Swan Dive - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  "Just what I need right now."

  "I saw it, Chris. The house, I mean. Have you?"

  "No. Well, the photos from the appraisal there and all."

  "It’s a palace. The Vanderbilt mansion done up in hardwood."

  "So?"

  "So it’s worth a fortune."

  "Yeah, well, is it worth getting a nutcake like Marsh going again?"

  "Also the insurance, Chris."

  "The insurance?"

  "Yeah, on the guy’s life. If I were you, I’d check on that policy with the company that issued it."

  "John, how the hell am I supposed to do that? Those kinda records are confidential, at least without going to court."

  "Felicia Arnold can have the home office of the insurer itself send you Marsh's coverage."

  Chris exhaled noisily. "Okay, okay, I’ll think about it. You got any other marching orders for me?"

  I hung up with Chris still a friend, then dialed the Boston police headquarters on Berkeley Street.

  "Homicide, Detective Cross."

  "This is John Cuddy. The lieutenant in?"

  She said, "You haven’t caused enough problems for a while?"

  "The courthouse thing?"

  "It’s what comes to mind."

  "Look, that wasn’t my fault."

  "Save it for him."

  A gruff gravelly voice, a mixture of Dorchester tough and street black, came on. Not his usual telephone manner. "Somebody post bail for you?"

  “Not funny, Lieutenant."

  We went around on that a bit, then at a convenient break point I said, “Could you check somebody out for me?"

  "I guess so. Name?"

  "Roy Marsh. Insurance agent, lives in Swampscott."

  "You got anything in particular in mind?"

  "I’m thinking he might be partial to the nose candy."

  "You talk to the Swampscott PD about him?"

  "No."

  "How come?"

  "Because I don’t know anybody there."

  Murphy grunted. "That all you want on him?"

  "The guy’s a bad actor." I briefly described what we found at Hanna’s house. Murphy and his wife had always wanted but never had kids of their own.

  "Cuddy, I’ll ask around Narcotics, but you come up with anything, I don’t want to see or hear about any vigilante stuff. Dig?"

  "I’m just investigating a divorce here, Lieutenant."

  He gave me his home number again and told me to call him tomorrow or Sunday.

  I put the phone down and did my best to forget Chris’s remark about my maybe having made things worse for Hanna. Just to be sure, I tried her number in Peabody. She was all right: no Roy, no incidents, not even harassment by telephone. I told her that was good news, probably meaning Roy had gotten the anger out of his system. She said she hoped so and thanked me again for helping at the conference. I didn’t mention my trip to Swampscott, and we hung up.

  I settled deep into the burlappy couch that is so unexpectedly cushiony and enveloping, it seems to eat people. If I were Roy, and I were going to visit Hanna in retaliation, I’d wait until the nurse was off duty so she could give me another alibi. That left me about six hours, plenty of time for a nap and a drive to Samaritan Hospital.

  * * *

  Samaritan is located in a North Shore community and treads a tough line. Not supported by state, city, or church, it is always in need of the kind of funding that has no strings attached. It doesn’t usually get what it needs, as is made clear by its fissured parking lot, kiltered sidewalks, and warped linoleum. Having passed the security desk with the last surge of patients’ visitors, I spotted Sheilah Kelley a few minutes later as she pushed a medicine cart toward the children’s ward.

  “Excuse me, Nurse Kelley?"

  She lurched around, flagging already at the three-quarter point of her shift. Up close, I saw she had brown eyes and more freckles than pale skin around them.

  "Can I help you with something?"

  "My name’s John Cuddy."

  She stiffened and pursed her lips.

  "Miss, you know who I am and why I’m here. Is there someplace we can talk privately?"

  "Lemme see your badge."

  "We’re not allowed to carry one."

  "What?"

  "In Massachusetts, all we can carry is identification, no badge. Here."

  " She looked at it, buying time more than reading or checking anything. Then she turned away, shuttling the cart forward again. As I was about to speak, she said over her shoulder, "End of the corridor. There’s a small playroom. I’ll be with you in ten minutes."

  I found it and went inside. The walls were done in early Bozo the Clown. Even stepping carefully, my shoes crunched the innumerable pieces of unnamable board games that lay scattered near a short-legged table. I gently swept a Barbie doll and a G.I. Joe from a Sesame Street floor cushion. Sitting down, I tried not to feel too foolish as I wondered whether Sheilah Kelley was calling Roy Marsh for guidance.

  She came in just as I was about to get up to search for her. She leaned against the wall, staying near the door. "Five minutes."

  "Why don’t we skip the preliminaries, then. Tell me, did Roy actually have you hold the kitten down, or were you just the wheelman?"

  She swallowed hard and tried not to blink. "Roy was with me all afternoon."

  "In Swampscott."

  "Right."

  "In nursing school they must have made you cut into animals, anatomy class and all. Were the animals usually dead first, because Cottontail sure—"

  "Stop it!"

  She couldn’t stop blinking now, and the tears came even as she brushed them away angrily.I

  I spoke more softly. "You work with kids. It’s your job. How could you cover for the guy after what he did?"

  She shivered and sank a little, then slid down the wall until her rump hit the floor. She used her arms to hug her knees, lowering her face into them like a sleeping sentry. "He was with me."

  Time for a different tack. "How did you meet Marsh?"

  She raised her head. "Why do you want to know?"

  "Look, I’m not after you. You want to be loyal to Marsh, fine. The truth isn’t going to bring back the cat or make Vickie feel any better. I just want to understand what happened so it won’t happen again."

  She said, "It won’t," a little too quickly, then put her head back down.

  I said as gently as I could, "You may love him, but you can’t change him."

  "Change him." She took a breath, then said, "I met him a few months ago. He drove himself in here, all beat up. I was covering in Emergency, and he was nice to me, sent me flowers for helping him. Then lunch, a drive to the beach. He . . ."

  When she didn’t continue, I said, "Ms. Kelley?"

  She shook herself all over, like a dog just out of the water. "Look, Mr. Cuddy. I can’t keep you from thinking what you want to think."

  “No more than you can keep Roy from doing what he wants to do?"

  "I said, nothing more’s going to happen."

  "How do you know? What if next time it’s the wife?"

  "Look, do you know . . . ? I’m twenty-nine years old, and I feel like ninety-nine. I work myself to sleep five nights a week here. Six years at this place, and I still get Mondays and Tuesdays off How are you supposed to meet people that way? I know Roy has other girls. Plus, my father hates him, hates him for what he’s doing to me. ‘A married man, Sheilah, your mother, God rest her, we never taught you any better than that?' "

  "What if next time it’s the child, Sheilah?"

  She scrunched her face, like a grotesquely older version of what Vickie had looked like at the vet’s. "There’s nothing I can do! I love him, can’t you see that?"

  Unfortunately, she looked so hopeless that I could. I got up and left her, head bobbing slightly as she cried.

  I found a pay phone in the lobby and told the Bonham cop who answered that I wouldn’t be at their firing range the next day. The scarecrow at the hospi
tal security desk told me to forget the cafeteria and gave me directions to the nearest diner, where I bought eight Styrofoam cups of tea. I set the bag of cups on the passenger-side floor of the Fiat and drove to Peabody.

  At the police station, I spoke briefly with the detective who had responded to the break-in earlier that evening. He said there wasn’t much hope of anything official happening. Not exactly news.

  I told him what I’d be doing that night, and he said, "It’s your time, pal." Then he cleared me with the patrol supervisor in case anybody reported my car.

  In the darkness, it took a while to find Hanna’s house.

  SEVEN

  -♦-

  One thing that must be said for tea: When you’re not used to drinking the stuff, the caffeine really keeps you awake. It also gives you the shakes and urges you to relieve yourself. Often. For the last symptom, the Styrofoam cups are reusable.

  I sat and watched Hanna’s place until my eyes glazed over. I perked up when somebody else’s cat scooted into the shrubbery and came out a few seconds later, thrashing something in its mouth and proudly prancing in that successful stalker way. I lost track of him, but thirty minutes later he was back, nosing around the bushes again.

  At fifteen past midnight, a car wandered down the street and jumped the curb at a driveway four houses away. A woman stumbled out, obviously drunk. She wore a dark dress that flashed purple in the car’s courtesy light. A guy got out from behind the wheel, playfully fighting her for the front door key and almost forgetting to come back and close the driver-side door. They laughed and groped each other a little too frantically as they finally crossed the threshold.

  A few hours later, I jumped when two birds zoomed by the windshield, so fast and so close they could have been a 3-D special effect. I couldn’t remember anything but owls flying at night. Maybe the questing cat had spooked them.

  An elderly lady in a bathrobe watched me from a third-floor window across the street. She was peering around a shade, but she had a hall light on somewhere behind her, producing a stark, clear silhouette. When I waved to her, she abruptly let the shade fall back. I expect she went to call the police.

  At 3:10, the man who drove the purple dress home came hustling out of her house, trying to knot his tie, put on his jacket, and check his watch all at once. He hopped in, fishtailed out, and took off the way Sheilah Kelley had earlier that afternoon in Swampscott.

  Perhaps with equal reason for feeling guilty.

  The rain began at 4:15, drops the size of dimes pelting the bugs on the windshield. I tried the wipers once, but I would have had to use them continuously to do much good, which would have been a bit conspicuous. I did my best to peer between the veins of water pulsing down the glass.

  At 5:30, the showers abated, and the sky started to lighten. At 6:00 I saw a light go on in Hanna’s apartment. Leaving the car, I disposed of the reused cups in a storm drain and creaked stiffly around the puddles to her door.

  * * *

  “You should not have stayed in a car all the night."

  "I was afraid Roy might be back."

  "On the telephone, you tell me he would not."

  "I didn’t want to chance being wrong."

  Hanna set a glass of milk next to me: She reached over the counter and absently pulled a box of dry cat food from a cabinet. Shaking it like a dinner bell, she caught herself, said, "Oh," and put it in the trash.

  She said, "At least you could knock on the door and come inside here."

  "Roy was mad enough at you already. I didn’t want him to think there was something else he should get even about."

  She added milk to her coffee and joined me at the table. "Vickie is still asleep. From the doctor’s pills."

  When Hanna raised her eyes to me, I thought I saw a glimmer marked "invitation." I thought of the guy with the woman in the purple dress. I said, "How is Vickie doing?"

  She sighed. "The same. She wakes up and she cries. A little less each time, maybe."

  "Time will heal it."

  "Yes. Time." She stirred her coffee unnecessarily.

  "Can I ask a question?"

  "Sure."

  "Chris said he would help me without any money."

  "That doesn’t sound like a question."

  "I called two lawyers in Swampscott before I . . . left. They both say they would not talk to me without money."

  "A retainer?"

  "Yes. A retainer which I don’t get back if I don’t have them as my lawyer."

  "And?"

  "I don’t want to be . . . She stopped stirring, fixing me with an unhappy look. "John, do you think Chris is a good lawyer for me? And Vickie."

  Uh—oh. "Why?"

  "Yesterday. In the office with Roy and his lawyer. I got . . . I think maybe Chris was not so willing to fight for me. Us."

  "Hanna, I’m pretty ignorant about divorce. It does seem to me you ought to get a lot from Roy, but how much is right, or enough, I don’t know."

  "Yes." She went back to the coffee. "I’m sorry."

  "There’s nothing to be sorry about."

  "Chris tries to help me for no money, and I worry he’s no good. You try to help me for no money, and I try to make you tell me about Chris." She got up and ran tap water into her mug. "I’m sorry."

  I floated out a change of subject. "Hanna, I think I know a faster way than time to cheer Vickie up."

  She turned around, canting her head to the side.

  * * *

  "Oh, Mommie, she’s so cute!"

  Vickie was sitting on an aluminum folding chair, next to a honeycomb of cages, each one containing three or four kittens. The one on her lap had rolled over onto its back, writhing and purring in ecstasy as Vickie stroked its belly. Long hair of half a dozen colors, gene pool courtesy of Cuisinart. It was about as unlike Cottontail as it could be and still be called a cat.

  Hanna kneeled down to scratch between its ears. Remembering Nancy’s comment about an animal shelter in Salem, I had called the vet who’d helped us yesterday, and she’d given me the name and address. The shelter volunteer we’d met at the door came over to us and said, "You’re welcome to take any of the other kitties out of their cages, too."

  Vickie lowered her torso protectively over the tiny animal. "No, no! This is the one."

  The volunteer smiled. I said, "Looks like we’ve got a sale."

  "The IRS says we have to call it a ‘donation.' Why don’t you stay here while I finish with someone else at the desk? I’ll just be a minute."

  As she walked away, my eye was caught by a dog in one of the larger cages. He was some kind of terrier cross, maybe with a pointer. His legs were too long, his body too short, and he had a coarse, off-white coat with uneven orange blotches and scraggly whiskers. It was the look on his face that got me, though. A look that implied he knew he was an orphan, but not cute and cuddly, and therefore doomed to remain one. I turned away and hoped the volunteer would hurry.

  I drove Hanna, Vickie, and replacement cat "Rocky" (don’t even ask) home. Hanna insisted I stay for dinner, and through the kitchen window I watched Vickie play with her new pet in the small backyard. Nerida, Chris’s former client who owned the building, came out and cooed and dangled a length of yarn that Rocky batted incessantly. Vickie was delighted.

  "Thank you," said Hanna, cutting some vegetables into a steaming pot behind me.

  "She’s going to be all right."

  "Soon."

  Half an hour later, Hanna called Vickie for dinner, and the three of us sat down to family-recipe soup and bread. About midway through Hanna said, "You were in the army, John?"

  "Yes."

  "Overseas?"

  "For a while."

  "Germany?"

  "No, Vietnam."

  "Oh." She didn’t say that it was too bad that Roy hadn’t gone there and I to Germany, but she was thinking it.

  After supper, I tried to reach Murphy but got no answer at his home number. I slept for about five hours on Hanna’s couch. S
he tried to convince me to

  stay in the house this time, but I insisted on the car, calling the Peabody police to let them know I’d still be there.

  By 11:30, I was back behind the wheel of the Fiat. Hanna had fixed me a thermos of tea with lemon, which I stood upright on the passenger’s bucket. On the floor near the pedals was an old tin saucepan that she wordlessly had handed me on my way out the door

  Purple dress rolled in with a different guy, but he was too short to be Marsh in disguise. Aside from that diversion, Saturday night made Friday look like New Year’s Eve.

  EIGHT

  -♦-

  I had Sunday lunch with Hanna and Vickie, Rocky mauling a catnipped cloth mouse in the corner of the kitchen. By then, I was fairly sure that Marsh had decided to take the hint I’d dropped at his house, and I left Peabody around 2:00 P.M..

  Driving into Boston, I circled my block a few times to be sure old Roy hadn’t decided to shift his aim to me. I parked behind my building and trudged up the stairs. I tried Nancy’s number first, but apparently she wasn’t back from New York yet. I reached Murphy’s home, his wife calling to him to leave the grill alone for a while and come talk to me.

  "Cuddy?"

  "Hi, Lieutenant?

  "We got company for barbecue, so I don’t have too much time."

  "Shoot."

  "Your boy Marsh, Roy M., stirred some interest."

  "How so?"

  "Seems my friend in Narcotics has some photos of Marsh in the company of one J. J. Braxley."

  "This Braxley a cocaine dealer?"

  "Call him a distributor."

  "Big-time?"

  "Dawk—that’s my narcotics man, Ned Dawkins--he didn’t seem to think so. Braxley’s a Crucian."

  "As in Saint Croix?"

  "Right. Come up from the island in the early seventies, set up shop. Not oversmart, but enough careful and enough lucky to stay out of the big shit so far. Probably deals with a white dude like your Marsh just to spread the snow line a little farther north without a whole lot of risk."

  "Thanks, Lieutenant?

  "Cuddy, you remember what I said to you. And don’t you be messing with Braxley, either. Old J .J. like to use the muscle, and his hired help’d scare the Fridge off the football field."