A Drink Before the War (8 page)

She came up close to me and said, “What I got here is a little part of it.”

I said, “Jenna—”

“No, no,” she said. “It's something, believe me. You'll see.” She glanced up at the State House, then looked back at me. “You prove you're ready to help me on this, show what side you're on, and I give you the rest. I give you…” Her eyes lost their fire and filled; her voice stuck like a worn clutch. “I give you…the rest,” she managed. I hadn't known her for more than twelve hours, but I had the feeling that whatever “the rest” was, it was bad. Tearing her apart from the inside out.

She smiled then, a nice soft one, and touched her hand to my face. She said, “I think we're going to turn out all right, Kenzie. Maybe the two of us get some justice while we're at it.” The word “justice” came off her tongue as if she were trying to taste it.

I said, “We'll see, Jenna.”

She reached into her purse and handed me a manila envelope. I opened it and extracted an eight-by-eleven black-and-white photograph. It was slightly grainy, as if it had been transferred from another type of film, but it was clear. There were two men in the photograph, standing by a cheap chest and mirror, drinks in their hands. One of them was black, the other, white. The black guy I didn't know. The white guy was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and black socks. His hair was brown, the gray that would consume it
in a tin sheath, still a few years off. He was smiling tiredly, and the picture seemed old enough that possibly he'd only been Congressman Paulson at that point.

I said, “Who's the black guy?”

She looked at me and I could tell she was sizing me up. The wet ass hour, as it were, deciding if she could trust me. I felt like we were in a pocket—the crowds of people hurrying past us, not really there but existing on a matte screen behind us, like in an old movie.

Jenna said, “What're you in this for?”

I was considering my answer when something familiar moved out of the screen to our right, heading for our pocket, and I recognized it as if I was underwater—a blue baseball cap with yellow stitching.

I said, “Get down,” and had my hand on Jenna's shoulder when Blue Cap set himself into his stance and a hammering metallic chatter drilled the morning air. The first burst of bullets slammed through the front of Jenna's chest as if it wasn't there, and I ducked as they blew past my head, still trying to pull her down as her chest jerked forward at all sorts of angles. Blue Cap had his finger pulled back on the trigger and the gun at full auto, the metal stitching slicing from Jenna's body to the cement, coming around in an arc for me. The crowd in the mall had turned into a stampede, and as I cleared my gun from its holster, someone trampled my ankle. Jenna's body crashed down on top of mine, and cement chips shot off the ground into my face. He was firing more methodically now, trying to get around Jenna's body to hit mine. In a moment, he'd just begin firing into her body again, and the bullets would pass through it as if it were paper and punch their way into mine.

Through the blood in my eyes, I could see him raising the Uzi up over his head, then bending it in at an angle, the muzzle a white flame. The line of bullets jackhammered toward my forehead and stopped suddenly in a white cloud of cement dust. The slim clip dropped from the gun toward
the pavement and he had another one slammed home before it hit the ground. He pulled back on the bolt and I leaned out from under Jenna's body and fired.

The magnum went off with a harsh
whoomp
and he flipped into the air sideways as if he'd been broadsided by a truck. He came back down onto the pavement and bounced, the gun skittering out of his hand. I rolled Jenna off me, wiped her blood from my eyes, and watched him try to crawl to his Uzi. It was eight feet away and he was having a hard time covering the distance because his left ankle was almost completely obliterated.

I walked over and kicked him in the face. Hard. He groaned and I kicked him again, and he went out.

I crossed back to Jenna and sat on the cement in a growing puddle of her blood. I lifted her off the pavement and held her in my arms. Her chest was gone and so was she. No last words, just death, splayed out like a broken doll at the edge of the Boston Common at the beginning of a new day. Her legs were askew, and the curious vultures were coming back for a second look now that the shooting was over.

I pulled her legs together and tucked them under her. I looked at her face. It told me nothing. Another death. The more I see, the less I know.

No one needed Jenna Angeline anymore.

Like the Hero,
I made the front page of both newspapers. Some rookie photographer was in the crowd when the shooting started, and once he'd cleaned the mess out of his underpants, he came back.

I'd walked back to Blue Cap by this time and picked up his Uzi by the sling. I slid it over my shoulder and squatted down beside him, my head down, magnum in my hand. That's when the photographer took his shots. I never noticed him. One shot showed me squatting by Blue Cap, a strip of green and the State House beyond us. In the extreme right foreground, almost out of focus, was Jenna's corpse. You could barely notice her.

The
Trib
carried it in the bottom left corner of page one, but the
News
plastered it completely over the front page with a hysterical black headline across the Statehouse—HERO P.I. IN MORNING GUNFIGHT!!! How they could print “hero” with Jenna's corpse lying in plain view was just beyond me. I guess LOSER P.I. IN MORNING GUNFIGHT didn't have the same ring.

The police showed up around that time and hustled the photographer behind a hastily set up sawhorse. They took my gun and the Uzi and gave me a cup of coffee and we went over it. And over it.

An hour later I was at headquarters on Berkeley Street and they were deciding whether to book me or not. They read me my rights in English and Spanish while they figured out what to do.

I know quite a few cops, but none I recognized seemed to be taking part in this investigation. The two guys who had been assigned to me looked like Simon and Garfunkel on a bad day. Simon's name was Detective Geilston, and he was short, neatly dressed in dark burgundy pleated trousers, a light blue oxford with a roll in the collar and cream crisscross stripes. He wore a burgundy tie with a subtle blue diamond pattern. He looked like he had a wife and kids and CD accounts. He was Good Cop.

Bad Cop was Garfunkel, or Detective Ferry as they called him around the station. He was tall and lanky and wore a drab brown two-piece suit that was too short in the arms and legs. Underneath he wore a wrinkled white shirt and a dark brown knit tie. Mr. Fashion. His hair was strawberry blond, but a wide bare patch ran up the middle now and the bushy remains shot out from the sides of his head like a cleaved afro.

They'd both been friendly enough at the crime scene—giving me cups of coffee and telling me to take my time, take it slow, relax—but Ferry started getting more and more pissed off the more I kept answering his questions with, “I don't know.” He got downright nasty when I refused to tell him who had hired me or exactly what I was doing with the deceased. Since I hadn't been booked yet, the photograph was folded and tucked into the ankle of one of my high-tops. I had a feeling what would happen if I gave it up—a formal inquiry, maybe a few nasty details about Senator Paulson's lifestyle, maybe nothing at all. But definitely no arrests, no justice, no public acknowledgment of a dead cleaning lady who'd only wanted to be needed.

If you're a private detective, it helps to be nice to cops. They help you out from time to time and vice versa and that's how you build contacts and keep business thriving. But I don't tolerate animosity very well, especially when my clothes are saturated with someone else's blood and I haven't eaten or slept in twenty-four hours. Ferry was standing with one foot on the chair beside me in the inter
rogation room, telling me what was going to happen to my license if I didn't start “playing ball.”

I said, “‘Playing ball'? What, do you guys have a police cliché manual or something? Which one of you says, ‘Book him, Danno'?”

For the thirtieth time that morning Ferry sighed deeply through his nostrils and said, “What were you doing with Jenna Angeline?”

For the fiftieth time that morning, I said, “No comment,” and turned my head as Cheswick Hartman walked through the door.

Cheswick is everything you could want in an attorney. He's staggeringly handsome, with rich chestnut hair combed straight back off his forehead. He wears eighteen-hundred-dollar custom-made suits from Louis and he rarely wears the same one twice. His voice is deep and smooth like twelve-year-old malt and he has this annoyed look that he gets just before he buries an opponent with a barrage of Latin phrases and flawless elocution. Plus, he has a really nifty name.

Under normal circumstances, I'd have to have won the lottery to afford Cheswick's retainer, but a few years ago, just when he was being considered for partnership in his firm, his sister, Elise—a sophomore at Yale—developed a cocaine problem. Cheswick controlled her trust fund, and by the time Elise's addiction had blossomed into an eight-ball-a-day habit, she'd depleted her yearly allowance and still owed several thousand more to some men in Connecticut. Rather than tell Cheswick and risk his disappointment, she made an arrangement with the men in Connecticut, and some pictures were taken.

One day Cheswick got a phone call. The caller described the photos and promised they'd be on the desk of the firm's senior partner by the following Monday if Cheswick didn't come up with a high five-figure sum by the end of the week. Cheswick was livid. It wasn't the money that bothered him—his family fortune was huge—it was the advantage
they'd taken of both his sister's problem and his love for her. So concerned was he for his sister that not once during our first meeting did I get the feeling it was the jeopardy to his job that angered him, and I admired that.

Cheswick got my name from a guy he knew in legal aid, and gave me the money to deliver with the express demand that I bring back all photos and negatives, and an absolute assurance that this would stop here and now. Elise's debt, I was to tell these men, was paid in full.

For reasons I can't even remember anymore, I brought Bubba along for the ride when I went down to Connecticut. After finding out that the blackmailers were a rogue group with no connections, no real muscle, and absolutely no juice with any politicians, we met two of them in a Hartford high-rise. Bubba held one guy by his ankles out a twelfth floor window while I negotiated with the guy's partner. By the time Bubba's victim had voided himself, his partner had decided that yes, one dollar was a very fair settlement price. I paid him in pennies.

Cheswick has been returning the favor to me by representing me gratis ever since.

He raised his eyebrows at the blood on my clothes. Very quietly he said, “I'd like a moment alone with my client, please.”

Ferry crossed his arms and leaned in toward me. “So fucking what,” he said.

Cheswick yanked the seat out from under Ferry's foot. “So fucking get out of the room now,
Detective
, or I'll slap this department with enough false arrest, harassment, and unlawful detainment citations to keep you in court until long after you've reached your twenty.” He looked at me. “Have you been Mirandized?”

“Yes.”

“Of course he's been fucking Mirandized,” Ferry said.

“You're still here?” Cheswick said, reaching into his briefcase.

Geilston said, “Come on, partner.”

Ferry said, “Hell no. Just because—”

Cheswick was looking at the both of them flatly, and Geilston had his hand on Ferry's arm. He said, “We don't mess with this, Ferry.”

Cheswick said, “Listen to your partner, Detective.”

Ferry said, “We'll meet again.” Professor Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes.

Cheswick said, “At your inquest, no doubt. Start saving now, Detective. I'm expensive.”

Geilston gave one last tug on Ferry's arm and they left the room.

I said, “What's up?” expecting he had something private to tell me.

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “I just do that to show them who's boss. It gives me a woody.”

“Swell.”

He looked at my face, at the blood. “You're not having a good day, are you?”

I shook my head slowly.

His voice lost its levity. “Are you all right? Really? I've heard snippets of what happened, but not much.”

“I just want to go home, Cheswick. I'm tired and I got blood all over me, and I'm hungry, and I'm not in the best of moods.”

He patted my arm. “Well, I have good news from the DA then. From everything he's heard, they have nothing to charge you with. You are to consider yourself released pending further investigation, don't take any sudden trips, blah, blah, blah.”

“My gun?”

“They keep that, I'm afraid. Ballistic tests, etcetera.”

I nodded. “Figures. Can we leave now?”

“We're gone,” he said.

 

He took me out the back entrance to avoid the press, and that's when he told me about the photographer. “I confirmed it with the captain. The man definitely took pictures
of you. He strings for both papers in town.”

I said, “I saw them hustling him out of there, but it didn't register.”

We walked through the parking lot toward his car. His hand was on my back, as if he were ready to run interference for me or simply to hold me up. I wasn't sure which. He said, “Are you OK, Patrick? You may want to stop at Mass. General, have yourself checked out.”

“I'm fine. What about the photographer?”

“You'll be on the front page of the
News
late edition, which should be coming out any minute now. I hear the
Trib
picked it up too. The papers love this sort of thing. Hero detective, a morning—”

“I'm no hero,” I said. “That's my father.”

 

We drove through the city in Cheswick's Lexus. It seemed strange, everyone going about their business. I'd half expected time to have stopped, everyone frozen in place, holding their breath, awaiting further news. But people ate lunch, made phone calls, canceled dentist appointments, got their hair cut, made dinner plans, worked their jobs.

Cheswick and I argued about my ability to drive in my present state, but in the end he dropped me back at Hamilton Place and told me to call him day or night on his private line if I required his services. He drove up Tremont, and I stood outside my car, ignored the ticket on the windshield, and looked at the Common.

In the four hours since it had happened, everything had gone back to normal. The barricades had been taken away, all the questions asked, all the witnesses' names written down. Blue Cap had been lifted into an ambulance and driven off. They'd rolled Jenna into a body bag and zipped it up, carted her off to the morgue.

Then someone had come along and hosed the blood off the cement until everything was clean again.

I took one last look and drove home.