Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy (2 page)

"Andrew has only one employee, and she is loyal
to him, I believe."

"No, I meant at your bank. Has anyone met Mr.
Dees?"

"Only my friend, Clude, who owns the house on
the Cape."

"Clude?"

"She is French-Canadian, but born here. The
spelling is C-L-A-U-D-E."

I wrote it down. "Last name?"

"Wah-zell, L-O-I-S-E-L-L-E." Evorova seemed
troubled. "I would prefer you not speak with her."

I placed the pen back on the blotter. "It might
help if you could tell me why."

The troubled look grew deeper. "Probably I will
talk to Claude about coming to see you. However, she has had dinner
with us—with Andrew and me—twice. I think she made up her mind
about him the first time, but she agreed to meet him again."

"And—"

"Claude is a very . . . instinctive person, Mr.
Cuddy. She believes Andrew is hiding something from me."

"Did Ms. Loiselle suggest you see a private
investigator?"

"No." The executive stare again. "She
suggested I stop seeing Andrew."

I'd already heard enough not to contest Evorova on
that one, but she kept going anyway. "You see, I have not had a
very . . . secure life. Before I am born, my mother was pregnant with
twins, another baby girl and me. When she reached her sixth month, my
mother was passenger on a bus in Moscow that collided with a truck.
Afterward, she felt sick, so she went to the doctor. He said to her,
'I am sorry, but one of your babies is dead.' He said also that it
would be safer for the other baby-me-if my mother carried both babies
. . . to term. She did what the doctor advised, and so I lay in the
womb three months next to my dead sister." A tear trickled over
the comer of Evorova's left eye. "I never met her, but I . . . I
still miss her.”

A moment. Then, "As my other family, the ones
who survived the Great Patriotic War, began dying, I dreamed of the
United States, and a different life here. A secure one. And now I
have that. But for me, life has been only study and work. All my
time, all my energy, all my . . . heart. Until I met Andrew. And my
heart tells me I cannot lose him just because my banker head—or my
banker friend—tells me some things are perhaps not quite right. Do
you see this?"

I thought about my wife, Beth, before the cancer took
her, and about Nancy Meagher, who'd very nearly come to replace her.
"I think so."

Evorova suddenly shrugged heavily. "I am sorry.
I am one professional coming to consult with another, and instead, I
. . ." The expressive wave again.

I picked up my pen. "We need to talk about my
retainer and how you want me to stay in touch with you."

She looked at me. "You will try to help, yes?"

"I'll try."

A sense of relief came into her voice. "Thank
you so much. "

Evorova thought my usual rate was fine, giving me her
home number but asking that I use her voice-mail at the bank, "just
in case Andrew is . . . might be at my apartment."

"And where do you live?"

She reeled off the street address. "A
condominium of my own, on Beacon Hill."

Which triggered an idea. I said, "You told me
Mr. Dees lives in a condominium too."

"Yes. Unit number 42 at Plymouth Willows in—"

"Plymouth Mills."

Evorova seemed pleased that I'd remembered the name
of her Andrew's town.

I said, "He has neighbors close by, then?"

"Exactly, yes. Townhouses on either side. In
little 'clusters,' he calls them."

"How big a complex is it?"

"Plymouth Willows? A total of perhaps fifty
units, sixty?"

Good. "So there's some kind of property company
that manages it?"

"I believe so." Evorova's eyes seemed to
search inside for a moment. "Yes. I remember Andrew saying once
the name of it, when he was writing his monthly maintenance check."

"Do you remember the name?"

More searching. "No, I am sorry."

I put down the pen and smiled at her. "Can you
find out?"

Olga Evorova smiled back, but I could tell she wasn't
sure why.
 

=2=

Knocking lightly on the jamb of the open door, I
said, "Mo, got a minute?"

Mo Katzen glanced up at me. He was sitting behind a
desk that looked roughly like the Charles River Esplanade after the
July Fourth fireworks' concert. Pieces of waxy sandwich paper
jockeyed for position with empty soda cans, the straws still bent at
the angle Mo preferred while drinking from them. Discarded stories
were scattered around the old manual typewriter he wouldn't consign
to the junk heap despite the fact that every other reporter at the
Boston Herald had computerized years ago. A half-smoked, unlit cigar
was jammed in the corner of his mouth, the eyes sad beneath an unruly
wave of snow-white hair. Seventy-something and looking every day of
it, the man himself was in his standard uniform, the vest and pants
of a three-piece suit, the jacket nowhere to be found. Only this
time, the suit was black instead of the usual gray.

"John, John." Mo motioned listlessly. "Come
on in."

I took the seat across his desk. "Something
wrong, Mo?"

He shrugged, the cigar doing a sit—up. "Nothing
much. Just the passing of a generation, that's all."

"Somebody died?"

"Of course somebody died. People die every day,
John. Every minute, probably every second, you want to stretch the
net wide enough. Why do you think I'm in this outfit?"

"Sorry, Mo. Someone c1ose?"

A smaller shrug, the cigar rising only halfway.
"Close enough. Guy I went to school with, back in Chelsea."

The city north of Boston. "How did it happen?"

"How? How. I'll tell you how." Mo came
forward, some animation flowing back into him. "Freddie—that
was his name, Freddie Norton—Freddie was walking by the McCormack
Building downtown. He was trying to figure out where the feds had
hidden the Social Security offices so he could ask them a question,
since of course trying to get them on the phone is just this side of
establishing radio contact with Mars. Well, Freddie looks the wrong
way stepping off the curb and gets pasted by this truck, pedal to the
metal in third gear trying to pass a police car on the right. I mean,
what kind of jerk does that? Pass a cruiser, and in the slow lane,
yet. Anyway, Freddie gets thrown fifty feet—he was always just a
little guy, and he hadn't grown any lately—and despite the cops
already being there and calling for an ambulance and all, he's DOA at
Mass General, like seven blocks away."

"I'm sorry for your troubles, Mo."

"Huh, tell me about it. People dwell on how
they're afraid to ride planes or even cars in this city. You know how
dangerous it is just to walk around here?"

"I have some idea——"

He pulled the cigar out of his mouth and gestured
with it. "I called this guy I know over in the Transportation
Department—those guys you can reach by phone, account of nobody
ever makes calls about safety, you know?—and he told me that
pedestrian deaths dropped from over thirty to just eleven in four
years."

"Impressive."

"Impressive? What, are you kidding me? That
eleven was something like forty percent of the total motor-vehicle
fatalities in the entire city for the year. Which puts us just behind
New York. Can you imagine that? We're killing our pedestrians at
almost the same rate as the Big App1e."

"Mo, I'm not sure your figures support—"

"Plus, after that drop to 'only' eleven, the
toll jumped back near twenty last year. I'm telling you, John, it's
like open season out there." Mo laughed silently. "The kind
of thing Freddie would've liked to hear."

"I don't get you, Mo."

He looked up at me, waving the cigar impatiently.
"Freddie was an undertaker, didn't you know that?"

"I guess not."

"He had some great experiences in that line of
work too, more than you'd think. I remember a couple of times I had
to cover the funerals of people laid out at his home—pols mostly,
hacks all—and Freddie'd take me aside, ask with that undertaker's
dirge if I could use them in one of my columns."

"Use what, Mo?”

"His experiences, what do you think? You got to
pay closer attention, John."

"Sorry, Mo."

"I mean, it's like you're losing the whole
thread of the conversation here."

"Won't happen again."

Mo shuffled through the mess on his desk till he came
up with a war-memorial lighter the size of a softball. He flicked it
three times, no results. Then he examined it more closely, the thing
no more than six inches from his eyes.

"Bastards!"

"What's the matter, Mo?"

"The ASNs. They stole my wick again."

"The who?"

"Not 'who,' John, 'what.' My wick, the little
thing in there, lets the flame come out. What college did you go to,
anyway?"

"Ho1y Cross, Mo. But-"

"And you don't know what a wick is? The priests
didn't have candles in the chapels there and all?"

"They had candles. What I meant was, who are the
'Ay-Ess-Ens'?"

"The initials, of course. The Anti-Smoking
Nazis."

"First I've heard of them, Mo."

"They steamrolled some kind of 'secondhand
smoke' policy through the powers that be, and now we're supposed to
go outside every time we want to light up."

“
That's becoming pretty typical of—"

"Only I won't go along with it, so they sneak in
here and steal my wick." He hefted the lighter for me to
appreciate. "You have any idea how hard it is to replace one, an
antique like this is?"

"None."

Mo shook his head. "And to think my favorite was
the one about this paper."

“
Your favorite?"

He fixed me with a baleful eye. "My favorite of
the experiences that Freddie told me about in his funeral home."

"Oh.”

"You gonna be all right now?"

"Just a momentary lapse, Mo."

"I hope so." He put down the lighter and
stuck the dead cigar back in his mouth. "Freddie had some great
ones, like the time this lifelong rival of the decedent comes into
the viewing room, walks up to the corpse, and spits in his face.
Spits in it. Or this other time, a nickel-and-dime loanshark comes
in, pays his respects to the surviving family, then goes to the
prayer rail. Only instead of kneeling down, the shark leans in and
grabs the corpse by the lapels—grabs him, John—and starts banging
the decedent's head against the side of the coffin, yelling, 'You
deadbeat, where's my five hundred? Where is it?' "

I didn't see where the newspaper fit in, but I wasn't
about to ask.

Mo took a deep breath. "But my favorite, all
time—all world—was this widow, comes up to Freddie straight from
the hospital to make the arrangements for her husband, and she says
to him, 'Freddie, my Gerry spent every blessed night of his life
sitting on one of our kitchen chairs, reading the Herald'—it wasn't
the 'Herald' for all those years, John, but you get the picture—and
Freddie says to her, 'There, there,' or something like that, and she
says back, 'No, Freddie, you don't understand. That's the way I want
Gerry laid out, sitting on one of our chairs at the front of your
viewing room here, his legs crossed and the Herald open in his
hands." Freddie tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn't
budge, so he swallowed kind of hard and the next evening, there was
Gerry, like any other night, in one of those chairs, upright and
edifying himself with the day's well-recounted news."

"A lovely image, Mo."

"I think so. In fact, it's kind of lifted my
spirits some too. Now, what brings you here?"

"I'd like to run a few names through your
computer, see if anything useful pops up."

"Sure thing." Mo reached for his telephone.
"I'll get one of the ASNs to help you out—keep their fingers
on the keyboard and away from other people's harmless vices."

The young man who appeared at the door a few minutes
later led me back through a rabbit warren of cubicles to his own,
more a library study carrel than an office like Mo's. I gave him
"Olga Evorova" first, and he typed her name after some sort
of search command. The screen showed two articles that referred to
her participation in deals underwritten by Harborside Bank as well as
a couple of "Executives in the News" blurbs, one with
photo, announcing her promotions within the bank. My client appeared
to be who she claimed to be, a nice reassurance.

The young guy did another search, for "Andrew
Dees."

I was disappointed but not
surprised when the computer came up empty.

* * *

I got back to my office in time to gather the
afternoon mail from the floor under the horizontal, flap-covered slot
in my door and open most of the envelopes before the phone rang.