The Penny Ferry - Rick Boyer (18 page)

Within thirty minutes eight of us wound our way up
the dismal stairs and onto the landing where we'd first spotted our
man. e The room was halfway down the hall on the right. Right in the
center of the big building. We went in. There was a very faint aroma
in there I didn't like. A burnt smell. Popeye went over to the wall
on the left and jumped up, sniffing. He whined and wagged his tail,
then dropped to all fours and turned in a tight circle. Whined
louder. Cried. Wailed. To the dog's left, near the door we had
entered, the wall was torn. The plaster and lath had been hacked away
from the studding and lay on the floor in a heap. This had been the
falling noise, the patter of debris like heavy rain, we'd heard from
the floor below before our mysterious friend had knocked off work and
fled, shooting at us.

"He picked the wrong place to look," I
said. "That's why he didn't find it."

"Find what?" asked Joe.

"Johnny's pouch. It's in there. In the wall.
Didn't you notice the dog's reaction? That's why we brought him in
the first place. He just also happens to be good at bulldozing old
doors. I'm going into that wall to get the pouch because I bet my
anterior bridge is inside. Now you see why our errand doesn't look so
dumb?"

"I just wish you'd told me is all," he
said. "And you're not doing any banging and digging until the
lab boys case this place."

And they did. While we watched from the doorway, they
took photographs of everything, and one guy made a sketch showing
measurements, the window and door, and the location of the old desk
that was in there. The team dusted the place for prints, collected
fibers and dust from the floor, placed some cigarette butts in vials,
and carefully collected the tools (a hammer and cold chisel) left by
our mysterious friend. Then they left. Joe, Mary, Sam, and I stared
at the wall. Then Joe examined the floor closely and drew our
attention to large scrape marks on the floor. They led to the heavy
old desk. His eyes went back to the wall, which was ruined along its
upper edge where it joined the ceiling. There was about a two-foot
line along the top where the plaster and lath had been removed from
the timbers a long time ago, perhaps in the expectation of installing
plumbing pipes or heating ducts. But it had never happened. That
meant there were deep troughs between the studs that ran all the way
down the wall toward the floor. The big gash in the wall was as high
up as a basketball net."

"What they did was," said Joe, "they
dragged that desk from the middle of the room over to the wall here,
then dragged it back. Yeah, they dropped something down behind the
facing all right."

I watched the dog jump up again, forelegs on the
wall, nose pointed straight up, whining. I took hammer and chisel and
poked through the wall just above the floor, right below him. Nothing
but space. I tried farther up and ran into horizontal cross bracing
between studs. So I tried right above the bracing, and before half a
minute was up I was seeing glimpses, through the plaster dust and
crumpled, splintered lathboard, of gray canvas. When the hole was big
enough I pulled at the cloth and then was holding the pouch in my
hand. On it, in dark-blue letters, were the words LOWELL SUN.

"Well, gotdamn!" said Sam.

The dog took it in his steam-shovel mouth and sank to
his belly, holding it between his paws with his chin resting on it.
He whined and thumped his tail on the old dirty floor. Popeye seemed
to know Johnny wouldn't be back.

I returned to the hole and kept pecking away, hacking
and tearing off slabs of plaster the way a pileated woodpecker works
on an old dead tree. My mouthpiece was in there. I just knew it. And
I'd save Tom and me a week's work if I could get it out. In fact, I
was in such a sweat to retrieve my dental work that I didn't notice
Joe. I heard him mumbling something but I couldn't—"

"Why?" he shouted. I turned to face him.
Joe had Sam get the paperboy's pouch for him, since he didn't want to
lose an arm. He turned it inside out. Examined the seams, the
carrying strap. "Why?" he repeated. "They got the
pouch, took the packet inside, then ditched the pouch behind the wall
just the way they ditched the gas masks . . . and for the same
reason. But what happens? They come back for it. Why?"

"
Because they failed to get what they were
after," I said. "They got the packet of documents from the
public library all right."

"What makes you so sure?" said Mary.

"Because here's the envelope," I answered,
gingerly pulling out as crumpled manila bundle that was slightly
torn. Clearly visible on it was not only the Santuccios' address but
the receiving stamp of the Boston Public Library.

"Well done, Doc. Well done. You shoulda been a
cop."

I continued to punch, pry, smash, and chip at the
wall. My reasons, and reasoning, were simple: there were two things
in Johnny's pouch when he was murdered, the Sacco-Vanzetti documents
in the packet and my anterior bridge in a small cardboard box. One
they wanted, one they didn't. They'd taken the pouch to this location
to examine it. Therefore, they'd disposed of the dental work the same
way they'd hidden the pouch. In the old wall.

Only it wasn't working out that way. When I'd
demolished the rest of the wall, with Joe's help and encouragement,
it yielded nothing except what we'd already found. I'd helped Joe a
bit but struck out on my personal quest. I led them back down and
outside, trudging across the old buckled asphalt and cinder. The
tools clanked and clinked under my arm. I was down. Joe was up; his
star would rise at headquarters. I would have to spend a lot of time
and trouble redoing the piece. Damn it all.

We asked Sam to dinner. He thanked us but declined,
saying he had a lot of extra work to do at home. As we dropped him
off I got out and walked with him over to the door, where he switched
off the electronic alarm.

"I want to thank you, Sam, for all you've done."

"Hmmmph! Should be me who's thankin' you, Doc.
We almost got that guy today. Next time, I promise you: I won't
miss."

"Call it a hunch, Sam, but if I were you I'd
take that cash out of your safe for a week or so."

"
Huh? Why?"

I shrugged my shoulders and repeated that it was just
a hunch.

Sam went in and reappeared with a shopping bag full
of bills. He asked us to drive him to Somerville. We did. Following
his directions, we soon found ourselves winding our way through tiny
labyrinthine alleyways that were lined with small businesses dealing
with the automotive aftermarket. Muffler shops, radiator repair,
engine rebuilding, front ends, rear ends, bumpers, windshields,
tires, shocks— the Cambridge-Somerville line was to cars what
Boston's South End was to leather and shoes. We passed a radiator
joint and I smelled noxious fumes of zinc galvanizing and acid baths.
We stopped at Nissenbaum's Auto Parts on Columbia, right down the
street from the Nike running-shoe factory.

I went inside with Sam; Maurice Nissenbaum put the
cash in his big safe, gave Sam a signed slip, and we returned to
Dependable where we finally parted. Sam left on that rumbly, popping
old Honda with Popeye, goggles and all, right behind him. It seemed
as if we could hear him three blocks out of sight. At home I poured
large dollops of Laphroaig into brandy snifters and added some
room-temperature soda water. We sat outside on the flagged terrace
and looked at the two pink dogwood trees that were in full bloom. Joe
and I stuck our noses down into the bowl-like glasses and inhaled the
warm malty smell of the whisky. Mary sipped on Amaretto liqueur.

My lawn was bright green and wide. In one cozy corner
of it was a cluster of paper-birch trees, and in the midst of this
copse was a rough wooden table with benches. Moe and I like to sit
there and play chess on a crisp fall day. Moe brings his old samovar
and we make Russian caravan tea and play and push our little chess
clocks down and he beats me. And we pretend we're Tolstoi and
Chekhov. We wear warm sweaters in the afternoon and play balalaika
music on a tiny cassette player. The birches are gold and white, and
it's very Russian.

Mary has part of the side yard bounded by a
walk-through arbor. The side of the house there is set with some
Florentine tiles and a bronze wall fountain. There are Lombardy
poplars around the other two sides, and two gas lamps. It's a
romantic Latin courtyard, and only about twenty feet square. My
favorite spot is still under construction, and borders on the small
garage-sized guest cabin far back on the lawn. It is enclosed by
birches and wild evergreens and wide bamboo stakes. Inside this tiny
court are boulders, a pond, a curved concrete footbridge, a small
torii, and two dozen dwarf bonsai in old pots or pots made by Mary,
or set into rock crevices, or lining the miniature waterfall. Then in
the middle, surrounded by all this miniaturized countryside, is a
tiny teak teahouse with ungawa and rice screens. By the time I'm a
hundred I may finish it. It's only forty feet square, but inside it
one has the feeling of great space, privacy, and timelessness. Not a
lot of talking in there. No laughing or loud noise. Cats but not
dogs. You go there alone, or with someone you really care about, and
sit quietly. Little bronze temple bells chime in the wind, and the
squat bronze lantern by the miniature lake glows, and you can
sometimes see the dull golden flash of the bug-eyed goldfish who live
in the lake. I wanted to be there right now. I wanted to be drinking
hot Keemun, not Scotch, and meditate on the past few days. I wanted
the dust and events to settle, find their place, and begin to make
sense.

"Charlie! Charlie! My God, how many times do we
have to ask you?"

"Hmmm?"

"What's it going to be tonight, rack of lamb or
bouillabaisse?"

"Oh, whatever." I got up and paced the
flagstones. I looked up at our house. It looked big. I felt insulated
and spoiled. Then I thought of what I'd read about Sacco and
Vanzetti. Sacco and his family lived in a tiny cottage in Stoughton.
He worked eighty-hour weeks and kept a big garden. He gave his spare
vegetables to the "needy" families in the area. Vanzetti
was a boarder in North Plymouth who, if the testimony of his
neighbors in that town could be believed, made pennies at a time, yet
gave the kids in the neighborhood dimes. Not only was their testimony
as to his good character and generosity not believed by the jury
(because the neighbors, too, were Italians and therefore in league
with him), but his giving away of dimes was taken as evidence that he
had stolen fifteen grand from the Slater and Morrill shoe company in
South Braintree. Of course this line of thinking failed to explain
why both Sacco and Vanzetti had none of this fortune in their hands,
and why they then perversely chose to continue to live in tiny
workingmen's dwellings and to work eighty-hour weeks.

Looking up at our red-brick house on Old Stone Mill
Road, which looked very big and splendorous, I thought of Sacco and
Vanzetti and all the old ladies on the oil-soaked floors who were
deaf from the looms, and felt guilty.

"I think we should sell this place, Mary,"
I announced, "and get something a bit smaller. What do you
think?"

"What?"

"Well, don't you think it's a bit big for us?
Jack and Tony are off at school now, and I just thought—"

"You're losing your mind, Charlie. Okay, sit out
here and moon and pout all you want. We're not selling this house;
we've got way too much at stake here. And a large part of it's mine,
kiddo. You forgot that? See you later; Joe and I are going in to make
bouillabaisse. And if you're not a good boy you won't get any."

But I couldn't have cared less. Oh, they tried to
distract me, all right. A few times I almost weakened. First the
aroma of the olive oil with onions, shallots, and leeks sautéing in
it. I didn't even flinch. Then Joe brought out a glass of cold Soave,
and shortly afterward I heard the strains of Mozart's Clarinet
Concerto in A major. I sipped and listened and sniffed, but not a
quiver. I just kept thinking of the pouch, the empty pouch . . . the
anterior bridge, and those two working-class Italians strapped into
the electric chair at Charlestown Prison and coming out in those
black boxes.

I heard the hum of the microwave. Mary was defrosting
frozen fillets of striped bass and containers filled with littleneck
clams and mussels, shrimp, lobster claws, and maybe even some
king-crab legs . . . big, thick, spiky golden sticks full of white
meat . . .I squirmed a bit and stared out over the wide lawn.

The pouch was empty. Why had they come back for it?
Maybe it was somebody else who'd come back. Some other party
entirely. That would explain why the guy we'd gotten the drop on had
been digging in the wrong section of the old wall. He hadn't been
there when the pouch was dropped down into the—

"How you doing?" asked Joe, who had sneaked
up on me. "Mary just added the fumet. Smell it?"

"
Yeah. Hey Joe, how did your old man get to be
president of his company, anyway? That's pretty good for an Italian
peasant who landed broke at Ellis Island. I know the broad details.
But you know Mary doesn't talk about it that much. I know he started
out as a carpenter, right? But how'd he—"

"Pop made it on hard work and luck. And common
sense. He was no genius, but he wasn't dumb, and he listened to the
right people. I tell ya, Doc, next to common sense, genius isn't
worth shit."