Death at Charity's Point (19 page)

“It’s not shorthand. I want you to read something for me.”

“Ah, come on. You know I’ll fix up your spelling.”

“I need your opinion on something.”

Her mouth formed an O and her eyes widened in an exaggerated expression of amazement. “My opinion, he says.” She looked at me for a moment. When I didn’t smile, she nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

We went into my office. Julie sat at my desk and I took the chair in front of it. I gave her the
Atlantic
article. She read it slowly, her eyebrows knitted into a frown of concentration. When she finished, she looked up and said, “So?”

“Now read this.” I handed her George’s photocopy of Harvey Willard’s essay.

She looked at it for only a moment, then jerked her head up to stare at me. “Finish it,” I told her. I moved to stand behind her so that I could read over her shoulder. Harvey The Beast had written:

On the morning of June 19, 1971, before anyone was awake, an explosion rocked the quiet of Norton Street in Queens. Minutes later the apartment building at number 72 was a smouldering pile of rubble.

Julie flipped the page. Together we read on:

The Fire Department, the Bomb Squad, the New York Police, and the FBI investigated. Then announced that the explosion had been caused by a radical under ground group known as “The Sowing Circle”—a bunch of rich college girls who wanted to cause anarchy and bring “The Establishment” to it’s knees.

When she finished it, she glanced up over her shoulder at me. I moved back to the chair in front of my desk.

“Well?” I said.

“He copied it.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

“I mean, there are some misspellings, and some of the words have been changed, lots of comma faults, sentence fragments, like that. But he copied it, all right. No doubt about it.”

“Notice how the magazine article and the kid’s paper have been marked up?”

“Sure. Like Mr. Gresham was making notes on the similarities.” Julie leaned forward in my chair, her elbows braced on the top of my desk. “What does it mean?”

I shook my head back and forth slowly. “I’m not sure. Let’s try to be logical. Okay. Harvey writes this paper. George suspects it. He goes to the library, finds everything he can on the subject. Takes out all those books, looking for the part Harvey copied. Finally he finds the magazine. It rings the right bell. He makes a copy, brings it home, compares the two. And
voilà
.”

I stopped. Julie regarded me expectantly. “Then?”

“Then—I don’t know. Plagiarism. Some schools expel students for it.”

“It gives Mr. Gresham an enemy,” Julie said softly.

“It sure does.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to think about it,” I said. “I’m going to give it lots of thought.”

Durgin Park is about the only thing that hasn’t changed from the days when that part of the city known as Haymarket Square really was a marketplace. In the old days, the only people who went to Durgin’s were the regulars from the financial district who were fanatical in their devotion, and the out-of-towners who were looking for an “authentic experience.”

Now, in the “new Boston,” it’s all different. Where there used to be dank alleys and dirty meat-packing plants, today stand glass and chrome storefronts surrounded by brick-paved malls. You can wander around, buying hunks of pizza and hot fried dough from the stalls, drop into little bistros for a gin-and-tonic or a strawberry crêpe, or just sit on the wooden benches and watch the people.

The trucks still come with their produce, and other trucks come to take it away, and late at night you’ll still see the old people from the North End with their shopping bags poking among the garbage to find a squashed tomato or a few stray leaves of withered lettuce after the trucks have gone and before the city’s street cleaners come to sweep it all up.

They call it urban renewal, and I suppose it’s a good thing. Still, I’m glad that they didn’t tear down Faneuil Hall, and that Durgin Park remains. They’ve added an Oyster Bar downstairs, and the first-floor bar has been redone. But at Durgin Park it’s still an experience in dining masochism. You can sneak up to the dining room the back way if you stop at the bar. The out-of-towners don’t know that. They wait in line, chattering in nervous anticipation, sometimes outside the door and halfway down the street from the back entrance.

Charlie McDevitt and I had a couple of quick bourbons with the stockbrokers and bankers and slipped right up the stairs.

Our waitress’s name was Stella. Most of the waitresses at Durgin’s seem to have names like Stella or Sheila or Maggie. They are carefully trained in rudeness. They majored in taunt and minored in insult. They sweat a lot, and their hair hangs in wet curls on their faces. They’re from Southie, mostly, and they support their husbands who are laid off. They have lots of kids at home, and they worry about them. They move fast. Time is money. They shove food at you and tell you to pass it down the table. They’re brassy, impatient, and crude.

Out-of-towners think they’re charming. I just think they’re vulgar. I go to Durgin’s for the beef, which is still unsurpassed. The out-of-towners go there for the insults, and for the “family” dining, and for the sawdust on the floor, which, they are universally disappointed to learn, is now forbidden by the city’s health statutes.

Durgin Park is a lousy place to conduct business. It’s a lousy place for anything except eating prime rib.

Charlie and I sat across from each other at one of the long tables covered with a stained, yellowed tablecloth. Next to Charlie sat a fat couple from Arizona, each of whom was hunched over a big sirloin, well-done. The couple’s two kids, a girl and a boy maybe eleven and nine, split a bowl of spaghetti. The boy complained that he hated spaghetti. The father told him to shut up, as he shoveled chunks of thick, overcooked beef into his mouth. The girl asked her mother for a french fry. The mother told her to eat her spaghetti first, then proceeded to gobble down all her french fries so that when the girl was finished there’d be none left.

“I had an interesting case last week,” said Charlie as we waited for our beef to arrive. “Drug bust on the high seas, off Cape Ann. The Canadian connection. Complicated—had the Federal narcs, Coast Guard, local cops, and me, from Justice, all on this Coast Guard cutter. Supposed to intercept these guys in a tuna boat with a false hull stashed with hash.” The waitress arrived with our dinner. “Hey, thanks.”

The prime rib at Durgin’s flops over the edges of the plate. When it’s rare, the juices drip down onto the tablecloth. Stella held my slab onto the plate with her thumb as she handed it to me, which is how they’re trained to do it at Durgin’s, I think. Charlie received his cautiously, smiling at Stella.

He cut off a huge chunk and crammed it into his mouth. “Mmm!” he groaned. “As I remembered it. Anyhow, the boat was surrounded by gulls—hundreds of gulls, diving and swirling the way they do when the tuna fishermen are tossing hunks of dead fish over the side for chum. Man, this beef is fine.”

I gave the kids next to me half a dozen french fries each, and smiled at their father. I have these gray eyes which Gloria used to call “baleful,” and there’s a scar through my right eyebrow, the result of an elbow I caught while trying to dig the puck out of the corner, so that I seem to smile in a way that discourages fat people from Arizona from being too critical of me.

So all the kids’ father said was, “Thank the man.”

“When we got close to the boat,” said Charlie, “we could see these two guys at the stern tossing stuff into the water as fast as they could. We hailed them and pulled alongside, guns drawn and all. A couple of the Feds boarded the boat, and we made fast to them. Then we could see what they were doing. They had these bales of hash, and they were ripping chunks of it off and tossing it into the ocean. Disposing of their evidence.”

“They knew you were coming.”

Charlie nodded. “Guess so. Someone tipped them off. Suppose they figured if they tossed the bales off whole they’d float, so they tried to toss over handfuls. The birds went bananas.”

“Hm,” I mumbled around a mouthful of rare prime rib.

“So we asked one of the guys what the hell he thought he was doing, feeding the gulls like that. Know what he said?”

“What did he say?”

Charlie stared at me. “He said, ‘I wanted to leave no tern unstoned.’”

“For Christ’s sake, Charlie,” I moaned.

“Honest,” he said.

“Can we get back to business now?” I asked.

Afterwards Charlie and I found a bench along the edge of the brick-paved mall to sit on.

“Okay. You said you wanted to talk,” said Charlie, appraising a tall, black girl with tight jeans tucked into high boots who was strolling by.

“Yup. Couple things. Think you could find out something for me on a guy who’s supposed to have been killed in ’Nam?”

“Whadda you mean, ‘supposed to’?”

I summarized for him the story of Lt. Winchester Gresham. “Florence thinks he’s still alive, and she wants me to find him,” I concluded.

“Jeez, I dunno, Brady. The Bureau keeps tabs on those survivalist groups, more or less. But they, you know, move around a lot, and they don’t usually do anything overtly illegal, except maybe smuggle in guns. And that isn’t the FBI’s jurisdiction, really. Army won’t be any help, for sure. He’s dead, as far as the Army’s concerned. I’ll see what I can do for you, anyway. It’ll probably cost you another meal, though.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. “This other thing that’s bothering me—I need your brain.”

“Such as it is,” said Charlie. “Shoot.”

I refreshed Charlie’s memory of the story of George Gresham’s suicide and my involvement in the case. I told him about Harvey Willard’s history paper, and the
Atlantic
article, and my impression of Willard, and I described the people I had met at The Ruggles School.

I didn’t tell him about my evening with Rina Prescott.

“Ah, yes,” said Charlie. “The Sewing Circle. I remember it. Those poor, misguided, dead girls. Real mess. Sure I remember. I wasn’t involved myself, but the Department was. They helped put the little pieces of those kids back together. Lotta guesswork. Had to identify the lower jaw of one of them. Feet, hands, scraps of clothing, pieces of jewelry. Teeth, scars, birthmarks, tattoos…”

“Tattoos?”

Charlie grinned. “Yeah. Those girls all had tattoos on their asses. Hip, actually. Praying mantis tattoos. You know about praying mantises?”

“We used to call them walking sticks.”

“Right,” said Charlie. “They’re creatures of prey. Very beneficial to farmers. Consume huge quantities of harmful critters. They look like they’re praying, hence their name. All those girls had these praying mantis tattoos. On their left hip. Outside the cheek.”

“Adorable,” I said. “Actually, what I wanted to talk about was this plagiarism thing. I’ve been trying to imagine. Suppose George decided to turn Harvey in…”

“It’s symbolic,” said Charlie, ignoring me. “See, the female mantis, she’s a very dominating broad. Like when she makes love, she eats her mate.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That,” I said, “could be worse.”

“No, I mean it literally. At that very moment of orgasmic ecstasy, when the boy mantis has got it all the way in and the girl mantis feels him starting to come, she turns around and bites the poor guy’s head off.” Charlie grinned at me. “Pretty apt symbol for a bunch of female radicals, huh?”

“A pretty damn blatant symbol, if you ask me,” I said. “Anyhow, suppose Gresham doesn’t turn the Willard kid in right away, and instead…”

“They were blatant broads,” continued Charlie. “The Cashen girl, I think it was, was pretty much intact from the waist down. Tattoo and all. Near as they could tell, these two girls—Cashen and the other one, O’Callahan, I think, who they had to identify by her teeth—they were assembling these bombs at a workbench in the basement, and when they went off, the top half of the Cashen girl was splattered all over the cellar. The bottom half of her was protected by the bench. That’s what they found. The bottom half of her. The other one, O’Callahan, and the others who were in the room—I forget their names—they were blown all to hell, hardly enough left over to pin a name to. They took the full blast.”

“Good God!”

“Yeah. Look, Brady, I’m not very good at creating scenarios with you. I mean, you know better than I do what this Gresham guy might have done. So the kid copied the paper and the teacher found out. Happens all the time. So what?”

“Here’s what I think,” I said. “See how it sounds. Okay. George tells Willard he knows about the paper. Willard panics. He’s going to get tossed out of school, he thinks. Football scholarship to Duke, his whole career, down the tubes. So he…”

“What do you think? The kid killed him?”

I shrugged. “Could be, huh?”

Charlie picked a piece of gristle from his teeth with his fingernail. “Could be. So how does the suicide note fit in?”

I nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure that one out.”

“Another thing. How does the kid get the guy up on the cliff there so he can toss him into the sea?”

“I don’t know, Charlie.”

“Pretty far-fetched, if you ask me.”

“I’ve gotta talk to the kid, anyway, don’t you think?” I said.

“What’ll you say? That you know he cheated? Or are you gonna accuse him of murder?”

I shrugged. “I’ll figure out something to say.” Charlie shrugged and extended his arm in front of him to examine his watch. “Ah, shit, I gotta get back. Unlike some people, I’ve got a boss. Some people don’t have any bosses. We public servants have to put in our hours.”

“Okay,” I said. We stood and started walking back to the MBTA station.

We lingered outside the stairway that led down into the subway. “What’d you say his name was?” Charlie said.

“Who?”

“The soldier. Gresham.”

“Winchester. Lieutenant Winchester Gresham.”

“Some name. Winchester. I’ll see what I can get for you. And I’ll think on the other thing. Don’t count on anything eyeball-popping from me on that one, though.”