I try to go through the Globe and the Herald front to back every day, and I’d thought I was one sharp lady P.I. the morning I’d spotted Ezekiel’s name as the sole surviving son in his father’s obituary. On the day of the service, I parked outside the funeral parlor, followed the procession to the cemetery, and bagged Ezekiel as he and his mother were leaving.
But Zeke’s mother proved pretty sharp herself. She had found out where I lived and was waiting for me outside my door the next morning breathing fire.
“My son had nothin’ to do with that guy gettin’ shot—” throwing the balled-up subpoena in my face “—an’ no way am I gonna let you get him killed.” She had the husky voice of a heavy smoker and the withering glare of an avenging angel. “He won’t be showin’ his face in no courtroom.”
And I didn’t have any better luck with the criminal defense attorney who’d hired me when I told him what had happened, either. He’d needed Ezekiel as the key witness for the defense in a murder trial and had hired me to find him.
“Were there any witnesses besides his mother when you served him?” he asked.
“No. No witnesses. I thought it might be just a tad insensitive to barge into the cemetery and slap the paper on him as they were lowering his father’s casket into the ground. I waited outside until the service was over and grabbed him as he and his mother were leaving.”
“But nobody actually saw you hand him the papers?”
“Just his mother.”
“So, when he swears he wasn’t served, it’s only your word against his?”
“Yeah, I guess, but—”
“Then you’re gonna have to serve him again.”
I’d not only lost the ensuing argument about why I had to serve the subpoena a second time, I’d failed to convince him he should pay me twice if I did.
And that’s how come — putting in a long day for short money chasing down Ezekiel Jones for the second time — I happened to remember my weirdo on the phone again.
Down a ramp off the bridge into Chelsea. A row of chimneys like tombstones—
...been away for a while, just got back...
Caught up with Ezekiel the first time outside a cemetery in Jamaica Plain—
...thought I’d give you a call...
Came out of hiding to bury his father—
...you look fantastic, by the way... haven’t seen you since the funeral.
I pushed through the doorway, stopped as it swished closed behind me, and let my eyes adjust to the gloomy interior. Along the wall to my right, a handful of guys sat drinking bottled beer with their backs against the bar. They, and the dozen or so patrons at a scattering of tables, were paying rapt attention to a small stage where a nearly naked redhead was making apathetic love to the ubiquitous brass pole. I headed for the bar.
Wearing khakis, a muscle shirt, and tattoos up both arms, the guy slinging beer at this end of the bar obviously spent a lot of his time pumping iron. Probably popping steroids too. But I’d have bet the farm he couldn’t spell it. Without a doubt he doubled as the bouncer.
The other bartender — khaki cut-offs, a cropped white tank top, and a ton of makeup — looked every bit as bored as the redhead who worked the pole. I made my way down the bar and climbed up on a stool in front of her. The nametag pinned over one of her more than ample breasts read MICKIE.
She gave me a blank look. “What’ll it be?”
“Beer’s good.”
“Bud, Bud Light, Miller Lite, or Coors?”
“I’ll take a Miller Lite.”
She pulled a Miller Lite from a chest beneath the bar, popped the top, and set the bottle down in front of me. No napkin, no glass. “That’ll be nine bucks.”
I’d done this so many times today that I had it down pat. I had stacked a twenty dollar bill, my P.I. license, and Ezekiel’s picture together in my bag. I slipped the little bundle out and laid it on the bar with the twenty on top.
I was the only female patron in the place, and from the other end of the bar, Mr. Muscles was watching me with a snarl on his face that said dyke. I leaned forward, put my arm on the bar so he couldn’t see what I was doing, and with my little finger slid the twenty sideways so Mickie could see my license. She leaned forward, squinted at my picture on the license, then looked up at me and scowled. I slid my license sideways and tapped Ezekiel’s picture a couple of times. When she looked down at his picture, I nudged the twenty toward her and said, “What d’ya say, Mickie, seen him around?”
She looked up and nodded.
“Today?” I said.
Another nod.
“When?”
She smiled, scooped up the twenty, and tipped her head toward the back of the room. “Dipshit’s in the john right now.”
I jammed Zeke’s picture and my license back in my bag and hopped off the stool.
So, the cheapskate who’d hired me wanted witnesses. Okay. I grabbed a chair from an empty table and dragged it to the men’s room. I yanked the door wide open, slamming it against the wall, and propped it open with the chair.
From behind the bar, a scowling Mr. Muscles jabbed a finger at me and yelled, “Hey!” But he couldn’t seem to make what he was looking at compute. He just stood there with his mouth hanging open, poking holes in the air with his finger.
“Well, if it isn’t Ezekiel Jones,” I said as I walked into the men’s room.
He jumped and turned away from the urinal, saw me standing there with the door propped open, and bent almost double getting tucked away. I stepped up to him, rolling the subpoena up lengthways, and jammed it down into his unzipped trousers. “Consider yourself served, Zeke,” I said. “And the spooky phone call? Not convincing. Laid it on way too thick.”
He stood there gaping at me with a puzzled frown.
I shook my head and turned to leave. “Careful you don’t rip anything zipping up,” I said.
When I walked out, Mickie was sipping from my Miller Lite and doing everything she could to keep from laughing. As I walked by, she pumped her fist and mouthed, “Yes.”
I gave her a wink, shot Mr. Muscles with my finger, and walked out the door.
And even though gray streaks of cloud were trying hard to block the sun, by the time I hit the parking lot I felt like singing. I had located Ezekiel Jones and served him — within twenty-four hours this time — and thought I’d solved the mystery of my whispering weirdo.
I climbed into my aging Honda, coaxed the engine to life, and was adjusting the rearview mirror when I caught a glimpse of an electric blue Neon pulling out of a space a couple of rows behind me. I buckled up, backed out of my space, and took off after the Neon with my heart thumping in my throat. But by the time I made it to the exit, the Neon was gone. I sat there shaking with my jaw clenched so tightly my teeth hurt and pounded on the steering wheel.
I’d put in a hard five working the streets of Boston in a P.D. blue-and-white, another three tracking down witnesses and cherry-picking testimony for a trip-and-fall attorney, then the last three on my own ticket doing messy little odd jobs for lawyers who didn’t want to get mud on their Guccis or muss up their hair. I thought I was capable of remaining reasonably cool, relatively calm, and fairly well collected. So why was I letting this weirdo push all my buttons?
I had crossed back over the Tobin Bridge into Charlestown, swung around up onto Rutherford Ave, rattled out over the upper end of the Inner Harbor on the antiquated Charlestown Bridge, and was sitting there stuck in traffic in the shadow of the soaring concrete spires and splayed cable-stays of the Lenny Zakim Bridge when my phone rang. I plucked it out of the cup holder without thinking.
“Yeah, Dymond here.”
For a couple of seconds, only the hiss of electronic white noise... then the soft voice, “Val, you always sound so angry.”