“I don’t know how to say this, exactly, but I think it needs saying. You really probably can’t make judgments about people by the way they look or what they do for a living or what country their ancestors came from.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve grown up in circles that probably made such judgments all the time. Judgments about class, and income, and race, and religion, and work history. It’s not your fault, but if you’re going to outgrow your family you need to stop doing that.”
“Well, I don’t like macho men. Look at his neck.”
“You like Spike, don’t you?”
“He’s not a macho man, he’s gay.”
“There you go again,” I said.
“What?”
Rosie was back with her ball, dropping it on the floor in front of me and picking it up and dropping it.
“Throw the ball for Rosie,” I said.
Millicent picked the ball up and fired it the length of the floor, a lot harder than she needed to, and Rosie was after it, scrambling, as the ball bounced around. I smiled. Millicent was annoyed. Excellent. Annoyed was so much better than disinterested.
Chapter 41
I was outside the Crowley Limousine dispatch office with Brian Kelly.
“This isn’t even my case,” Brian was saying to me.
“I know, but they’ll never talk to me. I need somebody with a badge.”
“If there’s a crime it belongs to Framingham,” Brian said.
“That may be,” I said. “But did anyone in Framingham take you to paradise last night?”
“Well, no.”
“Is anyone from Framingham going to do it again tonight?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then?”
“Let’s get in here,” Brian said. “I’ve got a number of questions for the dispatcher.”
The dispatcher was a large woman in a flowered ankle-length dress, the hem of which just brushed the tops of some blue-and-white Nike running shoes. “Mr. Patton is a very good customer,” the dispatcher said. “I don’t think he’d like us talking about his business.”
“Yeah,” Brian showed her his badge. “But I would.”
She took the time to look closely at the badge, as if to make sure it didn’t say Chicken Inspector on it.
“We’re looking for a particular instance,” I said. “Two men went out to see Mr. Patton in one of your limos. About a month ago.”
If she thought by the “we” that I, too, was a Boston cop, no harm to it. The dispatcher stared at me a moment.
“Two men,” she said.
“Un huh?”
“Last month?”
“About a month ago.”
The dispatcher sat at the computer and manipulated the mouse.
“Got a trip on the fifteenth of August,” she said.
“Tell us about it,” I said.
Brian and his magic badge leaned against the filing cabinet beside her desk. She looked at him. He smiled at her.
“Pick up two men at an address in Swampscott. Take them to Mr. Patton’s home in South Natick. Wait and return.”
“What were the men’s names?”
“Just one name, Mr. Kragan.”
“Address?”
“Mr. Patton’s.”
“No, the pickup address in Swampscott.”
“Thirty-three King’s Beach Terrace.”
“Who’s the driver?”
“College kid, Ray Jourdan, lives on St. Paul Street in Brookline.” She gave us the address. We left and got back in Brian’s car and drove back to my loft. I got out. Brian got out and came around and stood next to me.
“I got to check in at the station,” he said.
“I think I can take it from here,” I said. “The driver will talk because his employer sent me.”
“I don’t think you should brace Kragan alone.”
“I’ll have less chance to learn anything,” I said, “if there’s a Boston cop standing around.”
“How about your ex-husband,” Brian said. “Kragan might walk a little softer if he was around.”
“He’s baby-sitting Millicent,” I said, “while Spike’s working lunch.”
“Everything we know about Kragan says he’s dangerous,” Brian said.
“Remember how we met,” I said.
Brian put his arms around me.
“I remember,” he said.
“So you know, I am not without resources.”
“I know,” Brian said.
We hugged each other for a moment. Then Brian pulled back a little and grinned down at me.
“In a pinch,” he said, “you could probably love him to death.”
I smiled, and said, “You should know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “The voice of experience. Will I see you tonight?”
“I’ll call you,” I said.
Ray Jourdan lived on the second floor of a three-story walk-up off Washington Street. He was a light-skinned black man with merely the implication of an accent, which I guessed was Caribbean. He told me he was a graduate student at B.U.
“I always drove for Mr. Patton,” he said.
“You ferry his girls back and forth.”
“Girls?”
“When Mrs. Patton was out, Mr. Patton would have girls brought out to the house,” I said. “They’d come in a limo. License tag says Crowley-8. You always drive for Patton...”
“Yes. I brought the girls.”
“Where did you pick them up?”
“In the parking lot outside the Chestnut Hill Mall. Front entrance.”
“Same girls each time?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You can’t tell one from another? Didn’t you get out and hold the door?”
“They were always Asian,” Ray said. “They tend to look alike to me.”
“Well, aren’t you politically incorrect.”
Ray smiled. He was nervous about this, but he was contained.
“And me a minority myself,” he said. “But it’s true. I don’t think they were the same girls, but I couldn’t tell for sure.”
“Did you deliver them back to the mall?”
“Yes.”
“How long did they stay?”
“Usually I’d have them back to the mall about one-thirty, two o’clock in the morning.”
“You just left them in an empty parking lot, in front of a closed mall?” I said.
“Yes, ma’am. Those were my instructions. The girls never said not to.”
“Any idea how they got to and from the mall?”
“Maybe they lived around there,” Ray said.
“In Chestnut Hill?”
“Well, just a thought.”
“While the girls were at the house, were there other people there?”
“I don’t know. I waited in the car.”
“Were there other cars.”
“No.”
“When you took Cathal Kragan out, there was another man as well.”
“Who?”
“Cathal Kragan, not a name you’d be likely to forget, is it?”
“No, no. I remember him.”
“And the other man?”
“I don’t know his full name. Mr. Kragan called him Albert.”
“Anything else?”
“I think Albert might have been from Providence. They talked about some restaurants down there. You know, Al Forno? Places like that.”
“Did they talk at all about Mr. Patton,” I said. “Or Mrs. Patton?”
“No.”
“You have no idea why they were visiting.”
“No.”
I thought about it for a while. Albert, from Providence.
“This is a good job for a guy needs to work part-time,” Ray said. “Lot of time sitting and waiting, you can study. If you tell Mr. Patton you’ve been talking to me, I’m pretty sure he’ll have me fired.”