Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy (34 page)

"Primo, how would they know to go there in the
first place?"

"Account of they asked me in advance to show it
to them, give Coco a door key, in case they wanted to use the meat
locker for entertaining somebody."

Smart. "Somebody like Alfonso DiRienzi?"

"I had a brainstorm there, I think. I told this
coordinator that it was just possible the fucking feds had made Rick
and Coco somehow and decided to send our organization a message by
whacking them, so we were going to have to be real careful, here on
out."

"Only the feds wouldn't do that."

"Hey-ey-ey, some other time I'll tell you about
these former friends of mine would argue the point, they were still
alive to speak their piece."

"And you think the rogue-cop story sounds better
than what we came up with?"

"Yeah, but it's not gonna buy you and me much
time. I was able to convince our coordinator that Rick and Coco
oughta stay on ice for a while at the funeral home, till we could
hand the Milwaukee people a better result."

"Primo—"

"Look, don't say it again, all right? You ain't
gonna give up DiRienzi even if you do find him. Fine. You fucking
spook that rat from wherever he is, though, and it's open fucking
season on him, far as I'm concerned."

I didn't much like what I was about to suggest, but I
couldn't see any other way to be in two places at the same time.
"Primo, I'm going to ask you to do something else."

"Now what?"

“
I've got to run around tomorrow, trying to trace a
couple of things. I need you to get a pair of binoculars, some kind
of writing pad, and a rent-a-car."

"A rent-a-car?"

"Yes."

"What the fuck for?"

I told him.

He said, “And you think that if DiRienzi and your
client didn't take off on their own, one of his neighbors had
something to do with it?"

"Go back to what Cocozzo said in the
slaughterhouse. DiRienzi had no reason to run if my client tells him
she's the one who hired me. And the neighbors are basically the only
other people I talked with about him."

"You got a reason why one of them should have a
hardon for DiRienzi?”

"No, but I'm out of better ideas. You?"

About ten seconds went by
before Primo Zuppone said, "All right. How am I supposed to
recognize these assholes?"

* * *

After a teeth-pulling hour with my word-processing
wonder at the copy center, I rode the Green Line trolley to Boston
University. The transcript department is on the second floor of 881
Commonwealth Avenue. It reminded me a lot of the registrar's office
at the University of Central Vermont, except that I had to wait on a
growing line of seniors earnestly hoping their BU grades could get
them into the graduate school of their (parents') choice. When my
turn came, I walked up to a young, red-haired man.

"Can I help you?"

"Hope so. I need a former student's transcript."

Handed him the authorization letter for "Andrew
Dees," modified to "Lana Stepanian."

He scanned it quickly, barely glancing at the
signature I'd forged from Stepanian's "Hendrix Management"
questionnaire. "There's no Social Security or student ID number
on here."

"She didn't give those to me."

"Or date of graduation?

"Sorry, but isn't 'Stepanian' unusual enough—"

"We require all that stuff, plus date of birth,
any former name used, and——"

"Lopez."

"Lopez?"

"Her maiden name."

The red-haired guy sighed, writing "Lopez"
on the letter. "Well, I'll have to do some checking. If I find
her, I'l1 mail the transcript out to you this afternoon."

“
Can I come back and pick it up instead?"

He looked behind me, probably at the growing line.
"This place'll be a zoo the rest of today and tomorrow. You're
better off with me mailing it."

I didn't want to push my thinning luck. "Okay."

He wrote down the Tremont Street address. "That'll
be three dollars, please."

Same as the university in
Vermont. Even registrar's offies have a going rate.

* * *

"What, you again?"

"Sorry to disturb you, Mo."

"Wel1, you already have, so the harm's done.
Come in, close the door."

I took a chair across the cluttered desk. Mo Katzen
was in the vest and trousers of the usual gray suit today, some
strands of his white, wavy hair spit-curled onto his forehead.
Between index and middle fingers he held a lit cigar.

"Find your wicks, Mo?"

"My . . . ? Oh, yeah. The ASN's thought they got
them all, but they didn't." He gestured with the cigar toward
the desk top. "You know anything about the organ market, John'?"

"You mean human organs?"

"Yeah, human. What, you think they transplant
for kittens and bunnies?"

"No, Mo, but—"

"Well, Freddie's funeral—Freddie Norton, I
told you about him, last time you wrecked my train of thought—it
got me thinking. He had this organ-donor card in his wallet. Now
Freddie's own equipment, it wasn't what you'd call fresh off the
shelf, if you see my point. But I asked myself, what's the business
itself like? Life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, right?"

"Sorry, you lost me."

"John." A baleful look. “Concentrate,
okay?"

"I'll try, Mo."

He spoke very deliberately, as though I was
block-printing notes. "Freddie gets clocked by a truck, he's a
good fiiend, I'm at his funeral. That's the lemon, get it? Only the
organ-donor card gives me the idea to research the market for human
organs, the basis for a newspaper article. My business, John. That's
the lemonade, see'?"

"A friend's death is a sad thing, but it
inspires an article for you, which is making the best of a bad
situation."

"Move to the head of the class. Anyway, I start
looking into this 'market,' and it's fascinating?

After the slaughterhouse the day before, I wasn't in
the mood for that kind of fascination. "Mo—"

"One of the computer Nazis got me some of the
laws on this." He picked up a densely primed Xerox. "It
seems some doctor got the idea of buying organs from living donors,
then selling them on the open market. That made Congress pass the
National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which kind of regulated
things. But," picking up another Xerox, "every state in the
Union passed this Uniform Anatomical Gift Act—which, I got to tell
you, doesn't seem all that 'uniform' to me. Anyway, under the state
law, the families of people killed kind of 'quickly and cleanly' can
donate the decedent's organs. Only guess what, John?"

"No organ-donor card, no organ donation."

"What?"

"Without a card from the donor, the families
can't—"

"Oh. Huh, never thought about that."
Shaking one Xerox like a rattle at the other, Mo said, "Have to
read these over again, dammit. No, what I meant was, the families
won't receive a dime for the organs, but something called a
'transplant agency'—that's a nice touch, don't you think? A
transplant agency, like they're selling insurance or real estate.
Anyway, this agency gets something from the hospital, and the
hospital gets fifteen, twenty thousand for each major organ, and so
the old joke, it doesn't hold up anymore."

I had to bite. "Which old joke?"

This look was more disappointed than baleful. "Holy
Cross would be—you went to the Cross, right?"

"Right, Mo."

"The good priests would be ashamed, your lack of
chemistry culture."

"Chemistry?"

"Yeah, The old joke, that every human body is
worth only about a dollar forty-nine in chemicals. Well, I'll tell
you, John, if my computer Nazis are right," reaching for a
pencil and touching the sharpened tip to his tongue, "the price
went up to around . . . let's see . . . fifteen and change for a
kidney, times two, plus twenty for the liver, times—no, just one
per customer on—"

"Mo, speaking of computers."

He looked up. "What?"

"Speaking of the computers, could you loan me
one of your people to do a little more research?"

"Research? They already got all I can use on the
organ market."

"I meant for me, on something else."

"Will it get you out of my hair?"

"Cross my heart."

Waving at his Xeroxed statutes, Mo Katzen said, "That
supposed to be funny?" and then reached for the telephone.
* * *

The computer researcher who came to Mo's door this
time was a young African-American woman named Giselle with
dreadlocked hair and a Lauren Hutton gap between her two front teeth.
Giselle led me back through the rabbit warren of cubicles to her
carrel, and she turned out to be much faster than the first helper
had been.

We ran "Steven Stepanian" through the
search commands. Just a couple of isolated references to his being on
the Plymouth Mills School Committee. Then Lana Stepanian. Nothing. We
tried Lana Lopez. Nothing again. Next was Norman Elmendorf. A couple
of photo credits on pictures he'd taken for his Brockton paper years
ago that apparently the Herald had gotten permission to use as well.
Nothing about his military service, despite the exhaustive media
coverage the Gulf War had received. Giselle and I tried Kira
Elmendorf too. No entries. Tangela Robinette. Three stories—one
main, two much briefer follow-ups—on her husband being killed and
her own previous federal service. Son Jamey was listed as another
survivor in each article.
 
For the
hell of it, I asked Giselle to run Paul or Paulie Fogerty through.
Zip, but that's what I expected anyway. Giselle looked up, the gap
somehow making her smile seem more helpful.

"Anyone else?"

"Yes," even though it was really scraping
rock bottom.

"Try the names Yale Quentin and Plymouth
Willows."

"That's Y-A-L-E and Q-U-E-N-T-I~N?"

"I think so."

"And Willows, like the tree?"

"Yes."

"You want them linked?"

"Linked?"

"Yes. 'Plymouth Willows' within so many words of
'Ya1e Quentin' as the search command."

"No. Run his name on its own first."

The computer found a few articles from the early
eighties about Quentin doing some smaller developments else-where on
the South Shore. Later articles overlapped in discussing him and the
Plymouth Willows project: the initial optimism, the unfolding
difficulties, the eventual financial and personal tragedy. There was
even a grainy photo of Quentin's widow, a flight attendant, at the
cemetery ceremony following his suicide four years earlier. The story
and caption gave her first name as "Edith," but she wore no
veil, and the photo captured her lower lip curling as she
concentrated on something at the graveside.

Just the way Edie did, drawing a beer behind the bar
at The Tides.

Aware of my concentration on the screen, Giselle
said, "Would you like a printout of this one?"

"Please."

* * *

"Mo."

"Now what?"

The cigar was in his mouth but dead again. "I
just wanted to thank you for all the help."

"Don't mention it."

"One more thing?"

He made a ritual of taking the cigar out of his
mouth. "John, maybe you ought to put me on the payroll, you
know?"

"Last one, promise."

"What is it?"

"You know anybody on the Brockton paper?"

Mo Katzen turned the cigar to stare at its unlit end,
as if seeing it for the first time. "Not since Chester Snedeker
died. It's an interesting story, though. You got a minute to hear
about Chet?"
 

=22=

An hour later, I left the Herald's building, the air
temperature feeling like seventy and still putting the lie to October
on the calendar. Brockton being closer than Plymouth Mills, I got on
the Southeast Expressway to Route 128 and eventually Route 24. Three
miles after taking the second Brockton exit, I found the newspaper
where Norman Elmendorf had worked, housed in an old granite elephant
that could pass for a public library.

Locking the Prelude, I stuck under my arm the
portfolio briefcase I'd been using. Inside the building's front doors
was a fiftyish guy wearing a blue security uniform who couldn't have
looked more bored if he'd been snoring. I showed him my
identification, saying I was there to do a routine check on a former
employee now applying for a job with a client of mine.

The guard picked up a telephone, dialed three digits,
and passed my information on to somebody named "Betty."

Nodding and hanging up, he said, "Take a seat.
Somebody'll be right with you."