Speak Ill of the Living (4 page)

Henry shifted his weight in the chair, rolling his massive shoulders. He said, “When you play chess, do you prefer the white pieces or the black?”

Here we go again.

“The black.”

Henry snapped his fingers. “Yes, I knew that.” He looked Eddie hard in the eye and asked sharply, “And which do I prefer?”

Eddie thought about how Henry had controlled their encounter, from the mysterious letter to his disjointed questions. He answered, “The white.”

Henry laughed and banged a palm on his knee in delight. “That's right! Can you tell me why?”

“Because white always moves first. You like to have the first move of the game.”

Henry's eyes closed for a second, as a smile spread over him. With playful sarcasm, he said, “I feel like you're the brother I never had.”

Eddie imagined himself looking through Henry's eyes, seeing another human life end by his own hand. What weapon had been in that hand? A gun? A knife? A club? Eddie didn't know. He imagined a blurry gray object of death at the end of Henry's arm. He saw an armored car driver on the ground begging for life. Saw the begging stop and the blood begin. Saw meat and bones on the ground, and then the widow in black. The thoughts enraged him.

Eddie blurted, “You're so smart, how could you have been so fucking stupid?”

Henry raised an eyebrow. “Easy, easy,” he cautioned. “If you went back in time to save me, you'd destroy yourself.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Henry sighed. The telephone crackled. He switched it to the other ear. “Your kidnapped bank president is pictured sitting on a five-sided table made entirely of poplar, assembled in traditional method with white glue and pegs—not a nail in it anywhere.”

“How do you know that?”

Henry winked. “Because I made it.”

“You? But you're—it's been thirty years.”

“I built it to last, little brother.”

Eddie felt his reporter's skepticism bubbling up. He turned on his bullshit meter. “Can you prove it?”

Henry gave a pained look. “I got angry during construction—the wood wouldn't behave,” he said. “The left front leg would show the results of that anger. Look closely, see for yourself.”

“Fine, let's say you made the table. You didn't kidnap Roger Lime. Who did?”

An intercom burped to life and a voice of tin screeched, “Aaaangem-up!”

“What's that?”

“We're out of time,” Henry said. “We gotta hang up.”

Eddie jumped from the chair and slapped a hand on the glass. “Who's doing this?” he cried. “You said you knew who's doing this to Roger Lime!”

A guard appeared at Henry's shoulder, tapped him twice.

“I gave away the table I made,” Henry said, “to my partner's old lady.”

He hung up.

***

Eddie's foot mashed the accelerator to the floor. The Mighty Chevette whined and shuddered, like it might to fly apart on the trip back to Lowell. Eddie steadied the wheel with one hand and one knee, and dialed the Associated Press news desk on his cell phone.

He asked for Springer, waited for the transfer.

“Need a favor,” Eddie yelled to Springer over the wind roaring through the windows.

“Sure, Ed. Where the hell are you?”

“My car.”

“Sounds like you're
under
your car.”

“Just bear with me. Can you get the photo of Roger Lime that the cops released the other day?”

“Yeah. It's been scanned into our archive. Gimme a sec to call it up on the computer.”

Eddie yanked from his pocket the newspaper clip Henry had sent him. The newsprint photo reproduction was muddy. He couldn't see anything on the table legs.

“I got it,” Springer said.

“Zero in on the lower left quarter of the photo,” Eddie said. “The table legs. Can you enlarge it?”

“Lower left…yep…okay. Now what?”

“The table legs, man. Look closely. Notice anything, uh, unusual?”

“Seems pretty ordinary…well, there's a half-dozen marks on one of them—curved lines, crescent shaped.”

Eddie felt rising tension, like his stomach was being pumped full of helium. He knew the answer, but he had to ask: “What would you say made those marks?”

“I dunno, Ed,” Springer said. “Looks like somebody got pissed and whacked the thing with a hatchet.”

Chapter 3

Eddie burst into the classroom, ducked under the mysterious gurgling pipe, glanced at the clock, slapped his briefcase on the gray steel teacher's desk and grabbed an eraser.

“Sorry I'm late,” he announced as he obliterated the chemical formulas left on the blackboard from an earlier class. Eddie had been obsessing over his visit with Henry, and had struggled to plan his lesson before class. He despised being late and was embarrassed to face his students. He felt like he had cheated them out of ten minutes of learning, though Eddie suspected that his ten remaining class members would rather chat with each other than listen to Eddie Bourque.

In large, squeaky chalk letters, Eddie printed the evening's lesson: “ON AND OFF THE RECORD.”

He dropped the chalk in his shirt pocket and turned around. Five blank faces looked back at him.

“Oh,” Eddie said, suddenly realizing he was missing half his flock. “Where's the rest of the class?”

The mysterious pipe made its disgusting sucking sound, like a plunger in a bucket of worms.

“Eeeew!” said the class, as they always did.

Eddie frowned at the pipe and waited for the noise to end. It usually stopped after half a minute.

Another great moment in education.

When he had applied to teach this community college course, Eddie had come to the school with lofty images of the academic world. But “Introduction to Journalism” had been assigned a windowless, raspberry-red basement classroom, sectioned off from the boiler room by a cinderblock wall. The mysterious disgusting pipe, about five inches thick and made of unpainted steel, ran down the middle of the room at about six feet off the floor—just low enough for Eddie to scuff the top of his head on it. The pipe had nearly scalped him a dozen times, until Eddie had become programmed to automatically duck when passing from one side of the room to the other.

Nearly halfway through the semester, Eddie was wondering if agreeing to teach the course had been a mistake. He had applied for the job because he needed the money. At his interview, he had to overcome a lack of classroom experience, and to convince the college administration that money had nothing to do with it; he was just desperate to share his knowledge of journalism and practice the world's noblest profession—teaching. In convincing the administration, Eddie had convinced himself.

Lately, though, he was dripping with doubt. He had expected his students to be raw in the beginning, but they didn't seem to be getting any better. Actually, it was almost as if they were losing knowledge. And whose fault was that? An even worse sign: the class didn't seem to care that they weren't learning anything from Eddie Bourque.

They're killing their grandmothers to avoid my lectures.

“I heard that the two Irish lasses who sat in the back dropped this class,” said Gerard from the front row. He was around fifty, round-shouldered and potbellied, with dark eyes that looked frightened while he was listening but demonic when he was speaking; it was something about the way his eyebrows rose and fell. With a phony British accent he used from time to time, Gerard suggested, “Maybe you were too tough on 'em, Mr. Bourque, and their fair stock couldn't handle it.”

That got a laugh from the class.

“Are you calling them sweet girls
stocky
?” demanded Margaret, a chain smoker with a cheese-grater voice who had already lost two grandmothers that semester. “Because we girls don't like being called stocky.”

Gerard shot her a frightened glance, then turned away and mumbled devilishly, “How about
livestock
.”

Margaret squealed, “
What'd
he say?”

Eddie spread his hands and smoothed the tension out of the air. “Okay, now…”

The pipe made its other noise, the slurping, like somebody vacuuming live squid in a flooded basement.

“Eeeew!”

Eddie pinched the bridge of his nose a moment, and then slowly opened his briefcase. Two more students had dropped the class? That made eight—eight students who had signed up for Introduction to Journalism had decided to quit before the semester was over. Eddie couldn't wait until after mid-term exams—no more refunds for anybody who dropped the class…assuming anybody was left by then.

Don't let them smell fear.

He fished the chalk from his pocket. The instant the slurping stopped, Gerard asked, “When are the mid-term papers due?”

“Good point,” Eddie said. He reminded the class, “Your mid-term assignment is due by email next week. Those of you who still have living grandmothers might want to turn it in early, just in case something happens.” He lifted an eyebrow and glanced around the room. Half the class refused to look him in the eye. “It's a straightforward assignment. Just attend any meeting of any public board or commission in your home towns and write up a news story based on what takes place.”

He pointed to the blackboard and plowed into his lesson: “Which leads me to the point I'd like to discuss tonight. Public officials often try to go off the record. Can anybody tell me what it means to be
on
the record?”

“Like my band, man,” said Ryan Daniels, a twenty-something kid in all black. His right nostril was pierced with a nut and bolt from a hardware store, his head shaved to the scalp except for patterns above each ear that resembled a fist extending a middle finger. “We're cutting two tunes this weekend for an e-p recording next December.” He gave the devil horn sign with his fingers. “It's a heavy metal Christmas, baby.”

“That ain't what he means,” scoffed Margaret. “Your garage band ain't breaking any sales records. I doubt you'll sell ten of those things.”

Eddie ducked under the pipe. “That's not what I mean,” he said.

“See?” said Margaret.

“Elvis has the record,” another student said. “Or The Beatles.”

“No,” argued Ryan, “Pink Floyd.”

“What does
the term
on the record mean,” Eddie said, voice squeaking.

“I believe the sales record for a musical recording,” said Gerard, rubbing his chin, “is held by that Brazilian gentleman who plays the pan flute.”

Another student offered, “He means public records.”

“Public? Like free downloads?” Ryan asked, incredulous. “No way, man. If it's good enough to listen to, it's good enough to buy.”

“What the hell is the pan flute?” asked Margaret.

“People!” Eddie pleaded.

“I've never heard of anybody downloading music from that pan flute dude,” said Ryan.

Gerard shook a finger at Ryan, saying in his British accent: “That's probably why the gentleman has the sales record—nobody listens for free.”

Ryan nodded slowly, impressed. “Yeaaaaah!”

Margaret repeated, “What the hell is the pan flute?”

The pipe made its sucking sound.

Without meaning to, Eddie pulverized the chalk in his fist.

Chapter 4

General VonKatz walked on the piano keys, from the low notes to the high, sounding, in Eddie's imagination, like a tone-deaf elephant turning into a pixie.

Eddie opened his eyes. He had fallen asleep in the recliner again. He stretched, felt the knots in his back. The clock said seven-thirty in the morning; it felt much earlier. After class, Eddie had swallowed two jiggers of scotch and an Advil to help him sleep, but he had spent a restless night replaying the conversation with Henry in his mind.

I gave away the table I made to my partner's old lady.

Was Henry saying that this woman kidnapped Roger Lime?

And which partner?

For a moment, Eddie considered telling Detective Orr about the table, and what Henry had claimed. But Eddie resisted. The story was so outlandish, the proof flimsy. Henry might have seen a better copy of the Roger Lime photograph in some other paper, and had concocted that detail about damaging the table leg.

He doubted that finding this woman—his partner's old lady—would even lead to Roger Lime. Even if Henry were telling the truth, what's to say this woman even had the table? She could have left it at the curb for junk-pickers ten years ago.

Eddie also was uncomfortable with the notion that his brother, the killer, might have given Eddie something of value. He hoped that Henry was wrong—that it wasn't his table, and that he had nothing to do with Roger Lime.

The General walked back down the keys. He stopped, looked at Eddie and whined. Eddie laughed. “All right,” he said, heaving his body out of the chair with a groan. “Let's eat.”

The refrigerator held wheat bread, cottage cheese, eleven Rolling Rock beers, still left from the case he had bought a month before, and two dozen foods from the goop group: spreads and dressings, mustards and marinades.

“Nuts,” Eddie said. “Not much here.”

Hmmmm.
Nuts?
He checked the butter dish for a bag of slivered almonds he vaguely recalled. Nope. Long gone.

The General whined more intensely at Eddie's feet. There was better fortune in the cupboard—a can of white tuna. Eddie spooned half the fish into a bowl for the General. He ate the rest himself from the can, and then had two pieces of bread; it was like eating a sandwich one component at a time.

With more than twenty coffees to choose from in his freezer, he picked a Guatemalan he liked for the chocolate undertones.

Eddie went to fetch his
Washington Post
while the coffee dripped.

What the hell?

The paper was spread across the tiny patch of lawn between Eddie's rented house and the street. He recovered the news, metro and sports sections, and then gave up on finding the rest and went back inside.

Bad night's sleep, bad breakfast, bad newspaper. If my coffee is bad I'm going back to bed.

The coffee was never bad. Crisp. Nice acidity. Hard to believe something so good was legal. The caffeine jacked him to a higher level of awareness, like smelling salts for the soul. He read what little he had found of his paper, and barely missed the rest of it. The national news page had a short update on Roger Lime—essentially that the police had no new leads.

The General had finished his food. He swiped against Eddie's legs, whining for something else.

“How about some TV?” Eddie said.

He fed a videotape into the VCR and turned it on. The house filled with chirping and fluttering, as the television showed close-ups of wild finches jockeying for space on a crowded birdfeeder. The General hopped on the coffee table to watch. The cat's eyes darted over the TV screen.

“When you're sick of the birds, I'll put in the garden moles,” Eddie promised. He owned a half-dozen videos from the “Small Prey Series for Indoor Cats.” The tapes cost twenty bucks each, for sixty minutes of backyard animals scurrying around; it was an absolute goddam rip-off, and it
killed
Eddie that he hadn't thought of it first.

Springer called during Eddie's third cup of joe. “You working today?”

Eddie had planned to do research, to see if he could identify Henry's old partner. But it was hard to turn down a paying job, especially on a story with national interest. “I wouldn't mind another piece of the Lime story,” he admitted.

“Work the coroner angle,” Springer said. “The police have determined that the quack who mismatched Lime's dental records to the bones from the car fire is named Crane.”

“Yeah, Alvin Crane,” Eddie said. “Been in the medical examiner's office a long time. I've covered a zillion trials where he was the expert witness.”

“Well, he hasn't been around the office since the photograph of Lime turned up. Called in sick, and hasn't been back.”

“Is he sick? Or did he just misidentify his office?”

“Ouch,” Springer said. “Head over to his place and see if the doctor is in.”

***

Dr. Crane lived in a development of suburban mansions, each home identical except for details like brick face or stone face, pebble driveway or concrete. The developers had clear-cut a hardwood forest to build the homes, preserving little stands of mature white birch here and there for decoration. Crane's place was the only finished home on a cul-de-sac. Three dirt driveways stemming from the circle of asphalt led to fields of turned earth and weeds, for which the developer had not yet found buyers.

The house was two-toned, brick and yellow stucco. It was huge and attractive and unspecial at the same time. The black driveway smelled liked it had recently been treated with sealer. A silver Buick sedan was parked there. Eddie could see an unpainted, two-story barn out back, still under construction, stacks of clapboard on sawhorses outside it.

There were no cars going by, no children chasing each other around the neighborhood. Just the sound of the breeze sweeping across the lawn. People like Dr. Crane paid a lot of money for that kind of silence. Eddie found it creepy.

Eddie peeked in the mailbox—empty, so it seemed that Dr. Crane hadn't left town.

The doorbell was an orange dot lit from behind by a bright little bulb. Eddie rang it, heard the sing-songy chime from within the house.

Nothing.

He rang it again, waited, and then rapped the horseshoe knocker. He waited some more. He couldn't hear anyone moving inside.

From behind the house, a door slammed.

Eddie strolled across the front grass. “Dr. Crane?” he called out. “Dr. Crane?” Eddie felt like a trespasser on the lawn. He called out again, to announce himself, “Hello? Is Dr. Crane around?”

He walked down a lush side lawn that sloped gently away from the house. The lawn abruptly turned to dirt at the property line. Red brick paths wandered through the backyard, around rock gardens garnished with leafy ferns and smooth silver driftwood. Somebody had begun applying clapboard to the unfinished barn. A circular saw lay on the ground, still plugged into an extension cord that snaked through a window into the house. There was a hammer on a sawhorse beside a coffee can full of nails.

“Dr. Crane?”

A back deck on the house led to a sliding glass door, which was open. The breeze tugged at the curtains. That door could not have made the noise Eddie had heard.

He looked over the barn. The twin roll-up garage doors were down. The side door was closed. There were no windows to peek through.

Eddie went to the side door and tested the knob—unlocked.

He pushed the door open. It led into a tiny vestibule, and then, through another door, into the barn. The inside was nearly black.

Does he think he's developing film in here?

Eddie could make out a workbench, scattered tools, a lawnmower.

“Dr. Crane?”

He's got to be in here…he's not sick, he's working on his house
.

Eddie stepped into the barn. “Dr. Crane, it's Eddie Bourque,” he said, as he walked, arms feeling for objects in the darkness. “I'm a reporter, and I'm doing a story for the Associated Press today. I'd really like a word with you.”

Eddie recognized the “A”-shape of a six-foot stepladder. He walked around it, toward the garage doors, where the light switch probably would be.

On the other side of the ladder, he walked into something with a thwack on the bone above his right eye. “Ow,” he muttered, rubbing the tender spot.

Eddie frowned. Did he smell urine? He grabbed at the dark shape in the air.

Thin, narrow, smooth, leathery.

A shoe.

A leather wingtip and it was full.

Oh, Jesus
.

Eddie dashed across the garage, stumbling over boxes and a bicycle. He felt along the wall, found a conduit tube, followed it up, found the switch, turned on the light.

“Oh Jesus!”

The body hung by the neck from a green and pink braided nylon rope, the kind of happy rope you'd use to hang a little girl's tire swing.

Eddie had disturbed the body by touching it. It slowly rolled a quarter turn to the left, paused there, then rolled the other way.

He hadn't seen Dr. Crane in more than a year, but there was no doubt this was he—silver haired, slight paunch, close to seventy years old. He was wearing denim overalls under an unbuttoned white painter's coat. His face was swollen and purple, hard to look at. Eddie got another whiff of urine. What he had read was true; people piss themselves when they hang.

Eddie wanted to run. But he couldn't. For there was something in the chest pocket of Crane's white smock that grabbed Eddie's attention and wouldn't let him leave. A sheet of paper, folded once lengthwise. Something had been typed on it.

A note. A suicide note.

Part of him—the better part—knew that he should dash right out of there, get his telephone from the car, call the police and wait for them on the street. But then the police would seal the barn. They would take the note. And they wouldn't show it to Eddie Bourque.

It would only take a moment to read it. What would it hurt?

The rope had been looped over a crossbeam near the top of the twenty-foot peaked roof; Crane hung high off the floor. Eddie steeled himself with a deep breath. He put his clammy hands on the ladder and stepped up, up, up, to the third rung. He looked the body in the small of its back. He still couldn't reach the note.

The feeling of trespassing was back, a thousand times stronger, like Eddie had crossed some line between trespasser and grave robber. He reached for the paper. A drop of sweat ran down his underarm with a cold tickle. Still couldn't reach the note; the body was facing away from him.

With just a finger and thumb, he pinched a tiny fold of the dead man's smock, and tugged. The body slowly rotated. Eddie stepped one rung higher. The body turned toward him. Another whiff of piss. Eddie kept his eyes off that purple face and snatched the paper from the pocket. A dark urine stain had spread across the front of Dr. Crane's overalls.

Eddie read the typewritten lines:

The district attorneys are fighting the good fight!!!! When they needed me, I was THERE.

For what THEY needed. Told them what they WANTED to hear.

I never meant to hurt anyone.

I just wanted to HELP put the monsters AWAY!!!

It grew out of my control, like a thing of its own mind!!!!

Forgive me, these FORTY years.

The letter was unsigned.

Eddie's hand trembled as he slid the note back where he had found it.

Dr. Crane had been falsifying his reports. Cutting corners to help prosecutors close their cases.

Eddie had never heard his police sources chatter about Crane—nobody had ever suggested that Crane's work might have been suspect, except defense lawyers. But they got paid to discredit the state's witnesses; they'd do it to their own mothers.

Forty years?
How many bodies were in the wrong graves? No, to hell with the graves—Crane had been an expert witness at
thousands
of criminal trials over the past four decades. How many innocent people had he helped put away?

The body rocked back. Eddie smelled the stench. He grimaced at the stain on Crane's overalls.

Wait… his pants… still wet?

Eddie grabbed Crane's hand—cooler than the living, but still warm.

Holy Jesus, this just happened!

Eddie threw himself down the ladder and sprinted out, slamming the door behind him.

He ran toward his car.

The slam echoed in Eddie's mind.

Who made the door slam when I first got here?

Not Crane—it had been barely two minutes between the noise and the moment Eddie opened the door to the barn. Even if the rope had been ready, would Crane have had time to hang himself dead? Eddie couldn't say.

Was somebody else here?