Follow the Sharks

by William G. Tapply

  “Does this have something to do with E.J. Donagan, then?” I asked the two cops.

  “We’re not at liberty to say, sir,” said Garrity. “The Lieutenant will explain. Are you ready to go?”

  I pulled on a shirt and tucked a pack of Winstons into the pocket. “Okay.”

  In the elevator Laski and Garrity stood at attention, staring at the numbers as they blinked backwards from six to one. We got out and marched through the lobby. Nathan, sitting at his table by the front door, raised his hand to me, and I smiled and nodded to reassure him that I didn’t think I was under arrest.

  The cruiser was parked directly in front of the door. The two policemen got in front and I climbed into the back seat. Laski took the wheel. He pulled sedately out of the short driveway and onto Atlantic Avenue. Then he turned on the siren, tromped on the accelerator, and the car shot forward through the dark, abandoned city streets. We cut up State Street through the banking district, then over past Government Center onto Cambridge Street. We circled the rotary near Mass General and suddenly took a sharp right where there was no road and sped across the narrow grassy strip that separated the Charles River Basin from the highway. As we careened through the dark I could see ahead of us the pulsing flash of blue and red lights, and, reflected in their strobelike glare was the Hatch Shell, where the Boston Pops puts on its annual Fourth of July extravaganza.

  We skidded to a stop, and Garrity and Laski got out. “Come on, Mr. Coyne,” said Garrity. “This way.”

  I followed the two policemen toward the group of erratically parked vehicles. A tough-looking, white-haired guy wearing a short sleeved white shirt with a striped tie pulled loose at the throat detached himself from the crowd of mostly uniformed men and approached me. Garrity and Laski melted away.

  He held out his hand. “Travers,” he said.

  I gripped his hand. “I remember,” I said. “We’ve met. What’s this all about?”

  “Stern said you should come. He’s over here.”

  Travers turned and walked back toward the cluster of people. I followed him. He tapped a short man on the shoulder. When he turned I saw that it was Marty Stern. Stern looked at me through his thick horn-rimmed glasses. He didn’t bother to offer his hand.

  “Come over here, Coyne,” he said.

  We pushed through the crowd. They had gathered around a woman slumped on a bench. She wore dark blue slacks and a red shirt. She had long, straight dark hair. Stern gestured toward her, then bent over and lifted her head gently with both of his hands so I could see her face. What I saw, though, wasn’t her face, but the bright red semicircle under her chin, and the big splash of blood down the front of her. Her dark tilted dead eyes stared past me.

  I looked away and gulped back the bile that rose in my throat.

  “Look at her,” said Stern. “Is this the one?”

  I nodded without turning my head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “For Christ’s sake, I’m sure.” I forced myself to look at her again. The slash across her throat cut deep, through the tendons and tubes that connected her head to her body. They stood out white against the red of the rest of the wound. Annie’s shirt, I noticed, had once been white, but the entire front of it was soaked in crimson blood, still gleaming moist in the lights from the flashlights and automobiles.

  Stern lowered her head back onto her chest, wiped his hands on his pants, and took my arm. He steered me to another bench nearby, and we sat beside each other. I turned my body sideways so I wouldn’t see all the professionals working at Annie’s body.

  I tried to light a cigarette. My hands shook. I steadied one with the other so that I could direct the flame of my Zippo onto the tip of my Winston. I dragged deeply on it. “That’s her,” I said. “That’s Annie. She was right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Talking to me. Helping. She said it was dangerous. She shouldn’t have done it.”

  Stern shrugged. “I wouldn’t blame yourself. She knew what she was doing. You didn’t force her.”

  I looked sharply at him. “Don’t bullshit me. It’s my fault she’s dead.”

  Stern smiled as though he’d heard it all before. “That’s ridiculous,” he said mildly.

  My mind whirled with half-formed thoughts. “It means she was helping us, though, doesn’t it? What she was trying to give us, it was important, then. Otherwise, they…”

  “Maybe,” said Stern. “Maybe not. It could mean they knew she was in touch with you, anyway.” Stern touched my arm so that I would look up at him. “The interesting thing is that they did it here, where they knew she’d be found, and they did it this way, so that we’d know exactly why they did it. To shut her up. They could have dumped her body into the bay, or in a dumpster, or into a concrete form on Route 95 if they’d wanted to. But they wanted us to see this. Yes. I agree. There is a message here, Coyne. Do you get the message?”

  I nodded. “I get the message.”

  “Time to leave it to the pros.”

  “That’s the message. Yes.”

  What Stern didn’t need to say, because he figured I understood it perfectly already, was this: If somebody was willing to cut Annie’s throat and leave her to bleed to death on a bench by the Hatch Shell because she had given information to a nosy lawyer, what was to prevent them from seeing that the nosy lawyer met the same fate?

  That was the message.

  “The other thing,” began Stern.

  “I know the other thing,” I said quickly. “The other thing is that it doesn’t look very good for E.J. Donagan. Right?”

  Stern shrugged, then nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Yes.”

  “Or Eddie Donagan, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told Stern what I had inferred from the list of names Annie had given me, that it pointed straight to Eddie, and about the Sherlock Holmes book I assumed she had left for me.

  “Could be,” mused Stern. “I don’t see how he’s connected, though. Donagan didn’t kidnap the kid, we know that. Maybe he knew something, or figured something out. He hasn’t been heard from, huh?”

  “No. I talked to Sam Farina just today. Yesterday, that is. No one there has heard from him.” I flicked my cigarette away. “Maybe Eddie’s floating in the bay or taking up space in a bridge abutment somewhere.”

  “One good thing, anyway,” said Stern.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ll be able to figure out who the hell she is. That could lead us somewhere.”

  “Do you think they’d leave her body like this for us if we could trace them through her?”

  “It’s possible. We’ll see. In the meantime, I think you better go back to drawing up wills and separation agreements.”

  “That’s probably good advice.”

  I glanced over to where Annie’s body slumped on the bench. A police photographer was snapping pictures. The blinks of light from his flash were being soaked up by the brightening sky overhead. Bursts of static came from the radios in the official vehicles, which crouched there with their motors running and their doors open like animals of prey. Now and then came the unruffled voice of a female dispatcher, droning numbers and code words. The policemen and medics stood around, talking in low muffled tones, waiting for their turn to perform their given function.

  I knew Stern’s advice was sound. I had to admit that he was right. There was a message there for me, and it would be stupid to ignore it.

  Part 4 E.J.

  15

  THE SKY ALONG THE horizon was turning from black to purple when officers Garrity and Laski dropped me off at my apartment. I pried my sneakers off with my toes and kicked them against the wall, loaded up my electric coffee pot, and shucked off my clothes. The shower felt good, and I let it run as cold as I could bear it. It failed, however, to wash away the image of that gaping half-moon wound on Annie’s ivory throat. The tighter I squeezed my eyes shut, the redder I remembered her blood. She couldn’t have been dead long. T
he blood that had splashed over her breasts and puddled in her lap had only just begun to cake and turn brown.

  I dried myself, shaved, and slipped on some clean clothes. The coffee was ready, so I poured myself a big mug. Suddenly I was hungry. In the face of that awful death, I was starving, and I felt ashamed to be so aware of my own life processes.

  In the back of the refrigerator I found four white cardboard cartons with little wire handles—salvage from a jaunt Sylvie and I had taken a week earlier to the Yangtze River Restaurant in Lexington. I took them out, lined them up on the counter beside the stove, and opened them one at a time. Beef and pea pods in thick brown gravy. Sub Gum pork fried rice. Sweet and sour shrimp with chunks of pineapple and blood-red cherries. Moo Goo Gai Pan—little bits of chicken with mushrooms, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and other good stuff.

  I dumped the contents of the four cartons into a big skillet, stirred them all together, sloshed on some soy sauce, put it on low heat, and covered it. A real country breakfast. Then I took my coffee out onto the balcony to see if the sun would come up.

  It did, right on schedule, spilling crimson over the rippled surface of the ocean and staining the high clouds with a color not unlike what I had seen a few hours earlier on Annie’s white blouse.

  New England mariners knew what it meant: “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”

  I fiddled with a couplet of my own as I sipped my coffee. Bloody blouse at night/Should give dumb attorney fright.

  It didn’t scan, but the message was there, and I knew it. Marty Stern had been telling me all along I was in over my head, but some mix of guilt and adolescent adventurousness had prevented me from leaving the cops and robbers stuff to the cops and robbers.

  The lower rim of the sun cleared the horizon. Its motion was visible proof that our planet continued to rotate, as did all the other planets in the solar system, and all the other clusters of celestial bodies in the ever-expanding universe. What had begun as a big bang a few billion years ago wouldn’t be affected much by the behavior of a few clusters of protoplasm on one of those whirling chunks of matter.

  What egoism, to think that anything we did in the eye-wink of our lives meant a damn thing in the grand cosmic scheme of things—or to postulate a God who watched over it and gave a damn.

  I went back into my kitchen and lifted the lid on the skillet to sniff the steam that burst out. It looked awful—a brownish, glutinous mush—and smelled terrific, which reminded me of a really raunchy joke Charlie McDevitt had told me once. I dumped it onto a plate, poured myself a second mug of coffee, and sat at the table to eat my breakfast. The most important meal of the day.

  I was chasing the last bits of fried rice around the edges of my plate when the phone rang. I glanced at my watch. It wasn’t even six yet.

  “Yeah?” I answered.

  “Stern. Thought you might want to know. We’ve ID’d the girl.”

  “You guys work fast.”

  “This is the sort of thing we’re good at. One of the marvels of the computer age. Send a set of fingerprints down to Washington electronically, the big machine clanks and whirrs, and up on the screen pops the information.”

  “Your machine didn’t say who killed her, did it?”

  “Nope. Not yet. It might. We’ve just got to ask it the right questions.”

  “So who was she?”

  “Name of Mary Ann Mikuni. Japanese name.”

  “I might have guessed.”

  “Yes, I suppose you might have,” he said, implying that it was equally likely I might not have. “Anyway, she was arrested once in Providence back in seventy-eight.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess. Prostitution. Soliciting. What do they call it?”

  Stern laughed. “Nothing like that. God, you do have a conventional mind, Coyne. Or is that just a chauvinistic mind? You think any time a beautiful young woman is involved in a crime it has to be for selling her body?”

  “I take enough of that shit from my secretary,” I said. “What did she do?”

  “Legally, she did nothing. She was never brought to trial. But she was involved in an extortion scam. A Providence contractor gave kickbacks to some guy in the Mayor’s office for a big school building contract, then turned around and blackmailed the guy. They made some arrests—including Mikuni—but the guy in the Mayor’s office shot himself, depriving the state of its best witness. So they never prosecuted.”

  “What else do you know about her?”

  “That she grew up in San Diego, graduated from Brown in seventy-two cum laude with a major in chemistry. Went to work for a concrete manufacturer—how do you like that, you want bridge abutments?—a concrete manufacturer in Providence. Started out in the lab, but got promoted to an executive position after a little more than a year. Some kind of sales manager. That’s what she was doing when she was arrested. After that, we don’t have anything.”

  “How does that help us?”

  Stern chuckled. “Oh, we should be able to extrapolate where she went, who she knew, what she did. Like that.”

  “And how she got involved in E.J. Donagan’s kidnapping?”

  “Eventually. Maybe. It’ll take awhile.”

  “I have the feeling we don’t have a hell of a long time.”

  “Not ‘we,’ Coyne. Not you. Me, the Bureau, the cops. Not you.”

  “Sure. I hear you.”

  “I hope so.”

  “So she would’ve been in Providence in 1971, then, right?”

  “Brown University is in Providence,” he said. “Right.”

  “Eddie Donagan was at Pawtucket then.”

  “So?”

  “How far is Pawtucket from Providence?”

  “In Rhode Island how far is anyplace from anyplace else?” said Stern. “You know what the best thing was that ever came out of Rhode Island?”

  “What?”

  “Route 95.” I didn’t say anything. Stern said, “That was a joke.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be,” I said. “Guess I’m not in a real receptive mood for jokes this morning.”

  “Listen, damn it. Forget it, will you? Case closed, okay? Go to your office. Read the Constitution. Write a will. You want real excitement, chase an ambulance. You’re not in our league now.” I imagined Marty Stern jabbing at the telephone with his glasses.

  “Are you guys going to look for Eddie Donagan?”

  “We guys are going to try to find out who kidnapped the boy, if that’s what you mean. And the State Police and the Boston cops are going to try to figure out who carved up Mary Ann Mikuni. And if the two things appear to be related—”

  “Appear to be! Jesus, Stern. It’s obvious—”

  “It’s not obvious. It’s possible. It’s supposition. Maybe even likely. Look. We’ll see where the evidence leads us.”

  “Are you saying that you won’t be working with the police on this?”

  I heard his sigh hiss over the phone. “You should understand about jurisdictions, Coyne. It’s not clear that there’s overlap here. Not yet.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “I identified the girl as the one who contacted me to make arrangements to deliver the ransom money. And she’s the one I met who gave me information about the kidnapping. And she’s the one who got killed. What question can there be about overlap, as you call it?”

  “You think it was her voice. You think those names have something to do with the kidnapping.”

  “Yeah. I do think so. I know so.”

  “Listen,” he said, exasperation dripping from his voice. “I’m calling you out of courtesy. I got you out of bed this morning and put you through an unpleasant experience because I thought the girl might be the one you had met. The description was right. That proves that I haven’t discounted her connection with the kidnapping case. The fact is, Travers called me when they found her body because he and I have been communicating about this thing. Okay? So now I’m keeping you i
nformed. I don’t have to do this. But you’re an attorney. You’re supposed to be able to handle it intelligently. In return, I don’t expect you to criticize our methods, or interfere, or do stupid things.”

  “E.J. Donagan has been gone a long time.”

  “I know, I know. We’re doing our best.”

  “Well…?”

  “Be patient, will you? And stay the hell out of it.”

  “I hear you,” I said, and hung up.

  I found the street where Eddie lived in back of Tufts University in Medford. It was narrow, made more so by the cars parked on both sides. I drove slowly. Kids riding noisy three-wheeled plastic vehicles zipped in and out from behind the cars and played ball in the street. The stark gray stumps of dead elms poked up next to the sidewalk at regular intervals. They had been cut off at about twenty feet so they wouldn’t topple over and smash into any houses. They were marked with big orange spray-painted “X’s”. Some day maybe the city would come by to finish the job.

  The three-decker houses were all the same—square, close to the street, needing paint, and lined up close together. I squeezed my BMW into an empty place. A cluster of children came over to stare at my car. It looked out of place among the old Fords and Volkswagens. Then the kids stared at me, as if a man wearing a necktie was ipso facto cause for suspicion.

  Not all the houses bore street numbers. On those that were numbered, the numerals had been painted over, so that I had to mount the front steps to read them. Eddie’s apartment was at forty-six. I found fifty. Then I found forty-two. There was a house between them. I muttered, “Eureka!” to myself. Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of me.

  Beside the door were three bells. Over each was taped a faded scrap of paper with a name on it. The top bell was labeled “Donagan” in blue ball-point pen. I rang it, expecting no answer and getting none. The bottom bell was named “Sandella.” When I pushed it I heard the shrill buzz echo from inside. On the third ring a short man with a hooked nose and blue suspenders over his tee shirt opened the door.