Santis grinned. “Sure didn’t look that way.”
“You guys cut it awful close,” I said. “What were you trying to do?”
“Wanted to see how well you could handle yourself.”
I shook my head. “Not that well, to tell the truth. I expected you sooner, or I wouldn’t have been so cocky.” I held up my right elbow to look at it. The coatsleeve was wet and shiny with blood.
“Let’s have a look at that,” said Santis.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Help me up, will you?”
He put his arm around my back and helped me climb up onto my feet. “The transmission wasn’t very good,” he said. “We kept waiting to get something we could use.”
I took the little transmitter out of my pocket and unhooked the wire that led to the tiny microphone pinned to the inside of my shirt. I handed it to Santis. “You mean, you guys weren’t right there all the time?”
“Oh, we weren’t far away. Picked up your voice just fine, most of the time. Couldn’t hear what he was saying very well, though. Maybe the recorder got it all. What did he say?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Mm,” he muttered. “Well, anyway, we’ve got an assault here, and a weapon.” He showed me what looked like a miniature icepick, with a wooden handle and a thin steel shaft perhaps five inches long.
“That’s not an icepick, is it?”
“Looks to me like a pickle spear,” said Santis. “Seventy-nine cents at any five-and-ten. You use them to fish pickles out of a jar.”
“Or to stick into people’s brains.”
“That, too.” He held it up to the light. He was holding it gingerly with a handkerchief. “It’s got your blood all over it. Maybe we can find traces of other blood on it, too.”
We walked out of the alley. Becker had already been carted away. Two policemen stood beside a squad car, waiting for Santis and me. He said, “Hop in. We’ll drop you off at the hospital, get that arm looked at.”
I climbed into the back seat. Al Santis slid in beside me. “Now what do we do?” I said.
“Now we get that arm cleaned up. Then we go over to the station and talk about what happened.”
“Nothing happened,” I said. “I pretended I was drunk. I told him what I believed he did. He didn’t say anything. He admitted nothing. Then we went outside, and he tried to kill me.”
“Well, we’ll go over it, anyway.”
The police car got onto Washington Street, heading toward Mass General. It traveled sedately. No sirens or flashing blue Lights. It comforted me that no one seemed especially concerned about the wound on my arm. I put my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.
“How did you arrange that, so Becker would think you were loaded?” said Santis.
“I made a deal with the waiter. He brought me Mai Tais minus the booze. Just fruit juice. I can drink a lot of fruit juice without getting loaded. It does make me have to pee, though.”
“Well, anyway,” he chuckled, “you evidently made a pretty convincing drunk. Becker’s no dummy.”
“I’ve had lots of practice,” I said. “The thing is, I never did get around to taking that leak. Can’t we move it a little faster?”
EPILOGUE
AL SANTIS CALLED ME A WEEK later. “How’s the arm?” he said.
“I’ll be pumping iron in no time,” I said. The truth was, it hurt like hell. When I was younger, things seemed to heal faster. I had no desire to lift weights, anyway.
“Wanted to bring you up-to-date on the Becker case,” said the detective. “Figured you were interested.”
“I am.”
“The DA has hated the case from the start. Screaming for evidence.”
“Evidence? Jesus…”
“Listen,” said Santis gloomily. “Becker’s name is never even mentioned in the diary, okay? I mean, a few references to Redbeard just ain’t the same as spelling it out. Carver didn’t know Becker’s name, that much is clear. The whole goddam thing is hearsay, anyway, and there’s no convenient way to interrogate your friend there, who wrote it. In terms of evidence, it’s just a story. Pure imagination, for all we know. What we could use is, we could really use a witness.”
“I can certainly testify to an assault,” I said.
“Big fuckin’ deal.”
“Yes. I get it. What about the weapon? The pickle spear?”
“Negative.”
“And Becker won’t talk?”
“He smiled a lot, and his lawyer had him out on bail lickety-split. The assault is all we could charge him with.”
“He did it, you know,” I said. “Heather. Stu. Altoona. He set up that assassination. Becker did it all.”
I heard Santis sigh. “Maybe he did. Sure, he probably did. Whatever. It’s all academic now, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone. Couple FBI guys were around yesterday. They had papers. Jurisdiction, know what I mean? It’s now a federal case. Becker’s in their custody. It’s out of our hands.”
“I don’t understand. I know the law, and—”
“Me neither,” Santis interrupted. “All I know is, the DA ain’t fighting it. I personally think he’s relieved. Not that much fun, putting a federal drug agent on trial. Especially with the kind of case we’ve got. Becker’s gonzo.”
“Politics,” I muttered.
“Ah, we didn’t have a case anyway. If you’d been able to get him to say something into the tape…”
“Christ! He came after me with that pickle spear.”
“I know how you feel. I’m sorry.”
“So now what do we do?”
“Do? We do nothing. We go back to work, that’s what we do.”
“Not me,” I said.
“That is one hell of a story,” said Mickey Gillis, her monkey face breaking into a toothy grin. She snapped off the tape recorder that sat on the sofa between us. “Carver had himself a Pulitzer there. Another fuckin’ Watergate. And talk about plugging up the leaks. Three murders. Wow!”
“Nearly four,” I said.
“Yep. You would have made four,” she said. “That would have made the story even better.”
She lit another little cigarillo, her fourth during the nearly two hours we had sat in my office while I told her the story. “Go over that part that your pal McDevitt told you again, will ya?”
“I told you,” I said. “You can’t mention Charlie McDevitt in this.”
She waved her cigarillo impatiently at me. “Yeah, yeah.”
“About Becker’s stay in the prison camp, you mean?”
“That’s it. That’s what explains it all.”
I shrugged. “It’s not that clear exactly what happened. The VC had him for about nine months. He went in a clean-cut American boy and came out a bitter, twisted fanatic. A very heroic escape. He had to crawl through about forty miles of jungle with a broken leg.”
“It was broken because some communist interrogator had kept hitting it with a sledgehammer,” said Mickey, her eyes glittering.
“Yes, evidently. He had dozens of cigarette burns on his face. That’s why he grew a beard. To hide his scars.”
She nodded. “He kept most of his scars pretty well hidden. But they ran deep into his soul.”
“He hated the hell out of anything called communist, that’s for sure,” I said. “He was waging his own private war. Chasing down drug dealers wasn’t direct enough for him. But it gave him the access and the freedom. This thing with Lampley was obviously completely wacko. But he damn near carried it off. If it hadn’t been for Stu Carver…”
Mickey touched my arm. “And you, Brady Coyne. Don’t forget yourself.” She held her glass to me. “More, huh?”
I went over to the cabinet and sloshed some Scotch into her glass. “Can you write this story?” I said, handing her drink to her.
“Damn straight I can write it. This is a career story, Brady, old pal. Methinks I
’ll do a three-parter. Part one, the assassination story. Once upon a time there was this drug agent they called Redbeard, a Rambo type, who thought he could make foreign policy by staging an assassination, then making sure the assassin himself got it so he couldn’t talk. Part two, the murders. Three interesting victims, any one of whom might have been able to blow Redbeard’s scheme right out of the water. And part three, the official coverup, in which the Feds come along like the Apaches to whisk the drug agent away from the intrepid local police before they can properly apply the full and just measure of the law. This’ll get national attention. No question about it. I’ll probably have to run down a few details. But it’s got it all. This is a biggie. I love it.”
I sat down beside her. She put her hand on the inside of my thigh and leaned her face close to mine. Her breath smelled masculine, a mixture of tobacco and whiskey. Her hard little breast pressed against the side of my arm. “Whaddya say?” she said in a raspy whisper. “For old time’s sake, huh? This sofa pull out, or what?”
“No, Mickey,” I said. “Sorry to say, it doesn’t pull out.”
“Your loss,” she said with a shrug.
I checked the paper every day for two weeks. Then I called Mickey.
“When are they going to print the story?” I asked.
“They aren’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“They killed it.”
“Who? Who killed it?”
“How the fuck do I know? They. You know. Them. It’s dead.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Me? I’m gonna write other stories. That’s what I do. I write stories.”
“That’s it?”
“Unless you got a better idea.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t have a better idea.”
Ben Woodhouse called me on April Fool’s Day. “Brady,” he said, “I think it’s time you quit sulking.”
“I’m not sulking, Ben. I don’t sulk.”
“Then it’s time you came back to work for me.”
“You misunderstand. I don’t work for anybody. I am nobody’s employee. I have clients. You used to be one of them.”
He chuckled. “Well, then, we have a misunderstanding, that’s all. We can work it out. I need you. You’re the best.”
Ben Woodhouse used to be the consummate politician. His tools had not rusted noticeably in the years since his retirement from the arena. He was deft with flattery, deadly at negotiation.
“You’re not my client anymore,” I told him. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Dammit, Coyne. I’m warning you—”
“Don’t try to threaten me, Ben. That won’t work, either.”
“You’ll regret this.”
“I seriously doubt it. Give my regards to Meriam.”
I hung up before he had a chance to.
A few days later I strolled through the early spring sunshine to the St. Michael’s mission. Father Joe Barrone accepted the check I handed him with a nod and a smile.
“This is most generous, Mr. Coyne. I assure you, it will be put to good use.”
Heather Kriegel, I thought, would have been pleased with the way I had chosen to execute her estate.
Charlie McDevitt was swinging his driver back and forth while we waited for the twosome in front of us to hit their second shots. The fairway was beginning to green up. Springtime had begun its annual healing of the scrapes and abrasions that winter had inflicted on the earth. The April air smelled warm and sweet. It was good to be outdoors.
“You hear the one about the lawyer who died and went to see St. Peter at the pearly gates?” he asked.
“You told me that one,” I said.
“Too bad,” he said, swiping the blossom neatly off a dandelion with his driver. “Good story. You think I can hit now?”
“You could have hit a long time ago,” I said. “You’ll probably swing and miss anyway.”
“Probably will, this being the first hole of the season and all.” Charlie took another practice swing with his driver and peered down the fairway at the two golfers who were disappearing over the rise.
Charlie teed up his ball, then stepped back. “I think I’ll wait another minute. If I catch it just right I could hit those guys.”
“Not likely,” I said.
He propped himself up on his driver. “Remember your friend there, Gus Becker?”
“He wasn’t my friend.”
“I know. Anyway, something came over the wire yesterday. He’d been assigned to a tough case in Lima, Peru. Maybe you heard.”
“I’ve heard nothing about him since the FBI took him away from the Boston police,” I said.
“Well, they sent him to Lima. Yesterday on the wire it said that he was found in the trunk of his Buick. Big bullet hole in his forehead.”
“So there’s some justice after all,” I said. “Those South American cocaine dealers play rough, huh?”
“That’s what we’re expected to believe,” said Charlie.
“And what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Charlie shrugged elaborately. “Like you said, justice gets done, one way or the other.”
“I don’t get you.”
Charlie peered off down the fairway. “If anyone was to calibrate that hole in Becker’s forehead, I suspect it would measure just about standard United States government issue point-forty-five.” He turned to lift his eyebrows at me.
I shook my head. “American justice. I’ll be damned.”
“I’m gonna hit now. Think it’s okay?”
“Keep your damn head down.”
He stepped up and hit it well. Then it was my turn. I was eager to get the new season under way.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Brady Coyne Mysteries
Prologue
“EVEN A BROKEN CLOCK IS RIGHT TWICE a day,” said Charlie. “Even a monkey chained to a typewriter—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” I said. “So I made a couple good guesses.”
“Sheer luck. Random chance. Anyhow,” he said, tapping the flat plastic box on the top of his desk, “through the wonders of modern technology, the unlimited resources of the United States government, and the expertise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I have here the piece of the puzzle that you’re missing. The piece that makes sense of it.”
“Well, hell, Charlie. You gonna make me grovel, or what?”
He leaned back and grinned at me. “Naw. Makes me sick to see a grown man grovel.”
“Then play the damn tape, will you?”
“Lunch. On you, right?”
“Sure, sure.”
“Jimmy’s?”
“Agreed.”
“Lobster.”
“Sure. Lobster. Whatever the hell you want.”
“Good. It’s done, then.” Charlie went to the cabinet and took out a tape recorder. He brought it back and placed it on the center of his desk.
“The one who sounds like he’s got throat cancer is Uncle Fish,” he said, threading the tape through the old-fashioned reel-to-reel recorder.
“Vincent Collucci,” I said.
“Himself. And the other guy is Joseph Malagudi.”
“The one they call Ceci?”
“Yep.”
“And he’s the button from Atlanta.”
Charlie smirked at me. “You’ve got the terms down pretty good, Counselor. Watching reruns of the Godfather flicks, huh? Yeah. Ceci Malagudi is the button from Atlanta. One of the best—or worst, depending on your point of view—on the East Coast. High up on everybody’s most-wanted list, especially after taking out a promising witness in Baltimore last spring. The law, as you know, is a bit intolerant of guys who shoot other guys in the back of the head with twenty-two-caliber pistols. Anyhow, this recording came from a tap the boys downstairs had on Collucci’s phone, all legal and everything. The call was made last April.”
“Before I went to Maine.”
“Right. Before you went salmon
fishing and started to run into dead bodies.”
Charlie McDevitt’s office is high in the J.F.K. Federal Building in Boston’s Government Center. The single window looks out over a broad brick-paved plaza toward what used to be, in my youth, Scollay Square, where my buddies and I would catch the Saturday morning strip shows at the Old Howard before the ball game started over at Fenway Park. On this particular summer morning a hot breeze was coming in off the ocean, and through Charlie’s window I could see sharp-dressed ladies hurrying across the plaza, leaning into the wind, their flimsy skirts plastered against the fronts of their thighs, and I thought how it was a long way from Raven Lake, way up there in northwestern Maine, a few miles from the Canadian border.
“There,” said Charlie. “All set. Remember, now. That’s Collucci, at his modest mansion up there in Hamilton, hard by the Myopia Hunt Club. Fox hunting. Polo ponies. Tallyho. Just imagine Uncle Fish in jodhpurs. Anyway, the other one’s Malagudi. They failed to trace where he was calling from. Not that it especially matters.”
“Play the damn tape, Charlie.”
“Okay. Here goes.” He depressed a button. I heard static, then a click. Then a voice like sandpaper.
“Yeah?”
A hesitation. “This my uncle?”
“Yeah. Whosis?”
“Ceci.”
“Mr. M. Long time.” Collucci sounded as if he had his mouth full.
“I need someone to say a prayer for me.”
“Want some salvation, huh?”
“Salvation. Right.”
“Only Jesus saves, Mr. M.”
“Ain’t how I hear it.”
Collucci made a noncommittal grunt.
“How many angels it take for salvation, Uncle?”
“Fifty angels, Mr. M.”
“You still talkin’ to our lord, Uncle?”
Collucci burped. “I can arrange your salvation, Mr. M. Call back Friday.”
“With fifty angels, huh?”
“You need them fifty angels on your side, Mr. M.”
There was a click and then static. Charlie reached over and turned off the machine.
I sat back and lit a cigarette. Charlie smiled at me. “See what I mean?”
I nodded. “Yeah. That explains it, all right. Okay. Let’s go to lunch.”
Marine Corpse Page 21
