Renaming yourself after 88 years is a bold maneuver, but the Celebrity Series of Boston, which has mounted some of the city’s most remarkable live performances over the past near-century, did just that, hosting a party at the trendy South End Mexican joint Cósmica to unveil its new identity.

Vivo Performing Arts, the organization’s zippy new name, was officially revealed (after a minor audio-visual glitch) to a crowd that included such arts boosters as Amy d’Ablemont Burnes; anti-poverty crusader Terri Groome and bespectacled hipster Paul Belanger; the perpetually impish Peter Wender; marketing guru Andrea Hoff; the Boch Center’s new communications head honcho Jesse Needleman; unfairly attractive artist Ryan Edwards; restaurateur Jack Bardy; board chair Joshua Boger; and so on and so forth.

It was a veritable Who’s Who of Boston’s performing arts scene, all of whom raised a glass when president and executive director Gary Dunning said, “Here’s to Vivo. Or translated to another language: l’chaim!”

Overheard by the bar:

“This is the best margarita I’ve had since the last time I was in Mexico. But I just got back yesterday.”

Judging by the speed with which the passed apps disappeared, they were tasty, and one guest said, “You gotta love a party with a legit guacamole bar.” However, not all appetites were focused on food.

Gesturing with his chin toward a powerfully attractive male couple, one attendee said, “Now that’s a sandwich I could get into.”

The moral of the story: If you get enough good-looking people in a room with Mexican food, you don’t even need a mariachi band.

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Dress Code: Chaps and a Dog Collar

The beautifully reimagined Coolidge Corner Theatre presented its annual Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award to filmmaker Harry Lighton, following a screening of his first full-length feature, Pillion, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling. The sold-out crowd was treated to a Q & A moderated by James Nadeau, CEO of the Queer Film Institute, and it’s probably safe to say that it was the first time many of them had seen a gay BDSM biker movie.

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Elevated and Celebrated

The runway was alive with creativity when the Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge hosted Cosmic Roots: An Afrofuturism Hair & Fashion Show, featuring the work of such designers as the House of Nahdra, Sol Full Seams, Dhakye, and House of Blvck Ice. The evening also included original choreography by Tarikh Campbell and music by Salyse. The nonprofit promised “a stunning convergence of design, movement, and narrative,” and judging by the applause, they delivered.

This article was first published in the print edition of the May 2026 issue, with the headline,“A Newborn Octogenarian.”

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If you’re wondering who’s responsible for bringing the FIFA World Cup to Boston, it isn’t Robert Kraft, or the Healey administration, or the mayor’s office, or the loose confederation of pols, boosters, sports fans, glory-hogs, and straight-up opportunists that instinctively forms at the prospect of such events.

No, the credit lies with a man named Jason Waddleton.

Waddleton grew up in Scotland, outside of Aberdeen. Twenty-eight years ago, he attended Scotland’s last World Cup appearance, a 3-0 loss to Morocco. Twenty-five years ago, he immigrated to Boston. Sixteen years ago, he opened a beloved Scottish bar called the Haven in Jamaica Plain. And four years ago, he moved it from its original location in Hyde Square to the redeveloped brewery complex off Armory Street in J.P.

At some point during those years, Waddleton began willing into existence, with his mind, a Boston World Cup, featuring the Scottish national team. Last year, his efforts paid off. Scotland qualified for the Cup in November. And while some may have wondered where the team and its attendant Tartan Army would end up, Waddleton knew it would be Boston. After all, he says, “I had already manifested that to be the case.”

When we spoke in late March, Waddleton was in the middle of preparing a giant World Cup party in the bar, around the bar, and in the parking lot of the bar: “A three-day festival of food, drink, music, and whiskey,” he calls it. Many Scots are expected to turn out, and Waddleton is thrilled at the opportunity to introduce people from his native land to neighbors from his adopted home. In fact, he had already placed an order of Tennent’s beer so large—120 kegs—that the Scottish newspapers covered it. And that’s just the first wave. “We’re going to be swamped, mate,” he says.

It’s a lot, but Waddleton has had decades to prepare. “I’ve been manifesting this for a long time,” he says, laughing.

THIS IS A BIG SUMMER for Boston. The World Cup may be sucking up most of the oxygen, but it’s only one of several high-profile and likely well-attended events the city will be hosting this season. There’s also the return of Sail Boston, featuring a flotilla of tall ships from around the world, and Boston 250, a yearlong, citywide commemoration of Boston’s role in the American Revolution. Combined, these events are expected to attract millions of visitors, on top of the usual throngs who come to attend the Fourth of July festivities, see the Sox, or participate in that time-honored ritual of death-marching clutches of damp, unhappy children down the Freedom Trail in 98 percent humidity.

Boston isn’t great because it’s the best at everything. It’s great because it’s its own thing.

We’re told these events will generate more than a billion dollars in revenue for the city and state, all while showcasing to the world all that is great and good about Boston and Massachusetts. Wildly irrational projections are the oxygen of mass events, so those numbers are to be viewed with skepticism. But, on the whole, these are positive things—potentially enjoyable, edifying, and maybe even an occasion for genuine civic pride. Right? Aren’t they?

Because even as I write those words, an old ambivalence begins to creep in: Is this whole thing going to be a pain in the ass? A money pit? A traffic nightmare? Will the city’s narrow arteries be choked with the plaque of wayward French? Is the T going to crumble like a cracker under the added poundage? “Screw this,” writes a Reddit user. “We’re in no shape to host a global party.”

Many residents are understandably wondering who all of this is actually for. Is it for locals, or is it all just a sop to rich tourists and international travelers? If the latter, what are we even showing them? As Paul Ford, a 69-year-old lifetime Southie resident and small-business owner, put it, “Are they trying to show off the city, or are they showing off the real estate value because they’re looking for tax money?”

These sorts of concerns are, of course, part of Boston’s DNA, rooted in a deep and justified suspicion of overt boosterish activity. Boston never fares well when it tries to compete on the terms set forth by a New York, or a Los Angeles, or a Paris, or a Tokyo, or a petro-state nightmare like Abu Dhabi. There is nothing more third-rate than a second-rate city trying really hard to be a first-rate city

I’m on a group text chain with a handful of prominent former and current Bostonians. Recently, while discussing why Boston even wanted this thing to begin with, an ex-Bostonian argued, “There’s a case to be made that Boston as a people don’t really give a fuck about being seen as a top-tier metropolis. Perhaps only its leadership still longs for that status. It is a great city. It has excellent food, sports, history, architecture, schools, et cetera. And in recent years, it seems to have only improved on a number of those fronts. But it’s always punched above its weight class. Maybe the people of Boston just want to be a great place to live and not have to act like they’re on the same status as NYC and L.A. Maybe they’re done status-chasing.”

Maybe they are. Or should be. A disinclination to participate in these sorts of pageants is understandable. Even honorable. I don’t consider it a failing. Boston isn’t great because it’s the best at everything. It’s great because it’s its own thing. Just like biologists measure animal intelligence by how well animals succeed at being animals, not by how well they act like people, we should judge Boston by how well it succeeds at being Boston. And we should only do things that enhance its Boston-ness, whatever that may be right now.

How will the events of this summer do that? Who are they actually for? What are we actually showing? And what does it all say about what this city has become—and is becoming—in the year 2026?

WITH APOLOGIES to Sail Boston, I’m going to only briefly address the tall ships. They’re coming from July 11 to 16. The city has hosted them multiple times, it always draws a good crowd, it looks cool, kids like it, it gets people outside, it’s not ruinously inconvenient to locals, other neighborhoods like Eastie and Charlestown get a piece of the action, and it’s fun to see Italian sailors getting plastered for free in the North End. Organizers are estimating the event will attract millions of visitors, which—who knows? Probably not? But it doesn’t matter. The tall ships are fine. We probably don’t have to worry about the tall ships. Go see them.

The World Cup, going from June 13 to July 9, is another matter. It’s expected to attract some 2 million visitors and generate more than $1.1 billion. To put it nicely, the preparation for the seven games planned for Gillette Stadium has been uneven. To put it accurately, it has been a goat rodeo. By spring, as most other host cities were hysterically setting whole dumpsters of cash on fire and sewing the last sequins on their pageant gowns and practicing their best smiles, we were still fighting in the mud over who was supposed to be doing what, and who would be responsible for paying the bill, and how any of this stuff was supposed to actually work. For a minute, it wasn’t even clear if the World Cup was going to happen here at all. The Athletic memorably called Boston’s preparations the “most fraught” of all World Cup host cities. But while it remains to be seen whether it’s reasonable to expect millions of foreign tourists to attend your party in the age of ICE, or sane to mount a World Cup whose success relies heavily on a flawless performance by the MBTA, or cruel to inflict the Gillette Stadium fan experience on a legion of unsuspecting foreigners, the World Cup will happen.

And it will probably all be fine. Chris Dempsey is the cofounder of Speck Dempsey, an urban design and city planning firm headquartered in Brookline. In a previous life, he was one of the founders of No Boston Olympics. That was the group that masterfully torpedoed Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games a decade ago. While in some quarters that effort was seen as the handiwork of parochial killjoys lacking in vision, the city owes Dempsey and company a great debt for steering Boston away from what he estimated would have been a $10 billion boondoggle, destined to become a permanent feature in the fiscal lives of taxpayers for the next several ice ages.

Dempsey doesn’t buy the estimates that the state will reap $1 billion in revenue from the Cup, and he predicts it’ll end up costing far more than officials believe. He wishes that money and care and time could have gone toward things like schools and public health centers, but on the whole, he’s okay with the World Cup. “I’m pretty confident it’s all going to work out in the end, and there’s not going to be some embarrassment or disaster,” he says.

Okay, so what about the locals? What’s in it for them? Can they go to the games themselves? Or, as Southie’s Paul Ford put it, “How many people have $5,000 to toss away to go see soccer games?” As of April, tickets are mostly spoken for. You could still get a ticket to Haiti-Scotland on StubHub for between $700—for a seat so far from the action it might as well be in a bar in Mansfield—and more than $40,000 for one that allows you to see that the players have faces. You can also get a “hospitality package” for all seven games for $11,150 per person or rent a private suite at Gillette for between $102,000 to $162,800. It’s all just another opportunity for the rich to spend richly, in a city that does not lack for such opportunities. Maybe after the game, everyone can go try the $95 lobster tail at Nine restaurant on Beacon Hill. Maybe grab a spare to feed to the ducks in the park after. Maybe the ducks will give some to the homeless.

So no, the games themselves aren’t really for the locals. Their World Cup experience is likely to take place closer to home. In February, Boston’s host committee announced a fan festival on City Hall Plaza, promising a space in which “Fans will enjoy live match broadcasts, highlights, interactive games, activities, and a food and beverage program that reflects Boston’s local flavor.” As of presstime, no one has been able to give me any specifics about what the festival will actually entail. But the festival is happening. You will be able to go to the festival.

More promising than the prospect of hanging out in the wind-blasted wasteland that is City Hall Plaza, however, are the smaller events. These are also coming together higgledy-piggledy. Only in late March did the state award $10 million in grants to support community gatherings around the region, including viewing parties and neighborhood activations.

“The real question is: Are these events for locals?” says Ruthzee Louijeune, an at-large city councilor and daughter of immigrants who grew up in Hyde Park and Mattapan. Louijeune is pushing the city to include Black-, brown-, and veteran-owned businesses in the festivities, and pressing City Hall to support more events in the neighborhoods, particularly for Boston’s sizable Haitian and Cape Verdean populations (both countries will be playing in this year’s tournament). While Louijeune admits the city’s planning “is happening slower than any of us would have wanted…I do think that there’s still going to be really phenomenal events.”

These sorts of gatherings and the connections they may foster are also what excite Sam Mewis. She’s a women’s soccer legend from Massachusetts who played on the Women’s National Team in the 2019 World Cup, among many other accomplishments, and hosts The Women’s Game podcast. Mewis grew up in Hanson, a blue-collar community that placed a heavy emphasis on family and hard work. “I have a lot of pride in being from Massachusetts,” she says. “The opportunity to have soccer bring more people to the area, or help us stand out, feels like a convergence of my home and the thing that took me away from home,” she says. “For me, it feels like a really special opportunity to have all the people who made me the way I am cross paths with this huge global event celebrating the sport that has taken me to so many places.”

In other words, for Mewis, the World Cup will reunite the place that made her who she is with the person she has become. The past, the present, and the future will meet, and a newer, better, richer story will emerge.

Which brings us to Boston 250.

BACK IN MARCH, I walked the Freedom Trail for the first time in probably 40 years and listened to the National Park Service’s audio tour. At one point, the Northeastern professor Bill Fowler, a guest speaker on the tour, told a story about the Puritans. At the end, Fowler remarked, “It made for an interesting, if somewhat raucous, community, which is what Boston has always been.” I emailed Fowler to ask him what he made of the confluence of big events coming to Boston this summer. “Boston loves to celebrate!” he replied. He loves these parties, he said, “But celebrations should also be cerebrations. After the bands have gone home and the last firework has been sent off—what’s left?”

Boston 250 can be that cerebration. (Which is a word. I checked.)

But before we continue, a couple of caveats. Reporting on Boston 250 was…complicated. No one at City Hall was able to give me a definitive schedule of upcoming events, nor much by way of specific detail on what Boston 250 would entail, beyond a PowerPoint presentation and a couple of press releases. Mayor Wu wouldn’t agree to an interview. Nor would she answer emailed questions on the city’s preparations for the events of the summer in general, or Boston 250 in particular, or take a swing at what she considers singular about the city she governs. The mayor’s office did allow me to take a stroll with some officials working on Boston 250, who were passionate, intelligent, articulate, and a credit to the city and its mayor. But they weren’t authorized to speak on the record, so you’ll have to take my word for it. You can maybe request a transcript from the aide who followed us around recording the whole conversation on their phone. The paranoid ghost of Tom Menino, it seems, still stalks the corridors of City Hall.

Okay. That being said, let’s continue.

The theme of Boston 250 is “everyday revolutionaries.” The idea is to highlight the standard Revolutionary history that everyone learns in school, weave it together with the local histories that haven’t gotten as much attention—Black history, immigrant history, cultural history, scientific history, and oddball history like how the disco ball was invented in Charlestown—and place it all firmly in the context of how Bostonians live now.

There are a few things comprising Boston 250. By the time July Fourth rolls around, City Hall expects to mark a few dozen new historic sites around the city. They’ve established a $300,000 grant program, which community organizations can apply for to research and propose community markers in neighborhoods around the city. The city is working on a new app that will allow people to visit these historic sites, read the plaques, and then scan a QR code and listen to a story, or even enjoy an augmented reality presentation. All cool, and overdue. The city is also preparing a marketing push to introduce visitors to the city to Boston’s layered history.

There are also events. These are aimed at displaying history not as a thing that happened once upon a time, but is still happening, a continuum that modern Bostonians are very much a part of. For instance, in March, Boston 250 re-created part of Henry Knox’s famous march from Fort Ticonderoga to Roxbury with 59 stolen British cannons. The Boston event featured reenactors, horses, drums, fifes, and cannons—all the usual stuff—but they also wove in stories about Roxbury’s history as a cultural hub, showcased work curated by local artists, and brought in a drumline from the Hamilton-Garrett Center for Music & Arts.

I can’t offer much more about Boston 250 by way of specifics, as I don’t really have them as of presstime. But having discussed it with nameless individuals at a nameless City Hall, I have come to believe Boston 250 could actually be quite valuable, though as much as a thought exercise as an event. If the world is indeed coming here to see the best of this place—and not, you know, checking into a hotel, paying a fortune to ride the commuter rail, paying a fortune to attend a game, returning to their hotel, and flying home—what does Boston want them to see? To answer that, we have to ask, What is Boston? And to answer that, we have to ask, Who are Bostonians?

The fact is, I don’t have an answer to that question. I used to. But I haven’t for years, as the city changed so radically. Gentrification is a boon to a city’s finances, and diversity is a godsend for its dynamism, but both—separately or in tandem—can scramble a city’s identity and weaken its social fabric. What is a Bostonian in 2026? On the most basic level, a Bostonian is someone who can afford to live in Boston. But a city needs more than economic means to build its identity on. It needs something people can be proud to be a part of.

Boston 250’s idea of “everyday revolutionaries” is a good starting point. It draws from a past where ordinary Bostonians did extraordinary things, as a way to inspire modern Bostonians to see themselves as part of that lineage—to show them that they’re capable of similar feats of great daring in the face of cruelty, stupidity, and injustice, just by dint of being Bostonians, whether they grew up in Southie in the ’80s or came from Sulawesi a year ago.

“There are stereotypes that exist,” says Louijeune, “but I think that we are curious people, and we are interested in helping out our neighbors. I try to fight for a city that is warm and welcoming to all, and that doesn’t take any bullshit from people who are trying to bring us backward.”

As the world comes to Boston, show them that.

Back at the Haven in J.P., Jason Waddleton is ready. The kegs are ordered. The Tartan Army is coming, and so are the neighbors, and anyone else who wants to join.

He says it doesn’t matter where they come from. All are welcome. After all, that, to him, is the essence of the city. “If you walk into a bar in Boston and start talking,” he says, “you’ll have a conversation.”

And that’s a great place to start.

First published in the print edition of the June 2026 issue, with the headline,“The World Is Coming. Now What?”

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On June 26, 2025, in the dark of night, they came without warning. The dogs on Adams Street felt it first and started barking. Then the ground started shaking, and a loud grinding sound filled the summer air. Residents came out of their homes to see a vehicle moving slowly up the street toward Our Lady church, unleashing clouds of billowing dust on either side. “The only thing I could think was, ‘Are we being invaded?’” Daniella Proia said afterward. And in a way, she believes, they were.

The truck was grinding off the tricolor red, green, and white street lines that had marked these roads for as long as anyone’s mother’s mother could remember—a quiet tribute to the neighborhood’s Italian-American heritage. It was doing so three weeks before the Festa, the five-day celebration hosted by the St. Mary of Carmen Society that is the most important event of the year in Nonantum. Behind the truck came another vehicle, replacing the tricolored lines with standard yellow lines and then sealing them into place.

Residents came out and painted the old lines back on. Newton’s outgoing mayor had them removed again in August, citing public safety and traffic concerns. Then the story went national, and even international, circulated in the Italian press.

The lines were missing for eight months, until earlier this month, when Newton officials restored them. Residents say it’s the longest time they’d ever gone without the tricolor flourish. Their removal, Proia said, was like having something ripped from her body. And maybe that’s because the battle was never really about the lines. It was about something far harder to paint over: one of the last proudly working-class neighborhoods in Greater Boston, with a culture so specific it has its own mini dialect, trying to hold its ground against forces that want to erase what’s there.

“It’s like you’ve got this little neighborhood that’s kind of dancing to its own beat,” says Fran Yerardi, organizer of the Save Nonantum PAC. “It’s what neighborhoods used to be, and it’s just fighting to survive.”

The culture in Nonantum—also dubbed the Lake—last found its way into the national spotlight in 2014, when the neighborhood’s most famous son sat down with Conan O’Brien. Matt LeBlanc, raised in the Lake, gave an example to the late-night audience of something that might be heard on the streets of Nonantum: “We were down on the corner the other day, and there were some quiester jivals down there, mush”—meaning, for those who don’t speak Lake lingo, that there were some “really pretty girls down there, buddy.” LeBlanc noted, correctly, that some of his friends back home were losing their minds watching, because people who are truly from the Lake didn’t need anyone to explain it to them.

Nonantum is a village of Newton wedged between the Charles River and the Massachusetts Turnpike. It spans just over half a square mile and is the most densely populated of Newton’s 13 villages. Its history is the history of the working class. In 1778, industrialist David Bemis built a paper mill here, and for the next 150 years, the area was a center of manufacturing—wool, cotton, rope. Irish, French-Canadian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants came for the mill work and stayed. More Italian immigrants arrived as factories cropped up along Silver Lake—the body of water that gave the Lake its nickname before it was filled in during construction of Storrow Drive. A housing boom to construct dwellings for the workforce ensued between 1860 and 1910. For most of the century that followed, it remained a dense, close-knit neighborhood of single and two-family homes. Until recently.

The rest of Newton went a different way. An 1880 real estate listing in the Boston Evening Transcript advertised Newton as a city for “citizens of intelligence and refined culture.” Chestnut Hill got its wooded estates. West Newton Hill got its Victorian mansions. The Lake got its people—and kept them.

The slang LeBlanc performed for a national audience is not a novelty act. It is a living dialect, still spoken on these streets—words like wonga (money) and divya (crazy)—with roots that trace back to a lesser-known chapter of the neighborhood’s history: the Roma. The popular lore is that the lingo was picked up from traveling carnival workers. But according to Richard Dezotell, who grew up in Nonantum, Anglo-Roma families like his put down roots in Nonantum, married, and spoke the lingo with their Jewish and Italian neighbors—although they rarely discussed their heritage outside of the Lake for fear of anti-gypsy stigma.

For a culture this specific to survive, the people who carry it need to be able to afford to live here. That is becoming harder every year. “We’re a melting pot—a lot of people came from everywhere, not just Italy,” says Bo Pellegrini, a longtime resident. “We have our own culture.”

They also have a way of life that’s becoming increasingly rare in Boston. Jennifer Leone is a schoolteacher who built a home attached to her parents’, essentially turning it into a two-family on property that has been in her family for four generations. “It’s a really tight-knit community,” she says. “People know each other, watch out for each other, and help each other,” adds her mother, Linda Donalds. “It’s unique.”

But it turns out being unique hasn’t kept the neighborhood safe.

The threat to the Lake is not abstract. It’s arrived in the form of permits. Old single-family homes are being purchased and converted into multifamily buildings where each unit sells for more than the original house was worth. The younger generation, says Teresa Gentile Sauro, chair of the Nonantum Neighborhood Association, wants to stay—but increasingly can’t. “They’re knocking down these single homes and putting up two- to three-families, going over a million dollars,” she says.

Emilio Mazzola, who taught Italian at F.A. Day Middle School and Newton North High School for 40 years, says sometimes he cries over the fact that his children can’t afford to buy a home anywhere near the area where they were raised.

The affordable units in new developments are either too few or too expensive, even at the discounted rate. And in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, Newton city councilors voted to change their local-preference affordable-housing policy—which dictates how many affordable units are set aside for people from the area—from 70 percent to 25 percent. The goal was to address discriminatory effects and advance fair housing outcomes. The Newton voters who were most affected by this were working-class residents and municipal workers struggling to maintain community ties.

The frustration boiled over into city council meetings that became screaming matches. Residents told councilors they felt talked down to, that their concerns were not being taken seriously. The neighborhood organized its own PAC and successfully turned over seats on the council. Some residents came to see the removal of the street lines by outgoing mayor Ruthanne Fuller as retribution against an enclave that didn’t support her politically. (Fuller declined a request to comment.)

Nonantum’s predicament is sharpened by one additional irony: Despite having no direct MBTA bus stop, it’s still a preferred site for new development in Newton. “Whenever Newton has some greater social good to accomplish, but it requires installing something they wouldn’t want in their own backyard,” says Jordan Lee Wagner, a member of the neighborhood’s long-standing Jewish community, “they dump it in Nonantum.”

Newton’s new mayor, Marc Laredo, found an elegant workaround to the street lines impasse. By painting designated parking spaces which narrowed the road in March, he changed its classification—suddenly, the road required only a single white reflective strip rather than two yellow ones. The white stripe of the tricolor would serve that purpose perfectly. What had been ruled a traffic violation became, overnight, the legal solution. It was a genuine olive branch, and the neighborhood received it as one.

But Laredo is clear-eyed about what no mayor can undo. “It is almost impossible to battle market forces, in that Newton is a very desirable community,” he says. Close to Boston, great schools, “that’s what makes a community so attractive. And making a community attractive, by definition, is going to make housing prices somewhat higher. There’s always that trade-off.”

Residents are cautiously hopeful, for the first time in a while, that this administration might actually listen before it hands down decisions from on high.

The lines, now that they’re back, are red, white, and green. They will mark a street that looks, on the surface, like it always has. Whether the Lake can remain a place where the people who speak its language can afford to live is a question no amount of paint can answer.

“I think that is a massive step, and it’s going to carry a lot of goodwill,” says John Oliver, a city councilor who represents Nonantum. “I hope it’s a symbol of more to come.”

So does everyone else on Adams Street.

An earlier version of article was first published in the print edition of the May 2026 issue, with the headline,“The Writing on the Road.”

Otis House

This grand Federal-style mansion was designed by renowned architect Charles Bulfinch. Built as the first of three homes for former mayor Harrison Gray Otis in 1796, the house is one of the last remaining structures from what used to be Bowdoin Square. Thanks to Boston’s period of urban renewal in the 1960s, the historical home now straddles Beacon Hill and the West End. Inside, its paint colors and carpet designs are historically accurate—and they’re surprisingly vibrant.

Otis House Museum, 141 Cambridge St., historicnewengland.org.

Nichols House

Beacon Hill’s other Bulfinch-built house museum was once home to suffragist and landscape architect Rose Standish Nichols. Among her many accomplishments, she was a founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, which has a mission to unite all women for peace, disarmament, and gender equality.

Nichols inherited the Federal-style home on Mount Vernon Street from her father in the 1930s, and ruled the roost until her death in 1960. She never married, but often hosted salons at the house, gathering intellectuals to discuss and debate progressive ideas over afternoon tea. Nichols intended for the house to be left as a museum after her death, and since then, it’s shown Bostonians what life was like in Beacon Hill at the turn of the century. Tour highlights include furniture handmade by Rose’s sister, Margaret Nichols Shurcliff.

Nichols House Museum, 55 Mount Vernon St., nicholshousemuseum.org.

Gibson House

For a snapshot of life in Victorian Boston, step through the double doors of the Gibson House on Beacon Street. Though you wouldn’t know it from the outside, this brownstone conceals a historical interior that hasn’t been altered since 1954. That’s thanks to Charles Gibson Jr., who in the 1930s decided he should preserve the contents and opulence of his family’s 1860 home. A guided hour tour through the house’s four levels features a one-of-a-kind Victorian ventilator shaft (you have to see it to understand its majesty), “Japanese Leather” wallpaper, a 15-piece bedroom set, and more.

The Gibson House Museum, 137 Beacon St., Boston, thegibsonhouse.org

James Blake House

Built in 1661, the James Blake House is the oldest house in all of Boston. It’s tucked between Upham’s Corner and Columbia Point on a sliver of green space, though it’s about 400 yards from its original location on what is currently Massachusetts Avenue. The home’s original owner, a minister named James Blake, settled in Dorchester in the 1630s. He built the house in the Western English style, now a rare sight in New England. The Dorchester Historical Society only offers tours of the house on the third Sunday of each month, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

James Blake House, 735 Columbia Rd., Dorchester, dorchesterhistoricalsociety.org.

Prescott House

This impressive Federal-style construction dreamed up by architect Asher Benjamin flaunts unique rounded bay fronts and white columns. It was built overlooking the Common in 1808 for a merchant named James Smith Colburn, and on land once owned by portrait painter John Singleton Copley to boot. In 1845, historian William Hickling Prescott moved into the house, and about a century later, it was purchased by the National Society of Colonial Dames. The home, also known as the Headquarters House, is now open as a house museum on select Fridays.

William Hickling Prescott House, 55 Beacon St., Boston, nscdama.org.

Shirley-Eustis House

William Shirley, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony until 1756, spent his summers at “Shirley Place,” which he built in 1751. It also served as the summer home of William Eustis, a post-Revolution Massachusetts governor who took office in 1822. Now called the Shirley-Eustis House, the place is one of the last remaining Royal Colonial Governors’ mansions in the country. Tours of the mansion are offered 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, but the grounds, gardens and orchards are free and open to the public dawn until dusk.

Shirley-Eustis House, 33 Shirley St., Roxbury, shirleyeustishouse.org.

Last updated May 2026, with additional research by McKenna Johnson.

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Two things to keep in mind. First, we all adjust to our audience. If you’re at the MetroWest Chamber of Commerce, you say Ashland, because there’s a decent chance someone will respond “Clockers!” (high school mascot), and some beautiful connection might follow. But if you know the other person doesn’t know what a Holliston, much less a Taunton, is, you fudge it. Is it completely accurate? No, but so what? “It’s correct-ish,” says Deborah Schildkraut, professor of political science at Tufts University.

And that’s enough for the task at hand. The first rule of making conversation is to keep it going, which might mean you start big, sometimes really big, like saying you’re from Massachusetts, which never gets, “Sorry, I’m not familiar with that.” More likely someone says, “I got family in Hingham,” and then you can take it from there and get to the second rule of making conversation, which is to talk about anything but the weather, your commute, or geography.

And the second thing: People who didn’t grow up here don’t care if you’re not really from Boston. And people who are from here also don’t care. There are 351 cities and towns in the state, with plenty of natives who have never heard of, been to, or could locate Cummington (out west; Hampshire County), Goshen (next to Cummington), or Gosnold (on Buzzard’s Bay; smallest town in the state; around 70 people), and they’re not losing sleep over it. If it gets to a third date, maybe they’ll want to know. Maybe.

The only people who would be bothered are people from Boston who know you’re not from Boston at the exact moment you’re saying that you’re from Boston, and they’re nowhere around. So who cares? If you’re worried about your rep as an honest person, add “just outside of” or “around” to Boston. Anything west of the city along Route 9 or the Pike is understandable, even if it’s 30-plus miles away. But let’s be clear: No one from Cambridge, Somerville, or even Medford would ever say they’re from Boston. They’d rather die. You, on the other hand, are from Ashland. You’ve got nothing to prove. You’re a Clocker, dammit.

Got a question for the Salty Cod? Send it to editor@bostonmagazine.com.

Previously: Do I Have to Run the Boston Marathon to Be a Real Bostonian?

This article was first published in the print edition of the May 2026 issue, with the headline, “I Grew Up in Ashland, but I Tell People I’m From Boston. Is That a Lie or Just Efficiency?”

It’s 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, and the whole city is in a panic—correction, should be in a panic. A major blizzard is barreling up the coast. I’ve gotten three alerts from Eversource telling me that they know it’s gonna be bad and they’re ready to deploy. Even my mom in Philadelphia calls—they’re already getting snow. After 26 years of me living in Boston, she still wants to confirm I’m okay.

Instead of hunkering down, I head to Cactus Club Café, the Back Bay’s newest hot spot. It’s the Canadian chain’s first foray into the U.S. market, and the website promises an “upbeat and stylish” experience “fueled by energetic music, magnetic people, and spaces that feel as good as they look.” The sizzle reels suggest it’s exclusively a hot-lady hangout.

I catch the Green Line to Arlington, and of course it’s packed. Everyone’s in their twenties and thirties, and the impending blizzard isn’t on their agenda. Why should it be? They’ve got the T. A group of college students crowds the door. A dad wedges his Yukon-size stroller with infant into one corner. It’s all youth culture on display, phones in hands, canvas tote bags a-swinging. They exit in dribs and drabs at Hynes, and Copley, and with me at Arlington—all heading for the Back Bay.

Except by now—and you’ve probably read it somewhere—the Back Bay is supposed to be dying. Saks filed for bankruptcy. Neiman Marcus shuttered in Copley Place. Construction has slowed while developers point fingers at City Hall. Remote work keeps draining the office towers that anchor the neighborhood’s commercial base. The Boston Globe has questioned whether the Back Bay can survive without a business improvement district. And local merchants have blamed bike lanes for falling foot traffic. Meanwhile, the Seaport—Boston’s shiny new thing—has spent years quietly positioning itself as the neighborhood that will make the Back Bay obsolete. It’s a tidy narrative. It’s also, as best I can tell, almost entirely wrong—as a random Sunday is about to prove. If this is supposedly death, it looks pretty much like life. So I dig deeper: Is the Back Bay really okay?

Above ground on Boylston Street under heavy skies, my friend and I pass developer Ronald Druker’s luminous new limestone-clad 350 Boylston Street. Designed by classy firm Robert A.M. Stern Architects (of Harvard Business School campus notoriety), its 221,000 square feet will soon be occupied by upper-echelon retail and businesses—like Bain & Company, which just relocated its offices. (Druker can’t divulge who his other new tenants will be, but his silence feels expensive.) Meanwhile, Hermès glows from across the street, peddling $1,575 cashmere-and-silk shawls to those who can get past the proverbial velvet rope.

Walking up Boylston, we pick our way through the trash under the perpetually dodgy and scaffolded 384–390 block, former home of the Tannery and Globe Bar & Café (closed in 2019)—a reminder of dirty old Boston. This dire little section is owned by Sam Hassan, who was permanently banned in 2021 by then-AG Maura Healey from operating a retail business in Massachusetts following a discrimination lawsuit settlement. But we shouldn’t tar all of the Back Bay with one landlord’s brush.

Once we cross Berkeley Street, things are looking up again. Ahead, TikTokers are lined up to nab Blank Street’s shaken vanilla bean matcha. Next door, Café Landwer serves the best hummus in Boston. (My opinion, but I’m right.) A few blocks down, Dani’s Queer Bar is packed with brunchers awash in purple.

Meanwhile, two-year-old Trader Joe’s (the second in the Back Bay) is a complete madhouse. Sundays are always pandemonium at this 11,500-square-foot store, but mix in a blizzard forecast, and shoppers from the South End to Marlborough Street are converging to stock up on essentials like Joe-Joe’s and chili-lime rolled corn tortilla chips. The scene has a certain end-times energy, but make it bougie.

We continue to the Cactus Club, which occupies the street-level space in 500 Boylston, a postmodern pile designed by the late rich-boy plagiarist (in a good way?) Philip Johnson. Major tenants include law firm Arnold & Porter, Vor Bio, and Finepoint Capital, typical of the office mix in this area—posh law firms, biotech, and wealth managers. And soon, the sum total of Wayfair will consolidate here. The property is owned by Oxford Properties, a Canadian global real estate investor, developer, and manager, which may or may not explain Canada-based Cactus Club’s appearance in Boston.

As we approach, I’m wondering: Can a Canadian chain really fill 325 seats in the Back Bay on a Sunday in February? But when I peer into the main dining room, I can see with my own eyes that it’s full. I mean, yes, actually full. Every seat taken. The clientele approximates the sizzle reel, as much as Boston can approximate a sizzle reel. We enjoy our poke bowls in the “all-season patio,” and when my companion complains she’s chilly, I reach for the Matouk blankets hanging off the back of each chair. She wraps herself up and coos, then splits a chocolate-peanut-butter crunch bar dessert with me and hogs the ice cream. It’s all very cozy-day-nightclub. An hour later, we’re full, and so is the patio.

Property owner Mike Jammen asks if I’m writing an April Fool’s Day story—the idea of the Back Bay dying being so preposterous.

As for the health of Newbury Street, I call up Mike Jammen, principal of UrbanMeritage, who owns a dozen properties on the Back Bay’s main shopping drag, a portfolio valued at about $300 million (the second-largest on the street). Jammen works closely with Matthew Curtin, executive managing director of Newmark, to tempt unusual, international retailers to create the anti-mall. They’re shooting for diverse retail experiences to entice suburban and international shoppers and reward them for their good taste in visiting the Back Bay. Curtin reports that “vacancy is at an all-time low, rents are at an all-time high.” He adds that tenant sales among some 600 stores on the street are up 20 percent over one year. Considering all this, Jammen asks if I’m writing an April Fool’s Day story—the idea of the Back Bay dying being so preposterous.

These stats are no accident, but rather, the result of thoughtful retail curation. Jammen cites several new tenants, including Diptyque, Italian chocolatier Venchi, and Poetry, a women’s fashion brand from England. Add retailers like Sweden’s Byredo and Italy’s Santa Maria Novella—the world’s oldest perfumerie, which opened a Newbury shop in 2024, outfitted in green marble and dark cabinetry, now proffering scents as high as $87 an ounce—and it’s hard to imagine how this could be classified as dead.

Jammen says he has a list of retailers waiting for space as many as 40 deep. Curtin adds that the retail vacancy rate on Newbury is around one percent: “It’s slim pickings, and there’s no end in sight.” He says many clients are renewing leases early to secure their long-term presence in the Back Bay. He also gives me hard numbers: Foot traffic on Newbury is up 40 percent since 2023.

But aren’t malls dying? The lion’s share of the Back Bay’s retail muscle—more than one million square feet—is at the Pru and Copley Place, so maybe that’s where we should direct our mourning. But Curtin says that since 2023, Pru foot traffic is up 36 percent and Copley Place up 29 percent. True, the Pru’s Saks outpost may be on thin ice, but that’s a national bankruptcy, the result of an aspirational retail chain struggling to find its groove in the new economy, the same shift that landed Dick’s Sporting Goods in the former Lord & Taylor spot.

That trend is also behind the closure of Neiman Marcus in Copley Place (owned by Saks’ parent company). But Copley’s owner/operator Simon was ready for that. They’re bringing in Miami-based “culinary marketplace” Casa Tua Cucina and Estiatorio Milos, capitalizing on the Greek seafood trend that’s fueling the success of places like Greco and Krasi. Fendi and Tourneau are expanding; Loewe recently joined the fancy brand roster. Simon’s remodel, set to include additional retail, dining, and wellness concepts, is slated for completion in 2028.

Sure, okay, but what about new buildings? Some developers blame Mayor Wu’s reorganized Planning Department for the lack of construction cranes over Boston. Well, lemme tell you, as someone who’s reported on this beat for nearly two decades, I can safely say that real estate developer whining is the worst kind of whining. I get it: They want to make money. They think more housing supply will fix the affordability crisis. In general, they’re resistant to constraints. If there’s less new development, they’ll blame the city, the public process, the zoning—rather than rising interest rates, tariff-inflated building materials, and the spectacularly high cost of living, which is blowing up labor pricing.

Not all developers bellyache. Consider Steve Samuels, the developer whose firm single-handedly resuscitated the moribund commercial hub of the Fenway over the past two decades (filling stations and tire shops when I first got here in 1999). Samuels has a gift for working with the city and neighborhood constituents. He’s the epitome of the patient, attentive listener. And he’s reaped rewards for playing nice.

Samuels recently completed Lyrik Back Bay at the head of Boylston, going to great engineering lengths to mend the urban fabric cleft by the construction of I-90 more than 70 years ago. Offering more than 480,000 square feet, Lyrik nabbed CarGurus, the Lego Group, CitizenM, and Rivian, along with nationally lauded chains Avra Estiatorio and Chicha San Chen. One more note about how listening can pay off: One source told me the story of a woman who said she loved walking to the bridge on Mass. Ave. opposite the Hynes T stop to watch the sunset over I-90; Samuels thought it was such a great idea that he built a viewing platform there.

Meanwhile, the Hynes Convention Center is getting a $100 million upgrade. And the Harvard Club of Boston got final approval to redevelop its properties on the end of Newbury Street—including a surface parking lot—into two buildings that will include 133 residential units. Not bad for a dying neighborhood.

But aren’t the rich leaving Boston in droves? Nope. The millionaires’ tax has made Massachusetts a tougher sell for some—and the anger is real. But in the Back Bay specifically, the evidence points the other way. Ever since the dank marsh was filled in, the Back Bay has been home to several exclusive, and rather stuffy, private clubs. In 2021, that scene transformed with the opening of the ’Quin House at 217 Comm. Ave. Membership doesn’t come cheap—and yet the ’Quin still has a massive waiting list. On any given day, its Café Q is the place for deal-making, while the Reading Room, with its carved ceiling and two grand fireplaces, draws all kinds of power players to this Back Bay address.

Likewise, Back Bay residents are staying put. Eighty-seven percent of the Back Bay’s residential housing stock is occupied. Of those 10,000 occupied units, 35 percent are owner-occupied, according to a 2025 neighborhood report from the City of Boston. Twenty percent of residents are foreign-born, which gives the neighborhood its international flavor. They’re also highly educated. Of the Back Bay’s 18,000 adult residents, 74 percent have a BA or higher. And they’re financially well off, the median household income being roughly $128,700. One thing that residents really value is being able to use their feet to get around. About 35 percent walk to work; half of them don’t even own a car. They’re smart that way, saving thousands a year for more shopping, dining out, and whacking a golf ball at Swingers.

Central to the Back Bay’s success as a place to live is the extremely active Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay (NABB). I pop into their headquarters in the Vendome on Comm. Ave. to meet with Chairman Serge Savard, an unassuming gentleman, who’s originally from Quebec. In his French-Canadian accent, Savard explains that NABB developed its survival tactics back in the ’60s and ’70s when there was lots of talk about razing those Victorian brownstones, building towers, and jamming in more highways (see: the now-inconceivable Inner Belt). Now NABB boasts some 1,500 members and has a committee for everything from keeping the streets clean to monitoring the health of the tree canopy and the signature magnolia trees that make the place an Instagrammer destination each spring.

Savard considers NABB a problem-solving group that’s thinking 500 steps ahead of everyone else. By way of example, he tells me that when the water table in the Back Bay began dropping 40 years ago, exposing the wood pilings on which all of the majestic buildings depend to dry rot, NABB initiated the formation of the Boston Groundwater Trust, a citywide water-table monitoring nonprofit. Savard mentions that NABB volunteers have a precise color-matched paint for U.S. mailboxes, and will respond with a brush and paint can every time there’s a report of graffiti. NABB is politically strong and active; it plays nice with business and involves itself in every aspect of the city to ensure that Boston remains livable for most.

Okay, but then…crime. In fact, American cities are safer than they’ve ever been, and the Back Bay’s numbers bear that out. Violent crimes remained minimal, at 2 percent of all Back Bay crimes in 2025, according to an an analysis of Boston Police data. Aggravated assaults, auto thefts, and robberies are still low for an urban center, but warrant attention. The bigger issue by far is property crime—shoplifting and car break-ins in the area. Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president of the Back Bay Association, says the business community is working with Boston Police to reverse the trend.

The question worth asking isn’t whether the Back Bay is struggling—it’s why the negative narrative persists.

The blue-and-white Chevy Impala was missing. Raymond Scheublin noticed it the moment he pulled up to his home on Pine Hill Road—a quiet street in Bedford—in June 1971. He’d spoken to his wife, Natalie, earlier that afternoon, and the family car should have been parked out front. He walked through the garage door into the basement and glanced toward the stairs.

He froze.

Natalie, in shorts and a blouse, lay face-down on a blood-soaked rug. She had been stabbed twice, part of her skull bludgeoned into fragments. Her mouth had been gagged, her hands and feet bound with clothesline and articles of clothing. A piece of rope lay beneath her body. Raymond, a 52-year-old bank president who had served in World War II, hurried upstairs and called the police.

Bedford police officers arrived within minutes, calling in help from state troopers and homicide investigators. The door to the yard was unlocked—no sign of forced entry. Upstairs, Natalie’s purses had been rifled through, but nothing was taken. The silver and china were in their place. In the bathroom, the sink was streaked with blood, as if the killer had washed his hands before leaving. Police noted they found no murder weapon, but a paring knife and pinch bar were missing from the home.

Natalie was 54. She painted landscapes of the Concord River, kept a vegetable garden, and boated in Essex. She’d survived breast cancer—her daughter-in-law had washed her hair and helped her dress during the recovery. She had one grandchild and was planning to retire early with Raymond.

A police officer called the couple’s son, Kenneth, a Simmons graduate with a social work degree. “Your mother has been the victim of a homicide,” he recalled later, according to court records.

“Is this a sick joke?” Kenneth remembered saying. “I don’t believe you.”

The officer told him to hang up and call his parents’ house. On the other end of the line, Raymond told his son it was true.

Kenneth and his wife didn’t have a car and were out of cash, so they borrowed money from a neighbor and took a cab—17 miles to his childhood home. I just can’t believe this is happening, Kenneth repeated to his wife. When they pulled up, a hearse was backing out of the driveway.

Inside, investigators moved through the rooms, snapping photos and lifting fingerprints. Kenneth approached his father—not typically an emotional man—and offered a rare hug. Later that night, Kenneth recalled, according to court records, Raymond sat in shocked silence. At Natalie’s wake, it was all he could say: That bastard.

The house sat on a knoll at a bend in the road, encircled by woods. Police dispatched search teams, a State Police helicopter, and Air Force personnel. They canvassed neighbors and flagged down motorists. The killer had taken several keys from the home, including a set of bank keys. Raymond’s bank offered $5,000 for information and changed its locks. In this town of 12,500, residents had not been afraid to walk their own streets. Now they were. One neighbor reported seeing a neatly dressed man speed off in what looked like the Impala. The Boston Globe ran a police sketch: a slim man in his forties, fair complexion, and a bald spot.

Police found the Impala abandoned in the Veterans Administration Hospital parking lot, less than a mile away. Blood was inside. The car had been meticulously wiped down, but one clear thumbprint survived on a window. Detectives pulled the files of 750 VA patients, interviewing and fingerprinting many. One confessed—but officers ruled it a hoax. He hadn’t known about the stabbing. A pulp detective magazine later ran a piece titled “Mysterious Murder of the Banker’s Wife,” which made its way to a Kentucky prisoner who promised information in exchange for early parole. Another dead end.

What was the motive? Robbery gone wrong? Ransom? A psychotic attack? “It smelled more of a hit than just a random housebreak,” says Herbert Pike, the Bedford sergeant who responded to the crime scene. He is 87 now, living in Florida, and the only officer from that night who is still alive.

Without a national fingerprint database at the time, detectives couldn’t use the thumbprint on the Impala to identify a suspect. “Police admit they are stymied in their search,” the Globe reported at the time.

The case went cold. Raymond made near-daily trips to the cemetery to sit by Natalie’s grave. He sold the house less than a year after the killing and never remarried. He died in 2011 at 92 years old. The case file went into a box. The box went into storage. Natalie’s murder remained unsolved.

One day in 2020, the pandemic had nearly emptied the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office in Woburn. David Solet, who had spent the past year leading the office’s new Cold Case Homicide Unit—trawling through documents dating to the Civil Rights Era—used his keycard to enter the second-floor archives, accessible only to a handful of prosecutors, and stared at hundreds of boxes of cold-case files stacked 7 feet high, many yellowed and musty, some so caked in mold that he’d had staffers don protective gear and decontaminate them with a toothbrush in the parking lot.

The assistant district attorney glanced up and grabbed a box that felt heavier than most, labeled Scheublin, Bedford, 6/10/71, and peeked inside. Its contents—police reports, photos, sketches, and handwritten notes—had stiffened in the past half-century but were still legible. Flipping through, something caught his eye: a photo of a fingerprint, followed by pages of more recent evidence, a sign the case had already gotten a second look.

Solet could have joined a white-shoe firm after graduating from Harvard Law School, but chose the prosecutor’s office after working with indigent defendants and taking inspiration from a friend who worked with human-trafficking victims. He worked his way up to trying homicides and served as general counsel, the chief legal and ethical adviser to elected District Attorney Marian Ryan. His family eventually stopped asking when he’d get a real job.

After a four-year hiatus as legal counsel for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, during which he joined the Army Reserves, he returned to the DA’s office in 2019 to build the Cold Case Unit from the ground up. Aside from welcoming the challenge, he wanted to fight for families of murder victims he believed were deprioritized by law enforcement because of their race or class—to make good on the promise of equal justice under the law.

During his first year in the document morgue, he used a hand crank to retrieve boxes and leafed through sensational cases: decomposed bodies found in the woods, unidentified corpses buried without eulogy, mafia-style hits that shredded organs. He searched for hints police may have missed, retreading their paths, questioning lazy efforts. The work was demanding. Witnesses, cops, and journalists had died; physical evidence had been lost or destroyed. Many witnesses were originally uncooperative, but Solet wondered if time’s passage had blunted their misgivings. Perhaps they split with bad boyfriends, sobered up, or simply came to Jesus. “There are people who can be put under immense pressure to keep quiet,” he says, “and sometimes that can change.”

After pulling the Scheublin box and zeroing in on the fingerprint evidence, he scanned the entire file into PDFs so he could work on the case from his home attic—a makeshift pandemic office where cold-case boxes formed a semicircle around his desk and lamp.

There, he learned the thumbprint lifted from the Impala was so clear that cops at the time called it a “Helen Keller” print because even a blind person could see it. He also discovered that police reopened the case in 1999, following the FBI’s creation of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which quickly amassed tens of millions of prints of criminals and suspects, past and present.

The print belonged to a Lynn man named Arthur Massei—a career criminal whose specialty was bank fraud, with a history of charges for forging checks. He was 26, with a warrant out for his arrest, when Scheublin was murdered. He was still alive.

Solet’s strategy for building a case is to construct it like a stool. One or two legs are a start but often insufficient. Three legs are solid. Four are nearly unshakable. The fingerprint evidence was circumstantial—prints are fragile and can be damaged; misidentifications occur—but it was leg number one.

Squinting at his laptop through the attic’s dim lights, Solet came upon a trooper’s notes from a 2000 interview with Massei in a New York federal prison. Massei told the trooper he knew nothing about the killing, that he’d never been to Bedford in his life. Physically fit with dark hair, he hardly fit the description of the slim, fair-haired suspect sketched by police in 1971. Maybe the print meant nothing—Massei told the trooper that he could have unwittingly made a drug deal with the killer in Lynn. The trooper let the case go.

It was a plausible story. And deflating. But the next piece of evidence—an audio tape Solet grabbed from the case file—changed things. In 2005, out on bail after allegations of selling pills at a New Hampshire racetrack, Massei contacted police and tried to cut a deal: information on a 1971 murder in exchange for leniency on his pending charges. The trooper who’d visited him five years earlier traveled to Winchendon, a former textile town on the New Hampshire border, and knocked on his door. “God’s country,” the then-59-year-old called it.

Seated at a table, Massei told the trooper that in June of 1971, he’d just gotten out of jail when he was approached by a Lynn publican nicknamed Mr. Paul to do a murder-for-hire on behalf of a bank president with ties to the Winter Hill Gang. For $25,000, Massei would kill the banker’s wife.

“He says he wants his house broken into, and make it look like a breaking-in,” Massei told the trooper. “He wants his sweetheart to go to the angels.”

Massei claimed he’d declined. His cousin George carried it out, assisted by a triggerman named Buddy Leveridge and a Lynn bartender nicknamed Tony Dice, who’d signed on as getaway driver but bungled the pickup, Massei told the trooper. George, Massei said, never forgave himself and drank himself to death in 1996.

The trooper asked why he should believe any of this now.

“I’m giving ya a fuckin’ truth,” he replied, his dog barking somewhere nearby. “I can’t help it if you can’t solve it.”

The trooper looked for Mr. Paul and Tony Dice—both alive, but didn’t interview either one, according to court testimony. There were no records of a Buddy Leveridge and no connection between Raymond Scheublin and Whitey Bulger’s crew. Over time, the trooper got wrapped up in other investigations, and the Scheublin case went cold again.

Arthur Massei’s story was crazy—but maybe so crazy it was true.

Solet listened to the recording of the interview. Massei’s story was crazy—but maybe so crazy it was true. Either way, his intimate knowledge of Scheublin’s murder, combined with his thumbprint at the crime scene, was more than a coincidence. The prosecutor had leg number two.

Juggling a full caseload with only a paralegal and some college interns, Solet revisited the Scheublin files when he could. One day, he walked into the office of a recently deceased senior colleague, looking for documents, and spotted a folder labeled Scheublin. Someone else had been watching this case, too.

Later, Solet asked the Bedford police for a favor: a copy of the department’s 1971 leatherbound logbook with handwritten entries, the kind of relic discontinued in the ’90s. When he received the pages, Solet glossed over the small-town minutiae—someone’s dog escaped; the hardware store’s alarm went off; a stolen bike was found—until he reached the Scheublin entries and stopped. “Bank branch keys were STLN in murder,” a note read. “PLS watch until locks are changed.”

Massei’s main game was bank fraud. Solet kept turning the same question over: Why had he traveled all the way from Essex County to Bedford, passing hundreds of single-family homes, to end up at this one? The bank key was the answer. You only take bank keys if you want to get into a bank.

Solet knew not to get too excited. The killing occurred when Luis Aparicio patrolled the Red Sox infield and Carlton Fisk was still in the minors. No murder that old had ever been successfully prosecuted in Greater Boston. Not even close.

No murder this old had ever been successfully prosecuted in Greater Boston. Not even close.

Solet researched Massei’s records and learned he was living in Salem. To bolster his case, he wanted information on Massei’s associates over the past five decades—friends, roommates, cellmates, criminal accomplices, anyone still alive. For help, he asked the State Police to lend an investigator. The assignment went to an affable trooper named Michael Sullivan, who, Solet soon found out, had grown up not just in Bedford but on Pine Hill Road itself—three doors down from the Scheublin home.

Sullivan graduated from Bedford High in 1998, and after an Army tour, joined the Bedford Police Department in 2001 and the State Police in 2013. His father, one of 15 siblings from town, coached Sullivan’s football and baseball teams. Sullivan was a catcher—“the one commanding the field, which makes sense because he was a natural, quiet leader,” recalls former classmate Mike Korik. When the Scheublin case reopened, Sullivan volunteered to solve it for Natalie’s family—and for Bedford.

Solet convened a meeting at the State Police conference room inside the DA’s office, which had a large table, a flat-screen TV, and Venetian blinds for privacy. Sullivan partnered with a Bedford cop, Richard Vitale, who he knew from his time on the force. Solet briefed them: Massei’s thumbprint, his knowledge of the murder, the missing bank keys. Their assignment was to track down people who might share something incriminating. Maybe they no longer felt threatened.

“I wanted them to help me scour the earth,” Solet says. “We looked for any rock we could turn over.”

Most of the initial legwork fell to Solet, who searched criminal records, pulled police reports, studied news clips, and trolled social media. He mapped out a cast of characters from his office—decorated with his Judge Advocate General’s diploma, a vintage photo of Fenway Park, and a plaque gifted from a murder victim’s mother—like he was blocking out a play. Early mornings, he’d walk his dog, Pax, a rescue mutt from Arkansas, uttering facts aloud and hoping passersby didn’t think he was losing it. He was still juggling other cases, a slog that got harder after his paralegal was reassigned.

Many people he studied were dead, but several were alive. Phoning them wasn’t an option—many had criminal histories and would spook easily. This required shoe leather.

So Sullivan and his partner hit the road, making North Shore day trips to knock on doors. Sullivan was built like a linebacker, but his gift was disarming people with kindness—his natural disposition, Solet says.

After several interviews, the investigators formed a profile of Massei: humorous and often charming, a man who ran a successful bank-fraud hustle. “He was such an original,” former associate Toni Granese says. Several witnesses told investigators they feared him. One texted them from New York, worried that her husband and kids might learn of her past.

Sullivan updated Solet by phone every day about his trips to the North Shore, catching the prosecutor as he grocery shopped or schlepped his daughters to school. He began each morning with a cup of coffee with his father at his childhood home, passing the Scheublins’ old house daily. Some late nights, Sullivan listened to 1971 recordings of witness interviews, which drove his wife, a nurse, crazy. The investigators kept their assignment secret. If details connecting Massei to Scheublin went public, he might flee, or hurt a witness.

One day, Solet turned up 1991 booking photos of a heavily mustachioed Massei and three young women charged with attempting to defraud a Vermont bank. One of the women, Granese, then 23 with dark hair spilling over her shoulders, was apparently living in Lynn.

At Solet’s request, Sullivan and his partner sped along I-95 in an unmarked blue Chevy Malibu. They knocked on the door they believed was hers. No answer. They had a second possible address and zipped over. Another strikeout. Sullivan suggested trying a home listed under Granese’s daughter’s name. They rolled down a quiet block near a cul-de-sac and pulled up to a small home with a gabled roof, white siding, and kids’ toys in the front yard.

Sullivan knocked. A dark-haired woman appeared. Her face was weathered and more wrinkled than the girl in the Vermont booking photo, but matched her updated driver’s license. He knew he’d found his woman.

“Hi, Mike Sullivan with the State Police,” he said. “Are you Toni Granese?”

The 52-year-old said she was.

“No one’s in trouble, everything’s okay, but we want to talk to you about Arthur Massei.”

Her eyes widened—like she was rewinding her mind to a forgotten time, tugging open a wound. “Is he looking for me?”

“No,” Sullivan said, pulling out his notebook. “We just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

Granese—a waitress, three years sober, and soon to be a recovery specialist—stepped outside. Her granddaughter was playing in the house.

For six or seven months in 1991, Granese would later testify in court, she and Massei had been on the road together, hitting banks from Pennsylvania to Maine. They’d dumpster-dive behind banks and surface with account numbers and names. They’d forge checks, deposit them, and ask for half the money back in cash. They’d stay in hotels, chat up bar patrons, and travel up and down New England—a Bonnie and Clyde act that worked until it didn’t. Her cut alone was half a million dollars, but it finally caught up to them in Vermont when they hit the same bank twice after a $26,000 score, Granese says.

Before they got caught, Granese drove while Massei rode shotgun, doing drugs, spinning stories, and bragging that he knew Whitey Bulger, she later testified. She took him for a bullshit artist. Then one day, he told Granese he’d stabbed someone with a knife in the person’s home, carving them up like a piece of meat. She didn’t believe him. But she wondered why he always carried a knife.

Years later, she found herself pondering if the story was true. “And the next thing you know, cops are at my door,” she says now.

Sullivan thanked Granese, keeping his face neutral. Back in the car, he turned to his partner.

“Wow, that was good, huh?”

As they sped off, he called Solet.

“Dave, you won’t believe it.”

Solet’s heart began to pound. The third leg of the stool.

 

With Granese’s story, Solet’s instinct was to indict immediately—justice had been delayed for too long—but there were still steps to take. First, he wanted eyes on Massei; a quick arrest might be needed, and surveillance might also uncover more evidence.Sullivan traveled to Salem and found Massei living in a downtown apartment near the Witch House. Then in his mid-seventies, Massei wore a strong mustache and slicked dark hair and took daily walks through the city’s pedestrian market, popping into shops and cutting it up with people he knew. Sullivan kept his distance as he tailed him; getting caught would torpedo months of work. But he sometimes struggled to keep up with the remarkably spry old man, picking up his pace and ducking behind buildings as needed.

Massei had an odd habit of doing pushups in public and kept a strict routine, as if he were still in prison. When Sullivan mentioned it to Solet, the prosecutor grew queasy over dinner. Massei was still strong, possibly capable of violence, Solet realized, and he lived just a county away from his children, who at that moment were doing homework in their rooms.

It’s possible Massei knew he was being followed. During a snowstorm, he visited a Lynn acquaintance, Maureen Hohmann, a pet-grooming business owner in her early sixties who’d bought pills from him in the past. Massei occasionally stopped by her shop and sat with anxious dogs, Hohmann recalls now. She pitied him—he didn’t have a car, and she thought he was funny. He called her Mo.

Hohmann says Massei warmed up from the cold in her house and mentioned that police were after him for a murder he didn’t commit. “We were snowbound in here, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’” she recalls. Still, he was old. He didn’t seem the murderous type.

With only circumstantial evidence, Solet knew proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt would be challenging. He wanted physical evidence to help bolster his case—and there was a chance to get it.

When Scheublin’s body was discovered, police collected a piece of rope found under her. Four decades later, following DNA forensic breakthroughs, lab analysts determined the rope was handled by an unknown male. If Solet could obtain Massei’s DNA and prove a match, it was game over.

That wouldn’t be easy. Massei would never agree to submit DNA voluntarily, and a court-ordered swab would make him run after police let him go. Solet needed to collect it covertly and asked Sullivan to find a way.

A few days later, Sullivan watched as Massei walked through the market, gripping a coffee cup. For the next hour, he, his partner, and two more Bedford officers tailed him from afar, watching as he stopped for pushups and conversation. Massei held onto the cup the entire walk, and when he reached his apartment, he flipped it into a trashcan.

When Massei was out of sight, they rushed to the trash can, where an officer reached a gloved hand in and fished out the coffee cup. It said “Artie.”

Sullivan called Solet with the score, and the prosecutor told his friend at the State Police crime lab to be on the lookout for a sample.

Days later, the analyst called back. Solet braced himself. It was a miss.

Solet still believed he had the right man and typed up a letter of indictment for first-degree murder. A grand jury indicted him. Sullivan and a team of police and state fugitive officers went into Massei’s apartment building and asked the manager to call him down and play it casual. When Massei emerged from the elevator, he tried brushing past them but didn’t get far.

“Mike Sullivan, State Police. We have a warrant out for your arrest from Bedford,” the trooper said.

“Bedford?” said Massei. “For what?”

“Murder.”

Sullivan’s partner cuffed Massei while Sullivan read him his rights.

Before the arrest hit the newspapers, Solet called Kenneth Scheublin in Cambridge. “A man has been arrested for your mother’s murder,” Solet told him. Kenneth became emotional. “I was thinking that whoever it was would be dead by now,” he later said.

Back in Middlesex County, Massei pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. When Solet locked eyes with him at the arraignment, Massei had no idea who he was looking at. But I know you well, Solet remembers thinking, staring at the man whose photos he’d studied for nearly two years.

In the Middlesex jail, Massei set up a commissary account—flush with cash from a $25,000 personal injury settlement against UPS, after claiming he’d been hit by a truck, Hohmann says. He named Hohmann power of attorney and told her to keep the funds flowing.

As his case moved toward trial, Solet began listening to audio files of Massei’s recorded jail calls. For hours, the prosecutor tried to stay awake as Massei droned on about bad jail food and dwindling canteen funds.

Then Solet listened as Massei told Hohmann it was unwise to discuss certain things on the phone—better to use the mail. Solet jotted a reminder on a piece of scratch paper. The recording wasn’t enough for a search warrant, but if anyone could persuade Hohmann to hand over a letter or two, it was Sullivan.

Days later, Sullivan knocked on her door. After brief hellos, Sullivan told her they had questions for her about Massei. Her response caught him off guard.

She ducked inside, returned with dozens of envelopes, and handed him the bundle. Many were still sealed. Massei had grown threatening, she told Sullivan. Eventually, she stopped reading them.

“He turned nasty on me when his money was running low,” Hohmann says now. “Once he threatened my mother, all bets were off.” Sullivan called Solet with the hopeful news. “Bring ’em back, and we’ll read them together,” Solet said.

An hour later, the envelopes were splayed across the State Police conference table, organized by postmark date. Solet and Sullivan dug in. Several notes, which alternated between uppercase and lowercase letters, were threatening. Solet also learned Massei ran a loan-shark operation on the side, charging some destitute borrowers up to 100 percent interest.

Solet wasn’t surprised by Massei’s repeated claims of innocence. But then he noticed something that made him stop in his tracks.

Massei referenced a woman named Judy Emma—the since-deceased girlfriend of Massei’s cousin George, the one he’d accused of the Scheublin murder during the 2005 Winchendon interview. Solet recognized the name.

“Hey, you don’t know anyone in their fifties or seventies or eighties who may have gone to AA meetings in Peabody, a church on Lynn Street, may have buddied up with Judy Emma?” Massei wrote. He mentioned one of Hohmann’s pet-store clients, a woman named Mary Ann Lupo. “Didn’t she go to AA meetings?”

Then he offered a proposition: If Lupo told his lawyer that Emma had once claimed George killed Scheublin, “I’d sure give one thousand so she could get to court.”

Solet couldn’t believe the gift. Innocent people don’t try to bribe witnesses.

The prosecutor was too measured to call it a clincher. But he might have just found the fourth leg of his stool.

The morning of opening statements, in Massei’s trial, Solet slipped on a navy suit, knotted his favorite striped tie, and nibbled on a piece of toast—too nervous to eat anything more. At the defense table, Massei wore a hearing amplification device—a strategy to emphasize his old age, Solet suspected.

Kenneth Scheublin was preparing to testify. Since Massei’s arrest, Solet had come to know Kenneth as kind and dignified. The two men at the center of this—Kenneth and Massei—had both been in their mid-twenties when Natalie died. Now, after 10 presidential administrations, each was pushing 80, unable, in their own way, to escape the darkness of 1971. Their lives had collided again.

During Kenneth’s testimony, he talked of fond memories of his mother and the moment he learned of her death. There was also this: Three years after the murder, a sheet of paper arrived in the mail with magazine-clipped letters of various shapes and colors cut and pasted onto it. “You killed your mother over the will,” it read. During cross-examination, Massei’s attorney asked whether Kenneth’s father, Raymond, had any ties to organized crime—whether there was any reason he might have hired someone to kill his own wife.

Kenneth answered no to both.

Herbert Pike, the only living officer at the crime scene, traveled from Florida to testify. Silver-haired and dressed in a camel-hair sports coat, the 85-year-old spoke about the murder as his adult sons watched from the gallery. “I probably never stopped thinking about it,” he says now. As he left the stand, a former colleague pulled him into an embrace.

During closing arguments, Massei’s attorney declared there was “no evidence” connecting Massei to the crime. Massei’s appearance didn’t match the original police sketch. The theory that Massei broke into the Scheublin’s home to steal Raymond’s bank keys was “sheer speculation.” And the brutality of the murder—the stabbing, the bludgeoning, the bindings—suggested the crime was personal, not a calculated home invasion.

When it was his turn, Solet told jurors the DNA on the rope could have come from a gloveless police officer, a hardware store clerk, or an accomplice. The sketch might have depicted a potential accomplice, he said. Then he pulled out his ace—motive. Massei, he said, “went into the home of a bank president likely looking for bank documents or bank profit, and encountered Ms. Scheublin and tied her up. And having tied her up had to decide whether to let her live and potentially identify him, or to kill her. And after a period of deliberation, weighing the costs and the benefits, he killed her.”

After three days of deliberation, the jury found Massei guilty of murder—and of solicitation to suborn perjury for attempting to manufacture a witness in his letter to Hohmann. Solet took a deep breath and listened to the room exhale behind him. He allowed himself a moment of pride, then turned and spotted Kenneth in the front row. He seemed calm, even carrying a soft smile. When court adjourned, Solet and Sullivan huddled with Kenneth. (Kenneth chose not to comment for this story. Citing Massei’s appeal, Sullivan and Vitale did not have permission to comment. Massei did not respond to two letters sent to him at Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Shirley; his trial lawyer, Mark Wester, and appellate attorney, Neil Fishman, each declined to comment.)

During the sentencing two weeks later, Kenneth again took the stand. “One thing that hasn’t varied is the ache in my heart that I have carried with me for 53 years,” Kenneth said, describing the “image and the horror of what my mother must have gone through.” He pictured her getting dragged down the stairs onto the basement’s cement floor. “Did she plead with the perpetrator?” Kenneth said. “Did she say, ‘Don’t hit me?’ Did she pray to God? Did she yell out my father’s name?”

After learning of his mother’s death over the phone, it took him a decade before he could hear a phone ring without his heart pounding, he told the jury. “I resigned myself to the fact that my mother’s murder would never be solved,” he said, looking directly at the defendant. “It didn’t quite work out that way, did it, Mr. Massei?”

In the months following the trial, Solet continued leading the Middlesex Cold Case Unit, reinvestigating and prosecuting several murder and sex assault cases to conviction. He was named the county’s prosecutor of the year.

Behind the scenes, though, Solet says things were tense between him and his boss, District Attorney Marian Ryan. Both before and after the Massei case, he asked her repeatedly to add a second prosecutor to staff the Cold Case Unit, but she declined. At one point, Solet says, she offered a volunteer lawyer—a longtime campaign donor with no criminal law experience—who wrote just one memo.

Things came to a head after Solet began investigating a 1980s rape case—a stranger who had climbed through a first-floor hotel window in Bedford and raped a 33-year-old woman on a work trip. Solet used genetic genealogy to match crime-scene DNA to a man still alive. But the Massachusetts statute of limitations for aggravated rape is just 15 years. Forty-seven other states have longer limits—many with a DNA exception that stops the clock until a suspect is identified.

Solet says he approached Ryan to suggest she use the case to lobby for a new state law, but she declined, worried that a prominent local defense attorney wouldn’t get on board. “I was dumbstruck,” he recalls. “I think that she thought for her own political purposes, it was good to keep as many influential people happy with her as possible.”

When Solet called the victim to recommend a civil lawsuit, Ryan had instructed him not to reveal the suspect’s name—unless she asked. She didn’t.

In September, Solet typed up his resignation letter, handed it to Ryan, and told her he was running to unseat her as DA. “I said, ‘Marian, it’s not just about the Bedford case, but it is about the Bedford case,’” he says. “‘I don’t think what you did was right.’”

Solet announced his campaign that month, pledging to expand the Cold Case Unit into a national model. “We will not forget about the victims,” he says. He also promised to lobby to change the statute of limitations for rape. Ryan then announced she’d do the same. It infuriated him. (Ryan did not respond to requests for comment.)

More than 300 murder cases in Middlesex County remain unsolved. There is no state tracking system for cold cases. Boston reached out to all 11 of Massachusetts’ DA offices to ask about their oldest case resulting in a conviction; only the Hampden County office could cite a murder predating 1971, which was pleaded down to a manslaughter conviction.

That leaves more than 300 families in Middlesex County waiting. More than 300 Natalie Scheublins. Their files still sitting in a box.

…

Jimmy Ford and I were going to buy heroin. My palms were sweating and I tugged at my collar, gazing out the window. The drizzle was falling over the fast food joints and check cashing places as we cruised down the Revere Beach Parkway.

The money was burning a hole in Jimmy’s pocket. He had swung into the state police barracks in Danvers at four o’clock to sign it out. Throwing a thick envelope in my lap, he gunned the Crown Vic and took a left onto Route 62. Despite the pelting rain he cut around the traffic, going over the centerline to pass other cars. Jimmy didn’t want to take the Crown Vic to the buy, so I’d arranged to borrow my landlord’s car. We had to pick it up in Arlington, cutting through rush hour traffic to meet Fabian at six o’clock.

“If we’re late, he’ll get high and I’ll be fucked,” Jimmy said.

We got to Columbia Avenue in Arlington. I ran in, got my landlord’s keys, and got behind the wheel. “This’ll be the first heroin buy in a fuckin’ hybrid,” Jimmy said.

Heroin is a lucrative, tax free business, and in Boston hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash whizzed around from street corner to bodega to parking lot in Everett and Chelsea and Revere, lining the pockets of gangbangers and mob associates like Marco and Felix Dominical, who we were trying to set up. Going back to the city’s earliest days, when fur trading instigated vicious rivalries between the English, French, and various native American tribes, there was always something for sale on the streets of Boston. First it was slaves, then beaver pelts, scrimshaw, whale oil, bootleg whiskey, LSD, heroin, Oxys, and so on down the line.

Exactly when we were going to meet Dominical was unclear, but the one constant among dope peddlers is greed—they want the money. If this deal went down, Jimmy Ford would let Dominical walk. The goal for the initial buy was to establish the informant’s reliability—”the C.I.’s information led to convictions in previous heroin cases I developed with the C.I.’s assistance”—and to create a basis of knowledge—”I had observed drug sales on five occasions at the address provided by the C.I. prior to this instance.”

Witnessing Fabian’s buy would help Jimmy later, when he had to establish probable cause for the warrants, surveillance, and pinch.

Riding along, Jimmy was cracking his knuckles and staring out the windshield. He was right on the edge of doing violence, itchy for something to happen. Ford was dressed in ripped jeans and a Boston Bruins hoodie with the collar sliced open to allow for his thick neck. Now that I was driving, Jimmy fidgeted in the passenger seat, sighing when I let another motorist cut in. He flipped open his cellphone to call Fabian.

“Hey numb nuts, where are you?”

“I’ll be there in a half hour,” said Fabian, in his nasally voice. “I had to take my mother to a doctor’s appointment.”

Ford hung up. “What a humanitarian.”

Although I had never done this before, Jimmy had purchased heroin and coke and Oxycontin dozens of times, meeting shit birds in abandoned buildings, cemeteries, and rat-infested tenements. Guys like Fabian were the guides to this dimly lit underworld, shifty, chain-smoking Virgils who knew their way around the sub-basements of Hell.

Today, Jimmy was posing as Vinnie from Providence, a junkie who was Harry’s usual coke supplier. The story was that Vinnie was dope sick and wanted to score, and I was a friend who needed a ride to the airport. As we rolled along Ferry Street, Ford took the Sig Sauer pistol from his hip, ejected the seven-shot magazine, checked the breach, and replaced the clip.

Leaning forward, he tucked the Sig Sauer into the back of his jeans, pulling down his sweatshirt to cover it. At the sight of the gun, my heart quickened.

“You should get a license to carry,” Jimmy said. “Only a fuckin’ idiot shows up at a drug deal without a gun.”

Five minutes later, Jimmy indicated that I should turn into the Taco Bell on the Revere Beach Parkway. “Let’s get out,” said Ford, once I’d parked the car.

The rain had softened to a damp gray mist. We stood beneath the edge of Taco Bell’s roof, the mist billowing across the Parkway. A kid came riding up on a bicycle, dropped it on the sidewalk, and went into the restaurant.

Jimmy nudged me, and I watched as the kid, a Latino about sixteen years old wearing a St. Louis Cardinals baseball hat, marched through Taco Bell and out the other side.

Jimmy said, “Stay on the kid,” as a Mercedes turned into the lot, swung around the restaurant, and hovered for a moment.

The kid in the Cardinals hat walked past the driver’s side window. There was a brief touching of hands, and the Mercedes banged a left against traffic while the kid circled the restaurant, remounted the bike, and pedaled away.

“That’s your first heroin deal,” Jimmy said.

“Are you gonna pinch him?” I asked.

Jimmy shrugged: “Go with the flow.”

While we were standing there, a cream-colored Cadillac eased up, the sunroof open despite the rain and loud hip-hop pouring from the windows.

“Motherfucka get paid/motherfucka get laid/old times ain’t forgot/mothafucka got shot”

“Hey, tell everyone we’re here,” Jimmy said.

Jimmy climbed into the Cadillac’s front seat and I got in the back, gagging on the stench of body odor and cologne. “What the fuck are you listening to?” Jimmy said.

“That’s Patrick, from Southie,” shouted Fabian. He killed the music. “I represent him.”

“Where, at his arraignment?” Jimmy asked. “You should get a cowboy hat and call yourself Colonel Tom Parker.”

Harry Fabian was a swarthy, heavyset man in his early forties, with thinning hair and the plastic shell of a hands-free phone in his ear. He wore loose nylon shorts, his wrists covered in thick black hair and the flesh hanging from his arms like suet. His protruding lips made him look like a talking frog in a children’s story.

“What’s that?” asked Ford, indicating a Styrofoam cup between the seats.

“Try it,” Harry said.

“I’m not drinking that fuckin’ thing,” said Jimmy.

Fabian gestured toward the cup. “It’s banana hazelnut coffee with whipped cream,” he said. “And low-fat chocolate.”

“Low fat chocolate,” Jimmy said. “What’s the fucking point?”

“I have to pretend I’m trying,” Fabian said.

Jimmy said my name and I thrust my hand between the seats and Fabian shook it. His hand was like a dead octopus, and when he drew it back, I wiped mine on the seat.

Fabian’s driving was worse than Jimmy’s. As we careered along the Parkway, the C.I. juggled several phone conversations while avoiding a Toyota pickup that jumped out from a side street.

“Let’s try not to get killed,” said Jimmy, slamming his hands against the dashboard.

Although I knew a few things about Jimmy Ford and Fabian’s history, I lost track of what they were saying when we passed Everett High. “Did you talk to that guy about that thing?” asked Fabian.

“What guy?”

“The guy who knows my guy,” Harry said.

“I talked to my guy but he says his guy doesn’t know a thing about it,” Jimmy said. “Besides, if my guy gets involved with this thing, he’s gonna want something from the guy and that’s a whole ‘nother thing.”

During this Suffolk County version of Waiting for Godot, Felix Dominical buzzed to say his guy couldn’t find our car. “I’m right fuckin’ here,” said Fabian. “Do you want the money, or what?”

Fabian wheeled the Caddy into the KFC parking lot. His other phone chimed and I heard Marco’s voice saying he’d send Angel with a couple of $40 bags, but that he couldn’t do a big deal today—not enough product.

Fabian switched off the walkie-talkie function. “Wait a fuckin’ minute—” he said, opening his door. The snitch heaved his bulk out of the car, swearing into his phone.

Jimmy picked up Fabian’s coffee. “What are you doing?” I asked.

Jimmy’s lips nearly touched the cup. “He said it’s good.”

“You’ll probably get TB. Put that fucking thing down.”

Jimmy pushed the cup back into its holder, drumming on the dashboard with his hand. A minute later, Fabian rolled himself back into the Caddy.

“His guy saw you guys,” Harry said. “He’s spooked.”

“He didn’t see a fuckin’ thing,” Jimmy said.

Jimmy and I exited the car, crossed the lot, and stood beneath a dripping willow tree. Buying heroin from Felix Dominical was a necessary step toward getting eyes on his boss. Intelligence on Marco was slim. He went around with a big dude named Muscles, which was pretty much all Jimmy knew.

Shivering beneath the tree, we tried to dodge the rain. “What do you think?” I said, gesturing toward Fabian.

Jimmy shook his head. “He’s like a fuckin’ hobo on a ham sandwich.”

“You should refrain from making disparaging remarks about the culinary habits of the disenfranchised,” I said.

Jimmy laughed.

Finally, Harry waved us over. “Marco says Felix is having car problems. So Angel is bagging up the heroin. We’re meeting him in ten minutes.”

“Who the fuck is Angel?” Jimmy asked.

“Marco can only do a couple bags, so he’s sending Angel.”

Over the car radio, Stevie Wonder was singing about the devil being on his way. “Fuck it,” said Jimmy. “We’ll do a hand-to-hand.”

Fabian drove to Taco Bell, where the VW was parked. Jimmy looked over his shoulder. “Get out,” he said to me.

“Aren’t I going?”

Jimmy said to wait in the VW. Then Fabian pulled away and I sat with the rain pattering on the roof. Two minutes later, Jimmy phoned. “Turn left at the light, and look for us a half mile down.”

“What am I doing when I get there?”

“Everything is fluid,” said Jimmy, and hung up.

Chelsea Street was a battered collection of three-deckers opposite a dilapidated playground. The park rose up from the sidewalk behind a fence made of rusty iron spears.

I spotted Fabian’s car and got out of the VW and began walking along the fence. Jimmy emerged from the Caddy, went across the street, and sat on a low brick wall. He had the hood of his sweatshirt up, his hands thrust in his pockets, staring at nothing. No one was around.

With my heart booming, I went through a gate into the park. There was a swing set just ahead. Facing the street, I sat on a swing with my feet in the dirt. A short distance away, Fabian climbed out of his car and gazed up and down the street. It was so quiet, I could hear the jingle of his platinum chains.

Finally, a station wagon cruised up Chelsea Street. I was looking straight into the vehicle, which hovered nearby. The sole occupant was a Hispanic male in his late 20s, with close-cropped hair. His head was so small it looked like an afterthought.

Angel, I presumed.

Fabian glanced in the window, then opened the door and shoved himself inside. As Angel put the car in gear, I heard Fabian say, “My engine’s running. Let’s do it here.”

Angel reached into his pocket, accepting some bills with one hand and passing the dope with the other. Nearby, Ford was perched on the wall, his face obscured by shadows. In just thirty seconds, the deal was over and Angel drove away.

A few minutes later, we were back at Taco Bell and I hopped into Fabian’s car. “I done good, right?” asked the informant.

“You deserve a fuckin’ medal,” Jimmy said.

Fabian held two Baggie ends filled with soft brown powder. “What’s in it for me?” he asked, as Ford took the heroin from him.

“For this? Fuckin’ zero,” Jimmy said. Unexpectedly, he handed the bags to me. “Set up the deal for fifty grams, and I’ll give you a thousand bucks.”

Fabian looked like a little kid who expected a bigger ice cream. “That’s it?”

“There’s a war on,” Jimmy said. “The government’s broke.”

The heroin was weightless in my palm, the Baggie points knotted at one end. In all likelihood, Jimmy said, what I was holding began as poppies in the Golden Triangle straddling Burma and Laos, was routed across Europe by the Sicilian mafia, and then shipped to drug lords in the Dominican Republic, where Marco’s thugs picked it up.

Fabian leered at me. “Want some?”

Looking down, I realized the bags were coated with a fine brown dust. “No fucking way,” I said.

I passed the heroin back to Jimmy and spit on my hands and wiped them on the seat like Lady Macbeth. Harry Fabian started up the Caddy.

“Gimme,” said Ford, thrusting out his hand.

“What?” Fabian asked.

“My change, and the rest of the fuckin’ dope.”

“Me no take metaga,” said Fabian, using the Spanish word for heroin.

Jimmy laughed. “Yeah, and me no breathe air.”

The informant gave Jimmy a wad of banknotes and another Baggie point of heroin. “He won’t send Angel next time,” Fabian said. “For fifty grams, Felix and Muscles will deliver.”

“That’s the fuckin’ idea,” Jimmy said.

We said goodbye to Fabian, and Jimmy asked if I’d give him a ride to Carson Beach where he’d left his car. The next day, his partner would drive him to Arlington to pick up his cruiser from my driveway.

On the way home, the sky was black and glittering with stars. As I emerged from the O’Neill Tunnel, the buildings downtown glowed with an unearthly light.

The Red Sox were playing over at Fenway, an early season game on a cold, raw night. My story for the Boston Globe magazine was finally coming together. Adrenaline is the most powerful drug in the world, and at that moment, I felt like I could unlatch my seatbelt and float over the Zakim Bridge into the night sky.