Flesh and Blood

  “I’d take that as a compliment if I possibly could.”

  “By the book is what I’m saying. You didn’t care about the outcome, remember?”

  “I didn’t want to care about it,” I reply.

  “Sometimes you didn’t even read the paper or watch the news to see what a jury decided after you testified.” He glances at me again. “You used to say that the way a trial turned out or what insurance companies did wasn’t up to you or even part of your job.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Maybe you’re making it your job now.”

  “I might be.”

  “I’m wondering how come.”

  “Being the other way doesn’t feel right anymore,” I reply. “I’ve had enough of people getting away with things.”

  “You and me both,” Marino says as if something else is on his mind. “People shouldn’t get away with shit. I don’t care who they are.”

  “Cold and impersonal,” I consider as if I’m amused but I’m not.

  “I said sort of.”

  “You’ve waited all this time to tell me that?”

  “I’ve said it before including behind your back. You’re different now.”

  “I was that bad back then?”

  “Yeah and I was an asshole,” he says. “We deserved each other.”

  CHAPTER 18

  HE IMPATIENTLY TAPS HIS thick fingers on the steering wheel as we make progress, inching forward at three miles an hour.

  It wasn’t what Marino bargained for when he decided to take a creative route back, now on the Longfellow Bridge, locally known as the Salt and Pepper Bridge, its tall granite towers resembling salt and pepper shakers. Rusting train tracks run down the middle dividing four lanes of east- and westbound traffic.

  The century-old steel girder bridge spans the Charles River, connecting Boston’s Beacon Hill to Cambridge, and traffic is still awful. Right now it has nothing to do with Obama. As if detours and delays caused by his motorcade weren’t bad enough, a car is broken down up ahead, the right lane closed. Midway across in the eastbound lanes a twisted wreck is being chained onto a flatbed truck.

  A rolling surf of blue and red police lights flash and news helicopters hover like bright dragonflies, three of them rock steady at about a thousand feet. The low sun is glaring and I wonder if that might have contributed to the accident. Maybe the gridlock and road rage caused by a presidential visit did.

  “We’ve talked maybe half a dozen times over the past few years.” I’m telling Marino about my conversations with Bloom. “The exchanges are on a par with a number of junkyard lawyers I unfortunately have to deal with. Clearly he’s made it his mission to know as much about me as he can possibly find, including what I look like.”

  “Recognizing you isn’t exactly a big surprise,” he says. “You’re in the news and even in Wikipedia, which you need to correct by the way. It has a bunch of stuff wrong including that you and me had an affair when we were working cases in Virginia. I think they mean Benton.”

  “Our planned vacation in Florida hasn’t been made public.” I’m not interested in rumors. “The condo Benton rented isn’t. How do you explain that?”

  “Lucy might have ideas about it. Some database Bloom got into. Some blog out there you don’t know about. I haven’t heard jack shit from Machado since I saw him at the scene this morning.”

  He is sullen for a moment and I let my silence prompt him.

  “I thought I knew him,” he says and that’s what his projection is about.

  Marino’s anxieties that I might move or abandon him are really about losing his best friend. But a comment he made is digging into me, his question about betrayal and keeping secrets as if a person has done something wrong. That person must be Machado. What did he do and what is Marino hiding?

  “I don’t know what’s gone on but I’m sorry.” I’m not going to force the subject. I don’t want to come across as cold or impersonal, not even sort of. “I know the two of you were very close and that he did a lot to help you get back into policing.”

  “And I guarantee he wishes he hadn’t.” Marino is angry because it’s easier than being hurt. “You encourage somebody and it’s fine until they leave you in the dust. We used to ride Harleys together, hang out at Paddy’s, watch the games and get take-out barbecue, ribs and biscuits from Sweet Cheeks. Sox tickets, Bruins tickets, grab Italian, Pomodoro, Assaggio in the North End.” For an instant he looks sad and just as quickly his face turns stony. “We had each other’s backs.”

  “You don’t anymore?”

  “He doesn’t have mine and maybe I shouldn’t have his.”

  “It’s painful to lose a friend like that.”

  “Me in pain?” His laugh sounds more like a snort. “Hell no. Not even a twinge. He’s a traitor. All the times he said how much he wanted me to become a cop again so we could be partners? Well be careful what you wish for. Now he wishes I was fired or dead.”

  “Is that what this is about? That you’ve eclipsed him?” I know how to deal with Marino when he’s upset.

  But I always thought I did. From the beginning of our relationship I believed in my people management skills. Cold and impersonal, and I try to conjure up who I was to him. My psyche wavers like a flame disturbed by a sudden draft.

  “Damn right I’ve eclipsed him. It’s the damn truth,” Marino says. “There should be some gum in the glove box.”

  I OPEN IT TO look, nudging the Baggie of polished pennies aside and they quietly clink.

  Rand Bloom didn’t leave them on my wall. He didn’t tweet the poem from Morristown last month. He’s too crude and ham-fisted for acts of cryptic symbolism. Cold and impersonal. I can’t get it out of my mind. When I was hired as the chief medical examiner of Virginia, my first big job, Marino was a jerk. I was reserved. Maybe I wasn’t warm but I was fair. I was cordial. I thought I was nice while he went out of his way to make life hard for me.

  I dig around and find the gum—Clove, that figures. He loves retro and as I open the slim red pack I’m startled by a powerful rush from the past, images and sounds of my father’s grocery in West Flagler, an area of Little Havana that was a safe enclave for immigrants. I hold the pack up to my nose and smell it. Sweetly sharp and spicy, and I remember the hand-painted sign out front, SCARPETTA’S MARKET in big blue letters.

  Inside it was always cool, a window air conditioner rattling and dripping condensation on the tile floor, and the first thing I’d see was the candy and gum. Clove, Teaberry, Juicy Fruit, SweeTarts, M&M’s, Mallo Cups filled a wire rack, and on top of the wooden counter were gallon jars of Bazooka bubble gum with comics inside and silvery York peppermint patties coated in dark chocolate.

  Marino’s phone rings “Hail to the Chief,” a ringtone I’ve heard before but I don’t know who it is. I don’t pay attention as I envision my father’s hands as if they’re in front of me, tan with long slender fingers, placing coins inside the nickel-plated cash register, turn of the century and meticulously restored. For months I watched him work on it, a milk crate of pieces and parts on the kitchen table, which my mother made him cover with layers of the Miami Herald. He replaced the mechanical keys, added a brass ringer that clanged when the cash drawer opened.

  “What’s up, Boss?” Marino asks and I’m not listening to him.

  I’m listening to what my father used to say as he instructed me, advising me how to live because he knew he couldn’t much longer. But I never accepted that until he was gone and maybe not even then. We often spoke Italian in our home and his accent was gentle and lilting, his voice baritone and quiet. Succedono cose terribili. He would tell me that terrible things happen and one never knows who’s going to come through the door. Don’t turn your back and give a thief an opportunity. Life is short, Kay. It’s precious and fragile. There are those who want to take what doesn’t belong to them, so many people like that. Very hurtful people.

  Io non volevo vivere la mia vita con la paura del male. I would answer him t
hat I didn’t want to live my life fearing evil. I didn’t want to fear anything at all, and he said he was teaching me not to be naïve, to be smart. Non essere ingenua, devi essere furba, he said one day as he installed a side lock in the cash register that required a key, flat brass, oddly shaped on a fob with a small folding knife he always kept in a pocket.

  Later when he could no longer work, I began carrying the key and when he could still talk lucidly he would ask me if it was safe with me. Si, Papà, la terrò sempre al sicuro. It will always be safe, in my jewelry box now, and as I think of it I feel sad. It is an old feeling, vintage and from my past like Marino’s chewing gum.

  “Okay. I see. You got it from him but he didn’t bother sending it to me …” I overhear what Marino is saying as I see my father as if he’s next to me, thin even before he was sick, sharp featured with blond hair that was wavy and thick.

  He’d hold my hand and introduce me to customers when he’d take me to his store, sometimes on Saturdays, and I’d keep him company and do odd chores. Later when he could no longer leave the house I worked the register after school, on weekends and during the summers. At nine or ten I was keeping the books, making the deposits in the bank, meeting delivery trucks and refilling bins with fresh fruits and vegetables. I became facile at cutting and weighing meats and cheeses, an expert in the art of olive oils and crafting homemade pastas and breads. It never occurred to me that I was a child.

  My father’s leukemia made me old. Maybe it made me impersonal and cold. I stare out the window but don’t see the traffic, what I see is the Cuban sandwich shop my father loved, jamón dulce, ropa vieja, and Spanish beef stew that I would carry on a tray into the bedroom where he didn’t move, lying there with the blinds drawn, the slightest light seeping through. I believed I could make him eat and he would stop losing weight. The headaches wouldn’t be so severe and his fatigue would go away if I worked hard and made him happy.

  “I’ll look,” Marino says, not to me but on his phone, and I think about my being impersonal and cold, and I feel anger like a needle stick.

  When we first started working together years ago that’s what he thought. It seems worse to hear it now. Gratuitous, in fact. He didn’t need to say it and I’m not sure it’s an accurate description. I was earnest and diligent. Maybe my wry humor was lost on him or it could be possible what he said was true back then. It makes sense that it could have been. I’d learned not to care too much and gradually have unlearned it, which is where I am now. Marino wasn’t trying to be cruel. He didn’t mean anything.

  “I’ll look right now.” He’s unusually cordial to whoever he’s talking with. “Because I’m sitting in a damn parking lot. No, I don’t mean it literally. Why the sudden urgency?” A pause. “Yeah he got there about an hour before I did. A few uniforms were there. No, not inside with him, they wouldn’t have been. Why?” A longer pause. “Like I’ve said I can’t stop him from being the Lone Ranger … It’s looking like that. Tox will confirm. Right. Bleach.” He ends the call and says to me, “That was kind of weird.”

  I remember the opened pack of Clove gum in my hands. “I think it’s pretty stale,” I comment, and the anger is gone as if it were never there.

  He shrugs. “Hit me twice.”

  I peel the wrappers off two sticks as hard as cardboard. They crunch when he bites down on them.

  “The commissioner,” he says as he chews, opening something on his phone, staring long and hard at it. “Help yourself to the gum if you want.” His voice is different and distracted. “There’s plenty more where that came from. I order it off the Internet.”

  “The Lone Ranger?” I inquire as he closes whatever he was looking at and drops his phone into his lap.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.” He goes on to talk about it anyway. “Machado.” He tells me the problem started late last year when Cambridge Police Commissioner Gerry Everman mentioned that Marino is one of the best detectives the department has ever had and the word passed down through the ranks.

  If that wasn’t enough reason for jealousy there were a record number of letters of commendation from victims and witnesses Marino has worked with, and of course he wasn’t quiet about it. The more hostile Machado got, the more Marino pushed back. Finally there was a “situation” with a woman that began around last Thanksgiving.

  “The straw that broke it,” Marino summarizes.

  “Someone you were fighting over?”

  “This hasn’t got anything to do with me and no. I was seeing Beth Eastman until her daughter Julie got killed. The second Jersey victim who was shot when she was about to get on the ferry.”

  “You dated Beth in high school.”

  “Went steady and everything.”

  “She must be devastated.”

  “Her daughter was a real nice lady.” He talks and chews gum at the same time. “The other day I heard a rumor his latest thing is he’s trying to get on with the state police, wants to be an investigator assigned to the Middlesex County D.A.’s office.” He’s talking about Machado again. “If he does, it will be good riddance and my next pain in the ass, which probably is his motivation. He’ll try to steamroll Cambridge and interfere with every homicide we get. Sort of what he’s already doing on the inside. He was stupid as hell to tell Joanna that her husband was shot.”

  “I agree it wasn’t a good idea to give her an important detail like that.” I think about the guitars, their two cases on the bed and other items glowing whitish blue.

  “And you know why he’s making piss-poor decisions these days?” Marino says. “Because he wants people to side with him, not me. He’s obsessed to the point it’s crazy. If I turn up dead you know who to look for.”

  “You’ve mentioned that twice,” I reply. “I hope you don’t mean it literally.”

  CHAPTER 19

  WE PASS THE WRECKED Smart car in the opposite lanes, crushed, the windshield caved in, the roof flattened. Glass and plastic are all over the road and I wonder if the driver is en route to the CFC.

  “May as well be in a tin can.” Marino doesn’t want to discuss Machado anymore. “I don’t understand why anyone would drive something like that.”

  “It’s affordable.”

  “Yeah a real bargain if you’re killed in it. Maybe get something bigger than a bread box. It’s cheaper than a funeral.”

  “Rand Bloom will spare nothing, the end justifying the means.” I want to make sure Marino takes the insurance investigator very seriously. “I expect more underhanded tricks and we need to be prepared and proactive.”

  “Whenever you say proactive it makes me nervous.”

  “He’s been finding out everything he can about us. Let’s see what we can find out about him.”

  “Us? I think it’s just you. I don’t think he’s interested in me,” Marino says and I know what I’ll do.

  “He was in an accident or a fight,” I reply.

  “Yeah his face looks like someone hit him with a baseball bat. Get in line. Everybody who’s ever met him probably wants to beat the shit out of him.”

  “Let’s see what Lucy can dig up about him.” An accident or an attack, and there should be a police report, a record of what happened somewhere.

  “I think we get the drift,” Marino says, and we’ve reached the end of the bridge and are stopping at a red light now. “Bloom’s a shit stirrer, plain and simple. That’s why some sleaze insurance company would hire him.”

  He opens an email and an attachment on his phone, perhaps what the commissioner mentioned to him moments earlier or it could be something new. The head of Marino’s department is leaking information to him, and I’m reminded of what was easy for me to forget. Marino is one hell of an investigator. I wouldn’t want him after me.

  “TBP isn’t considered sleazy by the general public,” I tell him.

  “The Biggest Pricks.” He uses two fingers to enlarge whatever he’s looking at on his phone’s touch screen.

  “I don’t know what i
t stands for. The Best Policy comes to mind. If you look them up, it’s a great place to work and they’ve won all kinds of awards.”

  “Give me a break.”

  The light turns green. We’re moving again.

  “It’s a formidable insurer and well respected until you actually have a claim,” I add. “Then you find out the hard way what they’ll do to make sure you don’t get what you’ve paid premiums for.”

  “Totally disgusting.” Marino merges left onto Memorial Drive, and we’re back in Cambridge. “What a perfect job for a dirtbag who doesn’t give a damn about anybody and has no conscience,” he says and he’s right.

  Jamal Nari’s murder this morning didn’t deter Bloom from his ongoing harassment of Joanna. In fact he escalated it.

  “Obviously he targeted Mary Sapp too,” Marino says. “Looks like he may have targeted someone else,” he adds mysteriously.

  “My question is the same. How does he find out this level of detail about people? How did he know Nari and his wife were dealing with Mary Sapp, that she was the Realtor for a house they wanted to rent?”

  “All you got to do is tail someone, keep running into them somewhere, to be diligent and focused as hell. Then he passed on info so the rental fell through, getting a dishonest Realtor to do his dirty work. She’s happy to keep the deposit and avoid a problem. And who knows how she sweetened the pot.”

  “Someone in Bloom’s position probably gets a lot of pots sweetened.”

  “Kickbacks, and it’s just his good luck that Nari gets murdered.”

  “His wife loses him now she’s going to lose the house,” I reply and the Charles River Yacht Club is on our left, the MIT campus on our right, a lot of boats, brick and granite. “She can’t stay in their apartment after what happened and suddenly she finds she has no place to go.”

  Joggers and cyclists crowd the fitness path flanking the river, and lush green trees cast spreading shadows. Rowers and scullers skim over the dark blue water, pumping hard, going fast, ending the day physically and with civility unlike what we’re doing.