Speak Ill of the Living Page 5

  He hadn’t seen Dr. Crane in more than a year, but there was no doubt this was he—silver haired, slight paunch, close to seventy years old. He was wearing denim overalls under an unbuttoned white painter’s coat. His face was swollen and purple, hard to look at. Eddie got another whiff of urine. What he had read was true; people piss themselves when they hang.

  Eddie wanted to run. But he couldn’t. For there was something in the chest pocket of Crane’s white smock that grabbed Eddie’s attention and wouldn’t let him leave. A sheet of paper, folded once lengthwise. Something had been typed on it.

  A note. A suicide note.

  Part of him—the better part—knew that he should dash right out of there, get his telephone from the car, call the police and wait for them on the street. But then the police would seal the barn. They would take the note. And they wouldn’t show it to Eddie Bourque.

  It would only take a moment to read it. What would it hurt?

  The rope had been looped over a crossbeam near the top of the twenty-foot peaked roof; Crane hung high off the floor. Eddie steeled himself with a deep breath. He put his clammy hands on the ladder and stepped up, up, up, to the third rung. He looked the body in the small of its back. He still couldn’t reach the note.

  The feeling of trespassing was back, a thousand times stronger, like Eddie had crossed some line between trespasser and grave robber. He reached for the paper. A drop of sweat ran down his underarm with a cold tickle. Still couldn’t reach the note; the body was facing away from him.

  With just a finger and thumb, he pinched a tiny fold of the dead man’s smock, and tugged. The body slowly rotated. Eddie stepped one rung higher. The body turned toward him. Another whiff of piss. Eddie kept his eyes off that purple face and snatched the paper from the pocket. A dark urine stain had spread across the front of Dr. Crane’s overalls.

  Eddie read the typewritten lines:

  The district attorneys are fighting the good fight!!!! When they needed me, I was THERE.

  For what THEY needed. Told them what they WANTED to hear.

  I never meant to hurt anyone.

  I just wanted to HELP put the monsters AWAY!!!

  It grew out of my control, like a thing of its own mind!!!!

  Forgive me, these FORTY years.

  The letter was unsigned.

  Eddie’s hand trembled as he slid the note back where he had found it.

  Dr. Crane had been falsifying his reports. Cutting corners to help prosecutors close their cases.

  Eddie had never heard his police sources chatter about Crane—nobody had ever suggested that Crane’s work might have been suspect, except defense lawyers. But they got paid to discredit the state’s witnesses; they’d do it to their own mothers.

  Forty years? How many bodies were in the wrong graves? No, to hell with the graves—Crane had been an expert witness at thousands of criminal trials over the past four decades. How many innocent people had he helped put away?

  The body rocked back. Eddie smelled the stench. He grimaced at the stain on Crane’s overalls.

  Wait… his pants… still wet?

  Eddie grabbed Crane’s hand—cooler than the living, but still warm.

  Holy Jesus, this just happened!

  Eddie threw himself down the ladder and sprinted out, slamming the door behind him.

  He ran toward his car.

  The slam echoed in Eddie’s mind.

  Who made the door slam when I first got here?

  Not Crane—it had been barely two minutes between the noise and the moment Eddie opened the door to the barn. Even if the rope had been ready, would Crane have had time to hang himself dead? Eddie couldn’t say.

  Was somebody else here?

  Chapter 5

  The police arrived in their Ford Crown Victorias, white with blue and gold stripes. A belligerent lieutenant named Brill wanted to hear Eddie’s story again.

  “But I told you guys everything,” Eddie protested. He looked down Dr. Crane’s driveway, past the barrier of police tape, and saw a television news van pull into the cul-de-sac. Word of Crane’s death had leaked.

  This is crazy. I’m the only reporter with the full story, and I can’t get away to write.

  The lieutenant was short and built like a power-lifter. His shirt collar dug deep into his thick neck. “So why were you in the man’s garage?” he asked.

  Eddie started to sigh, but stopped himself. No sense aggravating this lieutenant and dragging out this interview longer than it had to be. “I heard a door, all right?” Eddie said, “I went looking for Crane. Found him hanging in the garage. Ran to my car. Called you guys.”

  “Uh-huh. So you heard a noise and then broke into the garage,” the detective paraphrased, scratching notes on a pad.

  “Don’t write it that way,” Eddie said. “The door was unlocked. I just went in.”

  Lieutenant Brill looked up from his notes. His eyes were the lightest blue Eddie had ever seen. “Doesn’t really matter, under the law.”

  Eddie sighed. Couldn’t help himself. “Somebody else was here,” he said. “That’s the person you ought to be interrogating.”

  “Crane lived alone,” the detective said. “There’s no evidence anybody else was here, except you and him.”

  “I’m telling you, I heard somebody.”

  The lieutenant went back to writing. “Mm-hm,” he said.

  Eddie felt the sudden stab of caffeine withdrawal. It quickly grew worse, as if his skull was a diving bell that had gone too deep.

  Another voice said, “When I heard that a reporter found the body, I hoped it wouldn’t be you—”

  Eddie turned. It was Detective Orr. She looked ticked.

  “—but I knew it would be, Eddie.”

  “I explained everything three times already,” Eddie said. “I need to go.”

  Orr ignored him. She nodded to the lieutenant, and the two of them walked out of earshot. She murmured to Brill, he mumbled to her, and then Orr came back alone to speak to Eddie.

  “Crane left a note,” she said.

  Eddie shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He didn’t say anything.

  “Did you read it?”

  A second TV news van pulled into the cul-de-sac. The reporter from the first van was taping her report with police cars and the house in the background. Eddie’s skull felt like it was about to buckle.

  Eddie asked, “Is that what Brill was busting my balls about?” He shrugged, irked that TV news was beating him on a story he had cold. TV should never beat print. He felt like he was letting down the brotherhood of ink scribes. “What do you think, Lucy? Of course I read the goddam note.”

  Orr gave a disapproving little grunt. “I wish you could have told me differently.” She pointed in the lieutenant’s general direction. “Brill wants to arrest you for interfering with a police investigation.”

  “Oh, come on,” Eddie complained, “That’s a bullshit charge.” His head was in a vise. His temperature was rising. Why couldn’t somebody make a caffiene patch or some gum for coffee drinkers who needed help between cups? He said, “The investigation didn’t even start until I called you.”

  “Of course,” she said. “But Brill can keep you in lockup, force you to pay for a lawyer—they ain’t cheap—make your life hell for twenty-four hours or so, till the charges are dropped.”

  She was right. Eddie calmed himself with a deep breath. He said, “Look, I’m not proud of what I did. But this is a big story—Crane admitted that he made it up as he went along for forty years. All those cases? When the district attorney hears this, he’ll shit his liver.”

  “He already has,” Orr said quietly.

  They stepped out of the driveway, to let the black hearse drive by.

  Orr said, “In light of the Roger Lime fiasco, I’ve been assigned to investigate Crane’s death, and to determine what evidence there is that he falsified his reports.”

  Eddie whist
led. “A big job.”

  “The lieutenant said that you heard something, before you found the body?”

  “He said that? I didn’t think he cared about what I heard.”

  “He doesn’t, but I do.” She squinted at him.

  Eddie told her about the sound that he heard. She took notes. Then they retraced Eddie’s path around the house, to the back deck, and then into the barn. Detective Orr timed it at two minutes, fifteen seconds, give or take.

  “Nobody chokes that fast,” she said, more to herself than to Eddie.

  “I thought hanging was instantaneous—broken neck.”

  “Only from the gallows, when the body can drop six feet or so—and even then it’s not always instant,” Orr said. “No, Dr. Crane suffocated at the end of that rope, and that would have taken longer than two-fifteen. Hard to pinpoint time-of-death with body temperature on such a warm day, but he was probably alive within the hour you found him.”

  They walked back to the driveway. The pressure on Eddie’s head had stabilized. He liked Detective Orr’s methodical style. She was the constant drip of water that eventually wore away a stone. Eddie had more information that any other reporter on the story. If he could get a cup of coffee and a telephone line in the next thirty minutes, he’d be okay.

  “So either I imagined a door slamming,” Eddie said, “or somebody ran out of the garage when I came calling for Crane.”

  Detective Orr was quiet a moment. Then she said, “Could have been neighborhood kids, here to steal a bike.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  She gave him the fake smile he hated.

  ***

  The TV was on in the Perez Brothers diner. The place was packed with the lunch crowd, mostly third-shift factory workers ordering their first meal of the day: cheese omelets and Budweiser. Four men were engaged in an animated argument in Spanish, either about Massachusetts politics or the metric system—Eddie wasn’t sure.

  He pounded the story into his laptop.

  Bobby Perez refilled Eddie’s coffee mug. “How can you write with all this noise, man?” he asked.

  Eddie kept his eyes on the keyboard. “Deadline makes me deaf.” He typed some more, and then added: “This place is peaceful compared to the newsroom I used to work in.”

  “Oh yeah, you worked for The Empire, man, that rag.”

  Eddie finished a final sentence, and then cracked, “I was young, I needed the money.” He smiled and handed Bobby the modem cord.

  After he transmitted his story, Eddie relaxed with coffee and a rumpled newspaper left behind by an earlier customer. It was the current edition of The Second Voice, gamely reporting the reappearance of Roger Lime, a week after every other paper in America had the story. Lew Cuhna had run the photograph the kidnappers had released, under the double-decked banner:

  Thought to be Murdered Last Spring Bank President Held for Ransom

  The story was a week late, but at least Cuhna had used his own byline on it, and had done a competent job with the writing.

  The noon news was starting on TV.

  “Could you turn this up, Bobby?” Eddie asked. “That’s my competition.”

  Eddie had little tolerance for local TV news, and the noon broadcasts were usually the worst. The TV anchormodel teased the rehashed material from the night before—a bar stabbing, a man who found his class ring twenty years after he had lost it down the toilet, and the Red Sox rain-out in Texas. Then she began a breathless reading of the morning’s one fresh story:

  Local coroner Dr. Alvin Crane was found dead at his home this morning, the victim of an apparent suicide. Crane has come under fire in the past week over his misidentification of the skeletal remains of kidnapped financier Roger Lime…

  Bobby Perez pointed to the TV. “This your story, Eddie?”

  “Yeah, but they don’t have half the material I have. They’ll be updating their six-o’clock report with my exclusive stuff.”

  Sources close to the investigation say that evidence found at the scene suggests that the doctor was despondent about his mistaken work on the Lime case, and perhaps other cases going back forty years…

  Eddie clapped his hands on his head.

  How did TV news get that info?

  Eddie was the only reporter to read the note.

  Lieutenant Brill!

  He knew Eddie was about to break the story, so he leaked Eddie’s scoop.

  Dr. Crane was pronounced dead at the scene, after a local freelance journalist, Edward Bourque, discovered his body while at the house to ask Crane for an interview…And now a check of the weather…

  Eddie was slack jawed. Most reporters despised becoming part of a story. Those who didn’t became columnists. Eddie had never wanted a column. If Eddie became too closely identified with the death of Dr. Crane, no news organization with any ethics would pay him to write about the case.

  Bobby grinned and slapped Eddie on the shoulder. “You’re famous, man. So you found him, huh? And the old man—he was dead?”

  Eddie frowned and then downed his coffee. He thought about the noise he had heard at Dr. Crane’s place. His palms grew damp reliving the feeling of Crane’s skin, the fading warmth left behind by a life that had hastily departed.

  “Yeah, he was dead, all right,” Eddie grumbled, “though just barely.”

  Chapter 6

  Eddie’s Washington Post was a mess again in the morning, parts of it missing. He made a mental note to call the delivery service. He often made mental notes about trivial items, and rarely followed up on them. He could never remember mental notes. For important stuff, he wrote real notes. A mental note was Eddie’s way of telling himself that an inconvenience wasn’t important enough to do something about. A few more days without the classified section, and he’d write himself a real note.

  General VonKatz was at Eddie’s feet, screaming about the dry kibble in his bowl.

  “I’ve got nothing to share,” Eddie told him. He leaned over and showed the General his breakfast plate—a mound of fried red cabbage with Velveeta. “See?”

  The General sniffed Eddie’s food. Satisfied that nobody was eating better than he, the cat crunched his cereal.

  The bag of cabbage discovered in the crisper drawer had been three days past its expiration date. It still went well with a quart of Hawaiian Kona coffee. But, really, what wouldn’t? Eddie would happily wash down a plate of potting soil with Kona.

  He had planned to dedicate the day to running down the tip Henry had given him. But he found himself loitering over the box scores, unable to start his research. The thought of his brother left Eddie uneasy, and he wasn’t sure why.

  He pushed the newspaper away and grabbed for the telephone, determined to unscramble Henry’s tip. There was just one place that would have all the information he needed. He dialed a local number.

  After three rings, a deep, rumbling voice answered, “Daily Empire, news library.”

  Eddie whispered, “Durkin? It’s Eddie Bourque.”

  “Bourque? That can’t be right. That chicken shit little bastard don’t work here anymore.”

  Eddie laughed. “You’re still campaigning for an ass-kicking. Why don’t I come down there and apply one?”

  Durkin roared. “That’s a good crack, Bourque. The next crack outta you will be your tibia, when I snap it like a candy cane.” He laughed like a dragon on a new pile of gold. “Been a long time, Bourque. What can I do you out of?”

  “Same shit as always. I need to see a file.”

  “Ooo. You heard the new rules? Employees only down here in the library. And that would go triple for you, considering all the trouble you caused this place when you left.”

  Eddie was shocked. “Since when do you listen to any rules that weren’t chipped into stone on a mountain?”

  “You’re right—there’s only ten rules in the world, and there’s nothing in them prohibiting a favor for an old friend. I was just softening you
up for what you gotta do to get in here without security calling the cops.”

  Durkin chuckled. Eddie got a mental picture of the dragon’s grin before he sprayed fire. “Here’s what I want you to do…”

  ***

  The truck needed shocks; it bounced over pitted streets toward the Daily Empire Building.

  Or that’s where Eddie assumed it was going. He couldn’t see a damn thing from the back of the truck, sealed inside a fifty-five gallon metal drum, which, according to its label, was supposed to hold newsprint ink.

  This is crazy. Durkin is crazy. I’m crazy.

  The big diesel slammed over a large bump, and Eddie’s chin clacked against his knee. His lower legs were going numb.

  How much air is in one of these barrels?

  He took comfort from the tiny hole in the lid that shone like a star. The truck driver, a buddy of Durkin’s from their service in Vietnam, had assured Eddie that plenty of air could squeeze through that pinprick. It was supposed to be a short ride on the flatbed truck with the barrels of ink, but Eddie began to wonder if the driver had taken a wrong turn. It started to get warm inside the barrel.

  Finally, the truck stopped, idling. Eddie heard the driver’s door open and then slam. And then a muffled conversation:

  “S’pose to be seventeen barrels on this truck.”

  “That’s what I brung you.”

  “You got three rows of six, that’s eighteen.”

  “Eighteen, huh? And you’re complaining?”

  Muffled laughter.

  “Okay, you’re fine. Bring ’em in.”

  The truck door opened and then slammed again, then the diesel growled and jerked forward. Eddie could feel the truck angling down a ramp. It leveled off, then stopped, and the engine shut off.

  Chains rattled. Bolts were thrown open. An electric motor hummed. Eddie’s barrel shuddered and clanked into its neighbors. His head banged the steel. He cringed silently and rubbed the spot. He heard a beeping, felt motion, assumed that a forklift was unloading the pallet of ink barrels. The forklift slammed the barrels down and motored off, doing more work nearby. Eddie rubbed his numb ankles. He was supposed to wait in the barrel for Durkin to let him out, but how long could he stand being squished in there?