it. There were no rugs on the floor. There was a couch and three armchairs in the living room. The windows were undraped. There were no pictures on the walls. The huge slate-framed fireplace was ash-free, soot-free, and perfectly clean. There was nothing on the mantel. I sat on the couch. Hawk sat in an armchair with a view out the front window. Anne offered coffee. We declined.

  “I found a few pictures of Bunny Lombard,” she said.

  “So her nickname was in fact Bunny?” I said.

  “Yes. While I was waiting for you, I checked our yearbook.”

  She picked up a thick, white leatherette yearbook from the floor beside her chair. It read TAFT 1967 in blue script on the cover. Bunny had not stayed to graduate, so there was no individual head shot. But she had been in the drama club and the Sigma Kappa sorority, and she appeared in a group photo of each. There was also a candid of her at some sort of picnic, a very young woman wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, her long dark hair cut straight across her forehead in bangs.

  “That’s me,” Anne said, “with her. The one with the huge cup of beer.”

  She had been plumper then, with a big head of frizzy blond hair.

  “I did a lot of beer in those days,” Anne said. “Among other things.”

  “And now?” I said.

  “A martini with my husband when he comes home from work.”

  “Adjusted to your environment,” I said.

  Anne grinned. “That would be me,” she said. “Adjustable Annie. If people were eating smoked worms for supper, I’d be gobbling them right down.”

  “Nothing wrong with flexible,” I said. “Did you know Bunny well?”

  “Yes. We were both into causes. Did a lot of marches and sit-ins. Very serious. Smoked a lot of dope together, but very seriously. It was a political position to smoke dope then.”

  “How fortunate,” I said.

  “Yes. I notice as I grow older that if you have deeply felt political convictions, you can make pretty much everything fit them, if you need to.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve noticed that, too. She have any pet causes?”

  “Mostly what we all had. The war! The establishment! The moral imperative of acid! She and I and about four other kids formed a prison outreach group. We figured all prisoners were political prisoners.”

  “Tell me about that,” I said.

  “We used to go down to Walpole two nights a week and give seminars on revolutionary politics with one of the professors.”

  “Whose name was?”

  “Nancy Young.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Probably dead. She must have been in her fifties then. Big woman with a lot of gray hair. In retrospect, she was probably a lesbian. But we didn’t think about that much at the time.”

  “How about the folks in charge at the prison,” I said. “They didn’t mind you teaching revolution to the inmates?”

  “They thought we were just teaching American history. Nobody ever monitored us. We loved it. We thought we were revolutionaries. We decided to organize with some of the prisoners. Make a cell to help them when they got out or if they escaped. Like an underground railroad.”

  “What fun,” I said.

  “It was heaven,” Anne said. “We wanted to help them escape, but we didn’t really know how, and we never freed one. But seve
ral of them joined us when they got out. We felt so authentic, we nearly wet our pants.”

  “Can you remember who the prisoners were?”

  “One of them called himself Shaka. We loved that. Shaka. It was so primeval.”

  “Can you remember his real name?”

  “We would have called it his slave name in those days.”

  “Can you remember?”

  “It was a funny name. Made me think of a comic strip.”

  “Abner Fancy?” I said.

  “Yes, that’s it. Abner Fancy. Always made me think of Li’l Abner.”

  “Any other prisoners?”

  “There was another man, a friend of Shaka’s, I think. We called him Coyote. I really can’t remember his actual name. I probably never knew it.”

  I looked at the yearbook pictures for another minute.

  “How about Emily Gold?” I said. “Any pictures of her?”

  “Emily? Oh God, Emily. She was killed a long time ago. Murdered.”

  “Was she in your group?” I said.

  “Yes. She was Bunny’s best friend.”

  “She was in the group with Shaka and Coyote?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you last see any of these people?”

  Anne was thumbing through the yearbook.

  “Oh, God. Years. I’m a nice Irish Catholic girl from Milton. Once there were actually ex-convicts in the Brigade, I got scared. My only close friends in the Brigade were Bunny and Emily. They both dropped out of school, and I didn’t. We just sort of drifted apart.”

  “Brigade?”

  “Yes, we called ourselves the Dread Scott Brigade. D-r-e-a-d, isn’t that so college kid?”

  She pointed at a picture in a montage of photos.

  “Oh, sure,” she said, “here’s Emily.”

  She looked like Daryl. Her hair was sixties straight, and she had the funked-out sixties look in a granny dress, but it could have been Daryl with a protest sign. The picture was too small for me to read the sign.

  “And now she’s been dead for . . . what?”

  “Twenty-eight years,” I said. “Her daughter looks just like her.”

  “She had a daughter? I didn’t even know she was married . . . listen to me—as if she would have had to be married to have a child. God, am I middle-aged suburban or what?”

  “It happens,” I said. “Do you know where Bunny Lombard is now?”