look at this property.”
The first address was on Chandler Street in the south end. The south end was once rather elegant redbrick town houses. Then it fell into slum wino. Now it was coming back. A lot of upper-middle-class types were moving in and sandblasting the bricks and buying Dobermans and installing alarm systems and keeping the winos at bay. It was an interesting mix: black street kids; winos of many races; white women in tapered pants and spike heels; middle-aged men, black and white, in Lacoste shirts. Our address was between a soul-food takeout and a package store. It was burned out.
“‘Bare ruined choirs,’” I said, ‘“Where late the sweet birds sang.’”
“Frost?” Paul said.
“Shakespeare,” I said. “Why’d you think it was Frost?”
“‘Cause you always quote Frost or Shakespeare.”
“Sometimes I quote Peter Gammons,” I said.
“Who’s he?”
“The Globe baseball writer.”
We drove to the next address on Symphony Road in the Back Bay. Symphony Road was students and what the school board called Hispanics. The address was a charred pile of rubble.
“Bare ruined church,” Paul said.
“Choirs,” I said. “Do we sense a pattern developing?”
“You think they’ll all be burned?”
“Sample’s a little small,” I said, “but the indices are strong.”
The third address was on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan. It was between a boarded-up store and a boarded-up store. It had burned.
“Where are we?” Paul said.
“Mattapan.”
“Is that part of Boston?”
“Yes.”
“God, it’s awful.”
“Like a slice of the South Bronx,” I said. “Life is hard here.”
“They’re all going to be burned,” Paul said.
’Yeah, but we gotta look.“
And we did. We looked in Roxbury and Dorchester and Allston and Charlestown. In Hyde Park and Jamaica Plain and Brighton. The addresses were always obscure so that we sometimes crisscrossed the same neighborhoods several times, following our list. All the addresses were in unpretentious neighborhoods. All had been burned. It was dark when we got through, and a little rain was starting to streak my office windows.
I put my feet up on my desk and shrugged my shoulders, trying to loosen the back muscles that eight hours of city driving had cramped. ”Your daddy,“ I said, ”appears to be an arsonist.“
”Why would he burn all those buildings down?“
”I don’t know that he burned them. He may have just insured them. But either way it would be for money. Buy it, burn it, collect the insurance. That’s his connection to Cotton. Your old man’s business was real estate and insurance. Cotton’s is money and being bad. Put them together and what have you got?“
”Bibbity-bobbity-boo,“ Paul said.
”Oh, you know the song. How the hell could you?“
”I had it on a record when I was little.“
”Well, it fits. And then when your father needed a little cheap sinew to deal with his divorce situation, Cotton sent him Buddy Hartman and Hartman brought Harold and his musical blackjack.“
”What will you do now?“ Paul said.
”Tomorrow I’m going to call up all these insurance companies and find out if your father was in fact the broker on these fire losses, and if they paid off.“
”The ones in the card file?“
”Yeah.“
”How will you know who to call?“
”I’ve done a lot of work for insurance companies. I know people in most of the claims departments.“
”Then what will you do?“
”Then I’ll file all of what I know for the moment and see what I can get on your mother.“
Paul was quiet.
”How do you feel?“ I said.
”Okay.“
