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"Yes ma’am, my name is Fintan O’Keefe. I'm a PI down here in Boston. A month or so ago I called your criminal investigations squad to let them know that I had found a person in Portland whom I had been hired to locate. I am remiss in that I don’t recall the name of the detective to whom I spoke, but I am hopeful he’ll remember me. Right, O’Keefe… from Boston. Yes, Ivana Grdesic, G-R-D-E-S-I-C, was the woman’s name. Nope, that’s all. Thanks. Sure.”
I was on hold for less than a minute grateful that Portland PD had never bought into the idea that a person on hold needs terrible arrangements of bad music in his ear to make the experience palatable. I didn’t mind the silence at all. My imagination is very fertile.
"Mr. O’Keefe is it?”
"Yes, Fintan O’Keefe.”
"Mr. O’Keefe, this is detective sergeant Emma Whitney. You spoke with my partner Ed Havelock last month I believe.”
"Right. I did. I’m sorry that I couldn’t recall his name.” With a pencil in need of a sharper point I wrote both names on the back of Janessa Potter’s international airmail envelope as I spoke.
"What can I do for you, Mr. O’Keefe?”
"Well, I’d like to talk with you about the woman I located up there, Ivana Grdesic. I was working for a guy named Ante Bukovats.”
"OK?”
"Anyway, she’s dead. Her body was found on a beach less than ten days after I notified my employer where he could find her.”
"Drowned?”
"I think so. That’s what the papers said. I haven’t talked to anyone official down here about that, yet.”
"Are the Mass state cops in charge of the investigation?”
"That’s what the Globe says. And the state’s Chief Medical Examiner was.”
"Huh. Well, we never saw her up here. We sent a patrol car to the address on…Commercial Street, wasn’t it?”
"Yup, it was.”
"Right. Your Ms. Grdesic was gone by the time our car got there. We followed up by seeing who owned the condo. Some guy gone on business to Africa somewhere. He sublet or lent it to a woman, or so said a neighbor. We never talked to her, though, either…"
”The sublet?” I swirled the beer in its glass.
"Right. Ed and I figured that it wasn’t a real case, you know, nothing had been done – no crimes committed - in Portland of which we knew.”
"I understand. In fact, I had called you as a courtesy. As far as I knew no crime had been committed anywhere connected to this case. Now I am not so sure.” I shared with Detective Whitney why I felt less than sanguine now.
"That is sort of squirrelly, isn’t it? Do you know anyone who might help you at the state cops?” she asked.
I thought of Tom Craven. I used to know someone.
"No, I don’t.”
"Can you give me the name of anyone quoted in the papers down there?”
"I think I can. Hold on a minute.”
While I was on the prairies of Canada I had asked Johnna to keep any and all material released to the press. I checked my email and there it was.
"Detective Whitney? Thanks for waiting. A trooper named Bevilaqua. Armand Bevilaqua. It doesn’t say which barracks, though.”
"OK, Mr. O’Keefe, let me find him and see what’s up. Meanwhile, you are sure that there’s not hide nor hair of this Ante Bukovats guy?” Detective Whitney had pronounced the name as it sounds as opposed to how it’s spelled: Antay Bukovatch. I finished my Pilsner.
"Sure as I can be. Everything else he told me was a lie, so why not who he was? This Croatian Exchange Enterprise has a box at the big post office in Boston but no street address. Perhaps you might ask Bevilaqua if…”
"I will. How can I reach you?”
I gave her any number of ways she might get to me and hung up, in a manner of speaking. The phrase “hung up” is no longer accurate. I terminated the connection by pressing a small button above the number pad. I placed the handset down next to my disappearing pilsner.
The densest portion of the smudgy tribute to fossil fuels seemed to be out over Deer Island and moving with pace to the east. The phone rang. Well, it didn’t really ring. Phones used to ring. That’s become a misnomer, too. Now it’s more of a nasally chirping bleating whiney thing. But, I digress…
"Hey Sweetie, it’s good to hear your voice.”
"You too,” Johnna Law said. “I just dialed you up to hear it.”
"Well, no you didn’t. One can’t dial a phone anymore. One can punch a collection of numbers to achieve what dialing once did, but…”
"Shut the fuck up, will you? Or I’ll hang this thing up.”
Hang this thing up?
"Ah…well…yeah.” Johnna was less interested in language minutia than I. In fact, everyone I had ever known was less interested in it than I. They don’t know what they’re missing.
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