The place was nearly empty, smelling of stale beer and urine, the linoleum tacky to the soles of my shoes as I walked over to him. Like the Carson mother and daughter, Devonne’s brother and he bore a striking resemblance to each other.
But, best to be sure. “Maurice Tinch?”
He didn’t look up from his peeling operation. “Depends on who be doing the asking.”
I took the next stool. “You ready for another one of those?”
“Now that’s the kind of question I been waiting on.”
I made a circling peace sign to the bartender, and when our beers arrived, Tinch drew about half his bottle before setting it back down.
I said, “Thirsty today?”
A shrug. “Man wants to buy me a drink, could be he’ll buy me another when this one here’s gone.”
“Could be.” I took out my ID holder. “I’m a private investigator, trying to help your brother.”
“Devonne?” Now a harsh laugh, Tinch never even glancing at my license.
“Man, nobody can help that boy.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Another few ounces of High Life took its next to last trip. “Devonne, he don’t just want to not be from here. He want to forget he ever was from here.”
I couldn’t guess why. “And that’s why nobody can help him?”
“Devonne, he got himself into this, going out to that nice surburban town, and its nice school, learn all that fancy stuff like math and science. Well, it seem to me science is what sunk the boy.”
“I understand you declined to have your DNA tested.”
“Damned straight. Look what it done for my little brother.”
“You know any of his friends from Calem?”
The fingernail scraped a mite harder against the clear glass. “Devonne, he never did like to bring his friends to our apartment down the street. He showed me a picture once, though, somebody took of them all standing together. Devonne and his squeeze name of Gloria, that Hamilton fox the police say he raped, and the fox’s boyfriend, the quarterback or some such on the football team, probably wear helmets made from gold. Well, you look at that picture, man, and what do you see?”
“You tell me.”
“Devonne, he look like a turd next to three slices of Wonder bread.”
“And you never met any of the three?”
“Uh-uh. Like I said to you, Devonne, he don’t want his fine friends meeting his worthless brother.”
Tinch downed the last of the beer. “How’s about a refill?”
I slid the one I hadn’t touched over to Maurice Tinch and wished the man a nice day.
Which it was. A nice day, that is, at least for late October.
And after spending time with the people I had earlier, a little cleansing ceremony seemed appropriate.
The flowers on the next grave in the row overlooking Boston Harbor had wilted badly, but not having put them there, I didn’t feel right moving them either. So instead I split my bouquet in two and knelt down, covering the long-dead flowers with some recently dead ones.
John, John. Always the best kid on the block.
I looked at her headstone. ELIZABETH MARY DEVLIN CUDDY. “Beth, I haven’t been ‘on the block’ for a long time now.”
Doesn’t matter. You always will be.
The remark reminded me of something Maurice Tinch had told me about his brother, and therefore I shared the lowlights of the case so far with my one and only wife.
But doesn’t the DNA evidence mean it has to be your client?
“Sure seems that way. But like Steve Rothenberg said, the kid doesn’t feel right for it.”
I wouldn’t want to bet on a jury “feeling” that way too.
I was about to tell her I agreed when my cell phone danced a little jig in my jacket pocket. I took it out, and the yellow window display showed in green letters the abbreviation in my “address book” for the Law Offices of Steven Rothenberg, Esq.
IV
It was nearly dark by the time I arrived at the location his punk rock receptionist had given me, so the State Police Crime Lab Unit had klieg lights up in the copse of majestic oak trees, giving a theatrical flair to the otherwise carnival-like atmosphere of spinning and flashing lights of the official vehicles, including the blue-and-white bubbles atop the medical examiner’s minivan.
Wending my way through the rubberneckers, I asked a young Calem uniform for Sergeant Detective Aphrodite Smith. He said she was consulting with a statie detective and couldn’t be disturbed. I told him she’d called a lawyer looking for me, and he told me to follow him.
As we entered the wood line, I could hear the buzzing of the evening flies thirty feet before we reached the cordoned area around the body. Techies were inside the yellow tape, Smith and a former fullback in a business suit just outside, notebooks out and pens in hand. The fullback began asking a long question of one techie as I reached Smith and she looked up at me.
“Recognize the decedent?”
I willed my eyes to go to the body, still in its tank top and sweatpants with the untied strings. “I never met this young woman, but I saw her on your high school campus around two thirty P.M. I believe that’s Gloria Carson.”
“As in girlfriend of Devonne Tinch?”
“Yes. I saw Gloria’s mother about half an hour later, at the Carson house, but she wouldn’t let me inside.”
Smith motioned toward the body. “Joggers found her. Popular place after five, but pretty much empty earlier in the day.”
I looked down again. “That’s a pretty nasty head wound for so little blood here.”
“Agreed. Preliminary is fractured skull, but done elsewhere.”
“One silver lining.”
Smith looked at me like we were playing poker. “I’d love to hear it.”
“My client’s in jail.”
“Meaning, it couldn’t have been him.”
“That’s right.”
“His brother isn’t.”
I was about to tell Smith I didn’t think Maurice “High Life” Tinch would be in any shape to make his way to Calem when I heard what sounded like Mrs. Carson’s voice, crying out her daughter’s name.
Desperately.
Smith squeezed her eyes shut. “Cuddy, you seen Mystic River yet?”
I knew what she meant. “No, but I’ve read the book.”
Sergeant Detective Aphrodite Smith closed her notebook and began to walk toward Mrs. Carson’s voice. “Well, now we both get to act in the play.”
“My husband is away on his business in New York City.” Mrs. Carson swiped a handkerchief across her nose, then brought it against her eyes. “I must telephone to him.”
Since I knew the poor woman, even just slightly, Smith asked me to stay as we waited in the Carsons’ darkened living room for a neighbor to drop off her own child with another family and come to comfort the bereaved.
Smith said, “We believe your daughter was killed somewhere else and then moved to the park. Mr. Cuddy here saw her with Lisabeth Hamilton just after classes ended today. Do you have any idea where Gloria might have gone from the high school?”
“No.” The hankie came down to half-mast. “She did not come home yet, but that is not unusual. Even after Devonne — her...” Mrs. Carson seemed to leave us for a moment. Then, “In Cuba, when I am very young, there was a man from Holland. He tells me once the story of the stork. The way I believe him, little babies come from eggs, like the birds. For years I would see a shell on the ground, broken, and I would smile, even to look up at the sky, because for me, it meant a new life had just begun itself.”
The hankie covered Mrs. Carson’s eyes again. “Only now somebody has killed my little bird, and Gloria is gone from my sky forever.”