Serpents in the Cold (14 page)

_________________________

The Pacific Club, Columbus Avenue, Roxbury

THEY OPENED THE
front door and a shaft of pale midday light speared the dark foyer of the club, and with it came the cold. Three black men at the bar turned almost painfully toward it. The door finally closed, and Cal and Dante stepped into the dim blue light. The men at the bar let their stares linger before turning back to their drinks and starting into conversation again, louder this time and brash.

“So, this was where you saw Sheila last?” Cal asked.

Dante took his hat from his head. “Yeah, you could say it was one of her regular spots.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“How long ago was it, the last time you saw her?”

Dante shrugged. “A while, okay? Right around Margo's death. Maybe a few months after.”

Cal scanned the length of the place. There were three booths beside the stage, four round tables, and red and green and blue lights blazing everywhere, as if they were aboard a submarine, or at a whorehouse during the holidays. Nautical artifacts hung from the walls. Anchors and compasses, a painting of a sinking ship entrapped within the tentacles of a giant fire-engine-red squid. And photos—lots of photos of well-dressed black musicians holding their instruments. Within the weaving strands of smoke were a miserable sort of shadow people: two bare-kneed bums half asleep at a booth, a round-faced man and a bedraggled white woman starting a binge on cheap wine, a young hophead standing by the men's room seeking some score, and a dusty whore sipping on a ginger ale all alone at one of the tables. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see an old man on the small stage holding a tarnished saxophone. The man began to toy with the scales, the brass emitting a sorrowful sound that quickly filled up the close space.

Imagining how the small club would look twelve hours from now at midnight, Cal was surprised to think of Sheila here and comfortable among the regulars, black men and women crammed into this small place as the night turned into morning, the room filled with cigarette smoke and loud, raucous laughter, blaring music, and sweating bodies. But now, just a bit after noon, he saw it only as a desperate way station where people shunned the light of day and carried on in the routine of a slow death.

They took the two stools at the end of the bar farthest from the stage. Dante unbuttoned his worn overcoat, laid it over a stool, carefully smoothed down its creases with his hand, and sat.

The old man blew a few chords of “Don't Blame Me” and steadied out with the gentle refrain of “Body and Soul.” Dante found his own left hand tapping the bar top along imaginary keys, fingers arched and striking the notes that sounded in his head. Catching himself, he pulled his hand off the bar, flexed and closed it to break apart the stiffness left over from the cold.

Above the bar, he stared at the ticking neon of a Schlitz sign whose bulb was ready to give out. The conversation at the other end shifted and lost some of its bluster, and Dante knew that they were sizing him and Cal up, waiting to see what they'd do next. He recognized the face of the guy in the Braves hat, but the other two he had never seen before. They must have been strictly midday drinkers here, their nights resigned to their wives, their families, and now just getting a cheery buzz on before they had to go back out into the world.

The bartender, Bowie, came down the bar to them. Bowie was cross-eyed, a gangly light-skinned man with lots of freckles and a glaring gap between his two front teeth. And to add to his clownish appearance, he always wore brightly colored shirts—lime green, canary yellow, pink, rose red.

“Is Moody in?” Dante asked.

“Yeah. He's just out back.” Bowie switched the rag on his left shoulder to the right one.

“No rush. I can wait.”

“Something to drink while you're waiting?”

“Two Jamesons,” Cal said, “and two beers.”

 Cal glanced over at the other men at the bar as he rummaged in his pants pocket for his wallet.

“You can at least unbutton your coat, Cal. They won't steal it off your back.”

“I was getting to it.”

Bowie brought their drinks to them, two old-fashioned glass mugs with white frothy heads. He placed two empty shot glasses on the countertop and filled them to the very top, so that both Dante and Cal had to tenderly raise them to their lips. Cal settled onto the stool, lit a cigarette, and looked along the bar at the photos crammed on the back wall. He raised himself from the stool to get a better look. He wondered if Sheila was in any of them, but not one white face looked back at him.

At the farthest end of the bar, a heavy velvet curtain parted and out came a large man, at least six foot five, holding a case of beer under one arm. He wore an immaculate white apron and a shimmering red collared shirt stretched across his hulking frame. Watching, Cal waited for him to smack his head on the overhang of the bar, or bump one of his wide shoulders against the rows of bottles by the wall, but he moved with a singular grace unusual for a man his size. He turned, looked first at Cal and then at Dante, and came down the bar to them.

“Shit, Dante,” he said. “Your face has seen better days.”

A younger man wearing jeans and a T-shirt joined the old man on the small stage, raised a trumpet to his lips, and began to add a little cheer to the sad ballad the old man was struggling with. Unlike the old man's saxophone, the trumpet was buffed and polished, and it reflected the red lights above the stage with a gemlike shimmer. Cal listened to the sound of the two instruments careen off the walls and the low ceiling of the bar as if two animals were chasing each other in play.

“This is my friend Cal,” Dante said.

Moody reached over the bar and took Cal's calloused hand in his large one and they shook. His arm was laced with tight muscle and corded with tendon and his shoulders were like rounded blocks of stone. Light brown eyes and a nose broken once or twice, set and healed crooked. When he smiled it seemed earnest and kind, even if he might have half his mind set on breaking your arm.

 “Are you two here to get drunk like the other bums, or is there something you want?” Moody looked down the bar at Bowie, who was staring at them. When they made eye contact, Moody nodded and Bowie went back to pouring a beer for one of the other patrons.

“We have a couple of questions to ask.”

Moody laughed low, almost like a growl, and shook his head. “I knew it. That's what every white bastard says when they walk in here. Next thing you know they're arresting us because we don't have enough soap in the bathroom.”

The shot glasses were empty and Moody went to the shelves and came back with a new bottle of whiskey and another empty shot glass. He refilled Cal's and Dante's and then filled up one for himself. “In that case, you're buying me this drink.”

Dante pulled two dollars from his pocket and placed them on the bar. “You know Sheila, my sister-in-law?”

Moody put down his whiskey, the glass small, thimble-like in his large hand. He shook his head, sucked in through clenched teeth. “I haven't seen her in a while.”

“Do you remember the last time you saw her?”

“Like four, maybe six months back, I think it was.”

“Was she with anybody?”

“Are you asking with one of us, or one of you?”

“I guess it doesn't matter.”

“Yeah, she was. Some guy she'd been here with plenty of times before.”

“What did he look like?” Cal asked.

“You'd know him if you saw him, big shot from one of the wards on the other side of town, one of your guys. Can't keep track of all those Irish names. Could be he's a politician or something. Good-lookin' cat, well dressed like a man does behind a big desk.”

“An older man?”

“He had white hair, sure, but I'd guess not much older than you two.”

“How was Sheila? She look okay?”

“Probably the same as always. She strutted in and gave me some sweetness, then sat at one of the tables and drank and smoked the night away, just like she always did.”

Moody gestured toward a table by the stage where dust motes tumbled through slants of daylight, and Dante stared at it as if he might see Sheila there, sipping from a cocktail, and the man, a shadowy and amorphous figure with his back to them, leaning across the table to her, whispering something in her ear, she smiling, pushing him playfully away. The vague recollection of the last time he had seen her came back to him. The man with her that night, Bobby, didn't have white hair and looked too sharp to be a politician, more like some hustler type.

Moody shrugged. “The guy, he kept looking over his shoulder. Didn't look comfortable, I remember. Like he was about to get caught somewhere he shouldn't be.”

“Anything else seem off?”

“Well, the night ended in a fight or something. They kept drinking and drinking hard. He was talking in her ear, shouting at one point, and she just kept a straight face and watched the band. Like she was trying to block him out so she could hear every note the band was playing. Like he wasn't even there to her. And when she got up to leave, he followed like an old dog who had done wrong and shit in the house.”

“Before this guy, had she come in with other men?”

Moody looked at Dante for a long moment, as if he might be playing a trick on him. “Well, that's a silly fucking question. A woman looking as fine as her, shit, she likes the attention…C'mon. Why all this, really? You're still in touch with her, right?”

Dante took a mouthful of whiskey, let the burn clear before answering. “Since Margo died, we haven't talked much.”

Cal looked at him, frowning. Perhaps Moody knew about Sheila's death and was pretending he knew nothing—it wouldn't help to know too much about a murdered white woman, especially if you were the owner of a colored club she frequented—but something was getting under his skin. And why the hell was Dante pulling his chain about Sheila?

“One other thing. There was a guy that came in here looking for her a couple of weeks back. I didn't want to give him nothing on Sheila so I asked for his name, told him I'd leave her a message if I happened to see her. He just smiled as though I wasn't in on the joke. Short little fucker up to no good, but not the type you'd mess with. Still, I wouldn't have served him if he'd asked.”

“Another politician type?”

“Hell no. He wore a black cap and a black leather jacket. Real thug type. Craziest blue eyes I've ever seen. Like ice, man—that if you looked at him sideways, he'd be likely to cut you up.”

Dante and Cal looked at each other, and Cal shook his head.

“Might have just done some time, definitely had that look about him.”

Dante finished his whiskey but left his beer untouched. “And that was it?”

“Yeah, never saw him come back asking for her again.”

“Blackie Foley,” Cal said. “Fucker gets around.”

“You know that guy well?” Moody asked.

“Too well. We all grew up in Fields Corner together. He runs most of Dorchester and Southie now.”

“No shit. You don't like him much, huh?”

Cal's face had become rigid, his jaw clenched and his face flushed.

“Let me guess,” Moody said. “He stole your girlfriend and broke her cherry before you got a chance. Damn pussy always getting between men.” And he laughed deep from his belly, but without any reaction from Cal he let it fade and filled his own shot glass with more whiskey.

Cal stood, pulled four singles from his wallet, and laid them on the bar. He put his hand out. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Moody.”

“No problem.”

When Moody and Dante shook hands, Moody pulled him close, lowered his voice. “Are you okay? You don't look so hot.”

Dante gave him a broken smile. “It's not as bad as it looks.”

“You got to stay off the shit, Dante. They don't call it junk for no good reason. I could string up a line of a thousand men I know whose lives were ruined by that stuff.”

Cal was buttoning up his jacket and watching.

“I appreciate it, Moody. I always listen to what you have to say.”

“Sometimes I fuckin' wonder,” Moody said.

Outside, Cal felt disheveled and dizzied by the bright cold daylight. He pulled his collar up tight around his neck as they walked. “You trust him?” he asked. “Him not knowing Sheila is dead and giving us the bead on all her boyfriends?”

“We wouldn't have come here if I didn't trust him. Moody's solid. You don't have to worry about him.”

“No, but I wonder if Sheila did. He had eyes for her, you could tell.”

“Lots of guys had eyes for Sheila.”

“And that's the problem, isn't it? Anyone might have had a reason to do what they did to her.”

Dante shook his head. They'd reached the car, and he looked at the cars passing sluggishly up and down Columbus Ave. A city truck with its plow pressing snow close to the curb raked the side of a parked car, shattering its mirror, and kept going. Leaden clouds passed low before the sun over the tenements on the far side of the street. “Not just anyone,” he said.

_________________________

 Southern Mortuary, South End

THE CITY MORGUE
resided in a decrepit four-story brick building just off of Massachusetts Avenue between Albany and Harrison. This time Cal and Dante entered through the main entrance instead of through the underground Boston City Hospital annex and its rat-infested tunnel. The lobby was done up in the Egyptian Revival theme popularized by the discovery of King Tut's tomb at the time of its construction. In the ornate marble lobby two sphinxes greeted those who had come to identify the dead—sometimes family members and lovers, husbands and wives, and at other times estranged children now fully grown, called to give voice and a face to a man or woman who'd abandoned them decades before—and guarded the stairs that led down to the medical examiners and the refrigerated storage drawers in which the dead lay interned. At first it had been a place to honor the dead and comfort those coming to identify them, but in the decades since, the building had fallen into disrepair. Now it was a dark, rambling labyrinth filled with the smells of decay and damp, and the constant sound of dripping pipes.

As Cal and Dante descended the ramp down two floors beneath the city streets, the stinging odor of formaldehyde bit at their nostrils. Underground it was as cold as the day they'd come to view Sheila's body. An elevator clanged open and they stepped back to allow a technician in green scrubs from the city hospital to pass, pushing a gurney on which a body lay beneath a bloodied sheet. They followed the sound of its clacking wheels and his slow, plodding feet down the tunnel.

The doors to the morgue opened, and in the white-tiled room they could see Fierro and two technicians discussing a body they'd just pulled from the storage drawers. On two other tables beneath the glare of white fluorescents lay covered remains. Fierro glanced up, pushing his glasses onto the top of his head, and frowned. He spoke quickly to a technician at his side, pulled the sheet up over the body, and slid the drawer back into storage. At the door, he raised up his hands to block the view and ushered Cal and Dante back into the hallway.

“What the hell are you two doing here?” He raked his fingers through what was left of his limp hair, accidentally knocking his glasses to the floor.

“Need to see if you've gotten anything on the women found in the trailer out at the city dump. Same as Sheila, right?”

“Cal, Dante,” Fierro said as he bent over to retrieve his glasses. “Owen's been looking for you for two days. He's already told me not to talk to you two, and he's pissed off as hell.”

Cal shrugged, uncaring. “C'mon, Fierro, have they identified the bodies?”

Fierro reached into his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. He motioned them down the hallway between a row of empty gurneys pressed against the damp wall. “You two are going to be the death of me, you know that.” He handed them each a cigarette and lit his own. “This office performs most of the state's examinations, almost three thousand autopsies a year. I'm so busy I don't even have time to use the john. I've got a freaking bladder infection, a headache that never quits, and when I come home my wife doesn't want to touch me because she says I stink of formaldehyde.”

From down the dim hallway came the distant sound of the elevator doors opening, and after a moment, as the three of them turned out of the hall, single footsteps, sharp and measured and officious, echoed on the floor, followed by a thick, phlegm-filled cough. Before he came into view, Cal knew it was Owen.

Owen's eyes widened slightly when he saw them. He took his hand from his mouth, reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, and wiped his nose. “Sooner or later I knew I'd run into you two.”

“You're not sounding too good.”

“You're an asshole, Cal.” He sounded congested, and he winced when he coughed into his handkerchief.

Owen looked at Dante and then back to Cal. “If you two aren't here to ID a family member, then you're trespassing.”

A speckled redness touched his cheeks but left the rest of his face sickly pale. He nodded, resigned. “What has the doctor here told you?”

“Nothing. We were about to beat it out of him.”

“I think he's got more important things to be doing than wasting his time with you clowns.” He nodded at Fierro. “You almost done with the Hyde Park shooting?”

“Almost.”

“Good. I'll be back after I talk to these two.”

INSIDE MAMA'S DINER
it was warm and filled with the chatter of people, the odors of coffee and of meat cooking on the grill. They took a booth by the front windows, and when a waitress came with coffee, they ordered breakfast: eggs, steak, and hash for Owen and Dante, eggs and blood sausage for Cal. Owen was staring beyond the window, and Cal was surprised by how much older he looked; the light reflecting off the snow had turned his face white, transparent-looking, and yet it couldn't erase the lines about his eyes.

“Owen, you have something on the bodies?”

Owen stirred sugar into his coffee and sighed, looked from Cal to Dante as he laid the spoon on the Formica table.

“First off, tell me why you two were looking for a meat truck over at the city dump, and in the early hours of the morning?”

“Got a tip from a dispatcher about a missing truck, that's all.”

“Why a missing truck?”

“Trucks are the only traffic down at Tenean this time of year. You see them coming and going like clockwork.

“And then there was the state of her body postmortem, as if she'd been killed on the beach when we know she wasn't. When I saw the tracks at the beach all I could think was that perhaps it had been a reefer. It was a hunch, but I didn't think it would end up anywhere. You had to have thought of that too.”

Owen nodded. “Yeah. We'd thought of it.”

“So, who are the women?”

Dante turned away and looked out the window. Hiding their faces from the driving snow, pedestrians labored against the wind and passed by slowly.

“Okay, this is what we've got, and I'm telling you only because you found the trailer.”

He lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and leaned back in his seat as the waitress arrived with their food. She refilled their cups with coffee and then passed down the row of booths.

“We know one of the Jane Does as Margaret Hill, a hooker from Roxbury, pimps for a creep named Shea Mack—”

Dante swore as he slopped coffee onto the table and his hand. Cal pushed his napkin across to him and Dante worked to pool up the liquid before it dripped onto the floor.

“You know this Shea Mack?” Owen asked.

Cal shook his head, but Dante nodded. “I've heard of him.” Shaking, he balled up the sopping napkin and put it aside.

Owen began to carve up his meat, placed a small piece in his mouth. “That figures.”

He chewed for a moment and then swallowed with obvious discomfort. “Okay, well then maybe you know a little of how he works. Real piece of shit. We've got beat cops looking for him, but no word yet.

“The other victim we identified as Anne Montague. She's from Weymouth. Her parents have had a Missing Persons out for her since the end of December.”

From between bites of food he said, “We've been in touch with the State Police and agencies from three other states, Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. So far they've gotten back to us with nine missing young women from Providence to Portland, all in the last twelve months.”

He pushed the plate away from him although he was only half-done.

“This all seems to be the work of the Butcher—maybe this Scarletti character you told me about. Hell, he's got the credentials for it. His record of arrest shows two burglaries and three aggravated assaults: assault with the attempt to cause bodily injury to another person by use of a deadly weapon, assault with the attempt to cause bodily injury to a police officer, assault with the attempt to cause serious bodily injury and have sexual activity with a person under the age of consent.”

“What do you mean ‘maybe'? We know who did this—it was Blackie Foley! Why haven't you already taken him in?”

“Those are
his
salvage yards, okay? He leases part of the property out to trucking companies so that they can load and unload, switch trailers, or dump them. For years we've known that he's used it as a front for black market smuggling. We've never been able to make anything stick on him, but we've known all about it.”

“So you're going to let him slide?”

“Christ, Cal, why would he jeopardize his business by leaving a truckful of bodies in a place he knows we watch? The yards are his property and he has every right to check on them whenever the fuck he wants.”

 “This is all bullshit, Owen.”

“Let me finish. A bum tipped him off about the rig, and as soon as he discovered the trailer, he called it in. He also said somebody chased him halfway across Boston.”

“So what did you say to him?”

“That's none of your business.”

“Fuck him.”

“No. Fuck you, Cal—fuck you both.”

“So that's it?”

“That's it.”

Owen sipped from his coffee, placed the cup on the table, and squared his hands around it. They were a boxer's hands, much like Cal's. Dante noticed the glimmer of Owen's wedding band shimmering dully beneath the lights of the diner.

Owen pursed his lips, looked at Dante. “So you knew this Margaret Hill?”

“It was a long time ago, Owen. The faces, the names, they all blend together.”

Owen stared, unconvinced, pushed his coffee cup to the center of the table. “That's okay. I've got to get back to the station.”

“What about Blackie?” Cal asked again.

“Like I said: Blackie had nothing to do with this.”

Owen hesitated. He stared at Dante, wiped at his nose with the back of his hand. “I've been dreading this all day. I should have just done it back at the morgue.”

“Dreading what?” Cal asked.

Owen ignored him, kept his eyes locked on Dante. “Giordano has been on me these past couple of days. He's pissing blood about how nobody questioned you before.”

Cal stiffened in his chair. “What the fuck is this shit, Owen?”

“Dante was the only real relative Sheila had. We got to ask him questions.” He stood, pulling his coat about him, and pushed a dollar bill across the table.

A sickly grin pulled at Dante's lips. “You're not going to cuff me?”

“No, and if it makes you feel any better, you can ride up front with me.”

“This is bullshit, Owen, and you know it,” Cal said.

“It's all part of the process, you know that. I promise to make it as harmless as I can.”

Outside, they had to lower their heads against windblown snow as traffic rumbled past. Cal and Dante huddled together for a moment against the side of the building, attempting to light a cigarette.

“Just go with it,” Cal said in a low voice. “Giordano is a real greaseball prick, and he'll try to heavy-hand you.”

Dante shook the match and inhaled off the cigarette. “I'll be fine.”

Cal watched Dante's fingers tremor as he reached toward his lips, took the cigarette, and passed it over.

“I'll be fine,” Dante repeated, as if he was saying it more to himself than to Cal.

Owen reached casually for Dante's shoulder, turned him in the opposite direction toward the city morgue. He gestured to Cal with his handkerchief.

“You can follow us in your car if you like. It's up to you.”

“Does he need an attorney?”

“I don't know.” Owen looked at Dante. “Do you?”

Dante shook his head and Owen nodded. “Good,” he said. “That'll make it easier.”

Owen blew his nose violently, looked down at the handkerchief, and frowned in disgust. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and glared at them. “I wish this fucking cold on you two idiots.”