Dead Heat (19 page)

Hurley stalled. “If you're going to tell me that Menlo stole the antique silver from the Collatos place, don't bother. The bastard's been accused before. He covers his ass.”

The medicine container Sharon Collatos had said she'd found in the bathroom couldn't really be called a bottle. It was a three-inch high brown plastic cylinder with a white cap. Red letters across the cap said:
PACKAGE NOT CHILD RESISTANT!
The typed label was not only torn across top and bottom, it was wavy and peeling. A red sticker had been affixed upside-down on the back of the container.
THIS PRESCRIPTION CANNOT BE REFILLED
. Spraggue displayed it in the folds of tissue paper he'd wrapped it in, kept the label turned away from Hurley.
Phial
seemed too medieval a word. Maybe
vial
.

“So?” Hurley gave in and admitted curiosity with a grunt.

“Remember those prints I asked you to run, as a favor?”

“The ones your aunt lifted? You have to stop doing that. The department's drying up for lack of funds. We can't trace stuff for every …” Hurley ran out of steam and a faint grimace crossed his face. “You knew I was going to give you this lecture, right?”

“Right. So I brought something to trade.”

“That—what is it?”

“Were those prints on file?”

“Yeah.” Hurley didn't have to look the information up on any of the thousand odd sheets of paper on his desk. He knew. “But there isn't a whole lot I can tell you.”

“You can give me a name.”

“Martin Emery.”

Martin Emery … Murray Eichenhorn. Same initials. But to go from such a neutral moniker to such an ethnic one. Why?

“And why were Emery's prints adorning your files?”

“Gun license.”

“Then, as far as you know, he's a perfectly law-abiding citizen.”

“Can't say anything else about him.”

“Why not?”

“Jesus, Spraggue, you want blood? For all I know you're thinking of blackmailing the guy.”

Spraggue rattled the bottle. “I have something to trade,” he said. “Remember?”

“Something you obtained by breaking and entering?”

“Pete's sister gave me the key,” Spraggue said truthfully, not mentioning that the presentation had taken place well after he'd picked the lock.

“Spiffy-looking lady, Pete's sister. Divorced, I hear.”

“You want what I found?”

“If it's evidence in a police investigation—”

“Martin Emery,” Spraggue said.

“Okay, but first you show me that bottle. If it has nothing to do with Collatos, if you just picked up some piece of plastic out of some dumpster to tempt me with …”

Spraggue held out the pill bottle. “Handle with care. Might have prints.”

“You mean your aunt hasn't dusted it yet?” Hurley turned it slowly, studied the label.

“This mean anything?” he asked.

“I called my local pharmacist,” Spraggue said. “It's a medication sometimes given to depressed people.”

“I could use some of that,” Hurley said.

“Martin Emery,” Spraggue repeated softly.

“Look, suppose I were to say that I couldn't tell you anything about Emery because of certain judicial rulings, what would you assume?”

“Gag order?”

“No. Think about it. When can a person have a record, but not really have a record because nobody can touch it?”

“Ah,” Spraggue said. “A juvie.”

Hurley opened his mouth, shut it.

“A juvenile record for what?”

“That's what I can't tell you. Sealed is sealed. Even for a cop.”

“Then tell me this. Did you happen to notice a cop at Collatos' funeral—”

“There were three hundred cops at—”

“Old retired cop, very short, just made the height limit, red face, broken veins in a knob of a nose, fat, sloppy—”

“Sounds like Sergeant Billy,” Hurley said with a groan.

“Full name?”

“Hell, what was it? William O'Donnell. A legend in his own time.”

“Bravery?”

“Stupidity. Drunkenness. Corruption.”

“Know where I could find him?”

“The retirement fund would.”

“Think Sergeant Billy would be as discreet as you are?”

“Discretion is a word Billy never heard of.”

“Fine.”

Hurley tapped the pill container with the end of a pencil. “Was this hidden in Collatos' apartment? Where exactly did you find it?”

“How about in the medicine cabinet? In plain sight?”

“Shit. Not even Menlo could have been dumb enough to leave this behind. I'm not going to flush him down the toilet on this one.”

“Don't you find it interesting that somebody planted his stash of pills in Collatos' bathroom?”

“I suppose. I can see stealing stuff out of there. I mean, anybody who followed the business in the papers would know that Collatos lived alone, know that the apartment was ripe for the picking. But why break in to put something there?”

“Maybe to let us know how Collatos died,” Spraggue said.

Hurley gave him a long look, flipped a page in the file he'd been reading, ran his finger down the right-hand edge. “I think we've already got a handle on that,” he said.

“That the JoJo Stearns file? The guy who turned up dead in the fire?”

“Stearns and a hell of a lot of other aliases, including a couple with a definite Greek sound to them.”

“I doubt Collatos knew the creep just because they were both Greek.”

Hurley fastened his eyes on the grimy window. Spraggue stared at the open file folder, upside down on the desk.

“The way Menlo figures it,” Hurley said, “this Stearns has run up against Collatos in the past. Maybe Collatos makes things tougher for him than he has to because he's Greek. You know how sometimes cops are harder on their own? Maybe this guy's got a king-size resentment against Collatos. Collatos has been in the news lately, right? You see him in pictures with Senator Donagher, on the TV with Senator Donagher. So our JoJo sees Collatos doing okay, knows he's going to run the marathon, decides to do him in.”

“Yeah, sure. And he knew all about the death threats on Donagher and decided to use them as a blind.”

“Why not?”

“You think he was that smart?”

“It's possible.”

“He decides to kill both of them? Why does he give the water to Donagher?”

“Ah.” Spraggue could tell Hurley had been waiting for that one. “Because Collatos might recognize him, even in his Little Mary Sunshine rig.”

“And he just feels in his bones that Donagher will share the stuff with Collatos?”

“It's a good guess. Collatos is the bodyguard. He probably tastes things. If you're running with someone … Maybe old JoJo even says to Donagher, share it with your buddy.”

“Maybe he even knew Collatos was allergic to speed.”

“It's possible.”

“Let me get this, Hurley. Are you guys planning to close this case? Just leave it at that? This JoJo Stearns, or whoever he really is, hates Collatos for reasons unknown, sets up a crackpot plan to kill him. Donagher almost gets taken out just for the hell of it? The end?”

Hurley stared out the window.

“What about the fact that old JoJo gets killed the next day? What about the arson blaze?”

“He could have been setting it himself, gotten trapped—”

“In his goddam dress and high heels? Come on, Hurley. If Stearns killed Collatos, he wasn't working alone.”

“Stearns is connected.”

“Huh?”

“What I said. Mafia. L.C.N. This may have been some move that came right down from La Cosa Nostra.”

“Are you saying it's political?”

It was Hurley's turn to look blank.

“Frankie Bartolo,” Spraggue prompted. “The man with the most to gain if Donagher doesn't make it back to the Senate. Rumor has it that Bartolo and the mob are not exactly strangers.”

“I don't know anything about that. What I do know is that if it's mob business, we'll take one fast peek, report it to the Feds, and forget about it.”

“I can't believe this.”

“We get more unbelievable stuff in here seven days a week.”

“As far as you're concerned, the investigation is over?”

“Hell, no, Spraggue. It's just that we're not facing the kind of heat we were—”

“Because you can put a paragraph in the papers that some guy who's suspected of giving Pete something that may or may not have killed him, is dead.”

“Nobody expects you to third-degree a dead man.”

“Quiets things down, a corpse. No pretrial motions by the defense.”

“Look,” Hurley said, “I'll go this far. I'll have these damn pills analyzed. I'll ask the M.E. whether they could have had anything to do with Collatos' death. I'll even send somebody over to talk to the super of Collatos' apartment, see if anybody broke in—”

“Thanks a heap.”

“Jesus, Spraggue, there are a hell of a lot of other crimes going on around here. There are three million people in this—”

“Save the speech for the mayor,” Spraggue said.

He walked out the door, slamming it the way Hurley would expect him to, ducked into the men's room. There, he pulled a notebook from his hip pocket, recorded the name he'd read off the dead man's rap sheet, the one neatly listed under known associates.

He could read quite well upside down. He'd just had to get Hurley angry enough to forget to cover the page.

TWENTY-FOUR

Sipping lukewarm coffeed water at a luncheonette with cracked green walls even grimier than Hurley's, he devised plans to locate one Arnold Gravier, known associate of one JoJo Stearns, aka Joseph Stavropoulos, aka Joey Stavros, deceased. A trip to City Hall, the inevitable wait to check the Registrar's voting list … maybe the additional joy of a visit to the Assessor's Office or the Office of the Registrar of Motor Vehicles.… He plunked his fifty cents down on the speckled Formica countertop. A smudged black dial phone was nestled into the crook between the cash register and the March of Dimes canister.

“Do you have a phone book?” The doughy face of the waitress was frozen under sparse gray hair that no longer had any need of its restraining hairnet.

She rang up a sale, stared at him blankly, and said, “It's not a public phone.”

“I wouldn't dream of using it. Just wondered if you had a phone book I could see. To check out an address.”

“It's not a public phone,” she repeated flatly, and walked away on feet so tired you could almost hear them groan.

The door creaked when he swung it open. She probably had to listen to it creak three hundred times a day.

The first phone booth he came to had no phone book, just a dangling metal snake with a bit of the ripped black cardboard cover still attached. He'd walked half a mile down Boylston by the time he found a sufficiently unmutilated book. He fought the wind and wrestled with the mechanism that held the volume in a position too awkward to peruse and thought nostalgically of the old-style phone booths, the ones that offered shelter, a beam of light, privacy.

There was no listing for an Arnold Gravier, but two A. Graviers headed the column. Probably Alice and Ann; women had long since learned the regrettable lesson that publication of a female first name in the directory was an invitation to the obscene phonecaller. He stuck a dime in the slot, dialed A. Gravier Number One, and let the phone ring twelve times. A. Gravier Number Two picked up the receiver on a spry two rings. A gentle flustered voice proclaimed herself ‘just the housekeeper.' Mrs. Gravier was spending her afternoon at the Athenaeum, but would be delighted to return the call if the gentleman would kindly leave his name.

A man in a tan Burberry hovered half a block up the street, hands deep in his pockets, head down, kicking a scuffed shoe against the uneven sidewalk. Spraggue wondered if the man wanted to use the phone, but waited at a distance so as not to appear impatient. Between the sweet creature on the phone and the raincoated man, he'd probably located the two politest individuals the city had to offer.

He inquired after dear Mrs. Gravier's son, Arnold, and was firmly put in his place. He must wish to speak to some
other
, the voice said clearly, some
inferior
, Mrs. Gravier, and his name would no longer be required.

He tried the first number again, hastily, in case the Burberry man was still waiting. Not home. Or not answering.

The rain had thickened into a gluey mist. Spraggue dodged over to Newbury Street, entered an art gallery, and stared vacantly at some sinister deep-hued surrealist paintings he didn't like until the gallery owner, assuming fascination, interrupted his thoughts to quote prices. He started when she spoke, nodded briefly, and left her shaking her head at the oddballs who ventured through her door.

The man in the Burberry huddled under an awning across the street, a too small tweed rainhat perched on top of his wet gray-flecked hair.

Spraggue's first thought was that Hurley must have dispatched some aging flatfoot to tail him. Why? Had the captain set things up so that Spraggue would see Gravier's name in JoJo's file? Had he been selected for the role of guinea pig by the Boston Police? Or was the man in the raincoat some fatuous tourist out for a circuitous jaunt in a strange town?

That theory, at least, he could test. He made his way back to Boylston Street, crossing against the lights at the corner of Dartmouth. Going up the steps of the Boston Public Library—the old building, now the research library—he shot a quick look to his right. Tan raincoat was on the scent, negotiating the traffic-jammed street. Instead of the following the most traveled path, up the marble staircase to the second floor, Spraggue took a sharp right past the periodical room, then a left. He pushed open the door that led to the courtyard, crossed it, and entered the air-conditioned stillness of the new library building, the modern granite cube of a circulation library, added some ten years back.