Yesterday's News

by Jeremiah Healy

  “Elie, I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

  “No trouble, really. They’re all out in the open, second floor.”

  “Elie, thanks but no. I can check the library on my own. Any other suggestions?”

  The concerned look again. “Friend to friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Did Nancy get to you?”

  “Nancy who?”

  “Never mind.”

  By the time I left Elie, it was pretty sunny, so I walked downtown along Commonwealth Avenue. Commonwealth begins at the Public Garden and rambles forever westward. Over the first ten blocks, a wide center strip hosts civic statues and grand Dutch elms that so far have survived both the disease and occasional hurricanes. With a dusting of snow, my route would have been a postcard.

  Midway through the Public Garden, I stopped on the bridge spanning the Swan Pond. In warmer weather the city raises the water level to provide swan boat rides. In colder weather the city lowers the water level to form a rink. Tourists with cameras, many of them Asian, stood at the edges of the ice, taking pictures of some locals playing pick-up hockey. None of the skaters was very good, but Boston does have the knack of creating photo ops at every time of the year.

  Crossing Charles Street, the Common was bleaker, as usual. Centuries ago, the site really was used in common by farmers for grazing their livestock. Now the three-card-monte dealers and souvenir wagons had flown south for the winter, replaced by raggedy runaways hopeful of peddling themselves for a warm bed and manageable abuse. Further on, groups of three or four men stood around benches, glancing in every direction while gloved hands traded glassine envelopes or plastic vials for folded currency.

  My office was in a building on Tremont, near the Park Street subway station. Derelicts clustered in irregular patterns around the entrances to the station, grateful for the canned heat from below and the solar variety from above. A few jerked up their heads as they became aware of how close I would come to them. I looked away to calm their fears of being rousted.

  There used to be a lot of pigeons on the Common. Now there are a lot of homeless people and not so many pigeons. You figure it out.

  I used my key to get into the building, taking the elevator up to my office. On a piece of paper, I wrote “Cuddy, ring bell” and drew an arrow underneath. Back downstairs, I taped the directions to the glass door. Then I returned to the office to kill some time and paperwork, waiting for two o’clock.

  They made a striking pair, if not quite a couple.

  Alec Bacall (“Call me Alec, please”) was as tall as I am but slim, with a ramrod posture and a steel-clamp handshake to go with the steel-trap mind. Pushing forty, his hair was still the color of wheat and probably streaked toward platinum if he spent much time outdoors in the summer. The Prince John beard and mustache were a shade darker, clipped so perfectly that trimming might be a daily exercise. Bacall wore a light gray suit with double-pleated pants. His shirt was a long-point requiring a collar stay. The paisley tie was woven in a pattern that catalogs caption “ancient madder.” Bacall sat in one client’s chair, or friend of client’s chair, and crossed his right leg over the left.

  Inés Roja (“I am the secretary of Professor Andrus”) wore very little makeup and needed less. Early twenties and perhaps five two in sensible shoes, she had lustrous black hair wound into a bun, high cheekbones, and irises that were almost black. Wearing a simple blue suit with schoolgirl blouse, Roja held a burgundy briefcase on her lap and crossed her ankles as she sat in my other client’s chair. Or secretary of client’s chair.

  Bacall said, “Perhaps it would be easier if you were to tell us what Tommy has already told you. So that we won’t bore you with details you already know.”

  “Tommy wants me to keep this as lawyerly as possible, Mr. Bacall—”

  “Alec, John.”

  “Alec, so maybe it would be safer for you to tell me what you think the situation is.”

  Bacall used his left index finger to touch both lips, then said, “I’ll try. Then you can ask anything you want. Inés, please feel free to jump in anytime.”

  Bacall looked at the woman only as he spoke her name, coming back to me with the rest of the sentence. I got the impression Roja didn’t feel all that free to jump in.

  “Maisy Andrus is a full professor of law, meaning with tenure, at the Law School of Massachusetts Bay. She’s been a controversial figure in legal education for some time, but I’m not versed enough in legal theory to give you all the ins and outs of why. Her stand on the right to die is what draws most of the fire. She’s put her money where her mouth is, so to speak.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, Maisy was never a poor woman, but after graduating from law school she made some shrewd investments with family money, and her writing and lectures have pulled in a good deal more. She also was involved in, well, the incident in Spain.”

  “Somebody in her family, right?”

  “Her husband. Or former husband, more precisely. A Spanish doctor named Enrique Cuervo Duran. A virtual Dr. Schweitzer in his own country, but suffering horribly toward the end from a stroke. He was considerably older than Maisy.”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “No. Oh, no, I’ve known Maisy for only … what, eight years now? The tragedy with Dr. Duran was all in the seventies, just after the generalissimo died.”

  “Who?”

  “Franco.”

  The little I knew about Franco I’d learned from Saturday Night Live. “I remember reading an article that claimed Professor Andrus helped—sorry, do you use the word ‘euthanasia’?”

  “Actually, ‘help’ is just fine, John. It’s both descriptive and down-to-earth. Maisy used humane means at hand to help the doctor end his agony. An injection.”

  I was thinking, “easy to say,” when Roja did jump in.

  “Perhaps, Alec, if we could show Mr. Cuddy the letters, he would see the problem we are bringing to him.”

  She spoke precisely, a Hispanic accent beneath New York-accented English.

  Bacall sat back. “Good idea.”

  Roja unzipped the briefcase and fished out a couple of sheets. “These are Xerox copies of the three letters.”

  I reached across the desk as she passed them to me. Calling them letters was being generous. In scissored syntax, with words of varying size and background, all were pretty similar.

  The first read, “ONLY GOD NOT YOU CU-NT,” the “CU” in the last word from a different source than the “NT.”

  The second read, “THEY DIE YOU DIE BIT-CH,” with different sources for the last word again.

  The third read, “YOUR TIME COMES SOON SLUT,” the letters in the final word all from the same source.

  “Any physical contact by the sender?”

  They said no together.

  “How about the telephone?”

  Bacall said, “Not connected to these.”

  I laid the copies of the letters on the desk as though I were dealing solitaire. “Which arrived first?”

  Roja said, “Like this,” pointing to each in the order I’d read them.

  “How did they arrive?”

  She said, “The first two by mail to the professor’s office at the law school.”

  “And the third?”

  Bacall said, “By hand. In her mailbox.”

  “Mailbox? Like a faculty mailbox?”

  “No, John. At her home.”

  I thought about it.

  Bacall added, “Maisy has a town house on Beacon Hill. The third note was in with the delivered mail but not stamped.”

  “Where are the originals?”

  Bacall said, “Inés?”

  Roja indicated the “ONLY GOD” note. “When I opened the first, I told the professor. She said not to worry, but I kept it anyway. When I opened the second, I called Alec. I told him I wanted to go to the police. He told me just to call them, so I did. But they did not seem very intereste
d, the police.”

  Bacall said, “When the third one arrived, Inés contacted me again. I told her this time maybe she’d better go to the police with the things.”

  I said to Roja, “And did you?”

  “Yes. I went to the police, and I brought the letters with me. They told me they cannot do much, but they kept the originals and told me to call if we get another one.”

  “Did you bring them the envelopes too?”

  “The first one, no. I tore it up when I was upset about the letter in it. The second one, yes, and the third one too.”

  “Name and address the same as the notes?”

  “I do not understand?”

  “On the envelopes. Were there cut-and-paste words like on the letters themselves?”

  “Oh. Yes, yes.”

  “Postmarks?”

  “Here in Boston.”

  “So the police have the originals.”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at the sheets on my desk. Bright, clear duplicates. “And they made these copies for you?”

  Roja said, “No. I made them. At the law school.”

  “You made them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me as though I were born without a brain. “I am a secretary, sir. I make a copy before I give away the original of the document.”

  I said to Bacall, “You go with her to the cops?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Bacall smiled, arching an eyebrow. “I don’t always bring out the best in peace officers.”

  I said to Roja, “Where did you go to the police?”

  “I called the headquarters on Berkeley Street after the second letter. Then I called them again after the third one, and they told me to go see the police by the Government Center.”

  Area A station house, the division that encompasses Beacon Hill. A simple complaint about unsubstantiated threats wouldn’t be taken too seriously, especially when directed against a lightning rod like Andrus.

  “Do you remember who you spoke to there?”

  “Detective William K. Neely.” Roja dug into the briefcase and produced a business card which she passed across the desk. “He did not want to give me that, but I insisted and so he did.”

  I handed her back the card. “Does the professor receive a lot of threats?”

  Bacall said, “Ten, twelve a week. More after a lecture or TV spot.”

  “Like these?”

  “Oh, worse. Vicious voices on the phone, photos of aborted fetuses, nasty packages through United Parcel with the remains of dead animals laminated inside them. Imagination is one capacity our opponents do not lack.”

  “Then why are you reacting to these?”

  “Because most of the hate mail Maisy gets is signed, you see, names and return addresses. Expecting a direct response, believe me.”

  “And these are anonymous.”

  Roja broke in. “And we have never before had one delivered by hand to the professor’s home.”

  I gathered the sheets into a pile. “Does the professor share your concern?”

  Bacall and Roja exchanged glances.

  He said, “Well, no. It takes rather a lot to get Maisy concerned.”

  “Then it doesn’t exactly sound like she’s interested in hiring me as an investigator, and I’m not much for body guarding.”

  Roja said, “The professor does not need a bodyguard.”

  Bacall caught himself starting to smile. “Maisy doesn’t need a bodyguard because she already has one.”

  I looked from one to the other. “I don’t get it.”

  Bacall said, “A man her former husband befriended and raised in Spain. Manolo’s really more of a house servant, but he never strays far from her side.”

  “You keep saying ‘former husband.’ She’s remarried?”

  “Yes. Tucker Hebert.”

  “The tennis player?”

  “He’ll be pleased to hear you remembered him.”

  “Please, sir.” Roja thrust her head forward, the eyes and mouth set for imploring. “I believe, and Alec believes, that the professor could be in real danger. We need you to help us.”

  “It sounds more like you need someone to convince Ms. Andrus that she should take this seriously. Without her cooperation, there’s not much I can do.”

  Bacall sat forward. “John, let me be perfectly frank here. Inés and I both have a bad feeling about this. I can’t tell you it’s completely rational, because feelings aren’t rational to start with. But we both believe someone should be looking into this, and I agree that you can’t do much without Maisy’s cooperation. However, that’s why you are the perfect person to help us.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Maisy is terribly concerned about appearing invincible to the public. Hence our concern about confidentiality with Tommy and with you.”

  Bacall dropped both the tone and the pace of his voice. “And there is another factor too. Some time ago, Tommy told me about your wife, John. It’s precisely because of your experience that Maisy might let you look into this for her.”

  I shifted in my chair. “Spell it out.”

  As Bacall hesitated, Roja said, “Mr. Cuddy, we respect your decision in your own life. What Alec means is that the professor would not speak to most investigators we could find, but she would be … interested in you.”

  “Because she’d see me as a whipping boy for her own views?”

  “No,” said Bacall. “Because she’d see you as someone who understood her views but hadn’t embraced them. She’d find that … interesting, as Inés said.”

  “And if I don’t especially feel like being a convert-in-waiting?”

  Bacall sat up straighter. “I imagine that you often have to pose as someone other than who you are. We aren’t asking that here. We’re simply asking that you be yourself, the man Tommy described to me, so that Maisy will receive the professional help she requires despite herself.”

  There was a certain dignity in the way Bacall made his argument. He seemed to care as much about stating his position accurately as about ultimately persuading me of it.

  Roja said, “Please, Mr. Cuddy?”

  “Okay, I’ll meet with her. Then it’s her decision and my decision from there.”

  Bacall said he’d call me at home that night with details. Roja just said thank you.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1990 by Jeremiah Healy

  cover design by Brendan Hitt

  978-1-4532-5316-8

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