The Dread Line

by Bruce DeSilva

  “I don’t like having my integrity questioned, Mr. Mulligan. I could kick your ass for this.”

  “No you couldn’t.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’m starting to like you, Conner. It would be a real shame if I had to shoot you. Now let me see your wallet.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to look at your credit cards.”

  “What for?”

  “So I can run them to be sure you haven’t used them on Internet gambling sites.”

  “I haven’t. I already told you that.”

  “I’m inclined to believe you, Connor, but no way the Patriots are just going to take your word for it.”

  He hesitated, then pulled his wallet from his pants and tossed it on the table. I flipped through it, drew out the lone credit card, and jotted the number on a cocktail napkin.

  “Meanwhile, stop gambling. If word gets out that you’re in debt to a bookie, some teams might shy away from you on draft day, and that could cost you a lot of money.”

  “Okay. I get it.”

  Bowditch had barely touched his water. I got up to fetch another beer. As Lee pulled the bottle from the ice chest, the front door creaked open. In the mirror behind the bar, I saw Michael McNulty stepped inside. Behind him, a pencil-thin Hispanic I took to be Efrain Vargas entered and stamped the slush from his shoes. They both stood by the door for a moment to let their eyes adjust to the dim bar light. I ignored them, grabbed my beer, and returned to our table.

  “Recognize the two guys who just walked in?”

  Bowditch twisted in his chair to look them over, then said, “Never seen them before.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The two thugs seated themselves at the bar, and McNulty tossed some bills on it. Lee wandered over to take their orders and clunked bottles of Budweiser in front of them. They each took a sip and spun on their stools to stare at us.

  “I get the feeling they know you,” I said.

  “Most people do.”

  “The big guy is Michael McNulty, and I think the other one is Efrain Vargas. The names mean anything to you?”

  “No. Who are they?”

  “A couple of strong-arm types from Boston. After the Patriots hired my firm to do a background check on you, they started tailing me.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “No, sir. I got no idea.”

  “I didn’t spot them behind me when I drove in this morning,” I said. “Makes me wonder how they knew I’d be in town.”

  “I didn’t tell them, Mr. Mulligan, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You know what else I wonder, then?”

  “What?”

  “If maybe they were tailing you.”

  Bowditch shifted in his chair. The thought seemed to unsettle him.

  “What about Romeo and Dante Vacca? Ever heard of them?”

  “No, sir,”

  “Morris Dunst?”

  “Don’t know him either.” But this time, he looked away when he said it.

  “Last I knew, McNulty and Vargas were driving a white Honda Accord. Keep an eye out, Conner. If you spot them following you, call me right away.”

  “You’re saying they’re dangerous?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I can handle myself, Mr. Mulligan.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “They’re both packing heat.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “By the bulges under their left arms.”

  “Jesus! What the hell is going on?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “No idea,” he said, and once again, he looked away. No doubt about it. That was his tell.

  * * *

  Later, as we trudged to the Weybosset Street lot where Conner had left his car, I kept glancing behind us. There was no sign of McNulty and Vargas, but I took scant comfort in that. I figured they knew where Conner or I—or maybe both of us—had parked.

  As Conner got behind the wheel of his Chevy Cruze, I asked him again for his laptop. He hesitated before slipping it from under the passenger seat and reluctantly handing it to me.

  “Where are you going now?” I asked.

  “To pick up Meghan. I promised to take her to a movie at Providence Place.”

  “And after that?”

  “I’ll drop her at her dorm and then head home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I’m staying at my folks’ place on the East Side.”

  “Stay safe, Conner. I’ll call when I need to talk to you again.”

  Once he drove off, I strolled to McCracken’s office in the Turks Head Building, filled him in on my conversation with Conner, told him about our brush with McNulty and Vargas, and gave him Conner’s phone, laptop, and credit card number.

  “My tech guy should be done with this stuff in a day or two,” he said. “Soon as I get the results, I’ll give you a holler.”

  * * *

  As a precaution, I took the long way home, driving west to Fall River, meandering through busy city streets, turning south into Tiverton, and crossing the bridge over the Sakonnet River to Aquidneck Island. By the time I rolled into Newport, I was sure I hadn’t been followed. I sped over the Claiborne Pell Bridge to Jamestown and made it home in time to join Brady and Rondo on the couch for the first period of the Bruins-Canadiens game.

  Later, just as P. K. Subban, the Canadiens’ all-star defenseman, leveled Brad Marchand with a crosscheck, “Glory Days,” my favorite Springsteen song, started playing on one of my cell phones. It was the ringtone for calls from the prepaid I’d given to Conner.

  “Mulligan.”

  “It’s Meghan Falco. Conner and I are on the way home from the movies, and he thinks we’re being followed.”

  “A white Honda Accord?”

  “Yes. What should we do?”

  “Do you have the phone on speaker?”

  “I do.”

  “Conner, I want you to drive Meghan straight to your folks’ place, go inside, and lock the doors. Watch the street, and if you see the car lurking outside, call the police.”

  A half hour later, he called back.

  “I think they’re gone,” he said. “I haven’t seen them since we turned onto our street. My dad called the security chief at his construction firm, and he’s on his way over; so whatever this is about, we should be okay for now.”

  27

  “What did Belinda Veiga have to say for herself?” I asked.

  “She got real indignant,” Ragsdale said. “Swore up and down she had nothing to do with the stickup.”

  We were seated in his office, both of us chewing on cigars while I silently cursed the nanny-state antismoking law he insisted on observing.

  “Did you ask her if she has a safe deposit box?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “And?”

  “The bank gave her one as a job perk. She let me watch while she opened it. Nothing inside but a light coating of dust. The way she tells it, she’s never owned anything valuable enough to put in it.”

  “So we’re back to thinking the stickup guy has a box of his own,” I said.

  “Unless we’ve missed something, but darned if I know what it could be.”

  “Anything new on the dognappings?” I asked.

  “We lost another one last night.”

  “Aw, hell.”

  “A female lab named Layla. Burned up so bad we’d never have ID’d her without her tags.”

  “Who’d she belong to?”

  “Marlon Jenks.”

  That stopped me. I stared at the ceiling for a moment, then said, “It could be a coincidence.”

  “Maybe, but I’m thinking it’s retribution for him trying to spoil the fun with his citizen patrol.”

  * * *

  Early next morning, Ragsdale rang me up with worse news.

  “Brace yourself, Mu
lligan.”

  “What now?”

  “A couple of Jenks’s vigilantes were prowling down by Clarks Village when they spotted what looked like a pile of clothes in the woods off Beaver Tail Road. They got out to check and found a body.”

  “Any ID?”

  “It’s only tentative but…”

  “Spit it out, Chief.”

  “They’re saying it’s Belinda Veiga.”

  I swallowed hard. “What happened to her?”

  “Not sure yet. I just got on scene.… Christ! There’s a lot of blood.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I arrived to find a uniformed officer stringing crime-scene tape through the scrub oaks and brush about thirty yards off the road. Beyond it, Ragsdale and three more uniforms watched a detective snap photos with a digital camera. Outside the police line, two civilians in parkas stamped their feet in the snow.

  Ragsdale waved me over. I ducked under the tape and got my first glimpse of the corpse, sprawled facedown in a blood-soaked snowdrift.

  “Are those the guys who found her?” I asked.

  Ragsdale nodded.

  “You sure it’s Belinda?”

  “So they say. They turned the body over to look at her face and then rolled it back. I already chewed them out for messing with the scene.”

  During my years as a reporter, I’d seen putrid human remains dragged from rivers, mobsters blasted against barroom walls, bodies tangled in the wreckage of airplanes, families burned beyond recognition in house fires … and the one that had stayed with me the longest, bloody bits of a twelve-year-old boy dangling from trees after he’d been dismembered by a train. But most of them had been strangers. A few had even deserved what they got. This was a woman I’d recently cradled in my arms.

  I excused myself, ducked outside the police tape, and deposited my breakfast in the snow. Behind me, I heard a couple of the cops snicker. When my stomach stopped heaving, I wiped my mouth with my sleeve, returned to the body, and squatted on my heels for a closer look.

  “Are you okay?” Ragsdale asked.

  “Fuck, no.”

  “Maybe you should sit this one out.”

  I felt the bile rise again, fought it down, and shook my head. “Is the medical examiner on the way?”

  “She should be here in twenty.”

  “Judging by the amount of blood, I think she was killed right here,” I said. “Two holes in her coat and one in her head. From the size of them, I’m guessing they’re entrance wounds.”

  “That’s how I see it.”

  “Could the men who found her have done this?”

  “Don’t seem likely.”

  “Check them for weapons?”

  “Found a Mossberg double-barrel in their truck, but those aren’t shotgun wounds.”

  “They could have ditched the weapon.”

  “When we’re done here, I’ll take them to the station and test their hands for gunshot residue, but I don’t expect to find any.”

  “So what are you thinking, Chief?”

  “I’m thinking Alexander Cargill better have himself an air-tight alibi. Soon as the M.E. establishes time of death, I’ll haul Richie Rich’s ass in for a chat.”

  “Mind if I sit in?”

  “No can do.”

  “I could bring my brass knuckles. And some salt to rub in the wounds.”

  “Knuckle dusters are illegal in Rhode Island, Mulligan, so I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that. Besides, we don’t do things that way anymore.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and added, “Sometimes I miss the good old days.”

  Minutes later, the chief and I stepped aside as Glenna Ferguson, an assistant state medical examiner, knelt in the snow and rolled the body.

  “Two gunshots to the back and one to the head,” she said. “Powder burns on her clothes indicate the shots were fired from no more than three feet away. Judging by the angles of the entry and exit wounds, the killer made her kneel and stood behind her as he fired. The body is in the early stages of rigor mortis, so she’s been dead at least four hours.”

  Ferguson unzipped Belinda’s blue Columbia jacket and yanked up her blouse. Then she plucked a scalpel from her kit and sliced an incision in the abdomen. I looked away as she drove a thermometer into the liver. I tried to conjure a memory of the sexy young woman I’d known, but my mind was fixed on the broken thing sprawled in the snow.

  “Lividity and body temperature put time of death at four to eight hours ago,” Ferguson said. “Find any shell casings?”

  “Not yet,” Ragsdale said. “We’ll sift through the snow after you bag her.”

  Once she did, there was nothing left for me to see, but I hung around until the body bag was loaded into the medical examiner’s wagon. A chill seeped through my shoes as I watched the taillights dim and disappear.

  * * *

  Late that afternoon I shrugged on my Richard Harding Davis persona, wrote an account of the murder for The Ocean State Rag, and e-mailed it to Mason. Then I poured myself a stiff one, threw it down, and refilled the tumbler to the brim. I carried it into the sitting room, put Muddy Waters on the sound system, and flopped on the floor with my dogs.

  Why the blues again? Why not a sultry crooner or that up-beat pop star everyone was listening to. Bruno Mars? Was that the guy’s name? Why was I always drawn to music about hard times at the bottom of a shot glass? The music of the scorned and shattered.

  At the end of most every day—even the ones that didn’t involve shaking a tail, tracking down thieves, or staring at a broken body—I’d lean back with a glass of something bitter and drown in Koko Taylor’s growl, Buddy Guy’s soulful riffs, or the vibing wire of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar. Just like my dad did before the cancer took him.

  He’d come through the door, exhausted from another day of delivering milk, put a scratchy Son Seals album on the turntable, pull out his Comet harmonica, and play along. Like him, I belonged to the downtrodden tribe that turns misery into music—the kind of music that warns us what the world is like and steels us against it.

  My old job as an investigative reporter, like my new one as a detective, was to probe the dark hearts we pray against. I’d locked eyes with murderers. Wondered, more than once, if something rotten was eating away at me, turning me into the very thing that I fear. Then the twang of a blues guitar would fill the room, preaching that even in the darkest of times, the idea of light exists—and that the purpose of life is just to live it.

  The blues is pain, but it’s pain that brings joy. B. B. King said that.

  When the music cycled around to “Baby, Please Don’t Go” for the second time, I got up, staggered into the kitchen, and poured myself another drink. I held the tumbler up to the light, thought better of it, and tried to pour the whiskey back into the bottle. My hands shook, and half of it ended up on the floor.

  I made some coffee and drank two cups, which sobered me up a little. Then I called McCracken to tell him that my prime suspect in the bank heist had turned up dead.

  “You’re still messing around with that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, forget it. We’ve got paying clients to worry about.”

  “Hey, a guy needs a hobby.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Do I sound drunk?”

  “As a skunk.”

  “Drinking’s my other hobby.”

  “Well, sober up and call me back. I got some news.”

  An hour later, I did.

  “My tech guy’s all done with Bowditch’s laptop and cell phone. They both came up clean.”

  “What about the credit card?”

  “For five hundred bucks, a Capital One clerk e-mailed me copies of his bills for the last two years. Nothing there to suggest the kid’s been using it to gamble.”

  “Doesn’t prove anything,” I said. “Maybe he’s got another credit card. He could have used somebody else’s computer. A roommate’s, or one at the school library.”

  “I
t’s possible,” McCracken said, “but I doubt he was thinking that far ahead.”

  “Did you check the call logs and e-mails?”

  “Of course.”

  “Any record of Bowditch communicating with Morris Dunst?”

  “No. Should I have a messenger deliver his things to his dad’s place?”

  “I’ll come tomorrow and pick them up,” I said. “I want to return them myself.”

  * * *

  The Bowditch clan lived behind a six-foot wrought iron security fence in a massive redbrick colonial just off Blackstone Boulevard in Providence’s best neighborhood. I was just a couple of blocks away when Conner’s cell phone tinkled. I pulled to the curb and snatched it from the passenger seat.

  “Hello.”

  “Conner?”

  “No. I’m a friend of his.”

  “Why are you answering his phone?”

  “He’s currently indisposed. I heard the phone ring, so I picked it up.”

  “He’s on the toilet?”

  “Uh.… Yeah.”

  “Well, drag him out of there and put him on the line.” The voice was a low rumble—like Sam Elliott but with a Boston accent.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I’d need a heavy-duty tow truck for that, and I don’t have one handy. Besides, Conner doesn’t like distractions when he’s squeezing one out.”

  “Then I’ll hold.”

  “May I tell him who’s calling?”

  “Morris Dunst.”

  “And the nature of your call?”

  “It’s a private matter.”

  “I think he’s gonna be a while. Perhaps it would be best if I have him call you back.”

  “You do that,” he said, and clicked off.

  28

  “So do you believe me, now?” Bowditch asked.

  “About online gambling? I think so, yeah.”

  “Why do you keep looking out the window?”

  “Because McNulty and Vargas are back. They’re sitting in their white Honda Accord a half block down the street.”

  Bowditch tried to rise from the couch, but his father, Malcolm, a fifty-something about two-thirds Conner’s size, stretched out a paw, clamped it on his son’s shoulder, and pulled him back in place. “Stay away from the windows,” he said, “and let Rene do his job.”

  Rene Vachon, Bowditch Construction’s head of security, roused himself from an easy chair and joined me at the window. Vachon wasn’t a Mulligan fan. Five years ago, when he was still a Providence vice cop and I was writing for The Dispatch, I’d exposed him and a half dozen of his coworkers for padding their paychecks with phony overtime. He still held a grudge, but in front of the Bowditch clan, he was making an effort to be civil.