Yesterday's News

by Jeremiah Healy

  Going through the building’s front door, I saw Liz Rendall race up in a little American car with NASHARBOR BEACON on the driver’s side door and a CB radio antenna stuck on the roof. She got out and said, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “Hurt it this morning, jogging. Can I speak with you for a minute?”

  “Yes, but I’m running late. Wait in your car. I’ll be right out.” I went to the Prelude and waited. Two minutes later, she hurried through the door of the Beacon and into a different car, an Alfa Romeo convertible. Expensive transportation for a reporter. She started up and drove by, beckoning for me to follow.

  Including Rendall, the aerobics class had seven members, all female. The instructor was a muscular woman with short black hair moussed into a spiky brush cut. The tempo was fast, and Liz was the only one in the loft who really could keep up with Spike. The ceiling vibrated with Aerosmith and Whitney Houston while the floor quaked from the cadence of the routines.

  Liz wore a yellow leotard outfit with the false socks, in navy blue, that I think are called leg warmers. Slim and sinewy, she moved well, and she knew it. The instructor treated the music as an opponent to conquer. Rendall welcomed the music as a partner to the dance, allowing its excesses to show off her capacity to be both energetic and sensual. I wondered if any of it was for my benefit. I caught myself hoping just a little that it was, which surprised me. Liz looked uncannily like Beth, but she wasn’t like Beth at all. Liz was more like Nancy, though maybe a little more aggressive.

  The tape stopped after forty-five minutes. Rendall grabbed a towel and came over to me. The perspiration scent rolled in front of her, that sweet musk some women exude after hard physical work.

  Smiling, she shook her head, the ringlets of hair curling and recurling damply as she rubbed the towel from ear to ear. “You ever try aerobics?”

  “No.”

  “Too sissy for you?”

  “Maybe it reminds me too much of another time.”

  “What other time?”

  “When we all wore green and the leader had stripes.”

  “Then I can’t blame you.” She passed the towel down her chest, the nipples underneath the stretch material doing their level best to pop out. “What’d you think?”

  “I thought you looked great.”

  Rendall shook her head again, this time negatively. “I don’t make myself look good to come here. I make myself come here to look good.”

  “That’s how I meant it.”

  “Then I’m glad I dragged you along.” She grasped my wrist, turning it so she could read my watch. There was a perfectly functioning clock on the wall, but she held tight, as though she were just learning to tell time. “I’m going to have to get out of here. You have a run-in with Arbuckle?”

  “Sort of.”

  “After I came back from lunch with you on Tuesday, he told me he never wanted to see you again. I tried to call you, but all I got was … “ Liz scrunched her features and dropped her voice two octaves. “‘You know, I run a motel here, lady, not some goddam message center.’”

  I laughed. “You do a good Emil Jones. How’s your Gary Cooper?”

  “I’d rather you see my Julia Child. I’ve got copies of Jane’s new articles and my notes on the old ones at home. We can talk over dinner tonight.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her bubbly air subsided. “Look, I don’t ” I have the funeral tomorrow, Jane’s, I mean, and I’m kind of down. This,” she waved her hand around the loft, “has already started to wear off. I’d really appreciate some company tonight. Even just for dinner. What do you say?”

  I thought about how much lousier funerals were when you anticipated them. “Okay.”

  “Great. Anything you can’t eat?”

  “Shrimp.”

  “No problem. You have a good sense of the city yet?”

  “Getting there.”

  “You take Main Street to Armory, then a right onto Armory to The Quay. Follow The Quay all the way to the end. My place is the last one on the right. Seven-thirty, bring white wine.” She headed for a makeshift locker room off in a corner.

  “Hey, you have a house number?”

  “Last place on the right. You can’t miss it.”

  I watched Rendall bounce lightly on the balls of her feet as she moved away. After the folks I planned to see next, a home-cooked meal sounded better and better.

  I bought a crabmeat plate and lemonade at a luncheonette, then crisscrossed the east side of town till I found Grantland Avenue. Knocking on doors, I finally got someone to point out Gail Fearey’s place. The homes on Grantland made the shacks on Crestview look like the mansions at Newport. What cars there were reminded me of the primered Buick, stilted on cinder blocks or slumped in carports like old dogs.

  Fearey’s house was a tiny ranch on a narrow lot. The driveway was packed dirt with a few patches of gravel too deeply embedded to erode away. A broken, rusted tricycle was at the edge of the driveway, as though somebody had run over it in the winter and just left it there to degrade over time.

  The siding was dull yellow here and flat white there. A picture window had nine frames where there should have been glass. Cardboard, irregularly cut and of different colors, was stapled over four of them. I walked to the front metal door that had neither screen nor storm window. The stock wooden door behind it affected a mail slot. I reached through the metal door and knocked on the wooden one.

  On my third try a female voice, husky from too much smoking, spoke from the other side of the door. “Who is it?”

  “Gail Fearey?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Ms. Fearey, my name is John Cuddy. I’m investigating the death of Jane Rust, and I’d like to talk with you.”

  “I don’t wanna talk about her.”

  “Just a second.” I took a twenty from my wallet, tearing it in half. “I’m going to slip half of a twenty dollar bill through the mail slot, Ms. Fearey. You get the other half if you let me come in. You piece the two halves together, the stores will accept it.”

  No reply.

  I flipped the slot and shot the first half in to her.

  After a moment, she said, “You got any ID?”

  “Yes. Here it comes.”

  After another moment, the locks clicked and the door itself came open. I pulled the metal door out and stepped inside.

  “Here’s your ID.” She was about five-two and looked anorectic, the big blue eyes popping from a waif’s teardrop face like a Margaret Keane painting. Acne scars riddled each cheek, and she used no makeup that I could see. Her lips were bloodless, her clothes a tee shirt that hung off her and jeans that billowed where they should have filled. “Where’s my other half?”

  “Of the twenty?”

  “Right.”

  “You get that after we talk.”

  A world-weary expression came over her features. “Sure.”

  Fearey turned away, walking to a gut-sprung chair. The chair and the daybed sofa across from it had metallic gray electrician’s tape in a lot of places. A bulky color TV nearly caved in the milk crates beneath it. The video was on, but no sound came out. A thick elastic band stretched tautly from the ears of the channel changer to a brick on the floor. Sitting, she saw me staring at the set.

  “Tuner’s gone. Rubber band’s the only thing can hold it on a channel.”

  I chose the daybed sofa. “Is the sound gone, too?”

  “No. The brat’s asleep in the other room. He’s been acting up lately, so keep your voice down, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Got a cigarette?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Think I got some somewhere. Just a second.”

  Fearey shuffled to the kitchen counter, pushing a Burger King bag onto the floor before finding a crushed pack of something. She pawed through three drawers for matches.

  Coming back and lighting up, she said, “I’m trying to quit. For the kid. Bad for his lungs too, they say now.”

&n
bsp; I nodded. “I understand you lived here with Charlie Coyne.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. He lived here with me.”

  “The difference being?”

  “This house was my parents’. They died, and I got it. Charlie, he never owned anything in his life.”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you wanted to know about Rust, the reporter.”

  “I do. I think her death and Charlie’s are connected.”

  Fearey almost laughed. “They were connected alright.”

  “I heard that too, but I don’t understand it.”

  She looked around. “You mean you don’t understand how he could leave me and all this every coupla nights to hump Miss College Tight-Ass?”

  After thinking about my phrasing, I said, “I guess I mean I don’t see how they would have become interested in each other.”

  “Thanks for sparing my feelings like that.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Look, Charlie, he wasn’t much, you know? But there was something about him. He just had a look in his eyes, like to say, ‘I really know how to make a woman happy.’ I don’t know how else to describe it, because it never made sense to me, either, and I was nuts about the guy.”

  “Jane Rust told me that Charlie was her confidential source for a story on pornography. Kiddie porn.”

  “Charlie did all kinds of things. I never got involved.”

  “I’m not saying you did. I just need to know what was going on.

  “Can’t help you.”

  “Charlie a delivery boy for the stuff?”

  The lips dissolved into two traced lines. “Like I said, I can’t help you.”

  “Know anybody who can?”

  “No.”

  “The night Charlie was killed. Tell me about it.”

  The lips relaxed, and she looked past me, out the window. “We had dinner here, some Kentucky Fried he bought on the way home. Tiger’s favorite.”

  “Tiger?”

  “The kid. Charlie’s and mine. He’s two. Charlie called him Tiger, help make him tough, you know?”

  I was thinking that half the people in the city were named after animals, but I said, “Go on.”

  “Well, we had the chicken, and Tiger got the runs, he gets them sometimes from the fast-food stuff, don’t know why, and Charlie, he’d had a few beers and wasn’t about to sit around all night, smell the brat’s shit every ten minutes.”

  “When did he leave here?”

  “I don’t know. Around ‘Wheel of Fortune.’”

  “The game show?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So maybe seven, seven-thirty?”

  “Around there.”

  “Do you know where he was going?”

  “The Strip.”

  “He said that?”

  “No, but that’s where he always went.”

  “Any particular place?”

  “Yeah. Anywhere they shook tits and ass. Charlie was a consistent son of a bitch.”

  “Bun’s?”

  “One of his favorites.”

  “Because he got comped to drinks?”

  “If that means free ones, that’s Charlie, alright.”

  “Charlie drink heavily?”

  “Charlie did everything ‘heavily.’ He found out early in life that if you can get enough booze, drugs, and sex, the rest don’t bother you so much.”

  “How did you find out he was dead?”

  Fearey looked past me again. “The cops. The fuckin cops. They roar up to the house, sirens and lights. I don’t have a phone, but Christ, they’d coulda called a neighbor first, couldn’t they? They didn’t have to come tear-assing up here like it was a bust or something.”

  “You go with them?”

  “Yeah. This fat sergeant, he said they needed me to identify the body. Bastards!” Her voice rose. “Tiger’s screaming his lungs out from the noise and all the strange people. Half the street’s out on their lawns, shaking their heads at the fuckin lowlifes brought the cops down. Like they never had a cruiser come to their house, right?”

  I heard a cry from the next room. Fearey said, “Shit. Just a minute.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette and went down the hall. Left alone, I noticed something odd about the tape on the furniture.

  Fearey returned shortly, hefting a little kid with just a diaper pinned on him. A smear on his cheek looked like jelly, but then anything on a kid’s face looks like jelly. Tiger took one look at me and whipped his head back into his mother’s breast.

  “He’ll be okay. Just don’t raise your voice or you’ll get him crying.”

  “I’ll do my best. You hear from anybody after Charlie’s death?”

  Fearey tightened. “Hear from anybody?”

  “Yes. Charlie worked for Bunny Gotbaum, right? Anybody come by?”

  She shook her head. “Bunny Gotbaum ain’t exactly General Motors, you know? They don’t have no benefit plans or anything like that down on The Strip.”

  I fingered the taping on the sofa.

  Fearey said, “What are you doing? Leave that alone there.”

  “Tape looks pretty new.”

  “Yeah, we change it every coupla weeks for guests.”

  “What I mean is, the tape all looks new. On all the furniture. Even with a two-year-old running around the house.”

  No response.

  “Like it was all taped at the same time. Like because it all got ripped up at the same time.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “When you got back that night, after the police and Charlie, I mean. This place was wrecked, wasn’t it?”

  “This place is always wrecked. I’m not much into housework.”

  “I mean it was torn apart by somebody, like by somebody looking for something.”

  She nuzzled the child, speaking more softly. “I left Tiger with a neighbor down the street. Old woman, nice enough to come up, see if I needed help with the cops and all. So there wasn’t anybody here when I went off with them. Musta been two, three hours later when I got back. The cops dropped me at her house, I picked up Tiger, then walked over here. I opened the door and … I didn’t know what to do. The place was destroyed, the furniture, the closets, even the stuff from the refrigerator was all over the floor in there. Why’d they have to do that?” She started to cry softly. “We didn’t have shit. Why’d they have to do that?”

  I waited a minute, then said, “Can I ask you a couple more questions?”

  Fearey wiped her nose on the child’s shoulder. “Ask.”

  “Was there anything that they could have been looking for?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything Charlie might have been holding for Jane Rust?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Documents, photos, videotapes. Anything.”

  “You mean the porn stuff again.”

  “Right.”

  “Look, I already told you. I don’t know nothing about any of that, alright?”

  “Alright. Do you know a man named Bruce Fetch?”

  “No.”

  “He was Jane Rust’s boyfriend before she became involved with Charlie.”

  “Oh, him. Yeah. She talked to Charlie about him, and Charlie’d say things to me. I never met the guy, though.”

  “Charlie told you about Fetch?”

  “Mister, Charlie told everybody about everything. That’s why this confidential source shit is so stupid. Charlie was about as confidential as a loudspeaker.”

  “Did Bruce Fetch know about Charlie being Jane Rust’s lover?”

  “I don’t know, but like I said, Charlie shot off his mouth about everything, it wouldn’t surprise me if Charlie told him himself.”

  I said, “Ms. Fearey, on the level, what do you think happened?”

  She raised her voice angrily. “What do I think hap
pened?”

  The child began to cry. I said, “Yes.”

  “What I think happened is that bitch reporter got Charlie killed somehow.” The child began to wail. “Shut up, Tiger! I think that bitch got him to fall in love with her, really in love. She screwed him up so much he did something so stupid he couldn’t get out of it.” The child was screaming now. “I said to shut up! God, none of this would’ve happened if I’d stayed with the Duck.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Who did—”

  “Get fucked.” The child was shrieking hoarsely now, and Fearey struggled to her feet. “Get out! Get out of here!”

  I left the other half of the twenty on the sofa. “We’re square. I’m sorry about Charlie.”

  She followed me to the door, the child nearly drowning her out. “Yeah, yeah, you’re so sorry, do me a favor, okay?”

  “If I can,” I said, going through the door.

  “That Rust bitch. She in the ground yet?”

  “Tomorrow. The funeral’s tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, well here’s what you can do. You can hawk up a good one and spit on her fuckin grave for me.” Fearey kicked the door shut behind me.

  Fourteen

  “IF YOU SO much as touch Bruce, I’m calling the police.”

  I smiled politely at Grace and said, “He swung on me last time. Can you let him know I’m back?”

  She didn’t return the smile. “Wait right here.”

  Entering Fetch’s office, she closed his door behind her, then reappeared, looking even less happy. “He’ll see you, but remember what I said about the police.”

  “I will.”

  Fetch was seated at the computer terminal, an architectural drawing turned sideways on the monitor’s screen. There was a splint on his right ring finger.

  He said, “What do you want now?”

  I took a seat in front of the desk, causing him to swivel around to face me. “Same questions as last time, but this time I’d like some better answers.”

  “I already told you everything I know.”

  “Not quite. Let’s start with Charlie Coyne. You knew he was Jane’s substitute lover, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t wash, Bruce. Jane told you about Coyne being her confidential source.”