Spare Change Read online

  “The civil libertarians got a better way to catch him,” Quirk said, “I’m eager to hear it.”

  The meeting unspooled with reasonable efficiency, for a meeting. Mostly because nobody knew anything and it doesn’t take very long to explain that.

  At the end of the meeting, the mayor came over to my father and me as we stood to leave.

  “Is this your daughter, Phil?”

  “Sunny,” my father said, “short for Sonya.”

  “The younger one,” the mayor said.

  “Yeah.”

  The mayor smiled at me and put out his hand.

  “I remember you as a baby,” he said. “I was running for city council from Hyde Park, your father used to drive me sometimes when he was off-duty. I understand you were on the job for a while.”

  “I was.”

  “And now you’re helping the old man.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “That’s great,” the mayor said. “That’s great.”

  6

  We were in my father’s small office at the new, spiffy police headquarters when Quirk came in with a mildly overweight man wearing flip-flops and one of those white Mexican dress shirts that hang out. This one had vertical black embroidery on the front. His hair was sand-colored and curly. He wore oval-shaped glasses with black rims.

  “Timothy DeVoe,” Quirk said. “Phil Randall, and Sunny Randall. They are working on the case.”

  We said how do you do. DeVoe’s eyes, behind the black-rimmed glasses, were red.

  “Mr. DeVoe,” Quirk said, “is Eugene Nevins’s partner.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. DeVoe,” my father said.

  “We both are,” I said.

  “Thank you,” DeVoe said.

  “Mr. DeVoe has confirmed the identification for us this morning,” Quirk said.

  “Are you okay to talk?” my father said.

  “Yes,” DeVoe said.

  My father gestured him to a chair.

  “When you’ve talked,” Quirk said, “bring Mr. DeVoe back to my office and I’ll have someone take him home.”

  My father nodded and Quirk left.

  “Can you think of any reason why someone would kill your partner?” my father said.

  DeVoe shook his head slowly and kept shaking it.

  “He wore a wedding ring,” I said. “Were you and he married?”

  DeVoe held out his own left hand. He, too, was wearing a wedding ring.

  “The day after the law passed,” he said.

  DeVoe’s voice was shaky.

  “Were you together long before that?” I said.

  “We were together twenty-five years,” he said.

  “Anyone ever threaten either of you?” my father said.

  “No. No one seemed to mind about the wedding thing.”

  “And no one threatened you or Mr. Nevins about anything else?”

  “No. We were discreet, always. You know, we didn’t kiss in public or hold hands on the street, that sort of thing.”

  I could see my father breathe a little deeper.

  “Did you have any trouble, either of you, from anyone, for reasons other than your sexual orientation,” my father said. “Any trouble. Any reason.”

  “Oh, no. God, no. We were very quiet.”

  My father nodded.

  “Where did Mr. Nevins work?” my father said.

  “I’ve told the other policemen all this already.”

  “I know,” my father said. “I’m sorry. But it’s one of the ways we do business, more than one of us asks you the same things.”

  “We run a small picture framing business on Boylston Street.”

  “In the Fenway area?”

  “Yes,” DeVoe said.

  He gave us the address.

  “Both of you worked there?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Business do okay?”

  “It was enough for the two of us,” DeVoe said. “Our needs are…were simple.”

  “So no financial problems,” my father said. “No big debts, not behind in rent or anything.”

  “No. We paid our bills and took a trip every Christmas…somewhere warm.”

  “Any enemies?” my father said.

  “No, I told you, we were a very quiet couple.”

  And so it went on. As it had how many times before? With how many sad people? All the same questions, mostly useless, but necessary to ask.

  “Was there anyone else in Mr. Nevins’s life?”

  “He had a brother and sister.”

  “What are their names?”

  And we’d talk to the brother and sister, and in-laws and nephews or nieces and friends and store customers, and we’d ask the same intrusive, tiresome, necessary questions that had so far in this case produced nothing. They were still being asked of those who knew the young black man who’d been the first in this second round. His name had been Theodore Eustis. He’d been a sophomore accounting major at BC.

  “Friends?”

  He gave us some names.

  “Any other—I’m sorry, I have to ask—intimate relationships?”

  DeVoe began to cry. As he cried he shook his head. My father waited. Slowly DeVoe got control.

  “You think just because we’re gay…” DeVoe said.

  “I think nothing except I have to ask the questions,” my father said. “I ask them of everybody.”

  He pushed a box of Kleenex across the desk. DeVoe took one and blotted his eyes and blew his nose. I pushed the wastebasket beside the desk around to where he could reach it.

  “I know,” DeVoe said. “I know you have to say what you say. I know that.”

  “How about other friends and acquaintances,” my father said. “Could you give us a list of them?”

  “I already told the other policemen I would do that,” DeVoe said.

  He was wearing down.

  “I can’t just rattle them all off. I’ll go home, go through our addresses. I’ll e-mail them to you.”

  “Okay,” my father said. “Just give me the first, oh, five you can think of.”

  “God,” DeVoe said. “I already did that, too.”

  “We don’t vary much,” my father said. “We all do the routine.”

  DeVoe took in a breath and let it out and listed three women and two men. My father wrote them down without comment.

  “Why are we going through all this?” DeVoe said. “I know you’re not being mean. But, damn, isn’t it obvious that it’s the Spare Change Killer?”

  “We don’t know it for a fact,” my father said. “But even if we did. He’s got to have a name. He’s got to be somebody’s acquaintance.”

  “Well, he’s not one of ours,” DeVoe said.

  My father nodded.

  “I know this is difficult, Mr. DeVoe,” he said. “Do you have any employees at the frame shop?”

  And so it went for another forty-five minutes, until DeVoe was drained dry and looked it. When I walked him back to Quirk’s office, he was perfectly silent. When I said good-bye outside Quirk’s office, he nodded silently. I left him slumped in an office chair, waiting for a ride home, and went back to my father.

  “That was awful,” I said.

  “It always is,” he said.

  “And will be again,” I said.

  7

  It was a Sunday afternoon in my parents’ backyard. I was drinking beer with my father. My sister, Elizabeth, had white wine, and my mother was drinking bourbon on the rocks. She always drank bourbon on the rocks. When my mother settled on something, she was slow to change.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” I said. “Sealing off the crime scene?”

>   “Won’t do any harm,” my father said.

  Elizabeth had the same blond hair I did, though she was more aggressively blond than I was. We’d gotten our hair color from our mother, from whom Elizabeth had also gotten her taste in clothes. Today she was wearing big, round sunglasses and a pink dress with a low square neck and big puffy sleeves. She leaned forward and poured another glass of white wine.

  “Don’t you think this is a great wine?” she said.

  No one commented that she was the only one drinking it.

  “Spare Change doesn’t seem dumb,” I said. “If he is hanging around, won’t he ditch the gun the minute he spots a search coming?”

  “Probably, but we might catch him doing it, and even if we don’t, we’ll have a murder weapon. He might get flustered. Maybe we’ll get a print.”

  “A man I’m seeing,” Elizabeth said, “brought a case of this back from Napa Valley. He’s a Harvard professor.”

  My father reached across the table and picked up Elizabeth’s glass and took a sip. He swallowed and thought about it. He had on a short-sleeved maroon polo shirt, and his arms were still thick and muscular.

  “Excellent,” he said. “I’m not a wine drinker, but that’s very good.”

  He gave the glass back to Elizabeth.

  “It’ll be a media circus,” I said to my father. “Especially if we don’t find anything.”

  “It’s already a media circus,” my father said. “It was a media circus twenty years ago.”

  “What are you two talking about,” my mother said. “The two of you, thick as thieves.”

  “Just the usual,” my father said, “cop stuff.”

  He got up and went to the cooler by the porch and got out a bottle of beer. He looked at me. I had half a bottle left. I shook my head. My mother watched him and then looked at me. She was wearing a bright blue pantsuit with a big sparkly flower embroidered on the front of the top.

  “You should drink wine anyway,” my mother said. “It’s not ladylike, drinking beer.”

  “Maybe bourbon,” I said.

  “I trust bourbon,” my mother said. She didn’t pronounce the r. “I know just how much I can handle.”

  I nodded and sipped my beer from the bottle. In fact, I didn’t like it all that much. But Daddy did.

  “I prefer wine,” Elizabeth said. “I’m reading a book about wine now. It’s really interesting sometimes to try different ones.”

  Daddy came back with his beer and sat down.

  “My friend, the Harvard professor, and I go sometimes to wine tastings,” Elizabeth said. “We match the right wine with the right cheese, you know. It takes some learning, but the results are worth the trouble. My Harvard professor friend says he’s going to get me a book on cheese.”

  “What is his name, dear?” my mother said.

  “Charles,” my sister said.

  “Charles what, dear?” my mother said.

  She rattled the ice in her empty glass and held the glass toward my father. He stood, took her glass, and went to get her another drink.

  “Dr. Charles Strasser,” Elizabeth said.

  “Is he a Jew?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “He’s German.”

  “From Germany?”

  “No, I mean he’s of German ancestry.”

  My father brought my mother her new drink. She took it and sipped some.

  “A lot of Harvard people are Jews,” my mother said.

  “You assume he’ll continue,” I said to my father.

  “No reason to think he won’t.”

  “It’s funny,” I said. “I’m sort of rooting for him to keep on.”

  “I know,” my father said.

  “I don’t want anyone else to die,” I said. “But if he doesn’t continue, we’ll never catch him.”

  “Oh, blah, blah, blah,” my mother said. “Why can’t you ever talk about anything interesting?”

  She was already starting to slur her s’s.

  “It’s not even something women should be talking about,” she said. “Are you dating anyone?”

  “Not at the moment,” I said.

  “And no wonder,” my mother said. “Men like girls, not cops, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m not actually a cop anymore, Mom,” I said.

  “Cop, shmop,” my mother said. “You know what I mean. Who do you think you’ll meet hanging around with cops.”

  “Maybe a man,” I said. “Just like the man who married dear old Mom.”

  My mother didn’t understand what I’d said. I could tell by the momentary flicker of fear in her eyes, before she hid it with bellicosity.

  “And there’s nobody going to want to marry a smarty pants, either,” she said.

  “I think Sunny was saying you married a cop and it hasn’t been so bad,” my father said.

  “And if you’d listened to me, you could have been commissioner,” she said.

  My father smiled at her.

  “Always been my problem, Em,” my father said. “Too soon old, too late smart.”

  My mother offered him her empty glass. My father took it and went to get her another drink. I got up and went with him.

  In the kitchen, I said to Daddy, “I thought she knew how much she could handle.”

  “She does,” my father said, and smiled at me. “But she doesn’t give a shit.”

  8

  The next murder site was nearly perfect for the seal-off-and-search plan. The body of a young woman in a summer dress was found by a swan boat pedaler coming to work. It was facedown in three feet of water, bumping gently against one of the swan boats at the dock. On the dock, right by the edge, were a nickel, a dime, and a quarter. Several ducks were swimming about the dock curiously. The Public Garden was fenced and sealable. The only drawback was that at the beginning of a workday, it was full of people.

  By the time my father and I arrived, there were cops at every gate and patrol cars slowly circling the Public Garden in case someone tried to climb the fence. Lines formed at each gate. Everyone protested that they’d be late to work. Cops don’t care about stuff like that. These cops didn’t, either. The lines got longer.

  More cops, in uniform and plain clothes, were going over the park a foot at a time. The ducks had gone to one end of the swan-boat pond. The squirrels and pigeons trailed around near the cops, hoping that a peanut might appear. Reporters and photographers and TV cameras mingled with them. My father and I stood with Captain Quirk on the small bridge over the pond in the center of the garden. A woman approached us. She was tall and austere and reeked of Beacon Hill the way my father reeked of cop.

  “Are you in charge,” she said to Quirk.

  “Of almost everything,” Quirk said.

  “I wish to register my strongest possible complaint.”

  “Except that,” Quirk said, “I’m not in charge of complaints.”

  “I will not be patronized,” she said. “This detention without due process is outrageous.”

  It was nearly noon. I knew that Quirk had been at the crime scene for a long time before we arrived.

  “Young woman’s death is pretty outrageous, too,” Quirk said.

  “Tragic,” the woman said. “And you think detaining innocent citizens in the course of meeting their responsibilities is the way to solve it.”

  Quirk closed his eyes and stretched his neck for a moment. Then he opened his eyes and looked at her. Not many people could do the dead-eyed-cop look better than Martin Quirk.

  “Lady,” he said. “Fuck off.”

  The woman jumped as if she’d been poked. I put my hand on her arm.

  I said, “Captain’s had a long day, ma’am. Here, I’ll walk with you over to this gate. Maybe we can squeeze you through
a little quicker.”

  The woman had bright red spots on her cheekbones. Her breath seemed a little short. She came with me without speaking. The line wasn’t any shorter, in fact, at this gate, onto Arlington Street. But, from my days on the job, I knew one of the cops checking people through. I winked at him and jerked my head at the woman. He nodded.

  “Annie,” he said to the female cop searching women. “This lady is next.”

  I turned the woman over to Annie. Someone in the line said, “Hey, how come she gets special treatment?”

  The cop I knew looked at him and shot him with a forefinger. Then he began to pat down a black man at the front of the line. I went back to the bridge.

  At ten minutes to one a sergeant named Belson, standing by a flower bed full of yellow tulips, put his fingers in his mouth and whistled to Quirk. Quirk nodded and walked over. My father and I went with him. In the bed, under some low leaves but not out of sight, was a black handgun.

  “We got here quick enough,” Quirk said. “He ditched it.”

  “So he was here,” I said.

  “If it’s his,” my father said.

  “You want to bet we don’t match it with the bullet in the girl?”

  “No,” my father said.

  Quirk, Belson, my father, and I all looked slowly around the still-sealed-off park. Nobody said anything. Nothing presented itself. After a long moment, Quirk squatted on his haunches and studied the gun.

  “Smith and Wesson,” he said, “revolver…” He bent over to look at the barrel opening. “Thirty-eight.”

  He leaned forward onto his hands and straightened his legs and did a kind of pushup so he could smell the gun.

  “Been fired recently.”

  He eased out of the pushup and got his feet under him and resumed his squat.

  “But not in this flower patch,” he said, “unless he bothered to clean up his brass.”

  “I’d look over there,” Belson said, and nodded at the swan boat dock.

  Quirk continued to sit on his haunches, looking at the flower bed.

  “Stay with this, Frank,” Quirk said. “I’ll get some crime-scene techs over here, but I want you to be the only one touches the gun, okay?”