Yesterday's News

by Jeremiah Healy

  “Looks like you’ve got everything.”

  “Gets better. Come on.”

  There was an outside gangway on the port side of the porch. Resting on two hooks drilled into the wood was a spear gun. A nasty metal arrow about eighteen inches long already was lodged in the channel on top of the tube.

  I said, “The weaponry original equipment?”

  She laughed. “Ever live on a boat?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the biggest rat you’ve ever seen?”

  “I think I get the point.”

  Liz took the gun from the wall, playfully stretching one of two, thick rubber bands near a notch on the shaft itself. “I’m allergic to cat fur, and a bullet would do as much damage to the boat as to the rat. With this thing, the shaft goes through and sticks the little pest to the wall or deck. That still keeps him at arm’s length from me as I scrape him off on a cleat and into the water for the crabs.”

  “Lovely. The other rubber band makes it two-barreled?”

  “What … oh, no. See this second notch on the shaft? If I nock both slings and pull the trigger, I get twice the power, but I’d never get the damn shaft back out of the wood.”

  I told her I was ready for the rest of the tour, and she put the spear gun back on the hooks.

  At the top of the gangway was another, smaller sun deck, with lounge chair and metal table. “I come up here when I want to tan all over.” She smiled saucily.

  “This the wheelhouse?”

  “Yes.” Rendall opened a small door by turning a brass ring to undo the latch.

  Inside, her bedroom stretched to the curved glass-front parlor from which the helmsman would guide a working tug. “I had them extend the wheelhouse aft, even though it meant cutting down the smokestack. I didn’t have much choice about that, though, unless I wanted a bedroom the size of a walk-in closet. This way, I can have a full bath up here as well as downstairs forward of the galley.”

  She’d kept most of the wood and metal, even the wheel itself and the handled ratcheting device that instructed the engine room on speed and direction. The bed was queen-sized and built with its headboard into the wall.

  “Everything but a two-car garage.”

  Liz sat back onto the bed. “I even have that. My deal with Joe includes renting out a garage behind his store. Nasharbor isn’t in Boston’s league as far as stolen cars are concerned, but there’s no sense in tempting anybody with the Alfa. This way, you can’t see it from the street.”

  I nodded. She drew her right leg languorously across the comforter till it tucked under the left one.

  “In fact, you can’t see much of anything from the street. That’s why I can go out on the upper deck in the altogether.”

  “And tease the sea gulls.”

  “Among other visitors.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned against the doorjamb. “Who’d you call about me?”

  “Who’d I? …”

  “Call. You said you checked me out.”

  “Oh, nobody in particular. I just thought as Jane’s executrix, I ought to find out a little about you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you haven’t had the easiest time of it. You lost your wife young, you hit the booze but you’re not a drunk.” The saucy smile again. “Like you’re technically available but you’re dating some lawyer.”

  “You’re being straight with me, let me be straight with you. Six months ago, you might have been the one. You look enough like my wife to be a sister. But the lawyer’s the one for me now, so why don’t we just have a nice professional dinner?”

  “Meaning you’re not married, but you might as well be.”

  “Like that.”

  Liz stood up and leaned in close, just brushing my neck with her lips. “Minds were meant to be changed.”

  “The stuffing?”

  “Portuguese-style French bread for the base, minced lobster, a little dill. It’s not hard.”

  “It’s great with the cod.”

  Liz put down her fork and sipped the wine. “So is this. The lawyer teach you?”

  “No. My wife liked wine and learned about it. She taught me enough to know what I enjoy and what to look for.”

  “My ex never taught me anything, except how to cash an alimony check.”

  “You married long?”

  “Three years. Seemed like three hundred. We lived in New York. He was a stockbroker, fifteen years older. It was fine at first, lots of parties and yachts and things. Mostly just things, though, acquisition of assets. You know what I mean?”

  “He bought things for investment, not enjoyment?”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly what he did. I was like that to him. An athletic young wife who would mature well, paying many dividends in the form of rousing sex and admiring glances at the club.”

  “Sounds kind of unfulfilling for you.”

  “‘Unfulfilling.’ How diplomatic. He was a domineering shit, is what he was. But that was okay, in a sense. I left a crummy job at a crummy paper to marry him, and I’m glad I got life in the fast lane out of my system.”

  “What led you to come up here?”

  Rendall poured herself a little more wine. “I went to college in Boston. Simmons.”

  “Fine school.”

  “Yeah. It was a good time to be in college, too. Cambodia semester my sophomore year. You remember that?”

  “I was a little older.”

  She smiled. “‘You carry the years lightly.’”

  “Is that a quote?”

  “I think so, but I have trouble remembering things like that. You … you went to Vietnam, right?”

  “Your sources are still batting a thousand.”

  “I … I don’t want to pry or anything, but I’m thinking of doing a series for the paper on vets today, not just the crack-ups, but a cross section. Could I call you about it?”

  I reached for the bottle. “Okay if I say no?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  There was an awkward silence. I said, “So why Nasharbor?”

  “Huh?”

  “Simmons explains your coming back this way, but why Nasharbor in particular?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. After the divorce, I needed a change of scenery. I’d had it with the City. New York was becoming what it wasn’t. I wanted to leave before I became what it is now.”

  “Which is?”

  “All hype and money. I know that sounds pretty clichéd, but I really could see it in just the four years I put in down there. Everybody was into things they couldn’t afford.”

  I swung my head around the boat. “This isn’t what I’d call the brink of survival.”

  Liz shook her head. “No, no. I didn’t think you understood me. I don’t mean they couldn’t afford things in the cash-and-carry sense. It was more that everybody was trying to be something they weren’t, hyping the person next to them in every encounter. No straight talk, no real people.”

  “And Nasharbor’s real.”

  “You bet it is.” She got a look in her eye, a lot like Bruce Fetch extolling redevelopment. “Here we’ve got every problem and every advantage that real people do. The old, the sick, the poor. The ones trying to help them or exploit them. People care about the real lives they lead, not some image of life they lifted from TV. It’s like the difference between a movie made in the forties and one made today, you know?”

  “James Stewart and June Allyson are real, Sean Penn and Madonna aren’t.”

  She pouted. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”

  “Almost, but not quite. Sorry.”

  “You’re forgiven. Help me clear the table?”

  We shuttled the dirty dishes to the galley. Liz piled them into a dishwasher and said, “You ready for dessert, or would you rather wait?”

  “How about if you show me what you found at the paper first?”

  “Sure. Here …” She reached into a cabinet, came out with some Benedictine and Brandy. “Take the B & B and two
glasses down into the living room. I’ve got the file in my study.”

  I carried the bottle and the small bell glasses down the stairs, setting them on the coffee table and myself on a rattan chair. I rocked back, finding it a little tippy. Liz appeared shortly, untying the string on an accordion file and withdrawing a sheaf of newspapers and a reporter’s spiral notebook. “It looks like more than it is, I’m afraid.”

  She sat on a sectional piece next to me. “Why don’t you just follow along on the notes from the police incident, then you can read Jane’s articles on Coyne and Dykestra while I get dessert?”

  “Okay.”

  Rendall started through the notebook, stopped, then turned one more sheet. “Here we go.” She ran her finger down the page. “Date of death: July 12, 1971. A little farther back than you thought. Decedent’s name: Meller, Dwight. Age: eighteen.”

  “Who was the reporter?”

  “C. E. Griffin.”

  “You know this Griffin?”

  “Never heard the name before. Definitely not there now, though.”

  “How about the paper’s employment records?”

  “I checked. State law says we only have to keep personnel records a year, but we keep them three. Even so, no mention of a Griffin. I talked to some people in the backshop and pressmen from that era. Nobody remembers him. Or her. From the way the story read, though, I can make a guess.”

  “Which is?”

  “An intern.”

  “You mean a student?”

  “Right. Usually a journalism major, working for the summer. The prose was awkward, redundant. Like an editor under deadline throttled it to make the piece presentable.”

  “Go on.”

  “I didn’t copy it word for word, but apparently Hagan and Schonsy interrupted the Meller boy in the course of a burglary. They chased Meller, caught him, then Meller got in a lucky punch with a brick, resulting in Hagan having to restrain the boy, who died of a broken neck.”

  Sounded just like Schonstein’s story. “Any other witnesses?”

  “Just the reporter.”

  “Griffin?”

  “Yes. I copied that … yeah, here it is. This reporter saw the altercation from the mouth of the alley, corroborating the police version of the event.’”

  Schonstein had omitted the reporter. “Read me that again.”

  She did. I said, “Would the paper let a reporter write a story when the reporter was involved in it?”

  “Are you kidding? A killing, even an accidental one, is page-one stuff in a town this size. I’d have whipsawed Arbuckle into letting me write it under byline or tell him he could read my story in the Boston Herald.”

  “I know somebody at the Herald. Would it be worth my while to have him check their morgue on this?”

  Rendall thought about it, riffling two more pages. “I doubt it. Looks like the Beacon ran only one more piece, when Hagan and Schonsy were officially exonerated. And that was only a page-three item because of two fires and a boat being lost in a storm.”

  “How about photos?”

  “First article had one of the alley, one of Schonstein with blood on him at the hospital, Hagan kind of holding him up. Looked like the Meller boy really nailed him with the brick, by the way. Couple of sentences of bio on the cops, how both were local products, married with kids, that kind of thing.”

  “This Meller have any family?”

  “The piece mentioned a mother, but didn’t give an address, just ‘of this city.’ I tried the telephone directories at the paper, even the old ones we keep, but came up empty.”

  “Anything about the Meller boy’s employment, education?”

  “Unemployed dropout. Sounded like a loner, too. No friends mentioned.”

  “Anything else in the article?”

  Liz skipped back and forth through the notebook a few times. “Sorry. After the big splash, even the paper treated it as pretty much cut-and-dried.”

  “How about the recent stuff on Coyne and Dykestra?”

  “Here and … here. The redevelopment ones are a lot more elaborate. They’re in reverse chronological order.” She stood. “We’ve got cherry pie, fresh baked, with vanilla or coconut almond ice cream.”

  “Coconut almond?”

  “So I splurged a little. I thought I was gonna get lucky, remember?”

  As I watched her climb the stairs, my mind strayed to how close we could have come, six months ago. “I’ll go with vanilla.”

  “I figured you would.”

  The pieces on Coyne were pretty cryptic, probably more an indication of Arbuckle’s judgment than Jane’s passion. The dragnet article named Coyne as one person arrested. The stabbing article mentioned a derelict witness, but no more detail than Hagan and Vip already had told me.

  There were three redevelopment stories in all. Jane’s first one dealt with the concept as applied to Nasharbor in general, mentioning Richard Dykestra only as a teaser toward the next two. The second story was specific and rough, how Dykestra’s dream was being financed by We the People, chapter and verse. The third story contained some unresponsive observations by Little Richard, echoed, as I suspected they would be, by Bruce Fetch at the NRA. I could see Dykestra resenting Jane, but I didn’t see anything she’d done beyond pasting together the effects of a dozen public documents and events.

  Rendall descended the stairs balancing a tray that made clinking noises with each step. I poured out some B & B for each of us, and we finished dessert before we resumed talking.

  I said, “You find any notes on Coyne or the cops in Jane’s desk at the Beacon?”

  “No, nothing. Maybe at her apartment?”

  “I checked when I saw Mrs. O’Day. Zero.”

  “Too bad.” Liz gestured toward the redevelopment articles. “So, what’d you think?”

  I told her.

  Frowning, she said, “Granted it was all public information, but wouldn’t you have been a little more than rankled at Jane for spreading it so thick?”

  “I guess I just don’t see it. So Dykestra got bailed out by the taxpayers. It all seems aboveboard, and nothing worse happened to him except maybe the pols won’t be so quick to lend a hand next time.”

  “What if her next story went a little deeper than public knowledge?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What if some of the numbers got a little cooked before Dykestra and Fetch served them up to the pols?”

  “You have any proof of that?”

  “No, but Jane was sure close to Fetch before Coyne and the porno craze overtook her. It wouldn’t surprise me much if she learned some things from Bruce during pillow talk that she could have documented given enough time.”

  “Again, you have any proof?”

  Rendall sighed. “No. I just can’t see the Coyne thing being anybody’s reason to kill her. And if it wasn’t that, or the redevelopment project, I’ve got to believe she really did commit suicide. I just don’t like that any better than murder, I guess.”

  “Maybe I should check Jane’s house again.”

  “For notes and so on?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can save you a trip. I have to go there again tomorrow.”

  “How come?”

  “The funeral. I already picked a dress for the undertaker to … to use. But Jane’s aunt’s coming in from Kansas, and I promised I’d take her through the place.”

  “What time’s the funeral?”

  “Eleven-thirty. At Almeida’s on Exeter Street. You coming?”

  I wanted to say no outright, but instead I said, “Who else are you expecting?”

  “Not many. I’m assuming at least some of my colleagues won’t be too scandalized to attend.”

  “Because of the suicide atmosphere, you mean?”

  “Yes and no. Suicide’s the rationalization they’ll use. The fact they just didn’t like her much is the real reason they’ll stay away.” She drank some more. “Could we maybe talk about something else? I mean, you came he
re tonight to take my mind off the funeral, remember?”

  “Sorry. Any other topic is fine. You first.”

  Liz mock-toasted by touching her glass to mine. “I like a man who doesn’t drink coffee.”

  “Just never cared for the taste of it.”

  She swirled her liqueur. “‘Why drink the grindings of beans when nectar flows so freely?’”

  “Another quote?”

  “Yes, but I can attribute this one. Malcolm Peete, our resident lush.”

  “Just because a guy’s a lush doesn’t mean he’s stupid.”

  “And just because he isn’t stupid doesn’t mean he does his job.”

  “When you replace Arbuckle, you going to do something about it?”

  She inhaled the warm liquid. “Mal tell you to ask me that?”

  “No.”

  Rendall poured another shot. “Peete thinks he’s invulnerable. He’s wrong. Arbuckle doesn’t know how to manage the big boys, the executive editor and the publisher. It’d take me all of three months in Arbuckle’s chair before I undermined all that old war-buddy stuff to the point that Peete would have to drive his drunken ass through the snows of another city. Believe it.”

  I did. “At least you could offer him transportation.”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Why?”

  “He lost his license.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “He did. Implicitly, anyway.”

  “No. No, that’s wrong. I’d have heard about it. Besides, he’s so tight with the cops he squeaks when he goes by one.”

  “Meaning he does drive?”

  “Well, he’s got a car, and I’ve seen it in our lot often enough the last few months. So unless he’s hired a chauffeur, he’s driving himself.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Old Volkswagen.” Liz looked at me more shrewdly. “Does that make a difference somehow?”

  I finished my drink. “I’ll have to let you know. Mind if I use your phone?”

  She pointed to a turquoise princess model on an end table. “I’ll take these back up and give you some privacy.”

  “Thanks.”

  I dialed the motel and drew Jones on the third ring. “Crestview.”

  “Emil, John Cuddy.”

  “I got your goddam message you been so hot to get.”