The Marble Kite

by David Daniel

  “I was at the library.”

  She glanced away, as if weighing something, then back, her gaze firm. “When you had a badge, the department was a boys’ club. Things have changed, but in a lot of ways, it’s still that. The other women officers and I have a mantra—‘twice as hard for half the respect.’ I’ve got to be smarter and better qualified and tougher just to be even. That’s why I’m really out here pounding the pavement, if you want to know. I’d rather be over at the Blue Shamrock like the others, having a burger and fries, swapping stories. There are days I’d rather be getting a pedicure than be in a smelly gym kicking a heavy bag—but if you’re thinking The sister is the weak link, I’ll go at her for inside information, then you can take a flying leap.” She spun on her Nikes and loped back toward the station house. So much for the idea of endorphins making people mellow.

  31

  I drove over to the neighborhood known as the Acre and parked. It was the district that had been the first home for successive waves of immigrants who’d come to work the mills—Irish to Greek to French Canadian and on, each group supplanting its predecessor as people got their feet under them and moved out to better districts. With the dying of the mills, the Acre had become a catch basin, hanging onto whomever and whatever washed there. Grady Stinson, for instance.

  A city police department could usually carry a few roughnecks on the rolls, the way a sports team could, as long as they didn’t become too visible. When one did, he was like the football player who tries to rip the opposing player’s head off: He was a liability. Grady Stinson was that guy. He and I had overlapped several years on the job, had even been partnered together for a short time, to no great effect on the city’s crime rate. A year or so back, he had lost his badge on a repeat brutality rap, though to this day, as far as I knew, he had never seen it like that. In his view roughing the opponent was a part of the job.

  Stinson’s world was encompassed by the rooming house where he stayed and a small orbit of local bars. The sun had well transited the meridian, so I didn’t bother with the rooming house. The circuit included the Mill Stone, the Goalie Cage, and two or three other joints strung along Moody Street, which was an irony I’d come to appreciate. That’s where I started to look.

  His sustaining myth was that one day he would be reinstated and given back his badge. But it had been a while now. He occasionally said that he might get into my racket someday, maybe as an associate. I always let it pass without comment. Mostly, he’d resigned himself to being an informant. It wasn’t any sort of formal arrangement; it rarely is. When he had something that he thought might be useful to me, he passed it along. I’d give him a few dollars, depending on the usefulness of what he had, but I don’t believe he did it because he liked me, or cared one way or the other especially. I think it was a way for him to flip a bird at the system that had taken him down.

  I found him at the Goalie Cage.

  I hadn’t seen Stinson in several months. It was as if someone had turned his timer to a faster setting; he looked older, paler, thinner. His voice was the same rusty wheeze, though, when he bellowed my name from a corner, where he sat alone at a table. “C’mon the hell over.”

  I got us each a cup of coffee at the bar, plus a shot of Black Jack for him, and took them over to the table he occupied in the corner, underneath a large photo of Bobby Orr, airborne in the Stanley Cup final of too long ago to remember. “Why don’t you yell it a little louder?” I said. “I don’t think they heard you in Tyngsboro.”

  He blinked at me, openmouthed, then got it and laughed. “Ah. Siddown.”

  Grady has a face like one of those character actors you recognize in a hundred movies without ever knowing their names. I think he saw me as some kind of affirmation that he still moved, roughly speaking, in law enforcement circles, though this seemed a bit like an LAX cabbie giving Spielberg a ride, then going around telling people he was in “the industry.” I got to the point.

  He didn’t rush at it. Why should he? I was buying. He tipped some of the whiskey into his coffee, took a sip, and smacked his lips. “The carnival killing? Who hasn’t? It’s big news. And the city seems ready to bust out in war. But you’re looking for more than a man-in-the-street angle, right? Well, I got one word for you. C-o-p-s.”

  At times, what Stinson had to sell was of use, but mostly I’d come to consider him something of a Johnny One-Note, and the note was always cops. For a roughneck, it was an odd revisionism, but to his mind, the police were the ones who pulled all the strings, from the drug dealing and illegal gambling to the garden-variety crime and corruption. Whether they actually perpetrated it or not, he claimed, didn’t matter; they were gatekeepers, involved by the degree to which they did or didn’t prevent it. The city’s crime, he insisted, was a joint effort. It was a convoluted argument, but I suppose that like many an argument advanced in this world—that one god was somehow three beings, or that war was really in the best interests of humanity—it could be made to seem plausible.

  “Keep spelling,” I said.

  “What is this? I give you good information, I’ve got to figure it out for you, too?”

  I drank some coffee, then set the cup down carefully. “Indulge me.”

  “Jesus, Rasmussen. People pay you to be an investigator? Start with the obvious. Who else controls the crime scene? Who holds the chain of evidence, and can yank it whatever way they want? Who writes the reports? Who can intimidate—excuse me, interview—witnesses? You mean to tell me at a carnival, with several thousand people strolling around, nobody saw nothing? Yeah, right.”

  “Go on.”

  “And who else is required to carry deadly force at all times?”

  “The woman wasn’t shot to death,” I pointed out.

  He didn’t waste any more of the Jack in his coffee; he took it neat. “Who said she was? I’m explaining how things work, ’cause evidently you’ve forgotten.”

  Actually, I hadn’t forgotten. I was my own shining example of how things could go very wrong inside a large and complex city police department. But I also knew that, even with the flaws inherent in any bureaucracy, most of the time it operated efficiently and even fairly. I knew, too, that Grady Stinson kept his favorite ax well ground. Still, if only to write him off, I listened.

  “This isn’t your run-of-the-mill junkie pop or gang drive-by. No way. Here you’ve got all the elements—a good-looking babe, from the picture in the paper, sex, a mysterious outsider, a carnival and all that means. I mean, shit, if Hitchcock were alive, he’d be all over this.”

  “With you as story consultant.”

  “Wait. Okay, the case is getting news, and I don’t need to tell you what time of year this is. A solid conviction makes the cops look good, which makes the candidates happy.”

  “It’s pretty thin gruel,” I said.

  “Wait, it thickens. On top of that, I hear there’s some beef in the department that a patrolman is gonna make detective.”

  “What’s to beef? That’s the normal path.”

  “After just a few years?”

  “You’re talking about a cop named Duross?”

  “I was beginning to wonder there, man.” Grinning, Stinson shook his head. “Duross shares a collar on the perp and gets a letter in his file for heads-up police work. Okay, fine, but you know where his juice is, too, right?”

  Stinson looked pleased that I didn’t. “His mother is Frank Droney’s sister.”

  It was an interesting detail. While there was a rank structure, and a system of qualifications, detective jobs were generally posted and an officer could bid for one, but it was commonly known that the superintendent made the call. “Maybe Duross is a very good cop,” I said. He’d seemed sharp enough, if not overly friendly.

  “Maybe, but Uncle Frank in your corner can’t hurt. I heard this Duross was a wild hair when he got out of the academy.” Stinson’s grin widened. “My kind of cop. Maybe when I get my badge back, I’ll show him a few things.”

  “You
know how to bring out the best in people.”

  “Hey, why not?” Irony passed through him like X-rays. “There’s always room on the street for a hardcase.” I probed his line with a few more questions, trying to make something useful of his scattered information, but beyond my sense that it linked in vague ways to things Officer Loftis had said—or not said—I didn’t find it. When I took out my wallet, he gave it a halfhearted wave. “I’m just doing my public service.”

  I grinned. “That angel on your shoulder has to eat, too.”

  He palmed the fifty bucks and said he’d give me a call if he heard anything. “And hey, don’t forget what I said about you ever need a hand with an op. Have gun, will travel. Remember that show? With Richard Boone? You’re old enough.”

  “The good old days. Thanks,” I said, nudging his train into a siding, “I’ll get in touch soon and we’ll go on a nostalgia binge.”

  Driving back to the office, I thought about how when I’d told Phoebe that I was going to see an informant, no name mentioned, she said, “He’s only going to drink anything you pay him.” She was probably right. Every person who worked the street, for information or for anything else, ran an account for small sins. Would I have preferred that Stinson think about counseling, or a rehab program? Maybe, but that wasn’t for me to determine. He earned the money by providing data, not by submitting to my demands for self-help. Tough love might have called for an intervention, pulling his family and friends together in a tight bond and compelling him with unconditional support to seek help. Beyond a coterie of determined drinkers, though, I doubted that Stinson had many friends or family, so I reserved some sympathy for him and credited him with a degree of cop honesty. Besides, fifty dollars wasn’t likely to corrupt either of us any more or less. It would purchase a round for the house and fade into another lost afternoon, and that would be put to my account, too.

  Since All Saints Hospital wasn’t far away, I decided to pay another visit to the ICU. After a short wait, a nurse came whispering along on foam soles to tell me that Pop Sonders was resting at the moment. As for prognosis, she was a bearer of happy tidings. “He’s a tough customer, in the good and bad senses of the term. If he takes care of himself, he should live a long time.” Pending a visit from his doctor, she said, he could be discharged as early as that afternoon.

  As I parked in the lot behind my building and headed for the rear door, someone called, “Hey, hawkshaw.”

  How many people this side of sixty knew that term? I turned. There was the pair of them, walking my way with a clip-clop of shiny shoes. Hackett was the front man. Just behind him and over his left shoulder loomed a large bald head, as if Hackett were towing a balloon wearing sunglasses. Parked behind them at the curb was the black 4Runner with tinted glass I’d seen at the Bamboo Court Inn. “What is it with you?” Hackett said. “You don’t remember our talk?”

  His sport coat this time was a rust-and-black houndstooth over a lime green silk shirt. It made my eyes hurt. Stepping out from behind him, his partner took off a pair of Wayfarers, and I didn’t pay any attention to his garb. I got my first close look at Bud “the Squisher” Spritzer. My notion of a fizzy drink evaporated right there. Hackett wasn’t a small man, but the former wrestler was constructed on a whole other scale of large. His chest was like a corn silo, and he had a neck I couldn’t have buckled my belt around. His ears stuck out from his naked head like baked pork rinds, and he had a jaw like the prow of a navy icebreaker; his pallid skin was pocked with old scars. I put him at around sixty, but even in this day of steroid-built freaks, he’d have been a specimen.

  “I thought we reached an understanding last night, Rasmussen.” I dragged my eyes back to Hackett. “You weren’t going to mess in my business.”

  “You said that, not me. And what makes you think I’ve been in your affairs?”

  “You called, right? I got the message. Plus I’ve been in touch with Sonders’s office. It seems you’ve been advising him not to sell.”

  “Not true, but the man’s in the hospital. Why hassle him now?”

  “You don’t got a clue, do you?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “That old coot isn’t in the pink of health. Payment comes due Friday, and I need to know I’m gonna get it.”

  “That’s two days away.”

  “Tough. What’s that got to do with you?”

  Spritzer shuffled a step closer. “Maybe this chooch needs a demonstration of what you told’m, Lou,” he said, opening his mouth for the first time. His teeth were studded in his jaw like yellow fence pickets.

  “Might have to,” Hackett agreed. “He doesn’t look very bright today.”

  “I’ll betcha he ain’t ever.”

  “Though I’ll bet he’s loaded with emotional IQ. Aren’t you, shamus?”

  I had to grin. “Okay, not bad. But Hollywood already did that two old hard-guys number. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, wasn’t it? I saw it on TV It wasn’t much.”

  “Oh, you’re a comedian, you are. Okay, here’s the skinny. When I—”

  “Wait, wait—” I stopped him. “I’m going to try to say that without smiling. The skinny? Hawkshaw? Do you know what year this is?”

  “Forget year—you’re about two minutes from fucking flatlining, you asshole.”

  I assessed the situation and shut up.

  “Now here’s the deal. I don’t give a good goddamn what you think of the contract I’ve got with Sonders. And I’m not going to waste any more time explaining it to you. Bottom line is this. Sonders has got one of his jacks up on charges he offed some chick. He’s got a city injunction that says he can’t operate, and someone torched one of his amusements. Rate that’s going, the whole show’s gonna blow up like cheap fireworks, and it won’t be worth a nickel. I’m not even gonna bother to hondle with Sonders now. Too late. He either comes up with my money, or he sells me the show and gets the hell out of the racket. So, final warning, mister—you tell him that, and I let you off easy this time.”

  “What’s hard?”

  “You don’t want to know. Come on, Bud.”

  They headed for the black 4Runner.

  32

  An osprey soared above the river on wings that would stretch across my living room. For years they’d been absent, pushed out by urban and suburban sprawl, poisoned; now they were back, fishing upriver from the coast. Not a lot of them, but when you start from zero, every one is something. I watched the bird from my car, drifting high and higher, until it had soared out of sight, and then I put my attention back on the mirrors, which I had positioned to watch the apartment building halfway down the block to the rear. I was snugged in behind an old VW van that looked as if it had been boosted off a street corner in Haight-Ashbury and beamed here in a time tunnel. A bumper sticker on the rear declared I MISS JERRY.

  I hadn’t received a callback from Carly Ouellette, so I tried her again, and the woman I’d spoken to earlier assured me that she had given Ms. Ouellette my card. “I’m sure she’ll get back to you, Mr. Rasmussen. She always does. She just tends to be rushing around with a million things. We kid her it’s why she needs that little gold sports car she drives. To keep up with all she’s got going on.”

  I’d mentioned her to Fred Meecham. “Carly Ouellette,” he said, nodding recognition.

  “It’s a nice name,” Courtney said. “Musical.”

  “Don’t be fooled,” Meecham said. “There’re men bleeding up and down the halls of superior court.”

  “For love?” I said.

  “For getting on her wrong side. She’s armor-clad, with machine guns for eyes.”

  Her address was in the phone book. “Careful, Alex,” Courtney said with a warning smile.

  A knock on my window startled me. I rolled it down. A lean man in a sweat-soaked Olympic Gym T-shirt and cotton shorts, and still sporting a boot camp haircut at forty, eyed me suspiciously. “Can I help you?” he asked gruffly.

  I gathered he didn’t belong with the VW va
n. “Who are you, homeland security?”

  “You were here when I went out to run. You’re still here.”

  “And it’s still a public street, last I checked. But if you must know, I’m waiting for a friend.”

  He frowned but seemed to buy it and marched off to fight other battles. I saw occasional cars whisk past on Tenth: red Toyota, gray Ford, Market Basket van. I watched a squirrel salting away winter provisions and thought I should be doing the same. The dashboard clock showed 4:23 P.M. I’d been there since three, when I’d been told Carly Ouellette’s job ended for the day. Earlier, I’d knocked at her unit in a small apartment complex and got no answer. A gold Mazda with a black vinyl bra stretched over the front end rolled up and parked, and I grew alert. In my side mirror I watched a woman get out. She had a bush of hair the color of her car and was wearing a striped beige knee-length suit, with a little flare to the jacket over her chunky hips. She moved along on swift feet in squat heels, heading toward her building.

  I got out and started after her. I sent a quick glance into the Mazda, which had one of those studded rubber steering wheel covers that looked like it came from someplace called Auto Erotica. I crossed the street. “Ms. Ouellette.”

  I had to call twice before she turned. Beneath the froth of hair, her round face crinkled skeptically as I explained who I was and showed her ID. “Yeah, what is it?” she snapped.

  “Can I ask you a few questions about Flora Nuñez?”

  “Like I know who that is. I don’t have time for this.” She spun away.

  “You may want to make time. Flora Nuñez is a woman you once helped fill out a request for a restraining order. If you read the paper, you know she was murdered.”

  She turned; her frown deepened to a scowl. “Who the hell are you?”

  “You weren’t even listening.” I told her again. “I left a card at your office.”

  “How long have you been spying on me?”