Devine's Providence: A Novel Read online

  She probably wouldn’t like it if I called her adorable. She’d probably hit me. But hey, sometimes the truth hurts.

  “One more thing, Mr. Devine,” she said, becoming less adorable. “It should go without saying that we work best in the shadows. If word gets out that I’m in town, it puts this whole operation at risk. Discretion is of the utmost importance, whether you end up helping us or not.”

  She looked me up and down.

  “Though I do hope you do.”

  “Of course,” I assured her. “Discretion is my middle name.”

  “Is that so?” she asked, breezing past me. “We had it as William.”

  She flashed that wry smile at me over her shoulder as she started down the outdoor stairway. After a few steps though, she stopped and turned back around completely.

  “Oh!” she said. “And please, please, please get a new cell phone as soon as possible. You really can’t live without one nowadays. Maybe something waterproof this time.”

  She whirled back around and was gone, leaving me on the landing shaking my head. I was so caught up in watching her exit, I hadn’t even noticed Marc walk past me and into my office. He was sitting down at one of the chairs in the reception area. I followed him into the room and leaned against the desk. We stared at each other for a beat, and then both burst out laughing.

  “I knew it,” I said. “I knew there was something up with you.”

  “I knew you knew,” Marc chuckled, “But that just proved to me how good you were.”

  He removed a piece of lint from his pant leg and seemed to study it as he spoke before flicking it away.

  “Besides,” he said, “I wasn’t on my best game last night, I’m afraid. You see, I had planned to bump into you in a pub—a natural place to strike up a conversation with a stranger. But the Parrot…”

  “The Parrot isn’t a natural place for anything,” I said. “Well, almost anything.”

  Marc nodded in agreement.

  “So,” I continued, “Why the charade? What did we possibly talk about that you couldn’t have asked me here?”

  “We’ve done plenty of research on you beforehand,” said Marc. He picked up a nearby magazine and began absent-mindedly flipping through the pages. “But Chelsea always insists we discreetly meet our ‘assets’ in person before we initiate contact. Just to ‘size them up’, as it were, to get a personal judgement on if they’d be a good fit for the job.”

  “And I’m an ‘asset,’ huh?”

  “We hope you can be.”

  “So your ‘personal judgement’…I guess I passed the test?”

  “Wasn’t exactly a ‘test,’ old boy. But you didn’t raise any unexpected red flags, if that’s what you mean. You’d be surprised how often that happens. A chap looks good—great, even—on paper, but in person…let’s just say not an ideal fit for the way we operate.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. Marc, dissatisfied with the magazine, dropped it carelessly on the end table.

  “Well then,” I said. “As I told Ms. Woodstern, I’m happy to help in any way I can. So what’s up?”

  Marc glanced around the room, but at least he tried to do it innocently enough. He adjusted his t-shirt and let out a deep breath.

  “It’s probably best we don’t get into it too much here,” he said. “So I’ll only speak broadly, if it’s all the same. Like Chelsea said, we can discuss details at the hotel tomorrow night.”

  I glanced around the room myself, but didn’t bother to pass it off as anything other than incredulously.

  “Do you…do you think this place is bugged? Like I’m under surveillance?”

  Either he was extremely over-cautious or extremely crazy. There was no way anyone would waste valuable time, effort, and equipment to keep tabs on the goings-on of Harry Devine.

  If these walls could talk, they’d scream of boredom.

  “Just a precaution,” said Marc reassuringly, leaning back in his chair. “We don’t think anything. We try to think of everything. In cases like this, there’s no such thing as being too careful. That’s all.”

  Marc seemed like an easy-going guy. There was a pensiveness about him too, a quiet observant quality that hadn’t shown through when he was playing the part of the aggressive, intrusive Jim.

  I guess he was actually a better actor than I had thought.

  “You sure know how to pique someone’s curiosity,” I said. “But that’s about the worst thing you could do to a detective.”

  “I realize that,” Marc chuckled, “and we do thank you for your patience and understanding.”

  He leaned forward, clasping his hands together in front of him.

  “In general terms,” he said lowly, “we’re talking about a tale of greed and corruption.”

  “If it’s greed and corruption you’re looking for,” I said, “you’ve come to the right city. That’s run-of-the-mill stuff here.”

  “We think it’s more than that.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, smirking, “extortion? Bribery and blackmail? Or, gasp! Murder?”

  “No, not murder…not yet.”

  “Wait…what do you mean not yet?”

  Marc leaned back and spoke very flatly.

  “Well, the body simply hasn’t turned up yet.”

  “Oh. Now I am intrigued.”

  Marc nodded slowly.

  “That’s about all I can say right now, other than there’s potential for much bigger implications,” he sighed. “But tell me, what’s your take on the Providence Police Department?”

  “My take? Well, I was a cop, once.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah…but that was a long time ago. I, uh…retired early. I’ve been out of it so long now, I don’t know most of the guys on the job now. But the older ones, the ones I do know…there are some real fine people on the force.”

  “Anyone you can think of as…less than fine?”

  I stared at him and bit my bottom lip. The PPD hadn’t always been fair to me, or to many other people, but my blood still ran blue. Any insinuations still felt like personal attacks.

  “You’re not thinking of going after the police department, are you?” I asked coolly. “Like any city, we’ve had our issues, but as a whole…”

  “As a whole,” Marc interrupted, “we’re not going after the police, no. And we don’t care about the ‘run-of-the-mill’ stuff, as you say. There may be a few bad actors worth looking into is all. But the PPD isn’t even the crux of the investigation. Like I said, we have to think of everything.”

  “Look,” I said as calmly and naturally as I could, “I left the department a lifetime ago. How far back are you, uh, looking into things?”

  “Oh, pretty current,” said Marc. The faintest glimmer of a smirk twitched at the corner of his mouth. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  I studied his face, but could read no more from it. I decided to employ evasive maneuvers anyway.

  “I gotta ask,” I said, “what’s it like working for the Chelsea Woodstern? That must be pretty incredible.”

  He laughed and nodded, breaking our staring contest.

  “It is,” he said. “Chelsea is quite the force. A real bulldog. I wouldn’t want to end up in her crosshairs.”

  Was that a threat? A warning? Just earnest chit-chat? I couldn’t tell.

  “Nor I,” I said slowly. If the comment was indeed veiled, Marc didn’t dwell on it long enough to stick the landing. Which was reassuring.

  “She’s the best, though,” he said. “Not just a wonderful employer…why, she’s become my closest friend.”

  I felt a brief, dull pang of jealousy for Marc. Not only to get to work so closely with a powerhouse such as Chelsea on a daily basis, but to actually consider her a friend?

  Nice work if you can get it, kid.

 
; “She seems so…intense,” I said.

  Marc sighed and nodded again.

  “She can be, quite,” he said. “That’s what makes her so good at what she does, I suppose. She’s relentless. She can also be a smidge…obsessive, at times.”

  “Obsessive?”

  “The way all the most successful people are, I mean. If she gets an idea in her head, or even just a hunch, there’s nothing that can stop her from getting what she wants.”

  “That’s not a bad quality to have.”

  Marc smiled warmly.

  “I bloody well love her for it.”

  Hmmm.

  My curiosity was getting the better of me.

  “Are you two…you and Chelsea…”

  He thankfully cut me off by holding up his hand.

  “Not like that,” he said, laughing. He stood up to leave. “I’m gay, as it were.”

  “Ah,” I said, with a sense of relief that I didn’t quite understand. “So…the Pink Parrot must have been extra terrible for you, then.”

  “Something tells me I wasn’t missing much, old boy.”

  Chapter 3

  OUT OF THE PAST

  That night I tossed and turned but slept for only five minutes at a time, my mind replaying the meeting over and over, from my first glimpse of Chelsea to her imploring me to get a new phone. The next morning I was waiting outside the Apple store in the mall when they opened the gates. I hated iPhones, but like many other people only bought them because that’s what I was used to and was too old to have the patience to learn anything else. There was irony somewhere, I thought, in that I had made my first Apple purchase, an iPod, primarily to listen to Chelsea Woodstern’s podcast on stakeouts. And here I was, a decade or so later, getting a replacement phone at her personal behest.

  The young clerk was by no means a Genius by any standards, despite his title, but was nevertheless very helpful. I was relieved to learn that virtually all of my old information, pictures, and messages were saved in a cloud. I didn’t know what a cloud was, but I was glad there was one because I hadn’t memorized a phone number in ten years. I was alarmed, though, that all my personal stuff was just floating around in the ether. The Genius was taken aback when he found out that my old phone was already seven years old. Up until it slipped into the sea, I had still referred to it as my “new” phone. The Genius referred to it as “vintage.”

  After I was successfully updated and plugged back into the mainframe of our computer overlords, I headed back to the office for a morning of research. Chelsea had given me very little to go on. She had said all would be revealed tonight, but I liked to have all possible information going into any situation. I hated surprises.

  The first thing I did was look up my Yelp reviews. Before Chelsea had mentioned it, I hadn’t realized that I had any Yelp reviews. I was shocked to find a listing for Devine & Associates, and even more shocked to find that it was indeed the highest-rated P.I. firm in the area. Bully for me.

  I then spent a good chunk of time scouring local missing persons reports. I painstakingly searched for anything that stood out, anything at all that would set my Spidey-Senses tingling, but it was all pretty normal, as far as missing people go. Nothing that should draw the attention of a world-renowned investigator like Chelsea, anyway.

  Next up was more information on Chelsea herself. For professional reasons, of course. I liked to gather some background on all of my clients, usually unbeknownst to them. It helped to see the bigger picture of every situation.

  As the Apple Genius could attest to, I wasn’t up-to-date on all the latest tech trends, but I had learned how to become quite internet-savvy when it came to researching people. In addition to the databases only available to law enforcement and licensed professionals like myself, my most powerful tools of the trade were Google and social media. It’s embarrassing, really, how many paychecks I’ve earned simply by checking someone’s (usually public) Facebook or Instagram. A cheater or scammer are usually their own worst enemy.

  Now, logging into my own Facebook account, I was met with a serendipitous notification:

  Chelsea Woodstern has sent you a friend request!

  ACCEPT | IGNORE

  I focused on her profile picture—the default white cartoon silhouette against a blue background—and couldn’t help but geek out a little. It was possible the request was sent in error, so I hurriedly clicked on “ACCEPT” before she could retract it. I gleefully pictured “Harrison Devine and Chelsea Woodstern are now friends” showing up on all my friends’ newsfeeds. My face started to ache because it wasn’t used to smiling so wide.

  Well, at least she made my job a little easier, anyway. I navigated over to her page to see what I could dig up. I should reiterate at this point, this was “investigating,” not “stalking.” This was all strictly professional, and—

  Holy Christ, she’s single.

  I couldn’t help it. Despite my rational side, I felt…something. It wasn’t hope, exactly, or even excitement. I knew I didn’t stand a chance, that I was getting way too ahead of myself, but still…a flutter of something.

  After a few breathing exercises, I tamped down whatever the hell it was I was feeling. I sent hormonal teenage boy Harry deep to the back of my mind and brought Harry the Detective up to finish his job.

  Chelsea’s social media presence was just about as secretive and reclusive as her in real-life. There were very few pictures of her—Harry the Detective didn’t much care, but the back of my mind started to tingle irately. There were no cat memes or clickbait articles so typical of every other person’s timelines. No complaining of Mondays, no political rants, no trendy hotspot check-ins. No bathroom mirror selfies, or pictures of glasses of wine, or any hashtags at all. This was the page of someone who knew what damage oversharing could do.

  There was the occasional link to some article or another about internet privacy, and plenty of shameless plugs for her podcast, but nothing that could give me anything about who she really was, or, not surprisingly, what she was doing in Providence.

  I wondered if at this exact moment she was perusing through my own Facebook page. Good luck to her, I thought, wading through the countless blurry pictures of cigars in front of sunsets and notifications on my latest Candy Crush achievements.

  It wasn’t until I started going through the archives of the Los Angeles Times that I started to put more pieces together, more than I had ever been able to dig up as just a superfan. It turned out that she had been married, to a young photographer who moonlit as a bartender on the weekends. Daniel Woodstern found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up caught in the crossfire of a police shootout. There wasn’t much else about it, other than him leaving behind his wife of six months, Chelsea…then twenty-four years old.

  Jesus.

  Whatever the circumstances beyond what the Times covered, it motivated Chelsea to dedicate herself to weeding out corruption and crime, especially when innocent lives got caught up in the mix. Losing a husband at such a young age was certainly one explanation for her tireless work ethic and ruthless search for the truth.

  I couldn’t help but think that it was funny how tragedy can shift a life’s course wildly in just about any direction. For Chelsea, it had hardened her and gave her the drive to always be working, always be helping, always racing toward the next challenge. For me, it had…well, it had set me off on a different route entirely. Yeah, maybe “funny” isn’t the right word at all.

  This idol of mine, this heroine that I held on a pedestal was slowly becoming more human to me. I was so caught up being star-struck that I forgot to notice she was just flesh and blood (Well, I hadn’t noticed the blood, anyway). She had gone through pain and suffering just like anyone else. And I had made a fool out of myself instead of just treating her like a person.

  You’re an idiot. You’re going to blow whatever opportunity t
his is for you, and look ridiculous in the process. How can you possibly help Chelsea Woodstern? How can you possibly even face her after that botched introduction? You should just call her now and cancel. You don’t deserve to even be in the same room as her.

  The self-loathing, second-guessing, and old memories being dredged up were blurring my thoughts. I instinctively poured myself a glass of scotch—it’s eleven a.m. somewhere—and took a sip, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I dumped the rest down the sink. Even though Chelsea was new in my life, these feelings were not. It was the same battle I waged with myself on almost a daily basis. A recurring nightmare. My methods of coping varied, but mostly consisted of doing my best to not think about it. Plastering on a smile and the Ol’ Devine Charm and pretending I was fine. When that didn’t cut it, I usually drank myself into not being able to think about anything. But now, I just needed to lie down.

  I tossed a Dave Brubeck album onto the old record player and collapsed onto the leather sofa with my arm over my face. Everything was getting darker and thunder started echoing on the fringes of my mind. I wanted—needed—this cloud to pass as soon as possible. Sleep usually helped, and luckily it overtook me quickly and effortlessly.

  • • •

  They say that some people only dream in black and white. I had never paid any attention to that, but this one was definitely colorless. The first thing I noticed were the shadows the overhead fan was casting on the ceiling of my office. I mean, I know it was my office, only some of it wasn’t. An illegible neon sign buzzed right outside the window, and the Providence skyline towered in the background—a view I didn’t actually have. “Harlem Nocturne” was playing from the record player which was now a cathedral-style wooden radio, the kind my grandparents had kept in their front parlor. Smoke hung in the air, billowing out from a cigar propped on my desk ashtray. I very rarely remember such details from my dreams, but I remember looking admirably at the tightly-wrapped stogie and knowing it was a Cuban.

  There was an abrupt knock at the door. The door itself was different too. The frosted glass on the top part showed a silhouette on the other side, and I had an inkling as to who it was. I floated over and opened it to confirm what I already knew.