Sacred: A Novel (12 page)

Good private detectives are notoriously minimalist. They’ve seen firsthand what the random jottings on a piece of paper or the hidden diary can lead to, so they’re very rarely pack rats. More than one person has said that my apartment resembles a hotel suite more than a home. And Jay’s place, while far more plushly materialistic than my own, was still pretty impersonal.

I stood in the bedroom doorway as Angie lifted the mattresses on the antique sleigh bed, lifted the throw rug by the walnut dresser. The living room had been icy modern, all blacks and charcoals and cobalt-blue postmodern paintings on the walls. The bedroom seemed to be following a more naturalistic motif, the blond hardwood floor polished and gleaming under the small antique replica chandelier. The bedspread was hand-sewn and bright, the desk in the corner a matching walnut to the dresser and bureau.

As Angie moved to the desk, I said, “So when did you and Jay have drinks?”

“I slept with him, Patrick. Okay? Get over it.”

“When?”

She shrugged as I came over to the desk behind her. “Last spring or summer. Around there somewhere.”

I opened a drawer as she opened its counterpart beside me. “During your ‘days of unleashing’?” I said.

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“Days of unleashing” had been what Angie called her dating ritual after she separated from Phil—extremely short-term relationships with no attachments, dominated by as casual an approach as was possible to sex in the years since the discovery of AIDS. It was a phase, one she grew bored with far quicker than I had. Her days of unleashing had lasted maybe six months, mine about nine years.

“So how was he?”

She frowned at something in the drawer. “He was good. But he was a moaner. I can’t stand guys who moan too loud.”

“Me, either,” I said.

She laughed. “You find anything?”

I closed the last of the drawers. “Stationery, pens, car insurance policy, nothing.”

“Me either.”

We checked the guest bedroom, found nothing there, went back to the living room.

“What are we looking for again?” I said.

“A clue.”

“What kind of clue?”

“A big one.”

“Oh.”

I checked behind the paintings. I took the back off the TV. I looked in the laser disc tray, the multiple CD tray, the tape port in the VCR. All were distinctly lacking in the clue department.

“Hey.” Angie came back out of the kitchen.

“Find a big clue?” I said.

“I don’t know if I’d call it big.”

“We’re only accepting big clues here today.”

She handed me a newspaper clipping. “This was hanging on the fridge.”

It was a small item from a back page, dated August 29 of last year:

“I’d say that’s a clue,” I said.

“Big or small?”

“Depends whether you measure by width or length.”

I got a good dope-slap for that on the way out the door.

“Who’d you say you’re working for?” Captain Groning said.

“Ahm, we didn’t,” Angie said.

He leaned back from his computer. “Oh. But just because you’re friends with Devin Amronklin and Oscar Lee of BPD Homicide, I’m supposed to help you?”

“We were kinda counting on it,” I said.

“Well, until Devin called me, I was kinda counting on getting home to the old lady, fella.”

It had been a couple decades, at least, since someone had called me “fella.” I wasn’t sure how to take it.

Captain Emmett Groning was five foot seven and weighed about three hundred pounds. His jowls were longer and fleshier than any bulldog’s I’d ever seen and his second and third chins hung down from the first like scoops of ice cream. I had no idea what the fitness requirements for the Stoneham Police Department were, but I had to assume Groning had been behind a desk for at least a decade. In a reinforced chair.

He chewed a Slim Jim, not eating it really, just sort of rolling it from side to side in his mouth and taking it out occasionally to admire his tooth marks and slick spittle residue. At least I think it was a Slim Jim. I couldn’t be sure, because I hadn’t seen one in a while—since around the same time I last heard the word “fella.”

“We don’t want to keep you from…the old lady,” I said, “but we’re sort of pressed for time.”

He rolled the Slim Jim across his lower lip, somehow managed to suck on it as he spoke. “Devin said you’re the two who settled Gerry Glynn’s hash.”

“Yes,” I said. “His hash was settled by us.”

Angie kicked my ankle.

“Well.” Captain Groning stared over his desktop at us. “Don’t have that kind of thing round here.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Your sicko killers, twisted deviants, your cross-dressers and baby rapers. No, sir. We leave that for all you in the Big City.”

The Big City was approximately eight miles from Stoneham. This guy seemed to think there was an ocean or two in between.

“Well,” Angie said, “that’s why I’ve always wanted to retire here.”

It was my turn to kick her.

Groning raised an eyebrow and leaned forward as if to see what we were doing on the other side of his desk. “Yeah, well, like I always say, miss, you could do whole lots worse than this here town, but not whole lots better.”

Call the Stoneham Chamber of Commerce, I thought, you got yourselves a town slogan.

“Oh, absolutely,” Angie said.

He leaned back in his chair and I waited for it to tip, send him back through the wall into the next office. He pulled the Slim Jim out of his mouth, looked at it, and sucked it back in again. Then he looked at his computer screen.

“Anthony Lisardo of Lynn,” he said. “Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. You ever hear it called that?”

“First time.” Angie smiled brightly.

“Oh, sure,” Groning said. “That’s a hell of a place, ol’ Lynn. Wouldn’t raise a dog there.”

Bet you’d eat one, though.

I chewed my tongue, reminded myself I’d resolved to work on my maturity this year.

“Wouldn’t raise a dog,” he repeated. “Well. Anthony Lisardo, yeah, had himself a heart attack.”

“I thought he drowned.”

“He did, fella. He surely did. First, though, he had a heart attack. Our doc didn’t think it was so big it would have killed him on its own, him being a young kid and all, but he was in five feet of water when it happened, so that was pretty much all she wrote. All she wrote,” he repeated with the same musical lilt he’d used on “wouldn’t raise a dog.”

“Anybody know what caused the heart attack?”

“Well, sure, fella. Sure someone knows. And that someone is Captain Emmett T. Groning of Stoneham.” He leaned back in his chair, left eyebrow cocked, and nodded at us, that Slim Jim rolling along his bottom lip.

If I lived here, I’d never commit a crime. Because to do so would put me in the box with this guy, and five minutes with Captain Emmett T. Groning of Stoneham, and I’d confess to everything from the Lindbergh baby’s killing to Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance just to get locked up in a federal pen, as far away as possible.

“Captain Groning,” Angie said, using the same breathy voice she’d used on Poor Walter, “if you could tell us what caused Anthony Lisardo’s heart attack, why, I’d be much obliged.”

Much obliged. Angela “Daisy Mae” Gennaro.

“Cocaína,”
he said. “Or yeh-yo as some call it.”

I was stuck in Stoneham with a fat guy doing his Al Pacino-as-Tony Montana imitation. Life didn’t get much better.

“He snorted cocaine, had a heart attack, and drowned?” I said.

“Didn’t snort it. Smoked it, fella.”

“So it was crack?” Angie said.

He shook his tiny head and his jowls made a flapping noise. “Your standard cocaine,” he said. “Mixed in with tobacco. What’s known as an Ecuadoran cigarette.”

“Tobacco followed by a hit of coke, followed by tobacco, then coke, tobacco, then coke,” I said.

He seemed impressed. “You’re familiar with it.”

A lot of people who went to college in the early to mid eighties were, but I didn’t tell him that. He struck me as the kind of guy who decided whether or not to elect presidents based on whether he believed they’d “inhaled” or not.

“I’ve heard rumors of it,” I said.

“Well, that’s what this Lisardo boy smoked. Had himself a groovy high going, man, but that high came a crashing on down in a real bummer way.”

“Word,” I said.

“What?”

“Def,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said.

Angie’s heel ground into my toe and she smiled sweetly at Captain Groning. “What about the witness? The newspaper said Lisardo had a companion.”

Groning took his confused eyes off me and looked back at his computer screen. “Kid named Donald Yeager, aged twenty-two. Left the scene in a panic, but called it in about an hour later. We ID’d him from a jacket he left behind, sweated him in the box for a bit, but he didn’t do jack. He just went to the reservoir with his buddy, drank some beer, smoked some mary jew wanna, and went for a dip.”

“Did he do any coke?”

“Nah. He claimed he didn’t know Lisardo was doing it either. Said, ‘Tony hated coke.’” Groning clucked his tongue. “I said, ‘And coke hated Tony, fella.’”

“Terrific comeback,” I said.

He nodded. “Sometimes when me and the boys get going in the box, there’s just no stopping us.”

Captain Groning and the Boys. Bet they had barbecues and went to church together and sang Hank Williams, Jr., songs together and never met a rubber hose they didn’t like.

“So how does Anthony’s father feel about his son’s death?” Angie asked.

“Crazy Davey?” Captain Groning said. “You see in the paper how they called him a ‘mobster’?”

“Yes.”

“Every corrupt guinea north of Quincy’s a mobster all a sudden, I swear.”

“And this particular guinea?” Angie said, her hands locked together into fists.

“Small-time. The papers said ‘loan shark,’ which is partly true, but mostly he’s a chop-shop guy on the Lynnway.”

Boston is one of the safest major metropolitan cities in the country. Our murder and assault and rape rates are barely blips on the screen compared with those of Los Angeles or Miami or New York, but we have all those cities beat when it comes to car theft. Boston criminals, for some reason, love to boost cars. I’m not sure why that is, since there’s nothing terribly wrong with our public transportation system, but there you go.

And most of these cars end up on the Lynnway, a stretch of Route 1A that cuts over the Mystic River, and is lined from end to end with car dealerships and garages. Most of those dealerships and garages are legitimate, but several aren’t. That’s why most Bostonians who get their cars stolen shouldn’t even bother checking their LoJack satellite-tracking system—it will just beep from a spot in the depths of the Mystic, just off the Lynnway. The tracking system, not the car. The car’s in pieces and those pieces are on their way to fifteen different places within half an hour after you parked.

“Crazy Davey isn’t pissed about his son’s death?” I said.

“I’m sure he is,” Captain Groning said. “But there’s not much he can do about it. Oh, sure, he gave us all the usual ‘My son don’t do coke’ bullshit, but what else is he going to say? Luckily, the way the mob’s all messed up around here these days, and Crazy Davey not even being in the running for a slot, I don’t have to care what he thinks.”

“So Crazy Davey’s small-time?” I said.

“Like a guppy,” Captain Groning said.

“Like a guppy,” I said to Angie.

And got another kick.

The offices of Hamlyn and Kohl Worldwide Investigations occupied the entire thirty-third floor of the John Hancock Tower, I. M. Pei’s icy skyscraper of metallic blue glass. The edifice consists of sheets of mirrored glass, each twenty feet high and sixty feet long. Pei designed them so that the surrounding buildings would be captured in the glass with perfect resolution, and as you approach, you can see the light granite and red sandstone of Trinity Church and the imposing limestone of the Copley Plaza Hotel trapped in the smoked blue of merciless glass. It’s not all that unattractive an image, really, and at least the sheets of glass don’t have a habit of falling out like they used to.

Everett Hamlyn’s office faced the Trinity Church side and you could see clear to Cambridge on a sharp cold night like tonight. Actually, you could see clear to Medford, but I don’t know anyone who’d want to look that far.

We sipped Everett Hamlyn’s top-shelf brandy and watched him stand by his sheet of glass and stare out at the city laid in a carpet of lights at his feet.

He cut a hell of a figure, Everett did. Ramrod straight, skin so tight to his hard frame that I often thought if a paper cut appeared in the flesh, he’d burst wide open. His gunmetal hair was trimmed tight to the scalp, and I’d never seen so much as a hint of stubble or shadow on his cheeks.

His work ethic was legendary—the one who turned on the lights in the morning and shut them off at night. A man who’d been overheard more than once saying that any man who needed more than four hours of sleep couldn’t be trusted, because treachery lay in sloth and a need for luxury and more than four hours’ sleep was a luxury. He’d been with the OSS during World War II, just a kid then, but now, more than fifty years later, he still looked better than most men half his age.

Retirement would come for Everett Hamlyn, it was said, the same night death did.

“You know I can’t discuss this,” he said, his eyes watching our reflections in the glass.

I met his eyes the same way. “Off the record, then. Everett, please.”

He smiled softly and raised his glass, took a parsimonious sip of brandy. “You knew you’d find me alone, Patrick. Didn’t you?”

“I assumed I would. You can see your light from the street if you know what square to look for.”

“Without a partner to protect me if you both decided to double-team me, wear an old man down.”

Angie chuckled. “Now, Everett,” she said, “please.”

He turned from the window, a twinkle in his eyes. “You are as ravishing as ever, Angela.”

“Flattery won’t deflect our questions,” she said, but a blush of rose lit the flesh under her chin for a moment.

“Come on, you ol’ smoothie,” I said. “Tell me how good I look.”

“You look like shit, dear boy. Still cutting your own hair, I see.”

I laughed. I’d always liked Everett Hamlyn. Everyone did. The same couldn’t be said of his partner, Adam Kohl, but Everett had an effortless ease with people that belied his military past, his stiff bearing and uncompromising sense of right and wrong.

“Mine’s all real, though, Everett.”

He touched the hard stubble atop his head. “You think I’d pay to have this on my head?”

“Everett,” Angie said, “if you’d please tell us why Hamlyn and Kohl dropped Trevor Stone as a client we’ll be out of what little hair you have left. I promise.”

He made the smallest movement with his head, one that I knew from experience was a negative motion.

“We need some help here,” I said. “We’re trying to find two people now—Desiree Stone and Jay.”

He came around to his chair, seemed to study it before he sat in it. He turned it so that he was facing us directly and placed his arms on his desk.

“Patrick,” he said, his voice soft and almost paternal, “do you know why Hamlyn and Kohl offered you a job seven years after you’d turned down our first offer?”

“Envy of our client base?”

“Hardly.” He smiled. “Actually, Adam was dead set against it at first.”

“I’m not surprised. No love lost there.”

“I’m sure of that.” He sat back, the brandy snifter warming in his palm. “I convinced Adam that you were both seasoned investigators with an admirable—some would say astonishing—case clearance rate. But that wasn’t all there was to it, and, Angela, please don’t take any offense at what I’m about to say, because none is intended.”

“I’m sure I won’t, Everett.”

He leaned forward, held my eyes with his own. “I wanted you, Patrick, specifically. You, my boy, because you reminded me of Jay and Jay reminded me of myself at a young age. You both had smarts, you both had energy, but there was more to it than that. What you both had that is so rare these days is passion. You were like little boys. You’d take any job, no matter how small, and treat it like a big job. You see, you loved the
work,
not just the job. You loved everything about it, and it was a joy to come to work those three months the two of you worked together here. Your excitement filled these rooms—your bad jokes, and your sophomoric high jinks, your sense of fun, and your absolute determination to close every case.” He leaned back in his chair and sniffed the air above him. “It was a tonic.”

“Everett,” I said, but stopped there, unsure what else to say.

He held up a hand. “Please. I was like that once, you see. So when I tell you Jay was as close to a son as I’ve ever had, do you believe me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And if the world were more populated with men like him and myself and even you, Patrick, I think it would be a better place. The raging ego of a proud man, I know, but I’m old, so I’m entitled.”

“You don’t look it, Everett,” Angie said.

“You’re a dear child.” He smiled at her. He nodded to himself and looked down at his brandy snifter. He carried it with him as he left his chair again, crossed back to the window, and stood looking out at the city. “I believe in honor,” he said. “No other human attribute deserves the exaltation honor does. And I’ve tried to live my life as an honorable man. But it’s hard. Because most men aren’t honorable. Most people aren’t. To most, honor is an antiquated notion at best, a corrosive naïveté at worst.” He turned his head and smiled at us, but it was a tired smile. “Honor, I think, is in its twilight. I’m sure it will die with the century.”

“Everett,” I said, “if you could just—”

He shook his head. “I can’t discuss any aspects of Trevor Stone’s case or Jay Becker’s disappearance with you, Patrick. I simply can’t. I can only tell you to remember what I’ve said about honor and the people without it. And to fend for yourselves with that knowledge.” He walked back to his chair and sat in it, turned it halfway back to the window. “Good night,” he said.

I looked at Angie and she looked at me and then we both looked at the back of his head. I could see his eyes reflected in the glass again, but they weren’t looking at my reflection this time, only his own. He peered at the ghostly image of himself trapped and swimming in the glass and the reflected lights of other buildings and other lives.

We left him sitting in his chair, staring out at the city and himself simultaneously, bathed in the deep blue of the night sky.

At the door, his voice stopped us, and it bore a tone I’d never recognized before. It was still rich with experience and wisdom, still steeped in lore and expensive brandy, but now it carried the barest hint of fear.

“Be careful in Florida,” Everett Hamlyn said.

“We never said we were going to Florida,” Angie said.

“Be careful,” he repeated and leaned back in the chair to sip from his glass of brandy. “Please.”