“Hard to say what’s missing,” Eddie said. “Nothing seems to be, but everything’s such a wreck.”
The cops walked around together, pointing out broken stuff and making little notes in their little cop notebooks. Then they wanted to know if Eddie knew who might have done this.
“No idea.”
“Had any threats lately?”
“Other than two guys throwing me in a canal the other day, no.”
“Got any enemies?”
“Obviously I do now.”
The cops didn’t like that. Humor had no place in police work, at least not until they were back in the car and Eddie couldn’t hear what they were saying about his crappy three-room shack.
“Frankly, Mr. Bourque,” one of the clones said. “If nothing was taken, this simply looks like a random prank, or like somebody’s pissed off at you.” Case closed. He shut his little cop notebook and slid it into his shirt pocket.
“That’s it?” Eddie asked.
“We’ll talk to the neighbors before we make a report, but nobody ever sees anything in these cases. They would have called us if they did.”
“Shouldn’t you be taking fingerprints, or something?”
“Wouldn’t find anything,” the other clone said, frowning deeply. “You said you searched through the place looking for your cat.”
“But I didn’t touch everything,” Eddie argued. “How about the medicine cabinet in the tub? Didn’t touch that.”
The cop sighed, annoyed by the necessity for the truth. “The BCI unit is all tied up.” For the benefit of the civilian in the room, he added, “That stands for the Bureau of Criminal Investigations. They do the fingerprinting.”
“I know what it stands for.”
“And they can’t come to every housebreak in the city.”
Eddie was about to begin an argument he absolutely could not win when a knock at the door cut him off. “It’s open,” Eddie yelled. To nobody in particular he mumbled, “Not that I could lock the damn thing if I wanted to.”
A familiar voice said, “When I heard at the station what had happened here, I came right over.”
Detective Lucy Orr, in uniform this time, cleared a path through the rubble with the end of her baton. The clones greeted her with deference, and relayed in cop-speak the details and particulars of this criminal-type incident, essentially that the place was wrecked. She nodded and sent them on their way.
“I’d get this door fixed,” one clone suggested on his way out.
Eddie grabbed a handful of his own hair and tugged until it hurt.
The General sniffed around Detective Orr’s black high-tops. He pronounced her worthy by sideswiping her ankles.
“Lovely cat,” she said. “He was shut in the closet during all of this?”
“That’s where I found him.”
Orr looked around. “I’m beginning to wonder about the type of persons you have been associating with, Mr. Bourque.”
“Could you call me Eddie?” he said. “Mr. Bourque makes me sound like a defendant.”
She smiled over a delicious punchline she would keep to herself. “Okay, Eddie,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s time to come clean with me?”
“About what?” he protested, without much enthusiasm.
“Come on, Eddie. You’ve deputized yourself in the Danny Nowlin case, and you haven’t told me everything you’ve found out.”
Eddie didn’t bother to pretend otherwise. “Look at this place,” he said. “Somebody’s scared. That means I’m getting close.”
“If you mean close to a cemetery plot, I’d agree. And the one who should be scared is you.”
Eddie frowned. He was supposed to be the wiseass around here. “Don’t you have a little card for me to sign before the interrogation?”
“We’re off the record,” Detective Orr said. “You’re a reporter. You know what that means. Whatever trouble you’ve stirred up is only going to get worse. Next time they bust up this place, they might do it when you’re home. I can help you get out of this, whatever it is.”
Eddie wavered. Maybe she had a point? He could give her what he knew and let her take over.
No, he decided, not yet.
Detective Orr was a blunt instrument. If Eddie told her he suspected that Nowlin was mixed up in Chanthay’s plot to take revenge, and his belief that Sok was involved, Orr would march onto the Sok estate and interview him, face to face, with a dozen lawyers in the room, and no trickery allowed. Eddie was convinced he could learn more from Sok his way—he could take shortcuts around the law that Detective Orr could not.
“Soon, Lucy. I’ll call you real soon,” he promised.
She bounced the baton lightly on her shoulder and took thirty seconds to study his eyes, which stared back at her, unblinking. She concluded, “You’re either guilty of something, or you’re in way over your head.”
Eddie nodded. “You got that right.” He looked over the destruction and said, “Any chance you can pull some strings and get the fingerprinting crew over here?”
She nodded. “Maybe early tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll leave it open.”
She smiled and retreated through the mess to the broken door. On her way out, she said, “We’ll send you a copy of the report when it’s done, assuming you’re still around to receive it. In the meantime, I’d get this door fixed.”
After she’d gone, Eddie gathered the contents of his toolbox from the kitchen floor and nailed the front door shut.
Chapter 28
The intercom crackled, “Who is it?”
“It’s Eddie. Buzz me in.”
“Eddie? It’s—six in the morning. Go away.” Click.
Eddie did not go away. He waited by the intercom outside the apartment building.
Tiny snowflakes from a morning squall swirled around him, and the cold air felt good in his lungs. The General whined from inside his plastic pet carrier. Eddie carried a coffee can with a plastic lid. The can was heavy. A similar can bulged in his coat pocket. That one was light.
Two minutes passed before Melissa asked over the intercom, “Are you still there?”
Eddie leaned to the speaker box. “Yes.”
“I figured.”
The door buzzed.
Melissa met him at her apartment door in a long white nightshirt. Her hair was tousled, her cheek creased from the pillowcase. She kept one hand on the door, ready to close it if she didn’t like what she heard. Then she saw General VonKatz. Surprised, she asked Eddie, “Whatever is this?”
“Could the General crash here?” he asked. “My house has some, um, security issues.” His hands were full so he gestured with his head in the general direction of his house.
Melissa beckoned Eddie inside and closed the door. Her apartment was bright, modern, and antiseptic: beige carpet, bone white walls and recessed lights in a vaulted ceiling. Her three-piece living room set, done in matching fabric, was clustered into a little conversation area. The magazines on the coffee table were highbrow reading on politics and theater. The television, nasty thing, was hidden away in a cabinet.
“What’s wrong with your place?” she asked him. Eddie assumed she meant what new was wrong with his place. Melissa often chided him about living like a castaway.
He put down the pet carrier and told her about the break-in and the destruction of nearly everything he owned.
“Good thing your stuff was so dreadfully awful,” she said. But her voice was too tender for the dig to really dig. “Who would do such a ghastly thing?”
“Who would do a lot of stuff we report in the paper every day? Who would kill Danny?”
She wrinkled her nose at his comment, as she bent to the pet carrier. “Of course the General can stay here,” she assured Eddie. She glanced up at him and smiled wickedly. “You, on the other hand, cannot.”
She opened the carrier’s wire gate. General VonKatz rushed out, riding low to the g
round. There were many, many things to be sniffed in this strange place, and he set right to work.
Eddie showed her the heavy coffee can. “Clean cat litter,” he explained. “Just pour it in a plastic tub or something.” He put the can down and pulled a bag of dry cat food from the carrier, which he gave to her. “Dump some of this in a bowl. He’ll eat when he wants it.”
“How long do you think it will be?” she asked.
“No more than a day or two—I hope.”
Melissa finally noticed Eddie was dressed for work. “You’re heading in early.”
“I have an interview at eight,” he said. “Look Melissa, the General likes you. If anything were to happen to me—you know, things can happen to people—I’d want you to adopt the little guy.”
She laughed nervously. “What do you mean?” And then she gave him a hard stare. Fright stirred in her big wet eyes.
Eddie lowered his voice. “I’m sorry about yelling at you, at the office.”
“I know.”
“You’re nobody I should be mad at.”
“Forget it, Eddie,” she said, softly. “Just be careful.” She reached her hand to his. He touched her fingers and felt forgiveness in them. She let the touch linger for a moment. And then, as if forcing herself to break the spell, she asked brightly, “Want a coffee for the road? I can put some on.”
“Sure, I got a minute,” Eddie said. His eyes narrowed. “This won’t be decaf, will it?”
She smiled. “Would I put kryptonite in Superman’s mug? You need your caffeine.”
“You’re right. Coffee without caffeine is like,” Eddie searched for the right metaphor, “like a night with a prostitute—it’s warm in your hands, but where’s the love?”
Melissa giggled and slapped his shoulder. Her forgiveness was complete. She headed for the kitchen, calling out, “Cream? Sugar? How do you want it?”
“Black is fine, thanks.”
As soon as she turned the corner, Eddie took out the other coffee can, the one in his pocket. He peeled off the lid and shook the General’s brown moth into the air. He fanned at it, and encouraged, “Go, go.” The beast flapped up, bounced off a wall and made a fluttering nuisance of itself along the peak of Melissa’s vaulted ceiling.
Chapter 29
The newsroom had the sizzle of a big story in the making. Gordon Phife had called in three extra reporters to help on the morning fireman shift. They had telephones welded to their heads. Line editors with no lines yet to edit yapped amongst themselves in excited low voices. The police scanner was cranked to maximum volume. It broadcast snippets of conversation across the newsroom, none of which made much sense out of context.
Phife spotted Eddie and waved him over. “I’ve been calling you,” he said in his no-nonsense, hard news tone. “Your number just rang and rang. Is your answering machine broken?”
It was. The harmless plastic thing had been squashed under a boot or a baseball bat or whatever. “I gotta get a new one,” he said. “I’m leaving for an interview in half an hour. What can I do until then?”
Phife groaned. “I need more reporters, not reporters with appointments,” he said. “You probably can’t do anything. Unless you can find out in thirty minutes why two dozen cops taped off Billings Mill and brought in the body-sniffing dogs.”
Eddie stared at him, wide-eyed. “I may have a source on that,” he said. He abruptly spun and marched off.
At his desk, Eddie put on a show to waste some time. He dialed his home number and pretended to have a conversation. The phone rang for real when he put it down.
“Bourque,” he answered.
“Is this Eddie?”
Eddie recognized the woman’s sandpaper voice. “Gabrielle? Nice to hear from you. You just caught me before I had to run out.”
“I tried you a few times this morning,” she said. “I didn’t leave a message because there’s no way you can get back to me. The phone company is slow to put service under the Chelmsford Street Bridge.” She honked, laughing.
“You’re up early,” Eddie said. “Everything all right?”
“Leo and I couldn’t sleep last night because of what we know. We wanted to tell you right away, because you asked us to help you investigate, and we did.”
How long had it been since somebody trusted Leo and Gabrielle? How long since somebody from the world outside the bridge had thought they had something to offer? She raced through the story:
“Leo and me checked with our paperboy first to see if he remembers selling horse and a spike to your friend. He hadn’t sold a spike for weeks. We tried some other dealers we know, and they didn’t remember anybody like that, either. So Leo and me split up and started talking to friends. And they told us about some other dealers we didn’t even know about, which is both good and bad for us, you know what I mean, Eddie?”
“Yeah, I know.”
She continued, “So this one girl tells me about this guy, name’s Swindale or Swindle or something—that’s a funny name if you’re selling, ain’t it?” She honked again. “And we go talk to him. He remembers selling one bag last week to this guy in a fancy raincoat, who he figured was just some chipper who works downtown and chased the dragon on weekends. And this guy wants a needle too. So Swindle—yeah, that’s his name—names a price. He starts out real high so when he comes down, the price is right. But the guy doesn’t blink. He takes out his wallet. Swindle charges him triple and the guy doesn’t blink.
“So Swindle thinks he’s a first-timer looking to get his wings. He offers his pager number, you know, to start a relationship. But the guy says no, he won’t need any more horse—ever. Does this sound like your friend?”
“I’m afraid it might,” Eddie said.
“One more thing,” she said. “Swindle said your friend asked about a piece.”
“A gun? Did he sell him one?”
“No. But he gave him some names. Ain’t hard to get one.”
He thanked her and they hung up. Nowlin wanted heroin and a gun? The gun made sense if he was fighting Chanthay’s war with her, or if he wanted to protect her—Eddie knew that feeling. But the heroin? A one-time hit? There was still a lot about Danny he didn’t know.
Eddie wasted another ten minutes on the phone with the cinema’s automated movie line. Then he ran to Phife.
“My source says the cops have two bodies in Billings Mill,” Eddie told him.
Phife jotted this down and then peppered him with editor’s questions. “Junkies? Suicides? Men? Women? Do you know?”
“Two men. One homicide for sure—bullet in the hat, execution style.”
“And the other?”
“Fell down an elevator shaft.”
Phife wrote this down. “You got names?” he demanded.
Sure—Mick and Ray. Not that Eddie could share anything the cops hadn’t yet discovered. “Gordon! Gimme a break,” Eddie pleaded. “I had half an hour.”
Phife put up his hands, surrendering. “I know, I’m sorry. Great work. How solid is this stuff? Can we run it?”
“It’s a rock.”
He nodded, impressed. “We’ll try to get the cops to confirm it on the record. If not, I’ll lobby Keyes to run it as exclusive material from unnamed sources. How should we characterize it? An unnamed police source? Or simply a source close to the investigation?”
Eddie considered the question. He had never permitted something false to get into print. “Let’s not get specific about the identity, okay?” he said. “My source would be screwed to the roof if he’s uncovered.” Which was absolutely true.
Chapter 30
The Mighty Chevette whirred east down a concrete boulevard. Harsh weather had battered away the last stubborn brown leaves from the sugar maples that reached huge limbs over the street. The homes along the road were all pleasant, a few even grand, if you were impressed by size, ornamental pillars and gardens. The early morning snow squall was over, not a trace remained on the groun
d. Clouds and sun split the sky evenly, and the air had warmed near forty.
Eddie steadied the steering wheel with a knee and studied a street map. The side streets meandered, in no hurry to get Eddie where he was going. The homes grew farther apart, backyards got bigger and stone walls reached higher. The Mighty Chevette coughed up a hill, on another boulevard divided down the middle by granite curbing, a strip of lawn and crab apple trees.
The fences along this street were taller than Eddie. Pointy iron crosses topped the stone walls around the Sok estate. They praised God, and discouraged thieves.
A gap in the wall appeared, and Eddie slammed the brakes. The Chevette made that metal-on-metal grinding again. He pulled the car into the gap and stopped at a black iron gate made of interlocking swirls. The swirls along the top curled toward the street and were tipped in serrated barbs, like fishing hooks for a Great White shark.
Beyond the gate, a pebble driveway curved right and vanished behind hemlock. Facing the drive on both sides, like pedestrians watching a parade, were about twenty-five large-as-life statues. Probably meant to depict the anonymous minor characters in the Bible—fishermen and shepherds, prostitutes and tax collectors—the figures looked like beatnik hitchhikers, dressed in robes and sandals. They had been painted lifelike colors, which the New England weather had faded unevenly.
There was no gate attendant or intercom box. Eddie rolled down the window and called out, “Hello?”
The reply, a woman’s voice, was as clear as a local telephone call, “Mr. Edward Bourque?”
The words seemed to come from the center of the wall beside the car, so that’s where Eddie directed his response. “Yes. I have an appointment with Matthew and Peter Sok.”
The gate parted at its middle and swung inward.
The Chevette’s tires crunched on the stone driveway. The car crept through the columns of figurines. One of the statues held a shotgun. No, Eddie realized, that was a man, an armed guard, who eyed the car as it passed. Eddie noticed another guard, and then a third, patrolling the grounds.
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