Yesterday's News - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  "The house is in a neighborhood, not the sticks, for chrissakes. She keeps her windows open and ears cocked, she'll hear David Letterman swing by, she stays awake late enough."

  I tried a different tack. "I understand you and a man named Schonstein were partnered a while ago."

  Hagan got his back up a little. "You understand correctly."

  "It's Schonstein's son that supposedly was on the take from the porno peddler, right?"

  "That's right. And you be real careful to say 'supposedly' or 'allegedly' every time you ask about that around here, because Coyne and Rust were both full of shit about Mark."

  "Mark's the son?"

  "That's right. He'll never be the cop his father was, but then nobody will. Schonsy was a god around here, buddy. The kind of cop doesn't just keep the order, he makes the order. He trained every cop in this department's any good at all, including me, from the ground up."

  "Mind telling me where young Mark was the nights Coyne and Rust died?"

  Hagan ground his teeth. "I hope that's your last question, because it's the last one I'm going to answer. Mark was here, in the station, both nights. Doing paperwork in front of six other officers because his partner was home, sick. Now get out."

  I thought better of asking if he meant out of his office or out of his town.

  * * *

  I'd just closed the hallway door to Hagan's office when I heard a gruff voice say, "Hey!"

  I turned. A monstrous uniformed officer was beckoning to me, so I walked toward him. The plastic name tag read "Manos."

  He said, "Captain wants to see you."

  "I just saw him."

  The officer moved his hand toward a doorway at the end of the corridor. "Other captain."

  * * *

  "My name is Hogueira. You're Mr. John Cuddy, private investigator from Boston."

  I shook his hand and we sat down, the uniform staying inside the office but at the door behind me. Hogueira was about five-eight, probably just over the minimum back before sex discrimination suits wreaked havoc with that requirement. Pushing fifty, mainly around the waist of his uniform pants and Sam Brown belt, he had the same black wavy hair as the desk sergeant downstairs, but with little sideburns and less mustache. His eyes were a warm, chocolate brown, like a particularly loyal and affectionate spaniel. Right.

  He said, "I'm told you're looking into Ms. Rust's death."

  "Indirectly. She hired me on another matter. "

  He nodded solemnly, sympathetically. "A difficult situation for us all, Mr. Cuddy."

  "How's that?"

  He spread his hands expansively. "We are a small city, sir. A poor one in many ways, rich only in our helping of each other. The several deaths weigh heavily in such a community. "

  "I had the impression Charlie Coyne might have been a tad light in the mourner department."

  "Mr. Coyne, who I remember well from his exploits as a juvenile, was not the most popular of individuals. Also, his employment environment was not conducive to long life and happiness. It is the circumstances prior to his death that concern me, however. "

  "The allegations of corruption."

  "Yes, the 'allegations.' That is exactly how you should refer to them."

  "Thanks, but I've already heard that advice once this morning."

  "My peer, Captain Hagan, advises you well."

  I decided not to say anything, let him lead me.

  "You see, it is good advice because there are many who would poison the community against the police force. There are enough in the minority community who already wish to do so, despite the fact that our present revered chief is himself of Portuguese descent."

  "Would that part of the community be reassured by the appointment of a similarly descended successor when the current chief retires?"

  A small smile toyed with the corners of Hogueira's mouth.

  "Many would be so, yes."

  "And a provable corruption scandal on the plainclothes side of the hallway might substantially increase that possibility."

  "Very likely. "

  "But it also couldn't look like the uniform side had given things a boost."

  "Oh no!" said Hogueira. "That would be unseemly."

  "But perhaps some information, civically shared with a concerned individual like myself. . ."

  "Perhaps in the form of more good advice."

  "I'm always open to good advice."

  Hogueira wiggled his rear end deeper into the chair. "There are several quite dangerous places to be avoided in the part of our city called, unfortunately, The Strip. An area of sex and sin which my uniforms patrol, but are discouraged from investigating. One such place is a theater called the Strand which shows unwholesome films. Another is a bar catering to voyeurs called Bun's."

  "Let me guess."

  "The management would say you were wrong. They would say they drew the title from the nickname of the owner, one Bernard 'Bunny' Gotbaum. But your guess about the quality of entertainment offered there would be distressingly accurate."

  "Is there any special reason I should stay away from these two places?"

  "Oh yes. The unfortunate Mr. Coyne was employed at the Strand, and he died behind Bun's after drinking heavily there."

  "Captain, if Coyne had lived, would the DA have sought an indictment against whoever on the force was allegedly involved in the porno business?"

  "You ask a question that a man in my delicate position should not answer. I believe, however, that without Mr. Coyne, no district attorney could possibly present a successful case. The state police investigator in that office, a Trooper Cardwell, might offer the same opinion, if you were to ask him."

  "Hagan said that a bum in the alley saw Coyne's killer and that Coyne was living with a woman somewhere around here. Can you help me out with their names?"

  "Mr. Cuddy, you should have learned by now that one captain cannot discuss a case assigned to another captain. I trust that you will take my good advice." He glanced over my shoulder. "Officer Manos will be pleased to escort you from the building now."

  8

  I drove up the road fifteen miles or so to the district attorney's office. I was lucky: a secretary covering the front desk said Trooper Cardwell was in.

  She pointed to his office, a slope-sided garret with another desk in it and the headroom of an attic crawl space. Seated in a low-back, wheeled chair, Cardwell was black and under thirty. He wore a military haircut and bearing, over a short-sleeved dress shirt and yellow tie. After we introduced ourselves, I closed the door behind me.

  Cardwell said, "What's on your mind?"

  I sat across from him and said, "Charlie Coyne and Jane Rust."

  With a toe, he propelled himself around to use the telephone. "References?"

  "On me?"

  "That's who I'm talking to, isn't it?"

  "Try Lieutenant Murphy, Boston Homicide."

  Cardwell's eyebrows perked up an inch. "Robert Murphy?"

  "That's right."

  "You give me his name because he knows you well or because he's black?"

  "Both."

  Cardwell stifled something, but whether a laugh or a curse, I'm not sure. He'd acquired the knack of stifling.

  After dialing and routing through some transfers, he said, "Lieutenant Murphy? Sir, this is Trooper Oliver Cardwell. I'm attached to. . . thank you, sir, I remember that, too ....Lieutenant, I've got a private investigator sitting in front of me named Cuddy, first name John, says he. . ." Cardwell grinned. "Nossir, I haven't been vaccinated recently. . . yessir, he looks that way to me, too .... You say so, that's good enough for me .... Right, right, look forward to it, Lieutenant."

  Cardwell replaced the receiver. "Murphy says you're an asshole."

  "See?"

  "Says I'd be better off throwing you out the window than down the stairs on account of you might hurt the stairs."

  "Good old—"

  "Says you fuck me up down here, he'll take more than your weapon by the time you check your
next mail delivery."

  "So he said you could trust me. Can I get on with this?"

  Cardwell eased back. "You can get started, anyway."

  "I already did. Charlie Coyne and Jane Rust."

  "Way you say that, you think they're connected. Doesn't look that way to me."

  "I'd like to hear it."

  "You talked with Hagan down to Nasharbor yet?"

  "Yeah."

  "And he didn't tell you much or show you much, so you came up to me."

  "That's right."

  "You know anything about my position here?"

  "I know the state police supplies investigators to the DA's. I know you guys are supposed to run the major crime stuff for the local cops in the smaller towns, but you don't get much involved in Boston. That's about it."

  "Right as far as it goes. Problem for us is political."

  "That's a surprise."

  "Yeah. Everybody starts in uniform on highway patrol. You request investigation, maybe you get assigned to the Bureau of Investigative Services, and maybe, if a DA wants you, you get assigned to a CPAC unit—that's Crime Prevention and Control—in a DA's office."

  "I'm with you so far. "

  "Well, in case you haven't been doing a lot of highway driving lately, there ain't a fuck of a lot of troopers of color on the roads. So when I requested investigation, where you figure I'd be assigned?"

  "Someplace there are a lot of people of color, where a black face on a cop might make a real difference in whether the jury gets to hear the witnesses who saw things go down."

  Cardwell canted his head, reassessing something. "Instead I'm down here. Know why?"

  "Politics. "

  "Good guess. The DA down here is on the outs with the current administration. That means every time one of his investigators gets good enough, the trooper or corporal gets promoted and finds himself riding a sergeant's desk in a barracks someplace, rearranging patrol patterns instead of looking into homicides and related major action. Guy I replaced seven months ago's doing that, and if I get good enough, same thing'll happen to me, unless I decline the promotion."

  "Sounds pretty counterproductive?

  "It is. But it helps you appreciate where I stand. And where you stand."

  "And where's that again?"

  "I stand where allegations of police corruption in local departments that support the DA don't get taken at face value, and you stand somewhere out by Montana unless the Nasharbor force tells me to cooperate with you."

  "What if I don't ask to read the paperwork or anything. What if I just want to talk a little about the crime scenes themselves?"

  Cardwell used a strong hand to rub on his chin. "Try an easy one first."

  "You see Coyne before they took him away?"

  "No. Nasharbor covered that. I came on it the next morning"

  "Anything about it trouble you?"

  Cardwell shook his head. "Coyne was small time. Delivery boy for dirty pictures, videos, and like that. " Without changing his neutral tone, Cardwell said, "Mostly kiddie porn. You want to see some of the shit we caught him with?"

  "No thanks."

  Cardwell dipped his chin to his chest. "Good. Makes me sick to think about it."

  "You think the movies got him killed?"

  "Doubt it. Most you could make of it is he steps in something, don't know enough to wipe his shoes before walking through the house, somebody decides he don't get to walk no more. And that's if he was hit on purpose. More likely, it's just bum sticks bum."

  "You talk to any witnesses?"

  "No. One of Hagan's detectives took a statement from a derelict in the alley. Miracle anybody saw or remembered anything. Statement made things sound pretty typical."

  "You see Jane Rust?"

  "Yeah. Walked through the place with Hagan himself. No sign of forced entry, struggle, even anybody else being there. Cocoa in the mug, some ground up pills in another one, me—"

  "Wait a minute. Two mugs, one with cocoa, and one with pills?"

  "Yeah. Like she used the one to drink from and the other to grind them up. You got a problem with that?"

  "Rust told me that afternoon she couldn't abide pills. I guess I can't see her being that methodical about them. Seems to me she'd just grind up a couple in a mug, then run the cocoa right on top. One mug, not two."

  "Assuming she was just trying to fall asleep, maybe. But if she's going off the deep end, and I've never seen more evidence of it short of a notarized bye-bye note, maybe she keeps grinding in the one and pouring in the other till she fades out."

  Cardwell made sense. I said, "Anything else?"

  "You talk with her landlady yet?"

  "Yes."

  "Then that's all I've got."

  I thanked him and rose.

  "Hey, Cuddy?"

  "Yes?"

  "You bring me something on this kiddie porn shit, I'll think about it. Especially if, and I say again, if the cops are in on it. Jane Rust never even tried me. Don't know why, but she never did. You find something that ain't ranting and raving, something tangible I can tie an evidence tag to, you come back and see me. Otherwise, I don't want to know about you. Got it?"

  "Got it."

  Someone, maybe Murphy, had taught Cardwell how to swim among the sharks. But I had the feeling he was learning how to grow that extra row of teeth all on his own.

  * * *

  The Nasharbor Redevelopment Authority was tucked above a coffee shop on Main Street, about three blocks down from city hall. I left my car in the municipal lot and walked it, passing on the way one Roman Catholic church with high windows of stained glass and two taverns with low windows of neon beer signs.

  At the top of the stairs, a pleasant woman of sixty-plus years looked up from her typing. She was working at a machine that hadn't benefited from electricity, much less memory, at the factory.

  "Yes?"

  "My names John Cuddy. I'd like to see Bruce Fetch if he's in."

  "Just one moment. " She got up and knocked at a door already ajar twelve feet away. She said, "Bruce?," then something lower that I couldn't catch. Turning back to me, she said, "Please go on in, Mr. Cuddy."

  He was thumbing through a thick binder of blueprints still rolling up at the edges despite their considerable weight. The binder and a computer monitor and keyboard usurped most of his desk. "Have a seat, be right with. . . you. There it is!"

  He marked a place with a sheet of paper while I sat across from him. Knowing he'd dated Jane Rust, I guess I expected an accountant-type, with horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, and thin black tie. The tie was thin and black, alright, but cut from distressed leather. It hung loosely from an L. L. Bean hunting shirt over wide-wale corduroy trousers. He was about five-ten and maybe a hundred forty with socks. His hair was dark brown, pulled back into a stubbly pony tail. He blinked frequently behind wire glasses that I thought had been unobtainable since "Mr. Tambourine Man" was on the charts. The hippie in the photo on Jane Rust's dresser.

  Finally looking up at me, he said, "I'm Bruce Fetch, executive director here. What can I do for you?"

  "My name's John Cuddy. I'm a private investigator from Boston. Jane Rust hired me."

  Fetch's face was long and expressive, the kind you can watch a thought sink into. This particular thought hit ledge right away.

  "I don't want to talk about her. Or why she hired you, okay?"

  "Can you give me a reason?"

  "Yes, but I don't see I have to."

  "You don't, but I understood you dated her. I'd think you'd be a little more interested in her death."

  He flared. "I am interested! Maybe I just don't see why I should have to talk with you about it."

  "The cops think she took sleeping pills. You ever see her with any?"

  "No." Fetch took off the glasses to massage his eyes with the heels of his hands. "No. She couldn't take them, something about swallowing medicine when she was a kid."

  "The cops believe she ground the pills up and then took them
in some kind of liquid, probably cocoa."

  "I. . . she drank cocoa a lot, but I don't see her doing that. I think she'd sooner get a shot."

  "From a needle, you mean?"

  "Yes, of course from a needle" He toned down. "But I was wrong enough about her as it was. I could be wrong there, too."

  He got up and walked to the window, sticking his hands into his side pockets. "Look, just what do you want from me?"

  "Jane hired me to look into things down here. One of the stories she was working on involved some projects out of this office."

  "Project. Singular. The only live one I've got is a condo site down by the waterfront."

  "Is that Richard Dykestra's complex?"

  "Yes. It's called Harborside. And right now it's the best thing this town's got going for it."

  "Why is that?"

  Fetch gestured with his hand across the street. "This town could have been dead. Dead and buried. Fall River and New Bedford were bigger, Taunton and North Attleboro were attracting new industry. We didn't have beaches like the Cape, or nice ponds, or even unspoiled meadows. What we had was a waterfront you couldn't breathe next to for three months starting Memorial Day and a welfare list the size of the telephone book."

  "And what changed that?"

  "Dykestra. He made some money commercially and started buying up parcels here and there privately. Then he lobbied with our state rep and senator and got a sewer project that made the harbor tolerable. He got funding for this office to push things along. I've got ten, maybe twelve projects that'll fly once Harborside makes it."

  "When, not if?"

  He turned to me. "That's right. A developer can get all the approvals in the world, but it doesn't mean squat if he can't sell the project once it's built. Richie can do that."

  "I'm told he's been a little pressed in the cash flow sense."

  "You know of anybody trying to accomplish anything who isn't? It's the nature of the beast. You've got to work on a shoestring because you don't know which parcel or project might go. But you can't attract investors without giving the impression that a particular project is the one that will go."

  "Sounds like you understand the industry pretty well."

  "My job. Part of it, anyway. The part that drives all the other parts." He came back toward me. "If Richie's project makes it, then all the guys, and women, he has working are drawing paychecks, not welfare checks. Harborside will need, the residents of it will need, all sorts of services. Those other ten or twelve projects I mentioned jump off the boards to supplement and eventually expand what Richie does down there."