Right To Die - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  "Give me the number I should use."

  He rattled it off, adding the extension as I wrote it down.

  "Only . . ."

  I said, "Only what?"

  "Do me a favor, okay?"

  "What?"

  "Don't tell Carla you're from the po1ice."

  "Don't worry. I won't."

  * * *

  "Bad pizza?"

  Nancy watched me carefully from across the glass coffee table in her apartment. On her haunches, she wore a New England School of Law sweatshirt over denim shorts and grasped a beer mug by its handle. Renfield, Nancy's cat, watched me expectantly from under the table as I picked at the slice on my plate.

  I said, "No, the pizza's fine. Just a lousy day."

  "How so?"

  I summarized it for her, starring Louis Doleman and Steven O'Brien.

  Nancy said, "It's no fun to be that close to crazies."

  It bothered me that I was probably bumming her out, since she had to deal with crazies a lot more often than I did.

  "John?"

  "Yes?"

  "I found a surefire way to get over that."

  "Over what'?"

  "Over being around crazies too much." Nancy took a mouthful of beer.

  "What is it?"

  "You seek out a no-nonsense, normal person and get deeply involved in an absolutely rational discussion."

  "The cure sounds worse than the disease."

  "No, really. Logic, deduction, P implies Q. It's the secret." I tossed a piece of sausage to Renfield, who played croquet with it until he realized the ball was edible. "Okay. How do we start?"

  Nancy set down the mug and made her eyelids flutter. "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours."

  =17=

  "NOW, JOHN, THE RACE ITSELF IS TWENTY-SIX MILES, THREE hundred eighty-five yards. You can't think of her as one distance, though. Nobody can really handle that. You got to break the course down into chunks. Think of her as four six-mile runs with kind of a victory lap at the end. That should be manageable.

  “Another thing. Talk to yourself when you train, eh? Tell yourself what you want to do and why it's important for you to do it. Concentrate and reinforce those goals and reasons. During the race you're going to be doing the same thing. Don't worry about what people think. Sometimes talking to yourself is the best conversation around.

  “One more thing for today. You're aiming at your first marathon, lots of people'll say, 'Don't make it Boston. Because it's in April, you'll have to train all winter, and the course isn't flat enough.' Well, I say bullshit to that. The beauty of Boston is the crowd. All along the route you've got folks two, even three deep, clapping and cheering. Little kids with card tables, handing out cups of water and orange sections. No, Boston's as good a first marathon as any, and better than most. Drink it all in, John. Remember, you'll never run your first marathon again."

  * * *

  Directory assistance had a phone number for Ray Cuervo in Marblehead, a harbor town about twelve miles north of Boston. Trying it, I got Cuervo's tape message. A silky, sales-pitch voice, the Spanish accent coming across only on certain words, the English idioms perfect. It told me that if I needed to reach him, he'd be at the Sarrey Co-op plant, giving a 603 area code. I took out a map of New Hampshire and found Sarrey just about where I remembered it, a little north of the Massachusetts border. It turned out to be only an hour and ten minutes from Boston up Interstate 93 and a couple of scenic country roads that hadn't yet yielded to suburbia's manifest destiny.

  The plant itself was three stories high and roughly square. The tall windows were recessed into an old facade of gray brick, giving the impression of a structure that had been built for one purpose and converted to another. I drove a circuit around the plant. On one side was a receiving dock, a Mack tractor-trailer just pulling away. On the second side, facing west, the windows were boarded up. On the third side of the building was another dock, this one with men loading boxes into the back of another trailer. The fourth side fronted a parking lot for a hundred cars, maybe fifty vehicles in it on a Wednesday morning. I left the Prelude next to a large sign saying SARREY CO-OP PACKING — BEST VEAL IN THE EAST.

  Inside the main door was a staircase and a blank concrete block wall. The stairs seemed more inviting. At the top was a door standing ajar and a catwalk. The catwalk curved out of sight toward sounds like a carpentry shop in high gear.

  The doorway led to a minimalist office, a young woman in a lumberjack shirt and jeans behind an old partners' desk. She was drowning in a sea of multipart invoices and order forms. As the

  woman flailed through the paperwork, the bangs of her hair fell to her eyes.

  I said, "Excuse me?"

  She looked up through the bangs like a sheepdog. "Help you?"

  "I'm looking for Ray Cuervo."

  "He's down on the kill floor with the rabbi."

  "How can I find it?"

  "If you're not in the business, mister, maybe you don't want to know."

  "Please?"

  The woman blew out a breath, more to clear her hair than to show exasperation, I thought. "You're not dressed for it." She pointed to the catwalk and said, "Follow the walk around. You'll know it when you see it. Might want to stay on the walk for a while, get used to things."

  I thanked her and moved around the walk.

  Below me, about forty men and women were wearing white butchers' outfits, yellow aprons, and black hip boots. At one end of the huge room, a worker prodded a calf from a wooden corral down a concrete ramp. Another worker affixed shackles, trailing chains from the ceiling, to the animal's hind legs. As soon as he was finished, a woman touched a long wand to the calf's temple. It jerked spasmodically and went down like a sack of potatoes. The shackler cranked something, and the calf rose by the shackles, hanging upside down.

  The chains moved the calf forward to a burly man in a full beard with ringlets of sideburns. He was dressed like the other workers except for a yarmulke on his head. With one clean slash of a big knife, the man cut the calf's throat. He stepped away from the torrent, joining another man who was holding a clipboard. As the man in the yarmulke sharpened the knife, the man with the clipboard talked with him. I pegged Clipboard to be in his early thirties, about six feet tall and slim, with wavy black hair and a black mustache.

  The calf began to move slowly along the line, workers gutting the animal and sorting the organs. Next, two women and a man skinned the calf with hand-held rotary saws like a pathologist would use on the skull during an autopsy. After they finished. one of them brought the hide to a washing machine, taking other hides out and heaving them down something like a laundry chute. At the next station for the carcass, the head was taken off and put on a rack next to twenty or so others, the tongues protruding. Then the rest of the animal, still hanging from the shackles, went off to a room from which I could hear water jets like a car wash. All in all, the process seemed pretty humane, kind of a reverse assembly line in which each part seemed destined for further use.

  The only problem was the blood smell. A warm, steamy thickness to the air, like being in a kitchen when someone was steeping the wrong kind of soup.

  "Hey?"

  I turned around.

  Clipboard, stripped to a dress shirt, tie, and slacks, was standing on the catwalk ten feet from me, grinning. "Ray Cuervo."

  "John Cuddy."

  "Come on into my office. We can talk."

  * * *

  "Sure you don't want some coffee?"

  "No, thanks."

  Cuervo sipped from his paper cup. We occupied two metal chairs in a cramped room. The shelves above and behind his desk held some looseleaf binders and a couple of photos in frames. One photo showed a house with beige stone walls and an orange tile roof, the walls bordered by small trees, kinds I was pretty sure I'd never seen before. In another photo, an adolescent Cuervo was standing near a man who resembled a dark-haired Cesar Romero, both wearing hunting gear. An elaborate telephone and a fax machine
took up most of the desk.

  Cuervo hadn't asked me for any identification, so I hadn't yet brought up why I was there.

  "This your first time at the co-op, John?"

  "It is."

  "We've got a great operation here. Only the second true growers' co-op in this part of the country. We patterned ourselves after Penn Quality out past Albany. Veau Blanc?"

  I nodded as though I knew what he meant.

  "Toughest part was coming up with the financing. The growers around here, like everywhere else, would just sell their calves to the packing house, never had much idea about the business side of running a plant themselves. But once we got them to see the advantages of fair price and fair grading for their product, they came up with their share of the front money, and we're in business. Doing eight hundred calves a week most weeks now, and that's not bad. Penn's a shade ahead of us, but they started before we did, and they've got this all-star named Azzone selling for them. It'll take us a while, but we'll catch them."

  To keep him going, I said, "Where are you concentrating?"

  He set down the cup. "Boston, for now. With veal, you know, you're pretty much selling to the supermarket chains and the restaurant distributors. And you pretty much have to hit the ethnics, your Italians, your Jews. I was lucky to get into the business, since it's mostly a family trade. But I'm from Spain originally, and a lot of the Hispanics in the New York/Boston corridor like their veal."

  "You ever visit the restaurants on Newbury Street?"

  "Newbury? You mean, like in Boston?"

  "Yes."

  I seemed to put him off track. "Once in a while. Couple of small accounts there. That where you are?"

  "A few blocks away."

  Cuervo came back on track. "So, what do you think of our operation?"

  "Impressive."

  "Damned right. State-of-the-art equipment and sanitary standards. You saw the schochet down there?"

  "The what?"

  "The rabbi, like."

  "Oh, yes, I did."

  "You don't run a clean plant, you don't have to worry about the government inspectors. The rabbis, they'll close you down first. Only use the front quarter of the animal, but you got to have them."

  "Even so, it didn't look like you waste anything."

  "Right again, John. The heads we send to Mexico-they go for the brains and the cheek meat down there. The hearts, the Italians, they stuff them. Kidneys to the fancy French bistros. The rest of the dropped meat we send off to Europe. The hides to Japan for tanning, then to Italy for gloves and shoes."

  "You get a lot of heat from the animal protection people?"

  "Pickets once in a while. They'd have us all living on bean sprouts and Velveeta, they had their way. But, hey, there wouldn't be any veal calves if it weren't for the dairy herds, right?"

  "Right."

  "I mean, what's a dairy farmer supposed to do? He needs the bull to knock up the cows so they'll give milk. But when he gets a boy calf instead of a girl that can grow up to give more milk, he doesn't have too many choices. One, he can let the calf roam with the mother and suckle, which cuts down on her milk production. Two, the farmer can let the calf loose in the fields to feed on grass and become a beefer. Three, he can sell the calf to a Bob-packer who whacks the animal at all of one or two weeks of life and maybe eighty pounds of weight. Four is us. The dairy farmer, if he's smart, can auction the calf to a fancy veal grower like the ones who own this plant. The grower's going to raise that calf for sixteen weeks and come in here at four hundred pounds, giving us maybe two hundred sixty pounds of meat. Now, those are the choices, right?

  You want milk, you're going to have male calves and you got to do something with them." He picked up the cup again. "And it seems to me that our way is the best way."

  I didn't say anything as he sipped.

  Cuervo blinked a few times and then said, "What outfit are you with, anyway?"

  "I'm not in the veal business."

  He rotated the cup in his hands. "I started to get that idea. What are you doing here?"

  "I'm a private investigator from Boston."

  Cuervo frowned. "What do you want from me?"

  I had decided on the drive up that there was no way around telling him the truth. But maybe not all the truth. "Your stepmother, Maisy Andrus. She's been getting threats."

  He laughed, shaking his head. "What's the matter, she flunk the wrong student?"

  "How's that?"

  "She's a teacher, right? Who's going to get mad at her except the students?"

  "I don't think it's like that, Mr. Cuervo."

  "Hey, call me Ray, okay?"

  "Not Ramon?"

  Cuervo took a big slug of coffee. "Look, I know it's not too cool to turn your back on your heritage and all, but it would be kind of tough to go through life over here as Ramon Cuervo Gallego, you know?"

  "Your last name isn't Cuervo either?"

  "In Spain they do names differently. My middle name comes from my father's family, the very last name, Gallego, from my mother's. So, my father was Enrique Cuervo Duran and my mother was Noeli Gallego de la Cruz, and I'm Ramon Cuervo Gallego. Understand?"

  "I think so."

  "Besides, I'm not exactly Spanish."

  "Now I don't follow you."

  "My father, the late great el Senor Doctor, had this thing about American stuff, okay? Everything from America was better: cinema, appliances, sporting arms, cars. When we went hunting, it was Remingtons all the way, and we were the only family in Candas, maybe in all of Asturias, that had a Cadillac. Yeah, he had a hell of a time getting that boat through the streets."

  Cuervo made a hitchhiking gesture behind him at the photo of the house. "Even had to widen the driveway, keep from scratching the paint off. If we ever got snow — which thank Christ we never did, it's more like London weather there — he'd have wrecked it first time out, the way he drove. And when it broke? Good luck getting it fixed. But that didn't matter, right? My father wanted the best of everything, and the best was American, so I got sent off to school over here, and after my mother died he married the showiest American woman he could find."

  "How old were you when your father married Maisy Andrus?"

  "I don't know. I didn't even go to the wedding. What the hell does it matter?"

  "Why didn't you attend the wedding?"

  A smirk. "I think I had a track meet that weekend. Yeah, yeah, that was it. The team couldn't spare me."

  "You get along all right with Andrus?"

  "Get along? I barely ever saw her. You got to remember, I was in school over here. And Maisy went to live in Spain with my father only part of the year. I sure as hell wasn't interested in seeing Maisy over here, and I'll bet Maisy spent more time in old Esparia during those years than I did."

  "You have a falling out with your father over Maisy?"

  "Falling . . . you got a hell of a nerve, interrogating me like this."

  I just waited.

  "What right do you have, coming into my place of business and asking me all these questions?"

  I hadn't checked in with the Sarrey police. "Only trying to do my job."

  "Which is?"

  "To eliminate as many people as possible from the list, and then focus on the ones who could be threatening her."

  Cuervo started rotating the cup again. "Look, I don't have any bone to pick with Maisy anymore."

  "Anymore?"

  "My father . . . when he died, she got some things, I got some things."

  I inclined my head toward the house photo. "She got the homestead."

  "Yeah, which if she was able to use it would be a nice place. It sits on this bluff, kind of overlooking the bullring in Candas, near Gijon. When I was a kid, the family'd sit on the lawn, swilling sidra — new cider, sweet, a little alcoholic — and we'd watch the corridas — the bullfights. The bullring is built right along the beach, so when the tide goes out, they can have the corridas right there. Of course, sometimes the bulls, they notice the h
ole in the wall and they swim for it, but . . . look, what I'm trying to say here is, by the time it came to dividing things up between her and me, I did fine. I got everything I needed to come back here, go to college, buy a place on the water in Marblehead. My father was right about one thing. American is the best, and I got all I needed from him to have it."

  "How did you feel about your father dying the way he did?"

  "My father got sick. He was a doctor. I never thought much about him getting sick. When I was young, still living in Spain before he sent me . . . before I came over here for school, I thought he was like Superman, you know?"

  "Invulnerable?"

  "Right, right. Like God didn't let the doctors catch any diseases. That they always had to stay healthy to keep other people alive."

  "And therefore?"

  "When I heard about him . . . about him being sick, I mean, I didn't take it seriously. I couldn't even remember seeing him sick. When I finally realized how bad it was, I got upset, sure. But there wasn't anything anybody could do about it, so . . ." Cuervo shrugged.

  "How did you feel about your stepmother helping him'?"

  A quick breath, then he leaned back in the chair and got casual. "I don't think Maisy is my stepmother anymore. I mean, she got to be that because she married my father, but now she's married to somebody else, right?"

  "Andrus injected your father with an overdose."

  A philosophical smile. "Maybe what she did was the right thing. He was going to die anyway. Maybe Maisy was just making it easier for him, like we do with the stunner on the calves downstairs before they can see the knife."

  "You get involved in any of the legal wrangle over your father's death?"

  "No. Maisy got charged and I was supposed to testify, but they never — what do you call it?"

  "Indicted her?"

  "No, like when they . . . extradited her. They never extradited Maisy. This was all after Loredo Mendez — the prosecutor that let her get off to start with — killed himself. Barely remember old Luis now, but he was a friend of my father's from the university and had this young wife my father saved from dying during childbirth." The smirk again. "Younger wives were real popular in my father's crowd."

  "You ever go back to Spain?"