Spiked

by Mark Arsenault

  “Sometimes.”

  “How do I get it back?”

  “Did you lose a file?”

  “Yes—well, maybe,” Eddie said. “I really don’t know.” He had no choice but to be straight with Stan. “I’m someplace I shouldn’t be right now, breaking into a computer I shouldn’t be messing with.”

  “Is that so?” Curiosity put life into Stan’s voice. “Does this have to do with Nowlin?”

  “Yeah. And I’m not sure how legal this is, but I’m gonna guess ‘not very.’ So you’d be smart not to ask me too many details.”

  “Right, right,” he said, disappointed. “What are you looking for?”

  “Maybe nothing. But I want to see what’s been deleted off this machine recently.”

  “I have a program that can help you,” Stan said. “A little utility I wrote myself. Can you come here and get it?”

  “This may be my only chance at this computer.”

  “Okay, okay, let me think—can you get on the Internet?”

  “No problem.”

  Stan told him to hang on. Eddie could hear him fumbling through his desk. And then his plump little fingers rapped his keyboard for a minute.

  “Still there?” Stan asked.

  “Still here. What’s the plan?”

  “I put my recovery utility on the paper’s Internet server, and created a link from my private area of The Empire’s Web page.”

  “You have a private area on the paper’s Web page? For what?”

  “For whatever I want. And the newspaper picks up the tab—not that they know it.”

  Eddie was beginning to like Stan. And to trust him.

  Stan instructed Eddie to log into The Empire’s Web site under the name “Bob Newhart.” The password to Stan’s private page was “Mrs. Webb.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Webb?” Eddie asked.

  Stan’s voice flat-lined again. “She was a character in a Newhart comedy monologue,” he stated. “In that act, Newhart was the driving instructor and Mrs. Webb was a student unskilled in the safe and legal operation of a motor vehicle. Their resulting mishaps and adventures, relayed by Newhart with understated dry wit, are quite comedic.”

  With the way Stan droned, he could have been lecturing on kelp, or the life cycle of the stink beetle. But he was explaining humor, and that was funny. Okay, maybe closer to amusing than sidesplitting, but hearing a comedy routine analyzed in Stan’s lifeless monotone broke Eddie into a smile.

  Eddie interrupted, “Tell me, Stan, when you tried doing stand-up, what were your routines about?”

  “I stayed faithful to the staples of contemporary comedic material—poor service by the airlines, the follies of big government, and the curious differences between men and woman.”

  There it was again—funny. Eddie was onto something.

  “Stan,” he said, “the Edward Bourque School of Funny needs some homework from you. Write me a two thousand-word essay on great comedy. The Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello—whatever. Break down a classic routine and explain why it gets laughs.”

  “How about the Three Stooges?”

  “Fine. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You want me to email this to you?”

  “Nope,” Eddie said. “You’re going to read it to me. And then we’re gonna talk about the comedic properties of irony.”

  “Huh?”

  “Forget it,” Eddie said. “We’ll cover this later in funny class. How do I work your utility program?”

  Stan explained a few simple functions.

  Eddie thanked him and said goodbye.

  “Bourque! Wait!” Stan yelled.

  “What is it?”

  “This report isn’t just busy work, is it? This is going to make me funnier, right?”

  “Write it well and you’ll be a goddam riot—if you develop a smile that won’t put your audience into cardiac arrest. I’ll check with you later.”

  They hung up.

  The computer dialed the Internet. Eddie followed Stan’s directions. As Stan had promised, the program soon offered him a list of two dozen deleted files. Most had been thrown out within the past few weeks.

  A few had been deleted late Monday night.

  When Nowlin was already in the morgue.

  Somebody had beaten Eddie to Nowlin’s computer, to make sure nobody would ever see these documents. They snuck past nearsighted Mrs. Evans, and they got past Nowlin’s password, but they didn’t consider the computer prowess of Stan Popko, The Bitter Comic. You beat me here, whoever you are, but I got the better geek. Winning his first round against his unknown adversary warmed Eddie like a caffeine buzz, but without the jitters.

  Two of the most recently deleted files were Nowlin’s resumé, and a letter dated two weeks ago to the talent recruiter at the Boston Globe:

  Dear Ms. Dannon,

  Thank you for the pleasant interview last week. You folks certainly asked the tough questions and brought the best out of me. I’m looking forward to my tryout next month. Please let me know what would be a convenient date to come in, and I’ll schedule the time off at The Empire….

  Buzz kill. Eddie slouched. Danny had never mentioned an interview at the Globe. And this wasn’t just a pity chat; they were bringing him back for a tryout. The room grew hot. Eddie slipped off his jacket.

  They wanted Nowlin? The guy couldn’t write for shit.

  Eddie had long considered Danny a competitor for newspaper jobs. But the race was over, and Danny had died in the lead. An interview is no guarantee of a job. Once the Globe editors saw his raw copy, they probably would have passed on Danny for somebody more polished. But Nowlin had broken through the membrane enveloping all great newspapers. His turn inevitably would come.

  Eddie thought about how much of the newspaper business is luck and timing. A reporter can labor for years building sources and developing a beat. After a while, even the most lunkheaded pols learn there’s a watchdog on their asses, and that they can’t get away with anything. So they feather their own nests the hard way—by providing good government. Services get better, taxes stay low; it’s the only way to stay in office if you’re clean.

  What does a reporter have to show for all this good government? Lots of copy about economic development and land preservation. It’s what makes good neighborhoods, but doctors prescribe those clips at insomnia clinics.

  And then there’s the dimwitted scribe on his way to the bar. He happens upon a hostage taking. The material is so compelling, nobody could screw it up. It’s like winning the news lottery. Awards pile up, and job offers follow.

  What was it about Nowlin’s political coverage that got him noticed? Eddie couldn’t say for sure. But Danny never wrote just to fill the paper, and if that meant Keyes bitched at him for a low byline count, so be it. Nowlin didn’t waste time shoveling coal. Eddie shoveled lots of coal, writing too many boring stories to satisfy the pressure to fill the white space. It was journalistic origami, the art of making copy from nearly nothing. Start with a single fresh fact. Fold some background in here, tuck some irrelevant quotes there—poof, it was a swan.

  Another document caught Eddie’s attention.

  It was labeled Story Draft, and Stan’s program could recover only a few lines, in two fragments:

  of the communist guerrilla group, the Khmer Rouge, which swept into Phnom Penh in April 1975 and cleared Cambodia’s capital city of its inhabitants with lies about American bomber planes on the way.

  The citizens were marched out into the country and forced into a slave-like existence as subsistence farmers. Many were worked to death. Within the ranks of commoners, the Khmer Rouge hunted down educated people whom they perceived to be a threat and took them away in the night for execution.

  The second fragment made even less sense out of context:

  showing amazing instincts, he mated each of them in March and was crowned their King

  Eddie copied the lines into his no
tebook. He tore out the page and stuffed it in his wallet.

  The last file of interest looked like a love poem in the making. The top wasn’t bad, but where was Danny heading with the ending? The poem trailed into nonsensical free-form verse:

  Color my world, my artist, and melt tubes of cherry butter paint

  Onto my Irish pale cheeks.

  Color my world with a secret dance we share in the night

  Your brush swipes at the canvas like a conductor’s wand.

  Hello. Who else would it be. What time. Yeah I’ll be right there. I got plenty to tell you and it’s going to blow your mind. That’s right the jackpot. I found it in the microfilm. The homilies. It was right there all along. No. Chanthay doesn’t have a phone. But you could page her.

  The poem ended with numbers spelled out in words. Eddie wrote them as digits in his notebook. Together, they formed a number in the millions—seven digits.

  A seven-digit number? Eddie looked from the computer screen to the telephone, and then to the microphone on the table. Danny had answered the phone while writing this poem. His voice-recognition software had dutifully typed his half of the conversation. The program’s auto-save feature had preserved it. And then somebody had erased it. Eddie checked the file’s creation date. Friday night, eleven-forty-five. Poetry was usually slow going, and Nowlin was a slow writer anyway. Figure half an hour to write the first four lines. That would time the call at around twelve-fifteen on Saturday morning.

  Yeah I’ll be right there, Danny had said. So he didn’t go far, and he never came back. It was Danny’s last phone call—he may have been talking to his killer.

  Eddie weighed a calculated risk, and then decided to see it through. He dialed the seven digits on the telephone. There were three high beeps from a paging service. He punched in the number written on Nowlin’s desk phone and then hung up.

  For four minutes he sat mesmerized by the hum of the computer.

  He jumped when the phone rang.

  “This is Eddie Bourque,” he said upon answering. “I think we should meet.”

  There was silence for a moment, and then a woman’s voice replied, “Yes, Mr. Bourque. I think we should meet.”

  ***

  Mrs. Evans caught Eddie in the driveway. She wore a ski parka and a knitted watch cap. In her mittens she held a wire rake. She trembled over a meager pile of leaves.

  “Um—Danny called,” Eddie tried to explain. “I need to get him at the airport.”

  She frowned. “Stow that crap.” Her voice was sharp. “Did you find what you came for, Mr. Edward Bourque?”

  Eddie’s mouth fell open. “You knew? How could you know?”

  She chuckled. “I gave up on TV and radio, but I read three papers every day. You get my drift, son? One of them is the typo-infested Lowell Empire. Why can’t you people catch the little mistakes? They go right to your credibility, they do.

  “I saw your picture in the paper after Daniel died, the poor man. So you thought he might someday win a Pulitzer?” She laughed, showing her teeth. It was nearly a cackle.

  “If you knew, why did you let me in?”

  She shrugged. “The police were here yesterday and they didn’t find anything, so what’s the harm? And it’s like I said, I got a sixth sense about people. I think you’re all right, Mr. Bourque. Even if you did hide my glasses. So what did you do with them? I can’t read my crossword.”

  Eddie assumed this meant he was not going to Hell. At least not for this.

  Chapter 19

  Traffic bunched at the Merrimack River bridges on Eddie’s way back into Lowell. The city’s Mile of Mills stretched along the river’s far bank. It was hard to see where the river ended and the mills began; they seemed to float on the water like a fleet of great red barges. The afternoon sun yellowed their sterns from the west. Their brick smokestacks pricked the sky.

  Massachusetts Mills led the armada down the river, followed by the Boott Mills, the Merrimack Mills, and the remnants of Lawrence Mills. An unexplained inferno had cremated the complex in the 1980s. Run-down Billings Mill sailed rear guard.

  The brick hulks could be depressing on gray days. Not today. Eddie sensed an aura around the mills left by the ghosts of the people who built them and worked them. Those immigrant mill workers spun southern slave cotton, and only the mill owners got rich, but it was on their backs that industrial America was built. And Lowell’s mills were where the little guy learned to stand up to The Man. The “mill girls” staged the first labor walkouts to protest pay cuts. In these mills, French-Canadian, Polish, and Portuguese textile workers learned to strike together, in three languages. The legacy of their labor was a city so mule-headed it thought it could recover from any economic disaster, and so it had. Lowell’s wage earners survived the mill closings of the 1920s and ’30s, and their grandchildren persevered when the city’s savior, Wang Laboratories, crashed in the ’80s.

  Eddie drove west past the steel-beam University Bridge that carries traffic over the dry rocks beneath the Pawtucket Dam, and then onto Pawtucket Boulevard, which runs along the river. He pulled his car into the parking lot for the city’s paved riverwalk. The Mighty Chevette was alone in the lot. In summer, the lot was often jammed. Every year, on the first spring day over fifty degrees, pale-legged Lowell yawned awake, pulled on shorts, stepped into running shoes or Rollerblades, and headed to the riverwalk.

  The asphalt walk runs through the swath of lawn between the river’s northern bank and Pawtucket Boulevard. It’s lined with old-fashioned lampposts and park benches. The path is shaded by oak, maple, and poplar, and short pine twisted like giant bonsai trees.

  Eddie traded his sports coat for the lined leather jacket he kept in his car, and then strolled upstream on the riverwalk. A bum under a blanket of newspaper dozed on a park bench. A runner in pink tights sped past him and kept going.

  Eddie stuck his hands in his pockets and walked toward the gray lattice Rourke Bridge, about a mile west. The steel bridge rose gradually from the river’s northern bank, stretched a quarter mile across the river on seven pillars, and landed on a high point on the southern bank. Through bare trees on the far bank, he could see the backside of industrial buildings, and a freight train crawling west on tracks that parallel the river.

  Chunks of ice flowed downstream. They reminded him of his trip down the canal. He still had the physical scars, but the event seemed like long ago, like a bad memory from childhood. He thought about the people who had dropped him in the canal. What did evil look like? He had covered court trials, seen murderers convicted and sentenced. But he had never seen a killer outside captivity, as far as he knew, and that included his brother, whom Eddie had never seen in his life.

  Would I recognize a killer? Danny didn’t, it would seem by his final telephone call.

  The river was high, flooding swampy areas along its bank, lapping against patches of ice. Swamp plants dampened the current, trapping black logs, tires, liquor bottles, and foam cups. Ducks bobbed with the trash, waiting for a handout of bread or crackers from Eddie.

  Eddie thought about what he and Danny had in common. Same job, same beat, same insatiable drive to get the story. He remembered the last time he had seen Danny alive, last week in the elevator, just the two of them. Eddie pictured that moment. They had talked about Manny Eccleston, the interview that Danny wanted to dump. Their conversation had been all business.

  Eddie felt a surge of regret. Would they have been so businesslike had they known one of them would be dead in three days?

  He reached the bridge and looked around a flat, grassy area behind it. He waited there a few minutes. Where is she? The steel bridge clattered under its traffic like a shoddy amusement park ride. Eddie marched back down river, the breeze at his back. Two kids on bikes whizzed by. A big black dog plodded against its leash, pulling a man in the black satin jacket of the Pawtucketville Social Club.

  Back at the parking lot, the bum on the bench rolled over.


  That was it. There was nobody else around.

  Eddie cut across the lawn toward his car, muttering under his breath. He didn’t like to be stiffed.

  “You give up too easily,” someone called out.

  Eddie spun around.

  The bum sat up and swept the blanket of newspapers to the ground. The wind lifted her long black hair. She wore tight black leggings tucked into black boots, a gray turtleneck, black ski vest, and red mittens.

  “Let’s walk,” she said, pulling off the mittens. She had no accent, like a network newscaster.

  “I’ve been walking.”

  “I thought they followed me here,” she said. “I had to hide to be sure they were gone.”

  “Who might have followed you?”

  She stuffed the mittens in her vest pockets. “It’s my problem, not yours,” she said. “We can walk the other way if you’re bored.”

  They did, strolling along the boulevard. They passed the Sampas Pavilion bandstand, and headed toward the riverfront mills and the university buildings. The riverwalk ended and they continued along the sidewalk. Eddie felt exposed walking along the street.

  “Your name is Chanthay?” he said.

  “That is the name I’m using right now, so that is what you may call me.” Her tone carried authority. This was a woman accustomed to giving orders.

  Eddie asked her, “Were you born here? Or Cambodia?” It sounded like an interview question. He instantly regretted asking it so soon.

  She was unfazed. “Cambodia. And I intend to go back when I’m finished here.”

  Finished? That was an invitation to another question. He asked her, “What is it you need to do?”

  “Kill somebody.”

  It was a statement of fact, lacking any moral undertones. The words hung there a minute, and rolled along with them as they walked toward the mills. She broke the silence. “Don’t worry, it’s not you. And it wasn’t Danny Nowlin, either.”

  “I know,” Eddie said. “Danny was your lover.”