Speak Ill of the Living Page 13

  “He must have died early this afternoon,” Eddie said. “Our appointment was for two. He had water boiling for tea.”

  “Two mugs,” she said. “But you don’t drink tea.”

  Eddie shrugged. “How would he know?” He stiffened as the black-suited men from the funeral home wheeled the black bag on a stretcher to a waiting hearse.

  “Are you sure you have no idea what he wanted to see you about?” Orr asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Lew was a strange guy. Last time I saw him, he said he trusted me—or something like that—I thought he was under too much deadline stress. What did he want to tell me? Could have been anything.” Eddie put his head in his hands. “I hope it wasn’t what got him killed.”

  “We have to go over the basics, Ed. Can you do it now?”

  “Let’s get it over with.”

  Eddie described for Detective Orr the call he had received from Cuhna, and then everything he had done—and everything he had touched—after he had arrived at the news office. She took it all down in shorthand.

  “You two didn’t have any disagreements, did you?” she asked. “Nothing I’m going to find out about later, right?”

  “Lucy!”

  She raised a finger and scolded, “You ask tough questions in your job, and I don’t get offended.”

  She was right. She was doing her job; it would have been irresponsible for her not to ask. He shrugged. “I barely knew the guy. We met for the first time at the cop shop the day Roger Lime’s photo first appeared.”

  “What was Cuhna’s reputation in the news business?” she asked. “Was he aggressive? Could he have been doing an investigative story on some criminal element? Maybe he made some enemies that way.”

  “Oh, please,” Eddie said. Realizing he had sounded dismissive, he explained: “Lew was the editor of the paper and the only writer on staff—all those other bylines were fakes. He had no time for in-depth investigation. That’s not even the kind of journalism The Second Voice does. They do art reviews, doughnut shop openings, the police blotter, and the school lunch menus, when they’re not chasing the daily news a week behind the daily papers.”

  “I don’t like this coincidence,” she said. “Kidnappers show Roger Lime holding Mr. Cuhna’s newspaper, and then somebody kills Mr. Cuhna.”

  They watched the hearse drive off, its wheels scuffing over some sand on the parking lot.

  “I had an old editor in Vermont,” Eddie said, “who said that everything we write is all part of the same story.”

  Orr thought that over. “I had an old sergeant who used to say pretty much the same thing. That’s why I had hoped the tip from your brother would pan out, but no luck. I tracked down your brother’s old partner, Mr. Whistle.”

  Uh-oh. Eddie’s stomach flash-froze. He had forgotten that Orr planned to talk to Whistle. If Jimmy told her that Eddie had visited him, too, Orr would suspect that Eddie lifted the old con’s address from her office.

  He waited for the toothy fake smile that Orr used when she was about to grill him. But the smile didn’t come.

  “Mr. Whistle was responsive to questioning,” she said, slipping into copspeak, “but could not provide any information useful to the investigation.”

  How about that! Eddie marveled at the irony—Jimmy Whistle testified against Eddie’s brother thirty years ago, but he hadn’t ratted on Eddie.

  “Did he remember anything about Henry?” Eddie asked, probing as his gut thawed.

  “He could not provide any information useful to the investigation,” she repeated. She gave him the piano key smile, and Eddie knew to drop the subject.

  He took a deep breath to reboot his RAM, and focused on Lew Cuhna. “I suppose there will be a funeral,” he said.

  Detective Orr was busy with her notes.

  “Did Lew have a family?” Eddie asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Next-of-kin, in copspeak,” he said. He gave a sad smile.

  Orr frowned. “No family that we know of.” She flipped to the first page of her notebook. Eddie liked that—her first questions had been whether the dead man had family. “I spoke to the advertising manager at this newspaper. He told me that Mr. Cuhna’s parents had passed away. Cuhna had no siblings, no spouse, no ex-spouse. No steady girlfriend. No boyfriend either, as far as anyone knows.” She closed the book. “There’s nobody.”

  Eddie imagined Lew Cuhna’s funeral—an open casket in front of two dozen empty folding chairs.

  If a priest gives a eulogy and nobody hears it…did it matter that the person died?

  It was easy for Eddie to picture his own body in the casket. If he had burned up in the Chevette, who would have come to the funeral? The widowed aunts who had raised him, some reporter friends left over from his work at The Daily Empire.

  Is there nobody else?

  “No family,” Eddie said, thinking aloud. “No one to mourn him.”

  “At least there’s nobody to be devastated by his death,” Orr said.

  Eddie thought that over a moment. “I can’t decide if that’s a relief, or the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  ***

  The bike rumbled under Eddie on a meandering route toward downtown, past the Lowell Cemetery. For a moment he thought about turning into the graveyard and winding the bike along the curlicue streets, but the bright blanket of lilies and impatiens at the gates turned him away; he found the flowers too full of hope and he wanted to plow the bike through them. Lew Cuhna’s murder had left Eddie angry and choked with frustration. What had Lew wanted to tell him?

  Eddie needed a place to sort his thoughts.

  He gave The Late Chuckie’s rat bike the gas, and felt it lurch toward the Grotto. Jack Kerouac and his mother used to pray there. Eddie found it a good place to think.

  He could pray, too, he told himself as he drove there, but knew he wouldn’t. Eddie was an odd variety of spiritual person—he dropped often to his knees in thankfulness when times were good, but he preferred to meet crisis alone. It never seemed right to ask God to alter His world for Eddie Bourque. He also refused to pray when he was drunk, but that was just good manners.

  The Grotto was across the river from Eddie’s neighborhood of Pawtucketville, not far from the brick funeral home where Jack Kerouac was waked after his death in 1969. The Grotto was a shrine to the Virgin, modeled after one of Catholicism’s holiest spots: the rocks and natural spring near Lourdes, France, where Saint Bernadette claimed in 1858 to have witnessed visions of Mary.

  The Lowell shrine was concealed behind a grand old Victorian mansion of red brick and slate, formerly the Franco-American Orphanage. A person could live decades in Lowell and never know the shrine existed. Eddie had discovered the Grotto in Jack Kerouac’s novel Doctor Sax, and had been thrilled to learn that a piece of Kerouac’s youth had remained essentially unchanged.

  Eddie slowed the bike at the Grotto’s entrance, a curving paved road between a parking lot and playground. Down the right-hand side of the road were a dozen small shrines, each like a little wood and glass church, on pillars of smooth stones and concrete. Red lights in each box illuminated taffy-pink figurines representing the characters in the Stations of the Cross.

  The shrine was built by a Canadian religious order; the Stations are labeled in French.

  Jesus est condamné a mort.

  At the end of the road is a man-made mound of rock and concrete, a little urban mountain the size of a house, blanketed by ivy, topped with a few small fir trees and a life-sized crucifix. From a notch in the mound, a statue of the Virgin gazes to Heaven.

  Eddie swung his leg off the bike.

  Sometimes the Grotto was crowded with elderly people praying the rosary, or uniformed parochial school boys punching each other when the nuns weren’t looking, but not today.

  Eddie was alone.

  A shallow cave in the side of the mound contained a stone table, which was covered with two dozen white
candles in clear glass jars, about half of them lit. Eddie wondered who had lit them. Faithful people, probably. Or people in trouble and desperate for faith. There was a little wooden bench in the cave, too, and a few prayer books on the table.

  Eddie could hear traffic from behind the red brick mansion, but otherwise the shrine seemed to radiate silence.

  Kerouac had written of the Grotto: “Everything there was to remind of Death, and nothing in praise of life.”

  For Eddie, the shrine was not about death; it was proof that literature is immortal.

  He walked to the far side of the stone hill and climbed the stairs that rose like a spine on its back. At the top, Eddie could see the Merrimack River, fat and lazy, through the green screen of a willow. He leaned against the iron cross and watched a wind surfer on the river pulling against a bulging blue triangle of sail.

  He wondered what Henry was doing at that moment.

  Perhaps he was staring through an inch of safety glass, out the one skinny window in his 11-by-7 cell. Eddie tried to imagine what Henry’s view would look like. Razor wire. Trees in the distance. Cars whizzing along the street, going places no prison lifer would ever see.

  Eddie had grown up in competition with Henry, though Eddie had never won as many trophies nor done as well in the classroom. That competition had driven Eddie; it had molded his personality. But even when he fell short of what Henry had accomplished, Eddie always knew that he had beaten his brother. Henry was a murderer and Eddie would never be—and that score eclipsed every road race Henry had won, and every test he had aced in algebra.

  So why did Eddie still compete?

  Through his life, Eddie had come to think of Henry as a different species. They shared parents, but so what? Eddie had gotten DNA from his folks, and not much else. He never felt a blood connection to his brother, and had been curious about him only from a distance, the way an anthropologist is curious about a backward and primitive tribe in the deepest recess of a distant land.

  Shame had always kept Eddie from acting on that curiosity.

  Eddie’s parents never would have had a second child had Henry not been jailed for murder. Reduced to the barest and most brutal mathematics, Eddie owed his existence to Henry’s double homicide.

  He heard the inner echo of something Henry had said through the glass.

  If you went back in time to save me, you’d destroy yourself.

  Eddie pressed his palm on the metal cross, felt the heat it had collected from the sun. A secret truth suddenly revealed itself.

  That’s why I’m so goddam competitive.

  He had not been chasing Henry’s grades nor his high school track records. Not really.

  Henry had killed and Eddie was born. Other lives had been traded for Eddie’s. Not directly, of course, but that didn’t seem to matter. For more than thirty years, Eddie had been competing with the universe to justify the trade.

  He thought about the possibility that Henry was innocent.

  Why had Eddie been so reluctant to believe that his brother could have been wrongly convicted? What if Henry could prove his innocence? How would that change the calculus of Eddie’s life?

  Eddie chuckled to himself, imagining Thanksgiving dinner at Bobbi’s house every year. She’d probably make Eddie bring the turkey, and cook it, too.

  But would it change me?

  He looked up at the feet of the figure on the crucifix, just above his head. They reminded him of Dr. Crane’s feet, suspended above his garage floor. Eddie realized that in almost every important way, Henry Bourque had been dead for thirty years. Bobbi was convinced that Eddie was the one who could bring his brother back from the death of a life sentence.

  This really was a resurrection story, he thought.

  Eddie breathed deep and looked down to where the shadow of the cross lay over his feet. The Grotto had been built for those who believe in what they cannot know. So had the Catholic Church, for that matter—so had all the churches.

  Eddie pulled out his cell phone and dialed Bobbi’s hotel.

  She answered on the third ring after the call was transferred, sounding distant and unsure, “Um…hello?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Eddie?”

  “I’ll talk to Henry.”

  She paused. Eddie heard her sniffle. “Oh, little brother,” she said softly. “I just knew.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll see when he’s allowed another call.”

  “I can’t promise I can persuade him of anything.”

  She sounded confident. “You’ll do it.”

  They hung up.

  The Late Chuckie’s rat bike needed a dozen kicks before it started. Eddie didn’t mind. He was moving on autopilot, barely paying attention to the labor of stomping on the starter. The bike finally agreed to do its job.

  He roared toward home, feeling new confidence in his skills with the motorcycle, and a nervous chill over the possibility that Henry could win his freedom.

  With the state’s star witness against Henry hopelessly impugned, a motion for a new trial might have real legs. If the physical evidence against Henry still existed, the defense could argue to make it available for DNA testing that wasn’t around when Henry had been convicted. If the evidence was no longer in police storage somewhere, the case file could still overflow with reasonable doubt—with the right lawyer pushing the right buttons.

  Eddie parked the bike outside his house and bounded up the stairs. He should make some notes of the argument he would present to Henry.

  Inside, the house was dark.

  He closed the door, looked around.

  Why were the shades drawn? He didn’t remember—

  A hand from behind seized Eddie by the collar and the open-mouthed kiss of a gun froze the tender skin below his ear.

  Chapter 16

  The gun against his neck pushed Eddie roughly into the room. Eddie’s knees went weak and he stumbled. The man holding the gun grunted, the hand on Eddie’s shirt pushed him to his knees, and then bent his torso backward, the way Eddie imagined the mob would hold a guy before they whacked him. The gun knocked against Eddie’s skull.

  The room smelled like Skin Bracer.

  “Where’s my cat, Jimmy?” Eddie said. He was surprised at the level calmness in his own voice.

  Jimmy Whistle whispered close to Eddie’s ear, “Locked in the bathroom, and he’s gonna starve in there while you’re dead on this floor, unless I get some fucking answers.”

  Eddie flinched at Jimmy Whistle’s wet breath. But he felt relief.

  This is an interrogation, not an execution.

  If Eddie stayed calm, he could get out of this. He looked around the room for a weapon, just in case. His chess set was splayed over the coffee table. The piano bench was tucked neatly under the upright. His lumpy sofa bed with no back support could not be used to injure anybody, unless Eddie could get Jimmy to sleep on it. His eyes fixed on the brass pole lamp beside the sofa. It was five feet tall with a corrugated lampshade like the cap from a giant tube of toothpaste. The lamp was Eddie’s best option, though hardly a handy weapon to wield.

  “You had me fooled earlier,” Jimmy said. “I was buying what you were saying at my place, but I should have known better. I’ve been double-crossed by a Bourque before.”

  “I didn’t double-cross anybody.”

  Jimmy tightened his grip on Eddie’s collar. “Then who put that lady cop on me, eh?” he growled. “She came right after you did, asking what I know about this guy Lime, the kidnapped bank president. The thing is, I’m a good actor. You know how many shakedowns I saw in the joint? James J. Whistle, prisoner number zero-five-three-nine-two, is smart enough to play stupid.”

  Jimmy had played stupid with Detective Orr so he could take out his anger on Eddie. “I was just looking for information,” Eddie said.

  “Bullshit!” The gun pressed painfully into the flesh at the base of Eddie’s skull. “What ar
e you and your brother trying to pull?”

  “Pull? We’re not—”

  “You and Henry are pulling something,” Jimmy insisted. He paused. “You’re chasing the money, aren’t you?”

  Eddie said nothing. Jimmy shook him and roared, “AREN’T YOU?”

  Chasing what money? Eddie wanted to say. But he didn’t want to aggravate Jimmy Whistle, who seemed to be slipping into desperation. Desperate people are capable of anything, especially pulling a trigger. He wished he could see Whistle’s face, so he could read how close Jimmy was to going over the edge. Eddie thought about it. Chasing the money? The money from the robbery Jimmy and Henry had pulled off?

  That cash was never found, but that was more than thirty years ago. Would bills that old even be passable?

  “You stole it,” Eddie said. “Why don’t you chase it?”

  Jimmy banged the butt of the gun across Eddie’s spine. The startling pain sent Eddie wrenching against Jimmy’s grip, but the cold barrel went right back against the hairless spot behind Eddie’s right ear.

  General VonKatz called for Eddie through the bathroom door.

  Jimmy Whistle leaned close behind the barrel and informed Eddie, “That’s my fucking money.”

  Eddie said nothing.

  “I rotted in the joint, kept my mouth shut and told myself every day that I didn’t care about the gold.” He panted noisily. “When I got out I thought I didn’t need it, but things have changed. If you’re going after it, I want my share.”

  “The papers never said anything about gold,” Eddie said. “It was cash. A banking transaction.”

  “The paper’s were full of shit,” Jimmy whispered. “They print what the cops tell them, and the cops didn’t want anybody to know they were looking for gold bullion, untraceable if it’s melted down and recast.”

  Eddie was doubtful. “Why would the cops lie?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to start a treasure hunt, or maybe they didn’t want to explain why they couldn’t find a thousand pounds of fucking gold.”