Blunt Darts Page 8

  We simultaneously said, “I’m sorry,” and laughed.

  I stopped sooner than she did.

  “Oh, John,” she said finally, “I’m so sorry I acted that way at the beach. It’s just that violence, in any form … well, it makes me feel sick, and …”

  “It’s all right. After I thought things through, I agreed with you. Let’s forget it. Okay?”

  A final sniffle at the other end of the line. “Okay,” she said.

  “Val, I’ve been thinking. Stephen doesn’t seem to have confided anything to his family. Was there anybody in your class he was friendly with?”

  She paused before answering. “Gee, John, that’s a tough one. Like I told you at L’Espalier, Stephen really is different from the other kids his age. I never noticed that he particularly palled around with any of the other boys.”

  “How about the girls?”

  Valerie giggled. “I’m not sure he was feeling the urge yet, although after what Miss Pitts said … Hey, wait a minute. There was one girl in the class who kind of, well, looked him over, if you know what I mean.”

  Boy, did I. “What’s her name?”

  “Kim Sturdevant. I’m not sure, but I think I remember seeing them eating lunch together when I was on cafeteria duty.”

  “Can you fix it for me to talk with this Sturdevant girl?”

  “I don’t know,” Valerie replied. “I’ve met her mother at parent-teacher conferences. Kind of mousy but okay. Her father I haven’t met, but she gave me the impression he runs kind of a tight ship.”

  “Maybe if you called the mother and sweet-talked her …”

  “I’m not so sure my sweet-talking is very effective anymore.”

  I let Valerie’s oblique comment pass. “I don’t see any other way for us to get inside Stephen’s recent thoughts.”

  “Well,” groaning more than sighing, “I’ll give it a try. Call me—no, I’ll call you, to let you know how I made out.”

  “Right. And thanks.”

  “Why not show your thanks?”

  Didn’t see that coming. “How?”

  “Dinner!” Valerie whooped. “But at my place, since you treated at L’Espalier and since the picnic was, well …”

  I pictured Valerie, then Beth. “I don’t think I can make it tomorrow.”

  “Oh, the men of your generation are so backward about accepting dates. I’m meeting a friend from college in Boston tomorrow night, anyway. How about Saturday?”

  “Val, I don’t know how the case will be—”

  “Like we said about the picnic, you still have to eat. See you here at seven. I’ll even provide the wine.”

  “Val—”

  Click.

  That made twice. Annoying woman, squared.

  “I’m tired, John. Dog-tired, damned-tired, down-and-out tired.”

  I let him vent for a couple of reasons. First, we were in his office. Second, in my opinion, Mo (short for “Morris”) Katzen, at age fifty-three, had become the best reporter in Boston. He is also the only reporter on the Herald-American who will speak with me, and I don’t even know anybody on the Globe. Since our city has only two major newspapers, and since I was trying to locate Thomas Doucette, a reporter or ex-reporter, I needed somebody in the biz to be my source.

  So I let Mo vent. A lot.

  “I’m tired of sports, John. I’m tired of the Red Sox breaking our hearts, I’m tired of the Patriots not even breaking our hearts. I’m tired of prizefights in hockey games and ballet dances in prizefights.”

  “Sports can be frustrating, Mo.”

  “Tell me about it.” Mo paused to puff obscenely on a cigar that looked as fit for any human’s mouth as a wolf-turd. He had a dour face and so much white wavy hair that at first you’d think it was a toupee.

  Mo Katzen was wearing his unvarying uniform: gray suit with a too-wide tie, visible because he wasn’t wearing the matching jacket, and his vest was completely unbuttoned. I once asked Mo why he even bothered to put that outfit on in the morning, when he sloughed off most of it by 10:00 A.M. His response? “It makes me look like a lawyer, John. Gets me past all kinds of screeners.” Since in twelve years I had seen neither the vest buttoned nor the jacket, period, I felt justified in reserving judgment.

  Mo took the wolf-scat out of his mouth. “Tell you what else I’m sick of. Politics. We got a mayor who builds buildings instead of neighborhoods. We got a school committee run by a Federal judge and school kids who can’t read and write English. And we got two fuckin’ newspapers that don’t do anything about it because one’s a black-and-white version of Sports Illustrated and the other’s a gossip rag with one foot in its fiscal grave.”

  “Politics stinks, Mo,” I said, and then, to be sure I wasn’t being deficient on my side of the conversation, I added, “And the newspaper business isn’t like it used to be.”

  “Tell me about it.” Now four more puffs. “At least in the old days, we covered stories with some soul behind them. Aw, people got corrupted, just like now. But back then, it was more, I dunno … understandable somehow. People were selling out so their kids could have food on the table or operations in good hospitals. And those stories hit hard because they hit home, you know? You’d write the story and, proofing it, say, ‘That gets to me, what this poor shit must have been going through, and now what’s gonna happen to him? And you’d read it, John, you’d read the story in the evening edition and you’d go, ‘Jesus, that could of been me. I learned something today.’”

  “I remember those feelings, Mo.”

  “Of course you do. Everybody does.” Three new puffs. “Everybody old enough, anyway. Nowadays, look around, what do you see?”

  I looked around. All I saw was Mo’s office, which could have passed for Hitler’s last bunker or a maturing hazardous-waste dump.

  “Youth!” he boomed, coming forward in his chair. “Youth!”

  “Youth is everywhere, Mo,” nodding my head.

  “Damn right. These kids, the kids that the school committee doesn’t educate, they graduate from high school anyway. John, half of them never wrote a book report. Shit, half of those probably never even read a book. They ‘intern’ here. Intern, that’s the word we’re supposed to use nowadays for ‘office boy,’ although both males and females can be office boys and you sure as shit better call them ‘young men’ or ‘young women’ or interns for neutral—they ‘intern’ here because they saw the movie All the President’s Men a couple, three years ago and they wanna be ‘journalists.’ You hear that, John? ‘Journalists.’ I haven’t met one yet, not one, that’s actually read the book version of All the President’s Men, and only two could spell Bernstein’s and Woodward’s last names right the first time.”

  “Youth can be sloppy, Mo.”

  “Aw, it’s not just sloppy, John. It’s the way they’ve been brought up. On TV and now videogames. Videogames, can you imagine? I got a niece—twelve years old—and she can’t speak a word of Hebrew, probably not even a syllable. When I was growing up in Chelsea, late-thirties, it was maybe seventy-five percent Jewish, twenty-five percent Italian. All the Jewish kids could speak enough Italian to be polite to the old store owners and whatever, and for sure understand the dirty jokes. The same for the Italian kids with Yiddish, even Hebrew. Now, Jesus, we don’t even give them names you can recognize any more. That niece of mine? Jennifer. Jennifer, can you fucking imagine? When we grew up it was Morris and Dario, Etta and Philomena. Now it’s fucking Jennifer and Ashley, Trevor and … and …”

  “… Stephen?” I offered.

  The cigar went limp in Mo’s mouth. “What?”

  “Stephen. With a ‘ph’ instead of a ‘v.’“

  “Oh. Yeah, and Stephen, right. Oh, I’m telling you, John, I’m tired. Dog-tired, down-and-fucking-out tired.”

  I glanced at my watch. Mo Katzen usually runs his course in fifteen minutes, and the repetition of his opening stanza is often the giveaway. “Mo, I was …”

  “You know, that’s why they g
ot me in here.”

  Often, but not always, the end-game.

  “They gave me my own office. Me, a reporter. No Pulitzer putzin’ Prize or anything. Just me. Back in the day, I don’t think the city editor had his own office. But I got one. And you know why?”

  I cleared my throat. “Ah, no, Mo, I don’t.”

  “It’s because of them.” He swung his hand in a majestic, all-inclusive arc. “It’s because of youth, John. The brass is afraid I’ll infect them. So they stay out there with their video terminals and I stay in here with my Remington,” which he paused to slap, firmly but affectionately. “Mo Katzen types his stories on this, but then they gotta go to somebody at one of those terminals to be entered. ‘Entered.’ That’s another word like ‘intern.’”

  “Bad words, Mo. One and all.”

  “Tell me about it. I haven’t had three stories in a year get printed without ‘constituency’ becoming ‘constitutional’ or ‘receive’ becoming ‘recieve’ or … oh, I dunno. I’m just so tired, John. So fuckin’ tired.”

  He paused again to resuscitate the cigar. I leapt into the breach.

  “Mo, I was wondering if you could help me.”

  “Sure thing, John.” Two puffs, fresh smoke. “What’s up?”

  “I’m trying to locate a guy who was a reporter for a suburban paper but now is supposed to be in Boston. His name is Thomas Doucette, and—”

  Mo held up his hand to stop me. “Assistant editor, The Gay News, South End. I forget the street.”

  “Thanks.” I rose. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Hell, John, if that’s all you wanted,” Mo Katzen managed between puffs, “why didn’t you just say so?”

  Fifteen

  I HAD A FILLING MEAL at Dante’s, a restaurant on Beacon Hill with a spicy Italian menu and an incongruously Asian staff. It’s a candlelit place, spread over several rooms, with low ceilings and fireplaces. I was the only one eating alone. Romantic couples occasionally glanced sympathetically at me as I chomped my linguini and read the Evening Globe.

  Next morning, I started out running four miles but cut it back to two because of the humidity. I cleaned up and grabbed a few doughnuts on my way to the rent-a-car, happily still parked where I had left it.

  The Gay News was located on a South End street that was “in transition.” For some cities, that expression is an unfortunate euphemism for racial evolution. Boston, however, uses the expression to reflect a building-by-building renovation. The South End (not to be confused with heavily Irish South Boston, where I grew up) is predominantly narrow streets, some with imitation gas lamps. The architecture is three- and four-story, attached brick townhouses, many with beautiful, bowfront windows. The population is a mixture of upper-middle-class, young professionals, gays, blacks, Greeks, Cubans, and a dozen other racial or ethnic minorities. The major condominium developers in Boston moved from Back Bay and Beacon Hill to the Waterfront, somewhat leap-frogging its South End because of the street-level drug trade and derelicts, neither ever brought under control. Accordingly, you can have one block of burgeoning gentrification and an adjoining one of accelerating degradation.

  The newspaper offices I was looking for were over a Greek restaurant in the middle of a nice block. Finding a parking space, I trudged sweatily up the stairs.

  To find no air-conditioning. But by the bustle of activity in the large cavern, you’d never guess that the staff was troubled by the heat. About ten men and women were telephoning and typing (old I.B.M Standards, most not even electric), editing and jabbering cross-desk or cross-room.

  A man about twenty-five came up to me. “Can I help you?” he said, without expression.

  I decided to try a smile. “Mo Katzen at the Boston Herald said I might find Thomas Doucette here.”

  The young guy smiled back. “I’ll get him for you.”

  Apparently trading on the news fraternity does open doors.

  I watched him walk to the back of the newsroom. He tapped a thirty-something, slim man with short-cropped blond hair who was bent over a spread of papers. My emissary pointed me out, and the blond man nodded and came over, hand extended.

  “I’m Thom Doucette. T-H-O-M, if you’re from the Herald, too.”

  I wasn’t sure if Doucette’s remark was an inside joke or an allusion to the staff spelling capacity of which Mo had complained so bitterly. I laughed politely and shook hands.

  “My name’s John Cuddy. Mo thought you might be able to help me with a story I’m following up.”

  “Happy to if I can. Mo sat at our paper’s table for the last Boston Press Club luncheon.” Doucette gave a quick frown. “He was one of two who did.”

  I nodded. “It’s kind of confidential.” I glanced quickly around the room. “Is there some place private we could talk?”

  Doucette regarded me for a moment, then said, “Let me make a call first.” He turned and moved to a vacant phone. His call was quickly made and nearly as quickly concluded, but he came back smiling. “All set. There’s a park two blocks from here. It’s not private, but it’ll be a hell of a lot quieter and probably cooler than this place.” Doucette moved past me toward the door.

  “That’s probably the least amount of time Mo’s ever been on the phone in his life. What’s your secret?”

  Doucette turned and gave me a sly smile. “He did say you were a pretty good detective.”

  The “park” was in a traffic triangle perhaps fifty feet on a side. There were nine newly planted trees and four newly painted benches. One was occupied by two men, one of whom smiled at me while the other glared at him.

  Doucette and I took the farthest bench. There was very little traffic, and a robin played king of the hill to three sparrows in “our” tree. We had bought lemonades at a corner grocery and had just exhausted the subject of Mo Katzen as mutual friend when we settled onto our bench.

  “So,” said Thom Doucette as he downed the last of his drink, “what’s the story you’re following?”

  “The death of Diane Kinnington. I’m investigating the disappearance of her son, Stephen, and …”

  I stopped because Doucette’s face had turned the color of sun-bleached putty, and I was afraid he was about to hurl his recently consumed lemonade all over me.

  “Shit,” he said. “You’re the guy who was at my parents’ house.”

  “That’s right. Your mother seemed pretty upset.”

  “She said it was a man and a woman, but supposedly from the school department.”

  “No one misrepresented anything,” I said quickly. “The woman I was with is a schoolteacher. Stephen was one of her students this year. I’m afraid your mother never let us explain ourselves.”

  Doucette gave a short laugh, and some of his color began to return. “That’s like Mom. Always protective. Even to the point of getting her facts wrong.”

  I sat back on the bench. “What are the right facts, Mr. Doucette?”

  “‘Thom,’ please.”

  “Thom. And I prefer ‘John.’”

  He nodded absently, then stared at the ground and licked his lips. “Did Judge Kinnington hire you?”

  Easily answered, but I decided a fuller explanation might advance me. “No. Confidentially, Stephen’s grandmother, through that schoolteacher, hired me. So far as I can tell, the judge is hindering, rather than advancing, the search for his son.”

  Doucette sniffed. “That doesn’t surprise me.” He licked his lips again, looked up at me, and took a deep breath. “John, moving to Boston and working on this paper—The Gay News I mean—has been the best … choice in my life. I’ve pretty much put Meade behind me. If … things got opened up again back there, I can’t be part of it.”

  “I understand.”

  “No. No, I don’t think you do.” Doucette seemed to puff up a little, regaining most of his facial color. “Working on this paper, you get cursed at and jeered at and threatened, but it’s all small-time stuff. Over the paper’s telephone, sometimes at home. That’s why I cho
se ‘unlisted.’ But, the Kinnington death, that was the real thing. If he … if it comes out that I’ve talked to you, I could be killed.” Doucette gave it a beat. “No joke, John. That was the threat three years ago.”

  I tried my best steady look. “Thom, I promise that I will not tell anyone—at any time—that I’ve spoken with you.”

  Doucette nodded once, then swallowed twice. I offered him the rest of my lemonade and he quaffed it. “So, what do you want to know?”

  “As I started to say, I think there’s a connection between Diane Kinnington’s death and Stephen’s disappearance. I don’t know what that connection might be, but I think it could help me find him. Precious few people seem interested in contributing to that effort, including some of those who should be most concerned. Since I don’t know what I’m looking for, it would probably be best for you to just tell me all you know—or even suspect—about her death that night.”

  A woman walked by with a dainty dog on a purple-ribbon leash.

  “Okay,” said Doucette. He waited until she was beyond earshot, then began.

  “I don’t remember whether it was March or April, John, but the weather was still cold and rainy.” Another beat. “You know much about small-town newspapers?”

  “No.”

  “Well, a reporter isn’t paid a lot, and the newsroom isn’t open after maybe three P.M. SO, you get most of your tips from the police radio. One advantage is that, by definition, you’re close to the action in your town, and the Boston papers and stations can’t beat you to the scene.

  “Well, it must have been about one in the morning, maybe one-thirty. I couldn’t sleep that night, so I was dressed, but in bed, reading a novel. I was still living with my parents. I heard his … an officer named Gerald Blakey’s voice came over the scanner on my bureau.”

  “I’ve met the man.”

  Doucette visibly shivered, then continued. “Gerry was calling in to the dispatcher, saying a Mercedes had gone off the Swan Street bridge and was in the river.”

  “Did Blakey say he saw the car go into the water?”

  Thom Doucette finally looked at me as brightly as he had after his call to Mo. “No, which made me wonder how he could know it was a Mercedes. But I’ll get to that.”