The Coleridge Project: Chapter 2
Detective Chuck Boxer was an eighteen-year veteran of the Boston Police force. Forty-six years old, he was a large barrel-chested man with a ruddy complexion, thinning red hair and a thick neck that too often turned beet red either because of anger or impatience. When he arrived at the North Street station, he found a copy of the Tribune left on his desk with paragraphs circled in red and a note from his captain asking him what the fuck was going on, and as he sat with his Dunkin Donuts coffee and an apple that he had brought from home and read the front-page article and the inside pages, both his ears and neck burned a brighter red than the ink his captain had used on those pages. He had been assigned as the lead investigator for the Post Office Square shooting, and when he heard what Gail Hawes had told the arresting officers he didn’t completely buy it, which was why he asked that her statement be kept from the media, at least until they could find her daughter’s death certificate and look into any involvement Forster might’ve had. By the time he left the crime scene and was back at the station, Hawes’s lawyer had shown up and had shut her down. From what Boxer could see of her demeanor, she didn’t appear outwardly crazy, and from the little he was able to check into her background, he couldn’t find any signs of mental illness. But after less than two hours of checking and while still waiting for her daughter’s death certificate to be tracked down, he was pulled off to investigate an armed robbery of a liquor store on Cambridge Street.
The article didn’t surprise him. He thought there was a chance the daughter would turn out to be imaginary, or if real, had died a more ordinary death. He couldn’t help feeling annoyed that someone had leaked her statement, but it would’ve been much worse if they hadn’t officially kept this bottled up. He wondered which it was, whether Hawes was crazy, or whether she had another motive for killing Forster and was trying to build an insanity defense. Of course, it was possible that this Conway guy at the Tribune had his facts wrong and there was a daughter after all, but his gut told him that wasn’t the case. Shit. He was going to have to look into whether Hawes and Forster had had an affair that turned sour. The thought that she could intentionally make up an imaginary deceased daughter infuriated him.
Boxer took a few slow deep breaths to calm his temper, then put the Tribune aside and sat quietly eating his apple, all the while wishing it was a Dunkin Donut’s chocolate cruller. His gaze wandered toward the photo on his desk of his daughter, Alice, and his ex-wife, Melissa. Most mornings he’d avoid that picture, but now he sat still and studied Alice’s chubby-cheeked smiling face and her equally chubby and awkward body. She was six when the picture was taken, and unfortunately physically resembled him a lot more than his wife, but she was such a good-natured kid. Smart as a whip also, at times saying things that would astound him. It was too bad she couldn’t have inherited more of Melissa’s genes. If she had, not only would she have had a better chance of growing up to be petite and blonde and pretty, but maybe she also wouldn’t have come down with lymphoma. The picture was taken several months before she was diagnosed, and Alice died four months after that. God, he missed her. After they buried her, he didn’t want him and Melissa to grow apart in the clichéd manner that he had been warned about when a child dies, but it happened anyway. He couldn’t help the distance he started feeling toward her, and he knew she felt the same—and she had better reason than him since every time she’d look at him, she’d have to be reminded all over again about Alice. They ended up divorcing, and it had been over six years since he’d heard from her.
He chewed the apple down to its core, tossed that into his wastebasket, and then sat silently drinking his coffee, this time staring blankly at nothing in particular. When he was done with his coffee, he lumbered to his feet. Under doctor’s orders, he had recently lost thirty pounds in the hopes of keeping his high cholesterol and family history of heart disease from killing him, and giving him a chance to make it to fifty, which usually didn’t happen with the men in his family. Now after his weight loss, his eighty-nine-dollar mud-brown wool-blend suit hung loosely on him, not that it fit him all that well to begin with. He wondered why he bothered, but stopped himself, instead reminding himself as he often did when he fell into these dark thoughts that he was doing it for Alice. That he had to live for her. He knew that would sound sappy if he ever admitted it out loud, but he felt there was a good amount of truth to it. That he needed to experience life as much for Alice as himself.
He headed to Captain Lou Harrison’s office and walked in without bothering to knock. He told Harrison not to believe everything he reads in newspapers.
“You telling me then she did have a daughter?”
Boxer shrugged noncommittally. “Hell, if I know. I’m still waiting on my request to track down the kid’s death certificate. But Christ, if the kid did exist, I wouldn’t even know what name she would’ve had. For all I know Hawes could’ve put the kid up for adoption. I’ll try her lawyer and see if he can shed any light on this, but right now I can’t tell you.”
“Figure out a way so you can.”
Boxer nodded and scratched lazily along his jaw. He swallowed back what he wanted to tell Harrison about how if he really wanted that, then don’t pull him off for another armed robbery. Instead, he said, “Sure, I’ll see what I can find. I’m also going to have to look into whether Hawes and Forster knew each other. Maybe she has another motive that she’s trying to cover up. It’s possible she’s just nuts. She should be sent to Bridgewater for evaluation.”
“That’s the District Attorney’s call, not mine. And find out how the fuck her statement got leaked to the Tribune.”
Boxer’s eyes darkened as he nodded. “Don’t worry, I plan to,” he said.