“I checked the files,” Orr said. “The physical evidence in the case against your brother no longer exists. Destroyed twenty years ago, when the warehouse flooded.”
“Aw, Lucy, that sucks.”
“Does it?”
“Sure it does,” Eddie said, sharply. “Henry could have filed a motion to have the blood evidence tested for DNA. The results would have excluded him as the killer, and there would be no need for another trial.”
“You’re so sure he didn’t do it.”
So that’s what this is about.
Eddie grew defensive. He said, “I believe in him.”
“Following your gut?” she said. “Our guts can lead us dangerous places.”
“He’s my brother,” Eddie pleaded. Can’t she see?
“Don’t split the facts,” she said. “He’s your brother, and he’s doing life for murder.”
She’s blind.
“What do you know about my family?” Eddie shouted. The General scrambled away. “Or personal relationships? Or following your gut feelings? Christ, Lucy! Do you even know anybody outside of the concrete coffin you work in downtown? Do you ever do anything but work?”
Eddie switched tones, to quiet sarcasm. “Have you ever had fun?” he asked. “Do you know what fun is? Every time I see you, you’re snooping around, asking embarrassing questions, writing it all down in your little notebook.”
“That’s what you do, too,” she calmly reminded him. “Aren’t you a reporter?”
Goddam. Fallen into my own word trap.
Eddie felt ridiculous. It was hard to get angry with Lucy Orr. She didn’t reflect his anger back at him, so that it just died when it hit her.
“And I do have fun,” she assured him. “I’m chair of the police windsurfer’s club. There are a dozen of us. We do exhibition races for charity. I’d spot you fifty meters and still beat you across the Merrimack any day.” She laughed.
She was absorbing Eddie’s anger like light into a black hole, destroying it as fast as Eddie could produce it. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I don’t know about your family, but I know of mine,” Orr said. “The lessons are universal.”
It was the first time Orr had ever mentioned her family to Eddie Bourque. Eddie had trouble imagining Lucy Orr as a child; he had come to think of her as a policing machine that had been created as is.
He asked, “Were you born and bred to be a cop?”
She paused a moment, smacked her lips. “My father was a police officer,” she said. “In Delaware, where I was born. Thomas Orr was chief of his department.”
“Ha! I knew your accent was wrong,” Eddie said. “It’s ninety-percent New England, but once in a while an R slips through.”
Eddie laughed, realized he was laughing alone, and then gave his instant analysis of Lucy Orr:
“So your pop was the top cop,” he said. “Impressive. You grew up in his gigantic shadow—it’s probably been hanging over you your entire career. And when you went into law enforcement, you found the old man’s shoes hard to fill, so you convinced yourself you gotta work twenty-four/seven to live up to your father’s standards. Because you want to be like him. Right? Right?”
“Is that what your gut says?” she asked.
That sounded like a trap. But Eddie could hardly back down now. “That’s how I see it.”
She began: “My father used his connections as chief to provide free prison labor to the city councilor who had cast the deciding ballot when my father got his job. Apparently, this was a deal they had worked out before the vote. This councilman owned rental property. My father had inmates painting his buildings, doing odd jobs, saving the guy thousands in maintenance costs. Then he falsified his reports to say that the inmates had been cleaning the highways.”
Eddie felt like an ass. His analysis of Detective Orr had been exactly wrong.
“Oh, Lucy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“When the scandal broke, he resigned in disgrace. Never got charged or did jail time, but the city revoked his pension. It was all over the local paper. The talk shows called him ‘Tommy Orr the political whore.’ ”
“Ouch.”
“Painful,” she agreed, “but not inaccurate.”
“And all these years, you’ve been trying to erase what he did by working so hard.”
That ruffled her. “For your information,” she informed Eddie, “I like what I do. I like solving crimes. I like taking predators off the street. And I’m not so foolish to think that I can undo the past. Neither should you.”
Eddie unclenched his hand and looked at the key. It shone with sweat. The key had left a jagged red indentation in Eddie’s palm where he had been squeezing it. “This is different,” he told Orr, softly. “I’m close to breaking this.” He stuffed the key in his pocket.
“Bring me in on it,” she said.
“Soon.”
She started to argue but Eddie cut her off, saying: “For thirty years I tried not to think about Henry’s sins, the shame of it, and the fear—what if I was like him? I didn’t want to be capable of murder, but if my brother was, who’s to say?”
Eddie’s voice cracked. He felt the pinch of emotion on his windpipe, and swallowed hard. “In my case,” he continued, “I can undo the past. Henry didn’t kill those people, so the last thirty years have been an illusion, just a bad movie that I thought was real. I’m going to shut off the projector. Then I’m going to get my brother back.”
He was close to crying, though he knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to cry and Eddie never cried unless he wanted to.
She sighed, saying: “I could have you picked up on an outstanding warrant, to keep you out of trouble.”
“Like a paperwork error?”
“Probably would take the courts forty-eight hours to sort it out. You’ll get your belt and shoelaces back, and maybe even an apology.”
“I won’t stop until I reach the truth,” Eddie promised. “I’ll do anything to get my brother back.”
“That worries me,” she said, suddenly sounding cold, as if Eddie had tapped her in a place outside their friendship. “Promise you’ll call me before you get killed.”
He thought about being deadpan. How much notice do you need? But he heard himself answer, “I swear it.”
Chapter 27
The night passed in choppy, sleepless chapters.
First there was an hour tossing on the bed, watching the digital clock’s hovering red numerals as they slowly ticked off the progress of the passing night, like the scoreboard of the world’s most boring basketball game.
At midnight, Eddie slipped out of bed. He liked to change his environment when he couldn’t sleep, but on this night, the sofa was no better. The change disturbed General VonKatz, who felt the sudden need to run from window to window, looking for squirrels. Eddie dozed in short fits. Every noise from the neighborhood piqued his fight-or-flight instincts, like when he tent-camped in grizzly country. He listened for the white van, driven by the man in the ski mask.
Shortly before dawn, a car slowed outside Eddie’s house. Eddie tensed, until he heard his Washington Post hit the sidewalk. The car sped off. The newspaper reminded Eddie of Lew Cuhna’s key, still in the pocket of his jeans, which were still on Eddie’s body. There was nothing in the world more important than the key.
What if he comes for me tonight?
Eddie got up. It was quarter-to-four. He put on his running shoes, went back to his bed, and slept.
He woke at five o’clock. Five-zero-zero, exactly—what was the chance he would have woken right on the hour? Hmmmm…One chance in sixty? No…if he considered the possibility of sleeping later—say, until eight o’clock—that would be one chance in one hundred eighty. Wouldn’t it? The clock turned to 5:01. Eddie realized he was wide awake.
“Uhhh!” he cried, yanking the pillow over his eyes. I gotta get to sleep!
He had left his comp
uter on. The cooling fan hummed harmless little white noise. Eddie let the hum fill his head.
Then the computer said DEE-do, the chirp it made when an email arrived over the broadband.
Probably spam, Eddie thought.
Leave me be! I don’t want generic painkillers, I don’t want to refinance my home or spy on my neighbor with a secret camera, and I prefer my penis the way it is.
He squeezed the pillow over his head.
He caught himself wondering who else might have emailed him so early in the morning. What were the chances that he would have been awake when the email arrived….Hmmm, one chance in sixty?
“Aw, Christ,” he cried, sweeping the comforter aside and rising from bed.
General VonKatz had been sleeping in Eddie’s desk chair. Eddie snapped his fingers and pointed to the floor. “I need my chair,” he told the cat.
The General looked Eddie up and down, rose with a shudder, bowed his spine, kicked out one hind leg a moment to stretch it, then kicked out the other one, yawned, licked a paw three times, hopped down and moseyed away, nails clicking on the hardwood.
“Thanks for rushing,” Eddie said. He dropped into the chair, rapped the keyboard to dispel the screensaver and then called up the email.
Oh, the missing mid-term, the last one, from Ryan. Later than the rest, but under the deadline—the way Eddie wrote his news stories. He was about to return to bed when he decided to inspect the paper, to make sure it had arrived intact. He read the top:
LOWELL—Sharon Matthewson gets to hear free live music three nights a week.
Trouble is, it’s usually when she’s trying to sleep.
The Board of License last night reviewed Matthewson’s noise complaint against her neighbor, Kara’s Irish Pub, 670 Hubbard St., which is known throughout the Merrimack Valley as an incubator of new rock’n’roll and heavy metal bands.
Pub ownership claimed last night that they are operating within the rules of their entertainment license, and have already gone beyond what is required to satisfy Matthewson by installing a new vestibule to contain the sound when patrons come in and out.
The board put the complaint on hold for two weeks, to allow commissioners time to schedule a site visit to the club…
Eddie read the story to the bottom. All the relevant facts were there. The top was engaging, even funny, while still respectful. The outcome of the hearing was clearly stated high in the story. And Ryan had added context with just a few words, describing the club as an “incubator” for new acts, which quickly characterized the garage bands that jammed there.
This is good journalism.
It was good enough to be published in any community newspaper. Eddie printed a paper copy of the story and then grabbed his red pen. With a few constructive edits, Ryan’s story would really sing, and then Eddie could get back to sleep.
The clock said five-thirty-one. Eddie sighed. It was time to give up on sleep. He set the paper aside for a moment and brewed himself a ten-cup batch of double-strength Sumatra.
Eddie watched it drip, rubbing the key in his pocket.
Chapter 28
The Late Chuckie’s rat bike glug-glugged over the bridge. Eddie looked downriver, where the Merrimack widened and became shallow. Patches of yellow-green grass sprouted from little almond-shaped islands where the water parted around sloping mounds of muck. The morning was bright, cloudless, hot. The wind from his slow ride failed to dry the sweat that dripped from under Eddie’s helmet. The perspiration came from a mix of nervousness and too much caffeine.
The Post Office was a modern building with a sleek design that suggested computer-age efficiency. Eddie left the bike between two yellow lines, patted his pants, felt the key again—still there—left his helmet and goggles on the seat and walked inside.
The building’s air conditioning had been set lower than cool, lower than cold, somewhere near cryogenic sleep. Sweaty after the ride, Eddie felt a deep-bone chill. He was afraid to ask for help finding the P.O. box—why would the rightful owner need help finding it? He browsed the little metal doors until he found the one with a number that matched the stamp on the key.
Looking both ways, feeling suspicious—probably looking suspicious—Eddie inserted the key and opened the box.
A manila envelope had been folded and stuffed inside.
Eddie wrestled it out.
It was nine by twelve, a half-inch thick, obviously containing paper of some kind. The address printed in green pencil was to Lewis Cuhna, at this post office box, Lowell, Massachusetts.
Cuhna had mailed this envelope to his own P.O. address.
Eddie checked the postmark and raised an eyebrow. Dated last spring…six months ago. He double-checked the box. No other mail inside. Weekly newspaper editor Lew Cuhna had taken the trouble of renting this post office box for the single purpose of stashing this envelope.
Eddie stuck the packet in his waistband, pulled his polo shirt over it and walked out, toward the bike. He felt like he was moving in slow motion, almost like he was not moving at all; it was as if the bike were simply getting bigger, until Eddie was standing over it, helmet strap cinched beneath his chin, his shoe stomping the starter. He revved the engine, blasted the coughs from it, and then drove off.
There was no need to think about where he would open the envelope.
***
There was one car parked beside the Grotto shrine, a twenty-year-old green Oldsmobile the size of a tugboat. A plastic St. Christopher statue stood on the dash. Eddie left the bike beside the car.
Nearly all of the two dozen white candles on the shrine’s altar had been lit. Somebody had strung Christmas tree lights around the statue of the Virgin. The lights shone feebly under the bright sun.
A car horn blared from the street. Two men argued loudly. Eddie blocked out their conversation and looked to the top of the shrine. He saw no one. For a moment, he thought he was alone.
He pulled the envelope from his waistband, and then walked to the stairs.
An old woman in a long black dress and white Adidas tennis shoes—a nun, Eddie quickly realized from her black habit—knelt on the staircase, halfway to the top. The nun clutched pink rosary beads. Eddie watched her. She grunted in pain as she stiffly climbed on her knees to the next stair, and then began mumbling her prayers.
Eddie held the iron handrail and climbed past her.
“Excuse me, sister,” he said gently.
The nun smiled up at him. Her face was wide, tanned and deeply creased with channels that flowed from around her eyes to the corners of her smile. Her skin was shiny in the sun. She was maybe eighty years old, and beautiful.
“Bonjour,” the nun said in a high, trill voice. “It is a joy to love in His name.”
Eddie smiled and nodded. “Oui.”
He climbed to the top of the shrine and sat on the bench there. Through the willows he could see the windsurfers tugging their bright sails over the river. Eddie wondered if Lucy Orr was among them.
He held the envelope and looked over the river. The sun was hot on his face, hot enough to burn his cheeks if he wasn’t careful. He could hear the old nun murmuring her prayers, groaning as she dragged arthritic limbs up each stair.
He hesitated, because the envelope from Lew Cuhna was his last hope.
There are no more leads.
If the envelope did not hold answers, then Eddie would have failed.
He traced the Sign of the Cross—seemed like the thing to do on top of the shrine—and then opened the envelope.
Inside, Eddie found three editions of Lew Cuhna’s newspaper, The Second Voice.
Eddie recognized one of the papers immediately: it was the edition Roger Lime had been holding in the first photograph released by the kidnappers. The front page had a cliché in a banner headline:
SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL OFF WITHOUT A HITCH
“So what, Lew?” Eddie muttered. “So what?”
Then he noticed the g
ray text under the headline.
It wasn’t a real story.
“Dummy text,” Eddie said aloud, running his finger up and down the columns.
It was all computer-generated nonsense, random letters grouped into unpronounceable words. Dummy text, such as this, was created by publishing software to permit a page designer to experiment with the page layout without using real news copy. Once the page design was set, the real news copy would be flowed into the columns to replace the dummy text.
Eddie turned the page—nothing but dummy text, and fake headlines, too. Not one real news story in the entire paper.
He stared at the top half of the front page and tried to make sense of it.
The page looked just like the edition that Lime had been holding in the kidnapper’s photo, except that this edition wasn’t dated; this wasn’t a real newspaper.
It’s a mockup.
Why did Lew want Eddie to see it?
He put it aside and looked at the next paper Cuhna had left in the envelope.
It was another mockup—all dummy text. The front page had been designed to look identical to the first mockup, except that the headline was different:
SHAKESPEARE FESVITVAL IS MARRED BY RAIN
That made no sense.
The weather had been ideal for the Shakespeare festival. No rain at all.
Eddie set that paper aside, too, and inspected the last one—also full of dummy text, and identical to the first two mockups, except that its banner headline read:
CANCELLED: NO SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL THIS YEAR
That headline was just idiotic. The Shakespeare festival had been held the same weekend in late July every year for the past two decades. The outdoor festival was a Lowell tradition.
Eddie’s head snapped up with a sudden revelation.
He stared blankly at the river for a moment, thinking, thinking. Then he flipped through the papers again, re-reading the headlines.
Speak Ill of the Living Page 22