Invasion of Privacy

slugged me Friday night. “And that’s everything you saw?”
    “Yeah.” Zuppone folded over the pad, stuck it back in his jacket. “So what do I tell Milwaukee ?”
    “What do they know so far?”
    I saw some anger rise in Primo, but he shook it off. “What they know is that number-one son and a pretty good fucking gun named Coco got on the silver bird Thursday p.m., called home twice, and ain’t been heard from since early yesterday.”
    I said, “And your ‘coordinator’?”
    “He’s getting nervous. Real nervous. Which ought to fucking terrify me, but I’m so numb, I don’t have the sense to be scared.” Zuppone glanced away from me. “Which scares me even more, tell you the truth.”

    The Tides was nearly empty on a Monday afternoon, and I didn’t see Edith “Edie” Quentin behind the deserted bar. As I took a stool down near the end, though, she came through the kitchen door, a distracted look on her face. “Lose something?” I said.
    She started and turned, then recognized me.
    I shrugged. “Or maybe you were just trying to remember something.”
    Edie didn’t bite at that, either, before moving past the raw bar and toward the taps, using a damp towel to clean the metal posts. Sort of.
    I said, “Maybe something you forgot to tell me?”
    She concentrated on the towel, her lower lip curling. “I don’t see what we have to talk about.”
    “How about a Harpoon, then.”
    Edie reached for a mug. “That’s what I’m here for.”
    As she set my ale down on the bar, I said, “You prefer ‘Edie’ over ‘Edith,’ I know, but do you still go by ‘Quentin’?”
    She closed her eyes, let out a breath. “Look, if all this is some kind of scheme to collect on Yale’s old debts—”
    “—it’s not—”
    “—let me tell you, the estate’s been bled dry already, okay? This isn’t even my place. I just work here.”
    “Since you left the airline.”
    A steady “Yes.”
    “I didn’t come in to dun you for money, Edie. I’d just like to ask a few questions about your husband and Plymouth Willows.”
    “And if I don’t feel like answering them?”
    “Then I go talk to other people, but I’d rather get the truth.”
    “The truth.” Bitter, almost a laugh.
    I said, “Your version of it, anyway.”
    Edie slapped the damp towel on the bar like a judge would a gavel. “Yeah, well, my version won’t take too long. Yale had big dreams and a big Cadillac Coupe de Ville to carry them around in. He thought he had the touch «fter developing a couple of dinky subdivisions further inland, so he tried his hand—and all our money—on a condo complex that was, get this, ‘Virtually oceanfront, Honey.’ ”
    “And things didn’t work out.”
    “Work out? Plymouth Willows sank like a stone. Oh, Yale kept telling me, ‘It’s not a recession, Honey. Just a bump in the road, our road to riches.’ ” Another almost-laugh. “Only one problem: it was a recession. Hell, it was a depression, and poor Yale kept trying to shovel sand against the tide he should have seen was coming at him.”
    “There were a lot of people with shovels back then, and most of them didn’t see it coming, either.”
    “Yeah, I know.” The bitterness left her voice. “And to give Yale credit where credit’s due, he protected me all right.”
    “ ‘Protected’ you?”
    “We kept a little house in one of those earlier developments, took title in my name only, then did a homestead exemption on it. You know what that is?”
    A very quiet “Yes, I do,” from me.
    “Well, when the walls came tumbling down around Plymouth Willows, the house was where we could have stayed, nice and warm, to ride out the storm.”
    “But you didn’t?”
    A labored sigh. “I thought we were. Only Yale got obsessed with saving his equity in the condo complex—which was crazy, all the prices had fallen so far, there was no equity left. That didn’t stop my husband, though. No sir, he kept trying to show the mortgage lenders he was going to come out of it, prove to them his already existing buyers were solid people.”
    “How?”
    A wave of the hand, which came to rest on the towel, kneading it a little. “Yale ‘investigated’ them, in his own half-assed way. He couldn’t afford a real private investigator—hell, by this time, even his lawyer had bailed out on him—so Yale went to talk with the people already in the complex, get them to vouch for him.”
    I remembered Norman Elmendorf telling me that