Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy (16 page)

I said, "They warned me off Hendrix Management,
saying it wouldn't be a good idea for me to investigate the company
or the projects it handles."

The two women exchanged looks.

Then Evorova spoke to me. "Hendrix and Plymouth
Willows, but nothing about Andrew?”

"That's right. Hendrix wasn't nuts about seeing
me, but the other neighbors were more or less cooperative."

Loiselle said, "And An-drew?"

I spoke to Evorova. "Not cooperative at all."

My client dipped her chin, as she had back in my
office.

"So you think maybe it is the Hendrix company
that is the problem, or maybe it is the condo complex, or maybe it is
Andrew."

"Right, and no real way of telling which, since
everybody in those three hours would have had time to sic the goons."

"I am sorry?" said Evorova.

Loiselle patted her friend's forearm. "Call for
the bad guys."

Evorova looked to me. "What do you recommend?"

"If there's something sour about Hendrix's
operation, maybe the complex should get rid of him. If it's the
complex, maybe Mr. Dees should move."

Evorova let out a breath. "And if it is Andrew,
maybe I should know, yes?"

"I think so."

"Me too, Olga," said Loiselle.

Evorova closed her eyes for a moment. Opening them
again, she stared at me hard. "How can you do this?"

"I'd like to try tracing Mr. Dees backward, and
the only sure thing we have is him telling you he graduated from the
University of Central Vermont. That means a trip up there, and it
would be a help if I could have a sample of his signature."

"His signature?"

"Yes. For me to get a look at the school
records, I'd need some kind of authorization signed by him."
Loiselle showed me the lopsided grin. "Or at least apparently
signed by him."

"Right."

Evorova said, "I do not know. Forging Andrew's
signature?"

Loiselle patted her forearm again. "In a good
cause, Olga."

"What cause?"

"You," said her friend.

Evorova closed and opened her eyes once more, then
gave me another long stare. "When we are first going out
together, I was at Andrew's house one night, and I was short of cash
for the next day. He drove me to the ATM machine in Plymouth Mills,
but it was broken. Andrew thought that was funny, a banker who could
not get money for herself. So he loaned me fifty dollars, but this
was early in our relationship, as I told you, and I wanted to give
him a check. He was reluctant, but I insisted."

"And Mr. Dees endorsed and deposited it," I
said.

"Exactly, yes."

"Do you have it here?"

My client consulted her watch.

Loiselle said, "Plenty of time, Olga."

Evorova rose, the gown shadowing her figure nicely in
the process. "I will get the check."

Loiselle watched Olga walk back the way she'd come,
then picked up her own wineglass. Speaking to me over the rim, Claude
said, "Blinded by love."

"It happens."

She gave me a harder look than Evorova had. "Yeah,
tell me about it."

Then Claude Loiselle drained the last of her Bonny
Doon.
 

=11=

After leaving Olga Evorova's condo carrying the check
Andrew Dees had endorsed, I went back to my apartment. There was no
message from Nancy with my answering service or on my telephone tape
machine. I thought about trying her, but after the way we'd left it
that afternoon, I decided to wait. Besides, she could always call me,
right? I fell asleep without hearing from her.

Thursday dawned bright and clear, the kind of
brilliant October morning that brings the tourists back year after
year for foliage season. Even the northwest wind was doing its part,
a steady ten miles an hour pushing all the smog out to the harbor and
beyond as it brought high, patchy clouds over the city.

I waited until eight, then dialed Nancy at home,
getting just the outgoing tape announcement. Figuring she might have
gone into work before the doctor's, I tried the DA's office too, the
secretary telling me that Ms. Meagher wasn't expected until after
lunch. I left the message that I'd be gone most of the day but would
still appreciate a return call.

Hanging up, I sat down and composed, in longhand, the
letter I intended to bring with me to Vermont.

“
Okay, now you want me to do this letter, right?"

Leaning an elbow on the counter of the copy center, I
watched the woman twist her frosted hair around an index finger.
"Just like last time."

"Yeah, but last time you wanted that
questionnaire."

"Right."

"So, what'd the people say?"

"Say?"

"Yeah, about it going two pages and all."

I nodded. "They weren't very helpful."

"See," she said, twisting another hank of
her hair. "I told you. Keep it to one page, you're better off."

"Which is why I'm taking your advice on this
letter."

She looked at it again. "What's that word
there?"

" 'Authorization.' "

"And you want it centered?"

"Right. And all caps."

She made her way down to the signature line, then the
return address in the upper-right-hand corner. "And you're
Andrew Dees?"

"No, I'm just getting this typed for him."

"Word processed. We don't actually 'type' things
anymore."

"I'd forgotten."

She said, "Five minutes."

"And I'll need three originals, please."

"Not an original and two photocopies'?"

"No. Three originals right off the printer."

"It'll take longer."

"How much?"

"Two minutes, maybe."

"Fine," I said.

"And it'll cost more, too."

I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. "How
much more?"

"Another fifty cents per original."

"I'll take the plunge."

Torturing a different hank
of the hosted hair, the woman moved slowly toward her desktop
computer. Back in my condo, I practiced copying the endorsement
signature on the back of Olga Evorova's check until it felt natural.
Then I signed the three originals of the authorization letter,
gathered some other papers, and went down to my car.

* * *

Used to be, driving north out of Boston was simple,
if not easy. Either you took the Sumner Tunnel, completed in 1934,
under the harbor and past Logan Airport, or you took the Mystic River
Bridge, completed in 1950 and renamed the Tobin Bridge in the
mid-sixties. You could die from the fumes in the tunnel or the
crosswinds on the bridge, but at least your choices were clear. Then
in sixty-one, they opened a second tunnel, the Callahan, which seemed
to multiply both the traffic and the fumes by a factor of four. Now,
another aspect of the Big Dig is the revamping of all the ramps that
lead onto and off the funneling highways, like the Central Artery,
Storrow Drive, Route 1—enough. The point is, now the drive's still
not easy but no longer simple.

I thought keeping the Prelude's moonroof back and
heater on might take my mind off both Nancy and the traffic. It
didn't, but it helped.

Once into New Hampshire, the miles on interstates 93
and 89 rolled by, me keeping the speedometer between fifty-five and
sixty without cruise control, the roadside foliage going from
not-quite-peak to peak to past-peak. About a hundred miles northwest
of Boston and through the second range of mountains, things went from
past-peak to pretty bleak. The trees had lost most of their leaves,
the varied colors now checkerboarding the ground like the French
Quarter after Mardi Gras. It was depressing, and found my finger on
the button that closes the moonroof even though I didn't think the
air had turned that much colder.

Crossing over into Vermont, I went another thirty
miles before seeing the exit for the university. At the bottom of the
ramp, I took a right, slowly climbing a switchback road up a
mountain. Cresting it, I looked down into the valley and on alternate
curves got better and better views of the town and campus, which
seemed to join each other at the narrow point in a geographic
hourglass.

The town had a quaint main street, tall-if bare-oaks,
maples, and poplars lining the curbs. Broad, clapboard houses, built
at a time when ten kids in the family put you somewhere near the
middle of the pack, stood a little too close to the road. The houses
gave way to a small commercial center, with a postage-stamp movie
theater, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, and the Towne Restaurant,
where the soup and half-sandwich special probably would go for half
what the soup alone costs in Boston. Across the street was a small
department store, a Chinese take-out place, and a photocopy closet
that would be pleased to type any résumé "professiona1ly."
At the edge of town stood a flat-faced taphouse with a “C&W
Dancing, Th-Sat" sign next to a video store next to a gunshop
advertising "Re-load Ammo, Cheap." One-stop shopping for
all your weekend entertainment.

I drove through a glade of evergreens that formed the
waist of the hourglass I'd seen from the crest of the mountain, the
gates of the University of Central Vermont just past it. Beyond the
gates, I came onto a narrow macadam road with yellow speedbumps every
two hundred feet. Around me spread a tree-and-lawn campus, the cement
sidewalks narrow, the hedges near the Colonial-era buildings trimmed
lovingly and blending into the ivy climbing the outside walls. I
found myself thinking that Paulie Fogerty, the superintendent at
Plymouth Willows, would like this place.

The combination football-soccer field appeared on my
left, the portable goal nets pushed to the sides at the moment so the
football team could run no-pads drills. Off in the corner, the
cheerleading squad—five females and one male—was practicing a
gymnastics routine in shorts and sweatshirts. The grandstands were
all steel-and-board bleachers, the capacity more befitting a high
school than a college. Bordering the field was an elliptical gravel
track, stringy men and women alternating in windsprints from a
crouching start. A campus cop in blue shirt and slacks leaned against
the front fender of a yellow Ford Explorer. His tires on the edge of
the gravel, he watched all the activity around him, giving special
attention to the cheerleaders.

After a curve in the road, I found the Administration
Building and a parking lot. Leaving my car in a VISITOR slot with a
meter on it, I fed the meter two dimes before I realized the first
had bought me an hour. I went up the sidewalk, taking in the
scattered clatches of students. Almost all impossibly young, the hair
styles ranging from New Wave butcherings to No Wave butch cuts, the
clothes spandex or L.L. Bean or oversized flannel shirts over tees,
the buttons on the flannel ones all open, shirttails out over jeans
with intentional slashes. Everybody in uniform, just different
branches of the service.

Look a little closer, though, and you could see a
stout thirty-year-old woman, maybe a young mother, coming back to
school and maybe not with a lot of friends her own age, sitting on a
threadbare jacket and nibbling a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich
while she poured over what  looked like an English lit text. A
trio of African-American students, sitting by themselves and eating
ice cream cones, Chicago Bulls and Philadelphia Eagles colors on the
two boys, one looking around every once in a while, watching the
street in a different kind of neighborhood. A studious Latino,
wearing black tie-shoes and a white dress shirt, his back against the
stoop of the Administration Building, tapping the keys of a notebook
computer he balanced on his knees.

I climbed the stoop and went in the main entrance,
taking the corridor toward the registrar's office as two of the L.L.
Beaners came out, knapsacks on their backs. Inside the door was a
rectangular waiting area, probably designed to accommodate long lines
of students, a couple of molded-plastic scoop chairs against the
wall. I could see two women behind the open counter, one in her late
fifties and severe, the other in her early twenties and
fresh-scrubbed. The older woman shrugged stiffly into a coat, saying
in a clipped New England accent, "Be back by one, Zina."

The younger woman sat at a desk bracketed by tall
file cabinets, scanning some computer printouts on green-and-cream
spreadsheet paper in front of her. "Take your time, Harriet. I'm
just meeting Lyle for lunch at the Towne."

Harriet hissed with her coat as she strode past me,
never even looking at my face. After she was gone, I went to the
counter.

Zina smiled up from the printouts. "Help you?"

"Please." I took out one of my forged
authorization letters. "I need a transcript and whatever else
you can show me on a former student."

Zina nodded and rose, lifting one form from a sheaf
of them on her desk. She came up to the counter and turned the paper
around for me to see. "We just need you to fill this out and get
it signed by the graduate involved."