Yesterday's News (17 page)

“Scared about what?”

“About what? About finding Jane's body and not reporting it or anything.”

“But you figured she'd committed suicide, right?”

“I didn't know what to think, understand? I mean, all I knew was she was dead. I didn't look around for anything or anybody. I just knew she was dead. It was only when I got back home and stopped shaking that I realized she probably died of something like that. Suicide, I mean. The way she looked, no blood or anything, I never even thought about murder.”

“Tell you what.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it now.”

Connie eyed me suspiciously as I approached her window.

I said, “Can you get Duckie for me?”

She put her
People
magazine down carefully, saving her place. “You're getting to be a real pain in the ass.”

“Pretty please with sugar on it?”

Connie reached under her counter, then made a ceremony of bringing the magazine back up so I couldn't see her face anymore. My loss.

Aside from four insurance salesmen whooping it up at the bar, Duckie Teevens and I were alone in Bun's. He'd suggested we take a table off in a corner. Sherry, who seemed to double as daytime waitress, at least for Duckie, took our order. Neither of us said anything until she'd delivered the drinks, whiskey for Duckie and a Michelob for me.

Teevens clinked his glass against the neck of my bottle and said, “So you wanted to talk with me, talk.”

“I haven't noticed you over my shoulder for a while.”

“Like I told you, Bunny decided he didn't want me trailing you no more.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“I figure that's his business.”

“No question you knew Coyne was seeing Jane Rust before he died, right?”

“We told you that, Bunny and me.”

“So you did. About the same time you couldn't quite remember Gail Fearey's name. And address.”

Duckie darkened. “That's right.”

“Funny thing about that. She remembers you pretty clearly.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She said she used to go with you, and she's lived in the house there for a long time, used to belong to her parents.”

“So?”

“So I'm wondering why the failure of memory from a guy who seems to have everything else pretty straight.”

Teevens played with his glass, making the little circles again. “Supposing I don't feel like talking about that?”

“Feel like listening?”

He shrugged.

I said, “You remember pretty well what Gail Fearey looked like some time ago, before she got hooked up with Coyne. I'm thinking that her going for him bothered the hell out of you. Duckie Teevens was trying to make something of himself. The wrong way, maybe, but at least you were going forward. Charlie Coyne was a bum, and you knew it, and it burned you that she couldn't see it.”

Duckie spoke to his whiskey. “She could see it.”

“She just couldn't do anything about it.”

“That's right. Charlie had that, I gotta admit. He had the magic somehow. I never could see it, but the broads sure did.”

“I'm wondering why your boss would have hired old Charlie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it's pretty clear Gotbaum looks on you like a son.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, which makes it odd to me that he'd hire Charlie who cut you out from a girl you liked.”

Teevens emptied his glass and tapped it on the table top. Sherry came over immediately.

She said, “You want another, Duckie?”

“That's what I want.”

“Kinda early, ain't it?”

“Another.”

“You got it.”

Teevens waited till the second drink arrived, though he didn't take any of it. After Sherry went back to the insurance crowd, he said to me, “I asked the boss to put Charlie on.”

“Why?”

“Because Charlie was living with Gail, and she was raising his kid, and they needed the money. And sure as shit nobody else was gonna go out of their way to recruit the guy.”

“Charlie was delivering the porn tapes, right?”

“I told you, I don't know nothing about that.”

“You're in the business of showing films, Duckie. Dirty pictures. Only it's a dying trade, like Bunny told me. ‘The VCR's, they're wiping me out,' he said. But you still want to move into the business. Only one way that works. You don't have the resources to open a legitimate chain of video stores, and the ones already out there offer most of the kinds of movies you'd have anyway. Except the forbidden fruit, right?”

“You're fulla shit.”

“The kiddie stuff, Duckie. Maybe snuff or fake snuff films, too. The kinds of things the suburban fathers can't quite ask the wife to pick up on the way home from school with the kids.”

He downed half the second drink.

“Only to move that kind of stuff, you have to be careful, selective, even secretive. So Charlie Coyne is the mule, carrying the stuff around, customer to customer or maybe club to club. Is that how it works, Duckie? The guys get together in a club to sort of pool their capital and swap their favorites?”

Teevens took a deep breath, then let it out and spoke low and quietly. “The fuck do you know about it?”

“Only that I see you with a pretty strong motive for killing Charlie. He gets caught in the net with the wrong kind of movies, and he gets intimate with the wrong kind of reporter, a crusader who thinks she can use him to bring down businesses like yours through her newspaper, bring down the future you've put in ten years to inherit.”

“Twelve years. I been with the boss twelve years.”

I didn't say anything.

He said, “The way you figure it, the same guy who killed Charlie killed the reporter girl, right?”

“Right. And then ripped the hell out of Gail Fearey's place looking for something.”

“What?”

“The night Charlie was stabbed, somebody ransacked Gail's house, took a knife to most of the furniture. Looking for something.”

“I didn't know about that.”

“You didn't.”

“Not about the searching there, no.”

“But you were here the night Charlie was killed in the alley.”

“I was here. I told you that.”

“Where were you Monday night?”

“Monday night. That's when the reporter OD'd, right?”

“Maybe with some help.”

Duckie said, “Then you got problems.”

“I've got problems?”

“Yeah. If the same guy did Charlie and the girl, the guy can't be me.”

“Why not?”

“Monday, Bunny had a bad spell. The heart shit, you know?”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, on Monday night, Sherry and me was sitting with him for maybe four or five hours in the hospital over to Fall River there.”

“You were.”

“That's right. With maybe a dozen docs and nurses and gofers mobbing the boss and us.”

“What time was this?”

“Time? I dunno. No, wait. The spell come over him during the second feature, so maybe seven-thirty, eight o'clock. The hospital there, it'd have when we rolled in. We was there till after midnight, Sher and me. And even after the boss was okay, they said he'd still have to stay the night. Sher was feeling sad and all, so I took her back to my place and consoled the fuckin shit out of her.”

I watched him. Sherry wasn't exactly a solid alibi, but the rest was a stupid story to trot out if it wasn't true. He finished the whiskey and rose, not bothering to leave any money on the table.

“Ask Sher, you want to. She'll remember. They always remember how the Duck makes them happy.”

T
HE ELDER
S
CHONSTEIN
violated the first rule of being a cop. He listed himself in the telephone directory.

I arrived at the address just after five. It was a modest Cape, two dormers on the second floor and a breezeway connecting a one-car garage. The breezeway had a concrete ramp sloping gently up to the side door of the house itself. In the driveway was a five-year-old predecessor of Hogueira's Olds staff car, highly polished. The stoop to the front door looked newly poured or little used. I rang the bell.

When the door opened, I had to look down for the voice that said, “Who are you?”

The man was in a wheelchair, a stadium blanket across his lap, legs, and right hand. His left index finger hovered over buttons on the arm of the chair. Bald, his eyes hid under a craggy brow and above a still-jutting jaw.

“Mr. Schonstein?”

He said, “Yeah, but Schonsy suits me better. You gonna answer my question?”

“My name's Cuddy, John Cuddy. I'm—”

“I know who you are. With everybody talking about you, I wondered how long it'd be before you got around to me.”

“I was surprised to find you in the phone book.”

“Wouldn't do much good not to be. Everybody knows where I live.”

“I'd like to ask you some things.”

“I expect you do. Well, come on in before I get a crick in my neck looking up at you.”

Schonstein pressed a button on the armrest, the chair emitting a low whine and turning him into the house. I entered and closed the door behind me. Following him into the living room, I saw an old-fashioned plush sofa with pine coffee and end tables. A big oxblood Barcalounger was centered six feet from a large-screen television. Next to the lounger, newspapers were heaped, with the folds zigzagged, like bricks in a tower built to go as high as possible without tumbling over.

“'Scuse the mess, but being in the chair and all, it's just easier to leave the damn papers like that. My son comes by once a week or so and cleans 'em out for the scouts.”

“The scouts?”

“Boy scouts. Used to be a troop leader myself. The scouts collect the papers, and somebody helps out with hauling them to a recycling plant somewhere.” He tipped his head toward the couch. “Sofa's probably the best seat in the house for you. Don't use it much myself, so watch you don't choke on the dust.”

I sat down, the cushions enveloping me. I could imagine why he didn't use it. Once in, he'd have a hell of a time levering himself up and out again.

“Comfy?”

“I would be if you let go of what you've got under the blanket.”

Schonstein grinned, teeth a mile too perfect for the rest of the face. Bringing his hand into view, he looked down, rolling the Browning automatic first left, then right, as though it were being featured in an advertising video. With thirteen in the magazine and one in the chamber, it would be a while before he'd have to reload.

“Mark said you were a pretty sharp fella.”

“Doesn't take a genius to figure an ex-cop's gonna answer the door with some backup.”

“'Specially some old fuck in a wheelchair, huh?”

“Especially.”

“You might just be alright, boy. I can see how you could of knocked Mark off his stride a bit.”

“The chair. From the disability?”

“Uh-huh. Damnedest thing. Come through Korea without a scratch, not even frostbite. Re-upped once, then twenty-eight years on the force here, not much more bumps and bruises than a bad sleigh ride. Until four years ago. I'm heading home after a midnight tour when I see smoke pouring out of this four-family, edge of a Porto neighborhood. They're good people, mostly, but they get stiff as fish from that red piss they drink. I figure I better see what's going down.

“Then I see this kid at the third-floor window. He's big enough to know he's in the shit, but small enough, he doesn't know what to do about it 'cept scream his lungs out. So I kick in the front door, taking the steps two at a time and banging every door I pass. People run outta there like ants from a hill. You couldn't count 'em all. One of the women, girl actually but they start young, you know what I mean, one of them had the balls to follow me up the steps, yelling something I couldn't catch. Funny how you can live among 'em for so long, never get the hang of their talking.

“So her and me hit the top floor, there's serious fire 'round us now, can't barely breathe much less see for shit, and I had to damn near knock the door off the hinges anyway to get us in. Smoke's worse somehow, but she gets hold of a little baby, and I grab the kid at the window, and we start down. She was hellbent scared, but she knew the stairs and I didn't. Damned landing, they never nail the runners down right, suppose I shoulda been surprised there was any there at all. I catch my heel in it, going full tilt down, and tear the shit out of one knee while I'm breaking my fall with the other leg, all the time trying to keep the kid's head from cracking open on the steps. I got all the way down, but it felt like somebody'd taken a bat to my legs, and the boys in one of our units had to carry me out like a dime-a-dozen halfback.”

“Hell of a story.”

“Damned right.”

“You have surgery on the knee?”

“Knees. Both of them. Wanna see?”

You can retire them, but you can't keep the good ones from sensing where you're going. “So I can check for recent knife wounds?”

Schonstein grinned again, but reached down to his cuffs, inching up the pants legs like a demented stripper until I could see the old stitch tracks. The calves looked toned instead of withered, but there were no new marks or scars.

He said, “Satisfied?”

“Some.”

Schonstein dropped his trousers back to normal. “Good. Good to be a bit skeptical, I mean. Lotsa cops forget that these days.”

“The motorized chair help?”

“Godsend. I figured I'd only be in this thing for two, three weeks, then braces, cane, and back to normal. But it didn't work out that way. Barely ever got to use the braces. Docs said it was the arthritis. Always had some twinges going back to my thirties, never paid it much mind till the surgery and all sort of speeded things up. But I get by, I get by.”