Brothers and Bones (48 page)

I was sorry Jessica had to hear it that way, but I knew she’d ask her father questions, which was what I wanted.

“Daddy? You killed Tommy?” Her eyes were wide with shock and horror.

Lippincott was focused on the weathered old briefcase we’d found. “No, honey, I didn’t kill him. I paid Carmen Siracuse to do it.”

“But why?” She shook her head in disbelief. “He was your son. My brother.” Tears had begun to course down her cheeks. It broke my heart.

Lippincott was distracted, spinning the numbers on the dual locks, jerking at the catches. “He was dragging us all down, honey, burying us. He was eating up all our money, leaving nothing for the rest of us. Besides, he had a miserable life. He was better off dead. Trust me, sweetheart. What’s the fucking combination, Charlie?”

“His murder killed Mom!”

“Cancer killed your mother, sweetheart. But Tommy was killing our family. Bleeding us dry.”

Despite all the horror I’d seen over the past few days—from Angel’s head hollowed out by a bullet to the video of my poor brother’s neck snapping—the raw pain in Jessica’s eyes might have been the most terrible sight of all.

“Tommy was costing you money so you hired someone to kill him?”

“Yes, honey, I told you already,” Lippincott said without looking up. “I did it. I gave fifty dollars to Siracuse to put Thomas out of his misery, the poor boy.”

Jessica seemed to be having trouble catching her breath. “Fifty dollars?”

I put a gentle hand on her arm. “There’s more, too. Your father owes many of his professional accomplishments over the years to his illicit dealings with Siracuse. I’m sorry, Jess, but your father is as dirty as they come. Isn’t that right, Lippincott?”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s right. If that’s the way you want to view it, then you may. I prefer to think of it as making an acceptable trade of information. With what Carmen has told me over the years, I’ve been able to send a lot of very guilty people to prison. Now, Charlie, you can stop this nonsense. Jessica knows it all now, so if you’re saying this for her benefit, you can stop.” He looked around the interior of the mausoleum. “And you didn’t have time to plant a microphone in here. I doubt you even had the equipment you would have needed for that.” He eyed me suspiciously. “Or did you?”

“Of course not.”

He regarded me for a moment, then said, “Perhaps we should step back outside.”

He carried both briefcases out of the mausoleum, out into the foggy graveyard. I followed with Jessica right behind me.

“Feel better?” I asked.

“As I said, Charlie, you can stop listing my offenses now, and those of Carmen Siracuse. Jessica knows everything.”

“Really? You told her everything? Because you seemed to have left out the part about Tommy before.”

Lippincott cleared his throat and placed Siracuse’s briefcase at his feet, then dropped his eyes again to the one we’d found in the urn. “Are we finished now? Give me the goddamned combination.”

“Just a minute,” I said. “Did you tell her that you framed me for Angel Medina’s murder? You and Siracuse. How Siracuse’s man Grossi shot Angel in the face, close enough to me to cover me with Angel’s blood? And how they got my fingerprints on the gun and planted evidence in my—”

Lippincott’s head snapped up. “Yes, Jessica, it’s true. Everything he’s saying is true. I helped Uncle Carmen frame him for murder. Now I want the combination, Charlie.”

Jessica said, “He’s the man I love, Daddy, and you were going to send him to prison? Did you consider at all how that would affect me?”

“It was necessary, Jessica, I assure you. Now, Charlie, give me the fucking combination to this fucking briefcase or I’ll fucking shoot you, so help me God. No, you know what? I’m tired of playing games here. I don’t even need the combination. I can take the briefcase with me and have it opened by someone with the right tools. Even something as crude as a hacksaw would do the job.”

“Yeah, you could do that,” I said. “But either you’re going to honor part of our deal, as you said, and let us go, or you or one of Siracuse’s men is going to kill us. And I don’t think you want either of those things to happen until you’re really sure that Jake’s tape is actually in there, right? That it’s not elsewhere, still waiting to be found? That the real location’s not in the letters I sent to my friends as insurance, or that that briefcase doesn’t merely contain another clue to the tape’s location, one that only I can solve?”

Lippincott’s eyes narrowed.

“Look,” I said, “I swear on the soul of my brother that I’ll give you the combination in just a minute. But first, I want Jessica to know all there is about you, Lippincott, what a first-rate shit you are. I want every last illusion stripped away. So I want you—”

“You always were jealous of my relationship with my daughter.”

“—to tell her how you agreed earlier, in Siracuse’s office, when you thought I didn’t have the tape and didn’t know where it was, that she’d have to be killed. Your own daughter. You were going to stand by and let her be killed.”

He sighed and turned to Jessica. She stared back with loathing. Over the past few hours Lippincott had put his daughter’s heart and mind in a blender. She’d bounced erratically between shock and horror and pain and multiple combinations of the three. Now, finally, it seemed to me that she was out of his reach. It was beyond his power to hurt her anymore. “It’s true, sweetheart,” he said. “Everything Charlie said is true. Siracuse thought you had to be eliminated and I agreed. It sounds harsh, I know, but it would have been for the greater good. The public can’t afford to have my association with Siracuse brought to light. All my good would be undone. So you would have had to die. I don’t expect you to understand. But please believe me when I say that I would have been very, very sorry if it had to work out that way.” His voice carried not a speck of remorse. He might as well have been admitting that he’d left the toilet seat up. “Fortunately, though, it didn’t work out that way, did it?”

“You really would have let them kill me.” Her tears had already dried. Her eyes were rocks, hard and without a touch of feeling for or about the man standing in front of her.

Though her words had been more of a statement than a question, Lippincott’s silence answered them anyway. He looked at me, his patience tissue-thin. “Tell me the goddamn combination, Charlie, or the entire deal’s off. I’ll take the briefcase with me and have it opened, and you’ll go to jail for murder. Or maybe we’ll kill you. And who knows what will happen to Jessica?”

“Okay,” I said. “No problem. The combination is one-two-three.”

Lippincott had begun turning the dials to the correct numbers as I said them. He stopped and looked at me. “You’re kidding.”

I shrugged. “Nope. That’s it. You can open the briefcase. But you’re going to be disappointed. There’s no tape inside. In fact, Jake never had a tape.”

FIFTY-ONE

“What do you mean Jake never had a tape?” Lippincott asked. He was staring at the briefcase in his hands. “I’ve heard it.”

“Well, I’m sure Siracuse has a tape, or at least he had one—the one he’s blackmailed you with for years—but Jake never had a copy.” I pulled the letter Jake had given me from my back pocket and slipped it out of its envelope, three sheets of yellowed, brittle paper, folded letter-like into thirds. I unfolded it as if it was Jefferson’s original, handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence. It was that special to me. Across the paper flowed a bold, distinctive handwriting I knew well. Jake’s, of course. I smiled to myself and looked up.

Lippincott looked perplexed. “But your brother had an informant, the one who was blackmailing Carmen with a copy of the tape, a copy he gave to your brother. Jake knew everything.”

“That’s right,” I said, looking back down at the letter again. “Jake knew everything. The blackmailer told it all to him in a phone interview. But he died before Jake could get the tape.”

Lippincott frowned. “So if there’s no tape, Charlie, then you’ve got no protection. There’s nothing stopping anyone from killing you, is there?” I couldn’t help but smile. “So why are you grinning like a buffoon?” he asked.

“Because you haven’t looked in the briefcase yet.”

His eyes narrowed to slits. He turned the last dial to the number three, then slid the buttons to the side. The latches snapped open. Lippincott opened the briefcase and looked inside.

“What the hell is this?” he asked. He wasn’t happy. I didn’t blame him. And I didn’t care.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like a walkie-talkie taped to the inside of the briefcase.”

“That’s exactly right.” It was taped so that the microphone lined up with some small holes Bonz had made in the side of the briefcase. With a briefcase as old and ratty as this one was, one that was supposed to have been hidden in a cemetery urn for thirteen years, I figured Lippincott wouldn’t notice a couple of little holes in the cracked black leather. “And you can see that the talk button on the walkie-talkie has been taped down.”

I watched the color drain from Lippincott’s face like milk from a badly cracked glass.

Thank God I’d been able to convince Siracuse that I had to meet Bonz at noon. It allowed Bonz to get to Aunt Fannie’s to buy the tape recorder and the weathered old briefcase I remembered seeing there the night we broke in. While I was pretending to nap and Siracuse’s men were arming themselves for this trip to the cemetery, Bonz had had time to rig the briefcase, find this mausoleum with the directions I gave him off the top of my head—the names of every road leading to it etched forever in my memory—stash the briefcase here, and hide the receiving walkie-talkie we’d bought at Walgreen’s and the tape recorder somewhere within range nearby.

“Where’s the other walkie-talkie, Charlie?” he asked.

“Not far. Right next to a voice-activated tape recorder. You know the kind, doesn’t record anything until it picks up sound. Like your voice, for instance, acknowledging your hiring of Carmen Siracuse to kill your son back in 1976, admitting to having decades of illegal dealings with Siracuse, condoning his illegal actions to assist your prosecutions, giving him confidential information to help him in his criminal activities. Oh, and your and Siracuse’s parts in framing me for murder. Don’t want to forget that.”

Lippincott’s left eye twitched. “I’ll kill you,” he said, slipping his delicate, manicured fingers into his coat pocket.

“Bad idea, Lippincott. You’ll just compound your problem. This is all being taped, remember. You want the last thing recorded to be the sound of you murdering me? Not just hiring somebody else to do it, the way you had your own son killed, but actually pulling the trigger? I don’t think so.”

Andrew Lippincott, one of the top lawyers in Boston, once so refined, so distinguished, so respected, looked around with the wild eyes of a cornered animal.

“Where’s the goddamned tape recorder, Charlie?”

He pointed the gun at me, then at Jessica, then back at me.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “it’s safe.”

Lippincott’s eyes jerked back and forth in their sockets as he looked out into the milky fog.

“I guess I should tell you that the police are on their way here,” I said. “We told them I’d turn myself in if they’d meet me here at exactly twelve thirty.” I looked down at my watch. “They should be arriving any minute. I guess you could search for the tape recorder. Gotta be around here somewhere, right? To be honest, the walkie-talkies were pretty cheap. Their range is limited. But there are a lot of places to look and very little time before the cops get here.”

Lippincott dropped the briefcase containing the tape recorder to the ground, beside the one supposedly holding my money. I watched his eyes as a battle raged behind them, thoughts and emotions I couldn’t fathom clashing. Then his eyes calmed and one side of his mouth curled up in a smile-sneer hybrid.

“You blew it, Charlie,” he said, shaking his head. “It looks like you banked everything on this gambit and you blew it.”

“How so?”

I thought I could see a canary feather fall from his feline mouth as he said, “In Massachusetts, it’s illegal to record a conversation without the other party’s knowledge. You should know that. The tape won’t even be admissible in court. You’ve got nothing. In fact, you could go to jail for even making the tape, plus be fined ten thousand dollars. And, to top it off, I could sue you.” He laughed. I laughed right back, though, which gave him pause.

“Yeah, Lippincott, you’re right. And I’d be concerned about that if it was the authorities I planned on giving the tape to.”

He wasn’t smiling any longer.

“See,” I said, “I don’t care if I go to jail for making that tape, and I certainly don’t care if you sue me. And I don’t care about the fact, which you’ve failed to mention so far, that merely disclosing the contents of an illegally taped conversation could land me in jail for two years and open me up to a five-thousand-dollar fine. What I care about is ruining you. And I’ll do that with this tape. After I’m arrested, Jessica’s going to go get it from its terrific hiding place and, on my instruction, without any knowledge of what’s on it, of course,” I added facetiously, “will send copies to every media outlet in town, to Michael Kidder and all the Criminal Division section chiefs in the USA’s office, to the Middlesex DA’s office, and to anyone else I can think of. You think word won’t get out about what’s on that tape, despite the law saying that I recorded it illegally? No one will care. They’ll care about the truth. Oh, and I should remind you that, even though the tape itself won’t be admissible in court, any witnesses to its being made can testify about its content. That makes Jessica’s and my word against yours. Our word, of course, on top of
your
word, which was caught on tape and which will be all over Boston in a few hours. In light of everything that’s going to come out, I think people will believe us, don’t you?”

My words had slapped any trace of smug from Lippincott’s face. Sometime during my speech his left eye had started to twitch again. “Oh,” I continued, “and I almost forgot, Jessica will send copies of the tape to the heads of all the major crime families in Boston. In fact, if I were you, I wouldn’t even fight going to prison. I think you’d be safer there—even if only a little—than out on the street. But maybe not, seeing as you put a lot of those guys behind bars in the first place. Whether you fight is up to you, of course.”