Authors: William G. Tapply
“Ah, Brady. Maybe I just don’t care.”
“One of us has to.”
She smiled quickly. “You’re the one. You always were the one who knew where the pits were.”
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. For the ten-millionth time. It’s my fault. Forget it. Please.”
She touched her lips with the tips of her fingers. “It’s just not that simple.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
She sat there staring across the room. I watched her face. It revealed nothing. After a minute, she turned. “Do you want to see the pictures?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
I followed her back into the darkroom. She had made two eight-by-tens, one each of the man’s face and the woman’s half profile. They were, as she had predicted, blurry and grainy. But the faces could be recognized by anybody who knew them, I felt certain.
“This is great,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. It’s a very long story. I’m hoping I can figure out who they are from the pictures.”
“How in the world do you expect to do that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe Charlie can help me.”
She found a big manila envelope and slipped all the photos she had done into it. I tucked it under my arm and we went upstairs.
“Stay for another drink?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I had a couple already. No, I better get going.”
She picked up my coat and held it for me. “What I don’t understand,” she said as I slipped my arms into the sleeves, “you must know a lot of compliant women.”
I thought of Becca Katz. She had been compliant. But somehow the word didn’t work for her. She had been lonely, empty, desperate. “I suppose so,” I said.
“And I bet you don’t go through great moral debates before you go to bed with them.”
“It depends.”
I hunched my shoulders into the topcoat and then turned around to face Gloria. She was frowning. “It depends on what?”
“On whether I like them or not.”
She turned her face so that she was peering at me out of the corners of her eyes, a sly, almost flirtatious look. “Just so I understand,” she said, “do you go to bed with the ones you like, or the ones you don’t like?”
I smiled. “The ones I like, of course.”
She shook her head slowly. “Then,” she said, “I deduce that you don’t like me.”
I reached for the doorknob. “No,” I said. “That’s not it. With you it’s much more complicated.”
C
HARLIE PICKED UP A
pencil and tapped at the photographs I had spread out on his desk. “Maybe if you could give me some names I could help you,” he said to me.
“If I had the names, I wouldn’t need your help.”
“Well, I certainly don’t recognize these people.”
“I didn’t really expect you to.” I sighed and lit a cigarette. “I just figured, you’ve been in prosecution for a long time. There must be some tricks.”
“Legwork. Paperwork. Cooperative witnesses. Plea bargains.” He waved at the smoke. “No tricks, counselor.”
Charlie had a lavishly furnished office high in the Federal Building in Government Center on the back side of Beacon Hill. I gazed past his shoulder at the slate-colored winter sky. The big floor-to-ceiling window looked out toward the arches of the Mystic River Bridge. Uncle Sam had spared none of the taxpayers’ funds in providing thick carpeting, chrome and teak furniture, and fancy electronic gear for his employees in the Justice Department.
Charlie lounged back in his Moroccan leather swivel chair. He tapped his teeth with his pencil. “Actually, when you think about it,” he said, “it’s all pretty farfetched anyway. So this guy”—he pointed with the eraser end of the pencil at the photograph of the man—“knew that Katz had found out about him and his lady friend. Katz sells him the pictures. The guy doesn’t trust him to keep a secret.” Charlie shrugged elaborately. “Hardly a motive for murder.”
“I’ve heard less impressive motives.”
“Oh, sure. You want to talk about wackos, that’s a whole ’nother thing. For instance, guy’s sitting in a movie theater. Suddenly he jumps up, turns around, yanks out his thirty-eight Police Special, and pumps five slugs into the chest of the fourteen-year-old girl sitting behind him. Know why?”
I shook my head.
“The guy tells the police, ‘She was crunching popcorn in my ear.’ Like that explained it perfectly. Or the broad in Queens who had the barking dog. Her neighbor calls her on the phone to complain the dog’s keeping the family awake. So the broad burns down their house. Said she didn’t like being harassed by those phone calls. So you’re right. There are less impressive motives. With crazy people, it’s unproductive to bother trying to understand motives. They’ve just got some weird logic twisted around inside their heads. Look, Brady. I’m not sure what you want to do even if you actually do identify this guy. You plan to have him arrested or something?”
I stubbed out my cigarette. “I don’t know. That’s something else I’m asking you, I guess.”
He began to doodle on a legal pad. “Okay. Maybe you do a little sleuthing. Find out where whatever-his-name-is was on the night in question. Sneak a look at his automobile, see if there’s a big dent on the right front fender. Or see if he’s had it in the body shop recently, go talk to them. Say you turn up this lady.” He touched her photograph with his pencil. “Run a trick on her. Grill her a little. See what she knows. Hell, Brady. You can grill both of them. Do the separate-room routine on them. Or try hot needles under the fingernails. Hook electrodes to the guy’s balls. Slap the broad around a little.”
“Come on, Charlie. I’m serious.”
“Me, too,” he said. Then he smiled. “Look. Frankly, I don’t see how you expect to identify them anyway, so it’s pretty academic.”
“I went through a lot just to get these pictures.”
“I hate to be the one to tell you you wasted your time.” He slid the photos together into a pile and tapped the edges even. He picked up his half glasses from the desk and pushed them onto his nose. Then he flipped through the photographs again. He shrugged and put them down. “Sorry, pal. I get nothing out of this.”
“Isn’t there anything your computers can do?”
He shook his head. “Nope.” He picked up the stack of pictures again. One by one he went through them, studying them more closely, placing them side by side on his desk. When he had them all spread out again he began to shake his head. Suddenly he pushed at his glasses with his forefinger and bent closer. He picked up one of the photos and held it to his face. “Wait a minute,” he said.
“What? What is it?” I stood up and moved around Charlie’s desk so I was standing at his shoulder.
He was holding the photograph that showed a crowd of people entering and leaving a building. “Look at this one,” he said.
I did. “That’s the guy, right there,” I said, touching the face with my finger.
“Yeah, I know,” he said impatiently. “What else do you see?”
It was little more than a dark vertical line with a lump on top of it. “I don’t know what it is,” I said.
Charlie sketched something onto his yellow legal pad. The sketch resembled a lollipop. “Does it look like this?”
“Yes. Nice sketch. What do you think it is?”
“I
know
what it is. A streetlight.”
I nodded. “Okay. Yes. That’s what it looks like. So?”
“So?” He swiveled around to peer up at me. “So now we know that this guy was at a place that maybe you can find. Where do they have streetlights like this one?”
“Up on the Hill?”
“Those are a little different. Come on.”
I smacked my fist into my palm. “Quincy Market, right?”
“Sure. Now see what you can tell about the building.”
We studied it together. It was severely out of focus, but the shape of the windows and the broad details of the facade were recognizable. “Think you could find this place, counselor?” said Charlie.
“It would be a place to start.”
“It’ll cost you, of course.”
“Fresh swordfish at the No-Name?”
“Deal.”
A ten-minute cab ride took me from Charlie’s office to Quincy Market. Produce trucks still congregate at Haymarket Square in the wee morning hours to peddle their fruits and vegetables, and bums sleep in abandoned doorways, and bag ladies pick over the rotting litter on the streets, just as they always did. Only now the out-of-towners don’t see it. In the headlong rush toward urban renewal during the reign of Kevin White, the squalid old marketplace was shunted out back. New brick walkways and chrome and glass edifices were erected out front. Good for business, good for tourists. The New Boston. Good for Kevin White. Now the folks from Kansas City can purchase pizza wedges topped with tofu and bean sprouts, stuffed teddy bears and plastic lobsters made in Taiwan, framed prints of the Paul Revere statue, and other remembrances of quaint old colonial Boston. And they miss the real thing just around the corner.
Quincy Market is a great place to hang around if you want to pick up lonely secretaries or bank clerks after work. There are a few good restaurants and barrooms. The best of both are still at Durgin Park, which had been there about a hundred years before redevelopment arrived.
I wandered aimlessly around the broad brick plaza, trying to match up the scene in the photograph. Although it was only midafternoon, the thick wet clouds overhead cast a dark pall over the city and made it seem like dusk.
I made a complete circuit of the marketplace. I cocked my head at the buildings, seeking angles that would include one of the lollipop streetlamps along the left edge of my view.
It wasn’t working.
Although I moved briskly, the damp chill penetrated my topcoat. My ears burned, and my nose began to dribble.
I ducked into the bar at Durgin Park and climbed onto a stool. The bartender was down at the other end talking with a woman whose corn-colored hair was cut like the Dutch boy on the paint cans. She wore a pink blouse with several strands of gold around her neck. Her black skirt was slit most of the way up the side, revealing a lot of sleek thigh.
She was, I guessed, either a hooker or an attorney.
The bartender wore a black beard, so densely grown and closely trimmed that it looked painted on. “Help you, mate?” he said, moving down the bar toward me. Australian, I judged. He made a ceremonial pass with his rag at the spotless counter in front of me.
“Jack Daniel’s, on the rocks.”
I shucked off my topcoat and folded it on my lap. I lit a cigarette and took the sheaf of photographs out of their envelope. I studied the one with the gas lamp and the building in the background again. One more wild-goose chase in a career full of them.
The bartender set my drink and a small bowl of dry-roasted peanuts in front of me. He glanced at the photograph before he went back to the lady.
I munched peanuts, sipped my drink, smoked, and stared unfocused at the picture. My thoughts strayed to Becca Katz, thence to Gloria. I had bedded Becca without hesitation. I had refused to do the same with Gloria. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had treated them both shabbily. I found it all very confusing.
“Whatcha got there, Captain?”
I looked up. The bartender was craning his neck, trying to examine the photograph that showed the streetlamp. I turned it around for him. “I’m trying to figure out where the photographer was standing when he snapped this,” I said.
I expected him to ask why, and my mind swirled with the senseless lies I could tell him.
Instead, he said, “Why, over by the kiosk, mate.”
“What kiosk?”
He touched the picture with his forefinger. “This is the kiosk. Bostix. Where they sell discount theater tickets, you know. Next to Faneuil Hall, Captain. I’d say the cameraman was just behind it.”
It was a very blurred shape in the foreground on the right edge of the photo, a slope of low roof, a smudge of wall, little more, so shapeless that neither Charlie nor I had registered it. The streetlight on the left of the picture, as fuzzed as it was, appeared sharply focused by comparison.
“Thank you, thank you,” I said. I dropped a ten-dollar bill onto the bar, stood up, and humped into my topcoat.
“Wait for your change, mate,” said the barman as I turned to leave.
“Keep it. You’ve earned it.” It could have been the same ten-spot Les had given me a couple of weeks earlier. Easy come, easy go.
Outside, hard grains of sleet fell like shrapnel from the prematurely darkened sky. Traffic moved slowly, showing fog lights. I found the kiosk positioned more or less in the middle of the plaza. I stationed myself so that it loomed on my right. The perspective was wrong, even accounting for the foreshortening effect of the long lens Les Katz had used. I crossed the street and tried again. The angle was okay. But now the streetlight was out of position, and Faneuil Hall in the background looked wrong. I crossed the street again. Slowly I walked around the kiosk. Then it dawned on me. Les had stood with his back to Faneuil Hall, shooting beyond the kiosk and up a flight of steps at the office building across the way.
I took out the photo and studied it. It fit. The building was modern, with a flat concrete exterior composed of several angled facets. The windows were square and starkly plain.
I guessed my mystery man had emerged from the building and begun to descend the steps when Les, leaning back against the wall of Faneuil Hall and looking like any other tourist, snapped the picture. It would account for the odd angle, and the way the pedestrians seemed to be superimposed against the third story of the building.
I tucked the photo back into the manila envelope and recrossed the street. A bank occupied the street level of the building. Through the window I could see the plush cranberry carpeting and the open layout, with tiny cubicles created by a maze of shoulder-high partitions. All of the bank employees were dressed very slick. None of them seemed especially busy.
I hadn’t figured out my next move. I went into the lobby. It was wide and glittery. Elaborately framed landscape paintings decorated the walls. There were two banks of elevators. At the far end crouched a family of soft chairs and an enormous sofa, all upholstered in identical rich blue material.