Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy Page 3

  Nancy leaned over and nearly shouted in my ear, "See?"

  The director next presented a Cape Breton fiddle soloist, his style a cross between folk and bluegrass music. While he was good, the next performer was incredible. Introduced as Alasdair Fraser, the bearded, bearish guy addressed the audience in a thick Scottish burr, every other word going right by me. But then Fraser began to play, his foot keeping time, his body weaving and bobbing as the bow made the fiddle laugh, scream, and weep. I found myself stomping my own foot against the floor, and after he finished, the man received from all of us the kind of ovation given when the best in the world has done his best for you.

  This time Nancy just smiled.

  "Why do I ever doubt you'?" I said.

  "Don't ask me."

  We enjoyed another half an hour before intermission, then a rousing second set with the step-dancers and the soloists and a remarkable Highland dancer, noticeably past her teens, who literally flew around the stage. After the second encore, we moved out into the lobby, me stopping at one of the tables and picking up a cassette tape of Alasdair Fraser.

  Nancy said, "And why are we buying that?"

  "Because I don't have a CD-player."

  The smile that always reminds me, for no good reason, of Loni Anderson scoring points against the males on the old WKRP in Cincinnati.

  "Don't gloat, Nance."

  She tuned the smile down but not off, leading me into the crowd moving outside.

  * * *

  We drove to the place Nancy rents in South Boston, the top floor of a three-decker owned by a police family. As we climbed the interior stairs, Drew Lynch, the son in the family, quietly opened and closed the door on his landing, nodding to us in between.

  I said, "It's nice that they still check on your visitors."

  "They're the best landlords an assistant DA could have."

  On the third floor, Nancy opened the door into her apartment, her cat scurrying out to meet us. Renfield had needed surgery on his rear legs a while back, and he's managed only a gimpy, crablike way of moving ever since. But there seems to be no pain, and because I was the one who picked him up from the animal hospital, the vet thought Renfield had "imprinted" on me as a kind of surrogate parent.

  Right then, though, he was chewing on my right shoelaces, his clawless front paws trying to burrow down past the leather to sock and flesh below. "Well named."

  Over her shoulder Nancy said, "Sorry?"

  "Renfield. After the guy in Dracula who eats small mammals."

  She turned, smiling down at him. "He's a toughie, but you know he loves you, John."

  "Pity he shows it through a foot fetish."

  Nancy said the word "Yummies," and Renfield immediately forgot about me, scurrying back into the kitchen and watching intently as Nancy took down a small can, popped the top, and mashed the contents into the remains of his cereal food from the morning.

  Laying the Alasdair Fraser tape on the shelf near her telephone, I said, "What's he having tonight?"

  "Savory Salmon."

  "Why not Chunky Chicken or Tender Beef?"

  "He had those last week. I don't want him developing gastronomic ennui."

  "Not exactly marinated pork and veal marsala."

  She set the bowl on the floor, then came over to me, wrapping her arms around my neck and aiming a saucy smile roughly at my collarbone. "A certain prosecutor was thinking about Irish sausage for dessert."

  With the knuckles of my right hand, I tilted her chin up.

  "She's in luck."

  * * *

  Afterward, we lay in bed, cuddling front to front, the door closed to keep Renfield out until we were ready to fall asleep. Nancy's right side was toward the ceiling, and I stroked it slowly from shoulder to hip with the tip of my left index finger.

  In a purry voice, she said, "That should tickle, but it doesn't."

  "Only because I'm going slowly. If I speed up—"

  "John, don't."

  "—or use the fingernail-"

  "Please."

  "Okay."

  "It's just so nice like this," she said.

  "I'm glad we both think so."

  The purry voice. "Being with you is like being with nobody else."

  I stopped the stroking. "Kind of an odd way to phrase it, don't you think?"

  A giggle muffled by the pillow. "You know what I mean."

  Starting over at the right shoulder, I said, "I hope so."

  Nancy shifted a little, causing my hand to stray onto the base of her breast. I stopped again but this time sat up.

  "John, what's the matter?"

  "Hold still a minute."

  "What are you doing?"

  I touched and pushed and probed.

  "John?"

  "Nance, I feel something here."

  "Something?"

  "I don't . . . it's like a small lump."

  "Oh, that's nothing."

  "Nancy, it's the size of a cherry pit."

  "Sebaceous cyst."

  "A what?"

  "It's just a cyst from the oil in my skin. My mom had them all the time, and I've had a few already."

  "I've never seen one on you. Or felt it before."

  “That's because the last time was years ago. They form pretty quickly, and you can either have them cut out or just leave them."

  "Leave them?"

  "Yes. They usually kind of wax and wane on their own."

  I stayed sitting up, images of Beth flooding into me. The hospital room's mechanical bed and tiled walls, the smell of disinfectant, the sound of hushed voices. And too many tubes connected at too many places, her head on a pillow, the white turban wrapped in an unbalanced way around where her hair used to—

  Nancy said, "John, what's the matter?"

  I let out the breath I was holding. "It just took me back."

  "What did?"

  "Finding something like that lump."

  "How would . . . oh." Nancy drew herself up to her knees, her arms around my neck again, but differently than in the kitchen. "Oh, I'm sorry. This reminds you of Beth."

  "Yes."

  "John, believe me. The lump is nothing. I—"

  “You've had it looked at?"

  "Like I said, the doctors have always—"

  “This particular one?"

  A pause. "No."

  I searched for the right words. "Nancy, I know you're trying to make me feel better, but I'm not completely rational on this, and I really wish you'd go to the doctor."

  "Soon as I can."

  "Name the day, Nance."

  "I'll call you."

  "Now."

  She broke off the embrace. "John, I told you outside the office, I have an attempted murder—"

  "Nancy, that's your job. This is your life. Not to mention mine, if I'm lucky."

  A quieter voice. "And ours, if I'm lucky too." Another pause. "I'll call her tomorrow before court."

  "Thank you."

  We hugged and kissed. Rolled over and stayed still. But I don't think either of us got much sleep.

  =3=

  The next morning, I woke up when Renfield licked my eyelids open. Nancy wasn't next to me in her bed. I felt the sheets where she'd been lying. Cold.

  Swinging my legs to the floor, I stood with that dull fatigue that comes from getting only half as much rest as you need. I used the bathroom, then went into the kitchen. There was a handwritten note propped up against the sugar bowl.

  John,

  I didn't have the heart to wake you this morning

  when I knew you hadn't slept well.

  Thanks for pushing me last night.

  I'll call my doctor today.

  Love,

  Nancy

  Today. Not "before court," as she'd promised. Crumpling the note and pitching it into the wastebasket, I went to see if I had some clean clothes in her dresser.

  * * *

  I didn't. Have any clean clothes at Nancy's, I mean. After riding the bus to South Station, I too
k the Red Line to Park Street Under. I seemed rank enough to myself that instead of walking to the office across Tremont, I turned west and moved through the brisk morning air toward Back Bay. It being a Wednesday, most of the people with real jobs were already at them. While the Common therefore wasn't crowded, the grass wasn't empty, either.

  The nice fall weather brought out the decrepit homeless, the crazy homeless, and the enterprising homeless. Interspersed with them were others, like a young mom and her toddler playing Frisbee with a Heinz-57 mutt, the dog able to leap nearly two of its own body lengths into the air from a standing start, the child squealing in delight. Farther along the winding walkway, separate benches held African-American teenagers necking chastely, a middle-aged Asian-American man in a business suit working on a note-book computer, and an elderly white couple, apparently having an argument, each angled away from the other but speaking alternately in grumbles and hisses.

  Across Charles Street, Parks Department employees lovingly tended the flower beds in the Public Garden, their supervisor the bearded man with the headband who seems to have replaced the tanned man in the hiking shorts. I nodded at the bearded supervisor the way everybody does, meaning thanks for making the effort. He nodded back, a little sadly, I thought, maybe thinking how little more time was left for the blossoms this year.

  Which after last night with Nancy was the wrong way for me to be thinking. I shook it off and continued over the bridge above the Swan Pond. The red and green pontoons for the boats were moored in the center of the pond next to a skiff, the white swan figureheads and bench seating already removed and sent somewhere else till spring. I walked around the equestrian statue of George Washington, saber drawn but broken off at the hilt, and then up the Commonwealth Avenue mall under the century-old Dutch elms that were also reaching the autumn of their days.

  Jesus.

  I picked up my pace, breaking a little sweat under the second-day shirt. At Fairfield, I turned right, shortly hitting Beacon and going up the steps of the brownstone on the comer. I was renting a one-bedroom unit from a doctor doing a two-year residency in Chicago, and when I opened the apartment door, the morning sun slanting through the violet stained-glass windows across the rear wall of the living room reminded me briefly of a church service. I felt tight enough inside that I postponed the shower and change to pull on my running gear and go back downstairs. Crossing Beacon, I went over the pedestrian ramp straddling Storrow Drive and started upstream on the macadam path into a northwest wind that would have spent yesterday blowing newspapers along the streets of Montreal.

  I forced myself to watch the river. Ducks playing tag near the docks, cormorants diving for the fish making a comeback against the receding pollution, a lone night heron looking a little lost in the crotch of a maple tree. College freshmen learned to sail in the tricky, skyscraper-skewed winds, their sunny sails dazzling against the blue-black water. A women's scull surged downriver in eight-oared spurts, Harvard colors on the crew shirts. A State Police launch drew alongside a Miami Vice motorboat, checking some kind of paperwork.

  After two miles, I turned back at the Western Avenue Bridge, using the pace to force my thoughts toward managing my breathing, a deep breath drawn in for six strides, then blown out with three short bursts to follow. Six-three, six-three, over and over. It bought me fifteen minutes of focused, empty peace.

  Warming down against the trunk of a poplar at the Fairfield ramp, I noticed a golden retriever swimming along the opposite shore of the lagoon. On the grassy perimeter, two terriers, a cairn and a Scottie, scampered point and drag to the retriever. An older woman waved leashes at the dogs, whistling for them. The terriers responded but the retriever didn't, just plugging along in the water, jaws open, drinking in the day—and I hoped not too much of the lagoon water.

  Finishing my stretching, I walked back over the ramp, looking forward to a little professional deception to get my mind off my own reality for a while.

  * * *

  "Let me get this straight," said the young woman at the copy center, twisting a hank of frosted hair around her index linger. "You want me to type this up like a questionnaire?"

  "Word process it," I said.

  "All's we do anymore. We just say 'type' because it's easier, you know?"

  Elbows on the counter, I nodded as a disheartened yuppie asked a male near an enormous Xerox machine to print his résumé on "the ivory stock again, same as last time."

  My helper read my writing, twisting a different hank of hair. Either she'd been awfully active that way or she'd had a perm recently. "Now, you want lines next to the questions?"

  "Lines?" I said.

  "Yeah, like for the people to write on. Their answers, I mean."

  "No. Just some vertical spaces between the questions."

  "Even the simple ones, like MAIDEN NAME and EDUCATION, that stuff?”

  "Yes."

  A frown. "Gonna make it more than a page."

  "That's okay."

  “We get paid by the page here, typing and copying both."

  "I understand."

  "I took a course in school, too, on public-opinion polling? Lots of people, they won't fill out forms longer than one page."

  “I'll risk it."

  "Your call." She walked toward a desktop computer, a third hank twisting around her finger.

  * * *

  Carrying the duplicated questionnaires back to my condo, I put them in a portfolio with some of my business cards. Then I brought the portfolio and a camera down to my silver Prelude, the last year of the original model, but still holding up pretty well. The camera could be hidden nicely under an old newspaper on the passenger's seat.

  Driving south out of the city, I refined my strategy. A pretty simple one, actually. Olga Evorova wanted me to investigate Andrew Dees as discreetly as possible, and that would require a credible cover story. So, first stop, Hendrix Property Management in Marshfield, to lay a little ground-work for the story: that I'd been hired by an undisclosed condo complex to check out potential management companies for it, Hendrix being on my "shopping list." After Marshfield, I'd continue on to Plymouth Mills, interviewing Dees and his neighbors at Plymouth Willows. Ostensibly about Hendrix, but really using the questionnaires to profile everybody's background equally, so Dees wouldn't suspect he alone was my target.

  The more I thought about the cover story, the more I liked it.

  It took me thirty minutes to reach the Route 128 split. Once on Route 3 toward Cape Cod, the traffic began to thin, becoming downright manageable by the time I passed Weymouth. Another nine miles and I saw the exit for Marshfield coming up. I took it, the ramp dumping me eastbound on a two-lane highway with a third, middle, lane meant as a temporary sanctuary for left-hand turns. It was almost twelve, and rather than gamble on when the Hendrix folks took lunch, I pulled into their parking lot before looking for food myself.

  The building was beige brick and two stories tall, the center section of an otherwise one-story strip mall with bakery, florist, dog groomer, two dentists, and eight or ten others. The sugary scent from the bakery's ovens made my stomach growl but probably made the dentists happy. The signs over the doors were all done in curlicue lettering on wooden plaques, rendering them hard to read. Maybe that explained why the lot was only a third full, at least half of those vehicles probably belonging to people working for the businesses themselves.

  I left my car in one of the slots outside the dog groomer and went up to a plaque with the Hendrix name on it. Opening the door, I came into a small reception area with two leatherette sling chairs flanking a coffee table, the magazines on it a bit tattered. The indoor-outdoor carpeting was institutional green, the paneling that stuff you can buy in three-foot sheets and glue to the studs if a hammer isn't your favorite tool. The desk to the right of the door was unoccupied, a bodice-ripper romance opened face down at the halfway point of the paperback book. Other than a phone, pink message pad, and some pencils, there wasn't much to see.

  Then
an inner door opened, and a short woman with thick calves came through it. About fifty, she wore a simple wool dress that clung unflatteringly around the thighs. Her hair was graying, probably naturally, since I didn't think anyone would use salt-and-pepper dye on theirs. The face was alert but pleasant, like a career bureaucrat who knows her way around the agency.

  "May I help you?"

  "Ms. Hendrix?"

  "Me . . . ? Oh, no." The pleasant face treated me to a pleasant smile. "No, I'm Mrs. Jelks. Did you want to see Mr. Hendrix?"

  "Please. My name's John Cuddy."

  "Will he know what this is in regard to?"

  Awkward, if polite. "I'm here about a condominium that's seeking new management."

  The smile seemed to waver. "Certainly. Please have a seat, and I'll see if he's available."

  I thought, "Like you hadn't just left him alone in there," but kept it to myself.

  She disappeared through the same door, coming back twenty seconds later. "Mr. Hendrix will see you now."

  I moved past her and through the doorway.

  The inner office was bigger than the reception area, but that was the most you could say about it, the only window giving a panoramic view of the strip mall's Dempster Durnpster. There was another door to the left, and a desk with relatively little on it tucked into the right corner. A credenza matched the desk, sort of, holding an IBM clone, fax machine, and multi-buttoned phone.

  A man of about forty with sandy hair and tortoiseshell, round-lensed glasses rose from a swivel desk chair to greet me. "Boyce Hendrix, Mr. Cuddy." A mellow voice.

  Apparently Hendrix believed in "Dress-down Everyday." From the soles up, he wore old Adidas tennis shoes with no socks, stone-washed blue jeans, and a buff-colored safari shirt with Hap pockets. His handshake was firm and decisive, though.