Eddie Bourque: Speak Ill Of The Living Part 25

Eddie felt a flash of defensive anger at Jimmy Whistle, and then a smear of some darker emotion...satisfaction over Jimmy's death. Whatever wickedness Whistle had been planning against Eddie, he had missed his chance.

"What are you going to do with it?" Bobbi asked.

Eddie wiped the photo on his sleeve and then held it only by the edges. "Keep your fingerprints off it, and put it back," he said. "We've learned all we need to know-Jimmy Whistle knew last week that I was going to come looking for him. Which means the cagey b.a.s.t.a.r.d was playing me for an idiot, steering me down the wrong path on purpose. He was using me."

"For what?"

"I don't know."

To stir things up? To ferret out information? To distract the a.s.shole in the ski mask, so Jimmy could operate in the shadows?

"Whatever it was, he was already planning it before Roger Lime's photo turned up." Eddie juggled the facts in his mind. Something was still missing.

What was your angle, Jimmy?

Eddie laughed. Bobbi raised an eyebrow at him.

"It's just nerves," he explained. "I get tense, I laugh."

"I get tense, I eat," she said, patting her own rump. "I need to calm down while I can still fit into my jeans."

They both laughed, nervously.

She looked up at him sweetly, "Thanks, little brother," she said in a hoa.r.s.e voice, as if speaking past a lump in her throat. "I came here not even knowing if you'd open your door for me, and here you are-risking your life to investigate. Even breaking into a house with me. All for Henry's sake, and you don't even know him-yet!"

"I've gotten to know my brother through you," Eddie said. "Thirty years is a long time to lose, but I'm not going to cry about it. My optimistic side says that Henry could be acquitted by reasonable doubt in a new trial, based on what we've already discovered. But I don't want to take that chance."

Eddie found his jaw tensing and his voice growing stern. "My brother didn't kill those men, and I'm going to get him out of there. I couldn't give up now if I wanted to." They had lost thirty years...the thought enraged him. Through gritted teeth, Eddie vowed: "I'm going to play a game of chess with my big brother."

She stared at him, her eyes filling with fright at Eddie's sudden burst of intensity.

"Be careful," she pleaded.

Eddie stared back, unblinking. "f.u.c.k careful," he spat. "I'm getting close, and I'll do anything to win Henry's freedom."

She stared at him.

He said again, "Anything."

Chapter 25.

After seeing Bobbi safely into a cab, and slipping her ten for the fare, Eddie rode The Late Chuckie's rat bike aimlessly around the city. Something about the bike's exhaust stench and the engine noise-like a dragon gargling toxic waste-cleared Eddie's head of stray thought. The bike practically steered itself down side roads, past old tenement buildings with street-level pubs advertising lowbrow beer in neon in every window. He headed deep into the Centralville neighborhood.

Eddie's brain seemed to be split in two. A tiny part of his brain operated the bike, stopped for lights, signaled for turns, swerved around double-parked cars; that was the easy job.

The rest of his brain obsessed over Henry. What Eddie had told his sister-in-law was true: there was nothing he wouldn't do to get his brother out of prison. The problem was, he didn't know what he should do.

The tiny part of his brain that was driving steered down a steep hill, in a neighborhood thick with triple-deckers, and no tourists looking for the historic attractions that the city fathers relentlessly marketed. This was not the neighborhood pictured in the travel brochures; this was where real people laughed, struggled, and died. The bike weaved through several more turns and then went down Lupine Road, and the rest of Eddie's brain tuned in to his surroundings. He had been here twice, the first time years ago on a personal pilgrimage along the roller coaster streets etched into the hills, to a writer's sacred site. The second time was four weeks ago, when he brought his journalism cla.s.s here on a fifteen-minute field trip. His students had been bored blind-they didn't notice a single interesting thing about the place; none of them could provide a pa.s.sable description when they got back to cla.s.s and Eddie had bushwhacked them with a pop quiz.

Two students had dropped the cla.s.s the next day.

Eddie slowed the bike and looked over the second-to-the-last house on the left.

Kerouac's birthplace.

Lowell's greatest writer was born there, on the second floor of a non-descript multi-family home, mud-puddle brown with yellow trim. There was a little chain fence out front, short enough that you could almost step over it, and a couple windowboxes on the porch rail sprouting unknown greens that had either pa.s.sed their bloom or hadn't reached it yet. The building's trim needed paint, the lattice that kept the cats out from under the porch was missing some slats. The shades were drawn; there was no life.

What always surprised Eddie about the house was its anonymity. There was no bronze plaque, no sign he could see, nothing to mark the manger in which Lowell's literary savior was born. He wondered if the people who lived there even knew about Jack Kerouac. Could anybody in the neighborhood point out the place Kerouac was born?

At the end of the street he turned left, hit the throttle, roared up a hill and headed back toward downtown.

Kerouac's birthplace was anonymous because it was hidden in plain sight.

He thought about Lew Cuhna's riddle in the same way. Eddie had come to believe that it wasn't a complicated encryption; it was probably the kind of puzzle that became more difficult the harder you thought about it.

He had committed the riddle to memory.

I trust only journalists. Left the key with the two giants, you know the duo. Don't send the cavalry; follow the Union rider to General Lee's surrender.

What bothered Eddie about the clue was that Cuhna had trusted "the key" to two other people, but had expected Eddie Bourque to track it down and get it from them. Why? Especially if Lew only trusted journalists.

Unlesss...

The two giants were journalists.

Eddie let the thought simmer. Coffee would help him think, he decided. He crossed the steel Ouellette Bridge, and pa.s.sed the minor league baseball stadium that vaguely echoed Baltimore's Camden Yards because it was designed by the same architects. He motored toward downtown, and the Perez Brothers diner.

...you know the duo.

Who were the giants of journalism? A "duo" that Lew Cuhna had a.s.sumed Eddie would know.

Eddie knew of many famous journalists, but not duos. Journalists were mostly solitary, like baseball players who each helped the team by succeeding as individuals.

Except, well, Woodward and Bernstein, of course. The Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporters who broke the Watergate story were the most famous reporter duo modern journalism had ever known.

Traffic backed up at a red light in front of City Hall. Eddie waited, straddling the bike, twenty car-lengths back from the light. To his left was the library, which Henry had jokingly suggested Eddie visit to solve Cuhna's riddle. It was one of the most impressive buildings in Lowell, a granite-block fortress of turrets and towers that looked like it could repel the a.s.sault of ten thousand barbarians. The upper windows were stained gla.s.s, half-moon shaped; the roof slate, elegantly trimmed with tarnished copper.

Eddie had not been to the library in years and was not well schooled in the building's history, but he knew it was old. More than a hundred years, for sure. Along with Lowell City Hall next door, the library was one of the few downtown buildings unchanged by renovation during the three decades Henry had been in prison.

Eddie concentrated on a relief sculpture, high on one of the library's main front turrets. He was dazzled by it. A sculptured horseman rode out of the granite, like a rider escaping a bank of impenetrable fog. A scabbard dangled from the rider's hip. On his head, a Civil War soldier's cap.

Don't send the cavalry; follow the Union rider to General Lee's surrender.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" Eddie shrieked.

The bike's tires squealed on the pavement. The motorcycle squirted across the street, up the sidewalk ramp to the library's front steps. There, Eddie killed the engine and stared up at the rider. Now he remembered-the library had been built as a Civil War memorial. The relief sculpture was a Union rider. Henry wasn't jerking Eddie around on the phone; he was being literal. You want to find Lee's surrender? Go to the library! Eddie slapped himself on the head, hurt his hand, took off his helmet, and slapped himself again. He left the bike in the sidewalk, parked about as illegally as possible, and dashed up the stairs, through a heavy wooden door, into a foyer of dark wood, lively reddish walls, and gently curving archways.

Beyond the archways, the library's main floor was a large, impressive s.p.a.ce of dark wooden pillars, many more arches, circular alcoves, and a high ceiling crossed by heavy ornate wooden beams. It looked antique and distinguished, like someplace where the old Continental Congress might have gathered to decide the future of the colonies. The only obvious compromise with modern times was the gla.s.s lamps that hung from the ceiling like mushrooms growing upside down.

A few patrons pa.s.sed with armloads of books; others lounged with magazines. Eddie hurried to a woman sitting alone behind a reference counter. She was about thirty, with a light complexion, s.h.i.+ny black hair in a bob cut, and lava-red lipstick. She was on the phone, speaking haltingly in a Southeast Asian dialect, which Eddie did not recognize. She raised her eyebrows at him, as if to say, "I see that you need help...give me a moment." Then her eyes narrowed as she inspected the purple bruise around Eddie's throat.

Eddie s.h.i.+fted impatiently from one foot to another, like a little kid outside the bathroom door. Finally, the woman hung up. She asked Eddie in English, "What are you looking for, sir?"

What was he looking for?

He hadn't even thought about it.

"I need a book-uh," Eddie said, his eyes darting around the room, "by...Woodward and Bernstein!"

The names did not seem to register for her. She turned to her computer, asking: "Fiction or nonfiction?"

Is she kidding?

"Nonfiction."

A few keystrokes brought up one t.i.tle: All the President's Men.

Eddie nodded like a madman. "I'll take it!"

She paid Eddie's enthusiasm no notice, took a sc.r.a.p of paper from a stack and wrote the book's six-digit identification number: three-six-four point one-three-two. "It's in the three hundreds," she explained. "That's on the second floor, the stacks on the right. Way in the back, past Lee's surrender."

Eddie was speechless. Lee's surrender? He s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper sc.r.a.p from her, spun and sprinted up wide pink marble stairs.

The second floor was a huge s.p.a.ce painted mint green and cream, a more sedate color scheme than the floor below. The ceiling looked to be twenty feet high. Lots of windows brightened the room. It held study tables and orderly rows of short bookshelves. The room also had two large rounded alcoves, opposite each other on the far walls. A gigantic curving wall-painting decorated the alcove to Eddie's right. In the picture, larger-than-life men in blue and gray uniforms gathered solemnly around a table draped in red.

Eddie didn't need to read the plaque beneath the painting; he knew the painting to be the surrender of General Robert E. Lee.

He pa.s.sed through the doorway to the right of the painting. It led to a bright room with creamy yellow walls and tall steel bookshelves. He quickly found the Woodward and Bernstein book, a hardcover, protected by one of those clear plastic dustcovers librarians liked to use.

What now, Lew?

Eddie looked around, saw that he was alone, opened the book's front cover, and leafed through the pages. Nothing unusual...no handwritten message.

He slipped off the dustcover.

On the book's spine, a two-inch piece of masking tape fixed a short bra.s.s key to the book.

Left the key with the two giants.

Eddie's hand trembled as he peeled off the tape. He inspected the key. Tiny lettering on the side read: U.S. Post Office, Lowell.

There was also a four-digit number stamped on the key-a post office box number. Eddie slid the book back onto its shelf, pocketed the key, hurried back downstairs and checked the wall clock.

Five-forty-five in the evening. The post office was closed until morning.

Eddie walked slowly from the library, the key in his pocket feeling like a boat anchor.

Chapter 26.

General VonKatz met Eddie at the door. He scratched Eddie's shoes to say, "Welcome home!" and "How was your day?" and "Is there food for me in that shopping bag?" Then the cat detected the scent of hot rotisserie chicken. The General whined like an ambulance and walked figure eights around Eddie's feet.

"Keep it down," Eddie said. "The neighbors will think I never feed you."

"Mwaaaaaaa! Mwaaaaaaa!" said the General, which, like everything in the language of cats, loosely translated to: "Me! Me!"

"You want somebody to call the SPCA? All right, take it easy, I'm cutting it right now."

The General sprang to the countertop to make sure Eddie was properly cutting the bird. He pushed his head against Eddie's elbow. Some people have rules forbidding pets on the kitchen counter, but not Eddie; a cat doesn't care about your rules, so why give yourself a reason to get mad at it?

Eddie put the General's plate of minced chicken on the floor, and watched the cat leap from the counter, race to the plate, stop, carefully sniff, sniff, sniff, and then eat, swis.h.i.+ng gray tail mopping a swathe of Linoleum.

Eddie ate the rest of the chicken, and then cracked a Rolling Rock.

He shoved the sofa against the door, sat, drank beer, and looked at the key Lew Cuhna had left for him. He could not imagine what waited at the post office in the morning. He felt a whoosh of antic.i.p.ation. He fantasized about breaking and entering to use the key during the night...hmmm...naw. It would be there in the morning.

He was so close to some answers, and he started to get excited.

Wrong frame of mind, he reminded himself.

Lew Cuhna died for whatever is in that post office box.

The phone rang.

Mid-term exams were due. Probably another student's grandmother was about to recline upon the satin pillow.

He smiled, reached for the phone and then suddenly stiffened.

In his home, on his sofa, drinking a beer-what could feel safer? And that was the feeling the killer in the ski mask had warned of; the killer had pledged to appear the moment Eddie felt safe.

He closed the key tightly in one hand. With the other, he lifted the phone to his ear but said nothing.

After a moment, Detective Orr asked, "You there, Eddie?"

"It's you, Lucy. Okay." He wiped his sleeve over his face. "Sorry, I'm a little jumpy."

"A little jumpy?" she mocked. "Yeah, and my office is a little small."