At the top of the stairs, a pleasant woman of sixty-plus years looked up from her typing. She was working at a machine that hadn’t benefited from electricity, much less memory, at the factory.
“Yes?”
“My name’s John Cuddy. I’d like to see Bruce Fetch if he’s in.”
“Just one moment.” She got up and knocked at a door already ajar twelve feet away. She said, “Bruce?,” then something lower that I couldn’t catch. Turning back to me, she said, “Please go on in, Mr. Cuddy.”
He was thumbing through a thick binder of blueprints still rolling up at the edges despite their considerable weight. The binder and a computer monitor and keyboard usurped most of his desk. “Have a seat, be right with … you. There it is!”
He marked a place with a sheet of paper while I sat across from him. Knowing he’d dated Jane Rust, I guess I expected an accountant-type, with horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, and thin black tie. The tie was thin and black, alright, but cut from distressed leather. It hung loosely from an L. L. Bean hunting shirt over wide-wale corduroy trousers. He was about five-ten and maybe a hundred forty with socks. His hair was dark brown, pulled back into a stubbly pony tail. He blinked frequently behind wire glasses that I thought had been unobtainable since “Mr. Tambourine Man” was on the charts. The hippie in the photo on Jane Rust’s dresser.
Finally looking up at me, he said, “I’m Bruce Fetch, executive director here. What can I do for you?”
“My name’s John Cuddy. I’m a private investigator from Boston. Jane Rust hired me.”
Fetch’s face was long and expressive, the kind you can watch a thought sink into. This particular thought hit ledge right away.
“I don’t want to talk about her. Or why she hired you, okay?”
“Can you give me a reason?”
“Yes, but I don’t see I have to.”
“You don’t, but I understood you dated her. I’d think you’d be a little more interested in her death.”
He flared. “I am interested! Maybe I just don’t see why I should have to talk with you about it.”
“The cops think she took sleeping pills. You ever see her with any?”
“No. “ Fetch took off the glasses to massage his eyes with the heels of his hands. “No. She couldn’t take them, something about swallowing medicine when she was a kid.”
“The cops believe she ground the pills up and then took them in some kind of liquid, probably cocoa.”
“I … she drank cocoa a lot, but I don’t see her doing that. I think she’d sooner get a shot.”
“From a needle, you mean?”
“Yes, of course from a needle.” He toned down. “But I was wrong enough about her as it was. I could be wrong there, too.” He got up and walked to the window, sticking his hands into his side pockets. “Look, just what do you want from me?”
“Jane hired me to look into things down here. One of the stories she was working on involved some projects out of this office.”
“Project. Singular. The only live one I’ve got is a condo site down by the waterfront.”
“Is that Richard Dykestra’s complex?”
“Yes. It’s called Harborside. And right now it’s the best thing this town’s got going for it.”
“Why is that?”
Fetch gestured with his hand across the street. “This town could have been dead. Dead and buried. Fall River and New Bedford were bigger, Taunton and North Attleboro were attracting new industry. We didn’t have beaches like the Cape, or nice ponds, or even unspoiled meadows. What we had was a waterfront you couldn’t breathe next to for three months starting Memorial Day and a welfare list the size of the telephone book.”
“And what changed that?”
“Dykestra. He made some money commercially and started buying up parcels here and there privately. Then he lobbied with our state rep and senator and got a sewer project that made the harbor tolerable. He got funding for this office to push things along. I’ve got ten, maybe twelve projects that’ll fly once Harborside makes it.”
“When, not if?”
He turned to me. “That’s right. A developer can get all the approvals in the world, but it doesn’t mean squat if he can’t sell the project once it’s built. Richie can do that.”
“I’m told he’s been a little pressed in the cash flow sense.”
“You know of anybody trying to accomplish anything who isn’t? It’s the nature of the beast. You’ve got to work on a shoestring because you don’t know which parcel or project might go. But you can’t attract investors without giving the impression that a particular project is the one that will go.”
“Sounds like you understand the industry pretty well.”
“My job. Part of it, anyway. The part that drives all the other parts.” He came back toward me. “If Richie’s project makes it, then all the guys, and women, he has working are drawing paychecks, not welfare checks. Harborside will need, the residents of it will need, all sorts of services. Those other ten or twelve projects I mentioned jump off the boards to supplement and eventually expand what Richie does down there.”
“All this boom talk put any people off?”
“Off? No. Well, there’s always going to be some opposition to any change, even if it is for the better. But we’re not exactly raping virgin forests here, you know? You seen our waterfront?”
“Some of it.”
“Well, let me tell you. Nobody in his or her right mind is going to miss the relics Richie will replace. He gets the right support now, the whole character of this area will change. I’m telling you, this city is perched on the edge of greatness.”
“What edge was Jane perched on?”
He cooled off and turned away again. “I don’t know.”
“She told me she was under a lot of pressure at work. Was that all the pressure on her?”
“I told you once, that’s none of your business.”
“She also told me her personal life was a mess. Was that your business?”
Fetch cried out and came at me, quicker than I would have credited him. He swung an amateurish right at me before I could get all the way up from the chair. I took most of it on my left forearm, and I heard a cracking noise that could only have come from one of his knuckles. He doubled over, holding the right hand in his left palm and grimacing to the point of tears.
“Bruce?” said the older woman behind me.
He squeezed out, “It’s alright, Grace. Just leave us alone.”
“Are you sure? You look hurt.”
“Grace, please. Just shut the door, okay?”
Hearing the door click closed, I sat. “You ought to ice that.”
Fetch worked his head up and down. “I’m going to tell you something. Not because it’s any of your business, but because I want you hearing it from me first.”
His words seemed to be coming a little easier. I said, “Go on.”
“I wanted to get married. Jane said she was pregnant.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I. The baby wasn’t mine.”
I watched him, then said, “Whose did you think it was?”
He shook his head and gingerly touched around the middle joint of the ring finger on his right hand. “I don’t know. I just know I had the mumps in college and the doctor at the infirmary had me give him a specimen. Turned out sterile. Not impotent, just sterile.”
Appreciating the distinction, I said, “When I walked in here, you weren’t exactly forthcoming. How come now you want me hearing this from you first?”
“Because—shit, this hurts, I think it’s broken, that’s all I need. Because Richie’s deal, the project, is the key to what I’ve worked for the last two years. I’ve lost Jane. I don’t want to lose what Harborside can mean for this town.”
Fetch looked hard at me, seeming to push the hand outside the room for a moment. “I don’t want to lose everything.”
According to the white pages, Richard Dykestra listed his of
fice under his own name. When I called, a vapid female voice advised me that Mr. Dykestra was “unavailable and not expected in the office today.” I told her it was usually one or the other, not both, but she didn’t get me, and I couldn’t see any sense in leaving a message.
I also looked up Charles Coyne. No luck, but then Hagan had said Coyne’s place was a dive.
Looping back toward my car the long way, I stuck my head into the Watering Hole. There were seven customers today. Three even had plates as well as glasses in front of them at two-fifteen. One of the three was Malcolm Peete.
“Mr. Peete, that doesn’t look like a very balanced meal to me.”
He regarded his vodka and french fries. “Nonsense, my lad. We have here representatives of the two basic food groups, alcohol and cholesterol.”
I sat down. “The experts would say you’re ruining your health.”
“Ah, that’s where the Smirnoff performs double duty.” He lifted the glass to eye level and rolled it affectionately between his fingers. “Preventive chemotherapy. Requires daily, nay, hourly treatments to be completely effective.”
“You sober enough to give me some background information?”
“I’m highly offended. If I’m sober enough to be offended, I’m sober enough to educate the likes of you, good sir.”
“Jane’s landlady said she had two visitors the night she died. Both came by car. Any candidates come to mind?”
“No. Mrs. O’Day’s humble dwelling is far enough from everything to require a car to get there, so I fear I’m your only excludable suspect. I’ve deemed it inappropriate to drive for some time now.”
“Meaning some judge hooked your license?”
“I’ll not dignify that with a reply.”
“Mrs. O’Day also said Jane had a lot of visitors in general. Male visitors. Aside from Bruce Fetch, was she seeing anyone you know of?”
“No, not really any of my business. Tell me, though, did Mrs. O’Day press upon you her view of the generational conflict ahead?”
“More than I cared to hear.”
“Don’t be so flip. She’s right, you know. The disputes of the sixties between the older and the younger just involved politics and patriotism, comparative trifles. Wait until every worker contributes 40 percent of a weekly salary to social security, and even then the recipients of our federal bounty will be having to choose between heating and eating. That conflagration will make the Vietnam War seem like a crack in the sidewalk.”
I let it pass, then said, “What exactly is the corruption situation here? From the police standpoint.”
Peete arched protectively over his drink. “There is no ‘exact’ statement anyone could make. Were you ever a cop?”
“Military.”
“Not the same thing. Oh, I’m sure the danger and camaraderie and abilities were quite parallel, perhaps even greater. But you were dealing for the most part with other military. You weren’t being paid yearly a tenth of what the bad guys collect monthly. That’s the problem, basically. The good cops, and most of them start out that way, the good cops arrest truly bad people and then see them released before they’ve wiped the fingerprint ink from their hands. Later, even the case you can make slips away because a judge can’t see jailing a ‘victimless’ gambling kingpin when the cell blocks couldn’t accommodate another violent offender with a shoehorn. So you get your meat eaters and your grass eaters.”
“Translation?”
“I first heard the terms when I was in New York. Knapp Commission, the Serpico matter and all. A meat eater is a cop who asks for a bribe, another license granter the bad guy has to pay on the front end. A grass eater is a cop who basically becomes the bad guy’s business partner for a piece of the take, on the back end.”
“Don’t most departments rotate their personnel every couple of years to minimize that?”
“Yes, and it does, but at the cost of reassigning your most experienced cops in a given area, geographic or specialty, outside the area in which they’ve become expert.”
“So you trade effectiveness off against the fear they’ve become tainted.”
“Quite well put, my lad. However, there is no such fear of that here. At some point before my arrival, the locals divided things up in such a way that rotation was off the negotiating table.”
“So the plainclothes guys are the foxes watching the chickens.”
“Instead of the uniforms being the foxes watching the chickens, or at least switching off from time to time so that everybody’s equally exposed to, and presumably resistant to, temptation.”
I said, “What can you tell me about Hagan versus Hogueira?”
“Ah, the Wimbledon of a police buff. Who will succeed the King? In this case, however, I’m afraid it’s rather like Ivan Lendl serving to Lou Costello.”
“Hagan’s a lock?”
“I think so. Thanks to former partner Schonstein.”
“The retired cop?”
“Correct. Two of the current city councilors are beholden to the former hero. The paperwork on the drug bust of one’s firstborn was conveniently lost; the drunk driving of a second steered miraculously clear of a Breathalyzer test. And not all Schonsy’s influence is by way of the fix, either. I nearly cried myself when I covered him doing magic tricks at a party for kids in the local hospital. No, I doubt that Hogueira can convince the others that a second Porto chief in a row constitutes a moral, ethnic, or political imperative.”
“Sounds like that special statute you told me about is backfiring.”
“Not really. Without the special statute, the current chief would be rattling doorknobs on the midnight shift, Christmas Eve. And with civil service, Hagan would be a shoo-in.”
“I don’t see that. I’ve listened to both of them talk. Hagan sounds more like a street cop, Hogueira like an Oxford don.”
Peete said, “All form, no substance. Hagan finished college before he started here, then took a master’s in police science at Northeastern. Hogueira earned a high school equivalency diploma at night, probably by mail. Resuméwise and testwise, Hagan would trounce him. No contest.”
“You a Hagan rooter?”
“No. And yes, I suppose. All cop buffs wonder what would happen if the right man—or woman, I suppose, to be fair as opposed to realistic in this town. In any case, we all wonder what would happen if the right person were put in charge somehow, whether he or she could really make the difference, transform the enforcement of authority into something to be admired rather than abused.”
“And you see Hagan as the right man?”
“I see Hogueira as the heir to the old way, the who-you-know way. Don’t misunderstand me: the old way is how Hagan will get to sit in the chief’s chair. I just think he could be a part of the new way. Or at least I’d like to find out.”
“Is Schonsy Junior a part of the new way, too?”
Peete laughed. “Oh no. No, I’m afraid Mark is a pale imitation of his father. I saw Schonsy only at the tail end of his career, but he was the best of the old way, my friend. A Jewish John Wayne who tamed this town for eight hours a day, five days a week. He was the real thing. Mangled his legs coming down the stairs of a burning tenement, carrying a baby out from the flames. Knees at any age are fragile structures, but at sixty, rehabilitation to a patrolman’s required agility was out of the question, so he drew a disability.”
“Schonsy Senior was only a patrolman when he retired?”
“Yes. And you can just refer to him as Schonsy. I can’t imagine anyone calling Mark the son ‘Schonsy.’ Yes, Schonsy decided early on, I guess, that the street was what made him go, and he never wanted to leave it. I’ve known men like that before in other departments. It gets into the blood.”
“Hagan told me that Mark was in the clear on both Coyne and Jane because he was doing paperwork at the station both nights. Said his partner was sick.”
“Sick? Hard to picture Dan Cronan sick. His wife now, that woman would have reason to be sick.”
“The partner’s married?”
“Correct. And being married to Cronan the Barbarian is not where a woman should spend her springtime.”
“Hagan also told me about a bum in the alley who supposedly witnessed part of the assault on Coyne. Any names?”
“Not that I heard. I doubt most of them remember or care to give their real names, anyway. Many are on the run from prior involvements, you know.”
“How about Coyne’s live-in girlfriend. Name and address?”
“They escape me. I must look into these losses of short-term memory. But the address and probably her name would be in the report on Coyne’s death.”
“Hagan’s not going to let me see it.”
“No. I meant the story Jane would have done on it. If the police released it to her.”
“Liz Rendall is getting those stories for me.”
“That is the second time you have offended me today.”
“I don’t get you.”
“By turning to dear Liz, you imply that I not only am incapable of competent conversation, but also incapable of competent research. Please do me the courtesy of departing.”
“Peete, I’m sorry.”
“No apologies are necessary because none are acceptable. Please simply leave so that a third transgression, however unintentional, does not nip in the bud what I’d hoped would blossom into a reasonable friendship.”
From outside, I saw Peete, catching the bartender’s eye and pointing to his nearly empty bottle.
Nine
I CALLED DYKESTRA again from a drugstore on the way back to the car. His receptionist still couldn’t help me. I tapped the plunger and tried a different number.
“Suffolk County District Attorney.”
“Nancy Meagher, please.”
“Hold on.”
Two clicks and two rings. “Nancy Meagher.”
“Do they let you receive obscene phone calls at work?”
“Hmmmm. Only when the felon involved is beyond the reach of process. Hold on.” I could just about hear her saying, “Tell him I’ll be with him in a minute.” Then, back to me, “How are you?”
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