Serpents in the Cold (11 page)

_________________________

A LITTLE PAST
two p.m. a Greek family came in to have their passport photographs taken. Cal rose from his chair, helped them fill out their passport applications for a trip back to the motherland, which they'd been saving for since their youngest was born. “At least you'll get the fuck out of this cold,” Cal said as he mimeographed their paperwork, but the family didn't understand him, which was just as well. When they left, he opened the mail and found a check from Merchant Tool and Die in Southie. It wasn't much, but he thought he might be able to make it last a while.

It had been shortly before Christmas since the last good money had come in: Walter McGrath, a wealthy World War I pensioner, ex-army quartermaster, who lived in an eighteenth-century colonial on a rambling twenty-acre estate out in rich and exclusive Dover, called him, convinced that his chauffeur was abusing his privileges, using the Lincoln Continental sedan for personal use and depositing his checks into his own account. The chauffeur's name was Roland Baggs, an ex-con from Mattapan who'd spent two years in Concord after being pulled over by state troopers for driving a truck with out-of-date tags, and when they searched the back, they discovered twenty television sets stolen from Sears, Roebuck in the Fens just days before.

Baggs could charm the skin off a cat, and Cal had actually liked the sap. But the quartermaster had been right. Roland was taking him for a ride, and he wasn't smart enough to be inconspicuous about it. Cal had one of his security guards who needed some cash for the holidays, a first-generation American Pole named Wolaski, sit in the parking lot of the Wellesley train station and watch Baggs, on one of his weekends off, pick up the quartermaster's great-niece, coming off the midday train from New Haven. After the train left, they'd parked the Lincoln in a corner of the lot and remained there for half an hour before Baggs took them on a jaunt into the city, first stopping to visit the Indian Head National Bank in Cambridge to deposit McGrath's checks into his own account, and then to the Stuart Hotel in the Theater District, where they stayed for two successive nights.

After sacking Baggs, McGrath had given Pilgrim Security a large Christmas bonus. But that was two months ago, and now Cal hoped he could keep the heat on throughout the rest of the winter so that the pipes wouldn't freeze and burst. If that happened, Pilgrim Security would be done, and with it all of his and Lynne's savings.

With the money from Merchant Tool and Die, Cal wrote out checks to the half-dozen Pilgrim Security watchmen they still managed and, in the lobby, dropped them in the building's mailbox, then crossed the avenue for a pint bottle at Trident Liquors on the corner of Brattle. The rain had let up a bit. He picked up a pint, two cold prepackaged bologna and cheese sandwiches, and cigarettes and the
Globe
and
Bettor's Weekly
for Dante, and was about to cross the street and return to the office when he paused. At the corner lot between Hanover and Broad Street, three gleaming limousines idled with white smoke steaming from their exhausts.

In one of the abandoned lots where Caskell's and Amerilio's Pizza had once stood, a group of men were gathered in fine wool overcoats. Out on the street one of the limo drivers stood outside his car, pale from the cold and clearly trying not to show it. Cal rummaged in his pocket for the pint bottle and limped toward him. As he approached, the driver looked up warily. He was tall and thin, sickly-looking; his overcoat hung loosely on his shoulders. In another time, it had probably fit him. Before a fall off a ladder at a four-alarm in Adams Square, he'd been one of Boston's most decorated firemen.

“Jesus, if it isn't Tim Donovan,” Cal said. “Why the hell you standing outside?”

“Boss's orders.” He nodded toward the four men gathered on the snowy clearing, where one of them was gesturing emphatically with his hands to the others, perhaps conjuring a vision of what would soon be built upon the empty lot.

“I work across the way,” Cal said. “Had to get something to keep myself warm.” He lifted the pint. “You want a pull?”

Donovan shook his head, sniffed loudly, and ran his gloved hand across his raw nose.

“C'mon, you're half frozen to death. You think they're looking from way over there?”

Donovan shook his head again.

“Who are they anyway?”

“The one on the right, the tall thin one, that's Francis McAllister.”

“The developer?”

“That's right.”

“Who's the one next to him?”

“That's Congressman Foley.”

Cal squinted toward the lot; from this distance they all looked alike, ordinary men in their finely tailored coats and expensive hats. “Is that so? Heard he's going to be our next senator.”

“That's what they say. Him and McAllister have got plans for the city.”

“They do, huh? Well, the city needs something all right.”

Cal looked at the other cars idling at the curb. “So, one of these cars belongs to the congressman too?”

Donovan nodded. “They've had us driving them down here every day, one location after the other for the last two months. Third time this week I've been here.”

A car blew its horn, and when they turned to look at it, double-parked in front of Tully's Tattoo Parlor, they had to squint against the wind that nearly pulled the hats from their heads. Cal shivered; he needed the warmth of the office.

“Here,” Cal said, handing him the bottle. “Just one pull.”

“I can't.”

“Sure you can. Standing out here in the cold like this.”

“The boss won't like it.”

“Your boss sounds like an asshole, making you stand outside while the car's still running.”

“Mr. McAllister, he's not an asshole all the time. He pays me well enough.”

“Sure he does, but take the bottle anyway.”

Cal left him then and trudged back up the street toward the office. The sandwiches, cigarettes, and newspapers in his pocket felt sodden and cold. He glanced back briefly as he looked both ways crossing the avenue: at Donovan by his limousine, standing with his head bowed against the wind, taking a half-concealed pull from the pint, and at the other men still there—the architects of the new Boston, black figures on the white snow—and at the rainwater sweeping down exposed walls from the dislocated and torn gutters atop the brick façade of the next building waiting for the wrecking ball.

_________________________

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Mission Hill, Roxbury

AS HE DID
most evenings after work, Cal took the trolley to Huntington Avenue and walked the two blocks to Mission Church, the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. An early winter dark had descended outside, and the lights inside the shops and diners and bars he passed were murky and diminished. Ice hung in colossal glacier ribs from the dual spires of Mission Hill's basilica, its Roxbury puddingstone hauled from the local quarries a hundred years before, the same stone that formed much of the bedrock underlying the city. The sky was the same color as the church, and it pressed down on Cal as he opened one of the heavy oak doors and stepped inside.

He sat in a back pew of the church and stared at the elaborate work of the artists of the Redemptorists and the depictions of the Passion, in each alcove the martyrs and saints. Footsteps reverberated upon the stone tile. Someone shuffled in a seat, coughed. The soothing sound of muted prayer. Old parishioners, mostly women, shuffled back and forth from the pews to the transept to light votive candles and pray for lost loved ones, asking God's intercession for those in limbo and purgatory, and for their own lost and empty souls, perhaps. Before the altar an altar boy practiced the swinging of the censer, his eyes shut, his mouth moving in prayer. The church smelled of beeswax and the heady, sweet thick scent of incense lingering from the midday Mass.

He listened to the hum of benediction, took in the scent of tallow candles burning low and spitting in the dark, and the light at play upon the frescoes and the stone faces of the saints, on Saint Francis, the Virgin Mother before the altar, Christ, and gleaming atop the bowed heads of those bent in prayer. He rested his head against the hard wood of the pew. The candles burned out one by one. Shuffling in the aisle. Shadows lengthening into darkness.

He prayed for his loved ones, the ones still with him, the ones who had moved on. He thought of the homeless woman, frozen dead, and a great sadness, a sentimentality that usually came only when he was inebriated, gathered in his throat. He looked up and watched the altar boy. The boy closed his eyes, raised his head toward the curved and bowed gilt laths above, and mouthed
Miserere mei, Deus.
The boy's arms and hands opened to the vaulted ceiling and the fiery ring of martyrs, their fixed gaze burning all souls for eternity.

AT THE END
of Mass, Cal allowed time for Father Nolan to change out of his vestments, then rose stiffly from the pew. In the transept he knelt and lit a votive candle for his mother and another for Lynne. At the sacristy he knocked and waited for Father Nolan to come to the door, but Father Nolan shouted for him to enter. Inside the small room Father Nolan, in black pants and a white T-shirt, was running an iron over a black shirt draped across an ironing board. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. His chasuble and stole were laid out on top of the sacristy credens waiting to be put away.

“Ahh, Cal,” he said, half grunting. “I'll be decent in one moment. What can I do for you?”

“I have a question, if you don't mind.”

“Okay.”

“Where would a young Catholic girl go if she was pregnant and planning to give up the child?”

“Is this someone in the family?”

“A close friend.”

“Well, if she's in trouble, I hope you'd advise her to get help, to talk to someone. I'd be happy to see her.”

“She's dead.”

“Oh, I see. I'm sorry to hear that.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
”

It was a common Irish condolence for the bereaved that he'd heard at wakes and funerals when he was young: May her soul be on God's right side. “Thanks,” he said.

“May I ask how she died?”

Cal hesitated. He'd known Father Nolan since he was a boy and Father Nolan a young man just off the boat and strutting about the Avenue; he'd been a boxer and after the seminary had served in the war. They said that before entering the priesthood he'd smuggled guns back to Ireland. There wasn't much he hadn't seen or heard.

“She was murdered.”

“The poor child.” Concern briefly clouded Father Nolan's face and he looked to Cal but understood that Cal would say no more and so resumed his ironing. Ash from his cigarette fell onto the board, speckled the white canvas top. For a moment he was lost in thought.

“The Convent of Saint Clare in JP, by the arboretum. That's a good place to start. You went to Saint Mark's; you'll recognize some familiar faces. You can tell them I sent you.”

Cal nodded and then, suddenly feeling awkward, gestured to Father Nolan's shirt. “I'll let you get back to that.”

Father Nolan placed the iron upright, steam breathing from its plate. He pulled on the shirt, rolled up the sleeves, and looked at him with eyes that were almost a mirror image of Cal's own. Cal knew what he was going to ask and wished he'd never knocked on the sacristy door.

“How's the need for a drink lately?”

“It comes and it goes.”

“It doesn't help in moments like these, you know that.”

Cal chewed on the inside of his cheek. “I know.”

“Cal, if you want to talk, that's what I'm here for.”

“Thanks, Father,” Cal said, and turned toward the door, “but I'm good.”

Outside, in the open space of the courtyard, the sharp outline of the church appeared even less distinct now against the darker sky. At the intersection of Tremont and Huntington, people were dark shapes bustling across the trolley tracks. The bell of a trolley sounded farther down the avenue. Cars blew their horns. Tavern doors opened and closed and music spilled out into the frozen night. Cal wanted a drink badly but, hearing Father Nolan's voice sounding in his head, passed the taverns without pause, his mouth set in a grim line.

_________________________

The Calf Pasture, Dorchester

THE WAMPANOAG CALLED
it Mattaponneck, a desolate 350-acre spit of marshy peninsula sticking out into Dorchester Bay. To Cal and Dante it was where they'd sometimes played as kids, a shadowy, mysterious place between the stark concrete worlds of Dorchester and Boston, and later, as adults, a no-man's-land, a dumping ground for the bosses who ran Dorchester and Southie. Beneath its marshes and compressed within its landfill lay the bodies of countless Boston dead, poor and gangster alike.

Cal drove them down the narrow tarmac beltway built for the peninsula's few heavy industries and the trucks bound for the city dump, where ash was dumped by the city incinerator. Dump trucks roared up and down the Mile Road, shuddering past them. Dante stared up at the black clouds bent and coiling in the wind. The dump burned refuse all night, turning the sky red and black, and pouring acrid smoke into the air. As they passed, they saw children playing on dump heaps while their parents scavenged through the debris. Cal gritted his teeth as the car's underside banged and scraped against the deep ruts left by trucks. Whiskey roiled in his empty stomach.

Dante stared out the window. “Remember when we were kids, skating out by the dump when the runoff froze?”

“Yeah, I remember. You'd think there'd be better places for kids to play.”

“It wasn't so bad. I don't remember complaining.”

Dante looked back out the window, seeing nothing for a mile around but frozen marshes and stacks from the dump and the burning refuse sending black smoke across the bay that would burn one's eyes when the wind shifted, and farther off, the city glittering just over Carson Beach. Out on the water of the bay, a cold, apoplectic light flickered as the sun vented fast-moving low clouds, was covered, and then emerged again. There was a boat out there—a small lobster boat out of the harbor, just rocking on the whitecaps.

Dante smiled, staring through the glass. “Remember the potato chip factory over in Uphams? They used to dump their leftover potatoes around here, all the burnt ones. Me and the Connollys, we'd heat them up over a fire at the edge of the dump, still tasted real good.”

“You never had to worry about going hungry when your dad was out on strike or laid off.”

“Or in the cooler.”

The Calf Pasture pumping station for Boston's sewage rose to the east. They passed the ruins of the coal room and the stone gatehouse with its ancient filth hoist, and beyond, the once stately and now decrepit Romanesque mansion of granite housing the electric sewage pumps and massive engines that moved waste out to the outer harbor on every receding tide.

As they drove the rutted road around the windswept peninsula, squatters' shacks appeared and then disappeared between the mountains of refuse and ash, squalid clapboard and corrugated tin dwellings that looked as if children had put them together.

“This place was never meant to be a place for the living,” Cal muttered, as he looked out over the banks of what Dante took to be fog rising from the dumps and floating over the peninsula, but which he realized after a moment was the hot steam of waste, of sewer runoff. He stared at the lights blinking out by Moon Island, and in that light the small darting shapes of rats streaming through the waste by the hundreds as the tide came in and forced them up from the shore and the overflow pipes.

“Shit, this is what it would look like if they dropped the Bomb on us.”

Cal steered the car over the dips and swells. “A lot of vets here. It's been that way since the war ended. Poor bastards slipped through the cracks and ended up with this. But maybe it's safer out here than the shelters in town.”

“Well, if life ever gets that bad, I'll take the shelters over this.”

They passed Boston Consolidated Gas Company, the American Radiator Company, a warehouse for Union Tire. And then the space opened up, and chain-link fence enclosed the three-acre lot of Duffy's wrecking yard. Next to the yard was a row of derelict trailers covered in snow.

Cal perched up in the seat, peering over the dashboard. “Got homeless people living in some of these. Take a look.” Cal gestured to a thin, trembling line of black smoke rising over the tops of the trailers at the center of the back lot.

“You really think you'll find this Scarletti guy's trailer here?” Dante asked.

“That dispatcher said this was where they brought their old trailers. I'm not taking anything for granted.”

“And you think that's how they got the body to the beach—by truck?”

“Yeah. It seems to make sense, and it's odd that this guy's gone AWOL.”

“But it could have been any truck going up and down the highway.”

“Any truck,” Cal repeated. He rubbed his upper thigh briskly, opened his door so that cold flooded the car, and stepped out. Dante lit a cigarette first and then followed. Bending their heads against the wind, they passed along the row of wrecks. The wind barreled between them, sent the sheet metal trembling so that it bowed and groaned. The snow soaked through their shoes and their feet were soon wet and cold.

A trailer door banged and they looked up, squinted into the windblown strakes. A face, bearded and pale, showed itself around one of the trailer doors, and seeing them, quickly pulled back, the door closing after it. Cal paused, looked about at the other trailers. Some had their doors torn from their hinges, and windswept snow lay inches deep within. Others were hollowed-out frames, exposed wooden slats through which the wind raced in and whistled. From beyond the wrecking yard a horn sounded. Slowly Cal drew his gun from its holster. He glanced back toward their car and the distant hobo shacks, and then moved toward the trailer doors.

He stepped onto the low rail and reached upward and then the door exploded outward as a man barreled out of the opening, and Cal was flying backward off the rail and into the snow. He rose with Dante pulling at his arms. He shook Dante off and at a limping run took after the man retreating across the snow-covered lot toward the wrecker's yard. Dante cursed and, after a moment, followed.

“Fuck, fuck,” Cal muttered as he ran. Something warm trickled from his left eyebrow and down his face.

The man was moving at a steady clip, but when he stumbled, Cal pressed his damaged leg to catch up. He hollered at him to stop, raised his gun, and fired in the air—the cracking sound of the shot loud enough to make the man turn, wide-eyed and frantic, and then the sound of the gunshot was gone in the wind and the man seemed to be moving even faster and Cal had to work harder to gain ground. Gradually the length between them narrowed.

The snow was thicker here and the man was slowing. His knees worked up and down as the snow deepened. With his legs failing, Cal made a last lunge forward and tackled him. The man dropped and rolled, swinging his arms as he did, smacking Cal weakly about the head. Cal wrestled with him, batted away his blows so that it seemed they were slapping at each other, and managed to bring a glancing blow from the gunstock down against his jaw before the man threw him off into the snow and was up and trying to run again.

Scrabbling through the snow on all fours, Cal reached for him, and the man kicked, but Cal wrapped his arms about the man's legs, pulled him down. He forced the man onto his back, climbed atop him, and went to strike him again. He grasped his windpipe and squeezed, and the man made a choking sound deep in his throat, tried to pry Cal's hands from his neck, and then shielded his face when Cal raised his fist holding the gun.

Dante pulled up, wheezing, beside them. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and gasped for air. “Forget it, Cal,” he said through staggered breaths. “He ain't gonna do us any harm.”

“Please,” the man said, and Cal paused with his arm raised, ready to strike. He sat on the man's chest, his breath coming to him in ragged gasps, and stared at the tattered army duffel coat, its olive-green horsehair. The smell off him, sour and rank, the sharp smell of urine.

“Put down your arms,” Dante said to the man. “He won't hit you. I promise.”

Slowly the man took his hands from his face. His eyes were wide and manic. A scraggly beard covered his face. His lips were cracked and his skin looked burned as if from exposure to extreme cold.

“Why'd you run?” Dante asked.

“I thought you were someone else.”

“Who?”

A dog was barking wildly from the wrecker's yard, and as their breathing calmed, Cal could also hear a dump truck rumbling along the Mile Road.

“Tell us who and he won't hurt you.”

He shook his head vigorously, his cracked lips peeled back over yellowed teeth.

“We're here looking for something,” Cal said. “A friend of ours—a woman—she went missing and ended up dead. We're trying to find what happened to her, okay?” Cal stared into the man's eyes and, slowly, the man nodded.

Cal rose off the man and now realized how bedraggled and small he was. He wore two coats, a soiled sheepskin vest under his olive horsehair jacket and a sweater beneath that. He'd struggled like an animal but without the heavy clothes would probably weigh very little. Cal reached out his hand. “C'mon, get up.”

Reluctantly, the man took his hand and Cal pulled him to his feet.

Cal touched a hand to the side of his face where blood had hardened and winced when he pressed against the top of his brow.

“What's your name?” Dante asked.

“J.J. They call me J.J.”

“You live in that trailer?”

“Me and about eight others. People come and go, y'know, but mostly there's about eight others.”

They trudged back across the snow toward the trailers. The sky had darkened and the temperature began to plummet. The snow cracked sharply beneath their feet. Tired now, they moved slowly, their breath smoking the air before them.

“About our friend,” Dante said. “When we mentioned her you gave up the fight. You thought we were someone else.”

J.J. lowered his head. “I thought you were here for the trailer.”

“What about the trailer?”

“I'm not going in there. I saw it once, I don't need to see it again.”

“What did you see?”

“You go over there and find out for yourself.”

Cal reached out and gripped J.J's sleeve. “What the fuck did you see?”

“A guy comes with the trailer, he drops it off here. He drives around and picks them up and then brings them back here so he can do what he likes.”

“Do what he likes?”

“To women. He likes to hurt women.”

“Who?”

“A big tall guy. Real nasty-looking. Kill you as soon as look at you.”

“Did he have a fucked-up mouth, a harelip?”

J.J. shook his head. “I don't know. I didn't see that.”

“When was he last here?”

“He mostly comes at night. In the morning the trailer's always gone again. This time he left the trailer sitting here.”

“For how long?”

J.J. paused, licked at his chapped lips. “Don't know my days anymore. Three days maybe?”

“Which trailer?” Cal asked.

J.J. turned around and pointed to a trailer toward the end of the lot.

“You got a crowbar, something that can snap the chain?”

“I got one inside.”

J.J.'s trailer had a makeshift chimney jutting out from the center of the roof. It was made from rusted sheet metal, and black smoke funneled from it and broke apart in the heavy winds. “We light a fire,” he said. “Keep it in a barrel and put a pipe through the roof so's we don't die in our sleep. No one ever bothers us over here and we keep to ourselves.”

J.J. opened the trailer doors and faces swam out of the dark at them, misshapen in the orange glow of the red flames flickering from a trash barrel at the center of the floor. J.J. waved his hands in a settling motion, told them everything was all right, and they inched backward into the dark. Here and there men lay curled beneath bits of blanket and cardboard and rags. Dante and Cal could smell them, and the heat of them huddled together. Wind banged against the side of the trailer and rippled the thin sheet metal roof. In the dark all they could make out were slivers of raw face, a gleam of broken teeth, protuberant, bulging eyes, as the residents of the trailer moved farther back into the shadows. J.J. nodded and clambered deeper into his trailer. After a moment he reappeared with a tire iron.

“I'm not giving you this,” he said. “We need it for protection. And I'm not seeing a thing. I'm not here.”

“You're not here, okay, I got it. Give me the fucking bar, would you?”

J.J. handed him the tire iron.

After the exertion of the chase, Cal's leg was stiffening and it had begun to throb with pain so that he had to walk slower than he would have liked. As they walked the row, Cal considered the dented and hollowed sheet metal sides, the snow that had accumulated in drifts between them, the threadbare tires and rusted wheels—wheels that hadn't moved in months but for one, the one that he knew belonged to a red and green Peterbilt. He'd seen the same frozen, ridged tracks along Tenean Beach.

The doors were padlocked. Dante pulled at the lock but it didn't budge. Dante watched as Cal leveraged the bar between the lock and the frame. Cal grunted and the lock shattered. He opened the trailer doors and they felt the ice cold of its interior and the sense of its frozen cargo like a weight pushing out at them. Coughing, he and Dante clambered up into the trailer. Cal banged his fist hard against his thigh, working the blood, trying to get the muscle moving again.

Inside the truck, carcasses of meat hung darkly from hooks, shuddering slightly as wind buffeted the chassis. Heavy drapes of sheer vinyl the color of dog piss separated the trailer into compartments of different meats, kept its insides even colder. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dim light; their breath steamed slowly in the half dark. Between two pale ribbed halves of cow lay the shreds of a torn dress, a woman's underthings: blue panties, the elastic waistband shredded, a white brassiere. A worn leather purse with tarnished clasps. Spooled in a small heap a gold crucifix and chain that made Dante pause. He reached down, held it in his hand, turned it over. After a moment he said, “It's Sheila's.”