Back Bay Blues Read online

  Books by Peter Colt

  THE OFF-ISLANDER

  BACK BAY BLUES

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  BACK BAY BLUES

  PETER COLT

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 by Peter Colt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2020936962

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2342-0

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: October 2020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2346-8 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-2346-5 (ebook)

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following:

  CME for tirelessly and heroically trying to bring some semblance of proper spelling and grammar to the stuff I write.

  TFA, who spent countless hours trying to educate me about the inner workings of ships and listening to me tell him my ideas for stories for the last thirty years.

  CLC, who is willing to answer questions about hypothermia, gunshot wounds, explosives, and many other esoteric things that Andy Roark should know about or experience.

  Any mistakes that the reader finds are mine and mine alone.

  Also, Cathy who patiently lets me slip off to my office and write, leaving her to deal with everything and everyone else.

  Lastly for Henry and Alder; there would be no point to any of this without you three.

  Chapter 1

  November 1982 had been a hard month for me. I had witnessed a man killed, killed a man, and found out that an old friend had betrayed me. I could see if he had betrayed me for a woman, but in this case, it was just money. Not even a lot of money.

  I had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to find work without Danny Sullivan feeding it to me from his business as a criminal defense attorney. I had about a week in without work, and then it picked up. I put a new ad in the Yellow Pages, and that did the trick. It also helped that a lot of cops and lawyers knew me. A lot of former clients had sent referrals, and I didn’t starve. After a time, I figured out that Danny’s referrals had been nice, but I didn’t need them, and the last one had almost gotten me killed.

  November had slipped into December without much fanfare. Christmas came and went, and New Year’s passed without resolution. February found me cold and worn out. I had been hired by a lawyer for a big shipbuilding company to investigate a workers’ comp case down at the shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the end of January. It was a couple of days that wrapped up quickly.

  That case led to one involving union agitators. The shipyard did a lot of work for the navy and operated on close margins. Too many union problems could shut them down. There was always a fear that the Soviets would pay agitators to do that at the shipyard and that the giant crane called “Goliath” that dominated the Quincy skyline would fall still.

  For me, it meant a lot of time hanging around the docks, the yard, and the bars that the shipyard workers went to. It meant a lot of time trying to figure out who was who in the world of shipyard labor. February down on the docks by the Fore River was cold, damp, wind-driven cold, the type of cold that started at my feet and worked its way up into the very center of me.

  I was dressed for the weather, plenty of wool, and on the colder days a peacoat and watch cap. I had good gloves, but they could only keep my hands warm for so long. I had a .45 caliber Colt Lightweight Commander in the pocket of the peacoat, in the special pocket the navy had designed just for it.

  It was a big gun that shot a big, slow .45 caliber bullet, but if I needed a gun down on the docks then I would really need a gun. I had two spare magazines in the other pocket. I had a big folding Buck knife stuck down in the pocket of my faded jeans. I could flip the blade out fast, and it was sharp enough to shave the hair off my arm. I used to carry a Colt 1903, but for legal reasons that was now in a safe deposit box in the basement of a bank in Providence, Rhode Island. I am not telling you which one, but it looks a lot like the building Clark Kent works in.

  Detective work is a lot of boredom: waiting, watching, and trying to make sense of what you see. Sometimes I was on foot, and other times I would park the Subaru Brat that I was borrowing from a friend. The Ghia wasn’t good for surveillance, so it stayed at home. The Brat was tan and had a cap on the back. The jump seats had been removed, and I could lie down in a sleeping bag in the back. It would get cold, but it let me unobtrusively take pictures of people in and around the shipyard. The downside was I ended every day cold, stiff, and hungry.

  One night when I was fighting traffic trying to get back to my apartment in Boston’s Back Bay, I saw a brightly lit restaurant in a strip mall on the outskirts of Quincy. It had red curtains and lacquered lattice woodwork in the windows. There was a yellowing menu in the window, and a bright neon sign that said, THE BLUE LOTUS, formed into that weird faux Asian version of the English alphabet you could only find in Chinese restaurants. It looked inviting, and the tickle of the cold starting in my throat made me think of Hot and Sour Soup.

  It had snowed lightly that day, adding to my need for warmth. I pulled the Brat through the slush and slid into a parking spot. When I pulled open the door, I was greeted by the wonderful smell of cooking food and exotic spices. There was a small counter in front of me with a cash register, and a ceramic golden cat with one raised paw was next to the register. To my left was an unused coatrack and a small shrine with a ceramic Buddha and incense. Behind the cash register was a dusty bar with dusty liquor bottles that ran half the length of the restaurant. There were two booths by the window that the Brat was facing and then a series of tables that ran the room’s length opposite the bar. Behind the bar were three red vinyl booths. The chairs were all black metal with red vinyl cushions.

  Two of the tables were taken up by older Asian couples: Chinese, Vietnamese, it was impossible to tell. There was a young white couple sitting in one of the booths by the window. A skinny Asian man with black slacks and a checked shirt with rolled sleeves walked up to me from somewhere in the back. He wore aviator-framed prescription glasses and was smoking. He said, around the cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth, “You wan table?” His accent was thick but not indecipherable. He could have been thirty-five or fifty-five, I couldn’t tell.

  “A booth, if you don’t mind.” He shrugged and, taking a menu from the stack by the register, led me to a booth. I sat down, the peacoat folded next to me on the booth, with the pocket with the Colt facing up. He took my order and, later, brought it out without saying m
uch or taking the cigarette from his mouth. The restaurant and its menu were Chinese, but I had spent over two years in Vietnam and knew that he was about as Chinese as I was. He could have stepped right out of any restaurant, bar, or club in Saigon.

  I turned down the bowl of bread rolls and Chinese mustard that every Chinese restaurant seemed to insist you eat. He merely grunted something that sounded like approval. I asked for chopsticks, and he answered with another grunt and put a paper sleeve with two wooden chopsticks down in front of me. He seemed genuinely shocked when I ordered tea instead of a drink; by that I mean he raised his left eyebrow a millimeter higher than the one on the right.

  The food was excellent. The Hot and Sour Soup did its job, and the dumplings I ordered were perfectly steamed and pan seared. I managed to eat Lo Mein with the chopsticks without wearing much of it or embarrassing myself. He brought the check on green paper on a plastic tray, pinned down by two fortune cookies, which I ignored. I left enough cash to pay the bill and leave a tip.

  When I stood up and put the peacoat on, he was at the table, moving on quiet catlike feet. “You din have fortune cookie. You no wan?”

  “No, I learned my fortune a long time ago.” He grunted, which seemed to be his preferred method of communicating with me. I wondered if he smelled Vietnam on me. I walked out past the ceramic cat, which was waving its frozen paw at me.

  Chapter 2

  The case seemed to have little end in sight, and the weather in Boston wasn’t going to get much warmer until the end of March, which to a true Bostonian meant May. I spent a lot of time down by the Fore and Weymouth Rivers, always in the shadow of the Goliath. I found myself stopping at The Blue Lotus once or twice a week. The only recognition that I was becoming kind of a regular was that the skinny Vietnamese man stopped bringing me bread rolls or fortune cookies. One night when a young, slim woman whom I took to be his daughter tried to bring me some bread rolls, he barked at her in their native language, and she whisked the rolls away.

  One day when I came in my peacoat and watch cap, the Asian man looked at me and said, “What are you, sailor? You in navy?”

  “No, I’ve been working down at the shipyard.” My hair was still pretty short. I was getting used to it being not shaggy anymore. My mustache, on the other hand, I had let go a little. It was good but it wasn’t Magnum good.

  “No, you no sailor. Hands too soft. Sailor have rough hands.” He held out his and showed me his palms, which were calloused and rough. The fingers were gnarled like tree roots and nicotine stained at the tips. They spoke of rough work done with stoicism and little else.

  One day in early March, I was the only one other than him in the place in the late afternoon. A car squealed into the lot and parked across two spots. It was an asshole move no matter how you looked at it. The car was a green Chrysler from the Carter years, and the four kids who got out looked like high school football players. Two had on team jackets from Quincy High, and two had baseball bats. I slid the Colt out from the peacoat and into the small of my back. The Asian man heard the bells on the door and came out.

  The tallest of the boys, with long dark hair, said, “We’re sick of you gooks coming here to our town.”

  One of the others added intelligently, “Yeah.”

  “We are gonna bust up your gook restaurant, then your gook face, and you are gonna leave.”

  The Asian man stood still and quietly, almost at a whisper, said, “Fuck you” in the clearest English I had ever heard him use. His anger seemed to radiate off of him. It was incandescent.

  “What did you say, gook? We are gonna trash the place and teach you a lesson.” This one had long blond hair and looked like he bench pressed small cars when he wasn’t stuffing smaller boys into lockers or dropping lit M-80s in the toilet. I saw his feet shift and I stood up.

  One of the others looked at me and said, “What the fuck do you want, faggot,” with all the toughness that a seventeen-year-old bully can muster.

  I pulled the Colt out with little hurry and flipped off the safety as it was on its way up. It made an audible clicking noise, but by then the restaurant was very still and very quiet. I pointed it squarely between the eyes of the first kid. His eyes widened but not as big as the barrel of the. 45 must have seemed. “It isn’t nice to call people names, like faggot. Also, I don’t like the word gook. I especially don’t like it when a bunch of limp dick high school jocks say it to a friend of mine.”

  “You won’t use that gun, mister. You won’t shoot anyone,” from one of the team jackets. His voice cracked with his lack of confidence.

  “My fren, he kill before, lots of times. He in Vietnam. He kill lots of gooks.” I was not expecting him to speak, much less say that.

  “Gook, round eye, it’s all the same to me. Okay, who’s first?” My turn to sound like a wannabe tough guy.

  “Come on, guys, let’s get out of here. My dad will want the car back.” Like that, they fled out the door. They couldn’t get in the Chrysler fast enough and almost caused an accident pulling out of the parking lot.

  “Okay, you put away you gun. Looks like something you buy in Tu Do Street. Like some Tu Do Street pimp with shiny gun.”

  My pistol was stainless steel with stag horn grips, and Tu Do Street was in Saigon, famous for its fleshpots and other forms of vice. If you had the money, you could have it on Tu Do Street. A pimp on Tu Do Street would have a chrome or nickel pistol.

  “How did you know?” I asked him. He held out his hand to me and I took it.

  “Old fren, my name is Nguyen. I am from Saigon. I have seen lots of American boys with guns. You different, your face, your eyes, you a killer. I have seen men like you.” He then smiled and laughed. He was right. He went to the dusty bar and poured us each a snifter of very old, very good cognac. We toasted in Vietnamese, French, and then English.

  From that moment on, when I went in the restaurant, he insisted on making me Vietnamese food. No more of the bread roll and fortune cookie variety of Chinese food that littered the South Shore; from then on it was pho so hot and spicy it would clear out my sinuses and water my eyes. Bee bong that was cool and filling and always good. I never saw an egg roll again, because nime chow displaced them on my plate. Sometimes it was something simple like rice and vegetables with a little meat in nuoc mam and soy sauce. He insisted on giving me the sweet, cloying Vietnamese coffee, made with condensed milk served over ice. If it was dinnertime, it would be Japanese beer in a silver can. There was no more Vietnamese 33 Beer to be had, and if there were they probably wouldn’t sell it in Quincy, Massachusetts.

  A few weeks later, I stopped into The Blue Lotus on a night when the April sunset had given away to an India ink sky. It was chilly but not raw. My case was wrapping up. The shipyard had offered me a permanent job as a security consultant. The money would be regular, but it would mean having a boss. I hadn’t much liked that in the army and even less so in the cops. The shipyard’s man paid me and told me if I reconsidered . . . but we both knew that I wasn’t going to.

  Nguyen waved me over to a booth toward the back when I walked in. He motioned me to sit and somehow without saying so indicated we would eat together. Two cans of Asahi arrived with chopsticks and napkins. A plate of nime chow arrived, translucent tubes of rice noodles, bean sprouts, cucumber, cilantro, and shrimp all in a rice wrapper. Nguyen sat down across from me, tapping the ash of his cigarette into an old cracked saucer that he placed not quite between us. He took off his silver-framed aviators and put them down next to his ashtray. His daughter brought out two steaming bowls of pho, spicy noodle soup. She placed a plate heaped with thinly shaved slices of rare beef between us. We each picked up a slice and put it in our soup.

  Nguyen’s daughter, Linh, looked at me, smiled, and said, “Enjoy your pho, Andy.” She pronounced it the Vietnamese way, “fa,” not the stupid white guy way, “fo.” I thanked her, and her father grunted one of his usual commands. I knew I had achieved status as regular when Linh started using my name.
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  “I think she has a crush on you, Round Eye,” he said between slurps of pho. He seemed to enjoy calling me by the mild racial slur. In his mind, it probably made up for all of the times I had referred to his people by racial slurs. It was easier in Vietnam not to think of them as people, to be dismissive, to dehumanize them. That was Vietnam. The war was over, and I had grown up enough to be ashamed of things like that.

  “I’m too old for her.” It was always a thorny point when someone tells you their teenage daughter has a crush on you. We each slid more beef into our pho.

  “You not rich enough, either.” He laughed.

  His laugh was the laugh of a much fatter man. It started somewhere in his stomach and positively rumbled out of his wiry frame. I ate my pho, alternating between chopsticks and the shallow spoon that you can only get in Asian restaurants. I managed to not drip too much broth on my shirt. When the soup got to be too hot for me, I bit into a chewy nime chow for a break from the heat, washing it all down with the excellent Japanese beer.

  When we had finished eating, he leaned back contentedly and grunted another command. Linh brought two more beers, didn’t make eye contact with me, and began clearing away the plates and bowls. “I hope you liked your pho, Andy.” She had the habit of overusing my first name, the way that teenagers do when they start dipping their toes in the world of adult acceptance. I assured her I did, and she cleared everything and left.

  “That was good, Round Eye, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.” My mouth was still burning, and I was still dabbing my nose with a napkin.