The Crossword Connection (2 page)

Jones chortled. “The right kind of exercise, Al. That's all you need for a physique like mine.”

“Right.”

The three men sucked at their coffee cups. In the cool, dim light, Jones's teeth shone like bright, white neon. Lever was right; Absalom “Abe” Jones was far and away the best-looking man in the police department, as many women in Newcastle could attest. A solid six feet, and bearing a strong resemblance to a youthful Harry Belafonte, Abe took enormous pleasure in baiting his boss. He mocked an exaggerated yawn. “Man, I'll tell ya, I got no sleep at all last night.”

“I don't want to hear about it, Abe.”

“Some women just don't know when to stop, if you know what I mean. Ever been with a lady like that, Al?”

Lever coughed again. “Spare us, please. For your information, I didn't get any sleep last night either.” His coughing jag increased. “Damn allergies. They kept me up all night.”

“Springtime, Al. The birds and the bees and pollen all over the place.”

The lieutenant chuckled. Then he brought his gaze back to the body in the alley. His face went sour. “I don't like this situation, Abe.”

“You're not supposed to like it. A man's dead. Why would you like it?”

“I mean, look at this poor schmo. What'd he have going for him? And to end up like this? A wasted life, if you ask me.”

“We don't know that. To begin with, we don't have positive identification. He could've been a doctor or a judge at one point. It wouldn't be the first time an educated person hit the skids.… Things get out of control, and it can be a long spiral down.”

Lever sighed, walked the thirty feet to where Adams Alley met Seventh Street, stubbed out his cigarette on a wall, and carefully put the remainder in his pocket. He watched as an early morning crosstown bus pushed east. He then ambled back to the dead man. “So, Abe, what did you turn up with your preliminary?”

“The crime appears to be pretty cut and dried.” Jones pointed to a plastic bag containing a rectangular piece of granite. “You see this cobblestone? There are clear traces of blood and matted hair. I'm assuming that this is your murder weapon. Someone slammed it into the victim's skull … once, only … from my initial examination. I'll dust the weapon and that liquor bottle over there for prints, pick up those stray cigar butts, and pull DNA samples. But that's about it. Nothing else appears out of the ordinary.… Nothing that doesn't belong to a back alley. Well, there are some tire marks up closer to Eighth Street.” He pointed casually. “I'll check them out, but I'm not optimistic they're connected.”

Lever sighed but didn't speak. He kept his hands in his pockets.

“Hey … Al … It happens all the time, all across America. These homeless guys get liquored up, fight over a bottle, and one of them ends up clobbering the other. Sooner or later, the person who did this will walk into your office and spill his guts so that he can get a dry place to sleep and three squares for the rest of his life.”

“Yeah, but if your scenario's correct, where are the signs of a struggle? I'm looking, but I don't see any. There's the guy's bed, a comfy nest of newspapers. He props up his head with the comics section and drifts off into dreamland. People arguing over a bottle don't die peacefully in bed. We don't even have a little broken glass here.”

“Being hit in the head with a fifteen-pound lump of stone isn't exactly a peaceful death, Al. Besides, motive's your department, not mine. Maybe our victim stole the pint of booze, and the former owner came after him. Found the bottle empty—which it is—and nailed the thief in his sleep. Tempers often run short among these marginal types, especially when they're hording something important.”

Lever thought. He turned his attention to Wallace. “Nothing remotely valuable on the body?”

“Not in immediate evidence, sir. Maybe the ME will turn up something interesting during the autopsy.”

Lever took another swig of his coffee. “Something's really wrong here.”

Abe Jones gave him a comradely grin. “You need a day off, Al. That's all.”

“The guy went to sleep on
Peanuts,
for Pete's sake. You know, Charlie Brown, Snoopy …”

“Speaking of Snoopy, Wallace found dog food in the victim's pockets.”

“What?”

Wallace answered, “That's right, sir. Three small cans; the kind with snap-off lids. A fourth empty can containing a plastic fork sat beside the body.”

Lever let out another weary sigh.

Jones touched his shoulder. “A homeless guy on a binge, Al. What else can you say? He was reduced to eating dog food.… They say cat food tastes like tuna. Dog food … I don't know. I hope I never have to find out.”

“Poor schmo.”

Patrolman Wallace interrupted them. “Carlyle's here with the morgue wagon, Lieutenant. Looks like he wants to back it down the alley.”

Lever glanced at Jones for approval.

“Sure, tell him it's okay,” Abe said. “But ask him to stay back fifteen feet until I finish processing.”

Lever watched in silence as Newcastle's dark gray morgue wagon eased down the alley. The steady beep-beep of the reverse warning signal pierced the cool morning air, bouncing off the empty industrial buildings, the fire escapes, and grungy, broken windows. Eventually, the van came to a halt, and the noise subsided. Carlyle, the medical examiner, stepped from the passenger's side, slipping on latex surgical gloves as he did.

“What have we got?”

Lever spoke. “Dead John Doe, no ID. See what you can piece together. I'll need a time of death. Not that it'll do much good.…” His words trailed off.

“Uh-oh.” Carlyle looked at Jones. “Do we have a depressed lieutenant on our hands?”

“He just doesn't like to see Charlie Brown bloodied up. Reminds him of his own mortality.”

Carlyle gave Jones a thin smile as he bent down to examine the body. “I'd say this guy's been dead for two or three hours. Maybe longer, judging from the dried blood. But then again, newspaper can often soak up blood more rapidly than cloth. I won't be able to supply an exact time until I perform an autopsy. He didn't suffer, if that makes you feel better, Al. This was quick, and definitely premeditated. Someone didn't like this guy. If he was a mobster, we'd be calling it a hit.”

Lever and Jones watched as Carlyle finished the prelim. He made notations on a form attached to a stainless steel clipboard; when he'd finished, his driver appeared with a black plastic body bag. He and Carlyle placed the victim in it, zipped it up, then positioned the bag on a stretcher, which they wheeled into the morgue van. Carlyle closed the van's doors and turned to Lever.

“I'll try to get the information by noon, Al. This alley gives me the chills.… Always has.”

“It's just an alleyway.”

Carlyle looked at Lever. “It's not a place I'd walk down at night.”

After the van disappeared, Lever and Jones studied the saturated newspapers. The blood was still sticky where the body had been; in other spots, it was dry.

“Have you ever known anything to give Carlyle the chills?” Lever asked somewhat rhetorically. “Penguins get more chills than he does.”

Jones chuckled, “He's an odd one, all right.… Hmmm, this is interesting.”

“What's that?”

“Look at the papers. John Doe used a local newspaper, the
Evening Crier,
to sleep on. But his head rested on the
Boston Sentinel.”

“He probably pulled whatever he could find out of the recycling bin over there.” Lever cocked his head toward a large wheeled plastic cart. It was piled high with discarded newspapers and magazines with a number of empty bottles and cans semisubmerged in the morass. A garbagey odor rose from the container, and a furtive scuffle indicated the stealthy presence of rats. “Or, maybe he likes the comics. The ones in the
Crier
stink. They never did have
Peanuts.”

“I'll see if I can lift some prints from the paper bin.”

Lever stared at the blood-soaked papers. “Right. Whatever you do, Abe, don't chuck these babies back inside it. Might not sit well with the neighbors.”

CHAPTER 3

“The word begins with a
C
,” Belle said gently, “not a
K.”
She pointed to the lined-paper practice notebook the other woman was laboring over. It was full of snippets of poetry, beginnings of stories, phrases heard and jotted down, and sidebar doodles that reflected a hidden artistic talent.

“Like in Sister Mary Catherine?”

“Exactly, Rayanne! Just like Sister Mary Catherine!” Belle gave her student's shoulder a quick, affectionate pat. “Courage,” she said. “C-O-U-R-A-G-E. The word has
heart
at its center. Two thousand years ago, in what is now Italy,
cor
meant heart.”

Rayanne stared at the notebook. “How'd you get to know stuff like that? Is it on accounta you working at the newspaper?”

Belle considered her answer. She and Rayanne were both in their early thirties: two healthy women of medium height and slender build whose only outward physical difference was that Rayanne had brown hair and Belle was a blond. Technically, they should have had equality in choices and careers, but their dual backgrounds had obviously presented such a disparity of opportunities that it was only Belle Graham who had learned that education mattered, and only Belle who had been taught to value self-respect and pride.

“I know about language, Rayanne, because it fascinates me, and I've worked hard studying it. The same way you work on your poetry and all those stories you've begun.”

Rayanne's face clouded with an old habit of frustration and anxiety. “But I can't spell like—”

Belle's gray eyes smiled. “I'll tell you a secret, Ray. Spelling's not nearly as important as the emotions you intuit and experience.… All the thoughts you've expressed in your notebook.”

“I can't get a job if I can't spell. That's what Sister Mary Catherine says.”

“Well, she's right. That's why you and I are working together.”

“You gonna make me do crossword puzzles like the ones you put in the newspaper?” Rayanne asked this in jest, and Belle just as lightheartedly responded, “I'm not about to force you to do anything you don't want. Besides, Ray, you'd win hands down. My idea of exercise is picking up a dictionary.”

“Brains and brawn, you and me.”

Belle grinned. “You know what you've got there, Ray? Alliteration. Two words with repeated consonants … similar sounds.”

“Fear and beer … beaten, cheatin' …”

Belle hesitated. Her students' struggles and life stories often came out in unexpected ways. “Those are rhymes actually, Ray. Did you put them in your new poem?”

Seated side by side at cast-off school desks, the women returned to Rayanne's notebook. As a volunteer with the Margaret House Shelter, the women's counterpart to Father Tom's Saint Augustine Mission for Men, Belle had quickly discovered that her efforts at teaching literacy fared better if the students' own words were used. Encouraged to write autobiographies or fiction, the women had ownership of the letters on the page. And ownership, Belle knew from experience, was empowerment.

“What's that Italian word for heart again, Belle?”

“Cor.
It's Latin. That was the language of Italy then. Just as you and I are speaking English. Or some folks around here speak Portuguese or Spanish or Greek. Then
cor
evolved into
cuer,
an old French word that's become
coeur
today. But even before
cor,
there was the ancient Greek
kardia,
which gives us the root for cardiac—”

Rayanne's pencil flew in the air. “You're giving me cardiac arrest!”

Belle beamed. “You've got it!”

It was then that the shelter's director, Sister Mary Catherine, walked into the room. She was in her midsixties, a person of indefatigable energy and zeal who had grown up on a Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona, been educated by nuns, taken vows herself, then devoted her life to teaching the most impoverished in the nation before moving to Newcastle and beginning a new career at the shelter she and Sister Zoe had helped establish. “This city!” she said, sinking heavily in a nearby chair. It was an uncharacteristic gesture of weariness and defeat.

Rayanne looked at her, immediately nervous and fearful. She bit her lip and curled her gnawed fingertips into her palms. “They gonna get the building, ain't they, Sister?”

“Not if I can help it.” Sister Mary Catherine forced a tight smile, then deftly changed the subject. “How's our star pupil?”

“Creating alliterations and rhymes,” Belle answered. “And a super poem about courage.”

Sister Mary Catherine nodded, but her mouth remained grim, the only discordant element in an otherwise grandmotherly demeanor.

“Is it the Peterman brothers?” Rayanne asked.

The nun paused before speaking. Belle could see her weighing how much information to share with one of the mission residents and then deciding that knowledge was the first stepping-stone to responsibility. “Yes, it's the Peterman brothers, Rayanne, plus a close friend of theirs who sits on the City Council.… Also a Canadian real estate enterprise, some female venture capitalist from New York … and that's only the folks that have come forward publicly.

“When Father Tom established the Saint Augustine Mission and Sister Zoe and I started Margaret House, who knew that this part of Newcastle would become a ‘hot property'? I've actually seen the loft building across the street listed just that way in a real estate advertisement. ‘Hot property' indeed.” She turned to Belle. “Oh, yes, I've heard the hateful rumors those money grubbers have been spreading. The shelters ‘attract undesirables'; we ‘encourage the criminal element'. Give me a break! God and Mammon: No man can serve two masters.”