Right To Die

7

AFTER LEAV1NG WALTER STROCK, I PICKED UP MY BOX OF FILES from Inés Roja. By the time I got outside the school building, I realized the load was going to be too heavy to carry under one arm and too awkward to ferry in front of me under two. Since there were no cabs, it seemed to make more sense to find a place for lunch. Across the street and down from the school was Bandy's, a burger-and-beer dugout owned by another Vietnam vet in my student days.

Sometimes nostalgia is a bad emotion to indulge.

The interior was still dark and just a little dank. The floor was still tacky from spilled beer, the vinyl in the booths still taped at the seats. But instead of the Stones or the Doors, the speakers blared Grace Jones doing a bad Katharine Hepburn imitation as she recited rather than sang some lyric about walking in the rain. The barkeep had a purple Mohawk and more pieces of metal piercing his ears and nose than a shrapnel victim.

The only obvious holdover from the original Bandy was a television monitor above the bar, showing a video of a Celtics-Lakers game. Bird holding the ball on his hip, glaring at an official. Kareem. with shaved head and goggles, a praying mantis seeking just one more grasshopper before calling it a night. The screen jumped to a clip of the Lakers slaughtering some team you never saw play from a city that made you think of rodeos, not hoops.

I'd already lost my appetite when the Mohawk said, "Help you?"

I started to say no, then recognized one of the facial scars the artifacts couldn't quite hide. "Bandy?"

"Yeah. I know you?"

Maybe not from this incarnation. "John Cuddy. I went to Mass Bay a long time ago."

"Cuddy? Cuddy, sure, sure." He stuck out a hand. "Southie by way of Saigon, right?"

I rested the carton on the bar, and we shook. "Good memory."

"Wish I could say the same about business."

I tried to look encouraging as I surveyed the room, seeing only the backs of three other customers, one a woman, scattered over twenty stools. "Lunchtime's bound to be slow."

"Tell me about it. Gave the cook a week off because it just wasn't worth it, with Mass Bay out of regular session." He flung a hand at the nearest stereo speaker. "This punk shit's the only thing brings them in."

"I listen to their songs, but I just can't hear the music "

"Aw, some of it ain't so bad. There's U2, Talking Heads, Fine Young Cannibals. They got something to say."

"Oldies like you used to have just don't cut it?"

"Shit, no. Held on as long as I could, but you gotta be downtown with a big dance floor for the yups or out in the burbs with parking for the young parents. Around here it's new wave or no wave. But kids today, they can't read, we probably shouldn't figure they'll listen too good either. How's about a beer?"

I again started to say no when the female customer turned on her stool. Nina, the student from Strock's office. Lifting the box of files from the bar, I asked Bandy to bring us two drafts and walked over to her.

"Mind if I sit with you?"

She barely looked up. "Sit. Don't talk and don't touch."

I set the carton on the floor as the beers arrived. I paid Bandy and took one, Nina draining the mug she'd had in front of her.

"For you," I said, pointing to the second full one.

She looked at me a little closer. "You're the guy who was waiting to talk with Strock, right?"

"Right."

"I can pay for my own."

"I didn't mean to imply otherwise."

Nina cocked her head. "All right. Why does a man who knows the difference between 'imply' and 'infer' want to buy me a drink?"

I showed her my identification, which she had to hold up to the light as Grace Jones finished on a warbled high note and the radio station's deejay segued into a group called the After-Births.

"I'd like to ask you a few questions about Professor Strock."

Nina closed the ID holder and handed it back to me. "You know a sergeant on the Mets named Nick Russo?"

Anywhere in Boston outside of sports bars and Fenway Park "the Mets" means the Metropolitan District Commission Police, a force that patrols major roads, parks, and waterways.

"Never met him."

"He's my father. Just so we know where we stand."

"Fine."

Nina Russo took at gulp of the beer. "Why are you interested in Strock?"

"I can't tell you."

She considered that, nodded. "Why should I talk to you about him?"

"Because you don't like him, and I won't tell anybody else what you tell me."

A tired smile. "Maybe I ought to cover the beer."

"You don't believe me?"

"Mister, law students get trained not to believe a lot of things. Especially things some stranger promises them in a bar."

"You know Lieutenant Robert Murphy, Boston Homicide?"

Russo perked. "No."

"How about Sergeant Bonnie Cross, also Boston Homicide?"

"No. Why, could they vouch for you?"

"Uh-huh. How about Officer Drew – "

"Enough." She took a little more beer, then rearranged her fanny on the stool. "Let me tell you a few things, okay? Then you can decide if you want to talk to me."

"Okay."

"I'm not the first person in my family to go to college, but a lot of them had to do school off-shift or weekends. I am the first one to go past college, which kind of makes me the center of attention that way. The flag bearer, get it?"

"Yes."

"Well, I want to specialize in Family Law, Domestic Relations. That means mostly divorce, but it also gives you adoptions, appointed work for abused kids, the chance to do some good for people who are in the worst time of their lives and really need the help. Strock teaches Family Law here. Before that, he was this big-time divorce lawyer. Doesn't talk about it, but I think he got tired of the hassle and decided to sort of retire to teaching. He maybe consults for some of the dom/rel firms in town, to keep his hand in, but mostly he's just a teacher and a… mentor."

"What kind of mentor?"

"The kind that can make or break your résumé."

"Like by who he chooses for research assistant?"

"And he chooses the assistants with a critical eye."

I was beginning to get it. "As in eye of the beholder?"

"The student who beat me out of the job is named Kimberly. She has long hair that I actually heard her call 'flaxen' once. If Strock's sitting down, she has to tuck some of that hair up and over her ear when she leans forward to look over his shoulder and glance at him sideways."

"Sexual harassment?"

"No. At least not the way you mean it. Kimberly was angling for the job more than Strock was angling for her, I think."

"But on the merits, you should have been picked?"

"Hands down. I know, that doesn't sound real modest, but I got the highest grade in his family law course last quarter and was the best performer in class."

I didn't say "as opposed to after class," but I did picture the couch in Strock's office. "All right, Ms. Russo. I understand the context. What can you tell me about the guy otherwise'?"

"Otherwise. Well, he's pretty insecure."

"In what way?"

"He's not a very good teacher – not just my opinion, by the way. Student evaluations as well as anecdotal comments by the other kids. He tries to get by on his reputation, but I don't think he's been inside a courtroom in ten years. He takes the simple law school administrative stuff and kind of blows it out of proportion. Probably makes him feel like a big man."

Something clicked. "Strock ever shoot for the deanship himself?"

"Yeah. At least that's the rumor. But he didn't get it. Don't know why, but maybe that's part of the insecurity."

"Sounds to me as though you shouldn't feel too bad, not having to work closely with the guy."

"Give me a few days."

"How about Strock's relationship with the rest of the faculty?"

"Hard to say. They're all kind of a blank to us about how they feel toward each other, unless one mentions another in class."

"Has Strock ever done that?"

"Once in a while. The only one he seems to have it in for is a woman named Andrus."

No surprise so far. "Maisy Andrus?"

"You've heard of her."

"Some."

"Well, she's got this thing about the right to die, but she also makes her students stand when they participate in class, so Strock always refers to her as She-Who-Makes-You-Stand, like that's the way he believes we think of them all."

"Of the faculty?"

"Yeah. Like He-Who-Has-Dandruff, She-Who-Smokes, like that." Russo drank some beer. "You know, you're right. He really is a dork most ways."

"You said Strock does consulting work?"

"I said maybe he does."

"You think that brings in much money?"

"That's what I meant by maybe."

"Go on."

"Well, just looking at his suits and car and all, I get the impression he might be hurting for cash. He's supposed to have this great house over in Cambridge, but he's sure around the school a lot more than the professors who consult in the corporate and tax areas. Also, I never really see people coming to see him, although I guess he could do a lot of that over the telephone."

"Anything else?"

"About the money thing or Strock in general?"

"Either."

Russo took a little more beer, then pushed it aside. "God, I hate to drink in the afternoon. Makes me worthless for the rest of the day." She shifted around to me. "About the money, I guess all I know is that Professor Andrus is supposed to be really rich, and Strock's jibes at her go beyond the usual joking. Makes you think he really resents something about her."

"What about Strock in general?"

Russo closed her eyes, then opened them. "I don't want you to think I'm fixated on this Kimberly thing."

"But?"

"Well, if somebody like Strock has the eye now, it wouldn't surprise me that he's had it for a while."

"And not for just law students?"

"There are a lot of stories you hear, about how… how well a divorce lawyer can do sexually with all the distraught people who come to him, or her, I suppose, as a client."

"And you figure Strock might have been like that?"

"I don't know. But if he was, and he's not getting the opportunities from practice anymore, maybe there've been some other Kimberlys."

I thanked Nina Russo and gathered up my box of files. As I said good-bye to Bandy, the deejay promised his faithful listeners a program entitled "Throbbing Gristle, a Retrospective."

I was able to hail a taxi on Columbus Avenue, giving the driver the address for my condo because it was closer than my office. I made a ham sandwich on rye and washed it down with more ice water as I began reading the Andrus files. I decided to save the anonymous folder for last, focusing first on the letters with identified names and addresses. The tones ranged from fastidious politeness to unintelligible harangue. Doctoral candidates expounding from Ivy League schools to functional illiterates exploding in Walpole State Prison. Every letter containing the buzz word "cunt" or "slut" came from a man. Those using "bitch" were all male except for a woman from Alberta.

It grew redundant quickly, so I started flipping faster, pulling out the ones I wanted to read more carefully, especially any repeat correspondents. Then I turned to the anonymous file. None used snipped-out words or letters. Many of them were block-printed with frequent misspellings.

After sifting and sorting, I was left with three people who had written more than one signed letter, were reasonably local, and had used one or more of the buzz words. The first was named Steven O'Brien, a rabid pro-lifer from Providence, Rhode Island. O'Brien believed Andrus to be part of an "international atheist plot to overthrow all that is decent." He referred often to the incident in Spain, calling Andrus a "slut" for doing in her own husband.

The second repeater was Louis Doleman, showing an address in West Roxbury. His letters, six over four months, chronicled the decline and "premature" death of his daughter from leukemia. Apparently "Heidi" had taken up the "sudo-religion" that the "Devil's bitch" Andrus "esposed." After reading the professor's "witchery," the daughter had taken her own life.

The third repeater's name was Gunther Yary. His smudgy letterhead proclaimed him Grand Marshal of the American Trust, some kind of skinhead group. The return address sounded like a storefront in a white section of Dorchester. It seemed Gunther and his "followers" believed strongly in "heterosexuity" and not in the "preverted" hoax of "mercy death" that "Zionists, Faggots, and Niggers" created to wipe out the last "vesttiges" of native Aryan stock. Yary employed all three buzz words and more.

I wedged the correspondence of O'Brien, Doleman, and Yary into a waterproof plastic portfolio and had copies made at one of the Copy Cops on Boylston Street. Then I deposited the Andrus check in my client's account at the Shawmut and continued toward police headquarters on Berkeley.

Even though the door was ajar, I knocked on the frame before looking in. Lieutenant Robert Murphy was cradling the telephone receiver on his left shoulder, signing a series of documents while somebody on the other end of the line talked to him. Murphy motioned me in. His black hand provided a photographer's backdrop for the gold pen he held.

I didn't like it when Murphy smiled at me.

Into the receiver, he said, "No problem… happy to help…right, right. Bye." As the receiver slid down his chest, Murphy caught it in his left hand. "You must be getting psychic, Cuddy."

"Who was it?"

"Don't suppose you know a Met sergeant named Nick Russo?"

"You're the second person who's asked me that today."

Murphy hung up. "Yeah, well, it seems he got a call from that first person after she talked to you. Seems that first person had second thoughts about your word being your bond."

"I plied her with strong drink."

"I bet you did. Think a cop's kid'd be smarter than to talk with a P.I., even without law school and all."

"She will be next time."

"Suppose that's how everybody learns, all right. You get your permit to carry back yet?"

"August."

"You ever hear the story, about Jesus and the lepermen, and one of them come back to thank him for the cure?"

"I called to thank you. Three different days. Left a message each time."

"Maybe some saviors, they get asked in person, they like to get thanked in person."

"You're right, Lieutenant, and I appreciate what you did for me."

Murphy let his lids get sleepy, showing about as much eye as teeth. "That A.D.A.?"

"Which prosecutor is that?"

"You still seeing her?"

"Yes."

He kept watching me.

"Lieutenant?"

"Just getting into the Christmas spirit, Cuddy. Not trying to pull anything."

"Or suggest anything."

Murphy made a face and shook his head. "Well, it's obvious you got no feeling whatsoever for the holidays. And you're back here in person. That means you'll be wanting another favor, huh?"

"You know a detective over at Area A, William Neely?"

"Neely? Yeah, from a time back. Why?"

"l'm representing somebody in his neighborhood. The client got some threats, and I'd like to talk with him about them. Wondered what kind of guy he is."

Murphy glanced out his window and then back. "This client, he or she?"

"She."

"She go to Neely?"

"Her secretary got referred to him."

"Her tough luck."

"Why?"

"This between you and me, or you going to be explaining it to real folks?"

"You and me."

"Neely, he fancies himself an old-time hard-ass dick. Runs a few informants, reacts when the brass gets edgy. Otherwise, low profile and count the days."

"To retirement time."

"Uh-huh."

"I don't see what I've got jeopardizing his pension."

"What do you got?"

I went through it, without names.

Murphy said, "Neely, he got the complaint to start with, it'll stay with him unless somebody gets nasty enough with a deadly weapon."

"I wasn't trying to go over his head here, Lieutenant."

"Sure you were, Cuddy. And once you meet Neely, you'll realize you were right to try too."

"Any suggestions on how to approach him?"

"Neely ever took a promotion exam, he got stuck on name and address. Play up to the man, let him talk."

"Okay. Thanks."

I was at the door when Murphy said, "Oh, and Cuddy?"

"Yeah."

"Neely's got a nickname. 'Beef'."

"Beef."

"Yeah. Don't say it to him, but use it, huh?"

"Use it how?"

"Take the man to lunch."

I looked at my watch. "But I thought I'd go over there now."

"Won't matter to old Beef."

"Thanks again, Lieutenant."

"One more thing."

"Yes?"

"You'd best visit a bank somewheres first."

"Pass the Worcestershire, will ya?"

"Sure."

"And maybe some more of that A-1 too."

I put both bottles in front of Neely. He spritzed the Worcestershire on his second cut of prime rib. The meat lapped two inches a side over the platter.

Victoria Station was done in a railroad car motif. It was the one restaurant Neely had said would have prime rib for sure, that time of afternoon. I had offered to cab it, but he said, "It'll look better, I sign out a unit." We were the only people in the room except for our waitress, and even she left, probably to call Central Supply and tell them to butcher another dozen head for the third course.

"My hand to God, I love this joint."

At least, I think that's what Neely said.

"They got – " The tongue wasn't quite quick enough to catch a dribble of jus cascading down his chin and onto his tie. Which was wider than the napkin he'd cornered into his collar. '

"They got real food here, you know? The kinda stuff we fought wars to eat."

Neely had stopped the beer after one stein, switching to tonic water. About six feet tall, counting crew cut, I couldn't even guess his weight. The knot of his tie was only an article of faith under the jowls. He rocked his head after every third or fourth bite, as though he were positioning the food to slide down a different chute. Small eyes were squinched up under the brows, a piece of toilet paper on a shaving cut near his right ear.

Neely generously rested his knife to point at my salad bowl. "That all you're eating?"

"Diet," I said.

He nodded like he'd heard the word but never studied the language that spawned it. I waited until he finished the slab and was tricking with the little veins of meat marbled in the fat.

"Neely?"

"Uh-huh."

"About these threats?"

"Yeah, sure. What about them?"

"What do you think?"

"Think." He put down his utensils, rolled his rump as if to fart, then just wallowed deeper into the booth. "I think this broad's asked for it, what I think."

"Can you tell me what you found out on the notes'?"

"The notes? Jesus, everybody but Jimmy Hoffa handled the things and the envelopes before the little secretary brought 'em in to me. Even so, I followed routine. Had 'em run through the lab."

"You take elimination prints from Andrus's people?"

"Nah. Just sent the notes on through. They even did that Sherlock thing, the computer search out to 1010 Commonwealth there?"

Neely suddenly straightened a little. "Look, Cuddy, I'm no brain trust, but I know what's what, okay? I keep up with things the best I can. The staties didn't find no match with any of the prints they got on file."

"I give you some names, will you run them through too?"

"See if anybody's got a sheet?"

"Yes."

"Sure, I'll do that. Sure." He rifled his pockets for a pad and pen. I gave him O'Brien, Doleman. and Yary from the threat files, then Walter Strock as well.

Neely scratched his forehead. "Strock?"

"Something?"

"Not sure. I'll run it. You got social security numbers on any of these guys?"

"No."

"How about D.O.B.s?"

"Just the addresses."

"Even so, gonna get a hell of a list for the O'Brien, although thank Christ it ain't 'John' or 'James,' computer'd be burping all fuckin' night. I'll still give it a try for you."

The waitress came over with a bowl of salted peanuts. Neely thanked her, his fingers plowing through the nuts like the blades of a backhoe.

He said, "Anything else you need?"

I decided to follow Murphy's advice. "You get many of these threat things, Neely'?"

"Aw, you know how it is. Runs in cycles. Broad like this Andrus, though, she probably could hire a stevedore, haul them away for her."

I told him about the drawerful of folders.

"That's my point. I get one of these, I end up chasing after scumbags write the kinda fan mail you wouldn't wish on Geraldo there. Jesus, Cuddy, every day some shithead sees somebody new on the tube, he decides to make the lady his personal project, you know? Guy can barely read the labels in a Seven-Eleven writes a love poem. I then jerks off into the envelope before he licks it. Whaddaya gonna do?"

"Okay if I follow up on the names? Go talk to them?"

"Fine. Let me just tell you, think about what you want to have happen here."

"What do you mean?"

"Start with the Secret Service, okay?"

The Secret Service. "Okay."

"Now, they got thousands of guys, no shit, got nothing better to do than guard a couple of big shots like the President and all, maybe total with the Kennedy kids and Truman's widow, total twenny, twenny-five."

The Kennedy children were now over-age, and Mrs. Truman left us in the early eighties, but I didn't want to wreck Neely's train of thought.

"And even the Secret Service can't keep track of all the scumbags writing letters and making phone calls. The calling, I gotta admit, that's gonna slow down some, now they got these computers, you can see the number the guy's at with this little screen thing on your phone there. 'Course, soon's the scumbag union finds out about the screens, they'll just call from some pay phone and a different one every time.

"But your letter-writing scumbags, now, they're different. All's you got is the handwriting and the postmark and maybe, just maybe, the saliva or cum juice or whatever the fuck other fluid they leave on the envelope, right? Only there's got to be enough of that for some other kind of test that even 1010 don't do but has to farm out. So, you see what I'm saying here?"

"Even with better physical evidence, not much chance of actually tracing the sender."

"Right, right. And not only that. What does your client really want?"

"Want?"

"Yeah. She want the scumbag to just stop or she want him hung by the balls too?"

"Probably both."

"Yeah, well, probably the best you're gonna be able to do for her is scare him off. Even if you catch the guy in the act somehow, what's a judge gonna do with him? Twenty days down to Bridgewater for observation in the rooms with the cushy walls? Shit, we're letting real bad dudes walk now, there ain't enough cells in all the slams to hold 'em."

"Good point."

"Yeah. Hey, look, I don't wanna come across like some lug, got no feelings. Jesus, I was the one getting these notes, especially the one by hand in the mailbox there, I'd be jumpy as a pregnant nun too. It's just, even if you do the best you can here, it ain't gonna be that much."

"Listen, Neely, I appreciate your being so open with me on all this."

"Don't mention it." He seemed to sniff something in the air. "Say, you pressed or we got time for dessert?"