Deep Pockets (22 page)

While she was speaking, she opened the door wide and stepped into a ten-by-twelve-foot office that had been turned upside down. The two desks were toppled, the drawers extracted and shaken until empty. Posters that had been on the walls were on the floor. Potted plants displayed their roots and the potting soil had been dumped on top of file folders. The shaken woman hadn’t gotten far with her cleaning.

“Look,” she said. “
Madre de Dios
. Who does such a thing?
Ai
, beasts, not humans. Pigs. It makes me sick.”

“What’s your name?” My Spanish runs to things like that, basics.

“
Pardon
. I should tell you, no? I am Fidelia Moros Santos.”

“And you work for Graylie?” I didn’t give my name, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Is no Graylie. Is my business, no? I don’t have the English so good, but I am here many years. A citizen, no? I am owner, but I am clever, no? I think, who comes to a business with a name like Moros Santos? Only maybe the women who want a clean house cheap, but I do more. I clean for the big companies. They like more English, no?” She folded her arms under heavy breasts and awaited my approval.

I smiled. “You made up the name?”

“
Sí
. I have a man here speaks good English, works for me. I have him for answer the phone. When Anglos know there is an Anglo in the office, they are more happy. They don’t care who owns, just they need to know someone understands good English. I understand good, but I sound not so good.”

“You sound fine,” I said.

“Look. Look what they do. Animals.” She held up a mound of disordered receipts much like the one I’d salvaged from Dowling’s drawer. I should have identified myself, asked her whether she remembered the client who’d paid her for services on at least two occasions, shown her his photo, but she was eagerly leading me around the room, pointing out the outrages visited on her office. In addition to the two dismembered desks, pillows had been tossed off a saggy couch. Magazines and papers were strewn across the floor. A file cabinet was upended, one corner dented.

“Did you keep money here?” Something seemed wrong, but I couldn’t yet pin it down. If you break into a business, you go for cash; you go for a safe. Maybe kids had broken in, but there was no gang insignia, no graffiti, no shit smeared on the walls.

“Not so much, no. A little only for when one of the crews goes for coffee, maybe. In a gray metal lockbox.”

“I don’t see it,” I said.

“Is gone,” she agreed.

All the time we were talking, I kept one eye on the window, an ear open for the sound of an approaching patrol car. The Medford cops wouldn’t come racing down the street, sirens screaming and lights flashing. An over-and-done-with B and E at a small business is not a bank robbery in progress. Before they came, I needed to work the conversation around to the receipt and what Benjy Dowling had purchased from a cleaning company.

“We ought to wait for a crime-scene team,” I told the woman gently. “I saw a doughnut shop across the street. We could wait there and talk. You look like you could use some coffee. And I could use a doughnut.” I doubted the Medford cops would call out a crime-scene team for such a small-potatoes crime. I just wanted out of there before the cops came.

“That’s so sweet,” she said. “You’re no like a cop at all.”

Inwardly, I cringed.

“I no can lock the door,” she protested.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just close it. We can see it from the window.”

She needed to find her bag, which she’d put down somewhere in her panic, and now she couldn’t remember even which bag she’d brought to work that morning.
Ai
, she moaned over and over. What would she do about the crews that were to work the next shift? She’d come in early because she had to do all the office work this week, what a mess, how hard it was to be alone in a crisis. She went on and on, until I found her bag and led her across the street to a coffee shop that must have been spanking new in the fifties and hadn’t changed since. Round vinyl stools poked up from the warped linoleum flooring. The counter faced cases of doughnuts that hadn’t been made within the past four hours. I hoped they’d been made sometime that week.

I glanced around cautiously, knowing that cops and doughnut shops go hand in hand, but the place was deserted. Didn’t bode well for the coffee. No sirens, no prowl cars. No activity across the street. I ordered two glazed doughnuts and coffee for myself, the same for Señorita Moros Santos. The middle-aged waitress had dull eyes.

At first, Señorita Moros Santos seemed too nervous to eat, but once she took her first bite, the doughnut disappeared in a few ravenous swallows. Then she started to talk again, and it seemed as though she’d keep going forever. Most of it was in Spanish, but the occasional phrase came out in English. I didn’t have trouble following her.

She loved her business and she loved Medford, which was also where she lived, and nothing like this had ever happened to her before, and it was terrible,
terrible
, that it had happened now, when she was so busy and understaffed. She wasn’t a grand cleaning business like the ones that did the big skyscrapers in Boston, but she didn’t have the union problems they did, either. She had lots of family members on her crews and she’d brought over friends and family from Guatemala, sponsored them now she was a citizen, and everyone was willing to work long hours because they were used to it and they wanted to stay in this country, and the money she made was very good, very good. Even her lone American was happy to work for low wages because, well, he was so very interested in the future of her firm.

An employee willing to work for low wages always catches my attention. The way she spoke about his interest in her future made me check her hands again, looking for an engagement ring. She blushed and paused, and I got a chance to insert a couple of questions.

“Do you sell uniforms? Coveralls for cleaning?”

“No.”

Dowling hadn’t bought the coveralls from Graylie; so much for that theory.

“Do you work for any of the universities in the area. Tufts? Harvard?”

“No, no.”

She was off again, and I learned she had an indirect connection to Harvard, cleaning many of its research labs. She was very proud that she was a licensed and bonded agency. No one ever complained about her work. Prompt, her people were, and they cleaned very well.

“Do you want another doughnut?”

She looked at the case longingly, then patted her round stomach and declined.

I said, “The American man who works with you, he has the other desk in your office?”

“
Sí
. We work together most days.”

“He only answers the phone?”

“
Ai
, no, he is so good with customers. He does everything. Even he heads one of the cleaning crews. He doesn’t want to be the favorite, the owner’s pet boy, my Ben.”

I was glad I hadn’t been drinking coffee when she gave his name; I’d have choked while trying to swallow. “Excuse me, but what’s Ben’s full name?”

“Benjamin Dennison.” She smiled as if it were the most beautiful name she’d ever heard, said it like the syllables were musical notes. The way her tongue caressed it, I wondered if she sat and practiced writing it over and over like some high school girl: Señora Dennison, Señora Dennison.

“And how long has he worked with you?”

The blush reasserted itself. “Almost a year now. We are such very good friends.”

“And so you’ve told him about the break-in?”

“
Ai
, no. I cannot. He is gone away. Very sudden, he goes. I don’t even know he is planning to go, but maybe it is his family. You know, sometimes things happen, and there’s nothing you can do but go yourself.”

“Where is his family?”

“I think maybe New York. I don’t really know. We have not yet been acquainted, but soon we will all meet. Maybe he goes to tell them about me.”

“When will he be back?”

“He didn’t say. The note he left is so very short. He say not to worry. He knows me — always I worry. And now look, see what has happened, and he is gone.” She gave me a wry smile, but the worry predominated, shadowing her black stone eyes. I thought she had more reason to worry than she knew.

“So you’re engaged?”

“
Sí
.”

“A handsome man?”

“
Sí
. Very.”

“You have a photo?”

“No. Ben hates it to have his picture taken. He hates it.”

“He is tall?”

“No, not so tall as you, señorita. You are tall as a man.”

“He has dark hair?”

“
Sí
. Dark hair, dark eyes.
Muy guapo
.”

She’d grown to rely on Ben because his English was so very good. She absolutely depended on him. He was such a devoted employee. She trusted him so much. Really, she hadn’t realized how much she’d placed on his plate. She didn’t actually do the cleaning much anymore, not that any of them were above pitching in. She kept coveralls at the office in case she had to fill in for a sick worker. The big firms expected things to get done. They didn’t want their efficiency hurt by a slow cleaning crew.

Shit. If her Ben was my Benjy, I bet she didn’t know about the ex-con stuff any more than she knew his real name. Maybe he’d told her he had trouble with the IRS so that she’d pay him in cash. Maybe she paid all her employees in cash.

I said, “Tell me, do you work for a company called Improvisational Technologies?”

“
Sí
, that’s one of Ben’s places. Always he goes with the team to Impro.”

Impro
. That word was emblazoned on a mug on Benjy’s windowsill, next to an unwatered plant.

“Excuse me,” I said softly. “Did you drop this?” I had placed the photo of Benjy in my jacket pocket, just in case. Now I mimed plucking it off the floor under her seat.

“Oh,” she said. “No, but look, that is Ben, yes. Maybe he put it in my bag for a surprise. It’s not so good a likeness, too dark, but you see how he is handsome?
Muy guapo
.”

I agreed with her, then deliberately glanced at my watch and looked out the window. “Where can they be? Really, a team should have come by now. I’d better see what’s holding them up.”

“Shall I go back to the office? Leave things alone? Fix things?”

“No, no, you finish your coffee, Señorita Moros Santos. If I’m told to report to another crime scene, you remember to tell the new people everything you told me.” I patted her on the shoulder, but I couldn’t offer any more reassurance, couldn’t make myself say that everything would be all right. Because it wouldn’t.

I called the Medford cops from a pay phone, reported the crime again, but this time I added an untruth, saying the thief might still be on the premises, possibly armed and dangerous. I thought that might speed them along sooner. I wondered if the señorita would ask them about me, about what had become of the tall Anglo woman cop with the so very red hair.

If my deception came home to roost, so be it. I couldn’t worry about it now. I had other fish to fry, plenty of them. For instance, I wanted to see exactly what Benjy Dowling had cleaned at Improvisational Technologies.

I drove the twisting parkways on autopilot, considering
the break-in at Dennison/Dowling’s workplace, dismissing the possibility that some clueless thief would choose
that
office to rifle and rob, not the shop next door or the liquor store down the block, but the office in which Dowling had a desk. Did Dowling’s killer imagine he kept blackmail materials at the office rather than at home? Would I need to visit his house again? If I did, would the woman cooking barley soup downstairs make me for the exterminator?

I recalled the photo of Dowling I’d left with the señorita, the hooded dark eyes, straight nose, and heavy brow. What in that face had made Denali Brinkman, small, blond, delicate but strong Denali, take notice? Question: How does a Harvard girl meet an ex-con? Answer: She spots him shoving a mop across the floor of her lover’s research facility and, boom, it’s love at first sight. Something wrong there.

But, of course, Denali and Benjy had rowing in common. Maybe she’d met him on the river, never known his interest in her lover’s business. I tried to make the couple work. I thought about the men I’ve dated, the men I’ve seriously dated, not the one-night stands or the blind dates recommended by friends you realize you don’t really know. The men I’ve dated have stuff in common. They’re tall, for one thing. I’ve wondered about it, about whether I harbor some secret desire to be dominated, but I think it’s just the culture; I’m not immune to it. I’ve never really dated anyone much shorter than my own six one. It limits the field.

Beyond the physical, there are other similarities in my men: humor, sensuality, intensity. Plus, like a lot of women, I tend not to date down, not to date guys less educated than I am. That doesn’t mean I need to see a prospective date’s college diploma — or proof of professional employment. It just means I look for a guy who’s quick on the uptake, a guy with something on the ball. No one I’d spoken to had stressed Dowling’s brilliance. Everyone I’d spoken to had stressed Denali’s.

Had Dowling been a break in her pattern? Or had Chaney? What was there about both men that had drawn Denali Brinkman? Had the choice of Dowling been a reaction against the overly intellectual Chaney? Had the girl felt so outranked, so outmatched by her Harvard peers that she’d rebelled and chosen a townie like Dowling? Had she been on some precipitous mental decline? Had Dowling been part of the disease that led to her decision to die?

Always supposing she’d made that decision herself… I kept coming back to that: Had Denali chosen to die? I sighed, punched on the WUMB-tuned radio, lucked into Chris Smither singing “Drive You Home Again,” and let his intricate guitar work overwhelm the throb of unanswered questions in my head. Times like this, you follow the leads, do the work, take it doggedly step by step, and hope something makes sense. Usually, I excel at theorizing, at speculation, if you will. Mooney used to tease me about my vaunted “intuition.” I wondered what he’d make of this mess, wondered if the Cambridge cops and the Brighton cops and the Medford cops would ever realize they each held a piece of the same puzzle.