MUNICH
One quiet evening in Munich an old married couple sat in front of the TV with their pet schnauser, Albert. Suddenly the wife grabbed her chest and mouthed that she was having a heart attack. Her crippled husband tried to reach the phone but he struck the edge of a table and his wheelchair flipped sideways, snapping his neck. He died instantly. The wife died a few minutes later. By the time police battered down the locked door, Albert had starved to death.
LITTLE MICHIKO
Little four year old Michiko brought a samurai sword to school and used it on the playground to decapitate her best friend. When she walked into the classroom after recess soaked in blood and holding the dripping head, her teacher fainted. The other children screamed and screamed.
DIE, FÜHRER
The Nazis killed the love of his life. Now a former Austrian mountain climber will join a daring plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
DIE, FÜHRER is available as a low priced Kindle e-book: DIE, FÜHRER
EXCERPT:
Chamonix, the French Alps, 1931
Rock!
Stefan Zeit hugs the face. He hears the bouncing clatter from above. Then a fist-sized stone whistles past his helmet and shatters on a frozen ledge with a crack like artillery.
Heinrich's outcry made him react without thinking. He now becomes aware of the disaster he has just missed. He licks his dry lips, longing for the succor of a cigarette. From below, Paul Vree shouts,
Christ!
Stefan leans out from the face to look, the cleats of his Swiss made climbing boots braced on bare rock. He sees the third climber in the little team spread-eagled on the face, his fingers clinging to a knife-sized fissure.
I am fine! Vree shouts – though, his tin helmet askew and hair wild, he looks like Charlie Chaplin in Alpine climbing gear.
Stefan now tilts his head to look up. Heinrich Aschen is a rope length above, perched on a small outcropping. He watches as Heinrich, grinning through his frozen beard with effort, taps in a piton. He listens to the rings of the hammer, the comforting snap of a carabiner.
Some of the holds on this pitch are barely depressions, smudges in the pale granite. Daylight is failing fast and they have yet to reach the first bivouac.
Stefan concentrates his mind to try to stop his muscles from shivering or going numb. He already tastes that cigarette. The rope that runs straight down to Stefan vibrates with Heinrich's effort as he glides to a safer hold on the implacable, dark face of the Dru.
*
They crossed the glacier, clanking under their gear, in darkness just before yesterday’s sunrise. Between the rim of the glacier and the peak was a deep crevasse, a bergschrund: Heinrich tossed their bags and equipment over, then each man took a running start and jumped across. Far below, a grinding roar of water. They sat at the base of the Dru and smoked, waiting for first light. Across the glacier, the Charmoz rose out of darkness, its shoulder glowing white. Damp earth smells rose from the ground amid twisted fir trees. Stefan tucked his head between his knees wondering if he would vomit. His nerves always made him suffer terribly at the beginning of a climb.
Finally Vree picked up a coil of rope. Heinrich flicked away his cigarette.
Well, gentlemen?
Stefan stood, put on his gear and backpack, and strode onto the rubble at the base of the Dru. He took hold of the rock and, without a glance backward, not even bothering to rope up, began to climb.
*
There are three pitons, in a zigzag pattern, set into the blank, slick-looking vertical expanse of rock between Stefan and Heinrich. Stefan blows on his searing fingers, flexes his hands one by one. Shouts, Climbing.
At Heinrich's answering shout, he launches himself up on a slab of stone that flutes outward, giving him an odd sense of climbing into an abyss.
Wind scours the exposed rock and blasts his eardrums, muffling the clink of the spare pitons, hammer, and ice-axe Stefan wears on his belt. Though the gum-cleats of his boots adhere lightly to the rock, he has a sensation of weightlessness. He might be climbing on Mars.
His legs are shaking. The sky looks black. At moments he feels he is climbing with the pads of his fingertips. It is with a shiver of relief that he places the toe of his boot on an iron piton.
He looks up. Heinrich still seems far, far above. Dwindling into bleak space.
Climb to your right, Heinrich shouts through cupped hands.
Stefan begins to see the path Heinrich has sketched out. It is a matter of moving smoothly from hold to hold.
Paul Vree shouts, Cold down here!
Stefan smiles.
When he steps off the piton, he knows, both he and the weight of his backpack will be suspended for a long moment by the fingertips of his right hand. He will have to pull himself up in one smooth lunge, finding the foothold for his right boot toe by instinct, all the while fighting gravity. Should he fall, Stefan thinks the rope will probably hold. But it would not be easy to regain the face; he would dangle twirling upside down in space until one of the other two climbers reached him with a line.
Go.
His boots scrabble on the rock as he clamps his fingertips into the fissure and wrenches himself upward.
There.
With a shout of effort, he launches himself into the next stance. And now Stefan is finding the holds without thought.
He is drenched in sweat. Blasts of wind shake him like a leaf.
He sees Heinrich's hand. Takes it. Heinrich hauls him over the last outcrop. The arm is powerful. The grip is sure. Stefan clips his harness to a piton and lets his body go slack with relief. He gazes out over the valley, at the stark gray-black peaks wreathed in cloud. Glimmers of snow, dark fissures. Hieroglyphs. They are thirty meters below the planned site of the first bivouac and daylight is dwindling fast. The chilling air bites his nose and ears.
The Dying of Ariel Sharon
What If He Was Reincarnated in the Womb of a Palestinian Woman?
sub-’junc-tive, adj. 1. The subjunctive mood, the form of a verb denoting an action or state not as fact, but only as a conception of the mind. It is therefore used to express a wish, a command, or a contingent or hypothetical event. 2. Characteristic of what is expressed by the subjunctive mood.
It was snowing lightly in Jerusalem (by which I really mean if it were to be snowing lightly in Jerusalem), a side-driven windy snow late in the day when Ariel Sharon left the Knesset with his bodyguard, if he were to do so, and traveled the short distance by armored car to his home, and after a light dinner with wine and television went to bed somewhat early in the darkness with snow still rushing outside, a snow so fine and spare it would be evaporated by morning. Yet Ariel Sharon was not to wake in the morning, for sometime during the night, doctors would say, the fat-streaked heart in his massive chest stopped ticking, clogged to a stop with one last difficult lurch.
Maybe he felt the heart lurching to a stop in his sleep, maybe he was dreaming of being on a train in a European country of flat and bare fields and the train suddenly stopped for no reason on the tracks with a lurch and a squeak of metal and the great engine ceased to throb through the metal plating and he, alone at a linen-covered table in the dining car, in the act of lifting a forkful of salmon to his mouth, froze and stared out over the bleak dark landscape like the one painted by the Dutch landscape painters in Holland, and as he stared out he noticed that his heart was no longer throbbing and he dropped the fork in alarm and heard it clatter on the plate and saw a waiter, a napkin folded carefully over his forearm, approach him with a questioning smile, and that was the last thing he saw because he died.
But what if Ariel Sharon were not to die–what does that word mean, die, it’s imprecise and it yields no image and does not satisfy the yearning part of the mind, not to mention the body–but instead of dying were to leave the train in a surge of anxiety and a rush like the wings of a descending angel (I am thinking here of the angel that streaks down from Heaven like a flaming arrow towards the tent-sleeping Constantine in Piero della Francesca’s fresco-cycle "The Legend of the True Cross") and if his soul, Ariel Sharon’s pitying lost human scorched terror-faced soul, were to find itself translated, like a flash of wonderment, into the womb of a young woman in Bethlehem who happens to be (why not?) a Palestinian Arab.
And what if, about nine months later, this same young woman were to bleed to death in the agony of giving birth, because her taxi has not been permitted to pass through an Israeli checkpoint on the only road to the hospital–and what if the baby, a boy, were to survive his mother’s death only to die himself, ironically but quite plausibly, at the age of ten-and-a-half rushing down a Bethlehem street away from soldiers firing from beside a tank into a crowd of stone-throwers?
This, I believe, is where Sharon’s life really ends, or is at least where my subjunctive mood would end it: not on a train stopped in an obscure dream-landscape but on a light-drenched street where M-16 bullets are zipping and cracking against cement walls and Sharon, whose name is now Samir, whose face is dark, and whose fist holds a stone, is sprinting away from soldiers bulging in heavy equipment who are kneeling to take aim and then he feels a flash in his leg and goes sprawling and looks down to see his knee mangled by the spinning M-16 round and bits of flesh and a splash of arterial blood and he turns to face the soldiers who are still shooting and feels another flash, not of pain exactly but of amazement, as another bullet hits him in the chest and he is conscious of a high-pitched tone in his ears and his mouth tastes blood–nauseated, he spits a brilliant glob of it out onto the asphalt.
And now Samir remembers, with wonder, what he’d forgotten at birth or slightly before, namely that he is Ariel Sharon. In the seizure of this memory, the boy utters a cry–of longing, of horror, or perhaps of disgust. Then he leaps from the sprawled Arab body, leaps across miles and perhaps even across a span of continents to surge like lightning into the joyous womb of yet another young woman engulfed in the throes of love just seconds before the IDF soldier approaches and, with a shouted curse, squeezes off an entire clip of ammunition into his chest.
sub-’junc-tive, adj. 1. The subjunctive mood, the form of a verb denoting an action or state not as fact, but only as a conception of the mind. It is therefore used to express a wish, a command, or a contingent or hypothetical event. 2. Characteristic of what is expressed by the subjunctive mood.
It was snowing lightly in Jerusalem (by which I really mean if it were to be snowing lightly in Jerusalem), a side-driven windy snow late in the day when Ariel Sharon left the Knesset with his bodyguard, if he were to do so, and traveled the short distance by armored car to his home, and after a light dinner with wine and television went to bed somewhat early in the darkness with snow still rushing outside, a snow so fine and spare it would be evaporated by morning. Yet Ariel Sharon was not to wake in the morning, for sometime during the night, doctors would say, the fat-streaked heart in his massive chest stopped ticking, clogged to a stop with one last difficult lurch.
Maybe he felt the heart lurching to a stop in his sleep, maybe he was dreaming of being on a train in a European country of flat and bare fields and the train suddenly stopped for no reason on the tracks with a lurch and a squeak of metal and the great engine ceased to throb through the metal plating and he, alone at a linen-covered table in the dining car, in the act of lifting a forkful of salmon to his mouth, froze and stared out over the bleak dark landscape like the one painted by the Dutch landscape painters in Holland, and as he stared out he noticed that his heart was no longer throbbing and he dropped the fork in alarm and heard it clatter on the plate and saw a waiter, a napkin folded carefully over his forearm, approach him with a questioning smile, and that was the last thing he saw because he died.
But what if Ariel Sharon were not to die–what does that word mean, die, it’s imprecise and it yields no image and does not satisfy the yearning part of the mind, not to mention the body–but instead of dying were to leave the train in a surge of anxiety and a rush like the wings of a descending angel (I am thinking here of the angel that streaks down from Heaven like a flaming arrow towards the tent-sleeping Constantine in Piero della Francesca’s fresco-cycle "The Legend of the True Cross") and if his soul, Ariel Sharon’s pitying lost human scorched terror-faced soul, were to find itself translated, like a flash of wonderment, into the womb of a young woman in Bethlehem who happens to be (why not?) a Palestinian Arab.
And what if, about nine months later, this same young woman were to bleed to death in the agony of giving birth, because her taxi has not been permitted to pass through an Israeli checkpoint on the only road to the hospital–and what if the baby, a boy, were to survive his mother’s death only to die himself, ironically but quite plausibly, at the age of ten-and-a-half rushing down a Bethlehem street away from soldiers firing from beside a tank into a crowd of stone-throwers?
This, I believe, is where Sharon’s life really ends, or is at least where my subjunctive mood would end it: not on a train stopped in an obscure dream-landscape but on a light-drenched street where M-16 bullets are zipping and cracking against cement walls and Sharon, whose name is now Samir, whose face is dark, and whose fist holds a stone, is sprinting away from soldiers bulging in heavy equipment who are kneeling to take aim and then he feels a flash in his leg and goes sprawling and looks down to see his knee mangled by the spinning M-16 round and bits of flesh and a splash of arterial blood and he turns to face the soldiers who are still shooting and feels another flash, not of pain exactly but of amazement, as another bullet hits him in the chest and he is conscious of a high-pitched tone in his ears and his mouth tastes blood–nauseated, he spits a brilliant glob of it out onto the asphalt.
And now Samir remembers, with wonder, what he’d forgotten at birth or slightly before, namely that he is Ariel Sharon. In the seizure of this memory, the boy utters a cry–of longing, of horror, or perhaps of disgust. Then he leaps from the sprawled Arab body, leaps across miles and perhaps even across a span of continents to surge like lightning into the joyous womb of yet another young woman engulfed in the throes of love just seconds before the IDF soldier approaches and, with a shouted curse, squeezes off an entire clip of ammunition into his chest.
The Russian Beauty
One night last week at Le Bernardin, Iris -- tossing her hair, lighting a cigarette and speaking in the usual breathless baby voice all that the same instant -- told me that Louis (her always-misbehaving ex) has just "shacked up with girl" he met on a recent business trip to Russia.
I forget what her name is but it's Russian, she's a real beauty. He bought her a diamond watch and a Chanel suit and a lot of other cool stuff. She has these eyes that when they look at you it's all over for your feelings, you're ready to do anything to please the girl or to impress her or even maybe just to spend a few more minutes with her eyes on you. I was over at Louis' place and she was just sitting there, nothing special, on the divan with one leg crossed over the other, bouncing her foot up and down, and it wasn't possible to pay attention to anything or anyone in the room but her. Louis is besotted -- calls her his fatal beauty, his princess, his doll, his kitty cat, his lie, his despair, his life, his death. I remember the name now. It's Olga. Eyes looking at you from under dark bangs, and that stunning beauty you can't rest after seeing, you can barely so much as breathe, you're a goner. She's such a little dove, such a sad Russian beauty.
I call up Louis that evening. A week later we're walking along the beach at Montauk, the three of us, and she and Louis are holding hands lightly -- she just places her fingers in his palm and lets him hold them. Louis is a big man; he eats well. He used to be handsome. He's a little on the heavy side now; he has flesh on his face that wobbles when he laughs or gets excited.
He tells a joke. Olga looks at him, squinting a little, from under her black bangs. She laughs a thick, vulgar laugh that startles you coming as it does from a doll like body.
She’s so old she barely recalls the fall of Communism. When she shuts her eyes, the eyeballs flicker visibly under the lids. For some reason, I suddenly imagine her wearing ballerina tights; sweat glistens on her neck, and the practice hall is silent but for rushed breathing and the squeak of ballet slippers on the parquet. Snow whirls against the chilled windows. A man in a worn black sweater claps his hands to signal the end of practice. She rushes to the changing room with the other girls, all as thin as storks. You can see the outline of her vertabrae when she bends to pick up a towel . . .
Louis catches up with me in the kitchen where I'm uncorking a bottle of Riesling. He gives me one of his heavy, damp hugs and a couple of sloppy Russian kisses -- he's been doing that since he and Olga started dating. He starts telling me about Olga's family, mother and father and grandmother -- what wonderful, plain, salt of the earth people they are, not criminals like his other Russian friends. He'd like to do things for them. I pours himself some of the wine and starts drinking as he leans against me and squeezes my elbow, talking and talking, yakety yakety yak yak. Olga drifs into the doorway and stands there. Louis turns to look at her, and she gives him a smile full of devastating Russian grief.
Louis laughs, grabs me by the waist, and presses his bulging stomach against me as I try to shove him away, and this whole charade is for Olga's benefit -- he's always trying to amuse her, like laughter will keep her from ever picking up her sparse things one day and walking out on him.
Olga smiles at Louis but not at me and leaves the kitchen. Louis lets go of me and I pick up my glass and sip to cover my confusion. He’s beaming. Isn't she just so gloriously beautiful? he keeps saying, shaking his head in that can't-believe-my-luck sort of way. To die for, I say. He crows in triumph. Yes! To die for! His eyes shine.
He grabs my elbow again. I gaze into his eyes as he tells me he wants to ask me a question. It’s an, er, hard thing to find the words for. He doesn’t want to sound, well, um, never mind, the point is . . .
Oh. You're offended, he says sadly when he's finished asking. No. I shake my head. I'm not. I lift the wine glass and drink. I've had almost half of the just uncorked Riesling already. Louis says, It sounds worse than it is. Really. I shrug. I’m trembling a little. I'm sure it does, I reply. But couldn't you, you know, think about it? I shake my head. No. No way. Louis lets go of my elbow and steps back, his shoulders collapsing. Well, just remember -- I was stinking drunk when I asked you to do this. We both laugh. And now, before I can stop the words from coming out of my mouth, I say I'll think it over.
You will?
I will.
Let me know as soon as you can. I'm sure you'll come to the right decision.
I stroll out onto the deck and find Olga posed against the railing, chin pressed to shoulder, like someone getting ready to play an invisible violin. The slender, graceful line she makes, standing like that against the sunset lit water, knocks the breath out of me. At that moment, something dark in me rises up into the spilling last light and says, Allelujia. Yes. Yes.
I know then I’ll never be able to pass up the chance to have Olga resplendently naked in my arms, even if it means tolerating Louis hovering over us with the Sony camcorder -- or, worse, deciding on impulse to join us in bed -- in what promises to be a truly memorable night of passion.
The Curse of the Yellow Lotus (excerpt)
The First Volume is available as an Amazon/Kindle e-original here.
Here E.P.'s notebooks break off. To trace the Mime's subsequent career and his revenge against Raj Singh we must turn to the man who knew Edward best, namely Phillipe Noir. As I described in my preface, I had been unable to contact Noir, even as I edited down the blue cahiers for private publication -- merely as a curiosity, I told myself, for my personal amusement and edification (and also, I must confess, because I felt they should not be lost; I felt the tug of some obscurely compelling sense of duty to their author, my earstwhile great uncle). Meantime I read and reread the Noir-authored tales in Black Mask and Savage Mysteries and other fading pulp periodicals from the twine-bound bundle that had first landed on my doorstep long before that dark Quebec winter, and sometimes I copied passages, and in this way I grew to admire a style I would never myself presume to emulate. But the stories were, after all, fast pulp adventures, written i' the heat, so to speak, and while they provided clues as to the aftermath of E.P.'s notebooks, they were too fragmentary and inconclusive to serve as anything more solid that a colorful basis for speculation. I wondered how much Noir had fashioned out of his imagination, and how much was real, yet I thought I could never learn the truth, and so for me the yellowing pulps took on an air of poignancy I feel sure they had never exuded in the hands of their original readers. Each time I flipped through one of these crackling magazines, a page or two was sure to detach, or a corner to break loose; they were that frangible. Piled on my desk in the light of the green shaded banker's lamp, it sometimes seemed to me they might, at any moment, turn to a puff of brown dust. Sometimes I stared through my reflection and the glow of my lamp out into the chill darkness of the Montreal night, and with a thrilling sensation up the spine envisaged the face of the Mime appearing suddenly, quite close to the glass. He would have climbed the fire-escape silently, gliding in his ninja-stealth, barely disturbing its frozen skin of snow, and there he was now in the coat of white grease-paint and motorcycle goggles and long black leather Nazi coat. Did I wish for such a meeting? I must have, I imagined it so intensely. Yet very gradually and with some reluctance I gave up on the idea of ever learning the truth, and let the Mime become, for me, another sad myth. My little edition of the blue notebooks was published, not to any fanfare, by a small house in Montreal, with a facing translation into French, and I gave away nine of my ten copies to bemused and disbelieving friends who assumed it was all my trite invention, and I assumed that was that: nothing more to be had from out of the past. Soon after, I published my own debut novel, a work of detective fiction with a postmodern flair and an inconclusive ending. It was reviewed nicely on a few Internet sites. The slender volume of Edward's memoirs and extracts from Noir's pulps received no attention at all but on a blog titled Le Blog, where under the heading "we have no idea what this is" the blogger, whose name now escapes me, raved that it reminded him of H.P. Lovecraft. That's all. I taught English, lecturing before a stark room in which a single radiator wheezed and groaned -- oddly, I cannot even remember the faces of my gum-chewing students, only their scornful attitudes, their young bodies twisted in boredom on the hard chairs, the occasional derisive laugh or bored whisper -- and at twilight walked home through a park in which the trees were perpetually bare and glistened under a skin of ice. Then one morning, a Saturday I think, my buzzer fizzed, and I went down to open the door and saw that my visitor was an aged fellow in a wheelchair, his nose a Gallic beak, his lap covered by a tartan blanket, his eyes blue and steady as twin revolver barrels under a green leather billed hunter's cap. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and, yawning, asked this old bird his business with me. He pushed the wheelchair forward a few inches over the glazed snow on the sidewalk and stuck out his hand, and when I shook it, my God, the man's vice grip almost broke my fingers. And he said, in a Corsican accented French, Je suis Monsieur Phillipe Noir. I am Phillipe Noir. I stared at him for a long, long time then finally shook the cobwebs (actually it was snow) out of my hair and invited him up to my apartment, out of the freezing March cold. As the lift was broken yet again, I had to back him up bumping step by step in his wheelchair, four flights to the door of my cozy little coal-heated atelier with its view of the frozen river. He coughed and hacked a little but offered no complaint and showed zero fear. Once in my book lined home (never mind that they were all paperbacks), I offered him a taste of cognac, to which he assented with a swift nod. I took my Napoleon bottle out from behind the Balzac and poured us two little glasses and we clinked then and drank. Then I refilled the glasses and tossed heaped newspapers from my chair and sat facing him, eager to hear whatever he might have to say. I viewed this old French gentleman, I am ashamed to confess, not so much as a person as an emissary from a mythic world I had despaired of ever hearing news of ever again. Corked up in him was the Mime's saga, the complete arc. I couldn't have been happier to see my own long lost brother, if I'd had a brother and if he'd ever been lost. So let us now cut to the high speed chase.
Noir produced from his weathered corduroy jacket a distinguished looking walnut pipe and a yellow leather tobacco pouch and tapped the bowl full and lit it with a shaking match, and once he had sucked in a few lungfuls of pungent turkish smoke, the bowl hissing, he sat back and straightened the lap- blanket and asked me in that sonorous, yet quavering voice if I would be interested in learning the rest of the Mime's story -- if I still yearned to know how my great-uncle's quest for revenge against the ultra-nefarious Raj Singh had ended up, even if no one would ever be able to tell me (himself least of all) what it all meant. I said I did. My God yes. And by the procedural by I asked Noir if he would mind being tape-recorded. No, he wouldn't. Pas de probleme. So I found my little tape recording machine and plunked in a fresh cassette and set it down between us with the spools turning and we were off. Hell-bent for motorcycle leather. Plunging pell-mell into the acrid inglorious past.
I am not going to bore you, my boy, with the details of my birth or my rough upbringing in the slums of Marseilles, or what happened to my mother, or if I even knew my father; feh. It should suffice that at nineteen I killed a man with an overzealous application of Savate, the Corsican art of kick-boxing, at which I was already adept. His skull cracked on the paving stone like the shell of an egg. I fled Marseilles for Algeria, where, in a wild drunken unshaven state, I signed my life away to the French Foreign Legion. There ensued much marching back and forth in the desert, whoring, breathing sand, drinking arrack, fighting native tribesmen, and so on. I am sure you have seen the silent movie many times. I survived; was pinned repeatedly with pretty medals and gold braided epaulets by a walrus-moustached general; rose steadily in rank, decoration, and plain viciousness. I drank and I drank and I whored and I whored my way across the blank expanses of North Africa, and no Gallic mercenary was ever more feared or despised.
But when I saw the newsreel of those neat lines of German soldiers goose-stepping under the Arc de Triomph and marching smartly behind their drummer boys down the Champs d'Elysees, all the while giving the Hitler salute to the sky, I became an instant patriot and deserted to join the Free French. My regiment followed me as gladly as they had against the Bedouins. All that winter and the summer after we fought like howling maniacs in the desert against General Rommel's tank corps. The British gave us our own clanking tanks and trucks and plenty of petrol and ammunition for our machine guns, and the Luftwaffe swept down and shot them full of holes and blew up our convoys, and Rommel was always appearing out of nowhere and blasting us to pieces. I watched most of my men die in black smoke and flames. This was the real war. I stopped drinking, I wised up, I became a ruthless and ultra-methodical killer. That has how I survived the North African campaign with a few dozen other french fools, all personally decorated with pretty ribbons and medals by De Gaulle. I landed in Sicily with American Marines and chased the jerries all the way to Messina. Then I drove my tank onto a swell beach in Normandy named for the capital of Nebraska. In the City of Lights, a few months later, we had a big party, emptying the restaurant cellars of all the champagne. We were all french, all free, all brothers. We danced. We ate flowers. We dragged collaborators out of their homes and stood them up against the nearest wall and shot them. Who ever said war wasn't easy? It's the aftermath that gives you a canard.
So, my dear boy, after the war I found myself depressed, maybe it was just nervous exhaustion, in any case I was suffering, so numb I could barely breathe, let along think about my life, all I could do well was spill blood, I was a murdering bastard and oh how well I knew it. I kicked about in Corsica hiking the remote mountains with a pack on my shoulders and a sturdy oak stick in my hand until my trousers fell to pieces then I bought new ones and went on to the Greek islands Corfu and Paros and Samos and a few others where I had some mighty odd experiences in old ruins and caverns devoted to the oracles of Delphi thence onto the mainland but we won't dwell upon all that right now for I've come to tell you everything I can about Edward P., Edward Parnassus a.k.a. the Mime, the world's deadliest and spookiest assassin, shrouded even while living in a thick coat of white grease-paint and a Nazi coat, whose name and life I perversely love and do not wish to be forgotten. I was trying to be young again in those snowcapped Greek mountains but it didn't work and in any case I'd stumbled on the war that was still blazing and roaring on, the one I thought we'd won but really hadn't, for just as in Spain the Greek Fascists (the Nazi collaborators and Nazi mercenaries) were busy as hornets hunting down the so-called Communists (the gallant Greek anti-Nazi fighters, in fact the whole so-called Resistance, along with a number of distasteful Soviet-trained apparatchiks who were trying to turn the whole desperate situation to the advantage of the Comintern), hunting them down, torturing them in cellars, hanging them young and old from trees, or putting them into "camps" and such to wither and die of typhus. The almighty Americans and British you see had jumped in on the side of the Fascists with airlifts and arms and stunts and infusions and intelligence officers and torture and killing consultants of all kinds -- I saw it with these watery eyes and the eyes wept. The truth is I'd come to Greece too late to do any good, it was now just the mopping up operations now, but I did manage to smuggle a few hundred people out to the East through safe houses in Athens and Salonika, god bless them, I hope they prospered, but I suspect Stalin killed the good ones. So I went on to north Africa by freighter because I was very tired and sick of the whole stinking mess, merde merde merde as we say in Marseilles, I hope I'm not boring you boy. There I poked and wandered and kicked about the deserts as an ordinary everyday kind of mec, no longer a Legionnaire with a sword-edge to grind and shiny black boots and a gold insignia, just ma petite Phillipe, exhausted and heart-sick, keening for another life, you know. I started up a bar in Morocco and that kept me busy for a few years and on my days off I dressed in white and went to learn at the feet of a Sufi teacher named Mustafa Q'bay. His teachings cleared my mind like a sky driven free of clouds by a gust of icy cold wind. Also, it was as a direct result of becoming Mustafa's student that I refused to do shady dealings with a local criminal headman who wished to use my bar as a drug smuggling channel. And so I found myself, one night, trapped at the wrong end of a crooked dead-end stone alley in the Casbah facing about twenty hashish-hopped young toughs armed with swords, sickles, clubs, and the like. Whirlwind that I was then as a Savate fighter, I still couldn't quite keep up with the sheer number and ferocity of assaults they were throwing at me, and I was taking blows and cuts as they backed me up to the bare wall, blood and sweat stinging my eyes. If I were a Sioux Indian I would have started chanting my death-song. I was truly ready. I had no regrets. I was grateful for my life, even such as it had been. Then I heard the thrum and throttling roar of a motorcycle, it sounded like a bull in heat as it shot of the tar-black night, sleek and fast, a Triumph, and astride it a figure all in goggles and black leathers crashed right into the fray knocking aside the crimelord's men like tenpins. When they swarmed at him he drew a pair of Mauser machine pistols and, well, that was the hasty end to a fine engagement, as they say in Tours. I slid down the wall watching all this -- the Angel of Death come to save my pitiful life. I saw him finish off every single howling assailant with a short rattlesnake burst from those German pistols or, when the ammunition petered out, a chop of his gloved hand. He was merciless. And oddly beautiful.
EMIL & THE DETECTIVES
I've been thinking about Emil and the Detectives. There was a Disney movie made of the book, broadcast first in 1966, then sometime in 1969 or even 1970, on Disney's Wonderful World of Color, which I believe was a Sunday night show. I remember seeing it, then going up to my bedroom and lying on the bed, shutting my eyes, feeling such a longing, such a deep longing to be taken bodily into that world of bold, clever, intrepid European child detectives, that I actually became sick with the longing and it turned into unbearable sadness.
I didn't see how I could possibly get from here to there. THAT world was a world where things mattered, where people actually meant something to each other, where there was good and bad, and what one did defined one and had real consequences. So, if you were good and kind, you could expect to be rewarded -- with friends, adventures, fun, and a satisfying conclusion.
Suddenly, this afternoon, I felt an unbearable longing, again, to be in the world of "Emil and the Detectives."
It occurred to me that if the boy I was then could see my life now, he might be terribly disillusioned -- he might pity me terribly.
BLUE MIDNIGHT (the first ten chapters)
One
Detective Sergeant Mark Roskov and I had just come off duty and were scraping snow from our boots in the foyer of the Tremont Pub when a shotgun blast from inside made us both jump. I glanced at Roskov. He already had his .38 out and cocked. I slipped mine out of the holster and hit the doors with my shoulder and found myself staring down the black bore of a12 gauge, my stomach turned to ice and dropping faster than an elevator with a broken cable.
I threw myself backward against Roskov and we both fell, sprawling, on the brown linolium squares of the foyer in the melting snow as the door disintegrated, showering us with glass and splintered wood. The shotgun kept on pumping and firing, pumping and firing. I rolled off of Roskov and, grabbing his collar in one hand, dragged him with me out onto the sidewalk. He shoved me against the wall and, edging to the doorway in a crouch, took a quick look in.
"Nothing."
I heard shrill screams start up inside the bar.
Gasping, I said: "The alley."
Roskov put my .38 in my hand. Until that moment, I hadn't realized I'd lost it. He took off in a crouching run. I followed him, it seemed across acres of whirling space although it was really only a half block. We turned the corner, covering the alley with our weapons.
A fire escape covered with snow. An overflowing dumpster.
"Ah. Jesus. Fuck me," Roskov screamed.
We were running back to the front door when the shooter came out. He was walking sideways and holding the shotgun at waist height as he pumped it. He fired.
I dropped to the sidewalk and squeezed off three shots, double action. Roskov was firing, too. My eardrums went crazy. Only when I saw the shooter stagger, drop the shotgun, and fall, did I roll over to check out the damage to Roskov. He was sitting against the wall holding the mess of blood and cartilege that had been his right knee.
"Go," he shouted through his clenched teeth. "I'm OK. Go."
I pushed myself to my feet with one hand and walked slowly over to the shooter. He was crawling away on his belly along the icy sidewalk. I crouched and jammed the barrel of my gun up under his chin.
"Freeze," I said. "Or die."
Twenty minutes later I watched as they picked up Roskov and put him into the back of the ambulance and two young paramedics bent over his leg. The doors were slammed shut and the ambulance pulled away from the curb, the siren whoop whooping.
There had been a lot of sirens. The call had gone out that two officers were in trouble. The place was crawling now with uniforms, and reporters were shouting questions as their cameramen tried to get every square inch of the site on video for the ten o'clock news.
The sidewalk where Roskov had been hit and where the shooter had fallen was being taped off with yellow tape. In the glaring camera lights, I saw spatters of blood on the snow in both places.
I followed MacLeavy and Pearson through the shattered doors of the Tremont Pub. There were tables and chairs tipped over and the floor was littered with broken glass.
"Are you sure you want to see this, Murphy?"
I looked at MacLeavy. He shrugged.
"OK by me. You just look a little wired is all."
He waved an arm at the bar. I looked at the rows of bottles. At chest height, almost a whole row had shattered, and there was dark blood splotched on the wall along with the liquor. I leaned over the bar to look behind it.
He was half sitting. His chest had been torn open by a shotgun blast. I saw a pistol next to his hand. It was the one he always kept under the cash register.
I turned to my colleagues.
"It's Tom."
"Tom what?"
"Tom Corgan."
MacLeavy flipped open a pad and scrawled the name.
"Wife?"
"No."
"Anybody at all to notify?"
"A father."
"You all right? You don't look so good. Dizzy?"
I nodded.
"Want a glass of water?"
I shook my head and sat.
"Looks like a robbery gone insane. We think this guy, this Tom Corgan, heroic bartender, pulled out a gun on the shotgun guy and that's why he got popped. Coincidence galore, you and Roskov are on your way in for a drink. The rest is tabloid news history."
"I don't think so."
"What?"
MacLeavy had been chewing gum. His jaws stopped working. He stared at me. So did Pearson.
"No," I said. "The shooter was standing here." I pointed. "Not at the bar. And look. The tables and chairs between here and the doorway -- they'd already been tossed aside, giving the shooter a clear line of fire. Tom, God bless him, that old bastard, he doesn't shout out to warn us. No, he knows the TV's on too loud in this place for us to hear any kind of warning in time to be able to react. So he goes for his .45. His old military service revolver."
I hit my head with a fist.
"Tom hadn't fired that fucking thing since Korea. And he probably lied to us about having done it then."
I looked up at them.
"The shooter was in here for a different reason than robbery. He was waiting for us to come off duty. Tom saved both our lives."
Pearson tightened his thin lips, then turned to MacLeavy. He said: "We had better get a couple of uniforms over to the hospital." MacLeavy hit himself on the head with his notepad and said, "Oh, God. Yes." He rushed out of the bar.
I shut my eyes and rubbed a hand over my face. When I felt Captain Pearson's hand on my shoulder. I looked up His expression was so solemn I thought he was going to offer me a handkerchief to blow my nose in. He seemed to be trying to find the words. Finally, he just cleared his throat and turned away as if to examine the debris scattered around the place.
I went over to the bar, careful not to look behind it, for a napkin. I wiped my face and blew my nose into it, then stuffed it into an overcoat pocket.
MacLeavy came in running through the shattered doors. Pearson turned to him.
He said,"I got a detail headed over to Brigham and Women's to keep an eye on Roskov. The shooter's critical. They're opening him up right now to try to get out the slugs. You two aces riddled the bastard. He'll be lucky to make it through the night."
"Got an ID?"
"Sure. It wasn't hard. I recognized the face right off from his mug shots. He's one of us , a boyo. Brendan Connor. Picked up and held on bail for pimping and drugs, but never yet put away. And get this. He's also rumored to have done hits for a fee here and in New York."
"Oh?" Pearson said. "How much does he get?"
"Dunno. The going rate I guess."
"Which is?"
They both looked at me.
I said, "I think about two thousand."
Pearson whistled. "I'm in the wrong racket." He turned back to me. "Can you think of anyone crazy or ticked off enough to go after two police officers in a town where the cops are known to stick together?"
"I don't know. No. Maybe. I'm not thinking very clearly right now."
"Somebody's got a hard on either for you or for Roskov. Think it over. I'd like to wrap up this thing before the Herald gets the story."
Pearson then turned to MacLeavy.
"Let's try to keep the witnesses and the press apart for at least a few days."
"OK," MacLeavy said. "Not that it'll be particularly easy."
I stepped away from the bar as the Crime Scene Trio walked in-- two officers wearing rubber gloves and plastic smocks over their street clothes and the other carrying a camera with a large flash attachment. They all nodded grimly at me. Biggs came in after them.
"The press wants a short statement from the hero cop who's still standing," he said to me.
I looked at Pearson, who tightened his lips to a thin line but nodded.
I lifted my shoulders.
"OK," I said.
We walked out onto the sidewalk and stood shoulder to shoulder in the blinding glare of the the news lights. A lady reporter -- I recognized her from Channel 5 Action News -- shouted out, "Detective Murphy, please, in your own words, would you tell us exactly what happened here tonight?"
I cleared my throat and said: "At approximately nine thirty this evening, I and my partner, Detective Mark Roskov, had just come off duty. We were about to enter the Tremont Pub when we heard a firearm being discharged within. We entered the premises with our weapons drawn and immediately came under fire from a suspect armed with a 12 gauge shotgun. We withdrew to the street, and he emerged a few moments later. In the rapid exchange of gunfire that ensued, my partner was wounded in the knee and our assailant was struck an, ah, undetermined number of times."
Someone shouted, "Detective Murphy, how many times did you fire your gun during the shootout?"
Pearson shouldered in front of me.
"Detective Murphy will not be taking any more questions at this time."
"Captain, can you give us any word on the suspect's present condition?"
"He's in critical condition and I understand is undergoing surgery as we speak."
"Is this event being investigated as a robbery?"
"At the present time, it is."
"Can you tell us the name of the deceased?"
"No. The Department will release that name to the press as soon as we have notified the next of kin. That's all," he said with a curt nod to the lady reporter -- a local celebrity of sorts, rumored to have a thing for cops. She beamed at him. He took my arm and I walked with Pearson across the icy sidewalk to a squad car parked at the curb, its blue lights turning and flashing. Biggs trailed us a few steps behind.
As we passed a group of uniforms they all turned to us whistling and clapping softly, and one even reached around Pearson to slap my shoulder.
"Hey, Detective, way to go."
Motherfuckin' OK corral."
"Murphy rules."
"Get lost, guys," Biggs said.
Pearson smiled a tight lipped smile at them as they dispersed.
We stopped at the open side door of the squad car. Biggs said, "Just a sec, Murphy. I need to eyeball your piece."
He held out his hand.
I unholstered my gun and put it in Bigg's hand. He checked the load as Pearson looked on.
"Yup, three rounds spent. It's official."
He clacked the magazine back into the pistol and gave it back to me butt first. I slid it back into its holster and fastened the thong.
"You and Roskov both will probably get a citation out of this craziness."
"Oh. Well"
"That was some damned fine work."
"Thanks."
Pearson put his arm around my shoulders and stared at Biggs.
"See how gone I am?" Biggs said.
He turned and strode smartly back to the crime scene.
Pearson glanced at Officer Wallace, standing straight and tall a few steps away, and said out of the corner of his mouth: "Officer, how about giving our Detective Murphy a lift home."
"I'd be thrilled and honored to do so, sir."
I took a few steps back. Pearson let go of my shoulders.
"Captain -- if you don't mind, I'd like to be the one to tell Mr. Corgan."
"Ah. I see."
"I think it's the least I can do."
"Sure."
He turned to Wallace.
"Get on the radio and call off Officers Velasquez and Chandler. They're on their way over to the Corgan place now. Tell them Detective Murphy wishes to personally notify the father of the, ah, deceased. "
"Sure thing, sir."
"Then take the address and get Detective Murphy down there, pronto."
"I'm on it, sir."
"I'll have my report on your desk in the morning," I told Pearson.
"Very good," he said. He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked off stiffly.
I turned to Wallace.
"Let's get this thing done."
Two
Paddy Corgan wouldn't let us over the threshold until he'd heard all of it. I told him that his son had saved the lives of two Boston police officers. He lowered his head and had a coughing fit that shook his emaciated frame. Then stepped back.
"Will you come in and have some tea?" he asked in a thin, wheezing voice.
"We'd be pleased," I told him.
Wallace sat on an armhair with his hat on his lap. I followed Paddy Corgan into his utility kitchen and watched him fill a kettle with water from the tap and set it by the stove. He lit a match on the side of the box and then held both the box and the burning match as if unsure of what to do with them. I was about to go to him when he put down the box and slowly turned the knob on the gas range. He touched the match to a front burner and the blue flame wooshed up. He shook out the match and dropped it in the sink with the milk cartons and empty pint bottles. Then he set the kettle on the flame.
He stood back, looking at the kettle, and said. "It won't be but a moment now."
He shut his eyes tightly so that all the tears were squeezed out of them at once and flowed down his sagging cheeks.
"Tom was a good boy," he moaned.
"Yes," I said. "He was a good friend, too.."
At about ten the next morning I went up to Brigham and Women's. I showed my badge to the police detail outside Roskov's room and went in. He was lying still, his eyes on the ceiling, the gauze wrapped leg up in a pulley.
He turned his head and blinked rapidly at me.
"Dan."
A nurse was puttering around by the window. She looked up at me, smiled brightly and left with the smile still on her face and her head lowered.
I picked up a stool and set it down beside Roskov's bed. He reached out a hand and I took it. He held mine in a firm grip.
"How are you doing?"
"I guess it could be worse."
"You sound parched."
"Yes. Would you mind pouring me a glass of water?"
He nodded at the carafe on the bedside table. I poured a glass full of water and tilted it to his lips. He shut his eyes as he drank in long swallows.
"Ah. Thanks."
I put the glass down beside the carafe and sat by his bed with my elbows on the rail.
"MacLeavy and Pearson were just here," he said.
"They're always on the job."
"Yeah."
"What's the word on your leg?"
"The doctors saved it. But there's still a risk of infection. They're going to have to go in again to make sure they got everything out the first time. And they've got to keep hosing it out every few hours with antibiotics."
I couldn't think of anything to say, so I reached out and patted his good leg.
"Did you hear about the shooter?" he asked.
"No. What?"
"Dead. This morning. On the operating table."
I shook my head.
"Why did he do it?" he asked with real wonder in his voice.
"I don't know."
"And who would be crazy enough to put out a contract hit on two cops? Dan, I can't get over the absurdity of this whole situation."
I squeezed his arm.
"Rest up. I'll stop by later on. Maybe we'll know something by then."
"Keep me informed, Dan."
"I will."
I stood.
"Dan."
"Yes."
"You saw him?"
"I saw him."
"And were you also the one who -- "
"I wouldn't let anyone else do it. Tom saved both our lives back there."
"We've got to get whoever's responsible."
"Don't worry. We'll get him."
I took the elevator the basement and followed the arrow on the sign that read: MORGUE.
"You're just in time," Jim Ferry told me. He was wearing a green smock with smears of blood on it. "The city morgue guys just called. They're on their way over to pick up the deceased."
He led me over to the aluminum table. The deceased was stretched out there -- long and pale, with dark hair that looked like he'd cut it himself the last time, and freckles on his shoulders.
"He was one real handsome kid," Jim said. "It looks like he took fine care of himself. Physically I mean. Weight lifter."
I stared at the incisions in his chest and abdomen.
"You guys chewed him up pretty bad," Jim said. "There was a lot of internal bleeding, damage to the liver and spleen. Not much of a chance of survival. The surgical staff sure gave it their damndest, though."
"Glad to hear it."
"Are you looking for anything in particular?"
I rubbed my face hard with both hands. The right hand still smelled like cordite.
"No," I said. "I just wanted to look at him. Maybe to get some little sense of what he was about."
"I could have saved you the trouble, Detective Murphy. We don't deal with human beings, just with the aftermath. We clean up the mess. If I didn't think that way I couldn't come in to work here every morning."
With that, he went to a sink against the cement wall and turned on the taps and began scrubbing his hands vigorously with a brush.
"If it had to be you or us, then I'm glad it was you," I told the body of Brendan Connor.
"What was that?" Jim called out over his shoulder.
"Nothing."
It had been bad enough when he'd only had a name. Now he had a face, too.
As I stepped out of the elevator, I saw MacLeavy chatting with the officer on watch outside Roskov's room. He shouted, "Hey!" and jogged over to me.
"We've got an address on the stiff."
I winced.
"You want it or not?"
"Sure."
He flipped open his notepad and tore off a page, which he pressed into my hand.
"I'll take my car," I said. "Would you call the precinct and get Officer Wallace over there to join me?"
"Hey, it's your show," MacLeavy said.
"Is it?"
"Yup. As per Pearson's decree. With whoever you like assigned to assist. You want Wallace, you got Wallace."
"Well, I want Wallace."
MacLeavy smiled.
"Then you got him."
As I walked off, he shouted after me: "Hey, tough guy. Did you see the Herald yet?"
"Not yet."
He rolled his eyes and intonedL"Back Bay Bloodbath! Hero Cops Take Out Shotgun-Toting Killer!"
Three
Officer Wallace was standing on the sidewalk outside the three decker on a side street in Dorchester when I drove up and parked in a cleared space between heaps of dirty snow. I stood beside him looking at the front of the three decker.
Wallace pointed. "That was his place. Third floor."
"Is the landlord in?"
"The landlady. Yup. She's watching us right now."
I looked over and saw a lace curtain being dropped back on a first floor window.
"Well, let's go.."
"Are we we don't want help on this?"
I yanked out of an overcoat pocket two pairs of latex gloves and handed one pair to Wallace.
"Absolutely."
Mrs. Leeds led us slowly up the steep, creaking staircase past the second floor apartment.
"Is this one occupied?" I asked her.
"Oh yes, dear, it is."
"Would the tenant be at home right now?" Wallace asked. "It might help us to have few quick words with him."
"Oh, I wouldn't want to bother Mr. Serra's sleep," she said. "He works the night shift, don't you know."
"Was he friendly with Mr. Connor?"
She stopped for a moment, shutting her eyes as she tried to recall.
"I don't think so, dear."
Mrs. Leeds stood by the open door to the apartment as I squatted on the floor of Brendan Connor's living room to read the titles of the paperbacks on a low shelf -- suspense novels by Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, James Ellroy, etc. I glanced up at her when she tightened the sweater about her shoulders.
"Did he always keep it this cold?"
"Oh," she said. "I wouldn't know about that. I'm always cold. It's these aged bones, dear. My arthritis was giving me trouble since before you boys were born."
I turned to Wallace, who was flipping through magazines.
"What have you got?" I asked him.
He turned the magazine he was holding so that I saw the cover: The New Yorker.
"What else?"
He picked up a few more magazines and showed them to me: True Detective, Soldier of Fortune, GQ.
"Our boy was quite the autodidact," Wallace said.
"A what?" asked Mrs. Leeds in a quavering voice.
I went into the bedroom. There was a bare futon on the floor. Three open carboard boxes stood against the far wall. I saw sweaters in one, socks and underwear in another, and in a third more magazines, paperback books and newspapers. As I rummaged through these things, I could hear Wallace going through the cabinet in the small bathroom off the passage.
"Anything?" I shouted.
"Nothing. No, wait -- codeine. Prescription." I heard him putting bottles back in. "That's it."
I swung open the closet door. There were several dark suits hanging from wooden hangers. I pushed them aside and saw, on a shelf behind the suits, stacks of glossy European and Japanese porn magazines. I picked up and thumbed through one of the Japanese magazines with the English title: Bondage Nurses.
Nice.
There was pile of shoeboxes on the floor of the closet. I opened one of these and found, wrapped carefully in tissue, it a Glock 9mm and several extra ammunition clips. I kicked the other boxes one by one with the point of my shoe. Most were empty, but one rattled. In it I found half a dozen boxes of 12-gauge shotgun shells packed tightly, a large wad of hundred dollar bills, and a small glassein bag containing about six grams of white powder.
Wallace walked into the room. I showed him the bag.
"Ah," he said. "The big H."
"Maybe."
"Too bad he's too dead for us to bust him."
I sighed.
"Sorry."
"Forget it."
Wallace said. "So far no address book, no phone numbers."
"What about letters?"
"Do the ones from Ed McMann count?"
"What's in the kitchen trash bin?"
"Junk mail. Bills. Kitchen trash."
We went out to Mrs. Leeds.
"Did you ever see him bring women up here?" I asked her.
She shook her head.
"I don't recall any."
"To your knowledge, did he have a job?" Wallace asked.
"I recall him saying that he worked for an electrician.That was when he first moved in, you know. Last summer."
"How did he pay his rent -- with checks, or with cash?"
"He paid cash, always."
"Do you have a key to his mailbox?" I asked
She stared at me, grimacing so that her dentures showed.
"Mrs. Leeds."
"Yes, dear," she said.
I saw that her eyes were tearing.
She shook her head. "I was just thinking about him, it's such a shock."
"I am sorry."
She looked at me closely.
"You're the -- "
I said, "Yes. Last night's ten o'clock news."
"Oh."
She had been rubbing her hands together, but she let them fall.
"I have that key somewhere downstairs, where I don't rightly recall."
"Why don't you go look for it, and we'll meet you downstairs in a few minutes when we've finished up here."
"Dan, look at this," Wallace said after the landlady had gone. He picked up the flip phone and handed it over to me.
I took it and pushed the redial button. As the phone was picked up on the other end, a Boston number flashed on the screen. I showed it to Wallace. He took a notepad and ball point pen out of his breast pocket and jotted the number down quickly.
"Hello? Hello?" said a young woman's somewhat throaty voice. Then: "Is that you, Brendan? Hello?"
I said. "This is Detective Murphy of the Boston Police Department, Homicide Division. To whom am I speaking, please?"
I listened, and then turned to Wallace.
"She hung up."
Downstairs, we found Mrs. Leeds standing in the foyer. She handed me the key and I opened the brass mailbox labelled CONNOR # 3. From it slid a number of envelopes and some magazines. Wallace knelt to gather them up as Mrs. Lees looked on.
"Anything there?" I asked.
"No, not really."
I turned to Mrs. Leeds.
"Would you mind collecting his mail for the next few weeks?" I asked her. "Officer Wallace here will be coming by to sort through it. There could be something in there that will help us in our investigation. We're taking these items with us." I showed her the shoeboxes. "I'll send some officers to sort through the rest. After that you can get the place cleaned out and put it up for rent again."
"Thank you, dear."
"No. Thank you."
As I squeezed her hand goodbye, her eyes again filled up with tears.
Four
As I walked through the doors of the 8th Precinct, Briggs was chatting with the desk sergeant. He excused himself and came over to me.
"Murphy, glad you're back. They located the shooter's car."
"Where was it?"
"In a parking garage, a few streets over from the scene."
"Anybody have a go at it yet?"
"No, they just brought it into the yard."
"I'll go take a look. Thanks."
"Sure thing."
"It's a nice ride," the officer in charge said as he took down his clipboard and the keys from the wall. "Ford Mustang. He kept it up pretty well."
As we walked into the garage, he said, "I saw you last night on TV. You looked pretty calm, I mean for the crap you'd just been through."
"It takes a lot to get me excited," I said.
I slipped on latex gloves, opened the driver's side door, and crawled into the car, where I felt under the seats, both driver's and passenger's sides.
"You want I should get you flashlight?"
"No."
I clacked open the glove compartment.
"What have you got?"
I held up the box of shotgun shells I had just withdrawn from the depths of the glove compartment and shook it. There were some shells missing. I put it down on the seat and reached in again. Buried underneath the registration, a box of tissues and a tube of K-Y jelly with a crimped end was a large envelope. This I took out and opened.
In it were were a dozen or so photographs in black and white. The first showed a young woman with long, loose dark hair and eyes that slanted a little upward at the corners kneeling on a bed with her arms raised like a dancer. She was wearing nothing but a pair of black thong panties.
I scrutinized the others one by one. They were all of the same girl.
"Do you know who she is?" the officer said. He was looking in over my shoulder.
"No clue."
At the Precinct, I spread the photographs out on a desk in front of Wallace.
He shook his head.
"You think she's a prostitute?"
"More like an escort. Look at these suits she's wearing -- very high end. And what's she doing in most of these? Walking through the doorway of a club, sitting in a restaurant, climbing out of a stretch limousine."
"She is one hell of a good looking girl," he murmured. He was looking at the erotic poses.
I glanced at him. He frowned.
"Sorry," he said.
"Don't apologize. I felt it, too."
"What?"
"I don't know. Fascination. A kind of thrill."
He cleared his throat.
"OK," I said. "Let's get off that. Did you get an address on that phone number?"
"I did. Why? You think it's her?"
There was nothing bad looking about the young woman who opened the door on the chain and stared out at the two of us standing in the hall, but it wasn't the one in the photographs. This was a liberally freckled redhead wearing a Boston College T shirt over long, bare legs.
I showed her my badge.
"Detective Murphy," I said. "We spoke on the phone earlier. And this is Officer Wallace. We'd like to come in and speak with you."
"Do you have a warrant?"
"No, but since this is a murder investigation I could get one pretty fast."
She shut the door to take off the chain and opened it wide. "Come in," she said, walking ahead of us, barefoot, into the apartment and slumping onto the sofa.
There were no chairs. Wallace and I remained standing. I could hear the traffic outside alon Commonwealth Avenue.
As I looked the young woman in the eyes, her face softened.
"I saw it," she said, her eyes filling with tears. "After we spoke. I turned on the TV."
"You have my condolences," I said.
Her laugh was throaty with phlegm.
"Oh my God."
Wallace picked up a box of tissues from the windowsill and tossed it to me. I held it out to the girl. She took the box and placed it on her lap. I watched as she pulled tissue after tissue out of the box, blew her nose in them, and then crumpled and dropped the tissues onto the floor.
Wallace stood at the bay windows looking down.
"You've got a nice view from up here," he said.
She shook her head and laughed again.
I said, "You're not under arrest yet, so you don't have to talk to us if you don't want to. Will you talk?"
"Why not?"
"Your name is Fiona Kyle. Correct?"
"Yes."
"What was the nature of your relationship with Brendan Connor?"
"I think I loved him."
"Did he share those feelings?"
"I don't know. I never asked. And I sure as hell can't ask him now, can I?"
I paused to let her blow her nose again, then asked: "Do you have any idea of what he did for a living?"
"Oh, well. I knew that he dealt drugs, sometimes. And that he worked for an escort service, something called Blue Midnight."
I exchanged looks with Wallace.
"Is that what you do also?"
"No," she shook her head. "I'm an exotic dancer. At this club in the Combat Zone."
Wallace took out his notepad and flipped it open. He asked, "Which one?"
"The Naked I. Do you know it?"
I smiled. Wallace stiffened a little, but said, "Sure, I know it.."
Fiona Kyle looked up at me and her eyes suddenly focussed.
"You're not him."
"What do you mean?"
"You're not the one Brendan was going after."
"Who was he going after?"
"It must have been the other cop. Your partner."
"Detective Roskov?"
"Yes. The one with the drugs. I'll bet you didn't know about that, did you? A Narcotics Squad cop dealing in pure uncut H."
"You're mistaken."
"Are you sure? Or are you just saying that because you don't want to believe anything bad about your partner?"
"No, I'm saying it because Detective Roskov, isn't on the Narcotics Squad. He never has been. He's in Homicide, like me. Here. Take a look."
I pulled out my shield again and handed it to her. She flipped it open and studied it for a long moment, then her shoulders slumped. As I took it back from her limp hand Wallace said, "This cop with the heroin. The one your boyfriend, for whatever reason, was after. Can you describe what he looks like?"
"OK, I think I can do that." She shut her eyes. "He's tall. Dark haired. He has a thick moustache. He's pretty heavyset. He wears a gold chain."
"Where was it you saw him?"
"At the 22 Club. Brendan pointed him out."
"Well, how do you know this man Brendan pointed out to you at the club was a police officer, if he wasn't wearing a uniform?"
"Brendan said he was."
"How did he know?"
"It's complicated. He was totally obsessed with this woman that the cop was with that night. We broke up over it, in fact. Then he decided he wanted to get back together. He said he was over her. That he wasn't going to see her anymore. But she called him on his cell phone last week. I knew it was her by the way his face looked when he answered his phone. We had a bad fight about it. He said that he had something he had to go and do for her. A last thing. That as a friend he had to do this thing and then it would be all over."
"Why do you think that last thing was killing a cop?"
"Because he's dead. From being in a shootout with two cops."
"Can you give us the woman's name?"
"No. But I do know that she worked for the same escort service Brendan did."
Wallace flipped back a page and scribbled on his pad.
"Can you describe her to us?" I asked.
Fiona Kyle laughed.
"Sure. Tall. Younger than me and really good looking, with dark hair. Very elegant. Always wears suits"
I said, "Let's go back to something that confuses me. Why would this woman want your boyfriend to kill a police officer?"
Fiona Kyle shook her head.
"I don't know, really. But I had the impression she thought she was in some danger. Like she had been partners or something with him and then the relationship went bad."
Wallace said, "You're saying you think she was partners with the cop? Like in dealing heroin?"
"I think she was involved. I don't know how much, or what she did. Maybe she helped him make contacts. Or maybe she was just there to sweeten whatever deals got made. Like as a fringe benefit."
"But you don't really know any of this for sure, do you?"
"You're right. I don't."
I said, "I want to thank you for your candor. I do have one more question. It's this: Did Brendan leave anything with you? Did he give you anything to hold onto for him?"
Fiona looked up at me and I saw, in her eyes, a flash of doubt.
"Please help us," I said. "He went after the wrong cop. We'd like to find the right one. If that cop's dirty, if he's dealing heroin, you can help us get him."
She blew a stream of air out from between her pursed lips. Then she stood and went into the other room and came back holding up a small key, which she placed on the coffee table between us. I stood for a moment looking at the key, then I picked it up.
She said, "He left this for me last Tuesday. There was a note with it but I tore that up."
"Did he say what this was for?"
"No. He just wrote that he'd like me to keep it safe for him and that he'd see me soon. I'm pretty certain it has something to do with her."
Wallace came over to look at it.
"It looks like it goes to a locker in a club or a gym," he said.
I turned to Fiona Kyle.
"Where did Brendan go to lift weights?"
A little startled by my question, she cleared her throat before answering.
"I think he belonged to the YMCA."
"Any idea which one?"
"The big one, near Symphony Hall. On Huntington."
Five
We went to the front desk in the YMCA and I showed my badge. The clerk looked for the name Brendan Connor in the registration book.
"Yup," he said. "He's a member all right."
I showed him the key.
"We'd like to take a look in his gym locker."
"I don't know. Do you need a warrant for that?"
"Nope," Wallace said. "We don't."
"Are you sure?"
Wallace looked at me. I shrugged.
"Wait a second," the clerk said. "Hey, didn't I see you on TV last night? You were interviewed on the news about that shooting?"
"That's me."
"Does this have anything to do -- "
"Can we please just go in and take a look in the locker?" Wallace said.
"No problem, guys."
He buzzed us through the security doors.
Wallace opened the locker and took out a gym bag. I crouched to go through the contents.
"Nothing very interesting here," I said.
"Wait," Wallace said: "What's this?"
He pulled something from the top shelf and handed it to me. It was a VHS videotape.
"There's no label."
"Good. We might be getting our first break."
"Where are we going?" Wallace asked.
I had just turned off of Huntington onto Massachusetts Avenue.
"To my place," I said. "I live on Marlborough Street. It's small but really cozy. You'll like it."
"No I mean -- why aren't we headed back to the precinct?"
"Because we're going to watch a video. And we don't want anyone disturbing us while we do."
I popped in the tape and turned on the VCR with the remote. We both remained standing, with our overcoats and scarves on. There was a moment of static, then a clear image.
"It's her," Wallace said.
The video camera followed her across what looked like a hotel suite. She was naked and holding a glass of champagne. She sat on the edge of a bed and set down the glass on a bedside table, and a pair of arms reached for her. The video camera jolted to the side and took in a large man, his muscles going to fat, lying naked on the bed with an erection sticking up. He guided her head down with his hands and then held her shoulders lightly as she sucked most of his cock into her mouth. Another woman, a petite false blonde, walked into the frame and sat on the bed. As the large man fondled her breasts, she took turns sucking on his cock, pausing on occasion to kiss the mouth and the breasts of the woman in the pictures.
"I don't know about you," Wallace said, "but this shit is giving me a definite hard on."
I sat on the couch and watched for a moment, then picked up the remote and fast forwarded. In a rapid sequence of frames, the man had an orgasm, wiped himself off with a towel, and got up, leaving the two women to fondle and kiss one another. Then another man came into the frame, this one even more heavyset, wearing a thin gold chain around his neck.
I slowed the speed of the images.
"That's Roskov," I said.
I sped up again. There was little foreplay. He fucked the fake blonde from behind for a few seconds, then crouched over the other and fucked her in the mouth.
"Jesus," Wallace said. "Look at him go."
The video ended in a rush of static. I shut off the VCR with the remote, then went over and popped out the tape.
"Who was the first guy?" Wallace asked.
I looked at him.
"If I'm not mistaken, that was Lieutenant Thomas P. Deeley," I said. "Of the Narcotics Squad."
Six
"This is crazy," Wallace said. We were in my car on our way back to the 8th precinct. "I mean, I haven't got the slightest idea how to proceed from here. What do we do?"
"No, the question is more like, what do we have," I told him. I held up a hand and counted on my fingers.
"We have a seemingly unprovoked attack on two cops in which the shooter is killed. We have a DOA with a history of drug arrests who is rumored to have worked in the past as a paid killer. We have a story about the shooter being obsessed with this woman who's in some trouble having to do with a cop who's dealing pure heroin."
"OK. Where does all that leave us?"
"Let's assume that Fiona Kyle is telling the truth. She seems credible enough. This woman, we''ll call her Miss X, calls up the shooter with a request. Does she want him to kill a cop? I don't think so. I think he does that on his own. That's why he goes after the wrong cop. He's acting on the assumption that the cop he saw her with last week is the same one she's told him about, the one who's dealing the heroin.
"Lietenant Deeley?"
I nodded.
"It's Roskov he tails, trying to work out where the best place might be to do the job. He gets around, asks some questions. He's doing all this in a hurry, remember. Anyway, we know he's not a real professional. He's done some hits before, but only on crack dealers. He's never gone after a cop. He concludes that there are too many risks involved in trying to take Roskov out at home. But he's nosed out the interesting little fact that Detective Roskov hits the Tremont Pub for a drink with his partner every Wednesday night at about nine-thirty. It's not a perfect set up, but consider the advantages. Roskov and his partner are both likely to be bone weary. That first drink and the one after it are looking pretty good. Also, they're walking into a place they're comfortable with -- a place that feels like home. They're relaxed. So Brendan Connor gets to the Tremont a little early, wearing a long coat to conceal his weapon. He sits down at the bar, orders something to drink, and watches the clock. At about nine twenty-five or so, he pulls out the shotgun, announces that this is a robbery, and tells the few other customers to go stand with their faces to the wall. He then kicks aside a couple of the tables to get a clear line of fire at the doors, since he's decided he's going to take Roskov as soon as he sets foot over the threshold. Tom Corgan, the bartender, opens the cash drawer. He's going to clean out the till for this boy, since the contents aren't worth risking his or anyone else's life for. But something's wrong. The kid's not interested. He's not even looking at Tom. He's looking at the doors. Tom looks over as well and it's just then that Detectives Roskov and Murphy step inside. They're too busy kicking the snow off their shoes to look up and see that they are, in effect, already dead. It's then that Tom goes for the .45 he's got on a shelf under the register. The kid catches the movement in his peripheral vision, or maybe he hears a hammer sliding back, and he swings the shotgun around and blows Tom away. It was an act of self-defense."
Wallace kept quiet for a few moments after I'd finished talking, possibly out of respect for Tom Corgan. Then he licked his lips and said: "Detective Murphy, stop me if you think I'm speaking out of turn here, but how do you figure Roskov isn't deep into some sort of unholy alliance on this heroin thing with the other cop -- the one you're pegging as dirty?"
"Lietenant Deeley?"
"Sure. I mean, they seemed to work pretty well together on that videotape."
I smiled and shook my head
"Isn't it a possibility we've got to be prepared to confront if we plan to dig much deeper into this mess?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Then you have your doubts about Roskov? I mean, if you feel you can say anything on this subject without betraying your partner?"
"I think we'd better hold off on this discussion until after I've spoken to Roskov," I said.
"I'm sorry."
"It's OK. I'm not easily offended."
As we turned onto Boylston Street, Wallace looked out the passenger side window at a construction site. Five story tall cranes were moving slowly in a skeleton of steel girders.
"This city's really getting an overhaul," he said. "It seems like some huge new architectural wonder is going up every other week."
"Tell me about it," I said. "I remember when the tallest thing on the skyline was the Ritz Hotel."
He looked at me.
"I didn't think you were that old," he said.
I laughed.
We were silent for a few moments before he spoke again.
"Detective Murphy, are you sure that it's a good idea to let Roskov in on what we've turned up so far? I mean, if he is involved, couldn't it -- "
I held up a hand.
"OK, OK. You're the boss."
I parked across the street from the precinct.
"Here's where you get off," I said to Wallace.
"Aren't you coming in?"
"No, I''ve got to see Roskov."
"Are you going to show him the videotape?"
"No. I'm going to show him the photos first and take it from there."
"That sounds smart."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence. Now you might want to get out your notebook, because there are some things I need from you, and I need them pretty quickly."
He took out his pad and flipped it open.
"To begin with, I need a complete run down on Lieutenant Thomas P. Deeley's activities over the past six months. I want to know as much detail as you can get me about the cases in which he's currently involved. I'd also like to know as much as possible about the man himself -- his family life, educational background, class standing in the Academy and professional record, including any and all decorations, citations and awards received in the course of his career with the PD. I even want to know whether he's a Rotarian, a Lion or a Shriner. And I want you get hold of all of this information without any murmers getting back to Deeley that someone's asking."
"How am I going to manage that?"
"Talk to Captain Pearson before you get going. Don't talk to anyone else. He'll probably be able to get hold of most of the material you'll need. You'll just have to sort through the crap for the good stuff."
"Okay," Wallace said. "What else?"
"I'll need some information on Blue Midnight Escorts. Who owns and runs it, how long they've been in business, if they've ever been shut down, etc."
"No problem."
"Lastly, I need to see Brendan Connor's rap sheet, including his juvenile record. We're looking for basic biographical information like who his parents were, names and whereabouts of any brothers or sisters, where he went to school and whether he ever did a stint in reform."
"Got it."
"Good. I'll call you in a few hours after I've spoken with Roskov and then we'll work out what to do next."
Seven
"Dan," Roskov said. "What's up?"
His hospital bed was an island in a sea of FTD bouquets and get well cards. He had the remote control in his hand. As I came into the room, he shut off the daytime talk show he’d been watching on the big TV fastened to the wall..
I held up the envelope.
"What's that?"
I walked over and dropped it in his lap, then pulled a stool to the bedside and sat down on it. He took out the photographs and looked at them one by one.
"I found these pictures in the glove compartment of the shooter's car. Do you know her?"
He frowned, shoved the photographs into the envelope, and handed it back to me.
"Yes."
"Dit me tutto, as they say in the North End."
"Do you by any small chance know a Lieutenant Deeley, works out of the 10th Precinct?"
"I know of him."
"Well, about a month ago I run into Deeley and Hartwell, that's another Narcotics cop, down at Harry's Gym. I take a break from the heavy bag to watch the two of them spar. They're not half bad. Eventually, Deeley notices me standing there and asks me do I want to go a few rounds against him. So I get gloved up and step into the ring. He's quick. Let me tell you. I got quite a work out. We end up in the sauna after Hartwell heads home to his wife and kids, and Deeley starts telling me about this girl he's met through an escort service, saying how sexy she is and how he's set up this double date with her and with another girl from the same service for he and Hartwell, but Hartwell backed out at the last minute pleading some kind of prior engagement. He says it's too late to call off the evening, and asks me am I interested in taking over Hartwell's place. I say, No problem. He says to meet up with him later at this chic club downtown. I go home and get suited up and show the club at the appointed hour, but Deeley's nowhere to be found. So I sit at the bar and have a couple of high priced drinks. Then this girl -- the one in the photographs, although she looks younger in person -- comes up to me and introduces herself as Katherine and says she's one of the escorts, and that we're going to meet Deeley over at a suite in the Sheraton. We stay at the club long enough to have a drink together, then we head over to the Sheraton."
"And?"
Roskov gave me a sheepish look.
"Deeley and this other girl, Sophie, had already started the party without us. They offered us some lines, I thought it was coke but it turned out to be heroin, and I did one or two and drank a lot of champagne, and then the girls put on a little sex show for us."
“Mark,” I said.
He looked in my eyes.
"I saw the videotape.”
"What?"
"The videotape you and Deeley made that night of yourselves and the girls. Brendan Connor had it. In a gym locker at the YMCA"
"Oh."
He blinked his eyes rapidly.
"You saw it?"
"This afternoon, with Officer Wallace."
I watched as a dark blush spread across Roskov's face and neck.
"Jesus, Dan. I'm sorry."
I shrugged.
"I would have told you, it's just -- "
"Don’t worry about it. Did the girls really put on a sex show first?"
"Yeah, for starters. Then the videocamera came out. By that time, Murphy, I'll tell you -- I was so whacked, I would have gone along with just about anything."
"Tell me about the coke you say was cut with heroin. How did you know it was heroin and not something else?"
"I knew."
"And the heroin -- was it of a particularly high grade?"
He looked at me.
"Yes. As a matter of fact. How the hell did you know that?"
"I think that Lieutenant Deeley set you up. He wanted Brendan Connor to see you with Katherine. That's why he sent you to the club and why he didn't show himself. He'd found out that Brendan Connor was tailing Katherine, even photographing her, and realized that the kid was looking to ID the heroin dealing cop he'd heard about. Deeley knew that he had to get rid of this kid if he was ever going to do any business in this town."
"Do you think Deeley knew the kid was going to try to kill this cop?"
"I don't know."
"And what about the girl? Was she in on it?"
"I don't know about that, either."
"So -- what's next?"
I picked up the envelope and stood.
"Do me a favor, Mark. For the time being, don't tell anyone about our little talk."
Eight
I went back to the Precinct. MacLeavy came up to me in the hall. He looked conspiratorily from side to side and placed his hand on my shoulder and said, out of the corner of his mouth: "Ahem. Detective Murphy. Exactly where is this thing going? I understand you've got Wallace conducting some real hush hush research into Lt. Thomas Deeley's past?"
I shrugged.
"We just want to cover all the angles."
MacLeavy laughed a deep, vulgar laugh right from the gut.
"You should go into politics."
"That's a fine idea. Maybe I will. Murphy for Mayor. It has a nice ring to it, don't you think?"
"Just let me know when you want to run. I'll quit the PD to work for your campaign."
"Sure. You can hand out the buttons."
He laughed again and walked off carrying his sheaf of papers -- a big man in shirtsleeves with a holster under his armpit, leaving in his wake an effluvium of sweat and aftershave.
I went in to see Pearson, who was smoking his pipe and gazing out the window. The late winter sunlight shone on the glass panes of the John Hancock tower. I stood looking out with him. Finally he wrenched himself away from the view and leaned over to tap out the pipe into a glass ashtray on his desk blotter.
"I really love this city," he said.
"Yeah. It's a great place."
"We seem to be seeing a lot more and messier kinds of homicides than in years past. MacLeavy says it's the crack dealers. It seems crack is going to be blamed for everything."
"Its the hot ticket. The War of Drugs can't do without a nefarious villain. I personally pine for the days of Fu Manchu and opium dens."
Pearson looked at me with an expression of something close to anguish.
"What's this nonsense about Lt. Deeley? I know him. I knew his father, too. He's a fine cop."
I explained briefly. Pearson sat back and closed his eyes, placing his fingertips on his eyelids, as he listened. When I finished, I stood there for a moment. Pearson took his fingers away from his eyelids and opened his eyes. They were bright blue and slightly watery from age.
"Jesus Christ," he said.
"I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news."
"Do you know what the Greeks used to do to those messengers?"
"Of course. They'd put them to death out of sheer spite."
Pearson said, "I've given Wallace everything I could find. He's got the files and he's going through them now in the basement."
"Good." I stood there for a moment longer, then cleared my throat and said, "Sir. There's nothing I'd like better than to find out that Deeley's as clean as I know Roskov is."
He waved his hand.
"OK, Sir," I said. "I'll check in later."
"Let me know soon as you've got something."
"Sure thing."
Nine
As soon as I walked through the door into Records I felt my sinuses start running -- I was allergic to dust and mold spores. Basically, I was allergic to books. Maybe that's why I didn't graduate at the top of my class in college, even though I came out with a respectable grade point average and a B.A. in Criminal Psychology.
Wallace was sitting at a desk poring over arrests for the past five years. The flourescent lights seemed to drain all the life from his long, somber face. I sat on the edge of the desk.
"What's up?"
He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands and yawned between sentences while he brought me up to date. All was pretty much as I'd expected. Lt. Deeley was a highly decorated afficer and a Rotarian. He had excelled in the Academy and worked his way up through the ranks as a street cop until his promotion to Lt. six years ago.
I shut my eyes and seemed to see Deeley, not as the beefy sex gourmand of the videotape, but as a slim, sarcastic cop in crisp blues. Where did this image come from? Maybe I'd met him at a charity ball. I was in my early twenties, he must have been about thirty. I remembered his hard, dry handshake and the way his eyes followed everything that was happening around him.
"Murphy?"
"Yes."
"You're fading out on me a little. Didn't you get any sleep last night?"
I yawned.
"Last night -- Christ, it seems like about a thousand years ago."
"You'd better make it an early night tonight, then."
"Maybe. Tell me about Deeley’s family life.”
"That gets a bit complicated. Deeley's wife killed herself few years ago."
I stared at him.
"What?"
"She ate his service revolver. There was a quick informal investigation but he was cleared of any wrongdoing. The interview records say he appeared 'genuinely grief stricken'. Those are their words, verbatim."
"Fine. Any kids?"
"There's a stepdaughter. Fourteen years old when it happened"
"His wife's child."
"Yes."
"What happened to the girl?"
"She stayed on with Deeley after they buried her mom. She attended Boston Latin. Graduated at the top of her class and went on to -- " he flipped through some of the papers in the portfolio laid out on the desk. "I don't know where she went after that. That's the extent of the information we have on her."
"So she'd be -- how old now?"
"Nineteen."
Is there a biological father anywhere in the background?"
"Nope. Dead."
"A cop?"
"Yeah. How did you know?"
I shrugged.
"It's a well known sydrome. Widows of dead cops getting remarried to live ones."
Wallace said, "I also looked for recent heroin busts. There's nothing as big as a suitcase implicated in any of Deeley's arrests. It's all small time -- mostly crack dealers."
"Sure. I expected as much."
"But there is this file." Wallace pushed it over to me. I picked up the folder and flipped it open. Inside were several typewritten sheets. It was a record of the pursuit of a subject who had fired a barrage shots at Deeley and his partner in a stairwell of one of the Mission Hill projects and had managed in the end, in Deeley's somewhat florid prose, to "elude capture". Several precints had been involved in the night search of the Mission Hill and Fenway areas. The subject had fired an Uzzi -- a litter of spent cartridges was found on the cement floor of the landing, along with a pool of urine, human fecal matter, MacDonald's Restaurant wrappers, and crack vials. Deeley had returned fire, emptying his service revolver and three shells from his back up pistol. Net result: many bullet pocket concrete walls, but not a trace of blood.
I remembered the incident. A number of young men were rounded up and taken downtown, only to be released the next day when a half dozen Black ministers held a press conference and one after another, thundered out threats of a lawsuit against the City of Boston. It had been another low point in race relations for a city with an already abysmal record.
There was a typed list of the names of young men arrested. Some of the men had not given their names, or had given Muslim names in place of their: Malik, Mufasa, Kalhil, etc. But one name caught my eye: Monk E. Stiles, aka 'Monkey' Stiles."
I looked at Wallace.
"Do you know that name"
He shook his head and yawned.
"He's a suspected dealer. He was born here but he spent a few years in LA, where he got involved with the Crips. There's rumors that he's running the show up at the Mission Hill Projects."
"So what?" Wallace said.
"So what were Deeley and his partner doing there?"
"The record says they were meeting an informant."
"Look -- wouldn't it be brain dead stupid of a police snitch to invite Deeley to call on him where he and Deeley are both known?"
Wallace sat up straight.
"I see your point. It would be like, Hi, Monkey, these are my nice cop friends. And later on, blam."
"So what was Deeley doing there?"
"Isn't that obvious?" Wallace asked. "He was stealing himself a suitcase full of heroin."
I smiled.
"Let's not jump to any conclusions."
"Sorry," hee said, his face flushing.
"We need to get out of this basement," I told him. "My allergies are acting up."
"Sure. I'm finished here."
I took out a tissue and blew my nose into it as he watched.
Putting the crumpled wad of tissue into my pocket, I asked Wallace, "Did you get any of the info I wanted on Brendan Connor or on the escorts?"
He slapped his forehead.
"No. I apologize. I got so engrossed in the life and illustrious career of Thomas P. Deeley that I just -- ."
"It's OK," I said. "You can stay down here and work on that. It shouldn't take long. Look at his recent arrest records; we're going to need to talk to Pearson to open his juvenile file, if that becomes necessary. What I'm looking for is names and addresses of any living members of the kid's family."
"Any particular reason?"
"I'm just curious. That's all."
I stood.
"And one more thing," I said. "Don't worry about Blue Midnight Escort Service. I'll get that number myself and give them a call."
"Sure," Wallace said. "That's easy. Let your fingers do the walking."
"I'm going to go out for lunch," I said. "We can talk when I get back here in about an hour."
He was already gathering together Deeley's files. I sneezed as dust rose from the folders.
"See you later, then,' Wallace said.
"Ta ta."
Ten
I went to Sorley's and ordered a steak and fries. I was tempted to get a beer with lunch. I let the waiter stand there for a few moments while in my own mind I hemmed and hawed. Finally I thought, All right, what the hell, and I ordered a Rolling Rock. As waiter walked off with mincing steps, I opened the bundle of newspapers I'd bought at the kiosk outside Copley Square Station.
I went for the Boston Phoenix Classifieds first. It took me just a few seconds to find the quarter page ad for Blue Midnight Escort Service. A black and white photograph showed a young woman in a very tight and very small black dress climbing out of a stretch limousine.
I looked at this picture for a long time because the contrast between the lithe sexiness of the woman's body and the bored, almost contemptuous expression on her face fascinated me. Printed above the picture, in large type, were the words: When Blue Is the Only Mood For You. Blue Midnight Escorts, Inc. Beautiful,Young, Discreet.
I took out my notebook and jotted down the phone number listed at the bottom of the ad. The waiter brought over my beer. It was cold and beaded with moisture on the outside. I took a long swallow from the bottle, then went into the payphone to the rear of Sorley's.
An older woman with a trace of a Georgia -- or perhaps a North Carolina -- accent answered the phone on the third ring.
"Good afternoon, Blue Midnight Escort Services." "Hello," I said, making my voice thin and hesitant sounding. "Um. I was told by a friend of mine to call you up if I ever came into town and to ask for a pretty young lady by the name of, ah, Kathy."
"Do you require an escort for this evening, sir?"
"Sure," I said.
"We have many young ladies to choose from, any one of whom could offer you a discreet, tasteful, very pleasurable experience."
"Um," I said. "Maybe I called the wrong service I might have gotten the names mixed up. I'm from, ah, out of town."
"Welcome to Boston, sir," the woman said, enunciating precisely and carefully."I believe we can find some way to satisfy your needs. After all, we have a lady for just about every taste."
"You're saying there's no Kathy working there?"
"At the moment, I'm sorry to say, there is not. But, again, we have a number of young ladies on call who would be perfectly capable of --"
I hung up the phone and went back to my booth. The steak and fries had arrived. I sat gazing out onto Boylston Street as I ate.
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