Flesh and Blood (17 page)

Later when he could no longer work, I began carrying the key and when he could still talk lucidly he would ask me if it was safe with me.
Si,
Papà, la terrò sempre al sicuro
. It will always be safe, in my jewelry box now, and as I think of it I feel sad. It is an old feeling, vintage and from my past like Marino’s chewing gum.

“Okay. I see. You got it from him but he didn’t bother sending it to me …” I overhear what Marino is saying as I see my father as if he’s next to me, thin even before he was sick, sharp featured with blond hair that was wavy and thick.

He’d hold my hand and introduce me to customers when he’d take me to his store, sometimes on Saturdays, and I’d keep him company and do odd chores. Later when he could no longer leave the house I worked the register after school, on weekends and during the summers. At nine or ten I was keeping the books, making the deposits in the bank, meeting delivery trucks and refilling bins with fresh fruits and vegetables. I became facile at cutting and weighing meats and cheeses, an expert in the art of olive oils and crafting homemade pastas and breads. It never occurred to me that I was a child.

My father’s leukemia made me old. Maybe it made me impersonal and cold. I stare out the window but don’t see the traffic, what I see is the Cuban sandwich shop my father loved,
jamón dulce, ropa vieja,
and Spanish beef stew that I would carry on a tray into the bedroom where he didn’t move, lying there with the blinds drawn, the slightest light seeping through. I believed I could make him eat and he would stop losing weight. The headaches wouldn’t be so severe and his fatigue would go away if I worked hard and made him happy.

“I’ll look,” Marino says, not to me but on his phone, and I think about my being impersonal and cold, and I feel anger like a needle stick.

When we first started working together years ago that’s what he thought. It seems worse to hear it now. Gratuitous, in fact. He didn’t need to say it and I’m not sure it’s an accurate description. I was earnest and diligent. Maybe my wry humor was lost on him or it could be possible what he said was true back then. It makes sense that it could have been. I’d learned not to care too much and gradually have unlearned it, which is where I am now. Marino wasn’t trying to be cruel. He didn’t mean anything.

“I’ll look right now.” He’s unusually cordial to whoever he’s talking with. “Because I’m sitting in a damn parking lot. No, I don’t mean it literally. Why the sudden urgency?” A pause. “Yeah he got there about an hour before I did. A few uniforms were there. No, not inside with him, they wouldn’t have been. Why?” A longer pause. “Like I’ve said I can’t stop him from being the Lone Ranger … It’s looking like that. Tox will confirm. Right. Bleach.” He ends the call and says to me, “That was kind of weird.”

I remember the opened pack of Clove gum in my hands. “I think it’s pretty stale,” I comment, and the anger is gone as if it were never there.

He shrugs. “Hit me twice.”

I peel the wrappers off two sticks as hard as cardboard. They crunch when he bites down on them.

“The commissioner,” he says as he chews, opening something on his phone, staring long and hard at it. “Help yourself to the gum if you want.” His voice is different and distracted. “There’s plenty more where that came from. I order it off the Internet.”

“The Lone Ranger?” I inquire as he closes whatever he was looking at and drops his phone into his lap.

“I don’t really want to talk about it.” He goes on to talk about it anyway. “Machado.” He tells me the problem started late last year when Cambridge Police Commissioner Gerry Everman mentioned that Marino is one of the best detectives the department has ever had and the word passed down through the ranks.

If that wasn’t enough reason for jealousy there were a record number of letters of commendation from victims and witnesses Marino has worked with, and of course he wasn’t quiet about it. The more hostile Machado got, the more Marino pushed back. Finally there was a “situation” with a woman that began around last Thanksgiving.

“The straw that broke it,” Marino summarizes.

“Someone you were fighting over?”

“This hasn’t got anything to do with me and no. I was seeing Beth Eastman until her daughter Julie got killed. The second Jersey victim who was shot when she was about to get on the ferry.”

“You dated Beth in high school.”

“Went steady and everything.”

“She must be devastated.”

“Her daughter was a real nice lady.” He talks and chews gum at the same time. “The other day I heard a rumor his latest thing is he’s trying to get on with the state police, wants to be an investigator assigned to the Middlesex County D.A.’s office.” He’s talking about Machado again. “If he does, it will be good riddance and my next pain in the ass, which probably is his motivation. He’ll try to steamroll Cambridge and interfere with every homicide we get. Sort of what he’s already doing on the inside. He was stupid as hell to tell Joanna that her husband was shot.”

“I agree it wasn’t a good idea to give her an important detail like that.” I think about the guitars, their two cases on the bed and other items glowing whitish blue.

“And you know why he’s making piss-poor decisions these days?” Marino says. “Because he wants people to side with him, not me. He’s obsessed to the point it’s crazy. If I turn up dead you know who to look for.”

“You’ve mentioned that twice,” I reply. “I hope you don’t mean it literally.”

W
E PASS THE WRECKED
Smart car in the opposite lanes, crushed, the windshield caved in, the roof flattened. Glass and plastic are all over the road and I wonder if the driver is en route to the CFC.

“May as well be in a tin can.” Marino doesn’t want to discuss Machado anymore. “I don’t understand why anyone would drive something like that.”

“It’s affordable.”

“Yeah a real bargain if you’re killed in it. Maybe get something bigger than a bread box. It’s cheaper than a funeral.”

“Rand Bloom will spare nothing, the end justifying the means.” I want to make sure Marino takes the insurance investigator very seriously. “I expect more underhanded tricks and we need to be prepared and proactive.”

“Whenever you say
proactive
it makes me nervous.”

“He’s been finding out everything he can about us. Let’s see what we can find out about him.”

“Us? I think it’s just you. I don’t think he’s interested in me,” Marino says and I know what I’ll do.

“He was in an accident or a fight,” I reply.

“Yeah his face looks like someone hit him with a baseball bat. Get in line. Everybody who’s ever met him probably wants to beat the shit out of him.”

“Let’s see what Lucy can dig up about him.” An accident or an attack, and there should be a police report, a record of what happened somewhere.

“I think we get the drift,” Marino says, and we’ve reached the end of the bridge and are stopping at a red light now. “Bloom’s a shit stirrer, plain and simple. That’s why some sleaze insurance company would hire him.”

He opens an email and an attachment on his phone, perhaps what the commissioner mentioned to him moments earlier or it could be something new. The head of Marino’s department is leaking information to him, and I’m reminded of what was easy for me to forget. Marino is one hell of an investigator. I wouldn’t want him after me.

“TBP isn’t considered sleazy by the general public,” I tell him.

“The Biggest Pricks.” He uses two fingers to enlarge whatever he’s looking at on his phone’s touch screen.

“I don’t know what it stands for. The Best Policy comes to mind. If you look them up, it’s a great place to work and they’ve won all kinds of awards.”

“Give me a break.”

The light turns green. We’re moving again.

“It’s a formidable insurer and well respected until you actually have a claim,” I add. “Then you find out the hard way what they’ll do to make sure you don’t get what you’ve paid premiums for.”

“Totally disgusting.” Marino merges left onto Memorial Drive, and we’re back in Cambridge. “What a perfect job for a dirtbag who doesn’t give a damn about anybody and has no conscience,” he says and he’s right.

Jamal Nari’s murder this morning didn’t deter Bloom from his ongoing harassment of Joanna. In fact he escalated it.

“Obviously he targeted Mary Sapp too,” Marino says. “Looks like he may have targeted someone else,” he adds mysteriously.

“My question is the same. How does he find out this level of detail about people? How did he know Nari and his wife were dealing with Mary Sapp, that she was the Realtor for a house they wanted to rent?”

“All you got to do is tail someone, keep running into them somewhere, to be diligent and focused as hell. Then he passed on info so the rental fell through, getting a dishonest Realtor to do his dirty work. She’s happy to keep the deposit and avoid a problem. And who knows how she sweetened the pot.”

“Someone in Bloom’s position probably gets a lot of pots sweetened.”

“Kickbacks, and it’s just his good luck that Nari gets murdered.”

“His wife loses him now she’s going to lose the house,” I reply and the Charles River Yacht Club is on our left, the MIT campus on our right, a lot of boats, brick and granite. “She can’t stay in their apartment after what happened and suddenly she finds she has no place to go.”

Joggers and cyclists crowd the fitness path flanking the river, and lush green trees cast spreading shadows. Rowers and scullers skim over the dark blue water, pumping hard, going fast, ending the day physically and with civility unlike what we’re doing.

“A punk. A damn vulture picking on people who’ve already been victimized.” Marino goes on to use other descriptive words and phrases that don’t bear repeating, but the gist of what he says is true.

Rand Bloom is a thug whose bread and butter is harassment. While we don’t know for a fact that he’s been spying on me, I suspect he’s been doing it since Johnny Angiers died in the woods six weeks ago. It could explain why Bloom was in my neighborhood this morning parked close to my house, and I think of the glint of light Benton saw from the backyard.

Possibly it was Bloom. He or maybe someone associated with him may have been spying or taking photographs of Benton and me during a personal moment to violate my privacy, to gather intelligence, to publicly embarrass. I can only assume the intention is to make sure it’s not worth my while to defend what I determined about Angiers’s death, and then I think of something else.

“What exactly went out over the radio about Nari’s murder this morning?” I ask.

“The address and that Angelina Brown, a resident in the house, saw a man collapsed on the driveway. I’ve got the transcript if you want to see it. Just sent to me,” he adds and I wonder sent by whom. “When we stop I’ll forward it to you.”

“Did you hear the calls?” I ask.

“I was in the gym and didn’t have my radio. Machado reached me by phone. After taking his sweet time. Why?”

“If Bloom was monitoring his scanner he would have heard any calls and recognized the address. He may have been only a couple blocks away. Certainly he was when you and I drove past his truck.”

“He wasn’t in it,” Marino points out. “We don’t know where the hell he was.”

“If he were near my house he might have seen you pick me up. Did anything go out over the radio about that?”

“When I left my place I radioed that I was ten-eight, responding to Farrar Street.”

“Did you in any way indicate you were picking me up and bringing me to the scene?” I ask.

“No. But it was out there that we had a ten-thirty-five.”

“A major crime which generally means a homicide. If Bloom heard that, he had an idea what was going on. He may have been watching my house, especially since he somehow knows I’m supposed to be on vacation in Florida. Now it’s really interesting for him. He gets to see if I respond to Nari’s crime scene or if maybe I’m too busy doing other things.”

I envision Benton’s arms around me, kissing me. But I don’t mention it. I think about Lucy buzzing the house, flying low enough to agitate trees and rattle windows. My mind rapidly sorts through any number of scenes that I wouldn’t want photographed and made public.

“Why would he bother?” Marino asks.

“My guess is he’s looking for anything at all that might impeach me. It doesn’t take much if you plant the right detail and it goes viral on the Internet. I’m no good to anyone if I’m not perceived as credible.”

“If what you’re saying is true he’s more industrious than the damn CIA.”

“I’m puzzled by Machado though,” I have to say. “If he’s so competitive with you then why did he bother to call you while you were in the gym?”

“He knew he’d get there first, have a huge head start working the case. It’s like inviting someone to a party late and then ignoring them so they feel like shit. These days he does anything he can to make me look bad and to make himself look better.”

“It appears he also was sending you information as he got it, at least for a while,” I point out.

“Not him. It wasn’t him doing it.” Marino doesn’t tell me who but I have a feeling I know.

The commissioner is Marino’s ally, and that bodes poorly for Machado and tells me something else. Gerry Everman has a problem. I have a feeling he’s using Marino to take care of it. My seven-story titanium-skinned building is up ahead, squat with a domed glass roof, and I wonder which members of my staff have waited for me and how I can graciously sidestep socializing and indulging in cannolis. There isn’t time.

“I suspect that Bloom assumed when you responded to Dorchester and requested a Boston PD backup that I would show up too,” I add. “He had just passed us in his pickup truck. You slowed down to let him go by and I have no doubt he saw us. Then he would have heard you radio the dispatcher to run his plate.”

I’m sure I’m right and wish I weren’t, and I’m certain the ruthless insurance investigator has an arsenal of dirty tricks I’ve yet to see. What else has he photographed? What other details of my personal life has he learned, and what will turn up on the Internet? Does he work alone? Who else is he involved with? He tailed Nari and photographed a drug deal, it seems. Maybe Bloom has drug connections.