Act of God (24 page)

Cross hung up, tore the sheet off the pad, and flicked the paper to me. “Read my writing?”

“He’s just down in Squantum.”

A powdered-sugar took its last journey. “Saved you some gas, too.”

“A
DA MEAGHER.”

“That has such a personal ring to it.”

“John. What’s up?”

“You pressed?”

“A little.”

“How about dinner tonight?”

“Tonight? Sure.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“It’s just … no, dinner’s fine. Where?”

“How about Commonwealth Brewery?”

“As long as there’s nothing going on at the Garden.”

“Nance, it’s July. The Celtics and the Bruins have a ways to go before they play again.”

“Then great. What time?”

“I’m going to be driving in on the Expressway, so how does seven-thirty sound?”

“Perfect. I’ve got some computer research to do, anyway.”

“You’ve got a computer case?”

“Oh, no. This is a legal research thing. You tell the computer to search the decided cases in the data bank for two phrases within a certain number of words of each other.”

“Why?”

“So you can get all the cases that, say, talk about both ‘cocaine’ and the ‘plain view exception’ to search warrants. That’s not a great example, but do you see the time it can save?”

“I guess so.”

A change in her voice. “John, did you see the doctor today?”

“And the physical therapist.”

“And?”

“I’ll tell you all about it over dinner.”

“Fine. Oh, and John?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for calling.”

“I wanted to.”

“I know.”

Expressway south to Quincy Shore Drive. After crossing the Neponset River, a left onto East Squantum Street. Past the entrance to Marina Bay, a mammoth beige condo building with a slate roof that overlooks the tidal flats. Then onto the peninsula of land called Squantum that’s the easternmost part of Norfolk County, cradling Boston’s Suffolk County on the west and south.

On Dorchester Street, I paralleled the bay for eight or ten blocks before winding up Bellevue Road, passing a grassy strip called John R. Nelson Park and the Star of the Sea Church. The homes ranged from converted cottages and disguised trailers to sprawling contemporaries with cupolas and decks offering vistas of the bay and maybe even Boston harbor over the roofs of their downslope neighbors. There were anchors for decoration on the lawns, lobster pots for cocktail tables on the patios, and ten or twelve different kinds of weathervanes spinning wildly in the gusty winds.

Crisscrossing, I found the street I wanted, the name FOLINO on a post with a smaller PRIVATE WAY sign above it. The macadam angled down toward the water, and I left the Prelude as much off the narrow driveway as I could.

He was sitting on a webbed lawn chair, his bricked patio commanding a view of the ocean as far as the horizon, a harbor island or two visible to the north. The house was one of the converted cottages, green clapboard with white trim, a wind sock standing straight out from its mooring. He’d probably go medium height and a hundred-fifty pounds, his age in the fifties, the facial features even, the hair mostly gray. Wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt over cutoff shorts and shower thongs, he had hairy calves and a newspaper on his lap, the right hand not visible as he distracted me by waving with his left.

“Help you?”

“Angelo Folino?”

“Sign kind of gives it away.”

I stopped a respectable distance from him. “My name’s John Cuddy. Bonnie Cross from Boston Homicide and I have a case up there I’m hoping you can help us on.”

“I got a call. ID?”

Without moving, I said, “Okay if I reach for it?”

Folino smiled, glancing down at his lap. “Guess I’m giving away lots of things, these days.”

“No. The wave was right. It’s just that Holman at your place wouldn’t tell me anything, and I’ve known some retired cops here and there.”

“You yourself?”

“Just military.”

“MP, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

He watched me for a minute, saw something else, and nodded, a different look in his eyes. “Pull up a chair.”

There were three more like his folded against a wall of the house. I opened one and set it conversationally to his left.

Folino lifted the newspaper, then carefully laid the Smith & Wesson Detective’s Special that had been under it on the brick next to his right foot.

I said, “Not that it’s any of my business, but you expecting somebody in particular?”

A shrug that included face as well as shoulders. “One of the guys on the force got the word through a source that a hard-case I put away’s out and maybe thinking about it.”

“You get a lot of that?”

“What, the threats? Oh, yeah. You get ’em all the time, working a small city like Quincy. It’s not like Boston, where usually there’s a little space between the cops and the perps. Down here, you shop at the same stores and drink in the same taverns. One guy I put away for armed robbery, his wife’d pour my coffee every morning, this little five-stool joint near the station.”

I swung my head around. “Pretty place you have here.”

“Yeah, in the family since my grandpa. Come over on the boat, learned carpentry, built this place when all you needed was hammer and nails and sweat, no permit or certificate or variance. My parents winterized it, and I grew up here. When they died, well, I couldn’t think of any place else to live. Hey, can I get you something to drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure? I don’t keep any hard stuff in the house, but I got some cold wine, iced tea maybe?”

“No, but thanks.”

Folino seemed to prepare himself a bit. “So, you’re the P.I., right?”

“Right.”

“Let me guess. Cross, she doesn’t give two shits about whatever you’re working on, but she owed you a favor, so she made the call to Holman, right?”

“Close.”

“She cared about whatever you’ve got, she’d be here herself.”

“She would.”

“So, what is it you’ve got?”

“Not much, but I think it might have to do with Barbra Proft.”

“Proft. The one who went off the building six, seven years back.”

Folino didn’t phrase it like a question. I said, “Almost six, from the papers.”

“The papers, I don’t remember they did much with the case. Just one day in the
Herald
and the
Globe,
two in the
Patriot Ledger.
”

“Did it merit more?”

He moved his tongue around inside his mouth. “What makes you ask?”

“The daughter of the dead woman is missing. The son of the dead woman hired me to find her.”

“The daughter was the one with the funny name.”

“Darbra.”

“Right, Darbra. Christ, she was a cold one.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, we get the call. A neighbor in the building’s looking out her window, making breakfast, and she sees this Barbra Proft’s body on the ground. Medical Examiner figured she fell some time the day before, but she took her dive into the window well, and nobody noticed her till the next morning.”

“Nobody heard a scream or anything?”

“We had two neighbors, both retired, both with windows onto the well. One’s deaf as a stone, the other’s watching
Hawaii Five-O
and God knows what else and said she didn’t notice any ‘unusual’ screams. Some commentary, huh?”

“So time of death’s screwed up.”

“Enough so everybody’s—I mean your Darbra there, the brother—I don’t get his name.”

“William.”

“William, even the spooky aunt from up in witch country. Everybody’s got an alibi or doesn’t. It’s not like on TV, you know, where everybody can account for their whereabouts and you got to figure who’s lying. I mean, who remembers where they were, and how can you pin them down if the M.E. can’t give you a decent time of death?”

“You can’t.”

“Of course you can’t. Besides, we didn’t have any physical evidence. No bruises, nothing missing, nothing where it shouldn’t be.”

“You got there before the staties and the lab people?”

“Yeah. Four, five minutes after the neighbor called it in, we’re at the scene. The roof—it was ten stories, I think. I haven’t been by the building in a couple, three years, but I’m pretty sure it was ten. After about five floors, though, might as well be fifty.”

“I know.”

“Right. Sorry, I forgot you’d been in.”

“Didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. Truth is, I’m on my own here, so a little interruption’s kind of a nice change of pace, you know?”

It was more a statement than an opening, so I didn’t take it. “Nothing up on the roof, then?”

“Nothing but what you’d expect. A lounge version of what we’re sitting on now, near enough to the edge. Some piping they had exposed there, right around the ankles, if you were walking. All kinds of signs, DON’T GO NEAR THE EDGE or some shit like that. You live there a year, though, you don’t even notice the signs anymore, much less read them or do what they say. Even had a drink, the ice melted, decedent’s prints all over the glass.”

“Nothing in the drink?”

“Gin. Just about straight, you figure she must have had a couple cubes in it, chill the booze for her a little, hot day like it was.”

“And Proft was sunbathing?”

“Yeah, at least she was wearing a bikini. Your Darbra told me she still had a good figure, too, but except for the legs, which looked all right, you couldn’t tell, her hitting facedown and all. That’s what I meant about cold.”

“Darbra being a cold one?”

“Yeah. The staties, they like to leave the notification to us. We found out from the decedent’s address book the kids’ names—they weren’t exactly kids, your Darbra being early twenties, though she looked older. The brother William, only late twenties, I think, but he could pass for a lot older, kind of … pasty. I saw him, I thought he might have done some time, till you talk to him and realize he’d catch a shank the first day on the yard just for being such a tight-ass.”

“You run him anyway?”

“Yeah. Clean. Back then, anyway. When I told him—oh, sorry, I was talking about your Darbra, got sidetracked.”

“That’s okay.”

“It’s just that an old case, it comes back to you in chunks like that, you know? It’s not like it’s a whole story, more like little scenes.”

“You saw Darbra face-to-face?”

“Yeah. The address book, people almost always put the relatives under the right letter for the last name, but use only the first names. So I looked right away under “P,” and found just “Darbra” and “William” with no last names. I remember this decedent, she had nice handwriting, flowery like an old woman who learned her penmanship real well.”

“What was Darbra’s reaction?”

“Well, that’s what I mean. I caught her at work—some kind of temp job, I think—and I broke the news the way you try to, kind of simple and quick but clear, so they don’t have to try and ask you any questions? But she asked me how it happened, and I told her it looked like her mom was sunbathing and tripped, and your Darbra, she says, ‘Her body, it always got her into trouble.’ Just like that, no tears, no break in the voice. Just the observation there.”

I had the feeling Folino had been one hell of a cop. “And it rubbed you the wrong way.”

“You could say that. Me, the hairs on my arms always tingled, I got somebody I thought was hinky. For you it’s rubbing?”

“More like something off in the stomach.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I knew a guy was like that. Narcotics. He said it was like he’d just had an extra dessert, something too sweet rolling around down there. Anyway, this Darbra, she was cold, but even so, I thought it might be better to have the son identify for us, being a man and all. So I left my partner with your Darbra, take down her story, and went out to him—a druggist back then.”

“And still.”

“They didn’t get along, William and her.”

“And still again.”

Folino stopped. “But the brother hires you to look for her?”

“Insurance.”

He looked out to the ocean. “He’s got a policy on her.”

“The aunt does, actually, William as beneficiary. She kept them up as a promise to her dead sister.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t want to testify to it, but there was more than a little insurance back then, too.”

“The brother told you?”

“Not right away. I come into the drugstore where he is, and I break it to him same way as to her. I remember that, because after your Darbra, I wanted to see what his reaction would be, so I used the exact same words with both of them. And he says, ‘How far did she fall?’ And I say, ‘Ten stories,’ and he says, ‘Well, then, there won’t be much to identify, will there?’ ”

“Cold runs in the family.”

“Except for the aunt. Maybe the dead woman, too, for all I know.”

“The aunt was different?”

“Yeah. I didn’t really need her for anything, but you want to do the right thing, not leave anybody up in the air, so I asked William if it was okay to see—I don’t get her name, either.”

“Darlene.”

“Oh, right, right. That’s where the daughter’s name came from.” A couple of sailboats did a ritual dance on the bay, sails changing color a little as they wheeled in the wind. “Christ, I should have remembered that.”

“It was six years ago.”

“Yeah, but it was my last—Jeez, I was about to say ‘homicide.’ A city like Quincy, you don’t get so many. I don’t want to say you’re nostalgic about them or anything, but there’s something to it when you don’t get a hundred a year like Boston or—what, four hundred down in D.C.?”

“More, I heard.”

“Christ, can you imagine that? I mean, D.C. proper, it’s not even that big.”

“I know.”

“Well, back to the aunt. I see her and I tell her the same way. Figure to see if it
really
runs in the family, the cold. Well, she’s just the opposite. I mean, she goes near berserk on me, crying and screaming about how the kids must have done it, the kids did her in.”

“Like, acting together, you mean?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t know what the aunt meant right at that moment, you know? She was just screaming whatever came into her head. Took me half an hour, more just to get her calmed down enough to tell me about the policies.”