Chaos

CHAPTER 12

SIRENS SCREAM AS A Cambridge patrol car squeals a tight left off Winthrop and falls in behind us. We’re a light show flashing along John F. Kennedy Street, and other drivers are slowing down and moving out of the way.

“Shit, shit, shit. Damn son of a bitch,” Marino continues cussing a blue storm, to borrow another of his uniquely crafted clichés.

He’s glancing in his mirrors as I sit back in my seat, hoping we don’t crash. We’re not going as fast as it seems but it’s nerve-racking, and Marino’s in a treacherous mood because of the phone call to the Hay-Adams Hotel. He rarely treats a death scene as an emergency. Usually lights and sirens aren’t needed. Usually it’s too late for us to prevent or save much, but he’s impatient, aggressive, in a blind fury.

“Jesus Christ! Who the hell was that? Who the hell was I just on the phone with?”

He’s been going on and on since he ended the call. There’s nothing I can say, and I know when it’s best to mostly listen. Marino needs to vent, then he’ll be okay. But he won’t forgive and forget. He never does. Whoever makes a fool of Pete Marino will have hell to pay. It may take years. In some instances it’s taken decades.

“I can’t believe it. I freakin’ can’t believe it! And what the crap does Roberts think he’s doing?” Marino glares into the rearview mirror at the marked unit flashing and wailing behind us. “Did you hear me ask for his assistance? Did you hear me request a backup or yell Mayday?”

He glances angrily at me, and he’s almost shouting. I’m silent as I sit snugly strapped in my seat, watching the lights pulsing in my side mirror, waiting for him to calm down.

“No, I didn’t think so,” he loudly answers his own questions. “This is what’s called playing cops and robbers. The idiot Roberts is all dressed up with no place to go because I don’t need his damn help.”

Marino glares in the mirror every other second, his jaw muscle doing its rapid-fire flexing again. He snatches his portable radio out of the charger.

“Unit thirty-three,” he holds the radio close to his lips, practically spitting he’s so pissed.

“Thirty-three.”

“Ask one-sixty-four to call me.” He’s instantly polite with a touch of sweetness as he talks to the dispatcher he refers to as Rosie.

“Roger, thirty-three,” she says, and her tone is different with him too, and it needles me a little.

Marino loves women but he’s never known what to do with them besides the obvious courting, badgering, acting out, being led by the nose and in general being controlled by his lesser member, as Lucy not so delicately puts it. No relationship he’s had has ever lasted, not with his former wife Doris, who in my opinion he’s never gotten over. He’s also fallen out with me more than once, badly, almost irreparably.

I think of him flirting with my sister in Miami. Benton swore the two of them started something when we were there earlier in the summer, and I wonder how I could have missed the cues. I watch him return the radio to the charger as Rosie calls unit 164 and passes on the message.

I check my phone for any further updates about when my sister is set to land at Logan. I’m about to send Lucy a message about my inability to show up at the airport in light of what’s just happened, but I’m distracted again when Marino’s cell phone rings through the SUV’s intercom.

“What can I do you for? What’s up?” A male voice fills the car, and Officer Roberts sounds hyper and too cheerful.

“What’s up is you.” Marino isn’t nice about it. “I see you bird-dogging me and need you to peel off and get the hell away.” He sounds vicious.

“You’re one to talk, all lit up like the Fourth of July. You know what they say. Monkey see, monkey do-” Unit 164 fires back as if he’s having a grand time, and Marino interrupts because now he’s really angry.

“Turn your fucking lights and fucking siren off, Roberts. If I need a meat puppet you’ll be my first damn call,” Marino snaps.

If he had a handset and could hang up with a slam, I’m sure he would. But he can’t. He presses a button on the steering wheel to end his tirade.

“I’m not sure what he was responding to,” I puzzle. “I’ve not heard anything on the radio that might hint we have a possible homicide in the park.”

“He knows something big is going on there. He may not know what but everybody out here knows something’s up. The radio silence is deliberate, and then he sees us go by, and that’s his excuse to fall in behind me,” Marino growls.

I remind him that it might not have been the best idea to turn on his own lights and siren. Certainly it’s attracting attention.

“Well that doesn’t mean you follow me like a damn parade. It’s not a damn party or a spectator sport,” Marino talks at the top of his voice. “Everybody wants to be a damn detective until they have to do paperwork, deal with lawyers, get sued, get called out at all hours and all the other bullshit we put up with.”

I can see the patrol car in the side mirror, dropping back, receding into the distance. The red and blue strobes have gone dark, the siren ended in a whimper. Unit 164 slows and turns left on South Street as we flash, pulse, yelp and wail through a well-lighted stretch of restaurants, coffee shops, taverns and breweries.

“Maybe it really was Interpol,” Marino says, and it’s a good thing I’m accustomed to his non sequiturs. “Maybe I wrote down the number wrong.” He picks up where he left off about the bogus phone call from a bogus investigator. “Maybe that’s all it is.”

“I seriously doubt it. I’m sorry to say but I think the call you got is exactly what it appears to be, Marino, and I’m sure it’s upsetting.” I don’t add that it might be somewhat the way I felt when Benton played the 911 recording for me that Marino refused to share.

I know all too well what it’s like to be falsely accused, excluded, belittled, treated suspiciously or simply tormented and harassed. But when Marino is upset, he doesn’t necessarily compare notes with others, including me. There are no other notes. Only his.

“Wait till I get my hands on whoever it is,” and he’s enraged all over again. “How the hell did this person come up with my name and get my cell number? Where did he get the information? How did he know to call me about anything?”

“I don’t know.” I’m saying that a lot.

“Well it’s the biggest and most important thing we need to find out. Who gave the info to this asswipe joker?”

“It’s probably not the biggest or most important thing we need to find out at the moment.” I stare at him, and I hate that someone has targeted him like this.

I know how Marino gets. He can’t endure being boondoggled. He can’t tolerate being made to feel as unimportant and powerless as he did while he was growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in New Jersey.

“I recommend you put this on a shelf for now,” I tell him. “We’ll worry about Interpol later. At your earliest convenience I suggest you have Lucy take a look at your phone to see if she can trace the unknown call that supposedly was from the NCB’s counterterrorism division.”

“Right,” he says tersely, and he’s furious with himself.

MARINO WAS TRICKED, AND it will be unfortunate if other cops find out about it.

I think of Roberts, for example, who Marino just emasculated. The way he goes after his comrades will come back to him a hundredfold if they discover he fell prey to a hoax of the worst order. They’ll be merciless, but it’s not a joke. It’s no laughing matter. Marino might have been talking to the same anonymous person who, it would seem, used voice-altering software to complain about me in a 911 call today.

Marino could have been talking to Tailend Charlie, for all we know. Or if Elisa Vandersteel is the dead woman and she’s a homicide, then Marino might have been talking to her killer. There’s no telling who Marino was on the phone with but I’m convinced it wasn’t Interpol. I’m no-nonsense as I tell him he really must let it go. With what we have ahead of us there’s no room to spare for personal outrage or embarrassment.

“Let’s just do this.” I raise my voice above the noise of our roaring through Cambridge in a juggernaut of brilliant strobes and urgent tones. “It’s been a hell of a day but we’ve been through much worse. How many years has it been? And here we are. We’re still here, and we’ll figure it out. We always do.”

“That’s the damn truth,” he says, and I feel him glumly settle down a little, getting steadier. “I just can’t believe it happened.”

“I know. But it could happen to anyone.”

“Even you?” He glances at me, and I nod. “Bullshit,” he says.

“Anyone at all,” I reassure him, but it’s not entirely honest.

I seriously doubt I would have fallen for the same ruse the same way Marino did or at all. I would have asked more questions. I would have been suspicious instantly if I’d gotten such a call on my personal cell phone from a so-called NCB investigator. I would have recognized the corruption of a process I know better than Marino does.

“Well I feel stupid as shit,” he confesses, and suddenly I feel stupid too but for a very different reason.

I suddenly remember Dorothy again. I’m startled and dismayed as I envision the disapproval, the I told you so look in her eyes and the gleam of satisfaction. She loves it when I screw up, and by the time I’d gotten into Marino’s SUV at the Faculty Club my attention had been diverted from my sister and her last-minute plan of an unscheduled visit.

She’s on her way here even as Marino and I are headed to a death scene, and I think of his flirting with the dispatcher Rosie. His annoying womanizing enters my mind. I resist looking at him as I’m unhappily reminded of what Benton accused, and it’s more disturbing when I think of Marino’s repeated offers to pick up Dorothy at Logan tonight.

Last I heard she’s supposed to arrive from Fort Lauderdale around nine thirty but she’s going to be late, according to Lucy. It’s already almost eight thirty, and I have no doubt my sister is expecting Benton and me to be waiting for her with bells on no matter when she lands.

That’s not going to happen, and Marino can’t be there either, not that I’d encourage it. Next it occurs to me as an additional blow that I left my shopping bag in the cloakroom at the Faculty Club. I won’t have gifts for the chronically dissatisfied Dorothy. Dammit. That figures, and the fact is I can’t possibly do anything for her right now. I can’t pay attention to her or make the slightest gesture of welcome. I’ve failed, and that’s exactly how she’ll look at it.

She’ll view it negatively and as an unfairness directed at her personally. It won’t occur to her that she wasn’t quite as inconvenienced as the person who’s dead. Dorothy’s not even as inconvenienced as I am, but that won’t enter her head. Once again I’m the busy and inaccessible Big Sis, and if she reaches out and makes herself vulnerable, this is what happens. I can hear her now. I could script it.

I send a text to Lucy and Janet: Unable to make it to airport.

Possibly you could get Dorothy? Or she could Uber? Very sorry.

Almost instantly Janet answers: No problem. We’ll take care of Lucy’s mom. Maybe stop by later? We’d love to see you.

It always jolts me when Dorothy is referred to as Lucy’s “mom.” It never sounds right, and it’s at moments like this when I’m reminded of how bonded I am to a niece I’ve raised like a daughter. I admit I might be a little possessive, just the tiniest bit territorial and jealous.