Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy Page 9

  I reached into the portfolio to get one of my forms. "It would only take——"

  "I said I don't have time."

  His voice nearly cracked, and Filomena's lips parted briefly, as though she'd never heard him speak to someone this way before.

  I withdrew my hand from the portfolio empty. "Maybe if I came back—"

  "The answer is no, Mr. Cuddy. I don't have time for you or your questionnaire. Is that clear enough?"

  Dees turned and stalked back into the inner office, closing the door just this side of slamming it.

  Filomena's eyes went from the door to me. "I'm really . . . sorry. Something . . . something must have . . ."

  “That's okay, don't worry about it. Probably just hit him at a bad moment."

  She gave me a very weak version of the gracious smile, and I left the shop. Carrying the portfolio back to the Prelude, I wondered how Andrew Dees knew I had a questionnaire to work from before he'd ever seen me bring it out.

  =9=

  I drove north, sailing along Route 3 until the merge at 128, then getting mired in afternoon traffic on the Southeast Expressway just before the Dorchester gas facility. In the early seventies, an artist had painted one of the giant tanks with bold slashes of red, blue, green, and other colors. She'd since died, and a couple of years ago Boston gas tore the tank down, pleading obsolescence. There was enough cultural outcry that the company let another artist painstakingly recreate the pattern on a new tank, which from the highway looks pretty good, especially compared to the skeletons of grandiose office and residential towers that ran out of development money before anything but the structural steel got erected.

  Back in the city, I double-parked by a one-hour photo place long enough to drop off the film I'd shot at Plymouth Willows, asking in advance for a dozen copies of the fourth frame on the roll, which I figured to be the best one of Andrew Dees. Leaving the car in the slanted space near the dumpster behind my office's building, I went upstairs and dialed the district attorney's office. A secretary said Ms. Meagher was "on trial." Probably the attempted murder case she'd told me about the night before. I asked the secretary to let Nancy know I'd called.

  Then I tried Olga Evorova's number at the bank to bring her up to date on how little I'd found out and to ask her how far she wanted me to push an already upset Andrew Dees. I drew a very formal secretary who advised me that Ms. Evorova was attending a meeting out of the office. I left basically the same message with her that I had at the DA's.

  After organizing the questionnaires from Plymouth Willows into a simple file, I did some other paperwork for an hour or so, involuntarily thinking of Nancy and glancing at the telephone from time to time. Following that, I signed my name to reports a nice woman at the accountants' office down the corridor word processes "under the desk" for ten bucks a throw. Then I looked at the Plymouth Willows iile again. I was about to start counting the turning leaves on the Common's trees when the phone finally did ring.

  "John Cuddy."

  "John, it's Nancy."

  Just hearing her voice made my heart settle when I hadn't been aware it was stuck too high in the chest. "You got my message?"

  "At the office, but I'm calling from a bar thing."

  Her voice sounded stilted.

  " 'Bar thing'?"

  "You know, a Bar Association event, cocktails and then dinner. Boring, but appropriate for a lawyer of my acumen."

  More stilted. "Nance, is everything all right?"

  "Fine. I guess I forgot to mention the bar thing, huh?"

  Now over-casual. "Yeah, I think you must have."

  "Well, I'm sorry. I've got this trial still tomorrow, so I'm just going to head home tonight."

  "Right."

  A silence between us.

  Then Nancy said,

  "John, are you okay?"

  "Only if you are."

  Another silence. "You mean, did I call the doctor?"

  "That's what I mean."

  "I called her but didn't get a chance to speak with her. I have an appointment for tomorrow morning."

  "What time?"

  "John, it's nothing. Don't worry."

  "I do worry, Nance. What time?"

  "The appointment?"

  “Yes."

  "Ten o'c1ock."

  "That won't foul up your trial?"

  "The judge will let me work around it."

  "I'll drive you."

  "Where?"

  "To the doctor's."

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Her voice became a little sharp. "Because I'm a big girl, and I can make it to the doctor for a simple checkup on my own."

  "Nance, do me a favor. Don't turn my concern for you into some kind of insult to you, okay?"

  "John, I'm not in a position where I can discuss this very well."

  "Call me tomorrow, then, after the doctor's."

  "If I can. I've got to be back on trial for the afternoon."

  "I love you, Nancy."

  A softening. "Same here, squared."

  Then she rang off.

  I hung up the phone with a bad feeling. I tried to shake it off, then thought about burning it off at the Nautilus club back near the condo. Downstairs, the traffic on Tremont Street was gridlocked, so I walked to the photo place before getting my car. The pictures were ready, and the dozen extras of Andrew Dees at the driver's door came out beautifully. Small triumph.

  Putting the envelope of prints and negatives in a jacket pocket, I walked back toward the office, my mind on Nancy and whether I should have pressed more or less in talking with her. Coming around the corner of my building to the parking area, I registered only the forearm coming up, clotheslining me just under the throat.

  I went down backwards, a pair of strong hands on each of my arms as soon as I hit the ground. The hands brought me back up, face against the wall, my wrists twisted behind my spine as one hand on each side frisked me quickly.

  "I'm not carrying," I said.

  One of the frisking hands rapped at my left kidney. The pain and nausea broke over me like a wave, my knees buckling a little.

  A man's gruff voice spoke into my left ear.

  "And if you was?"

  I managed to say, "Then you'd be dead, and somebody else would be asking me these questions."

  The one on my right arm spun me around. I braced my stomach muscles for the shot I expected from his partner, but the punch, with fingers stiffened at the second knuckle like a striking cobra, still penetrated deep, taking my breath away as it doubled me over. Then the other guy used the heel of his left hand to smack my forehead, whiplashing my skull back against the brick. One hand from each gripped my lapels while the other hands pinned my arms against the wall. I was fighting the gag reflex and seeing stars, but I could also make out the two men.

  Both had dark hair, slicked back in a way that looked wrong, like they didn't have the right cut for wearing it that way. Each wore a suit jacket, with fly-away-collar shirt open to the third button and a gold chain instead of a necktie. Olive-skinned, burly, and a few inches shorter than my six-two-plus, one guy had coarse features, the other fine.

  Fine said, "You been asking around about Hendrix Management, Cuddy. Why?"

  "You guys . . . have condos too?"

  Coarse tightened his grip on my lapel and pushed me against the wall harder but didn't hit me. "You were fucking asked why, asshole."

  "I'm representing . . . another complex. They—"

  Fine pushed me too. "That's bullshit. Why?"

  "——they want to know how . . . good a company Hendrix—"

  Coarse pushed me again. We'd gone from a solid working—over to the schoolyard at recess, and I couldn't see why. "Which complex we talking about here, asshole?"

  The line didn't sound right coming from him, like Nancy on the phone. "Confidential."

  Fine said, "You got any idea the pain we can cause you?"

  Coarse grinned at me. Nice teeth.

  "My associate here,
he likes to kill people."

  "Loves to kill," said Fine.

  "Lives to kill." Coarse grinning broader.

  Fine moved his lips to within three inches of my face.

  "We got a message for you, Cuddy."

  "Simple message," said Coarse.

  "Yeah, but real irnportant," said Fine.

  Coarse brought his lips to the same distance from me as his partner's. I could smell the mint on his breath. "You tell your clients, Hendrix ain't interested in their business."

  Fine said, "You don't fuck around with Hendrix Management or its properties, capisce?"

  Coarse almost kissed me. "You don't go see them, you don't call them, you don't even fucking think about them."

  "Seems clear enough," I said.

  Fine feinted, as if to give me another shot with the cobra hand. I tensed as best I could before he pulled his punch.

  "Don't make us fucking deliver the message again, huh?"

  They both let go of me at the same time, Coarse hunching his shoulders, Fine shooting his cuffs like he'd just learned how that moming.

  Coarse said, "You stay right here."

  Fine gestured toward the dumpster. "Enjoy the garbage, like we had to, fucking waiting for you.”

  "And don't start up or anything before we're ten minutes gone." Coarse flicked his fingertips at me. “Capisce?"

  I watched them walk out, Fine forward, Coarse backward, watching me. When they reached the side street, they turned left and disappeared.

  I rubbed my stomach, coughing up some remnants of lunch that didn't have any blood in them. As the adrenaline wore down, I shook a little too. The guys had come on hard, then backed off. They didn't feel right to me, like they'd seen somebody else do this kind of routine and were trying to copy the model.

  So, maybe they were mob-connected and maybe they weren't. I wasn't sure, but I thought of one person who might be able to shed some light on the subject.

  =10=

  Hey-ey-ey, Cuddy, how you doing."

  A greeting, not a question. His right hand returning a car phone to its cradle on the console, Primo Zuppone looked up at me from the wheel of his Lincoln Continental, the same one he'd had when I first met him. Mid-forties, he wore a double-breasted blue suit that didn't do much to hide his blocky body. The hair was still black and slicked over the ears, duck's-ass style. His complexion hadn't changed, either, ravaged by the pits and scars of teenage acne. The brown eyes glittered happily above his half-smile, a trademark toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth.

  "Primo, it's been a while."

  "Get in, get in." He leaned over, opening the passenger's side door. "We'll drive around, listen to some music."

  I slid onto the front seat gingerly, the buttery leather creating almost no friction against my suit pants. I noticed Zuppone checking his rearview and sideview mirrors, and then me. A leather coat the same color as the upholstery was folded carefully on the back seat, an audio cassette partway into a dashboard slot next to the radio.

  Primo pushed the cassette the rest of the way into the player. "Tim Story. Solo piano mostly. You ever hear him?"

  "I don't think so. I have some Liz Story tapes. They related?"

  A tick-tocking of his head, left to right and back again, as we moved into traffic. "Beats me. I just listen to the shit, I don't study it."

  I'd first met Zuppone working a case that involved the Danucci crime family from Boston's North End. Primo had been the "situation guy" assigned by them to "coordinate" with me. A mobster who loved New Age music.

  The cassette began to play, a mournful piano accompanied by something acoustical.

  I said, "That Wim Mertens album you gave me still sounds great."

  He rolled the toothpick from one comer of his mouth to the other. "Glad to hear it. That was Close Coven am I right?"

  "I think so. It was a bootlegged tape, so there isn't a lot of information on the cassette holder."

  "Yeah, yeah. It's a homemade jobbie, that was Close Cover all right. They love him in Europe—he's Dutch or some fucking thing—but it's tough to get the guy's stuff over here. I'll dupe one of the other albums for you."

  "Thanks."

  Zuppone nodded. "How do you like old Timmie so far?"

  "Reminds me of old Wimmie."

  Primo glanced over. "That's pretty fucking good, Cuddy, just off the top of your head and all."

  My turn to nod. "Hope you'l1 understand if I don't ask after the family."

  "Tell you the truth, they probably wouldn't be so hurt about that. You're not exactly on the Christmas list from the last thing, you know?"

  A killing I was part of had been cleaned up by a friendly funeral home and covered up by a doctor beholden to the Danuccis.

  "So, how have you been, Primo?"

  "Pretty good. All things considered, anyways. Just got back from A.C."

  "Atlantic City?"

  "Yeah." The toothpick rolled to the other comer. "I go down there a couple, three times a year. This friend of ours comps me to the charter flight and hotel. You oughta see their idea of a fucking honeymoon suite, it'd look great in a Madonna movie. Best part, though, I met this guy named Enrico, used to be a POW in World War II."

  "Prisoner of war?"

  "Yeah, but one of ours."

  "I don't get you."

  "I'm standing around the casino, taking a break, and I overhear this little old guy talking in Italian to a little old lady, looks like she's gotta be his wife. So I say something to the guy, and it turns out this Enrico served his home country in the Italian army and was one of our prisoners, way out in the desert, Arizona someplace."

  "And he came back after the war?"

  "And got made a citizen some fucking way, don't ask me how. Anyways, Enrico starts telling me what it was like to be a POW, and it was fascinating. I mean, he remembers being in the middle of Indiana, and then they get told by this MP—that's what you used to be, right?"

  "I was Military Police, but a lot later on the time line."

  "Right, right. Vietnam, I remember. But this little old guy, he's telling me about the MP captain who's moving them by some kind of convoy—like fifty trucks, ten Italian soldiers to a truck, all lying down on the floor of the thing, with guards and a canvas stretched over slats above them. Like a fucking olive-drab covered wagon, get it? And the MPs, I guess they bought these prisoners box lunches along the way when they stopped for gas or whatever."

  "Anyone try to escape?"

  "No. Enrico said the captain told them through an interpreter that if anybody lifted his head, the guards would shoot it off. Then, after they drive around the clock, they get to this camp in the desert, godforsaken fucking place with chain-link fences and barbed wire, like five hundred of the guys per compound. And one day, there's an attack."

  "Attack?"

  "Yeah. Must have been locusts or grasshoppers or something, but I guess the prisoners just went nuts, account of they thought it was like the plague from the Bible and the fucking bugs were gonna eat them. So apparently this same MP captain—he wasn't their commandant like that Klink guy from Hogan's Heroes, he had to come from somewhere else—he yells at them through an interpreter again to get back, get back into the center of the compound. And then the captain, he takes a flamethrower—a fucking flamethrower—and starts frying these bugs, on the wire, in the air, you name it."

  "Sounds wild."

  "It gets better. After the bugs incident, I guess the real commandant decided he ought to do something for the prisoners, they been scared out of their fucking wits and all. So he asks them, 'What do you guys want to do?'—as kind of a break, you know? And they tell him, 'We want to go see Hollywood.' They've been captured in a fucking world war, but everybody knows about Hollywood, right? So the commandant, he tells them, 'I'l1 take you out there a couple, three busloads at a time.' "

  "You've got to be kidding."

  "Uh-unh. Enrico says the prisoners were real well-behaved in the camp, and Hollywood turned out to b
e only a few hours away from where they were. I guess the commandant got all these Italian prisoners GI American uniforms, but no insignia on them. Enrico said he thought there'd be some kind of 'shoot-us-like-we-was-spies' problem if the commandant gave them patches and stuff. So, they troop onto these busses, in American uniforms, and go to Hollywood, where—get this—the guards let them leave the buses and fucking walk around, see where the actors had their stars in the cement and all."

  "This really happened?"

  "Hey-ey-ey, Cuddy, what do I know? I wasn't there, but Enrico says he was, and the way he described things, I'm inclined to believe him. Well, anyways, they're walking around Hollywood when this same MP captain—the one who moved them from Indiana and fried all the bugs?—comes roaring up in a jeep to the bunch of guys Enrico's with and just goes bullshit on them. In English, of course, but Enrico said you could kind of catch the guy's drift in any language. And then they all had to get on the buses again and back to the compound. The rest of the prisoners never got to see Hollywood, and Enrico says he never saw the camp commandant again."

  "Great story, Primo, but how was the gambling?"

  "Huh?"

  "In Atlantic City. You went there to gamble, right?"

  "Oh. Oh, yeah. Picked up almost four thousand on one of the tables."

  "Roulette?"

  "Right, right. But I gotta tell you, I like watching the suckers play the slots almost as much as gambling myself. The machines, they've changed most of them over to a computer thing now. Totes up your money, keeps track of it like a bank account, all you got to do is look at the screen."

  "Sounds like expensive equipment.”

  "Yeah, but you know why they did the changeover?"

  I thought about it. "So the suckers don't have to waste gambling time by feeding in the quarters."

  "You got it. Good example of what can happen when higher technology falls into the wrong hands. Of course, there's a row or two of the old-fashioned machines, too, the jobbies with the big handles? They keep those for the illiterates, I guess, the ones get scared off by anything like a computer. Anyways, I'm walking along, and this rickety broad—had to be eighty she was a day—is pulling the lever on one of the old machines so hard and so fast, you'd have thought she got paid by the quarter herself. Only thing is, she all of a sudden lets go of the handle and grabs her chest, like she's having a heart attack. The rickety broad hits the floor, and there's at least three other old people rushing to take her place at the machine, thinking, 'It's gotta pay off now, right?' Then this young broad next to me says, 'What do you suppose happened to her?' And I say, 'Maybe all the blood rushed to her wrist.' "