Yesterday's News (2 page)

“What about the corruption angle?”

“They buried it. Said they wouldn't print it unless I revealed my confidential source.”

That didn't sound right. “The paper wouldn't run the story without the name of the guy you talked to in it?”

“No, no. The editor wouldn't run the story without me telling him, that editor, the name of the source.”

I watched her for a minute.

“What's the matter?” she said.

“I guess I'm thinking that if I'm the editor involved, I might want to know your source's name before I let fly at the local cops.”

The cheeks imploded again. “Maybe I'm wasting my time here.”

“Ms. Rust, I just don't see where I fit in.”

She toned down. “He's dead.”

“Who?”

“My source. They killed him to shut him up.”

“Who killed him?”

Her eyes glowed fanatically. “The cops, who else?”

Uh-oh. “Ms. Rust, cops don't—”

“I am wasting my time.”

“Ms. Rust, hear me out, okay? Reciprocal courtesy?”

She folded her arms but remained rigid in the chair. Rust was going to hear me out alright. She just wasn't going to listen. I decided to give it a try anyway.

“Cops don't have to kill people like your source to shut them up. Guys like your source are usually involved in action the cops know about. It's risky to kill somebody, especially when there's a motive to kill. It's a lot safer just to pressure the guy, tell him if he rolls over on us, we turn up some new ‘evidence' and nail him for something that sends him away for heavy time. Like maybe to Walpole State Prison or Cedar Junction or whatever the hell they call it now, where all sorts of bad things happen to guys who rat on other people.”

She smiled sarcastically. “You said ‘we.'”

“I'm sorry?”

“When you were talking about cops just now, you used ‘we' and ‘us.' You identify with them, don't you?”

“I was military police, and I've worked with all kinds of law enforcement over the years. I suppose I do identify with them. That doesn't mean I think they're all good scouts. It does mean I don't easily see even the bad scouts doing something stupid.”

She unfolded her arms and hunched forward. “Look, Mr. Cuddy, I've gotten no support on this. None! From anyone! My editor thinks I'm a loose cannon, I can't sleep, my personal life's a mess. All I want to do, all I ever wanted to do, is be a good reporter, and now you won't help me either.”

Rust turned sideways, snatching off the glasses with her left hand and clamping the right to her face to dam the tears. I opened three drawers before I found the Kleenex box I knew I'd bought weeks ago. I pushed it toward her. She crumpled one, then came back for another. The tears and tissues savaged her mascara.

Putting her glasses back on, she said, “I need somebody to look into the man's death, Mr. Cuddy. I understand it'll cost money, but I owe him that much.”

She looked up at me with the defiant dignity of a high school girl who doesn't have a date for the prom but decides to go anyway. Wrecked makeup and all, it gave her a surprising air of attraction.

“Ms. Rust—”

“Please, call me Jane.”

“Jane. I'm not saying I'll accept the case. Police anywhere take a dim view of a private investigator poking into a killing. But I'm willing to hear more first if you're willing to tell it.”

She nodded. “The head porno guy is named Gotbaum. I can write all this out for you with first names and addresses and all. My source … my source's name was Coyne, Charlie Coyne. He was kind of a messenger, carrying some of the stuff. He … they found him in an alley behind one of the bars in the part of town … the part we call The Strip. Kind of like your Combat Zone up here.”

“Topless bars, peep shows, that kind of thing?”

“Right, right. When the city fathers, and I emphasize the gender, decided that it would cost more to close them down than hem them in, a decision was made to sacrifice three blocks down near the cannery. It was called The Strip long before I ever came to town.”

“When was that?”

“When?”

“When you came to town.”

“Oh, about two years ago. I worked in Florida, then South Carolina, then New Jersey before I came up here.”

I thought it sounded like a lot of stops for someone so young, but I let it go. “How was Coyne killed?”

Rust bit her lip, and then I thought the tears might be back on the way. “Knifed. And robbed. Hagan said Charlie was mugged by a derelict and closed the book on it.”

“Hagan?”

“He's the detective captain. In line for chief.”

“And you don't believe him because

She regained a little fire. “I don't believe him because his ex-partner is a guy named Schonstein, or ‘Schonsy,' as he is affectionately called.” Rust made the last sound like the deepest insult one could inflict. “And, surprise, surprise, guess who the cop is that Coyne told me was on the take?”

“Schonstein.”

“Right. But not Schonsy.”

“I don't get you.”

“The cop with his hand out is Detective Mark Schonstein. Schonsy's son. Hagan's old partner's son. Smell anything now?”

“Schonsy Senior still on the force?”

“Retired. Disability pension a while ago.”

“And you figure one of the cops killed Coyne to keep him from …”

“From talking to me.”

“But he'd already talked to you, right? The night of the raid, I mean?”

“Yes, but I kept after him on it. I wanted to have a story so well documented that even the cops couldn't sweep it under the rug. And if my editor wouldn't run it, I'd find somebody who would.”

“How did the cops know that Coyne was your source?”

“I don't know. That's one of the things I need you to find out.”

When I didn't go on, Rust fidgeted. Finally I said, “Who did you tell, Jane?”

She shook her head.

“Come on. How am I supposed to find the leak if you won't—”

“I can't, I just can't! I have to know if one of them … I have to know without telling you. It probably wasn't even professional to tell … Look, if I was … if Charlie was betrayed that way, I want to know you found it out independently. Don't you see?”

“I see that you didn't want your editor to know the name of your source, but that you did tell others. If you don't tell me who the possibilities are, my hands are pretty much tied.”

“The people I told wouldn't. … They couldn't have told the police about Charlie. I'd feel worse than I do now if I hired you and you made them feel like I suspected them. Besides, I'm sure the cops found out Charlie was my source some other way.”

“Well, would Charlie have told anyone?”

Suddenly Rust dipped her head forward, middle fingers rotating gently at the temples like a cocktail lounge mentalist going into her act. “I'm sorry, it's just that I have a splitting headache.”

“I think I have some aspirin.”

She shook her head again. “Can't. I mean, I can't abide pills. Probably psychosomatic, but I can't swallow anything medicinal, not even those little cold things. I throw up.”

“I think they have—”

She cut me off by saying, “I've got to get back. I'm supposed to be working on a series about redevelopment, and this real estate guy who's getting more than he's paying for. Speaking of which …” She began rummaging through her shoulder bag. “… here, let me give you a check.”

“Jane, I haven't said I'd take you on yet.”

Rust pushed toward me a pale blue draft with the spidery imprint of a sailing ship. She already had filled in the date, my name, and her signature. “The proverbial blank check.”

“Jane—”

“And this is my business card, with my home number.”

“I won't accept a blank check.”

“What's your daily rate?”

“Three hundred. Plus expenses, which would mean travel, meals, and hotel down there if I did take your case.”

I hoped the amount would discourage her. It didn't.

She entered “$900.” and “Nine hundred and no cents” on the appropriate lines and got up to leave. “Three days' worth. This way you can think about it and still have to get back to me. Good reporters make people get back to them.”

I spent the next two hours catching up on paperwork. I focused on one item in particular. The police commissioner had lifted my permit to carry a concealed weapon because of a failure to report my gun being stolen. I was told on the sly that if I submitted a second request through headquarters on Berkeley Street, the permit would be reinstated.

I kept Jane Rust's check and card, paper-clipped together, on top of the in-box. That forced me to think about her. I really didn't want the case. I really didn't want to spend a week or so living out of a motel in a decaying industrial city with a stinking harbor. And I especially didn't want to make cops there overly eager to roust me for looking into one of their own.

On the other hand, I wasn't going to be a private investigator very long if I had to rely on public transportation to get around. And there was one person within walking distance who might tell me whether Ms. Rust was a client who'd bind.

“T
WENTY DOLLARS
, John, twenty dollars. Can you believe it?”

“That's steep, Mo.”

“Steep? Steep? I'll give you steep, alright.” Mo Katzen squared his stubby shoulders, the too-wide tie riding like a scarf beneath the unbuttoned vest to a suit jacket I'd never seen him wear in all the years I'd known him. He ran a hand through his snowy hair and then shook the fire-orange parking violation at me like a medicine man with a gourd rattle. “Time was a citizen could feed a family of four on twenty a week. Of course, time was a citizen could leave his car at the curb in his own city without a Resident Parking sticker, too.”

“Mo, I need—”

“You got one of those?”

“One of what?”

“Those. Those parking decal things.”

“Yes.”

“You're a traitor to your roots, John.”

“I'm sorry, Mo.”

“Goddamnest idea.” Mo spun the ticket down onto his desk. I wasn't sure whether the surface of the desk was metal or wood, since I'd never seen it through the town dump of sandwich wrappers, Red Sox programs, almanacs,
Playbills,
and probably Mo's own high school yearbook. “Imagine, the Athens of the Atlantic restricting parking to ‘Residents Only.'”

“An outrage.”

“Mild, John, too mild. Granted, I should have my head examined for even trying to drive into Yuppiedom over by you, but I got invited to a dinner, and I'm not about to pay ten bucks for two hours in one of those private lots.”

“And not many of them left.”

“Of course not. If there were, the developers couldn't get their price for selling the spaces behind the condo buildings. You know what a space goes for now?”

I decided not to mention the one I rented from my landlord. “No.”

“Forty to fifty grand. For an eight-by-twenty table of tar that you couldn't fit a decent-sized car into. Assuming Detroit made decent-sized cars anymore. Which if they did they couldn't sell, because everybody's buying these foreign jobs. You ever see a foreign car in Southie when you were growing up?”

“No, Mo. South Boston was pretty much true blue.”

“Bet your ass. Not in Chelsea either. The Irish and the Jews were proud to be in this country. For that matter, you never even saw a Fiat over in the North End, did you?”

“Not that I can—”

“No, no, of course you didn't. All the neighborhoods back then bought American. Now they're calling them ‘imported,' you know. Not ‘foreign' anymore but ‘imported,' like that justifies the king's ransom you gotta pay for them and the whack you give the trade deficit when the dealer negotiates the check, but who cares, right? Tell me this, how the hell you gonna depend on a car you couldn't communicate with the guys who built it?”

“Communicate?”

“Talk with them, for God's sake. How you gonna know if a Yugo's built right, huh? You don't have a next-door neighbor or a guy dating your sister works in a factory on them. You got instead some preppy fraternity president telling you on a television commercial costs a hundred grand a minute how great the little boxes are, but you never get to talk to a guy who builds one.”

“You could talk to a mechanic, and I think Ford and GM buy some time on the tube now and—”

“Speaking of a hundred grand.” Mo reached for a comatose cigar on the corner of his half-opened top drawer. A good sign that he was winding down. “You know that's what one of them goes for now, don't you?” He lit the cigar with a war memorial lighter as big as a softball.

I said, “A Yugo?”

“No, no. A parking space.”

“I thought you said fifty?”

“John, you gotta pay attention here. Fifty just gets you an outdoor space where you gotta contend with the snow and the soot. You want a roof over the little fucker's head, you gotta go a hundred.”

“That seems—”

“I just read it. In our new ‘Downtown' section, the Sunday supplement that's supposed to win us over all the yuppies I can't stand who've done this to the city in the first place. A ‘garage condo' now starts at one hundred grand cash money. Can you imagine that?”

“I sure can't.”

“And we're not talking your
own
little garage either, my friend. We're talking one measured slot under a leaky pipe on the third floor of a place looks like Michael Caine's gonna gun down a CIA agent before midnight.”

“Mo, I wonder if I—”

“Yep, it's either shell out the long yard for a condo garage space, or leave your little Yugo out on the street. I was mad about this ticket until I passed this one car, old beat-up Mazda, got seven or eight of them tucked under the one wiper still attached. Know what the guy had on his bumper?”