Hush Hush: A Shane Cleary Mystery

By Gabriel Valjan

Shane Cleary is living a comfortable life. He has money. He has a girl. 

 

But a visit from a friend shakes up his status quo. Chess may be the metaphor, but the case is one that

• Language: English
• Publisher: Historia
• Release date: Jan 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685120443

Gabriel Valjan

Gabriel Valjan is the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, Silver Falchion, and Shamus-nominated author of the Shane Cleary mystery series with Level Best Books. He received the 2021 Macavity Award for Best Short Story. Gabriel is a member of ITW, MWA, and Sisters in Crime. He is a regular contributor to the Criminal Minds blog. He lives in Boston's South End and answers to a tuxedo cat named Munchkin.

Book preview

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. John 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.

What’s wrong then?

Everything about the case, including the weather.

Chapter 2: Charlie’s

By 5 AM, I was awake and tuned into a repeat of The Jack LaLanne Show I found with some twists and turns of the rabbit ears on the television. An ageless LaLanne admonished his audience that cheese, butter, morning coffee and cigarettes were killers. I’d given up smokes but remained guilty as charged on the coffee. The aroma was as irresistible as sex and I couldn’t do without either in the morning. Coffee was reliable and likely, whereas sex wasn’t, until Bonnie came into my life. I took my morning jolt without cream or sugar, as my one concession to Jack’s campaign for a healthier heart.

By 6 AM, I’d showered and shaved and dressed. My clothes were off the hanger and on my frame. The early reveille was a habit from the army. Other routines, like the art of ironing, I owed to my mother. She’d do the floors, vacuum, dust high and low, and work the ironing board Saturday afternoons after a round-robin of shopping the local vendors. Like her, I pressed all my clothes on the sixth weekday. Unlike her, thanks to the United States Army, I stocked my closet, pants on the right, shirts to the left, and everything was two fingers apart. Shoes were shined and my jackets or winter coat debrided of lint.

Bonnie allotted me some space in her closet, and I co-opted a disused bureau she bought at a garage sale. I billeted at her place, a duffel bag nearby in case I received the order to vacate the premises. Home for me was Union Park in the South End, and there I kept the rest of my wardrobe and belongings. My most sentimental items were pictures of my parents and of the guys I had served with, in a small lockbox which I didn’t lock or take with me to Bonnie’s.

Bonnie mattered to me, and I was determined to make it work. I believed we were special together. This thing of ours was important to me because she did three unexpected things in succession. She allowed a gun in her house. She permitted Delilah to stay there and, last but not least, she gave me a key to the place.

By 7 AM, I drew up a list of To-Do items for the properties. Nikos boarded up his shop before winter visited New England. He ran a Mom and Pop fixture in the South End, where folks could enjoy decent, affordable food, and the kids, ice cream, and a safe place after school. Nikos had lost his wife to cancer, his son to Vietnam, and we’d become close over the years. Before he became a snowbird and migrated to Florida for the winter, he’d entrusted me with his real estate. I collected the rent and kept the peace like Marshall Dillon. Nikos offered me a spacious apartment but I preferred my place in Union Park before I moved in with Bonnie.

By 8 AM, I’d completed all the calls for the odds-and-ends that needed attention. Nikos staffed regulars, so I had a black electrician, a Puerto Rican plumber, and a Greek landscaper who did double-duty. He trimmed hedges, lawns, and shrubs during the spring and summer. He bagged leaves in autumn and shoveled and salted the walkways and driveways during the winter.

I created the work orders and entered the details into a notebook. Nikos kept a series of books for repairs and ledgers on rents. He was a good landlord, and he was easy on people because he knew the elderly waited for their government checks, and single moms had deadbeats for husbands or exes. On more than one occasion, Nikos would hire off-book to find the deadbeats. He called such expenses Miscellaneous.

By 8:30 AM, give or take the follow-up in the afternoon, and checking the machine, my day was done. Nikos had rigged a knockoff of Jim Rockford’s answering machine. Press this button for Play, depress the levers for Rewind or Forward, and hold them together for Erase. The difference between Nikos and James Garner on TV was nobody called to remind him he owed them money.

By 8:45 AM, I was twirling a pencil. If I wanted to vary the doldrums, I set a wastepaper basket six feet away from my chair and I toss playing cards to see how many I land inside the bucket. It was a game the guys and me played in the service whenever we had downtime in the barracks at Fort Campbell. On a good day, our Drill Instructor joined us, but on a bad day, which was when he lost money on the game, he worked us harder and meaner than Jack LaLanne ever could from his studio lot in San Diego. Top, our sergeant, dished out what he called The Thomas’ English Muffins Breakfast Special, which meant he’d have us love every nook and cranny of a trail between Hopkinsville, Kentucky and Clarksville, Tennessee. We’d run, ruck, and performed a medley of pushups, burpees, and mountain climbers until we puked.

By 9 AM, the existential crisis du jour would hit, and it’d choke Camus and every chain-smoking French philosopher, or arthouse derelict in a coffee shop. This had become my life, a stultifying pattern of security for a paycheck. I shouldn’t complain. I had a roof over my head, steady income, and a retirement account, thanks to the Commissioner.

I could do what the nuns from my parochial school days called Good Works, which meant I donated money, or volunteer at Rosie’s Place, the local women’s shelter. The truth was that I was a manager, no different than Caspar Milquetoast in some office.

I delegated, I managed, and I was paid well. Someone else did the grunt work, and I received the credit. I couldn’t imagine this routine day in, week out, month after month, and year after year until I did the Fred Sanford and clutched my chest for the heart attack, The Big One.

I threw down the pencil and reached for my jacket. I needed some reminder that life wasn’t all suede and velvet, round and smooth, or warm and comfortable. I needed someone to look at me crooked and say what they thought. I needed to see that the streets had names, and that I was a guest, and Life moved fast and hard and most people were sleeping.

I pulled the door open to Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe. The spelling might’ve been from Middle English and seemed as medieval as Robin Hood, but a Greek owned the place. On any given day, Arthur the proprietor was Art or Artie and, like his old man before him, he worked the grill. Charlie’s was open twenty-four a day, seven days a week, including all the major holidays, Jewish or Gentile.

I’ve eaten breakfast countless times at his counter. The place did have tables, but it was designed for food on the move, men on the job, and people on the make. Walk into the shop and it was sometimes cops on one side of the room, gangsters on the other. Peace was a meal until everyone returned to the pavement outside, and there was no one-way streets about it: the South End was trouble. Charlie’s eggs, hash, bacon, and stiff coffee worked harder than the UN.

Charlie’s dated back to the Twenties. Framed photographs, some of them signed and some not, hung on the wall and told a history most Americans had forgotten, and why I supported the place. The Negro Motorist Green Book in hand told jazzmen and other itinerant talent that Charlie’s was a safe haven. In all of Boston, this was the one place where they could eat and, for a time, one of the few places where they were allowed to eat. Segregation ruled Boston until 1973, when public housing and schools were desegregated.

Sammy Davis, Jr. hoofed outside Charlie’s door for change, and he performed with his family at The Gaiety Theatre, which is now in the Combat Zone. Barred from the vaudeville stages in town, black talent played the burlesque houses. Audiences in these naughty houses were integrated. Some of the acts were women-owned and they managed acts that toured the TOBA circuit. TOBA stood for Tough on Black Asses.

There were no police officers in the place when I sat next to a familiar face at the counter. People called him Charcoal. He was thin as a stick and dark as his nickname. We sat on stools covered in cracked vinyl,