Deep Pockets (10 page)

I sat up, clutching the blankets, wondering whether I’d woken Paolina with my screams, but I knew Paolina hadn’t spent the night. Neither had Leon, and the screaming came from the telephone. I readjusted to the reality of my own dark room, bedding flung helter-skelter, the ringing telephone. I don’t keep the phone on the bedside table; too easy to reach out, pick up, hang up. I forced myself to place bare feet on cold wooden boards. The chill woke me and I moved quickly to intercept the shrieking phone. My client’s urgent whisper got me dressed and out of the house in less than fifteen minutes.

Damn. Damn. Damn. Chaney was supposed to stall. The blackmailer’s call wasn’t supposed to come so soon. Yes, after midnight qualified as Friday, but the blackmailer was rushing the drop, and while I managed to reach Roz, who was sleeping at her boyfriend Lemon’s dojo, who knew if she’d get into position in time? Who knew if I would?

The blackmailer must have picked the time because of the weather. I pulled my hood over my head, tucking wisps of soaked hair inside, and imagined him praying for just such a night. May, ha; more like November, chilly, with a nasty northeast wind that drove the rain into my face. My sneakers sank into the muddy grass near the edge of the river, and I regretted my choice of footwear. Rubber boots, heavy waders, would have been the thing.

Money drops in books and films take place at midnight. Midnight would have been a good time, trains still running, people on the streets. If it had been midnight, I could have anticipated a trip to Chinatown for a steaming bowl of hot-and-sour soup. No such luck. It was 3:37, the drop was set for 4:05, and anybody on the streets was heading to an early shift at a hospital or looking for someone to mug.

I hugged my shoulders, shivered, and told myself the empty streets were a good thing. Easy to follow the guy with so few people on the street. Easier for him to spot me, my subconscious snapped back. Or Roz. I told my subconscious to shut up. I knew we might not be able to follow him, or her. The key was identity — getting a photo, matching it to a suspect.

Lemon’s dark paneled van would be parked on the bridge or circling the rotary. I raised my head, but I could barely see with the damn rain sheeting down. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I let them roam the landscape, checking for new or different shadows.

The payoff spot wasn’t the small lot behind Thompson Hall. The scene had shifted to the old stone bathhouse at Magazine Beach. For years, I’d thought Cambridge’s Magazine Beach and Magazine Street were named for some sprightly Colonial digest that had built its offices in the area. Not so. Magazine Beach is the site of a military powder magazine built on what used to be an island in the Charles River. Captain’s Island, it was called, and its isolated nature and defensible hill recommended it for the storage of highly flammable gunpowder. In 1899, the stones of the defunct powder magazine were reused to build a bathhouse for the new beach down by the filled marshes. When the beach closed in the fifties, the bathhouse was shut down.

These days, it’s waiting for renovation; meanwhile, it’s used to store equipment for the muddy playing fields nearby. Less than half a mile from the BU Bridge, it’s isolated, ill-lit, and eerily deserted. The main path sends people forty feet up the riverbank, along Memorial Drive. The rusty pedestrian bridge at Magazine Street further discourages traffic. Night like this, even teens searching for a lover’s lane would stay away.

My beeper was set to silent pulse. Roz, from her perch on or near the bridge, equipped with a night-vision scope, was supposed to signal any approaching pedestrian, any car that slowed and parked. Three times, Cambridge cops had sped by with cherry lights flashing. The same man had passed twice on Rollerblades. I rocked slowly on the balls of my feet, as though I were standing a beat. Rain dripped down my neck in spite of the hood, and I wondered if I had a hole in my jacket.

I poked my nose a few inches from my watch to check the time. My client was due in fifteen minutes. He had his orders. Park in the elementary school lot across the street, walk over the pedestrian bridge, cut through the baseball field, drop a backpack filled with cash over the stone wall behind the bathhouse. Get lost.

I’d parked in the turnoff near the MDC pool, built to make up for the polluted beach. The turnoff was posted
NO VEHICLE ENTRY
, and I was hoping my car wouldn’t get towed or, more likely, stolen. I’d removed my bicycle from the trunk, stashed it behind a shrub. I was currently lurking behind the pool, doing an imitation of a bag lady. I thought it most likely the guy would have a car parked nearby, but who knew? Cambridge, you can’t count on a car. He might be a runner, a biker, a blader. Any of those activities would camouflage him once he reached the path. Cops wouldn’t stop a citizen exercising along the Charles. Even in the predawn hours. Even in a rainstorm.

I checked my watch again; it hadn’t moved. Things weren’t exactly going according to plan. My idea was that the guy would be in position long before my client showed with the money. What kind of urban blackmailer trusts to the fact that no street person is going to show in between drop time and whenever he finds it convenient to claim the cash? Cash isn’t like a check payable only to you. Money is money, finders keepers.

My pocket jiggled. I saw a shadow cross the bridge and I tensed, ready to move. If it was my client, he was right on time, but as far as I could tell, there was no one in the vicinity to receive the package. Maybe Chaney had gotten the information wrong, the night wrong. Maybe this was a dry run, to see how well he obeyed orders.

It was Chaney, on foot. He did his stuff with dispatch, moving briskly. I’d warned him not to wait around, not to look for me or for the blackmailer. “Play it by the book and leave,” I’d told him. He followed orders.

I focused on the backpack through the camera lens, barely distinguishing its rectangular bulk from the shadows and the bushes. I kept the camera to my eye and scanned the horizon. I waited for the beeper to shake and I listened. The occasional car thundered hollowly across the raised bridge over the rotary. I thought I heard a car pull into the turning where I’d parked. A stray dog snuffled at my bicycle. I shifted my feet, shooed him off, and took a quick hit from the flask in my pocket. I’d been strictly rationing the brandy because I didn’t want to have to find a place to pee.

Rain poured down. The Charles is broad and placid at Magazine Beach. The sound of the river hadn’t played a role in the night symphony, and it took me a while to classify the new noise, the soft rhythmic splashing, barely noticeable at first, then louder. Deliberate. It hit me suddenly that I hadn’t taken the river into account. Denali Brinkman had been a rower; she’d have had friends who were rowers. I hadn’t considered the river for what it was, a roadway. Damn. How could I follow if the blackmailer traveled on the river?

I ordered myself to relax. The important thing was identification. I trained my camera lens on the water, trying to get a fix on the rhythmic splashes. It was difficult to pinpoint the origin of the sound. Upstream toward Harvard and the Weld Boathouse? Downstream toward the lower Charles, the river basin?

The small boat came into focus, a kayak like the one Denali’s roommate had described. Maybe Denali hadn’t stored all her possessions in the boathouse. Maybe the kayak, like the blackmail letters, hadn’t burned. I held my breath and pressed the shutter. I didn’t need a flash. I had a fancy night-shot rig Roz had borrowed from Lemon.

I stayed in the shadows while the kayaker tied his craft off on a small tree and clambered up the bank, his feet making squelching noises in the mud. He used a small pencil flash to locate the backpack, then grabbed it. I focused on the money, took three more shots. The shutter click sounded as loud as one of the old cannons I imagined defending the site of the powder magazine in the old days, but the blackmailer didn’t seem to hear. He wore a hood drawn up over his head, but I thought I caught the pale oval of a face. Good. If he’d had the presence of mind to wear a face mask, I’d have been out of luck.

I made a mental note of the black pants, the black hooded parka. Medium height, medium build. Rower’s shoulders. My gut said the boyfriend, the ex-con.

I waited in the shadows till he pushed off. I could have followed him upriver or down, but if he crossed the water, made for the Boston side, I’d be stuck. I grabbed my bike and carried it to the car, dialing my cell phone as I moved.

“Roz, get up on the bridge. Heading toward the center of the Charles from Magazine Beach in a kayak.”

“A kayak? Like a fucking Eskimo?”

“Find it, Roz.”

“Can’t see it.” She sounded annoyed. “You didn’t tell me to watch for boats.”

“I know.”

“Aren’t boats supposed to have lights?”

“Yeah. I guess he forgot his.”

“Dumb remark, huh?”

“See him?”

There are rules on the river, rules that govern which way you can launch from which boathouse, and under which arches of which bridge you can pass in which direction. The bow light should be red and green, red for port, green for starboard; the stern light should be white. But those rules were for racing shells and coaching launches, and I didn’t think they held for blackmailers rowing kayaks in the middle of stormy nights.

“I think I see something down there,” Roz muttered.

“Upstream or downstream?”

“Heading toward downtown, keeping midstream.”

That would be the clever course, downstream to travel more quickly, keeping to the middle of the river till he could decide whether anyone was in pursuit. But where would he come ashore?

I started the car’s engine. The heater felt glorious.

“Do you want us to follow him?”

“Us” meant Roz and Lemon. She’s never learned to drive. I’ve been after her, have even volunteered as her instructor, but since Lemon jumps to chauffeur her around, she sees no reason to expand her skills.

“Follow a fucking boat?”

That was Lemon, in the background. He sounded sleepy and crabby, and knowing Lemon, he was probably high on whatever was stashed in the glove compartment. The chances of my Toyota or Lemon’s van drawing a cop seemed higher than the chances of either of us getting a better photo op.

“Forget it,” I said. “Go home.”

I warmed my hands on the heater vents and thought about how neatly the blackmailer had handled the pickup. Then I drove to 157 Claremont Street, a triple-decker on a narrow street near the Somerville line. The parking was tight. I didn’t want to stick the car in front of a driveway or a fire hydrant, didn’t want anything to look odd or out of place. I had to circle the block three times before a man in green scrubs hurried out of an apartment across the street from my target and moved his well-placed Volvo.

Then I waited. I have a love-hate relationship with surveillance. It’s filled with potential. Anything can happen at any time. You soak up the atmosphere of an area of the city you might not have appreciated before. After awhile, it gets goddamned boring. And then you have to pee.

At least it was dry inside the car. I took off my jacket and inspected it. Hole right in the damned collar.

Two hours and thirteen minutes later, a black TransAm with a kayak strapped to the roof turned into the narrow driveway next to 157. The garage door didn’t operate from an automatic opener, so the figure in black had to get out and expose himself to the elements.

Bingo. The Claremont Street address was Benjy Dowling’s. I didn’t even need to snap another photo, but I did.

I couldn’t have been asleep more than twenty
minutes when the phone rang. I rolled over and stared at it in dismay, hoping my glance would fry it, but I never considered letting the machine pick up. Ex-cops are tough; we answer the phone.

“Did he come? Did you follow him?”

Light streamed through the flimsy curtains and tried to blind me. I blinked. It felt like someone had removed my right eyeball, rolled it in sand, and reinserted it. “Professor Chaney?”

“Were you asleep? I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have called so early, but I won’t be reachable later today. I’ll be at the lab, a conference with investors, not the sort of thing I can interrupt. So I just — I felt I needed to know.”

“I got him,” I said.

“Got who?”

“Not the sort of person you’ll be able to convince with words.”

“Is it someone I work with? Someone I know?”

“Look, go to your meeting and try to relax. There’s a good chance this will all work out, and soon.”

“You really think so?”

“Yes. Good night.”

I hung up. It wasn’t night, of course, but my body was confused. I tried to get back to sleep, but it wasn’t any good. I’d sleepily reassured my anxious client that everything would work out even though I had no reason to suspect it would, and I couldn’t rest with that on my plate. I wasn’t making any progress on the case lying in bed.

I got up and hit the shower. Sometimes a long shower — hot water, hair scrub, cold-water finish — is almost as good as a night’s sleep. I wrapped my dripping hair in a towel, my body in a red chenille robe, and went down to the kitchen to make coffee.

When I started at the Academy, I thought cops had it in for ex-offenders. The whole cop attitude, I thought, reeked of that final scene in the old film
Casablanca
, the one where the French cop says, “Round up the usual suspects.” The French cop knows who did it, knows who killed the nasty Nazi major, but the usual guys are gonna get rousted, and probably one of them will wind up doing the time.

That’s how I used to feel. Then I worked the city, and damn if the same guys didn’t keep pulling the same shit over and over again. It pissed me off, the way they refused to learn from their mistakes.

What I’d learned on the streets told me Chaney hadn’t a prayer of convincing Dowling that he hadn’t struck gold with those love letters. If little Jeannie or one of her university pals had shown last night, the story might have been different. But Dowling was it, and I didn’t see him as an easy nut to crack.