Authors: Jeremiah Healy
On the way into town, I stopped and again dialed the office of Richard Dykestra. The receptionist again told me the developer was unavailable. I thanked her and hung up.
Back in the car, I drove until I saw a stationery store on Main Street. I bought a small book mailer and a fancy label. On the label, I wrote Dykestra's name and address. In the upper left corner of the mailer, I printed the name and address of the fictitious Boston law firm of Dewey, Cheatham & Howe.
Then I parked at a meter near the police building. Approaching the front doors, I saw Captain Hogueira in a large, black Oldsmobile, Manos at the wheel. I limped over.
“Mr. Cuddy, you are hurt? We are just returning, but perhaps we could provide you with a ride. This car is one of the few privileges of my rank.”
“I'll be alright, thank you. I would like to talk though. Before I see your esteemed colleague Captain Hagan.”
In his office, Hogueira said, “How may I be of service?”
“Fair to say the uniformed branch here investigates traffic incidents?”
“With diligence.”
“Somebody almost ran me down this morning.”
“When?”
“About six-thirty.”
“Where?”
“The car followed me from the motel west along Crestview, then tried to resurface the river bridge with me.”
“Most unfortunate. Witnesses?”
“One.”
Hogueira regarded me for a moment. “Before I inquire of the name of the witness, may I ask why you waited these several hours to report the accident?”
“No accident. The driver was trying to kill me.”
“You saw the driver?”
“No. And I didn't get a plate number, either.”
Hogueira shrugged. “Of little importance. Almost certainly stolen.” His eyes refocused on me. “Again, however, why did you wait so long to contact us?”
“I thought I should bandage myself up first.”
“You are injured badly?”
“More in pride than body. I should have seen it coming.”
“You should have realized someone would try to kill you with a car?”
“I should have realized that if someone was willing to kill Charlie Coyne and Jane Rust, I probably weighed in as an afterthought.”
“Oh, Mr. Cuddy, you should not sell yourself so short. Your presence in our city seems alone to be reordering all kinds of priorities. And speaking of priorities, can you tell me now why you waited so long to report the occurrence of early this morning to the police?”
The Little Prince, who once having asked a question ⦠“I wanted to be sure I'd be reporting it to the right side of the department.”
Hogueira breathed laboriously. Not aggravated, just considering things. “Perhaps I should inquire now of the name of your witness?”
“Duckie Teevens. An employee of Bunny Gotbaum.”
“Ah, yes. Well, it seems your first impression of the right side of the department is incorrect. This incident certainly seems within Captain Hagan's domain. There is a bench just outside his office where you can await him in relative comfort.”
Hagan stumped past me, favoring his right leg. “I can give you five minutes, Cuddy.”
I stood awkwardly from the bench, thinking that I hadn't seen him walking the day before. “Old Buick with primered fenders, right?”
He stared at me, his hand on the doorknob to his office. “What are you talking about?”
“Your leg. You got chased by an old Buick this morning, too?”
“Football from high school. Acts up once in a while. You want to see me or not?”
I followed him into the office. We sat down, and I explained what happened to me, including Duckie as witness.
Hagan said, “Sounds to me like your witness is part of your problem.”
“More like I'm part of somebody else's problem.”
Hagan reclined in the chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Guy could have been coming off a bad night. Boss lays him off, he gets soused, maybe mistakes you for the boss.”
“Captain, when I was in the MP's, we had a kind of principle we lived by. Know what it was?”
“Can't wait to hear.”
“We used to say that nothing happens by coincidence. Everything that seems related is related. Cause and effect, disease and symptom.”
“What is this, Philosophy 101?”
“No, it's murder. Two completed, one attempted. No avenging clock-puncher this morning, either. Thoughtful, professional, and damned near successful.”
“So you say. And so Duckie boy says. Talk to the sergeant downstairs. He can write up an incident report. That it?”
“Yeah, that's it. Except for one thing.”
“Which is?”
“How come you didn't tell me the autopsy report showed Jane Rust was pregnant?”
“I told you that I couldn't see dredging up her problems once she'd decided to end them.” Hagan reached for a file on his desk. “Have a nice day, now.”
HARBORSIDE CONDOMINIUMS, LTD.
EXPERIENCE A WORLD OF WONDER
LIVING BY THE SEA.
RICHARD DYKESTRA, DEVELOPER
That's what the big sign said. The little sign hanging from the chain link fence was a bit more realistic: THIS IS A HARD-HAT JOB. I pulled the Prelude past the gate and parked behind a Ford Bronco with jumbo tires and a raised suspension. There were plenty of empty spaces around it. I took another look at my book mailer. The hand-printed return address wouldn't fool even a slow secretary, but I figured it could get me onto the job site.
Walking back, I noticed the padlock on the gate was open. I pushed it in.
The site was a countinghouse on an old wharf. The wharf itself, rotting timber pilings and some huge old boulders, didn't seem the most stable foundation for a condo complex. It appeared that Dykestra was going to build his wonderland within the shell of the old countinghouse, since half the exterior filling of the structure had been demolished, leaving only the skeleton of beams and joists that one day would be polished ribs in stylish, fireplaced living rooms. If Harborside were ever finished and successfully sold.
There was very little activity on the site. No crane and wrecking ball to punch out the unwanted parts. I could count only three guys in a far corner, one measuring, two others standing by, leaning on sledgehammers. Day labor is one thing you can't get on credit. Nobody who needs a pay envelope every Thursday's going to stay on the job if wages aren't kept current.
“Hey, you! Can't you read the sign?”
I looked up. A guy wearing construction clothes and a red hard hat stood on a second-floor beam with his fists on his hips like a foreman. He tossed his head toward the gate. “What does that sign say?”
I waved the mailer at him. “I've got something here for Mr. Dykestra.”
“Packages go to the office.”
“Not this one.” I sat down on a fairly flat piece of rubble and crossed my arms.
“I'm coming down.” He didn't sound pleased with me.
I lost track of him as he wended his way back into the intact part of the building. He came out a first-floor door along the wharf, with a short, pudgy man in a large-patterned plaid three-piece suit clumping after him. Pudge's vest didn't reach his belt, and his pants didn't reach his shoes.
As they drew even with me, the foreman pushed up his sleeves while Pudge said, “What kind of package you got for Dykestra?”
“Confidential package.”
“Give it here.”
“You Dykestra?”
The foreman said, “Give the man the package, asshole.”
I tried to sound hurt. “I was given explicit instructions to give this only to Mr. Dykestra personally. In hand.”
Pudge's jaw set. “In hand, huh? A process server? Al, this guy don't have a hard hat. Throw him off the job before the feds cite me for a safety violation.”
“With pleasure.”
I figured Al had watched me limp before he yelled at me, and he started for my bad left side. I pivoted on the weak leg, throwing my right hip into his left thigh. Reaching my right arm up and past his left armpit, I threw him over my hip. He landed on his back, the air whoofing from his lungs. My leg hurt as badly as he sounded.
I said, “Mr. Dykestra, someplace we can talk this over?”
Pudge watched me as he said, “Al, you gonna be okay?”
Al, wallowing on the ground, nodded erratically.
Dykestra said, “Let's sit down by the water.”
“I gotta say, I figured you'd be around to see me.”
“Bruce Fetch give you a call?”
Dykestra laughed. “Bruce is a good guy. He's had more than his share of problems lately, that's all.”
“Seems like the kind of town, everybody's got problems.”
A man was maneuvering a beamy sea skiff with a small outboard across the choppy bay. He was hunkered down in the stern, spray dousing him every time the prow smacked a wave.
Dykestra said, “You see that boat?”
“Yes.”
“What do you see?”
“An old one barely making it.”
“That's pretty close to right. The guy in that skiff used to have a big fishing boat. Bank took it from him because the insurance company said the premium's tripled and the bank won't let him go out without insurance to cover their loan. So he loses his boat and now the poor bastard tries to feed his family the only way he knows how, by fishing handlines.”
“There a moral to this story?”
“Yeah. Yeah, there's a moral awright. The moral is you gotta change, otherwise you lose what you got and get left with something worse.”
“And that's what you're doing here, changing things?”
“Bet your sweet ass. This fuckin town's like a fat broad, you know? Has enough to eat, don't have no reason to look good, it just sits and eats. That's fine, till all of a sudden the food runs out, and nobody thinks the town looks good enough to treat to a dinner.”
I looked over my shoulder, partly to view the condo site and partly to watch for Al. “You're a long way from making this look good enough.”
“You gotta start somewhere, right? I grew up in Nasharbor. Wrong side of the tracks, wrong side of the sheets. I can't help that. But I got smart the hard way, and I got lucky, too. And now I can do something for the place, give it a hand, help pull itself out of the shit it's in before it gets any deeper.”
“And you figure Harborside is just what the doctor ordered?”
“You gotta have some vision. You remember the Faneuil Hall area in the old days?”
“I remember.”
“Mud flats, open sewers, wharf buildings so cruddy the rats were looking to move up. Now, what do they get for those waterfront condos? Three, four hundred thousand.”
“That's Boston. The city draws young professionals like a magnet. Down here, I don't see people wanting to move into an area that looks like a Soviet missile landed last week. I see them going for single-family homes, bigger, with more property than they could buy in the city.”
“Like I said, you gotta have vision. When Harborside hits its stride, other developers'll move on the other parcels around here. Snowball effect, you know?”
“Or Harborside gets built, even though it's a bad tax time and market time for it. Only it's public money fronting the project, so after the construction bookkeeping gets entered, you're made whole. Then if Harborside's a bust, the taxpayers end up paying the tab, as usual.”
Dykestra smiled the way a magician does when someone in the audience yells out the secret to a trick he just performed. “I forgot you were listening to that Rust maggot. What other bullshit she throw at you?”
“What difference does it make now?”
“No difference. I just thought I could set you straight on some things is all.”
“You ever try to set her straight?”
“Yeah.” He got serious. “Yeah, I did try. I tried to show her how what I was doing here was putting people to work, people like that poor bastard in the skiff who won't have to risk drowning himself every day to put food on the table. I tried to show her the plans for this place here, the shot in the arm it'd give the city. Jesus Christ, you'd of thought that she'd get off on that kind of story. But no, man, somebody put a bee up her ass about this and about me. And all my nice talks with her, and even Bruce hosing her, just wasn't making no impression on her. And the shit she was slinging was starting to stick, not because it was true, you understand, but because she just kept slinging it. She was a screwy broad, that one. And I can't say I cried any when I heard she did herself.”
“You figure that's what happened?”
“I figure that's what happened.”
“You know of anything in particular that would set her off?”
Dykestra looked disgusted. “Aw, c'mon, man. Could have been a lot of things. Bruce said he told you about her being pregnant and all. That plus the Coyne guy getting stabbed.”
“What do you know about Coyne?”
“Nothing, man. Just from Bruce, that she was real upset about it. Like I said, a screwy broad. I was the editor, I would have fired her.”
“You run your own crew here?”
“I run ⦠you mean the guys on the job here?”
“Right.”
“Yeah. They're my employees. At least, they work for one of my companies. That's public record. Why do you want to know?”
“Any of them drive an old Buick, couple of fenders with just primer on them?”
He didn't look away or stop to think. Maintaining eye contact, he said, “No. Nobody's got that kind of car I ever seen.”
I stood up. “Guess that's it for now. Al going to give me any trouble as I leave?”
“Not if I walk you out.” Dykestra rose, whisking the dust off the back of his pants with his hands. “'Course, I'm not on the site every day, so I wouldn't stop back here again if I was you.”