Devine's Providence: A Novel Page 12

  “I’m aware,” said Chelsea. “As you know, I do my research. As did Marc. And it may surprise you that, in that respect, Providence isn’t that different from any other city I’ve covered. Wheels and palms get greased in every major town from coast to coast. And yet, even in spite of Providence’s illustrious past, this is something else. Something bigger.”

  “Look, Chelsea,” I said, “if your intention is to swoop in and clean up the state, or the city, or even just one department…I hate to tell you, but it’s not going to happen, it’s just not. It’s like Chinatown. We may be the smallest state in the union, but it’s definitely a state with little dog syndrome. The corruption is so deeply rooted you just can’t dig it up without razing the entire forest around it.”

  Chelsea didn’t appear to be listening, and dug out a file folder from a stack on the table. She opened it up to a picture of a middle-aged man.

  “Does the name Philip Grayle mean anything to you?”

  “Sure,” I said, a bit too smugly. “Head of the City Planning Commission. Until recently, from what I hear.”

  Chelsea arched an eyebrow. “Attend many city planning meetings?”

  “Nah. Not a lot of crossover with my line of work. Just word on the street is Grayle’s been missing for a few months.”

  She remained unimpressed. “So Lieutenant Zachetti told you?”

  My shoulders drooped.

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  “Good,” she said. “So we have bribery—on a large scale—and now, a government official who vanished under mysterious circumstances.”

  “And you think they’re connected?”

  “Harry,” Chelsea leaned forward, “we’re not talking about the usual amount of money being laundered around. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. Cash. Wired into campaign funds and retirement accounts. Physically handed off in metal briefcases and canvas duffle bags in dark, empty parking garages and back alleys. Written off as car purchases, luxury vacation bookings, mortgage payments, jewelry for mistresses, and in the case of the D.A., college tuition for his daughter. The police chief and the D.A. are getting so much money in so quickly, they can’t spend it fast enough. And despite his lower civic status, Philip Grayle was a part of that club, graciously accepting however much money was thrown at him in any given month. Until he stopped.”

  “Stopped accepting the payout?”

  Chelsea nodded. “I’m not sure what happened. Marc had a hunch his wife found out and talked some morals into him. But no matter the reason, he had a change of heart. A few weeks later, he leaves the house and never came back. Wife reported him missing, but the police conveniently found a note saying he was leaving her.”

  “Just to play devil’s advocate,” I said, “isn’t it possible he actually just skipped town?”

  “I’m thinking more like whoever was behind the payouts caught up to him. It’s just too suspicious.”

  “But why all that money and trouble?” I asked. “Who’s paying, and what’s in it for them?”

  “Great questions,” she said. “That’s where you come in.”

  “Me?”

  “This is the point where Marc and I decided we needed some more help on this. Someone with a better knowledge of the inner workings and nuances of this city. That’s when we started vetting local private detectives.”

  “I’m honored I made the cut to be your research assistant,” I said.

  “You should be,” she said, “even after the first two guys we went to wouldn’t take the case.”

  I wanted to hate her smile, I really did, especially because it almost always meant she was taking a dig at me, but I was too excited just to see it.

  “Alright,” I said, “I have a few more great questions. Like, for starters, how high up do you think this goes? You’re tossing around a lot of big names. There’s some folks on that wall over there that are downright celebrities around here. You really think this thing is that widespread?”

  Chelsea nodded. “Dollars to doughnuts even if they did investigate, and found a suspect for kidnapping—or worse—the D.A. would choose not to prosecute.”

  I rubbed my chin. “So your theory is there’s someone controlling the entirety of the city government, funneling money in to play puppet master to a variety of officials. We don’t know who, and we don’t know why, but we think Grayle stopped playing ball so he was ejected from the game.”

  “That’s the theory,” said Chelsea. “As far-fetched as it seems, that’s where everything points.”

  “And then there’s Marc Winters,” I said. Chelsea’s eyes dropped to the table. “You two were doing what you do, snooping around, and someone catches wind. You’re too famous to do anything about overtly—it’ll draw too much attention. But Marc…nobody knows he exists. But he couldn’t just disappear like Grayle did; you’d never let up on that. It would just muck things up worse for the good City of Providence and our mysterious benefactor. So a sloppy story of unrequited love is concocted, and who wouldn’t sympathize with that? And his ‘suicide’ is arranged. The hope is you’d either get the message for what it is and back off, or be so upset you’d leave town, at least for a bit. Either way, it’d buy them some time.”

  Chelsea nodded. I continued.

  “After Marc is strangled and then assisted out of the window…,” I regretted my terminology immediately as Chelsea winced, but I moved on quickly, “… Zachetti takes the call as lead investigator. They know he can’t be bought, so they don’t even try. But they bank on his eagerness to see things as they are, and falsify the coroner’s report, knowing he’d just let it lie. And it almost worked.”

  “But like you said,” sighed Chelsea, “it was sloppy. Too many variables. They didn’t do enough checking to realize Marc was gay. They didn’t count on Lieutenant Zachetti following up personally with the medical examiner. And they didn’t expect me to have hired a private detective.”

  “Right,” I said. “Then they got scared. They didn’t know who knew what. They tore through my office, but there was nothing there to find. So they put a tail on Zachetti and sent some blockhead to rough me up. Just in case.”

  “Again, sloppy,” said Chelsea. “They didn’t expect that to have the opposite effect on us, and spur us to keep digging.”

  “That’s a lot of not knowing what to expect,” I said. “This has the mark of professionals nowhere near it. This is not the work of, say, the mafia. Especially not the Providence mob. I’ve dealt with them enough to know how they work. This is someone new to the game.”

  “That’s somehow comforting,” said Chelsea. “If we can’t outnumber or outgun them, at least maybe we can outsmart them.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I nodded slowly. “One other thing, though. How did you get onto this? What made you guys start looking into Providence in the first place?”

  “An anonymous email,” said Chelsea. “That’s where we start with most of our stories. It outlined Grayle’s disappearance, and suggested it was part of something much bigger. The bribery and widespread involvement we found out through our own investigating.”

  “And you have no idea who sent it?”

  Chelsea frowned. “We tried to follow up, but the account had already been deactivated. This thing is so intricate, the whistleblower could be anyone. Someone at the D.A.’s office, a city hall employee, a good cop. Or someone in Grayle’s family, not satisfied with the police’s lack of action on his disappearance.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “but I guess it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

  “Not really, I suppose, but I’d still like to know. The more allies we can put together the better.”

  “What we should do,” I said hesitantly, “is go to the State Police or even the FBI or Federal Justice Department.”

  Chelsea shook her head defiantly.

  “I know you want to be the one
to see this through,” I said. “I know you feel you owe that to Marc. But we’re like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys down here. The feds have resources, they have manpower, and they have the means to both get justice and keep us all safe. Plus, if it ever comes out that we knew all this and never alerted anyone, we could find ourselves in trouble with both sides of the law.”

  “I know that’s the endgame, eventually,” said Chelsea. “But I’m not ready. Not yet. We have a lot more work to do before we can hand it over. I need—we need—to make sure the case is airtight. We don’t know how far-reaching this goes. We don’t know who we can trust. Plus, I don’t want this case to be lost through the cracks of bureaucracy and red tape.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t argue with her distrust of the government, even in the best case scenario. I rubbed my face.

  “Okay,” I sighed deeply. “Then I guess we’re off to the races. Where do we start?”

  “When in doubt,” said Chelsea, “follow the money.”

  Chapter 10

  THE BIG SHOT

  The next few hours were spent in relative silence, each of us buried deep in research. We didn’t really have anything concrete to start with, so we were casting a wide net. Chelsea was a bit of a computer whiz, and was attempting to access bank account information for the bribe-takers. When I informed her that was incredibly illegal, she responded by wrinkling her nose at me.

  I took the more old-fashioned approach, as usual, and started poring over the agendas and minutes of every City Planning Commission meeting of the past year. I was looking for anything that stood out, anything that seemed odd or shady or repetitive. Although the public records were available online, Chelsea had the foresight to physically print them out for me so I could make notes and cross-reference as needed. I much preferred to feel the weight of the paper in my hands anyway, instead of just scrolling down a screen. It was for that same reason I still stopped at the newsstand every day for the Providence Journal. Or a Boston Globe. Or a Playboy.

  Screens are just so impersonal.

  Terry joined us at some point, although she kept darting out of the room to oversee her operation. We never heard her saying anything to the workers, but they all moved noticeably faster when she was around.

  It was late afternoon when the buzz in the main chamber quieted down and the workers tapered off for the day. Terry was combing through old newspapers, but she seemed more interested in the horoscopes and “Dear Abby” than searching the local news for any clues.

  A loud crash rang out in the room, causing us to jolt up. It came from the escape tunnel on the other side of the large metal door. Chelsea and I looked to Terry for an explanation, but she seemed just as startled as us. There was another bang, and then another and another, each one louder, closer, and more frequent.

  Terry stood up, alarmed, and her eyes darted to the desk drawer where Chelsea was sitting. There was something about the way she looked at the drawer that kicked my instincts into gear. Like there was something in there worth protecting.

  …Or something that could help us.

  She’s got a gun in there.

  Before any of us could react though, a voice boomed out to accompany the crashes, muffled by the thick door but still unmistakably familiar.

  “SON OF A FUCKING WHOOOOOOORE!”

  The last crash was the sound of a shoulder slamming into the door, and then Jake Zachetti barreled into the room like a dirty, angry Kool-Aid man.

  He was filthy from head to toe, all dirt and cobwebs and sweat. From the looks of the pitch black tunnel behind him, he was unable to find the light switch at the bottom of the ladder as I had. The loud crashes we heard were evidently the sounds of Zachetti bouncing off the earthen walls in the dark, picking up speed and force as he ran forward. Jake had a lot of traits, but finesse was certainly not one of them, in either actions or words.

  My first instinct was to remind him of how much better of a detective I was than him, finding the light switch and all.

  “FUCKING FUCK!” Zachetti gasped.

  I was now detecting, however, that I should wait to gloat.

  “Oh, hi, Lieutenant,” said Terry. “Didn’t hear you come in.”

  Zachetti pushed the door shut and leaned against it, as if to keep the horrors of darkness trapped in the tunnel.

  “Never again,” he said. “I’ll take my chances coming in through your store from now on, thank you very much.”

  “C’mon, Jake,” I said. “Don’t you think the sight of you going into a health food store on the regular is beyond suspicious?”

  “I don’t do small spaces, Harry, you know that. I’m not built for that shit.”

  He took off his tent-sized sports coat and shook the dirt off of it. Then he leaned against the back of a chair and dramatically wiped a cobweb from his brow.

  “Any-fucking-way,” he said, “I hope you guys had as productive a day as I did.”

  I shook my head. “Not particularly lucky…yet. Why, you got something?”

  Zachetti grinned from ear to ear, his face still bright red and glistening.

  “Oh, I got something. Boy howdy, do I.”

  Chelsea’s left eyebrow arched so high it could’ve hailed a cab.

  “I paid a visit to Mrs. Grayle,” Jake continued. “The wife our missing Phil left behind.”

  “Ballsy,” I said.

  “I was careful,” Zachetti shrugged. “Gave her a fake name, told her the idiots who first took the case lost the paperwork, so I was just following up. She seemed relieved to talk to someone who actually seemed to care.”

  “What did she say?” asked Chelsea. “Anything new?”

  “Not really,” said Zachetti. “Same as you told it. Ol’ Phil split, she called the cops, they found the note on the fridge. Which, by the way, she swears was definitely not there earlier. She did, however, give me something she didn’t give the cops who gave her the brush-off—on account of her not trusting them from the get-go. It’s amazing what a smile and a little patience can do.”

  Maybe I was wrong about Zachetti not having finesse. When it came to getting what he wanted, Zachetti had it in spades. Sure, it generally only worked on a certain type of person—panic-stricken wives worried out of their minds for their missing husbands, say—but it worked nonetheless.

  “Okay,” said Terry, “stop vamping already, and tell us.”

  I expected a frown at getting his Big Reveal ruined, but Zachetti’s smile only widened.

  “I got his laptop,” he said.

  Chelsea’s right eyebrow joined her left on the ceiling.

  “His laptop?” she repeated. “That could be useful.”

  Zachetti nodded.

  “I’d bet my salary it is,” he said. “The missus said he did everything on it. All his work, emails, even personal stuff like paying bills.”

  “Where there’s bills being paid…” I said, looking at Chelsea.

  “…there’s bank account information,” she finished.

  “That’s terrific, Lieutenant,” said Terry. “So where is it?”

  Everyone in the room, including Zachetti, stopped and realized that when he had crashed into the room like a wrecking ball, he had done so empty handed.

  The proud smile still beamed from Zachetti, but his eyes glossed over a bit as he blinked at Terry. The grin even remained plastered on his face while his head slowly turned to face the door to the escape tunnel and he whispered, “Fuck.”

  • • •

  After Terry dutifully volunteered to retrieve the dropped laptop bag from the bottom of the ladder, and after Zachetti let out a string of colorful profanities when he learned there had been lights available in the tunnel the whole time, we all stood crowded around Chelsea at the conference table as she booted up the computer.

  The home page came up immediately, with no password protection.<
br />
  “Well, that’s stupid of him,” Chelsea whispered to herself.

  “And lucky of us,” I said.

  “Indeed,” said Chelsea.

  She navigated over to the browser history, which revealed the usual news, sports, and weather sites, some utility pages, and lots and lots of pornography. Terry gasped audibly at the sight of some of the page names. Zachetti let out a snort. Chelsea looked unfazed.

  “There is…a lot of porn on here,” I said.

  “There always is,” said Chelsea. “Without exception.”

  “You’ve done this before?” I asked. “Hacked into someone’s personal computer?”

  “Well, yes,” she said, “but this isn’t hacking. This is looking at something that was given to us.”

  “It still feels like a gray area,” I said. “What’s the difference?”

  “About six years’ jail-time,” she said. “But we’re kind of past that, anyway, aren’t we?”

  Zachetti pointed a stubby finger at one of the links in the browser history. It was for a particular subgenre of fetish that most likely would not be helpful to us at all, save for satiating his curiosity.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “Click on that one.”

  “Something better researched on your own time, Lieutenant,” said Chelsea, then added under her breath, “trust me.”

  She instead clicked on a link for a boring old email server.

  “Unbelievable,” she muttered, as the saved username and password automatically filled themselves in on the logon screen. One click of the “Log On” button and all of Philip Grayle’s personal and business emails were spread out before us.

  There were hundreds of unread messages, and even more that were read.

  “This is going to take forever,” said Terry.

  “Nah,” said Chelsea. “I got this.”

  She produced a flash drive and plugged it into the side of the laptop. She bit her lower lip and her fingers started a hurried but graceful dance across the keyboard. She scrolled, clicked, dragged, and dropped so quickly I couldn’t even keep track of her movements.