Eddie rested on an oil-spotted cement floor, allowing himself a few deep breaths. He was in a one-car garage with a low-end Toyota and a scattering of dirt-caked garden tools. Three wooden stairs led to a doorway.
A doorbell chimed. A cop pounded the front door. “Police! Police!”
Eddie got up and made for the doorway. It led to a hall covered with pictures of an aged couple surrounded by what probably were grandchildren. A weather report blared at maximum volume from a television ahead. Eddie tiptoed down the hall. The doorbell rang again; he could barely hear it over the TV.
The condo had a spacious, open floor plan. To Eddie’s left, their backs to him, an elderly couple sat hand in hand on a sofa, learning, at earsplitting volume, about a coming cold front. To Eddie’s right was a dining room. Straight across—a back door.
There was no sense startling these people into heart attacks. Eddie crept behind them, and then let himself out the back. He was in a common courtyard with a parking lot, a few scattered hardwoods and picnic tables, enclosed by an iron fence.
Immediately, a police cruiser screamed around the building into the parking lot and stopped.
Now that’s not fair. Eddie broke into a sprint. No wonder criminals were so bad-tempered in court—the cops ganged up on them by radio. He headed for a gate in the fence. A uniformed officer jumped from the cruiser and raced after him. This guy was jar-headed and beefy, not a long-distance runner. But he was fresh and Eddie was near-exhausted and the chase stayed close through an urban industrial block of grimy brick buildings, loading docks and rusted tractor-trailer hulks.
A train whistled ahead. The five-fifteen. Gravity grabbed harder at Eddie’s tired legs. The cop closed in behind him.
Eddie turned toward the whistle, onto the cement pad of a demolished warehouse. Kids had drawn a baseball diamond in blue chalk. Beyond the pad was a trash-strewn outfield of patchy grass, and beyond that, the railroad tracks.
The silver freight train, coming from Eddie’s far right, clanged along at maybe fifteen or twenty miles per hour. He spied another police car on his far left. Both front doors opened and two more uniformed guys got out.
Eddie ran for the tracks, angling ahead of the train.
The two new cops yelled, “Stop! Police!”
Eddie would never stop, not before he learned what happened to Danny, and who had set him up.
The train hammered down the tracks, growing ever louder. Eddie pumped his burning thighs. His lungs sizzled like steaks on the grill. The cops yelled something he couldn’t make out over the rumbling train. He focused on the tracks, at the spot he would cross ahead of the engine. The whistle was deafening.
He stretched one last stride across the tracks in the shadow of the locomotive. The engine nicked his right heel. His shoe flew off. The blow spun Eddie in a pirouette and deposited him, face down, in a crushed granite embankment on the far side of the tracks.
The trained clattered by. Three cops on the other side watched Eddie between the cars. He had maybe three minutes. He retrieved his shoe, some thirty feet down the tracks, and staggered away, down a concrete hill, under a highway overpass, and into the warehouse district. The cops no doubt had already radioed his position to other units. More officers, fresh and ready to run, were on their way. He had to hide, but where? There’s no time.
An older-model Mercedes, a light lilac color, peeled around the corner and slammed to a stop. Eddie whirled and started back toward the hill.
“Bourque!” a voice yelled.
Eddie turned around. “Stan?”
Stan Popko leaned over and popped the front door. “Get in!”
Eddie dove into the front seat. Stan pounded the gas. The car jerked forward as Eddie was slamming the door.
“On the floor,” Stan ordered.
Eddie knelt in the foot space, panting, his head and chest on the seat. Stan drove off.
“Hello officers,” Stan said calmly to himself.
“More cops?”
“Going right past us. Just stay down.”
“How…how did you know?”
The dashboard police scanner crackled with excited voices, barking commands and relaying positions. Stan turned it off. “The police have been quite explicit in their description of the chase,” he said in his pitch-perfect monotone.
“You’ll go to jail for helping me.”
Stan frowned. “Only if I’m caught.” He turned the car onto a residential boulevard. “Which seems highly improbable at this point.”
Eddie lay quiet for a minute. His strength came back. Who could have planted the weapon at his house? What kind of monster would allow Eddie to decompose inside maximum security for forty years to life? It struck him as bizarre that even the hitmen in the old mill had more compassion than whoever had set him up. The hitmen would have shot Eddie through the heart, but they wouldn’t have murdered him little by little, for forty years.
“I didn’t kill Danny,” Eddie told him.
Stan said, “You are a thorough and cunning investigator. I find a low probability that you would leave incriminating evidence in your dwelling. And though I have knowledge of several unlawful activities you have perpetrated during your investigation, those crimes were consistently committed toward a uniform higher moral purpose.”
“You believe me?”
“Didn’t I just say so?”
Chuck Boden’s wristwatch said the time was nearly five-thirty. “Barely half an hour,” Eddie said. “I need a phone.”
Stan handed him his minuscule cell.
“Start heading toward The Empire,” Eddie directed, while dialing. “And pay attention to this call. We gotta work together.” Into the phone, he said, “Boyce, here’s what I need you to do….”
Chapter 35
“Are the cops still parked there?” Eddie asked from a crouch on the floor of Stan’s Mercedes.
“Right across the street from the front door.”
“Anybody around?”
“Sidewalk is clear.”
“Okay, let’s do it. Get as close to the curb as you can.”
Stan pulled up outside the Empire Building’s main entrance, the only way inside that wasn’t locked. The car’s tires scraped the cement curb.
“Not that close,” Eddie said.
Stan frowned. “Mom’s not going to like that.”
“Buff the rubber with olive oil. She’ll never know.”
Stan stopped directly in front of the door, shifted the transmission to park and let the car idle.
“Are the cops watching?” Eddie asked.
Stan looked to his left. “Mm-hmm.”
“Do you see Boyce?”
He looked the other way. “Mm-hmm.” From the side of his mouth, Stan said, “He’s coming out now with two bundles of newspaper.”
Boyce shuffled to the car and set the bundles on the roof. Then he opened the front passenger’s door. “Hi Stan,” he said. “Are two bundles enough?” He did not look at Eddie.
Stan nodded. “Nice improvisation,” he said in a low voice. “Load them in.”
Boyce took a wide stance and reached for a bundle on the roof. Eddie dove between Boyce’s feet and crawled on knees and elbows across the sidewalk to The Empire’s glass door. He looked over his shoulder. Boyce loaded the second bundle into Stan’s car. The Mercedes completely blocked the view of the policemen across the street.
Stan and Boyce thanked each other, and then Boyce nonchalantly stepped over Eddie and pulled open the door. At that instant, Stan got out on the driver’s side and yelled over the car, “Hey, one more thing!”
Boyce turned around, still holding the door. “What’s that?” he yelled back.
Eddie crawled inside, under a picture of publisher Alfred Templeton posing on a putting green with a U.S. senator, and headed for the stairwell.
“Oh, never mind,” Stan said. “I’ll catch you later. Thanks again for the scrap paper.”
“Anytime,”
Boyce said with a wave. He went inside. Stan drove off.
Eddie pounded up ten flights of stairs. At the top landing, he bent over to catch his breath. The time was 5:54.20 p.m., according to the borrowed wristwatch that was worth more than Eddie’s car. He wouldn’t mind giving it back. Eddie didn’t care for pricey timepieces, or for anything that cost a lot of money for the sole purpose of being expensive.
Eddie pushed through the glass door on which was stenciled: Alfred T. Templeton, publisher.
Templeton’s decorators had dressed up his outer office like a fine hotel lobby—maple paneling, dwarf trees in big clay flowerpots, and a small stone fountain—into which people had actually thrown spare change. The secretary’s desk was empty. The door to Templeton’s office was cracked open. The office was dark.
Eddie fought off a rush of doom. Templeton always stays late. How could he have picked that evening, of all evenings, to leave before six?
But then music lumbered from the publisher’s office—cello music, too thick to be a recording. The notes were long and slow. Gloomy. Like the end of a tragic opera, when the wounded hero crawls around stage looking for a place to die.
Eddie pushed open the door. The lights were off, the shades drawn. His eyes took a moment to adjust. He could make out the desk, two chairs, some bookshelves cluttered with golfing memorabilia, and a computer on a table. Templeton’s high-back leather chair faced away from the door. A television, dark at the moment, was suspended from the ceiling like at a sports bar.
Eddie knocked twice.
The music stopped but there was no other sound.
He knocked again.
“Who is there, please?” Templeton asked tenderly from behind the tall chair. His voice was so warm, so comforting—like a hypnotist’s voice, telling you to relax, just relax—
“It’s Eddie Bourque.”
The cello complained with a tiny hum when Templeton leaned it against the wall. The chair slowly spun around. The publisher of The Empire was tall and lean. His white eyebrows bent into points, like upside-down Vs, and his short white beard was trimmed to a triangle beneath his chin. He offered Eddie a chair with a gentle wave of his hand.
Eddie descended into the chair, an uncomfortable squishy thing. He sunk in it, and had to look up to make eye contact. The chair’s message was clear—not even the furniture would support you in the presence of Alfred T. Templeton.
Templeton reached across the desk in slow motion and tugged a little chain dangling from a desk lamp. The bulb, no more powerful than a flashlight, cast its light straight down, putting both men in shadows. Templeton nodded, satisfied with the light, and folded his hands on the blotter.
He looked Eddie over, and then said, “Everybody in the city is looking for you.” He nodded to his desk phone. “I touch a button and the police are here.”
“We both know I had nothing to do with Danny’s death,” Eddie said. “And you would have called the cops already if you weren’t interested in why I’m here.”
Templeton was expressionless a moment, and then a smirk creased his lips. The publisher was amused—a servant had outgrown his station.
Eddie said, “What was it about Danny’s story that frightened you?”
The publisher tugged his beard. “Mr. Nowlin wrote many fine stories before his terrible end.” That voice, so smooth, reminded Eddie of a lion in a fable, persuading the hare to come closer, just a little closer. “Do you have any story in mind?”
“The story about Samuel Sok.”
“I don’t recall Mr. Nowlin publishing anything on that topic.” He was playing with Eddie. No problem, they had a few minutes to kill.
“Not from a lack of trying,” Eddie said. “He came to you with the story shortly before he died—I’d wager a couple days before. Then, last Friday, you spiked his piece.” Eddie was guessing, but felt good about his chances. Chanthay had said that Danny was upset about his story on Friday. It was obvious Frank Keyes didn’t know about the piece…the editor wouldn’t have sent Eddie to see Sok if he did. So that left Templeton.
The publisher was inscrutable behind his smirk. “Why would I do such a thing?”
“Political power and money,” Eddie said. “Why does anybody do anything around here? Bad press before the election would kill Sok’s renewal project for the Acre.”
Templeton sat back in the chair, still smirking but clearly surprised. He played with Eddie some more. “Meddle in politics? Me? Why, I’m just a paperboy with a nice office.”
“I’ve done my homework,” Eddie said, with cockiness that comes from knowing you can’t be fired if you’ve already decided to quit. “You paid Dr. Chi to destroy Danny’s notes. And you’re behind the paper’s aggressive management of the news before the City Council election. Nothing gets in the paper that could undermine public confidence in the incumbents. You gotta protect those incumbents. You own them, and you need their votes to ram the Acre redevelopment deal through.”
The publisher’s smirk fell. One of his servants was getting uppity.
Eddie ranted on, enjoying himself, “And this stupid renewal project is your dream come true. Yeah, what a great idea—we’ll cure poverty in Lowell. Fuck the poor, tear down their houses. They don’t advertise anyway.”
He stopped short of telling Templeton that Peter Sok was pulling his family money out of the deal. Let him enjoy that surprise later.
Templeton folded his hands into a little pyramid on the desk. His voice took a sinister edge, like a sorcerer casting a spell. “Mr. Nowlin did not get it, and neither do you.” He swiveled back and forth in the chair, but his eyes locked on Eddie. “Have you bothered to check the crime statistics for your precious Acre? The drug use? The illiteracy rate? Abominable. It is a blight to be stamped out. This newspaper shall always support what’s good for the city.”
Eddie squirmed out of the quicksand chair and paced the room. He grabbed the TV remote control from a bookshelf. “You mean what’s good for the city as you see it,” he argued. “Why should you decide what’s good for the city? Why should your voice be so much louder than the rest?”
The publisher was losing his patience. “When you were a child, your mother told you what to do because you did not yet understand.”
Eddie laughed bitterly. “You’ve sacrificed this newspaper’s neutrality and its role as the people’s watchdog—the things that gave it integrity. You’d rather have a great city than run a great newspaper, and you don’t understand that you can’t have one without the other.”
“I’ve given my life to this city,” Templeton growled. “I know what makes a city great.”
“Great for whom? Rich old white men?” Eddie pointed out the window. “Have you walked around out there recently? This ain’t your city anymore. It left you behind.”
“It has done no such thing,” Templeton shouted. He banged a fist on the desk, bouncing his pen off the blotter. “And you, Mr. Bourque, have taken enough of my time.”
The Rolex said six o’clock and ten seconds. “Not yet I haven’t,” Eddie said. “I wanna know how Danny ended up dead the day after you spiked his story.”
“I know nothing about that, except that the police suspect you. And you—you no longer work here.”
Eddie ignored him. He paced the darkened office. “Danny was pissed off, right? Maybe worse than pissed off. Maybe he threatened to take the story someplace else. The Globe, maybe—he had contacts there. So you saw the Acre project falling apart. And it’s easy to imagine the political fallout when the public learned that the local paper refused to print the story. Why, it might be enough to take down an empire.”
“Did you hear me?” Templeton bellowed. “You’re fired!” His face twisted in horror, as if his words were bullets that had failed to drop his foe.
Eddie shouted over him, “You couldn’t take the chance Danny would get the story published someplace else, so you picked up your phone and dialed some hood and you had Danny whacked.
It was your good fortune he was stoned on heroin at the time, and it looked like he died in a drug dispute.”
Templeton grabbed his telephone. “I’m calling the police.”
Six-oh-two, exactly.
“Don’t bother,” Eddie said. “The cops will be busy with this—” He clicked the television to Channel Eight.
“—We warn viewers that the scenes you’re about to see could be disturbing, and we advise parents of young children to send them out of the room. We go now live to Lowell, where Channel Eight’s Chuck Boden is in the field with this exclusive story.”
Boden, somber-looking, walked down the steps of St. Francis de Sales, toward the camera. Templeton’s eyes narrowed against the television’s light. He froze with the phone in his hand.
“Thank you, Jill,” Boden began. “It has been seventeen years since the church bells sounded the start of Sunday services here at St. Francis de Sales Church. This place of worship was closed after its pastor, Father Zygmunt Wojick, suddenly disappeared. The Lowell Empire reported at the time that Father Wojick ran off with a woman to California. But an exclusive Channel Eight source has shown that to be—” he paused one beat for drama—“nowhere near the truth.”
Cut to film from inside the church, showing the murals, the stained glass and the giant crucifix, still on its chain.
“These exclusive pictures taken earlier today show the final resting place of Father Wojick. And I remind viewers these scenes may be disturbing.” Close-up of the cross. “For nearly twenty years…Father Wojick has been entombed inside this statue.”
Cut to film of the body draped over the altar. “Lowered by a Channel Eight source, this statue broke apart to reveal Father Wojick’s horrifying end.” He was silent for a moment, to let viewers soak in the video.
“Jill and Willy, it is not known yet where this cross came from, or who may have placed Father Wojick inside. But you can be sure police are going to be on this case, and we hope to have a word with them later in the broadcast. From Lowell, as one mystery ends and another begins, I’m Chuck Boden, Channel Eight news.”
Eddie clicked off the television. Templeton stared slack-jawed at the black screen. Then he noticed the telephone receiver still in his hand and set it down. It rang immediately. Templeton jerked his hand away as if the phone had fangs. Then he answered it.
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