Swan Dive - Jeremiah Healy (2 page)

My home answering machine glowed one message in
fluorescent green-on-black. I rewound the incoming cassette while I
called my office answering service. The service said a friend of mine
from college, a lawyer in Peabody, needed to speak with me. He was on
the tape too as it replayed.

"John, Chris Christides. Jeez, I hate these
things, you know, you never know how much . . . Anyway, they had you
on the news, from the courtroom thing again. I’m in kind of a tight
spot with one of my cases tomorrow, and I’d really appreciate your
giving me a call tonight, anytime. Thanks."

I hadn’t seen Chris in maybe four years. He was a
third-string offensive guard on our Holy Cross team back when ability
and heart meant a little more than size. He was only about five nine,
but at two hundred he hit like a bowling ball with legs, blocking on
sweep plays and specialty teams. Dialing his number, I thought also,
and painfully, about his wife, Eleni.

"Hello?" said a familiar accented woman’s
voice.

"Eleni?"

"Yes? Who is this?"

Her words were more slurred than I remembered, but
only a little more. A good sign, I hoped.

"Eleni, it’s John Cuddy. Chris called me."

"Oh, John! It is good to hear the voice. How are
you?"

"I’m well, thanks."

"John, I know Chris need to see you, but he is
not here now. Can you come his office tomorrow, nine o’clock?"

"Do you have any idea what it’s about?"

"No. I know Chris is very worried on this case,
and if he talk to you, he could tell why."

I thought of asking her to have Chris call me back,
but then I pictured her, the way she looked the last time I’d seen
her, and pushed away an image of what further progression of the
multiple sclerosis had done to her by now. "I’ll be there. He
still in the building on Lowell Street near the courthouse?"

"No, no. He give that up, John. He have the
office here in the house now. We fix up the garage."

I caught myself estimating mentally what Beth’s
last few months with the cancer would have done to our finances
without Empire’s hospital plan. I didn’t want to think how
Eleni’s illness might have drained them. She gave me directions I
half recognized, and we said good-bye.

Talking with her on the phone had quashed most of the
good spirits left over from dinner with Nancy. I read more bad news
in the New York Times for another hour or so, then went to bed early.
 

TWO
-♦-

I was up by 6:30, thumping over Storrow Drive on the
Fairfield footbridge by 7:00. I headed downstream, favoring the
waterside path over the roadside one. People who say they can’t
stand running must never have jogged along the Charles River. I
passed the giant layered bust of Arthur Fiedler, the late conductor
of the Boston Pops. The mustached granite face eternally watches the
Hatch Shell stage from across the field where thousands, over half a
million at Fourth of July, would cheer for the orchestra and him.
Near a scullers’ boathouse, I almost collided with Robert Urich,
practicing a firing stance with his .45 while filming a "Spenser
for Hire" sequence on location. In the water, geese were
landing, mallards were swimming, and cormorants were diving. What
more can you ask from a sport?

I forded the river courtesy of the Museum of Science
and turned upstream on the Cambridge side, recrossing at the
Massachusetts Avenue bridge. I went in the Bildner’s food emporium
near Commonwealth for muffins and orange juice. Back on the street, I
saw a throng of well-dressed office workers waiting outside a
shuttered video store. The air was chilly, and they were stamping
around, flapping their arms and checking their watches like a line of
addicts outside a methadone clinic.

At the condo, I showered, shaved, and debated what to
wear. When I was an investigator at Empire, I talked with another
classmate in Legal about throwing some simple cases Chris’s way.
Unfortunately, Chris was the kind of lawyer that dressed in nubby
polyester sports jackets and ill-matched slacks. His files were
coffee-stained and never contained the right documents in the proper
order. In the words of the guy in Legal, it was one thing to wish
Chris well but quite another to refer him an insured as a client.

I rummaged through the closet. While I didn’t want
to outshine Chris by wearing a suit, I also figured there was at
least a chance I’d have to be in court with him that morning. I
pulled out gray slacks, a blue blazer, and a conservative striped
tie.

I drove to Route l and followed it north, mercifully
opposite the choked, honking traffic crawling southbound into the
city. Route l is a mixed bag of wholesome family restaurants,
space-devouring businesses like fence companies and lumberyards, and
pornographic adult entertainment centers. As I passed one, its
marquee read: ALL NEW! "A HARD  MAN IS GOOD TO FIND” AND
“EVERYBODY COMES BETWEEN ME AND MY CALVINS."

I turned northeast at the Route 128 interchange, and
then shortly thereafter took the exit for Route 114. After a mile and
a half of suburban forks, I found the Christideses’ house.

It was a small ranch on a quarter of an acre. I
remembered when they bought it, to be their “starter" home.
Back when her inability to conceive was thought to be a temporary
aberration in an otherwise healthy woman. Then Eleni began to suspect
that the infertility might be related to the occasional tremors she
experienced in her legs. She nearly didn’t mention them to her
doctor, "they was such a small thing."

After the tests and the retests came the
confirmation. There was no relationship between the unsteadiness and
the infertility, but the tremors were just the first signals of MS.

I left the Fiat curbside, even though the driveway
had been widened to simulate a parking area for the converted garage.
The new office appeared makeshift from the outside, not exactly the
kind of facade that would inspire confidence in the professional
working behind it. Chris’s old sedan, a Pontiac that had two years
on my coupe, slumped over the macadam abutting the space where the
overhead door used to hang.

I knocked on a human-size entrance and heard Chris’s
voice say, "Yeah, come in."

The cramped reception area
was paneled in bottom-of-the-line imitation pine that was already
starting to yellow. I stepped around three molded plastic chairs of
different colors and a low veneered coffee table with some ragged
magazines. Chris stood at a desk that seemed secretarial but had no
one behind it. He once told me that he was the first member of his
family to go to college, much less law school. From what I remembered
of his professional stature four years earlier, he was losing ground.

* * *

"John, John! Jeez, it’s good to see you."

He hustled over to shake my hand, clutching and
crushing a manila folder in his left list. His curly black hair
looked home-cut. Wearing a shirt whose collar points were a decade
too long, he’d also put on thirty pounds that he didn’t carry
well.

"Chris, it’s been a while. How’s Eleni
doing?"

His broad, mobile face drooped. "The best she
can. With the MS, sometimes it’s the muscles, other times the
breathing or the voice. What can you do?"

He began to walk backward toward a half-opened door.
“Come on into my office so we can sit. I got a temp that was
supposed to be here twenny minutes ago, but you and I gotta talk
quick if we’re gonna be on time."

I figured he’d tell me for what.

"Chris, I don’t do divorce cases."

"This isn’t like a divorce case."

"Chris, you’re representing this woman,
right?"

"Hanna. Her name’s Hanna Marsh."

"Hanna. And she’s got a five-year-old
daughter?"

"Right. Victoria. Vickie."

"And in an hour you’re supposed to be in
Marblehead at the office of the attorney for Hanna’s husband to
discuss things like custody, support, and division of property?"

"Well, yeah, of course things like that, but—"

“
Chris, that sounds a hell of a lot like a divorce
case to me."

Chris whoofed out a breath and held up both his
hands. “Jeez, John, will you just let me tell it all the way out
first?"

"All right."

"Then you can make up your mind."

“
I said all right. Go ahead."

"All right." Chris collected himself,
opened the file, then closed it again. "Aw, I don’t need the
details to tell you the way it is. This Hanna, she and her husband
live—lived, the husband’s still there—in Swampscott. She moved
out on him and took the kid with her. Somehow she ends up at the
doorstep of this woman that I represented some years back in her
divorce but never charged."

"Never charged?"

"Billed, billed. Never billed. I used to do a
lot of kinda courtesy stuff for family and friends in the Greek
community here and there, you know? You’re in solo practice, you
gotta do those kinds of cases to get the better ones, the bigger ones
later."

"Go on."

"Anyway, this former client’s got an apartment
to rent, and I guess Hanna musta seen it in the paper. Hanna’s from
Germany, met her husband when he was in the army over there, and she
hasn’t got any relatives over here. Truth is, she ain’t got a pot
to piss in, but Nerida—that’s my former client—she sees Hanna
and the little kid and, well, she takes ’em in, cat and all."

"Cat?"

"Yeah. The little kid, Vickie, she’s got a
cat, kitten, whatever."

"I don’t see—"

"So, Hanna and Vickie are in the crummy first
floor of the three-family here while the husband, his name’s Roy,
Roy Marsh, lives in a waterfront contemporary he had built over there
in Swampscott."

"And you’re representing Hanna against him."

"We already established that."

"Chris, it still sounds like a divorce to me."

"Just wait, just wait a minute, okay?"

I looked at him but didn’t talk.

"You see, I don’t need you to do any
investigating here. I mean, like assets or peephole stuff or like
that. This guy Marsh is loaded, and I’ve got him dead to rights on
at least one solid affair with a nurse who works Samaritan Hospital.
This nurse, you wouldn’t believe it, is off Mondays and Tuesdays
yet, perfect for screwing around, huh? Plus Hanna says he’s done
God knows how many pickups, hookers even."

"You’ve got him financially and morally, where
do I lit in?"

Chris shifted his eyes down and away from me,
fiddling with a ballpoint that had printing on its side, a giveaway
advertisement from some bank. "He scares me, John."

I watched Chris until I realized I was making him
uncomfortable. "What do you mean?"

"Just that. You think it’s easy for me to
say?" Chris squirmed in his chair, rubbing his left knee. His
“civilian-preservation" knee, he called it senior year of
college, the injury that kept him out of the draft’s chilly grasp.
"The guy scares me."

"Has he done something?"

"Not exactly."

“
Well, threatened you, what?"

Chris glanced up at me, not liking this at all.

"Nerida, this former client, she calls me and
pours out Hanna’s sob story. Then Nerida calls Eleni, and tells
her, and so Eleni nags at me till . . ." Chris gestured at the
folder. "Look, I’m not complaining. This is a good case. Jeez,
maybe a dream case, the guy’s earning power. But this Marsh, as
soon as he hears I’m gonna represent his wife, he comes in here, to
my office. Nobody out in reception that day, he comes in, stands in
that doorway there, and just looks at me."

“
Looks at you?"

"Yeah, just looks at me. I know he was doing it
before I looked up from what I was working on, because I could feel
the guy staring down at me. Anyway, he looks at me, and when I ask
him what he wants, he says, ‘I just wanted a look at you. I just
wanted a look at the man who thinks he’s gonna take away everything
I’ve worked for.' He wasn’t yelling. Jeez, he didn’t even say
it angry or nothing. Just low and even, like he was some gunslinger
in a western. He stared and said that, and left. He didn’t even
tell me his name, like automatically I’d know who he was."

"Did you?"

"Did I?"

"Did you know it was Roy Marsh?"

“
Oh, yeah, Hanna described him to me. She’s
afraid of him, too. Along with everything else, it seems he was a
little free with his hands."

"Can’t you get the court to order him not to
bother you? Or Hanna?"

"In a general sort of way, yeah. But we’re not
at that stage yet."

"I don’t follow you."

"Well, we haven’t filed for divorce yet, so
there’s nothing for the court to order him on."

"Why don’t you file?"

"There’s a thirty-day separation requirement,
and Hanna only moved out a coupla weeks ago. I could go to court and
get that waived, but in these things it’s usually better over the
long haul to avoid ruffling feathers."