Spiked (22 page)

He grew angrier for all the times she had haunted him.

Peter ushered his brother from the room and snicked the door shut. He returned to his seat, explaining, “My brother is unaccustomed to forums such as this. He will tend to some business matters while we continue.”

Eddie willed his fury behind a calm façade, picked up his pen and notebook and concentrated on the task before him. He said, “Off the record—it's obvious to me who's really in charge here.”

Peter smirked and straightened his vest. “You have no idea,” he said, laughing and showing perfect teeth. “Those business matters I just sent him to attend? Unloading a truckload of paint.”

They shared a good laugh. And then Eddie pushed a little harder. “So how's he supposed to help with the Acre project?”

Peter throttled back. “You can imagine my dilemma, if you know the scope of the project.”

He was testing Eddie's knowledge. Eddie had to be straight; he didn't know enough to fake it. “All I know is it's big,” he said. “Tell me—how big?”

“I cannot discuss it until after the election.”

“Then you must expect controversy.”

“We can proceed through controversy,” Peter insisted. “God in Heaven created this entire world from chaos.”

“God didn't need five votes on the council.”

“Precisely why I cannot speak of this now.”

“Then tell me off the record,” Eddie suggested. “I'll be covering this story when it breaks. Having the background now will help me later.”

Peter frowned. He seemed about to turn him down, when Eddie added, “I can't put this in the paper until Templeton, my publisher, says it's okay. If I wrote it today, he'd just hold it until after the election.” He set the pad and pen on the couch.

Peter seemed to recognize the truth in Eddie's argument. Maybe he even liked the reporter he had thrown from a bridge without learning his identity, and who now sat there like Irony himself, asking questions and going about his job. Peter relented, and told the tale:

Samuel Sok had proposed a total reconstruction of the Acre neighborhood. The city would use eminent domain powers to take ownership of blocks of tenement buildings. It would evict the occupants and sell the homes at cost to Sok, who would demolish them. Then Sok would solicit bids for the land from private developers, who would agree to build single-family homes and luxury condos.

What was in it for everyone?

The city would get rid of its most troublesome neighborhood. The lower density and the higher rental rates of new housing would attract the middle class, which would soon spread out and gentrify what was left of the older housing in the Acre. The developers would repay the city's investment, so the taxpayers wouldn't take a bath, and no politician could be criticized—God forbid—over the tax rate.

The plan depended on the incumbents holding their majority on the council through the election; the challengers would never approve such a radical destruction of low-income housing. For pushing the incumbents to victory with slanted news coverage, the brass at The Empire would get a new neighborhood of coveted middle-class readers. Boosting circulation would allow them to charge higher advertising rates, and that was good for the manager's profit-sharing plan.

What was in it for Sok? He would profit as the middleman in the land transfers to private developers. And Sok got something else, too:

“The city will condemn St. Francis de Sales Church as unsafe, settle with the diocese, and sell the building to us for demolition and redevelopment,” Peter said.

It suddenly made sense why Councilman Eccleston had fed Eddie the structural report on the church. They needed to undercut that save-the-church group before it posed real opposition.

“What good is the church to you?” Eddie asked. “Is the land under it so valuable?”

Peter shrugged. “No more than any other. It's my father's old church. My brother and I were baptized there. Someone will tear it down eventually. We prefer to be the ones.”

“Just sentimental, are you?” Eddie asked, the doubt thick in his voice.

Peter raised an eyebrow at Eddie's tone. “For family reasons,” he said.

“It might not work if that church group pitches a decent redevelopment plan.”

Peter scowled and smacked a tiny fist on his thigh. He insisted, “It shall work.”

The tone of the interview suddenly lurched toward adversarial. Eddie badgered Peter, “What about the neighborhood? Do you really want to destroy the Acre?”

“The neighborhood will be reborn.”

“The buildings, maybe. But not the people. They're getting the boot.”

“Persons displaced by the demolition shall have first choice of the new housing,” Peter said, sounding exasperated. “That will be in the plan.”

“Please,” Eddie said. “The folks in those tenements can't afford better housing—that's why they're in those tenements. Your project will price them right out of town.”

“We are improving the quality of the city,” Peter insisted. “Where are social problems more concentrated than in the Acre? The crime? The drugs? Violence? That will all be gone. Let the suburbs offer some affordable housing. The city has done its fair share.”

“For a hundred and fifty years Lowell's been a landing pad for new immigrants. Why screw with that kind of history?”

“History is for books,” Peter declared. He fidgeted and checked his wristwatch. “I believe our time is short, Mr. Bourque.”

“For books? You don't believe that, Peter.” Eddie tapped into his anger and let it flow over him. “The people in the Acre are first and second-generation Americans, immigrants just like you and your father.”

“Bah!” Peter rose and jabbed a finger at Eddie. “They're nothing like my family.”

Eddie stood and slapped the finger away.

Peter stepped back. The child of privilege was wide-eyed at the sting of physical contact. He backed away as Eddie advanced on him. Eddie spit his words. “I suppose they're not like your family. They don't have a warrior from the old country stalking the family patriarch,
looking for revenge
.”

“No!” Peter cried. He covered his ears to protect them from the truth. He backed into a wall and shrank against it.

Eddie grabbed two handfuls of the smaller man's vest and hauled him upright. Peter struggled meekly; he was frail and quaking with fear.

Eddie spoke low and hoarse, and the words came out wet. “Goddam right, Peter. Your old man confessed something to Father Wojick, didn't he?” Eddie got no answer. He shook Peter and shouted, “And Wojick freaked out.”

Still no answer.

He pulled Peter close, and then slammed him back into the wall.

Peter moaned and squeezed his eyes shut.

Eddie warned him, “I've had a bad week, and I'm done getting jerked around.” He held Peter against the wall. “Wojick freaked out and wrote a sermon just short of calling your father the criminal he is. What is he? A rapist? Some kind of killer? Your old man thought Wojick would tell the world that Lowell's famous civic benefactor is scum. So he got rid of him. He got Wojick to go to California and disappear. How'd he do it, Peter? How'd he get Wojick to go?”

Peter hung limp in Eddie's hands and wept.

Eddie pressed Peter to the wall. He whispered at him, “Wojick stayed away and everything went great for years. But then Chanthay came to Lowell looking for revenge. And everything went to hell. That's why you got all the security here, the guys with guns walking the grounds.”

Between sobs, Peter blurted, “I did not know her name.”

At last, confirmation. “You and your brother set fire to the old house in the Acre with her in it, but she managed to escape,” Eddie said.

Peter nodded and shook tears onto Eddie's hands.

“And your hired New York hitmen couldn't take her out, either.”

“We never heard from them again.”

“And when you found Nowlin with her, you beat his brains and dumped him in the canal.”

Peter's eyes opened, full of tears and terror. He shook his head. “No, please,” he begged. “Not us. That's wrong.”

Eddie shook him again. “You dumped my beat partner in the canal, just like you dumped me, you stupid son-of-a-bitch.”

Peter gasped. “No—you fell through the ceiling right at our feet. We saw your notebook, with The Empire emblem. We realized you were one of Templeton's reporters. We dragged you out, to save you.”

Eddie's hand slid around Peter's throat. “You save people by throwing them off a bridge?”

“We thought you were dead,” Peter insisted, tears running into his mouth. “Matthew checked you. He had a year of med school.” Anger flashed across his face. “Matt is an
idiot
. I should have checked you myself.”

Eddie eased his grip. “Then how'd I end up in the canal?”

“We read about that other reporter in the paper, the one they found in Worthen Canal. It made sense—dump the body in the same place. We thought you were
dead
.”

What Peter claimed was possible. There were a hundred fine spots along the Worthen Canal to dump a body; it was why so many bodies ended up there, and everything dumped in the canal flowed to the same place.

Eddie demanded, “Why did you trash my apartment? What were you looking for?”

Peter gasped for breath. “Not us. We didn't know who you were until you came here this morning.”

That figured to be true, too, judging by Peter's reaction when they had met. But if Peter and Matthew didn't wreck Eddie's house, who did?

“One thing you haven't answered,” Eddie said, tightening his grip on Peter's vest. “How did your old man get Father Wojick to go to California?”

Peter said nothing. His eyes were bloodshot. They looked back into Eddie's eyes. Neither man blinked. Eddie pressed Peter against the wall and snorted, like a bull. “I can have a hundred cops, armed with a hundred warrants, tear this place apart,” he said. “You're an arsonist, at the very least. Do you trust your brother not to crack under interrogation?” Eddie glared at him. He asked slowly, “What happened to Wojick?”

Peter glanced over Eddie's shoulder.

Eddie turned to look. There, on the wall, was the horrid, twisted crucifix, like the one in the old stone church.

And the truth fell hard upon Eddie Bourque. Father Wojick had never left St. Francis de Sales. He was entombed there, seventeen years, in the crucifix.

He glowered at Peter. “Your old man is a murderer. He
killed
Wojick.”

Peter's mouth moved to speak, but nothing came out.

Eddie held him against the wall and thought about Wojick's last homily, about Danny's secret profile, and Chanthay's plot for revenge.

Peter was like a cadaver in Eddie's hands; the family secret had sapped his strength to stand.

Eddie felt his own knees weaken beneath the weight of another revelation—Chanthay was hunting a criminal of the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Chapter 31

The veranda on the back of the Sok estate house overlooked a man-made pond, frozen white, that reflected the sun with such glare it was impossible to look at without squinting.

“So the story about Father Wojick leaving for some woman was fake?” Eddie said.

Peter swirled whiskey in a glass and gulped it. “That's right,” he said. He leaned on the veranda's polished railing and looked past the pond, to the gardens that rolled two hundred yards to the wall. “My brother and I are the only ones who know what happened to Wojick. And, I suppose, my father.” He took another sip. “And now you.”

Peter's eyes were still puffy from crying. He had wept a long time, curled on the floor of the sitting room, after Eddie had let him go. Eddie had spent that time staring at the scale model of the crucifix of St. Francis de Sales Church.

When Peter had recovered, he got drinks and brought Eddie to the veranda. The truth seemed to relax him. Seventeen years ago, Peter explained, as Samuel Sok prepared to make First Communion, he had offered to create a new crucifix for St. Francis de Sales. Sok wanted his donation to be anonymous, so Father Wojick never told anyone from whom he had ordered the figure. Sok had already finished the scale model when he made his first confession, in which he told Wojick about his part in genocide.

Peter did not know what had happened in the confessional. But Wojick's last homily had unnerved Sok, who feared he would be exposed. When his sons were away, Sok lured Wojick to the estate and knifed him through the heart. He had to hide the body. By chance, the mold for the full-scale crucifix was ready.

Sok routed the finished piece through several artists and trucking companies to conceal its origin. The Diocese installed it, but, given the shrinking number of communicants and the structural concerns about the church, never assigned another priest to St. Francis de Sales. No wine ever turned to blood under the murdered form of Father Zygmunt O. Wojick.

Eddie drank beer and organized the facts. “That's why you can't let the church be redeveloped,” he said. “You're afraid the secret might be discovered, and your father would be exposed.”

Peter sighed. “Not really,” he said. “The records of the statue were so thoroughly confused, I doubt anyone could trace it here.” He tipped the drink to his lips and emptied it. “My brother and I were just children during the Khmer Rouge. Only later did we come to understand our father's connection to them, and to their tactics. We had believed that St. Francis de Sales Church broke that connection. Our father's conversion to Christianity was genuine. He believed in his heart he would be saved. He became a generous man. You have seen his gifts to strangers.”

Peter examined his thick-bottomed cocktail glass a moment, and then hurled it onto the ice. It bounced with a clink and skidded fifty feet to the far shore. “What happened to Wojick….” That thought trailed off and another began. “The crucifix must be buried. It can't hang in a house of God, mocking my father's chance for redemption. And then, we pray, our Heavenly Father may begin to forgive our earthly one.”

Eddie finished his beer and left the bottle on the railing. “When I asked who knew about Wojick, you said you
suppose
your father knows. Wouldn't he know better than anyone?”

Tears flooded Peter's eyes again. He pressed his palms over them and gritted his teeth. He staggered back into the railing and knocked the beer bottle over the side. It fell to a walkway and smashed to bits.

“Do you wish to see?” he asked.

***

The guard outside the second-floor bedroom sat stiffly on an antique wooden chair with a pink velvet cushion. He nodded at Peter trotting up the stairs, and then stared at Eddie, who trotted two steps behind. Peter pointed to the bedroom door. The guard nodded again, rose without a word and unlocked the door with a key on a chain.

Peter grabbed the guard's elbow. “Anything today?” he asked.

The man frowned. “Not a peep, sir. I'm sorry.”

To Eddie, Peter said, “This is our cross.”

He pushed open the door and they went inside. The bedroom was white and sunny, with a view through an oval window of a grove of poplar. It was warmer than the rest of the house, too warm. It smelled mostly like household cleaners, though Eddie caught a whiff of urine.

Six odd machines arranged in a ring beeped and buzzed, like bystanders bustling over somebody having a heart attack on the sidewalk. The machines reached tentacles of wire and plastic hose to the victim. They seemed to be arguing in different languages over what to do.

In the center of the argument was a withered man on a twin-sized bed. He was covered to his chest by a purple blanket. His cheeks and throat looked caved, as if somebody had sucked the air out of him. A plastic tube brought oxygen to his nostrils. His hands were outside the blanket, palms up. Intravenous bags dripped clear liquid to needles in each wrist. Someone had crossed two long-stem red roses on the pillow above his head. They bloomed big in the heat.

Peter approached the bed and stroked the man's white hair. He whispered, “Papa? Please speak to me.”

Only the machines answered.

“How long?” Eddie asked.

“Five years,” Peter said. He continued to touch the man's hair. “He could do nothing for himself after the stroke. We have a nurse on staff here, and you probably saw the ambulance outside. We tend to his body. We've given up on his mind.”

“He can't understand?”

Peter shrugged. “No one can say. I doubt it. He speaks, but we never make sense of it.”

Eddie shuddered at the magnitude of this news story. He said, “Nobody in the city knows this. Everyone thinks Samuel Sok is a millionaire recluse. Why is this such a secret?”

Peter adjusted the blanket around his father's chest. “Because a millionaire recluse is more powerful than a man dead in every important way,” he said. “Dead, but does not know it.”

“You admit that, but yet you'd kill to protect him?”

Peter stepped back from the bed. He washed his hands under an invisible faucet. “It's almost funny,” he said. “We are at war with this woman and her organization, and I did not know her name until you spoke it in the sitting room.”

Eddie cringed. He tried to atone for his loose lips. “That's not her real name.”

“It matters nothing.”

“Do you know why she wants to kill him? What did he do during the genocide?”

“I could only imagine,” Peter said, looking down to his shoes.

“Explain this to her,” Eddie said. “Show her he's no threat. Christ, Peter, this is barely the same guy. Maybe I could convince her.”

Peter folded his arms and turned away. He concluded, “It is too late now. She will not stop until he is dead. A Cambodian-born priest from Paris is in Lowell, visiting family. His timing is very good. We persuaded him to come here this morning in secret to perform my father's last rites.”

“I'm going to talk to her for you,” Eddie pledged.

“Do as you wish.”

A voice croaked out. Peter and Eddie glanced at each other, and then to Sok. Peter rubbed his father's chest. The old man repeated himself in his first language.

“What did he say?” Eddie asked.

Peter frowned. “He said, ‘Look at all the stars.' ”

They stood there a while, beside the bed, two more bystanders crowding in for a good look at the guy on the sidewalk.

***

Peter walked Eddie down the path that crossed the grounds. “You come here with knowledge dangerous to my family,” Peter told him. “I want you to understand our position, so I have hidden nothing from you.

“I can speak to Alfred Templeton and stop The Empire from publishing what you have seen here. But I cannot stop you from repeating what I have shared. Whatever you say will become rumor. Rumors are very damaging. The true ones are the hardest to kill.”

Peter took a deep breath, and then delivered his pitch. “My father will pay God for what he has done. Must his reputation pay as well? What of his generosity? His family name? And our ability to be benefactors in his place? Must it all pay?”

Eddie walked in silence. He thought about the sins in his own family, the fifty-year-old brother he'd never met. “What I don't get,” Eddie said, ignoring Peter's larger point, “is what is your leverage with Templeton?”

“What does that—?”

“You said you could get my story spiked, and I believe you,” Eddie said, interrupting. “But I want to know how.”

Peter rubbed his little hand over his naked scalp. “Mr. Templeton and my father have an old friendship.”

“It's more than that.”

Peter nodded. “When Father Wojick, uh, disappeared, my father was worried—he didn't want any manhunt. So he asked Alfred Templeton, just an editor at the time, to plant the story in The Empire saying Wojick had fled to California. This is true. I have a note Templeton wrote my father.”

Eddie recoiled, offended. “Why would any journalist agree to print a lie?”

“My father gave Templeton the money he needed.”

It made sense. “The money Templeton needed,” Eddie said slowly, “to buy enough Empire stock to appoint himself publisher.”

“That is what Templeton wanted.”

“And your father got what he wanted—Wojick's name was so smeared, the church membership considered it bad form to even mention him.”

Peter kicked at the stone path. “Father Wojick soon fled from memory.” He washed his hands in the air again. “So, Mr. Bourque, what of my request? Can my father keep his good name?”

Eddie gazed across the grounds, to the far stone wall. What to do? Samuel Sok was a philanthropist, and he was a killer. Which legacy did Sok deserve? And who was Eddie to rule on such a question?

There were no
good
answers. So he picked the one he could live with—a compromise. “I can keep my mouth shut,” he said. “But I need you to trust me, and play a few things my way.”

Peter's eyes narrowed.

Eddie said, “You can't make amends for all your father's crimes, but you can undo one of them. He stole a good man's reputation with that bullshit story about Wojick abandoning his church. Let both men have their good names.”

“But how—?”

“Leave that to me. You said yourself there's no way to trace that crucifix.”

Peter held his palms out. “The police might suspect,” he said.

“Let them. There's no proof if you destroy the miniature cross in your sitting room. I'll cover your tracks.”

Peter clenched his fists and pledged, “I will crush the small statue to dust.”

“Wojick will get his proper burial,” Eddie promised, “so you won't need the old church. Leave it alone. And there are plenty of triple-deckers in the Acre that could use your money for rehabilitation. Pull your cash out of the demolition project. Kill the deal—it can't happen without you.”

“You would have me disappoint my friends in the community? Your boss, even?”

“He's going to have bigger problems.”

Peter nodded. “Agreed. What else?”

“My last request,” Eddie said, “is material in nature.”

Peter inhaled and held his breath. He squeaked, “What is your price?”

Within minutes, Eddie had what he wanted in an envelope in his shirt pocket. He retraced his steps along the path, back through the sculpture garden.

He believed what Peter had told him. The Sok brothers hadn't bashed Nowlin's skull. Peter had supplied a lot of answers, but not to the big question.

Another set of footsteps crunched up the path toward Eddie, the priest here to deliver last rites to Samuel Sok, just in case Chanthay ever snuck past security. He was about Eddie's age and height, broad in the shoulders and handsome. He carried a black leather bag on a shoulder strap and whistled an odd, familiar tune.

Eddie nodded hello.

The priest smiled and bowed his head as the two men passed.

Back in the parking lot, Eddie chatted with the ambulance crew for a few minutes about the weather and the giant chessboard, and then he eased the Mighty Chevette down the driveway, back through the gauntlet of plaster pedestrians. The gate opened automatically to let him out.

He steered down the hill. There were no pay phones in this neighborhood; he would have to wait to place a call. Goddam Frank Keyes was too cheap to issue Eddie another cell phone….

That melody!

Eddie slammed the brakes. The Chevette squealed and bucked and skidded toward the granite curb. The right front tire hit with a whump. Metal scraped on stone. Eddie slammed forward against the shoulder belt. The car rocked twice, complained with a rattle, and stalled dead.

The priest had been whistling Claude Debussy, the melody Chanthay had played on Eddie's piano—her father's favorite. He remembered what Chanthay had told him:

One day my father caught a fish and cooked it for my brother and me.

Chanthay's brother. He had been the man chanting out of view in the old triple-decker. And he was the assassin pretending to be a priest.

Eddie turned the key. The starter coughed. He pumped the gas, he pounded the steering wheel, he shouted encouragement at the Mighty Chevette, and then he shouted filth. The car refused to be abused any longer. He jumped out and sprinted toward the Sok estate. He ran until his lungs were full of lava and his legs of lead. It was no use; there was still a mile to go, and then the gate. He moaned and staggered to a stop.

Eddie walked back to the Chevette, panting.

If the brother was anything like Chanthay, Samuel Sok was already dead.