Spiked (21 page)

Chapter 28

The intercom crackled, “Who is it?”

“It's Eddie. Buzz me in.”

“Eddie? It's—six in the morning. Go away.” Click.

Eddie did not go away. He waited by the intercom outside the apartment building.

Tiny snowflakes from a morning squall swirled around him, and the cold air felt good in his lungs. The General whined from inside his plastic pet carrier. Eddie carried a coffee can with a plastic lid. The can was heavy. A similar can bulged in his coat pocket. That one was light.

Two minutes passed before Melissa asked over the intercom, “Are you still there?”

Eddie leaned to the speaker box. “Yes.”

“I figured.”

The door buzzed.

Melissa met him at her apartment door in a long white nightshirt. Her hair was tousled, her cheek creased from the pillowcase. She kept one hand on the door, ready to close it if she didn't like what she heard. Then she saw General VonKatz. Surprised, she asked Eddie, “Whatever is this?”

“Could the General crash here?” he asked. “My house has some, um, security issues.” His hands were full so he gestured with his head in the general direction of his house.

Melissa beckoned Eddie inside and closed the door. Her apartment was bright, modern, and antiseptic: beige carpet, bone white walls and recessed lights in a vaulted ceiling. Her three-piece living room set, done in matching fabric, was clustered into a little conversation area. The magazines on the coffee table were highbrow reading on politics and theater. The television, nasty thing, was hidden away in a cabinet.

“What's wrong with your place?” she asked him. Eddie assumed she meant what
new
was wrong with his place. Melissa often chided him about living like a castaway.

He put down the pet carrier and told her about the break-in and the destruction of nearly everything he owned.

“Good thing your stuff was so dreadfully awful,” she said. But her voice was too tender for the dig to really dig. “Who would do such a ghastly thing?”

“Who would do a lot of stuff we report in the paper every day? Who would kill Danny?”

She wrinkled her nose at his comment, as she bent to the pet carrier. “Of course the General can stay here,” she assured Eddie. She glanced up at him and smiled wickedly. “You, on the other hand, cannot.”

She opened the carrier's wire gate. General VonKatz rushed out, riding low to the ground. There were many, many things to be sniffed in this strange place, and he set right to work.

Eddie showed her the heavy coffee can. “Clean cat litter,” he explained. “Just pour it in a plastic tub or something.” He put the can down and pulled a bag of dry cat food from the carrier, which he gave to her. “Dump some of this in a bowl. He'll eat when he wants it.”

“How long do you think it will be?” she asked.

“No more than a day or two—I hope.”

Melissa finally noticed Eddie was dressed for work. “You're heading in early.”

“I have an interview at eight,” he said. “Look Melissa, the General likes you. If anything were to happen to me—you know, things can happen to people—I'd want you to adopt the little guy.”

She laughed nervously. “What do you mean?” And then she gave him a hard stare. Fright stirred in her big wet eyes.

Eddie lowered his voice. “I'm sorry about yelling at you, at the office.”

“I know.”

“You're nobody I should be mad at.”

“Forget it, Eddie,” she said, softly. “Just be careful.” She reached her hand to his. He touched her fingers and felt forgiveness in them. She let the touch linger for a moment. And then, as if forcing herself to break the spell, she asked brightly, “Want a coffee for the road? I can put some on.”

“Sure, I got a minute,” Eddie said. His eyes narrowed. “This won't be decaf, will it?”

She smiled. “Would I put kryptonite in Superman's mug? You need your caffeine.”

“You're right. Coffee without caffeine is like,” Eddie searched for the right metaphor, “like a night with a prostitute—it's warm in your hands, but where's the love?”

Melissa giggled and slapped his shoulder. Her forgiveness was complete. She headed for the kitchen, calling out, “Cream? Sugar? How do you want it?”

“Black is fine, thanks.”

As soon as she turned the corner, Eddie took out the other coffee can, the one in his pocket. He peeled off the lid and shook the General's brown moth into the air. He fanned at it, and encouraged, “Go, go.” The beast flapped up, bounced off a wall and made a fluttering nuisance of itself along the peak of Melissa's vaulted ceiling.

Chapter 29

The newsroom had the sizzle of a big story in the making. Gordon Phife had called in three extra reporters to help on the morning fireman shift. They had telephones welded to their heads. Line editors with no lines yet to edit yapped amongst themselves in excited low voices. The police scanner was cranked to maximum volume. It broadcast snippets of conversation across the newsroom, none of which made much sense out of context.

Phife spotted Eddie and waved him over. “I've been calling you,” he said in his no-nonsense, hard news tone. “Your number just rang and rang. Is your answering machine broken?”

It was. The harmless plastic thing had been squashed under a boot or a baseball bat or whatever. “I gotta get a new one,” he said. “I'm leaving for an interview in half an hour. What can I do until then?”

Phife groaned. “I need more reporters, not reporters with appointments,” he said. “You probably can't do anything. Unless you can find out in thirty minutes why two dozen cops taped off Billings Mill and brought in the body-sniffing dogs.”

Eddie stared at him, wide-eyed. “I may have a source on that,” he said. He abruptly spun and marched off.

At his desk, Eddie put on a show to waste some time. He dialed his home number and pretended to have a conversation. The phone rang for real when he put it down.

“Bourque,” he answered.

“Is this Eddie?”

Eddie recognized the woman's sandpaper voice. “Gabrielle? Nice to hear from you. You just caught me before I had to run out.”

“I tried you a few times this morning,” she said. “I didn't leave a message because there's no way you can get back to me. The phone company is slow to put service under the Chelmsford Street Bridge.” She honked, laughing.

“You're up early,” Eddie said. “Everything all right?”

“Leo and I couldn't sleep last night because of what we know. We wanted to tell you right away, because you asked us to help you investigate, and we did.”

How long had it been since somebody trusted Leo and Gabrielle? How long since somebody from the world outside the bridge had thought they had something to offer? She raced through the story:

“Leo and me checked with our paperboy first to see if he remembers selling horse and a spike to your friend. He hadn't sold a spike for weeks. We tried some other dealers we know, and they didn't remember anybody like that, either. So Leo and me split up and started talking to friends. And they told us about some other dealers we didn't even know about, which is both good and bad for us, you know what I mean, Eddie?”

“Yeah, I know.”

She continued, “So this one girl tells me about this guy, name's Swindale or Swindle or something—that's a funny name if you're selling, ain't it?” She honked again. “And we go talk to him. He remembers selling one bag last week to this guy in a fancy raincoat, who he figured was just some chipper who works downtown and chased the dragon on weekends. And this guy wants a needle too. So Swindle—yeah, that's his name—names a price. He starts out real high so when he comes down, the price is right. But the guy doesn't blink. He takes out his wallet. Swindle charges him triple and the guy doesn't blink.

“So Swindle thinks he's a first-timer looking to get his wings. He offers his pager number, you know, to start a relationship. But the guy says no, he won't need any more horse—ever. Does this sound like your friend?”

“I'm afraid it might,” Eddie said.

“One more thing,” she said. “Swindle said your friend asked about a piece.”

“A gun? Did he sell him one?”

“No. But he gave him some names. Ain't hard to get one.”

He thanked her and they hung up. Nowlin wanted heroin and a gun? The gun made sense if he was fighting Chanthay's war with her, or if he wanted to protect her—Eddie knew that feeling. But the heroin? A one-time hit? There was still a lot about Danny he didn't know.

Eddie wasted another ten minutes on the phone with the cinema's automated movie line. Then he ran to Phife.

“My source says the cops have two bodies in Billings Mill,” Eddie told him.

Phife jotted this down and then peppered him with editor's questions. “Junkies? Suicides? Men? Women? Do you know?”

“Two men. One homicide for sure—bullet in the hat, execution style.”

“And the other?”

“Fell down an elevator shaft.”

Phife wrote this down. “You got names?” he demanded.

Sure—Mick and Ray.
Not that Eddie could share anything the cops hadn't yet discovered. “Gordon! Gimme a break,” Eddie pleaded. “I had half an hour.”

Phife put up his hands, surrendering. “I know, I'm sorry. Great work. How solid is this stuff? Can we run it?”

“It's a rock.”

He nodded, impressed. “We'll try to get the cops to confirm it on the record. If not, I'll lobby Keyes to run it as exclusive material from unnamed sources. How should we characterize it? An unnamed police source? Or simply a source close to the investigation?”

Eddie considered the question. He had never permitted something false to get into print. “Let's not get specific about the identity, okay?” he said. “My source would be screwed to the roof if he's uncovered.” Which was absolutely true.

Chapter 30

The Mighty Chevette whirred east down a concrete boulevard. Harsh weather had battered away the last stubborn brown leaves from the sugar maples that reached huge limbs over the street. The homes along the road were all pleasant, a few even grand, if you were impressed by size, ornamental pillars and gardens. The early morning snow squall was over, not a trace remained on the ground. Clouds and sun split the sky evenly, and the air had warmed near forty.

Eddie steadied the steering wheel with a knee and studied a street map. The side streets meandered, in no hurry to get Eddie where he was going. The homes grew farther apart, backyards got bigger and stone walls reached higher. The Mighty Chevette coughed up a hill, on another boulevard divided down the middle by granite curbing, a strip of lawn and crab apple trees.

The fences along this street were taller than Eddie. Pointy iron crosses topped the stone walls around the Sok estate. They praised God, and discouraged thieves.

A gap in the wall appeared, and Eddie slammed the brakes. The Chevette made that metal-on-metal grinding again. He pulled the car into the gap and stopped at a black iron gate made of interlocking swirls. The swirls along the top curled toward the street and were tipped in serrated barbs, like fishing hooks for a Great White shark.

Beyond the gate, a pebble driveway curved right and vanished behind hemlock. Facing the drive on both sides, like pedestrians watching a parade, were about twenty-five large-as-life statues. Probably meant to depict the anonymous minor characters in the Bible—fishermen and shepherds, prostitutes and tax collectors—the figures looked like beatnik hitchhikers, dressed in robes and sandals. They had been painted lifelike colors, which the New England weather had faded unevenly.

There was no gate attendant or intercom box. Eddie rolled down the window and called out, “Hello?”

The reply, a woman's voice, was as clear as a local telephone call, “Mr. Edward Bourque?”

The words seemed to come from the center of the wall beside the car, so that's where Eddie directed his response. “Yes. I have an appointment with Matthew and Peter Sok.”

The gate parted at its middle and swung inward.

The Chevette's tires crunched on the stone driveway. The car crept through the columns of figurines. One of the statues held a shotgun. No, Eddie realized, that was a man, an armed guard, who eyed the car as it passed. Eddie noticed another guard, and then a third, patrolling the grounds.

The driveway curved four times, left and right, before ending at a gravel parking area and a four-car garage. The parking lot was half-moon shaped, the garage castle-like, with battlements along the roof and two small stone turrets. A miniature of the garage would have been perfect at the bottom of a fish tank.

Two other vehicles were in the parking lot, a silver BMW sedan, and an ambulance, its back doors open. A man and a woman, both thirtyish and dressed in matching blue uniform jackets, were sitting on the back bumper, chatting in the sun. They held magazines,
Sports Illustrated
for him,
The New Yorker
for her. Eddie parked beside them.

They nodded hello when he stepped from the car.

“Everything all right?” Eddie asked.

“We're on call,” the man said. He had a deep voice, like the overnight disc jockey on a blues station. “Finally got a nice day, too. They say it might hit fifty this afternoon.”

“That'll be nice,” Eddie agreed.

The woman added, “Better than freezing our butts off, crammed all day in the front seat.”

“You stay here all day? Every day?”

“Not just us,” the woman said. “Second shift gets here at three-o'clock.” She winked. “Nice to have money, huh?”

“The Soks hire you?”

“They hire our company,” she said. “Round-the-clock. Ted and I pull this detail a few days a month. Not much action, but it's a nice break.”

Eddie pointed down a stone walkway. “The house down this way?”

“Past those trees,” the man said. “Across the chessboard. You'll see.”

The path took Eddie along a knoll landscaped with bark mulch, and then through a grove of Douglas fir, each a little too big to be an indoor Christmas tree. It climbed the knoll, leading to a sculpture garden on a forty-foot checkerboard of red and white squares. Cement chess pieces as big as people—one side white, the other reddish like clay pottery, were positioned on the board and the sidelines, like during a game between giants.

More fir trees crowded the edges of the board, like spectators leaning in for a good view. Eddie strolled across the sculpture. From a strategic standpoint, the red pieces held the advantage; the white side had lost more players and was on its heels. A copper plaque bolted to a boulder made sense of the scene:

There was no year listed. Tarnish, the color of month-old bread, speckled the plaque.

Eddie laughed out loud at Sok's personal monument to a third-rate amateur chess club championship. The wealthy were simply another species.

He was still laughing when a line on the plaque echoed in his head.

Defeated the Field and Named “King”

Had he read that before? He had skimmed scores of clips on Samuel Sok from The Empire's library; several had mentioned Sok's love of the game, but Eddie couldn't recall reading about Sok's club championship.

Danny's story!

Eddie yanked from his wallet the notes from Nowlin's home computer, the fragment from Nowlin's story draft:
…showing amazing instincts, he mated each of them in March and was crowned their King.

Danny's secret story had been a profile of Samuel Sok. The scent of Danny's trail was suddenly overpowering. Eddie hurried along the path.

The estate house was surprisingly modest. More charming than stunning, it could have been a bed and breakfast on Nantucket. It was three stories, mostly clapboard, pale yellow, and cluttered with windows, round, square and oval, and no two alike in size. The trim was white, as were the carved wooden pillars supporting the portico. The building's peaks and gables complemented two small cupolas and a circular widow's walk with a white railing.

Cold weather had blunted the front yard's summer glory. It was landscaped with shrubs and fruit trees. Concord grape vines swarmed a wooden gazebo. There were cement benches in a rock garden and a dozen more Biblical sculptures, all men in robes. The Apostles, maybe?

Eddie walked under the portico, and up two stone steps to an imposing wooden door. Fixed to it at eye-level was an iron bell shaped like an army helmet, and a metal hammer dangling on a chain. There seemed to be no conventional doorbell. Eddie clanged the bell twice with the hammer. The tone was low and sweet. The two chimes reminded him of a movie,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. Not one of his favorites. He rang a third time.

The lock mechanism clattered from the inside, and then the massive door jerked inward an inch, before momentum took hold and it swung open. A housekeeper, a woman of about fifty, no bigger than the average sixth-grader, greeted Eddie in a thin voice and led him down a hall to a sitting room.

The inside of the Sok house looked like a monastery run by monks who had discovered a loophole in the vow of poverty. The walls of the sitting room were angel-white, decorated with a chair rail and intricate moldings along the nine-foot ceiling. An Oriental rug was on the parquet floor in front of a fireplace. Religious figurines on pedestals prayed and wept and raised their swords. Seven paintings of the Madonna with child were hung around the room. There were three fabric sofas, each with an entourage of end tables, reading lamps and overstuffed pillows.

Eddie gasped.

On the wall above the fireplace hung a three-foot statuette of a bloody Christ figure, struggling from the cross. It was identical, except for size, to the crucifix hanging over the altar in abandoned St. Francis de Sales Church.

The housekeeper caught Eddie gaping at the cross. “Beautiful, isn't it?” she said.

“Fascinating,” he answered, trying to be diplomatic.

“Mr. Sok is very talented.”

Eddie pointed. “Samuel Sok made this?”

“Mr. Sok made everything in this home, and on the grounds. These figures were his business.”

“I thought his business had to do with historic homes?”

She nodded. “He made custom molding for historic replication.” She gestured to the molding around the room until Eddie got the point and nodded. “But as you can see, a higher power asked him to expand his enterprise.”

She excused herself and promised to alert Peter and Matthew that he had arrived.

Eddie draped his coat over a sofa. Sok's sons joined him in two minutes. One was built like a jockey. He wore brown suit trousers, a formal white shirt, and a buttoned, olive-colored vest. He camouflaged his receding hairline by shaving his head.

The other man was tall and bear-like, with sloping shoulders and a mess of black hair on a big oblong head. He wore a white T-shirt and a sports coat with jeans. Black chest hair curled over the shirt collar.

The bald one offered a hand with silver rings on each finger. “Welcome, Mr. Bourque,” he said. “I am Peter Sok. And this rather large gentleman—”

And then he just stopped.

Eddie gripped the outstretched hand and pumped it twice. Peter Sok held his smile, but the emotion behind it had drained away, leaving a corpse's face. Then he recovered as suddenly as he had frozen. “—And this gentleman is my brother, Matthew. We're pleased to be your hosts for our conversation this morning.”

Eddie thanked him and nodded. He shook Matthew's hand. The big guy's grip was powerful, but his hand too soft to make much of an impression. Matthew bit his bottom lip and squinted at Eddie. He asked, “Do I know you?”

“Of course not!” Peter scolded his brother. “Mr. Bourque is a writer for the newspaper. He is not a person we would have met before today.”

Matthew looked unconvinced, but dropped the matter. They sat down, each man on his own sofa.

Eddie declined their offer of tea. They chatted for fifteen minutes about the house and the grounds and the hope for a warm afternoon. Peter spoke for the brothers.

When they seemed loosened up, Eddie said, “Nobody has seen your father at city functions in several years. Such an influential man is easily missed. How has he been?”

Matthew looked at his brother, who looked at Eddie and assured him, “He is very well.”

“Would it be possible, when we're done here, for me to get a word with him?” Eddie asked.

No, it would not.

Peter gently explained, “Our father has come to treasure his privacy.” He pronounced the word priv-a-cee, with a short
i
sound. “He prefers to see no one. My brother and I are his spokespersons.”

That brought Peter to the point. “How may we help you today, Mr. Bourque?”

Eddie took out a note pad for the sake of maintaining a sense of authenticity, and then lied, “I'm researching a story on your father's recent step into city politics with the formation of his own political action committee.”

“You know about that?” Matthew asked, alarmed.

Peter seemed comfortable, even relieved, by Eddie's inquiry. He said to his brother, “Mr. Bourque is obviously skilled in the review of obscure public documents.” To Eddie, he said, “We had intended to remain anonymous on our first foray into politics, in case we were not successful. But you have found us out.”

Peter continued, offering long, corny quotes about the importance of being part of the democracy and contributing to the government of the people, blah, blah. Eddie had no need for his comments, but he jotted them down.

Matthew found his confidence and added his own platitudes. He seemed to enjoy participating on the same level as Peter, who was clearly the brains behind the Sok operation. Matthew was well spoken, but his thoughts came from shallow waters. He struck Eddie as a lunkhead with a million-dollar education.

Eddie asked, “But why give donations only to the incumbents?”

“They support our interests,” Peter said.

Added Matthew, “They're behind our project.”

Eddie perked at that.

Peter hissed at his brother, “That's enough!”

What project?
Eddie could imagine only one, the redevelopment project for the Acre neighborhood that Councilman Eccleston had tipped him to. It was not much to go on. Even when he bluffed, Eddie preferred a better hand. After half-a-beat to steel his nerves, Eddie said with confidence, “The Acre redevelopment proposal—I'm aware of it. An undertaking that huge needs a majority of the council behind it. You're right to think the incumbents would be with you.”

Matthew blanched. “Templeton said his reporters would not know until after the election!”

Peter popped up. “Enough!” He bowed to Eddie. “Pardon us one moment.” Then he took his brother by the arm and led him toward the door. He whispered to the big man, “If you tried all day, could you
be
any more stupid?”

Eddie dropped his notebook. His pen slipped from his fingers.

He recognized Peter's words, spoken in his whisper. He had heard them in the Worthen Canal, as he lay half-conscious on the ice.

These men had thrown Eddie off the bridge.

No wonder Peter's brain had short-circuited when he met Eddie that morning. He was seeing a ghost. And Matthew, big as an ox and just as smart, had recognized him too, but he couldn't place the face of the man he had tried to drown.

A foul rage stirred inside Eddie. His hands trembled. He closed them into fists.

And Eddie suddenly realized why he hadn't felt
different
after Chanthay had shot the hitman on the floor—the change had already taken place. Eddie had lost his boyhood nemesis, Fear, in Billings Mill. Her breath would never raise the chill it once did.