Sweetheart (2 page)

I
T WAS
a Monday morning, a freezing day with a glaring sun; snow was predicted for Boston by nightfall, which did not bother Russell Thurston at all. He took things as they came and, when possible, capitalized on them. He was situated in a remote space in the Kennedy Building in the heart of Government Square, his office a comfortable cubicle overlooking several desks jammed into a narrow room. He was tall and sober-looking, with faded brown hair combed flat to one side and with neutral gray eyes buttoned into a parched face that rarely revealed his deeper feelings, not even now when an excitement was building in him.

He shouted for his assistant, Blodgett, but was answered by a man named Blue, the only black on a special team of agents under his supervision. He was occasionally civil to Blue but more often glib. Blue appeared in the doorway, slender, quite dark, meticulously groomed, as if his field were international banking, not investigation.

“Where’s Blodgett?” Thurston demanded.

“He’ll be back in a minute.”

“That’s not what
I
asked.”

“He’s in the head.”

“Get him.” Thurston watched Blue turn away and take two steps. On the third step, Thurston said, “Blue!”

Blue returned to the doorway and placed a foot back inside the cubicle. “What is it?” he asked, and Thurston smiled cryptically.

“You take a lot of crap from me. Ever ask yourself why?”

“Never.”

“Ever wonder why I picked you specially for this unit?”

“Because I’m smart.”

“That goes without saying. What’s the big reason?”

“I figure you’ll tell me sometime.”

“I’ll probably let you figure it out yourself.”

“I’ll get Blodgett,” Blue said.

“Do that.”

Alone, Thurston swiveled in his chair to stare through the single window at Boston’s frigid sky. He had never regretted his assignment here. He relished the charms and contradictions of the city, the sedateness of much of its architecture and the eccentricity of its streets, the incestuousness of its neighborhoods and the corruptness of its politics, and he found a challenge in the anarchy of its traffic. He delighted in occasionally breakfasting at the Ritz and lunching at Maison Robert in a city small enough to rub elbows with venerables like Archibald Cox, rumpled Brahmins like William Homans, and vulnerable beauties like Joan Kennedy. His biggest wish was for them to recognize him.

For many minutes his mind had been dwelling on the possible means to make that happen.

He turned back to his desk, rummaged in a drawer, and came up with a pair of shears. Carefully he scissored a double-column story out of the Boston
Globe
and laid the cutting in front of him. He had read it before, and now he read it again, slowly, savoring each sentence and pausing after each paragraph to reflect. Then his eyes returned to the headline.
Elderly Greenwood Couple Slain
. He could scarcely believe his luck.

“Where’s Greenwood?” he asked when Blodgett appeared. Blodgett ruminated.

“Western part of the state, I think. Somewhere near Lenox and Lee. God’s country.”

“Your geography’s good. Read this.”

Blodgett sat in a chair to read the article. He was stocky and square-shouldered and had a businessman’s close-cropped haircut. The hair was blond, the face bland. His head tilted. He was a deliberate reader, which soon taxed Thurston’s patience.

“Skip down to the end. The survivors. Son, Anthony. Daughter, Rita O’Dea.”

“Jesus Christ,” Blodgett said, his eyes absorbing print. “Tony Gardella’s mother and father.”

“You’ve got it. What else do you get?” Thurston’s voice was sharp. “Think, man,
think!
”

Blodgett thought hard. His smooth forehead dominated his face, and his mouth pressed in on itself. He was slow to lift his gaze. “It means Gardella’s going to want the blood of the bastards who did it.”

“Keep going.”

“Give me a second.”

Thurston’s smile was smug and fixed. He had his elbows on the desk and his unusually long hands fisted together under his chin. “Take your time on this one.”

“We make it easy for him?”

“That’s only the beginning. That’s how we sucker him in.” Thurston moistened his lips as if he had the special spit of a snake. “I’m going to make opera out of this. A big cast of villains. A grand production. You keeping up with me?”

“You’re going too fast.”

“I’m thinking big. That’s what you’ve got to do if you ever want my job.” Thurston’s mind raced on. “Who’s Wade? Do you know him?” Blodgett didn’t, and he began to read the cutting again. Thurston said, “Get me a rundown on him. Says there he’s a lieutenant, so he probably took the course at Quantico, which gives us a hook. I want to know all about him. Personal stuff. A complete profile.”

Blodgett was nonplussed. “Why him?”

“Because I’ve got a hundred thoughts buzzing in my head right this minute, and that’s the best of them. Get working on it. Blue can help you.”

Blodgett heaved himself out of the chair and returned the cutting, which bore a damp spot from his thumb. Before he turned to leave, he murmured confidentially, “I suppose the less said to Blue the better.”

“You suppose right.”

Thurston dropped back deeply into his swivel chair and stared at two framed photographs on the side wall. One was of Ronald Reagan, and the other, which he peered at the longest, was of himself receiving an award from J. Edgar Hoover a year before the director’s death. He remembered priding himself on looking, a little at least, like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. He also remembered his awe of Hoover, as if the man were more powerful than God, with dossiers listing everybody’s peccadilloes.

• • •

Brother and sister traveled across the state in a chauffeured Cadillac Eldorado to Greenwood Regional Hospital, where they satisfied legal obligations by identifying the bodies of their mother and father. Anthony Gardella had not wanted his sister to make the trip, but she had insisted. In the gleaming basement of the morgue, near the almost soothing drone of a refrigeration unit, she viewed the still and brutalized faces and gagged. She did not cry. The medical examiner led her to a metal chair, which she would not stay in. She rose up and looked enormous. She had on a storm coat and knee boots that would not zip up all the way because of the heft of her calves. “I want to know every injury that was done to them,” she said in a tone that disconcerted the doctor.

“I don’t know everything yet,” he said delicately.

Anthony Gardella said, “We know enough.”

Rita O’Dea raised a fist and clenched it. “You know what I want.” Her face, lacquered with a hard makeup, was, for the moment, fierce. Her brother gave a quick glance at the doctor.

“Leave us alone,” he said, and the doctor did. The droning in the room seemed to intensify. Gardella, very quietly, said, “Get hold of yourself.”

“I want to know what you’re doing about this,” Rita O’Dea said in a voice now unsteady. “Let’s discuss it.”

“Wait till they’re buried.”

“You should be on it now.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You don’t do something, I
will
.”

“You’ll do nothing,” Gardella said evenly. “Everything’s being taken care of.”

Rita O’Dea fixed her eyes upon him, her concentration intense and almost morbid. She stumbled in place, and her brother swiftly gripped the sleeve of her coat. The doctor returned. There were papers to sign in his office. On the way he said, “If I were you I wouldn’t delay the trip back. It’s starting to snow.”

The mournful winter sky was already benighted, and the snow fell fast, sticking to the rural road. The headlights picked up a rabbit darting in a jagged direction before the left front wheel killed it in its tracks. In the opulence of the Cadillac, Rita O’Dea pushed her hair back. “I want to drive by the house.”

“No,” said Gardella. “There’s nothing to see.”

“There might be some things we want.”

“There’s nothing we want.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I speak for both of us,” he said, his voice dropping. A glass panel sealed their words from the driver, who doubled as a bodyguard. A sign showed the way to the highway, which was reached within minutes, a smooth ride. Rita O’Dea tugged at the collar of her coat. The car was warm, but she shivered. Gardella opened a compartment in the back of the front seat and removed a flask and a tumbler. He poured for her.

She took a taste. “I remember a time you only bought wop wine.”

“That’s an aperitif.”

“I know what it is. I’d prefer a shot of gin.”

“Show a little class, Rita.”

“I got all that money can buy.”

Anthony Gardella studied his hands. His wedding band was a half-inch wide. His nails were manicured. With deliberate cruelty he said, “Why’d you bring that spic up here?”

For a heavy moment it seemed she would not respond. Her dark head sagged. She was tired. “Does it bother you?” she asked, her large face softened by shadow.

“Yes, it bothers me.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It’s an insult,” he said bitterly, and she sighed.

“What should I do, Tony? Be lonely?”

“You can do better than him.”

She smiled with hard irony. “No, Tony. I can’t.”

• • •

Twice Silas Rogers avoided them, the first time by pretending that he wasn’t home, though it was obvious he was, and the next time by shouting that he was too sick to talk, which in a faint way was true. One of his mongrels was ailing, and he suffered for it. He had five dogs, and during the winter he kept them inside because their bodies breathed heat for the house and life into his solitude. He was a widower. Now, for the third time, the dogs alerted him that the two men were back. He let them knock several times before opening the door just enough to show his crag of a face. “You don’t need to talk to me,” he said with false bravado. “I told everything to Hunkins.”

Trooper Denton stuck his foot in the door. Lieutenant Wade said, “You’ve been ducking us. What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing.” The dogs pressed against him from behind, their paws scratching the floor. The dogs were odd sizes and colors, nervous, anxious for air. “You’re upsetting my animals.”

Lieutenant Wade said, “Do you want to talk here or take a ride to the barracks? We can do that.”

“You threatening me?”

“Yes.”

“I saw what I saw and nothing more.”

“Let us in, we’ll talk about it.”

“You think I know more than I do. I don’t!”

“We’ll see.”

They got nothing from him. They sat at his bare table, the dogs milling beneath, and interrogated him, the trooper rephrasing questions the lieutenant had already posed. It was a ploy to trip him up, but he was too smart for that. He kept his hands in his lap and his head high and gave out flat answers either negative or neutral. Once he got up to wipe piddle from one of the dogs off the floor. Lieutenant Wade shifted the substance of the questions to the Gardellas themselves.

“What did you think of them?”

“They didn’t mean nothing to me.”

“They lived in the town twenty-five years, I’m told.”

“We didn’t mix.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t mix with nobody.”

“Especially Italians?”

“You said that. I didn’t.”

“You don’t say much of anything, Mr. Rogers. Two good people were sadistically murdered, and you sit there blowing smoke up my ass.”

Silas Rogers reddened. “And you come in here threatening a man. It ain’t right!”

The lieutenant got to his feet. So did Trooper Denton, a young giant of a man who had played football for UMass. Together they stared down at Silas Rogers, who nervously patted a dog. In a stage whisper the lieutenant said, “He’s only making it worse for himself.”

The trooper agreed. “He doesn’t give us a choice.”

“There’s only one way out of this, Mr. Rogers. Put you to a lie detector.”

For a second Silas Rogers went sick inside, and his face wrinkled up like a baby’s. When he rose out of the chair, he did not seem entirely lucid. Then he stiffened himself. “I know my rights,” he said and stood on them.

• • •

“You scared?”

“Shit, no. You?”

“I keep thinkin’. S’pose he saw?”

“We’d’ve been arrested.”

“Fifty-three fuckin’ dollars.”

They spoke in the dark, their faces pinched from the cold, and passed a Seagram’s bottle back and forth. One was hiccuping. The Seagram’s and the nearness of the cows inside the barn kept them from freezing. Outside it was snowing.

“Be a blizzard by the time it’s through.”

“Who cares?”

They huddled in hay, their knees drawn up. The cows were restless, and some were ailing, mostly from neglect. “Hate it here,” the younger brother said, though he was used to the smells and sounds of the barn and never noticed them.

“Quit hiccuping.”

“Can’t. Christ, it’s cold. Let’s go in the house.”

“No way. The old man knows something’s up, and we ain’t gonna let ‘im guess what.”

“We’ll give ‘im the bottle. That’ll put ‘im to sleep.”

“Shake it, you damn fool. There ain’t none left.”

One of the ailing cows let out a low moan of discomfort and then a screech of pain that sounded more human than animal. Snow blew in under the double doors.

“Leroy.”

“What?”

“We had the chance to go back there and do it again, would you still do it?”

“I’d do it better.”

A wind shot through the doors and cut into their mackinaws. They squirmed deeper into the sour hay. “Still and all,” the younger brother said, “we oughta make sure.”

“ ‘Bout what?”

“ ‘Bout Rogers.”

• • •

A foot of snow fell through the night and much of the morning. It was midafternoon when Lieutenant Wade turned in his chair and peered out the window. His office inside the state police barracks was small, his desk occupying most of it. The building was just off the highway and surrounded by birch and pine. Snow cuddled branches of the pine and clung to the birch. Chickadees made twitchy and brief appearances. Wade saw nothing but the stark snow and blades of ice flashing in the cold sunlight, which increased his dissatisfaction with the remoteness of the area. He disliked country winters, which billowed with the fiercest of winds and the deepest of drifts, as if the other seasons there had misspent themselves, as he seemed to have done with the years of his marriage. His sense of aloneness, dull during the day, worsened at night when the only sound might be a dog’s barking in the dark.