Authors: Jeremiah Healy
“You were the one involved in the shooting at Middlesex last month.”
“Correct.”
She glanced down at the ID again as she returned it to me. “That still your address?” She was leering at me and peripherally checking for Paul’s reaction. Lovely woman.
I stood up. “Just call us when Marsh arrives.”
He didn’t look like an insurance salesman. What he looked like was a snake.
Marsh came into the conference room dressed in old corduroy pants and a windbreaker with a chamois workshirt underneath. He had black hair, short but shaggy, with the kind of wispy mustache that insecure nineteen-year-olds affect just after basic training. In his thick-soled “tanker” boots, he was three inches over my six two plus, but he was too lean and bony, as if someone had siphoned the flesh off him.
Arnold said, “Roy, I believe the only person you don’t know is Mr. Cuddy. John Cuddy, Roy Marsh.”
Marsh sniffled and said, “Who’s he?”
I’d already prepared Chris for Arnold’s reply. “Mr. Cuddy is a private investigator looking after Hanna’s interests.”
Marsh looked at me and sniffled again. “You got any ID?”
I showed him. His mannerisms were herky-jerky. I couldn’t read his eyes because of the opaque lenses on the aviator sunglasses he wore, but I had a pretty good idea what I’d see in them, especially if I could check for cartilage holes up his nostrils as well.
Cocaine. And lots of it.
Handing back my identification, he grinned at Hanna, who looked down. “How you plan on paying for him?”
Chris reddened but didn’t say anything. Marsh said, “He sees those stretch marks, he won’t be too much interested in your interests anymore.”
Chris coughed and said, “Felicia, I really gotta make that closing. Can we—”
“Just hold on, boy! This is my financial future we’re going to be talking about, and I want things done nice and slow and right. So we all know where we stand. Got it?”
It was pretty obvious where Hanna stood. But Chris was the lawyer, not me.
Arnold said sweetly, “Roy, why don’t you pull up a chair and we can get started.”
Marsh having seized the initiative, Arnold exploited it. In detail, she went over Roy’s financial statement, all typed out with elaborate exhibits. She even managed not to laugh when Chris produced his version of Hanna’s financials. As the talk centered on Marsh’s income, Roy looked bored. I don’t think I would have been bored.
According to Arnold, Marsh made over $200,000 in each of the last three years working for the Stansfield Insurance Agency. That built the waterfront house at 13 The Seaway in Swampscott, for which Arnold had a written, certified appraisal of $150,000 against an outstanding mortgage of $40,000. The appraisal seemed low to me, but there was more to come: the BMW 633i that Marsh leased; the Escort station wagon, purchased for cash, that Hanna had taken; a twenty-six-foot inboard motor racer bought entirely on time; a snowmobile and trailer; and thousands of dollars of video and stereo equipment, hunting rifles, and club memberships. Rampant consumerism, but no real investments. Life in the fast lane.
Chris looked at his watch and wanted to start talking about more immediate things, such as temporary support, but he had let Arnold set the conference agenda and now she insisted, gently but firmly, on sticking to it. I suspected Marsh’s late arrival had more to do with negotiating tactics than any business commitment he had, and Arnold’s approach confirmed it. She was forcing Chris, because of his other appointment, to plod through the property stuff first, getting those long-term important matters resolved to Marsh’s advantage before even considering the short-term issues.
Arnold represented that Marsh was maintaining $250,000 in life insurance payable to Hanna for the benefit of Vickie. Chris didn’t scrutinize the certificate Arnold waved at him. Stupid. A guy in the business like Marsh could easily hoke one up. Chris should have realized that and insisted on a letter directly from the insuring company itself, postmarked at home office.
Then Arnold committed Marsh to paying Chris’s legal expenses (“Would ten thousand be satisfactory, Chris?” “Ten … oh, yeah, sure, so long as we don’t gotta go to trial over anything.” “Oh, I’m sure we won’t. We’re all reasonable people here”). Roy was getting more bored, and impatient too, I expect because he had other things elsewhere that he wanted to deal with now that he didn’t need to worry about Chris’s efforts on his wife’s behalf.
Marsh, however, had underestimated Hanna.
Just as Chris was about to agree that Hanna would trade her half of the house for a cash buy-out of $55,000, Hanna spoke for the first time. “No.”
Chris and Arnold stopped talking. Marsh’s head snapped to attention.
Arnold said, “But Hanna, the fifty-five thousand represents a fair share. It’s half of the hundred-fifty fair market value minus the mortgage of forty.”
“Yeah,” said Chris, “See, it’s half the equity in the house.”
Hanna stared down at her hands, clamped together and whitening on the table top. “No. The house is worth more, much more than that.”
Arnold said, “But Hanna, we have an appraisal.”
Hanna said to Chris, “Do we have an appraisal?”
“Well, no, we don’t. But jeez, Hanna, this here is from a reputable real estate firm.”
Hanna said, “You ever have business with them before?”
“Well, no … but—”
“Then I want an appraisal, too.”
Marsh started to say something but Arnold said, “Certainly, Hanna. If that’s what you want, I can easily commission another firm to do one. I must say though—”
“No.”
“No?”
Hanna motioned at me. “No, I want the other appraisal from somebody Mr. Cuddy picks.”
Each person turned to look at me, and I thought, “That’s just swell.”
Marsh said to me, “Just who the hell do you think you are?”
Arnold said, “Hanna, I’m sure Mr. Cuddy wouldn’t be familiar with—”
“I trust him.” No missing the implication there.
Marsh glared at her and started to say, “If you think …”
I said, “What harm could it do?”
Marsh whirled over to me and ripped off the aviator glasses. His pupils contracted from tea saucers to pinpoints. “The fuck asked you?”
I said, “Marsh, which hand do you write with?”
“What?”
“Which hand do you use when you write?”
Nobody else said anything. Marsh put his glasses back on with his left hand.
I said, “My guess is you’re a lefty. That right, Hanna?”
“Yes.”
“The fuck you want to know that for?”
“Because my dad always told me never to break the hand a man writes with. Especially here, since that’d restrict your making money and signing support checks and all.”
Marsh started flexing his fingers, then caught himself.
Arnold said wearily, “Could we all drop this macho posturing for a while and return to business?”
Marsh let her save face for him, sagging back into his chair and folding his arms. He looked up at the ceiling as he said in a low voice to Hanna, “You really ought to take the fifty-five, honey.”
Hanna said, “I want the house. The house itself.”
Marsh bolted forward and I got ready. He yelled, “You what?”
Hanna’s voice quavered but she pressed on. “That is the home that Vickie knows. Where she has grown and has her friends. This divorce thing is already hard for her. She should get to stay there with her mother.”
Marsh slammed both his palms on the table and rose halfway out of his chair. “You fucking greedy bitch!”
Arnold said, “Roy, please—”
“The fuck you letting her get away with here? That house is mine! Goddamn it, I built that house. Every fucking board and nail came from money I earned, busted my ass for while she sat around trying to learn English off the soap operas and embarrassing me in front of my friends and contacts.” He sank back down and refolded his arms. “No fucking house, and no fucking appraisal by Mr. Shitface here.”
Arnold said, “Why don’t we move on to—”
“Move fucking on all you want. The house stays with me, and the offer just dropped to fifty, and it’s not looking too steady there, either.”
Chris said, tentatively, gaugingly, “Hey, hey, we can come back to the house, all right? Felicia, how about the temporary support now?”
Hanna was crying. Not making any more noise than labored breathing requires, but both eyes were pinched closed and tears were sliding down her cheeks and onto the table. Arnold pulled open a drawer in the console behind her and lifted out a box of Kleenex. Daintily setting the box next to Hanna, Arnold touched her arm to suggest taking some.
Hanna stabbed at the box. Felicia, pretending to read Chris’s handwritten financial statement, said, “I’m afraid the support’s going to be a tough one, Chris.”
“I’m really sorry about this, Hanna, but I already postponed this closing thing twice, and the bank attorney’ll kill me if I’m not at the Registry by two-thirty.”
Chris rolled up the window and pulled away, leaving Hanna and me standing on a street corner in Salem. We were only a short hop by cab from Chris’s house in Peabody, and I wanted Hanna to get a chance to compose herself and have something to eat before she saw her daughter. On the ride from Marblehead, it had been decided that I’d give Hanna and Vickie a lift home. Chris had spent most of the ride gloating over what a great deal he’d worked out on everything but the house, which he thought Hanna should “rethink.” I was a less than objective observer at the conference, but in my opinion Arnold had stolen Chris’s pants without undoing his belt. The problem was it was Hanna’s, and Vickie’s, future that was on the line.
We found a small French restaurant called the Lyceum. With exposed-brick walls and high windows and ceilings, it was a pleasant and airy place to hold a postmortem. It being the end of the lunch hour, a few words whispered by me to the hostess got us a nice table away from the boisterous Friday hangers-on ordering one more carafe of the house white. I was pretty sure that if things couldn’t be settled, Hanna and Roy would be litigating their differences in the Essex County Family and Probate Court a few blocks away.
I tried to make small talk for a while, but received only nods and one-word replies. Finally Hanna said, “Thank you for trying to help.”
“You handled a difficult time well.”
She nudged the remains of a large spinach salad around with a fork. “What do you think I should do?”
“Change lawyers by sundown” was what I thought, but it wasn’t my place to say it. “It seems to me that the house, even without seeing it, is probably worth more than the appraisal said. I also think you’re right to want to have it all, especially for Vickie’s sake.”
“My husband …” She almost smiled. “I must stop calling him so. Roy is a bad man to push like that.”
“Just what kind of man is he, really?”
She hooded her eyes. “The kind you don’t tell to do things unless you can beat him.”
I considered asking her a lot about old Roy, but I had hired on as bodyguard, not psychotherapist. We closed out lunch by my promising to press Chris to get a second appraisal of the marital home.
We got a taxi on the corner and rode to Chris’s house. The cab had no sooner pulled away than Vickie came bounding out the front door, laughing and calling, “Mommie! Mommie! Wait till you see what Eleni and I made!”
Inside the kitchen, Vickie proudly displayed the file folders they had assembled and the tray of baklava they had made. We each had a slice of the sweet pastry while Hanna kept her daughter focused on the morning with Eleni and away from the conference in Marblehead.
As Hanna went with Vickie to gather her things for the ride home, Eleni tugged on my sleeve.
“Things, they go well?” she said, without much confidence.
“No violence. A tough negotiation, but I’m no expert at judging lawyer talk.”
Eleni rested her forehead in the palm of a hand. “When the husband come here, I see him. He smile at me when he leave. Not a nice smile, John.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“And not a nice man, John. Not just bad. He have the look.”
“The look?”
“The look of the men I leave Greece to get away from. A man who does the gambling, visits the whores, beats the wife. The look of a man who like to hurt.”
I could hear Hanna and Vickie coming back into the room behind me. Eleni said, quietly but insistently, “Watch good for them, John. Chris, he … cannot.”
We got in my car, Vickie pleased with the ancient bucket seats fore and aft. She babbled on the way kids do, about her friends in Swampscott (“There’s Ginny, and Karen, and Fred, but nobody
ever
wants to play with him”), her cat (“I know Cottontail’s kind of a funny name for a kitty, but she’s all white all over, and …”), her starting kindergarten in the fall (“I hope Fred’s not in my class, but I don’t know how they do things like that”). Ordinarily, I can’t abide kid noise, but it was nice to have something filling the air.
We arrived at the dilapidated three-decker and Vickie said, “Oooooh, wait till you see Cottontail! You’ll love her, too.”
Before I had turned off the motor, Vickie was out of the car, urging her mother to hurry. Once in the building foyer, Vickie ran to their apartment door. “Cottontail? Cotton? We’re home!” She put her ear up to the discolored wood and concentrated. “I can hear her crying. She must have missed us. It’s okay, Cottontail, we’re coming.”
Hanna put the key in the lock, and Vickie burst in, calling the cat’s name and getting a mewling sound from the back. “Oh, she must have got all tangled up again.” She darted down the hall.
Hanna said, “You like something to drink, maybe?”
“No, I—”
The screaming cut me off. Hanna veered and raced the way her daughter had. “Vickie! Vickie!”
I caught up with them at the entrance to a rear bedroom. Vickie’s face was burrowing into her mother’s stomach, her screams muffled by Hanna’s dress. Hanna’s eyes were closed, and she was saying, “Don’t look, don’t look.”
I pressed by them into the room. Although the wallpaper was dingy and scaly, there were some bright yellow curtains around the window and a yellow blanket covering the twin-size iron frame bed. The window itself had a pane of glass missing, and the broken shards were scattered on the sill, bed, and floor. But that wasn’t the major damage.