Authors: Jeremiah Healy
I laid the roses that morning at an angle to her stone, the blooms toward the head.
Roses. What’s the occasion?
“I’m heading north for a while, Beth.”
What’s north?
“A case Nancy’s gotten for me. A guy accused of killing his wife and another couple at a summer place in Maine.”
A pause.
And you’ll be representing the guy?
“Not exactly. If I take the case, I’ll be working for his lawyer.”
Why do they think he did it?
“I’ve only seen the TV coverage, but apparently The Foursome did everything together.”
Another pause.
Everything?
I couldn’t stop the smile. “You know how slow I am about that sort of thing, Beth.”
And here I always thought you were a child of the sixties, John.
“I was a college student in the sixties. That makes me a child of the fifties. Hell, it was 1983 before I realized that Eleanor Rigby was waiting for Father McKenzie.”
Good line. Pity to waste it on me.
“I’ve wasted a lot of things in life, kid. None of them ever on you.”
I looked down at the edge of the water, the sun just high enough to make it look opaquely gray. Two seagulls were trying to take off into the east wind by flapping their wings and running in a slow-motion, flat-footed, “sproing-sproing” way along the rocks, like old kinescopes of pre-Kitty Hawk flyers and their contraptions.
John?
“Yes?”
You may be a child of the fifties, but don’t forget you’re also a man of the city.
“Meaning?”
Meaning be careful up in Maine. They may do things differently there.
I thought about the crossbow that every news update, however short, managed to work into the voiced-over videotape, sandwiched between the more familiar urban clips of drug drive-bys and serial killers. “Different, Beth, but ever the same.”
She didn’t need to ask what I meant.
I
DROVE BACK TO
the condo in Back Bay I was renting from a doctor doing a two-year residency in Chicago. Parking the Prelude in its slot behind the brownstone building, I went upstairs and used the number on Nancy’s message slip to reach Gil Lacouture’s office in Augusta. In clipped but friendly syllables, his secretary told me that her name was Judy, that it was “a real shiny day up here today,” and that her boss would be available by the time I got there. She gave me simple directions from the Maine Turnpike, saying it would probably take about three hours if I did the speed limit.
I changed into a suit, then pulled a Samsonite from the closet in my bedroom and packed what I thought I’d need for a couple of days. The last of the deli meat in the refrigerator went into a quasi-brunch that I figured would hold me until dinner.
Back in the Honda, I took Fairfield Street across Beacon between the buildings that back onto the river. I turned right into the alley that’s an extension of Bay State Road and parallels Storrow Drive through most of my neighborhood. At Berkeley Street, I got on Storrow eastbound and began to inch my way toward Leverett Circle.
Over the last fifteen years, the major roads around Boston have become as clogged as the cart paths we laughingly call our city streets. The Registry of Motor Vehicles says the main reason for this is the forty percent increase in passenger cars in the metro region, vastly inflating something called the “congestion severity index.” There are plans on the drawing boards for widening some of the arteries and building a third harbor tunnel to the airport. I figured the recession would reduce traffic a little, but the opposite seems to have happened, the rush hour now extending virtually from seven
A.M.
to seven
P.M.
I finally made my way onto the ramp for Route 1 north. After ten miles of car dealers, strip malls, and pancake houses comes Interstate 95. The traffic stayed with me but spaced out. I kept the Prelude at fifty-five and didn’t pass anybody for thirty miles.
Skirting Newburyport and Salisbury, the Interstate crosses the Merrimack River and then goes through about fourteen miles of New Hampshire, for which privilege you get to pay the Granite State a dollar at an inconvenient tollbooth. Shortly thereafter, I climbed onto the curving bridge over the Piscataqua River and halfway across the span saw a little sign telling me I was entering Maine. Just after the bridge in Kittery is a bigger sign, a small billboard really. In white letters on a royal blue background, it says WELCOME TO MAINE—THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE.
I hadn’t driven to Maine for a while, and even then really only along the ocean, where Beth and I had taken “getaway weekends” out of season at some of the ports like Bailey Island or Boothbay Harbor. After about five miles, I noticed more evergreens and less development. The people drove faster but better. I saw fewer Massachusetts and New Hampshire cars and more Mainers, white license plates with deep blue letters and numbers and a red lobster logo. Even when the road narrowed, the drivers seemed to be able to merge politely and smoothly. I realized that it was a “real shiny day” and put back the moonroof to let the sun into the cabin. Then I kicked the Honda up to sixty-two and sailed along past Portland, staying with the more inland Maine Turnpike instead of the more coastal Route 95.
About ten miles north of Portland, the horizon seemed to expand, the most sky I’d seen east of Montana. In between the patches of blue were darker, humpbacked clouds, as though a sketch artist had used broad strokes with a charcoal stick. Each time the car topped a rise, the clouds gave the illusion of flying over glaciered mountains, endless ranges of them still in front of me.
I found myself taking deep, regular breaths of the warm but not humid air. I even hummed a little, the melody Nancy and I heard before dropping off to sleep the night before.
The last fifty miles seemed to melt away, and I almost regretted the Augusta exit coming up on the right.
“You must be Mr. Cuddy.”
The woman that went with the voice of Judy over the phone was in her late twenties, a fresh-scrubbed look to her plainish face over a simple cotton dress. Gil Lacouture shared office space with a real estate broker and an insurance agent in a huge white colonial house with fluted Doric columns and black jalousied shutters.
“Call me John.”
Judy shook my hand vigorously and asked if she could get me anything.
“No, thanks.”
“You sure? Coffee, tea?”
“No, really.”
Judy indicated a burlap couch with matching chairs and low table that formed the waiting area. “You have yourself a seat, then. Gil is just about finished with a client.”
I took one of the chairs. On the table, back issues of outdoor magazines like
Field and Stream
and
Sports Afield
mingled with
Woman’s Day
and
Good Housekeeping
. Judy sat behind an old wooden desk and began clacking away on an original IBM PC.
A doorway to what felt like a front parlor opened, and a man and a woman came through it, the woman first. She seemed to be in her late teens, with long black hair and makeup verging on war paint. Her blue jeans were two sizes too small, making little rolls of fat above and below the front pockets. Large breasts pushed against a T-shirt that read YOU CAN’T BE FIRST, BUT YOU CAN BE NEXT.
The man was of medium height and build, with blond hair short enough to make his eyebrows and mustache look bushy, like a British army sergeant. He wore khaki pants, a plaid work shirt, and a solid wool tie that picked up one of the minor colors in the shirt.
The man spoke more to the T-shirt than to the woman. “And maybe just a white blouse for court on Thursday, right?”
The woman noticed me and smiled. Then she turned back to him, flirting an index finger under his chin. “Whatever you say, Gil.” I got a brighter smile and a “Sorry to keep you waiting” as she vamped past me and out the door.
The man watched her go, then came over to me. “John Cuddy?”
I stood and shared a handshake with him. “Right.”
“Gil Lacouture. Come on in.”
Lacouture’s office itself was roomy, with big, multipaned windows on two of the four walls and white floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built into the others. The carpeting was beige, allowing the red drapes to draw your attention to the windows and welcome you to a sense of hominess.
I said, “Nice place.”
Lacouture dropped into a squeaky leather chair behind a maple desk, motioning me toward one of two black captain’s chairs with the sword and scales of New England School of Law on them. “Almost too nice, John, you want to know the truth. When I left the public defenders up here, I bought a retiring lawyer’s practice, and this office came along with it. A great place to spend time, but it’s kind of hard to get clients to leave it.”
“Like Ms. T-shirt?”
“Cinny? Yeah. She got caught practicing hand relief.”
“Hand relief?”
“Genital massage.”
“You mean prostitution?”
“No. Just hand relief. As long as there was no intercourse, it used to be legal all over the state.”
“You’re kidding?”
Lacouture shook his head. “Then the massage places started spreading out from Portland, and a lot of communities like Saco and Biddeford got nervous and banned the practice. A town around here decided to jump on the ‘banned’ wagon, and the cops picked up Cinny.”
“Spelled with a ‘C,’ I hope.”
“Spelled … ? Oh, ‘Cinny’ right.” Lacouture laughed silently. “She says to me—this is technically a client confidence, John, but you’ve got to hear it—she says to me, ‘Gil, they want to see I’m responsible, how about I wear these earrings in front of the judge?’ And she shows them to me, and they’re condoms, John.”
“I saw an article about them.”
“Well, up here, they don’t read those kind of magazines.”
“It was in the
New York Times
.”
“Like I said.”
Lacouture grinned, letting me know he was extending the joke. I wasn’t so sure I liked a lawyer who revealed one client’s secrets to an investigator he’d never met who might end up working for another client.
Lacouture turned in his chair and brought an accordion file to center stage on the desk. “So, Nancy tells me you’re a crack private eye back in Boston.”
“Nancy’s prejudiced.”
Lacouture looked up at me. “She told me why. I want this to sound right, John. Especially after joking around about Cinny. I’ve known Nancy from first year of law school. She’s the best, in every way. If Nancy Meagher’s with you, you must have a hell of a lot right with you. I’m going to assume that includes your professional competence, unless you give me reason to think otherwise.”
It was as though Lacouture had changed personality. In one sentence, he went from locker room to board room.
I said, “I’m listening.”
His hand slid the band off the accordion file in an assured way. “I’m going to let you read this at your leisure, but let me give you the condensed version first.”
“Before you do, I’m not licensed up here. Nancy said—”
“—that I’d fix that, and I have. There’s a clerk waiting for you at the Department of Public Safety Annex in Gardiner. The commissioner and I went to college together at Orono.”
Another classmate. “So I’ll be licensed in Maine?”
Lacouture said, “Provisionally. Usually it takes about sixty days for your application to be processed, to schedule you for a written test—”
“Test?”
“On the Maine criminal statutes, the private investigator law, and so forth. But we’re going to be spared the test so long as we post a fifty-thousand-dollar bond on you, which I’ve already arranged for, and so long as you agree to one other condition.”
“What’s that?”
Lacouture paused. “You won’t be getting a certificate of firearms proficiency or a permit to carry a concealed weapon.”
“What’s the difference?”
“With the certificate, you could carry a gun while you were on the job as a licensed private investigator.”
“Provisionally licensed.”
“Right. With the permit, you could carry a gun any time, even if you weren’t exactly working.”
I thought about it. “Since I wasn’t licensed up here, I didn’t expect to be able to carry in Maine anyway.”
Lacouture exhaled. “Good. For the rest of this conference today, the district attorney has given me his word that he won’t try to go around the attorney-client privilege on the ground that you weren’t yet licensed when you might have heard some privileged information.”
Lacouture was elevating my opinion of him. “You’re satisfied with the prosecutor’s word on that.”
Another grin. “This is Maine, John. A lawyer’s word is still his bond.”
I took out a pad. “Go ahead.”
Lacouture rifled through the file, more like he was looking for something than that he needed to refresh his memory. “My client Steven Shea and his wife, Sandra—for business purposes, she kept her maiden name of Newberg when they married—drove up to their summer place on Marseilles Pond a week ago Friday.”
Lacouture pronounced it “Marcel’s,” as Nancy had. “Hale and Vivian Vandemeer, friends of theirs from down by you, drove up separately in their car. The Foursome—I’m guessing you’ve already heard the media people use that—spent a lot of time together, including some weekends on Marseilles. Well, it seems that Steve did a piss-poor job of checking the larder before driving home each time, so there was always something he had to run to the country store in Marseilles to buy. That night, it was some wine and bread and other little stuff. My client drives his camp road to—”
“Camp road?”
“The dirt road going from his camp—his house on Marseilles, hell of a house, actually—to the lake road to the village. Anyway, Steve gets in his four-wheel-drive and heads to the country store. He buys the stuff he needs, comes back, and discovers a fucking massacre.”
Lacouture’s voice broke a little, and his hands were quivering as he took out some eight-by-ten glossy photos.
I reached across the desk to take them. The photos were in color, but you would have preferred them not to be. Three showed one body each, two women and a man, an arrow lodged pretty squarely in each chest. One of the women had her hand and what looked like a napkin or paper towel nailed to her breastbone by the shaft in her body. The fourth photo showed a crossbow, gunmetal gray with fingerprints enhanced by the dull brown of dried blood.