Authors: Jeremiah Healy
“Glad to hear it. Which neighbor called me in?”
The sleepy smile. “This street, Cuddy, it has a thousand eyes. Just so we don’t get any more calls though, how about we move our car and you move yours somewhere else?”
“Fair enough.”
W
HEN
I
PULLED TO
the curb outside Roger Houle’s house in Meade, there was no sign of him or his neighbor, Mrs. Thorson. However, this time the front lawn was mowed, the clippings either raked off or captured in some kind of bag so that his place looked the same as the other mini-manses on the street. Turning off the engine, I could hear the sound of a hammer. Bang-bang-bang, then a pause, then one-two-three again. Getting out of the Prelude and walking around the back of his house, I found myself almost marching in time to the rhythm.
The hammering got louder as I cleared the corner on Mrs. Thorson’s side. This time I saw Houle from the front, and he looked a little better than the first time I’d met him. The face under the bald head still seemed haggard, but he’d shaved that morning, and there was some color on his arms below a breast-pocket T-shirt. He stood on a ladder leaned against the potting shed, which was almost finished, the glassless windows showing what would have been a bright, airy place for a person interested in gardening to work.
Houle had a magnetized hammer in his left hand, holding a nail by its head as he positioned a section of green, tweedy shingle with his right on the sloping roof of the shed.
He was about to drive the nail when my movement caught his eye. “You’re … ?”
“John Cuddy, Mr. Houle. I was by here last Thursday?”
He seemed to have to focus on that. “Oh, right. About Darbra.”
Nodding, I glanced over at his wife’s garden, less to check on the plants and more to check on the covered urn. The other vases and his redwood lounge chair were still in the same positions, which let me see more quickly that the urn wasn’t.
Houle climbed down from the ladder, slipping the handle of his hammer into a loop on a leather carpenter’s apron, then unstrapping the apron like a cowboy reversing his gun belt. “What can I do for you?”
“There’ve been a few developments I thought you should know about.”
Houle looked at me carefully. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“More than just Darbra being off somewhere.”
“I’m afraid so.”
He shook his head. “It just doesn’t stop.” Walking, almost shambling over to the corner of the shed by the fertilizer bags and tools, Houle pulled the other lounge chair by its foot, the back wheels making tracks in the grass. “The arm of this thing’s like a little desktop, in case you need to write something down.”
He seemed to be functioning a lot better. I said, “Thanks.”
Houle sat on his lounge sidesaddle, like he expected maybe to get up again soon. “I wasn’t in real good shape last time I saw you.”
I eased into the other one. “Pretty understandable.”
“That first week … I didn’t wash or look after myself. Wouldn’t have eaten anything if it wasn’t for a neighbor.”
“Mrs. Thorson?”
Houle narrowed his eyes. “How did you … ?”
“I met her coming in last time.”
He shook his head again. “Sorry. I don’t remember much about … that.”
“You seem to be doing well now.”
Houle grunted. “Sometime Friday, I got up, looked in the mirror, and got a little scared. Up till then, I was mostly … numb. But I looked at myself, and I saw one of those guys you try to avoid when you go into the city, mumbling to themselves on the street in torn clothes and dirty shoes. That was when I showered and shaved. Cut myself to pieces, hadn’t tried to take a beard off since college. But it brought me around, a little.”
He looked toward the garden. “Then I came out here, saw the ashes—the urn, I mean, and said fuck the law, said it out loud, and spread Caroline among the flowers, where she belongs.” Houle moved his head the other way. “Then I saw the shed over there, halfway done, and figured I could work on it some, and that brought me around a little more. I’m building it better than it has to be, but …” Just a shrug.
“I’m sorry to have to do this, but I need some more information.”
Houle came back to me. “Look, I’m sorry. You’ve got a job to do. I don’t remember what all we talked about last time, so you might have to repeat some of it for me.”
“Since I spoke to you, somebody went through Darbra’s apartment.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I got a call from a Boston detective. Police, I mean. A woman. It was only … Sunday, maybe, but I don’t remember her name.”
“Sergeant Bonnie Cross?”
“Right. Cross. She asked me where I was on Saturday and Sunday both, and I told her I was here. I’d been here all week. Then I asked her why she wanted to know, and she said some guy Darbra knew was dead.” Houle looked at me harder. “You told me about some … men she was seeing, right?”
“Right.”
“Good, because that’s what I told her—Cross, I mean. I didn’t know the guy—God, it’s terrible, I can’t even remember what she said his name was.”
“Teagle, Rush Teagle.”
“Teagle, right. Teagle. She said he was dead, and did I know him, and I said no, I didn’t. Then she asked me if I had a key to Darbra’s place, and I said I did, and she wanted to know if I still had it, and I said I thought so, but with everything else, I didn’t know where it was.”
“Did Cross also ask you if you knew any reason why somebody would search Darbra’s apartment?”
“Yeah. I told her no. I mean, it’s not like I bought her jewelry or something, and Darbra never had more than a twenty-dollar bill in her purse. Even that wouldn’t last the day, the way she bought herself little things.”
“What kind of little things?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Trinkets, knickknacks. They were all over the apartment.”
I thought about the Hummels and other figurines.
Houle said, “I always figured she was just compensating.”
“Compensating?”
“For being a little kid and poor. Like she never got presents from her mother except at Christmas and birthdays, and then probably not enough for her.”
“Darbra ever mention anything about somebody buying them for her?”
“No. I bought her some of the Hummels, but … wait a minute, you asked me about one of the guys at her store, right?”
“Right.”
“Rivlin?”
“Rivkind.”
“Right, right. That Cross asked me about him, too.”
“What about him?”
“Did I know if Darbra knew him, then about him being killed. She—the policewoman—wanted to know where I was then.”
“You told me Denver.”
“I told Cross the same thing. She said could I prove it, and I told her I guessed I could, but the receipts for the plane and the hotel and restaurants—you know, the expense account stuff?—all that was at the office. So I called the secretary this morning to messenger Cross what she needed.”
“Mr. Houle, you know anybody who’d have reason to hurt Darbra, or get somebody like Teagle to maybe do the job?”
“Hurt her? No. Darbra … Darbra can kind of rankle you, you know? Or fly off the handle, like she did with me in that restaurant.”
“When you thought she was acting.”
“Right. But she could do that, kind of put on an attitude for the occasion. She did it with me, often enough.”
“I don’t get you.”
“With, uh …” Houle looked over to the garden. “With like … sex games in her apartment.”
I thought about it. “But nobody who hated her.”
“Unless it was reciprocal.”
“Reciprocal?”
“Her brother, Wee Willie. She couldn’t stand him. I think I told you that, or at least his name.”
I’d also told Houle that I was working for William Proft, but I let it pass. “Darbra ever say anything about her brother threatening her?”
“No. No, nothing like that, ever. Just that she hated him and hated that she had to split the money from her mother with him. That’s about all she ever said to me about Wee Willie, except for his … preferences.”
“What do you mean?”
“His …” Another look at the garden, shorter this time. “His sexual preferences.”
“What were they?”
“That’s just it. Darbra told me she didn’t think he had any.”
I was thinking the same thing when Houle said, “Look, I don’t want to seem … touchy, but it’s kind of hard for me to talk about these things … here.”
“I’m sorry I have to ask about them.”
He nodded.
Aware of the last few days with Nancy, I said, “One thing that might help.”
Houle looked harder at me again. “What’s that?”
“Time. It’s been a while since I lost my wife, and over time, it gets easier.”
He nodded, the eyes starting to fill.
I said, a little quickly, “You ride it out, somebody else can matter again.”
Houle rubbed the back of his wrist across his nose. “Yeah, thanks.”
Watching him dam it in, I really didn’t want to stay or say much more, but I couldn’t be sure Cross thought to tell him something he might not have realized on his own. “One last thing, Mr. Houle?”
“Yeah?”
“Both Abraham Rivkind and Rush Teagle were killed by fireplace pokers.”
“Fireplace … ?”
“Pokers. And as I said, it might be that both Rivkind and Teagle had relationships, sexual relationships, with Darbra Proft.”
He just stared at me. “So?”
“So you did, too.”
Houle stared some more, then started. “What? You mean … ?”
“I don’t know what I mean, but I don’t think it’s only coincidence. I think you ought to be careful, just in case.”
He worked his hands together, like he was washing them rather than praying with them. “Jesus, you mean like … hire a bodyguard?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know you well enough to give you advice. And I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily. But it’s something that comes to mind, and I wasn’t sure you saw it.”
Houle swallowed hard. “Another Ex-Lax.”
“What?”
A few tears, the eyes bewildered. “Another laxative. God taking them so he can really shit on you.”
I stood up, said again I was sorry for his loss, and left him, Roger Houle now looking not that much different than he had the first time I’d met him.
The address Cross had given me for Howard Ling was in Allston. It turned out to be a brick building just off Brighton Ave. with a hardware store on the street level and three floors of apartments above. I found a metered space a block down, then walked back, the entryway next to the hardware having an unlocked outer door and just the word LING and an oriental character handwritten under the middle buzzer.
Instead of pressing the button, I climbed the stairs. The second floor smelled strongly of garlic, the next like the vent from the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. There was only one doorway on that third floor, so I knocked. I heard a kind of growling, more human than animal. I was about to knock harder when the door opened, a hissing voice saying something in a language that might have been Chinese.
Looking into the apartment, I saw the kid with the dreadlocks standing in front of me, the one Rush Teagle had called “Hack.” He wore black jeans and no top and held one of those small, strawed boxes of Gatorade in his hand. Behind him, an Asian man in his forties was lying on the couch. The man wore just a strappy T-shirt and boxer shorts. One leg was half off the bed, the sock half off the foot, and one arm was up and around the neck, as though he were trying to put himself into a half nelson. The man was snoring irregularly and giving every indication of sleeping off a monumental drunk.
The kid didn’t like me at his doorstep, but the way he looked behind him told me he didn’t like the man being awakened even more.
Quietly, I said, “Why don’t we step outside, Howie.”
In the hissing voice, he said in English, “Don’t call me that.”
“Fine. Outside still looks better.”
Another look over the shoulder. “All right, all right.”
He did something to the door lock with his free hand, then came out, closing the door behind him so that it barely clicked shut. The corridor had a black rubber runner tacked down here and there with carpet staples, the runner buckling at the beginning and end of each flight of stairs. The walls were plaster and painted pumpkin-orange, but there were enough crumble spots that the white showed through, like mold on a damp vegetable.
Howard Ling said, “What do you want?”
“First things first. What should I call you?”
“Hack. That’s my name.”
“Not according to the police, Hack.”
“They need the righteous one for their paperwork, that’s like their problem, not mine. I didn’t have anything to do with Rush getting killed, man.”
“Kind of an abrupt segue, don’t you think?”
Ling took a sip of his Gatorade. “I don’t know what to think.”
“You and Rush and the other two were supposed to do a gig on Saturday night, right?”
“We already told the cops everything.”
“Indulge me, Hack.”
“Why should I? You gonna beat me up?”
“Maybe we could just wake your dad, have him talk it over with you.”
“He’s not—” Ling caught his voice rising, lowered it. “He’s my stepfather.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“Out buying him more booze so when he wakes up, he’ll drink some more and go back to sleep.”
I took a breath. “I’m sorry.”
Ling seemed to soften a little. “You don’t see it much in us. Drunks, I mean. Not a very ‘Chinese’ vice, you know?”
“About that night.”
“What night?”
“When Teagle was killed. You guys had a gig, right?”
Ling got more tired than soft. “Right.” He took another sip.
“And Rush didn’t show.”
“Right. But we didn’t like know he was dead.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember the last time you saw your friend?”
“No, man, I don’t.”
“How many friends you have get killed?”
Almost a smile, the kid’s face angelic. “Like Rush, just two. First was this crackhead, he smoked a pipe with the wrong dude. The other took a little speed one night, thought the Mass Pike was the Daytona 500, and crossed the median doing about a hundred and five.”