Deep Pockets (7 page)

Well, yes, I guess I do. Her mother dresses the same way. Marta, married twice, abandoned twice, four kids, no skills, considers the landing of a male meal ticket the be-all and end-all of life. Probably coaches Paolina in the proper tightness of clothes. And glories in Paolina’s body, seeing her daughter’s curves as golden lures.

I drank my coffee slowly. I hadn’t gotten a hint as to where Denali Brinkman might have stashed her love letters. I hadn’t learned her roommate’s name, but I’d taken the precaution of writing down every name that appeared on a Phillips House mailbox. The girl, Jeannie, if she lived there and wasn’t just visiting to watch TV, was probably J. P. St. Cyr.

I needed to find out who was using the letters to blackmail my client, but my mind kept veering back to the fire. In the light of a new day, I found myself curious about exactly what had happened at the boathouse shed the night Denali Brinkman died.

The private-eye business is all about trading favors. It’s about who you know and what they know — and what you can offer in return. I know Cambridge cops; more particularly, I know a sergeant who’d know what I wanted to know — namely, who’d responded to the fire at the boathouse — and I was in a position, due to a favor from a previous encounter, to ask. Kevin Shea gave me a song and dance, flirted lamely, and stalled around, but we both knew he’d kick up the name in the end, and he did.

I got dressed in a hurry, briefly debated between the T and the car, decided on the car. The risk was parking tickets, the benefit freedom, and I wasn’t sure where I’d be headed after the cop house.

Central Square’s station house is surrounded by funky ethnic restaurants and slightly seedy stores. The neighborhood gets better; the neighborhood gets worse. Right now, it’s on an upswing. You can pay four grand a month for a three-bedroom apartment on Inman Street, and dine in splendor at Centro, an upscale Italian eatery entered through a dive called the Good Life.

Central Square is my stomping ground. I play volleyball at the Y, hang at the Plough and the Stars, eat at the Green Street Grill. I was never a Cambridge cop — Boston all the way — which means that fewer people hate me at the Cambridge cop house. They know me mainly as a PI, and most don’t want to get too close, due to the natural antipathy between those who like to keep secrets and those who want to know the details.

I stopped by Dunkin’ Donuts and got a dozen to go, half glazed, half chocolate. I’d just eaten a healthy breakfast, sure, but I’d only eat the doughnuts if Officer Danny Burkett wasn’t interested, and the number of cops uninterested in doughnuts is minimal.

I held the fragrant white box against my right hip and paced the corner of River and Green, across the street from the main entrance, waiting for Burkett to make an appearance. I sniffed the breeze and caught spices from the Indian place down the block. Kevin had described Burkett as a rookie and a hotshot, and I could see that from the way he walked, the bold stride, the purposeful gait. He was close to six feet, fresh-faced and eager. He wouldn’t want to damage his rep being seen with a private eye. On the other hand, Kevin outranked him, and he’d want to do his sergeant a favor. So he was in a bind. I watched him as he glanced around. Probably Kev had said tall redhead and left it at that.

“Officer Burkett?”

He made the connection and a faint blush tinted his cheeks.

“Shea didn’t mention I was a woman?”

“Just said private heat. Carlyle?”

“Carlotta. Doughnut?”

He glanced at me with speculative eyes. Sometimes I tend to read too much into expressions, but I thought he was probably wondering whether I was sleeping with Kevin Shea. Mostly, it’s just how cops think. I repeated the doughnut offer.

“I dunno. I eat that, I’ll have to spend an extra hour at the gym.”

“We’ll walk while we eat. One cancels the other.”

He nodded. “What you got?”

He took glazed and so did I, just to keep him company. It’s not like a doughnut’s a bribe; it’s more of a relaxer. It helps to eat while you talk, loosens up the speaker.

We walked half a block, each getting used to the other’s pace. He was shorter than I was, but he kept up. His boots were polished, his uniform starched and pressed. A man with long dreadlocks gave us a wide berth, and I remembered how it was when you walked around in uniform.

“That guy looks like a fucking drug bust on the hoof,” the rookie offered.

“Yeah. Works the high school.”

“Yeah?”

“My sister’s at Rindge.”

“Kids won’t fucking tell you the time of day.”

Rookies have to hold their own, and one way they do it is with their mouths.
Fucking this, fucking that. I’m a tough guy and don’t you forget it
. I remembered the drill. Hell, I used to talk the talk.

I said, “Kevin tell you what I’m interested in?”

“Kevin never asked me to cooperate with private heat before. You special or something?”

“Bet your ass I am. April third, you caught a fire.”

“That boathouse shit.” He chewed his doughnut and admired his reflection in the CVS window.

“You remember the call?”

“Thing is, why should I tell you about it?”

“Kevin Shea’s a good guy to work for, you think?”

We walked for a while. I didn’t want to interrupt his internal debate. It wasn’t an easy call. Sure, Shea may have told him to cooperate, but did he mean it? Was it some kind of test? Would the whole business come back and bite the rookie in the ass?

“You like working private?” he asked.

“Sure. Best part’s the pension,” I said with a straight face. “You gonna tell me about it, or am I wasting my time?”

“It’s old,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You work for fucking Harvard?”

“No.”

“Nobody’s saying anything’s fucking wrong with how the department handled it, right?”

“Right.”

He stared at me, like he was trying to decide how big a lie I was attempting to put over on him. “I brought my incident book.”

“We can get to that later if you need to check details, but I’d rather just hear what you saw, what you did. I don’t expect total recall.” I put a faint challenge into my voice.

“Don’t underestimate me. I’m fucking good.” He broke into a sudden grin.

“You from around here?”

“East Cambridge, born and bred.”

So we talked “Who do you know?” shit for a while. Since I grew up in Detroit, my local repertoire’s limited, but I’ve picked up a lot of Cambridge lore from living here, talking to cops and firefighters. He accepted another doughnut, which I took as a good sign.

He remembered the fire.

“Hell, wish I didn’t fucking remember,” he said. “Freezing to death, like these bums do in winter, that’s not so bad. You go to sleep, like, you don’t feel the pain. But burns, shit. I burned my hand once, bad, when I was a kid. Christ, I’d been an animal, I’d have chewed the fucker off. You’d think a kid going to fucking Harvard — I mean, how can you be so goddamn unhappy, you’re smart enough to get into fucking Harvard in the first place?”

I could have told him smart didn’t mean happy, but I didn’t want to stop the flow. We’d walked as far as the Main Street cutoff by the firehouse. We sat on a bench and I offered him the doughnut box again. This time, he took chocolate. He was going to have to spend a whole day at the gym to atone.

“You want specifics?”

“Whatever you got,” I said.

“Okay. It’s April third. I pulled graveyard eleven/seven, and the beef comes in early morning — I can get the exact time — after a goddamn boring shift. I’m in a car with Eddie Daley. You know Daley?”

“No.”

“It gets back I said he’s an old fat fart, I’ll know it came from you.”

“It won’t come back.”

“Well, it was up to him, we’d a missed the call. Came in as a fire, so we’re backup; the fire guys are on it. It’s dark, confusing, but things are okay. We block the street ’cause they gotta run the hose off a hydrant the other side of Mem Drive. The Harvard cops are all over it, and you know what they’re like, former fucking Green Berets, think we’re nothing but fucking trash.”

“Uncooperative.”

“Trained to keep that dirty laundry off the line. We go to a disturbance call at Harvard, the U cops get there first, they’re flushing dope down the johns.”

“They get in your way?”

“Nah. The place is just makeshift, made of wood. I remember thinking maybe bums got in, you know, find a fucking place to sleep. Light a candle, things go up. Like that warehouse fire in Worcester killed all those firefighters.”

“You figure somebody’s inside?”

“Nope. But the fire boys decide they better go in, case a bum got in, and by then the place is really burning and they can’t get in, except for one team, and they think somebody’s in there, but the captain calls them out ’cause the roof’s going. Turns out she made a regular — whatchacallit — funeral pyre in there, accelerants and shit.”

“But how did you make it as a suicde?”

“Didn’t then. Treated it as a fucking supicious death. By the fucking book.”

“Somebody could have set the fire.”

“You think we’re too fucking dumb to figure that? We talked to people, talked to her boyfriend. The guy’s trying to be stand-up, but he’s crying like a baby.”

Her boyfriend
. My client told me he was out of town. “Who?” I said. “Name?”

“Benjy? Yeah, Benjy somebody.”

“You can look it up later.” He was giving me good stuff, slipping into present tense, reliving it instead of just reporting it. I didn’t want him to stop.

“Somerville boy — those Harvard babes can’t stay away from the locals, ya know? Yeah, well, he fucking knew she was feeling down. She tried to break it off with him, told him she didn’t want to fucking see him anymore. We traced her final evening. Had good luck with that. She goes to the gas station on Mount Auburn, the one at Aberdeen, gives ’em a story about running out of gas, buys a couple gallons. We got a good ID. Man, she didn’t even have a car. Plus, she left a note. They usually do.”

“How do you leave a note in a burning building?” Maybe that’s what was bothering me.

“Left it at her dorm. Shoved it under this woman’s door. Miranda somebody. Starts with a
G
.”

Miranda Gironde, the resident adviser.

“So you treated it like a homicide?”

“Right up till the pieces started falling into place, saying she did herself. You know, maybe if we didn’t find a note. Maybe if we didn’t find out about how she bought the gas. I mean, the way it played, she douses herself with gasoline and lays down naked on this thing — whachacallit, the kids have ’em — a fucking futon. Lights a match. Fuck, you think nothing bothers you after awhile, drunks beating kids, puking in the backseat, but this one bothered me.”

I wondered how long before he wouldn’t feel anything at all.

“Smelled like roast pig,” he said. “Didn’t want to eat anything grilled for a while. The smoke just bit at the back of your throat. I thought maybe I’d be a fireman once, but man, I don’t know how they fucking do it. That’s not how I want to end up. You get shot, hey, you get shot; they can still fix you up for a nice funeral. You’re not a crispy critter.”

He was already getting the humor right.

“I need the name of the boyfriend, the next of kin, the people you interviewed.”

I could see that he wanted to deny me the information. Then I could see him think about Shea, about having Shea owe him one.

Benjy Dowling was the boyfriend. Not a student, Somerville address. I’d already spoken to Miranda Gironde at Phillips House. A Jean St. Cyr was in the mix, and sure enough, she was the roommate. The next of kin was Albert Farrell Brinkman, a Swiss businessman. They’d spoken to him by phone; he was elderly and unable to travel.

I said, “Who made the ID? The boyfriend?”

“Wasn’t much to ID. One of those where the morgue asks if you’ll please send a photo. Two choices: dental records, DNA. Took awhile, with the goddam reporters all screaming for the ID. Hell, we had to find the kid’s great-uncle in fucking Switzerland.”

“Next of kin send the dental records?”

“ME would know. I don’t have it. Christ, those Harvard stiffs are lucky she didn’t do it in the dorm,” Burkett said. “Man, you send your kid to Harvard, you think she’s gonna be with high-class kids. Imagine, sending your kid to Harvard, she rooms with somebody burns down the whole goddamn dorm?” He had a ring on his finger. Married. Maybe with a kid, a little girl he had dreams for.

“Other than the boyfriend, who was upset by the news?”

“Woman at the dorm, one found the note, she took it hard, but she coulda been scared for her job. She was shocked, you could tell, but not as shocked as she might have been. Shit, I don’t know. Everybody deals with their shit differently, you know what I mean?”

I knew what he meant.

“Anything feel — I don’t know — off about it?”

“Other than a kid killing herself for no reason, you mean?”

“Note say anything about being pregnant?”

“Nope.”

“Remember it?”

“Don’t have to. I wrote it down.” He thumbed through a well-worn spiral pad. “It said she was unworthy, something about being unworthy to be there. Here it is. Three fucking sentences and out: ‘Unworthy as I am, I apologize to those who tried to help me. Time to delve for deeper shades of meaning, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry, but I simply can’t go on.’ ”

Delve for deeper shades of meaning
? What the hell was that about? This was her life, not some freshman class in literary criticism.
Ladies and gentlemen
. A litle sarcasm there? An acknowledgment of class differences?

I said, “So, you’re okay with it being suicide?”

“Hey, not just me, Carlyle. I didn’t make the fucking call. The ME, the arson guys, we all did our job with this one.”

“Hey, I’m not saying you didn’t.”

“Finished?”

“What I mean is, are you satisfied with it being called a suicide?”

“Satisfied? What the hell’s that mean, lady? A kid’s dead, I’m not fucking satisfied. Look, I gotta go. My partner’s gonna think I dumped him.”

I gave him the rest of the doughnuts to give to his partner as a peace offering. Then I studied the names I’d scrawled in my notebook. Benjy Dowling, shaken-up boyfriend. Jeannie St. Cyr, former roommate.