Widow’s Walk Read online

  Pike was a tallish guy with narrow shoulders and thinning blond hair that hadn’t been cut. His face was red. When he sat next to me I could smell the booze on him.

  “Jesus Christ, a fucking private detective? How about that? Goddamn. You ever see that movie Chinatown?”

  “What can you tell me about Mary Toricelli?” I said.

  “You know, Jack Nicholson gets his nose cut, and he goes around with this fucking bandage on the whole freakin‘ movie.”

  “That’s just what it’s like,” I said. “Mary Toricelli?”

  “What about her?”

  “What can you tell me about her?” I said.

  “It worth any dough?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Lemme see?”

  I took a twenty out and showed it to him.

  He grinned. “All right!” he said. “Whaddya wanna know?”

  “Whatever you can tell me,” I said.

  “What if it ain’t worth twenty?”

  “Sitting there and saying nothing isn’t worth anything,” I said.

  “So I may as well say something, huh?”

  “May as well,” I said.

  One of the women rolled a strike. Both of them cheered and low fived each other.

  “She turned out to be a lot better-looking than she was in school. You know? Sometimes that’ll happen with a broad. She grows up and learns to take care of herself and turns out to be some pretty good-looking pussy.”

  “You’ve noticed that, too,” I said.

  “You should be talking to Roy Levesque. You know Roy?”

  “We’ve met. Why should I talk to him?”

  “He still sees her.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Well, I mean I see her in town sometimes,” Pike said. “With Roy. But I mean Roy’s seeing her, you know?”

  “They intimate?”

  “Oh sure, Roy’s been fucking her for twenty years.”

  “I heard she was married,” I said.

  “Yeah, some rich guy. Never bothered her and Roy though.”

  “Was she going with Roy before she got married?”

  “Sure.”

  “How’d Roy feel about her getting married?”

  “He liked it. All that dough?”

  “He get some of it?”

  Pike looked at me like I’d asked about the Easter bunny. “‘Course he got some of it.”

  From the front desk the manager yelled at Pike. “Leagues start pouring in here at five,” he said. “I need them ashtrays clean by then.”

  “Fuck you,” Pike muttered but not so loud that the manager could hear him.

  He stood and looked at me. “I gotta get to work,” he said. “That worth twenty to you?”

  I gave him the bill. He folded it over and stuck it in his pocket. Then he had a thought. I could tell he wasn’t used to it.

  “Hey, you’re not gonna tell Roy I was talking about him, are you?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “He don’t like people talking about him. You gonna tell him, I’ll give you back your twenty.”

  “Why doesn’t he like people talking about him?”

  “Roy’s a mean bastard,” Pike said. “You don’t know what he’s gonna do.”

  “What might he do?” I said.

  “I just told you,” Pike said. “You don’t never know what he’s gonna do.”

  From his shirt pocket he took a little nip bottle of vodka, unscrewed the cap, and drank it.

  “Little cocktail,” he said. “Settle my stomach.”

  “I won’t tell Roy,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Did Amy Peters have a case?” I said. “There’s always a case,” Maggie Mills said, “especially if you are one of a discriminated minority.”

  She was a senior partner at the law firm of Mills and D’Ambrosio, about fifty-five, and small, with crisp gray hair and hard blue eyes.

  “Like women,” I said.

  “Women are a good example,” she said. “It is nearly always possible to raise the issue of gender discrimination.”

  “Was it justified in this instance?”

  Maggie Mills smiled. It was a somewhat frosty smile.

  “That would need to be adjudicated,” she said. “Clearly there was something at issue besides her professional competence.”

  “Why do you say so?”

  “Among other things, she was frightened,” Maggie Mills said.

  “I know. Do you think she came to you because she was scared?”

  Maggie Mills shook her head briskly.

  “She came to me because her ego couldn’t take it,” Maggie Mills said. “She couldn’t stand being fired.”

  “Did you gather she was afraid of her boss?”

  “I didn’t gather anything,” Maggie Mills said. “She didn’t speak of it. But I have been in business for a long time, and I can recognize a frightened woman.”

  “You have any reason to think she was suicidal?” I said.

  “The police asked me the same thing,” Maggie Mills said. “And I’ll answer you the same thing I answered them. I’m an attorney, not a psychiatrist. I don’t know what someone is like when they are suicidal. But it seems odd to me, personally, that she would hire a lawyer and then kill herself.”

  “At least until the bill came.”

  “The death of a young woman should not evoke levity,” she said.

  “One of my failings,” I said, “is finding levity where it doesn’t belong.”

  “What is your interest in the case?”

  “It may be pertinent to another case I’m working on,” I said.

  “Do you have any other interest?”

  “She came to me and told me she was scared and I reassured her.”

  “And you are now reconsidering that?”

  “It would have been nice if I’d done something useful.”

  Maggie Mills studied me for a time. “So her death is not solely an occasion for levity.”

  “Not solely,” I said.

  “I didn’t help her either,” Maggie Mills said.

  I nodded.

  “It seems that both of us might have failed her.”

  “Seems possible,” I said.

  “It is my intention to continue to look into the gender discrimination matter,” Maggie Mills said.

  “Even though your client is dead.”

  “The crime didn’t die with her,” Maggie Mills said. “If either of us discovers anything, perhaps we could share it.”

  “I’m already employed by Cone Oakes,” I said.

  “This is not a professional matter,” Maggie Mills said. “This is personal.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.” CHAPTER THIRTY It was Marvin Conroy’s turn. No one at the bank knew where he was. His ferocious-looking secretary knew only that he wasn’t there. She had no idea where he was. On my way out I picked up a copy of the bank’s annual report and took it with me. I found it difficult to believe that no one at the bank knew where the CEO was, so I went and sat in my car across the street and looked at the report. In the front was a big picture of Nathan Smith and, on the facing page, a big picture of Marvin Conroy. He looked as if someone had advertised for an actor who looked like a chief executive. Square jaw, receding hair, clear eyes that looked right through the camera lens. I put the report aside with Conroy’s picture up, and waited.

  At 2:15 he came out of the bank and walked down First Street, toward the Cambridge Galleria, a big shopping center that backed up onto the old canal. This part of Cambridge wasn’t one where a lot of people walked, and I had to let him get pretty far ahead of me to keep from being obvious. But Conroy wasn’t looking for a tail. He was a big guy with a good tan and an athletic stride. He was balder than his picture indicated, but he made no attempt to conceal the fact, wearing his hair very short. It looked like he went to a good barber.

  He went into the Galleria with me behind him and walked straight to the food court. He stood in
line for a meatball sandwich and a large Coke, and when he got it took it to an empty table. It was a standard shopping-center food hall with maybe fifteen fast food outlets surrounding an open area full of small tables. The patrons were mostly adolescent kids, as was the service staff.

  I’d been hoping we’d end up at an elegant club that catered to CEO’S. But experienced detectives are flexible. I bought a cup of coffee and went over and sat down at his table with him. He glanced up at me, looked around at the number of empty tables still available, and looked back at me with a frown.

  “Do I know you?” he said.

  “This is very disappointing,” I said. “The CEO of a multibranch bank and you’re eating in the Galleria food court.”

  “Cut the crap,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

  He had a very cold gaze. There was something cruel about the way his forehead sloped down over his little sharp eyes, something about the aggressive jut of his prominent nose, and the thickness of his wide jaw.

  “Who are any of us,” I said. “Why’d you fire Amy Peters?”

  “What?”

  “It was a two-part question. I raised the metaphysical question about human identity, and the more worldly question of why you fired Amy Peters.”

  “What the hell business is it of yours?”

  “Human identity is a concern to us all,” I said.

  “Goddamn it, I’m talking about Amy Peters. Why are you asking me about her?”

  “Amy Peters is dead,” I said. “I want to know why.”

  A couple of teenaged kids passed by wearing baggy jeans and do-rags. They each had a tray of french fries and a giant Coke. I wondered if there were such a thing as negative nourishment.

  “Are you a policeman?” Conroy said.

  I gave him my most coppish deadpan stare.

  “What was she fired for?” I said.

  “I know nothing of her death,” Conroy said. “She was fired because she was incompetent.”

  “She was bringing suit against you for gender discrimination.”

  “Of course she was. They all do. You fire somebody and it’s suddenly un-American.”

  “Can you tell me about her incompetence?”

  Conroy leaned back in his chair a little, and gave me a hard CEO look.

  “I guess I’d better see some identification,” he said.

  “Amy Peters told me she was fired because she talked to me.”

  “You’re that fucking private detective,” Conroy said.

  I smiled at him.

  “I am he,” I said.

  Conroy stared at me and opened his mouth and thought about what he was going to say and decided not to say it and closed his mouth. Then he thought of something else.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  He stood abruptly and walked through the food court and out into the mall. I got up and strolled into the mall after him. At the far end I saw Vinnie Morris come out of a music store wearing a Walkman and earphones. He went out through the mall door onto the street ahead of Conroy. After Conroy went out, Hawk stopped window-shopping and drifted out after him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “You seem down,” I said to Susan. “Would you like me to have sex with you and brighten up your week?” She shook her head. We were at a small table in the high-ceilinged bar at the Hotel Meridien. I had beer. Susan was barely touching a cosmopolitan.

  “That’s the answer everybody gives me,” I said.

  “The parents of the boy who committed suicide are suing me,” Susan said.

  “They blame you,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I guess they’d probably have to,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You’ve seen a lawyer?”

  “I talked with Rita.”

  “Rita? I thought you didn’t trust Rita.”

  “I don’t trust her with you,” Susan said. “I think she’s a good lawyer.”

  “She is,” I said. “And a big firm like Cone Oakes has a lot of resources.”

  Susan smiled without much pleasure. “So I’m employing Rita,” Susan said. “And she’s employing you.”

  “What’s she say about the lawsuit?”

  “She feels it’s groundless.”

  The Hotel Meridien was in a building that had once been a bank. The bar was in a room where they probably used to keep the money. The ornate ceiling looked fifty feet high.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I feel guilty.”

  I ate a few peanuts. Eating a few peanuts was not easy. Mostly, I tended to eat them all.

  “Be surprising if you didn’t,” I said.

  “I know. I know the guilty feeling comes from my reaction to the event. Not the event itself.”

  “Still feels bad, though,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I ate a few more peanuts, and determined to eat no more. The waitress brought me a second beer. Susan took in a milligram of her drink.

  “You know what makes me love you?” she said.

  “My manliness?”

  She smiled.

  “You haven’t tried to talk me out of feeling guilty,” she said.

  “Be aimless,” I said.

  “Yes. But not everyone would know that.”

  “It’s a gift,” I said.

  I could almost see Susan decide that she had been down as much as she was prepared to be.

  “Tell me about what’s going on in that case you’re working on for Rita.”

  “It keeps spreading out on me,” I said. “The more I investigate, the more I learn. And the more I learn, the more I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “That happens to me often in therapy,” Susan said. “I know something’s in there in the dark and I keep groping for it.”

  “That would be me,” I said. “Groping.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know that Smith is dead. I know that I talked to a woman at his bank and she got fired and now she’s dead.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Appears to be suicide,” I said.

  “But?”

  “But she had just been to a lawyer about a gender discrimination lawsuit against the bank,” I said.

  “So why would she be making long-range plans just before killing herself?”

  “Yes.”

  “It happens sometimes,” Susan said. “It is an attempt to convince themselves of the future.”

  I shrugged and had a Brazil nut that I plucked out from among the remaining peanuts. One Brazil nut wouldn’t hurt anything.

  “The bank was a family-owned business, until Marvin Conroy came aboard. He fired the woman for incompetence. And he doesn’t want to talk with me. I know that some people from Soldiers Field Development Limited are interested in what I’m doing and want me to stop doing it. I talked with Smith’s broker and was assaulted shortly thereafter.”

  “Assaulted?”

  “Yeah. They weren’t very good at it.”

  “That’s nice,” Susan said.

  “DeRosa, the guy that says Mary Smith wanted him to kill her husband, is represented by Ann Kiley, Bobby Kiley’s daughter.”

  “The defense lawyer?”

  “Yes. The firm is Kiley and Harbaugh, but it’s really Kiley and Kiley. Father and daughter.”

  “That’s sort of charming,” Susan said.

  “It is,” I said. “But why is a firm like that representing a stiff like DeRosa?”

  “Social conscience?”

  “You bet,” I said. “And then we have Mary Smith herself. She still seems to have a relationship of some sort with an old high school boyfriend who is evasive when asked about it.”

  “By you.”

  “By me.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “As I recall,” I said, “he told me to ”shove fucking off.“”

  “She must have been attracted to him by his silver tongue,” Susan said. “What does Mary say?”

  “You’
d have to talk with Mary to understand,” I said.

  “Why? What’s she like?”

  I found another Brazil nut in the dish, and a cashew. I ate both of them. I hadn’t seen the cashew before.

  “She’s a living testament to the power of dumb.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you ask her something and she seems too dumb to answer it. You can’t catch her in contradictions because she doesn’t seem aware of them even after they’re pointed out.”

  “Seems kind of smart to me,” Susan said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she knows she’s dumb and sort of uses it.”

  “Maximizing her potential,” Susan said. “Anything else bothering you?”

  “Yeah. Nathan Smith. He was unmarried until he married Mary, in his fifties. According to Mary, he was a friend and helper to a number of young men, both prior to and during his marriage to her.”

  “If he were gay, would he have hidden it? This is not a closeted age.”

  “Old Yankee family. President of the family bank.”

  “Still,” Susan said.

  “Remember your patient,” I said.

  “He was a boy. And he was very troubled.”

  “Nathan Smith was once a boy.”

  Susan nodded.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “It’s something I’ve got to look into.”

  “Because you think it would have bearing on his death?”

  “Suze, I don’t have a goddamned clue what has a bearing on his death. Every time I find a rock I turn it over.”

  We sat quiet for a time. She held her partially sipped cosmopolitan in both hands, looking at its pink surface.

  “It bothers you that the woman from the bank died.”

  “She came to me and told me about getting fired,” I said. “She said she was afraid of Conroy, the new CEO.”

  “And you feel you should have protected her?”

  I shrugged.

  “S.” Susan’s eyes were very big as she looked up at me over the glass. “You’re feeling a little guilty, too.”

  “Yep.”

  “And, like me, you know that it’s not rational.”

  “Just like you,” I said.

  “I think you’ve never quite altogether forgiven yourself for that woman in Los Angeles all that time ago.”