I saw him give the hint of a smile.
Willie Shakespeare sure was right about lawyers.
I turned to them on my way out of the room and said, “Just one more thing. Do either of you gentlemen know where I can get scrod here in Boston?”
I left without waiting for an answer.
Back in my cubicle at the Homicide Unit, I Googled Stewart’s lawyer, Gilbert Norquist. No surprises: Phillips Exeter Academy prep school, Harvard undergrad, where he was on the crew and squash team, Harvard Law, clerked for a Supreme Court justice … Gag me with a spoon. Or maybe Norquist was one of those stolen-valor creeps and he really got his college degree from an online diploma mill, one of which had been owned by the current president of these United States, and then he went to law school on Granada. But probably not. You didn’t learn to say “aforementioned” at those schools.
I realized that Stewart Leverton had not suggested that Scooter Lowry or June Dumont might have a motive for ordering the hit on Uncle Henry, or that it might be someone outside the family. Definitely significant.
Another conversation with Libby Leverton who, so far, was not lawyered up, seemed to be in order, so I called her at home. My buddy Jeeves the butler answered and, what a surprise, wanted to know what my call was regarding.
“Tell Mrs. Leverton I’m with The Mayflower Society,” I said. “And we believe that one of her ancestors might have crossed the pond on that noble ship. If she can document that, we’d like her to attend our next meeting at Plymouth Rock. She’d be eligible to join our society. We have tee shirts and hats.”
I’d read about The Mayflower Society in that Boston guide book in my hotel room. Sounded like a real fun group. Did they have annual conventions in Las Vegas, get liquored up, put lampshades on their heads, bet the red, and play the slots like our nation’s police chiefs? Probably not. More likely, they met at the Mayflower House Museum in Plymouth, sipped tea, and gave a prize to the member who did the best British accent.
“One moment, please,” Jeeves, who was now a person of interest, said.
Libby came on the line and said, “Yes?”
“It’s your old pal, Jack Starkey,” I said. “Do you think the Red Sox have a shot at the pennant next year?”
“I don’t think we should be talking, Detective Starkey,” she said.
She obviously didn’t follow baseball.
“But I so enjoyed our last chat, Libby,” I said. “I have a few more questions.”
“Stewart told me you’d been here at the house and then met with him at his lawyer’s office,” she said. “He said I should never talk to you again. He was quite upset about my Florida trip.”
“So you didn’t tell him you’d visited me? I thought he arranged your flight on his corporate jet and hired a limo.”
“I arranged that trip through Stewart’s executive assistant,” Libby explained. “I told her the trip was confidential for a reason I could not disclose.”
“She’d do that for you?”
“Yes, because I once did her a favor.”
I didn’t ask what that favor was because it was unimportant to my agenda. The important fact was that she hadn’t told Stewart about coming to see me and naming Scooter as the likely culprit. But now he knew it because I’d spilled the Boston baked beans.
“I’m interested about why you didn’t want your husband to know about your visit,” I said.
“I knew he wouldn’t want me meddling in your investigation.”
“Because?”
“Because he’d worry that suggesting Scooter was involved in the murders could cause legal problems for us. For example, a civil suit brought by Scooter if he wasn’t guilty.”
That made some kind of sense. Maybe.
“I flew to California to talk to Scooter,” I told her. “I don’t think he was involved.”
“Did you tell him what I’d said about him?” she asked.
“Yes. I felt that I had to. To explain why I was there.”
“Oh, my,” she said.
Oh, my, indeed.
“By the way,” she said, “I already am a member of The Mayflower Society.”
Having set me straight, she hung up.
23.
Rube Goldberg, at Your Service
On my flight back to Fort Myers, I attempted to diagram the hot mess my case had become on a yellow legal pad I’d brought along in my overnight bag. I drew columns for all the suspects, possible motives, cities and police jurisdictions involved. I thought about having a column to list meals, but there was not enough room on the page.
Often, on those TV cop shows, the detective has all that kind of data written on a whiteboard on a wall in the squad room, plus photos of the victims and suspects pinned to a corkboard. He stares at it for long hours, rubbing his chin, and suddenly has an epiphany. He slaps his forehead. Ah ha! Of course! Why didn’t I see it before! Then he takes his Magic Marker, draws arrows connecting the relevant boxes, and the case is solved.
My diagram looked like the sketch of a Rube Goldberg machine that would perform a simple task using an impossibly complicated mechanism: Gears were turned, chutes and ladders came into play, water rushed down a sluice, bells rang and whistles blew, a dove was released from a cage and, at the end of all that, a little flag waved.
I was in an aisle seat. I noticed that a woman in the window seat, with the middle seat open, was surreptitiously glancing at my legal pad, so I drew a smiley face saying “Hi!”
Her face reddened and she looked out the window, maybe searching for skywriting to peek at. I put the legal pad back into my briefcase and for the rest of the flight I played blackjack on my cell phone. The woman in the aisle seat studiously avoided watching. I knew it was killing her.
Back home, I checked in with Sam at the bar, visited with Tom Sullivan and Cubby Cullen, spent some quality time with Marisa, which involved walks along the beach, fine dining, and you-know-what. I explained to Joe my cat where I’d been all that time and why. He didn’t seem to be very interested because, before my tale was done, he went to sleep on the galley bench.
Three days later, I sat in my usual booth at The Drunken Parrot and resumed editing Stoney’s Downfall with the deadline breathing hard upon my neck. I picked up the story at the point where Stoney had been told by his snitch, Jake the Snake, that Father Ferguson had been killed by a leg-breaker sent by a bookie he was in debt to, and not by the prime suspect, Roland Jeffries:
The job now was to figure out which bookie owned Father Ferguson’s gambling debts. In Chicago, that narrowed it down to a large portion of the underworld population.
Where to begin? With police arrest records of bookies who’d been caught and charged with illegally accepting bets, Stoney decided.
He sat in front of his desktop computer and logged into the departmental database. The search turned up too many names to deal with, so he narrowed it to only include people with multiple arrests within the previous three years who were not incarcerated. That produced a more manageable list. He decided to start with the top ten, based upon numbers of arrests.
Number one was a guy named Harry Del Monte. Like the ketchup, Stoney thought. Stoney was a Heinz man, not that it mattered, because if Harry was related to the Del Monte ketchup family, he wouldn’t be taking sports bets in Chicago.
Harry’s last known address was an upscale condo building on Michigan Avenue. His bookie business must be doing well, Stoney reflected. The record also reported that Del Monte owned a bar called The Four Aces on Wells Street. The name sounded familiar to Stoney. He’d been there a few years ago, when one customer stabbed another to death in a dispute over the last available barstool. The murder weapon was a Swiss Army knife. Short blade. Many stabs. The corkscrew came into play.
The Four Aces was a good place to start, Stoney decided. He drove there and parked his unmarked brown Taurus out front beside a fire hydrant. He went inside and breathed in the aroma of stale beer and cigarette smoke. If nothing else, he could
bust Del Monte for violating the city’s no-smoking law.
The Four Aces looked like any other sports bar in the city, its main feature being the many large-screen TVs which were tuned to various sporting events and were being watched by customers, aka illegal gambling clients, aka suckers.
Stoney took a seat at the bar. There were several open stools, which diminished the chance of a knife fight. The nearest TV was tuned to a soccer game. He considered soccer to be the second most boring of all sports, behind curling. Players ran around for what seemed an eternity, dribbling, passing, and heading the ball, until finally someone scored a goal, making the final tally one-zip. In a real barn burner, the ending score might be two-zip, or two-to-one. This game was taking place in England, Stoney could tell, because of the kinds of products being advertised, including Newcastle Brown Ale, which, he noticed, was available at The Four Aces on tap.
The bartender came over. Stoney ordered a Newcastle. When it arrived, he asked the bartender, a skinny young man with a nose ring, “Is the proprietor on the premises?”
The question was met with a blank stare. Stoney figured the guy didn’t understand the two “p” words, so he rephrased the question: “Is Harry Del Monte here?”
“Yeah, he’s in the back,” the kid bartender said, then just stood there looking at Stoney.
This witness needs prompting, Stoney thought, so he said, “If it’ s not too much trouble, can you get him for me?”
The kid shrugged, which could have meant yes, or no. Finally, he came out from behind the bar and walked down a hallway to the back of the establishment. He returned a few minutes later, went back behind the bar, and began washing glasses without telling Stoney if Del Monte was available or not.
Just for the hell of it, Stoney asked him, “What kind of ketchup do you serve here?”
His answer was “Huh?”
Before Stoney could repeat the question, a man appeared from the back hallway, scanned the barroom, and walked over to Stoney. He looked like a man who needed to hire muscle to collect debts because he had none. Muscles, not debts. He was of less-than-medium height, in his fifties, bald, with a beer belly that jiggled when he walked, and the pasty white complexion of an indoor worker, which bookies are.
“Darrell says someone wants to see me,” Del Monte said. “That you?”
“I’m the one,” Stoney answered.
“About what?”
“Guy I know says I can find some action here.”
“What guy and what kind of action?” Del Monte asked.
“A guy who wants to remain anonymous and the action being wagering on sporting events,” Stoney answered.
“Anonymous doesn’t cut it and betting is illegal,” Del Monte said. “So if that’s all you got …”
“I got one more thing,” Stoney said, and flashed his gold shield.
I heard someone say my name and looked up from the manuscript. It was Alice Radinsky, my cook. She was holding a plate with something in a hamburger bun.
“I think I’ve finally got it,” she said.
“Got what, Alice?”
“The recipe for those sloppy joe sandwiches you told me about, the ones they serve at that Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West. I called there and the cook said he couldn’t give me the recipe. No surprise. I won’t give out my recipe for creamed chipped beef on toast, beloved by battalions of gyrenes. So I’ve been experimenting.”
She put the plate in front of me. “See what you think.”
I picked up the sandwich, took a bite, and said, “No reason for me to ever go to Key West again.”
24.
Lien on Me
Lucy Gates came through for me once again. I’d called and asked her to “drill down” into Stewart Leverton’s business dealings. She reported that Leverton Properties was known for perpetually stiffing its subcontractors and for violating city construction codes, and that, over the last year or so, those nonpayments had gotten worse. I needed to find out if that was because the company had a money problem that prompted its owner to order Henry Wilber-force’s murder so his wife could get an expected inheritance.
If it looks like a clue, smells like a clue, and walks like a clue, it’s a clue. Or not.
Libby was not the kind of person to hire a hit man, it was clear by then. If it came to light, she would have been drummed out of The Mayflower Society. How very embarrassing. But she would know if Stewart was financially strapped and that their best source of funds for them was Uncle Henry’s estate. I now didn’t believe that Libby really kept her trip to see me secret from Stewart. More likely, they both decided she should tell me that because her accusation of Scooter would seem more credible if I thought she was having a crisis of conscience. They were in it together.
Sherlock Holmes told his sidekick Doctor Watson: “How often have I said to you when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Elementary.
In a real-life whodunit, half the job is figuring out whodunit. The other half is proving it.
I caught a flight from Fort Myers to Boston, which was beginning to feel like my second home. After Lucy’s report on Stewart’s problems with his subcontractors, I decided I’d start by interviewing them to try to gauge the magnitude of the financial bind he was in and see where that led.
We landed at Logan and I called Danny O’Rourke from the taxi. He said that my cubicle wasn’t available because Detective Steve Bancroft had finally passed his kidney stone and was back on the job, but I could use O’Rourke’s desk because he’d be out on a case for a while.
I went into the headquarters building and took the elevator up to the Homicide Unit. O’Rourke wasn’t there, but Steve Bancroft was at his desk. I introduced myself and said, “I kept your chair warm for you.”
He was a man of about fifty, wearing an expensive glen-plaid suit with a white button-down oxford-cloth shirt and a blue tie. He swiveled his chair around and said, “If you ever get a kidney stone, pal, shoot yourself.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I told him.
“I was just going to get a cup of coffee,” he said. “Join me?”
“Love to,” I said.
We went to the coffee room. Bancroft knew how to work the espresso machine and asked if I wanted coffee or “one of those foo-foo drinks.”
“When you put it that way, make it a coffee,” I answered.
When he’d extricated two cups of coffee from the machine, he went to one of the cabinets, opened it, moved a stack of dishes, and came out with two glazed doughnuts. He winked at me and said, “Everyone has their own hidey-hole.”
We went back to his cubicle. I pushed O’Rourke’s chair over to where I could chat with Bancroft as we had our coffee and doughnuts.
“Danny told me about your case, Jack,” Bancroft said. “Where does it stand?”
I explained where I was with Stewart and Libby Leverton.
“Danny’s in the middle of a big investigation,” he said. “Someone murdered a Catholic priest. But I’m in between cases, so I can go with you to talk to those subcontractors if you want.”
Wow. The murder of a Catholic priest. Just like in Bill’s new novel. Life imitates art.
“Sure, that’d be great,” I told him. “If only to help me find them.”
“Roger that,” he said. “Getting around downtown can be a bit tricky.”
I followed Bancroft outside to the parking lot and we got into his unmarked brown Taurus. First stop was a company called Shamrock Electric in Brookline.
Shamrock Electric was located in a single-story, tan-brick building on Boylston Street, just one street over from the ballpark. Bancroft parked on the street in front of the building in a legal space, no fire hydrant or loading zone being available. I’d called to make an appointment with the company’s owner, a man named Tiny Berger. In my experience, a man named Tiny was anything but. Which proved to be the case when the receptionist told us Berger was in the shop, “
Right through that door.”
The shop was an open, expansive space consisting of rows of metal shelves holding various electrical components and an open area with benches where several women were seated, at work assembling electrical thingies.
A very large man wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots was standing beside a bench, chatting with one of the women. We walked over and I said, “Mr. Berger? I’m Detective Starkey and this is Detective Steve Bancroft.”
“Mr. Berger was my father,” he said. “Call me Tiny.”
“Works for me,” Bancroft said.
“You said you wanted to talk about that sonofabitch Stewart Leverton,” Tiny told me.
“I’m investigating a murder in Naples, Florida, and Leverton might have some information about it,” I responded.
“Let’s go to my office,” Not-So-Tiny said, and we followed him to a room in a corner of the shop. It had unpainted Sheetrock walls with a window overlooking the shop floor. We all went inside. Tiny closed the door, sat behind his cluttered desk, and nodded us toward two side chairs. When Tiny dropped into his desk chair it made a groaning sound as if protesting the load.
When we were seated, Tiny said, “Leverton Properties hired us about two years ago to do all the electrical work for a big shopping mall development in Woburn. We did the job and still haven’t been paid. He claims we did shoddy work and he had to hire another electrical contractor to redo everything. Which is complete bull-crap. He owes us north of a hundred grand. We slapped a mechanic’s lien on the property, which doesn’t get us paid, it only means we can ask the court for a judicial foreclosure sale and get our money from the proceeds. But that takes time. Years. That’s what guys like Leverton count on. They either hold onto our money, interest free, until it’s convenient for them to pay, or they negotiate a settlement for a lot less than what’s owed.”
Tiny opened a wooden humidor on his desk, extracted a cigar, used a silver cutting tool to snip off the tip and a butane lighter to fire it up, took a luxurious inhale, and asked if we’d like one of his stogies. “Cohibas,” he said. “Got a pal who brings them to me from Toronto, Cuban cigars still being illegal in this country.”
The Now-And-Then Detective Page 15
