Eddie Bourque: Speak Ill Of The Living Part 24

Maybe Henry was more wisea.s.s than genius.

I'm trying to solve a murder, not write a book report.

The phone rang again in Eddie's hands.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Did he call? Did you talk to him?" Bobbi sounded tense, crackling with nerves.

"Yeah, he called. And that reminds me, you need to call Detective Orr from Lowell police. Nothing to worry about-she's a friend of mine, a straight shooter."

She didn't seem to hear him. "What did he say, Ed? Will he do it? Will he fight for his freedom?"

"He's thinking about it."

"Uh!" she groaned. "Ed, we gotta do better than that. He's thinking about it? That's like when you ask your dad for a pony and he says, 'We'll see, lemme think about it.' It's the easiest way to say no." She sighed and moaned dramatically a few times. When Eddie said nothing, she sighed a few more times.

"I get the message-you're ticked," Eddie said.

"Henry told me that he wanted to hear what you thought about his chances, and that he'd do what you told him to do."

"Who said he won't?"

"I thought you'd get a commitment out of him." She was scolding Eddie, not harshly, but her disappointment was clear. "You're his brother."

"I barely know the guy."

"What would that have to do with it? It's family, Ed-you got leverage with family you need to use in tough sc.r.a.pes like this. You got to lean on that frustrating, pigheaded man, make him see that he has a chance, that it's worth it to try to be free-that I'm worth it, G.o.ddamit!"

"How would you know what leverage I have with my family?"

"Because everybody has it," she said. "In every family! Jesus, Ed!"

Eddie heard her slap the phone on a table. She held it there a moment, then picked it up. She clucked her tongue, took a deep breath, gave a playful "grrrrrrrr" and a flighty chuckle. Sounding brighter, she said, "I need to remind myself that you don't know the first thing about siblings, do you?"

The question embarra.s.sed Eddie. Why should he be embarra.s.sed? He wasn't the one in prison the past thirty years. None of this mess was Eddie's fault-not Henry's incarceration, nor his parents' split, nor the way his folks had faded from his life. Yet he had trouble admitting aloud that his family was a disaster. He swiped his hand over the General's back as the cat strolled across the table. He had no answer for Bobbi.

She was tender to him. "Relations.h.i.+ps between brothers are normally made when you're both little kids," she said. "You're doing it as an adult. It has to be hard-like learning Chinese."

"Chinese kids can speak it when they're four," Eddie said, completing her thought.

"So you'll do it the hard way," she said. "Big surprise-one of the Bourque boys is doing things the hard way. You are so much like your brother..." She trailed off, laughing.

Eddie smiled-couldn't help himself.

"We've found some circ.u.mstantial stuff that might help Hank's case," Bobbi said, businesslike all of a sudden, "but we need more."

Eddie looked over the notes he had made trying to crack Lew Cuhna's code, and frowned. "I think our best chance right now is to see what we can learn from Jimmy Whistle. I interviewed him recently and I know where he lived."

"Isn't he dead?"

"That's an inconvenience we'll have to work around," Eddie said. "They say you can't take it with you, so all Jimmy's stuff is still in his apartment. By now the police have searched the place, but I'd like to see what they found, and what they missed. You can learn a lot about a guy by what he keeps hidden in the back of the closet."

"Take me with you!"

"Not a good idea," Eddie said. "The cops might have the place roped off, or even guarded."

"Then you'll need me to pry open the lock. I got eleven credit cards, and I know how to use them."

Eddie had figured on finding an open window, slipping into Jimmy's place and poking around. He didn't have a backup plan if the place was locked down. Reluctantly, he gave in: "Your sister-in-law's credit cards-don't break into a home without them."

Eddie waited a hundred yards down the street from Jimmy Whistle's place, in the parking lot of an upscale athletic club-the kind of place that played nothing but dance music, and where even the tanning beds were plated in chrome. European sedans shared the parking lot with a dozen gigantic SUVs that each could out-tow a battles.h.i.+p, though the s.h.i.+p would get better mileage. Eddie had parked The Late Chuckie's rat bike behind the trash bin, the only place in the parking lot where the bike seemed in character with its surroundings.

He watched Bobbi stroll past the police car parked outside Whistle's apartment building. She buffed her nails with an emery board, gave a tiny, uninterested glance into the cruiser as she pa.s.sed, and then walked on, around the block and back to Eddie.

"Just one cop in the car," she said. "He's working on a laptop computer."

"Probably just filing reports," Eddie said. "But he's busy, and that's a good sign. I'm guessing that he's still technically on patrol and not on orders to guard Whistle's place his whole s.h.i.+ft."

Bobbi huffed, "Are we supposed to wait here all afternoon for him to leave?"

"Get ready to run."

She looked around, confused. "Why?"

Eddie slammed his palm on the hood of a gray Saab. The car alarm screeched, Deee-OOOH! Deee-OOOH!

He smacked a Lincoln Navigator and set off another alarm, the same cadence as the first. He hit an Audi, a high-end Subaru, some little thing by Mazda-anything with a blinking red alarm light inside. Within seconds, a dozen car alarms were howling.

Eddie grabbed Bobbi's hand, sprinted her across the parking lot to the street, stopped, and then calmly crossed while looking over his shoulder at the chaos of electronic screams, blasting horns, flas.h.i.+ng headlights and irate people now pouring from the club, barking curses and searching pockets and purses and gym bags for the remote control doohickeys to tame their cars. These people started looking for someone to blame, and immediately began finger pointing and arguing with each other over the din.

"This could turn ugly," Eddie deadpanned. "I hope there's a cop in this neighborhood."

As if on cue, the officer parked at Jimmy Whistle's place hit his blues and decided to drive in for a closer look at the madness in the parking lot.

Bobbi turned to Eddie with a half-smile. "And I thought my husband was the bad boy of the Bourque family," she said.

They hurried to Whistle's building as quickly as they dared. Out of sight from the street, Eddie checked the back yard.

"Jimmy's c.r.a.ppy old bike is still there," he said.

"Who'd steal that piece of junk?"

"The bike was Jimmy's only transportation, which means he was either killed here and dumped at the farm, or he left willingly in somebody else's car."

"Or he took a cab," Bobbi argued. "Or walked someplace and got s.n.a.t.c.hed off the sidewalk."

A devil's advocate-the downside of bringing a relative on a break-in.

"Just open the door," Eddie said.

Bobbi wiggled a Filene's card against the jamb and had the door open in three seconds. "Ooh," she said, "I shouldn't have done that so quick-you're going to get the wrong idea about me."

Eddie laughed and pushed her gently inside. He felt a fluttering sense of danger, like a pigeon flapping inside his chest. They were committing a crime for a n.o.ble purpose, but breaking and entering was still a crime.

"Don't touch any lights," Eddie reminded her. "We don't want to advertise that we're looking around in here."

Bobbi stuck her hands on her hips and surveyed the grime left by an old, dead bachelor. "This would go quicker if I knew what to look for."

"A defining detail," Eddie said. "That's what we call it in journalism. Something to show us an unknown truth about James J. Whistle." He stepped to the kitchen.

Bobbi wandered into the bedroom. "Yuck!" she cried. "He's got dirty clothes piled like a haystack. Eew! And I think he liked to eat in bed. This is gross-how did I end up with the bedroom?"

"Can't be worse than this kitchen," Eddie said. "He was keeping an ant farm in here, the free-range variety."

"Ug!"

"Industrious little fellers," Eddie said. "You should see them work this cheese doodle."

Bobbi laughed and made some comment, but Eddie wasn't listening. In the sink were two clay mugs, empty except for one damp tea bag in each. Eddie leaned into the sink and sniffed them.

Chai spice tea.

The kind of tea Lew Cuhna had been making when he was killed. Eddie checked Whistle's cabinets-nothing but generic coffee, matzo crackers, and macaroni and cheese. No tea. He dug through the wastebasket and sent black ants scurrying. Lots of fast food wrappers, no empty tea boxes.

Eddie had long believed that there was no such thing as coincidence.

Lew wasn't making tea for me...

Cuhna had been making tea for his killer. So had Jimmy Whistle.

What did Jimmy Whistle, thirty years locked up, know about chai tea? The killer had brought his own tea bags. He had asked Whistle to brew it, had even shared some with old Jimmy. Then he persuaded Whistle to go for a ride, eventually to his old lady's farm.

Eddie shot a hard glance at Jimmy's kitchen table, a little square of black Formica. There were two chairs, chrome and padded with pink vinyl. Eddie's imagination put the man in the ski mask in one of the chairs.

You were here.

Jimmy had known the killer well-but not well enough to suspect he was to be murdered.

Eddie walked back to the living room, his eyes combing the clutter and trash. There were no bloodstains, no obvious signs of struggle. The soda cans Eddie had noticed last time he had visited were still upright on the coffee table. The lone picture of Jimmy junior was still on the wall.

Bobbi shouted from the other room: "Is it all right I turn on the closet light? I doubt anyone would see it, and there's a lot of junk in there I can't make out." The bedroom was at the back of the house, away from the street.

"Yeah, that should be safe," Eddie answered. He couldn't look away from the photo of Jimmy junior. Whistle had nearly blown off his hinges when Eddie had reached for the picture. He lifted the frame off its nail and studied it.

The s.h.i.+rtless little boy throwing the ball in the snapshot had little tan lines at his collar and his upper arm, where the sleeves of a t-s.h.i.+rt would be. He was still training his muscles to work together to throw, and his face showed supreme concentration.

Eddie slid the backing off the frame, to look for a date on the photo.

Underneath the picture of Jimmy junior, Eddie found a second photograph, a four-by-six of a man in a business suit-in his mid-thirties, probably-reading the New York Times at an outdoor cafe, apparently unaware that he was being photographed. The date stamped by the processing lab on the back of the picture was three months ago.

Eddie studied the face. The man was a stranger, but Eddie sensed that he knew the guy... something about the chin, the way it tapered and then suddenly squared off.

It's Jimmy.

Naw, couldn't be... Eddie double-checked the date on the back of the photo. This was a recent shot. But the resemblance was unmistakable-the guy in the picture looked like a younger, healthier, broad-shouldered James J. Whistle.

Hmmm... Eddie compared the photo with the picture of Jimmy junior. Same widespread, sad eyes. Same pointy uptick in the middle of the upper lip. There could be no doubt-the man in the picture was the full-grown Jimmy junior. It was impossible to tell where the photo was taken; a city, obviously, with sidewalk cafes. He was reading the Times...Manhattan, maybe?

So Jimmy had lied to Eddie about his son. He did know what had happened to Jimmy junior, and by the looks of the younger Whistle-healthy, well dressed in a charcoal suit, peach-colored dress s.h.i.+rt, and dark tie-the kid had fared well while his father was in the penitentiary.

"Eddie?" Bobbi called. "I got something here, a picture."

She appeared in the bedroom doorway.

"I got one, too," Eddie said, holding up the photos. "Jimmy Whistle's son!"

Bobbi's face was blank.

"A new picture of him, all grown up," Eddie explained in excitement. "When I first met Jimmy, he told me he hadn't seen Jimmy junior in thirty years. But he went through some trouble to get this candid shot of his kid having lunch, so he-what? Why are you looking at me like that?"

Bobbi looked to the photograph in her hand. She reached it toward Eddie and held it there.

Eddie hesitated, and then took the picture. It was an instant camera snapshot, the kind that developed by themselves. The picture had been taken in downtown Lowell-Merrimack Street at lunchtime, judging by the crowded sidewalk. Eddie recognized himself in the picture coming out of the bookstore, newspaper under his arm and a paper coffee cup in his hand. He was wearing his gray sports coat, white polo s.h.i.+rt, and no tie.

Somebody had used a grease pencil to circle Eddie's head in the picture. Above the circle was a blood red "X."

Eddie could hardly wrench his eyes off the red X over his own image. He said in a whisper, "I can't believe that the police missed something like this. Where did you find it?" He looked at Bobbi.

"Between the mattress and the box spring," she said. "Same place my first husband used to stash his t.i.tty magazines." She patted him lightly on the shoulder and nodded to the photo. "Do you know when this was taken?"

He shrugged. "I go there a lot, nearly every day. But that's a summer jacket I just rescued from storage in the bas.e.m.e.nt the past couple of weeks. I think this was a day last week."

"It looks like Jimmy Whistle had his eye on you."

Eddie glanced to the drawer in which Jimmy Whistle had kept his pistol. He had been convinced that Jimmy had only meant to scare him-here at Jimmy's apartment and then later at Eddie's place-but this picture...

Bobbi said, "I don't like that red X."

"It doesn't make the least bit of sense," Eddie said. "Jimmy didn't even know I existed until I tracked him down here to ask him about Henry."

"He must have known more than he let on."

"I came here to interview him. If Jimmy wanted to kill me, I gave him the perfect opportunity."

"Maybe not," she said. "What was Whistle supposed to do? Kill you in his own living room? Throw your corpse over his handlebars and pedal you to the river? He must have been quaking inside when you interviewed him." She flicked a fingernail against the photo. "The guy who took this picture helped lock your brother away for life. He might have figured you'd be coming after him. Maybe he was planning to strike first. Or maybe he wanted to get back at Henry for some grudge he nursed for thirty years, and thought he could hurt Henry by hurting you."