Killer (14 page)

chapter 22

present

At nine o’clock the next morning someone knocked on my door. When I didn’t answer it, the person knocked harder and shouted through the door, announcing himself as Eric Slaine, a reporter for one of the local Boston papers. I put away the book I had been reading and pushed myself out of the recliner. If Lombard’s boys had figured out where I was living, they wouldn’t bother with a trick like pretending they were a reporter to get me to open the door – they would just kick it down.

I opened the door enough to look out. Standing in the hallway was a kid in his thirties, about my size, dressed casually in jeans and a turtleneck sweater. As thin and short as he was, he was good-looking with thick brown hair and the type of pretty-boy looks a lot of girls go for. He also looked damned pleased with himself as he stood there smirking at me.

He introduced himself again and held out a hand for me. When I didn’t take it, it didn’t deter him in the slightest. All it did was make his expression all the more smug.

“Leonard March,” he said, whistling softly to himself. “I’ve been looking nonstop for you for over a day now. What will it take to let me interview you about what happened outside Donnegan’s Liquors?”

He was lying to me. It couldn’t have been true about him looking nonstop for me, not with how refreshed he looked. He had clearly had a good night’s sleep. He’d also taken the time in the morning to shave and shower, and not a hair was out of place. You could tell he wasn’t someone who was ever going to skimp on his personal appearance. Instinctively, I didn’t like him.

“How’d you find me?” I asked.

“A professional secret,” Slaine said.

“If you were able to find me, others will too, and these will be people who are going to want something other than an interview. So why don’t you quit acting cute and tell me if someone’s selling my address.”

I didn’t need him to tell me that. I already knew somebody was. While it was no mystery that I was living in Waltham, nobody should’ve known my address, at least outside of my prison caseworker, Theo Ogden, and whoever had access to the apartment building’s administrative files. The story I was given about pest maintenance being in my apartment was bullshit. My place had been searched by professionals the other day, and I wanted to know whether Theo or someone else was giving out my address.

Slaine considered what I asked him. “I’ll trade you,” he said. “You give me an interview and I’ll tell you how I found you.”

Looking at him I could feel the heat rising off the back of my neck, especially with how much more smug his smile had gotten.

“If you’re going to be knocking on doors expecting favors from people the least you can do is answer a civil question,” I said. “And show some consideration. What the fuck are you doing knocking on doors at nine in the morning, especially given that people might’ve been working late the night before?”

“You have a job, huh?” he asked pleasantly. “And you’re working nights, too. Mind my asking where?”

I started to close the door on him, but he moved a foot into the doorway to block me, then squeezed his shoulder through the opening. I didn’t fight him as he muscled the door open and pushed his way forward, only stopping when his face was inches from mine.

“I showed you more consideration than you showed the people you murdered,” he said, his voice tight, his breath sour as if he’d been eating chopped herring. He was still smirking at me, but there was no humor in his eyes any more and his skin color had dropped a shade. “About waking you up – I didn’t think there was much chance of that, at least not after talking to prison officials about you and finding out about your sleep habits. So Leonard, let’s quit the bullshit. What’s your cost for an interview?”

“Two things,” I said. “First, tell me how you found me.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed. “I went to every low-rent apartment building starting near Donnegan’s Liquors, and showed your picture around until I found you at this dump. What else?”

“Ten thousand dollars. In cash and off the books.”

He didn’t bat an eye at that price. “I’ll have to talk to my supervisor,” he said. “But for that amount of money we’re going to want a lot more than what went down at that liquor store. We’re going to want to know about your life as a hit man for the mob and your time in prison.”

“Okay.”

He stepped away from the doorway and rolled his shoulders in order to adjust his turtleneck sweater. “Why don’t you give me your phone number so I can call when I get an answer about your price?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Leave me a card and I’ll call you next week.”

He looked like he wanted to argue with me about that, but he reluctantly fished a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. “For ten grand it’s going to have to be an exclusive interview,” he warned me. “You can’t be talking to anybody else.”

I watched him walk away before I closed the door shut. When I gave him that ten grand figure I never expected him to be able to meet it, I just threw out that number to get him away from me. I stared at his card for a long minute trying to decide what to do with it. I wanted to rip it up – I sure as fuck didn’t want to do an interview – but I started thinking about what I could do with ten grand if I could get it paid to me under the table, and Sophie figured in the equation. If it wasn’t for her the money wouldn’t have even been a thought. In the end, I stored the card away instead of tossing it like I had first intended.

There was only one person who knew the truth about any of the things I’d done, and that was me. If they were able to come up with ten grand and I decided to go along with an interview, whatever I gave them would be better put to use as fertilizer.

I had an hour before I was going to be meeting Sophie. I stripped off the ratty clothes I’d put on when I first woke up, took a long shower, shaved, then splashed on some new aftershave I’d bought the evening before. After that, I put on a new pair of slacks, shirt and sweater that I had dropped two bills for at a local department store after I had left Sophie the other day.

I stepped outside and pulled the collar of my leather jacket tight against my neck. The weather had turned colder with the sun nowhere in sight and the skies darkened by thick purplish-grayish clouds. Sophie and I were going to meet in a park near Moody Street. I hadn’t been there before but I followed her directions, walking briskly with my head lowered and my hands buried deep in my jacket pockets.

The park was empty when I arrived there. There wasn’t much to it: a few benches, a swing set, a small area of dead grass. As I made my way to one of the benches I saw Sophie off in the distance. I smiled at that. As good as she’d been so far with the con she still had things to learn. The smart play would’ve been to keep me waiting at least a half-hour to get me more invested. Anyway, I waved to her and she waved back.

Her hair was as much a hornet’s nest as every other time I’d seen her, and she looked even colder than I felt in her threadbare cloth coat and jeans that weren’t in much better shape. I couldn’t help feeling a jitteriness in my stomach as I watched her hustling towards me carrying a paper bag under one of her arms. When she joined me on the bench she handed me the bag while she rubbed her hands together and blew into them. Inside the bag were two large coffees and cream cheese bagels wrapped up in paper. I handed Sophie one of the coffees, then unwrapped a bagel and cream cheese to hand her as well. We sat quietly eating our sandwiches and drinking our coffee, but it was a comfortable quiet. When we were done Sophie commented that it was nice having breakfast with someone for a change, then glanced up at the sky and remarked how it might start raining soon.

“That would put a dampener on things,” I said.

She got a laugh out of that. “Yes, it certainly would,” she agreed.

“How come a beautiful girl like you doesn’t have someone to share breakfast with?” I asked.

She smiled at that. It was a sad, almost tragic smile, and it made me think again about my original thought of her having done time in prison, and I couldn’t help feeling that that was probably what had happened, and maybe it was only recently that she had gotten out. It would explain a lot, especially the connection I knew we had.

“Leonard,” she said softly, but with a heavy breath, “that would be a long and complicated story, one I could write a book on. And I have to thank you for the ‘beautiful’ compliment, although I certainly don’t deserve it. Also for thinking that I could be young enough to be thought of as a ‘girl’. How old do you think I am?”

“Twenty-five,” I lied.

“You’re ten years off, my friend.”

“You’re only fifteen?” I said, raising an eyebrow in mock surprise. “Chrissakes, I could get myself thrown back into prison for corrupting a minor.”

The word “prison” put a dampener on her mood, and for a few seconds a darkness clouded her face to a color that came close to matching the skies. Then just as quickly it was gone. I couldn’t help feeling something bad had happened to her when she was young, and I wanted to ask her about it but I didn’t want to hear what I knew she would tell me: that she had been abused at one time in her life and ended up serving time for manslaughter or maybe even second-degree murder. Instead I sat there tongue-tied, feeling an awkward silence between us.

She reached over and took hold of my hand and squeezed it, the way a friend would, and just like that, knocked away any of the awkwardness that we had started to feel.

“You’re a charmer, Leonard,” she said. “But as you well know, I’m thirty-five, and it hasn’t been the easiest thirty-five years so far. Not exactly the fairy-tale princess life I’d dreamed about when I was a very young child.”

“The next thirty-five then,” I said.

She nodded solemnly at that. “The next thirty-five it will be,” she agreed.

“If you want to tell me anything, feel free,” I said. I forced a rigid smile. “I’m not exactly someone who could hold you or anyone else in judgment.”

“There’s not much to tell,” she said. “Bad stuff happened to me as a child, I ended up in foster homes, then much worse stuff happened. Now I’m in Waltham trying to figure out what to do with my life, and I meet you.” She paused for a moment, then asked, “Leonard what were your parents like? Were they the reason you ended up working for the mob?”

From her tone and the hopefulness in her eyes, she was really searching for why her own life had taken the course that it did, because if I had made my wrong turn due to environmental factors maybe she had also. Maybe there wasn’t something seriously broken in either of us. It would’ve been easy to lie to her; instead, though, I shook my head.

“My parents? No. Hardly. My pop was what you’d call a salt o’the earth type. As honest and decent as the day is long. A good man who never had a harsh word for anyone, and sweated blood every day as he worked his way to an early grave.” “Your mom, then?”

“My mom and I never got along,” I admitted. “She had a hard life herself, lots of tragedies and losses, but she had nothing to do with me working for the mob either. They gave me a good home. Whatever happened was my doing.”

The skies opened up then, the rain coming down hard and suddenly as if a faucet had been turned on full. I took my jacket off so Sophie could use it to shield herself. We ran the two blocks back to Moody Street, stopping only when we were under an awning. Even with my jacket sheltering her Sophie had still gotten soaked and was looking a bit like a drowned rat. I was so winded I had a hard time breathing, and thought at first that I might be having a heart attack, but the moment passed and my breathing became less ragged.

Sophie handed me back my jacket. With a heartbreaking smile, she said, “What a mess we are, huh? Leonard, dear, I’m sorry you got so wet, but it was very chivalrous of you. I thank you.”

She looked so miserable standing there with her hair hanging down in wet tangled clumps and her threadbare jacket and jeans soaked through. She had also started to shiver. I ignored her protests and draped my leather jacket around her thin shoulders, then told her there was a store a block over where I was going to buy her a new jacket.

“I can’t let you do that,” she said.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Think of it as a gift from the Waltham Police.”

That got her curious, and I explained how the police had first tried to tie me up with an assault charge after I had broken up the attempted liquor store robbery, and later how I squeezed a hundred and fifty dollars out of them. Even with the way she was shivering I could tell that she enjoyed the story.

“I can’t think of a better way of spending that money,” I told her.

She didn’t put up a fight over it, and we made our way through the rain to the next block by darting in and out of doorways and under awnings for protection. When we got to the department store, I first bought a beach towel, which we used to dry ourselves off, then I helped Sophie pick out a ski jacket. It was bulky on her and hid her curves, which was a shame, but it was waterproof, had a hood, and offered much better protection from the cold than what she’d been wearing. When she put it on she gave me one of the brightest smiles I’d ever seen. Yeah, it was going to cost me a hundred and seventy dollars and my funds were dwindling, but it was worth the price. And besides, if I got ten grand for that interview, money wasn’t going to be much of an issue, at least not for a while.