The Off-Islander Read online

  I walked down Commonwealth Avenue heading toward the Common but turned down a parallel street heading toward Newbury Street. I made my way through the streets, stopping to wait for the lights to be in my favor. Anything else would have been madness. The bar was more or less where Danny said it would be. It was also three steps down from the street and had black and white pictures of old Boston Celtics and Red Sox. It had a bay window, tables, chairs, booths, and a vaguely nautical feel to it. It was quarter to five, and the place was two-thirds full with the people who slip out of work early for a drink. The bar was already loud and filling with smoke. I made my way through the swell of put-together men and women to the bar, where Danny was sitting. There was a glass of scotch with four ice cubes and two fingers in it in front of him.

  I slid into the seat next to him, beating out a man in a blue suit who I would have sworn had a perm. Golden Curls shot me a dirty look, hunched his shoulders, and moved down the bar toward the corner. He might have muttered “asshole” under his breath, and I might have cared in some other lifetime.

  “Andy, how’s the boy?” Danny punched me lightly on the shoulder.

  “Danny, did you get good news, or have you been in this place since lunch?” Danny was the type of guy who drinks, drinks a lot, but doesn’t get drunk. It has something to do with that computer he calls a brain.

  “Our friend in San Francisco called. She is pleased with you, which means that she is pleased with me.” He drank some of his scotch and waited while I ordered from the bartender, who also looked like he had a perm. His curls weren’t golden, though, they were brown. Was I missing out on a male fashion trend?

  “She is pleased that I took the job?” I wanted to say case. Philip Marlowe would have called it a case. On the other hand, Marlowe had a lot more class than I did. The bartender brought my Löwenbräu and pilsner glass, which I ignored. When he went away, Danny started to talk again. He was the type who never talked business in front of waiters or bartenders.

  “She called me this afternoon. She said that you were the right man for the job. She then said that I was to draw one thousand dollars a week from an account at Old Stone Bank for expenses and your pay for as long as you are gainfully employed on her case. You will report your progress to me and send the report to me, which I will forward to her.” I nodded my understanding of his instructions.

  “You must be digging up a lot of dirt or burying something big.” There was a question somewhere in there, and I found myself wondering if Danny was actually off the clock. Knowing Danny, he would find a way to turn all twenty-four hours of the day into billable hours. I was also noticing a very pretty brunette in the mirror behind the bar.

  “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s a missing person case.”

  “Who’s missing? Not the husband?” He sounded alarmed. The brunette was lighting a cigarette and looking bored while Golden Curls talked at her.

  “Her father is missing.” Danny had finished his scotch and was motioning for the bartender to bring us two more. I lit a cigarette and contemplated the brunette in her light gray jacket and cream-colored blouse. The beer arrived in front of me, and Brown Curls took away the unused pilsner glass.

  “Her father, the patent attorney? I thought he was dead.” He finished what was left in his old glass of scotch and slid it toward the bartender’s side of the bar.

  “Nope, that was her stepfather, and yes, he is dead. Her real father was a marine in Korea. He came home from the war to wife and daughter, went out for a pack of smokes, and you guessed it . . . never came back.” The Löwenbräu was cold, and the brunette was laughing at something Golden Curls said. I did not take it as a good sign for me.

  “She isn’t your type.” Danny was looking in the mirror, too. He also knew me pretty well.

  “Whaddaya mean, not my type?” I wasn’t even sure I had a type.

  “She’s not some intellectual liberal grad student or some sensitive arts type.” He was smiling a little, not much of a smile.

  “How do you know?”

  “She is a contract attorney in my firm, and she would eat a sap like you for an appetizer.” He was good at building a case.

  “I meant, how do you know what my type is?”

  “Leslie. Remember all those dinners at the house? Remember how Maryanne thought you two were going to get married? Remember how she told you not to screw it up?” Danny was allegedly brutal in cross-examination. I had enough cop friends who almost didn’t want to talk to me when they found out that Danny and I were friends.

  “Can we change the subject?” I didn’t like being reminded of the fact that Leslie walked out because I am hard to live with and apparently easy to live without.

  When we first met we would talk about all of the things you talk about when the relationship is new. Childhood, family, early happy memories. We decided to get a place together and were lucky to find our apartment. It wasn’t big and the building, an old brownstone, was in perpetual disrepair, but the rent was reasonable and we had a view of the river between buildings. There was a lot of joy in picking our furniture, building bookshelves, buying books. At first it was great to stay in and make dinner together. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of trying to see who could get out of their clothes first.

  We made love at night. Then I would dream about Vietnam and wake up muttering. Kicking at sheets and blankets, sweating after fighting the imaginary demons of my bygone war. The war that society didn’t want to talk about and the army said that I could not talk about. I didn’t want to talk to Leslie about it. I didn’t want to talk to her about the men whom I had killed and even worse, the friends who had been killed. I didn’t want her to think of me that way. Soon, the silences grew longer and more frequent. Soon I didn’t want to talk about work; I didn’t want to talk about much. Talking led to arguing about my not talking. In the end she chose absence over silence and left me.

  “Okay, so tell me about the case.” Danny seemed interested, and the brunette lady shark lawyer looked like she was interested in Golden Curls’s stories. I brought Danny up to speed on the thinnest case ever.

  “I am looking for a Korean War veteran, a marine, the last trace of whom was in 1972.” I tried to wash the statement down with cold Löwenbräu, but it stuck in my throat like dust.

  “1972, that was ten years ago. You were in Vietnam.” He said it as though my being in Vietnam had any bearing on anything. A woman with honey-colored hair who was sitting next to Danny cocked an ear at the Vietnam thing. I smiled like it was a joke. “So, what happened in 1972?”

  “That is the last time that he collected his check from the VA.”

  “Here in Boston?” Danny was motioning to the bartender, and I was beginning to wonder if it was going to be one of those nights that leads to one of those days where I wake up wondering why I don’t learn.

  “No, he got his last check in San Francisco.” The woman with honey-colored hair was trying to listen without seeming to listen.

  “So, why did she hire you? Wouldn’t someone out there be better suited?” Danny slid a bottle toward me, and I slid an empty back toward him.

  “She did. She hired Pinkerton.” The woman with honey-colored hair was wearing a dark jacket over a cream-colored blouse, probably another killer lawyer who Danny knew.

  “Pinkerton. Are they still detectives? I thought all they did now was security work.” He was smiling his three-scotch crooked smile.

  “Nope, they still do detective work. I have a Gone with the Wind–size file to prove it.” The woman with honey-colored hair and the cream blouse under her blue jacket was leaning closer.

  “What does she think you can do that they can’t? They are a pretty big outfit with a lot of resources.”

  “Her father got a few checks out on the Cape in the late sixties. Pinkerton looked into it, but she felt from their report that people on the Cape wouldn’t talk to them because they weren’t local.” I took another pull on my beer.

  “Where will
you start?” He was all ears now.

  “I’ll go to the post office where he got his checks and see if they can tell me who owned the box in 1968. Then I will see if they are still around.” The woman with honey-colored hair in the cream blouse with a dark jacket also had on a string of pearls, and I wanted to send her a drink.

  “That is an awfully long shot.” Danny, master of the obvious, had struck again.

  “I know, but it is all that is left. That and going to the VA and spending a lot of money to see if anyone knows anything.”

  “Don’t you think that Pinkerton tried all that?”

  “I am sure they did, but their reports indicate that people really didn’t say much to them at all. They might just talk to me.”

  “Well, when you are not being an asshole, you do have a winning way about you.”

  “Thanks, I wish I could say the same of you.”

  Danny swirled some scotch around in his glass and then took a drink of it. Ice cubes clinked against the glass, and he put it back down on the bar.

  “Do you think there is a chance that he is out on the Cape somewhere?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I can tell you that he isn’t in San Francisco or Las Vegas, probably not even on the West Coast. Pinkerton would have picked up on that.”

  “How do you know he isn’t dead?” Danny was not too subtly slipping into cross-examination mode. The woman with the honey-colored hair was barely even trying to look as though she wasn’t listening.

  “He might be, but I doubt it. He was in the service and he was fingerprinted. If his body turned up, they would have printed him, and the VA would have sprung for the burial. There would have been some sort of record of that. Pinkerton would have picked up on that.” In the bar mirror, she looked to have brown eyes, but in the low light they could have been hazel.

  “Or his body never turned up?”

  “That’s true. Whatever he was up to, it probably wasn’t legal, and people doing illegal things tend to get dead sooner than straight people.”

  “They also tend to end up in shallow, unmarked graves more often as well.”

  “Like Jimmy Hoffa,” I said.

  “Like Jimmy Hoffa,” he agreed.

  “I don’t think that this guy was in Hoffa’s league.” The woman with honey-colored hair was drinking white wine.

  “What do you think he was into?” Danny had also noticed the woman with honey-colored hair and shot her a smile in the mirror.

  “I don’t know. Could have been anything. He could have been mobbed up or in the rackets. He was in Vegas, so I am sure that gambling wouldn’t be a stretch. Drugs are always a possibility, too.” She smiled back at Danny, but it was a smile that acknowledged her transgressions at the bar.

  “If he was in Vegas in the sixties and seventies, he couldn’t have pulled on a one-armed bandit without tripping on someone who was mobbed up.” Danny would know, given who many of his clients were. Danny’s clients were the type of mobsters who could buy anything, anyone—cops, judges, politicians—and when they couldn’t go to jail, they paid Danny.

  Danny could park his Cadillac in neighborhoods that cops couldn’t go into alone. There were bars in Southie that I wouldn’t go into without a shotgun, where Danny never had to pay for his whiskey. Danny was a good lawyer who kept a lot of people out of jail and who had a lot of very powerful friends. The Mercedes in the garage and private schools for the girls came at a high price.

  “Or it could be he is another vet who came home from a shitty war and drank himself to death while no one was looking.” I had known enough guys who had done it.

  “Like you?” Danny wasn’t smiling anymore. Danny had told me often enough what a fuckup I was. He had hated it when I joined the cops but lost it when I quit. He had yelled at me, saying if I had stuck with it I could have risen through the ranks. He frequently reminded me that I was smart, that I could have been anything. I would have made a great lawyer. In the end, I think he felt guilty that I went to Vietnam and he didn’t. Sometimes when he got drunk enough he would talk about feeling bad being antiwar while I was over there. He thought if I just grew up, married the right girl, and had a family it would all be fine.

  “I didn’t try and drink myself to death. I cut loose a little, but I adjusted all right.” I had a few rough nights, but that was understandable.

  “That isn’t what I am talking about. You went on a couple tears, but more than that, you were just quiet. You wouldn’t say anything sometimes for hours at a time. You used to disappear. We’d be in a bar or at a party, and one second you would be there and the next I wouldn’t see you for a couple of days.” He was all business now. It was true. I remember one night, we were at a party in Quincy, and I had to get out of the place. I went and told Danny and Maryanne that I was going to the bathroom and walked out the kitchen door into the night air.

  I walked up into the Quincy Quarry and started moving down the trails. I rubbed dirt into my face and hands to camouflage them. I moved quietly, slowly, the way I had been taught, off of the trail. I moved around kids making out and around kids smoking weed. I slid around all of them like water around rocks. For a short time, I was back doing what they had trained me to do, the only thing I had ever really been good at doing. I once was so close to an NVA that I could hear his cigarette crackle softly when he inhaled. He never knew I was there.

  When I woke the next morning, cold and damp in some scrub, there was a thick fog. For a few seconds, I thought that I was in Vietnam by the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I would wake up in the mist. You couldn’t see anything, and that was the scariest part. You didn’t know if the men hunting you were just a few feet away. You didn’t know if they had gotten close or not. I had hated the mornings.

  That morning in Quincy, I woke up cold and scared. It was like one of the bad dreams from the war. Instead of being in school naked, I was in the jungle. I didn’t have my Swedish K gun with the big silencer. I didn’t have my 9mm Browning or my knife. No grenades or Claymore mines. No radio, no nothing. I was just cold and wet, and the enemy was out there. But he wasn’t. I was in a quarry outside of Boston covered in dirt, with twigs in my beard and hair. I was scared of phantoms, of my past sins. I had readjusted just fine.

  In the end, I had to learn to live with it. I dropped out of school. Political Theory is a lot less interesting if you have debated it with guns and grenades. I saw an ad in the Globe—the police department was hiring. I almost had a degree, a good war record, and a couple of medals that didn’t mean anything to anyone but the hiring board. The academy was drudgery, but it passed. My training officer had been in Korea—he didn’t say much to me. He smoked a lot, drank more, and didn’t take shit from anyone on the street. I saw more than one guy get his head bounced off a wall or the hood of a cruiser.

  I loved the street. It was electric. You never knew from one call to the next what you were going to get. Some nights it was just one brawl after another. Some nights I got the shit knocked out of me. I was cut with a box knife and had a bottle broken over my head, but in the end, I could sleep most nights. Once I put on the uniform, I lost the feeling of waiting for things, bad things, to happen to me. I had regained a measure of control. By the time I realized that it was bullshit, I was on my way out. I told off a few too many people who had more drag than me, and a fistfight with a sergeant ended a career without much future. Like I said, I adjusted just fine.

  Danny finished his scotch and mumbled something about Maryanne and the kids. He threw some money down on the bar and told me to call him when I had learned anything. I said sure, and with that he was gone. I still had half a Löwenbräu and was in no rush. I lit a cigarette and looked in the mirror, but the woman with honey-colored hair was gone. I wasn’t her type, anyway.

  Chapter 5

  I woke up the next morning and got myself cleaned up. I had coffee and toast, and looked through the Globe. Nothing in it looked good. The Globe had news about the president increasing the marines’ mission in Leb
anon. I was dressed in jeans, a blue oxford shirt, the Colt .32, and a corduroy jacket, all of which went under Leslie’s trench coat. I got in the Ghia and headed toward Route 3 South to the Cape. The drive down 3 South starts off in the high, granite walls of an area that two hundred years ago provided slabs of granite for the cities of the Northeast, leads past Route 24, and eventually flattens out to the beginning of the sandy arm that is Cape Cod.

  When I passed Route 24, it was obvious that fall was in full effect and until the ride flattened out into pine trees, the foliage was red and yellow. It was the type of fall day where the sun was playing tag with the clouds. Warm enough when the sun was out, but if it stayed behind the clouds for too long, I had to coax heat out of the Ghia’s heater. It was anybody’s guess, but the weatherman had said that the sun would give way to all-too-familiar New England wind and rain. It was the type of weather that I loved and one of the reasons I couldn’t live anywhere else. That and the Red Sox.

  The classical radio station was playing Dvorak, and it was nice to be driving somewhere other than the mad traffic of the city. Occasionally the program host would come on with his deep voice, sounding like he had smoked a pound of weed before the program. Nice and mellow. Letting you know that no matter what shit was going down, he had the classical music locked down for you.

  In Vietnam, our radio guy Donnie Hicks had been like that. It didn’t matter what shit we were into, Donnie’s deep basso would rumble down the handset to you when he was a Covey Rider, a sort of Forward Air Controller just for SOG. “Be cool, baby. We got some fast movers coming in. Gonna burn up some shit, so you best be getting to the LZ an’ get with the slicks. You dig?” Hearing Donnie’s voice on the other end of the radio was like taking a golf ball–sized Valium. Whatever was going down, you just got calmer. Mellower. You knew shit was just gonna work out, because he told you so.

  Donnie was a legendary radio man on teams. When I first got to Nam, I was lucky enough to work with him. He was a radio artist. AK-47 rounds would be snapping all around, and Donnie would be just chatting with the Covey Rider, circling above us in his little prop plane. You’d hear Donnie, “Um, baby, we in some shit down here. What you got on deck for me? Shit yeah, F-4s be nice.” Like he was discussing blondes or brunettes instead of jets with napalm and rockets. “Uh-huh . . . Cobras . . . yeah, send them, too. Ain’t you got no Sky Raiders for me, baby?” Shit, yeah. Donnie was the living embodiment of Zen cool, and his calm saved my ass more than once. I heard that Donnie stayed in the army. He said that Vietnam was safer than the South Side of Chicago.