One-Way Ticket (20 page)

I swallowed back a sudden spasm of nausea.

Hello, Mole-face Louie.

I put the top back onto the box, still handling it with the dish towels.

Then I sat on the front step. I took a few deep breaths to settle my stomach and slow down my heartbeat.

Paulie had used a knife, or maybe heavy shears, to cut out this piece of the man who’d given me that kidney punch. I wondered whether he’d killed Louie first or afterward.

Probably not Paulie himself. Probably one of his goons. Now that I thought about it, the man in the Celtics sweatshirt had looked and sounded familiar.

I poked out Roger Horowitz’s cell number on my own. I figured that without a big hunk of his face, Louie would have a hard time staying alive, so I probably had evidence of a homicide in the Nike shoe box.

It rang four times before he answered. “Jesus Christ, Coyne,” he snarled. “This better be good.”

“It’s not good,” I said.

“It’s eight-thirty on a Wednesday night,” he said. “I only got home half an hour ago. Alyse and I just sat down to eat. We haven’t eaten together all week. She made a nice pot roast. Carrots, potatoes, onions, biscuits, gravy. Alyse makes the world’s best gravy.” He blew out an exasperated breath. “So what the hell have you got that you’re calling me on my business cell rather than my home phone, which I wouldn’t’ve answered, that’s more important than my wife’s gravy?”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t call your home phone,” I said. “Because I figured you wouldn’t answer. And I’m sorry about the gravy. What I’ve got is a man’s face.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Last time I looked you did.”

“It’s in a shoe box,” I said. “Somebody else’s face. Not mine.”

He said nothing for a minute. Then he said, “Okay. I’ll bite. Whose face?”

“One of Paulie Russo’s thugs. They called him Louie.”

“And you have this Louie’s face in a shoe box… why?”

“Please come and take it away,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. He sounded as if he had stopped listening to me. “Christ,” he muttered, and then I heard him say, “Keep it warm in the oven, honey. I gotta go… Well, don’t be mad at
me.
You can blame your pal Brady.” Then he said, “Hey, Coyne? You still there?”

“I’m here, Roger.”

“I suppose you got your fingerprints all over that box.”

“No. I handled it with dish towels.”

“Henry slobbered on it, though, I bet.”

“He did not. I told him not to.”

“Right,” he said. “Good dog. Okay. Sit tight. Don’t let the fuckin’ box out of your sight.” And he disconnected, as he usually did, without saying good-bye.

I told Henry to sit still and guard the box while I went inside for a can of Coke. Then the two of us sat on the front steps and waited.

Less than fifteen minutes later a dark sedan with a portable red-and-blue light flashing on its dashboard pulled to a stop in front of my house, and a short woman with a long black braid stepped out. It was Lt. Saundra Mendoza, a Boston homicide cop. Mendoza and I were old friends.

She came up the path to where I was sitting on my front steps. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and dirty sneakers. She had a big leather bag slung over her shoulder. “Horowitz called me,” she said.

I nodded.

“Jurisdiction,” she added.

“Right.”

In Massachusetts, the city of Boston has its own homicide department. For the rest of the Commonwealth, the state police have jurisdiction over homicides. In the case of Louie with the mole on his face, or what we had of him, and assuming he hadn’t survived his face-lift, it was uncertain where he’d been killed and where his face had been lopped off and where the rest of his body might turn up, In cases like this, the city and state cops worked, usually reluctantly, together.

Mendoza looked down at the shoe box. “Looks innocent enough,” she said.

I shrugged. “Except for the bloodstain.”

She nodded and sat beside me. “You looked inside?”

“It’s a bloody hunk of face.”

“Ha,” she said. “What a world, huh?”

“What a world, indeed,” I said. “We going to wait for Horowitz?”

“Only way to do it,” she said.

“I got some coffee.”

She jerked her head at the can of Coke I was holding. “I’d rather have one of those.”

I went inside, fetched a Coke for Saundra Mendoza, and brought it out to her.

We sat on the front steps sipping our Cokes. We talked about the Red Sox. I understood that she didn’t want to have any conversation about the face in the shoe box until Horowitz arrived. That was all right by me. It gave me a chance to figure out what I could and couldn’t tell them.

R
OGER HOROWITZ PULLED UP
to the curb on Mt. Vernon Street about twenty minutes later. He got out of his car, gave the door a hard, angry slam, and as he walked toward Mendoza and me, he snapped latex gloves onto his fingers.

He stood there on the pathway looking down at the box, “You opened it, you said?” he said to me.

“Yes. With a dish towel.”

“And it didn’t blow up, huh?”

“It’s not a bomb.”

“Yeah,” he grumbled. “Sometimes, Boston, Baghdad, you can’t tell the fucking difference. Faces in shoe boxes. Christ, anyway.” He bent down and picked up the box. “Let’s go inside.”

We went into the kitchen. Henry, who’d been sulking on the living-room sofa, scrambled down and followed us.

I spread an old newspaper on the kitchen table, and Horowitz put the box on it and lifted off the top with his gloved fingers. He and Mendoza peered inside.

I looked the other way.

After a minute, Horowitz put the top back onto the box. “You got another Coke?” he said.

I went to the refrigerator and took out a Coke for him.

He sat at the kitchen table. Mendoza and I sat, too.

Horowitz looked at Mendoza with his eyebrows arched.

“You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll interrupt.”

They both fished out notebooks.

“Okay, Coyne,” said Horowitz. “What can you tell us?”

“Henry and I were sitting on the front steps this evening,” I said, “sometime around eight, eight-fifteen, and this man came walking up the street. He was carrying that box. He was wearing dark jeans, dark glasses, and a hooded green sweatshirt with the word ‘Celtics’ on it. The hood was pulled over his head and I couldn’t see his face. He was maybe five-eight or -nine. Heavy build, but not fat. He spoke my name. I think I recognized him, but I wouldn’t want to swear to it. He put that box down at the end of my front walk. I asked him to take off the top, and he did. Then he walked away. That’s what happened.”

“You said you recognized the guy?” said Horowitz.

I nodded. “I’m pretty sure he’s one of Paulie Russo’s goons. Like Louie here. Or what’s left of him.”

“Names?”

I shook my head. “I once heard Louie called by name, though I suppose it might not be his real name. I recognize this piece of face because of that big mole there beside where his nose used to be. The other guy, I have no idea.”

“Could you pick him out of a lineup or ID him from a mug shot, do you think?”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t see his face.”

“So, okay,” said Horowitz. “The big question—”

“I can’t say much,” I said.

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Can’t. Ethically.”

“Which,” he said, “in my book, means won’t. We most likely got a murder here, Coyne, in case you hadn’t figured that out. You’re obligated—”

“I understand all my obligations,” I said. “I’ve told you what I know about the apparent murder of this guy with the mole on his face.”

Horowitz glowered at me. “You know more than that.”

I shook my head. “No, I really don’t.”

He sighed. “At least you must have some idea why Paulie Russo had Louie’s face delivered to you in a shoe box.”

“I think it’s his way of apologizing.”

Horowitz snorted. “Apologizing? Russo? To you?”

I nodded. “Louie’s the one who gave me that kidney punch the other day. Hurt like hell.”

Horowitz turned to Mendoza. “Quincy Market. Coyne fell down, made a big scene. Bystander, figuring he’d had a heart attack or something, summoned an officer. Coyne didn’t say anything about Paulie Russo to her.”

Mendoza looked at me with her eyebrows raised.

I shrugged.

“Louie did that, huh?” Horowitz said.

I nodded.

“And for that, by way of saying he’s sorry, Russo has the guy killed? That what you’re saying?”

I shrugged. “Basically, yes. That’s how I interpret it.”

“Basically,” he repeated.

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Come on, Coyne. Help us out here.”

“I’m trying.”

“Well, so far it makes no sense.”

“There are things I can’t tell you,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “Things between you and some damn client. Confidential things. Like why you got yourself kidney-punched in the first place. That privilege bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit.”

He waved his hand in the air. “Tell us what you can, willya?”

“I thought Russo was, um, responsible for something that might have happened to one of my clients, and—”

“What client?” said Horowitz.

“—and in connection with that, one of his thugs, the guy with the mole on his face—Louie—gave me that kidney punch. Subsequently I confronted Russo. He said he didn’t order Louie to hurt me, apologized for it, and said he wasn’t responsible for this, um, other thing. I made it clear I didn’t believe him. He said something like ‘How can I convince you?’ So I think this”—I pointed my chin at the shoe box—“is his way of trying to convince me.”

“That’s crazy,” said Horowitz.

“Of course it is,” I said. “Paulie Russo isn’t exactly the world’s sanest human being.”

“You gotta tell us about this other thing with your client,” he said.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t. At least not now. Not yet. Stop pushing me.”

“You’ve got information about a crime,” he said. “You’re withholding it.”

I didn’t say anything.

Horowitz glowered at me.

“Did it occur to you,” said Saundra Mendoza, “that this—this piece of a man’s body—might be something other than an apology?”

“Like what?”

“Like a warning.”

I looked at her. “
The Godfather?
That horse’s bloody head in the rich guy’s bed?”

She shrugged. “Or a dead fish wrapped in newspaper.”

“I’ll have to think about that,” I said.

Horowitz leaned across the table toward me. “It sounds to me like you’ve got yourself into some deep shit,” he said. “You really don’t want to be involved with Paulie Russo.”

“I’m not involved with him.”

“That ain’t what it sounds like.”

“I wish I could turn it all over to you,” I said. “But I can’t.”

“We can get a subpoena,” he said, “haul you in, and if you refuse to talk, we can prosecute you for withholding information relevant to a police investigation of a felony.”

I smiled at him. “I’m scared.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You should be.”

“I’ve told you everything I know that’s relevant to this particular crime,” I said. “The alleged crime being, cutting off a piece of a man’s face. The man in question hasn’t filed a complaint, and you don’t have a dead body, or a witness, or any evidence, really, if you’re thinking there’s been a murder committed. All you’ve got is a hunk of face in a shoe box. As a law-abiding citizen and an officer of the court, I have done my duty by reporting it and turning over the, um, evidence to you, and I have been additionally helpful by tentatively identifying the owner of this piece of face and suggesting to you that Paulie Russo, our local crime boss, might know something about it. Might have even done it, or had it done. I have further hypothesized a motive, such as it is, as to why this shoe box was presented to me.”

“Hypothesized,” muttered Horowitz. “Christ. Fuckin’ lawyer.”

“Means, motive, and opportunity,” I said. “What more do you want?”

He looked at Saundra Mendoza. “I got interrupted in the middle of a nice pot roast dinner for this happy horseshit.” He sighed. “How do you want to handle it?”

“It’s hardly horseshit,” I said. “Happy or otherwise.”

He glared at me. “I was having dinner with my wife, for Chrissake. Look what you’ve done to my appetite.” He turned back to Mendoza. “So what do you think?”

Mendoza shook her head. “Without a body…”

“We know there’s a fucking body,” Horowitz said. “Unless you think there’s some guy walking around without his face.”

“All I meant,” she said, “was that until a body turns up, we can’t treat it as a homicide. But, okay. Here we are on Beacon Hill. It’s my jurisdiction, for now, at least. I’ll get forensics to deal with the box, see if they can lift the prints of the guy who delivered it, maybe get lucky with the plastic bag. I’ll get an ID for this Louie guy with the mole, and I’ll see if we can conjure up a complaint so we can go after him on the grounds that we want to arrest him. That way, we can put the squeeze on Russo.”

Horowitz was nodding. “Sounds good. Keep me in the loop.”

She cocked her head and smiled “at him. Saundra Mendoza had a great smile. Big brown laughing eyes, wide mouth, white teeth. “You think I want this?”

“Get your name in the paper,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just what I need.” She fished some latex gloves out of her shoulder bag and pulled them on. Then she stood up and picked up the box. “I better get this to the lab before it goes bad.” She started for the front door.

Horowitz and I went with her. I held the door for her, and we went outside. I sat on the porch steps. Horowitz walked Mendoza to her car. She handed the shoe box to him while she unlocked the trunk. He put the box into the trunk, and she slammed it shut.

They stood there on the sidewalk talking for a few minutes. Then Mendoza got into her car and drove away.

Horowitz came back up the front walk and sat on the steps beside me. “I wouldn’t mind a beer,” he said. “How about you?”

“A beer sounds good.” I went inside, snagged two bottles of Long Trail from the refrigerator, popped the caps, and took them out to the porch.

I handed one to Horowitz. He held it up, and we clicked bottles. He took a long swig, then wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. “So how’s Evie doing?” he said.