Speak Ill of the Living (8 page)

Chapter 10

Roger Lime was back in another four-by-six snapshot. Oddly, Lime was pictured holding the current edition of
The Second Voice
—the edition that had carried the
first
photo of Lime. The kidnapped Roger Lime was holding up a published photo of his kidnapped self. Eddie wondered about the
next
edition of the paper. If the pictures kept coming, how long before Lew Cuhna's front page looked like two mirrors reflecting into each other?

Eddie recognized the rock wall in the background of the picture—same as in the last Lime photo. He recognized the five-sided table that Henry claimed he had built from scraps of poplar. Eddie squinted at the table leg and felt his face flush; he counted seven marks on the leg, like little frowns, maybe from a curved hatchet blade.

He made some notes for his story. Lime was wearing black sweat pants, a peach-colored dress shirt, un-tucked, and a black baseball cap.

He appeared no worse physically since the last photo, but something seemed different. Eddie leaned closer, studying every crease in Lime's face, then leaned back and stared at the photo from a distance.

The creases in his face.

That was what was different—his face had
different
creases last time.

His expression is wrong.

In the last photo, Lime's face showed anger, even arrogance, like he was running out of patience with an incompetent employee, and was about to fire him.

Not this photo—Lime's eyebrows were high on his forehead, his eyes huge and round, his cheeks drooped, and his mouth bent into a stiff frown.

He was terrified. Or at least he looked it. It all went into Eddie's notebook.

Eddie loitered for a moment after he had finished with the photo. Did he dare stop to visit Detective Orr? Would she still be upset that he had read Dr. Crane's suicide note?

Eddie thought of General VonKatz. The cat was never shy in telling Eddie exactly what he wanted—
Wake up! Food! More food!
—and he was never any worse off for speaking up. This time Eddie would ask Lucy for exactly what he needed for the story—the ransom note. What was the worse she could do? Throw him out of that tiny office? Eddie would step out before she could crawl over the desk.

He spun and marched off, walking straight into Lew Cuhna. The shorter man's nose smashed into Eddie's sternum.

“Ow,” Eddie said, rubbing the spot on his chest.

Cuhna cupped his hand over his schnoz and cried, “Son of a bitch!”

“Shoot—sorry, Lew.” Eddie stepped forward to try to help… somehow.

Cuhna waved him away. “It's fine, fine.” He took a green pencil from behind his ear. “Not your fault, you didn't mean it.”

Eddie watched him scribble
a-s-s-h-o-l-e
on his pad.

“Um, are you sure you're okay?”

Cuhna crossed out what he had written. He drew a giant exclamation point. “Lot on my mind, Bourque, okay? Got another paper to put out by myself again this week.”

“News never stops,” Eddie said, but Cuhna wasn't listening.

Cuhna drew a rainbow on his pad, or maybe a frown. “Don't need this, can't take another week of this,” he said. He crossed out the frown, and then looked up hard at Eddie. “You're a good man, Bourque. A newsman. I trust a good newsman.”

Were those tears in Cuhna's little green eyes? From hitting his nose, maybe? Cuhna just gazed up at Eddie, apparently waiting for some kind of answer.

Eddie nodded, unsure. “Okay, Lew.”

Cuhna wrote
O-K
on his pad in heavy letters, and then headed off to do his job.

Eddie stared at the back of Cuhna's head for a moment, wondering what was going on inside it.

***

“No way, Eddie. Not a chance in hell.”

“Lucy, come on—you haven't even heard what I'm asking for yet.”

Standing behind her desk, Detective Orr closed her eyes a moment and held up her hands like she was stopping traffic. “I don't need to know. Take this down in your notebook,” she said, pausing a beat. “There is no way in hell that I could give up what you're about to ask for—no chance, no how, not in
this
lifetime, or the next one, and things are looking doubtful for the lifetime after that.”

At least she's thinking about it.

The desk in Detective Orr's tiny office was strewn with manila folders and computer printouts. Eddie couldn't help himself; he glanced to the pile, just for a second—he couldn't read anything because the damn type was too light.

Don't they replace the toner around here?

Orr frowned, reached for a stack of printouts and flipped them over. “I got a lot of work to do,” she said.

To most people that might have sounded like an invitation to scram; to Eddie it sounded like an opening. “I can help,” he offered.

He smiled while his inner librarian ransacked his brain for any shred of logic that could explain how giving reporter Eddie Bourque some secret inside blab might aid the police investigation.

“I don't even want to ask.”

“It's simple, really,” Eddie said, stalling. His librarian was screaming and shoving over the bookcases. Eddie picked one word, almost at random. “Pressure.”

Orr perked. “Huh?”

Eddie verbalized the brand-new thought as he was creating it: “You guys publicly released the kidnapper's photos of Roger Lime to turn up the pressure on whoever grabbed him, to educate the public into a tip generator. If they try to move Lime, he gets recognized and your phones light up.”

She nodded slowly. “Right,” she said, sounding suspicious, still searching for the trap.

Eddie turned an invisible valve in the air. “So crank up the pressure. Let me see the ransom note.”

Detective Orr blanched, and Eddie talked faster: “When the kidnappers see their own note quoted word-for-word in a news story running in papers across the country, they'll feel heat. Maybe somebody will recognize the syntax and rat them out. You see what I'm saying? Is it handwritten? If it is, even better. Just leave it near a photocopier and turn your back.” Eddie winked. “Presto—you can say you have no idea how that note got to the press, because you didn't see a thing.”

Detective Orr looked at him and sighed. She pulled the vinyl-padded chair out from under her desk. The wheels screeched like an old shopping cart. She dropped hard on the seat.

Eddie pleaded, “Don't you want to catch the bastards?”

“I can't give you what I don't have,” she said, suddenly sounding exhausted.

Delicately, Eddie prodded: “I know it's not exactly, precisely, particularly
your
case, but you have access—”

“There's no note,” she interrupted.

She rubbed her eyes and then looked at her hands. “It's the most publicized case this department ever had, and we have no working leads,” she said. “None whatsoever.” Then she closed her eyes and massaged her temples. “And I can't get myself assigned to the case. I'm being shut out. The whole department is focused on finding Roger Lime, except me.” She batted a stack of printouts with her hand. “I'm following the suicide of a medical examiner with a guilty conscience, or maybe with psychosis.”

“So you think it was suicide?”

She looked at him. “Not for the record, at least not yet. Okay?”

Eddie hated taking tips off the record. He would never burn a source by printing something he had been told in confidence, so an off-the-record conversation sometimes made him feel like he was typing his story in handcuffs. But Lucy Orr was no ordinary source. She was the only friend Eddie had outside the newspaper business.

“Off the record,” Eddie affirmed. “But I reserve the right to badger you into going on the record later.”

She gave a sad smile. “We don't know what happened to Crane,” she admitted. “The rope marks around his neck angle up toward his ears. Those abrasions—and the note, and the ladder—say suicide.”

Eddie sensed a “but.” He waited.

Orr continued, “But there's a bruise at the base of his skull we can't account for.”

“I don't understand. A bruise?”

“Like maybe that's where a killer leveraged his hand when he choked Crane to unconsciousness, before he dangled him from the noose.” She demonstrated, jamming her left palm into a make-believe neck, while her right hand jerked an invisible rope. “And then there's the noise you heard,” she added. “You might have stumbled onto a murder minutes after it happened.”

Eddie's imagination superimposed a life-sized image of the man in the ski mask, a noose in his hand, behind Detective Orr.

Eddie shut his eyes, willed the fantasy away. He looked at Orr. “Let's go with this a minute,” he said. “The killer hears me calling for Dr. Crane and beats it. But he can't be sure I didn't spot him. So after your colleague, Detective Brill, releases my name to the headline whores from Boston TV, the killer follows me from home, lies in wait all afternoon and then offers me a body massage with his Goodyear radials.”

Orr rubbed her palms together. “Could be, Eddie,” she said. “But you've been in the news business a long time. We can't say how many people you might have pissed off over the years. It could have been an unhappy reader playing out an old grudge.”

“There's no such thing as coincidence,” Eddie said, stabbing his index finger on her desk for emphasis. His own words brought to mind Henry's tip about the disappearance of Roger Lime. He needed to find Henry's old partner, and Detective Orr could help.

“It's time I come clean with you about something I'm working on,” Eddie said. He tapped his notebook. “Gimme half an hour to file this piece on the new picture, so the General and I can pay our rent.”

***

After Eddie filed an eighteen-inch story, he met again with Orr in her office.

She made a few notes in a handheld computer as Eddie described his brother's background, the letter Eddie had received from him and the strange tip Henry had offered during the prison visit.

When Eddie had finished, Orr tapped a stylus on her tiny computer and scrolled through her notes. She looked perplexed, as if in pain and trying to decide if badly hurt.

Finally, she said, “Are you thinking that Dr. Crane invented his testimony thirty years ago, to put your brother away?”

Eddie spread his hands. “I don't want to go that far—yet.” The statement was one part lie, one part true. He was eager to believe his brother was not a killer, yet afraid to invest any hope in the long odds that Henry could ever establish his innocence. “I need to check out what Henry is telling me. I can't even be sure his old partner is still alive, or that he ever got out of prison.”

Orr rubbed her chin. “Lots of those long-timers don't get out. Once they see how slow the time passes, they quit on life and pick up new charges—assaults mostly, occasionally attempted murder, or the successful kind.”

Orr turned toward her desktop computer. “If this guy did get out, after all that time, he'll be on the probation rolls for the next thousand years.”

She banged the keys.

Eddie laughed. “You type with two fingers—like me.”

“I type at the speed I think,” she said, pounding the poor plastic keys like they were the skulls of her enemies. “Any extra typing ability would only be wasted capacity.”

Eddie smiled. Lucy Orr was practical to the point of being eccentric about it.

“Ah,” she said, and stopped typing. “According to this, Mr. James J. Whistle is no longer a guest of the state. Wow—he got out early this year. He's on intensive probation, of course. The probation record is clean and complete, no unexplained absences or positive drug screens.”

Eddie sunk to one knee behind her, and leaned in to read over her shoulder.

Orr shifted to block his view. “Sorry, Ed,” she said. “These records are private. I can tell you that your man is out of state custody because that's public information, but there's a lot of personal info here that I can't release.”

“I understand,” Eddie said. He lowered his head in disappointment.

“Thanks.”

She waited until Eddie began to stand, and then turned her attention to the spreadsheet on her computer.

As Eddie slowly rose, his chin lifted, as if pulled by a force outside his will. His eyes raked the computer screen, digesting the green block letters on Orr's ancient computer. A moment later he was standing, head bowed like a penitent.

Orr banged one key. The information vanished from her computer. She picked up her handheld organizer and tapped in some notes. “I'll put Mr. Whistle on my list of subjects to interview in connection with Dr. Crane's suicide,” she promised. “I'll be interested if anything your brother told you gets a reaction from Whistle.”

Eddie smacked a fist into his palm. “Lean on him,” he said. “He's gotta know something.”

Orr flipped her handheld computer onto a stack of papers. “I can't do that, Eddie,” she said. “Your brother's crazy story…” She paused, clucked her tongue, stared at the wall a moment, and then gently started over: “With a perfect probation record, we have to assume that James Whistle is trying to start a new life. Until there's some evidence otherwise, I'm not going to do anything except ask a few simple questions, all right?”

Eddie couldn't stop nodding. He heard himself say, “Perfectly clear,” as his brain worked out the shortest route to the address he had spied on her computer.

Chapter 11

Jimmy Whistle's apartment house was a tan triple-decker, with cream-colored trim and a brick foundation, in Centralville, a crowded neighborhood chopped up into maddening little streets that unexpectedly dead-ended, merged at odd angles or suddenly became one-way. This neighborhood, like Eddie's Pawtucketville, was north of the Merrimack, and west of where the money was in Lowell. It was hard to avoid a Jack Kerouac connection in any part of Centralville; his family lived all over it. Whistle's place was three blocks from Baulieu Street, where Kerouac's brother, Gerard, died of rheumatic fever in 1926, when Gerard was nine and Jack Kerouac was four. Thirty years later Kerouac wrote a book about Gerard. He never got over losing his brother.

Eddie tipped the cabbie heavy and sent him along. Then he surveyed the neighborhood.

There was a Brazilian restaurant across the street. A sign in the window said,
Closed for renovations
, which was code around here for “cash flow problems, need another loan.” To the left of Whistle's place was another triple-decker, stripped of paint down to the bare gray wood, except the trim, which was pink. To the right was a square patch of yellow sand, weeds sprouting here and there. Whatever had stood there had been recently torn down.

There were no pedestrians in this part of the neighborhood, and no sidewalks. Just cars on their way to someplace more important. Down the street, some of those cars turned into an upscale fitness club, a recent charge by the forces of gentrification.

Eddie climbed the steps and knocked. A window shade moved and a muffled voice yelled from inside the house, “Yeah?”

“Mr. Whistle?”

The shade fell back. “That shithead's around the side.”

Around which side? Eddie walked toward the sand patch. The only door on that side was high above, at the second level, which led out into nothing. Maybe the person who built this place had figured on adding a deck. Or maybe he installed the door for his in-laws.

Eddie continued around the house. The backyard had not been mowed in a long time, if ever; the grass was waist-high and spitting seeds. Eddie could see an old-fashioned bicycle, single speed, with rust-spotted chrome fenders curved over the tires, on its side a few feet into the grass, at the end of a skinny track worn through the weeds.

Around the other side of the house, ten concrete steps led down to a white basement door.

Where else could he be?

Eddie stepped down three steps and then caught himself. What cover story would he use? That he was writing about ex-cons? That he wanted Whistle's comments for a retrospective on Greater Lowell's most mysterious double homicides? That Eddie was selling subscriptions to
Grit?

I'm here for the truth…I won't lie to get it
.

The door had a round window, like a porthole, shrouded by newspaper hung from the inside.

He knocked three times.

Eddie could hear somebody moving around inside, though nobody answered.

He pounded harder.

A man growled from behind the door, “Fuck you, bastards! I paid for two months on the first, and you won't get another cent from me until the end of next month. Goddam bloodsucker.”

Eddie felt his eyebrows levitate. “Mr. Whistle?”

“Did you hear me, bastards?”

“I'm not the landlord, Mr. Whistle. I don't want money. I just want to talk to you.”

The apartment was silent a moment. Then the door opened twelve inches and a head peeked around. “Talk to me?” He sounded curious, not angry. “Who the hell wants to talk to me?” Eddie got a whiff of Skin Bracer aftershave, the original scent that smelled like a barbershop.

Jimmy Whistle was older than Eddie had expected, late sixties, probably. He was Eddie's height, a little better than six feet. He had a reddish complexion, a big swollen nose and wore black-rimmed rectangular glasses, which magnified his deep brown eyes. The muscles at the corners of his lips were unnaturally tight, locking his mouth in a grimace; it gave him the look of a man forever agonizing over a tough decision. Whistle's voice was deep and clear, and Eddie guessed he probably was a good singer.

The head in the doorway looked Eddie over. “Do I know you,” Whistle said, “because I think I know you.”

“You don't. I'm a reporter, and I have a couple questions.”

Whistle looked into his apartment, and then back at Eddie. “It's a mess in here.”

“Two minutes, Mr. Whistle.”

Whistle turned away, muttering, but he left the door open. Eddie followed him into a dank living room transported from the 1970s. Butter yellow plastic tile covered the walls, under a drop ceiling painted mold-green. The room was furnished with two ancient upholstered chairs that the Salvation Army wouldn't have accepted if you stuffed the cushions with money. The room smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and General Gao's chicken. Takeout food containers, a pizza box and about thirty orange Moxie cans littered the coffee table.

Whistle wore maroon penny loafers, no socks, tan slacks and a loose blue pullover, like something a hospital patient would wear. He looked around the apartment and spread his hands. “A shithole, like I said.”

He didn't look like a killer. He looked like a lonely old man, as if he had recently become a widower and was struggling to care for himself after a lifetime of depending on a woman to buy his clothes, make his meals, clean his mess and find the TV clicker when it slid under the sofa. Prison had been James J. Whistle's wife. They had been married thirty years.

Looking him over, Eddie listened for the screams of James J. Whistle's victims—not just the armored car guards, shot or stabbed and buried somewhere in a shallow grave that nobody had ever found, but for all the people he had victimized early in his career. What had Jimmy Whistle been as a young man? Gang leader? Street punk? Strong-arm robber? How many people did he maim before the men in the armored car? Eddie listened, but heard only the wheeze of an old man.

He took out his notebook and plunged into the interview. “I'm a freelance writer working on a story—”

“What's your name?” Whistle demanded, calm but firm. He lifted his head and peered at Eddie under his glasses.

Eddie tapped his pen on the pad, stalling. He had promised himself he wouldn't lie to get the truth. And maybe it would help if Whistle knew who he was. He said, “My name is Bourque. You knew my brother.”

Whistle's eyes narrowed and he nodded slowly. “Now I see how I know you.” He backed up toward an end table made from creamy white plastic. Keeping his eyes on Eddie, he reached down, opened the drawer and took out a gun.

Eddie's throat tightened. He stiffened in place.

Whistle laid the black pistol on the table and stood beside it. Quietly, he said, “What do you want, Bourque?”

Eddie tore his eyes from the gun, and looked at his brother's old partner. Whistle had not pointed the weapon at Eddie. The message was more of a warning than a threat. Eddie said, “Is it legal for an ex-con on probation to have a firearm?”

“Is it healthy to have a nine millimeter slug bore through an eye into your brain? What the fuck do you care about legality after that?”

Eddie tried to stand at-ease, resting his weight on one leg.

He just wants to scare me.

“Tough point to argue from my position,” Eddie said.

Whistle's mouth smiled, but his eyes weren't involved. “Funny man, like your brother. He was a comedian—yep, a homicidal comedian. Did you come here to even the score for him? Well, you can forget it. I said what I had to on the witness stand.” He glanced to the gun, then back at Eddie. “Don't forget that I went to prison, too. I did every goddam minute of the time I got. Henry can do the same. It's been more than thirty years. The statute of limitations has expired on his revenge.”

Eddie suddenly realized that Jimmy Whistle wasn't trying to scare him, he was scared
of
him. Still, Eddie needed to tread lightly. He had covered enough murder trials to know that fear can reach critical mass and ignite anger, and that guns have a mysterious knack for going off when somebody in the room is angry.

“I'm not here to get back at you for testifying against my brother,” Eddie said in a calm voice. He shrugged. “I wasn't even born then.”

“Then what's your question?” he said, sounding impatient.

“Was my brother into woodworking?”

Whistle's mouth drooped open. “You hunt me down in my home, after thirty years…” He batted the air in Eddie's direction to show his disgust.

“Henry said he made a table before he got arrested.”

“I don't remember.”

“Light-colored wood,” Eddie said. “Made it by hand, he told me. A five-sided table. I need to know if he's telling the truth. So if you don't remember a specific project he did, can you at least remember if he ever worked with wood?”

Whistle smacked his lips, grabbed his chin and looked to the floor. After a few moments he said, “The kid mentioned he wanted a workshop, I think.”

“You
think?
”

Whistle's eyes flickered up at Eddie's hard tone, but that was all. He continued, “We were gonna split the score down the middle.” He closed his eyes and laughed softly. “I was heading to Amsterdam, first class, with my dough.”

“Amsterdam?”

“It was like Oz to the younger version of myself. Booze and hookers, no rules if you don't hurt nobody, and I figured that with my share of the money I could afford not to hurt anyone ever again.” He gazed off and seemed to lose himself in an old regret.

“And Henry?” Eddie prompted.

“He wanted a big house right here in Lowell, the best part of Upper Belvedere.” He snapped at Eddie, as if a thought had suddenly occurred to him: “Do
you
live up that way?”

“At the moment I couldn't afford a refrigerator crate in Belvedere.”

Jimmy Whistle smiled, pleased by the answer. “Your brother had a place picked out—don't ask me where after all these years. Said it had land where he could build himself a workshop, someplace to put his tools.”

Eddie jumped in, “He used tools? Woodworking tools?”

Whistle nodded. “I think he did. You know, I remember him whittling now and then, too—not really making anything, just shaving away a stick. But he seemed to enjoy it. So, yeah, I suppose he might have been a woodworker—I can't say I knew the kid too personally.”

Eddie wiped his sweaty hands on his pants. Whistle's recollections seemed as close to confirmation as Eddie was going to get. The first part of Henry's story checked out, sort of—he
could
have made the five-sided table. But the second part—what Henry had done with his creation—would be harder to confirm.

I gave away the table I made to my partner's old lady.

How to bring up the subject? Eddie stalled, strolling toward a dusty window, high on the wall, which looked out to the weeds in the backyard. He had a hundred questions about Henry for Jimmy Whistle. “What was my brother like?”

Whistle snorted. “You really don't know, do you?”

“I've met him once.”

“It was like that kid was made of electricity,” Whistle said. “Nothing but nerve—raw nerves twisted together and stretched tight, like those power lines that are so fucking dangerous they put them on towers a hundred feet tall. He was all nerve, and no brain. He didn't understand there could be a downside to risk.” Whistle paused, looked at Eddie. “Henry Bourque was a beast.”

Eddie felt a sting in his throat, like he had been punched in the Adam's apple. He tried to swallow the feeling, but it wouldn't go away. “There's a lot I don't understand about the robbery,” he said. “How'd Henry get involved? How'd you guys ever plan it? How did you get control of the truck?”

“Too long ago,” Whistle said. “Who can remember?”

“Can we at least start with how you got the truck
open
?”

Whistle shifted, uncomfortably. “Like I said at the trial, I didn't deal with the details.” He looked at his wristwatch. “I got things to
do
, Bourque. We're almost finished, right?”

Eddie didn't believe him. He couldn't imagine Jimmy Whistle had anything to
do
but drink soda and watch the calendar from this little basement prison cell he had created for himself. And Eddie didn't believe that Whistle had forgotten the details of the heist. Whistle had paid his debt to society in prison, so why wouldn't he talk about the robbery? After all these years, what was there to hide?

Eddie stepped to a faded color picture in a plain black frame, hung eye-high on a wall. A redheaded little boy in the picture, probably five years old, had his right arm cocked back, holding a softball. The ball looked huge in his hand. His face was determined; he was going to make a good throw.

Eddie turned. Jimmy Whistle was watching him watch the picture.

“My kid,” Whistle said. “Jimmy junior.” His lip quivered.

“Jimmy junior,” Eddie repeated, marveling at the revelation that Whistle was a father. He studied the picture again. Maybe there was a resemblance, around the chin. The boy in the photo didn't fit Eddie's image of James J. Whistle. He had pegged Whistle as a former street thug, nothing more. He reached a hand toward the picture, to take it off the wall for a closer look.

Whistle thundered, “Leave him ALONE!”

Eddie's hand jerked back as if scalded. “I was just—”

“Just NOTHING! You wanna talk to me? I'm over here.”

Eddie felt the interview crumbling. He grasped for better footing. “What's your boy like now?”

Whistle rubbed a knuckle beneath his nose and grumbled, “How would I fucking know? I took that picture the month I got pinched. Last time I saw my kid, I was in the back of a squad car. He was crying and I think he pissed his pants.” He laughed, sad and ironic. “I think we had both pissed ourselves. Five years of fathering was all that boy ever got. I hope it was enough. I saw to it that he was taken care of, protected—but you can't be a father through a wall.”