Free Void in Hearts by William G. Tapply Page A

He touched her photograph with his pencil. “Run a trick on her. Grill her a little. See what she knows. Hell, Brady. You can grill both of them. Do the separate-room routine on them. Or try hot needles under the fingernails. Hook electrodes to the guy’s balls. Slap the broad around a little.”
    “Come on, Charlie. I’m serious.”
    “Me, too,” he said. Then he smiled. “Look. Frankly, I don’t see how you expect to identify them anyway, so it’s pretty academic.”
    “I went through a lot just to get these pictures.”
    “I hate to be the one to tell you you wasted your time.” He slid the photos together into a pile and tapped the edges even. He picked up his half glasses from the desk and pushed them onto his nose. Then he flipped through the photographs again. He shrugged and put them down. “Sorry, pal. I get nothing out of this.”
    “Isn’t there anything your computers can do?”
    He shook his head. “Nope.” He picked up the stack of pictures again. One by one he went through them, studying them more closely, placing them side by side on his desk. When he had them all spread out again he began to shake his head. Suddenly he pushed at his glasses with his forefinger and bent closer. He picked up one of the photos and held it to his face. “Wait a minute,” he said.
    “What? What is it?” I stood up and moved around Charlie’s desk so I was standing at his shoulder.
    He was holding the photograph that showed a crowd of people entering and leaving a building. “Look at this one,” he said.
    I did. “That’s the guy, right there,” I said, touching the face with my finger.
    “Yeah, I know,” he said impatiently. “What else do you see?”
    It was little more than a dark vertical line with a lump on top of it. “I don’t know what it is,” I said.
    Charlie sketched something onto his yellow legal pad. The sketch resembled a lollipop. “Does it look like this?”
    “Yes. Nice sketch. What do you think it is?”
    “I know what it is. A streetlight.”
    I nodded. “Okay. Yes. That’s what it looks like. So?”
    “So?” He swiveled around to peer up at me. “So now we know that this guy was at a place that maybe you can find. Where do they have streetlights like this one?”
    “Up on the Hill?”
    “Those are a little different. Come on.”
    I smacked my fist into my palm. “Quincy Market, right?”
    “Sure. Now see what you can tell about the building.”
    We studied it together. It was severely out of focus, but the shape of the windows and the broad details of the facade were recognizable. “Think you could find this place, counselor?” said Charlie.
    “It would be a place to start.”
    “It’ll cost you, of course.”
    “Fresh swordfish at the No-Name?”
    “Deal.”
    A ten-minute cab ride took me from Charlie’s office to Quincy Market. Produce trucks still congregate at Haymarket Square in the wee morning hours to peddle their fruits and vegetables, and bums sleep in abandoned doorways, and bag ladies pick over the rotting litter on the streets, just as they always did. Only now the out-of-towners don’t see it. In the headlong rush toward urban renewal during the reign of Kevin White, the squalid old marketplace was shunted out back. New brick walkways and chrome and glass edifices were erected out front. Good for business, good for tourists. The New Boston. Good for Kevin White. Now the folks from Kansas City can purchase pizza wedges topped with tofu and bean sprouts, stuffed teddy bears and plastic lobsters made in Taiwan, framed prints of the Paul Revere statue, and other remembrances of quaint old colonial Boston. And they miss the real thing just around the corner.
    Quincy Market is a great place to hang around if you want to pick up lonely secretaries or bank clerks after work. There are a few good restaurants and barrooms. The best of both are still at Durgin Park, which had been there about a hundred years before redevelopment arrived.
    I wandered