Spiked

by Mark Arsenault

  Eddie retold his story, omitting Danny’s wallet. He would check it out later.

  Orr recorded Eddie’s tale in shorthand. When he had finished, she read over what she had written. “What are we missing?”

  Eddie sat there, thinking about how often he was blinking, and whether it was too damn often or not often enough. “That’s all I know.”

  Detective Orr lifted an eyebrow. She picked up the bag holding Eddie’s melted cellular phone, held it to the light and inspected it, frowning. “I’ll call you, Mr. Bourque, when I find your nameless ponytail-swiping Cambodian woman.

  “And if this unforgettable woman tries to contact you,” Orr said, “I would recommend that you not forget to call me.”

  She tossed him the bag.

  Chapter 12

  “Edward Bourque, you are such a rat.”

  The insult carried across the newsroom. Eddie tried to steer around Melissa, but she stepped into his path, hands on her hips, her right foot tapping.

  “You abandoned me at that funeral home yesterday and all sorts of dreadful political types spent the afternoon slithering all over me,” she said. “How do you deal with those people?” Her breath smelled of coffee, some sort of hearty dark roast.

  Coffee. Eddie hadn’t had any coffee. No wonder his head ached and his IQ had fallen by fifty points.

  “I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “I got problems.”

  “I could name a few,” she offered.

  He threw up his hands. “Keyes just spiked the best feature idea I’ve ever had, the cops are on my ass, two goons tried to maroon me on an iceberg, my hip is killing me, and if my caffeine withdrawal gets any worse, I’m driving to the train station to piss on the third rail.”

  He walked around her.

  Melissa called after him, “Maroon you on a what?”

  “Read about it in my obit.”

  The lunchroom coffee machine took Eddie’s three quarters and filled a paper cup with a long squirt of steaming gray java. It burned away his brain fog like morning sun.

  Back at his desk, Eddie locked Danny’s wallet in a drawer, and then threw himself into his job to escape the problems of the morning. He rewrote two press releases into briefs for the political page, and then harassed a few candidates by phone for biographical information he needed for his election coverage. Then he drafted a top for his election analysis:

  LOWELL—The November City Council election will be about the philosophy of spending taxpayers’ money.

  Not whether to spend it—all the candidates have plans for every penny of bounty from the city’s property taxes. The question is what that money should buy.

  A block of powerful incumbents, led by Councilman Manuel G. Eccleston Jr., favors spending public money on brick-and-mortar capital projects. Public development begets private investment, they argue.

  Most of the challengers want to spend more on social service programs. Basic human needs, such as education and housing, must come before concrete and steel, they insist.

  Okay, that was the premise. Now he had to back it up. For that, he needed a few more interviews, and the background clips on the candidates, which at this time of day were a pain to get. Twice a day, the library courier was paroled from the basement—Middle Earth, it was called at The Empire—to deliver any files reporters had requested. But the morning run had already come. He’d have to fetch the clips himself.

  The elevator doors opened to the mildewed smell of eight decades of newspaper clippings decomposing inside scores of metal filing cabinets. The Empire library was a file cabinet graveyard. Every old four-drawer, too creaky, dented, or homely for life in the office world was condemned to eternity there, damned to hold generations of hackneyed clippings, from breathless reports about the crowds at the Lowell Folk Festival to every recorded nuance in the history of septic systems in Dunstable.

  The cabinets ringed the four walls of the windowless basement, and three sides of the elevator shaft. More cabinets, stacked back-to-back, formed islands throughout the chamber. Slanting stacks of newsprint were piled everywhere upon the cabinets. Some piles reached to the flickering fluorescent tube lights in the ceiling. They cast shade on the floor.

  Eddie called out over the maze, “Durkin?”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Eddie Bourque. I need a file.”

  There was a clink-tap, clink-tap of metal crutches and one boot on the cement floor. Durkin, the records librarian, liked to come to you. Showed that he was not a cripple just because a North Vietnamese satchel charge had blown off his left leg when he was a teenager on patrol in the A Shue Valley. Above his crutches, Durkin’s huge shoulders bulged and throbbed like he was smuggling pot-bellied pigs up his sleeves. His silver hair was slicked straight back and his goatee was stiff like wire. He kept a diamond stud in his left earlobe.

  He looked Eddie over and grinned. “Who beat the shit outta ya?” His voice was deep and hoarse.

  “I fell.”

  Durkin laughed. “Into a wood chipper, it looks like. What are you bench pressing these days?”

  “Not as much as you.”

  “Obviously.” He balled his right hand into a fist the size of a croquet ball, which he shook at Eddie. “Why, I could lick you with one arm.”

  “You’d have to catch me first on that one wheel, old man,” Eddie said.

  Durkin chuckled, like an idling bulldozer. Durkin thrived on conflict. Eddie had met his challenge, and now Durkin was ready to help him.

  “What do you want?”

  “The clip file for the current crop of City Council candidates.”

  “Oh yeah, bunch of Einsteins there, eh?” He tugged his beard, in thought. “Council candidates—right—right. That’s filed under general heading O, in the temporary drawer of subcategory P. Over here, row five.” He crutched through the alleys between the cabinets.

  Durkin’s filing system had for years confounded the newsroom staff. “Why wouldn’t it just be under C?” Eddie asked.

  Durkin roared, “C? That wouldn’t work.” He explained, “Would that be C for council, for city council or for candidate? Maybe C for city of Lowell?” He grimaced and shook his head. “Too many options. Gets confusing. In the old days, we’d file it under E for election, but there’s so many E’s in modern language. Most popular letter in the alphabet. Did you know that, son? Though I prefer S.”

  Eddie nodded.

  “In a perfect world, we’d find the candidate file under V, for vote,” he continued. “Except that the V cabinets are full. So we drop to the second letter of the word and look in O.” He stopped at an unlabeled cabinet and drummed his fingertips on the top. “That’s this year’s election, so we go to subcategory P, for the present. That file stays twelve months in what we call the temporary drawer, and then we move it to subcategory L, for last year.”

  Eddie started to ask what would happen after next year, but thought better of it.

  Durkin yanked open the top drawer, thumbed through manila files and handed Eddie a thick folder marked “City Council candidates.” In it, Durkin had filed every story written about the council race this season.

  Eddie nodded and thanked him.

  Durkin tugged his goatee again. “Before you go, Bourque, I got something to ask you. Over here.”

  Eddie followed him to his desk, which was covered with file folders, cuts of newspaper, and back issues of Soldier of Fortune. Durkin looked through a ledger. “Near as I can tell, you have three outstanding files,” he said. “These are the archives, son. Archeologists will uncover this place in a thousand years. With any luck, by then I’ll be dead. But I want these records to be complete. You’ve got two files on political appointments and the housing sale statistics from last year.”

  “You gonna fine me three cents a day?”

  “Nope. But I may twist your head backwards so you can watch me kick your ass.”

  Eddie laughed. “Fair enough. I’ll send the files
back.”

  Durkin glanced further down his list and frowned. “Another thing,” he said in a low voice. “Nowlin had some files out. I don’t want to tear through the man’s desk, you know? If you see them, could you send them down?”

  “What did he have?”

  “Bunch of files on Cambodia.”

  Cambodia? Eddie took the ledger. Most of the entries were printed in soft pencil, in Durkin’s heavy block letters. The Cambodia files were signed out in ink, in Nowlin’s light, slanted handwriting. He had taken them out four weeks before he died, according to the date he had entered in the ledger.

  “Did he check these out when you weren’t here?” Eddie asked.

  “Must have. I don’t like it, but I realize this is a twenty-four-hour business.”

  “How’d he ever find them?” Eddie asked. “Where were they filed?”

  “Under C.”

  “C? For Cambodia? That makes sense.”

  “No. C for country,” Durkin said. “They’re supposed to be under A, subcategory S. That’s for Asia, Southeast, where we keep most of the Cambodia files. The ones he took wouldn’t fit there, so they got parked in C while I was looking to vacate some space.”

  Nowlin had taken every Cambodia file he could find. And then a breathtaking woman of Cambodian descent stole a lock of his hair at his wake. “Gimme the rest of those files,” Eddie said. “This could be important.”

  Durkin nodded. “Affirmative. They’re in row five.” He pointed. “Thataway.”

  Eddie was confused. He pointed in the other direction. “Weren’t we just in row five, over that way?”

  “This is the other row five.”

  “Why,” Eddie pleaded, “is this place organized like a Mensa exam?”

  The big man smiled. Light twinkled off his diamond earring. “Job security, son,” he said. “Job security.”

  ***

  Eddie spent the rest of the afternoon at his desk, the Cambodia files in his lap and a vending machine coffee in his hand. The concussion had left him with a vague headache, a heavy feeling in his head. His neck was getting sore, too. He filled a plastic sandwich bag with ice from the lunchroom freezer and taped it to the back of his neck.

  Nowlin had taken the entries about Cambodian immigration, which had peaked in Lowell a few years after the Khmer Rouge regime fell from power. Eddie’s quick search of Nowlin’s desk didn’t turn up those files.

  Danny had missed the folders on Cambodian businesses, festivals and culture. Why hadn’t he just asked Durkin for them? The question troubled him.

  Most of the files were flimsy, just like the newspaper’s half-assed coverage of the Cambodian community. The Empire had been slow to recognize the flood of Cambodian immigrants to Lowell. Most came straight from refugee camps in Thailand to the triple-deckers of the Acre.

  One file was fatter than the telephone book. It was a collection of stories on Sawouth “Samuel” Sok, a reclusive Lowell philanthropist who had immigrated to the Acre with two sons soon after the Vietnamese army drove the Khmer Rouge from power. Though he never talked about it for the record, Sok had somehow survived the four-year Khmer Rouge genocide, which killed some two million Cambodians, including most of the country’s educated people.

  Samuel Sok converted to Catholicism in America, made a fortune in historic home renovation and tried to give away his money as fast as he could make it, it seemed. Ten years ago, he had retired to an estate deep in Lowell’s most affluent neighborhood.

  Eddie found a clip from Sok’s last public appearance, five years ago at the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. He had not been seen in public since, but his charitable contributions continued. According to another clip in the file, Sok had given more than a million dollars to local causes in the last year. The most recent clip was four months old. Melissa had written it. It quoted Sok’s public relations spokesman announcing a thousand-dollar donation to fly a local chess club to a tournament.

  Melissa had a good line in the story: Businessman Samuel Sok’s two passions are God and chess, which he devoutly maintains in that order.

  The Gospels first, Bobby Fischer second. Made sense, even if Luke had never beaten Boris Spassky. Eddie’s mind wandered to a mental image of the apostles playing a round-robin chess tournament in DaVinci’s Last Supper. Half of the guys would have to move to the other side of the table. A line near the end of Melissa’s story perked him from the daydream: Sok is pondering plans to expand his sizeable influence—which he wields from Tyngsboro to Ayer, spanning the depth of the Merrimack River Valley—to promote Cambodian causes in business and politics.

  Reading past Melissa’s overwriting, Eddie’s eye stuck on the word “politics.” He dug the notebook from his overcoat and found the name of the political action committee he had jotted down: the GLCI PAC.

  He called the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance in Boston and confirmed a hunch. The PAC was registered as the Greater Lowell Cambodian Interest Political Action Committee. Its co-treasurers were Sarom and Pen Sok, the sons of Samuel Sok, known in Lowell by their Christian names: Peter and Matthew.

  Through his PAC, Sok had spread money to the City Council incumbents. It made no sense. The challengers’ platform had more to offer the immigrant population, much of which was still poor and struggling to fit in. Plus, the PAC had given money to every candidate likely to support Councilman Eccleston’s plan to tear down the old church, and to redevelop the Acre immigrant neighborhood.

  It was nearly six o’clock. The rally to save the old church would be starting in a few minutes. Might be worth his while, he decided, to see why Vaughn, or anybody else, would want to save the old building. Eddie rubbed his neck. Icing had not helped. Still, he found himself looking forward to meeting with Hippo. If there had been a cover-up of Danny’s death, Eddie Bourque wanted to know what was worth covering up.

  Chapter 13

  St. Francis de Sales Church at the edge of the Acre neighborhood was completed about 1850 in gothic revival style. It’s a wedge-shaped behemoth of gray Chelmsford granite, fat on the bottom and stepping up to a sharp blade at the top, decorated by a spine of jagged spires. Stone buttresses, guarded by gargoyles that spit in the rain, jut out into overgrown shrubs along the long sides of the building. The huge stained glass windows between the buttresses are dark and meaningless from the outside.

  Twenty stone steps lead to a main church entrance of three oaken double-doors, recessed within gothic archways. Twin spire towers are the building’s most imposing feature. Soaring a hundred fifty feet, the towers are festooned from the ground to their needle-like tips with ornamental arches and columns, mini-spires and spikes.

  The church had been closed about seventeen years. Momentum had been building among Lowell’s inner circle of politicians to take the land for redevelopment. Grass-roots opposition, organized under the name SAVIOR, had hastily assembled to save the church, with Congressman Vaughn’s blessing.

  The opposition had yet to get any ink in the paper. Franklin Keyes had low regard for political amateurs, especially neighborhood groups, and had ruled that the issue lacked the critical mass to make a full-blown story. He had not bothered to assign a reporter to the save-the-church rally.

  The Empire was missing a good story. Volunteers from SAVIOR passed out candles to a crowd of about a hundred people, most of them old enough to have baptized their children in St. Francis de Sales before it closed. SAVIOR was an acronym for Save All Valuable Interests for Our Re-use. The neighborhood group was a little GOOFY (Gone Overboard On Finding an acronYm), but their motives seemed pure.

  Congressman Hippo Vaughn’s aide, Tabby, was toward the back of the crowd, cradling a stack of white folders. Tabby commuted from Boston to run Vaughn’s district office in Lowell. Her smooth, dark skin came from her Lebanese parents. Her smoldering beauty, unspoiled with not a dab of makeup, came straight from Allah.

  Whenever Eddie and Tabby spoke in person, she would tilt her
head a little, curve her lips into a tiny smile, and touch Eddie’s arm. Was she flirting with him? Or was he just wishful? She maintained an interminable, live-in relationship with a boyfriend who taught oboe in Central Square in Cambridge. That was all Eddie cared to know about him.

  Tabby handed a radio reporter a press folder from the top of the stack. She handed Eddie the one on the bottom. “It’s some history on the church and a copy of the congressman’s remarks to open the rally,” she explained.

  “Is Hippo around?” Eddie asked.

  The whites of her eyes were big and flawless behind the dark pupils. She said, “He made his comments and excused himself for another appointment.”

  Eddie flipped through the paperwork. “So, does Hippo really support these SAVIOR people?”

  She put her hand on his and closed his folder. “The congressman’s remarks are clear. You won’t need his staff around to explain them.” She smiled and walked off.

  Eddie watched the rally for twenty minutes. Speakers addressed the crowd with a bullhorn from the front steps. The speeches were all the same. How many ways can you say “save our heritage”? Boring.

  Seated on the church steps, Eddie looked through the folder. There was Vaughn’s two-page speech, which called for the church to “stay as safe as a two-run lead with The Monster on the mound,” a reference to 1960s Red Sox reliever Dick Radatz. There was an old church photograph from the Historical Society, a timeline of church history, a list of well-known church members, and a copy of a twenty-year-old letter from the last pastor of St. Francis de Sales, imploring the Diocese to keep the church open to serve the Acre and its new wave of immigrants from Southeast Asia.

  Eddie scanned the list of prominent church members, recognizing a handful of former mayors, a former U.S. senator and others who seemed familiar only because of the streets named after them.

  One name stuck out: Sawouth “Samuel” Sok, the reclusive philanthropist whom Eddie had spent the afternoon researching.