by Ace Atkins
I touched the bandage over my eye and let out a long, painful breath. “Didn’t feel like crap to me.”
“Get over it,” Belson said. “You think you can retain the belt forever? Someone’s coming up. Someone’s always coming up these fucking streets.”
“You’ll have to deal with that crap on your own,” Glass said. “We want to talk to you about a guy named Rob Featherstone.”
“Sure,” I said. “Remind me again. Who’s Rob Featherstone?”
“The guy from the Sparks museum you talked to last week,” Belson said. “And a poor unfortunate bastard. Somebody dumped his body off the Tobin Bridge last night. Some college kids farting around on sailboats fished him out of the water.”
“Was he already dead?”
“Somebody was real pissed off,” Belson said. “Shot twice in the back of the head. Twice in the back.”
“Ouch.”
“We understand you spoke with him in connection to Holy Innocents?” Glass said. “You’re working for a Boston firefighter off the books.”
“I can’t divulge my client list,” I said.
“Zip it up, Spenser,” Belson said. “We’re on the same team. Featherstone loved firefighting so much, he’d get up in the middle of the night and chase sirens.”
“And what do you do?”
“I get paid for it,” Belson said. “Featherstone did it for free. In my book, that makes you a little screwy.”
“He seemed like a nice guy,” I said. “What else can you say about a person who hands out coffee and donuts to men on the job?”
“Just what did he tell you?” Glass said. “Did he know anything about the church fire?”
“No,” I said. “Mainly I looked at Arthur Fiedler’s helmet collection.”
“Yes or no, Spenser,” Belson said. He stopped at a traffic light. “Yes or no.”
“He talked about what he saw,” I said. “But nothing he said was of any help to me. Or anything that might’ve gotten him killed.”
“His wife said he’d become obsessed with all these summer fires,” Glass said. “He nearly lost his day job hopping from place to place. He told her he’d figured out what was going on and was damn well going to do something about it.”
“And who’d he suspect?”
“Well, that’s the problem,” Belson said. The car lurched forward on Commonwealth as we made our slow, steady way toward the Public Garden. “Never told her. Found his car down in the Seaport. Cleaned of all prints. Some blood on the window glass, which we’re pretty sure is his.”
“Friends?”
“Not many,” Glass said. “We’re working on it.”
“Maybe it’s a coincidence?” I said.
“Belson,” Glass said. “I thought you told me this guy was smart.”
“Lucky,” Belson said. “I told you he was often lucky, Captain.”
26
Where’s Galway?” I said.
“In the back room playing poker with the other hounds.” Teddy Cahill looked up from the bar and shrugged. “What the fuck happened to you?”
I touched the bandage on my eye. “I disturbed some local wildlife.”
“Looks more like it disturbed you,” Cahill said.
I took a seat next to him. It was just after six at Florian Hall, the fire union headquarters down in Dorchester. The union had an impressive array of banquet rooms, offices, and, most important, a bar. Cahill walked behind the bar, popped the top of a Sam Adams, and slid it over to me. We were the only ones in the large space.
“I always admired you guys.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said.
“You know a guy named Rob Featherstone?”
“Sure,” he said. “Works over at the fire museum. He’s a Spark.”
“Was a Spark,” I said. “He’s dead.”
“No shit.” Cahill cut his eyes over at me. “He wasn’t the bastard who got dumped off the bridge?”
I nodded and drank some Sam Adams. The union knew how to calibrate their cooler. The beer was ice cold. In a separate room, a rock band was warming up for a wedding. The walls vibrated pictures of long-dead union members and guys standing among the ruins of many buildings. “A police lieutenant named Belson just braced me, thinking he might be tied to the arson case.”
“Yeah, I know Frank,” Cahill said. “He should’ve called.”
“Check your messages,” I said. “I’m sure he will.”
“I thought it was a suicide,” Cahill said. “Heard the guy jumped.”
“He had an incentive,” I said. “There were four bullet holes in him.”
“Christ.”
“Had he talked to you about the church fire?”
Cahill stubbed out the cigarette and scratched his cheek. “Nope,” he said. “Not a word. Or anybody else from the Sparks, for that matter. Rob Featherstone. Really? I think he collected model trains or some shit.”
The band launched into the first few bars of Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded.” They got to the part where the fever reached a hundred and three and stopped to make some adjustments.
“Could he have contacted someone else in Arson?” I said. “Maybe as a confidential source?”
“Sure,” Cahill said. “It’s possible. But I doubt it. We tend to talk amongst ourselves on stuff like that. And if a guy like Featherstone had known something, he wouldn’t have kept it a secret. Those Sparks really bleed for the department. They come out at all hours looking out for us. I mean, this is a thankless job sometimes. Just like being a cop. Someone gives you a pat on the back and it’s appreciated.”
“Sometimes comely young women hand me a shot of rye on the street,” I said. “Gumshoe boosters.”
Cahill grunted under the walrus mustache.
“I interviewed Featherstone last week,” I said. “He didn’t offer anything. He said he got there maybe two minutes before the engines. He talked a lot about Dougherty, Bonnelli, and Mulligan. But Belson says Featherstone told his wife he knew who’d been setting all the fires the last few months. Maybe Holy Innocents.”
“And?”
“And he never told her or told the police,” I said.
“Of course not,” he said.
“Yep.”
“Son of a bitch.”
Cahill hadn’t touched his beer since I walked in. He opened a pack of cigarettes and pulled out a fresh one. It had been a while since I’d been around so much smoke. I figured the union didn’t think the smoke would offend the firefighters. I drank some more beer. The band turned it up to eleven, rocking out to Eddie Money, “Baby Hold On.”
“Jesus,” Cahill said. “What is this, the summer of fucking ’78?”
“You remember that far back?”
“Only when I drink.”
“Busy week?”
“Eight more suspicious fires,” Cahill said. He streamed smoke out of the side of his mouth. “It’s what keeps me young.”
“I’ll check with the museum and let you know what I find out.”
Cahill nodded. He looked up at the collection of booze bottles on the shelf and the dusty framed photographs of firefighters then and now. A ceramic figurine of a little boy dressed in fireman’s garb stood tall by the whiskeys. He was holding a cute little ax.
“You want to be straight about what happened to your freakin’ eye?”
“I was following a guy named Tyler King and some of his friends threw up a roadblock,” I said. “We made a real mess out of some fruits de mer.”
“I got a nice file on Tyler King.”
“We just had a chat yesterday.”
Cahill shook his head. “But he’s not your guy,” he said. “All these fires ain’t his work, Spenser. We eliminated him a long time ago.”
“‘All these fires’?” I said. “Hmm. Are you coming around to the
idea of one guy?”
Cahill blew out a long stream of smoke. He shook his head. “Tyler King is a pro,” he said. “He does what he does for money and that’s it. All these fucking fires. This is something else. It’s the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Everything started at Holy Innocents?”
Cahill touched his mustache. I drank some beer in the silence. After the second sip, he stared at me and just nodded. “Okay. Okay.”
“How?”
“Some of the new ones look like what we found at Holy Innocents.”
“Which was what?”
“Stuff,” he said. “Similar stuff.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t get too technical with me.”
Cahill shrugged and reached for his beer. He drank a sip. Hot damn. We were making some progress.
He reached for some Bushmills and poured out two shots. “Commissioner would shit a golden brick if I told you this. Nobody wants the public to panic over some nutso. But by my last estimate, we’ve had at least eighty.”
“Yikes.”
“From now on I want to know what you know,” he said. “And I won’t hold back, either. Me and you are working together.”
“In cahoots?”
“Unofficial or official, I don’t give a shit,” Cahill said. “But this fucking guy is burning up this town. Three of our people are dead, and I know that won’t be the last of it. This guy is getting his rocks off.”
“How do you know it’s a guy?”
“’Cause he sends us letters,” Cahill said. “Don’t you let that get out. Son of a bitch calls himself Mr. Firebug. Sent all that shit over to ATF and didn’t get squat.”
“Mr. Firebug,” I said. “Very gender-specific.”
Cahill raised his eyes at me, put down the cigarette, and stroked his mustache. “Don’t hold back nothing.”
He slid the shot of Bushmills closer. We both reached for the shots and drank them together.
27
Would you mind if I kidnapped you for the weekend?” I said.
“What’s the occasion?”
“Have you forgotten?”
“I’d sometimes like to forget my birthday,” she said. “But I figured you might with all this fire business.”
“How could I forget?” I said. “You wrote it in my DayMinder.”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “Would a birthday kidnapping include champagne and room service?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay,” she said. She tapped at her cheek with an index finger. “I can be willingly accosted. But are you sure you can afford taking a couple days off?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Trouble will be waiting when I return. We leave Friday. I made reservations. Pearl can stay with Henry.”
“Isn’t that presumptuous?”
“Presumptuous is that I’m not packing a lot of clothes.”
“And what should I pack?”
“The black bikini,” I said. “I’ve bought a few things for you from La Perla.”
“They must love you there,” she said.
“I buy you another getup,” I said, “and they’ll throw in a free pair of knickers.”
Susan drummed her fingers on the table. We’d found a nice corner booth at Alden & Harlow, still finding it hard to believe the space had once been Casablanca. I’d ordered their Secret Burger and Susan asked for a bruised tomato salad. She had a glass of sauvignon blanc while I stayed on my Sam Adams kick from Florian Hall. Continuity was important.
“I like the bandage,” Susan said. “It’s kind of cute.”
I touched my brow, having forgotten, and smiled. And then I showed her my right hand knuckles, purplish and swelling.
“Not so cute.”
“A hazard of the job.”
Susan took a healthy sip. Half the glass was gone.
“And the other fella?” she said.
“Sort of like punching the cab of a Mack truck.”
“Yikes,” Susan said. “Big?”
“I thought of him as Killer Kowalski’s older and more physically developed brother.”
The food arrived. The waitress, a cute young woman with black hair and purple highlights, placed the plates before us with some flourish. She asked if we had everything we needed. I looked to Susan, gripped her hand under the table, and said, “You bet.”
“And would it spoil the surprise if you told me where?”
“The Cape.”
“That narrows it.”
“Hyannis.”
“That narrows it a bit more.”
“Our old place,” I said. “Where we used to go.”
“The old Dunfey’s?” she said.
I took a bite of the Secret Burger and nodded. The burger was spot-on.
“Aren’t you nostalgic,” Susan said.
“It’s been more than twenty years,” I said. “Back then, you were afraid of Hawk.”
“Afraid isn’t the word,” she said. “More like scared shitless for you.”
Her bruised tomatoes, although impressive, looked like I felt. She took a bite of the salad as I worked on the hamburger. Alden & Harlow chefs were artists. I tried to make it last. Susan laughed at me, reached over, and wiped some high-end ketchup off my chin.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll let you kidnap me. But only for nostalgia’s sake.”
“I heard they turned our bedroom into a shrine,” I said. “Holy men come there to pray. It promises to grant amazing prowess.”
“It’s where you—”
“Opened the heavens?”
“We’d already done that many times,” Susan said. “It’s where we forged our bond. In a very real sense, where we made a lifetime commitment to each other.”
“With only one brief and yet unimportant interruption.”
“You call that time unimportant?” she said.
“No,” I said. “But the other people involved were.”
“We never discuss that time.”
I looked up from my drink. “Would it be helpful?”
“Nope.”
I offered my Sam Adams across the table. Susan lifted her wine and we touched glasses with a sharp clink.
“To the future?” she said.
“‘Art is long,’” I said. “‘And Time is fleeting.’”
28
Rob Featherstone had lived in a blue cottage, like they built for GIs after the war, a few blocks from the water in Quincy. The next morning, I stepped over several flower arrangements set on the steps and mashed the buzzer. Within a minute or two, a woman opened the door. She was in her mid-sixties, with a long, drawn face and sagging shoulders. She wore narrow glasses and a Sox hoodie over a gray shirt.
I told her I’d worked with her Rob. A solid half-lie.
She nodded, reached into the hoodie, and grabbed a tissue. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and said she was Mrs. Featherstone.
“I’m very sorry to hear about Rob.”
She nodded and wandered back in the little house. I opened the storm door and followed. A handful of people sat in the living room with more talking back in the kitchen. Mrs. Featherstone walked back from the kitchen and nodded to a small dining room. The table was finely polished. The seats had been covered in protective plastic. On the walls hung prints of old locomotives and coal burners. Several model train engines sat side by side on the table with a track encircling the table.
“You a Spark?”
“I’m a private investigator. Rob was helping me with an arson case.”
“Christ Almighty,” she said. “I knew they were going to kill him.”
“Who?”
“The damned arsonists,” she said, wiping her nose again. Her nose was very red and her eyes completely glazed over. “Don’t you kn
ow about all these crazy fires?”
“And who are they?”
She shook her head. “Hell if I know,” she said. “But Rob did. He was sure of it. Just sure of it.”
“Besides you, who would he confide in?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Jerry Ramaglia? He’s here. Other Sparks. Rob saw them more than he saw me. When he wasn’t at work, he lived at that firehouse museum.”
“You think he meant someone who was a Spark?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t tell me nothing. We’d been together for forty years. But the last thirty hadn’t been so easy. We stayed together for the kids, and then the kids leave and we stay together ’cause it’s easy. Even if Rob wasn’t an easy man to be around. Chasing fires and playing with his model trains.”
“But he told you that he knew who set all these fires.”
“Yes.”
“And what else?”
“That he was going to do something about it.”
“And you didn’t ask him what he meant?”
“To be honest, I thought it was just talk,” she said. “Rob always had some kind of conspiracy theory working. I just said, ‘Good luck with that, dear,’ and turned the newspaper while eating toast. But they killed him. Didn’t they?”
“Someone did.”
“Couldn’t’ve been anything else,” she said. “Rob was an electrician. He fixed and wired shit. He did good work. Never pissed anyone off. Wasn’t into getting drunk or drugs or crap like that. He loved being a Spark. It was his life.”
She blew her nose long and hard. There was an odd burst of laughter from the kitchen. A man walked into the dining room and asked if we would like some coffee. We both shook our heads and the man disappeared.
“God,” she said. “Someone killed him. He finally did it.”
“Did what?”
“Something really important.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I’m sad for him. ’Cause he’s dead. But he finally did something big for Boston Fire. He would have loved that.”
“And if he did have some big information, might he have shared it with Jerry?”
