Act of God (35 page)

But it hitting you and you proving it are two different things. Especially if you’re trying to protect someone like Pearl Rivkind and her memories of her husband as you’re doing it. I stayed at my place solo that night, not answering the phone, just thinking about what I needed to find out the next morning.

“Hold me up and fan me quick.”

“Mo—”

“I don’t see you for what, months at a time? And now it’s three times in a week?” He was leaning back in his desk chair, the dead cigar at the corner of his mouth. I took the chair in front of the mound of paperwork on his desk.

“I need some help, Mo.”

“Huh, tell me about it. You need help? I need help. First I don’t have any story ideas, now I got too many.”

“Too many?”

“Yeah, I got this story here about Chinese fortune cookies.”

“Mo, my—”

“Did you know fortune cookies don’t come from China?”

“No, Mo, I didn’t.”

“Well, they don’t. At least, the Chinese don’t have them over there now, so this guy down in Brooklyn—a Chinese-American himself—he’s going to export them back to China. Can you imagine that?”

“Sounds like a pretty good—”

“I mean, we Americans, we don’t know from these sayings, are they authentic, you know? Tell me, John, you open a fortune cookie in a Szechuan place here, can you tell whether Confucius or whoever actually said some of the things in there?”

“Probably not, Mo.”

“Huh, probably is right. I remember this one company up here, they did reverse fortune cookies.”

I had to ask. “Reverse fortune …”

“Cookies. Cookies, you know what I’m talking about here, right, John? I mean, these hard, sugary things you break apart and read the little slip inside there.”

“I get the picture, Mo.”

“So, okay, this company up here, they make cookies with terrible fortunes in them, like ‘You will get syphilis and your brain will rot,’ and so on.”

“I wouldn’t think there’d be much market for that sort of thing, Mo.”

“Neither did anybody else. I don’t think the company’s still around.”

“Mo—”

“But this guy in Brooklyn, now, how do you suppose he’s going to know if his sayings are right for the real Chinese over across the Pacific, huh? I mean, how are they going to react, he sends them fortunes that aren’t quite kosher?”

“Sounds like a genuine problem, Mo.”

“Problem, huh. That guy’s problem pales in comparison to the other story idea.”

“What’s that, Mo?”

Katzen removed the cigar from his mouth and regarded it disdainfully. “Condoms.”

“Condoms?”

“Yeah. The city council’s going to make all the bars and restaurants in Boston have coin-operated condom machines in the rest rooms.”

“I must have missed that, Mo.”

“Yeah, well, it’s going to be kind of hard to miss them, I’m thinking. Most of these places, they got a men’s room the size of a broom closet, you can barely turn around in there by yourself, and you’re going to be doing your business with this machine staring you in the face? I remember when I was young—this was quite some time ago, John, believe it or not.”

“I believe you, Mo.”

“I remember we used to carry the little buggers around in our wallets, hoping we’d get lucky. Only in those days, lucky meant once, so you’d have just this one in there, and you’d be praying your mother wouldn’t go into your bedroom to put some lunch money in the wallet and see the thing and have a heart attack and die, right there at your bureau, and all the family would know when she was found with the thing in her hand that you’re the one who killed her, killed her stone cold. And the problem was, they always got ruined in there, anyway.”

“Ruined, Mo?”

“Yeah, ruined. I mean, you keep that wallet in your back pocket, you’re sitting on it all day, every day. You never thought to, like, replace the thing. I mean, you know you haven’t used it, there’s no reason to go through the agony of buying a new one. And that’s what it was, too. Agony, John. That movie got it right, there.”

“Movie, Mo?”

“Movie. Film, whatever.
Summer of ’42,
when the kid goes into the pharmacy and tries to buy a condom.”

Pharmacy brought me back to William Proft and his sister. “Mo, I wonder if—”

“Now they got whole stores of them.”

“Whole stores, Mo?”

“Yeah. Condom stores, with corny names. They got one over by you there in Back Bay, whole place is like a card store except instead of catchy verse they got legions of latex.”

“That’s pretty catchy itself, Mo.”

He gestured with his cigar. “What is?”

“ ‘Legions of latex.’ ”

Katzen pointed the cigar at me. “I can’t use that, John.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t make fun of this stuff anymore, not with AIDS and all. It’s off-limits, unless you want to do a serious story on it, and I’m not sure I’m in the mood for a serious story today.”

“Then the fortune-cookie one sounds like a good bet.”

“Yeah.”

“You can do it like spaghetti.”

“Spaghetti?”

“Yes. The way Marco Polo brought spaghetti to Italy from China.”

“Italy? I’m talking Chinese restaurants here, John, not Italian ones.”

“Mo, what I mean is—”

“Who ever heard of a fortune cookie in an Italian restaurant?”

“Nobody, Mo. That’s—”

“Wait a minute. You know, that’s not such a bad idea. Why not have fortune cookies in all your ethnic restaurants. The Italian places, Irish pubs, the kosher joints in Brookline there. That’s actually a great idea for a nice light story. Only now”—Mo suddenly looked gloomy—“now I have three story ideas I got to choose from.”

“Mo?”

He didn’t look up.

“Mo?”

“What?”

“I need to see some more articles from your morgue files.”

“More?”

“Yes, and another favor.”

“You come in here, bothering me three times in a week, and now another favor, too?”

“It might be worse than that, Mo?”

“Worse?”

“You may have to call in a chip or two for me.”

“From where?”

“Your friend at Logan Airport.”

“Let me get this straight.”

“Okay.”

“You’re this private investigator named John Cuddy, right?”

“Right.”

“And you’re calling me about that crash outside Washington, D.C.”

“That’s right.”

“What do you want from us?”

“Since your agency investigates these things, I thought you might be able to help me with some questions I have.”

“Look, I’ve known Mo Katzen a hundred years, but you I don’t know from a hole in the ground.”

“I don’t think what I’m asking is all that secret. I just need to know it fast without going through a lot of reports.”

“Wouldn’t matter anyway.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, wouldn’t matter anyway. The reports aren’t admissible into evidence.”

“Who said anything about a trial?”

“Why else would a private eye want information about a plane crash, you’re not going to use it to sue somebody?”

“I’m just trying to track someone down.”

“We don’t release whether a given person was a passenger on a flight. Neither do the airlines.”

“I already know the passenger was on the flight from the
Herald
articles Mo dug out for me. I just need to know what happened.”

“What happened?”

“To the plane.”

“The plane would still be in a hangar down by D.C., lying in pieces after they reconstructed it, as far as they could.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I just need to confirm some things about how the crash itself occurred.”

An exasperated sigh. “This is for Mo, right?”

“Right.”

Some shuffling of papers. “Tell him he owes me.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Dinner at Dunfey’s Parker House.”

“He’s already looking forward to it.”

“All right, I got the report in front of me. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know if there was any possibility the plane was sabotaged in any way.”

“What?”

“The news stories dealt with the incident and even quoted some of the passengers. What I need to know is whether what the papers said was the cause is the only possible cause of the crash.”

“Look, I don’t spend that much time reading the papers. Don’t tell Mo that, all right? I don’t want him having a stroke on my account. But you want, I can tell you what the report says on causation.”

“Please.”

More shuffling. “You want all the surrounding stuff, or just the conclusion?”

“Start with the conclusion.”

“Okay, I’m reading this, now. Let’s see … ‘Therefore, it would appear that the sudden, unpredictable ascent of the flock of geese into the flight path of the aircraft was the cause of the engine failure, and that no pilot action could have avoided that failure or the incipient crash.’ How’s that?”

“No indication of any other cause, then.”

“No.”

Despite the magnitude of the tragedy, I found myself smiling a little.

The voice said, “We get these once in a while, pal. The lawyers like the one you probably work for, they’d like to have you believe that everything is somebody’s fault, but once in a while, we get one of these.”

“I understand.”

“Know what we call them?”

“Them?”

“A crash like this one. Do you know what we call it?”

“No.”

“Just an act of God.”

I stopped smiling.

The voice said, “Hey, you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Tell Mo I’m free tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow … ?”

“Night. For that dinner at Dunfey’s.”

“Oh, right. I will. One last thing?”

An impatient “What?”

I asked the question.

“Of course we do.”

“Where would it be?” I said.

“Be? Probably down in Washington. No reason to ship that kind of thing back up here. The families sure as hell wouldn’t want to take them home and watch them.”

I thanked her and hung up the phone in Mo Katzen’s office.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Thorson?”

“This is she. Who is this, please?”

“Mrs. Thorson, this is John Cuddy. I’m the investigator who spoke to you last Thursday.”

“Oh, yes. You’ll be pleased to know that Roger is doing much better.”

I said, “I’m glad.”

“Yes. He actually came over to dinner with my husband and me last night. He seemed, well, if not over what happened to Caroline, at least on his way back to life.”

“I was wondering, I really don’t want to disturb him by dredging up memories, but you mentioned that you took videotapes of him and his wife.”

A pause. “Yes?”

“For the case I’m working on, it would be a real help if I could see one of those.”

Another pause. “See one?”

“Yes. I know it’s kind of an odd request, but—”

“Oh, no. It’s not that. In fact, I’m glad you called me instead of Roger.”

“You are?”

“Yes, I have a number of them you could look at, but he has only the one.”

“Only the one?”

“Yes. It was a tape I took of them at a little going-away party we had just before one of their vacations. It wasn’t much, really, just drinks and some silly gifts, all of us waving good-bye and them waving back. You know.”

“I can picture it, I think.”

A third pause. “They were such a lovely couple. Roger borrowed that tape from me, oh, a month or so before Caroline was killed, but naturally I haven’t had the heart to ask for it back.”

“Naturally,” I said quietly.

I
T WAS A CONDO
complex spread up a hill overlooking Route 1A in Swampscott, about twelve miles north of Boston. I’d had to do some driving around to locate the right unit in a brick building with white trim around the outside doors and windows. At the main entrance, I rang the bell under the name JORGENSEN.

Before I could say anything, a woman’s voice came over the intercom. “You’re a doll, Janey. Come on in, I just have to put my shoes on.”

The building door made a buzzing noise, and I pushed through it.

There were two units on the first floor of the entryway. The door to the rear one was open, soft rock coming through it. I walked down the short hall and knocked on the jamb.

“Janey, you don’t have to—who are you?”

The woman looking back at me was in her mid-thirties, with a youthful face and trim figure in slacks and a short-sleeved knit jersey. She had one foot in a slip-on sandal, the other foot next to its mate, the toenails painted shocking pink. The only thing spoiling the picture was the cast on her right arm, elbow to hand, the fingers showing dark, as though ink-stained.

Staying in the hall, I took out my ID holder. “Becca Jorgensen?”

She used her good hand to brush brown, ringletted hair out of her eye. “I said, who are you?”

“My name’s John Cuddy. I’m a private investigator from Boston.”

I held up the ID, and Jorgensen looked at it from across her living room, though she was too far away to read anything on it. Her voice gave me the impression she didn’t trust me. “I don’t have time for anything right now.”

“I can come back another day, but I need to talk with you.”

“About what?”

“About the flight to D.C. you were on, a week ago Friday.”

The voice got frosty. “We’re not commenting on that.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with a lawsuit against the airline.”

“Right,” in a tone that meant she wasn’t close to buying it.

“Ms. Jorgensen, I—”

The phone rang but she ignored the noise, just keeping me in sight. “You’ll have to leave now.”

I didn’t say anything. There was a tape machine next to the ringing phone on the little table near her kitchen, and I had the impression she couldn’t wait it out.

Glaring at me, Jorgensen used her left hand to pick up the receiver. “Hello? … Janey, where … Oh, no, Janey. … Well, when’s the last time you started it? … The lights on? How … Okay, okay I know you didn’t do it on purpose. … Right, right. … I guess I’ll have to call—just a second.” Jorgensen kept her eyes on me. “Listen, there’s a guy here … No, not him. This guy claims he’s a private investigator.”