Yesterday's News - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  "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.

  2

  "Twenty 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?"

  "TaIk 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?"

  "No."

  "Guy's got this sticker, says METER MAIDS EAT THEIR YOUNG. I love it. "

  "May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb."

  "What?"

  "I said—"

  "I heard what you said. Who the hell was talking about livestock here?"

  "Mo, it's just an—"

  "You know, I gotta lot of work to do before deadline. I can't spend the whole afternoon bringing you back on track like this."

  "I know, Mo, and I appreciate it. I'm here about a client you referred to me. Jane Rust."

  Mo took a deep drag on the cigar, blew a perfect smoke ring, then another. "What did you think?"

  "I met with her today, and I thought I'd come see you, find out what I might have on my hands."

  "This Rust. Mid-twenties, kind of mousy, nervous?"

  I felt a little ping. "You don't know her. "

  "I know her, I just don't know her, you know?"

  "You lost me."

  Mo knocked some ashes into his drawer. "Couple of years ago, editor here got me a job teaching adjunct, a journalism school crosstown. This Rust was in one of my classes. O
r so she said on the phone."

  "She called you Professor Katzen with me."

  "Hah." Mo set down the cigar. "Professor Katzen. Yeah, she would, she's the one I'm thinking of. "

  "She telephoned you?"

  "Yeah. She needed an investigator to nose around Nasharbor. Somebody who wasn't already wired into the big boys down there."

  "She tell you why?"

  "No. You gonna?"

  "No. Statute says I can't. But I would like to know this—you figure her for a conspiracy nut?"

  Mo stuck the cigar back into his mouth and spoke around it.

  "Can't help you there. I just don't remember her much. Only saw her for a couple of hours on maybe ten Tuesdays two years ago. She asked some questions, gave some answers, barely stuck in my mind."

  When I didn't reply, Mo said, "What I'm saying is, you don't owe me anything on this. You want to take her ease, you take it. You don't, no offense on my part."

  I got up. "Thanks, Mo."

  Reaching the door, I heard him punch in a telephone number and say, "Parking Bureau? Listen, we gotta talk here."

  * * *

  Walking back to the condo, I averted my eyes from the traitorous, but still empty, parking space. Upstairs, I showered and shaved for the second time that day, the face protesting that it was too soon to be scraped again. I used styptie pencil to stanch the blood, and aftershave to wipe off the white, powdery residue. Pulling on a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and Reebok sport shorts for Nancy, I decanted a bottle of red wine and chopped some fresh spinach, proscuitini, and cheddar cheese into a simple salad.

  The downstairs buzzer sounded. From the staircase, I could see her through the second of two glass-paneled doors. Lustrous black hair, charcoal suit, white ruffled blouse still looking fresh after a tough day litigating for the Suffolk County district attorney's office downtown.

  I opened the door, and the hand that wasn't carrying her briefcase came out from behind her back. A mixed bouquet of flowers.

  "Pity I just pawned the Ming vase."

  She went up on her toes to kiss me. "Only a Holy Cross grad would consider putting flowers in a Ming vase." The kiss was sweet, a combination of nature and wintergreen Tic Tac.

  "Let's continue this upstairs."

  Nancy followed me. "Your buzzer system broken?"

  "No. After the nurse was raped and murdered on Commonwealth, we disconnected the door latch part of it."

  "Welcome to Back Bay."

  "Sorry."

  "I'm sorry, too. It's just been that kind of day."

  At the apartment door, I motioned for Nancy to step past me over the threshold. "Well, what do you think?"

  She moved her head slowly around the apartment, taking in the polished oak-front fireplace, the lavender windows, and the Scandinavian Design furnishings. "1 knew I should have gone to medical schoo1."

  Nudging her toward the couch, I went to the kitchen. "Wine or hard stuff?"

  "What's the wine?"

  "Robert Mondavi, 1982 Cabernet Sauvignon."

  "You're impressing me."

  "Wait'll you see the receipt for the entree."

  "Maybe half a glass of the wine, John."

  I poured us both the same amount and carried the carafe and long-stemmed crystal on a Fanueil Hall Memorial tray.

  Nancy smiled up at me. "After the day I've had, this is really wonderful."

  Putting the tray on the coffee table, I said, "Want to tell me about it?"

  The smile faded. "Only briefly."

  "On1y briefly" stretched into forty minutes and a second round of wine. Three guys in a local rock band fancied a cocktail waitress during a gig at one of the student madhouses in Allston. She didn't return quite the groupie fascination they'd come to expect, so they waited for her in their van afterward. Four hours later, they dumped her behind a boarded-up building in the Combat Zone.

  Nancy said, "It was her mother made her go to the police the next day. Fortunately, she drew an officer who cared, and he triggered the Rape Unit."

  "Any physical evidence left?"

  "Yes and no. The victim had bathed and douched herself for a couple of hours, which pretty well eliminated the semen and hair possibilities. But there were plenty of bruises, and a bartender who corroborates her story of the guys hitting on her beforehand. "

  "Where are you now?"

  "I just finished my direct of the bartender. Tomorrow, they'll cross him, then probably put their own clients on the stand."

  "That's pretty unusual, isn't it?"

  "In most criminal cases, yes. But not in rape. Especially not in group rapes like this one. These guys aren't contesting that she was in the van and had intercourse with them. In fact, they bragged about it to their manager afterward. No, they're claiming consent, but they lost their motion to have her prior sexual behavior come in as an exception to the rape shield statute, so it pretty well leaves their word against hers and her physical condition, backed up by photographs at the district station the next day. "

  "They have any priors?"

  "No. Which makes them a lot harder to impeach. But I was watching them while we impaneled the jury. They're cocky, probably figuring the publicity they're getting will increase their name recognition for the future. I think that'll come across as guilty arrogance, not innocent righteousness, once I have a shot at them."

  We ate dinner, my filet mignon garnering almost the level of praise the price tag warranted. The wine was just right, and Nancy put some symphonic music on the stereo system that the doctor couldn't bear moving from the custom-built cabinet next to the hearth. We lay back, slanted in toward each other on the couch, sipping the last of the wine.

  "I like where you live, John."

  "It's grown on me the last couple of hours."

  "Thanks to the company?"

  "Mustn't fish for compliments, counselor. "

  She slid her hand up to my neck, flicking and tugging gently on the roots right at the hairline.

  I looked into her eyes, blue and wide-spaced, the freckles that multiplied week by week as the sun scaled higher in the early summer sky. "After the kind of stuff you had to deal with today, I'd understand if you'd rather not tonight."

  She moved her head slowly, left to right. "I waited long enough for you, John Cuddy. I'm not about to miss any chances now. And besides, after the kind of stuff I dealt with today, what I'd really like is a night of nice, slow lovemaking, to put sex back where it belongs rather than turn against it." She stood up and walked to the stereo. "I know a lot of this is new for you still, and I don't want to suggest anything radical, but how would you like to make love to music tonight?"

  "Good idea."

  "Any requests?"

  "Well," I said, putting down my glass and coming up behind her, "let's avoid the 'Minute Waltz.'"

  * * *

  I got to a sitting position and picked up the telephone by the third ring. Every muscle was tight but strangely refreshed from the Nautilus workout and being with Nancy. The circulating floor fan blew the sheets against my legs as Nancy groped for an unfamiliar light switch. The luminescent dial on the clock radio read 5:45 A.M.

  "Hello?"

  "John?"

  "Who is this?"

  "John, it's Mo, Mo Katzen."

  "Mo. What the hell is it?"

  "I'm in the newsroom, John. At the Herald. One of the guys here just heard from somebody he knows down near Nasharbor. "

  "What happened?"

  "It's the Rust girl. Jane Rust, the reporter. They found her dead in her apartment. Suicide, looks like."

  "Shit."

  "I thought you oughta know," he said, and hung up.

  3

  How did she die?

  "I don't know, Beth." Bending down, I arranged the mums longways to her. There were a few sport Fishing boats in the harbor below her hillside, but the people on them looked more involved in basking than baiting and casting. "Preliminary indication is suicide, but I don't have any details."

 
Were you going to take her case?

  "I don't know that, either. Mo Katzen really couldn't vouch for her. She'd just been a student of his years ago. And she struck me as a little. . . high-strung."

  High-strung or strung out?

  "Cood question."

  I mean, do you think she was suicidal?

  "No." I was surprised to hear myself say that, but it was true. "No, when she left me, I thought she was getting a grip on herself, like talking with me had settled her down. She even gave me a check, which she figured would force me to get back to her. "

  Which you wouldn't have been able to do if she'd killed herself in the meantime.

  "Exactly. Of course, that doesn't mean that something couldn't have pushed her over the edge after she left me yesterday afternoon."

  Is it legal to keep her check?

  "Getting mercenary?"

  You know what I mean. Is it legal for you to go on after she's dead?

  "There's nothing in the licensing statute, so Nancy couldn't say for sure. And it's tough for her to advise me when she's technically a government lawyer who's not supposed to be handling private clients."

  So what are you going to do?

  "First, I'm going to pick up my new car."

  What happened to the Fiat?

  "Forced retirement. The new one—or at least the newer one —is a Honda Prelude."

  From Renault to Fiat to Honda. Does that mean you're moving up in the world?

  "At least moving. "

  What are you going to do about the reporter?

  "I'm going to drive down to Nasharbor, stay a few days, and see if I can convince myself that Jane Rust was both wrong and suicidal."

  Stay well.

  I turned to go.

  And John?

  "Yes?"

  Give Nancy my best.

  "I will."

  * * *

  The trip to Nasharbor was almost a pleasure. After paying for the Prelude at Arnie's and waiting in line at both the Registry of Motor Vehicles and my insurance agency, I took Route 3 to Route 128, and then Route 24 south toward the Narragansett coast. The Fiat had been one of the last cars imported before the catalytic converter—unleaded gas requirements and was a rocketship in its prime. However, the pressure of aging and the demise of leaded premium gas had reduced its acceleration mightily, and the gearshift, despite synchromesh, required double clutching half the time. By comparison, the Honda was smooth as silk and quick as a cat, the fifth gear allowing me to cruise near sixty at only 2,400 rpms. The car also sported a moon roof, retractable electrically, which created the illusion of a convertible provided I didn't turn my head too much. Nasharbor itself, however, was an end that didn't justify the means. Patch-paved roads with gravel to fill the potholes. Dense, two-decker neighborhoods on hillsides overlooking abandoned mills. Adjacent, vacant lots in moonscape, strewn with washers missing lids, grocery carts without wheels, Ford Falcons and other ancients in random pieces.