Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  "The CD case?"

  "Right."

  "No, I didn't."

  "Then how did you know . . . ?"

  "Took a music appreciation course back in college. You happened to be playing the one piece I could have gotten right, that's al1."

  Lifting her wineglass, Loiselle said, "Olga was playing, actually."

  Speaking of whom. "Before she joins us, anything else you can tell me about Andrew Dees?"

  Loiselle put the glass down again, spreading her hands on her thighs as though she were wiping the palms. In a serious tone, she said, "I'm sorry . . . John, right?"

  "Right."

  "I know you're trying to help Olga—and God knows, I think she needs it—but I've been flip as hell with you because I skipped lunch and had two glasses of Bonny Doon here when I should have stopped at one."

  "That's all right."

  A sniffing that had nothing to do with the wine. "An-drew Dees. He wants to be with Olga, but not enjoy some things with her. Take tonight, for instance. He'll go to the ballet, or even a folk concert. But while Olga loves opera—especially Puccini and Verdi—he won't budge on it. Listening to a CD of the Three Tenors'? Fine. Going to see Pavarotti live? Not a chance."

  "There has to be something more than that."

  "No, there isn't, and that's my point. It's like I said on the stairs before. An-drew's a cipher, an android. He—"

  "I am so sorry to keep you waiting."

  I stood up at the sound of Olga Evorova's voice. She came into the room, dressed in a black gown with silver sequins at the shoulders and holding a sequined handbag in the shape of a dinosaur egg. Wearing more makeup, she now looked glamorous rather than merely attractive, and I began to wonder why Andrew Dees wouldn't want to be out and about with her, appreciating the attention she'd garner.

  Claude Loiselle rose from her loveseat. "I'll just go powder my nose while you two talk."

  "No," said Evorova. "I would like you to be here, Claude." She turned to me. "Unless it would destroy some of the confidentiality we discussed, yes?"

  I said, "As a client, you usually can have a confidante with you. If you want Ms. Loiselle—"

  "Claude," said Loiselle.

  "And I am Olga, please."

  "Olga," I said, "if you'd like Claude to be here too, that's tine with me."

  Sitting back down, Loiselle shoved over a little, and Evorova joined her on the loveseat.

  I sat so that I was facing my client directly. "I went to Plymouth Willows, acting like I was representing another condo complex interested in hiring Hendrix Management. Evorova only watched me, but Loiselle nodded in quick bobs, like she'd already known that.

  "I spoke to Hendrix himself before the neighbors, just to make it look right, and then to Mr. Dees afterward. However, about three hours later, a couple of guys roughed me up behind my office building."

  Evorova's jaw dropped as she sucked in an audible breath. Loiselle leaned forward, elbows on her knees, concentration cutting through the wine haze.

  I said, "They warned me off Hendrix Management, saying it wouldn't be a good idea for me to investigate the company or the projects it handles."

  The two women exchanged looks.

  Then Evorova spoke to me. "Hendrix and Plymouth Willows, but nothing about Andrew?”

  "That's right. Hendrix wasn't nuts about seeing me, but the other neighbors were more or less cooperative."

  Loiselle said, "And An-drew?"

  I spoke to Evorova. "Not cooperative at all."

  My client dipped her chin, as she had back in my office.

  "So you think maybe it is the Hendrix company that is the problem, or maybe it is the condo complex, or maybe it is Andrew."

  "Right, and no real way of telling which, since everybody in those three hours would have had time to sic the goons."

  "I am sorry?" said Evorova.

  Loiselle patted her friend's forearm. "Call for the bad guys."

  Evorova looked to me. "What do you recommend?"

  "If there's something sour about Hendrix's operation, maybe the complex should get rid of him. If it's the complex, maybe Mr. Dees should move."

  Evorova let out a breath. "And if it is Andrew, maybe I should know, yes?"

  "I think so."

  "Me too, Olga," said Loiselle.

  Evorova closed her eyes for a moment. Opening them again, she stared at me hard. "How can you do this?"

  "I'd like to try tracing Mr. Dees backward, and the only sure thing we have is him telling you he graduated from the University of Central Vermont. That means a trip up there, and it would be a help if I could have a sample of his signature."

  "His signature?"

  "Yes. For me to get a look at the school records, I'd need some kind of authorization signed by him." Loiselle showed me the lopsided grin. "Or at least apparently signed by him."

  "Right."

  Evorova said, "I do not know. Forging Andrew's signature?"

  Loiselle patted her forearm again. "In a good cause, Olga."

  "What cause?"

  "You," said her friend.

  Evorova closed and opened her eyes once more, then gave me another long stare. "When we are first going out together, I was at Andrew's house one night, and I was short of cash for the next day. He drove me to the ATM machine in Plymouth Mills, but it was broken. Andrew thought that was funny, a banker who could not get money for herself. So he loaned me fifty dollars, but this was early in our relationship, as I told you, and I wanted to give him a check. He was reluctant, but I insisted."

  "And Mr. Dees endorsed and deposited it," I said.

  "Exactly, yes."

  "Do you have it here?"

  My client consulted her watch.

  Loiselle said, "Plenty of time, Olga."

  Evorova rose, the gown shadowing her figure nicely in the process. "I will get the check."

  Loiselle watched Olga walk back the way she'd come, then picked up her own wineglass. Speaking to me over the rim, Claude said, "Blinded by love."

  "It happens."

  She gave me a harder look than Evorova had. "Yeah, tell me about it."

  Then Claude Loiselle drained the last of her Bonny Doon.

  =11=

  After leaving Olga Evorova's condo carrying the check Andrew Dees had endorsed, I went back to my apartment. There was no message from Nancy with my answering service or on my telephone tape machine. I thought about trying her, but after the way we'd left it that afternoon, I decided to wait. Besides, she could always call me, right? I fell asleep without hearing from her.

  Thursday dawned bright and clear, the kind of brilliant October morning that brings the tourists back year after year for foliage season. Even the northwest wind was doing its part, a steady ten miles an hour pushing all the smog out to the harbor and beyond as it brought high, patchy clouds over the city.

  I waited until eight, then dialed Nancy at home, getting just the outgoing tape announcement. Figuring she might have gone into work before the doctor's, I tried the DA's office too, the secretary telling me that Ms. Meagher wasn't expected until after lunch. I left the message that I'd be gone most of the day but would still appreciate a return call.

  Hanging up, I sat down and composed, in longhand, the letter I intended to bring with me to Vermont.

  “Okay, now you want me to do this letter, right?"

  Leaning an elbow on the counter of the copy center, I watched the woman twist her frosted hair around an index finger. "Just like last time."

  "Yeah, but last time you wanted that questionnaire."

  "Right."

  "So, what'd the people say?"

  "Say?"

  "Yeah, about it going two pages and all."

  I nodded. "They weren't very helpful."

  "See," she said, twisting another hank of her hair. "I told you. Keep it to one page, you're better off."

  "Which is why I'm taking your advice on this letter."

  She looked at it again. "What's that word there
?"

  " 'Authorization.' "

  "And you want it centered?"

  "Right. And all caps."

  She made her way down to the signature line, then the return address in the upper-right-hand corner. "And you're Andrew Dees?"

  "No, I'm just getting this typed for him."

  "Word processed. We don't actually 'type' things anymore."

  "I'd forgotten."

  She said, "Five minutes."

  "And I'll need three originals, please."

  "Not an original and two photocopies'?"

  "No. Three originals right off the printer."

  "It'll take longer."

  "How much?"

  "Two minutes, maybe."

  "Fine," I said.

  "And it'll cost more, too."

  I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. "How much more?"

  "Another fifty cents per original."

  "I'll take the plunge."

  Torturing a different hank of the hosted hair, the woman moved slowly toward her desktop computer. Back in my condo, I practiced copying the endorsement signature on the back of Olga Evorova's check until it felt natural. Then I signed the three originals of the authorization letter, gathered some other papers, and went down to my car.

  * * *

  Used to be, driving north out of Boston was simple, if not easy. Either you took the Sumner Tunnel, completed in 1934, under the harbor and past Logan Airport, or you took the Mystic River Bridge, completed in 1950 and renamed the Tobin Bridge in the mid-sixties. You could die from the fumes in the tunnel or the crosswinds on the bridge, but at least your choices were clear. Then in sixty-one, they opened a second tunnel, the Callahan, which seemed to multiply both the traffic and the fumes by a factor of four. Now, another aspect of the Big Dig is the revamping of all the ramps that lead onto and off the funneling highways, like the Central Artery, Storrow Drive, Route 1—enough. The point is, now the drive's still not easy but no longer simple.

  I thought keeping the Prelude's moonroof back and heater on might take my mind off both Nancy and the traffic. It didn't, but it helped.

  Once into New Hampshire, the miles on interstates 93 and 89 rolled by, me keeping the speedometer between fifty-five and sixty without cruise control, the roadside foliage going from not-quite-peak to peak to past-peak. About a hundred miles northwest of Boston and through the second range of mountains, things went from past-peak to pretty bleak. The trees had lost most of their leaves, the varied colors now checkerboarding the ground like the French Quarter after Mardi Gras. It was depressing, and found my finger on the button that closes the moonroof even though I didn't think the air had turned that much colder.

  Crossing over into Vermont, I went another thirty miles before seeing the exit for the university. At the bottom of the ramp, I took a right, slowly climbing a switchback road up a mountain. Cresting it, I looked down into the valley and on alternate curves got better and better views of the town and campus, which seemed to join each other at the narrow point in a geographic hourglass.

  The town had a quaint main street, tall-if bare-oaks, maples, and poplars lining the curbs. Broad, clapboard houses, built at a time when ten kids in the family put you somewhere near the middle of the pack, stood a little too close to the road. The houses gave way to a small commercial center, with a postage-stamp movie theater, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, and the Towne Restaurant, where the soup and half-sandwich special probably would go for half what the soup alone costs in Boston. Across the street was a small department store, a Chinese take-out place, and a photocopy closet that would be pleased to type any résumé "professiona1ly." At the edge of town stood a flat-faced taphouse with a “C&W Dancing, Th-Sat" sign next to a video store next to a gunshop advertising "Re-load Ammo, Cheap." One-stop shopping for all your weekend entertainment.

  I drove through a glade of evergreens that formed the waist of the hourglass I'd seen from the crest of the mountain, the gates of the University of Central Vermont just past it. Beyond the gates, I came onto a narrow macadam road with yellow speedbumps every two hundred feet. Around me spread a tree-and-lawn campus, the cement sidewalks narrow, the hedges near the Colonial-era buildings trimmed lovingly and blending into the ivy climbing the outside walls. I found myself thinking that Paulie Fogerty, the superintendent at Plymouth Willows, would like this place.

  The combination football-soccer field appeared on my left, the portable goal nets pushed to the sides at the moment so the football team could run no-pads drills. Off in the corner, the cheerleading squad—five females and one male—was practicing a gymnastics routine in shorts and sweatshirts. The grandstands were all steel-and-board bleachers, the capacity more befitting a high school than a college. Bordering the field was an elliptical gravel track, stringy men and women alternating in windsprints from a crouching start. A campus cop in blue shirt and slacks leaned against the front fender of a yellow Ford Explorer. His tires on the edge of the gravel, he watched all the activity around him, giving special attention to the cheerleaders.

  After a curve in the road, I found the Administration Building and a parking lot. Leaving my car in a VISITOR slot with a meter on it, I fed the meter two dimes before I realized the first had bought me an hour. I went up the sidewalk, taking in the scattered clatches of students. Almost all impossibly young, the hair styles ranging from New Wave butcherings to No Wave butch cuts, the clothes spandex or L.L. Bean or oversized flannel shirts over tees, the buttons on the flannel ones all open, shirttails out over jeans with intentional slashes. Everybody in uniform, just different branches of the service.

  Look a little closer, though, and you could see a stout thirty-year-old woman, maybe a young mother, coming back to school and maybe not with a lot of friends her own age, sitting on a threadbare jacket and nibbling a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich while she poured over what looked like an English lit text. A trio of African-American students, sitting by themselves and eating ice cream cones, Chicago Bulls and Philadelphia Eagles colors on the two boys, one looking around every once in a while, watching the street in a different kind of neighborhood. A studious Latino, wearing black tie-shoes and a white dress shirt, his back against the stoop of the Administration Building, tapping the keys of a notebook computer he balanced on his knees.

  I climbed the stoop and went in the main entrance, taking the corridor toward the registrar's office as two of the L.L. Beaners came out, knapsacks on their backs. Inside the door was a rectangular waiting area, probably designed to accommodate long lines of students, a couple of molded-plastic scoop chairs against the wall. I could see two women behind the open counter, one in her late fifties and severe, the other in her early twenties and fresh-scrubbed. The older woman shrugged stiffly into a coat, saying in a clipped New England accent, "Be back by one, Zina."

  The younger woman sat at a desk bracketed by tall file cabinets, scanning some computer printouts on green-and-cream spreadsheet paper in front of her. "Take your time, Harriet. I'm just meeting Lyle for lunch at the Towne."

  Harriet hissed with her coat as she strode past me, never even looking at my face. After she was gone, I went to the counter.

  Zina smiled up from the printouts. "Help you?"

  "Please." I took out one of my forged authorization letters. "I need a transcript and whatever else you can show me on a former student."

  Zina nodded and rose, lifting one form from a sheaf of them on her desk. She came up to the counter and turned the paper around for me to see. "We just need you to fill this out and get it signed by the graduate involved."

  I glanced down at the form. At the top over a couple of detailed paragraphs, it had spaces for FULL NAME, DATE OF BIRTH, and YEAR OF GRADUATION.

  Since I didn't know the last two, I positioned my letter the same way she held her sheet. "I already have an authorization?

  Zina read it. "Hey, Plymouth Mills, that's, like, south of Boston, right?"

  "Right."

  "We don't get many grads going al
l the way down there."

  "You don't?"

  "Uh-unh. Most of our students are state residents when they come here, and they already know Vermont's the best place to live you could ever find."

  I smiled with her. "Well, after I get a look at his records, maybe I can persuade Mr. Dees to move back."

  Zina shook her head. "I'm real sorry, but you have to use our form."

  "But I'm only going to be here for today."

  "Sorry."

  I read the two paragraphs of line print on her piece of paper. "Look, I know my letter isn't worded quite the same way, but it's pretty clearly the same thought. Andrew Dees here is authorizing you to release all his records to me."

  "Uh-huh, but your letter there doesn't have the disclaimer clause or the hold-harmless clause, and the university counsel says we have to have both to cover ourselves from liability."

  Zina said the legal phrases correctly, but she pronounced them slowly, as though she didn't know for sure what they meant. In a bureaucracy of any kind, that usually means the person you're dealing with isn't going to yield. I thought about asking to see her superior, then remembered Harriet's demeanor and had a better idea.

  "Could I have a couple of those forms, then?"

  Zina seemed relieved. "Sure."

  * * *

  "Hi, can I help you?"

  "It's not exactly a résumé, but I was wondering if you could type this up for me?"

  The young guy in the photocopy place across from the Towne Restaurant looked at the registrar's form and said,

  "Why don't you just use the form itself, mister?"

  "I don't want all that stuff about DATE OF BIRTH at the top."

  He ran his hand over hair too short to twist around a finger. "Okay, but it's still going to be five dollars a page."

  "A steal at twice the price."

  He took it to a desktop computer and got to work. I sat in my car outside the Towne, enjoying the soup and half-sandwich the waitress inside had put up for me in take-out fashion. Homemade vegetable beef in the cardboard cup, deviled ham on toasted wheat in the waxed paper. Two bucks. The fifties aren't dead everywhere. A few minutes later, I was finishing my soup when Zina bicycled down the street from the direction of campus. No helmet, though, and she just leaned her bicycle against the wall outside the restaurant, not bothering to lock it when she went inside. I thought about Primo and the concept of trust.