Invasion of Privacy

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 hard-on 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.” I 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’ll 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 offices have a going rate.

    “What, you again?”
    “Sorry to disturb you, Mo. ”
    “Well, 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?”
    “HI try, Mo. ”
    He spoke very deliberately, as though I was block-printing notes. “Freddie gets clocked by a truck, he’s a good friend, 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