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“You’re grinning like a goofball,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I just fired Howard Finch.”

  She frowned. “Can you do that?”

  I shrugged. “Probably not. The hell with it. Life’s too short. Howard’s a pain in the ass.”

  “He was paying us a lot of money,” said Julie, doing her job, worrying about money.

  “He wasn’t worth it,” I said.

  Julie nodded. “He’ll come crawling back to you, all contrite and cooperative, right? That your strategy?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have any strategy except I don’t like him and don’t want to work with him anymore.” I shrugged. “It felt good to fire him, I know that. We’ll see what happens.”

  We left the office together. Outside in Copley Square, Julie headed over to the parking garage, and I took my usual walking route.

  I was happy to see that Louise and all my other homeless friends were still at their corners asking for money. I gave them some, as I always did. They all looked me in the eye and said they’d been showing the photo of the dead girl around but had learned nothing. I hoped they were lying. The last thing I needed was another dead homeless person on my conscience.

  I told them I was all set now and asked to have the photos back. They didn’t ask why, and I didn’t tell them.

  Seven

  When I got to the Common, I didn’t turn onto Charles Street and climb the hill to my house like I habitually did. I continued down Boylston, crossed Tremont, and went looking for the Shamrock.

  I found it on the corner of a shadowy one-way street and Summer Street, a few blocks from Chinatown. It looked like it had been a warehouse in some previous incarnation. It was narrow and deep, four stories high, with tall windows showing cheerful pink-and-yellow curtains.

  A wooden sign over the front door sported a picture of a green shamrock. It read: “The Shamrock Inn for Women, Founded 1997.”

  I tried the door. It was locked. I rang the bell.

  A minute later the door opened. A hefty fiftyish woman with long blondish-gray hair and a half-glasses perched low on her nose stood there with her eyebrows arched. She was wearing an ankle-length blue dress and a bulky orange sweater, and she had a cordless telephone in her hand. She looked me up and down for a minute, then said, “May I help you, sir?”

  “I’m a friend of Maureen Quinlan,” I said. “Sunshine?”

  The woman blinked. “You didn’t hear?”

  “I heard,” I said. “Do you work here? I need to talk to somebody about it.”

  “Are you with the police?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m Sunshine’s lawyer.”

  She cocked her head and frowned at me, then put the telephone to her ear, said something into it, hesitated, then clicked it off. “I work here,” she said to me. “I run the place.” She held out her hand. “I’m Patricia. Patricia McAfee.”

  I shook her hand. “Brady Coyne.”

  She stepped away from the door. “Come on in, if you want.”

  I stepped into a big open rectangular room. In the front corner beside the doorway, some sofas and upholstered chairs were clustered in front of a big clunky console television set. The furniture was colorful but threadbare, and the TV looked like a ten-year-old model.

  A dozen or so women of varying ages and ethnicities, along with three or four toddling children, were watching what sounded like an afternoon talk show. The women weren’t talking with each other. They all appeared to be thoroughly immersed in the TV show, or in their own private worries.

  The children were sitting on the rug on the floor. They were unnaturally still and quiet, as if they expected to be punished if they made any noise or sudden movement.

  The rear of the room was apparently devoted to dining. There were eight long wooden tables with folding chairs lined up around them. I counted the chairs around one table, multiplied by eight, and estimated that they could feed sixty-four souls in this place.

  One wall was lined with tables. At one end were several stacks of dishes and some plastic tubs that I guessed held silverware. At the other end was a big coffee urn. I figured they served meals buffet style.

  I assumed there was a kitchen area behind the doors at the back of the room.

  “This,” said Patricia McAfee, sweeping her hand at the sofas and chairs, “is our common area. That, as you can see, is the dining room back there. The dormitory is upstairs.” She shrugged. “Well, it is what it is, which isn’t much. We provide breakfast and dinner for up to sixty-four women, and we can sleep about fifty. Weather like we’ve been having, some nights we squeeze in a few more than the fire regulations allow. Anyway, you said you wanted to talk. My office is over here.”

  I followed her across the room, and she opened a door off the dining area. “Here we are,” she said. “Come on in. Have a seat.”

  Her office was small and crowded, cheerless and Spartan. One small square window with wire mesh over it looked out onto a side alley. The room was lit by harsh fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling. It held a metal desk, several head-high file cabinets, a couple of bookcases stacked with manila folders and three-ring binders, a table bearing a computer and a photocopier, and three or four straight-backed chairs. Everything was industrial gray. There were no pictures on the walls or on the desktop. No decorations whatsoever.

  Patricia McAfee sat behind her desk. I pulled up one of the other chairs.

  “Sunshine told me she’d found a lawyer to help her,” she said. “That’s you, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you making any progress?”

  “I made some phone calls, got the ball rolling. I only met her a few days ago. And then…then this happened.”

  “At first she was very elated,” said Patricia McAfee. “That was, um, Wednesday morning. Right after she met with you, I guess.”

  “Yes,” I said. “What do you mean, at first?”

  “Next thing I know, she’s depressed again. She wouldn’t talk about it. I think she was just being pessimistic. She’d been yanked around so much, I guess she didn’t dare get her hopes up again.”

  “I wasn’t yanking her around. I was going to help her.”

  “Well,” she said, “now she’s dead. What a world, huh?”

  I nodded. “I want to know who killed Sunshine.”

  “Me, too.” She picked up a manila folder that had been lying on her desk. She held it in both hands and tapped the bottom of it on her desktop to square the papers that were inside. “This is her folder,” she said. “I made copies of everything for the police. You can look at it if you want. Everything I know about her is in here.”

  I thumbed through the folder. There were three or four sheets of paper in it. I skimmed through them and found nothing I didn’t already know. “Do you have any idea who might’ve killed her?” I said to Patricia McAfee. “And why?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “That information isn’t in her folder, I guess.”

  “Do you have any thoughts?”

  “Me?” she said.

  “The police seem to think it was some other homeless person,” I said, “wanting something she had.”

  “They got that idea from me,” she said. “I told them that’s probably what it was. That’s what it usually is. Somebody wanted her hat or some worthless trinket she had. Something trivial. Something stupid. Not that I have any specific knowledge of anything. Just that our guests—well, let’s say they’re not exactly one great big happy family. These are not calm, peace-loving, well-integrated members of society. These people are mentally and physically ill. They are economically and intellectually deprived. They are social misfits. Their lives are in chaos. They survive one day at a time. They are depressed and defeated and desperate. Sunshine was actually in better shape than most of them, and as you know, she was pretty bad off. You want a motive for murder, you’ve got to understand who these people are, where they’re coming from. The police wanted me to name names. I would’ve been happy to, but I couldn’
t.”

  “Surely they’re all not like that,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Most of them are.”

  “Sunshine worked at Skeeter’s,” I said. “She had money. Is that what her killer wanted, do you think?”

  “Sunshine didn’t carry very much money with her. Most of our people knew that.”

  “What did she do with what she earned?”

  “Actually,” said Patricia, “she gave it to me. I put it in the bank for her. She had a little over five hundred dollars saved up.”

  “Did some of her money go to”—I waved my hand around her little office—“to your operation here?”

  Patricia dismissed that idea with a flap of her hand. “Wouldn’t take it if it were offered,” she said. “If our guests are able to earn some money, and if they’re actually trying to save some of it, we figure they’re that much closer to regaining their lives. That’s what we want for all of them. That’s our whole purpose. It would be counterproductive for us to take their money.”

  “If she wanted some money?…”

  “I gave it to her. It’s her money.”

  “What did she do with it?”

  She shrugged as if the answer was self-evident. “Booze.”

  “But you gave it to her anyway, even knowing how she was going to spend it?”

  Patricia McAfee leaned across her desk and looked at me. “Do you give money to homeless people, Mr. Coyne?”

  I nodded. “There are four regulars between my home and my office. I always give them something.”

  “What do they do with your money?”

  “I used to tell them I hoped they’d buy a nice hot meal or a pair of warm gloves or something like that, something I approved of, you know, and they always said, Oh, yes, sir, that’s exactly what I aim to do. A pair of gloves. A bowl of soup. Yes, sir, Mr. Coyne.” I smiled. “I figured they were bullshitting me, but I liked the illusion. Now that I’ve gotten to know them a little better, and they understand that I don’t intend to judge them, sometimes they’ll talk to me a little. They tell me that getting some booze is number one on their list of priorities. After that they might buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee.” I shrugged. “I still give them money. I don’t ask. It makes me feel good, and I think it makes them a little happier than they’d otherwise be.”

  Patricia was smiling at me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Same thing. You gave Sunshine money even though you knew she was going to buy herself some wine.”

  “It was her money.”

  “But she didn’t carry it around with her.”

  “If I gave her any, it would only be a few dollars, and she’d spend it immediately.”

  “So you’re saying that whoever killed her wasn’t after her money.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not really saying that. These people readily kill each other for a few dollars, or even just in the hope they might get a few dollars. I’m only saying that most people who knew Sunshine and knew she earned some money also knew she didn’t carry much of it around with her. They might’ve been after her change, just like they’d kill anybody for whatever they happened to have in their pockets. But anybody who might know that Sunshine worked and brought home a pay check, they’d also probably know that she turned it over to me.”

  “She had had a locker here, the police told me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “The police took everything. I don’t think there was much there. A few paperback books. A couple pair of socks. A spare sweater. A picture of her kids. Like that.”

  I nodded. “Do you know if Sunshine was showing a photo of a girl around before she died?”

  “A photo?”

  I took one of the dead girl’s photos from my pocket and put it on her desk.

  She frowned at it, then looked up at me. “Is this girl dead? She looks dead.”

  “She is,” I said. “She died a few days ago. This is a morgue shot.”

  Patricia shook her head. “I didn’t see Sunshine showing any photo around. She didn’t show it to me. What’s going on? Who is this girl?”

  I tapped the photo. “Look at it, please,” I said. “Maybe you’ve seen her around?”

  She narrowed her eyes and looked at the photo. Then she looked up at me. “No, I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “This is a young girl. A teenager, I’d say. We do get the occasional teen here now and then. The word on the street is that they can come here. The Shamrock is funded entirely by private donations. No government money, which means way less bureaucracy, way fewer forms to fill out, way fewer constraints and restraints on what we can and can’t do. If we were government-funded, teenage runaways would never come here. The paperwork, the bureaucrats, the idea of being sent back home—it’s all very threatening to them. As it is, compared to the number of them out there, relatively few teenagers come to shelters, even one as unthreatening as ours. There are predators out there who get to them first. Oh, now and then, yes, we’ll get a young girl off the street. We take her in, we feed her, we give her a safe place to stay.”

  “Do you work with them?”

  “You mean counsel them?” She nodded. “Of course. I try to find out where they’re from. I try to get their permission to phone their parents or somebody. I try to get them to go to the clinic. But there’s no obligation. I figure, every day they eat a good meal, every night they have a warm bed to sleep in, that’s progress, whether they let me help them or not.”

  “You probably get pregnant girls now and then.”

  She smiled. “A lot of homeless women get pregnant.”

  “You mentioned a clinic.”

  “Dr. Rossi comes Saturday afternoon, and Monday and Thursday mornings.”

  “Comes here?”

  Patricia nodded. “Noon to four every Saturday, nine to eleven on Mondays and Thursdays. She sets up in the dining room. She’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Can anybody go to her?”

  “It’s entirely free. Dr. Rossi accepts no payment, asks no questions. People want to give a fake name, they can. She doesn’t care. She just wants to look after these people’s health. Street girls, teenage runaways, yes, she examines them, no obligation.”

  “What about pregnant girls?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” I said, “would she just examine a pregnant girl, then let her go back onto the streets?”

  “I’m sure she tries to counsel them,” said Patricia, “but Dr. Rossi is like me. She figures something is better than nothing. Girls get the word that Dr. Rossi is cool, won’t pressure them, won’t ask too many questions, and so they feel that they can go to her.”

  “What about Sunshine,” I said. “Did Dr. Rossi see her?”

  “I don’t keep track of who sees Dr. Rossi. That’s entirely separate from what we do here. We just provide space for her clinic. I would imagine at one time or another Sunshine saw her.”

  “Is this the only place Dr. Rossi conducts her clinics?”

  “Not hardly. She does clinics all over the city. She’s got some kind of grant.”

  “Government money?”

  She smiled. “I’m pretty sure it’s a private grant. Dr. Rossi feels the same way I do about the government.” Patricia McAfee glanced at her watch. “Was there anything else, Mr. Coyne?”

  I touched the photo of the girl that still lay on her desk. “I’m trying to figure out who she was.”

  She picked it up, glanced at it again, then frowned at me. “May I ask why?”

  “She died in my backyard,” I said. “I feel kind of responsible.”

  Patricia McAfee shook her head. “Oh, dear.”

  “I don’t like the idea of her falling through the cracks,” I said.

  She nodded. “Do you want me to keep this photo, show it around?”

  I picked it up and put it in my pocket. “No, that’s all right.” I gave her one of my business cards. “If you hear anything about a young pregnant girl, fifteen or sixteen, who might’ve looked like this gir
l, though, maybe you’ll give me a call?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Absolutely.”

  Back out in the open room, the number of women in the television area had about doubled. It was approaching dinnertime. I showed the photo of the girl to each of the women. None of them admitted that Sunshine had showed them the photo. None of them admitted to having seen the girl. None of them even reacted when they looked at her picture.

  They just nodded and shrugged and looked at it with flat, empty eyes. I couldn’t tell whether they didn’t care, or if they didn’t trust this lawyer in an expensive suit, or if they were hiding secrets from me, or if they just didn’t have any emotion left in their souls to squander on somebody they didn’t know.

  Maybe they saw themselves, or their own future, in the dead girl’s photo.

  Eight

  We were less than a month past the shortest day of the year, and when I walked out the front door of the Shamrock Inn for Women, darkness had already seeped into the narrow city street. A day of what the television weatherpeople call “radiational cooling” had left the evening air so dry and cold it hurt to take a deep breath.

  I took several deep breaths anyway. The cold, sharp air cleansed my lungs.

  A dozen or so women were hanging around on the sidewalk outside the Shamrock. They were smoking and shifting their weight from one hip to the other and talking among themselves in low, lifeless voices. I guessed that after they’d stomped out their cigarettes, they’d all file inside for dinner.

  It was close to suppertime, so I headed for Skeeter’s. A block up the street from the Shamrock, I spotted three women talking to the driver of a dark panel truck that was pulled over to the curb puffing clouds of exhaust into the frigid air. As I got closer, I saw that the women were quite young. Late teens, early twenties at the oldest. They were wearing short skirts and high-heeled boots and fake-fur jackets and a lot of makeup.

  Streetwalkers, no doubt. Hookers. Once upon a time everybody called the Washington Street part of Boston between Tremont and Chinatown the Combat Zone. It was sprinkled with peep shows and dirty-book stores and strip joints and nudie bars, and it was populated by prostitutes and pimps, coke dealers and crackheads, muggers and scammers and runaways.