Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy (23 page)

I heard Andrew Dees' voice, a romantic murmur. "Just
letting you know I love you."

Loiselle made a retching sound. "Usually takes
two people to fuck up a relationship, unless one of them happens to
be the Horse's Ass."

Through a couple of hang-ups, she continued.
"Remember when I met you here and you asked me about him?"

"Yes."

"Well, that message sums it all up. The man's
not so much transparent as translucent. The bad light shines through,
even if you can't quite see where it's coming from."

Then out of the machine came another voice I'd heard
before, from Olga's computer at the bank. "Olechka" again,
plus something rapid fire in what I assumed to be Russian.

Loiselle said, "Did you notice?"

"What?"

"Uncle Ivan used English at work, Russian at
home."

"And therefore?"

"He has nothing to hide, John. Otherwise they'd
both be in Russian."

I watched her as my voice came next, first from the
arrival lounge and the front door the night before, then alternating
with Loiselle's own, the last message her "Olga, please!"
from the bank half an hour earlier.

When the machine clicked off, I went to the window
and looked down. "Can you come here a minute?"

Loiselle joined me.

I said, "Is that empty space where Olga would
park her car?"

"Yes."

"Not good news."

"There's worse."

I waited for it.

Loiselle held up a toy the size of a hand calculator.

"Olga's PDA."

"Where was it?"

"On the desk." Loiselle looked back to the
black furniture. "She must have come home from the bank
yesterday and dropped this here, then taken off in her car."

"And not on business."

"Without this baby? Never." Loiselle's
expression grew dark. "What's going on, John?"

"I'm hoping you can help me find out.”

Loiselle looked around the room. "How?"

I inclined my head toward the PDA. "Can you make
that thing give us Uncle Ivan's last name and address?"

As she poked furiously at it, Loiselle said, "I
told Olga."

"Sorry?"

"If I told her once, I told her a hundred times:
'This Dees character is just no good for you.' "

"I hope you get the chance to tell her again."

Claude Loiselle looked up
at me, then went back to work even faster.

* * *

The address turned out to be a turn-of-the-century
building on Beacon Street near Coolidge Comer in Brookline, about
three miles from my place. Red brick with white cornices, the
landscaping of low shrubs and postage-stamp lawn was meticulously
trimmed, and the twin entry doors were oiled mahogany. Obviously
cared for by someone who really cared, and I thought again of Paulie
Fogerty at Plymouth Willows. Propping Nancy's rose upright against
the passenger seat so the water from its little tube wouldn't run
out, I left the car and walked to the main entrance.

Uncle Ivan's last name wasn't on the list of buzzers
and mailboxes between the entry doors and the security door, so I
pushed the one marked SUPERINTENDENT. After a short time, a
bandy-legged man who looked eighty but moved spryly appeared inside
the foyer. He opened the security door and stuck his head out.

"I can help you?"

It sounded like the voice from Olga Evorova's tape
machine. “If you're Ivan Evorova."

"That is who I am, but it is pronounce
'Ee-vor-ov', no 'a' at end. Because I am man, not woman."

He spoke with a certain loopy elegance. "My
name's John Cuddy, Mr. Evorov." I held out my identification
holder to him. "I'm a private investigator from Boston, and your
niece hired me. Now I'm trying to find her, and I'm hoping you can
help."

Evorov absorbed all this without looking at my ID.

"Olga, she has some kind of trouble?"

"I hope not."

His face darkened. "You will come in?"

"Thank you."

Evorov made a curious gesture with his right hand,
almost like a conductor cuing the brass section, and I followed him
down a sparkling, tiled corridor, the floor beneath my feet feeling
freshly waxed.

"You do a fine job of maintaining the place."

"It is good job for me now. Olga, she helped me
from her bank to get it." We reached the end of the corridor,
and he made the same conductor's gesture toward a door just barely
ajar. "Please."

I passed through a coat-closet foyer into a small
living I room, the furniture that puffy style of the Great
Depression, the floor hardwood and as polished as the tiles outside.
Instead of his niece's Russian motif, though, Evorov had framed
posters on one wall. Of Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House,
and other New York institutions. On another wall were framed photos,
all eight-by-ten black-and-whites, showing a 1940s version of him in
a tuxedo with entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.

I said, "You were in show business?"

"I played the concert violin." He gestured
again, this time toward a glass cube on top of a mahogany server.
Inside the cube were a violin and bow, arranged like museum pieces.
"Not for one orchestra only, but for many vocalists."

He walked to the wall of photos. "When I come
this country—from Soviet Union, 1932—the boat lands in New York.
But first I see the Statue of Liberty, and I tell you this thing: it
makes me feel very good, very warm inside. I am then on the dock
place, and all I have is my violin, in a leather case with handle.
And a man I do not know"—Evorov touched the corner of a photo
showing a man I didn't recognize, also in a tuxedo, hugging him at
the shoulders—"Teddy Adolph, who is there on the dock place
waiting for a relative, he sees me with my case and he says to me,
'You are musician or gangster?' And I do not know what he talks
about, but Teddy laughs and tells me if I am good violinist, he can
maybe get a job for me. Imagine, I am in this country five minutes,
and already yet somebody is helping me with job!"

I nodded at the other photos. "And you got to
work with some real celebrities?

Evorov shrugged. "Teddy, he was fine fellow and
always with his camera, but he took photographs only of the ones we
admire." He touched the comer of another shot. "Sinatra, he
was the best male vocalist I ever work with. The quality of the
voice, the showmanship on the stage. Nobody else ever come close to
him."

Evorov moved to a third photo, a man who was vaguely
familiar, with flowing gray hair. "This is Leopold Stokowski,
the finest conductor. His hair, like the mane of a lion it was. And
the hands? Stokowski, he never used a baton." Evorov made his
curious gesture with both hands. "He used his fingers, so long,
so graceful, and all his conducting he did with them. You play for
him, and it is like watching the butterflies on the first day of
spring."

Evorov touched a jaunty face I remembered from movie
musicals. "And Maurice Chevalier, you see his straw hat? He made
all the orchestra wear a hat like he did—a 'skimmer' is how he
called it. Wonderful man, Chevalier, wonderful personality. Was only
one problem for me with him. I have to wear the skimmer, and
everytime I do an upbow, I knock my hat funny. So I try to do more
the downbow, because it is the stronger motion, the exclamation point
if music is literature."

And one more. "This of me with Judy Garland
here, Teddy takes this photo at the old Metropolitan Opera House,
where I play for her two weeks. She was the best female vocalist.
Garland sang, you could hear the hurt in her voice. The only time I
ever cry when I am playing for the public." Evorov's voice
suddenly changed. "Mr. Cuddy, you going to make me cry about my
Olga?"

"I hope not."

He turned, indicating that we should sit. "Tell
me what you here for."

I took a puffy chair across from his. "Your
niece didn't come to work at the bank today. I found your messages on
her telephone machines there and at her apartment. Have you spoken
with her since?"

"Not since I leave for her the messages. She
always calls me back, unless she tells me she is going on trip."

"Trip?"

"Like for her bank or the vacation?" A
small smile. "Or maybe the weekend with her boyfriend."

"Andrew Dees?"

"Yes. You know him too?"

"Not really. We met once."

"He is fine fellow. Good match for my Olga. I
tell her so."

"You like him, then."

"What is not to like? He has his own business,
good manners at the table."

"Then you have no idea where your niece might
be?"

"No, but I tell you this thing: my Olga, she
cares about other people. She does not leave without telling me where
she is going, the people at her bank what she is doing."

Evorov's mouth twisted a little over his next words.
"Her friend there—the one who likes women—you talk to her?"

"Claude Loiselle. Yes."

"And she does not know too where my Olga is?"

"No."

The darkening came over Evorov's face again. "This
is very bad, yes?"

"It's hard to say. She's been missing only since
some time yesterday afternoon."

"When I am in Soviet Union, it is time of
Stalin. You know what that means, Mr. Cuddy? That means missing is
gone forever."

"Maybe not here, Mr. Evorov."

A head shake. "Stalin, he shot many people.
Millions, even during the Great Patriotic War. I am over here already
in the United States, but my friends, they tell me. All our
relatives, Olga's and mine, are dead from the war or dead from the
shootings or dead from the gulags. Stalin, he killed a whole country
of people. Hitler was a devil, that one. But Stalin, he was the
devil's devil, yes?"

When I stood to leave,
Ivan Evorov made me promise to call if I found his Olga. Then he rose
too, but got no farther than the photo showing him with Judy Garland,
and I let myself out.

* * *

"Lieutenant, you have a minute?"

"Cuddy. Where you been keeping yourself?"

"Out of state, on a case."

I closed the office door behind me. Lieutenant Robert
Murphy of Boston Homicide sat at his desk in a building off West
Broadway in Southie, a flowered tie snugged tight to the collar
button of a starched shirt, the points of the collar held close by a
golden stay. The single gold pen from the holder in front of him
contrasted, like another piece of jewelry, against the black skin of
his hand. Closing a file folder, he replaced the pen in one of the
holder's angled sheaths, next to the miniature American flag flying
at forty-five degrees in the other.

Murphy said, "Sit."

I arranged one of the green padded armchairs for
conversation, then tilted my head toward the folder he'd closed. "Am
I taking you away from anything?"

"Just another dead end. Had a shooting in
Charlestown last night. Seventeen-year-old Townie, three to the back
of the head. Neighborhood's only a mile square, and that's the ninth
hit we've had there since Fourth of July. Almost all the folks
involved are yours."

Meaning Irish-American. "The victims."

"And the shooters."

"You know who they are?"

"We know it, all right, based on who the victims
are. But knowing's one thing, and proving's another. Townie witnesses
won't come forward, and we can't arrest, much less convict, on motive
alone."

"What about the victims' families?"

"Not a word." Murphy rocked in his chair,
the swivel part squeaking like a saddle. "Last night, for
example. I'm watching the medical examiner's people finish up, and I
spot this one woman, she lost her own son two years ago to this shit,
and I ask her how long she's gonna put up with it, with seeing other
kids gunned off a street corner like her boy was. And you know what
she tells me?"

"No, what?"

"She says, 'Hey, if somebody knows who did it,
the somebody'll call the family, tell them what happened. Then, the
family wants to take out their grief, one of the sons or nephews'll
go kill the guy? "

"The Townie code."

Murphy let his eyelids drop to half-mast. "Every
society has one. Makes me wish I worked South Portland instead of
South Boston."

"South Portland. As in Maine?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"They got Cop Cards up there."

" 'Cop Cards'?"

"Right. Like for baseball or football, except
they got these color photos of the people on their police force, from
patrol officer to chief. There's information on the backs of them
about the cops and their families, and antidrug stuff, and so on. I
guess they release one card a week, and the department's swamped with
kids on that day, all wanting the newest 'collectible.' "