I was staring at the espresso machine, with all its bells and whistles, valves and chrome spouts, without the faintest idea about how to get a cup of coffee out of it when a woman of about forty came in, looked at me, and said, “I’m Alison. Call me Al. Can I be of assistance?”
A gold detective’s shield in a black leather case was clipped to the waistband of her slacks. “I’m Jack,” I responded. “And you sure can. I didn’t go to MIT, but I’d like a cup of coffee.”
She smiled. “Done and done. Would you like espresso, cappuccino, a latte, or maybe a macchiato? I can also do a Frappuccino or herbal tea.”
“I’m more in the mood for an actual cup of coffee,” I said sheepishly.
“Oh, you mean a Caffè Americano,” she told me.
I didn’t, but I was encouraged by the “Americano” part, so I said, “That’d be good, thank you.”
Al fired up the machine with the skill of an engineer at the controls of a steam locomotive. Maybe she’d spent her junior year in Italy. After much whooshing and gurgling, out into a white ceramic mug with a Boston PD logo on it came what I recognized as an actual cup of coffee.
“Milk’s in the fridge, sugar and sweetener in the cupboard,” she told me as she began to fix one of the more complex drinks for herself.
“I take it black,” I told her. “By the way, I’m Jack Starkey, a detective from Florida.”
“I heard we’re having a visitor,” she said. “You need more coffee, come find me.”
I took the mug back to Bancroft’s cubicle. I sat at the desk, fired up the computer, and searched the departmental database to see if Stewart Leverton had a criminal record. As I expected, he didn’t, and neither did Libby. Not yet.
I finished the coffee, took the elevator back to the lobby, and asked the receptionist where I could find the motor pool. She directed me out through a back door to the employees’ parking lot. There was a booth with a middle-aged uniformed officer in it. He must have screwed something up royally to be assigned to parking lot duty. I told him that Detective O’Rourke had reserved a car for me.
He took a set of keys off a pegboard, handed them to me, and said, “Space ten. Bring it back with a full tank.”
Just like Hertz, except he didn’t ask if I wanted the supplemental insurance.
Space ten held a chocolate-brown Ford Taurus with black-wall tires and a whip antenna on the roof. It didn’t need Boston PD markings to scream out “Police! Halt!”
I decided I’d begin Plan D, if my plan count was accurate, by cruising past the Leverton home on Beacon Hill. I entered the address of their row house on Beacon Street into Google Maps on my cell phone, fired up the Taurus’s big Police Interceptor engine, and waited for the Google lady to tell me which way to go. But the only voice I heard was that of the dispatcher on the police radio. The Google lady was either on a break or she didn’t do Boston.
I opened MapQuest on my cell phone and entered the Levertons’ address, which produced written directions and a little map with a bold black line showing my route. I backed out of the parking space and drove onto the street. After ten minutes of trying to follow the directions through winding, crooked streets, I was not at my destination. In fact, I had no idea where I was. The street signs were in Chinese. Maybe I could find my way back to that neighborhood for dinner that night, but probably not. However, I could stop to get a carryout menu from one of the zillion Chinese restaurants and order a delivery to the Hyatt Regency.
With that in mind, I pulled over in front of Yee’s Noodle House, parked at the curb, and spotted a taxi stopped across the street. I walked over and asked the driver, a man in his fifties, I thought, for directions to Beacon Hill.
He thought about that and said, “Well, that’s tricky. Boston streets began as cow paths in Colonial times. It’s a wonder that the cows ever found their barns. I used to drive a cab in New York. Now that’s a logical street pattern. Here, it’s total chaos.”
I thanked the cabbie and began to walk away when he said, “I do of course know how to get to Beacon Hill. It’s just that I can’t articulate it.”
Articulate. In Boston, everyone was either a college student or graduate, or talked like one. I had an idea: “How about if I follow you there, with your meter running?”
He shrugged and said, “Why not? A fare’s a fare.”
I gave him the address, and that’s just what we did, arriving in less than fifteen minutes, even with heavy traffic, piece of cake, without seeing any cows. We both parked at the curb. I got out of the Taurus, walked over to the taxi, and gave the cabbie his $18.25 fare, plus a $10 tip. It occurred to me that my case had become as convoluted as the streets of Boston.
The cabbie asked, “You new to the department? Most Boston cops know their way around the city.”
It was the Taurus.
“Just visiting,” I answered. “But I do know enough to get the prime rib at Fat Thomas’s Tavern.”
He said, “I like their chicken pot pie better,” and drove away.
Nice neighborhood: narrow streets with gaslights, brick sidewalks, and blocks of brick and grey-clapboard row houses, all well-maintained. The Beacon Hill Property Owners Association wouldn’t let me buy one because the Starkey family came to America via Ellis Island, not Plymouth Rock.
From the sidewalk, I studied the Levertons’ Federal Style row house: three stories, red brick, black door and shutters, six steps up from the street to a small front porch, and a brass plaque bolted to the wall beside the door that probably said: “George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Paul Revere Slept Here.” Or maybe: “No Soliciting.”
I walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. The brass plaque did not say “No Soliciting,” a good thing because I would have had to leave. It said “1783.” Like The Drunken Parrot, the Levertons’ row house probably needed a new roof after all that time.
After a few minutes, no one answered the door and came out with their hands up and confessed to the murder of Henry Wilberforce. My work there was done, at least for the moment, so I went back to the Taurus.
Next stop was Stewart Leverton’s office, which, I’d learned from the company’s website, was in a building called Exchange Place at 53 State Street. Yeah, right. I remembered the name of the taxi company that had gotten me to Beacon Hill, called it, and gave the dispatcher the Levertons’ address. The same driver showed up ten minutes later. He got out of the cab, walked over to my car, smiled, and said, “Thought we might be hearing from you again. Now where to?”
I followed the taxi to Exchange Place, paid the fare, and gave the cabbie another $10 tip. I was beginning to think of him as Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who guided Edmund Hillary to the summit of Mount Everest, which might have been easier to find than any destination in Boston because all you had to do was climb straight up.
I thought the cabbie got lost on the way because we passed some of the same buildings and street corners twice, but I let it go. He was, after all, a New Yorker, where the island of Manhattan was laid out in a uniform grid, with the streets running east and west, the avenues running north and south, and where the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.
Now and then, Marisa and I flew to New York, which the locals called “The City” as if there were no other, for a weekend of shopping, theater-going, and fine dining. As for the dining, she preferred restaurants with lots of stars and white tablecloths, like Per Se, Le Bernardin, and Guantanamera, where we didn’t go very often because it was Cuban and Marisa’s cooking was better. But sometimes she liked to see if the chef was doing anything new and noteworthy. I liked the pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s Deli, the hot dogs at Nathan’s Famous, and the steak sandwiches at the Lobel’s stand in Yankee Stadium. For one thing, you didn’t have to book a reservation at my places ten years in advance. But life was compromise. To get along, you go along. Quid pro quo. You scratch my back … and so forth.
I’d decided to use the same tactic with Stewart Leverton as I had with Alan Dumont. Show up
unannounced at his office, get in his face, and see if he exhibited any poker-game kind of “tell,” such as beginning to sob uncontrollably when I confronted him, or scream and run for it, or hold out his wrists for handcuffs. Or reach in his desk drawer for a pistol.
Another building lobby, another receptionist, another elevator up to a suite of offices, in this case, the fortieth-floor headquarters of Leverton Properties LLC.
“I’m here to see Stewart Leverton,” I told the young woman behind the second receptionist desk standing between me and my prey. I paused for the standard question.
And she asked it: “May I ask what this is regarding?”
How to answer? If I said “None of your beeswax, little lady. Tell your boss to get out here now or his ass is grass,” she’d sound the silent alarm and I’d be frog-marched to the street by building security.
“It’s a personal matter,” I told her.
She said, “I’m afraid that Mr. Leverton is gone for the day.”
“Will he be in tomorrow?” I asked her.
“I’m afraid that I don’t have that information,” she answered.
Leverton Properties LLC needed to hire a receptionist who wasn’t a scaredy-cat.
“May I tell him your name?” she asked.
“Wyatt Earp,” I said, winked at her, and hightailed it out of Dodge.
Maybe his development business was slow, or Stewart Leverton was a fast worker, to leave so early during a weekday. Or maybe he was feeling ill or went home to help his wife hang new wallpaper in the dining room. Or to retrieve false passports and a stack of cash so he and Libby could take his private jet to a country without an extradition treaty with the US.
If showing up was 80 percent of life, I needed to find a way to close the gap on the remaining 20 percent.
I decided to try the Levertons’ row house again, just in case Stewart had gone there from the office and I’d just missed him. If Magellan could circumnavigate the globe without GPS, I should be able to use dead reckoning to drive back to the Levertons’ row house without following my Sherpa guide again. At night, I could navigate by the stars, if I knew how to do that, which I did not: Twinkle, twinkle, little star, I have no idea who you are, or where I am.
I made it to my destination by stopping three times to ask directions, once from a woman pushing a baby stroller, once in a Walgreens, and the third time from a city worker just emerging from a manhole. He laughed and said it was easier to get there underground, but he did direct me to the Levertons’ row house using surface streets.
I parked the Taurus in front of a fire hydrant. A beat cop would recognize the car as a police vehicle and not issue a ticket or call for a tow. I walked up the steps of the row house and rang the doorbell. After a few moments, a very thin older man with snow-white hair and a hooked nose, dressed in butler’s garb, answered the door.
“Yes, sir?” he asked with an English accent. Central casting again.
“I was here a little while ago and no one was home,” I told him.
“I’m very sorry for your inconvenience, sir, but our doorbell was broken,” he explained. “The repairman was just here.”
“I guess that happens when doorbells get that old,” I said.
“That old, sir?”
“Installed in 1783,” I said.
He smiled, getting my joke, and said, “I should imagine it’s a bit newer than that.”
“I’d like to speak with Mr. and Mrs. Leverton,” I told him.
“I’m sorry, sir, but they are not home at present,” he said.
“Do you know when they will return?”
“The mister and missus are hosting a dinner party here tonight,” he said. “They should be here in a few hours. May I tell them your name?”
I didn’t want to warn them that they would have an extra dinner guest, so I said, “I’m Jack Stoney. I’ll catch them another time.”
Jack Stoney, my alter ego. I didn’t imagine that this English butler read Bill’s books. Probably stuck with English classics like David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights.
I found my way back to police headquarters, stopping only two times to ask directions. Progress. One time, I asked a man in his sixties walking along a sidewalk who was, I swear, dressed like a Continental soldier. I pulled up beside him, stopped, powered down the window, and said, “Pardon me, sir. Which way are the British? I’d like to head in the opposite direction.”
He laughed and said, “I’m just coming from a parade. I can assure you that the British have been thoroughly beaten and are no longer a threat to the city.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “In that case, can you direct me to police headquarters at One Schroeder Plaza?”
“Sure can,” he said, and gave me very specific directions, which I followed until I got lost.
To my good fortune, I spotted a Dunkin’ Donuts at a street corner and parked in front of it, next to a fire hydrant. Dunkin’ Donuts stores were as ubiquitous in Boston, the chain was founded nearby, as college students and seafood restaurants.
I went inside and bought two baker’s-dozen assorted from the counter girl as a gift for the Homicide Unit. Jack Starkey, always the good guest. I walked out of the store and found a Boston police officer on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle parked behind my Taurus. He was tall, in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing a white helmet with a Boston PD logo, a black leather jacket, dark blue jodhpurs with tall black boots, and sunglasses—Ray-Bans, not Oakleys. A cool dude. In my experience, motorcycle cops did the job for the outfits, mostly.
He looked at the Taurus and asked, “You on the job or did you steal this car?”
“I borrowed it for a doughnut run,” I said.
I opened one of the two boxes I was carrying, rested it on the Harley saddle, and said, “Take your pick, officer.”
“Trying to bribe a police officer is a felony,” he said as he selected a glazed raised. “I’ll let you off this time with a warning.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Can you give me directions to your headquarters while these are still fresh? I’m not from here.”
“Better follow me,” he said, and turned on the Harley’s siren and flashing lights. Officer Studley knew an emergency when he saw one.
I pulled into the police headquarters parking lot behind the Harley and turned into a staff-only space. The officer stopped his cycle, somehow maintaining his balance without putting a foot down, snapped a salute my way, and powered back out onto the street in search of real lawbreakers.
Just then, Corporal Millie Ryan pulled into the lot, driving a squad car with another officer in the passenger seat. I exited the Taurus, took the doughnut boxes from the back seat, and walked over to her car. Millie and her passenger got out and she said, “Hey, Jack. Is that evidence you’re carrying?”
Her partner was a man with sergeant’s stripes on his uniform jacket sleeves. He came around the car to provide backup, eyeing the Dunkin’ boxes.
“It is, but before I check it into the property room, would you like to have a look?” I asked Millie.
“Sure, if it won’t break the chain of custody,” she said.
I put the boxes on the trunk of their car, opened the top box as I had for the motorcycle cop, and said, “Take your pick. I won’t rat you out to Internal Affairs.”
Millie selected a white frosted with sprinkles and her partner took two chocolate-coated, saying, “Rank has its privileges.”
I followed them through a back door into the headquarters building that required a code to open and rode the elevator up to the Homicide Unit. I was on my way to the coffee room when a portly, forty-something man, dressed Rotary-Club style in a cranberry double-knit sport coat, stopped me, looked at the Dunkin’ Donuts boxes, and said, “Whoever you are, you’re always welcome here in Homicide.”
I opened one of the boxes again. He picked up a powdered-sugar doughnut, examined it, put it back in the box, brushing the powder off his hands onto the floor, picked
up a plain cake doughnut, gave it a slight squeeze, put it back, selected a jelly-filled, took a bite, smiled and said, “If you ever get pulled over for speeding in this city, tell em Tony Petrocelli says you get a free pass.”
Tony walked away with his jelly doughnut. I took the two boxes, now containing twenty-one doughnuts, to the coffee room, selected a glazed raised, partly because Tony hadn’t touched it, looked at the espresso machine, shrugged, and went to my cubicle, where I called Tom Sullivan in Naples, who asked, “How are you doing in the Hub City, Jack?”
I was aware of that nickname for Boston because of a piece in the New Yorker by John Updike, in October of 1960, about Ted Williams’s last game at Fenway Park before retiring. The article was titled “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” I considered that to be the finest piece of sports journalism I’d ever read. But I didn’t know where that nickname for the city came from, so I asked him about it.
“It’s a shortened phrase from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote, Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system,” Sullivan, the Quincy native, explained. “Anyway, what’s up?”
I told him everything that had happened since my last update.
“So you’re going to show up at the Levertons’ dinner party. And you expect to be invited in to dine with them and their guests?”
“Actually, I don’t know what to expect,” I said. “I’m making this up as I go along.”
“If you do find yourself at their dining room table, remember that the small fork is for the salad and the big spoon is for the soup.”
“I’ll do my best to not embarrass the Naples Police Department,” I promised.
“Atta boy,” he said and we ended the call.
I moved the mouse to awaken the computer from its sleep mode. There was no use trying to find out anything incriminating about the Levertons because Lucy Gates had not. I noticed an icon for Grand Theft Auto on the screen and played the game while waiting for the Levertons’ dinnertime. I’d never played that game before, but after a few minutes I decided to download it onto my laptop at home. I was getting tired of solitaire and gin rummy.
The Now-And-Then Detective Page 13
