Authors: Jeremiah Healy
We laughed. I said, “How about dinner tomorrow?”
A frown. “I can’t. I promised a friend of mine from New York that I’d fly down on the shuttle tomorrow afternoon and stay the weekend with her.”
“Monday then?”
“Sounds great.”
“I’ll pick you up at your office, and we can eat at Locke Ober’s.”
“Percy Plunger. Are we celebrating?”
“Anticipating.”
She smiled. “Make it about six-fifteen. Whenever I break away early on a Friday, things pile up.”
After the network news, I kissed Nancy goodnight and drove home to the eight-unit brownstone on Beacon Street. I parked my Fiat 124 in the assigned space behind the building, the lamp pole’s light supposedly discouraging the car strippers that are a constant of downtown living. A couple of years ago, our state legislature passed a Home Defense bill, which basically gives a resident the right to shoot an intruder who the resident believes might cause serious injury or death. Now some of the gentry wanted a Blaupunkt Defense bill, which would allow the owner of a BMW to shoot any thirteen-year-old breaking into the car for the radio. I wouldn’t bet against it.
Walking around to the front of my building, I got my mail from the entrance foyer and climbed the stairs to the condo. My landlord, a doctor on a two-year residency program in Chicago, had decorated the place with Scandinavian Design furniture. In daytime, the pieces were cheerily set off by the ultraviolet rays flooding through the seven living room windows. Now, however, I had to use the lights.
My home answering machine glowed one message in fluorescent green-on-black. I rewound the incoming cassette while I called my office answering service. The service said a friend of mine from college, a lawyer in Peabody, needed to speak with me. He was on the tape too as it replayed.
“John, Chris Christides. Jeez, I hate these things, you know, you never know how much … Anyway, they had you on the news, from the courtroom thing again. I’m in kind of a tight spot with one of my cases tomorrow, and I’d really appreciate your giving me a call tonight, anytime. Thanks.”
I hadn’t seen Chris in maybe four years. He was a third-string offensive guard on our Holy Cross team back when ability and heart meant a little more than size. He was only about five nine, but at two hundred he hit like a bowling ball with legs, blocking on sweep plays and specialty teams. Dialing his number, I thought also, and painfully, about his wife, Eleni.
“Hello?” said a familiar accented woman’s voice.
“Eleni?”
“Yes? Who is this?”
Her words were more slurred than I remembered, but only a little more. A good sign, I hoped.
“Eleni, it’s John Cuddy. Chris called me.”
“Oh, John! It is good to hear the voice. How are you?”
“I’m well, thanks.”
“John, I know Chris need to see you, but he is not here now. Can you come his office tomorrow, nine o’clock?”
“Do you have any idea what it’s about?”
“No. I know Chris is very worried on this case, and if he talk to you, he could tell why.”
I thought of asking her to have Chris call me back, but then I pictured her, the way she looked the last time I’d seen her, and pushed away an image of what further progression of the multiple sclerosis had done to her by now. “I’ll be there. He still in the building on Lowell Street near the courthouse?”
“No, no. He give that up, John. He have the office here in the house now. We fix up the garage.”
I caught myself estimating mentally what Beth’s last few months with the cancer would have done to our finances without Empire’s hospital plan. I didn’t want to think how Eleni’s illness might have drained them. She gave me directions I half recognized, and we said good-bye.
Talking with her on the phone had quashed most of the good spirits left over from dinner with Nancy. I read more bad news in the
New York Times
for another hour or so, then went to bed early.
I
WAS UP BY
6:30, thumping over Storrow Drive on the Fairfield footbridge by 7:00. I headed downstream, favoring the waterside path over the roadside one.
People who say they can’t stand running must never have jogged along the Charles River. I passed the giant layered bust of Arthur Fiedler, the late conductor of the Boston Pops. The mustached granite face eternally watches the Hatch Shell stage from across the field where thousands, over half a million at Fourth of July, would cheer for the orchestra and him. Near a scullers’ boathouse, I almost collided with Robert Urich, practicing a firing stance with his .45 while filming a “Spenser for Hire” sequence on location. In the water, geese were landing, mallards were swimming and cormorants were diving. What more can you ask from a sport?
I forded the river courtesy of the Museum of Science and turned upstream on the Cambridge side, recrossing at the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. I went in the Bildner’s food emporium near Commonwealth for muffins and orange juice. Back on the street, I saw a throng of well-dressed office workers waiting outside a shuttered video store. The air was chilly, and they were stamping around, flapping their arms and checking their watches like a line of addicts outside a methadone clinic.
At the condo, I showered, shaved, and debated what to wear. When I was an investigator at Empire, I talked with another classmate in Legal about throwing some simple cases Chris’s way. Unfortunately, Chris was the kind of lawyer that dressed in nubby polyester sports jackets and ill-matched slacks. His files were coffee-stained and never contained the right documents in the proper order. In the words of the guy in Legal, it was one thing to wish Chris well but quite another to refer him an insured as a client.
I rummaged through the closet. While I didn’t want to outshine Chris by wearing a suit, I also figured there was at least a chance I’d have to be in court with him that morning. I pulled out gray slacks, a blue blazer, and a conservative striped tie.
I drove to Route 1 and followed it north, mercifully opposite the choked, honking traffic crawling southbound into the city. Route 1 is a mixed bag of wholesome family restaurants, space-devouring businesses like fence companies and lumberyards, and pornographic adult entertainment centers. As I passed one, its marquee read:
ALL NEW! “A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND” AND “EVERYBODY COMES BETWEEN ME AND MY CALVINS.”
I turned northeast at the Route 128 interchange, and then shortly thereafter took the exit for Route 114. After a mile and a half of suburban forks, I found the Christideses’ house.
It was a small ranch on a quarter of an acre. I remembered when they bought it, to be their “starter” home. Back when her inability to conceive was thought to be a temporary aberration in an otherwise healthy woman. Then Eleni began to suspect that the infertility might be related to the occasional tremors she experienced in her legs. She nearly didn’t mention them to her doctor, “they was such a small thing.” After the tests and the retests came the confirmation. There was no relationship between the unsteadiness and the infertility, but the tremors were just the first signals of MS.
I left the Fiat curbside, even though the driveway had been widened to simulate a parking area for the converted garage. The new office appeared makeshift from the outside, not exactly the kind of facade that would inspire confidence in the professional working behind it. Chris’s old sedan, a Pontiac that had two years on my coupe, slumped over the macadam abutting the space where the overhead door used to hang.
I knocked on a human-size entrance and heard Chris’s voice say, “Yeah, come in.”
The cramped reception area was paneled in bottom-of-the-line imitation pine that was already starting to yellow. I stepped around three molded plastic chairs of different colors and a low veneered coffee table with some ragged magazines. Chris stood at a desk that seemed secretarial but had no one behind it. He once told me that he was the first member of his family to go to college, much less law school. From what I remembered of his professional stature four years earlier, he was losing ground.
“John, John! Jeez, it’s good to see you.”
He hustled over to shake my hand, clutching and crushing a manila folder in his left fist. His curly black hair looked home-cut. Wearing a shirt whose collar points were a decade too long, he’d also put on thirty pounds that he didn’t carry well.
“Chris, it’s been a while. How’s Eleni doing?”
His broad, mobile face drooped. “The best she can. With the MS, sometimes it’s the muscles, other times the breathing or the voice. What can you do?”
He began to walk backward toward a half-opened door. “Come on into my office so we can sit. I got a temp that was supposed to be here twenty minutes ago, but you and I gotta talk quick if we’re gonna be on time.”
I figured he’d tell me for what.
“Chris, I don’t do divorce cases.”
“This isn’t like a divorce case.”
“Chris, you’re representing this woman, right?”
“Hanna. Her name’s Hanna Marsh.”
“Hanna. And she’s got a five-year-old daughter?”
“Right. Victoria. Vickie.”
“And in an hour you’re supposed to be in Marblehead at the office of the attorney for Hanna’s husband to discuss things like custody, support, and division of property?”
“Well, yeah, of course things like that, but—”
“Chris, that sounds a hell of a lot like a divorce case to me.”
Chris whoofed out a breath and held up both his hands. “Jeez, John, will you just let me tell it all the way out first?”
“All right.”
“Then you can make up your mind.”
“I said all right. Go ahead.”
“All right.” Chris collected himself, opened the file, then closed it again. “Aw, I don’t need the details to tell you the way it is. This Hanna, she and her husband live—lived, the husband’s still there—in Swampscott. She moved out on him and took the kid with her. Somehow she ends up at the doorstep of this woman that I represented some years back in
her
divorce but never charged.”
“Never charged?”
“Billed, billed. Never billed. I used to do a lot of kinda courtesy stuff for family and friends in the Greek community here and there, you know? You’re in solo practice, you gotta do those kinds of cases to get the better ones, the bigger ones later.”
“Go on.”
“Anyway, this former client’s got an apartment to rent, and I guess Hanna musta seen it in the paper. Hanna’s from Germany, met her husband when he was in the army over there, and she hasn’t got any relatives over here. Truth is, she ain’t got a pot to piss in, but Nerida—that’s my former client—she sees Hanna and the little kid and, well, she takes ’em in, cat and all.”
“Cat?”
“Yeah. The little kid, Vickie, she’s got a cat, kitten, whatever.”
“I don’t see—”
“So, Hanna and Vickie are in the crummy first floor of the three-family here while the husband, his name’s Roy, Roy Marsh, lives in a waterfront contemporary he had built over there in Swampscott.”
“And you’re representing Hanna against him.”
“We already established that.”
“Chris, it still sounds like a divorce to me.”
“Just wait, just wait a minute, okay?”
I looked at him but didn’t talk.
“You see, I don’t need you to do any investigating here. I mean, like assets or peephole stuff or like that. This guy Marsh is loaded, and I’ve got him dead to rights on at least one solid affair with a nurse who works Samaritan Hospital. This nurse, you wouldn’t believe it, is off Mondays and Tuesdays yet, perfect for screwing around, huh? Plus Hanna says he’s done God knows how many pickups, hookers even.”
“You’ve got him financially and morally, where do I fit in?”
Chris shifted his eyes down and away from me, fiddling with a ballpoint that had printing on its side, a giveaway advertisement from some bank. “He scares me, John.”
I watched Chris until I realized I was making him uncomfortable. “What do you mean?”
“Just that. You think it’s easy for me to say?” Chris squirmed in his chair, rubbing his left knee. His “civilian-preservation” knee, he called it senior year of college, the injury that kept him out of the draft’s chilly grasp. “The guy scares me.”
“Has he done something?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, threatened you, what?”
Chris glanced up at me, not liking this at all. “Nerida, this former client, she calls me and pours out Hanna’s sob story. Then Nerida calls Eleni, and tells her, and so Eleni nags at me till …” Chris gestured at the folder. “Look, I’m not complaining. This is a good case. Jeez, maybe a dream case, the guy’s earning power. But this Marsh, as soon as he hears I’m gonna represent his wife, he comes in here, to my office. Nobody out in reception that day, he comes in, stands in that doorway there, and just looks at me.”
“Looks at you?”
“Yeah, just looks at me. I know he was doing it before I looked up from what I was working on, because I could feel the guy staring down at me. Anyway, he looks at me, and when I ask him what he wants, he says, ‘I just wanted a look at you. I just wanted a look at the man who thinks he’s gonna take away everything I’ve worked for.’ He wasn’t yelling. Jeez, he didn’t even say it angry or nothing. Just low and even, like he was some gunslinger in a western. He stared and said that, and left. He didn’t even tell me his name, like automatically I’d know who he was.”
“Did you?”
“Did I?”
“Did you know it was Roy Marsh?”
“Oh, yeah, Hanna described him to me. She’s afraid of him, too. Along with everything else, it seems he was a little free with his hands.”
“Can’t you get the court to order him not to bother you? Or Hanna?”
“In a general sort of way, yeah. But we’re not at that stage yet.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, we haven’t filed for divorce yet, so there’s nothing for the court to order him on.”
“Why don’t you file?”
“There’s a thirty-day separation requirement, and Hanna only moved out a coupla weeks ago. I could go to court and get that waived, but in these things it’s usually better over the long haul to avoid ruffling feathers.”
“Meaning, don’t make the other side mad in the short run by having court orders against him?”