“Not worth the risk right now,” he said. “I hate that, though. Hate that. A good cop doesn’t take free things—not even so much as a damned hot dog.”
I regarded him for a moment as he calmed himself down. “You didn’t answer my question. Do you and your wife—what’s her name, by the way; I can’t call her Mother—have any kids?”
“Mary Mae.” He smiled, then said in something of a pitched whisper, “Mary Mae. Don’t you love the name? I like the old classics. That’s why I love your Elizabeth’s name so much.”
She’s decidedly not mine anymore, though I didn’t feel like pointing that out to him at the moment. “It is pretty,” speaking vaguely to both names. “Kids?”
He looked down at the scrunched napkin on the table, then at his hands. Without looking up, he said, “One. A son. Michael.”
I knew something was wrong. I knew it because he continued to stare down at the table. So I asked, “What does he do?”
“A cop. Like his old man.”
“Around here?”
“Used to be. Boston PD. Drug squad.”
“The two of you close?”
“Couldn’t have been any closer.” Past tense. His eyes passed over mine for a split second, then he turned his head and looked out the window onto the dark street, suddenly morose.
He said, “He was shot on the job five years ago, right as I was getting ready to retire. He died that night in Mass General.” His voice trailed off to a glimmer. “They made a scapegoat of him. I live with that every day. Every damned day.”
I cleared my throat and stared at Sweeney in profile staring at nothing at all. “I’m really, really sorry. I had no idea.”
Almost as if he didn’t hear me, he said, “Mother was never the same after that.”
“How’d he get shot, if you don’t mind me asking? A drug dealer?”
Sweeney turned his head toward me, slowly. He focused his eyes on mine, but there was none of the boyish sharpness I usually saw in them. Instead, he looked vacant, faraway.
He said, “Friendly fire.” He left it sitting out there just like that. Two words that took one life and forever changed two others.
I leaned close, my head low to the table as if we were whispering to each other during junior high study hall. I tried to contain my confusion, my shock. “Friendly fire? You’re saying he got shot by another cop?”
Sweeney just looked at me, his face suddenly appearing somewhere beyond his seventy years. He nodded in a labored kind of way, then dropped his hand hard on the table and said, “Come on. We have a different case to solve.”
And we were off to probe the past, which might well portend the future, my future, my paper’s future.
Twenty-Nine
THIS WASN’T ANY BROKENdown retiree I was with, or the despondent father recalling the death of his cherished son. No, this was a spring deer, loping across the dewy meadow of life, or more specifically, prancing down the darkened alley behind the State Medical Examiner’s building. He was silent, but he had a look on his face that spoke volumes, and what it said was that crossing the thin blue line was the most invigorating thing he’d ever done.
“Hold this,” he said, passing me a black satchel containing the flashlights and some lock-picking tools that would, if all things went according to plan, not be needed. We were at the unmarked back door. He looked up and down the alley, whisked the keys out of his pocket and carefully and quickly fitted the larger of the two into the keyhole on the steel door. He hesitated for a moment, leaned his body against the building, and turned the key with a surgeon’s precision and a Latin lover’s steady pace.
I heard it click open, the first small victory of the night. Sweeney turned back and looked me up and down. He whispered, “Next time you break into any other building but a shag carpeting warehouse, I’d advise that you not wear loafers with hard leather soles.” He nodded at me, staring me flush in the face. I stole a glance at his footwear and saw he was wearing black sneakers. Then he said, “Get those things off and leave them by the barrel.”
I did, but with a disturbing image of a homeless guy wearing a pair of $230 Cole-Haan shoes to dinner at the Pine Street Inn the following night. Sweeney kept his hand firmly on the door and pushed it open one arduous inch at a time. We both slipped inside, and he closed it even more slowly.
That put us in a short, dark hallway that led to another steel door, and on the other side of the door, the cavernous main lobby. He pulled the satchel back and groped ahead of me, the only sounds being the quiet, rhythmic pace of his breathing. I slid along behind him in my stocking feet, keeping one hand on his belt for direction.
In the dark, we reached a door with one of those emergency bars. He slowly pressed against it, and the door quietly pushed forward, exposing a faint crack of light from the lobby. He kept pressing until there was just enough room for us to squeeze through, one at a time. He went first, scanned the lobby and waved me in.
When I pinched through the door, my eyes fluttered reflexively in the hazy light of the musty lobby. As I focused, there looked to be an acre of black-and-white checked tiles between us and the heavy, gray, unmarked door that led to the basement stairs. The ceilings were a good twenty feet high, meaning noises carried off the hard floor and echoed through the vast expanse. Now I understood why loafers may not have been just the right call.
The newspaper stand was boarded up, the front door was chained, the elevator sat open and empty. The mouths of the hallways that led in and out of the lobby were enveloped in gloomy shadows that led only to black. You’ll forgive me for thinking there was a haunted look to the whole place, this, after all, being the state morgue. I mean, there were dead people in refrigerated lockers just down a short hallway. If there’s a more ghoulish place to find yourself alone at night, someone’s going to have to draw a picture of it for me.
This being the morgue, by the way, meant that it would not be extraordinary or even unusual for cops or coroners to be coming in and out of the building overnight, which partially explains why we chose nineP.M. as our target time. Murders are less likely to occur in the early evening than the early morning hours after midnight—at least that’s what Sweeney says, and he should know. So we were more likely to have the place to ourselves.
Sweeney started across the floor, hunched low, his short strides smooth, stealthy and silent, like those of an Indian, though maybe that’s politically incorrect to say these days. He pulled on my sleeve and I followed close behind, the hard floor cool to my stocking feet. There were about thirty yards between us and the door that led to the stairs that brought us to the cellar. Probably about fifteen yards across, we both heard a loud smashing sound to our right. The hair on my neck bolted up like it was giving me a standing ovation. In unison, we whirled in that direction and squinted through the empty haze. But there was no one there, nothing unusual to see.
“The radiator,” Sweeney whispered. Sounded good enough for me, and certainly better than any of the alternatives. He set out again, faster, and I stayed close to his heels.
At the door, he pulled it inchmeal, but it began creaking like a shutter on a haunted house, so he paused, then moved it so slow that mold could have formed on his hand. Same drill—when it was finally opened a crack, he slid through, then I did as well. The staircase was black as a moonless night in a Montana barn.
When the door kissed shut behind us, he whispered to me, “Slow and easy, both feet on each step, hands on the wall. No accidents, no noise.” If all of life could be so easy.
At the bottom, he grabbed my shoulder and said under his breath, “Don’t move.” We stood there for what felt like half of eternity, though I suspect it was really only about ninety seconds. I heard a rustling noise, then he flicked on one of the penlights.
“It’s down here,” he said. I knew that already, but didn’t feel any need to point that out.
If the cellar of the state morgue looked morosely grim in the middle of the day when all the lights were o
n and there were helpful doctors and happy bureaucrats and curious members of the public milling about one floor above, you can imagine how it looked in the dark of the night in an otherwise empty building with the only illumination being the slightest rays from this tiny handheld lamp. If my heart beat any harder I’d sound like the lead drummer in the Dr. Pepper Marching Band.
Sweeney handed me a penlight of my own and started down the hallway, which zigzagged between cold stone walls and storage closets that held God only knows what—and I certainly didn’t want to know right now. We moved slowly, precisely, the narrow bands of weak light from our little lamps poking into the dark like a trawler in a stormy ocean. Sweeney stayed in the lead; I followed close behind. Every dozen or so steps he stopped, held his breath, and listened. Thankfully there was nothing to hear.
Two rights, three lefts and a quart of sweat later, we arrived in the morose gloom between the file cage with the chain-link fence and the evidence locker with what looked like a five-foot-thick titanium door.
Sweeney waved his little penlight through the links, the rays dispersing over the old manila folders. “Every file, a tragic death,” he said, speaking as much to himself as to me. “Blessed are the people who leave this Earth on peaceful terms.”
He handed me the satchel and dug into his pocket again, bringing out the keys. He shone his light on the locker door, fussed with the key for a moment and, with some effort, shoved it into a padlock. With a swift, steady motion, he turned the key and the lock came undone. The door immediately lurched ajar with a loud shudder.
“Kill your light,” Sweeney urgently whispered, his voice sounding more like a hiss.
I did, and so did he, and we both stood in the silent dark as the acrid smell of age and death spilled from the crack in the evidence locker door. The odor was so bad that I reflexively drew my hand up to my nose just to give myself a break.
About two minutes later, all quiet on the coroner’s front, Sweeney whispered, “Flick on your lamp.” When I did, he put both hands on the sturdy door and pulled it steadily toward him. The hinges groaned in the dark, Sweeney stopped, then did it all over again. When it was open just wide enough, we both slipped inside, and Sweeney pulled the door tight behind us.
He took the satchel, fumbled with it, and pulled out a high-powered flashlight. When he pushed the switch, the wide, firm beam of light seemed warm and friendly, bright like the lamps I used to have in my room as a kid when my parents would read me books likeHarry the Dirty Dog andMake Way for Ducklings. Not that I’m regressing.
He shone it toward the far wall, and we saw that the room—a chamber, really—was about twenty feet deep and another twenty feet wide, all containing a motley collection of cabinets and cases and what looked to be the kind of ancient storage refrigerators and freezers that you would find in a suburban basement. The smell was sharp in the nostrils and hard to the eyes, so bad it made the air feel thick with the sense of death and rot.
“Stand still another moment,” Sweeney whispered to me.
I continued to look around the room, aided by him sweeping the area with his flashlight. The ceilings had exposed pipes and wood beams thick with cobwebs. An occasional exposed bulb hung down. The floors were concrete, but covered with an unhealthy layer of dust so thick that it had morphed into dirt. The walls on the far end were jagged rock.
“This is the city’s room of forgotten memories,” Sweeney said. I looked at him, the eerie shadows flickering on his wide face, and saw how much in his element he seemed. I knocked on his screen door but three days before in that godforsaken swamptown hard by a Florida inland highway, and he seemed amused, smart, somewhat curious. But here he stood surrounded by the relics of death and he appeared fully in control, endlessly confident, almost happy.
I also saw that he was right. Indeed, this was the room where shouted questions were diminished by time to a barely audible whisper, where once crucial clues in life’s vilest crimes were boxed and shelved where no one would ever likely see them again, afterthoughts, really.
“I think we’re set,” Sweeney said.
“Tell me what we’re looking for,” I told him.
“Anything that says John Ellis Cutter on it would be a good place to start,” he replied, his tone lighter than the look on his face. Then he added, “Follow me. I have a hunch.”
We walked toward a collection of about a dozen refrigerators on the back wall, some of which you had to pull upward to open, others you just pulled out like normal kitchen appliances.
“Start looking,” he said. “When you see something that might be something, just tell me.”
We both went to opposite ends, about a free throw apart, and started working our way in. I pulled opened the first refrigerator and saw hundreds of small vials of what appeared to be blood, all of which were tagged with a small piece of adhesive paper, some with a name, more with just a case file number. I shut the refrigerator and walked down to Sweeney and asked, “Does this have a number?”
“5372-97,” he said, reeling it off the top of his head. John Cutter’s death, reduced to six digits and one dash.
“Shit, that’s my lucky number,” I replied.
“It will be tonight.”
I went through each bottle in the first refrigerator, picking every one up, reading the label, carefully placing it back in its spot. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for the specimens to be where they were—nothing so obvious or simple as dates of death or the alphabetization of the dead. I think it was a space-available filing system.
I did this in the second refrigerator, then the third, which was a pull-up, meaning I was crouched down. My arms were getting sore from the precise handling and my back weak from bending. It made me think how I hadn’t had a decent workout since I shot baskets in the North End four nights before. I’d probably never have a workout so easy and simpleminded again.
I was just opening the fourth refrigerator, noticing that Sweeney was two ahead of me, when a sudden groan erupted from the hinges of the thick door behind us. Sweeney immediately extinguished his light. We both shut our refrigerators, and I heard him fall gently to the floor. A few seconds later, his hand was around my ankle and he whispered, “Down boy.” I quelled my sudden impulse to shag down a tennis ball, knowing if I did, it would probably be the last thing I’d ever do.
We lay there on the ground like that for several fat minutes, stone silent and dead still, not to overuse that last analogy at a time like this. Finally, Sweeney put his mouth right up to my ear in a way that I’d really only want a woman to do, and said, “Stay here. I’ll be back.”
I hope.
He began slithering away, though because of the dark I could only hear him, not see him. I lay in wait, futilely probing the overwhelming blackness of the basement room with my eyes, seeing nothing, hearing nothing—until I heard the door creak some more. Then nothing again.
I grew restless. I felt helpless—not a feeling I’m accustomed to with the full weight of the largest newspaper in town behind me. I considered getting up and roaming through the room, or turning on my light in search of Sweeney, but knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, not yet, anyway.
Then, without even a hint of a warning, I felt a stream of hot breath in my right ear.
“Hold this,” Sweeney said in a hoarse whisper, handing me the strong flashlight. “Turn it on when I hit your arm and scan the room with it.”
I groped for the switch, and he rapped my shoulder softly. I flicked the light on and washed the beam across the room. My eyes hurt, I was staring so hard for any sign of life, which would probably signal imminent death. I poked the light in the various crevices between cabinets and old steel tables.
I looked over at Sweeney and he was in a crouched position with a cocked revolver in his hands moving it along with the beam. So it was more than flashlights and implements in that bag.
We did this for about sixty seconds until Sweeney tossed what sounded like a coin against a metal cabinet on the oth
er side of the room, then called out in a tight voice, “We have the locker surrounded. We see you. Put your hands up, drop your weapon, and step into the middle of the room.”
Silence. He reached over and held my arm still so I wasn’t waving the light anymore. “Last chance,” he said, his voice strained but confident.
Still silent.
Sweeney whispered to me, “Walk in opposite directions.”
He went right, I went left. Nothing happened. We reconnoitered at the door. I slipped through the new crack before he could stop me and poked the inky dark of the hallway with the beam of light. Again, I saw nothing.
Back inside, I said to him in something just north of a whisper, “The door must have just slipped open.”
He nodded, his eyes still scanning the room and the gun still in front of him, and said absently, “Old building.”
He pulled the flashlight from me and walked around the room. I took out my penlight and did the same. We saw nothing, though I’d be lying if I said the shadowy crevices weren’t unsettling. He drew the door shut again, and we returned to the business at hand—the search for evidence.
As we meticulously scanned each and every vial looking for the name “Cutter” or the right file number, it occurred to me that here we were in the dark of night up to our elbows in dead people’s blood on a blind mission for the truth.
Then, bingo, or as I said to Sweeney—“Bing-fucking-o.” There was the name we were looking for, scrawled across a tiny white sheet stuck to a thin vial of blood: John E. Cutter.
I rather ghoulishly held it up to my penlight for a moment, mesmerized by the color. This, physically, is what remained of the late publisher.
Sweeney appeared at my side and gazed at the bottle like an acolyte might look at the Shroud of Turin. He said, as if to himself, “Those bastards did draw blood for the toxicology test.” He shook his head and mumbled, “So why not put it in the report.”
The Nominee Page 28
