Gravewriter Read online

  Martin crumbled the letter and hurled it with a grunt toward the open window. It sailed high, bounced off the glass, and rolled into a corner near a mousetrap baited with petrified peanut butter, an abandoned spiderweb, and a dozen other paper balls.

  “How can you respond if you throw it away?” Carol asked.

  “I have the return address,” Martin huffed. “Take a letter down for me. Please?”

  Carol smiled. Martin had never said “please” for anything before Carol had entered law school, six months ago. With her legal pad and a sharp no. 2 pencil, she wheeled her chair to the center of the small office, sat, and crossed her legs. She saw Martin’s eyes flicker for an instant to her coffee brown thighs as she casually pulled at her skirt and flipped it down over her knee. She looked away and smiled again. Martin had been married longer than Carol had been alive. She readied the pad and pencil.

  Martin rubbed his chin, looked off toward Saturn, and dictated.

  “ ‘Dear Dickhead,’ ” he began. “ ‘In response to your rant, there’s a little document I like to refer to from time to time, known as the fucking U.S. Constitution. I suggest you read it, or’—strike that—’I suggest you have somebody read it to you. I hope you can understand it, though I realize it was written a long time ago on old-fashioned crinkly paper, and there has never been a sitcom or a reality TV show based on the Bill of Rights.’ ”

  Martin stuck his thumbs in his waistband and paced, dictating off into space. “ ‘Idiots, such as yourself, may find the Constitution an inconvenient document, especially the parts about getting a speedy and fair trial, and the right to speak your mind in the newspapers. Well, fuck you. I will defend Peter Shadd because he is a man, a human being, presumed innocent, with rights of equal weight, in the eyes of the court, to you or me or the goddamn Pope’—uh, Carol, don’t put ‘goddamn’ before Pope.’ ”

  “Mm-hm,” she said, scribbling.

  “ ‘So in conclusion,’“ Martin said, “ ‘take a civics class and then kiss my ass.’ ”

  “Short and sweet,” Carol said.

  “Signed ‘Martin J. Smothers,’ blah, blah, blah—you know the rest.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Oh, and add a postscript. ‘When I say kiss my ass, I don’t mean the smooth white outer regions.’ ”

  “Of course not.”

  Martin plopped hard on his desk chair and tore open his McDonald’s bag. He bit into his burger and squirted shredded lettuce onto his blotter. “Uhhhhh!” he moaned in delight.

  “You sound like an addict getting a fix.”

  “Read back to me what you got,” Martin said, grease shining on his chin. “Please.”

  “ ‘Dear sir,’“ Carol said, reading her shorthand. “ ‘Thank you for expressing your opinion to me. What a delight it is to engage in robust debate. As a private defense attorney and a former public defender, I believe in the value of providing all citizens charged in a crime with a vigorous defense, as prescribed by the United States Constitution. Though you and I may disagree on the matter at hand, be assured that I respect your opinion and will take your comments to heart. Sincerely, Martin J. Smothers.’ ”

  The telephone rang on Carol’s desk.

  Martin grumbled, “At least you got the Constitution in there.”

  Carol grinned as she stepped to the phone. “Martin Smothers, attorney at law,” she said, using her polite but icy professional voice. Her eyes turned hard to Martin. “Oh—hi, Nicki,” she said, suddenly sounding breezy.

  Martin gagged and spit cow into the trash.

  “I’ll check,” Carol said, and then put the call on hold.

  “How does that woman know every time I’m eating meat?” Martin cried.

  “Because she’s been your wife for thirty-five years.”

  “I’ll be sleeping alone on the sofa for a month.”

  Carol laughed. “Your own fault for marrying into PETA.”

  “Tell her I’m having a salad—no, too obvious and unspecific. A falafel! Extra humus! And I’m not here. I already ate and you found the wrapper on my desk. Please!”

  “You know I don’t like to lie.”

  Martin stiffened, indignant. “Who says you gotta like everything you do to work here? I defend killers and rapists. Do you think I goddamn like it?”

  four

  “Povich! You brilliant son of a bitch! I’m glad I found you at work.”

  Billy could almost smell the whiskey through the telephone.

  “Phil?” he asked, checking his desk clock. “It’s almost two in the morning. Are you hammered?”

  “There are anvils that don’t get as hammered as I am right now,” admitted Phil Nussel, the paper’s lead investigative reporter, sounding like he had a mouthful of Novocain.

  Billy laughed.

  Nussel explained: “So I’m sitting here an hour past deadline with the Madam Vroom column, and I’m blocked, man. Fuckin’ blocked.” Billy heard a bottle hit the table. “Whoops! Hang on… . Anyway, I’m working on my column and I asked my buddy Jim Beam for some ideas and, goddamn it, he’s fresh out, too. So I thought I’d call my old partner, Billy f’ing Povich. ‘Cause there’s nobody cleverer than him.”

  As an investigative reporter, a sober Phil Nussel—or even a slightly less hammered one—was the best, like an FBI agent working under the First Amendment.

  Billy had no idea why Nussel had agreed to secretly author the paper’s horoscope column while Madam Vroom was out with bunion surgery.

  “What made you think you could write astrology?”

  “Pfffft!” Nussel scoffed. “Anybody can do it, so long as you know your ass from Uranus. Help me!”

  “I always try. What’s the sign?”

  “Capricorn,” Nussel slurred. “My nephew’s a Capricorn, so I was thinking of writing something to pick up his spirits. He threw six interceptions in his junior varsity game last Friday.”

  “How about ‘Try, try again—but after six times, give the hell up and join track,’“ Billy joked.

  “Hmmm,” Nussel said, sounding interested.

  “No—you freakin’ drunk, don’t write that!” Billy shouted. “Lemme think.… Um, try this. ‘Capricorn—troubles today feel like life or death? They’re much more important than that—they’re about life. Live through them, and don’t back down.’ ”

  Billy heard typing over the phone. “Oh, yeah, that’s beautiful,” Nussel said. “You should have this job. How do you do it every time?”

  “I’m a Capricorn.”

  “You, plus Alexander Hamilton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesus.”

  “That would be a hell of a poker game.”

  Nussel laughed, then suddenly became quiet and serious, the way drunken people do when they have something to tell you they think is so important, it could change the world.

  “Look, Povich,” he began. “When are you gonna get off the obituary desk? It’s below you, man. You’re a good reporter.”

  “Was.”

  “Still,” he insisted. “You think you don’t care about journalism, or the truth, anymore, but you’re wrong. I can still see it, even in those obits you write. Look, I got some political yank around this place.… I could sober up and put in the good word for you, maybe get your old beat back.”

  “Sober up,” Billy said. “You can do that much for me. Otherwise, I’m cool here for now. Look, man, the fax machine is spitting out another dead body, so I gotta go.”

  “When you’re ready,” Nussel said. He hung up.

  The Obituary department’s fax machine ground out the dead all night long.

  Billy was amazed that a life of seventy, eighty, ninety years could be condensed to a single sheet of paper, faxed from a funeral home. We should teach kids in preschool, Billy thought, to grow up ambitious enough to deserve a second page.

  The continuous flow of obits reminded Billy of visiting Niagara Falls as a young man. He had looked up from the deck of the Maid of the Mist tour boat and wondered how so much wate
r could come so fast, for so long, without running empty. How many people lived in this puny state? How many people could die in one night before Rhode Island ran out?

  Billy worked the late shift in the newsroom annex. The building was a converted train depot in a forgotten part of downtown Providence, isolated four decades ago by highway construction. The Daily Pen had taken over the depot and then divided the soaring space with a second floor to make two levels. The old redbrick walls had been covered with Sheetrock and painted a two-toned dirty yellow and avocado. Fluorescent tube lights hung from a web of stainless-steel conduit bolted to the timber-beam ceiling.

  A television was tuned to a twenty-four-hour sports channel. Billy kept the sound off. During the day, the dozen people who worked at the annex processed community news—graduations, military promotions, wedding and birth announcements, real estate transactions—the least glamorous parts of the paper.

  Billy Povich worked the obit desk alone at night, 7:00 P.M. to 2:30 A.M. He was generally undisturbed, except for when the security guard ambled through, smelling like pot.

  The obituaries Billy processed would be printed in the paper’s noon edition, which the editors put to bed every morning at ten o’clock. It was an inviolable deadline, controlled by the delivery drivers’ contract, so the late obits had to be in the can when the first editor arrived at 5:00 A.M.

  Billy liked the solitude. It spared him the looks from the paper’s city-side reporters and editors, who looked on Billy with pity and with contempt, for how far he had fallen.

  The depot’s wall clock, some six feet across, had stopped decades ago at six minutes to midnight. The giant clock face, with its black iron hands and fancy Roman numerals, reminded Billy of the Doomsday Clock, invented by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 to symbolize how near mankind had flirted with atomic destruction. If the Doomsday Clock ever struck twelve, the world would fizzle in a blizzard of hydrogen bombs.

  Billy had come to imagine that the depot’s clock measured his own doomsday.

  Six minutes to midnight.

  Seemed about right.

  The fax groaned and clacked and spit another dead soul into its tray.

  Billy snatched it up.

  A woman, seventy-eight years old. She had been born in Providence, gone to Providence schools. She’d lived here, worked and retired here, and died here yesterday. She’d be buried here tomorrow. She’d had her church and her garden club. No husband, no children. Two nephews in Colorado listed as survivors.

  Is that it?

  Billy sighed. He punched the information into his ancient computer, touch-typing a ten-pound keyboard so old that the letters on the keys had worn off, except for X and Q. When he had finished typing, he measured the obituary electronically.

  In the paper, it would be three inches of text, less than half the length of most obits.

  Billy was outraged. Goddamn lazy funeral director couldn’t get more information than this?

  This will be the shortest obituary in the paper …

  What to do?

  No editor would say a word to Billy if the obit ran in the paper the way it was. Nobody would even notice it—that was the problem.

  There had to be more to Ms. Margaret Eleanor Drew.

  He dialed the funeral home that had gathered the raw information for the obit. An answering machine picked up. Billy slammed down the phone, looked up the undertaker’s home number in the paper’s database, and dialed it.

  He waited.

  Billy let the phone ring thirty times. He hung up and snarled out loud, “I hope I at least woke the bastard up.”

  Billy ran the name of Margaret Drew’s church through the paper’s computer archives of past news stories and found the name of the parish priest. Yanking open his bottom desk drawer, he fished through a strata of racing forms and losing lottery scratch tickets and hauled out a Providence telephone book nearly five inches thick.

  The brass plaque Billy had won for investigative journalism was under the book.

  The award was seven years old.

  Billy frowned at it and slammed the drawer.

  The rectory’s answering service picked up after six rings. “I need Father Conley,” Billy said.

  “Is this an emergency, sir?”

  “It’s life and death,” he said. Not a lie—not really. Billy felt no need to explain any more.

  The service rang the call through to the priest, who got on the phone, sleepy and startled.

  Billy introduced himself.

  “A little late to be calling for a quote, Mr. Povich,” the priest said, now fully awake and peeved at being bothered by the newspaper at two o’clock in the morning.

  “Margaret Drew,” Billy said, in no mood for a snippy priest. This guy could sleep anytime; Margaret Drew had one shot on the obit page.

  “Yes, a parishioner of mine—she passed away.”

  “I’m working on her obituary and I need to know more about her.”

  “I thought the funeral home—”

  “That home sucks,” Billy said, cutting him off. “They gave me nothing. She’s got a three-inch obit and she’s going to look like a goddamned loser who never did a thing with her life … and I can’t believe somebody like that could live to seventy-eight. I’m not running this bullshit obit the way it is. So tell me something more about her. Or tell me who else I need to wake up.”

  The phone was silent a moment. Then the priest said, “She went by ‘Maggie.’ ”

  “Good,” Billy said, typing. “More.”

  “Uh … for years she was part of a crew of ladies who hosted the church coffee hour, after eight o’clock Mass on the first Sunday of every month.” He chuckled. “Maggie was in charge of the coffee for a while, until she got voted out of the job for making it too strong.”

  “ ‘Too strong,’“ Billy echoed as he typed.

  “So they put her in charge of doughnuts. She took it in good humor.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Never married, of course. And she didn’t have much beside Social Security and a tiny pension from that jewelry factory where she had worked. But she had inherited her little house and didn’t have a lot of bills, which is why she could sponsor so many people.”

  “ ‘Sponsor’?”

  “The church’s sponsorship program,” he explained. “Somebody in America pays eighteen dollars a month to sponsor a hungry person in Kenya.”

  “That’s not much money.”

  “It goes a long way over there. It’s enough to make sure a person gets three squares a day, vaccinations, and some basic health care.”

  “And Maggie sponsored someone?”

  “Oh, no, she sponsored a whole enclave—something like thirty people. She got letters from them all the time and drawings from the children. In fact, the main path through the village over there is named for her. It took nearly every cent she had each month. Toward the end of her life, when her own medical bills went up, she would skip lunch and sometimes dinner to keep her commitments. Not many people knew about it, but those who did have already volunteered to take over her sponsorships in her memory. Um, what else can I tell you?”

  They chatted a few minutes more about the sponsorship program, how the money was collected and distributed. Billy thanked him and hung up.

  He thought for a moment and then typed.

  PROVIDENCE—Margaret E. “Maggie” Drew, 78, of 11 Quentin Parkway, died Thursday at home of natural causes.

  She had been a hero to impoverished African villagers she never met, for she gave them all that she had, took away their hunger, and suffered it herself… .

  He read over what he had written. Tears blurred the gray block letters on his screen. Now this was a life.…

  The fog had drifted up the bay, into the mouth of the Providence River, and then into the city. It had spread through downtown like delicate snow twenty stories deep, through which rose only the tops of the tallest buildings in the city’s financial district. Waves of fog sp
lashed in slow motion against the truncated towers and then curled back down into the white. To the north, the fog thinned at the base of the Rhode Island State House, the state’s grand cathedral to politics, done entirely in glossy white Georgia marble.

  After work, Billy had planned to drive past the cop’s house-nothing more—early this morning.

  The swirling fog had stopped him. He slid the van’s transmission into park on College Hill, one of the city’s seven hills, overlooking downtown. He had decided to wait maybe twenty minutes or so, to watch the rising sun shoo the fog back into the bay.

  Behind Billy, empty streets zigzagged up the hill to the gates of the Ivy League Brown University. Below him, pristine Colonial-era homes crowded streets barely wide enough for two horse carts to pass between the brick sidewalks, which rose swollen around the trunks of sugar maples; it was the most expensive real estate in Rhode Island. From here, the tenements of South Providence were invisible, as if they did not even exist.

  In a nearby park, a stone arch framed a statue of Roger Williams, who had founded Providence three hundred years ago, after the Puritans kicked him out of Massachusetts for shooting off his mouth about religious freedom, and being a pain in the ass. Nobody knows what Roger Williams might have looked like. The statue depicted Williams as Jesus, spreading his palms over his city as if to bless it, or to turn its two rivers into wine.

  Billy watched the fog out the driver’s side window, across the narrow park surrounded by a low fence of iron spikes. He caught himself absentmindedly stroking his fingers through the fake-fur steering wheel cover. The van’s engine idled unevenly, seeming to work hard just to sit still. The headlights threw weak yellow beams against the morning gray.

  He had not expected to see Maddox so early in the morning.

  Billy’s stomach twisted into a rope when Maddox hobbled into view. He had approached, unseen by Billy, up the hill from behind the van, on the far side of the street. Billy’s neck tightened and his skull pressed back hard against the headrest.

  He watched the injured cop’s slow waltz with his cane.