Back Bay (59 page)

“Cold-cock the bitch,” said Katherine Carrington. Her own language surprised her.

Fallon threw the nurse into a headlock and dragged her into the living room. Wrestling with her wasn’t quite as exciting as fighting with Harrison, but he had to settle her down. He hauled her right up to the muzzle of Ferguson’s .45. When she saw the man behind the gun, she stopped moving.

“That’s better,” said Ferguson, still sitting in the coffin.

“Easy work, scarin’ women,” said Sonny.

“Even easier to keep an old lady penned up when she don’t want to be,” said Ferguson.

They bound and gagged the guards and the nurse and locked them each in a separate closet. It was easy. Sonny and Benny had both been around long enough to know they didn’t argue with a man holding a .45.

Evangeline threw her arms around her grandmother’s neck. “I’ve worried about you, Grandmother.”

“I’ll be all right, darling. You’re so brave to help me.”

“Let’s save the speeches for later and get the hell out of here,” said Danny.

“What about the quotations?” asked Peter.

“When we get to the airport,” said Katherine firmly. “How are we going?”

“There’s only one way out,” said Ferguson.

She studied the strange-looking man sitting in the coffin. “Do I know you?”

“We met a long time ago, and before this trip is over, we’ll be best of friends.”

“It’s tight quarters,” said Peter. “But you’ll only be in there for a few minutes.”

She looked at Ferguson and joked, “I’ll have no hanky panky, young man.”

“You have my word.”

She squeezed into the coffin, the lid was closed, and Katherine Pratt Carrington was smuggled out of the Lynnewood Manor.

At twelve-thirty, she was standing with her granddaughter, Peter Fallon, and Jack C. Ferguson in the Eastern Airlines lounge. She was wearing a powder-blue jumper, bought by Evangeline, accented with a dark-blue scarf. She looked again like the vibrant old woman Fallon had first met at Searidge. She was in her seventies and beginning a new phase of her life.

“I feel like a schoolgirl going off on a great trip.” She laughed nervously. “Of course, the last time I felt this way, I was eleven years old, and we were about to embark on the
Titanic
.”

Evangeline embraced her. “Oh, Grandmother, I’m so afraid to send you off alone.”

Katherine put her arms around Evangeline and patted her gently on the back. “I should be worrying about you, leaving you here in the middle of all this.” Her hands stopped moving and she looked at Evangeline. “Do you realize I used to pat you like this when you were a baby?”

“Where will you go, Grandmother?”

“Away from here. I had to leave that place.” She smiled at Ferguson. “Even if it meant hiding in a coffin with a strange man.”

Ferguson smiled back, almost sheepishly. He was still in awe of Katherine Carrington.

Evangeline drew her grandmother to her and held tight. “I can’t just let you fly off.”

“Nonsense.” Katherine’s voice was growing stronger as departure approached. “If I were younger, I’d stay and help you clear this up. I’m convinced now that the only way is to find the tea set, and I’m too old to do that.”

The public-address system announced departure, and people in the lounge scurried for the plane.

Katherine took an envelope from her purse and put it into Ferguson’s hand. She took Evangeline’s and Peter’s hands in her own and held them tightly. “Find it and rid us of it for good. But be careful, darlings, please.” For a moment, she didn’t want to leave them in danger, but she knew that until the Golden Eagle was found, they would always be in danger. Let them find it together. She had done all that she could to help them.

She threw her arms around Evangeline again. They held each
other silently for a moment, then Katherine broke away and picked up her suitcase. There were tears in her eyes. She turned and started down the tube.

Evangeline ran after her. “Grandmother, where will you go?”

“I’ll visit cousins in New York for a few days. Then I’m going to Hawaii.”

“Hawaii?”

Katherine kept walking. “Cousin William has invited me a hundred times. He runs a school for the retarded on one of the outer islands.” She reached the plane. She stopped and looked back. “I still have my music and my love of children, dear. I can still be of use.” She stepped onto the plane and the door was closed.

Evangeline walked back to Fallon and Ferguson. “I never even asked her about my father.”

“I can fill in a few of the details,” said Ferguson. “It’s a long story.”

Fallon’s attention had already shifted to the envelope in his hands. “Does it have anything to to with
Paradise Lost?
”

“I’ve always though so.”

It was one o’clock in the morning when the
Peter
returned to Lewis Wharf. Before Rule cut the engines, Lawrence Hannaford jumped from the wharf onto the main deck.

“Hey, Larry. How ya doin’?”

“Terrible.”

“Too bad you didn’t come out with us. We didn’t catch many fish, we got a little wet, but we beat this heat and had a real nice time anyway.”

Rule’s wife jumped off the boat and secured the stern to the dock.

“Help me tie ’er up, Larry, then we’ll go upstairs and have a drink.”

“It’s late, Rule, I didn’t come here to socialize.” Hannaford’s slender voice cracked with anger. He threw the early edition of the Sunday
Globe
, which came out on Saturday night, onto the table in Rule’s cabin. He flipped back the comics and pointed to a story on the bottom of the front page. “Do you know anything about that?”

The headline read, “Gangland Assassin Found Dead in
Cambridge Apartment Building.” Above the headline was a police photograph of the man with the pockmarks and the receding hairline.

Rule cursed softly.

“You tried to kill the student, didn’t you?”

“Anybody I knock off is as much of a threat to you as he is to me.” Rule pointed a stubby finger at Hannaford. “Before I came up with the tea set, we were both smalltime. I did you a favor, and you did me one. We’re partners, right down the line.”

“I won’t be partners with a murderer. I won’t permit you to kill anybody else.”

“I’ve waited too long, Larry. I’m too close.”

“You can kill a whore in Los Angeles and a bartender in South Boston and a young lawyer—”

“We didn’t kill Carrington,” interrupted Rule.

“Somebody did, but the spread among the three of them is wide enough that you can get away with it. Kill any more people, and you’ll end up in jail instead of at the head of Pratt Industries.”

“You’ll be right along with me, Larry.”

Hannaford sensed Rule’s contempt. He hated Rule. He hated himself. “I have a better solution,” he said softly. “We can solve all our problems without killing anyone else, and we can do it once and for all.”

Rule studied him for a moment, and then leaned against the bulwark. “Convince me.”

From the fold of the newspaper, Lawrence Hannaford took a large manila envelope. It continued a sheet of paper, which he unfolded and spread on the table in front of him. Rule studied it quizzically. The paper was covered with floor plans and circuitry diagrams. Lawrence Hannaford explained his plan.

December 1972

O
n the last afternoon of 1972, Lawrence Hannaford sat in the office at the rear of his gallery and sipped coffee.

In other years, he had always thrown a New Year’s Eve party, and every party had been a resounding success. His theme for the 1971 party had been “Do Your Own Thing.” He stripped the white gallery walls, gave all his guests paintbrushes and buckets of bright latex, and let them follow their fancy. The results were so colorful and unusual that, for the succeeding two weeks, he invited the public to view a work of living art, “New Year’s Eve, 1971,” on the walls and ceiling of his gallery.

This year, there would be no such celebration. Lawrence Hannaford was broke. Since 1969, when he had been politicized by the Vietnam War Moratorium, he had been showing the work of radical young artists who painted their protests. But stark, primary-colored depictions of American B-52s raining bombs on black Americans or of angry Vietnamese peasants trashing Wall Street did not sell to the people who bought art in Boston. Nor had abstracts with titles like “Napalm,” or “African Sunrise,” in black, red, and green, attracted buyers. Radical liberal sentiments did not reach deep into Boston pocketbooks.

Hannaford’s Newbury Street gallery was closing. He would miss his life there, the sophisticated chatter of art lovers at champagne previews, the liaisons with college girls who came to his gallery to research term papers on current American art, and the excitement of discovering a talented young artist. Eventually, he would have to sell his sports car to pay for his beautiful Marlborough Street apartment. His life-style, which remained extravagant despite his support of the Movement, and his tastes in art had cost him most of his savings and true money. His father refused to lend him any more money. If he declared bankruptcy and allowed his personal finances to be scrutinized, several rather large discrepancies,
appearing regularly over a period of five years, would be uncovered in Hannaford’s income-tax returns.

Around four o’clock, just as Hannaford was about to close up the gallery for the last time, a man in a chauffeur’s uniform appeared at the back door. Twenty minutes later, Hannaford was sitting in the office of a warehouse in East Boston. The coils of an electric space heater glowed at his feet, a pot of coffee steamed on a hotplate behind the desk, and a single hanging lamp threw harsh shadows onto the floor. The chauffeur had told Hannaford that his employer was interested in some art work, but this was not the sort of place where collectors did business. Hannaford was beginning to feel nervous.

Through the windows that separated the office from the rest of the warehouse, Hannaford saw a stocky man with a mustache walking toward him. The man was wearing an expensive cashmere overcoat and brown fedora, and he moved past the crates and boxes like a pit bull looking for trouble.

The office door opened and the cold air rushed in. The man extended his hand. His greeting was more friendly than his appearance. “Good afternoon, Mr. Hannaford. I’m Bill Rule. Thanks for coming over. These damn year-end inventories keep me all tied up, but I wanted to talk to you.”

Hannaford smiled. “I’m always ready to talk to a collector.”

Rule poured two cups of coffee and sat behind his desk. It was cold in the little office, and he kept his overcoat on. “A little New Year’s Eve cheer for your coffee?”

“It might make me a little warmer. Sure.”

Rule took a bottle of Jack Daniels from his desk drawer and tossed generous shots into each cup. The men toasted to the new year, and Rule tilted back in his chair. “Mr. Hannaford, I’ve been watching your career for quite some time.”

“I hope you like what you’ve seen.”

“What I’ve seen is a man trying to do something different. I don’t hold with all this radical hippie shit, but I admire a man who has the balls to be a rebel, no matter what he’s rebellin’ against.”

Hannaford was flattered. He liked to think of himself as a rebel. “Thank you.”

“But I’ve also seen a man slipping into debt, a man who’s spent
all his money, who’s borrowed heavily from people in his family, whose father would rather have an alcoholic Communist faggot than an art dealer for a son.”

Hannaford put down his coffee and stood. “This has nothing to do with art, mister.”

Rule smiled, “I also see before me a man who, according to my private sources, has been jerkin’ off the IRS to the tune of ten or fifteen thousand a year since he first started selling paintings.”

Hannaford swallowed hard. He was so shocked he didn’t have the presence of mind to deny it. “That was a war protest.”

“Sit down, Mr. Hannaford, and cut the shit. Can I call you Larry?”

“I prefer Lawrence.”

“Okay, Lawrence. I’m not tryin’ to be unfriendly by tellin’ you all this. I just want you to know that I’ve had my eye on you for quite a while, and I know you pretty good. I think you and I can do some business.”

“I’ll tell you right now that I’m not interested.”

“The IRS might be interested in you, Larry. Lawrence. So I’d suggest that you listen up.”

Hannaford sat reluctantly.

Rule leaned across the desk. “What you need is somethin’ to make your name a household word with the people who buy art. You have to build a good reputation before you can sell that gook-and-nigger art. You have to be in the know with those rich Europeans who look for brainy American dealers who can sell their trinkets and junk to stupid Americans at armed-robbery prices. Furthermore, you need money. I’m gonna help you out on all counts.”

Rule opened the safe behind his desk and took out a velvet bag. He placed it on his desk, loosened the drawstring, and peeled the velvet away from the contents of the bag.

Hannaford was dazzled.

“You’re an art man. What does this look like to you?”

“It’s a teapot,” he said softly. “Probably Federal.”

“Look closer.”

Hannaford saw the tiny golden eagle. He carefully turned the teapot over and saw Revere’s stamp in block letters on the base.
He knew enough about Revere to know the story. “This was stolen from the White House in 1814. It’s been missing ever since.”

“You want to sell it for me?”

“Where did you get it?” asked Hannaford suspiciously.

“You haven’t answered my question, Larry. Lawrence. You want to be my partner?”

“Certainly I want to sell it. But first, I want to know where you got it and what kind of deal you want to make.”

“Second question first. You sell the tea set for what you can get. A million, maybe a million and a half. You keep the money. When your father dies—and we all know that Henry Hannaford’s had three heart attacks in two years—you sign over to me his fifty thousand shares of Pratt Industries stock, market value of about two million, and I gamble that the stock stays where it is. Big liberal art dealers shouldn’t be holdin’ stock in a company that produces chemical defoliants, anyway.”