Marine Corpse (3 page)

“My sister Meriam’s boy, Stu Carver,” he was saying to me. “The family black sheep. I’m rather proud of him, myself, but then, I’ve always been a bit out of step with the rest of the clan.”

Ben had ascended gracefully into his seventies, with his unruly shock of slate-colored hair still as intact as his political influence, and his patrician nose as long as his memory and as straight as his ethics. “It wasn’t bad enough, he grew a beard and marched around Washington carrying a candle during Vietnam. Hell, Chub Peabody’s mother did that, too, though my brother and sisters didn’t think that should absolve Stu. After all, Peabody was a Democrat, so that sort of misbehavior might be expected. But it wasn’t dignified for a Woodhouse. And, of course, moving in with that Jewish girl—well, his mother admitted that it could have been worse.” Ben chuckled.

“He could have married her,” I said.

“Yes, I’ve mentioned that to you before, haven’t I, Brady?” He gazed out over the rolling fairways. “Stu thinks this place here”—he waved his hand, taking in the green sweep of the golf course and the big rambling clubhouse “—is a shameful example of conspicuous consumption. Of course, he’s right.”

I nodded absently. The golfers had reached the green. By the way they squatted behind their putts, dangling their putters in front of their faces and squinting along some imaginary line of sight, I supposed large sums of money rested on the number of strokes it would take them to knock the balls into the holes. I was thoroughly relaxed in Ben Woodhouse’s company, and not the least bit concerned about consumption, conspicuous or otherwise.

“He’ll be late,” said Ben. “He’s always late. It’s his way of protesting.”

“Protesting what?” I asked.

Ben grinned. “Doesn’t matter. In this case, I imagine he’ll rant and rave against the tyranny of time. He likes to say that the wristwatch was the invention of a fascist mind. ‘You’re never free,’ he says, ‘when you have your arm shackled onto one of those things.’ But if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. That’s why I admire him. He holds his principles firmly, even if they’re silly.”

“And the closest you ever came to protesting was hiring a lawyer from Yale,” I observed.

“I’ve got to admit, Brady, my boy, the family didn’t take too kindly to it. We’re all Harvard, as you know. But that wasn’t it. You were the only one who wouldn’t let me beat him at golf. I can’t trust a man who won’t try his damnedest, and accept the consequences of victory as graciously as those of defeat. It’s blasphemy, I know, but I find those Harvard Law School types mealy-mouthed at best.”

“Well, Ben,” I murmured, “I’ve enjoyed our relationship.”

“And well you might. Ah, here he is now.”

Ben unfolded himself from his chair, and I stood up beside him, as a dark-haired man of middling height approached us. He wore baggy corduroy pants, a blue dress shirt open at the neck, and a broad smile. He was, I guessed, in his early thirties. He moved with the quick grace of a gymnast to shake Ben’s hand. “Uncle Ben,” he said. His ice-blue eyes narrowed impishly. “I’m surprised that you risked permanent ostracism from the Woodhouse clan to do this for me.” He looked at me. “You must be Mr. Coyne.”

I extended my hand. His grip was firm. “At your service.”

“You know what you’re getting yourself into here, Mr. Coyne?”

“Brady, please,” I said. “And, no, actually, I don’t. Your uncle has been very mysterious about this. But when The Senator calls, I come.”

“Don’t they all,” smiled Stuart Carver. “You going to buy your wayward nephew a beer, Uncle?”

“A beer?”

“Well,” said Carver, “a beer for starters. Just for the thirst. Then some good Cutty Sark for the serious sipping.”

I detected the trace of a frown skitter across Ben’s face. But he made a circular motion in the air with his forefinger and a young man in a white jacket materialized before us. “A Beck’s for Mr. Carver, Alan, and a refill for Mr. Coyne and me,” Ben said.

“Very good, Senator.” The waiter dipped his head and left.

Stu Carver pulled a wicker chair up beside me and Ben. We all sat down. Carver leaned forward, his knee jiggling furiously with nervous energy. “Let’s get to it, Uncle.”

“You have no sense of propriety, Stuart,” Ben replied benignly. He sighed. “Ah, the impetuosity of youth,” he said to me. “It seems that my nephew has written a book, Brady.”

“Good for you,” I said to Carver. “What sort of a book is it?”

“It’s a novel, actually,” he said. “I’ve been working on it, off and on, for about ten years. It’s based on some field work I did in college.”

“Harvard?”

He grinned. “Afraid so. Senior year, for a sociology project, I studied this religious cult. They had what they called a cell down near Central Square, and I joined them. Went through the initiation rites and so forth, and, for about two months, I lived with them. My novel is based—pretty loosely—on that experience.”

I nodded uncertainly. “So where do I fit in?”

“Stu wants to publish his book,” said Ben, as if that explained it.

I shrugged. “So…?”

“But the family doesn’t want me to,” said Stu. “They think it’ll besmirch the good family name. And, of course, in things that involve the good family name, the good family makes the decisions.”

“Democratically,” said Ben. “The family voted that Stu would not publish his novel—assuming he was able to find a publisher, which, given the, er, access the family has, he probably would.”

“So this was Uncle Ben’s idea,” said Carver.

“What, for God’s sake, was his idea?”

“It was a compromise,” said Ben. “In the finest democratic tradition. Something we Massachusetts Republicans have become rather deft at accomplishing. The meat of politics, compromise. When you can win, you go for the throat. When you’re going to lose, you go for the compromise. It was my idea. We let Stu publish his novel. But he must use a pseudonym. No one must know that it was a Woodhouse, by any other name, including Carver, who wrote this book. That’s where you come in, Brady.”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

We paused while the waiter set our drinks down on the table. Stu Carver lifted his glass of beer and drained off half of it in one long draught. “See,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “I’ve got to have an agent. Somebody who can keep a secret, who can handle all the business so the revered family will not need to soil its fingers.” He dumped the rest of his beer down his throat. “The point is, they think it’s trash.”

Ben touched his nephew’s knee. “It
is
trash, Stu,” he said gently. He turned to me. “The other half of the story is this, Brady. We have persuaded Stu that he wouldn’t want his novel published just because he wrote it, and because anything written by a Woodhouse would be instantly newsworthy. We have appealed—successfully, I believe—to Stuart’s artistic integrity, and he agrees that he wants it accepted or rejected on its own terms. Through you, and pseudonymously.

“So you want me to peddle Stu’s book,” I mused. “I don’t know much about that.”

“But you do know how to be discreet, and if there should be a contract in the offing, you could certainly handle that.”

“Yes, I could. And if all you want me to do is keep your name out of it and work on a contract, I don’t see why I shouldn’t give it a try. It goes with the territory, I’d say.”

“Good, good,” nodded Ben. “Then it’s settled. Now. Shall we dine?”

Later that night I started reading Stu Carver’s manuscript. He called it
Devil’s Work
. It was a real page turner, replete with bizarre religious rites, sexually perverse ceremonies of all descriptions, torture, and death. I found scant redeeming social value in it, and it wasn’t particularly well written, by my standards. Stu had decided to use the pen name “Nick Cutter,” which I thought had a certain ring to it, and, all in all, I had to agree with the Woodhouse clan’s verdict: Stu’s book was trash.

Which was what the editor from one of Boston’s biggest and most prestigious publishing houses told me two weeks after he had agreed to read Stu’s manuscript. “It’s garbage, Mr. Coyne,” he told me on the phone, pronouncing it as if it were a French word, with the accent on the second syllable. “Drek. Crapola. Utterly, irredeemably without literary merit.”

“Well, that’s all right,” I said. “I understand.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” he said. “We want to publish it. We think it’s going to be a big seller.”

And it was. The publisher gave it a big pre-publication buildup, and when it hit the bookstores nine months later—which, I learned, is the average gestation for a book as well as a human being—it landed near the top of the local bestseller lists. I earned my hefty retainer from Ben Woodhouse just by keeping the media at bay and nurturing the mystery of Nick Cutter’s identity—which did nothing to hurt the book’s sales. The publisher encouraged me to accept invitations to radio talk shows to discuss
Devil’s Work
, and when I told them I’d have to give my honest appraisal of it, they encouraged me to do that, too. “Call it trash,” they told me. “Trash sells big.”

For the first couple of months, supermarket tabloids and other gossip-brokers debated the question: “Who is Nick Cutter?” I had fun, teasing them when they asked me. Stu and Ben thought it was quite grand. Ben told me the family remained apprehensive that I’d let the pussy creep out of the sack, or that Stu would find himself unable to resist the temptations of celebrity. For my part, discretion was easy. For Stu, it was a relief that his real name hadn’t been appended to the manuscript. “I guess the clan was right,” he told me. “It really is trash. And, anyway, it’s more fun this way.”

I had my own fun, negotiating the sale of rights with British and Italian publishers and movie and television option brokers. I rather enjoyed my ten percent off the top, too.

After the initial hubbub died down, several months after
Devil’s Work
made its splash, Stu Carver showed up at my office. It was a golden October Friday afternoon, and I had kept my calendar clear for a golf date with my friend Charlie McDevitt, my old roommate from Yale Law days, and presently a lawyer with the Justice Department’s Boston office. I told Stu I could only give him half an hour.

“Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “Hey, you got something to sip on?”

I produced the bottle of Cutty Sark I kept on hand for my clients who lacked sufficiently refined taste to prefer Jack Daniels, and poured him three fingers. Stu tossed it off and helped himself to a refill.

“How ’bout you, Brady?” he said, holding up the bottle.

“I have an important engagement this afternoon,” I said, thinking about how many beers Charlie would win from me if my putts wobbled. “I better keep my mind sharp.”

“You got a court date?”

I thought how much easier this sort of thing must be for my attorney friends who play tennis. “A court date,” I said. “Yes. Something like that. So what’s up, Stu?”

“I’m gonna do another book.”

I shrugged. “Nick Cutter has a big following. Good idea, if you’re looking to get rich.”

He grinned. “I already
am
rich, Brady. Have been all my life. That’s not it. This one is going to be a
real
book.”

He knocked back his second drink and splashed more Scotch into his glass. I must have frowned at him, because he tilted his head at me and said, “I drink too much, sometimes, I know. But this is by way of celebrating. Wish you’d join me.”

I waved my hand at him. “Help yourself. I’ll pass. What do you mean, a real book?”

“Oh, I read what everybody’s saying. They’re right.
Devil’s Work
was pretty trashy. I didn’t think so when I was writing it, and it’s truer than people seem to think. I mean, all those things really did happen. It was originally going to be a kind of journalistic novel, based on sound field work. But I guess I got a little carried away with it. I decided to fictionalize it, so I could generalize. I thought I could actually tell the truth better that way, if you know what I mean. And I wanted to protect everybody’s privacy. And then I found the fictionalizing more compelling than the reporting.” He let some Scotch slide into his mouth, tilted his head back to swallow, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Anyway, this one’s going to be different.”

“This new one, you mean.”

He nodded.

“Well, why don’t you put down your drink and just tell me about it.”

He grinned at me, to let me know he caught the disapproving tone that had crept into my voice, and I grinned back at him by way of apology. Then he drained his glass and set it down on my desk. He licked his lips and cleared his throat. “This city,” he began earnestly, “is full of homeless people, Brady. Every one of them has a story. And there are people who devote their lives to helping them—priests and ministers, Welfare workers, do-gooders, and just plain nice people. I want to meet with them, live with them, talk with them, experience what they experience, feel what they feel. It’ll be another field investigation. But this time I’ll tell the story straight.”

I nodded. “Sounds good. Another Nick Cutter tale will get people’s attention. That, I guess, would be a good thing.”

“I’m hoping it won’t be another Nick Cutter,” said Stu. “I’m hoping the family will allow this one to be a Stuart Richmond Carver book. I’d like that name to mean something. I’m a little sick of being a Woodhouse, to tell you the truth. I want this to be an important book in its own right.”

“Well, good,” I said. “Do it, then.” I glanced at my watch—a little ostentatiously, I hoped. I didn’t want to keep Charlie waiting. The sun was setting earlier every day, and I wanted to be sure we’d get in our full eighteen holes before dark.

Stu chose to ignore my hint. He poured more Cutty into his glass—just a finger, this time, which I took to be a hopeful sign—and tipped all of it into his mouth. He swallowed it with a great show of pleasure, sighed, and leaned toward me. “I will be needing your help on this one, Brady,” he said.

“Your uncle hires me to help.”

“I’ll be in the field for several months.”

“In the field.”

“Yes. Living among the homeless, learning their lifestyles, their mores. I’m going to
be
homeless. No safety net. I’ll be out of touch with the family. I will sever all ties. No money, no place to run to, until the project is over. I have to learn what it’s like to feel hopeless, if that’s the way they feel, to have nobody to bail me out or to feed me or to keep me warm. It will certainly be a new experience for a Woodhouse. I think I will bring a unique perspective to that experience, given my—privileged, I guess you’d call it—background.”