Quick Pivot

by Brenda Buchanan

  Joan’s stare made it clear that wasn’t sufficient explanation.

  “It isn’t you, it’s me,” he said. “I’m not the kind of guy a girl like you should get serious about. I disappear into my work. Hate being interrupted. I’m not proud of it, but when you get to know me, I’m a jerk. You’d see that side of me eventually. I want us to stop seeing each other before that happens.”

  Joan’s face was a mask, but her eyes glistened. “You’re too much of a bachelor, is that it? A lone wolf? Never going to settle down?”

  Unsure how to respond to her mocking, Paulie kept his mouth shut.

  “I’ve met men like you before,” she said, her voice even. “You think the world will end if you can’t live entirely on your own terms.”

  “This is for your own good.” He realized as the words tumbled out how patronizing he sounded.

  “I should have known better than to have gotten tangled up with the likes of you.” Joan swung her long legs out from under the picnic table and reached for her purse.

  “Where are you going?” Paulie stood up when she did.

  “There’s a pay phone at the snack bar. I’m going to call a friend to arrange a ride home.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  She shook her head, a firm set to her mouth. “No, you won’t. I’m done with you, Paulie Finnegan.”

  He sat at the table and watched her walk away until a seagull landed at his elbow and began pecking at the sandwich she’d left behind.

  “Get out of here, you goddamn flying rat.” He shooed the gray-and-white bird off the table before gathering up the remains of the meal and chucking it onto the sand-speckled grass.

  By the time Paulie turned his attention back to Joan, she’d reached the squat cinderblock building and stepped into the phone booth. She spoke for less than a minute, then hung up and took a seat on a nearby bench half blocked from his view by a parked pickup truck. The only part of her still visible was her long, slender legs, clad in close-fitting slacks.

  Ignoring what was now a pack of squabbling seagulls fighting over the leftovers ten feet from where he sat, Paulie kept those legs in sight until they stood and walked to the curb when a pale blue VW Bug pulled up. Joan climbed in without a backward glance and the little car roared off.

  * * *

  Tommy MacMahon didn’t sound surprised when Paulie called to ask if they could meet somewhere to talk.

  “I heard Wellington tattled on you,” MacMahon said. “Told you the asshole would do that.”

  “Who filled you in?”

  “Doesn’t matter. When I heard you were dragged to the woodshed yesterday, I knew why.”

  “Wellington plays hardball.”

  “With everybody. If you want to talk, tonight’s a good time. My wife and kids went to her sister’s for the weekend, so even though I’m off the clock, I’ll be working.”

  “Can we meet someplace other than Riverside?”

  “Name a place within a thirty-mile radius. I’ll be there.”

  Paulie thought a minute. “Do you know Anjon’s in Scarborough?”

  “Meet you there at seven-thirty.”

  Paulie suggested Anjon’s because its location on the edge of the Scarborough Marsh would deny an easy vantage point to anyone who might be tailing him. MacMahon said Wellington’s men were keeping an eye on Joan, but maybe they were watching him too. If so, he didn’t want to expose his source to the wrath of the G-men.

  He drove a roundabout route to Scarborough, keeping his eye on the mirror. Nobody seemed to be following. He parked on the west end of a short side street that ran alongside the restaurant, and sat slouched against the driver’s door for a full five minutes. When no other car appeared he got out and walked with his head down, keeping to the shadows. As soon as he stepped through the foyer he spotted MacMahon sitting at a table on the back wall, facing the door. He was wearing chinos and a sport shirt, and his Irish face had been scorched by the afternoon sun.

  “I went ahead and ordered myself a scotch,” he said as Paulie slid into the opposite chair. “They stock Johnny Walker Black. I recommend it.”

  “Kind of tied one on last night,” Paulie said. “Dove into a bottle after the Chronicle’s honchos handed me my ass. I’ll just have a beer, if it’s all the same to you.”

  MacMahon’s smile was part smirk. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling.

  “I gave you fair warning. Too bad you couldn’t disentangle your dick in time.”

  Paulie put his hand up to stop MacMahon’s mouth. “Joan’s a nice girl. Despite what Wellington’s peddling, she was never involved with Desmond. She’s not his sidekick. She’s doesn’t deserve what’s happened to her.”

  “You mean Wellington’s fucking full court press?”

  “That, or getting involved with me.”

  A middle-aged waitress arrived and took Paulie’s order for a draft beer and MacMahon’s for another Johnny Black. When she was well on her way to the bar, Paulie confessed his afternoon sin.

  “On orders from the Chronicle’s managing editor—who probably hasn’t been laid in months—I broke up with Joan today. Didn’t want to. Had to.”

  MacMahon closed his eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry, Paulie. There’ll be other girls.”

  Paulie shrugged and watched the waitress make the return trip across the dining room.

  “Last time we talked, you were going to keep an ear open for mutterings about Ken Coatesworth,” MacMahon said. “You got anything for me?”

  “We were at the same party on Memorial Day, out at Jay Preble’s family’s private island. I dogged his heels as much as possible. Never heard a word out of him about Desmond, the mill, nothing. He was a perfect gentleman. Friendly. Not mouthy. A regular guy mostly, but kind of—I don’t know—cultured.”

  “What you see isn’t always what you get, when it comes to criminals. Al Capone loved opera. Didn’t mean he wasn’t a fucking stone cold killer.”

  “Are you comparing Coatesworth to Al Capone? Jaysus.”

  “Just making the point that bad guys don’t always look like bad guys.”

  Paulie took his first sip of beer. “When we last talked you were tracking down some hot theories.”

  “Still working on it.”

  “How about you give me the outline of what you’re doing, off the record for now?”

  MacMahon hadn’t touched his second drink. He leaned back against the booth and took Paulie’s measure, interrupting his gaze every three seconds to flick his eyes in the direction of the door.

  “I hear you’re no longer the reporter assigned to this story. I had a call today from a guy named Francoeur, telling me he took over the Desmond beat. A goddamn kid. Sounded like his voice changed just last week.”

  “It’s true. Bernie’s working on the story now.”

  “With you, or instead of you?”

  “Technically, instead of me. But I’m gonna stay with it on my own time. No law against that.”

  The waitress rounded back, order pad in hand. Following MacMahon’s lead, Paulie ordered a steak, medium rare.

  “Here’s my dilemma,” MacMahon said. “You’ve been yanked off the story and forced to break up with your girl. You’re pissed and want to show that sex-starved boss of yours that he’s wrong. I might have information that could lead to a big scoop for you, something you could drop on his desk and say ‘I told you so.’ Am I right?”

  Paulie moved his head in a way that could have been understood as a nod.

  “Problem is, I’ll wind up with my nuts in a vise if something I tell you finds its way into the paper and compromises the outcome of the investigation. So unless you can convince me I can trust you, I’m not going to tell you a fucking thing.”

  Paulie closed his eyes for
a moment while he gathered his thoughts. “I understand why you doubt me. Guys with something to prove can be unreliable, and I sure as hell want to regain the respect of the boys in the newsroom. But I’ve been around long enough to know that if I use you cheap and knock a hole in your investigation, that’ll never happen.”

  MacMahon looked at Paulie without saying a word. His scotch still sat on the table.

  “I won’t burn you, MacMahon.”

  The burly cop picked up his glass and held it for a moment, watching the liquor dance around the ice.

  “To trust,” he said, holding up his glass, inviting Paulie to tap it with his pilsner glass before taking a long sip. “I hope to hell I’m not making a mistake.”

  * * *

  For the next hour, MacMahon laid out his suspicions about Ken Coatesworth. Paulie knew enough not to take notes. But he stopped sipping his beer and listened with both ears.

  “We haven’t been able to link him directly with anything criminal,” MacMahon said. “He’s always one degree removed. He’s hip deep in shit, but smart enough to have a pocketful of plausible explanations when it hits the fan.”

  “How does this connect with Desmond?”

  “I wish I knew. There’s too much grime surrounding Coatesworth for the connections to be coincidental. We haven’t yet found the right person to lean on who’ll make all the puzzle pieces fit. Coatesworth may be the guy who pulled the levers. He may be his right-hand man. Either way, he knows what happened to Desmond.”

  “If he’s working for someone else, who could that be?”

  “The mob,” MacMahon said. “There are two primary gangs in Maine, and a bunch of smaller offshoots. We have moles in all of them, but there’s an elaborate etiquette to getting information out of them.”

  “Your guys aren’t cops who’ve infiltrated?”

  MacMahon shook his head. “Our informants are the kind of guys who might have become cops had the opportunity presented itself. But it didn’t, so now they’re two-bit tough guys whose hearts aren’t in it.”

  “Is the difference between the good guys and the bad guys always that narrow?”

  “Not always. Most cops are honest. Most bad guys would die rather than inform. But for those in the middle—whether they start from the law side or the outlaw side, it’s a razor-thin line.”

  “So what are your informants saying?”

  “Kenny’s a careful boy. He spends a hell of a lot of time around men we know to be criminals, but always has a valid cover story. He raises money for a group that promotes horse racing in New England, meaning he rubs shoulders with the owners of all the tracks. He’s the clerk of a corporation called Maine Drives, Inc., which owns a couple high-end used car dealerships. Sources tell us they’re really money-laundering outfits. We haven’t been able to prove it yet, but we’ve got our eye on them. To a casual observer, it’s all legit, but that’s bullshit.”

  “I still don’t get how Desmond fits into this,” Paulie said. “Was he tied in with Coatesworth’s extracurricular activities?”

  “There’s no evidence they interacted outside of the Saccarappa. In fact, they rarely crossed paths at the mill. But Desmond had a notebook in his office—it was in a black binder identical to two dozen others on his bookshelf—that tracked discrepancies with the mill’s bank deposits.”

  “Does Wellington know about it?”

  “The fibbies found the notebook on their first pass through George’s office. They saw the entries about bank deposits and decided it was Desmond keeping track of his own handiwork. That theory doesn’t wash when you decode the rest of the notebook, something Wellington’s boys were too fucking lazy to do.”

  “Decode?”

  “Unscrambling it was a snap for anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of how civilians go about camouflaging their records,” he said. “Desmond caught on to banking irregularities before Christmas. He watched for a while, then set a little snare. When it got sprung, he knew where to focus his attention.”

  “On Ken Coatesworth.”

  MacMahon held his hand parallel to the table and rocked it back and forth, signaling a less-than-solid connection.

  “Desmond’s little trap presupposed an understanding of how big companies manage their financial accounts,” he said. “Coatesworth himself is a marketing guy, but like I said, he has close connections with guys who spend all their time scheming about how to steal and launder money.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “You need to be patient, not write a word until we make our move. Trust me, you’ll find it worthwhile to wait for this to play out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Wednesday, July 16, 2014

  Kennebunkport, Maine

  MacMahon had our dining spot picked out, a lobster shack near the Cape Porpoise Pier, where a welcome breeze was blowing off the water. A fortyish woman with sun-bleached hair bent to kiss his cheek before leading us to a table on the open deck. Well-spaced from its nearest neighbor, it was next to an ice machine with a noisy motor.

  “You a secret agent too?” She winked at MacMahon, who didn’t try to disguise his grin.

  “Sure,” I said. “Got a phone in my shoe and everything.”

  “I figured as much.” Crossing her arms, she looked me up and down. “When he called me this afternoon and asked for this particular table, I knew he’d be dining with a comrade in arms.”

  MacMahon watched me watch her walk toward the bar to fetch us our drinks.

  “Clarissa is a lovely girl,” he said.

  “Looks like she’s got your number.”

  He quirked his head to the side, smiling. “She keeps my confidences.”

  We made small talk until Clarissa came back with our drinks—beer for me, scotch for MacMahon.

  “Now the two of you can put your heads together and save Maine from the bad guys.” She tossed a smile over her shoulder. With the clanking of the ice machine assuring the privacy of our conversation, I asked MacMahon if he remembered Joan Slater.

  “Sure. Desmond’s secretary. The gal who almost cost Paulie his job. How could I forget her?”

  “What do you mean, ‘almost cost Paulie his job’?”

  “He never told you that sorry tale, eh?” MacMahon tasted his scotch and smacked his lips.

  “I don’t recall him mentioning her name.”

  I recalled Joan’s quavery voice, telling how she hid her pregnancy from her lover and moved to New Hampshire. Then Paulie’s own words echoed inside my head.

  Every story’s got at least two sides, kiddo.

  “It was an object lesson in the folly of forgetting to watch one’s own back,” MacMahon said. “In other words, a grand fuckup.”

  “On whose part?”

  “Paulie himself. Wellington, the FBI big shot, was convinced Joanie was Desmond’s lover, waiting for the dust to settle before she slipped away to meet him in paradise. He assigned some junior fibbies to tail her. But instead of catching her packing, they saw Paulie climbing out of her bedroom window every goddamn morning before dawn. I told him that by screwing Joanie he was interfering with the FBI’s pet theory, warned him Wellington was about to blow his stack. But Paulie was crazy about Joan, so he kept it up. Sure enough, someone dialed up the big bosses over at the Chronicle. He was yanked from the Desmond story for sleeping with a source, and told if he didn’t dump Joanie he’d be looking for a different line of work.”

  “Wellington turned him in?”

  “That’s the kind of asshole he was.”

  “So the FBI not only did a half-assed investigation, its lead agent was petty too?”

  “It was the J. Edgar Hoover era. The FBI compiled dossiers on people’s sexual escapades as a matter of course. Wellington tattled to neutralize Paulie, because he was a b
ulldog, no doubt figuring once the story dropped out of the press he wouldn’t have to stick around Maine, working on a case he didn’t give two shits about.” He took another sip of scotch and closed his eyes for a second, savoring it.

  “I’ve met a couple of FBI agents in my years as a reporter,” I said. “I would not describe them as cavalier about solving cases.”

  “Curt Wellington wasn’t cavalier, just too big for his britches. He fancied himself the big shot who was going to bring down the mob. In order to get himself back to Rhode Island, he needed to be able to say there was no further work to be done here, that Desmond was long gone.”

  “So he hung Paulie out to dry, huh? The clip file shows a reporter named Francoeur took over in early June.”

  “That would have been when Paulie was reassigned to the doghouse beat.”

  I rolled this new information around in my mind. “He stayed on the story unofficially though, didn’t he?”

  MacMahon moved his wheelchair backward so he could catch Clarissa’s eye and signal for another round of drinks.

  “Oh yeah, Paulie stayed on the story.” MacMahon leaned his elbows on the table. “He had to sneak around, because they would have canned him outright if they knew. He was determined to show Wellington and the assholes at the newspaper that they were wrong about Joan and Desmond being in cahoots.”

  “Do you know if he dug up any more facts?”

  “If he did, he never told me. Within a week of his demotion I was pulled onto another case, a double murder over in Oxford County, if I’m remembering right. My communication with Paulie was kind of sporadic the rest of the summer, and by fall even Paulie had given up working on the Desmond case.”

  “I tracked down Joan Slater,” I said. “Interviewed her on Sunday in Durham, New Hampshire, where she’s been living since she left Riverside.”

  “Nice work. What’d she say?”

  “She’s been nursing a grudge against Wellington all these years. Today she told me she found a bunch of information filed away, notes she made at the time. Do you want to ride down to Durham with me tomorrow and look them over?”

  Clarissa rounded the ice machine and slid another scotch in front of MacMahon and another beer in front of me.