Speak Ill of the Living (20 page)

Chapter 26

General VonKatz met Eddie at the door. He scratched Eddie's shoes to say, “Welcome home!” and “How was your day?” and “Is there food for me in that shopping bag?” Then the cat detected the scent of hot rotisserie chicken. The General whined like an ambulance and walked figure eights around Eddie's feet.

“Keep it down,” Eddie said. “The neighbors will think I never feed you.”

“Mwaaaaaaa! Mwaaaaaaa!” said the General, which, like everything in the language of cats, loosely translated to: “Me! Me!”

“You want somebody to call the SPCA? All right, take it easy, I'm cutting it right now.”

The General sprang to the countertop to make sure Eddie was properly cutting the bird. He pushed his head against Eddie's elbow. Some people have rules forbidding pets on the kitchen counter, but not Eddie; a cat doesn't care about your rules, so why give yourself a reason to get mad at it?

Eddie put the General's plate of minced chicken on the floor, and watched the cat leap from the counter, race to the plate, stop, carefully sniff, sniff, sniff, and then eat, swishing gray tail mopping a swathe of Linoleum.

Eddie ate the rest of the chicken, and then cracked a Rolling Rock.

He shoved the sofa against the door, sat, drank beer, and looked at the key Lew Cuhna had left for him. He could not imagine what waited at the post office in the morning. He felt a whoosh of anticipation. He fantasized about breaking and entering to use the key during the night…hmmm…naw. It would be there in the morning.

He was
so close
to some answers, and he started to get excited.

Wrong frame of mind, he reminded himself.

Lew Cuhna died for whatever is in that post office box.

The phone rang.

Mid-term exams were due. Probably another student's grandmother was about to recline upon the satin pillow.

He smiled, reached for the phone and then suddenly stiffened.

In his home, on his sofa, drinking a beer—what could feel safer? And that was the feeling the killer in the ski mask had warned of; the killer had pledged to appear the moment Eddie felt safe.

He closed the key tightly in one hand. With the other, he lifted the phone to his ear but said nothing.

After a moment, Detective Orr asked, “You there, Eddie?”

“It's you, Lucy. Okay.” He wiped his sleeve over his face. “Sorry, I'm a little jumpy.”

“A
little
jumpy?” she mocked. “Yeah, and my office is a
little
small.”

Eddie snickered. He had been afraid to mention the size of her office, but if Orr was making a joke about it, the topic was in play.

“I heard that your office used to be the broom closet,” Eddie joked, “until the janitor bought a second broom.”

Silence.

Oh boy.
Eddie cleared his throat. “Anyway, you called—what can I do for you?”

“Your sister-in-law hasn't returned the messages I left at her hotel. I'm beginning to worry about her willingness to be interviewed.”

“She's willing,” Eddie insisted.
That sounded defensive
. He added, “I mean, I asked her to call and we talked about it. I vouched for you.” He thought back. Did Bobbi ever say that she
would
call?

“If she's willing to call but hasn't, then it's my job, considering the circumstances, to worry about her well being,” said Orr. “When did you see her last?”

“Today. Um. Earlier.”

When we distracted your law enforcement colleague by creating a false disturbance, and then broke into a dead man's apartment and ransacked his stuff.

“This afternoon?”

“Yeah.”

“Specifics!”

“Mid-afternoon, uh, from around two-thirty to four, give or take,” Eddie blurted. What was it about Detective Lucy Orr that reduced Eddie to a blabbering knucklehead? “I can't pinpoint the time. I didn't wear a watch.”

“What were you two doing?”

Uh-oh.

Eddie might lie to a police officer by necessity, but he didn't want to lie to a friend. Maybe Lucy Orr and he were too close to be interviewer and interviewee. In journalism, it's trouble whenever reporters write about their friends, so the practice is banned by newsroom ethics.
Your college buddy just got elected state rep? He has a hot tip? Great, let's get somebody else to write about that.
Eddie wondered if cops had a similar code.

“I'm not going to tell you what we were doing,” Eddie said.

She made a grave little moan. “I can ask Detective Brill to conduct this interview if that would make you more comfortable.”

Was that a nod toward Orr's friendship with Eddie? Or a veiled suggestion that Eddie might have shagged his brother's wife today?

“My conduct with Bobbi was not
immoral
,” Eddie said, choosing the words carefully.

Detective Orr got the message. She asked, “Was your conduct illegal?”

“Am I qualified to say?” Eddie answered. “I don't have a copy of the Massachusetts General Laws at my fingertips, and I'm not a lawyer or a law enforcement officer, such as yourself.”

“I'm closing my notebook,” Orr said.

Eddie relaxed. “Thank God,” he said. “Sorry about the crack about the size of your office. At least you have an office. Mine is a briefcase. I lecture my students under a sewer pipe, and, judging by the mid-term papers, I teach worse than I golf.”

“Do you really think you can get your brother out of prison?”

Her abruptness startled Eddie. He pulled the phone away from his head, looked at it a moment and then pressed it back to his ear, saying, “A jury might find reasonable doubt, if Henry could get a new trial.”

“Because two of the former witnesses against him are dead?”

Eddie hadn't thought about it that way. Dr. Crane and Jimmy Whistle had provided the bulk of the evidence against Henry thirty years ago. He said nothing. General VonKatz hopped onto the sofa, walked two tiny circles and then settled on his belly, next to Eddie.

“I checked the files,” Orr said. “The physical evidence in the case against your brother no longer exists. Destroyed twenty years ago, when the warehouse flooded.”

“Aw, Lucy, that sucks.”

“Does it?”

“Sure it does,” Eddie said, sharply. “Henry could have filed a motion to have the blood evidence tested for DNA. The results would have excluded him as the killer, and there would be no need for another trial.”

“You're so sure he didn't do it.”

So that's what this is about.

Eddie grew defensive. He said, “I believe in him.”

“Following your gut?” she said. “Our guts can lead us dangerous places.”

“He's my brother,” Eddie pleaded.
Can't she see?

“Don't split the facts,” she said. “He's your brother, and he's doing life for murder.”

She's blind.

“What do you know about my family?” Eddie shouted. The General scrambled away. “Or personal relationships? Or following your gut feelings? Christ, Lucy! Do you even
know
anybody outside of the concrete coffin you work in downtown? Do you ever do
anything
but work?”

Eddie switched tones, to quiet sarcasm. “Have you ever had fun?” he asked. “Do you know what fun is? Every time I see you, you're snooping around, asking embarrassing questions, writing it all down in your little notebook.”

“That's what you do, too,” she calmly reminded him. “Aren't you a reporter?”

Goddam. Fallen into my own word trap
.

Eddie felt ridiculous. It was hard to get angry with Lucy Orr. She didn't reflect his anger back at him, so that it just died when it hit her.

“And I do have fun,” she assured him. “I'm chair of the police windsurfer's club. There are a dozen of us. We do exhibition races for charity. I'd spot you fifty meters and still beat you across the Merrimack any day.” She laughed.

She was absorbing Eddie's anger like light into a black hole, destroying it as fast as Eddie could produce it. He couldn't think of anything to say.

“I don't know about your family, but I know of mine,” Orr said. “The lessons are universal.”

It was the first time Orr had ever mentioned her family to Eddie Bourque. Eddie had trouble imagining Lucy Orr as a child; he had come to think of her as a policing machine that had been created as is.

He asked, “Were you born and bred to be a cop?”

She paused a moment, smacked her lips. “My father was a police officer,” she said. “In Delaware, where I was born. Thomas Orr was chief of his department.”

“Ha! I knew your accent was wrong,” Eddie said. “It's ninety-percent New England, but once in a while an R slips through.”

Eddie laughed, realized he was laughing alone, and then gave his instant analysis of Lucy Orr:

“So your pop was the top cop,” he said. “Impressive. You grew up in his gigantic shadow—it's probably been hanging over you your entire career. And when you went into law enforcement, you found the old man's shoes hard to fill, so you convinced yourself you gotta work twenty-four/seven to live up to your father's standards. Because you want to be like him. Right? Right?”

“Is that what your gut says?” she asked.

That sounded like a trap. But Eddie could hardly back down now. “That's how I see it.”

She began: “My father used his connections as chief to provide free prison labor to the city councilor who had cast the deciding ballot when my father got his job. Apparently, this was a deal they had worked out before the vote. This councilman owned rental property. My father had inmates painting his buildings, doing odd jobs, saving the guy thousands in maintenance costs. Then he falsified his reports to say that the inmates had been cleaning the highways.”

Eddie felt like an ass. His analysis of Detective Orr had been exactly wrong.

“Oh, Lucy,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“When the scandal broke, he resigned in disgrace. Never got charged or did jail time, but the city revoked his pension. It was all over the local paper. The talk shows called him ‘Tommy Orr the political whore.' ”

“Ouch.”

“Painful,” she agreed, “but not inaccurate.”

“And all these years, you've been trying to erase what he did by working so hard.”

That ruffled her. “For your information,” she informed Eddie, “I
like
what I do. I like solving crimes. I like taking predators off the street. And I'm not so foolish to think that I can undo the past. Neither should you.”

Eddie unclenched his hand and looked at the key. It shone with sweat. The key had left a jagged red indentation in Eddie's palm where he had been squeezing it. “This is different,” he told Orr, softly. “I'm close to breaking this.” He stuffed the key in his pocket.

“Bring me in on it,” she said.

“Soon.”

She started to argue but Eddie cut her off, saying: “For thirty years I tried not to think about Henry's sins, the shame of it, and the fear—what if I was like him? I didn't want to be capable of murder, but if my brother was, who's to say?”

Eddie's voice cracked. He felt the pinch of emotion on his windpipe, and swallowed hard. “In my case,” he continued, “I
can
undo the past. Henry didn't kill those people, so the last thirty years have been an illusion, just a bad movie that I thought was real. I'm going to shut off the projector. Then I'm going to get my brother back.”

He was close to crying, though he knew he wouldn't. He didn't want to cry and Eddie never cried unless he wanted to.

She sighed, saying: “I could have you picked up on an outstanding warrant, to keep you out of trouble.”

“Like a paperwork error?”

“Probably would take the courts forty-eight hours to sort it out. You'll get your belt and shoelaces back, and maybe even an apology.”

“I won't stop until I reach the truth,” Eddie promised. “I'll do anything to get my brother back.”

“That worries me,” she said, suddenly sounding cold, as if Eddie had tapped her in a place outside their friendship. “Promise you'll call me before you get killed.”

He thought about being deadpan.
How much notice do you need?
But he heard himself answer, “I swear it.”

Chapter 27

The night passed in choppy, sleepless chapters.

First there was an hour tossing on the bed, watching the digital clock's hovering red numerals as they slowly ticked off the progress of the passing night, like the scoreboard of the world's most boring basketball game.

At midnight, Eddie slipped out of bed. He liked to change his environment when he couldn't sleep, but on this night, the sofa was no better. The change disturbed General VonKatz, who felt the sudden need to run from window to window, looking for squirrels. Eddie dozed in short fits. Every noise from the neighborhood piqued his fight-or-flight instincts, like when he tent-camped in grizzly country. He listened for the white van, driven by the man in the ski mask.

Shortly before dawn, a car slowed outside Eddie's house. Eddie tensed, until he heard his
Washington Post
hit the sidewalk. The car sped off. The newspaper reminded Eddie of Lew Cuhna's key, still in the pocket of his jeans, which were still on Eddie's body. There was nothing in the world more important than the key.

What if he comes for me tonight?

Eddie got up. It was quarter-to-four. He put on his running shoes, went back to his bed, and slept.

He woke at five o'clock. Five-zero-zero, exactly—what was the chance he would have woken right on the hour? Hmmmm…One chance in sixty? No…if he considered the possibility of sleeping later—say, until eight o'clock—that would be one chance in one hundred eighty. Wouldn't it? The clock turned to 5:01. Eddie realized he was wide awake.

“Uhhh!” he cried, yanking the pillow over his eyes.
I gotta get to sleep!

He had left his computer on. The cooling fan hummed harmless little white noise. Eddie let the hum fill his head.

Then the computer said
DEE-do
, the chirp it made when an email arrived over the broadband.

Probably spam, Eddie thought.

Leave me be! I don't want generic painkillers, I don't want to refinance my home or spy on my neighbor with a secret camera, and I prefer my penis the way it is.

He squeezed the pillow over his head.

He caught himself wondering who else might have emailed him so early in the morning. What were the chances that he would have been awake when the email arrived….Hmmm, one chance in sixty?

“Aw, Christ,” he cried, sweeping the comforter aside and rising from bed.

General VonKatz had been sleeping in Eddie's desk chair. Eddie snapped his fingers and pointed to the floor. “I need my chair,” he told the cat.

The General looked Eddie up and down, rose with a shudder, bowed his spine, kicked out one hind leg a moment to stretch it, then kicked out the other one, yawned, licked a paw three times, hopped down and moseyed away, nails clicking on the hardwood.

“Thanks for rushing,” Eddie said. He dropped into the chair, rapped the keyboard to dispel the screensaver and then called up the email.

Oh, the missing mid-term, the last one, from Ryan. Later than the rest, but under the deadline—the way Eddie wrote his news stories. He was about to return to bed when he decided to inspect the paper, to make sure it had arrived intact. He read the top:

LOWELL—Sharon Matthewson gets to hear free live music three nights a week.

Trouble is, it's usually when she's trying to sleep.

The Board of License last night reviewed Matthewson's noise complaint against her neighbor, Kara's Irish Pub, 670 Hubbard St., which is known throughout the Merrimack Valley as an incubator of new rock'n'roll and heavy metal bands.
Pub ownership claimed last night that they are operating within the rules of their entertainment license, and have already gone beyond what is required to satisfy Matthewson by installing a new vestibule to contain the sound when patrons come in and out.

The board put the complaint on hold for two weeks, to allow commissioners time to schedule a site visit to the club…

Eddie read the story to the bottom. All the relevant facts were there. The top was engaging, even funny, while still respectful. The outcome of the hearing was clearly stated high in the story. And Ryan had added context with just a few words, describing the club as an “incubator” for new acts, which quickly characterized the garage bands that jammed there.

This is good journalism.

It was good enough to be published in any community newspaper. Eddie printed a paper copy of the story and then grabbed his red pen. With a few constructive edits, Ryan's story would really sing, and then Eddie could get back to sleep.

The clock said five-thirty-one. Eddie sighed. It was time to give up on sleep. He set the paper aside for a moment and brewed himself a ten-cup batch of double-strength Sumatra.

Eddie watched it drip, rubbing the key in his pocket.