Hush Hush Read online

  Gabriel Valjan

  HUSH HUSH

  A Shane Cleary Mystery

  First published by Level Best Books/Historia 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Gabriel Valjan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Gabriel Valjan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  First edition

  ISBN: 978-1-68512-044-3

  Cover art by Level Best Designs

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  Contents

  Praise for HUSH HUSH

  Characters

  Chapter 1: Stormy Weather

  Chapter 2: Charlie’s

  Chapter 3: L is for Knight

  Chapter 4: Low & Slow

  Chapter 5: Crossroads

  Chapter 6: Recon Alpha

  Chapter 7: Mad Money

  Chapter 8: Figures in the Carpet

  Chapter 9: Chinatown

  Chapter 10: Special Delivery

  Chapter 11: Jungle Room

  Chapter 12: Frontier Medicine

  Chapter 13: Entre nous

  Chapter 14: Under & Over

  Chapter 15: Luck of the Irish

  Chapter 16: The Camel’s Back

  Chapter 17: She’s Gone

  Chapter 18: Two Olives

  Chapter 19: Mr. W

  Chapter 20: Blinked Twice

  Chapter 21: Flan Overnight

  Chapter 22: The Devil’s Hour

  Chapter 23: Big Red

  Chapter 24: The General

  Chapter 25: Just the Facts

  Chapter 26: Trifecta

  Chapter 27: Figures in the Wood

  Chapter 28: One More Thing

  Chapter 29: Eminent Domain

  Chapter 30: Hush Hush

  FORGOTTEN HISTORY: An Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Gabriel Valjan

  Praise for HUSH HUSH

  “HUSH HUSH is filled with biting wisdom, savory dialogue, and the authentic flavor of 70’s Boston.”—Cheryl Head, author of the Charlie Mack Motown Mystery series

  “Boston. Dodgy cops. Class. Race. Murder. It’s all here, and there’s enough grit on the pages to grind your teeth down. Loved it.”—Tracy Clark, Sue Grafton Memorial Award-winning author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery series

  “HUSH HUSH is brutally honest, stunning and thoroughly engaging. When it comes to exciting and provocative mysteries, Valjan is the real deal!”—Stephen Mack Jones, Hammett Prize, Nero Award-winning author of the August Snow series

  “With compelling characters, sharp prose and wit, and a slew of historical facts, this clever and twisty mystery’s topic is as poignant today as it was then.”—Marco Carocari, author of Blackout

  “Crisply written and richly detailed, it’s 70’s Boston where race, class, and the dark secrets fuel the deadliest of deceptions. Despite the title, people will be talking about HUSH HUSH. Highly recommended.”—James L’Etoile, author of Black Label, At What Cost, and Bury the Past

  “With clear and unflinching prose, [HUSH HUSH] brings a voice to issues of race and class through compelling and honest characters.”—Meredith Doench, author of the Luce Hansen Thriller series

  “Precise and powerful…written in vivid, unforgettable prose.”—Lori Robbins, author of the On Pointe Mystery series

  Characters

  John: Shane’s friend and owner of a bar in Central Square

  Bonnie: Shane’s girlfriend and a criminal defense lawyer

  Elliott Dawson: murder victim

  Alfred Wiggins: student and friend of Dawson

  Desiree Fox: prostitute

  Louis Meechum, Junior: the accused and convicted

  Louis Meechum, Senior: father of Louis, Jr. and Shane’s client

  Henri Robichaud: criminal

  Andre Kane: criminal

  Richard Case: Shane’s writer friend

  Sylvia: John’s wife and owner of Sylvia’s, a soul food restaurant

  Delano ‘Professor’ Lindsey: Shane’s former teacher

  Bill: Friend of Shane, a Vietnam veteran, and an officer of the Boston Police Department

  Pinto: Middle man between Shane and the Boston Police Department Commissioner

  Mr. B: Mafia don

  Tony Two-Times: Bodyguard of Mr. B

  Mr. W (Wang): 14K Triad and boss of Chinatown

  Dorothy Harrison: Boston Police Department’s first black female detective (retired)

  Saul Fiedermann: Friend and jeweler on the first floor of Shane’s office building.

  Chapter 1: Stormy Weather

  “White acts, black reacts.”

  I’d never played the game. Philip Marlowe played against himself, between cases or while he waited for a client in his office. It was a cold November night in Boston and John tried hard to sell me the Dawson case, but I wasn’t buying.

  “White always moves first, and black is on the defensive. Always.”

  “John.”

  He was a friend, and John’s wife Sylvia cooked the best soul food in Dorchester, but he’d worn out both of my ears. He talked hard and fast, while the wood in the fireplace crackled and flames sputtered. He persisted, like a hound with the scent lodged in his nose.

  “White sets the tempo. People think because you can see the first move, you can determine your opponent’s strategy, but that ain’t so.”

  “John.”

  My PI license had lapsed, and I had no intention of renewing it since Nikos asked me to manage his rental properties. I’d let Dot at the Mercury Answering Service go. Saul downstairs had taken over the lease to my office inside the Jeweler’s Building on Washington Street.

  Maybe I was a sellout. Maybe I feared dying, alone and forgotten, in an alley because I’d walked into a knife or a bullet. Nonetheless, John plied the sale’s pitch with a pastor’s fervor.

  “Problem is black can never move faster than white. Sure, the black man can perfect his defense, but the white man has had the privilege of the first move, since time immemorial.”

  “John, please stop with the game of chess.”

  I stood up. John rose from his seat, a nice leather upholstered chair.

  “Why did you stand up? I was just stretching my legs.”

  “When Massah rose, the slave stood. Think of it as the black man’s reflex response.”

  “Please stop. I understand your sense of outrage, John, I really do, but I’m not a PI anymore.”

  The Dawson case had tested the city for color blindness. The DA indicted three black men with first-degree murder for the death of a college kid in the Combat Zone. The Public Defender filed a motion to have the cases severed, and each defendant tried separately. The judge dismissed the motion, saying the accused trio had acted in a ‘joint enterprise’ to commit a crime and furthermore, three separate trials was both inefficient and expensive.

  Midway through the trial, two of the defendants changed their tune for a plea deal. The assumed verdict of GUILTY prevailed on radio talk shows, in the newspapers, until the jury stunned everyone when they’d tossed the indictment for premeditated murder and convicted the man left standing on the lesser charge of manslaughter. Racial slurs raged through Boston like the seasonal flu. Mayor White didn’t exactly fiddle, but Boston almost burned to the ground.

  White moved first on the chessboard, like John said, and it compelled a reaction. ACLU lawyers, who audited the trial, let Boston and the nation know the prosecutor had struck more than ninety percent of black jurors from the jury pool.

  The DA, speaking from the courthouse steps in his blazer with suede elbow pads, dismissed any allegations of impropriety or racism. He insisted justice had been served. He emphasized the jury had one black man and that juror was the foreman. Blacks in Boston said Uncle Tom received a promotion. White liberals equated it with the Pilgrims as friends with the Indians for Thanksgiving and enemies by Christmas.

  Poised for a confrontation near the scene of the crime, Boston Police manned the Combat Zone around the clock. The union reps for the Patrolmen’s Association didn’t have to beg for OT because Mayor White said the city would pay for the overtime and the riot gear. Downtown Boston looked as if the governor had declared martial law. I knew how the city prepared for a race riot, because I’d been one of the boys in blue once, a member of the Boston Police Department, until an incident in a housing project and my testimony in court ended my career.

  John wasn’t a man to disturb the bedsheets. He’d known all his life how the bed was made, by whom, and for whom. He’d survived the Klan and all the other little indignities a black man in America suffered. He’ll tell you trouble finds his dark skin without him trying.

  John worked in a bar and pool hall in Central Square. He owned the place outright. A whisper of appreciation from an Italian don we both knew, and John wasn’t paying protection money anymore. His booze deliveries were on time, intact, and the cops didn’t shake him down or hassle his joint. Joh
n had every incentive to steer clear of the Dawson case, every reason to enjoy the life of Riley. And here he was ready to open the door and invite the devil inside. I wasn’t interested, but I was curious.

  “Why the Dawson case?”

  “The boy they convicted, his daddy and I go way back.

  “He reached out to you?”

  “Called me himself. His son is facing twenty years.”

  “What is it you think I can do?”

  John understood why I had quit the dead man’s skulk. He knew I was with Bonnie. He was sitting in her chair, in her house. She wasn’t in the room, but she could hear the conversation. Bonnie was a criminal defense lawyer and she might have sympathy for what James Baldwin called “The White Problem.” There was another reason.

  Bonnie had clerked for W. Arthur Garrity, the judge who desegregated Boston. It was before we’d met and she filled me in on what it was like after her mentor issued the court order, and it what it was like to be inside the courtroom while the Dawson jury deliberated. Extra security guards were posted in the hallways, entrances and exits, even the stairwells.

  The few times we discussed legalities, she was rabbinical about definitions, particularly murder. There are two kinds of manslaughter: voluntary and involuntary and John’s friend’s son had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter. The other two men took a plea deal and said he stabbed Dawson. Bonnie told me what I already understood about the criminal justice system. Time was money, and District Attorneys stay in office if they maintained a high conviction rate. Justice is what you paid for. It was that simple. As for deals, they happened all the time, and Louis Meechum, Junior rode the express train to prison because he went with a Public Defender, the lowest paid and most overworked lawyer in the legal profession.

  Rumor was that, because of the “token minority” on the jury, there might be grounds for an appeal. Bonnie said a good defense attorney would’ve been working on an appeal to reverse the conviction before his client was in the van back to his cell. Public Defender McCormack did nothing. I asked her what were the odds for a successful appeal since the lawyer failed to file one, and she said an Irishman like me would receive the freed slave’s forty acres and a mule before Meechum’s conviction for murder was overturned, or there was a new trial. Not today, not tomorrow, and not in Boston, she said, no matter what John had to say about chess as a metaphor for race and justice, or how hard he swung John Henry’s hammer at me.

  “I was wondering if you’d meet with the boy’s daddy for me. Just listen and hear what the man has to say. The way I understand it, that in order for an appeal to work, it has to have merit, like there’s new evidence or proof something’d been overlooked the first time. Am I right?”

  “Correct.” The answer came from behind me, from Bonnie, who was standing in the doorframe. John’s eyes widened and for good reason when she stepped into the room and into the light. Bonnie’s hair was blonde, almost platinum, and she was tall, with high cheekbones and blue eyes. In another era, she would’ve worn furs and leather, carried an axe, and conducted Viking raids.

  John had apologized earlier for disturbing her Sunday evening. Bonnie smiled and told him to think nothing of it, though I knew better. Because of John, she missed one of her television shows.

  At twenty-six, she’d already perfected the expression of no expression, though her sanctum sanctorum had been disturbed. Bonnie valued privacy. Her apartment was as sacred to her as Jerusalem was to Jews and Christians.

  “Think there’s new evidence?” she asked John.

  “I believe Shane Cleary can find it.”

  “Do you believe something was overlooked during the initial investigation?”

  “I believe that—”

  “Shane Cleary will find it,” she answered. “I get it.”

  “I don’t think you do, Miss. Look, no disrespect intended but I’ve known this kid since he was a sprout and he ain’t no killer. All I’m asking is for Shane to talk with the boy’s father and revisit the facts of the case.”

  “Facts are two boys ventured out for a wild night on the wrong side of town. One of them dies, violently, and three men, suspects, were in the vicinity. Those are the facts.”

  John nodded. “These are also facts. The dead one is white, and the three suspects are black. Let’s be honest here, Miss. A white life is more valuable, and has been since Cain and Abel. White dies, black pays the price.”

  “You need more than race, more than black and white.”

  “Which is why I say, let Shane talk to the kid’s father. This boy I’m talking about, he’d starve to death before he’d kill a chicken.”

  “I recall another fact,” Bonnie said. “His fingerprints were on the knife.”

  “I can’t explain that, but there has to be a reason.” John looked to me. “All I ask is for you to talk to him at my place, tomorrow afternoon.” He named the hour. “This kid says he’s innocent.” He turned to Bonnie. “I know they all say that, but I believe him. Something went horribly wrong that night, something more than a Harvard boy stabbed to death.”

  Technically, the kid had lapsed into a coma and died later, but I didn’t correct John.

  I watched John disappear into the November night. I avoided Bonnie and made some excuse, like I needed a moment to myself. I said I’d return. She’d joked while that line may’ve worked for General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, it wouldn’t for me in Boston. Then she uttered those infamous words a man never wanted to hear from a woman, at any age or station in life. She wanted to talk.

  I paced with my thoughts in the bedroom. Delilah, on the bed, mewed. I didn’t have to guess what she was thinking. My cat interpreted my moods, every register of my voice. She was there every anniversary of my father’s suicide and my mother’s passing and cuddled with me when I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night after a vivid memory of Vietnam.

  She headbutted my hand, her way of reminding me of the inevitable and unavoidable. She lifted a paw and placed it in the palm of my hand. We understood each other. Dogs hunt in packs and learn to kill together. A cat, wild or not, is both a loner and a solitary killer. A dog wants to please, a cat is selective about friendship.

  Bonnie appeared in the doorframe. She had sought me out, instead of waiting near the fire for my return. “You can’t stay away, can you?”

  “John is a friend.”

  I wouldn’t look at Bonnie. Delilah’s ear twitched and I grinned.

  “You think this is funny?” she asked.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You smiled.”

  “At the cat, Bonnie.”

  She blocked the door behind her. There was no escape. I was inside the box. Trapped.

  “This isn’t an open-and-shut case. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t say I’d take the case.”

  “I didn’t hear the word no.”

  She stepped forward. She wanted something from me, an answer, or a reassurance of some kind. I couldn’t give it to her. We were different in that regard. As a PI, I dealt with uncertainties, and I tried to fix the bent and broken. As a lawyer, Bonnie was trained to tear answers out of people, to twist a word or a phrase and use it against them.

  “You believe him because he’s your friend,” she said.

  “I do.”

  “Friend or not, he could be wrong.”

  She put her arms on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. She kissed me. Images came to me, of my opening up envelopes, collecting rents as a landlord, of my donating money to the Little League year after year, and seeing my name on the back of team jerseys.

  By forty, I’d have a beer belly and collect stamps.

  At fifty, I’d be more than halfway to the graveyard.

  “Shane,” she said into my ear. Her blonde hair against the side of my face, I breathed in her scent, tasted her lipstick on my lips. I pulled my face back and said, “It’s the case. You’re worried I’ll take it.”

  “That and because it’s wrong,” she said.

  “Wrong I take it?”

  “No, not that,” she said, her breath warm in my ear.