“Save it, Doctor. Where does he live?”
“Daggett? I couldn’t tell you. Somewhere outside the city. But I know he has an office in town. He told me once if I didn’t keep doing what he wanted, he would take my son up there and throw him off the top.”
“The top of what?”
“Williams Wharf.”
CHAPTER 24
We drove past the USS Constitution into the crowded North End and came to a driveway that served three six-storey condo buildings that faced the harbour. They were red brick with large art deco windows. Daggett worked up top of the middle one, Williams Wharf. We entered the private drive and came to a dead end where short concrete pillars linked by chains were set to block off a plunge into the water, accidental or otherwise. The back end of the building extended right to the pilings at the water’s edge. The views from any floor would be totally unobstructed.
As soon as we got out of the car, a uniformed security man exited the building and asked if he could help us. I got my digital camera off the floor of the car and said we were going to take a few pictures. He said okay but stayed there, arms crossed across his chest, as I struck a few touristy poses against the harbour backdrop, looking around the complex as Ryan snapped away with a flash that was nowhere near up to the job, but I doubted the guard would know that. On the right the driveway circled around to the lobby entrance; on the left it sloped deeply toward a door to an underground garage.
We traded places and I took four pictures of Ryan, letting him look around. Then we waved to the security guard and got back in the car. He unleashed one arm to wave back, then refolded it and continued to watch us until we had turned around and headed back out to the street.
“No way he has Jenn in there,” I said. “Not with that security.”
“He could have direct entry from the garage.”
“Still. It’s too public a place. Other tenants below. Cameras over the lobby and garage entrance.”
“I saw.”
“Which also means it’s impossible for us to get in. We’re not going to fool anyone pretending to deliver flowers or pizza.”
“I used to hang around the North End with the locals when I did business here,” Ryan said. “There’s a couple of places up the corner we can watch from. We’ll see if he comes in or out.”
“If he does,” I said, “then what? This isn’t much of a place for a gunfight.”
“Few places are. But they still happen.”
We found an Italian café called Troppo that promised more of everything, including endless coffee refills. We took a window table and spent an hour eating dishes Ryan ordered, though I barely took note of what I ate. We watched fine vehicles enter and exit the driveway into the Wharves. We kept a running track of European, Asian and American luxury sedans, hybrids, crossovers and SUVs. We debated the plural of Lexus.
We didn’t see Sean Daggett come or go.
“These Irishmen,” Ryan said, “they’re crazy fuckers, you know that. In New York, back in the day, half of them weren’t even five-foot-seven, a hundred and fifty pounds, they still gave the families a run for their money. Pound for pound the most fearless guys out there, they’d go in anywhere blasting. The Gambinos, among others, used them for certain hits and muscle jobs because it was better to have them with you than against you.”
The waiter came and asked if there’d be anything else. A line was forming past the door and the table was in demand. We couldn’t drink any more coffee or water so we paid up and walked back to the car in darkness.
Halladay’s Funeral Home was in a Mattapan neighbourhood called Wellington Hill. It sounded Colonial or British but was all twenty-first-century urban blight. Half the stores were boarded up and the bus shelters advertised great deals on new foreclosures. The elderly clutched their purses and belongings tightly and put what little threat they could into the thrust of their canes. Single men gathered in tight-moving knots under canopies as a light rain drifted through.
The mortuary was surrounded by white hoarding with a gated entrance. The front half was two storeys and covered with light stucco. The back half was a long one-storey brick extension. Through the fence I could see two cars near the front door, none in the expansive lot on the west side. Signs on the hoarding said an application to turn the facility into a night club was before the zoning board. Graffiti was scrawled here and there denouncing the proposed club. As we cruised down the street we saw posters calling for a residents’ meeting to stop the zoning application.
“He’s smart,” I said. “He buys a place that suits his purposes, applies for a usage the residents don’t want, and it can sit tied up for years while he makes a fortune off it.”
“Think Jenn is in there?”
“Even if she is,” I said, “we’re not ready to storm it.”
“We’re all we got.”
“Do you know anyone in Boston?”
“No one I’ve seen in years. Back in the day, mind you, I came a few times. My old crew back home was hooked up with the Patriarcas. I mingled with them a few times.”
“Anyone you could ask for help?”
“There’s one guy here I got out of a jam. He might be a chip I can cash.”
“Think he’d accept an invitation to a gunfight?”
“Him personally, no. But he might know some guys who would. When do we need them?”
“Soon as you can.”
“Anything we can do in the meantime?”
“Go see our congressman.”
Back in my hotel room, I showed Ryan a page I had found and bookmarked during an earlier search. The architect who redesigned McConnell’s house had posted photos and a video tour of the outside on his website. “It’s on Louisburg Square,” I said. “Steps from the historic State House in the heart of Beacon Hill. The one with the black shutters and the Stars and Stripes fluttering bravely in the wind.”
Ryan took a look at the four storeys of solid red brick, the black shutters and trim. “Must have cost a fortune, that location.”
“It did,” I said. “Fortunately his wife has one, because it was way beyond his means. He took a few hits in the House when they bought it, got razzed about living off the avails of his wife while pretending to understand the common man, yada yada. I want to be there by nine, nine-thirty, approach him as he’s leaving for church.”
“How do you know he goes to church?”
“An Irish politician in Boston? I’ll bet you breakfast I can find an image of him toting a Bible in under one second.”
It took 0.63 seconds to come up with photos of the congressman and the heiress entering a historic church downtown, not far from where Rabbi Ed Lerner was striving to open his shul.
“What time do Catholics attend church on Sunday?” I asked Ryan.
“Ask someone who goes. Hey, zoom in on this corner,” he said, pointing to the lower left.
“What?”
“The front of the car parked there. Yeah, that’s a Crown Vic parked there. Preferred car of the Secret Service. Might make approaching him tricky.”
“But not impossible.”
“Not for us.” He looked at his watch and said, “I’m going to go down to the lobby, use a pay phone to call my friend.”
“Give it everything you’ve got.”
“You know me,” he said. “Mr. Persuasive.”
After he left, I kept looking at different angles of the McConnell house, zooming in on details like the coal chute and the wrought-iron fixture servants would have used to scrape manure off their shoes before entering the side door.
When the phone rang, I assumed it was Ryan calling from the lobby but it wasn’t.
“Hi,” she said. “It’s Sandy Lerner.”
“Hi.”
“We just got your message. I wish I’d listened to it sooner but we never do until Shabbos ends.”
“I figured as much.”
“Dad and I are both so sorry about your partner.”
“Sorry enough to tell me
the truth?”
CHAPTER 25
The knock on my door came half an hour later. Ryan had already come back up from the lobby, saying the man who owed him a favour was going to see what he could do on our behalf. I told him Sandy was coming over to talk about David, and that I was sure she knew where he was. He retired to Jenn’s room to give me the space I needed to get it out of her.
When I opened the door, Sandy was standing in the halo of light from the hall lamp, holding a bottle of wine and a corkscrew.
“I think I might need a glass of this,” she said.
I slipped the paper wraps off two water glasses I found in the bathroom, and poured us each a measure. I tasted mine and said, “Just right for the occasion. Now tell me what the occasion is.”
“It’s helping you find your friend, of course. As long as we protect David too.”
She was sitting on the club chair, slim in jeans and a black sweater, feet up under her. I said, “The man who kidnapped my friend is a gangster named Sean Daggett, and he’s going to kill Jenn tomorrow unless I find David first.”
“I won’t let you turn David over to him, even to save her. If that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I just need to speak to him, face to face. Between us we’ll find a way out.”
“From a gangster? I don’t think David’s much of a fighter.”
“I am.”
“I know. My father told me a few things about you after you left Friday night.”
“What things?”
“That you were a martial artist and you’d been in the IDF. And …”
“You can say it.”
“That you’ve killed three people.”
“Did he tell you how?”
“They were all in defence of yourself or others.”
“That was nice of him.”
She sipped her wine. “I heard you discussing Abner, so I take it there was some grey area?”
“In one of them.”
“But you live with it.”
“For the most part.”
“You’ve been injured a lot.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The way you carry yourself.”
“It hasn’t been a great year in that way,” I admitted. “As my grandmother would have said, there was too much excitement.”
“Did you get injured helping people?”
“Mostly.”
She took a longer drink than before, a longer pause, before saying, “You’ll protect David? You won’t use him as bait?”
“Just a diversion. And I’m not alone. I brought someone down from Toronto who’s a fighter too. A frighteningly good one.”
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what happened.”
On the Friday morning after David’s flight from Summit Path, Sandy had woken at dawn and driven him to a place called Plum Island, accessible only via a causeway near Newburyport, an hour north of the city. Much of it was a nature reserve, she told me, with home ownership restricted to certain areas. A wealthy developer named Stephen Cooper, who attended Adath Israel and adored her father, had a retreat that he allowed Rabbi Ed to use from time to time, knowing his finances would never allow him a decent weekend out of the city. Sandy had always been invited too. “Normally,” she said, “a weekend with my dad after spending all week with him at home? No thanks. But Plum Island is magical. You see plants there you don’t see anywhere else around. Birds too. It’s a huge nature preserve, with all kinds of tidal flats and salt marshes. You see different water, and bluer skies. So I went a couple of times. Took a lot of long walks, tons of photos.”
“This is where David’s been the last two weeks?”
“As far as I know. Our agreement with David was we wouldn’t contact him. He threw away his cellphone. If he needed anything he would call from a pay phone in town. The house has no phone service in the off-season, no Internet, so we’ve had no way of reaching him, and he hasn’t called here. There’s also no electricity, water or heat. But I set him up with candles, blankets, a lot of canned food, bottled water. A camp stove he could use to warm up soups and meals, make coffee. I thought he would call after a few days, a week, for more supplies or cash.”
“But he hasn’t.”
“No.”
“You’ll take me there in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll need to leave early,” I said. “First light.”
She got up off the club chair and sat down next to me on the bed. Her hair smelled like green apple and the smell went straight to a sweet spot inside me, a welter of emotion and feelings that had been aboil far too long. I hadn’t held a woman with feeling in many, many months. I hadn’t had sex in the year since Camilla Lauder and I had split. And I hadn’t had anything remotely resembling good sex with the lovely Camilla for a year before that. I might have hooked up with Katherine Hollinger, a Homicide sergeant in Toronto, but my friendship with Ryan had cost me that one.
Now here was someone I found very attractive, close to me now—too close. As much as I wanted to take her clothes off and swarm her, my heart was with Jenn, wherever she was. My head was troubled by the danger she was in. I needed to stay focused on what was ahead of us. Like a fighter before a championship fight, the last thing I needed was wobbly legs.
“Go home, Shana,” I said. “I’ll pick you up around six.”
She leaned in closer. “Are you sure?”
“No,” I said. “Which is why you should go.”
Later, I went next door and told Ryan where David was.
“I should go with you,” he said.
“No.”
“You don’t worry it’s a trap?”
“The rabbi’s daughter?”
“She could be the pope’s mistress, I don’t give a fuck. It could still be a set-up.”
“It’s not.”
“Said Caesar to his wife. And what am I supposed to do while you’re out getting your throat slit?”
“We have two places to watch now. The mortuary and Williams Wharf.”
“I’ll take the Wharf, where us lean Italian guys blend in, hang there until I hear from you.”
“Maybe your guy will have news.”
“Maybe. Just watch your back on this island.”
“I will.”
“And if David won’t help?”
“He will. He has to. I’m not going to ask him to walk into Daggett’s arms, but there has to be a way we can use him.”
“My advice is drag him back here by the hair if it saves Jenn’s life. But I know you won’t do that.”
“No.”
“Take your gun.”
“I will.”
“And an extra clip.”
“Yessir.”
“All right. Thirty-four shots ought to get you through the morning.”
That’s the kind of send-off you get when you hang around Dante Ryan.
CHAPTER 26
I woke up at five-thirty, my head reasonably clear and free of pain. I had a light breakfast as soon as the hotel coffee shop opened and by six-thirty was on my way back to Brookline with my Beretta snug in its holster on my right hip. I was feeling a sense of excitement that bordered on hope. If David was still at the house on Plum Island, and if he agreed to help, I’d be one step closer to finding Jenn before Daggett could carry out his sick plan.
Shana was standing outside her house in a dark wool coat. She got in and directed me to the I-95; I realized I much preferred her voice to that of the GPS. I felt a twinge of regret that we hadn’t spent the night together. I certainly could have used the release. But it was the right decision and I shook my mind clear of it. “How far is this island?”
“About forty-five minutes to the causeway,” she said. “And another twenty or so from there.”
She fell into silence, looking out the window, twisting a strand of her hair around her fingers. I asked if she was okay.
“I’m just worried about what we’ll find,” she said. “Without heat,
power and everything, it will have been hard on him these last two weeks. He’s not the hardiest of men.”
“You said he had plenty of supplies.”
“Still, it’s been cold at night. Colder up there, I imagine. But I suppose he’s also an ascetic kind of character. If anyone can get by on the bare minimum, it’s him.”
“From what I’ve heard of him, he’ll have written a new research paper on toilet paper by candlelight.”
We went past the exits to Lowell, Lawrence and Ipswich and got off on Scotland Road, which bent toward the sea and Newbury. The road went south and east around the wide mouth of the Merrimack River, then took us north on the Plum Island Turnpike, the river basin on our left, the ocean on our right. As the road became narrower. I cracked open my window and smelled salt and brine, only slightly tainted by diesel fumes.
“You should see it here in the spring,” she said. “Between the wildlife refuge and the tidal flats, more than three hundred bird species have been recorded. The spring migration here is one of the biggest in the world. Zillions of hawks, shorebirds, warblers. If you’re into that sort of thing.”
I wasn’t, not now. Not unless one of those birds could tell me where Jenn was, and that she was okay.
I guess Shana picked up on what I was thinking about, because she asked, “How long have you and Jenn been partners?”
“Just a few months. But we’ve known each other much longer—she’s my best friend too, like a sister.”
“You have any?”
“Sisters? No. Just an older brother.”
“That didn’t sound warm and fuzzy.”
“Our relationship has a lot of grit in it. Bit of a sandstorm sometimes.”
“What’s the age difference?”
“He’s three years older chronologically. And twenty more mature.”
“One of those,” she said.
We drove in silence until she said, “You see the house there on the right?”
It was an A-frame made of dark stained wood, with a lot of pine trees around it. “That’s not such a bad campsite. I don’t think I’d call it ascetic.”
Boston Cream Page 17
