"Even if you knew where DiRienzi is, right?"
"That's right.”
Another glance. "You really don't fucking know?"
"Primo, you just killed two guys proving it."
Zuppone brought the Lincoln slowly to the curb outside a furniture store shuttered for the night. Always the careful driver, he seemed to be concentrating even more on the little tasks, something I remembered doing after having to take a life. Or lives.
He left the engine running. "Cuddy, I never done anything like this before."
I looked at him.
Primo shook his head. "No, I don't mean whacking somebody, for chrissake. Or even somebody in the organization, for that matter. I mean doing a hit on my own, something that wasn't authorized?
"Especially if it was somebody you were told to protect."
"That's right. That's exactly right. Those guys they were my responsibility. Ianella, he might have been the worst prick I met in ten years, but him and Coco were my responsibility, and I didn't . . . Aw, shit.”
He rubbed his right palm over his eyes, like he was trying to wake up from a dream. A bad one. "What I'm saying here, I never did anything I wasn't told to. I always been faithful to my oath, the one I took when they made me a member. You read in the papers about how the ceremony is all mumbo jumbo, like some kind of witch-doctor shit. But it's real, Cuddy, the realest thing I ever went through. I'm a made fucking member of our organization, and for twenty-two fucking years I always stood up for it. And now I'm so fucking bummed out, I can't even think straight."
"Primo?"
"Yeah?"
“Just one question."
"What is it?"
"There any doubt in your mind that you did the right thing today?"
Zuppone looked at me steadily, the eyes moist but not filling with tears. "No. No fucking doubt whatsoever. You were telling them the truth, and Ianella was going to kill you for it, and Coco couldn't have stopped him."
"Well, then, you shouldn't feel bad about that."
"I won't, you can explain to me one thing."
"What's that?"
"How you going to get us off the hook with my people and Milwaukee?"
* * *
Primo dropped me at my car in downtown, and I drove toward the condo, nagged by what Cocozzo had said back in the slaughterhouse. "Andrew Dees" really didn't have any reason to run on Thursday night. He might have been madder than hell at Olga Evorova for having me check into his background, but that didn't explain his leaving the Witness Protection Program, with or without her. Especially since DiRienzi knew the marshals' service would have relocated him again if he had any real reason to fear that his current identity had been compromised. It just didn't make sense.
I thought about what I'd been told by Norman Elmendorf and the Stepanians, the argument from unit 42 they all overheard, Steven Stepanian seeing "Dees" loading luggage into the Porsche. If Stepanian was lying about what he saw, then he and his wife could have been the couple dropping off Olga's car in Elmer's lot at the airport. But why would the Stepanians want to impersonate DiRienzi and Evorova? To help with some escape plan that a neighbor they hardly knew didn't really need?
And if Steven Stepanian was telling the truth, then did somebody else hijack DiRienzi and Evorova before they got to Logan? Most of the other males I'd seen were probably "tall" enough for Elmer's description of the driver. But none had any motive I knew about, and besides, Boyce Hendrix was part of the cooperating witness program, Norman Elmendorf wasn't very mobile, and Jamey Robinette was attending a band concert with his mother on Thursday night.
Things were making even less sense to me as I parked the Prelude behind the brownstone. Upstairs, the window of my tape machine was blinking a single message. I played it back. Nancy, saying she'd waited until two-thirty before taking a cab home and what the hell had happened to me? When I was connected to her number, the outgoing announcement clicked on, but as I started my own message after the beep, Nancy broke in. "John, where are you?"
"Home."
"What—"
"It's a long story, Nance."
A pause. "John, is something wrong?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean your voice. It doesn't sound right."
I cleared my throat. "How's this?"
"Uh-oh. Something bad happened, didn't it?"
"This mean I can't fool you even over the telephone anymore?"
"It must. What's wrong?"
"How about if I drive to your place and we talk there?"
"I don't have anything much for us to eat."
I suddenly noticed the scent of the slaughterhouse coming off my clothes. "I'm not very hungry."
"There's still some of that chicken soup left over from Friday night?"
"That'd be fine. See you in thirty minutes."
"Thirty? It shouldn't take you fifteen without traffic."
I was already out of my suit jacket. "I need to shower and change first."
* * *
Inside the kitchen, I could smell the soup simmering in the crockpot. Renfield kept his distance, sensing something the shower hadn't washed away. Nancy first looked up at me, then laid the right side of her head against my chest, arms around my waist.
"You seem sound of wind and limb."
I said, "Just barely." `
Nancy tilted her head back, then broke the hug. "Meaning, you're the one who could use some cuddling tonight."
"I came close this afternoon, Nance. Real close."
Her eyes grew troubled, then she smiled without showing her teeth. "The soup can wait. Let's bring some wine into the living room, and you can tell me about it."
I said I thought that would be a very good start.
=21=
After I told Nancy as much as I could about what had happened, we made our way to the bedroom. A few hours later, while she dozed, I got up and went quietly into the kitchen for some water. The phone rang, startling me, and I answered it instinctively. "Hello?”
"Cuddy, that you?"
"Primo, what're you doing, calling me here?"
"Look, I been burning the fucking wires to your condo there and getting squat. If your girlfriend answered, I would've hung up."
"That doesn't—"
"Besides, I figured we still had kind of an emergency on our hands, you know?"
No question there. "Okay. So tell me."
"Things suck, but I'm still alive." The whooshing sound as he breathed. "After my guys took care of the cleanup, I figured I oughta let this friend of ours—the coordinator?—know that everything hit the fan."
"And?”
"And he's bullshit, what do you think, but he believes what I told him because he wants to believe it."
"What did you tell him?"
"That Rick and Coco found a lead on their own and left me a fucking message. When I picked it up, I went straight to the slaughterhouse and found what I found."
"Primo, how would they know to go there in the first place?"
"Account of they asked me in advance to show it to them, give Coco a door key, in case they wanted to use the meat locker for entertaining somebody."
Smart. "Somebody like Alfonso DiRienzi?"
"I had a brainstorm there, I think. I told this coordinator that it was just possible the fucking feds had made Rick and Coco somehow and decided to send our organization a message by whacking them, so we were going to have to be real careful, here on out."
"Only the feds wouldn't do that."
"Hey-ey-ey, some other time I'll tell you about these former friends of mine would argue the point, they were still alive to speak their piece."
"And you think the rogue-cop story sounds better than what we came up with?"
"Yeah, but it's not gonna buy you and me much time. I was able to convince our coordinator that Rick and Coco oughta stay on ice for a while at the funeral home, till we could hand the Milwaukee people a better result."
"Primo—"
"Look, don't
say it again, all right? You ain't gonna give up DiRienzi even if you do find him. Fine. You fucking spook that rat from wherever he is, though, and it's open fucking season on him, far as I'm concerned."
I didn't much like what I was about to suggest, but I couldn't see any other way to be in two places at the same time. "Primo, I'm going to ask you to do something else."
"Now what?"
“I've got to run around tomorrow, trying to trace a couple of things. I need you to get a pair of binoculars, some kind of writing pad, and a rent-a-car."
"A rent-a-car?"
"Yes."
"What the fuck for?"
I told him.
He said, “And you think that if DiRienzi and your client didn't take off on their own, one of his neighbors had something to do with it?"
"Go back to what Cocozzo said in the slaughterhouse. DiRienzi had no reason to run if my client tells him she's the one who hired me. And the neighbors are basically the only other people I talked with about him."
"You got a reason why one of them should have a hardon for DiRienzi?”
"No, but I'm out of better ideas. You?"
About ten seconds went by before Primo Zuppone said, "All right. How am I supposed to recognize these assholes?"
* * *
After a teeth-pulling hour with my word-processing wonder at the copy center, I rode the Green Line trolley to Boston University. The transcript department is on the second floor of 881 Commonwealth Avenue. It reminded me a lot of the registrar's office at the University of Central Vermont, except that I had to wait on a growing line of seniors earnestly hoping their BU grades could get them into the graduate school of their (parents') choice. When my turn came, I walked up to a young, red-haired man.
"Can I help you?"
"Hope so. I need a former student's transcript."
Handed him the authorization letter for "Andrew Dees," modified to "Lana Stepanian."
He scanned it quickly, barely glancing at the signature I'd forged from Stepanian's "Hendrix Management" questionnaire. "There's no Social Security or student ID number on here."
"She didn't give those to me."
"Or date of graduation?
"Sorry, but isn't 'Stepanian' unusual enough—"
"We require all that stuff, plus date of birth, any former name used, and——"
"Lopez."
"Lopez?"
"Her maiden name."
The red-haired guy sighed, writing "Lopez" on the letter. "Well, I'll have to do some checking. If I find her, I'l1 mail the transcript out to you this afternoon."
“Can I come back and pick it up instead?"
He looked behind me, probably at the growing line. "This place'll be a zoo the rest of today and tomorrow. You're better off with me mailing it."
I didn't want to push my thinning luck. "Okay."
He wrote down the Tremont Street address. "That'll be three dollars, please."
Same as the university in Vermont. Even registrar's offies have a going rate.
* * *
"What, you again?"
"Sorry to disturb you, Mo."
"Wel1, you already have, so the harm's done. Come in, close the door."
I took a chair across the cluttered desk. Mo Katzen was in the vest and trousers of the usual gray suit today, some strands of his white, wavy hair spit-curled onto his forehead. Between index and middle fingers he held a lit cigar.
"Find your wicks, Mo?"
"My . . . ? Oh, yeah. The ASN's thought they got them all, but they didn't." He gestured with the cigar toward the desk top. "You know anything about the organ market, John'?"
"You mean human organs?"
"Yeah, human. What, you think they transplant for kittens and bunnies?"
"No, Mo, but—"
"Well, Freddie's funeral—Freddie Norton, I told you about him, last time you wrecked my train of thought—it got me thinking. He had this organ-donor card in his wallet. Now Freddie's own equipment, it wasn't what you'd call fresh off the shelf, if you see my point. But I asked myself, what's the business itself like? Life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, right?"
"Sorry, you lost me."
"John." A baleful look. “Concentrate, okay?"
"I'll try, Mo."
He spoke very deliberately, as though I was block-printing notes. "Freddie gets clocked by a truck, he's a good fiiend, I'm at his funeral. That's the lemon, get it? Only the organ-donor card gives me the idea to research the market for human organs, the basis for a newspaper article. My business, John. That's the lemonade, see'?"
"A friend's death is a sad thing, but it inspires an article for you, which is making the best of a bad situation."
"Move to the head of the class. Anyway, I start looking into this 'market,' and it's fascinating?
After the slaughterhouse the day before, I wasn't in the mood for that kind of fascination. "Mo—"
"One of the computer Nazis got me some of the laws on this." He picked up a densely primed Xerox. "It seems some doctor got the idea of buying organs from living donors, then selling them on the open market. That made Congress pass the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which kind of regulated things. But," picking up another Xerox, "every state in the Union passed this Uniform Anatomical Gift Act—which, I got to tell you, doesn't seem all that 'uniform' to me. Anyway, under the state law, the families of people killed kind of 'quickly and cleanly' can donate the decedent's organs. Only guess what, John?"
"No organ-donor card, no organ donation."
"What?"
"Without a card from the donor, the families can't—"
"Oh. Huh, never thought about that." Shaking one Xerox like a rattle at the other, Mo said, "Have to read these over again, dammit. No, what I meant was, the families won't receive a dime for the organs, but something called a 'transplant agency'—that's a nice touch, don't you think? A transplant agency, like they're selling insurance or real estate. Anyway, this agency gets something from the hospital, and the hospital gets fifteen, twenty thousand for each major organ, and so the old joke, it doesn't hold up anymore."
I had to bite. "Which old joke?"
This look was more disappointed than baleful. "Holy Cross would be—you went to the Cross, right?"
"Right, Mo."
"The good priests would be ashamed, your lack of chemistry culture."
"Chemistry?"
"Yeah, The old joke, that every human body is worth only about a dollar forty-nine in chemicals. Well, I'll tell you, John, if my computer Nazis are right," reaching for a pencil and touching the sharpened tip to his tongue, "the price went up to around . . . let's see . . . fifteen and change for a kidney, times two, plus twenty for the liver, times—no, just one per customer on—"
"Mo, speaking of computers."
He looked up. "What?"
"Speaking of the computers, could you loan me one of your people to do a little more research?"
"Research? They already got all I can use on the organ market."
"I meant for me, on something else."
"Will it get you out of my hair?"
"Cross my heart."
Waving at his Xeroxed statutes, Mo Katzen said, "That supposed to be funny?" and then reached for the telephone.
* * *
The computer researcher who came to Mo's door this time was a young African-American woman named Giselle with dreadlocked hair and a Lauren Hutton gap between her two front teeth. Giselle led me back through the rabbit warren of cubicles to her carrel, and she turned out to be much faster than the first helper had been.
We ran "Steven Stepanian" through the search commands. Just a couple of isolated references to his being on the Plymouth Mills School Committee. Then Lana Stepanian. Nothing. We tried Lana Lopez. Nothing again. Next was Norman Elmendorf. A couple of photo credits on pictures he'd taken for his Brockton paper years ago that apparently the Herald had gotten permission to use as well. Nothing about his military service, despite the exhaustive media coverage the
Gulf War had received. Giselle and I tried Kira Elmendorf too. No entries. Tangela Robinette. Three stories—one main, two much briefer follow-ups—on her husband being killed and her own previous federal service. Son Jamey was listed as another survivor in each article.
For the hell of it, I asked Giselle to run Paul or Paulie Fogerty through. Zip, but that's what I expected anyway. Giselle looked up, the gap somehow making her smile seem more helpful.
"Anyone else?"
"Yes," even though it was really scraping rock bottom.
"Try the names Yale Quentin and Plymouth Willows."
"That's Y-A-L-E and Q-U-E-N-T-I~N?"
"I think so."
"And Willows, like the tree?"
"Yes."
"You want them linked?"
"Linked?"
"Yes. 'Plymouth Willows' within so many words of 'Ya1e Quentin' as the search command."
"No. Run his name on its own first."
The computer found a few articles from the early eighties about Quentin doing some smaller developments else-where on the South Shore. Later articles overlapped in discussing him and the Plymouth Willows project: the initial optimism, the unfolding difficulties, the eventual financial and personal tragedy. There was even a grainy photo of Quentin's widow, a flight attendant, at the cemetery ceremony following his suicide four years earlier. The story and caption gave her first name as "Edith," but she wore no veil, and the photo captured her lower lip curling as she concentrated on something at the graveside.
Just the way Edie did, drawing a beer behind the bar at The Tides.
Aware of my concentration on the screen, Giselle said, "Would you like a printout of this one?"
"Please."
* * *
"Mo."
"Now what?"
The cigar was in his mouth but dead again. "I just wanted to thank you for all the help."
"Don't mention it."
"One more thing?"
He made a ritual of taking the cigar out of his mouth. "John, maybe you ought to put me on the payroll, you know?"
"Last one, promise."
"What is it?"
"You know anybody on the Brockton paper?"
Mo Katzen turned the cigar to stare at its unlit end, as if seeing it for the first time. "Not since Chester Snedeker died. It's an interesting story, though. You got a minute to hear about Chet?"
Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy Page 23
