I drifted off.
Something woke me. The nurse stuck her head around the door. “Still awake, bright eyes?”
“Yeah.”
“More visitors.”
“Do they have an appointment?”
She looked behind her. “One of them has probably never needed one.”
I blinked my eyes. “Send her in first.”
The nurse beckoned to somebody and held open the door. Eleanor Kinnington came over the threshold on her braces like a crab on stilts. Mrs. Page followed and arranged the chair for her boss talking distance from me. Mrs. Kinnington leaned the braces against the side of my bed frame. The housekeeper displayed the same look she’d greeted me with that first day and then exited in front of the nurse.
“Mr. Cuddy,” said Kinnington, “you’ve accomplished that which no one else was able to do. And for that, I am grateful.”
“Much better, thank you for asking.”
She dropped her eyes to her purse and opened it. “Could we perhaps eliminate the sarcasm? My grandson has been all that matters to me, and he still is. I’m sorry you were injured, but,” Kinnington extended a check-like piece of paper to me, “I am also sure that this will cover all expenses and fees.”
I took it face down from her and folded it three times without looking at the thing. “I’m sure it covers even the speech I’m about to make. Mrs. Kinnington, there was never anything between Blakey and your grandson, was there?”
“I certainly hope not, but as I explained to you, I have no way—”
“Mrs. Kinnington,” I interrupted, “I’ll ‘eliminate’ the sarcasm if you’ll cut the bullshit. That ‘relationship’ was a spark in Miss Pitts’s imagination that you fanned to advance your own agenda.”
“I’ve no time to indulge drug-addled ravings from the likes of you.” Kinnington reached for her braces.
In a desperate lunge, I got to them first and flung both into a corner. My left shoulder seared, then simply throbbed as her metal aides clattered against the wall.
“You unspeakable bastard!”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kinnington, but I’m not finished yet. Stephen is a very sick boy in a whole lot of trouble.”
“If you mean the nonsense that Brower man—”
“It is no nonsense,” I said. Keeping my eyes closed helped a little. “Your grandson has, by my unofficial count, violently killed three people, two in my presence. The third was his mother, after she drunkenly provoked Stephen by telling him he was illegitimate. Your grandson may be an intellectual prodigy, Mrs. Kinnington, but he desperately needs professional help. For his mind. And not just Willow Wood with its—”
“Mr. Cuddy, Stephen has told us that you killed Blakey. Stephen has told us that the judge killed his mother. Stephen has also told us that his father was reaching for a gun in that desk drawer, giving you no choice but to—”
“Mrs. Kinnington, District Attorney Brower doesn’t believe that, and neither, I hope, do you. Stephen does not know—or care about—the concepts of right and wrong. He regards lying as a tool to get him through the day, and he doesn’t understand that most killing is wrong. Just like his father.”
“I won’t have that kind of talk about Stephen or my son!”
“Which son do you mean?”
Eleanor Kinnington seemed knocked back. “I don’t … intend to listen—”
“Mrs. Kinnington, you damn well will listen. While I was lying here, thinking this through, something finally hit me. Stephen had planned to go to that ranger station. Hell, he had photocopied the article after he found the gun, but before Miss Pitts saw Blakey chasing him. It took me a while to figure that out, but you should be able to see where it leads. Stephen had long intended to take off, maybe hoping the judge himself would follow the trail to somewhere that Stephen could control the action. Blakey’s incompetent ‘chase’ was just the immediate trigger for Stephen’s leaving Meade.”
“I refuse—”
“Look,” I interrupted again. “When I found your grandson at the ranger station, Stephen couldn’t chance believing that I was working for you. He figured—reasonably—that I might have had a partner with me, so he checked around the ranger station and eventually must have spotted Blakey. Stephen then left me tied up to lure said ‘partner,’ Blakey. And, lo and behold, Stephen ‘happened’ to get back in time to see us fighting and to drill about six well-placed holes in the back of Blakey’s neck and wrap my hand around the gun. Stephen would have killed me then, too, if he hadn’t needed somebody to—”
“I will not—”
“Shut up, Mrs. Kinnington, or I will shut you up. Stephen figured I was hurt badly enough that, after using me as the fall guy for killing the judge, your grandson could take me, too, back at your house. With my own gun. But I was able to knock Stephen cold before he could properly arrange the frame and before he could finish me off in our ‘struggle’ after I allegedly shot the judge before his horrified, sheltered, fourteen-year-old eyes. And because Stephen couldn’t arrange the frame properly, there are half a dozen facts that he can’t change, Columbo-like facts that point to him as damningly as holding the proverbial smoking gun.”
Eleanor Kinnington seethed. “The judge persecuted Stephen because he was afraid of him.” She was yelling now. “My grandson will never go to trial.”
“Mrs. Kinnington,” I said softly, “your grandson will go to trial, unless the D.A.’s psychiatric experts testify that he is unable to aid in his defense by reason of insanity.”
Somebody started tugging down on my eyelids. Mrs. Kinnington glared back at me, but with tears in her eyes. She was trying to stand up.
“I think I know what’s best for my grandson.”
“So did … the judge,” I mumbled, at which point I sensed polar bears bustling back into my room.
Thirty
THE SUMMER RAIN IN Boston is somehow dry. It’s made of water and falls from the sky in the usual way, but it never soaks you through. It’s more like a refreshing breeze that clears any mugginess from the air.
“Funny, they take the carnations but leave the roses.” I lifted the withered, crackly flowers and replaced them with fresh ones, yellow this time. I had to work with only one hand and slowly; my left arm was still in a tight sling, and the rib wouldn’t hear of quick movements. I’d dragged a light, folding beach chair from my car and down the path with me. I set it up with the help of my right foot. Easing into it, the light rain dimpled my forehead, nose, and cheeks.
“Yep,” I said, pitching my voice older, scratchier. “Sure is good to rest the weary bones.” Off to the left I noticed the elderly man again. He still wore the old gray suit, no raincoat, and held the Homburg. He was straightening back up with difficulty after laying some flowers near his headstone.
I dropped the imitation from my voice.
“Suicide, Beth,” I said, a little thickly. “Remember how we would talk around it, the last few weeks? When I wouldn’t leave you alone? Well, somebody left Stephen alone. Two days after the D.A.’s third psychiatrist agreed that Stephen couldn’t stand trial, the kid tore open a pillow and shoved the stuffing down his throat. Kept packing it in until he choked. Eleanor Kinnington had just arrived at the hospital to visit him, special arrangements and all. Given her status, I mean, despite Stephen’s. Brower told me she saw her grandson being rushed to a resuscitator. Mrs. Kinnington suffered another stroke, and the D.A. doubts she’ll last the week.”
I paused. “Especially if the woman is told that the last of her bloodline has died by his own hand.”
The tissue paper around the roses was beginning to flatten here and bulge there from even the gentle rain. We watched the power launches and a few maverick sailboats slap against the light storm chop in the harbor below. And we talked. It was my first day back in quite a while, so we had a lot to catch up on.
After a time, I found myself not just noticing but actually watching the elderly man nearby. He was still standing over his place, the Homburg clen
ched in his fingers and his head bowed. His shoulders were shaking now, almost shuddering, and every once in a while his torso would heave up, rocking him forward a little.
I decided it was time to go, before the weather started getting to me, too.
-The End-
Turn the page to continue reading from the John Cuddy Mysteries
One
I SWATTED THE SNOOZE button on my clock radio twice. The ringing noise didn’t stop, so I picked up the telephone.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Shouldn’t you be answering ‘John Francis Cuddy, private investigator’?” A gruff, hearty male voice.
I blinked at the time. “Not at 7:05 a.m. Who is this?”
“Or, at least, ‘Captain Cuddy, Military Police, retired’?”
“In a minute you’ll be talking to yourself, my friend. Who is this?”
“Christ, John,” said the voice through a deep laugh, “you always were a pleasure to wake up in the morning.”
“Al?” My head began to clear. “Al Sachs?”
“The one and only.”
“It’s been …”
“Actually, that’s not true, not anymore. You know Martha and me got married four years ago? Well, I’m no longer the one and only, being the proud father of Alan G. Sachs, Junior, age two-point-eight years.”
“Al,” I said, getting upright and rubbing the sleep from my eyes, “you’re Jewish. You’re not supposed to be naming your children after somebody still living. It’s bad luck.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Al, “but Martha, she’s Lutheran and my folks are all gone, and I’ll bet you’ve been to Temple more than I have since we got back to The World. Hey, remember that time in ’Nam, when you were going to some feast-day Mass to get out of being duty officer? I went to tag along and when the old man tried to stop me, you told him I was your technical advisor on the Old Testament readings.” Al laughed for me. Kind of nervously, I thought.
“So, what are you doing in Boston?”
“Making my fortune, John, making my fortune. I had a lotta luck with the B’s last night.”
I had watched the game on television. “Al, you’re crazy to bet on hockey in this town, even in favor of the Bruins.”
Another nervous laugh. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. Listen, John-boy, I’m a manufacturer’s rep now for Straun Steel. They’re a Pittsburgh outfit that fabricates little steel gizmos for building construction, and I gotta go, I got an eight-fifteen appointment at a jobsite. Listen, whatsay we roll for drinks and dinner tonight, maybe eight-thirty, nine o’clock?”
“Where are you staying?”
“A place called the Midtown Motor Inn. On Hunterton Avenue.”
“That’s Huntington Avenue, Al. Also, it’s a Tuesday, and Boston tends to close down early during the week. Want to make it seven?”
A quick cough and again that nervous edge in his voice. “No, no, can’t. Got another appointment. Can you swing by my motel at eight-thirty?”
“Sure, Al. I’ll see you then.”
“Oh, and John?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember 13 Rue Madeleine.” He hung up.
13 Rue Madeleine. As I put down the receiver, memories of Al bubbled back to me. The best, if also the oddest, guy I knew from the service. We went through military-police training together. Not an altogether easy time. The Jew from CCNY and the Harp from Holy Cross. Tossed in with fifty or so Ivy Leaguers, West Pointers, and Old South military school graduates. At first, Al and I were more ignored than actively hated. Then we started to win a couple of friends by sheer force of personality, in which many of our classmates were sorely lacking. Our newfound acceptance wore thin on some hardliners who picked a fight with me one day in the TV lounge of the bachelor officers’ quarters. I had decked a Yalie when a Virginia lad, who I later found out had prepped with the Yalie, swung a chair ungentlemanly close to the back of my head. The Virginian missed because Al had clouted him on the upper arm with the edge of his hand, thereby breaking a bone above the swinger’s elbow. The battle was joined, as they say, with a West Pointer named J.T. Kivens siding with us. The real MPs eventually arrived, and the official box score went Yale/Virginia. Al, J.T., and I eventually found ourselves as street MP officers in Saigon. I heard that Yale and Virginia ended up “guarding” VIPs in some appropriately front-page—but tightly secured—battle sectors and conferences.
Al and J.T. had preceded me to Saigon by about eight weeks. Al was billeted in a former hotel converted into a bachelor officers’ quarters. The connecting bedroom shared his bath and was available, so I moved in.
Beth and I weren’t married then, and Al and I did our best to keep each other alive and sane. When we got back to The World, he was terrific about staying in touch. When we didn’t reciprocate his happy-holiday card the year Beth died, Al called me. He must have called every few weeks from there, after Empire Insurance fired me for refusing to falsify a jewelry claim, after I started to sink into the bottle, and again after I began to pull myself back out with my own private-investigator business. Then I stopped hearing from him, which I now realized was surprising.
Al Sachs. He was the oddest guy I knew because you could never figure him out. One day he ran around literally putting tacks on everybody’s chairs. When I asked him why, he said it was something he suddenly remembered he had wanted to do since grade school. Another time, on an R-and-R in Hawaii, he spent fully two and a half hours of our precious time going through a Honolulu telephone directory looking up the names of his CCNY classmates, just in case one might have moved six thousand miles southwest. A third time, in Saigon, he broke down crying at the sight of a bunch of street orphans in rags because he said they were posed like a photograph he had seen of the starving Jewish defenders in the Warsaw ghetto.
But 13 Rue Madeleine. An old World War II movie with Jimmy Cagney. Contrary to popular belief, we did not always get first-run (or even second-run) films in Vietnam. One night Al and I saw it. I remembered Cagney as an American secret agent caught by the Nazis in Europe and tortured for information. They were going to just dump him on the road as though he had been hit by a car or mugged. Cagney has the last laugh, though, because intelligence that he relayed out before his capture results in an Allied bombing raid that destroys the German headquarters in which he’s being held.
After the movie, Al and I were drinking back in his room. He said to me, “John-boy, if I’m ever captured by the other side, like Cagney was, and I figure they’re going to fake my death—like an accident, you know?—what I’ll do is break my little finger, and then you’ll know I was killed by them instead.”
“Christ, Al,” I replied, “what ‘other side’ is going to be interested in a pissy-ass MP lieutenant like you who doesn’t even deal with combat intelligence?”
He went on as though he hadn’t heard me. “Yup, I’ll break my little finger so you’ll know, and then you’ll go after them for me like I’d go after them for you. To square things.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Evening things up. A repayment for all we’ve been through together. I get them if they get you, you get them if they get me. See?”
I told him I saw. I changed the subject, and I couldn’t remember it ever coming up again.
’Til Al’s phone call.
Two
I HAD TO TESTIFY at the D’Amico trial the morning that Al called me, so I did my best to push our dinner out of my mind. When Empire fired me, I was quickly blackballed in Boston insurance circles. Then I received some pretty good press from a case I worked on involving a judge and his missing son. Thereafter, a few heads of claims investigation began to call me for special assignments.
About six months ago, a worried fire and casualty company contacted me. They had been tipped that one of their insureds had hired an arsonist to torch a warehouse containing obsolete merchandise. The only problem was they didn’t know when. The Boston arson squad is professional but limited in personnel. It
simply cannot stake out indefinitely a building where one act of arson might occur, while being crucified by the media for not nailing the perpetrators of twenty definite arsons that have occurred. Accordingly, the company asked me to watch the warehouse from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., the most likely arson period.
Since the warehouse owner, one Harvey Weeks, obviously could not be let in on the surveillance, I checked through the neighborhood until I found a nice elderly couple whose house backed on an empty lot behind the warehouse. I was frank with them, and they swore that they would not tell anyone why I was there. Their name was Cooper. Jesse was black, Emily was white. They came north from Alabama to escape racist remarks, slashed tires, and occasional beatings. I suppressed a desire to ask if things proved better for them in Boston. They hated violence of any kind, and they agreed to let me use one of their closed-off back bedrooms that faced the warehouse grounds. It wasn’t perfect, but no one observer can watch all four sides of a building except while hovering in a helicopter above it. The Coopers insisted on leaving me food and fixing the old daybed in the room. I goosed the head of claims investigation for twenty dollars more per week than he wanted to spend on them.
The first seven nights passed without incident. The arson squad had run a discreet check on the nightwatchman. His name was Craigie. He was seventy-one, nearsighted, and straight as an arrow. With my binoculars, I could see him outlined in the reflection of his battery lantern, the warehouse owner being too cheap to use floodlighting. Craigie was as punctual as a steeple clock, and I began to feel that I knew him as well as I did the Coopers.
My hosts extended their bedtime so they could have tea with me before I went upstairs. They both wore cardigans off the 2-for-$5 rack at Zayre’s. Jesse was one of the first black Marines in combat in World War II, losing most of one hand to a Japanese grenade. Emily had retired from teaching fourth grade in a non-Catholic parochial school. The whole time we talked, rarely more than twenty minutes a night, Emily would hold Jesse’s good hand. I did my best not to think about the times Beth and I had kidded about what we would be like when we grew old.
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