The cruisers of the Lowell PD snaked around the old textile compound looking for the man we described. No luck. He was a slippery one, was the guy in the trenchcoat. More cars were dispatched to continue the search while we were dropped off at the Dubliner. The Market Street section is the New Lowell, the phoenix arising from the ashes of the abandoned mills. Across the street were new condos made from converted mill buildings.
The Dubliner was an attractive pub that bordered an area increasingly filled with fine shops and busy offices. We found Mary pacing out front. Our greeting wasn't peaceful, but I realized through it all that her anger was the result of worry. We sat in a booth with one of the officers and I bought beers. The officer had coffee. We told him what had happened. Not only was he not impressed, but he informed us we had trespassed. Fortunately for us, Joe arrived shortly thereafter and smoothed things over. The squad car left for the factory, and we had lunch. The others dug into their bacon-cheeseburgers on bulkies, and I had a small Greek salad. Unless you're a lumberjack you've either got to skip lunch or go light. If you don't, before long you'll look like Santa Claus. We had more beer and then coffee. The strings were beginning to loosen, the tension of the 0. K. Corral incident receding.
The manager, who had refused to let Popeye into the establishment, stopped by our booth in a distressed state. The bull mastiff had sprawled in front of the Dubliner's door for a little post-adventure snooze. Patrons and potentials, seeing the beast in their path, were afraid to enter or leave. I looked out the window and saw pedestrians glance down, shift into high gear, and move right on. They were avoiding the place like a herpes hooker. So we brought the big lug in and he went up to Mary and started wagging his tail and big fat butt around and whining and piddling. The manager looked on and shook his head slowly. Joe tried again to pat Popeye, who growled at him. Then Joe reached over and gave Sam a quick pat near his upper arm. Joe winced.
"Use it?"
"Uh-huh."
"Score?"
"Uh-huh. Indirectly; clipped him with a splinter I think."
Joe groaned softly and pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes shut.
"You guys give me a pain in the ass," he said. He reached over and tapped me under the arm. "You packing iron too?"
"Of course not, dummy. I don't even own a shoulder holster
"Well I just never know with you, Doc. You're a strange one, with your fancy watches and-"
"Pooooor baaaaaaby!" cooed Mary as she patted the dog's head. "Baaaaaby got a headache, hmmmmm?" She wrenched open his mouth and popped in three Excedrin, closed his mouth, held it shut, and massaged his throat until his big pink tongue popped out, which meant the pills had been swallowed. Sam watched, amazed.
"Let's split," said Joe, getting up. "The state lab team will meet us at the factory. They're probably already there."
The manager was glad to see us go. On the way I stopped at a hardware store and bought a small crowbar, a pony sledge-hammer, and a broad mason's chisel. I knew there were tools left at the scene, but in all likelihood the lab boys would want them.
Within thirty minutes eight of us wound our way up the dismal stairs and onto the landing where we'd first spotted our man. e The room was halfway down the hall on the right. Right in the center of the big building. We went in. There was a very faint aroma in there I didn't like. A burnt smell. Popeye went over to the wall on the left and jumped up, sniffing. He whined and wagged his tail, then dropped to all fours and turned in a tight circle. Whined louder. Cried. Wailed. To the dog's left, near the door we had entered, the wall was torn. The plaster and lath had been hacked away from the studding and lay on the floor in a heap. This had been the falling noise, the patter of debris like heavy rain, we'd heard from the floor below before our mysterious friend had knocked off work and fled, shooting at us.
"He picked the wrong place to look," I said. "That's why he didn't find it."
"Find what?" asked Joe.
"Johnny's pouch. It's in there. In the wall. Didn't you notice the dog's reaction? That's why we brought him in the first place. He just also happens to be good at bulldozing old doors. I'm going into that wall to get the pouch because I bet my anterior bridge is inside. Now you see why our errand doesn't look so dumb?"
"I just wish you'd told me is all," he said. "And you're not doing any banging and digging until the lab boys case this place."
And they did. While we watched from the doorway, they took photographs of everything, and one guy made a sketch showing measurements, the window and door, and the location of the old desk that was in there. The team dusted the place for prints, collected fibers and dust from the floor, placed some cigarette butts in vials, and carefully collected the tools (a hammer and cold chisel) left by our mysterious friend. Then they left. Joe, Mary, Sam, and I stared at the wall. Then Joe examined the floor closely and drew our attention to large scrape marks on the floor. They led to the heavy old desk. His eyes went back to the wall, which was ruined along its upper edge where it joined the ceiling. There was about a two-foot line along the top where the plaster and lath had been removed from the timbers a long time ago, perhaps in the expectation of installing plumbing pipes or heating ducts. But it had never happened. That meant there were deep troughs between the studs that ran all the way down the wall toward the floor. The big gash in the wall was as high up as a basketball net."
"What they did was," said Joe, "they dragged that desk from the middle of the room over to the wall here, then dragged it back. Yeah, they dropped something down behind the facing all right."
I watched the dog jump up again, forelegs on the wall, nose pointed straight up, whining. I took hammer and chisel and poked through the wall just above the floor, right below him. Nothing but space. I tried farther up and ran into horizontal cross bracing between studs. So I tried right above the bracing, and before half a minute was up I was seeing glimpses, through the plaster dust and crumpled, splintered lathboard, of gray canvas. When the hole was big enough I pulled at the cloth and then was holding the pouch in my hand. On it, in dark-blue letters, were the words LOWELL SUN.
"Well, gotdamn!" said Sam.
The dog took it in his steam-shovel mouth and sank to his belly, holding it between his paws with his chin resting on it. He whined and thumped his tail on the old dirty floor. Popeye seemed to know Johnny wouldn't be back.
I returned to the hole and kept pecking away, hacking and tearing off slabs of plaster the way a pileated woodpecker works on an old dead tree. My mouthpiece was in there. I just knew it. And I'd save Tom and me a week's work if I could get it out. In fact, I was in such a sweat to retrieve my dental work that I didn't notice Joe. I heard him mumbling something but I couldn't-"
"Why?" he shouted. I turned to face him. Joe had Sam get the paperboy's pouch for him, since he didn't want to lose an arm. He turned it inside out. Examined the seams, the carrying strap. "Why?" he repeated. "They got the pouch, took the packet inside, then ditched the pouch behind the wall just the way they ditched the gas masks.. . and for the same reason. But what happens? They come back for it. Why?"
"Because they failed to get what they were after," I said. "They got the packet of documents from the public library all right."
"What makes you so sure?" said Mary.
"Because here's the envelope," I answered, gingerly pulling out as crumpled manila bundle that was slightly torn. Clearly visible on it was not only the Santuccios' address but the receiving stamp of the Boston Public Library.
"Well done, Doc. Well done. You shoulda been a cop."
I continued to punch, pry, smash, and chip at the wall. My reasons, and reasoning, were simple: there were two things in Johnny's pouch when he was murdered, the Sacco-Vanzetti documents in the packet and my anterior bridge in a small cardboard box. One they wanted, one they didn't. They'd taken the pouch to this location to examine it. Therefore, they'd disposed of the dental work the same way they'd hidden the pouch. In the old wall.
Only it wasn't working out that way. When I'd demolished the rest of the wall, with Joe's help and encouragement, it yielded nothing except what we'd already found. I'd helped Joe a bit but struck out on my personal quest. I led them back down and outside, trudging across the old buckled asphalt and cinder. The tools clanked and clinked under my arm. I was down. Joe was up; his star would rise at headquarters. I would have to spend a lot of time and trouble redoing the piece. Damn it all.
We asked Sam to dinner. He thanked us but declined, saying he had a lot of extra work to do at home. As we dropped him off I got out and walked with him over to the door, where he switched off the electronic alarm.
"I want to thank you, Sam, for all you've done."
"Hmmmph! Should be me who's thankin' you, Doc. We almost got that guy today. Next time, I promise you: I won't miss."
"Call it a hunch, Sam, but if I were you I'd take that cash out of your safe for a week or so."
"Huh? Why?"
I shrugged my shoulders and repeated that it was just a hunch.
Sam went in and reappeared with a shopping bag full of bills. He asked us to drive him to Somerville. We did. Following his directions, we soon found ourselves winding our way through tiny labyrinthine alleyways that were lined with small businesses dealing with the automotive aftermarket. Muffler shops, radiator repair, engine rebuilding, front ends, rear ends, bumpers, windshields, tires, shocks- the Cambridge-Somerville line was to cars what Boston's South End was to leather and shoes. We passed a radiator joint and I smelled noxious fumes of zinc galvanizing and acid baths. We stopped at Nissenbaum's Auto Parts on Columbia, right down the street from the Nike running-shoe factory.
I went inside with Sam; Maurice Nissenbaum put the cash in his big safe, gave Sam a signed slip, and we returned to Dependable where we finally parted. Sam left on that rumbly, popping old Honda with Popeye, goggles and all, right behind him. It seemed as if we could hear him three blocks out of sight. At home I poured large dollops of Laphroaig into brandy snifters and added some room-temperature soda water. We sat outside on the flagged terrace and looked at the two pink dogwood trees that were in full bloom. Joe and I stuck our noses down into the bowl-like glasses and inhaled the warm malty smell of the whisky. Mary sipped on Amaretto liqueur.
My lawn was bright green and wide. In one cozy corner of it was a cluster of paper-birch trees, and in the midst of this copse was a rough wooden table with benches. Moe and I like to sit there and play chess on a crisp fall day. Moe brings his old samovar and we make Russian caravan tea and play and push our little chess clocks down and he beats me. And we pretend we're Tolstoi and Chekhov. We wear warm sweaters in the afternoon and play balalaika music on a tiny cassette player. The birches are gold and white, and it's very Russian.
Mary has part of the side yard bounded by a walk-through arbor. The side of the house there is set with some Florentine tiles and a bronze wall fountain. There are Lombardy poplars around the other two sides, and two gas lamps. It's a romantic Latin courtyard, and only about twenty feet square. My favorite spot is still under construction, and borders on the small garage-sized guest cabin far back on the lawn. It is enclosed by birches and wild evergreens and wide bamboo stakes. Inside this tiny court are boulders, a pond, a curved concrete footbridge, a small torii, and two dozen dwarf bonsai in old pots or pots made by Mary, or set into rock crevices, or lining the miniature waterfall. Then in the middle, surrounded by all this miniaturized countryside, is a tiny teak teahouse with ungawa and rice screens. By the time I'm a hundred I may finish it. It's only forty feet square, but inside it one has the feeling of great space, privacy, and timelessness. Not a lot of talking in there. No laughing or loud noise. Cats but not dogs. You go there alone, or with someone you really care about, and sit quietly. Little bronze temple bells chime in the wind, and the squat bronze lantern by the miniature lake glows, and you can sometimes see the dull golden flash of the bug-eyed goldfish who live in the lake. I wanted to be there right now. I wanted to be drinking hot Keemun, not Scotch, and meditate on the past few days. I wanted the dust and events to settle, find their place, and begin to make sense.
"Charlie! Charlie! My God, how many times do we have to ask you?"
"Hmmm?"
"What's it going to be tonight, rack of lamb or bouillabaisse?"
"Oh, whatever." I got up and paced the flagstones. I looked up at our house. It looked big. I felt insulated and spoiled. Then I thought of what I'd read about Sacco and Vanzetti. Sacco and his family lived in a tiny cottage in Stoughton. He worked eighty-hour weeks and kept a big garden. He gave his spare vegetables to the "needy" families in the area. Vanzetti was a boarder in North Plymouth who, if the testimony of his neighbors in that town could be believed, made pennies at a time, yet gave the kids in the neighborhood dimes. Not only was their testimony as to his good character and generosity not believed by the jury (because the neighbors, too, were Italians and therefore in league with him), but his giving away of dimes was taken as evidence that he had stolen fifteen grand from the Slater and Morrill shoe company in South Braintree. Of course this line of thinking failed to explain why both Sacco and Vanzetti had none of this fortune in their hands, and why they then perversely chose to continue to live in tiny workingmen's dwellings and to work eighty-hour weeks.
Looking up at our red-brick house on Old Stone Mill Road, which looked very big and splendorous, I thought of Sacco and Vanzetti and all the old ladies on the oil-soaked floors who were deaf from the looms, and felt guilty.
"I think we should sell this place, Mary," I announced, "and get something a bit smaller. What do you think?"
"What?"
"Well, don't you think it's a bit big for us? Jack and Tony are off at school now, and I just thought-"
"You're losing your mind, Charlie. Okay, sit out here and moon and pout all you want. We're not selling this house; we've got way too much at stake here. And a large part of it's mine, kiddo. You forgot that? See you later; Joe and I are going in to make bouillabaisse. And if you're not a good boy you won't get any."
But I couldn't have cared less. Oh, they tried to distract me, all right. A few times I almost weakened. First the aroma of the olive oil with onions, shallots, and leeks sauteing in it. I didn't even flinch. Then Joe brought out a glass of cold Soave, and shortly afterward I heard the strains of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major. I sipped and listened and sniffed, but not a quiver. I just kept thinking of the pouch, the empty pouch… the anterior bridge, and those two working-class Italians strapped into the electric chair at Charlestown Prison and coming out in those black boxes.
I heard the hum of the microwave. Mary was defrosting frozen fillets of striped bass and containers filled with littleneck clams and mussels, shrimp, lobster claws, and maybe even some king-crab legs
… big, thick, spiky golden sticks full of white meat… I squirmed a bit and stared out over the wide lawn.
The pouch was empty. Why had they come back for it? Maybe it was somebody else who'd come back. Some other party entirely. That would explain why the guy we'd gotten the drop on had been digging in the wrong section of the old wall. He hadn't been there when the pouch was dropped down into the "How you doing?" asked Joe, who had sneaked up on me. "Mary just added the fumet. Smell it?"
"Yeah. Hey Joe, how did your old man get to be president of his company, anyway? That's pretty good for an Italian peasant who landed broke at Ellis Island. I know the broad details. But you know Mary doesn't talk about it that much. I know he started out as a carpenter, right? But how'd he-"
"Pop made it on hard work and luck. And common sense. He was no genius, but he wasn't dumb, and he listened to the right people. I tell ya, Doc, next to common sense, genius isn't worth shit."
"I agree."
"Well, Pop went from New York up to Schenectady, where he had some relatives. He learned to be a plasterer, and he earned good money, which he saved. He got married and Mom worked too, as a pastry cook. They saved and saved. just before World War Two, rock lath came in. Most people dismissed it as a fad, but Pop saw the writing on the wall- no pun intended. He knew rock lath was here to stay, and that it would put him out of business. I don't know if you know this, but it took a week to put up a real plaster wall. The wooden lath, sometimes wire lath, then the rough coat. Day or so later the brown or scratch coat. Finally the finish coat. A great wall, but a lot of time and dough. So Pop, using his common sense and some of the saved money, got some young greaseballs off the anchovy boats and trained them to put up rock lath. That was the start of his contracting business."
"Ah sooo."
"It was small at first, and Pop worked with them, doing the fancy cornice work and stuff. Before long he hired more greaseballs to work as carpenters, putting up studding and door frames. About that time Pop ran into a young Polack named Ray Woznicki, who was a plumber. Well, both guys were looking for a shop and some rolling stock, and they thought if they could go together on the capital equipment both would benefit. Ray wasn't Italian, but he was Catholic, which was almost as good. They were in the same parish. So they went in as partners, and each guy moved out of his garage and into their new rented building in the center of town. Result? Central Construction Company. Hah! Original, huh?"
"And so it just grew and grew."
"And so it just grew and grew. Right. Pop went overseas in the war and fought at Anzio and all up through his old country, then came home. Ray didn't come home; he got shot to pieces on Iwo. Broke Pop's heart. Old Mrs. Woznicki, Ray's widow, she still owns a lot of the company. Anyway, Central Construction grew like Topsy in the postwar boom, and they went into retail… started a lumberyard and supply house along with the contracting company. Now Pop was hiring greaseball architects, for Chrissake."
"Amazing!"
"No, not amazing. You're forgetting it all happened real gradually, Doc, over years and years. And sometimes, growing up, I remember some pretty lean years. But it kept growing mostly, and Pop paid off his notes, and then he did the smartest thing of all."
"What?"
"He got out. As Kenny Rogers says in the song, he knew when to fold 'em. Around nineteen sixty Pop saw the dramatic rise in union scale. The greaseballs were now making more than he was. No good. It was the rock-lath story all over again to Pop. You couldn't pay a guy nine bucks an hour to slam nails. Again, common sense. Forget the financial rags and the guys with MBAs… good old common sense, eh?"
"Right."
"So in sixty-one Pop sold the contracting business for a bundle, and put the money into three big retail stores specializing in what Pop saw would be the new thing: do-it-yourself home improvement. So there you are."
We sat in silence for a minute.
"America is a great country," I said.
"It sure as hell is. Got some warts, but we're the best around. You bet! So come on in now and have some bouillabaisse."
When the fish stew was ready Mary served it in big crocks she had made. Each one held over a quart of bouillabaisse, which we ate with huge wooden spoons. There was a long baguette of French garlic bread, and more cold Soave. Okay, they'd done it to me.
"Well I wish you luck on this bad business, Joe," I said, refilling my glass. "I really hope you catch the guys who did Johnny in. And I hope Sam doesn't get hurt, either. But one thing's for sure: I'm out of it. My mouthpiece is nowhere to be found. So they chucked it into some old trash can somewhere and it's gone for keeps. So that lets me out. Exit Doc." '
"About time," growled Mary, who was cracking a lobster claw in her teeth. "No more screwing around in old factories and getting shot at."
But she was wrong, and so was I. Because my mouthpiece was about to surface in a most surprising manner. And like so many things that come back at you- like the late john Robinson's voice- it came with strings attached.