Rough Weather (13 page)

“It’s a theory,” Healy said.

“Motive?” I said.

“Picky, picky,” Healy said.

We were quiet. I realized I didn’t know what I was looking at out the window. I turned from the window and sat back down at my desk.

“Suppose the son-in-law had a will?” I said.

“Of course he did. People in that bracket, they have wills and trusts and pre-nups and post-nups and up-nups . . .”

“Be nice we could see the pre-nup and the will,” I said.

Healy was quiet for a time, looking at the thought.

“Wouldn’t do any harm,” he said. “But even if it is for money, the very late ransom demand makes no sense.”

“So maybe it’s time to unleash the forensic accountants,” I said. “Can you do that?”

“I am a captain in the Massachusetts State Police,” Healy said.

“I’ll take that for a yes,” I said.

Healy grinned.

“Tallyho!” he said.

Despite that it was November,
Susan and I spent two days at a resort in Rhode Island, in a big cottage on the beach. The cottage had a fireplace and a king-sized bed, and in the late afternoon of the first day we were lying on the bed, with the fire burning, looking at the ocean. It was a clear blue day, just starting to darken, and the pre-winter ocean looked gray and hard as it rolled up onto the smooth sand where the seabirds hopped about.

“‘Roll on,’” I said, “‘thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sail over thee in vain.’”

“Is that Byron?” Susan said.

“Maybe,” I said.

Outside our picture window, the seabirds were very busy at the edge of the waves, scooting back and forth as the waves came in and broke and spread out on the beach. I assumed they were looking for things edible that the waves had roiled up. But I never did know for sure, and when I brought the question up to Susan, she trivialized it. I got up and added wood to the fire and came back and re-propped my pillow and lay on the bed beside her.

“Are we just going to lie on the bed all afternoon and look at the ocean?” Susan said.

“We can look at the fire, too,” I said.

“That’s it?”

“Except for occasional outbursts of scandalous sexuality,” I said.

“Oh,” Susan said.

She stood up and took off her tank top, and unsnapped her bra and let it slide down her arms.

“Do you feel such an outburst approaching?” I said.

“I fear that I’m in its grasp,” Susan said.

She unzipped her skirt and dropped it to the floor and stepped out of it, and wiggled out of her fairly exotic underpants.

“Would you experience it as depravity,” I said, “if I suggested that you leave the high heels on?”

“I would,” she said.

“But?” I said.

“I admire depravity,” she said.

“Does this mean I should disrobe?” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said.

So I did. And when I was done, Susan smiled, gave me a thumbs-up, and jumped on me. Then, for a while, the rest was silence . . . of a sort.

By the time we were finished it had gotten dark, and the ocean was visible mostly as the white foam of the beached waves showed in the moonlight. As soon as we were through making love, Susan squirmed under the covers and pulled them up to her chin.

“Um,” she said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said.

“We left the shades open,” Susan said.

“So we did,” I said.

“What if someone had passed by?”

“Might have been instructive for them,” I said.

We lay quietly for a time. Only the ocean moved in the darkness outside our window. My gun was on the bedside table.

Susan looked at it.

“There it is,” she said.

“My gun?” I said.

“Our constant companion,” Susan said.

“Better to have it and not need it . . .” I said.

“I know,” Susan said. “I know all that.”

“Part of the business,” I said.

“I know that, too,” Susan said.

“You have a gun,” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said.

“You’d use it if you had to,” I said.

“I would.”

We lay quietly, listening to the ocean.

After a while, I said, “I believe the cocktail hour is upon us.”

“In a minute,” Susan said.

She rolled over against me and put her arms around me and pressed her face against my chest. We stayed that way for a time. Then Susan let go and rolled over and bounced out of bed.

“I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” she said.

“You will not,” I said.

“Will too,” she said.

It actually took her forty-eight minutes. But it was well worth the wait.

While I was examining
the well-dressed young women passing below me on Berkeley Street, the phone rang. Still looking out my window, I picked it up and said “Hello.”

“I’m in Franklin Park,” Quirk said to me on the phone. “Near White Stadium. You might want to drop by.”

“Okay,” I said, and hung up.

It was a very nice fall day, more October than November, and a lot of the people walking by were coatless. I watched one especially attractive woman walk across Boylston Street and into Louis’s before I put on a leather jacket to cover my gun, and went downstairs to get my car.

It was easy to find Quirk. I could have probably located him from an orbiting spacecraft. There were half a dozen cruisers, some with the lights still rotating, at least two unmarked police cars, an ambulance, the coroner’s truck, yellow tape, flashbulbs, an amplitude of gawkers, and a couple of television news trucks at the edge of the scene. A uniformed cop stopped me after I parked behind one of the TV trucks and got out.

“Crime scene, bud,” he said. “Got business here?”

“Quirk asked me to come by,” I said.

The cop nodded and turned and yelled.

“Captain?”

Quirk looked over, saw me, nodded his head, and gestured me toward him. The patrolman who had stopped me grinned, and gestured me in with a big sweep while he pretended to lift a velvet rope.

“Right this way, sir.”

I walked over to Quirk, who was standing with a detective I didn’t know, looking down at a body covered with a tarp.

“Know anybody named Leonard Rezendes?” Quirk said.

“Know a Leonard works for Tony Marcus,” I said. “Don’t think I ever knew his last name.”

Quirk nodded.

“He’s had several. But Rezendes is what’s on his driver’s license.”

Quirk bent down and turned back the tarp. It was hard to be sure because his head had been shot up pretty good, but it seemed to be the Leonard I knew.

“I think that’s him,” I said.

“It is,” Quirk said. “Some kids called nine-one-one couple hours ago.”

“They around?” I said.

“They wouldn’t give a name, and there was no one here when we arrived,” Quirk said. “I got a guy canvassing the crowd.”

“Doesn’t appear to be accidental,” I said.

“Wow!” said Quirk.

“I’m a detective,” I said. “It comes pretty easy.”

“At least four rounds to the head,” Quirk said. “Probably forties. We found four shell casings.”

“So he was done here.”

“Unless they brought the casings and threw them around to fool us,” Quirk said.

“Boy, you must be a detective, too,” I said.

“And a captain,” Quirk said. “Lot of blood on the ground.”

“Hard to fake that,” I said.

“Yeah,” Quirk said, and grinned. “We assume he was killed here.”

“See?” I said.

“Leonard was Rugar’s connection to Tony,” Quirk said.

“Yes.”

“You think it got him killed?”

“Something did,” I said.

“His wallet’s still in his pants,” Quirk said. “Seven hundred dollars. His Rolex is still there; somebody told me it was worth about twenty thousand dollars.”

“For a watch?” I said.

Quirk shrugged.

“Wasn’t a robbery,” Quirk said.

“Four in the back of the head,” I said. “Sounds like an execution.”

“Any other thoughts?” Quirk said. “You being a detective and all.”

“Rugar killed him to break his connection to the attempt on me,” I said. “Or maybe Leonard did it without Tony, and it’s Tony’s way of explaining to him how wrong that was.”

“And breaking the connection to him,” Quirk said, “in the process.”

“True,” I said.

“It’s still all speculation,” Quirk said.

“At least,” I said, “we’re starting to have things to speculate about.”

“Which is what we do,” Quirk said.

“Until we know something,” I said.

“Which we will,” Quirk said.

Hawk and I were working out
at the Harbor Health Club, which was becoming accessible again as the Big Dig went out not with a bang but a whimper. Even though the place was now more upscale than Buckingham Palace, Henry Cimoli, who ran the place, still kept a small boxing room in back as some sort of gesture toward us, or maybe to his roots.

“Susan say you going out too much by yourself,” Hawk said as he worked on the uppercut bag.

“I figure they might let things slide a little after the last shot at me went so bad.”

“Rugar don’t let nothing slide,” Hawk said.

“This has been atypical Rugar,” I said, “since they started playing ‘Here Comes the Bride’ on Tashtego Island.”

“Maybe stuff we don’t know,” Hawk said.

“That’s for sure,” I said.

I was throwing hooks at the heavy bag.
Body, body, head, head.

“I mean maybe he got problems distracting him, why he farmed the hit out on you,” Hawk said.

“He doesn’t normally do that,” I said. “Sees it as being dependent on other people, I think.”

“You ever think it a fuckup?” Hawk said.

“Tashtego?”

Hawk nodded.

“Didn’t go the way it was supposed to,” Hawk said. “And Rugar be scrambling ever since?”

“Well, it sure isn’t vintage Rugar,” I said.

Martin Quirk came into the boxing room. He nodded at Hawk. Hawk nodded back.

To me, Quirk said, “I need you to look at another body.”

“Everybody’s got to be good at something,” I said to Hawk.

“Looking at bodies?” Hawk said.

“It’s a gift,” I said.

I untaped my hands, put a leather jacket on over my sweats, put my gun in a side pocket of the jacket. Small gun today, five-shot .38 with a two-inch barrel. Strictly defensive.

“You probably safe with the captain,” Hawk said. “I meet you here when you through?”

“I’ll bring him back,” Quirk said.

Hawk nodded and went back to the uppercut bag. I followed Quirk out to the street, where his car was illegally parked at the curb, impeding traffic. With a callous disregard for anyone else driving at the time, Quirk drove us swiftly to Boston City Hospital, where I was able to look at the distorted corpse of a man I may have killed.

“Found him by the Charles River Dam,” Quirk said, “bumping around the lock.”

“Pretty sure it’s him,” I said. “I only saw him for a minute, and he’s been in the water for a while.”

“No ID,” Quirk said. “No DNA match in the database. They’re trying to lift some fingerprints, but he’s pretty waterlogged.”

“You get a slug out of him?”

“His head,” Quirk said.

I nodded.

“We’ll go over to the lab,” I said. “I’ll fire a test round for you. If the slugs match, it’s him.”

“The driver probably dumped him soon as he cleared from you,” Quirk said.

“Which would put him in the river somewhere this side of the BU bridge,” I said.

“And the river brought him down.”

“Surprising no one spotted him,” I said.

“Might have been under for a while till he started to puff up,” Quirk said.

I nodded.

“Nice,” I said.

Quirk gestured with his head, and the morgue attendant slid the drawer shut.

“Come on,” Quirk said. “I’ll buy you lunch.”

“What could be better,” I said.

There was a sandwich shop up Albany Street a little where Quirk bought sandwiches and coffee for us. I declined the sandwich and drank the coffee while we sat in Quirk’s car and watched the activity at the wholesale flower market across the street.

Without looking at me Quirk said, “And the two goons got shanked.”

“My goons?” I said. “That tried to kill me?”

“Yep. In the jail yard, yesterday. Guard found them both in a corner. Throats cut.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Yeah,” Quirk said. “Last man standing.”

“Tony got to them,” I said.

“Or Rugar,” Quirk said. “Pretty sure it was an inmate or a guard.”

“What a pleasure to watch a trained mind work,” I said.

“Years on the job,” Quirk said.

“Anybody talk to them, before their demise?”

Quirk shook his head.

“Epstein finally found us a translator,” Quirk said. “He and I were scheduled to interview them today.”

“What a coincidence,” I said. “Was their attorney going to be present?”

“Yep.”

“Good old Lamar,” I said. “Murder weapon?”

Quirk shrugged.

“Maybe a utility-knife blade,” Quirk said. “We’re looking into it.”

“What do you expect to discover?”

“Zip,” Quirk said.

“Any suspects?”

“Everybody,” Quirk said. “You got yourself into something pretty ugly.”

“Yeah, but at least I’m not making any progress,” I said.

“Assuming it’s all related to Tashtego,” Quirk said, “I count eleven people killed so far. Two of them by you.”

“I know,” I said.

“For what?” Quirk said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Me neither,” Quirk said.