Shallow Graves

by Jeremiah Healy

  “I went to my bag and got the key Mau give me to her place.”

  “Do it.”

  “What, now?”

  “Yes.”

  Fagan went into the kitchen and fetched the key from a handbag that looked like a leather descendant of Davy Crockett’s powderhorn. “Awright?”

  “You all rushed upstairs then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go upstairs, like I’m Shinkawa and we’re going up there.”

  Fagan said, “This is getting too weird,” again the word coming out “we-id.”

  I said, “We’re almost done. Promise.”

  She didn’t look convinced, but Puriefoy said, “Let’s get this over with, huh?” and went out to climb the stairs. I let Fagan precede me.

  Even walking at just normal speed, it didn’t take long to get to the third floor. At the door, I said, “Hold it. Position yourselves like you were that night.”

  Puriefoy said, “We can’t, man.”

  “Why not?”

  “Larry, he was in front, but you’re too big for all of us to be here at once.”

  “Okay, simulate that.”

  “Say what?”

  “Just make like I’m in front of you. Who did what?”

  “We pounded a little, Sinead started to work the key.”

  Fagan said, “Then Larry took it away from me ’cause he was closer on the door.”

  “Then the door opens?”

  “Yeah, but the chain’s on, so you can’t see much.”

  I said, “Unlock the door, but don’t open it.”

  Fagan stopped. “Unlock … ?”

  “Use the key in the lock, but don’t open the door itself.”

  She did.

  “Okay, now stand back a little.”

  I moved in front of them, turning the knob and cracking open the door. I moved it to two inches, then three, then four. At three inches I could see the corner of the futon couch, at four probably a quarter view of where Mau Tim’s body would have lain.

  I said, “Then you broke through the chain?”

  “Oz did.”

  I pushed the door all the way open.

  Fagan trembled. “Jesus Mary.”

  I said, “What is it?”

  “It’s just … it’s like I was gonna see her all over again.”

  She turned and started downstairs.

  “Sinead?”

  “Fuck you. I ain’t going in there.”

  As Fagan left us, I looked at Puriefoy. “Was there music on in here?”

  “Music?”

  “Or television. Anything?”

  Puriefoy said, “No, nothing.”

  Same as Shinkawa. “How about the shower?”

  “That was off, too.”

  “What did you all do then?”

  Puriefoy said, “I don’t like being here either, man. Not at all.”

  “What did you do?”

  He walked into the apartment, but gingerly, like he wasn’t sure the floorboards had been nailed down. “I bent over by Mau, see if I could get a pulse or anything, but she was gone.”

  “Shinkawa?”

  “Like I told you at my place, he took off for the bedroom, saying he heard something.”

  “You didn’t go with him?”

  “Shit, no. You think I’m a hero?”

  Not so far. “Then what?”

  “Sinead, she’s screaming, and I’m trying CPR.”

  “Even though you thought Mau Tim was dead?”

  “In the class I took, they said try it anyway.”

  “All right. Then what?”

  “I tell Sinead, ‘Call the 911’ but she’s like hysterical, man. Larry, he comes back in from the bedroom and says he didn’t see nothing. I tell him to help me move Mau a little so I can work on her better. Then Sinead finally goes and calls the ambulance.”

  “From where?”

  Puriefoy pointed to a Princess phone on a shelf of the home entertainment wall. “That one there.”

  “The three of you stay together here all that time?”

  Puriefoy said, “All what time?”

  “Till the ambulance arrived.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anybody leave the room for anything?”

  “No.”

  I walked into the kitchen and pulled on the drawer nearest the faucets. Next to a pair of tongs was an odd, pimpled key like the one Ooch had used on the second-floor apartment door.

  I came back into the living room. Puriefoy was squatting at the corner of the couch.

  “Anything else you can tell me about what you all did?”

  “Larry, he saw this piece of necklace under the futon here. I think he showed it to the cops, too.”

  “Beyond that.”

  Puriefoy stood up. “Like I been telling you, Sinead, she wasn’t in great shape, and Larry and me, we was working on Mau, but with her face blue and all …”

  I swung my head slowly around the apartment. I didn’t like what I’d already learned, but I didn’t think the place had anything more to tell me.

  Twenty

  AS I WAS LEAVING Mau Tim’s building, a calico cat scuttled under a bush near the iron front gate. Fortunately, it reminded me to call the vet’s from a payphone and check on Renfield. A female voice at the other end of the line impatiently confirmed that he’d be ready for pickup any time after three-thirty and before six. She made a point of telling me they accepted either MasterCard or a personal check as payment. I thought that was a bad sign. I asked her how much the bill was for. She said they hadn’t totaled it yet. I thought that was a worse sign.

  The receptionist at Winant, Terwiliger, and Stevens looked and sounded like Diana Rigg in her Avengers days. She asked me if I would “care” to hang my coat in the closet. I said I would and was led regally to an expanse of polished cherry wood. Trusting me to use the hanger properly, she glided back to her desk, which would have put the cockpit of a 747 to shame. Moving toward the woman, I heard her ask the telephone if Mr. Dani could see “a” Mr. John Cuddy. She waited, fiddling with some pink message slips, then said, “I’ll advise him.”

  The receptionist turned to me. “Mr. Dani’s secretary will be right with you. Would you care to take a seat?”

  I was sitting on an unyielding silk-covered settee over an aquamarine carpet under a print of a fox hunt when a young woman came around the corner. She did not remind me of Diana Rigg. She reminded me of Whoopi Goldberg. Until she talked, at which point she reminded me of Diana Rigg, too.

  “Mr. Cuddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Rita Knox. Mr. Dani can see you in a few minutes. Would you please come with me?”

  I followed the dreadlocks back through a rabbit warren of common corridors. Kangaroo-pouch enclosures of secretaries sat outside windowed offices of lawyers and windowless offices of paralegals.

  At the midpoint of one corridor, Rita Knox slowed beside a closed door and looked back over her shoulder at me, swishing the braids. “Mr. Dani is on long distance. Please have a seat and let me know if I can help you with anything.”

  There was another silk settee, the cushions on this one also stiff as a board. Several people coming down the corridor slowed hesitatingly near the adjoining office, then walked by quickly, eyes averted from a man in his early fifties who was putting his wall plaques into a brown and green packing box. My day to catch people on the move.

  When the corridor was empty, I spoke to Knox. “I don’t want to impose on Vincent at a bad time. How is he holding up under the strain of his niece’s death?”

  The secretary shook her head. “He’s doing so well, the poor man. They were quite close, but he hasn’t missed a beat here.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No. Well, yes, but only over the telephone. I must say, every time I think of talking with her that day, it is as though a ghost crossed my grave.”

  I tried to keep my voice
light. “You talked with her the day she died?”

  “Yes.” Knox took a breath, her eyes tipping me that this was a story she’d told before, a story she relished in that guilty way we all have. “She called here that afternoon, just before I left. Mr. Dani was in a meeting, so I left her message for him on the spike.”

  “Sorry?”

  Knox held up a six-inch message spike with a brass base. “This. We still don’t have a voice-mail system, so I impale his messages on it.” A devious little smile, then she seemed to remember the story she was telling. “Poor girl.”

  I needed to be careful here. “That happened to me once in the Army. I spoke to somebody at noon, and then at dinner I heard he’d died. I kept asking myself, was there something in his voice that day that said he knew his time was coming?”

  “The very same with me! I’ve been saying to myself, ‘Was there something in her voice?’ But she sounded fine. Even buoyant, like a girl her age should. So full of life and—”

  At which point the office door opened and Vincent Dani stood there, the balding head lifted an inch higher than eye level, as though he were trying to sense the words that had been in the air before he interrupted us.

  “Mr. Cuddy, I can give you only a few minutes.”

  I stood. “A few minutes should do it.”

  Dani looked at his secretary for a moment, then just said, “Rita, hold all my calls.”

  “Yessir.”

  His office was rectangular, but some sort of shaft for the building’s structural integrity ran at a diagonal to the ceiling, creating a lean-to effect on that side of the room. The opposite surface was more standard, covered with framed prints of grouse, pheasant, and quail. At least there were no polo fields or yacht basins.

  Outside his window, six other skyscrapers eclipsed most of the horizon. His view between them was a thumbprint of Boston Harbor and a hundred yards of Logan Airport runway.

  Dani settled behind a cherry desk with Scandinavian lines. The credenza, desk chair, and both client chairs were of the same grained wood, the third hue in the Oriental rug beneath us picking up the cherry color. The underlying wall-to-wall carpeting that continued in from the hall was beige, as were his lowboy file cabinets and shelving. He had a personal computer on the credenza, not much of anything beyond a telephone complex and pen set on the desk.

  Dani looked at me, the hair thin and the eyes sharp but the face expressionless, again the only emotional part of him his lips, which twitched a little. Dressed impeccably in another Brooks Brothers suit, this one gray with a houndstooth pattern, he gave the impression of a man who had seriously considered a hair transplant only to decide, rightly, that it would make him look silly.

  “Well, Mr. Cuddy?”

  “I’ve been out to the building. Your cousin and I did a walkthrough, and I have a couple of questions.”

  “Ask them.”

  “How many people have a key to Mau Tim’s apartment?”

  Even his lips suggested he expected that one. “I wouldn’t know. She wasn’t supposed to give them out.”

  “To your knowledge, who has a key?”

  “Certainly Cousin Ooch. Perhaps the downstairs tenant—they were good friends.”

  “Her agents?”

  “The modeling agency? Perhaps, but I don’t see why.”

  “Her current boyfriend?”

  “If she had one. Or more than one. As I told you before, I really didn’t know much about her social life.”

  “How about you?”

  The lips danced. “Me?”

  “Yes. You’re a trustee of the building, right?”

  “I am a trustee in a paperwork sense, yes. But Ooch would take care of all the … on-site matters.”

  “You have any keys to the building?”

  A pause. “I imagine I must have a front door key somewhere.”

  “How about the second floor?”

  That stopped the lips cold. “The sec-ond floor?”

  “Yes. The guest suite or whatever you call it.”

  Vincent Dani stared at me, then said, “What does that have to do with a burglary on the third floor?”

  “Probably nothing.”

  Dani’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. His silence was interrupted by a tap-tap-tap on the office door. I turned halfway to see a man lean across the threshold. His hair was that maize color blond turns to when most of us just get gray. He wore round wire spectacles and a jaunty bow tie on a white shirt so starched it rode his chest like body armor. I bet myself that his first name would be a last name.

  “Vincent, terribly sorry to disturb you, but I’m just back from Washington and now off to London and I did want to congratulate you on joining the partnership.”

  The man’s voice was as crisp as the starch in his shirt, the crackle of a no-nonsense, North Shore Yankee.

  “Uh, oh, thank you, Whit. I appreciate your support.”

  “Support well deserved, Vincent, well deserved.” Old Whit seemed to make the next statement for my benefit. “Contributions like yours cannot go unnoticed. Or unrewarded.”

  Dani was uncomfortable about Whit loitering in his doorway. For his part, Whit seemed to be reminded of something by his last comment. The man looked to the right outside Dani’s door and then spoke more softly. “I believe this is Charlie’s last day.”

  “Thanks, Whit, I’ve already had the chance to wish him well.”

  “Right. Right then. In that case, I’ll be off.”

  Old Whit sent a smile and a nod my way and I’m sure had forgotten about me by the time he’d taken ten steps.

  Dani was coming back to me when I said, “Charlie the guy next door?”

  “Uh … yes.”

  “A little young for retirement.”

  “He’s not retiring. He’s … leaving the partnership.”

  “The rest of you voted him out.”

  Dani’s lips did another dance. “The rest of them. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “They voted you in but him out?”

  “Law is a business, Mr. Cuddy. Charlie was … is a competent technician, but not a rain-maker. He brought it on himself, never developing any portables he could—”

  “Portables?”

  “Clients he could take with him to another firm. If you develop clients who come to think of you as their ‘real’ attorney, they’ll follow you to a new firm. Since those clients would follow you, your current firm would never let you go, would want you to stay, leveraging associates and paralegals on your matters to maintain a given level of billings.”

  “And Charlie didn’t do that?”

  “No.”

  “And you did.”

  “To the extent currently expected of me.”

  “Like through your brother’s mall development company.”

  “Among others.”

  “But his as the first among equals?”

  Dani’s lips tightened. “I don’t suppose that’s really any of your business, is it?”

  I decided to take a different tack, hopefully without sinking Rita Knox. “Tell me, Mr. Dani, did Mau Tim call you the week she died?”

  The lips seemed almost to fold inward, a man not wearing his false teeth. “About what?”

  “About your making partner here.”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I called her.”

  “You did.”

  “Yes.”

  “From where?”

  Dani’s lips danced a third time. A lot of people don’t know that the telephone company keeps track of all local calls, but I was willing to bet that Vincent Dani did.

  He said, “I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure where you were when you called your niece about making partner here?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Okay. When did you call her?”

  “I don’t recall the exact day.”

  “Was it the same day you were voted the partnership?”


  Something inside Dani seemed to stop for a moment, a robot who’d just had his power switched off by remote control.

  Then he said, “I believe I’ve given you all the time I can spare today.” He pushed a button on the telephone complex and spoke toward it. “Rita, could you show Mr. Cuddy back to the elevators?”

  Twenty-One

  I’VE HAD SOME ROUGH experiences with veterinary hospitals over the years. This one was sparkling clean and very busy. Two women in yellow smocks careened around behind a large reception counter, the benches in the reception area arranged obliquely, presumably to minimize the warfare between pets of different species and temperaments. The area was full, a lot of yelping and mewling and chirping in the air as I spoke to the closest woman behind the counter.

  She said, “What?”

  “I’m here to pick up a cat.”

  The woman moved to a flattened card file. “What name?”

  She sounded like the impatient voice on the telephone. I said, “The owner’s name is Meagher, Nancy.”

  “No. I need the cat’s name.”

  “Oh. Meagher, Renfield NMI.”

  “NMI?”

  “No Middle Initial.”

  I got a look like somebody put vinegar in the ice cream.

  “Here he is. Just a minute.” The woman picked up a phone and hit two numbers. “Donny? Julie. I need cage number seventy-three, cat, gray tiger … Yes, in a carry-box … Right.”

  Julie put down the phone and slapped a carboned invoice on top of the counter. “The total’s at the bottom.”

  I looked at the bottom and said, “God in heaven.”

  The woman said, “What’s the matter?”

  “The amount of the bill.”

  “The cat had bilateral knee displacements.”

  “But this is more than the Bears spent on Gale Sayers.”

  When she said, “Who?,” I said never mind and took out my checkbook.

  Julie had just given me the pink copy of the invoice when a scuzzy-looking kid I took to be Donny appeared from behind a door. He was carrying a cardboard container that resembled a Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins box magnified five times. There were airholes an inch in diameter on the short ends of the box, and one clawless gray forepaw coming through one of the airholes, trying to bend it back.

  I said, “That’s him, all right.”