Blunt Darts

TENTH

– ¦ If Father's First were located in a poorer neighborhood than Beacon Hill, it would be a dive. Being on Charles Street, it's a charming institution. It's dark, dingy, and jukeboxed, with a mixed bag of gays, MBTA motormen, nursing students from Mass General, and law students from Suffolk University. I spotted her near the corner. She was wearing a disguise, sort of.

I slid in next to her. "I like your fatigue jacket," I said.

She looked down into her beer. "You realize that this could cost me a job I've worked toward for six years?"

I ordered a screwdriver. "If it makes you meet guys like me in places like this, it can't be such a great job."

She looked up, but her hands kept toying with her beer mug. "It's not, really." She reached into a big leather tote bag and withdrew a file folder. She passed it to me. "Read it. No notes. No copying."

It took all of three minutes to read.

"This is it?"

"Yup."

"After two weeks?"

She nodded.

"What's going on, Ms. DeMarco?"

"Nancy, please," she said, more I thought from anonymity than cordiality. She took a sip of beer and began. "The case came in through Perkins on the thirteenth, the day after Stephen disappeared. He assigned me right away. He handed me the police reports, which he'd already had copies of. After I read them, he told me I'd be on my own because the judge wanted a quiet, accent quiet, investigation."

"How can you find a fourteen-year-old under that kind of mandate?"

"You can't. Look at the file. Initial police report. Five-minute call to the housekeeper. Follow-up police report. Alert calls to airport and train-station security. One leg visit to the bus stations. End present efforts."

"Amateurish."

She grimaced. "Worse. Perkins himself has loaded me with other files. I'm not complaining, but I was the operative with the most files pre-Stephen, and I've gotten more than my share since. Every time I try to do something on Stephen's case, Perkins moves up the priority of some other case I'm on. I'd be embarrassed to talk with the judge-assuming Perkins would let me."

I confirmed that Smollett's signature was on both the initial and follow-up reports before I closed up the file and passed it back to her. "What do you suppose Perkins is trying to tell you?"

She put down her beer. "He's a professional. That means minimal effort is intentional. And that probably means pressure from the client to keep it that way."

I took a sip of my screwdriver. "You know anything about the judge's wife?"

She looked surprised. "Perkins told me she was dead."

I nodded. "Years ago. It pushed Stephen off the deep end. I was wondering if something similar pushed him again."

She shrugged. "I don't know. But then, what I don't know about this case could make a mini-series."

I smiled sympathetically. "It's not your fault, you know. You're a professional who's being reined in."

"Yeah." She finished her beer and slid off the stool.

"If you need to talk to me again, which I hope you don't, call me at the office and identify yourself as Mr. Pembroke but don't leave a return number."

"By the way, why did you decide to call me?" I asked.

She smiled as she slung her bag. "What we're doing stinks. And in the office you didn't refer to him as 'the kid' or 'the boy.' You called him by his name, Stephen. Poor little son of a bitch."

Eleventh

– ¦ The next day was bright and clear. There was only one cruiser in the range parking area. Cal was waiting for me inside the wire enclosure. He waved to the short wooden tower, which was centered just inside the range. The tower man buzzed me in through the gate. Bonham may not be a big-budget town, but Chief Calvin Maslyk knew where the money he got was best spent.

"Been a while, John."

"Nearly four weeks."

We picked up some sonic muffs and wad-cutter cartridges and moved to the seventy-five-foot line, just left of center. Cal had already set up some traditional bull's-eyes down range, one target easel apart. We adjusted the muffs over our ears, and the tower man clicked on.

"Gentlemen, load five rounds." We did so. Then the tower again. "Is there anyone down range?" A pause. Then again. "Is there anyone down range?" Another pause. "The range is clear. Ready on the right. Ready on the left." We waved. "Ready on the firing line." A pause. Then, "Fire."

We fired five rounds, single-shot. "Clear your weapons." We opened our cylinders, jacked out the expended shells, and slid our fingers into the gun frame so the cylinder could not close back in.

"Is the firing line clear?" intoned the tower. We held up our weapons, cylinders out. "The firing line is clear. You may proceed downrange." We began walking toward the targets.

I liked Cal, and I liked the way he required his range to be run. I'd read about a chief on the South Shore who hadn't taken those precautions. A nine-year-old, playing army, had crawled onto the range. A rookie cop who never saw him hit him twice. The boy died the next day, and the rookie resigned the day after. The chief was forced out the following week by the board of selectmen, the governing body of the town.

Usually Cal outscores me. This time he slaughtered me. "Something on your mind, John?"

"Have you got any unbreakable vows toward Meade?"

He measured me evenly. "None past neighborliness."

"I'm trying to find Stephen Kinnington, the judge's son. It looks to me like the judge has told the present searchers to stand down and has sealed the case against outsiders like me."

"Unfortunate family, the Kinningtons."

With a pencil he marked our bullet holes on the targets so we'd know that unmarked holes came from our next shots. We walked back to the firing line.

"Feel like talking about them?" I asked.

He rubbed his chin as we approached the bench.

"The judge's brother, Telford, was killed in 'Nam, oh, 1969, maybe. The wife died four or so years ago. Went off the Swan Street bridge into the Concord. I suspect the booze caused the crash."

"No autopsy?" I said as the tower told us to load five more.

"No body."

"In the Concord?" I asked. "That river's current barely pushes a leaf."

The tower man's voice crackled in the background.

Cal clicked his cylinder shut. "It was early spring, John. Big from the snows and rain. When they pulled the car up, she wasn't in it. Never found her."

"Was one of the doors open?"

Cal smiled and pulled his muffs on. The tower man finished his liturgy. We fired the second string double-action and again cleared our weapons.

As we moved downrange again, Cal continued the conversation. "Smollett's diver said he didn't notice."

"Did you say 'driver' or 'diver'?"

"Diver, as in scuba diver."

"Meade has its own scuba team?"

"Of sorts. Meade is 'concerned about crime.' At least I think that's Smollett's usual budget speech. Pretty effective speech, too."

"Cal, I'm told that the kid flipped soon after his mother's death. Institutionalized. Then he was apparently fine until two weeks ago. Can you tell me anything about his disappearance?"

Cal frowned and dropped his voice. "Smol1ett never even called me to put me on alert. I found out from one of my men whose wife works in the cafeteria in Stephen's school. Nothing on the radio or the computer. Nothing at all."

We reached the targets. "Can you think of any reason the judge wouldn't want his son found?"

Cal clucked his tongue, perhaps at the question, but more likely at my miserable shooting. "Maybe the kid just doesn't fit into his system." He began penciling our shots. "The judge, who by the way this department and I have to live with, is a cold, cold man. Just the opposite of his brother, who was real personable, though in an unpredictable sort of way. But the judge… well, if you ever saw him in court, you'd know what I mean."

"I have. I've also met his bodyguard."

"Bodyguard? Oh, Blakey?"

I nodded.

"Blakey," said Cal. "He's a bad-ass, John. He was on the Meade PD, then broke up a fight in a tavern a little-no, a lot-too hard. Citizens' group managed to raise enough fuss to get him off the force, because he was still probationary. But then the judge hired him on at the courthouse. One of those political moves that makes the judge look fearless to the law-and-order folks."

Cal pocketed his pencil but made no move back toward the firing line. "You have a jam with him?"

"Sort of," I said.

"Watch his hands, John. He could open coconuts with 'em. By the by, if memory serves, Blakey was the officer who noticed the smashed fencing when Mrs. Kinnington went into the river."

I perked up. "And then sometime later, when Blakey is squeezed off the force, the judge gives him a job?"

Cal nodded.

"How does that add up to you?" I asked.

Cal gave me a philosophical look. "Small-town police chiefs don't add, John; they subtract. Every time they take a stand, they subtract from their support in the town. Support remembers only the times when you do what they don't want. Enough subtractions and there's a new chief to do the arithmetic. I don't know what happened between His Honor, Smollett, and Blakey."

While I decided not to push my luck any further, Cal walked over to a locker at the end of the range and came back with a stapler and two bigger cardboard targets. He stapled them onto the target easels. They were full-sized, human silhouettes.

"Why these?" I asked.

"You didn't do real well on those first two strings, John. Never can tell when you might need to be better." We turned and walked back toward the tiring line.

"Combat string," he yelled to the tower man.