He heard a noise on the left, turned his head slightly, and saw the wrinkled, haggard face of Mrs. Cuehlo. The old woman stared at him for a moment, then slammed the door, and for the only time since he’d known her, Whelan felt sorry for her. Mrs. Cuehlo was in mourning for her cat, and suffused in every pore of her ancient being with hatred for Whelan, whom she believed somehow responsible for the animal’s untimely death under the wheels of an ice-cream truck. And while it was true that Whelan had loathed the animal and been caught several times in the act of throwing stones at it to drive it from his garden, he hadn’t yet stooped to killing animals. Not even that one.
The brown Chevy returned, slowed down when it reached the house across the street from Whelan’s, then laid rubber and tore off toward Lawrence. Same four inside: an old guy driving, a heavyset one in the shotgun seat, two teenagers in the back. No license plate, muffler tied on with rope, rust holes everywhere you could have rust on a car, and a Confederate flag decal on the rear bumper.
They were interested in the new residents across the street, a married couple. The husband was black and the wife was white, and these four in the beater seemed to have a problem with that. They weren’t local. Only outsiders would think anything of a mixed couple in Uptown, and there had been rumors when the couple moved in that they’d experienced racial harassment in another neighborhood. Whelan wondered if this was just a continuation of their earlier trouble. This was the fifth time in three days that the Chevy had visited Malden. Several times the car had appeared late at night, and Whelan saw trouble coming.
He walked east on Lawrence past the dark gray walls of St. Boniface Cemetery, grabbed a cup of coffee from the smoky little diner under the El tracks, and went to the door of his office building. He paused a moment to study the street—the storefront that had once housed his beloved Persian A & W was still vacant, the marquee of the Aragon Ballroom promised more boxing, and there was already a collection of men standing outside the pool hall on the corner.
He turned to go inside his office building and had to step over an old man sleeping, sitting up, against the doorjamb. The man didn’t stir and Whelan quickly and deftly touched the man’s throat. There was a pulse.
Well, that’s a start, he told himself.
He trotted up the dark stairwell, opened his office door, and sucked in a lungful of stale, hot air. There was no mail yet. He walked across the room, opened both windows, and thought he felt a slight stirring in the air. Then he sat down to wait.
Twenty-five minutes later she arrived. She was late, and he would’ve bet the rent on it—it fit with the phone voice and the grammar and all the other baggage that went with them. She stood in his doorway as though deciding whether to come in. She was just like her voice, this woman, but prettier than he’d envisioned, quite a bit prettier, and he was conscious of the heat and the smallness of the office, of the exhaust and street noises coming in the window, and of his own clothes, for this was the type of woman who’d make you conscious of your clothes.
“Mr. Whelan,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
“Morning. Have a seat, Mrs. Fairs.”
He came around the desk to pull out a chair for her, and she looked down at it before sitting. He went back to his chair and sat. She gave a short shake of her head when he asked if she wanted coffee.
Janice Fairs was a short, slender woman in her early thirties, with frosted brown hair pulled back, very pale blue eyes, high, sharp cheekbones, and fair, almost translucent skin that gave her an ascetic look. She looked at him calmly and the bottom half of her face smiled. She wore a gray business suit and a cream-colored blouse and there wasn’t a hair, not a molecule of her existence, that was out of place. In her world it probably wasn’t even hot. She tilted her head slightly, looking at his loose cotton shirt.
“A guayabera, isn’t it?”
“Right.”
“Is that because of the location of your office?” Perfect eyebrows went up in question. “I mean because of the, ah, Latin population?”
“No. I just like cotton shirts. And if I wanted to look like my neighbors up here I’d have to wear something different every day. Something Vietnamese today, something Nigerian tomorrow, something from the Tennessee hills on Friday.”
She nodded and looked around the room. “Are you aware that there is a man lying unconscious on your doorstep outside?”
“Sure,” he said, and decided to let her run with it.
She decided not to. “You work in an interesting area, Mr. Whelan.”
“I live not far from here. My parents’ home. I didn’t have the heart to sell it.” He realized that that didn’t explain an office in Uptown.
“You live up here?”
“Lot of folks do.” She was about to comment but he hit her with, “The Governor is purchasing a large home two blocks from mine. Mr. Lobster Jim Thompson’s going to rehab it, and then his whole block will be gentrified and my neighborhood will be respectable. And no shellfish on this side of town will be safe.”
Mrs. Fairs seemed to be weighing several comments.
“Interesting,” was all she said.
“You said on the phone that you’d gotten my name from a ‘reputable source.’ May I ask who referred you to me?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t a direct referral. A friend of my family is a police officer in Lake Forest. He has a summer home on Lake Geneva. Near mine.”
“Police work must pay better in Lake Forest.”
“He’s the deputy chief. His name is Myers.” She cocked an eyebrow.
“And he was my watch commander in ancient times. We didn’t much like each other.”
She shrugged. “Your old war stories are irrelevant, Mr. Whelan. What matters is that he recommended you. He told me that you were honest and good at what you do.”
“But I know Fred Myers, and that’s not all he told you.”
“No. He told me that you are stubborn and unnecessarily independent, a born lone wolf and proud of it, and that some of these qualities are unfortunate in a police officer. You couldn’t, ah, ‘work in harness’ is the way he put it. He said you have a high opinion of your own intelligence and that you dress and think like a hippie.”
“He thinks anybody who hasn’t served in the marines is a hippie. He thinks Kennedy was a hippie, probably Nixon, too. So, with all these glowing references, you still came to see me.”
“As I’ve already told you, these old conflicts have nothing to do with me, or with what I need you to do. He also said that you never, ever let anything go.” She sat back and stared. He decided he wanted a cigarette but he wasn’t going to light up yet. After a moment she made a little shrug and went digging around in her tiny gray handbag for a cigarette. When she came up with one, he leaned over and lit it with a Zippo, then took one out of his own pack.
They traded little gusts of smoke and he noticed that she puffed at hers a lot harder than he did. When the air had gone a comfortable cloudy gray he put his cigarette in the ashtray between them and sat back.
“So…would you like to tell me what you want done?”
“Of course.” She blew smoke with a sharp upward jerk of her head. “It is in the nature of surveillance. I want you to perform surveillance on someone.”
“Why?”
“I require…certain information on this person.”
“Who?”
“The man I believe responsible for my husband’s death.”
“Are we…are you suggesting something here?”
She raised her eyebrows again and surprised him with a smile, a sincere one this time, and it made her look ten years younger and twelve times more attractive.
“‘Suggesting,’ Mr. Whelan? How charming. Yes, we most certainly are suggesting something.” The smile went underground and she leaned forward, and the look in the blue eyes was the one that makes the servants jump. “We’re suggesting that my husband was murdered by the person I want followed.”
He thought for a mom
ent about the various ways to couch the necessary and usually offensive questions. “There are a number of ways to…”
She made a hissing sound and waved irritably in the air, as if dispersing the smoke. “My husband’s death was ruled a suicide. Were you going to refer me to ‘normal channels’?” She let her voice go down low, in an imitation of a cop speaking the universal language of cops.
“There was a complete investigation of my husband’s death, Mr. Whelan, but it was over before it started. He was killed on his boat. Someone covered it with gasoline and then torched it, with him on it. And it was determined that he did it. Phil was seen on the boat shortly before the accident. This happened exactly two years ago this weekend.”
He nodded and waited. He could see the end of this one already, understood the motivation and the way a person could misread the evidence and refuse to see the proof.
She went into the little bag again and extracted a photograph. It wasn’t a recent picture and it had been a lousy processing job, so that the color was garish, unnatural, but in it a pair of good-looking young men stood arm in arm in front of a twenty-five- or thirty-foot boat. The boat’s name, The High Pair, was painted across the stern in bright blue lettering.
“The man on the right, the bigger one, is Phil. My husband. The other man is his friend and business partner, Rich Vosic. I think Rich had my husband killed.”
He began to shake his head over the poor quality and the age of the picture. “Mrs. Fairs, this really wouldn’t be much…”
She held up one hand and then took out another picture. It had obviously been clipped from a larger picture, and showed a good-looking blond man sipping from a Styrofoam cup and smiling.
“The other one was taken when they were very young and thought they had the whole world figured out.” She nodded as she handed Whelan the new picture. “That one’s a little more recent. He’s about five nine and he weighs about one hundred seventy pounds. It’s a good likeness.”
“Why?” He kept his face passive.
“Why what? Why did he do it, do you mean?”
“No. Motive doesn’t concern me. Why do you suspect his partner, and why do you think it was murder when the police think it was suicide?”
She stiffened. “You really don’t sound particularly interested in this, Mr. Whelan.”
“What I’m not interested in is running around on a snipe hunt, Mrs. Fairs. I mean, have you discussed your ideas with the police?”
“Of course I have. Well, no, no, that’s not true. There was no discussion. They had their preconceived notions of what happened and they didn’t pay any attention to me whatsoever. Besides, Mr. Whelan, I was just a pampered suburban housewife—and after I’d identified the body, a hysterical suburban housewife—whose husband happened to die in Chicago waters. An inconvenience, I suppose. And they saw a convenient way to wrap it up, one more case solved in a very efficient day’s work.”
“I assume they found evidence that this was a suicide.”
He could see her begin to shake her head and watched the visible struggle between impulses. Then she sighed and nodded. “There was a note, of sorts. I mean, they believed it was a note. It was…it could have been anything, it was just a scrap of paper with some words on it. It must have been part of something else. It was on his desk with some of his papers.”
“And what did it say?”
“‘It’s all out of control.’” She shrugged. “That was it, the whole thing. The whole ‘message.’ ‘It’s all out of control.’”
“Any idea what it meant?”
“No. So they took that little scrap of paper and…and bits and pieces of things and came up with suicide.”
“Couldn’t it have been?”
“No. No, it couldn’t have been,” and she favored him with the look that she probably saved for clumsy waiters.
“Why not? All right, that’s not a fair question. What factors in his life might lead someone to believe your husband would consider suicide?”
She made a shrug of pure stubbornness and a little wave of her hand. He noticed that the cigarette was a long, slim column of ash now. She caught his glance and tapped the ash into his ashtray.
“Excuse me. He was a businessman, so of course there would be money worries at times, and he was a little concerned over the stability of his business ventures.”
“What business was he in?”
“My husband and Rich Vosic had a computer software company. That was the primary source of income, and there were other investments and interests. There was perhaps a bit of…of overextension.”
“Such as?”
“You mean you want—”
“I mean I want it in English, Mrs. Fairs.”
“They expanded their interests rapidly, bought property, too much property, and with so much of their assets tied up as collateral, there was bound to be some trouble.”
“What kind of property?”
“All sorts of things. A couple of small commercial properties, a twenty-two-unit apartment building, and…other things. And there was concern that their investments weren’t turning a profit as quickly as they’d hoped, but not overmuch. After all, Phil had been in debt before. But they had wonderful credit, Mr. Whelan, and mostly because of Phil’s ability to win people over to his way of thinking. Although…I suppose it’s only fair to give some of the credit to Rich Vosic. He was what I believe is known as a ‘front man’—very charming, a marvelous way with people.”
“Anyone in particular that they were into for a great deal of money?”
She hesitated. “They had a number of debtors, Mr. Whelan.”
“Besides the usual bank loans—anybody who made large personal loans?”
She sighed. “They owed a large sum to a mortgage banker named Victor Tabor. The loan was secured, Mr. Whelan.”
“All right. So what have we got? A lot of investments and more mortgage than most people are comfortable with.”
She nodded. “They both spent freely, and I’m sure anyone would say too freely, but the money was there. Spending wasn’t the problem. There were other things that didn’t help, of course.”
“He was a drinker?”
“No. But he gambled. He took risks with his…with our money.”
“You mean on business, or real gambling?”
“Real gambling.”
“He gambled heavily?”
“Yes. Sometimes he made a lot of money at it and other times he lost quite a lot. He didn’t have a problem with it, though.”
No, they never have a problem with it. He shook his head. “Well, Mrs. Fairs, problem or not, to gamble on that scale you have to come into contact with people that are best left in the holes they live in.”
Mrs. Fairs seemed on the verge of saying something important and then caught herself. She shook her head. “But none of that would have damaged the company as severely as it was.”
“No? Seems like enough to sink just about anybody’s boat to me. Overspending, overextension of their resources, a good deal of borrowing, and large-scale gambling. Yeah, that would just about do it.”
“But I’m telling you that it wasn’t, Mr. Whelan. I know this for a fact.” Spots of red appeared in her cheeks and Whelan thought she might be just a few seconds away from losing her temper.
“I was just telling you how it seemed to me. Go on, please.”
“There were other things, Mr. Whelan. They made a major mistake—at least Phil did. Rich…I think Rich knew exactly what he was doing all along. It was a hiring mistake. They took on an accountant, a man Rich found, named George Brister. A very strange man.”
“How so?”
“Oh, in many ways. A very unstable person. A very disquieting person as well. He was a big, hulking man, first of all—bigger than Phil, and my husband wasn’t small. And he had very dark eyes, set close together and very piercing. He seemed to fix his eyes on you and keep them there, long after it was polite or even normal. I think he realized he was doing
it and that it made people uncomfortable. And he said almost nothing, answered people with one-word answers when asked a question. The first time I met him I was very uncomfortable around him, and there was no reason for me to feel that way. I mean, he was just—”
Just the hired help, Whelan thought.
“—just another man working for High Pair Enterprises.”
“That was the name of the company? Same as the boat?”
“Yes.” She allowed herself a sad little smile. “It was how Phil always thought of himself and Rich, the High Pair. It also said that they were…equals, a team, and that Rich was just as responsible for their rapid growth as he himself was. He was a generous man, my husband, and quick to accept the ideas of others, and that is why he hired George Brister, in spite of everything.”
“What ‘everything’ are we talking about here? A police record or something like that?”
“Brister was…unstable, as I said.”
“So are the rest of us, more or less. What were his particular symptoms?”
“He was an alcoholic. You could tell it from his resume and references, even though nowadays they try to dress it up or camouflage it to avoid lawsuits. He was a drunk.”
“But that’s no reason…”
She leaned forward, eyes glittering. She looked ready to pounce. “There were rumors about him. About his instability, about the way he kept the books. He had been fired from several positions. Phil didn’t like the whole situation but let Rich talk him into hiring Brister. Phil decided to give Brister a chance, Mr. Whelan, and inside of a year George Brister had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from company accounts.”
A Body in Belmont Harbor Page 2