Speak Ill of the Living (11 page)

Chapter 14

The black “shorty” helmet on Eddie's head fit like an upturned mixing bowl, barely covering the tops of his ears. Durkin had also given Eddie a pair of round aviator goggles so he wouldn't lose an eye to a stray pebble or an unlucky bumblebee.

The bike handled better than it looked, though it had taken Eddie a dozen harrowing laps around Tony's garage to understand that steering a motorcycle was a little counter-intuitive. He also had to train his foot to shift gears, and he had almost run over Durkin in verifying Tony's warning about “target fixation.” Eddie's hands shook on the handlebars every time he thought about Durkin's friend, the late Chuckie, who had died on this bike—under it, actually.

But as he cruised the city's byways toward Lew Cuhna's newspaper office in South Lowell, Eddie enjoyed the warm wind on his face. He enjoyed the odd looks he got from motorists and pedestrians, who seemed to view him as something between nuisance and criminal. He could even learn to overlook the high-velocity grease splatter the bike's chain spit on his pants.

The Second Voice
newspaper was in a former laundromat, with apartments on the second floor, overlooking a busy intersection on the outskirts of a commercial zone of big-box department stores. Not the best place for a news office—it was often a slow crawl through traffic to downtown Lowell, the center of city government and the arts community. Cuhna's building was painted light peach with white trim. The paper's name was stenciled in white letters in giant headline font on a picture window that looked into the office. The fluorescent ceiling lights were on inside, but Eddie didn't see anyone at work as he drove up. The digital clock at the bank across the street said that Eddie was three minutes early.

He threaded The Late Chuckie's rat bike down the alley between Cuhna's building and a wallpaper store, and then killed the engine next to a Dumpster. He left his goggles and helmet on the seat and walked to the front door. He was about to knock when he noticed that Lew Cuhna had taped an index card inside the window. It said:

Side door. Wait til nobody's looking!

An arrow pointed to the left side of the building.

Cuhna's cloak and dagger personality was getting annoying.

Eddie walked down a concrete wheelchair ramp and around the side. The door there was glass, formerly the entrance to a diner.

Eddie looked around, made sure nobody was looking, grimaced at his own silliness in going along with Cuhna's note, and then went inside.

The old diner's breakfast counter was still in place, though the stools had been removed. There were no booths, either, just skinny L-shaped spots on the Linoleum, where the booths used to be.

The place was noisy. A radio on the counter was broadcasting the local afternoon talk show—guys yakking and laughing. Eddie heard a low whistling from another room, and, from deeper in the office, some clunky machinery.

“Hey Lew?” he yelled.

Nothing.

Eddie looked around again. The breakfast counter had been turned into a distribution center. Bundles of newspapers, bound by yellow plastic bands, were stacked chin-high. Two gray cabinets stood like sentries on either side of the door. Their drawers were open; a few manila folders were on the floor. Lew Cuhna was either messy, or had tried to find something in a hurry. The walls were covered with calendars given out free by local restaurants and insurance agents, cork bulletin boards papered with take-out menus and scribbles torn from notebooks, and a street map of Lowell, with circuitous distribution routes marked in pink, yellow and green highlighter.

Eddie turned off the radio.

He followed the whistling noise around the breakfast counter, through swinging double doors, and into a kitchen. The kitchen probably hadn't changed much since the building had been a restaurant; it was crowded with gleaming stainless steel appliances and countertops.

The whistle was coming from a round teapot on the stove. Eddie took it off the heat and turned off the flame. He noticed that Lew Cuhna had placed two ceramic mugs on the counter, a bag of chai spice tea in each.

Is he making me tea?

The teapot was nearly empty; most of the water had steamed out.

A side door led to a full bathroom, with sink and tub, a paper towel dispenser, no shower curtain and no mirror. The current edition of
The Daily Empire
was on the floor. The paper had come out in the early afternoon, so somebody had read it in here recently.

Eddie left the kitchen the way he had come in, walked around the counter again, and then into the main newsroom, a former laundromat. Eddie had to agree with what Cuhna had told him—the place had an overpowering smell of lemon detergent.

Nobody was there.

The room was a clutter of former laundry-folding tables, now piled over in documents, files, ancient telephone books, and newsprint. Most of the laundry equipment had been taken out, though there was still an oversized avocado-colored washer pushed against the wall, next to a whirling commercial clothes dryer with a digital countdown timer and a little glass porthole in the door. It was at work drying what sounded like a load of coconuts.

A row of steeply slanted tables against one wall drew Eddie's attention. They were old paste-up stations—the finest in 1980s-era newspaper technology, still in use at
The Second Voice
. Under this production system, a special printer spit news copy in paper strips, the width of a newspaper column. A paste-up artist—at this rinky-dink operation, probably Lew Cuhna himself—would cut the strips of type with a razor knife to the proper lengths to fit on a newspaper page. Using hot wax as glue, the artist arranged the columns of type on cardboard sheets, leaving spaces for the photos to be added later. The completed sheets then went to the camera room. Modern technology had done away with the whole setup; the job could be done more quickly on a computer screen.

A phone rang.

Eddie jumped. He slapped a hand over his heart in relief, feeling a tingle as a squirt of adrenaline upped his blood pressure. He had been invited to come here—there was even a note on the door telling him to come in—but he still felt like an industrial spy who had broken into a competitor's laboratory.

The ringing phone was on a receptionist's desk, near the front door. He considered whether he should answer. Cuhna obviously had ducked out in a hurry, not even bothering to shut off the stove. Maybe he was calling to explain. Would he have expected Eddie to answer the telephone in a foreign newsroom?

Eddie answered. “Hello?”

“
Second Voice
?” said a woman in a clipped tone.

“Yes it's the right number, but—”

“You people owe my bridge club a terrific apology!”

Eddie said, “Ma'am, I'm not the person you want to speak with.”

But the caller didn't want to hear any excuses from Eddie Bourque. She berated him: “We were expecting a photographer for our Pawtucketville tournament yesterday, and nobody from your arrogant little paper showed up.”

Eddie grabbed a pen. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he said, taking down the complaint. “I'll pass this message to the editor when he gets back.”

“That's it?” she shrieked. “Our tournament is ruined, and you'll make it up to us by
passing a note?
”

Eddie had fielded a hundred angry calls like this one during his journalism career. He had learned that it's not worth thirty minutes to explain why a paper with a tiny staff and ludicrous deadlines can't cover every neighborhood bridge tournament. But calls such as this allowed Eddie to exercise his God-given talent for sounding deathly serious whenever he wanted to, an ironic gift for a joker.

“Oh, I'll pass the note along,” Eddie said gravely, “and when Mr. Cuhna gets the message, I expect he'll
fire
the photographer immediately. This newspaper doesn't tolerate mistakes like that. She's outta here.”

A pause, then she repeated: “He'll fire her?”

“Neglect of duty is inexcusable, single mother or not.”

“She has children?”

Eddie lowered his voice, like he was sharing gossip: “Ever since her husband passed away, she's made one screw up after another. I'm sure that
this
will be the last one.”

Her anger now in perspective, the woman decided she wasn't so unhappy after all, and tried to talk Eddie out of giving the note to Mr. Cuhna. Eddie hedged, let her beg for a minute, then promised to throw away the note, and hung up.

He was pleased with himself for getting rid of a complaint and saving Lew Cuhna a headache, when he realized he didn't know what to do—should he leave? Or put the tea back on the stove and wait?

Waiting didn't make much sense. If Cuhna had ducked out for just a moment, he would have been back already. And if some emergency had come up, he would have called, or at least left a note.

Eddie sat at the receptionist's desk to pen his own note, telling Cuhna to call to reschedule. He added his cell phone number at the bottom, and then looked around for some tape.

Bzzzzzzz!

Eddie jumped again.

The commercial clothes dryer was buzzing as its time had expired. Eddie watched the laundry inside spin over.

The note fluttered from his hand.

The dryer load spun once more and Lew Cuhna's face thumped against the glass.

Chapter 15

“
This
one ain't a suicide, that's for damn sure,” Detective Orr said dryly. “Wounds around the neck clearly indicate strangulation.”

Eddie didn't look at her. He sat on the front steps of
The
Second Voice
and watched traffic, as he had for the past two hours.

He said, “The telephone cord was still around his neck when I found him.” He stared at a small stone in the parking lot, relaxed his eyes and let his vision blur. “I unwrapped the cord, tried to get him out of there…”

“There was nothing you could have done, Ed.”

“The body was hot to the touch. He felt bruised all over. He was fucking
cooking
in that thing.”

“He was dead before he went into the dryer, Ed.”

“Then why put him in there?”

“Because some people are sick,” she snapped. She pulled out her notebook and flipped a few pages. “But more likely, to heat the body to make it impossible to determine when the crime took place. In this case, the medical examiner can't estimate the time of death based on body-heat loss.”

“He must have died early this afternoon,” Eddie said. “Our appointment was for two. He had water boiling for tea.”

“Two mugs,” she said. “But you don't drink tea.”

Eddie shrugged. “How would he know?” He stiffened as the black-suited men from the funeral home wheeled the black bag on a stretcher to a waiting hearse.

“Are you sure you have no idea what he wanted to see you about?” Orr asked.

“I've been thinking about that. Lew was a strange guy. Last time I saw him, he said he trusted me—or something like that—I thought he was under too much deadline stress. What did he want to tell me? Could have been anything.” Eddie put his head in his hands. “I hope it wasn't what got him killed.”

“We have to go over the basics, Ed. Can you do it now?”

“Let's get it over with.”

Eddie described for Detective Orr the call he had received from Cuhna, and then everything he had done—and everything he had touched—after he had arrived at the news office. She took it all down in shorthand.

“You two didn't have any disagreements, did you?” she asked. “Nothing I'm going to find out about later, right?”

“Lucy!”

She raised a finger and scolded, “You ask tough questions in
your
job, and I don't get offended.”

She was right. She was doing her job; it would have been irresponsible for her not to ask. He shrugged. “I barely knew the guy. We met for the first time at the cop shop the day Roger Lime's photo first appeared.”

“What was Cuhna's reputation in the news business?” she asked. “Was he aggressive? Could he have been doing an investigative story on some criminal element? Maybe he made some enemies that way.”

“Oh, please,” Eddie said. Realizing he had sounded dismissive, he explained: “Lew was the editor of the paper and the only writer on staff—all those other bylines were fakes. He had no time for in-depth investigation. That's not even the kind of journalism
The Second Voice
does. They do art reviews, doughnut shop openings, the police blotter, and the school lunch menus, when they're not chasing the daily news a week behind the daily papers.”

“I don't like this coincidence,” she said. “Kidnappers show Roger Lime holding Mr. Cuhna's newspaper, and then somebody kills Mr. Cuhna.”

They watched the hearse drive off, its wheels scuffing over some sand on the parking lot.

“I had an old editor in Vermont,” Eddie said, “who said that everything we write is all part of the same story.”

Orr thought that over. “I had an old sergeant who used to say pretty much the same thing. That's why I had hoped the tip from your brother would pan out, but no luck. I tracked down your brother's old partner, Mr. Whistle.”

Uh-oh.
Eddie's stomach flash-froze. He had forgotten that Orr planned to talk to Whistle. If Jimmy told her that Eddie had visited him, too, Orr would suspect that Eddie lifted the old con's address from her office.

He waited for the toothy fake smile that Orr used when she was about to grill him. But the smile didn't come.

“Mr. Whistle was responsive to questioning,” she said, slipping into copspeak, “but could not provide any information useful to the investigation.”

How about that!
Eddie marveled at the irony—Jimmy Whistle testified against Eddie's brother thirty years ago, but he hadn't ratted on Eddie.

“Did he remember anything about Henry?” Eddie asked, probing as his gut thawed.

“He could not provide any information useful to the investigation,” she repeated. She gave him the piano key smile, and Eddie knew to drop the subject.

He took a deep breath to reboot his RAM, and focused on Lew Cuhna. “I suppose there will be a funeral,” he said.

Detective Orr was busy with her notes.

“Did Lew have a family?” Eddie asked.

“Huh?”

“Next-of-kin, in copspeak,” he said. He gave a sad smile.

Orr frowned. “No family that we know of.” She flipped to the first page of her notebook. Eddie liked that—her first questions had been whether the dead man had family. “I spoke to the advertising manager at this newspaper. He told me that Mr. Cuhna's parents had passed away. Cuhna had no siblings, no spouse, no ex-spouse. No steady girlfriend. No boyfriend either, as far as anyone knows.” She closed the book. “There's nobody.”

Eddie imagined Lew Cuhna's funeral—an open casket in front of two dozen empty folding chairs.

If a priest gives a eulogy and nobody hears it…did it matter that the person died?

It was easy for Eddie to picture his own body in the casket. If he had burned up in the Chevette, who would have come to the funeral? The widowed aunts who had raised him, some reporter friends left over from his work at
The Daily Empire
.

Is there nobody else?

“No family,” Eddie said, thinking aloud. “No one to mourn him.”

“At least there's nobody to be devastated by his death,” Orr said.

Eddie thought that over a moment. “I can't decide if that's a relief, or the saddest thing I've ever heard.”

***

The bike rumbled under Eddie on a meandering route toward downtown, past the Lowell Cemetery. For a moment he thought about turning into the graveyard and winding the bike along the curlicue streets, but the bright blanket of lilies and impatiens at the gates turned him away; he found the flowers too full of hope and he wanted to plow the bike through them. Lew Cuhna's murder had left Eddie angry and choked with frustration. What had Lew wanted to tell him?

Eddie needed a place to sort his thoughts.

He gave The Late Chuckie's rat bike the gas, and felt it lurch toward the Grotto. Jack Kerouac and his mother used to pray there. Eddie found it a good place to think.

He could pray, too, he told himself as he drove there, but knew he wouldn't. Eddie was an odd variety of spiritual person—he dropped often to his knees in thankfulness when times were good, but he preferred to meet crisis alone. It never seemed right to ask God to alter His world for Eddie Bourque. He also refused to pray when he was drunk, but that was just good manners.

The Grotto was across the river from Eddie's neighborhood of Pawtucketville, not far from the brick funeral home where Jack Kerouac was waked after his death in 1969. The Grotto was a shrine to the Virgin, modeled after one of Catholicism's holiest spots: the rocks and natural spring near Lourdes, France, where Saint Bernadette claimed in 1858 to have witnessed visions of Mary.

The Lowell shrine was concealed behind a grand old Victorian mansion of red brick and slate, formerly the Franco-American Orphanage. A person could live decades in Lowell and never know the shrine existed. Eddie had discovered the Grotto in Jack Kerouac's novel
Doctor Sax
, and had been thrilled to learn that a piece of Kerouac's youth had remained essentially unchanged.

Eddie slowed the bike at the Grotto's entrance, a curving paved road between a parking lot and playground. Down the right-hand side of the road were a dozen small shrines, each like a little wood and glass church, on pillars of smooth stones and concrete. Red lights in each box illuminated taffy-pink figurines representing the characters in the Stations of the Cross.

The shrine was built by a Canadian religious order; the Stations are labeled in French.

Jesus est condamné a mort.

At the end of the road is a man-made mound of rock and concrete, a little urban mountain the size of a house, blanketed by ivy, topped with a few small fir trees and a life-sized crucifix. From a notch in the mound, a statue of the Virgin gazes to Heaven.

Eddie swung his leg off the bike.

Sometimes the Grotto was crowded with elderly people praying the rosary, or uniformed parochial school boys punching each other when the nuns weren't looking, but not today.

Eddie was alone.

A shallow cave in the side of the mound contained a stone table, which was covered with two dozen white candles in clear glass jars, about half of them lit. Eddie wondered who had lit them. Faithful people, probably. Or people in trouble and desperate for faith. There was a little wooden bench in the cave, too, and a few prayer books on the table.

Eddie could hear traffic from behind the red brick mansion, but otherwise the shrine seemed to radiate silence.

Kerouac had written of the Grotto: “Everything there was to remind of Death, and nothing in praise of life.”

For Eddie, the shrine was not about death; it was proof that literature is immortal.

He walked to the far side of the stone hill and climbed the stairs that rose like a spine on its back. At the top, Eddie could see the Merrimack River, fat and lazy, through the green screen of a willow. He leaned against the iron cross and watched a wind surfer on the river pulling against a bulging blue triangle of sail.

He wondered what Henry was doing at that moment.

Perhaps he was staring through an inch of safety glass, out the one skinny window in his 11-by-7 cell. Eddie tried to imagine what Henry's view would look like. Razor wire. Trees in the distance. Cars whizzing along the street, going places no prison lifer would ever see.

Eddie had grown up in competition with Henry, though Eddie had never won as many trophies nor done as well in the classroom. That competition had driven Eddie; it had molded his personality. But even when he fell short of what Henry had accomplished, Eddie always knew that he had beaten his brother. Henry was a murderer and Eddie would never be—and that score eclipsed every road race Henry had won, and every test he had aced in algebra.

So why did Eddie still compete?

Through his life, Eddie had come to think of Henry as a different species. They shared parents, but so what? Eddie had gotten DNA from his folks, and not much else. He never felt a blood connection to his brother, and had been curious about him only from a distance, the way an anthropologist is curious about a backward and primitive tribe in the deepest recess of a distant land.

Shame had always kept Eddie from acting on that curiosity.

Eddie's parents never would have had a second child had Henry not been jailed for murder. Reduced to the barest and most brutal mathematics, Eddie owed his existence to Henry's double homicide.

He heard the inner echo of something Henry had said through the glass.

If you went back in time to save me, you'd destroy yourself.

Eddie pressed his palm on the metal cross, felt the heat it had collected from the sun. A secret truth suddenly revealed itself.

That's why I'm so goddam competitive.

He had not been chasing Henry's grades nor his high school track records. Not really.

Henry had killed and Eddie was born. Other lives had been traded for Eddie's. Not directly, of course, but that didn't seem to matter. For more than thirty years, Eddie had been competing with the universe to justify the trade.

He thought about the possibility that Henry was innocent.

Why had Eddie been so reluctant to believe that his brother could have been wrongly convicted? What if Henry could prove his innocence? How would that change the calculus of Eddie's life?

Eddie chuckled to himself, imagining Thanksgiving dinner at Bobbi's house every year. She'd probably make Eddie bring the turkey, and cook it, too.

But would it change me?

He looked up at the feet of the figure on the crucifix, just above his head. They reminded him of Dr. Crane's feet, suspended above his garage floor. Eddie realized that in almost every important way, Henry Bourque had been dead for thirty years. Bobbi was convinced that Eddie was the one who could bring his brother back from the death of a life sentence.

This really was a resurrection story, he thought.

Eddie breathed deep and looked down to where the shadow of the cross lay over his feet. The Grotto had been built for
those who believe in what they cannot know
. So had the Catholic Church, for that matter—so had all the churches.

Eddie pulled out his cell phone and dialed Bobbi's hotel.

She answered on the third ring after the call was transferred, sounding distant and unsure, “Um…hello?”

“I'll do it.”

“Eddie?”

“I'll talk to Henry.”

She paused. Eddie heard her sniffle. “Oh, little brother,” she said softly. “I just knew.”

“When?”

“I'll see when he's allowed another call.”

“I can't promise I can persuade him of anything.”

She sounded confident. “You'll do it.”

They hung up.

The Late Chuckie's rat bike needed a dozen kicks before it started. Eddie didn't mind. He was moving on autopilot, barely paying attention to the labor of stomping on the starter. The bike finally agreed to do its job.