Solo Act by Richard J. Cass

Author:Richard J. Cass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Boston
South Shore
Publisher: Encircle Publications
Published: 2019-02-06T03:02:59+00:00

Burton was suspended from duty while the BPD’s version of Internal Affairs investigated whether he had beaten Carlos Lopes to death. At first, the break in routine seemed to do him good—he spent a lot of time in the Esposito, reading the newspapers, listening to music, and dreaming up obscure bits of jazz trivia to stump me with. He drank only beer, and then only in the late afternoons.

But all his open murder cases were put on hold while the bureaucracy ground itself fine, and I knew it bothered him that no progress was being made. Too, it must have felt insulting to be treated like one of the criminals he’d spent his professional life calling to account. By Friday afternoon of that week, he was as ugly-tempered as I’d seen him, and he was sinking a shot of rye whiskey with every second or third beer.

The drinking and the bad temper didn’t do his relationship with Marina any good, either—she seemed to have accepted the BPD’s notion that he might have killed Carlos. They went out of their way to keep from speaking with each other, which made me about as comfortable as a cat on a hotplate. But I didn’t think business was so good yet that I could afford to fire a paying customer.

Burton knocked the bottom of his empty shot glass on the bar, a sound I was coming to loathe. I was starting to feel like I was his priest, not that he was confessing anything to me.

As I poured him one more shot of Jameson, I considered cutting him off. He’d been sitting on the same stool since lunch and it was almost five p.m. Eric would be coming in soon to set up for the band, and once we got into the evening crowd, I didn’t think I wanted a sodden cop in a nasty mood taking up a seat in my nice civilized jazz bar.

He pointed at the niche up behind the bar, where the whiskey in Alison’s glass had evaporated some more. I topped it off from the Macallan bottle.

“Waste of good hooch,” he said. “Let me take another look at that journal of hers.”

“Give it a rest, will you?”

Over the past couple days, we had chewed over every possible fact, fancy, and combination of theory about Carlos Lopes’s murder, Alison’s death, Tommy Cormier, Delford Woodley’s mugging, everything even slightly odd that had happened in the last week. We still couldn’t find a thread that bound them together.

And I didn’t want to bring the drugs and pills I’d found in Alison’s apartment into it yet, to protect him. The Internal Affairs cops would likely grasp any club they could find to ding him with, and having any knowledge of illicit pills and large untraceable amounts of cash wouldn’t help his situation at all.

“You’re giving up on that idea?” he said. “You were pretty sure about the fact she was killed for a while there.”

I hadn’t given up on the idea, but I couldn’t explain a motive without the evidence I wasn’t talking about.

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