Widow’s Walk

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I called Frank Belson and asked him if we could arrange to talk with DeRosa again. He called me back in an hour.

“DeRosa’s been out of jail for a week,” he said. “Eyewitness couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.”

“Charges dropped?”

“Yep.”

“Got an address for him?”

“Got the one he had when they busted him,” Frank said, and gave me the name of a street off Andrews Square.

In half an hour Hawk and I were crossing the bridge on Southampton Street. We were in Hawk’s Jaguar. Hawk parked it behind a place that sold orthotics, where it was about as inconspicuous in South Boston as Hawk was. We walked across the street to a brick duplex, which had a tiny front yard that had been carpeted with gray stone and surrounded by a chain-link fence. The downstairs windows were grated. There was a peephole in the front door.

“DeRosa don’t seem interested in botany,” Hawk said.

“He’s probably just a renter,” I said.

“Landlord’s a geologist?” Hawk said.

Above the doorbell button beside the right-hand door was a small hand-lettered card that said DeRosast.McDermott. I rang. No one answered. I rang again. Same thing. Hawk reached over and rang the doorbell on the left-hand door. Nobody answered. I looked through the peephole the wrong way, like I always did, and I found that I couldn’t see anything in that direction. Like I always did. I tried the door. It was locked. Hawk nodded and walked back across the street to the Jaguar and opened the trunk, took out a big red gym bag, and came back across the street with it. He set it down on the steps and took out a flat bar and handed it to me.

“Why do you have one if you can’t use it?” I said.

“I use it when I haven’t got an Irish-American laborer handy.”

I took the flat bar and got it wedged in against the doorjamb where the lock tongue would be and heaved and there was some doorjamb splintering and then the bolt tore loose and the door popped free. I put the flat bar back in the red gym bag and handed it to Hawk.

“Tote that bale,” I said.

He took it back to the Jaguar. No one in the neighborhood seemed interested that I had just performed the B part of a B and E. I pushed the door open. The lock I had jimmied was the kind that locked behind you when you went out. The house was silent. And hot. And stuffy. Lights were on in the hallway. I smelled a bad smell. Hawk came in behind me from his bale-toting chores. I could hear him breathe in.

“Whoops,” Hawk said.

I nodded and, breathing through my mouth, started through the front hall toward what was probably the living room. I knew what I would find. Hawk walked beside me. Inside the living room archway we both stopped.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Un-huh,” Hawk said.

The distorted remains of a man and woman lay together on the floor, their bodies disfigured by the slow flame of decay. The woman sprawled diagonally across the man. Someone had shot them many times, probably with an automatic weapon, maybe more than one. They had, in the process, chopped the room up pretty good. Pieces of chair backs, scraps of upholstery, bits of lamp shade, shards of glass, and fragments of plastic, and plaster, and human tissue clung to the walls. The blood covered the floor, black by now, and hardened like a vast scab. Insects had found them both. The room was very hot and flies buzzed thickly in the stinking air.

I had seen it before, but I never liked it. And this was worse than most. Except that I could hear him breathing through his mouth, Hawk showed no sign that it bothered him. For all that showed on his face, he could have been looking at a lawn tractor.

“DeRosa?” he said.

“I assume so,” I said. “And maybe McDermott as well.”

Hawk walked over to the corpses and looked down at them.

“Hard to be sure,” Hawk said. “McDermott the girlfriend?”

“I dunno. It’s the other name on the doorbell.”

“People dying just after you talk to them or just before,” Hawk said. “Somebody think you closing in?”

“I guess so,” I said. “Wish I had their confidence.”

“We pretty clear on what happened to these folks,” Hawk said. “You think Amy Peters a suicide?”

“No.”

“You believe Brink Tyler an accident victim?”

“No.”

Hawk was still staring down at the bodies. He shook his head a little to dispel a fly.

“They shot these people to pieces,” Hawk said. “I bet they got fifteen, twenty rounds apiece in them.”

“Had to make some noise,” I said.

“Anybody heard it, they ignored it,” Hawk said. “These people been here awhile.”

I looked around the living room. The windows were shut and locked. There was a big air-conditioning unit in a side window. I looked at it. It was turned off.

“When’s the last time it was cool?” I said.

Hawk shrugged.

“Don’t do weather,” he said.

We went through the house, living room and kitchen on the first floor. Two bedrooms and a bath on the second. The smell thickened the air in every room. All the windows were closed and locked. The air conditioner in the second-floor bedroom was shut off, too. The back door was locked. In the drawer of the front hall table we found a 9mm Colt, with a round jacked up into the chamber.

“Man locked everything,” Hawk said. “Yep. No windows open, even if it be cool when he shut off the AC, most people like a little ventilation in the summer.”

“It’s not a bad neighborhood,” I said. “But he was being pretty careful. Gun in the front hall. Round in the chamber.”

Hawk nodded. “He knew them,” Hawk said.

“Seems like it,” I said.

“He would have looked through the peephole,” I said. “And he would have unlocked the door when he saw them. The hall gun is still in the drawer. He wasn’t afraid of them.”

“And he should have been,” Hawk said. “You figure the broad got shot because she was here?”

“Could be. Or it could be she was part of the whole deal. Whatever the whole deal was. Or it could be they wanted to kill her, and he had the misfortune to be on hand.”

“Going to call the cops?” Hawk said.

“Guess we got to.”

“We could just close the door and walk away.”

“Your fingerprints in the system?” I said.

“‘Course,” Hawk said.

“Mine too.”

“So give them a call,” Hawk said.