Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy (9 page)

"Right. Well, Mrs. Robinette and Jamey moved in
just, oh, two years ago, maybe. And Mr. Dees about a year after that,
so only the Elmendorfs have been here as long as Steven and me.”

Guessing "Elmendorf" was Paulie's
"Eh-men-dor,” I tried to stay on track. "Did Mr.
Robinette die before they moved here, then?"

"Oh, yes. Sometime before that. I'm not sure
when, though."

"And now, how about the Elmendorfs?"

"That's Norman, and his daughter, Kira.
K-I-R-A."

"Wife?"

Stepanian looked away, a pained expression on her
face this time. "Norman's wife left him. After he got sick."

"Sick?"

"Yes, he . . . it has to do with the war."

"Which one?"

"The Persian Gulf." Stepanian came back to
me. "I mean, can you imagine, just abandoning your husband, and
child, and . . . taking off?"

"Any idea why she did that'?”

"None. It's so . . . abnormal to me,"
looking to the framed photo on the shelf. "But I'm starting to
sound like a gossip again."

Okay. "How old is his daughter?"

"Kira? About the same as Jamey Robinette, only .
. . I don't know, I guess I have this feeling that she's a year older
than he is? I'm not sure why."

Lana Stepanian had given me more than I thought she
would, but I didn't want to overdo the questionnaire on its maiden
voyage. I also had the feeling that Stepanian was running out of
information on her neighbors. "Last point, then. Where are the
Elmendorfs from?"

"His wife was from the South, somewhere. I never
knew her well." A bitter laugh. "I guess that's obvious,
isn't it? Anyway, Norman's originally from Massachusetts. He did
photography for the Brockton newspaper until—wel1, you can ask him
yourself."

Brockton was a small city, also in Plymouth County,
and a number of reserve units from the South Shore had been mobilized
for Desert Storm. "I wonder if you could just review and sign
this form I've filled out."

Stepanian looked at it, then to me. "Is this
really necessary?"

"It just shows I spoke with you and have a basis
for my eventual recommendation on the Hendrix Company."

More hesitation, but she finally picked up the pen.
When Stepanian gave the form back to me, "Lana Stepanian"
was scripted in a precise hand at the bottom.

I said, "Do you think Mrs. Robinette would be
home now?"

"I wouldn't know."

"How about Norman Elmendorf?"

Lana Stepanian smiled sadly, without showing any of
the tiny teeth. "Mr. Cuddy, Norman's always home."
 

=6=

Leaving the Stepanians' townhouse, I felt pretty good
about the cover story I'd given Hendrix and the way the questionnaire
had "tested" with the first neighbor, especially how Lana
Stepanian's reactions tipped me to some of the more "questionable"
parts of it. However, I really hadn't learned anything about Andrew
Dees beyond what Olga Evorova already had told me.

I walked down the Stepanians' path to the sidewalk
and past the Dees unit At the next path I went up to the door with
number 43 on it and ROB1NETTE under the button. When I pushed,
another bong sounded inside, but nobody answered. After trying the
button twice more without success, I tracked back down their path and
over to the Elmendorfs at number 44.

Their bong was answered by Kira's muffled voice
saying "Just a second,” and then she herself at the door. Up
close, the eyes under the platinum hair were brown, some silver
glitterdust sparkling at the comers. A stainless steel ring pierced
her left nostril, its triplets through her left ear but an inch above
the lobe. She carried a Sony Walkman in her right hand, the headpiece
to it down around her throat like a necklace.

Kira looked at me oddly, as though aware that she
ought to know me. "Can I help with something?"

I introduced myself and gave her my ID. There's no
photo on the license, but she still compared what was written on it
with my face, saying, "You were in The Tides today, right?"

"Right."

Kira handed my holder back to me, with a little
flourish I took to be her idea of coy. "So how come you're
following me?"

"I'm not. I represent another condominium
association that's thinking of hiring the Hendrix company to run
their complex, and I'm just checking on how well people who live here
think Hendrix performs for them."

"Well, I don't know much about it, but come in
anyway."

I'm not sure what I expected after the Stepanians'
place. In terms of structural layout, the Elmendorf unit had exactly
the same design, but mirror-imaged, so the kitchen was on the left
and the staircase to the catwalk on the right. While the Stepanians
had overstuffed furniture and carefully selected knickknacks, this
place seemed more cluttered than decorated. Magazines covered all the
horizontal planes. Teen, Outdoor Life, Elle, Popular Mechanics. Some
technical photographic journals were sprinkled into the general mess.
The couch, chairs, and table in the living room looked twenty years
old, used pizza boxes and Chinese food cartons stacked on the counter
separating kitchen from dining area. No sign of Norman Elmendorf. But
some sound of him.

A gravelly male voice called out from the upstairs.

"Kira, who is it?"

"No problem, Dad. Just a man wanting to know
about the condo management."

Kira said the words sweetly, no condescension toward
him or me in her manner.

"Well, send him up.”

She looked at me, spoke very quietly. "If you
don't go up to see him I'll, like, hear about it for a week. Do me a
favor, though?"

"What?"

Kira bit her lip once and let out a breath. "Be
gentle and patient with him, okay?"

Watching her, I said, "Okay."

She sat down on the old print couch, putting the
headpiece to the Walkman back on and picking up a magazine. Climbing
the stairs, I noticed only two chairs at the dining room table.
Looking down at the staircase itself, I saw a number of indentations
on the wooden steps. The marks were round and roughly the
circumference of a half-dollar. As though somebody on crutches had
been making this journey for a while.

When I arrived at the threshold to what I predicted
would be the master bedroom, the door was half open, but I knocked
anyway. The gravelly voice said, "Come on in."

Entering the room, I saw a man of six feet or so
lying in bed, propped up by two pillows behind him, a pair of metal
braces like polio victims might use leaning against the night table
next to him. The bedclothes covered his body up to the waist, but on
top he wore a hooded, navy-blue sweatshirt which I would have thought
too warm for the mild temperature on the second floor. Elmendorfs
smiling face was cheery, but the rosy cheeks, bulbous nose, and
crooked teeth caricatured him like an engraved portrait out of
Dickens. He was about my age with homecut hair, the rosy color of his
cheeks extending in blotches down his neck and onto his chest along
the zipper of the sweatshirt. I could see why Kira had asked me to be
gentle with him.

A liter bottle of Jim Beam was nearly dead on the
night table, two fingers of the bourbon in a glass next to the
bottle. Probably why his daughter had asked me to be patient as well.

"Pull up that chair. Kira uses it to watch over
me when I have nightmares, but they're hours away yet."

I tugged over a wooden armchair that might once have
stood at the head of the dining table downstairs. A print on its seat
cushion matched the one on the living room couch.

"Nightmares from what?” I said.

A tolerant laugh, though it came out more a grunt,
like he had phlegm in his throat. "The war, what else? Desert
Storm." Taking a swig of his booze, Elmendorf squinted at me.
"You?"

"Vietnam."

"Army?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"I was MP, so mostly Saigon, occasionally the
bush."

"The 'bush.' God, what we would have given for
some 'bush' where old Bushie sent us. Even a branch or a twig,
anything to throw a little shade."

"How did you get sent over?"

"My own stupid fault." Another gulp of
bourbon. "I went into the Reserves after college. Make a little
extra money, you know? Then I got married and Kira came along, and
the extra money looked even better, so I reupped each time. Never
thought I'd ever go anywhere, just weekends at Fort Devens or
wherever we did our training for two weeks in the summer. Kind of
fun, actually, be with the guys away from home every once in a
while."

"Until."

"Until is right. Should have known better."
Elmendorf set down his glass. "My father was in WW II, the 45th
Infantry. He's from Lowell here, but he gets stuck in the 45th with
all these National Guard guys from Colorado and Oklahoma, he can
barely understand how they talk. And where do they send him first?
Martha's Vineyard, to practice amphibious landings. Then he ships out
for Sicily somewhere. Here he is, this son of a German immigrant
himself, trying to take Italy back from the Italians and the Germans.
Crazy, huh?"

I wanted to be patient, for Kira and for me, so I
said,

"Crazy."

"And that's not all of it, either. When he's in
Sicily, my dad gets to see the first Bob Hope USO show, the very
first ever. There's Dorothy Lamour, Jerry Colonna, and Hope himself,
coming out on stage and telling jokes and dancing some, then comedy
skits. The show had to be held during the daytime, account of they
were afraid the German bombers'd see the lights at night. All that
and wounded at Palermo to boot, and he still gets called up for Korea
seven years later. Which is why I should have known better than to
stay in the Reserves."

"Where were you in the Gulf?"

"Oh, here, there, and everywhere."

Which seemed a peculiar answer, as vague as Lana
Stepanian had been about her husband's hometown.

Reaching for the glass, Elmendorf shook his head,
then downed the remaining liquor like a shot of tequila. "They
talk about Desert Storm as a war, and I guess it was, I don't have
anything to compare it to, myself. But you know how long the actual
shooting lasted? I don't mean those air raids in January and all,
just the actual ground war."

"Not long, as I recall."

"Not long is right. A hundred hours. Saturday,
twenty-four February, to Wednesday, twenty-eight February. I heard
one guy call it 'the Andy Warhol War,' account of it was like
somebody being famous for fifteen minutes, you know? Well, all I know
is I saw enough death and destruction to last me a lifetime. It
wasn't war so much as slaughter. A video game where you just racked
up points from planes or tanks or even the little bit of
house-to-house there was. The Iraqi Republican Guards, they were
well-armed enough, with nice green uniforms and these scarves around
their heads and necks, fishnet pattern, like desert chieftains or
something. But the poor regular soldiers? Shit, we just plowed them
under, right under the sand. The ones that surrendered, the
EPWs—Enemy Prisoners of War?—you could see them miles away, like
long lines of ants, marching across the horizon with their hands up,
praying to Allah because they were going through a minefield. I
swear, I was on guard duty one night, and there was a windstorm, and
by morning you could see all these mines the Iraqis had laid, a whole
line of them, forty or fifty, maybe five meters apart. And I looked
down at my LPCs and-"

"Your what?"

He motioned with the empty glass toward his feet. "My
boots. LPC, that stands for 'Leather Personnel Carrier'. Get it?"

"Got it."

"Like the Hummers, the desert jeeps we had? You
run them on asphalt, that's 'hardball.' You run them on sand, that's
'softball.' I read in a magazine that this car dealer in New Jersey's
selling them for winter driving, get through the snow like we did the
sand over in the Saud."

"What happened to you there?"

"You mean, how come I'm in this bed?"

"Yes."

Another tolerant laugh as he reached for the bottle
and poured a few more ounces without offering me any. "I used to
say it was from the MREs. You know what that stands for?"

"I heard it as 'Meals Ready to Eat.' "

"Yeah, well, I called them 'Meals Rejected by
Ethiopians.' Like, even starving Africans wouldn't touch them, get
it?"

A poor joke, but I let him have it.

"Only thing is," said Elmendorf, "it's
not the food that got me, though I had to eat those MREs anytime the
supply sergeant couldn't come up with better through his 'General
Store.' Scrounging and trading, you know?"

"I don't think that part ever changes."

A nod, then another toward the Jim Beam. "No
booze, though. Jesus, they were strict about that. A Moslem country,
we couldn't disrespect our hosts by drinking liquor before we went
off to die for them."