The Big Dig (10 page)

Raquela's looked the same but
I didn't. I'd changed my fade-into-the-background snoop garb for more feminine attire, although I should add that my idea of feminine runs more toward tight black jeans and a turquoise sweater with a low scoop neck than anything trimmed with flowers or lace. I'd traded sneakers for slides, used lipstick to make up for the missing color in my hair, dabbed perfume in the hollow of my throat.

You go see the old flame, you want him to regret the passing of the spark.

Carl was behind the bar, chatting with a crewcut male. Heidi waited tables. I didn't spot my brassy-haired whore, but a couple of her sisters were laughing and drinking with a group of suits wearing conventioneer's name tags.

The joint was Friday-night noisy, abuzz with animated post-work-week conversation. Potential customers formed a ragged line by the door, but Sam already had a table. You get a good table in this town if your last name is Gianelli.

He's the son of Anthony “Big Tony” Gianelli, mob underboss. He's also the first man I slept with, an event that seems long ago and just like yesterday. I was driving a cab nights, making a stab at my first year of college. The passion and the heat rose like steam in the back room at Green and White Cab, and we kept the office door locked all hours of the night. He was my boss, and I was dumb enough to think it didn't matter.

The spark can lie dormant for months, but never seems to completely cool. A soft breath can send it flaring. Who knows what it is, that thing that makes one man deliciously sexy, another seem like a cartoon cutout?

Sometimes I think it's his voice. There was a time I used to dial his answering machine when I knew he wasn't home, shiver at the husky rumble as he promised to return my call. Must be the voice, I thought, moving toward the table, iron drawn by a magnet. There are things I like about the way he looks: tiny wrinkles around his eyes, the way his shoulders meet his neck. He's solid, tall, good-looking enough, if you're partial to stubborn jaws and dark hair. But he's no male model, no movie-star clone. He was wearing a dark suit, charcoal gray with a faint stripe, a deep maroon shirt.

We've been married, but never to each other. We're both divorced. In spite of all I've learned from the vast experience of a nineteen-month marriage and way too many men, Sam exerts a pull I can't explain or deny.

“Margarita? Beer? Or I could order a bottle of champagne.” His lazy smile brought more wrinkles to the corners of his eyes than I remembered.

Saying yes to champagne would be as good as saying the night would end in a tangle of sheets and limbs. My stomach tightened and I sat quickly, hoping no color had flared in my cheeks. If we started with champagne there would be no way to ask the questions Eddie would expect me to ask.

“What kind of champagne?” I asked.

“When I got your call, I wondered if you'd started drinking without me.”

“You think I'd need to get drunk to get up the nerve to call you?”

“Not at all. I hope not. What's with the hair? I'm not complaining; it's fine. It's just not—”

“Yeah, it's not me. I'm not supposed to be me.”

“So who are you?” He lit a cigarette, offered me the pack. I shook my head.

“Just a secretary.”

“You need work? I can always use a secretary, especially if you take dictation.”

“Nobody takes dictation anymore, Sam.”

We'd settled easily into the old routine, speaking with our eyes, saying what we had to say between the lines.

Heidi appeared at the table, a lot more quickly than she'd come to take my order when I'd been alone. I wondered how much of that had to do with the Gianelli pull. “You wanna order?”

“I'll have a margarita,” I said.

Sam lifted an eyebrow. “A martini for me. Bombay Sapphire.”

“How're you doing?” Heidi's smile sparkled in a way it hadn't when I'd been traveling solo. “You talk to Veejay?”

“No. You?” Her smile went to Sam, hoping for an introduction.

I decided not to oblige.

She said, “Carl found somebody else for her job. You want salt on that margarita?”

I nodded.

“What's that about?” Sam asked me as she left.

“I'm looking for a waitress. A woman who disappeared.”

The clink of glasses and the tinkle of laughter ebbed and flowed around a Sinatra tune. The lighting seemed dimmer than last time, the plants greener. The ceiling fans spun rising smoke into mist. I glanced up and my eyes met other eyes in the mirror over the bar. The man looked down abruptly, muttered to his companion.

They wore suits too expensive for cops, but they had the look of cops. The heavier one should have told his tailor to allow more room for the shoulder holster. The slimmer one wore a pinkie ring.

Sam said, “Is it this missing woman you want to talk about? Or did you just …”

“Miss you?”

“That's what I want to hear.”

“It's not the missing woman.”

“Sure you don't want champagne?”

“It's a different case.”

“Oh …” He took a long drag on his cigarette and I wished I had one to hold, to wave for punctuation.

“Eddie Conklin says hi. I changed my mind, can I bum a cigarette?”

“I wouldn't want to corrupt you, Carlotta.”

“Too late.” The motions of lighting up will never be foreign to me. Like riding a bike. I can always flick a match or guide a gold cigarette lighter to my lips.

“I heard you were working for Eddie.”

Boston's a small town disguised as a big city. You hear about people you know, people you don't know. I inhaled, felt the smoke stir in my lungs. I was pleased that Sam listened to what people said about me.

“It surprised me,” he went on.

“Why?”

“I thought you were so damned independent. Working for Eddie.”

“It's partly the insurance.”

“How's your leg?”

“Fine. Yours?”

His was shattered when a bomb went off in the Green and White offices. For a long time I considered it my fault. I regretted mentioning it, wondered if he'd waited for me at a table instead of the bar because he didn't want me to notice his limp.

“Fine.” The silence might have been awkward if not for the cigarettes. “How's the kid?” I fished in my backpack, found my wallet, and passed him a photo.

Paolina's most recent class picture is almost too revealing. It's not the low-cut blouse, or the too-red lipstick, or the over-styled hair. She looks proud of her femininity, but I see fear behind the arrogance. To me, she looks scared of how grown-up she's getting, how grown-up she is.

“She's gorgeous. A babe.”

“She's smart.” My voice was sharper than I intended. “She's also pretty messed up.”

Paolina used to play this game where I'd marry Sam, we'd adopt her, and we'd all ride off into a glowing sunset. That kind of shit is pernicious, especially for girls. They market it in fairy tales, in movies geared for the six-to-ten-year-old set. Happily ever after. It's the sort of thing that puts me off marriage. Permanently, I think.

“You seeing anybody?” Sam asked.

I was ready for the query, parried it. “Mostly I'm working, looking for the missing waitress, doing this stuff for Eddie.”

“On the Dig.”

“Some questions came up and—”

“You figured it was dirty so you came to me.”

“I figured you'd give me the word. It's not that Eddie's people are gonna step in and shut it down or mess it up. It's that we want to know what we're dealing with.”

“It's always good to know what you're dealing with,” he said.

Heidi brought the drinks, my margarita the size of a birdbath. We clinked glasses. I rolled salt crystals around on my tongue and watched the two men in the mirror watch me.

“You're dealing with me, Sam. Nothing's gonna come back on you.”

He shook his head. “You're asking me is the Dig dirty? Come on. How mobbed up can it be, with politicians up the wazzoo? You wanna know about the Dig, I'd say it's a different kind of dirty. Cover-your-ass dirty. Who-gets-the-contract-and-why dirty. There's a trail of dirt goes all the way to Washington and all the way back to the Reagan administration and before. It's dirt with governors and congressmen and lobbyists involved.” It was a long speech for him, and I was surprised by the passion in it.

“Let's drink to old Tip O'Neill,” he suggested. “And to all the congressmen who supported the Dig in order to thank Tip for all the pork over all the years.”

“What I'm talking about, specifically, is Horgan Construction. Gerry and Liz Horgan.”

“Horgan? How'd you pick them?”

“I didn't. Eddie did.”

“Eddie's not as smart as he used to be if he thinks the Horgans are paisans. Horgan, he'd be into the Irish.”

“Is he?”

“Don't ask me. I'm a paisan.”

“Norrelli Trucking.”

“Probably paisans, too,” he said flatly.

“Sam, what do you hear about kickbacks on dirt hauling?”

His eyes narrowed. “That's the big deal Eddie's working?”

“He's wondering if the teamsters are working a scam.”

“And you figure they'd give me the nod. Dirt hauling?”

“Selling dirt.” I deliberately used the same phrase Fournier had used on tape.

“Dirt as in what?”

I raised an eyebrow. The way Eddie'd presented it I'd only considered dirt, plain old dirt, Boston clay, the stuff that comes out of the ground.

Sam said, “You got your dirt as in shit. Brown heroin. I know guys call that dirt.”

Street lingo changes fast. Brown heroin used to be called Mexican shit.

“I've heard nitro and fertilizer called dirt,” he added. “Makes a big bang.”

“You're full of possibilities, Sam.”

He smiled. “Glad to hear it.”

My mind was ticking. Selling dirt … I hadn't really considered other meanings. Could be dirt as in information. As in blackmailable info.

“Anything you can tell me, Sam? So I don't veer off in the wrong direction. Anything about, say, Norrelli?”

“Nothing having to do with our business, Carlotta. I'm not your field guide to the mob anymore.”

“If dead rats turned up on a site, would that mean anything to you?”

“Like I said, I respectfully refuse to answer.”

I'd heard the rumors. They didn't need further confirmation, not with the two restless-eyed goombahs seated at the bar, nursing tall colorless drinks that were probably soda water.

“I don't know if you've heard. My dad hasn't been well.”

I swallowed tequila. He was in the organization now. No longer a Mafia son, but one of them. The two suits at the bar weren't there for decoration. They were watching the heir, guarding the boss. Making sure nobody threatened the boss.

I felt the change like a hard knot in my gut. And I knew I'd been right about avoiding champagne, in spite of the longing.

I'm a cop's kid. I always will be. There are places I don't go.

Morning dawned as cold and
gray as a margarita hangover. I sat up in bed in forgot-to-set-the-alarm-clock panic, then lay back down and stretched. It was Saturday and while other sites worked weekends, the Horgan site was generally quiet. Sometimes, Marian had told me, specialty crews were brought in at odd hours, and if there was a crunch, all schedules went by the board, but today the site would be especially silent. With burial arrangements still incomplete, Fournier would be waked this afternoon.

If his death were considered an unlikely accident, chances were I'd recognize a few guests at the funeral home. Cops attend wakes; cops attend funerals, though I've never heard of a perp, overcome by grief, confessing graveside. That's not why they go.

I'd seen the light in Fournier's watery blue eyes, heard the urgency in his voice, but by the time homicide gets brought in, it's too late for the cops to meet the victim, shake hands, inquire about passions, loves, hatreds. Eulogies humanize the victim. Friends and family—who comes to the funeral, who doesn't, how big a turnout—tell the cops about the victim, but some cops don't drop by to learn about the victim at all. They come to recharge their batteries, rededicate themselves to the job, to justice or vengeance or both.

When a person disappears, like Veronica James, there's no wake, no funeral. A few get immediate publicity, a news-flash hue and cry, a search, printed flyers, yellow ribbons. Most are gone for weeks, months, before anyone raises the alarm, and then there's no general panic, just paperwork. In some countries, people routinely disappear. Off to prison, to the gulag, to the provinces. In Chile, so many people disappeared for so many years that they became a
cause célèbre: Los Desaparicidos
. Gone without a trace, some of them tossed alive from army transport planes over the South Pacific.

Paolina knows that if she disappears I'll find her. But here's a thought that keeps me up nights: If I disappear, who'll look for me? I used to assume it would be Sam.

We'd talked late into the night and while the subject had shifted, we'd done most of the dance to the tune of working for someone else. He'd spoken obliquely; I still didn't know whether he considered himself to be working for his father or working for his father's thing, for the mob. I wasn't sure it made a difference.

I was working for Eddie and wondering how far I could trust him. To his credit, he'd told me up front that he was biased, that he wished the Horgans well. But was he acting on their behalf to blunt my efforts? If Spike's search revealed that someone on-site had a criminal record, would Eddie tell me or withhold the information? He had manpower, a web of associates to trace paper trails, but could I trust him to deliver the goods?

I wondered whether he'd managed to grab the tape off Fournier's answering machine, taken it, along with the other tapes to the FBI lab. Would he tell me that Fournier didn't have an answering machine, used one of those movie-star-taped greetings? Would I believe him if he said he found the tape mysteriously erased?

I got up and stood in front of the closet, considering what to wear to the wake. I didn't want to overdo it—I'd hardly known the man—but I didn't want to seem disrespectful, either. I selected a navy skirt and jacket, a white blouse that didn't need ironing, and hung my great-aunt's locket around my neck.

I left a note on my refrigerator/message board, asking Roz to heat up the computer and determine the financial status of the Horgans and their company, with an emphasis on what would happen to the company in the event of a marital split. With her weird hair and tattoos, I think twice before sending her into the field, but there's no doubt she has an effect on men, so I also assigned her the task of finding the EMTs who'd rescued Fournier. Eddie had said he'd find out whether Fournier had spoken to them. Roz
would
find out. I could compare and contrast.

Roz is the computer wiz, but I'm not that bad myself. Before leaving the house I ran a little search of my own. I'd already done some checking on Dana Renee Endicott, but my primary goal, I'll admit, had been to determine her solvency. Now I delved for background, employment, a bigger picture. As the only daughter of Franklin and Emily Farr Endicott, her pedigree was as elite as any show dog's. Educated at private schools and academies, she had passed the bar in '92 and currently sat on the board of Smith College, three major corporations, and four charities. She tended to stay out of the newspapers, while her parents were relentlessly photographed at every society gathering in New York. Franklin and Emily sat on twice as many boards as their daughter. Emily was an officer of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

When Eddie called to tell me the autopsy had been delayed, I told him I'd spoken to my contact, but heard no relevant tales. I wondered if he knew Sam had taken over for his dad, if every damn cop and private op in the city knew.

 

Fournier's not an Irish name, but the funeral home was O'Hara's, a three-storey white clapboard in Southie big enough to be mistaken for a church. It must have housed a huge family in bygone days; now urns flanked the wooden door and the foyer was hushed with heavy carpet.

Come by and pay your respects, sign the book, spend a moment in the long candlelit room with the dark closed coffin. But the real deal was two blocks south, around the corner, and down a few steps to Mikey Finneran's Pub, closed to all but family and friends of the deceased.

Mikey's was jammed by the time I entered, although the crowd was less dense on the far side of the bar. Like most nighttime places—movie theaters, dance clubs—it looked eerie in the afternoon, off-kilter, faintly wrong. Sunlight shone through the streaked windows and warred with the overhead lighting. I spotted Marian, short black suit and pink blouse, twenty paces away, stopped to grab a beer at the bar before working my way over to her.

Some of the mourners had come straight from work, in jeans and flannel shirts. The family had let it be known that workboots were fine, no offense taken. Workboots went with the worn red-leather bar stools, the weathered wood paneling. I glanced around for a likely girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, a woman in whom Fournier might have confided. I picked out several older women at a back booth, aunts or family friends, severely clad in black, wondered what they thought of the boisterous crowd, the smoke and music, the chatter and laughter. Three women in tight sweaters seemed to have places of honor at the bar, but I didn't see the sadness of a young widow in any of their faces, and went on scanning the crowd. The serious mourners might be absent, too worn by their hospital-bed vigil to manage such a gathering.

Leland Walsh, reflected in a mirror, chatted quietly with Harv O'Day. I couldn't spot Liz Horgan, but her husband moved purposefully from group to group, resting a hand on a man's shoulder here, an arm, a back there, nodding his head in sympathy before moving on. I heard general complaints about the site, specific ones about the weather.

“Fuckin' concrete cracked like peanut brittle.”

“Hands so cold, couldn't fasten rebar worth shit. So whatchya gonna do?”

A fiftyish bantamweight ordered a shot of tequila, said he wouldn't be surprised if the next thing his crew unearthed was the fuckin' mummy's tomb.

A younger man laughed, said the weirdest thing they'd dug up so far was that Colonial woman's privy. Loaded with cherry pits, too, and whaddaya think of that?

“Stomachache, for sure. I heard Jody Fargo found half a boat. Lumber from a boat, anyways.”

I set my beer down and lit my first cigarette of the day. A boat wouldn't be so odd. Much of downtown is built on landfill, the place-name the only remnant of former landmarks like Fort Hill—the fort dismantled, the hill dumped in the bay to enlarge the town. Archeologists still worried that Colonial artifacts might be unearthed and unwittingly destroyed by Dig workers. Like most citizens of the Commonwealth, I'd been unaware that Massachusetts
had
such a thing as a state archeologist until teams began panning for gold along the Dig route. I knew the Horgan site was near the Mill Pond and Paddy's Alley, the most thoroughly excavated and examined archeological sites thus far.

“Way things are going around here, we're probably sittin' on an ancient Indian burial ground.”

“Indians are over on Spectacle Island. Here we just got that Colonial shit.”

“This site ain't got the mummy's curse, it's got the Horgan curse.”

“Hey, shut it. I worked other Horgan sites and they never had no curse.”

A man in a denim workshirt mounted a bar stool and banged his glass with a spoon till the crowd quieted. He offered a series of toasts to Kevin Fournier, and there was much clinking of lofted glassware.

Marian, at my shoulder, said, “Hey, it's nice you came.” Her sheer blouse was the same shade as her glossy lipstick.

“You look terrific,” I said.

“You don't think the blouse is too much?”

The body was too much, but I wasn't about to say so. “Hey, you know if Fournier ever got a chance to talk to Mrs. Horgan?”

She shrugged. Blouse and body rippled.

I said, “He seemed upset that morning, you know, about not being able to talk to her.”

“Yeah, well, he asked me for her home number, but I told him he was out of line.”

“Is his family here?” I asked.

She tiptoed and craned her neck. “I don't think so. Not yet. I mean, they chose the spot—Gerry's buying the booze—so they ought to come. It's not a big family—mother, father, couple of aunts, on his mother's side, I think, and a brother overseas, in the army. I'm not sure if he's on the way or what. Some of these guys must be army buddies.”

Army and construction. No wonder the boys outnumbered the girls. Marian moved on and so did I. Nodding to familiar faces and unfamiliar ones, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the bar. Not much chance of anyone recognizing the woman with the mouse-brown hair and glasses. Maybe my profile, caught just right.

I kept moving purposefully, eavesdropping. Most of the one-liners I overheard had nothing to do with Fournier or his death or the Dig. I heard about a great deal on a used Toyota four-by-four, a girl who'd do damn near anything for twenty-five bucks. I heard about a guy got hit by a truck, but he was gonna be fine, shoulda looked where he was going, that haul road behind the South Boston Postal Annex was a death trap and no mistake.

I didn't see any obvious cops, and I didn't make any of the construction workers for undercovers. I was renewing my search for a grieving girlfriend when Horgan's baritone caught my ear, part of a trio, with Harv O'Day, the site super, and a muscular man I'd seen near the trailer. Horgan's voice was aggressively loud. I edged closer, but it seemed I'd missed the meat of a heated argument.

“Hey, maybe it got misfiled. You ever think of that? Happens all the time.” The muscular man was trying to oil the waters, make peace.

O'Day muttered, “Could have, Dennis, I suppose,” in a conciliatory tone.

“Sure,” the man called Dennis said. “Your girl's thinkin' about her hair, her nails, her boyfriend. That's what happened. You two make up now. Hey, come on, Gerry. He didn't mean nothing by it, for chrissakes.”

Horgan, aware of the attention of the crowd, seemed embarrassed. “OSHA and everything, it's fuckin' making me crazy, Harv. Guess I was outta line. Sorry.”

Instead of clasping his outstretched hand, O'Day glared and walked away. I thought the boss was going to go after him, spin him around, turn the disagreement into a brawl, but Dennis quickly moved in and ordered another round of drinks. I thought I could probably paste a name to him. Dennis Marcantonio was a masonry sub-contractor whose smaller trailer abutted ours.

O'Day's charge led him close. “Hope you don't think
I
misfiled anything,” I said.

“Crowded here, huh?” The wiry man's cheeks were flushed, but his voice was level.

“Problems?” I wondered what grievance he harbored against Horgan, or vice versa, whether alcohol had primed the dispute.

O'Day thumped his glass down on the bar. “You're a temp, right?” I wondered if he meant I should butt out. I nodded, a look of earnest sympathy on my face. O'Day should know whether Fournier had punched the time-clock the morning he'd been found.

“What agency sent you?” he asked.

“Franklyn Mellors.”

“Yeah, well, Horgan says you do good work, but don't count on edging out Miss Marian.”

“There's enough work for both of us, maybe a third, if the company lands another contract.”

“There's always work, and look at everybody, drinking it up, taking it easy. Plenty of these guys barely spoke to Fournier. You hardly even met him. No discipline, that's what it is. Carelessness and no damned discipline.”

“You saying Fournier was careless?”

He lowered his voice. “Man's dead. I ain't gonna speak badly of him.”

“I heard he wasn't wearing a hard hat.”

“Yeah, well, what does that tell you about a man?
Carelessness and no damned discipline
.”

With that, he made for the exit, edging his way through the crowd.
Damn
. I could have stopped him and tried to learn more about the time card, but I doubted whether anyone had punched in or out for Fournier with O'Day staring at the clock. And O'Day wouldn't admit he'd been away from his desk, not to a mere temp. I wondered why he'd asked about my status. If he checked on me at Franklyn Mellors, I'd come up roses; Eddie had a deal with them. I wished I'd overheard his argument with Horgan from the beginning, knew what had been misfiled.

Leland Walsh appeared on my left and asked if I could use another beer.

I nodded. “O'Day and Horgan were really going at it. You know what it was about?”