Deep Pockets (12 page)

“Verisimilitude is all,” Leroy said.

His vocabulary is outstanding.

I knocked on Mrs. Hooper’s door and told her we thought there might be a major roach infestation in the garage. She looked nonplussed. She couldn’t give us the garage key because she didn’t have it. One of her tenants rented the garage and he had the keys.

Didn’t she keep a spare set? I asked. Well, yes, she usually did, but they’d gone missing.

Dowling, I thought, probably stole them. He kept stuff in the garage that he didn’t want other people to see. I was sorry I’d formally requested entry. I could have picked the lock or Leroy could have forced it. In the second-floor hallway, we debated our next move. The garage door was in plain view of the window over Mrs. Hooper’s kitchen stove. The barley soup seemed to require frequent stirring. There was no way she wouldn’t notice any hanky-panky with the garage door.

We carried our canisters back to the van, like it was time to refill, maybe time for a break. Mrs. Hooper’s probably still expecting us to come back and do the other two buildings.

Leroy negotiated the narrow one-way streets, stopping at all the stop signs, keeping to the fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limit. I should have been pleased; I had the blackmail letters in my pocket. Dowling smoked dope, maybe had a hot TV. We turned at the KFC franchise and started heading back toward the river. I wasn’t pleased. I’d wanted hard evidence of criminal activity that had nothing to do with my client.

“How the hell do you make somebody stop doing something illegal?” I was musing aloud, talking more to myself than to Leroy.

“This a bad dude, guy on the top floor?” The question surprised me. Usually, Leroy doesn’t ask. It’s immaterial to him.

I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me with his gaze directed straight ahead. “Bad,” I agreed.

“But you don’t want to take it to the cops?”

“No.”

“Dude bothering you?”

“Not personally.”

“That’s good. ’Cause if he was—”

“I know. Thanks for the offer, Leroy.”

“Lemme make you another one. How you stop somebody doing what’s illegal? What you do is, you hire me to mess with him. I’ll break his fucking leg. That’ll stop him from doing what he’s doing, least for a while.”

Back at my place, after sliding Chaney’s letters into a heavy mailing envelope and updating my expenses on the case, I found myself replaying Leroy’s offer in my head, giving it serious consideration. I’m not saying the idea didn’t bother me. I was concerned that I couldn’t seem to find a better solution to Chaney’s dilemma than grievous bodily harm. It made me feel like some kind of vigilante, some kind of gangster, on the opposite side of the law from the one where I consider I belong. But in a curious way, Leroy’s words comforted me. When I discussed the next step with my client, at least I’d have more than one option.

Chaney was right: That day, he was unreachable.
I left message after message on his cell phone, which was all I could do, since he didn’t want anyone to know he had business that involved a private investigator. He didn’t want me leaving word with his dragon lady secretary, and I was specifically forbidden to communicate via his home phone, as his wife wouldn’t take kindly to calls from females asking to speak to her husband.

When Leon phoned, I warned him I might have to cut the evening short, but I agreed to meet him for dinner. I took my cell along. Chaney would be able to reach me. It didn’t feel like a dereliction of duty.

We ate bowls of hot-and-sour wontons and plates of spicy green beans and dun dun noodles at Mary Chung’s in Central Square. Over dinner, we talked music and movies and he told me about his first wife, Sally, who’d hated his cop job from day one. I told him about my ex-husband, Cal, a Cajun bass player who’d turned into a coke addict and run off with a blues singer. The Szechuan spices were hotter than Leon expected, but he seemed to relish the flavor, downing glasses of Chinese beer to soothe his tongue. Sam Gianelli’s name didn’t come up. I assumed Leon knew we’d been involved; he’s in law enforcement, where the gossip mill churns. Sam’s name never surfaced, but there were moments when I almost felt his presence, as though he were a third at the small table.

I met Sam even before I met Cal, and I married Cal when I was a green nineteen. Sam knows me. I don’t need to tell him stories about my younger days. He knows them. I am who I am with Sam; no temptation to reinvent myself by leaving out the ugly parts, retelling the tale. It’s easy to misrepresent yourself with someone new. It’s not even lying. You simply don’t mention this error or that lapse. And it’s not really lying, because at that moment you figure you’ll never do anything that stupid again, won’t be that person anymore. You’ll be somebody who’s learned from her mistakes. Sure. Bullshit. Excuse me, but ha.

“Was Sally black?” I asked.

“Yeah. Cal white?”

I nodded, wondering about Leon and Chaney again, wondering how their apparently different circles meshed. I kept recalling Chaney’s comment about how difficult it was for him to trust a white person. My Jewish grandmother, my mother’s mother, never trusted a non-Jew. Goyim were okay, she would allow when pressed, and she never offered any explanation for her mistrust except that they were goyim, other, separate and apart. I glanced around the crowded, noisy room, at tables filled with flirting couples, rowdy students, multigenerational families, all colors, Korean, Chinese, African-American.

From a small table near the rest room, a woman glared back with hostile eyes. She was middle-aged and pudgy; her husband was husky and had a buzz cut. Both were white. I didn’t know them. I wondered if she glared because I was half of a multiracial couple. That way, paranoia, I thought. Maybe she simply despised women with red hair.

My cell phone didn’t sound during the meal. I checked it and the batteries were fine, no messages. I didn’t want to go to a movie, where I’d need to shut it off. Leon liked the idea of a club, but I didn’t want to go anyplace noisy enough that I was likely to miss Chaney’s call.

We rented a pile of old movies, enough for a popcorn marathon, and went back to my place, where we couldn’t agree on which one to watch first. I suggested we put on some music instead, hoping to listen to a new Chris Smither album. Leon like the idea of music; he wanted to dance. He found an oldies station that specialized in Motown, tried to teach me old Detroit dances I’d forgotten, the Stroll and the Grapevine. One thing led to another, it got late, and we wound up in bed.

I was drifting off, my head on his shoulder, my right arm draped across his chest, which he didn’t seem to mind, when the bell rang. Not my cell phone, which I’d thought might ring and which I’d carefully cradled upstairs. The doorbell.

Leon tried to sit up. “Wha — That your sister?”

“She wouldn’t ring. She’s got a key.”

“I might have slipped the chain on by mistake. You want me to—”

“Go back to sleep.” The clock said 3:08. If it
was
Paolina, we were going to have words. I slipped on my robe, fastening the sash as I hurried downstairs. My bizarre tenant, Roz, has awakened me late at night, but my thoughts were of Paolina. Paolina hurt, Paolina injured, Paolina in trouble. Even so, I put the chain on the door. I was half-asleep and worried, but habits hold fast.

Chaney tried to push his way past the chain, his bloodshot eyes wide, his hair wild. He brought his face close to the crack in the door and spoke in a voice choked with anger.

“How much do you want?”

My “What?” was simply a reflex, a protest at the fury in his glare and his voice.

“What the hell were you — How could you have—”

“Be quiet. Keep it down!” Pretty soon, porch lamps would flare the length of the block. If he’d been drunk, I’d have smelled it on his breath at such close range. Drugs were harder to rule out. He didn’t have a hand in his pocket or a suspicious weapon-shaped bulge in his clothes. He was fully dressed, but he’d done it in a hurry. One of his shirt buttons was undone, his right shoe untied.

I closed the door and removed the chain to the beat of insistent knocking. When I reopened, his charging entry took him clear across the foyer.

“Are you high or what?” I shut the door and turned on him angrily. A bigger man, a less well-educated man, I’d have been more careful.

“
Are you crazy
?” he responded. “Don’t think I don’t know. The cops — the police. I must have been crazy to—”

“Are you going to calm down, or am I going to kick you out? For a man who doesn’t want anybody to know he’s seeing a PI, you’re pretty damned loud in the middle of the night.”

He shot a quick glance at the staircase. “Are you alone here?”

“Chaney, what the hell is going on?”

“I can’t believe this. My God, now I am totally fucked.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

He grabbed me by the shoulders, this intellectual, inoffensive man, grabbed me and tried to shake me like an angry parent might shake a child. “They won’t believe me. You’ll tell them I hired you. I’ll never make them believe me. I could — I ought to kill you for what you’ve done.”

“Let go of me.” My voice cut like ice. Before I needed to follow up on it with my fists, he released me and turned away.

I took the single step down to the living room and my desk, lifted the receiver. “Nine one one right now, Chaney, unless you start talking sense. They’ll trace the call, even if I hang up.”

“Yeah, well, I know you’re bluffing.”

I made it to the second digit before he yelled at me to stop. For a moment, he looked hesitant, as though his intellect was warring with his fury. I took advantage of the pause.

“Sit down. Tell me what you think I’ve done before you go off like a bomb.” I didn’t swear; I didn’t shove him into a chair, or whack him with a length of lead pipe. I made my voice deliberately gentle. Meet belligerence with belligerence, you just get more of the same.

To my surprise, he sat, almost toppling into the old butterfly chair that faced my desk. “The police came to my house.” He seemed to think that was sufficient explanation but I sure as hell didn’t.

“Do they know about the blackmail?”

“They haven’t made any connection between me and the dead man, except for the car. But if they do,
when
they do—”

“The dead man.” It came out too loud, an explosion of its own.

“Yes,” he said, packing venom into the single word.

“Who?”

“Benjamin Dowling.”

Benjy Dowling.
Shit
. I tried to pretend I’d heard other syllables, other words, but the name Benjamin Dowling echoed and rechoed till I couldn’t stop myself from asking how Dowling had died.

“Like you don’t know,” Chaney said. “Tell it to the marines.”

“And what about you? How do you even know his name?”

“Denali mentioned him. It wasn’t important, just conversation, you know. I barely listened. She said something about rowing, a guy she met. But when I heard his name again, a man who
knew Denali
, when the cops told me about the hit-and-run, with
my
car, I thought — and then I knew. When did you take my car?”

“Back up. What exactly do you think—”

He looked around my living room, registering his surroundings for the first time since he’d entered. “This is quite a place. You know, I thought that before…. This house in this neighborhood. How does she afford a place like that? You blackmail your other clients to pay for it? You think I’m your meal ticket, but you’re wrong. My wife has money; I don’t have money. She won’t help me. She’ll let me sink. I wish I’d told you all this before — before it was too late — but it didn’t seem any of your goddamned business. I might have money, money of my own, if I keep my job, if this drug trial goes through. But with the FDA, at this stage, it’s hard to say, and Harvard will get the lion’s share of the money.”

“You think I killed Dowling.”

He nodded slowly, as if it were the most logical thing in the world. “You used my car.
My car
. I didn’t even know the damn thing was gone until the cops came. I guess you figured they’d believe me when I said it must have been stolen. As long as there’s no connection between me and… and the dead man, why shouldn’t they believe me? You’re the only one who can make the connection, so instead of paying Dowling one thousand or five thousand, now I pay you. God, I ought to call the police and tell them and the the hell with it. I can’t believe you’d do this. I can’t believe I’d do this. Cover up a murder to shield myself.” He planted elbows on knees and lowered his head to his hands. I could hear his shuddering breath. “How much do you want?”

“What did you do today?” I demanded.

“What?”

“I want every minute of your day, Chaney.”

“Why?”

“Do it!”

“After I called you, I went to the lab. I was in meetings all day.”

“With?”

“Two different sets of drug company representatives. It was exhausting.”

“When did you get out?”

“The afternoon session lasted past six. I had dinner at the Faculty Club. I went home.”

There must have been gaps. Time when he could have tailed me, realized who the blackmailer was, put his own plan into motion. We eyed each other with growing distrust.

I said, “When did this happen? When did Dowling die?”

He seemed to sink farther into the chair. “The police came after two. Woke me up. They frightened my wife. They asked if I knew where my car was.”

“Did they ask where you were at any specific time?”

“Twelve-thirty to one.”

“And you were asleep?”

“Yes.”

“Your wife will back you up?”

He pulled a face and glanced away. “I’m not sure.”

“
Were you asleep
?”

“I didn’t kill that man.”

“Neither did I.”

“If neither of us did it, do you suppose it was an accident? Could it have been an accident? Could—”

“A hit-and-run. With your car? An accident? I hope to hell you don’t teach probability in your classes.”

He wiped his hands on his knees, then rubbed them together rapidly as though trying to warm them, as though he’d taken a sudden chill. “Dowling was the one then. The blackmailer.”