The Death of an Ambitious Woman (11 page)

John McGrath lingered in the hallway outside Chief Murphy’s office. She was sitting at her desk eating lunch. His feelings were as mixed about his mission as they were about Murphy herself these days. Her promotion three years ago to head of the detective force hadn’t mattered to him. All she got that he could see was a desk in the corner and more miserable administrative work. She’d been good at the job—thorough, fair-minded, open to other people’s ideas. He’d give her that. But since her elevation to acting chief, she was indisputably the boss. She’d gone over to the other side. And he, McGrath, had been the only one who hadn’t seen it coming.

Still, she was showing some guts on this investigation, bucking Baines just at the moment when politics dictated she should be making nice, and yesterday’s lunch reminded him of the good old days when he and Murphy traded barbs at every chance.

“A word, Chief?” he ventured, stepping over the threshold.

“Sure,” she answered, continuing to eat.

“I’ve been wondering,” McGrath ventured, “what’s our theory of this case, exactly?”

“That Al Pace killed Tracey Kendall by tampering with her car.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“Because they were having an affair. Fran Powell confirmed it and Moscone is talking to Brenda O’Reilly right now trying to get another confirmation.”

“They were having an affair and what? If everybody who was having an affair killed somebody, we’d spend all our time picking up bodies.”

“They were having an affair and she wanted to break it off, or he wanted to break it off and she wasn’t going quietly, or she wouldn’t leave her husband, or she threatened to tell his wife or she had money and she wouldn’t give him any. Aren’t these things fairly predictable?”

“Yeah, they are. But in this case, there’s a little more.” McGrath opened the manila folder he carried in his hands. “I went to Al Pace’s bank today. On Tuesday, sometime after Mrs. Kendall was killed, Pace came in and made four months’ back payment on his mortgage. That’s almost five thousand dollars. The bank found this in their records.” He handed her a copy of the deposit slip. “They’re looking for the videotape now.”

The boss looked confused. “Don’t people usually withdraw money when they bolt, not deposit it?” McGrath waited while the meaning of his words sunk in. Bingo. Murphy put her head in her hands. “Oh, my God.”

“Uh-huh.” He nodded. One thing you had to say about Murphy. She was smart.

The chief sat back in her chair. “So you’re telling me we’ve spent the last two days establishing a connection between Tracey Kendall and Al Pace, and now we have to get back out and establish a connection between somebody else and Al Pace?”

“And somebody else and Tracey Kendall. Somebody who wanted her dead.”

“He was paid to commit this murder.” Murphy sure looked unhappy. “We have to re-interview everybody.”

McGrath stared down past his wrinkled shirt and bagging trousers to his scuffed shoes. “It’s up to you, of course,” he answered. “You’re the boss.You can count on Pace to spill it all, but the more we know when we bring him in, the easier it’s going to be to get him to talk.”

Murphy threw the remnants of her lunch into the bin. “Boy, Baines is going to love this.”

Her obvious misery got under McGrath’s normally thick skin and made him feel lousy. “You were right, it was murder,” he offered, hoping it would help.

She looked him in the eye. “Thank you, Detective,” she said evenly. “You’re doing great work on this case.”

As McGrath left her office, he had to admit to himself it was nice to hear. And it was especially nice to hear it from her.

After McGrath left, Ruth closed her eyes and leaned her head back against her desk chair, trying desperately to order her jumbled thoughts into a coherent picture.

Baines already hated the case against Al Pace and he was going to hate this new turn of events even more. Convicting someone who hired a killer, someone who had never touched the weapon or the body, was extraordinarily difficult. Doing it in the media circus this case could become was even more so. In the course of the investigation, the New Derby police would be knocking on the doors of a lot of prominent people—Kendall, Gleason, Powell, Holden, maybe even Fiske & Hold-en’s clients. This was the kind of case that lost D.A.s their jobs.

“What a mess,” Ruth muttered. Baines already opposed her appointment to chief. The mayor had told her to stay out of theD.A.’s way. Instead, she had told Baines a half-truth and then ambushed him on television, creating interest in a high-profile case in which a conviction might be impossible. Every step in the chain had seemed like the right one, but now it was all going totally wrong.

Ruth longed for someone to talk to. She briefly considered calling the old chief, but she knew that what she really wanted was someone who would tell her what to do. And no one could tell her what to do. All the decisions going forward rested solely with her. It was the first time she had felt the enormity of that. And it was galling but somehow inevitable that the source of so many of her current problems was Baines.

Baines. Ruth didn’t have to wonder how things had gone so wrong with him. She knew.

It had been Marty’s idea to move the family to New Derby. He’d enjoyed their time in Boston, but when the children came, he’d begun agitating to move back to the town he’d grown up in where his parents, uncles and aunts, two of his five brothers, and several cousins still lived. He’d harangued at length about Ruth’s safety on the job, how he couldn’t sleep at night while she worked. He pointed out the well-known deficiencies of the city schools.

Ruth wasn’t fooled by any of this. She knew Marty would be concerned about her safety no matter where she worked, and they’d find a way to educate their children wherever they lived. Marty wanted to go home. He was being pulled by fatherhood back to his own happy childhood. And since Marty was a man who asked for little, but who cared deeply about the few things for which he asked, Ruth agreed to go. It wouldn’t be so bad, she’d thought. New Derby was close to Boston and hardly small, a dense and varied suburb. Besides, Marty’s career sacrifice would be the greater. He’d leave the Suffolk County district attorney’s office to set out his shingle in New Derby.The extended clan of Murphy relatives and neighbors would have to pay for the advice they’d gotten free these last nine years.

The Murphy family’s New Derby connections made it possible for Ruth to transfer as a lieutenant directly into a day shift detective job. It was an unusual move, at a time of declining force size and in a town that preferred to bring its officers up through the ranks. Ruth knew some price would be exacted by her colleagues, and she was right. For training, they paired her with Detective First Class Arthur Pezzoli.

Pezzoli didn’t like female officers and he didn’t approve of transfers. Of course, he also didn’t like Protestants or Jews, Blacks or Hispanics, the upper crust or the poor. Ruth saw her time with him as something to be endured. She knew she was being watched closely by the entire New Derby force.

One afternoon in the sixth week of her “training,” Pezzoli hurried Ruth into his unmarked car. “I heard some things,” he answered vaguely, when Ruth asked where they were going.

On a narrow street, two blocks from New Derby High School, Pezzoli slowed to a crawl and pointed to the supermarket across the way. A boy in his mid-teens was collecting carts in the parking lot. He wore black pants, a white shirt, and a white cotton jacket identifying him as an employee of the store. He pushed the carts together and strolled back across the parking lot.

As Ruth and Pezzoli watched, another boy sauntered into view from the direction of the high school. He was a slight figure in a ratty windbreaker and tattered jeans. Long blond hair scrawled out from under a baseball cap.

The two boys greeted each other. Ruth pegged the newcomer as younger, perhaps fifteen to the other boy’s sixteen or seventeen. The boys stood chatting at the parking lot fence. The younger one lit a cigarette.

“What are we doing here?” Ruth asked.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Pezzoli responded.

Sure enough, moments later, a third boy arrived. He approached the older, bigger boy directly.

“Here we go,” Pezzoli cautioned.

The transaction occurred in a flash of hands. Pezzoli was out of the car, yelling, “Police officers!” while the cash was still in transit. The bigger boy jerked his hand back as though bitten by a snake. Green bills floated to the ground.

The boys prepared to scatter, but Ruth and Pezzoli were too close. Only the third boy, the buyer, got away. Ruth tackled the big kid from behind as he started to run. When she turned, the ground was covered with plastic packets of white powder and Pezzoli had the slight, blond boy in a headlock.

The boys were Russian immigrants. Both spoke with slight accents, Eastern Europe breaking through more in intonation than pronunciation. The big one was Kvitnitsky, the smaller one Goubanov. Kvitnitsky was angry, bordering on belligerent, but Goubanov looked scared and sick at heart.

At the station, they were printed and booked. The big one had eight hundred dollars in his pocket—and two prior convictions. “I got you,” Pezzoli snarled. “You little turds. Teach you to bring your Rusky ways into my town.”

Ruth followed Pezzoli back to the roll call room. “Write it up now?” she asked, heading for the stairs.

“Nah,” he answered. “Let’s go next door and dig up Baines.” Baines was an Assistant D.A. then, but with ambitions.

“You’ve got this first kid—Kvitnitsky,” Baines said, “hand-to-hand sale, less than a thousand feet from a school, over 128 grams, third offense. We’re talking minimum mandatories here. This kid is going away for a long time.” Baines paused. “But I’m not sure about this other kid, Goubanov.”

“Whaddya talkin’ about?” Pezzoli was incensed. “We’ve got him on joint enterprise.”

Baines looked interested. “You’re sure he was involved? Maybe he was the lookout?”

“Lookout, hell, he was the one who had the dope on him.”

“You’re sure.”

“I found it at his feet.”

“Not enough,” Baines replied. Ruth wasn’t surprised. She didn’t see how they had the Goubanov kid, either.

Then the D.A. had leaned toward them. “Now, if you’d seen something, then maybe we could move this ahead.”

Pezzoli sat back. “What if I saw Goubanov throwing the dope on the ground?” he asked.

“Then we’d have him,” Baines responded.

A look of mock astonishment crossed Pezzoli’s face. “That’s amazing,” he said. “That’s exactly what I saw.”

Ruth’s heart sank.

Baines looked at her. “Did you see the same thing?”

She took a deep breath. “No. And I don’t believe Detective Pezzoli did, either.”

Baines squared his shoulders. “Here in the ’burbs, we don’t let these people sell to high school kids. We like to get them off the street.”

In the silence that followed, Ruth’s world closed in on her. She thought about the young man. She didn’t know the town and she didn’t know its streets. He might be guilty as hell, morally, but nothing she had seen or heard could prove it legally.
Damn you Marty,
she’d thought,
where have you brought me?

A knock on the doorframe interrupted the memory. McGrath and Lawry were standing outside her open door. “We thought you’d probably want to have a conversation about next steps in the Kendall case,” Lawry said politely.

Ruth pushed the scene with Baines and Pezzoli out of her mind and waved Lawry and McGrath into her office.

“Pace’s car was found in Salton Beach about fifteen minutes ago with a thirty-year-old New Jersey license plate on it,” Lawry said when they were settled at Ruth’s big conference table. “No sign of the man himself.”

McGrath tapped his folders with his pen. “Were the other missing plates from his garage found in the car?”

“No.”

“So he could be anywhere by now.”

“Perhaps,” Lawry answered, “but there’ve been no vehicles reported stolen from Seabrook to Rye.”

“A resort area like that, some folks are bound to have left cars stored over the winter,” Ruth pointed out.

“I’ll get the New Hampshire guys to check for garage breaks.”

McGrath pulled out his reading glasses and opened his first folder. “As you both know, Pace brought his mortgage up to date on his way out of town. Five thousand dollars. I’ve gone through Pace’s finances with a fine-toothed comb.This guy is in big trouble, and has been since he bought Screw Loose three years ago. They also took out a big mortgage, at least for their income, when they bought that house from Karen Pace’s family. I’ve waded through piles of warnings, shut-off notices, threats of liens by suppliers. You name it. Anyway, all the time I’m doing this, something is bugging me. I finally figured out what. In the last six months or so, he never went over the edge. Not once. Nothing ever got shut off or repossessed. At the last possible moment, the bills always got paid.”

“That’s the way those guys operate,” Lawry pointed out. “They pay the squeaky wheel—”

“Yeah, but this was too neat. For one thing, there was never any jump in his business. The takings were pretty steady from month to month. How did he do it? Or, if he had the money coming in, why didn’t he pay his bills in the first place?”

“He’s robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Lawry countered. “The minute he pays off one guy, the meter starts running on some other poor schmo. Now the second guy has to wait until he threatens a shut-off or a lien until he gets paid.”

“That’s what I thought, but I couldn’t find enough information around Pace’s office to prove it, so I called his creditors and got his records faxed over here.”

“And?”

“He was definitely doing some shifting around. That was part of it. But what really struck me is since late November, every single one of these last-minute payments was made in cash. There isn’t a check drawn on his account for even one of them.”

“Could this be underground economy stuff?” Ruth asked. “We already know he fixes his buddies’ cars. He gets strapped, he pulls some cars in, works ’round the clock and collects his fees in cash.”