Swan Dive
Page 23
I stopped the car for a minute. Some of the fishermen, in port for the first time in probably a week, were hanging the nets to dry or hosing down the decks. Others stripped off the layers of oilskin slicker and sweater needed for warmth on the big water even on a summer’s day. Working or changing, they yelled and laughed back and forth in Portuguese. I felt disoriented, marooned in another country.
I turned the key in the ignition and headed back toward the Beacon.
“You what?”
“I said I want to see someone about Jane Rust. My name’s John Cuddy, and I’m a private investigator from Boston.” I showed the woman at the horseshoe reception desk my identification.
She looked at it and shook her head hard enough to nearly dislodge her pilot’s headphone and mouthpiece. “I don’t know who here could help you.”
There were three chairs and a table in a sitting area off to the left. “How about I wait till something occurs to you?”
I sat in one of the chairs and picked up a copy of the previous day’s Beacon from the table. It was a long form paper like the Boston Globe or the New York Times. Skimming it, I got the impression of a first section focused on the city, followed by others labeled National, Regional, and Sports. It seemed to have more coverage and articles than I would have thought a local daily could produce.
A new voice said, “What do you want?”
I lowered the paper. A thickset man of forty-five stared down at me. His jowls sagged like the plots on network TV. He wore the pants of a cheap green suit, and a white shirt with a flyaway collar. A K Mart tie was pulled down from his neck, and the sleeves on his shirt were rolled up unevenly.
“My name’s John Cuddy. I’m a private investigator and I want to talk about Jane Rust with someone in authority. Are you it?
“The cops are the authority around here. You want me to call them?”
“Eventually. But you might want me to tell you things before you find out I told them things. Your choice.”
His jaw realigned twice before he said, “My name’s Arbuckle. I’m managing editor. Come back to my office.”
Arbuckle led me through a winding corridor that had computer cables inelegantly braided overhead. We moved into a room measuring a hundred feet wide and twice as long. Pillars rose from the linoleum floor to the high ceiling. The ubiquitous computer cables dropped from ragged holes to most of the fifty or so desks in the area, each with a terminal and screen. An unabridged dictionary lay open on a pedestal stand under a large mural map of Nasharbor’s part of the county. There were maybe thirty men and women talking on phones or clacking keyboards, a. life-sized Bavarian clock gone mad. From one corner, a police scanner squawked like an electronic parrot. Altogether, it was just about quiet enough to hear a bomb drop.
“The city room,” said Arbuckle, as he led me into an interior office whose only window looked out onto the bustle of the people I watched. He closed the door behind me and threw himself into a desk chair without telling me to have a seat. I took one anyway.
“Now,” he said, “exactly what do you want here?”
“I understand Jane Rust died last night. I’d like to know what happened.”
“Talk to the cops.”
“I’m talking to you.”
“We think it’s kind of bad taste to dwell on suicide. Unless it’s somebody prominent, we don’t even identify the cause of death in the obit.”
“Bad taste.”
“That’s right.”
“She was one of your reporters. One of your own.”
“She was …” he stopped for a moment, then said, “she came to see you, right?”
“That’s right.”
“About the confidential source thing, right?”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, she probably told you more about it than she told me, but what she told me was screwy enough.” Arbuckle rearranged some papers on his desk. It ran Mo Katzen’s work space a close second in appearance. “Jane wants to do a story, no, a series of stories, on this kiddie porn thing. I have her on the Redevelopment Authority project, and she isn’t giving me shit on that. But Jane had this idea, no, this obsession, that the police here knocked off this scumbag source she had. Only she wouldn’t talk about the source at story conference or staff meetings. She wouldn’t tell me the guy was her source until after he buys the farm, and even then she won’t come clean on things that don’t make any sense at all.”
“Like what?”
“Not the way it works, pal. I gave you a little, now you give me a little. Jane wanted to hire you on her own nickel, that’s her business. She’s dead now, and I want to know why you’re here when she isn’t around anymore to pay you.”
I considered it. “Because you figure I’m trying to get the paper to foot the bill for keeping me on the investigation.”
“Jesus, now why didn’t I think of that?”
“At two in the afternoon she wanted me to look into what she believed was a murder conspiracy. Then she ends up dead that night. Sound like the way of nature to you?”
“The way of … listen, let me tell you some things, maybe you’ll get the point.” He took a deep breath, let it out exaggeratedly. “Jane was a lightweight, a beginner who wasn’t going to get much better. She had these fantasies, romantic fantasies, of what the newspaper business is like. Exposés, dramatic disclosures, Woodward and Bernstein. Am I getting through to you?”
“She was unrealistic.”
“Gold star. She was ridiculous. We hired her on as a Gee-Ay, a general assignment reporter. She’d bounced around too much, paper to paper, for somebody only a couple years out of school. I should have started her in Lifestyles covering store openings and women’s stuff, but a couple people liked her, said give her a chance, so I did. Should have had my head examined.”
“How’d she get involved in the porno thing if she was so unreliable?”
“Don’t remind me. She was covering a Saturday night, skeleton crew. The weekend editor’s trying to get lines on two fires and a vehicle fatality, so he sends her out to check on this raid. Then she can’t think about anything else but that she’s going to protect our fair city from the purveyors of kiddie porn panting at the gates. Obsessive, like I said.”
“The source, his name was Charlie Coyne?”
“So I’m told.”
“This Coyne character does end up dead.”
“This Coyne character was a slug with the life expectancy of a thirteenth-century pickpocket. He hung out down on The Strip. Coyne was lucky to live as long as he did, the kind of people he probably crossed down there.”
“How did Jane Rust die?”
“Preliminary says overdose.”
“Drugs?”
“Sleeping pills.”
I looked at him.
Arbuckle said, “What’s the matter, you don’t know what sleeping pills do?”
“I know what they do. I also know she said she couldn’t take them.”
“What?”
“She couldn’t swallow pills. Made her sick.”
“I don’t know anything about that and I could care less. Coyne and Rust are yesterday’s news, understand? In fifteen minutes, I got a story conference in the executive editor’s office on thirty-six pages of today’s news.”
“Anybody else here that knew her better than you did?”
Again the exaggerated breath. “Let’s make a deal, okay? I give you two names and the rest of the day to poke around here. After that, I see you in the building again, I call the cops to kick your ass off the premises. Seem reasonable to you?”
“What are the names?”
“Malcolm Peete and Liz Rendall. They’re both Gee-Ay’s and knew Jane as well as anybody could. Okay?”
“Thanks for your consideration.”
“Don’t mention it. Close the door behind you.”
When I pulled the door shut, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked into a face badly weathered by the elements, so long as you counted alcoho
l in with wind and rain. His eyes were bleary, his nose a road map etched in red. The hair was gray, but given the booze his age could have been anywhere from me to sixty.
He said, “You’re here about Janey.”
“Word travels fast.”
“The drums, fellow traveler. The drums tell all.”
He didn’t seem stiff, just overly metaphorical. “Can you point me toward Malcolm Peete?”
He extended his right hand. “At your service. I plan to get stinking drunk to mourn the poor girl’s passing. Care to join me?”
I shook his hand. “Only for one.”
“Drink or bottle?” he said as he moved to the closest desk and wangled a tweed sports jacket off the back of its chair.
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copyright © 1991 by Jeremiah Healy
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