Act of God
Authors: Jeremiah Healy
Jeremiah Healy
For Robert J. Randisi,
who’s done more to help each of us
than we have ourselves
One
U
SUALLY THEY CALL FIRST.
Clients, I mean. Seventy, maybe eighty percent of a private investigator’s work comes in through law firms, and attorneys rarely do anything without an appointment. On top of that, almost always you’re the one who has to visit their offices.
That Tuesday afternoon, though, the knock came before the telephone rang. I looked up from my desk, which had on it what I’d been able to gather about a teenaged runaway from Vermont. The pebbled-glass part of my door was still shaking against the wooden frame, the stenciled JOHN FRANCIS CUDDY, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS dancing a little. That was odd, too, because most folks will rap on the wood, not the glass.
When I said come in, they did.
A woman and a man, she entering as he held the door open for her. The man nearly had to nudge the woman across the threshold so he could come in, too, and close the door behind him. People are uncomfortable bringing their troubles to a stranger, but from the awkwardly polite way the two of them moved around each other, I got the impression they weren’t used to being together, either.
The man said, “Mr. Cuddy?”
I stood up. “Yes?”
He cupped his right hand gently around the left elbow of the woman. “This is Pearl Rivkind, and I’m William Proft.”
The woman said, “Mrs. Abraham Rivkind,” as though she were both correcting him and reassuring herself.
To Rivkind, Proft said, “Sorry,” in a voice more formal than sincere. Then he looked to me. “I wonder if we could have a few minutes of your time?”
It’s a good idea to be wary of off-the-street business, but a bad idea to turn it away automatically.
I closed the file on the runaway and eased back down. “Please, take a seat.”
My office has two client chairs that face my desk and two windows that overlook the Park Street subway station at the northeast corner of the Boston Common. Rivkind and Proft sat so that each was in line with one of the windows behind me.
Pearl Rivkind was barely five feet tall, even with high heels. Into her mid-fifties, she wore heavy makeup that did little to hide her age and nothing to hide a lantern jaw that would make Jay Leno wince. Her hair was tinted a few shades redder than brown and chopped stylishly short. The silk dress was stylish, too, and went with the warm, late June weather outside, but the clinging silk only accentuated a body that would have seemed dumpy in a bulky bathrobe. It was her eyes that caught you up close, though. Big and brown and deep, the whites were bloodshot and bulged with the irritation of someone who’d lately spent a lot of time crying.
William Proft was tall and lanky, taking a while to lower himself into the other chair. Thirtyish, his hair was sandy but balding front to back over a long face, hollow cheeks, and prominent lips that curled a little, a perpetual grin that you could grow tired of very quickly. He wore a seersucker jacket over a buttoned-down shirt and solid black tie. The jacket rode up on him as he finally got settled, as though he didn’t usually wear one or didn’t get to sit in it much. Up close, Proft’s eyes caught you, too, but more like the guy at the next table in a restaurant who’s constantly staring at the food on your plate to be sure he’s ordered the best item on the menu.
I said, “How did you find me?”
Rivkind said, “My lawyer, he called around, got a recommendation on you.”
“Is there some reason he didn’t contact me himself?”
“Yeah,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “He doesn’t think it’s such a hot idea, my coming to see a private investigator. Neither does my son or anybody else, for that matter.”
I was beginning to like Rivkind. She’d corrected Proft on the introductions, and she wasn’t afraid to be direct with me.
Proft said, “Perhaps if I summarized our situation, you could get a sense of what’s involved here.”
I was beginning not to like Proft much, but I said, “Go ahead.”
He crossed his right leg over the left, showing Hush Puppy shoes I hadn’t noticed before. “Two weeks ago—that Thursday, actually, so almost three weeks now—Mrs. Rivkind’s husband was brutally murdered during an attempted robbery at his furniture store. This past Saturday—three days ago—my sister, Darbra, who worked as a secretary at the store, came back from vacation and seems to have disappeared.”
At his mention of the husband, I looked to Rivkind and nodded in sympathy. Her jaw came out a little more, but she nodded back.
To Proft, I said, “You have reason to think the two are related?”
“Frankly, no. But Mrs. Rivkind came to my pharmacy yesterday to have a prescription filled—”
“Sedative. My doctor, he said, ‘Pearl, no matter what, you’ve got to sleep.’ ”
Proft took the interruption in stride. “She and I began talking about the, well, odd coincidence at best, and we thought it might make sense to consult someone like you.”
“There a reason you didn’t call first?”
They exchanged glances. Rivkind came back to me. “It seemed kind of hard to talk about over the phone.” Her eyes drifted toward the window. “Kind of hard to talk about, period.”
She said the last in a neutral way, like she’d had a lot of practice with the phrase over the last few weeks.
I said, “What exactly is it that you’d like me to do?”
Proft said, “Well, since Darbra’s disappearance may be tied in with Mr. Rivkind’s death, we thought you could investigate them together.”
Rivkind said, “Kind of a package deal, right?”
I turned my chair to look out the window that shows the top of the State House over some shorter trees on the Common. The capitol dome was dedicated two hundred years ago, Paul Revere sheathing it in copper when the original wooden shingles fell off. Just after the Civil War, some gold leaf was applied. They regilded the thing every twenty years or so until 1942, when it was painted gray to protect us from German bombers or U-boats, nobody seems to be sure which. Now the most recent gold leaf from the late sixties is peeling so badly it should be replaced, but the new fiscally responsible governor who succeeded the old fiscally responsible governor doesn’t think the quarter of a million needed would go over too well with state employees who haven’t seen a pay raise in five years.
Proft said, “Mr. Cuddy?”
I shook my head and turned back to them. “Representing joint clients isn’t a great idea.”
“How come?” said Rivkind.
“First, it’s tough to give equal time to each side of the problem.”
She said, “You can’t kind of … use your own judgment on that?”
“Yes, but then there’s the problem of conflicts.”
Proft said, “What conflicts?”
“If the death and the disappearance have nothing to do with each other, then I’m wasting somebody’s money looking into the other side of this. If the death and the disappearance are related, then it’s possible, even likely, that I might find out something that helps one of you but hurts the other.”
In the neutral voice, Rivkind said, “I don’t think I can hurt worse than this. I hope not, anyway.”
I didn’t say anything.
Proft arched his shoulders forward in the chair. “Couldn’t you work on our problems together until a conflict—what do they do, ‘arise’?”
He said the last with the lips curling a little more than they had been.
Before I could answer him, Rivkind wrung her hands together, the four rings on her fingers clicking against one another. “I don’t like saying this to a man I never met before, but I … I don’t know if I can go through this with another investigator.”
I looked at her. The makeup was cracking over the muscles in her jaw and cheeks as she tensed them to keep from crying. The woman was doing what she thought was right, despite other people bumping her the other way.
I said, “How’s this. Let me interview each of you separately. Then I’ll maybe have a better take on whether it makes sense for me to go forward for both of you.”
William Proft got up a good deal faster than he’d sat down. “Why don’t you begin with Mrs. Rivkind, then? She’s had her problem longer, and I can slip out for some coffee.” At the door, he said, “Can I get either of you anything?”
I told him no, while the widow just waved a hand and bit on her lower lip.
A
S SOON AS THE
door closed behind Proft, Pearl Rivkind fumbled in her handbag for a tissue. She used it to dab at her eyes, once to the right one, once to the left, then again to the right before swiping it twice under her nose. Gripping the tissue in her left hand, she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. There’s nothing you have to apologize for.”
She tried to nod. “What do you need to know from me?”
I brought a notepad to the center of my desk. “I can get the details from the police, but it would help if you could tell me a little more about what happened.”
A better nod, resolute. “My Abe, he’s part—he was partners in Value Furniture. It’s a store down in the Leather District.”
A small, commercial neighborhood lying between Chinatown and South Station. “Go ahead.”
“It’s a beautiful building, built a hundred years ago, back when they knew how to make them. He was working late on that Thursday—they stay open till eight, Thursdays—and somebody tried to rob him. They hit him … they hit him over the head with the poker from the fireplace in his office. The bookkeeper found him, lying on the floor, all his blood …”
I didn’t want to push her. “What do the police say?”
A shrug and more work with the tissue. “They don’t, except what I told you already. They figure somebody came in the store, hid somewhere till closing, then went to the office after the money.”
“If the store was closed, how did the person get out?”
Another shrug. “Through the emergency door at the back. Beverly and the security guy heard the alarm go off.”
“Beverly?”
“Beverly Swindell.” Rivkind pronounced it “Swin-dell.” A bleak smile. “First time I saw her name written down, I said to Abe, I said, ‘Abe, you’re hiring a bookkeeper with a name like ‘swindle’?’ He got a big kick out of that. Abe always loved my little jokes.”
“Do you know the name of the security guard?”
Rivkind shook her head. “He was new. An Irish guy, big like you, only not here very long.”
“Here?”
“In this country. He came over from Ireland, I don’t know, like less than a year ago?”
“Have the police made much progress?”
“I don’t know from murder, Mr. Cuddy. They tell me they’re looking into things, what do I know to ask them? Nobody saw anything, and whoever it was just ran away.”
I waited a minute. “What exactly is it you want me to do?”
A judicious nod this time. “After Abe … died, I went through his bills. The charge stuff, you know? Joel offered to do it for me, but I thought I should … get a handle on his debts, whatever.”
“Joel’s your son?”
“My …? Oh, no. Joel’s … Joel was Abe’s partner. Joel Bernstein. They worked in the furniture business for other people, then got together twenty years ago and bought out the owner of Value. Anyway, I’m going through Abe’s papers, and there are …” Rivkind made another couple of passes with the tissue. “There’re these receipts and things for restaurants and bars, only like too many of them.”
“What do you mean?”