Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy (15 page)

"Then come, please."

I hung up and started walking.

Beacon Hill is the neighborhood around the gold-domed
Statehouse that I can see from my office window. The Beacon Street
side overlooks the Common on the downslope and the Public Garden on
the Hat. The major thoroughfare that divides the slope from the Hat
is Charles, home to antique shops and trendy restaurants. Unlike Back
Bay, much of the Hill remains single-family homes, though there
aren't very many single families that can pony up the nearly two
million required to own one. Condominium development was slower to
catch on here, the narrow floor plans of the Federalist townhouses
being less amenable to internal division than the Victorian
architecture elsewhere. As I climbed the red-brick sidewalks to reach
Evorova's address, however, I realized her building was plenty wide
enough for condos.

There was a keypad mounted on the wall outside the
front door, another glass-paneled, inner door visible before the
foyer. A typed list under a clear plastic cover next to the pad gave
directions and two-digit telephone numbers for the occupants, listed
in alphabetical order. I assumed the order was a security measure,
scrambling unit number and owner name so a browsing burglar couldn't
figure out which apartment had nobody home at any given time.

I pressed the DIAL TONE button, then Evorova's
number. I heard a telephone ringing through the speaker in the pad,
and then a pickup and Evorova's voice saying, "Yes?"

"John Cuddy."

"Good. I can buzz you through the first door,
but someone must come down to let you in the second."

I got out the first syllable of "Someone?"
before the dial  tone told me that Evorova had cut the
connection. I pressed the HANG UP button, and the tone stopped as a
bumblebee noise came from the outer door's jamb. I opened it, went
inside, and waited. Through the glass panel, the foyer had burgundy
carpeting leading up a broad staircase and a small, tasteful
chandelier suspended three feet from a fake mantelpiece with a mirror
over it.

About a minute later a fortyish woman in high heels
walked deliberately down the foyer's stairs, carefully holding the
railing. She was dressed elegantly in the sort of eveningwear you
don't usually see on a weekday, workaday night. The green gown
appeared to be buff velvet, a broach at the throat and spaghetti
straps crossing both shoulders. If the gown was the first thing you
noticed, the upswept auburn hair was the second, and I bet myself
that her eyes would be somewhere around the green of her gown.

As the woman opened the inner door for me, I won the
bet.

Extending her hand, she said, "Mr. Cuddy, Claude
Loiselle."

I shook politely. "Not exactly what I expected."

A lopsided grin that made me think of Audrey Hepburn
as Holly Golightly. "What did you expect, something from the
Women Seeking Women section of the personals? 'White professional
bull dyke seeks femme for roller derby, beer blasts, and possible
relationship'?"

Loiselle slurred some of the words, and I realized
she'd had a few pops of something. "Ms. Evorova just said you
were a banker, like her. And I was referring to your gown."

"Oh." Loiselle looked down at herself, then
back up to me. "We're going to the opera, Verdi's Rigoletto.
Even bankers dress up when they do that." Teetering a little on
the heels, she turned and beckoned me with a single, crooked index
finger. "Hope you don't mind the stairs. The elevator's no
bigger than a dumbwaiter and gives me claustrophobia."

"The stairs are fine."

Loiselle had to hitch up her gown a little at the
hips to negotiate the first few steps.

"Claustrophobic Claude. Kind of 'sings,' don't
you think?"

"I give it an eighty-five. Good melody, but
tough to dance to."

Her laugh was almost a gargling sound.

"Too bad Olga didn't meet you instead of the
Horse's Ass."

As we reached the first landing, I didn't see any
open doors, so I said, "Andrew Dees'?"

"The same. I mentioned 'relationship' before?
His idea of a deep and lasting relationship is about six inches
'deep' and 'lasting' twenty minutes."

We started the next flight. "You know him well,
then'?"

"Met him twice. The second time wasn't
necessary, if you take my point."

"Bad first impression?"

"No first impression."

"I don't get you."

"The man's not really there . . . what do I call
you, anyway?"

"John is fine with me if Claude is fine with
you."

"Dear God, a private investigator who speaks in
parallel structure? I can't find a fucking assistant who even knows
what parallel structure is. "

"It's just the generation. Reading and writing
isn't what they were focused on."

"Now, that's a dangling participle, right?"

"Preposition, I think."

Second landing. "Right, right. Preposition."

We kept climbing. "Back to Mr. Dees. You were
saying . . . ?"

"Saying what?"

"Something about his not really being there."

"Oh. Andrew doesn't talk about himself. I mean,
have you ever met a man who didn't drone on about how he starred at
quarterback in high school, or what a screwing he took from his bitch
of an ex-wife, or something?"

"And Dees doesn't."

"Not a word. You get the impression that he's an
actor, not entirely comfortable with a new role he's playing? We
reached a door that stood ajar, what sounded like chamber music
coming from behind it. Loiselle bumped the door open with her right
buttock. "We1come to the Dostoyevsky Museum." 1

Inside the unit, a short corridor had a carpet runner
of a design I'd never seen before, brocades of red and gold. The
corridor walls had been scooped out, shelved in, and glassed over,
with indirect lighting above exotic bric-a-brac that I didn't have
time to catalogue.

Loiselle led me into a living room decorated from top
to bottom in the most striking taste I'd ever seen. Orange drapery
over the windows, pulled and tucked in a sequence that drew your eyes
first upward then outward to the antique prints of armored warriors
and dancing women and the not-quite-Catholic icons on the walls.
There were delicate chairs and heavy tables, some with marble tops.
Festive, folkish dolls sat or stood on open shelves around a
magnificent fireplace, other shelves holding books, spine out, with
Cyrillic lettering on them.

Two loveseats opposed each other in front of the
fireplace, a hand-carved, black wood coffee table between them. On
the table stood a fluted glass, white wine filling a third of the
bulb. The fireplace wall was painted a deep green that matched my
guide's gown so well she looked like a floating face and shoulders in
front of it.

Loiselle gestured toward one of the loveseats. As I
went to sit, she said, "Drink?"

"How close are you and Ms. Evorova on time?"

"Time?"

"For the opera."

"Oh. An hour yet. Olga's still getting dressed,
but I've hired a car."

"Then yes to the drink, whatever's easiest."

"We have a nice chardonnay open."

"Half a glass would be great."

"Done."

Loiselle moved to a linoleum area, the kitchen
visible through a pass-through hole in that wall. The loveseats were
upholstered in silk, strands of shining red and gold thread
embroidered into the fabric, reminding me of the carpet runner in the
hall. The music sounded like a crying piano, and I thought I
recognized the piece.

Loiselle returned with my glass, a little more than
half full, but close enough. After setting the wine on the coffee
table, she sat down across from me. Raising her own glass in a mock
toast, Loiselle said, "To whatever you've discovered about the
Horse's Ass."

I tried the chardonnay. Vanilla and oak, nicely
blended and not so cold the flavor cou.ldn't come through.

"Excellent."

"Ought to be. That Bonny Doon's thirty dollars a
bottle."

"I'll sip it slowly.”

The lopsided grin again. "I didn't realize
private investigators were so easily offended."

"We've gotten more sensitive over the years."

"I could tell right away," said Loiselle.

"Tell what?"

"That you weren't a clod."

"How?"

"From the way you reacted downstairs." She
tilted her glass, allowing the wine to slide around and coat the
inside, then sniffed it without drinking from it. "When I
mistook your 'not what I expected' remark and came on like a
chip-on-the-shoulder lesbo, as one of my dear departed colleagues
used to call me."

“
Departed."

"After he said that to me once, I dedicated the
next month to undermining him, and he was gone two more after that."

I nodded.

"Anyway," said Loiselle, "you took my
shot in stride and just turned it around on me. I do the same thing
to others often enough myself."

"What kind of banking are you in?”

"Commercia1 lending, and deadly serious stuff it
is, too. Say you want to develop a shopping center or office
building, but you need a hundred million or so in construction
financing. I'm the one you have to make happy."

"And does it make you happy?"

"Sometimes." Another nip at the wine. "Not
often, actually. But it lets me own a house down in Provincetown and
my version of this place, with Melissa Etheridge instead of
Tchaikovsky on the stereo."

"I think it's Rachmaninoff."

Loiselle stopped. Then she stood up and moved to the
stereo stack in the corner, reaching under something to pull out a
compact disk cover. Coming back to the loveseat, she said, "You
didn't look at this, did you?"

"The CD case?"

"Right."

"No, I didn't."

"Then how did you know . . . ?"

"Took a music appreciation course back in
college. You happened to be playing the one piece I could have gotten
right, that's al1."

Lifting her wineglass, Loiselle said, "Olga was
playing, actually."

Speaking of whom. "Before she joins us, anything
else you can tell me about Andrew Dees?"

Loiselle put the glass down again, spreading her
hands on her thighs as though she were wiping the palms. In a serious
tone, she said, "I'm sorry . . . John, right?"

"Right."

"I know you're trying to help Olga—and God
knows, I think she needs it—but I've been flip as hell with you
because I skipped lunch and had two glasses of Bonny Doon here when I
should have stopped at one."

"That's all right."

A sniffing that had nothing to do with the wine.
"An-drew Dees. He wants to be with Olga, but not enjoy some
things with her. Take tonight, for instance. He'll go to the ballet,
or even a folk concert. But while Olga loves opera—especially
Puccini and Verdi—he won't budge on it. Listening to a CD of the
Three Tenors'? Fine. Going to see Pavarotti live? Not a chance."

"There has to be something more than that."

"No, there isn't, and that's my point. It's like
I said on the stairs before. An-drew's a cipher, an android. He—"

"I am so sorry to keep you waiting."

I stood up at the sound of Olga Evorova's voice. She
came into the room, dressed in a black gown with silver sequins at
the shoulders and holding a sequined handbag in the shape of a
dinosaur egg. Wearing more makeup, she now looked glamorous rather
than merely attractive, and I began to wonder why Andrew Dees
wouldn't want to be out and about with her, appreciating the
attention she'd garner.

Claude Loiselle rose from her loveseat. "I'll
just go powder my nose while you two talk."

"No," said Evorova. "I would like you
to be here, Claude." She turned to me. "Unless it would
destroy some of the confidentiality we discussed, yes?"

I said, "As a client, you usually can have a
confidante with you. If you want Ms. Loiselle—"

"Claude," said Loiselle.

"And I am Olga, please."

"Olga," I said, "if you'd like Claude
to be here too, that's tine with me."

Sitting back down, Loiselle shoved over a little, and
Evorova joined her on the loveseat.

I sat so that I was facing my client directly. "I
went to Plymouth Willows, acting like I was representing another
condo complex interested in hiring Hendrix Management. Evorova only
watched me, but Loiselle nodded in quick bobs, like she'd already
known that.

"I spoke to Hendrix himself before the
neighbors, just to make it look right, and then to Mr. Dees
afterward. However, about three hours later, a couple of guys roughed
me up behind my office building."

Evorova's jaw dropped as she sucked in an audible
breath. Loiselle leaned forward, elbows on her knees, concentration
cutting through the wine haze.