“Chloe may have been stupid about money, but she didn’t deserve to see that shit.”
“Nobody does.”
“I remember when I was a kid getting a bad feeling from this priest who used to come around the projects,” she said. “He ran some kind of youth program. Board games and watching movies and all that. After-school bullshit. You know. He used to always knock on my door and ask my mom if I wanted to join him and the other kids. And my mom always shut the door in his face. She said the man had the devil in his eyes and she’d seen it before.”
“Your mom knew.”
“Yeah,” Mattie said. “But once, I heard this priest was taking a bunch of kids to the zoo. And my mom wouldn’t let me go. I was mad and said screw it and decided to go anyway.”
A city electric truck rumbled past, nearly taking off my side-view mirror, and then turned down G Street. It was very dark and quiet again. I heard a dog barking far in the distance, making me think of Pearl and wonder how she was doing with Susan.
“The priest had this big black car,” she said. “But when I met him at the front of the projects, it was just him. I asked the priest if I’d gotten there early, and he acted like he’d already been to the zoo, dropped off the other kids, and come back for me. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he opened up the door. Like my mom said, something was wrong with his eyes. His skin was also real white, like someone who never went outside. So white you could almost see through him.”
“Translucent.”
“Sure,” Mattie said. “Anyway. He was sweating and smelled like bathrooms and old closets at Gates of Heaven. Like he’d crawled out of one and come for me. I got real nervous, told him I had to get back home, and ran all the way back to my apartment. Two weeks later, I found out he’d been watching some girls change into their swimsuits. He was reported, they canceled the after-school thing, and I never saw him again.”
“Sometimes you just know.”
“Is that something you’re born with?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I think the older I get, the better I am at reading people. Sometimes I’m wrong. But more often I’m right.”
“Like if someone is lying.”
“Lying is tough,” I said. “Sometimes people are such good liars they believe it themselves.”
“But you know when someone wants to do you harm.”
“Yep,” I said. “I usually know when they aim the gun at me.”
“Smartass,” Mattie said. “You know what I mean.”
“Sure,” I said. “You can see it in their eyes or the way they hold themselves. Men often stiffen up when they react to you. Like dogs. You need to develop a sense of awareness when you’re in a bad place with bad people. Realize it may come at you from any side or all sides all at once.”
“How come you didn’t like being a cop?” she said. “I bet you were a good cop.”
I shrugged. A pair of headlights appeared far off in my rearview mirror. We both watched the car come up fast and then disappear into the distance. A few seconds later, another turned behind us and moved slowly past my window.
“I liked being a cop,” I said. “I didn’t like taking orders.”
“And you like working for yourself.”
I nodded.
“Maybe being a cop wouldn’t be so bad,” Mattie said. “The guy who came to talk to me after my mother was killed was stand-up. The detectives that came later wouldn’t listen. But the guy on patrol stayed with me and my sisters until my grandmother got there. In the same way I got the bad feeling about the priest, I had a good feeling about this cop. Even though my world had just been tossed upside down, he made me feel like everything was going to be okay. That I would live through this. You know? That’s something else.”
“Love all,” I said. “Trust a few.”
“You love all?”
“Maybe not all,” I said. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
The second car stopped in front of the duplex. The side door opened and a young woman in a white hoodie got out. She headed up the steps, showing herself under a bright porch light, and pulled out some keys to unlock the door.
“That’s Debbie.”
“Nice car.”
It was some type of Mercedes coupe with the top up. We were too far to see the license plate or who was inside.
“Can I say, ‘Follow that car’?” Mattie said.
“Please do.”
10
The car was registered to a woman named Patricia Palmer. But it didn’t take too many strokes of the keyboard the next morning to learn she went by Poppy. I’d clicked through so many party photos of Poppy Palmer on the Boston scene that I started to feel underdressed.
She was forty-three, born in Surrey, England, and operated some type of consulting company not far from the Quincy Market. It didn’t appear she had ever been sued. Or arrested. I found a bland and vague company website that told me only that she worked with many Fortune 500 companies. Doing what, I had no idea. She was thin but muscular, with severe, somewhat masculine features and short black hair and black eyes. She kept constant company with men in tuxes and women in sequins.
In every photo, she seemed to be having a hell of a time lifting a champagne glass to fight illiteracy, poverty, cancer, blindness, hunger, domestic violence, and animal abuse. I didn’t see Save the Whales, but maybe I hadn’t been at it long enough.
Around lunchtime, I called Bill Brett, who took most of the event photos for The Globe.
He remembered the parties. But didn’t know anything about Poppy. “Do you have any idea of how many of these things I’ve gone to? Jeez, Spenser.”
“I have a birthday coming up,” I said. “Catered by Karl’s Sausage Kitchen. Front-page material.”
He hung up. I kept scrolling through pictures.
I took a few notes, walked across the street to Starbucks, and returned with a tall coffee. I drank the coffee and put my feet up on my desk. After several minutes, I took them back down. I drank some more coffee and stood up. I looked across the street to an office building that used to be a completely different office building where a woman named Linda Thomas had once worked. I wondered what became of her.
I finished the coffee and began to click through the photos again. Most had appeared in The Globe, Boston, and Boston Common. Poppy Palmer seemed to have a dazzling array of cocktail dresses. Sequins. Silk. Backless and scoop-necked. And I noted, she was quite fit. Not fit in the way Susan Silverman was fit but more like a woman who might deadlift the back of a Buick.