Deep Pockets (13 page)

“Yes,”

“What about my letters? Did you find them? Do you have them?”

I must have nodded.

He couldn’t keep his hands still. “Thank God.
Thank God
. Imagine what would have happened if the police had found them. Give them to me.”

I was motionless. “I don’t think so.”

“What about the money? Will the police find it? If—”

“I didn’t find any money.”

He looked at me as if he was sure I was lying.

“Go home,” I said.

“But the letters…. Are you still working for me?”

“Now you want a murderer on your payroll?”

“I may have spoken too quickly, made assumptions.”

“Go home.”

“But I need to — I need to order my life. I need to have a plan.”

“You want a plan? Hire a lawyer.”

“I” — he swallowed — “I have a lawyer.”

“A criminal lawyer?”

“Will I need one?” His words were barely audible.

“You might.”

“Burn the letters,” he said. “Please. If you won’t give them back to me, burn them.”

“Go home.”

“I should never have come.” His words were bitter and tinged with regret, for this meeting, for our first meeting, for having sought my help in the first place. He got to his feet like a man who’d aged twenty years in as many minutes and walked slowly to the door.

When a blackmailer dies under mysterious circumstances, you
look closely at the person he was blackmailing. That’s basic. I reconstructed my earlier phone conversation with Chaney. I hadn’t mentioned Benjy Dowling by name; I was certain of that. But Chaney might have known it all along.

I went into the kitchen, yanked the refrigerator door, and inventoried the sparse contents. Three cans of Rolling Rock on the lower shelf were unappealing, cold when I craved warmth. I opened the high cupboard where Roz hides her scotch, found a clean glass, and poured myself a healthy slug.

Shit. Chaney could have followed me after the drop, or this morning in the exterminator’s truck. Could have used me to locate his target. Maybe his original approach, that half-assed tail job through Harvard Square, had been a matter of design, a blind to keep me from the thoughts I was currently entertaining. Maybe Chaney had been deliberately awkward and noticeable. Maybe he was actually a skilled stalker.

I know a PI who was hired to find a missing sister, hired by the nicest, most concerned brother, only he wasn’t the brother after all. Turned out to be an abusive ex-lover. When the PI told him where the little sister lived, he beat her so badly, she never regained consciousness before she died. I remembered vowing that that would never happen to me. I’m damn careful when I locate women for men.

I’d been less careful with Benjy Dowling. Because he was a con and a blackmailer. I finished the scotch without tasting it, felt sudden heat in my gut, and poured more.

“Hey, you comin’ back to bed tonight?”

Leon stood in the kitchen doorway, eyes narrow in the light, wearing boxers and a frown. I had trouble focusing on his face. He seemed to exist in some other universe, the world of before.

“Wilson having wife trouble again?”

“You listened?” When I set my glass on the table, it made a louder noise than I’d anticipated. “Let me get this straight. You eavesdropped?” My voice was louder, too. Maybe it was the scotch. Maybe it was the memory of my friend’s guilty conscience or the churning anger I felt when I considered whether I might have misjudged Chaney, misread him completely.

“Hell no. Calm down. I just saw him out the window. Man, twenty years ago, folks in the neighborhood would’ve thought you were hosting an NAACP meeting. I don’t know what they’re thinking now.”

“You
saw
him?” It was pitch-black outside.

“Yeah, I love this house. Lookit what I found on the windowsill upstairs. You some kind of pervert?” He brandished my night-vision scope. “Where’s a civilian get shit like this?”

“Put it down,” I snapped. “Leave it alone.”

“Hey, no harm intended.”

“Leon, think of this as my office. I’m working.”

“This is your kitchen, babe. This is the middle of the fucking night.”

“Go back to bed, okay? I need some time to think.”

“You let all your clients come busting in anytime? Don’t they realize you have a personal life?”

If it had been some other time or place, I might have calmly discussed the nature of emergencies. Now, in the middle of the damn thing, I had no patience. It seemed to me that Leon was turning into all the men I’d ever known who’d chided me for not being at their beck and call, not paying more attention to them, not understanding that their work was more important than mine, starting with my father and moving down a long, long line. Or maybe he just reminded me of Chaney, standing there. I hadn’t yelled at my client, but I’d wanted to.

“Leon, I need to think.” I rested my head in my hand. For a moment, I thought he’d gone away, but he didn’t take the hint.

He said, “If that’s how you think, with a glass of scotch, can I join you? Hey, maybe I can even help. Trained and at your service.”

When I was a cop, I worked with a cop named Mooney. He was special, unusual; I could have talked this mess over with him. I trusted his instincts, trusted him. Leon was FBI, and until we’d met, I’d never had a good feeling about anybody attached to the feds. I’d worked with him on a single case, a case that had nothing in common with this one. I had knowledge of a crime, two crimes if you counted the blackmail, and I had no intention of speaking my mind to a federal agent, not about Chaney’s predicament or my own.

“Please, just go to bed.” I tried to keep my voice low, but, like the glass smacking the tabletop, it echoed.

He started to reply, stopped, then muttered something under his breath that I didn’t catch. As he turned and stomped upstairs, I considered hurling my empty glass at the wall, then changed my mind and refilled it instead. Maybe I wouldn’t drink it, just stare that amber liquid down.

How long before bright-eyed rookie Danny Burkett or desk-bound Kevin Shea made the connection? How long before one or the other decided he ought to question the private eye who’d inquired about a man who turned up dead? How long before Dowling’s apartment manager thought she ought to mention the odd salt-and-pepper duo who’d come unexpectedly to exterminate?

Heavy footsteps descended the stairs, hesitated near the bottom, then crossed the foyer. The lock clicked and the door squeaked. I pushed back my chair and walked toward the noise.

“Leon?”

“What?” He turned with the door half-closed behind him. The breeze caught my robe and the sash fluttered.

“Look, you don’t have to go. I’m sorry.”

“But you don’t wanna talk about it?”

“Can’t.”

“Sorry about that, too.” He plucked his jacket off the coat tree in the hall. He was going to leave and I wasn’t going to stop him.

“You didn’t see Wilson Chaney here,” I said.

“I did, but don’t worry. I’ll keep my mouth shut about it.”

I stood on the front porch, watching his retreating form disappear into darkness, ignoring the night chill till it brought prickles to my arms. If the officers who’d gone to Chaney’s house had followed him here, if they were out in the dark watching my door, they were getting their money’s worth. Maybe they’d figure one lover, Chaney, had found me in the arms of another, Wells. That’s the way cops’ minds work.

No one seemed to be parked in the tow zones or blocking the fire-plugs. The usual cars huddled quietly under the streetlamps. I sucked down a breath of cool night air.

Kevin and the rookie might not make the connection. The building manager, that vague and harried chef, might never mention the exterminator. I went back inside, sat behind my desk, and tugged at my hair, twirling a heavy coil round and round my forefinger.

I’m not a believer in coincidence. I didn’t intend to calculate the odds of a blackmailer falling under a hit-and-run driver’s wheels the day after hitting up his victim for more money. The cops might not be thinking deliberate homicide, but I was. Would the cops consider Chaney a suspect? Anyone might be upset to learn his car had been stolen and involved in a fatal accident. It would depend on how he’d handled his face when they’d mentioned Dowling’s name.

If Chaney had done it, brilliant Chaney, Harvard’s own Chaney, wouldn’t the man have arranged an airtight alibi? Used someone else’s car? Sure, if he’d planned it, but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d been following Dowling, waiting to make his rational approach, and then there he was, Dowling, blissfully unaware, crossing the street. In a sudden moment of rage and entitlement, Chaney might have gunned the motor, put an end to his tormentor.

If Chaney hadn’t done it, who had? If he had a guardian angel, I figured he or she existed in solidly human form, not nemesis but accomplice. Had the guardian angel followed me? Had Chaney hired not one but two?

If Chaney had done the hiring, why Chaney’s car? Rage and entitlement didn’t cut it there, not with a proxy. A man smart enough to hire a proxy killer wouldn’t let the killer use his car.

I yawned and blinked, sleepy after all. The scotch had done the trick. If Leon had just stayed upstairs, not been so damned nosy… Now there was nothing upstairs but tangled sheets on an empty bed, the scent of a man.

I recalled the sour smell of dirty clothes in Dowling’s apartment, walked through it room by room in my memory. If I’d entered knowing the tenant would soon be dead, would I have seen it differently? The flat was messy, yes, but was it the mess of a slob, or had someone else searched it before me? Where was Dowling’s checkbook, his bank statements? Where were his tax receipts? Why were the blackmail letters so easy to find? Had they been left on the desk deliberately, to give the cops a link to Chaney?

I regretted the unexamined locked garage. I’d decided to go for it another time, to pull a nighttime break-in if necessary. Now time seemed to have run out.

As long as the cops didn’t connect the victim with the owner of the car, it would stay a hit-and-run investigation. They’d dust for prints on the recovered car, but they wouldn’t be surprised to find Chaney’s. Don’t kid yourself: a hit-and-run can be treated in different ways. A homeless man goes under the wheels, that’s one thing. A politician midcampaign, that’s another. The victim always matters. If cops had found the blackmail letters in Dowling’s apartment, they’d be on Chaney like ants on sugar.

“Burn them,” he’d said.

I didn’t burn them. I’m too much a cop at heart to destroy evidence. On the other hand, I didn’t want any cop to be able to walk in and take them. I know people who have secret hidey-holes, safes behind switch plates, in baseboards, under the floor. I have a good place, too.

I reread Chaney’s love letters. So much trouble for so few words. “Darling Denali, you make me feel like a teenager, like a bridegroom, like a gigolo, evil and pure, darling Denali.” Nothing new, no secret code. Simple passion, rising heat. I put each back in its envelope, enclosed them in a plastic bag.

My cat’s Kitty Litter tray comes apart. I cleaned and emptied it, stuffed the plastic bag between the two halves, and rejoined them invisibly with duct tape. I don’t know a whole lot of people who would search a Kitty Litter tray. And even if someone did search this one, he wouldn’t find the love letters in among the litter. Wouldn’t even realize the two halves came apart.

Good thing T.C., my cat, can’t talk. After the cheap canned-tuna scraps I’d doled out that week, I knew he’d turn me in if he could. Before I closed my eyes, I wondered how Chaney was sleeping, if he was sleeping. And that led me to another thought, just a wisp of memory and query before sleep dragged me down. Why hadn’t his wife given him an alibi?

I didn’t sleep long and I didn’t sleep
well. I kept waking abruptly, flipping the pillow, searching for a cool spot against my cheek. It wasn’t just the musky smell of the sheets that made me regret Leon’s absence; I regretted the reason he’d left. I’d been angry at Chaney, the messenger who’d brought bad news at a bad time. Running straight to me after a visit from the cops was pure stupidity on his part. I’d been furious, and that fury, deprived of its rightful target once Chaney’d made tracks, homed in on Leon like a guided missile.

You learn from your mistakes. Oh yeah, sure you do, and I was getting to be damned good at recognizing them, too,
after
committing them.

Did I dream? I don’t remember. I ran over the facts of the case until they became a shopping list, a rote exercise. I couldn’t leave Dowling’s death alone. It was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking at, a sore spot in my mouth that my tongue couldn’t leave untouched. I rolled out of bed, knowing that whether the cops treated the hit-and-run as a traffic accident or a homicide made no difference. I couldn’t ignore it. I had to know. If I’d fingered a man for a killer, I needed to know. How can you learn from your mistakes if you don’t even know which mistakes you’ve made?

I showered and dressed in khakis and a cotton shirt Paolina had unexpectedly and kindly ironed. Not part of our deal, any more than making her breakfast was for me. Over coffee and toast, I listened to the news but learned nothing. After breakfast, I searched the bushes for the newspaper. The delivery guy must be a hot prospect for the Sox pitching rotation. His velocity is terrific, as demonstrated by the broken branches on the rhododendrons, his location erratic.

Dowling was relegated to a small boxed item inside the “City and Region” section, which used to be called “Metro” before the news execs realized they needed to boost their circulation beyond the city limits. Page two, upper right side, part of a column of disparate items headed “New England in Brief.” The subhead read “Police seek witnesses in hit-and-run.”

Boston police requested that witnesses come forward to assist the police in identifying the motorist responsible for the death of a pedestrian. The victim, identified as Benjamin Dowling, 30, of Somerville, was hit while crossing the Birmingham Parkway at approximately 1:00
A.M
. The vehicle was traveling west at a high rate of speed. No skid marks were found at the scene, indicating the driver may have been unaware of the pedestrian’s presence in the roadway. Anyone with information should call the hit-and-run hot line at 1-800-555-9687.