Boston Cream (14 page)

“Then you must think I have something to tell you.”

“Why?”

“This cup of what you call coffee. If the conversation was over, you’d have sent me on my way. You didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. Because I do think you know more than you’ve said.”

“I told you I’d share whatever I found and I did.” At least my legs were crossed when I said it. “So who is he?”

“The Irish are a lot less structured than the Italians,” Gianelli said. “You got more gangs than families. But my connections in organized crime tell me McCudden and Walsh used to work for a guy named Sean Daggett.”

“Used to?”

“He got sent up on a state weapons charge, just came out not that long ago. Well, maybe a year. And seems to be keeping straight. Hasn’t done dick since he got out.”

“What was he into before?”

“The usual. Extortion, gambling, hijacking, armed robbery.”

“What kind of gambling?”

“Christ, I don’t know—numbers mostly.”

“Poker?”

“Cash games, you mean? I suppose. Why?”

“Just a wild swing,” I said. “David played on his computer so we thought maybe he’d ventured into a live game.”

“With what? We looked at his bank statements, the man had nothing.”

Unless I told him about David’s money, the story had all the credence of a federal budget. And if Sammy Patel wasn’t telling about his half, I was staying quiet about David’s. “Never mind. Like I said, a wild swing. So what does an Irish gangster want with a nice Jewish doctor?” I asked. “Those two thugs didn’t just happen to accost him for his wallet. Can we at least agree on that?”

“Of course we can. And don’t think Betts and Simenko wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t in front of you.”

“A kidnap with zero possibility of ransom. His parents have nothing except their house and I’ve seen it: it’s the kind of place the next owner will knock down. I asked his boss if he could influence donor lists and the answer was no. The only other thing he had in the world was his skill.”

“Maybe someone needed an operation done outside the box. The kind only he could do.”

“A transplant?”

“You know how impossible it is to get a kidney here?” His voice took on a different colour as he said it. A personal note.

“You know someone on a waiting list?” I asked.

“I did,” he said. “My brother-in-law. My wife’s younger brother. Great kid. He died waiting for a transplant, must be eight years ago now. He was thirty-eight when he passed. Anyway, all I’m saying is it’s not easy watching someone getting sicker and sicker when a transplant would help.”

“You think someone procured an organ on their own and demanded he implant it?”

“It sounds dumb, I know, but you said yourself, apart from his skills, what did he have? A simple mugging gone wrong, we’d have found his body by now.”

“But you’d need more than one guy to perform that kind of operation.”

“How many more?”

“I don’t know, but it’s got to be a few. I’ll ask Dr. Stayner. So what are you going to do about Daggett?”

“Me? Nothing. What’s Daggett got to do with me? He doesn’t live in Brookline and as far as I know he has no place of business here.”

“You have reason to believe a crime took place.”

“Maybe. But even if I believe it, there’s nothing I can act on. The best I can do is work behind the scenes a bit, see what else I can find. Just don’t expect me to bail you out of anything. You’re on your own here.”

Didn’t I know it.

I called Jenn as soon as I was out of the Brookline station and filled her in on my lovely chat with the Boston PD. I was pissed at Gianelli, pissed at the mugs from Boston. My heels were pounding bits of mica out of the sidewalk as I stalked toward my car.

“What do you think of Gianelli’s theory?” I asked.

“That David was kidnapped and made to operate on a gangster? That had to have been a Bogart movie.”

“Who plays the surgeon? Fredric March?”

“Or Leslie Howard. And are they supposed to have kidnapped an entire team? What did they do, show up with a bus?”

“Unless they already had a team in place and just needed one more. Look, I know it sounds too film noir,” I said, “but Gianelli and I agreed on this much: the fact that McCudden and Walsh were involved tells us this was no random mugging, it was a legitimate kidnap attempt. I think the poker angle is bullshit.”

“So do I.”

“And two different people have told us David couldn’t have manipulated the organ donor waiting list. We know ransom was out and there was nothing for him to embezzle. So what else did
David Fine have in the world worth taking him for, if not this very special expertise of his, this world-class talent?”

“Maybe he witnessed something.”

“What, like a Mob hit?”

“It’s no less wacky than the Bogart script.”

“Still doesn’t explain the ten thousand he had. All right. Maybe I’ll find out something at dinner tonight. David might have gone to Rabbi Ed for help that night and he might know where he is.”

“That’s two mights in one theory, Holmes. And where he went that night is not necessarily where he is now.”

“No. Listen, I’m going to drive back to the hotel and drop off the car. I want to take the T to dinner.”

“The T—aren’t you a local boy!”

“I want to take the same ride David took, if he took it, get off where he did and walk to Rabbi Ed’s from there. I doubt there’s any sign of anything after two weeks but I’ll walk it. Try to see it through his eyes.”

“Good idea.”

“Plus you need the car.”

“To do what?”

“See what Carol-Ann Meacham does on a Friday night.”

Stayner himself didn’t call—he had left for the weekend—but one of his residents, Tania Hutchison, phoned me as I was walking into the hotel lobby. “According to Dr. Stayner,” she said, “the minimum team required to perform a simple transplant such as a kidney would be five. You’d need a lead surgeon, an assistant surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a scrub nurse and an OR nurse.”

“That’s it?”

“Ideally, you’d have one more nurse, but he said you could get by with five if the organ is coming from a cadaver.”

“And if not?”

“With a live donor, we always have two teams. The organ is taken out by one team, carried next door, where a second team one implants it while it’s fresh. Meanwhile, the first team tends to the donor. Prepares him or her for post-op care.”

“Can it all be done by one team?”

“Yes … but it would take a lot longer. They not only have to do it all, they’d have to rescrub in between.”

“What about space? How big a theatre would you need?”

There was a moment of silence while Tania considered it. “Not that big. You really just need a table with good light, and room for the team and their instruments. You could do it in the type of room where simple day surgeries are done. Cosmetic surgery, arthroscopy, that type of thing.”

“Okay. So how well do you know David?”

“We’ve spent a lot of time together,” she said. “A
lot
of time. We were residents together before being awarded our fellowships. And we were the only two who won them. I know his mind pretty well, what kind of problems he enjoys solving, how he approaches challenges, which is always the same. Study it closely, really closely, know everything about it and how it works, let it simmer a bit and then move decisively. And brilliantly. I don’t know if he plays chess, for example, but he’d be unbeatable if he does.”

“Apparently he prefers poker.”

“No! David? Really? Huh. I don’t associate him with that. But I can see that he’d be good at it. His temperament is actually pretty moderate for a surgeon. Some want to grow up to be Napoleon, I swear. I’m way more uptight than David, I can tell you that much. Although the last few weeks there …”

“What?”

“He never talks about anything personal. I don’t know to this day if he’s straight or gay. My gut feeling is he’s straight but I know he’d never go out with someone not Jewish so I never tested the waters. Maybe when he—”

“Tania? Did he seem upset?”

“Right. Sorry. Yeah, he did to me. It’s hard to describe changes in someone who keeps to himself as much as he does, but it’s like his screws got a little tighter. He’s always been pretty serious but the last few weeks he looked more grim. Not just soaking up information, which is like oxygen to him. Stewing about something. Did you ask Dr. Stayner?”

“Yes. He said he hadn’t noticed a change.”

“I doubt David would show any weakness around him. Stayner’s his idol. He’d never disappoint him. Or never did until he dropped out of sight.” Then she hesitated and said, “What feels the worst is I’ve really benefited from his disappearance. I’ve assisted on all of Stayner’s surgeries since then and if David doesn’t come back, I’ll be first in line for a fulltime position. It’s everything I’ve wanted since I started Harvard and I can’t enjoy it. I can’t tell you how badly I want him to come back.”

I thought of Ron Fine’s deeply lined face and the catch in his voice when he spoke about his missing son. I said, “You don’t have to.”

T
he southern sky was dark indigo when I got off the trolley but there were still lighter shades of blue to be seen in the northwest as I walked up Washington Street. The air was cool and damp, the street lights blurred by ragged mist. I looked down at the sidewalk and curb as I walked, like you do when you’ve lost a ring or wallet and you’re retracing your route, as if I might actually see something. Look! There! A vital clue that explains it all. Suddenly we know why one of the most stable people on earth suddenly had to run for his life. Footprints materialize that show the way he went. Snippets and fragments are discovered. There! On that branch! The snagged bit of cloth our forensic team will analyze to ferret out his location.

Oh, wait. We have no forensic team. Which was fine because there was no cloth snagged on the bare branches that hung over the street. There were no vital clues. No footprints or fragments, no clouds of his breath still steaming in the night air. No rings or wallets in the gutter. Nothing but an oily swirl of water running next to the curb.

Someone was playing blues guitar on Rabbi Ed’s street, and not badly. I could tell it wasn’t a recording: at one point as I neared his house, the player stumbled once and had to start his riff
again. It sounded like an early 1960s Chicago style: no fuzz or pedal effects, just a nice clear tone that emphasized the actual notes, and he could play them, bend them, make them sing pretty well. I had a vision of a teenaged boy in one of the neighbouring houses, learning at the feet of the masters. Then I got to Rabbi Ed Lerner’s house and realized it was coming from the bay window on the ground level. When I knocked on the door, the music stopped, and I heard a searing screech of feedback before the amp shut off.

The house was a cottage with vinyl siding painted a deep green and white shutters framing the leaded windows. The garden in front had low shrubs along the walkway still wrapped in burlap coverings.

Rabbi Ed was perspiring when he opened the door. He wore the same white shirt and blue jeans he’d had on at the restaurant. “Sorry,” he said, wiping his brow with a sleeve. “I always shvitz a little when I play. Must be my soul coming out.”

“You sounded great.”

The hall was wide, with dark wood wainscotting, archways and door jambs. He led me into the study at the right of the entrance. A turquoise Stratocaster rested in the cradle of a guitar stand next to an old Fender Twin amp. They looked like they could blow a high school dance apart.

“Long before I became a rabbi,” he said, “when I was in theatre school, if you can believe it, I played in a band with some of the kids. We called ourselves the Castoffs and I was the lead guitarist.”

“I’m still digesting the theatre part.”

“Scratch a rabbi, find an actor. Or, God forbid, a comedian. Anyway, that was my undergrad experience. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d never make it as an actor and I didn’t want to be a hanger-on. I made a total break.”

“But you still have your guitar chops.”

“That I can always practise on my own,” he said. “You
can’t really act in your living room. And if ever I fall on hard times, that’s a 1961 Stratocaster. I could retire on it. Listen, I have to change for dinner, I’m not wearing this sweaty thing for Shabbos. You want a drink or anything? Glass of wine? I have some Scotch, nothing fancy, but I think there’s Chivas.”

“Chivas on ice would be great.”

“Let me get you that and I’ll tell Shana you’re here. I did tell you my daughter would be joining us?”

“I thought her name was Sandra.”

“To everyone else, yes. Sandra or Sandy, depending if it’s work or friends. But to me, it’s Shana.”

He went off to get my drink and I looked around his study. There was a large wooden desk against the wall in one corner, with a closed laptop barely visible under sheaves of paper. He had bookshelves along one entire wall, with a collection of Judaica and philosophy like David Fine’s, only three times the size. The other wall was dominated by an aquarium in which four or five turtles swam lazily, bumping up against driftwood that stood like a tree in the middle. On the wall above it were photos of Ed Lerner in a variety of settings: breaking ground at a construction site along with three other men, all in hardhats; cutting a ribbon in front of the Holocaust Memorial; decorating a sukkah; accepting an oversized cheque from a man in front of a building called the Vilna Shul.

I leaned in closer. The man presenting the cheque was the congressman from the Eighth District, Marc McConnell. Couldn’t miss that hair and height.

I heard footsteps behind me and ice clinking in a glass. I took a breath to compose myself before turning to face the rabbi. If there was anything to ask about the photo, I wasn’t sure what it was yet.

It wasn’t him standing there with my drink. It was his daughter and she had two drinks. She looked nothing like him, wasn’t cut from the same ursine cloth at all. She was in her
mid-twenties, about five-five, with deep grey-green eyes and chestnut curls that spilled past her shoulders. There was the finest mist of freckles across a face that met every qualification for lovely. Shana was the right nickname for her. It means pretty or sweet in Yiddish. One of the nicest compliments you can give a woman is to say she has a
shana punim
, a sweet face. Which she had.