Brothers and Bones (39 page)

I said, “Well, now let’s hope Nick has nowhere better to be at midnight on a Monday than at home.”

Rantham’s apartment in Jamaica Plain wasn’t a dump, but it wasn’t nice enough to have a secure lock on the front door. We had no trouble walking right in and there was nothing stopping us from climbing the stairs to apartment 8, where Rantham lived.

As we neared the top of the stairs, I became aware of loud, muffled music coming from one of the apartments. But something wasn’t quite right about it. It was an old ’50s song, “In the Still of the Night,” by the Five Satins, but one of the instruments—the sax—was off. Some of the notes seemed right, but the riffs were punctuated with frequent and terribly jarring groans and squeaks. As we approached the door to Rantham’s apartment, I realized the music—and I have to use that term in the loosest possible sense—was coming from inside Rantham’s place. Bonz knocked on the door, the torture of the innocent musical instrument mercifully ceased, and the Five Satins sax player wailed beautifully on his own as footsteps thumped toward the door inside.

An angry voice snapped from inside, “Goddamn it, Marty, if you tell me to turn my music down one more time I’m gonna bring out my bopper and—”

The door opened, revealing a tall, thin black man with a thin little mustache, one hand on the doorknob, the other holding the offending saxophone. He stopped midsentence when he saw us, his eyes shifting from Bonz, to me, then back to Bonz, where they stayed firmly planted. He looked like he was deeply regretting opening the door.

“I don’t think we wanna see your ‘bopper,’ Nick,” Bonz said. “No offense.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Rantham asked. He tried to sound tough and cool, but his apprehension was evident.

“You’re Nick Rantham, right?” Bonz asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“We already know, Nick,” I said.

With apparent effort, Rantham dragged his eyes from Bonz and looked at me. He took in my face, my bruises, my blond buzz cut, and frowned. I definitely looked familiar to him but he couldn’t place me.

“Mind if we come in for a minute?” I asked.

“Yeah, I do. In fact, I gotta get back to my practicing.”

Having heard him play a little, I thought that was a great idea on his part, but it didn’t suit our needs. So Bonz put his hand on the door, pushed it open, and stepped into Rantham’s apartment. I was sucked into the place in his wake, like a wounded mackerel behind a speedboat.

The apartment looked to be a modified studio: a big living space with a few of the areas set off by partitions, almost like the cubicle walls you’d find in a typical office, though they were higher, above a man’s head but not quite as high as the twelve-foot ceilings. There was a combination kitchen–dining area off to one side. The room we were in contained a worn couch in front of a big-screen TV, a state-of-the-art stereo system on which “In the Still of the Night” had given way to “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight,” and a desk with a computer on it. One computer. Fewer than I’d expected, unless Nick had, in fact, been scared straight by his two years in stir.

“Shit, guys, what do you want?” Rantham asked. He looked scared now. I felt a little sorry for him.

“You don’t know who I am?” I asked.

“No, man, I don’t. Listen, just tell me—” Then he frowned, narrowed his eyes, and the light clicked on in his head. His eyes widened and he shook his head. “Holy, shit, it’s you. Man, oh, man, oh, man. This is precious, man. This is just delicious. You a piece of work, you know that? All high and mighty, strutting around that courtroom like you owned it, telling the jury what a scumbag I am. And here you are now, a murderer. Man, this beats everything.” He laughed. It was abrasive, nasal, horribly obnoxious, the kind of laugh that could make a wife of forty years walk into the bathroom one day, out of the blue, while Rantham was soaking in the tub, plug in a toaster, and drop it into the water—if Rantham was married, of course, and if he could have kept a wife for that long. His laugh was
that
grating. The laugh thinned out to mere snorts and Rantham called out, “Bopper, get in here. You’re not gonna believe who’s here.”

Bonz and I had screwed up. We’d incorrectly assumed that Rantham was alone. We were wrong. From around one of the partitions walked a refrigerator on legs, a ripped body in a skin-tight muscle shirt and a pair of bicycle shorts that hid absolutely nothing. From the sheen of sweat on his skin, it looked like he might have been between sets at that very moment, ready to pump some more iron, when Rantham called. He wiped his face with a towel and said, “I hope this is good, Nick, because I was—” He stopped short. He looked at Bonz first, as everyone seemed to, then at me, but, unlike most other people, he didn’t return his gaze to Bonz. No, he kept his eyes on me. He recognized me immediately. And I recognized him. As I looked at his face, another face of his, in a mug shot, floated in my mind. The picture was clipped to a file that bore the name Chester Aaron Harwick, aka “the Big Bopper.” Harwick was another loser I’d put away when I was with the DA’s office. I checked my mental file. Violent history, though nothing had stuck until I nailed him for assaulting a federal officer in the commission of his duties. As I recalled, Bopper’s nickname came from his passion for ’50s rock and roll and for hitting people really hard. But as I also recalled, he claimed he earned the nickname by having the biggest “bopper” in Boston. From what I knew of the effects steroids could have, and what I could see at the front of Harwick’s painted-on bicycle shorts, I doubted that, if his claim had ever been true, it was still the case.

When I knew these guys, Harwick and Rantham, they’d had no connection with each other, at least none I was aware of. My guess was that they’d met in prison—where I’d sent them both—and had become friends, or partners in crime, or whatever. In fact, the way Rantham had threatened to bring out
his
Bopper a minute ago made me think that the “whatever” option was the most likely one. I didn’t know what brought them together, whether it was a mutual love of doo-wop music, or a mutual hatred of me, but, either way, they’d probably served out their sentences hating me, and now spent their hours living under the same roof, partners in many things, including hating me.

“Look who it is,” Harwick said. He grinned, exposing four silver teeth in the top center of his smile. “Fucking DA Beckham, right here in our place.” He walked slowly across the large space. “Only you’re not a DA no more, are you? You’re not even with the feds now, right? Not since you popped that guy in your apartment. No, you got no little prosecutor badge. And your cop friends are out lookin’ out for you, right? Looks like you’re pretty much fucked, ain’t you?” He dropped his towel on the couch as he passed it, walking slowly, savoring this moment. “You’re a zombie, man.”

“A zombie?” I said.

Rantham laughed that ice-pick-in-the-ear laugh of his and said, “The walking dead, man, that’s you. You’re dead and you don’t even know it.”

“I am?”

Harwick nodded, his thick head bobbing slightly on his even thicker neck. “Cops ain’t never gonna find you, man, ’cause the word on the street is that the mob wants you bad. They’ll pay big money for you, too. My problem is, I’d rather twist your head off myself. I wouldn’t even do time, probably. I mean, who’d care, right? The cops want you, but they’d probably be just as happy to get you dead as alive. But the mob, they want you alive, I hear, and the money’s too good to pass up.” He flashed his silver teeth at me again. “But look at your face, all banged to shit. I suppose that mob guy—what’s his name, Uncle Carmen something?—he wouldn’t care too much if you had a few extra bruises when we gave you to them.”

Harwick was a big bastard, as I said, and my guess is that his size made him supremely confident. Plus, as tough as he’d been before I sent him away, I wouldn’t have been surprised if prison had forged a man twice as hard as the boy he’d been. He’d probably been out of prison for three or four years. Not nearly long enough, I didn’t think, to completely remove the jungle from an animal like Harwick.

But the confidence he likely got from his time away made him cocky—cocky enough to concentrate on me and essentially ignore Bonz. Never a good idea. Bonz started to move and Harwick turned to him.

“I’ll be with you next, sweetie,” he said as he turned his eyes back to me and kept walking my way.

I waited for Bonz to pull his gun but as Harwick, smiling viciously, passed within five feet of Bonz, when he was just three feet from me, Bonz stepped forward and punched Harwick squarely in the side of his head. The Bopper’s big head rocked to the side a little, but there wasn’t enough give in his tree-stump neck to let the head snap far. Nonetheless, the big melon swayed to one side, then to the other. The eyes in that head fluttered and the smile, finally, disappeared. Harwick staggered back a step, blinked once, and fell flat on his back with a room-shaking thud that apparently woke a baby in the apartment below.

I turned to Rantham, who stared open-mouthed at his huge, fallen friend, and said, “So, Nick, we came here tonight for a little help, which I assume you’ll be more than happy to provide.” Without waiting for a reply, I said, “So why don’t we get started?”

* * *

Ten minutes later the unconscious Harwick was lying on the floor where he’d fallen, only now his hands and feet were bound with our handy duct tape. Bonz was making himself a sandwich from fixings in Rantham’s fridge.

Rantham and I were on the other side of one of the partitions, where, in a twelve-by-twelve-foot space, Rantham had two desks with three computer monitors on them. CPUs were lined on the floor, wires snaking from them. Rantham was sitting before one of the terminals, clacking away on the keyboard. Having seen what Bonz did to his gigantic partner, Rantham needed little urging to do everything I asked of him.

After ten minutes of fingers dancing over keys, he lifted his hands like a virtuoso concert pianist ending a piece with a flourish, swiveled his chair toward me, and said, “You’re in.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll let you know if I need anything else. Bonz?” I called.

Rantham’s eyes widened in fear. Footsteps thudded toward us and Bonz appeared around the partition, a half-eaten sandwich in one hand.

“Yeah?” he said around a huge bite of what looked like ham and cheese.

“I’d like some privacy. Would you mind taking Nick out there with you?”

“No problem.” Bonz jerked his head to the side and Rantham practically leaped from his seat and hurried into the living-room area. A moment later I heard Rantham say, “Oh, man, you don’t have to do that.” Then I heard the ripping sound of tape pulled from a roll.

“Not too tight,” I called. “I might need him again.”

I sat down at the keyboard and heard Rantham say, “Hey, man, he said not too tight.”

I took a breath. Under the overpass earlier, a thought struck me. If Lippincott was involved, which he certainly seemed to be, perhaps Michael Kidder wasn’t, despite what it sounded like Big Frank D’Amico was wheezing out at the very end there. Lippincott would be much bigger potatoes, right? If he was involved, why would Big Frank waste his dying breath telling us about Michael Kidder? So I wondered if he could have meant something else. It had sounded like he’d said “Michael” and “Kid,” but I couldn’t be sure that’s what he either said or meant. There were a few stray syllables in there, like “kell,” I think it was. Or that could have been the second syllable of “Michael,” repeated by a dying, babbling man. I guess I wasn’t sure about any of it, but the word “Michael” just stuck with me. Maybe because I’d seen it recently elsewhere—or something close enough to it. And when I had flipped through Jake’s notes, I saw it again. Just after the notes about suspected abuse in health-care facilities and just before the notes about possible mob corruption in the mayor’s office, Jake had scribbled in the margin, “Get Mike’s time records.” Beside that, he’d written “B.B. 2/76.” I wasn’t sure yet who Mike was, but I had a hunch what “B.B.” stood for.

So, at my request, Rantham had hacked into the
Boston
Beacon
’s internal computer archives. I assumed that another trip to the Boston Public Library would have provided the information I hoped to get tonight, but I didn’t want to wait until morning, nor did Bonz or I think it a good idea to waltz around in public in broad daylight more than we absolutely had to.

From what I could tell as I familiarized myself with the
Beacon
’s internal site, the paper had transferred stories to its digital archive going back to the mid-1960s, so I figured I’d be able to find what I was looking for. I played with the search engine a little to see how it worked, then searched for stories published in February 1976 containing Andrew Lippincott’s name.

My search produced a single story. The headline was “DA With a Heart.” I clicked on it. It appeared to be a puff piece about Lippincott. The reporter gave a little background on the then recently elected Middlesex District Attorney, then detailed his humanitarian efforts to assist those he sent to jail, once they served their time. The reporter highlighted the stories of a few ex-cons for whom Lippincott had personally secured employment in various businesses in the Boston area upon their releases. One of those ex-cons was Carmen Siracuse, twenty-seven years old, convicted by Lippincott’s office eighteen months before for assault. Siracuse was released a few weeks earlier and Lippincott had convinced a local health-care facility—St. Michael’s Hospital—to hire him as a member of its building-maintenance crew. According to the reporter, Lippincott showed remarkable humility in refusing to provide a comment for the story. The reporter wrapped up the article by wondering how much better this world would be if there were more public servants like Andrew Lippincott.

I sent the article to a printer beside the desk and considered what I’d read. When the story was finished printing, I folded it, put it in the back pocket of my pants, and stood. I was about to join Bonz in the other room when I heard a soft buzzing. It seemed to come from my jacket and I realized it was Randy Deacon’s cell phone vibrating. For a guy with an incredible memory, I sure had trouble remembering to turn off that phone. It had to be nearly out of battery. Anyway, one of us had a call coming in again. Hoping it was Jessica, and she was calling for me and not Randy, I answered without checking the caller ID.