Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  A laugh from Primo. “Get it?"

  "I got it."

  "You just don't think it's funny, am I right?"

  "That's right."

  The toothpick rolled from port to starboard this time.

  "Good thing the young broad did. We had ourselves a hell of a weekend." Zuppone glanced over again. "Climbing in the car here, you looked a little tender."

  "Actually, that's what I wanted to talk about."

  The half-smile faded. "Maybe you oughta get to it, then."

  "I had some visitors an hour ago. Two guys, starting rough then tapering off."

  The smile disappeared altogether. "Let me guess. Italian-looking, am I right?"

  "Could have been."

  "Could have been? You didn't see them?"

  "Dark hair, slicked back, only I don't think it was cut to wear that way. Olive-skinned."

  A nod. "What about clothes?"

  "Long-point collars, open buttons, gold chains."

  "And that's what makes you think they're connected?”

  "They tried to play the role, Primo. Only they overplayed it, like out of the movies."

  "How?"

  "They said 'capisce.' "

  Zuppone winced.

  "Twice," I said.

  We made a left tum. "These guys, they were the first people talked to you?"

  "And they didn't start out by talking."

  Zuppone shook his head. "It don't sound right to me. You stepped in something, we'd send like an emissary first, you know?"

  "Like you."

  The half-smile came back. "Yeah, like the way I handled it with you the first time. Nice-nice till nice-nice don't work no more."

  "That's what I thought."

  "You got any idea what you might have stepped in?"

  "They were pretty clear on that. I'd been asking questions about a real estate management company, and they told me to butt out."

  "What kind of questions?"

  "How good a company it was, as though I had a client that was interested in hiring them."

  "You were doing like a reference check?"

  "That's right."

  Another shake of the head. "What's the name of this outfit?"

  "Hendrix Property Management, out of Marshfield."

  "Marshfield, down on the South Shore there?"

  "Right."

  Zuppone said, "It don't ring a bell, but then that's No Man's Land."

  "Sorry?"

  After making another turn, Primo checked his mirrors.

  "You know how that guy Sammy 'the Bull' Gravano turned rat down in New York there?"

  "Testifying against John Gotti?"

  "Right, right. It's happening every-fucking-where, but that cocksucker Gravano, he gets a reduced sentence of five years—five fucking years, now—for being involved in nineteen killings he admits to, and even then, the feds'll give him the witness protection thing when he gets out. Meanwhile, he's nearly destroyed three of the Five Families down there with his testimony."

  "And?"

  "And that's kind of what's happened up here too. The destroying part, anyways. Back when the Feebs—the FB-fucking-I—wired the Angiulos' place and put them all away, things around Boston were kind of up for grabs, you know what I mean? One family, it runs most of the operations for twenty, twenty-five years, then it gets brought down, the operations, they have to be . . . 'redistributed' would be a good word for it."

  "And Marshfield didn't get 'redistributed' to anybody in particular."

  "Not much there to work with, kind of a summer resort that's going year-round. Still . . ." A shrug.

  "Still?"

  "Maybe somebody's trying to establish some kind of presence there. But it don't have to be from the North End, you know."

  "Meaning they could have come up from Providence."

  "Maybe. Or to tell you the truth, the La Strada guys from East Boston or some of your Irish friends from the Winter Hill Gang. That's assuming, of course, that it's us."

  "Us?"

  "White people. You got the Jamaicans, or the fucking Dominicans, now, Christ knows what the hell they're doing."

  Tangela Robinette said she was born in Haiti of a father from Jamaica, but that seemed a pretty slender thread.

  "Go on."

  "Only those crazy bastards'd make more sense in Rox."

  Roxbury, a substantial minority neighborhood of Boston. "Actually, Primo, I was thinking that part of the Danucci family lives on the South Shore not so far from Marshfield?

  Zuppone chewed on the toothpick. "One of the brothers lives down there, he ain't gonna piss in his own soup."

  "How about if he just lives close?"

  "No. No, it don't feel right, even to you. The family sent me to talk with you the first time when I didn't know you. Now I know you, if they're in this, they'd for sure send me to talk with you, am I right?"

  "Probably."

  The ha1f-smile. "You're a piece of work, Cuddy. Don't you trust nobody?"

  "I trust you, mostly." I decided to take a chance. "My asking around about the management company was just a cover. I'm really looking into the background of a guy."

  "What's his name?"

  "I'd like to keep my own counsel on that for now."

  Another shrug. "Hey-ey-ey, you're the one called me, remember?"

  "I remember." Reaching into the pocket of my suit jacket, I took out one of the Andrew Dees photos. "This is him."

  Zuppone checked all three mirrors again before bringing up the interior lights and looking at the photo I held. Then he doused the lights and rechecked the mirrors. Ever the careful driver, and even more the perfect poker player. I couldn't tell by his expression whether he'd recognized the man in the photo or not.

  Primo made a left. "You let me see the guy's picture, but won't tell me his name?"

  "I just want to know if you recognize him."

  "Why?"

  A reasonable question. "If I got paid my visit because somebody's interested in Hendrix Management, so be it. I'd want to know, though, if the man in this photo is the real reason the two guys came to see me."

  "Because he's connected himself."

  "Right."

  Another glance at the photo. "I gotta admit, there's something rings a bell about him, but he's a pretty ordinary-looking fuck, so what can I tell you? Could be he's just somebody I passed on the street some time."

  "Can you check around?"

  "What, I'm supposed to describe your guy to my friends, see if one of them makes a match? Come on, Cuddy, this fuck could be anybody."

  Zuppone had a point. "How about if I give you his picture, and you show it around discreetly, ask if anybody knows him."

  The tick-tocking head again. "I guess I can do that." He took the photo from me. "You got any other information on this guy?"

  "Not for sharing."

  Half a laugh. "Christ, Cuddy, you gotta have trust in something, you know?"

  "What do you trust, Primo?"

  "Me?" Zuppone got serious. "I trust the organization. Back in school the nuns treated me like a dunce, far as I went. I try to get a job in the straight world, the citizens'd treat me like a bum. I don't talk so good, I don't spell so good, I don't fit in so good. With the organization, I'm in my element, you might say. A made member, blood oath and everything. They know they can trust what I do for them, and that makes me want to trust them too. Understand?"

  "I do. But that's why you should understand the reason I can't entirely trust you."

  Primo turned left again, bringing me back to where he'd picked me up. "You got that right. You got brains for thinking of it and heart for saying it to me, man to man. But I like you, Cuddy, and that can make all the difference in the world." A glance. "All the fucking difference, you know what I'm saying here?"

  The toothpick rolled one last time.

  * * *

  After Zuppone dropped me off, I walked randomly for a while, just in case anybody who might have been interested in him decided to
be interested in his passenger as well. I didn't spot anybody following me, so I found a pay phone and dialed Olga Evorova's home number on Beacon Hill.

  "Yes?"

  "Ms. Evorova, John Cuddy."

  "Ah, you have something to report?"

  "Yes, but it would be easier in person."

  "Well . . ."

  "Is Andrew Dees with you?"

  "No, no. But . . . how long would it take for you to come see me now?"

  "I'm five minutes away."

  "Then come, please."

  I hung up and started walking.

  Beacon Hill is the neighborhood around the gold-domed Statehouse that I can see from my office window. The Beacon Street side overlooks the Common on the downslope and the Public Garden on the Hat. The major thoroughfare that divides the slope from the Hat is Charles, home to antique shops and trendy restaurants. Unlike Back Bay, much of the Hill remains single-family homes, though there aren't very many single families that can pony up the nearly two million required to own one. Condominium development was slower to catch on here, the narrow floor plans of the Federalist townhouses being less amenable to internal division than the Victorian architecture elsewhere. As I climbed the red-brick sidewalks to reach Evorova's address, however, I realized her building was plenty wide enough for condos.

  There was a keypad mounted on the wall outside the front door, another glass-paneled, inner door visible before the foyer. A typed list under a clear plastic cover next to the pad gave directions and two-digit telephone numbers for the occupants, listed in alphabetical order. I assumed the order was a security measure, scrambling unit number and owner name so a browsing burglar couldn't figure out which apartment had nobody home at any given time.

  I pressed the DIAL TONE button, then Evorova's number. I heard a telephone ringing through the speaker in the pad, and then a pickup and Evorova's voice saying, "Yes?"

  "John Cuddy."

  "Good. I can buzz you through the first door, but someone must come down to let you in the second."

  I got out the first syllable of "Someone?" before the dial tone told me that Evorova had cut the connection. I pressed the HANG UP button, and the tone stopped as a bumblebee noise came from the outer door's jamb. I opened it, went inside, and waited. Through the glass panel, the foyer had burgundy carpeting leading up a broad staircase and a small, tasteful chandelier suspended three feet from a fake mantelpiece with a mirror over it.

  About a minute later a fortyish woman in high heels walked deliberately down the foyer's stairs, carefully holding the railing. She was dressed elegantly in the sort of eveningwear you don't usually see on a weekday, workaday night. The green gown appeared to be buff velvet, a broach at the throat and spaghetti straps crossing both shoulders. If the gown was the first thing you noticed, the upswept auburn hair was the second, and I bet myself that her eyes would be somewhere around the green of her gown.

  As the woman opened the inner door for me, I won the bet.

  Extending her hand, she said, "Mr. Cuddy, Claude Loiselle."

  I shook politely. "Not exactly what I expected."

  A lopsided grin that made me think of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. "What did you expect, something from the Women Seeking Women section of the personals? 'White professional bull dyke seeks femme for roller derby, beer blasts, and possible relationship'?"

  Loiselle slurred some of the words, and I realized she'd had a few pops of something. "Ms. Evorova just said you were a banker, like her. And I was referring to your gown."

  "Oh." Loiselle looked down at herself, then back up to me. "We're going to the opera, Verdi's Rigoletto. Even bankers dress up when they do that." Teetering a little on the heels, she turned and beckoned me with a single, crooked index finger. "Hope you don't mind the stairs. The elevator's no bigger than a dumbwaiter and gives me claustrophobia."

  "The stairs are fine."

  Loiselle had to hitch up her gown a little at the hips to negotiate the first few steps.

  "Claustrophobic Claude. Kind of 'sings,' don't you think?"

  "I give it an eighty-five. Good melody, but tough to dance to."

  Her laugh was almost a gargling sound.

  "Too bad Olga didn't meet you instead of the Horse's Ass."

  As we reached the first landing, I didn't see any open doors, so I said, "Andrew Dees'?"

  "The same. I mentioned 'relationship' before? His idea of a deep and lasting relationship is about six inches 'deep' and 'lasting' twenty minutes."

  We started the next flight. "You know him well, then'?"

  "Met him twice. The second time wasn't necessary, if you take my point."

  "Bad first impression?"

  "No first impression."

  "I don't get you."

  "The man's not really there . . . what do I call you, anyway?"

  "John is fine with me if Claude is fine with you."

  "Dear God, a private investigator who speaks in parallel structure? I can't find a fucking assistant who even knows what parallel structure is. "

  "It's just the generation. Reading and writing isn't what they were focused on."

  "Now, that's a dangling participle, right?"

  "Preposition, I think."

  Second landing. "Right, right. Preposition."

  We kept climbing. "Back to Mr. Dees. You were saying . . . ?"

  "Saying what?"

  "Something about his not really being there."

  "Oh. Andrew doesn't talk about himself. I mean, have you ever met a man who didn't drone on about how he starred at quarterback in high school, or what a screwing he took from his bitch of an ex-wife, or something?"

  "And Dees doesn't."

  "Not a word. You get the impression that he's an actor, not entirely comfortable with a new role he's playing? We reached a door that stood ajar, what sounded like chamber music coming from behind it. Loiselle bumped the door open with her right buttock. "We1come to the Dostoyevsky Museum." 1

  Inside the unit, a short corridor had a carpet runner of a design I'd never seen before, brocades of red and gold. The corridor walls had been scooped out, shelved in, and glassed over, with indirect lighting above exotic bric-a-brac that I didn't have time to catalogue.

  Loiselle led me into a living room decorated from top to bottom in the most striking taste I'd ever seen. Orange drapery over the windows, pulled and tucked in a sequence that drew your eyes first upward then outward to the antique prints of armored warriors and dancing women and the not-quite-Catholic icons on the walls. There were delicate chairs and heavy tables, some with marble tops. Festive, folkish dolls sat or stood on open shelves around a magnificent fireplace, other shelves holding books, spine out, with Cyrillic lettering on them.

  Two loveseats opposed each other in front of the fireplace, a hand-carved, black wood coffee table between them. On the table stood a fluted glass, white wine filling a third of the bulb. The fireplace wall was painted a deep green that matched my guide's gown so well she looked like a floating face and shoulders in front of it.

  Loiselle gestured toward one of the loveseats. As I went to sit, she said, "Drink?"

  "How close are you and Ms. Evorova on time?"

  "Time?"

  "For the opera."

  "Oh. An hour yet. Olga's still getting dressed, but I've hired a car."

  "Then yes to the drink, whatever's easiest."

  "We have a nice chardonnay open."

  "Half a glass would be great."

  "Done."

  Loiselle moved to a linoleum area, the kitchen visible through a pass-through hole in that wall. The loveseats were upholstered in silk, strands of shining red and gold thread embroidered into the fabric, reminding me of the carpet runner in the hall. The music sounded like a crying piano, and I thought I recognized the piece.

  Loiselle returned with my glass, a little more than half full, but close enough. After setting the wine on the coffee table, she sat down across from me. Raising her own glass in a mock toast, Loiselle said, "To
whatever you've discovered about the Horse's Ass."

  I tried the chardonnay. Vanilla and oak, nicely blended and not so cold the flavor cou.ldn't come through.

  "Excellent."

  "Ought to be. That Bonny Doon's thirty dollars a bottle."

  "I'll sip it slowly.”

  The lopsided grin again. "I didn't realize private investigators were so easily offended."

  "We've gotten more sensitive over the years."

  "I could tell right away," said Loiselle.

  "Tell what?"

  "That you weren't a clod."

  "How?"

  "From the way you reacted downstairs." She tilted her glass, allowing the wine to slide around and coat the inside, then sniffed it without drinking from it. "When I mistook your 'not what I expected' remark and came on like a chip-on-the-shoulder lesbo, as one of my dear departed colleagues used to call me."

  “Departed."

  "After he said that to me once, I dedicated the next month to undermining him, and he was gone two more after that."

  I nodded.

  "Anyway," said Loiselle, "you took my shot in stride and just turned it around on me. I do the same thing to others often enough myself."

  "What kind of banking are you in?”

  "Commercia1 lending, and deadly serious stuff it is, too. Say you want to develop a shopping center or office building, but you need a hundred million or so in construction financing. I'm the one you have to make happy."

  "And does it make you happy?"

  "Sometimes." Another nip at the wine. "Not often, actually. But it lets me own a house down in Provincetown and my version of this place, with Melissa Etheridge instead of Tchaikovsky on the stereo."

  "I think it's Rachmaninoff."

  Loiselle stopped. Then she stood up and moved to the stereo stack in the corner, reaching under something to pull out a compact disk cover. Coming back to the loveseat, she said, "You didn't look at this, did you?"