Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  Halperin had supposedly disappeared not long after the report had been filed. No next of kin had filed any claim on military benefits or pension he might have still had, explaining why no one in the government had caught on to the fact that a dishonorably discharged soldier turned mercenary who had suffered from post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation had returned home.

  Our investigation of that anomaly began at a Walgreens located in a dedicated parking lot shared with a Winter Hill Bank Loan Center adjacent to it in an L-shaped structure. This was clearly Somerville’s main drag, or one of them, nestled among other staple stores along a row of storefronts. They were enclosed just a few blocks away by a slew of two- and three-story tenement houses that looked like they’d been lifted straight out of the heart of working-class America. Somerville had been a factory and mill town long before it had gained a reputation as a haven for the Boston-based Irish Mob. As the old saying went, the Italians will kill you, but the Irish will kill you, your family, your friends, and your pets. It was the kind of insular blue-collar community that kept to itself and detested outsiders like us who’d come to pry into local business. The stories I’d read about the infamous, and now imprisoned, alpha gangster Whitey Bulger had him buying ice cream cones for kids and Thanksgiving turkeys for the poor, while strong-arming locals out of lottery winnings and taking possession of convenience stores to launder his riches. Somerville was a place where nobody squealed and everybody called cops by their first names, while never even considering ratting anyone out to them.

  “Just us?” I said to Mort, surprised that no local police were waiting in the parking lot to meet us.

  “I wasn’t sure the locals would have our best interests at heart, given that we’re looking into one of their own,” he explained.

  It felt as if we’d driven two hundred miles back in time. That just wasn’t something you heard said much anymore, Somerville seeming to offer a last glimpse of a bygone and forgotten time.

  “So we’re on our own,” I said.

  “We’re on our own,” Mort acknowledged, and into Walgreens we went.

  Mort took the military photo of Tommy Halperin and we took our place in line at the pharmacist’s counter behind two older women, both of whom knew everyone working behind the counter by name. Few realize that, thanks to the opioid crisis, the DEA now keeps a database of every single prescription of any kind filled in the entire United States; the more dangerous ones are funneled to the FBI. Very few realize that, I suspect, because the outcry against governmental snooping would be enormous.

  That explained how Mort had been able to track Tommy Halperin down so quickly, thanks to any number of factors in his profile that made him stand out. First and foremost was his age, given that most who suffer from this condition are older, more like Doris Ann’s age. There was also the reasonable proximity of Somerville to New York, Acadia National Park, and Cabot Cove. It made sense that whoever was behind the murders I was convinced were associated with The Affair manuscript would hire local talent. And Halperin certainly fit the bill there. Even though he boasted no formal criminal record, he’d been involved in several scrapes with the law that suggested criminal involvement prior to embarking on a career as a mercenary. But all the cases had ended up dismissed when witnesses mysteriously recanted their testimony or failed to show up in court.

  We reached the front of the line and Mort flashed the photo of Tommy Halperin to three separate pharmacy techs, all of whom said after taking much too fast a glance at the picture that they didn’t recognize him.

  “He filled a prescription here three weeks ago,” Mort said three different times, receiving three different indifferent responses.

  “I’m not saying he didn’t. I’m saying I don’t remember him.”

  “I’ve never see him in here.”

  “What’d you say the drug was called again?”

  The silver-haired pharmacist was too busy to talk to us, so Mort and I busied ourselves by speaking to more Walgreens workers. All of them professed to have never seen Tommy Halperin in their entire lives. Nor, they uniformly insisted, did they know anybody by the name “Halperin” at all, in spite of the fact that various offshoots of Tommy’s family had been living in Somerville for somewhere around a century.

  Maybe if he went by the name “Tom” or “Thomas” we would’ve had better luck. As it was, we were getting nowhere, and I started to wonder if Mort’s decision not to bring in any of the local police had been the right call.

  “Excuse me?”

  We both turned in the cold-and-flu-care aisle to find the white-haired pharmacist, Manny according to his name tag, drawing close to us.

  “This is the one we recommend,” he said, taking a rectangular box of cold medication down from the shelf. “It’s the store brand, but equally effective at a much better price.”

  Then he lowered his voice.

  “You were asking about Tommy Halperin?”

  “You know him?” Mort asked, pretending to check the label on the medication Manny had pretended to recommend.

  “From around the time he was born.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Three weeks ago, when he picked up a prescription for his skin condition.”

  “Then he must not be overseas,” I noted.

  Manny looked at me for the first time, as if not realizing Mort and I were together. “No, he’s not overseas.” Suspicion tightened his features. “Is that why you’re here?”

  Mort managed a slight nod. “Partly.”

  Manny regarded the CABOT COVE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT patch on Mort’s jacket. “But you’re from Maine.”

  “Not a long drive from here.”

  Manny the pharmacist shook his head. “What’s Tommy done now?”

  “What can you tell us about him?” Mort asked instead of anwering the question.

  “That I was glad when he left and sorry when he came back.”

  “Any idea who he works for these days?” I asked, hoping Manny had at least some notion that might point us in the right direction.

  He checked both ends of the aisle before answering. “Not that I’d want to mention. I can’t be sure, but that’s what everyone around here figures, given who really runs this town,” Manny said, the bitterness plain in his voice.

  “What about where he lives?” Mort said. “Can you tell us that?”

  I expected Manny to hedge on that, fearful for his own safety if he gave up information to outsiders. He looked at me, seeming to read my mind, as he pulled up his sleeve to reveal a nasty burn scar.

  “He gave me this in the basement of his house after I refused to make some prescription opioids ‘disappear’ off the shelves.”

  And then Manny gave us Tommy Halperin’s address.

  * * *

  • • •

  The neighborhood where Tommy Halperin lived, a short drive from Walgreens, was more or less typical of Somerville’s blue-collar atmosphere. While I saw any number of renovated homes mixed in among a smattering of others that still carried the stains from the exhaust belched from the smokestacks of long-shuttered factories, there was virtually no new construction. The area enjoyed a staid, homogeneous look, the yards surrounding the mostly two- and three-family tenements uniformly small but well kept. Along some streets we drove on, those houses enjoyed precious little space between them. There were few garages, almost none, and many residents electing to leave their trash and recycling containers between their front walks and driveways that were often cluttered with cars.

  It was a gray day, overcast with the promise of rain in the forecast. All that was missing for this to feel like 1950 were thick gray plumes rising from long-leveled, shuttered, or converted factories that attested to the town’s working-class roots. Somerville was only one of the Boston-area communities that boasted a strong presence and tradition of the Irish Mob
. Others included Dorchester, Charlestown, Roxbury, and South Boston itself, where the more generic term “Southie” originated. Every mystery writer knows that the Irish Mob is the oldest organized crime entity in US history, its existence dating all the way back to the early nineteenth century and owing to the wave of immigration that spawned street gangs and ethnic rivalries in cities across the East. But the Irish Mob had flourished and risen to power during Prohibition, which gave birth to the forerunners of the Mullen Gang, the McLaughlin brothers, Howie Winter and his Winter Hill Gang, and, of course, Whitey Bulger.

  To this day, these particular neighborhoods didn’t cotton much to, and remained suspicious of, strangers. And, I imagined, they didn’t actually put out the welcome signs for men in uniform driving police-issue SUVs. I noticed this fact must not have been lost on Mort, given that he had hitched his police jacket behind the holster holding his semiautomatic pistol.

  “Here we go,” Mort said, following the GPS map onto the street where Tommy Halperin lived. “You reading this the same way I am, Jessica?”

  “That depends on how you’re reading it.”

  “Assuming this thing with that book is as big as it seems, whoever’s behind the murders is hiring ex-mercenaries and special operators like Halperin to do their dirty work.”

  “An army of their own, in other words.”

  “That’s my thinking.”

  “Mine, too.”

  Mort snailed his SUV to a halt just past the driveway attached to a three-story tenement matching Tommy Halperin’s address. A single car was squeezed off to the left to allow others to park alongside it. A big muscle car I thought was a Dodge Charger, complete with massive tires and windows that looked painted black. Close your eyes and it wasn’t hard to picture old Buick Roadmaster station wagons and the like dotting driveways like this years before, vehicles in which entire families were routinely packed with luggage so high in the back that the driver couldn’t see out the rear window.

  I reached into my bag upon exiting Mort’s SUV and his eyes followed me to the car.

  “Jessica?”

  “Just a minute,” I said, crouching by a rear tire of the Charger.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, really,” I told him, standing back up.

  I knew Mort didn’t believe me, and I kept my distance while following him up the steps to the front porch. If it turned out Tommy Halperin was my attacker from a few nights back, he would almost surely recognize me, but not Mort necessarily. And I felt certain that police knocking on his door was nothing new for him.

  “Stay back, Jessica,” Mort ordered, even though I already was.

  He opened the storm door and knocked on the wood-frame door inside it, painted the same drab gray color as the rest of the house.

  “Police, Mr. Halperin. Open the door, please.”

  No response.

  “We have a few questions for you, Mr. Halperin. Just routine,” Mort added, raising his voice to make sure he was heard.

  I caught a flicker of motion through one of two twin windows on either side of the door. Something about that motion seemed all wrong, triggering an instinctive response. Before I knew it, I had charged up the last few steps and slammed into Mort, shoving him away from both the door and the window through which I’d glimpsed the figure.

  BOOM!

  The blast reverberated in my eardrums, accompanied by a shower of splinters and shards blown outward at about the level where Mort’s head had just been.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We tumbled over a plastic table topped with a layer of dirt and grime, taking a pair of light matching chairs over with us to the porch floor.

  “Are you all right? Are you all right?” Mort demanded, working to free his gun at the awkward angle at which the tumble had left us.

  He couldn’t reclaim his feet and free the pistol at the same time, so he first focused on rising. Then he stooped to help me to my feet, drawing his pistol in the same moment the Dodge Charger with the blacked-out windows screeched out of the driveway, its massive tires churning through a cloud of smoke. The car tore away down the street, riding that same cloud with Tommy Halperin behind the wheel, no doubt.

  He’d tried to kill us with a shotgun blast before fleeing, and Mort was left with gun in hand watching the Charger whipsaw around a corner up the street; he wasn’t about to start firing in a densely populated neighborhood where a stray bullet might find its way through a window or wall.

  “Somerville Police?”

  “Guess we should’ve called them earlier,” Mort said, yanking his cell phone from his pocket while holstering his pistol.

  I saw faces pressed against glass in some of the surrounding homes, a few doors opening, and people actually emerging from others.

  “Jessica!” Mort called when he saw me heading down from the porch toward the driveway.

  I heard his footsteps thudding after me, catching up as I reached the driveway and turned my gaze downward.

  “It worked!” I realized.

  “What?”

  “Old trick I used in a book once,” I told him, gesturing toward a thin red line bleeding out of the driveway and following the same path the Charger had blazed up the street. “Nail polish. I put a large bottle under one of the rear tires.”

  “So it would end up coated with the stuff.” He nodded.

  I flashed my fingernails. “See, my favorite color. Red.”

  He shrugged, looking off down the street, as if to follow Tommy Halperin’s trail. “Why am I not surprised?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Mort lurched behind the wheel of his SUV; the engine was revving before I got my door closed and seat belt fastened. His tires were smoking as he spun into a U-turn and, with sirens screaming, took off down the street, following the thin red line of nail polish the Charger had left in its wake.

  “You would’ve made a good cop,” Mort said, meaning it as a compliment.

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I like people too much.”

  “I don’t like people?”

  “I have trouble believing anyone I like is capable of doing something bad.”

  “Sounds strange given your experience.”

  “I like keeping things black and white in my books. The real world is much grayer.”

  “Not as much as you think.”

  Mort followed the trail of nail polish through the narrow streets and tightly clustered neighborhoods of Somerville until it thinned, dissipated, and then vanished. It made no sense to me why Tommy Halperin would’ve weaved his Dodge Charger through this warren of roads when heading straight for Route 93 should have made for a much better strategy.

  Whatever the reason, we were about to learn it. Mort continued along the route until it brought us down a street perpendicular to the one where the Charger was parked almost in the middle of the road.

  Mort veered sharply to the side of the street, threw the SUV into park, and went for his gun.

  “Slow down,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll wait for Somerville PD before I approach.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Look closer.”

  He took off his sunglasses and squinted, eying the blackout glass on the driver’s side. “Is that . . .”

  “Sure looks like it, Mort: a bullet hole.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We still waited for the Somerville police to arrive before approaching the vehicle. Such displays of patience are hardly part of my nature, but this wasn’t the kind of murder investigation I was used to becoming embroiled in, fraught with danger and my own life having already hung in the balance.

  Somerville squad cars came in full force from all directions, each officer who emerged from his or her cruiser angrier than
the last that a pair of outsiders, one who wasn’t even a cop, had stumbled into a murder on their turf. They gave Mort short shrift, the on-scene supervisor asking again and again what had brought him here. Mort’s answers remained vague. Meanwhile, the supervisor refused to talk to me initially and seemed intent on pretending I wasn’t even there.

  While he continued to pester Mort about being out of his jurisdiction and breaking protocol by not informing the locals of his presence in town, I loitered and studied the crime scene for myself. All indications pointed to the fact that Tommy Halperin had been shot by someone either standing outside the car on the passenger side or seated within it. He’d suffered a single wound to the temple by a bullet of a caliber sufficient to blow a golf-ball-sized hole out of the driver’s side window, against which Halperin’s head was resting. I spared myself a closer inspection of the Charger’s cab and busied myself instead with trying to picture what had happened.

  Halperin recognizes me standing outside his house and blows a hole in his own door with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  Then he flees not for the highway but here. To someone, based on the positioning of his Charger, whom he was expecting to pick up.

  But his would-be passenger kills Halperin instead of joining him.

  The second attacker from the other night maybe, clearly still alive and now on the run.

  I made a mental bet with myself that whoever it was would have a background similar to Tommy Halperin’s, another man with a military and mercenary background familiar with killing for a living.

  I felt the cell phone vibrating in my bag and removed it to see I’d already missed four calls from Harry McGraw, but I managed to answer the fifth just in time.