Act of God (6 page)

“He didn’t. He figured it’s just somebody pulling a prank. They’d had a few lately, so he wanted to catch the guy or kid or whoever was doing it.”

“Quill actually see anybody?”

“He says no. He went all the way down the alley, but the guy must have gone up and over the fence and God knows where after that, maybe for some
dim sum
at the Dynasty around the corner.”

“And Bernstein joined Quill?”

“No. Bernstein says he started to go downstairs, then heard Swindell screaming.”

“And so …”

“And so Bernstein goes down the fourth floor hall to her while Quill comes up the backstairs.”

“Quill heard her, too?”

“Yeah.”

“From the first floor?”

“The sound carries down the staircase. It’s their fire stairs, they don’t have an escape because of the windows not opening.”

“So Swindell was screaming …”

“Because she’s the one found the body, and she’s screaming till she gets to the fire stairs, then opens that door and screams some more.”

“And Quill and Bernstein join her.”

“And basically destroy the fucking crime scene in the partners’ office, though truth to tell, if they hadn’t, we would have.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, you know how it is, Cuddy. Alarm goes off, here comes the fire department. Then 911 gets a call, you got uniforms and EMTs and even media swarming all over the place before one of us gets there. Then it’s like trying to orchestrate a fucking circus, all the people traipsing in and out. This one, though, it was more stupidicide.”

“The killing itself, you mean.”

“Yeah. Granted the perp must’ve panicked when he saw Rivkind still in the office, but he could’ve just run. He used the poker from the fireplace, not some weapon he brought in.”

“The poker was the murder weapon.”

“No question. From the location and angle of the wound, M.E.’s pretty sure Rivkind was at his desk, back to the door, when the killer comes in and picks up the poker. Rivkind’s turning and standing as he gets it across the left temple, goes down onto the floor.”

“Just the one blow.”

“One was enough. Fractured his skull like an eggshell.”

“How did Mrs. Rivkind take it?”

Cross started to say something, then didn’t. “You know what the hardest part of this job is, Cuddy?”

I thought back to my time as an MP in Saigon. “Notifying the families.”

“No, but I can understand why a civilian—” She shook her head. “Sorry. Forgot you were overseas. I can see what you mean. No, for us, the notification isn’t the hardest part, because it’s over quick. The people are so much in shock, they don’t get emotional right away, and we’re usually out of there before the real impact hits them. No, the tough part is dealing with the survivors, over the months and even years after the killing.”

I nodded. “You don’t think you’re going to close this one, do you?”

“FBI says something like thirty percent of all homicides nationwide never get solved. Of the ones we do close, most of them are made on eyewitnesses, which we don’t have here. Hell, there isn’t so much as a physical description of the perp, and he didn’t take anything away, not even the poker, which doesn’t have but smudges on it, no readable latents or even partials. First twenty-four, forty-eight hours, you’ve got a good chance something new’ll turn up. But now we’re at what, three weeks tomorrow? Things get awful stale, that kind of time goes by and fresh bodies come in, barking at you for attention.”

Cross shook her head. “No, that’s the hardest part, Cuddy. Getting the calls from the family when you know the case isn’t going anywhere, them asking us if we’ve checked things we already told them we checked, us telling them again. Some of the guys, they duck those calls, but I can’t. Nobody wants to talk to the survivors, but I’ve got to, you know?”

Knowing her I knew. “Anything else you can give me?”

Cross thought about it, taking another Munchkin to help her. “We ran checks on everybody. Swindell had a continued-without-a-finding on a receiving-stolen-property back fifteen years ago, not even a traffic ticket since. Nobody else showed anything, but I thought this Quill breathed a little easier when he realized we weren’t from INS.”

“You think maybe he has an immigration problem?”

“Cuddy, you didn’t know it, let me tell you. Half the brogues in this city have some kind of immigration problem, either in illegally or in legally and overstaying. Quill, though, I just had that feeling about him.”

“I appreciate it, Cross.”

“So how about your Darbra, what’s the line on her?”

“I don’t know much. She went off on vacation, she came back, then disappeared.”

“And her brother hires you to go fetch.”

“At least go find. Any other tie-ins to Ms. Proft from your end?”

“No, but she’s a flashy one.”

“I haven’t seen a picture.”

“Kind of blank face, a ‘so-what-did-I-do’ look on it. But big green eyes and legs to her chin and the kind of walk you can’t be taught.”

Cross said it like she’d once tried to learn it.

I stood up. “I find out something you should know, I’ll be in touch.”

She reached for another cholesterol ball. “Have one.”

“Thanks, but my body’s a temple.”

Cross regarded the Munchkin like it was something precious. “My body used to be a temple. Now it’s a ruins.”

I left her chewing.

“What kind of day am I having, John? Let me tell you what kind. I’m having a Sol Wachtler day in a Woody Allen week, that’s what kind of day I’m having.”

“Sorry to hear it, Mo.”

“Huh, tell me about it.” Mo Katzen interrupted himself to set down his newspaper, whisk some tobacco ash from a dead stogie off the front of his vest, and lunge for a war memorial lighter on his desk. The lighter was the only functional thing on the desk, awash in the quasi-paperwork of baseball programs, playbills, sandwich wrappers, and God knows what else from fifty years of reporting, the last ten or so at the Boston
Herald.
“I tell you, John. I’m tired, dog tired.”

Mo had been saying that since I’d met him, wearing the same outfit of the pants and vest to a three-piece suit without ever being seen in the jacket. His feet were up on a corner of his desk, the rickety manual typewriter still on the secretarial pull-tray, the old warhorse resisting computerization like it was the glue factory.

“Mo—”

“I mean, it’s not just the hearing aid, which I still got to wear, God knows why. Actually, I know why. It’s because I couldn’t hear you talking to me, I didn’t have the little bugger in. And it’s not just old age, though I’m a lot sharper than most of these little shits snickering behind their hands because they can work the computers and they think I can’t. I’ll tell you why I’m so tired, you want to know.”

“I want to know, Mo.”

“I’m so tired, John, because I find myself bereft of ideas. That’s a nice turn of phrase, don’t you think? I first heard it from an old editor I had, Bissington, Jonas Bissington, as WASP as they come, but willing to give a Jewish kid a chance if the kid was willing to work and able to write a decent lead. Bissington, he sat me down one day, and he said to me, he said, ‘Mr. Katzen’—he was a real formal guy, John, all the younger men Mr. this, all the women, younger or older, Miss this or Mrs. that. Anyway, Bissington, he says, ‘Mr. Katzen, someday this will happen to you. Someday you will be in need of a column, a story, a bylined article, whatever’—he didn’t say ‘whatever,’ John, that’s just me, giving you the sense of it—and he looked at me and he said, ‘Mr. Katzen, I stand before you, bereft of ideas. Provide me one.’ Not ‘provide me with one.’ Oh no, Bissington was a stickler. But he was dry, John, pumped dry of ideas, and I was so taken back—taken ‘aback,’ Bissington would say—that I couldn’t think of one. Not one idea, and me an energetic young man at the start of a promising career. So Bissington said to me, he said, ‘Mr. Katzen, then I shall have to stoop,
stoop,
to reading the …’—and Bissington paused, John, and he made a face you wouldn’t want to see over a meal. Then he finished by saying, ‘… the
class
-i-fieds.’ I tell you, all things considered, it was not a pretty scene.”

“I can imagine. Why—”

“Imagine? Imagi
-nation,
that’s the problem, John. To get a new idea, you have to have imagination, an imagination, some imagination. Well, I got to tell you, I’m all out. Not that there haven’t been plenty of newsworthy events. Last Wednesday, we had those three honor students killed in the drunk driving thing on Route 2. That night the North Shore woman supposedly lost overboard from a sailboat turns up tied and weighted down next to some lobsterman’s traps. And then Friday, that airliner heading from here to D.C. hits the flock of geese down there, crashes, and kills half the people on board. Picture that, John, a flock of birds. I got a friend on the state police I can call on the students thing, another friend in the Coast Guard on the woman, and a contact over at Logan in the agency investigates air crashes. Great stories all, John, but they’ve been covered, every last one. And now I’m like Bissington. One toe in the grave, and pumped dry of ideas. So I’m stooping,
stooping
to reading the …
class
-i-fieds
.”

Katzen passed his hand over the pages he’d been holding when I came in, so much like Cross’s gesture with the case file that I felt for him. “I don’t get it, Mo.”

“Don’t get what?”

“How do the classifieds help you?”

“How? How? You just got to read them. Look.”

Or listen, as Mo picked up the paper and traced with his now-dead-again cigar down a column. “Here, here’s one. For sale or trade, four polar-bear rugs. Skins dingy, but all teeth, claws, and’—I love this, John—‘eyes in good shape.’ Now, you see what I mean?”

“There’s a story in that ad.”

“There’s got to be a story. Who the hell has four polar-bear skins? How’d they get them? Where’ve they been? What are the chances of other ones being out there? It’s like that, all through the ads. Oh, you’re going to have ninety, ninety-five percent duds, but then that one comes up for you, and boom, you’ve got your idea.”

“And you’re no longer bereft.”

Mo aimed his cigar at me. “Somehow, that doesn’t sound too good coming from a man your age, John.”

“Sorry, Mo. Listen, I was wondering—”

“I mean, a man your age shouldn’t be bereft of anything except the foolishness of youth. That’s a quote, too—from somebody else, not Bissington—though it wouldn’t surprise me much, he was to have said it back when I knew him.”

“He probably did. Mo—”

“You knew Bissington?”

“No, I—”

“Of course you didn’t, you were born way too late. You shouldn’t do that, John.”

“Do what, Mo?”

“Try to confuse a tired old man like me. It makes us go off on tangents.”

“Sorry, Mo.”

“That’s okay. Now, what brings you here?”

“I’m working on a missing-person/murder case.”

“I don’t get you. The missing person is dead, they’re not missing anymore, right?”

“No, Mo—”

“Unless, of course, somebody stole the body after the person dies, but then it’d be a ‘missing-body’ case, right?”

“Right, Mo. I—”

“You ever have one of those?”

“One of … ?”

“A missing-body case.”

“Not yet.”

“The day will come, John. The day will come.”

As all days do. “I was just wondering if you could get me into your paper’s morgue for some stories on a killing that happened a few weeks ago, a killing that might be related to the missing-person case I’ve got now.”

“Sure thing. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“My oversight, Mo.”

He got me the issues for the days after Abraham Rivkind’s death. The stories didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already learned, and the obit with Pearl Rivkind mentioned prominently just reminded me of why I agreed to take the case to start with.

W
HEN
I
CALLED MY
answering service, there was a message from William Proft. He’d reached Traci Wickmire, and she’d told him that I could come see her anytime that afternoon. I took the Mass Pike a few miles west to avoid the downtown traffic, then wound up Western Avenue and Harvard Street to Commonwealth Avenue.

Commonwealth stretches for a lot of miles and is featured prominently in the Boston marathon. The avenue starts at the Public Garden in Back Bay, where it’s lined with stately townhouses and mansions that were once single-family, a few remaining so even today. Within a mile, though, Commonwealth winds through Boston University and Kenmore Square, just a bad hop from the Red Sox home at Fenway Park. After that, it’s fast-food and electronics stores and mostly closed car dealers before doglegging left and climbing the long, slow hill toward Boston College, where Father Drinan once headed the law school and Doug Flutie once guided the football team, though not many alums would put the two men in that order.

About a mile from BC, the numbers approached the address Proft had given me for his sister’s apartment house. It turned out to be a three-story stucco with a Bauhaus look to the beams in the walls. I found a parking space about a block away and walked back to it.

The entryway was recessed under a peaked miniroof. There were ten buzzers and mailboxes, none marked superintendent. I found WICKMIRE, T. under the button marked 31 and PROFT, D. under 21. Enough of the last names had full male first names after them that I wasn’t sure the women were fooling anybody by using only their first initials.

I pressed 31 and heard an internal ringing. Then the glass doorway buzzed at me. I pushed through just before the buzzing stopped, entering a hallway with white and black diamond tiles and no rug except for a remnant that served as makeshift welcome mat. The bulb in the fixture overhead was maybe twenty-five watts, and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the central staircase in front of me. It had a steel bannister and posts painted black and a carpet runner that could have started almost any color but now was dirt-brown.

From an upper floor came a woman’s voice that trilled like a dolphin’s. “I’m on three.”