Lie Down with the Devil (28 page)

“Do you have an emergency number for Guidance Consulting?”

“What do you mean, emergency?”

“Fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, sprinkler system comes on, who you gonna call?”

He searched the file, ran a grubby finger down a page, gave me a number with a 508 area code. That’s central Massachusetts. It also covers the Cape.

“Why is the company closed today?”

“Huh, you sure? Nobody there?”

“Not answering the door.”

“Well, how about that?”

“You know about it?”

“Who says I know anything?” He was almost crowing with secret glee.

“You do, right? Smart guy like you?”

“I just figure they might be closed for good, that’s all,” he said smugly.

“Why?”

“Huh. Having trouble with the equipment, man says to me yesterday. Shredder on the fritz, cleaning out a ton of paper. Says he’s waiting on one of those trucks.”

“What did the man look like?”

“Some man. I don’t pay him no mind.”

“But he’s waiting for a truck?”

“You know, like a shredder on wheels. Porta-shredder, yeah.” He stepped aside to display six well-filled thirty-gallon trash bags stuffed into an alcove beside the furnace.

“I told ’em I’ll burn it for half the price,” the super said with a wide grin. “I did some of the bags, but I’m not finished yet. Been real busy.”

“Can I see what you’ve got left?”

We dickered. I explained that I didn’t intend to pay for bags he might have collected from some other office, some other building, for all I knew. He rolled his wily eyes and professed himself shocked, shocked, that I’d consider the possibility that he might be planning to deceive me.

I peeked into one bag, then another. There was leftover food as well as paper, but the paper belonged to Consortium Guidance.

We held a second round of negotiations, then the super helped me wedge the Hefty bags into the trunk and backseat of Gloria’s Ford. As I drove around the corner, I saw him scurry into the building that housed CGCG, probably rushing to search for a warm body who might make him an offer for information about me.

Mooney found me down by the beach, on a long flat stretch of sand bounded by strategic trash barrels. He cupped his hands and hollered down from the top of the dunes. “Aunt Pat flagged me as I drove in, told me a crazy woman was garbage-barreling down Burke’s Beach.”

I’d hauled a tarp, a rake, and the trash bags from the Marshfield house. “Aunt Pat?”

“All the ladies on the road are my aunts. It’s a neighborhood thing. I feel about five years old here. Having fun?”

“If you can find another rake, I’ll let you help.”

“What a tempting offer. You lose something?”

“Found it.” I jerked my chin to the left.

Mooney followed the gesture, knelt near the place I’d secured a pile of salmon-colored flyers under a hefty stack of stones. “Where’d the trash come from?”

“Consortium Guidance.”

The salmon-colored flyers were identical to the one from Mooney’s pocket. The headline read
STOP PROPOSITION
6!

Mooney said, “I’ll be right back.”

There is no dainty way to sift through thirty-gallon Hefty bags. Primarily office waste, this stuff wasn’t
as bad as some I’ve encountered. No used needles or condoms, but the political consultants ate a lot of pizza, and week-old pepperoni-and-cheese smells none too grand. It was almost enough to make me grateful for the wind that froze my ears. It dissipated the stink.

I had a method: outright garbage to the left, paper and objects of potential interest to the right. The Consortium Guidance Consulting Group read both the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Boston Herald.
They tossed their printer manuals. They did Chinese and sub-shop takeout as well as pizza. Somebody in the office suffered from a bad cold. The wind blew used Kleenex far and wide in spite of my efforts to contain it.

Mooney came over the rise, carrying a broom and a carton of disposable plastic gloves. The gloves would have been in the Buick’s glove compartment, standard-issue cop gear.

“This is so romantic,” he said, gazing at the trash heaps.

I tried to keep a straight face. “No luck with your old Indian?”

“Good chance he’ll recover, but he may never remember what he wanted to tell Thurlow. His daughter’s not sure he remembers his granddaughter’s dead.”

Small mercies, I thought.

“Didn’t attract any followers?” That was Moon’s way of saying he’d taken note of the cab.

“Didn’t go home, didn’t go to Gloria’s.” I hadn’t gone to see Paolina either. The omission troubled me while I told Mooney about the abrupt closure of Consortium Guidance, the encounter with the building super.

“You got a phone number?”

“Roz already tried running it. It’s a phony.”

“Makes it harder to track.”

“Did you have to wait long at the hospital?” I figured we might as well have a little conversation while we sorted and shifted the foul mounds.

“Thurlow wanted to chat.”

“About?”

“Job stuff.”

“You don’t want to talk about it.” The wind spiraled more Kleenex through the air. We’d probably get arrested for littering.

“You made the Boston papers. That’s one thing Thurlow wanted to talk about.”

“The other?”

“Dailey, the Boston fed who’s after my ass.”

“The red-faced guy? He was hanging around Charles River Park. And he stopped me on the road, almost like he wanted me to know he was following me. What’s his game?”

“Wants my badge, wants Gianelli in the joint. Bastard’s loaded for bear. He wasn’t indicted in the Whitey Bulger business, but feeling in the bureau is that he’s dirty.”

“So he’s trying to prove them wrong.”

“Mr. Clean. Gonna put away the dirty copper.”

“Nobody would believe that about you, Moon.”

“Hey, it’s true. I told Gianelli about the indictment, didn’t I? And I know where you are, but I told Thurlow I didn’t.”

I stopped raking garbage. “You did not let Wilder’s murderer walk.”

He met my eyes. “Let’s agree to disagree.”

“But you’re working—”

“I’m working this because you did not run over
that girl. I don’t even know for sure the hit and run reaches back to Nausett.”

“It has to. Julie Farmer links Nausett and Boston. You can’t get away from it. She was Danielle Wilder’s closest friend. She contacted the BIA—”

“Yeah,” Mooney said. “Okay.”

We sorted trash awhile. I batted the rake at an aggressively curious seagull and he squawked off down the beach.

Mooney said, “How long have you had the key to Gianelli’s car?”

“It was in a purse. In one of the boxes that Jonno brought by when he cleared out Sam’s apartment.”

“A mob errand boy.”

“Jonno’s not mob as far as I know. He’s family. His mother married Tony G, but I don’t know that he’s mob. Nardo was angry when Jonno dumped the boxes on me. Like Jonno had overstepped his authority.”

“Nardo’s a stone killer. If they’d found his DNA in the graveyard with the girl’s body—”

I said, “I’d buy it.”

“But you still don’t believe that Gianelli—”

“No.”

The pesky gull started creeping back. When he encroached on the tarp, Mooney took a swing at him this time.

I barely paid attention. I was kneeling in the trash. “Hey, this could be a spreadsheet. Money in, money out.” I held it up for Mooney’s approval.

“Could be polling numbers,” he said.

There was no way to tell. All the numbers were in neat columns. The rest was groups of initials.

“Code?” I said.

“Everybody’s got their own shorthand,” Mooney said.

“Like you’re still officially AWOL with BPD?”

“I’ll work it out.”

A glint of silver caught my eye. Normally I don’t mind getting my hands grimy, since crud washes off, but I was increasingly grateful for Mooney’s plastic gloves. The CD was half-hidden by a rotting banana and too close to a dead mouse.

I held the disc aloft. “Keys to the kingdom?”

“Or a bootleg Michael Jackson concert.” Mooney picked up a filter filled with damp coffee grounds and tossed it aside.

“You’re just jealous ’cause you didn’t see it first.”

Bag Four was the jackpot, but I didn’t realize it at first. There was more paper, a blend of lined notebook stuff and twenty-weight bond, hand-ripped into larger-than-confetti-sized chunks. When I noticed the first matchbook, I swept it into the discard pile. The second one, too, without bothering to read it. When I spotted the third, I noted its similarity to the rest. Then I bent and extracted all of them from the remains of a moldy bag lunch.

“Smoking while in the People’s Republic of Cambridge,” Moon said. “Great. We’ll nail ’em for that.”

The matchbook was glossy green with
FOXWOODS
printed on the front and a sketch of a castle-like tower outlined in deep brown.

I said, “Jessica Franklin had matches just like this in her purse. Along with a deck of cards.”

“Julie Farmer. When did you go through her bag?”

“She spilled it.” I remembered her hands, the assured shuffle so at odds with the tearful eyes. “She knew how to handle cards.”

“Like a pro? Thurlow told me the Nausett Council arranged to apprentice some of their young people at Connecticut casinos.” Mooney peeled off his gloves,
stepped downwind, and extracted his cell from his pocket. He punched buttons, waited till someone—I assumed Thurlow—picked up. “Hey, you know if Julie Farmer ever worked over at a casino? Call back on this line? ASAP. Great.”

There were eight more matchbooks, but no empty cigarette packs or cigarette stubs. There were broken Bic pens, Styrofoam cups, brown paper bags, more rotten fruit with semi-frozen bugs to keep it company.

When the sun started sinking, we repacked the refuse, flattening and consolidating, since one bag had ripped when we had opened it. The wind made the cleanup a tricky, messy job.

“Some date, huh?” Mooney said as we trudged back to the house. He carried the bag of stinking prizes over his shoulder: the mutilated paper, the disc, the matchbooks.

We showered in icy water. The soap, which I hadn’t even noticed before, now smelled terrific. We ate more eggs.

Often I found myself darting glances at Moon when he wasn’t looking, gratified to find that his neck was exactly as I remembered it under the blue shirt collar, his hands strong, the fingernails short and blunt-cut. The confines of the house forced us together. Brushing against each other, even in passing, felt electric.

After we’d eaten, I suggested jigsaw puzzles.

“Sounds like a hot second date.”

We separated scraps of paper, lined and unlined. I’m good at jigsaws. Paolina and I once put together a Monet water lily, the background blue on deeper blue, fading to purple and gray, the pieces positively minute. This was harder. We might not have been able to
reassemble a single page if it hadn’t been for a strategic ketchup stain.

The page had the bullet format of a PowerPoint presentation. Someone had scrawled the word
Strategy
across the top margin in pencil. Underneath:
25 CFR 83.7.

Mooney said, “CFR is Code of Federal Regulations.”

A laptop computer would have come in handy. The document, held together with aged Scotch tape from a kitchen junk drawer, read:

• The Petitioner has been identified as an American Indian Entity on a substantially continuous basis since 1900.
  

  recommend countering this based on 1900–1910 special Indian Schedules of federal census, newspapers, scholarly texts.
  

• A predominant portion of the petitioning group comprises a distinct community and has existed as a distinct community from historical times to the present.
  

  recommend countering this based on close Nausett links with Mashpee Wampanoag.
  

• The Petitioner has maintained political influence or authority over its members as an autonomous entity from historical times to the present.
  

  recommend countering this based on lack of tribal records from 1870-1872, 1910-1912.
  

  Also cite joint 1937 venture with Mashpee Wamps.
  

• A copy of the group’s present governing document including its membership criteria must be submitted.
  

  reworded document ambiguously to cause further delay.
  

• The Petitioner’s membership consists of individuals who descend from a historical Indian tribe.
  

  recommend hiring fraudulent signatories?
  

Mooney gave a low whistle. “It’s a list of the federal criteria for recognition of Indian tribes.” He had been reading over my shoulder. “Complete with suggestions and instructions on ways to screw the tribe.”

Here’s the kicker: The letterhead was the firm of Hastings, Muir, 158 Downe Street, Nausett, Massachusetts. The Nausett tribe’s own attorney, their strongest advocate.

“Refresh my memory,” I said. “Danielle Wilder worked for Hastings how long?”

Traffic was light, and moving briskly. We were encountering more cars now, after crossing the Connecticut border.

Mooney’s hands were easy on the steering wheel. “Years. More than three, almost four. She was going to go to law school and they were going to pay her way.”

I bit my lip and tugged a strand of hair. Under what pressure? What compulsion?

Moon said, “I met him at Mitch Farmer’s, in the upstairs hall, when I was trying to find Julie’s room. Which I never did get to search, by the way.”

“What was he doing upstairs? “Hastings? Cold pills, cough drops. The old man sent him up to—”

“But you said the old man’s bedroom was downstairs. You said you looked into the downstairs rooms and—”

“Should have cuffed him then, for lying to me. Damn.”

“What?”

“Hastings used the word
consortium.
Really. He was yapping about how the community and the banks,
‘a wide consortium of interests,’ all supported the Indians.”

Some support. “And he came to Falmouth Hospital just to hold Alma’s hand,” I said slowly.

“You think Julie’s grandfather caught on?”