Deadly Diamonds (20 page)

Mr. D. and I looked at each other as some of the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place.

“And the diamonds, Dom?”

“I'm told they were never found. And there's your connection. After Barone's death, he was succeeded as capo by Packy Salviti. My source tells me Salviti's still looking for the diamonds. That boy who stole Barone's car is your client, Kevin O'Byrne. My guess is Packy Salviti thinks the O'Byrnes have the diamonds. He wanted to put pressure on you to get the boy or his father to give them back. What better way than to trade the life of your close friend, Matt, for the diamonds? If he couldn't get the O'Byrnes to give them up any other way, sooner or later he'd have come to you with a deal to take the
pressure off Matt. That was his ace in the hole. He may still play that card. None of them know yet that Matt's accuser is off the street.”

It felt like the deck had been reshuffled and a whole new set of questions had been dealt. Our Mr. Frank O'Byrne had been up to his pink Irish ears in a sleazy business with the man in the trunk.

If, in fact, the death of Barone by many symbolic weapons had been at the hands of the Italians, as seemed likely, O'Byrne must have jumped out of his skin when he saw the face of the dead man in the trunk. Not because it was a mutilated body. He'd “allegedly” seen his share of those. And possibly not because of a deal gone sour. He'd undoubtedly experienced those. But this one had sucked his straight, clean son, Kevin, into the mired vortex. And that was enough to cause him to suck me right in there after him.

Mr. Santangelo had plugged a number of vital pieces into the puzzle, but a number of pieces still sat on the table. Just how did young Kevin get his hands in the mud, and how dirty were they? And how much of Kevin's involvement was known to Papa O'Byrne? And the winner and still champion of all of the unknowns—who actually had the diamonds? And how many more people would die to find out?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was time to get a few renegade ducks in a row. What started a week ago as a one-time request for a simple mediation by O'Byrne was beginning to show shadows behind the shadows. I left the hospital trying to get my mind around the true dimensions of what O'Byrne had originally presented as young Kevin's boyish prank. The more I digested the full implication of what Mr. Santangelo had tipped us to, the more my quietly smoldering resentment at O'Byrne's concealment of the risks was turning into a fully bugged-out rage.

And that was fortunate. In a collected, dispassionate state of mind, I would never have had the grit to beard that particular lion in his den. I had worked up a fully stoked head of steam by the time I walked into O'Byrne's bar, marched straight up the stairs, and knocked on his office door. I passed the two thugs on watch at the bar below before they could lift their bulk off the bar stools.

My knock had enough insistence in it to bring O'Byrne to the door about the time the two on watch caught up with me.

“Mr. O'Byrne, a word with you.”

The force of the words seemed to stun O'Byrne, his two guardians, and me as well. He waved off the guardians with a look that said he'd have a word with them later about the level of security.

“What? What the hell is this all about?”

I took the seat in front of his desk and waved him to his desk chair. He sat, in spite of the inconsistency of being invited to sit in his own office.

Now that I was there, I came back down to cool rationality in time to put on the brakes. I realized that whatever I was about to say
to O'Byrne could not divulge anything I'd learned in confidence from Mr. Santangelo. That was limiting.

“A couple of things turned up, Mr. O'Byrne. Most immediately, I need to talk to Kevin.”

“Why? What?”

“Because, you may remember, about a week ago you hired me to represent him. He's indicted for murder. That means things have to be done in court that require at least speaking with my client.”

That produced a wrinkled forehead and silence.

“The question is: where is he? Have you heard from him?”

He paused and leaned back, I think to get a grip on what I had dropped in his lap before he said anything compromising. The question was relatively simple. I figured the pause meant more hiding of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that was now inhabiting both of our lives.

“No. I haven't heard from him. You?”

I held up my hands with a look that said, basically, “Would I be here asking?”

He caught the logic. He seemed to pass over the impertinence of the way it was asked to focus on an appropriate answer. “I'm worried as hell. The place in New Hampshire was a mess. I'm sure someone's got him. Funny I haven't heard from anyone with any demands.”

I heard the words, but this time I was tuned in to the lack of deep-seated paternal panic behind them. I had about a dozen questions on the tip of my tongue. The problem was that every one of them was premised on the confidential disclosures of Mr. Santangelo. I asked the only untainted question that stood a chance of getting a truthful answer.

“The place in New Hampshire. Where is it? Maybe if I took a look I'd see something that might give us a lead.”

I could almost hear the wheels grinding behind his solemn look.
If I let him see it, could he find anything I'd rather he didn't?

“Yeah, sure. Why not? Maybe you'll come up with something. You'll let me know if you find anything.”

“You'll be the first to hear.” I figured a lie to a liar is not exactly a lie.

It was mid-afternoon, so I put off the trip north till the following morning. That left me an afternoon to follow a lead that I had let lie dormant in the back of my mind. That first night, Kevin gave me the names and addresses of the two boys who went with him to Patrini's restaurant in the North End, purportedly for pizza. Being South Boston Irish kids and friends of the son of the Irish mob boss, they more than likely had some notion that a pizza—even a North End pizza—was not worth the risk of riding into hostile territory. That, plus the fact the Kevin apparently wanted them along on whatever monkey business he was into, indicated that there was gold to mine. I also figured I'd probably need blasting powder to get anything out of either one of them.

I drove to the campus of Northeastern University on Huntington Avenue. Kevin had said the two boys were also in their junior year.

My first stop was in the office of the dean of student affairs. I figured most of the employees in the dean's office would be bound and gagged by privacy issues. Fortunately, one of the secretaries in that office had a son for whom Mr. Devlin had performed near miracles in short circuiting an early drug conviction before it could derail his life.

Luisa Espinosa had recently lifted herself and her son out of the barrio in Roxbury with a move to Cambridge. The move was financed by income from her recently acquired job at Northeastern—another fix up by Mr. Devlin.

I found her in an office occupied by four other people. She recognized me from her visits to our Franklin Street office, saving the need for introductions. Thanks to an early upbringing by my mother, who was more fluent in the Spanish tongue than English, I was able to smile and speak to Luisa in the Puerto Rican dialect we shared. Her pure-white office mates seemed to take no offense, in the spirit of inclusiveness the university fostered.

I wanted the class schedules of each of Kevin's two friends. Innocuous as that information seemed, I knew I needed some leverage to crack the gagging rules of privacy. Luisa's gratitude to Mr. Devlin provided the leverage. While we chatted amiably in words no one else in the office understood, she fingered the keys of her computer and handed me a printout of two class schedules, facedown.

At three thirty, I was standing to the side of the stream of twenty students flowing out of Churchill Hall. I asked the first girl in the flow to point out Chuck Dixon. She complied with a smile. I fell in alongside target number one.

I flashed my business card and invited him to a bench for a quick word. He seemed immediately on edge, but when I mentioned that I was Kevin's attorney, he appeared willing to suspend the defensive-ness—at least to the extent of a sit-down.

I was on a tight schedule, since I had to catch target number two coming out of class in fifteen minutes. That meant a more direct approach than I'd have liked.

“Chuck, you were with Kevin that night in the North End, right?”

I could see the defenses go back up behind the withdrawn posture. “I'm sorry. Who are you again?”

I slid over closer. “I'm quite possibly the best friend you've got in this city. Maybe you've heard. Kevin's been indicted for murdering that guy in the trunk of the car Kevin stole. You were with him at the time. The D.A.'s out for all the blood she can get. Nothing would tickle her small heart more than widening the net to include you in the indictment.”

That produced the look of shock I was going for. Time for a full-court press.

“Hear this, Chuck. It's just possible I can keep you out of it. It depends on one thing.”

I paused in the hope of drawing him into the conversation. It worked.

“What's that?”

“Information. I need to know exactly what happened that night. I'm listening.”

I could see him weighing how much or how little information to give in answering a question that had caught him without time for preparation.

“Like, what do you mean?”

That was a staller. I checked my watch. “Start at the beginning of the evening. I need all the details. Just pretend you're writing a thesis for a history course, except that the next thirty years of your life depend on your answer. It's that simple.”

He was looking off in the distance at nothing in particular. I could tell he was searching for a safe path. “We'd been at the library. It was about midnight. Kevin said he felt like a pizza. He said the best in the city are in the North End.”

He looked over to see how it was going down. “No argument so far.”

“So we drove over.”

“Who else?”

“Another classmate. Bob Murphy.”

“Who drove?”

“I did. My car was closest.”

“Go ahead.”

“We were going into Patrini's. We saw a guy pull up in a Cadillac. He just left the motor running. He ran into the restaurant. Bob dared Kevin to take the car for a spin around the block.”

“It was Bob's idea?”

“Yeah. I thought he was joking. Anyway, before we knew it, Kevin jumped into the car and drove it down the street.”

“And?”

“The guy came running back out of Patrini's. He was yelling and screaming. Kevin must have heard him. He stepped on the gas and took off.”

“Would you know the guy if you saw him again?”

“I guess so. It was dark, but I got a good look. It scared the—I
was kind of panicked. Bob and I ran back to my car and got out of there. That's all I know.”

“Have you talked to Kevin since that night?”

He looked away and took the moment to wave at a couple of students in the distance. It could have been a significant body-language sign of a stall or I could have been just desperate enough to see clues where they didn't exist.

“Um, no. Not since then.”

“Did you call him?”

“No. I don't think so. I've got to get to another class.”

I leaned in closer. “I've got a better idea, Chuck. As I said, we could be talking about an accessory-to-murder charge. Suppose you finesse the class and meet me in twenty minutes in the Curry Student Center. I'll find you in the cafeteria.”

I left him with a blank look on his face, tinged with just enough panic to insure he'd be there. I hustled over to Hayden Hall in time to catch Bob Murphy coming out of class in the same way I caught Chuck.

The scene played the same, with me sitting on a bench beside a kid who was digesting the thought of a possible thirty-year sentence as an accessory to murder. The dialogue was remarkably similar. In fact, his telling of the tale of that night came out in practically identical words. That much could be coincidence, but there was one jarring, at least to me, dissimilarity in the telling. According to young Bob, it was Chuck who dared Kevin to take the car.

I took Bob in tow, and we joined Chuck at a table in an unoccupied end of the student center cafeteria. I left them alone at the table and picked up three Cokes from the counter. My arrival back at the table cut off a whispering session in midstream.

I sat down with a smile and distributed the Cokes. “Now, boys, here's where we're at. You've both told the same story with remarkable consistency, except for one point. Let's see if we can work out the truth. Which one of you dared Kevin to steal the car?”

The silence hung like a cloud. They stared at each other for a few
seconds. Chuck pulled out of it first. “What difference does that make?”

“Ah, Chuck, good question. Who cares, right?” I leaned in and dropped it to a whisper. “I care. You might wonder why, right?”