“One more thing,” I said.
He shook his head. “Enough, okay?”
“Who were those six men?” I persisted. “The men in the photographs.”
Varney sighed. “You could probably guess.”
I shrugged. “Government enemies. Men beyond the reach of the courts. Like that?”
“That’s it, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “End of discussion.”
“Yeah, okay,” I nodded. “I do have one more question.” I turned to Charlie, who had been sitting there quietly staring out of his window. “Charlie,” I said.
He turned to look at me.
“You knew all this?”
“Me?” He smiled. “Shit, no. Oh, I suspected something other than an electronic snafu when I lost those names off the computer. That’s why I tried so hard to ram it through your concrete skull that you should back off. Otherwise?” He shrugged.
I turned to Varney and lifted my eyebrows. He nodded. “Charlie knew nothing of this.”
“Then why are we here?”
“Here? You mean in this office?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have met me anywhere else, Mr. Coyne?” said Varney.
“Probably not.”
“I worry about you,” said Charlie.
“I know,” I said. “I’m glad.”
“Well, then,” said Varney. “Those photographs?”
“Sure,” I said. I unsnapped my briefcase and dug into it. I rummaged around, then looked up at him. “Damn,” I said.
“What?” said Varney.
“I thought they were here.” I dumped out my briefcase onto Charlie’s desk and pretended to look through all the papers. Then I snapped my fingers. “I remember now,” I said.
“God damn it, Coyne,” said Varney.
I shrugged. “Sorry. I’ll have to get them for you.”
“Damn right you will. Let’s go.”
“No. Not now. I’ve got to be in court today. Meet me at Locke-Ober’s at five-thirty. I’ll have the photos with me.”
“You better—”
I held up my hand. “Anyone who can arrange the murders of ten men doesn’t need to threaten me. I’ll be at Locke’s bar at five-thirty, Mr. Varney.”
He looked at me for a moment; then he smiled. “That’ll be fine, Mr. Coyne.” He held out his hand.
I shook it. “I’ll see you then.”
Charlie walked me out of his office, leaving Varney behind. “I hope the hell you know what you’re doing,” he whispered to me.
“Hey,” I said. “I forgot the photographs.”
He squeezed my arm. Hard. “Sure you did.”
27
I GOT BACK TO my office around ten-thirty. Julie looked up at me. “You said ten,” she said.
“You know me.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “Coffee?”
“I’ll get it.” I went to the machine and poured two mugs full. I gave one to Julie, then took the chair across from her desk. I lit a cigarette. “What’ve we got today?”
“It’s all on your desk, Brady. I had to rearrange some things. You’re pretty packed in from eleven on.”
“Cancel everything.”
“Oh, no, you don’t. You can’t—”
“Julie,” I said, “I’ll make it up to you. But you’ve got to do your thing. Tell them whatever you’ve got to tell them. Reschedule everything.”
She frowned at me. “This isn’t fishing, is it?”
“No.”
“Something more important.”
“Than fishing?” I pretended to dwell on that question. “I’m not sure I’d go that far. But it’s pretty damn important.”
I reached The Honorable Chester Y Popowski in his chambers at the East Cambridge courthouse at five of eleven. Pops always takes a recess at quarter of eleven—out of deference to his aging prostate, he says—and his secretaries all know me well enough to put me through to him.
Pops sits on the Superior Court bench. He’s been there for several years. We were classmates and friends at Yale. Now he’s one of my clients. “Hey, Brady,” he said into the phone.
“You finish taking your leak?”
“Blessedly, yes. What’s up?”
“What time do you expect to go into recess this afternoon?”
“Oh, the usual. Four, four-fifteen, at the latest. Wanna buy me a drink?”
“I do want to do that. And I will, as payment for the favor you’re going to do for me. But not today.”
“What’s today?”
“I just want your signature.”
“Sounds mysterious.”
“It is. And it will remain so. I’ll be there at four-fifteen.”
“I’ll be here.”
“Call Zerk for me,” I said to Julie. “If he’s not in, have him get back to me. Make sure it’s understood that this is very important.”
She snapped me a quick salute. “Aye, aye, sir.”
Julie knows when not to ask questions.
I spent the next two hours at my typewriter, getting it all down.
My phone rang a couple of minutes after one.
“I’ve got Zerk for you,” said Julie.
“Good,” I said. I pressed the blinking button on the console. “Zerk, I need a favor,” I said.
Several years earlier, when Julie was out on maternity leave, Xerxes Garrett clerked for me in return for my tutelage on his law boards. He passed and set up a practice in North Cambridge that has evolved into the mirror image of my practice. My clients tend to be wealthy, and therefore elderly and white. Zerk’s are mostly poor, young, and black.
He’s the best criminal defense lawyer I know. If he wanted to, he could become very rich very fast. So far he’s resisted it, for which I admire him enormously.
He’s also one of my trusted friends, for which I am grateful.
“Darlene say you been phoning me, man,” he said. “Something about urgent.”
“More like important,” I said. “You in court this afternoon?”
“That’s where I’m at right now. Another three minutes and I go try to keep Ellen Whiting’s boy Artie out of prison. He not a bad boy, she says.”
“You’re at East Cambridge?”
“I practically live here.”
“Meet me in Judge Popowski’s chambers at four-fifteen, can you?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Bring your notary seal with you.”
“Heavy paperwork, huh?”
“Yes. Heavy paperwork.”
Julie went out for sandwiches. I chose that time to use the photocopier. I didn’t want to risk her seeing a thing. By the time she came back with our tuna on onion rolls, I had the two manila envelopes stashed in my briefcase.
Pops and Zerk were both there when I arrived. They were munching carrot sticks from a plastic bag on top of Pops’s desk. When I went in and took the chair beside Zerk, Pops shoved the bag at me. I held up my hand and lit a cigarette instead.
“This’ll only take a minute,” I said.
“And you’re not going to tell us what it’s all about,” said Pops.
“Right. You don’t want to know.” I rummaged in my briefcase and removed the envelope that contained the originals.
I had typed three single-spaced pages. At the bottom of each I had left two lines. One for my signature and one for a witness. I spread the three sheets of dense typing on Pops’s desk. “I’m now going to affix my signature to each of these pages,” I said to the two of them. “After each one, Pops will sign to attest. Then Zerk will notarize our signatures.”
My two friends both nodded.
“You won’t read these pages,” I said.
“We ain’t so dumb,” said Zerk.
I nodded. “A fountain pen would give it the right flair,” I said to Pops.
He handed me the one he always wears in his shirt pocket.
I wrote my signature on the bottom of each page. Pops signed as witness. Zerk squeezed his notary public seal
beside the signatures. Then I put the three sheets of paper back into the big envelope, along with the smaller envelope that held the six photographs and two index cards, the computer printouts from Charlie, and the two photocopies from Al Coleman’s notebooks.
“Tape,” I said to Pops.
He rummaged in the drawer of his desk and handed me a roll of cellophane tape. I taped up the envelope.
“Pen again,” I said.
Pops handed his pen to me.
I wrote across the envelope: “In the event of my demise, convey all contents unopened to Mickey Gillis at the Boston Globe.” I signed my name under it.
I handed the envelope to Zerk. He looked at it, then looked up at me. He showed it to Pops.
“Demise,” said Zerk, grinning. “Shee-it!”
“A technical term,” I said.
“Mickey Gillis,” he said. “That reporter who’s got the hots for you.”
“That one,” I said. “Not exactly hots. More like luke-warms.”
“This for when you get offed.”
“This for if I get offed.”
“You want me to keep it for you, man?”
“Keep it secure, Zerk. Tell no one you’ve got it. Tell no one you met with me today. You, either,” I said to Pops.
They both shrugged.
“Well, thanks.” I stood up. “Drinks for both of you. Next week sometime.” I shook hands with each of them and turned to leave.
“Wait,” said Zerk. “I’ll go down with you.”
“No. I’ll go down alone.”
Zerk turned to Pops. “Heavy paperwork,” he said, weighing the envelope in his two hands and nodding solemnly.
Phil Varney was perched on a barstool just inside the entrance to Locke’s. I climbed onto the empty one beside him and placed my briefcase on the bar. Varney glanced at it, then at his watch. “You’re right on time, Mr. Coyne,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have missed it,” I said. I caught the bartender’s eye. “Daniel’s, rocks,” I told him.
We didn’t say anything until my drink was delivered. Then Varney held his glass at me. “To the satisfactory completion of our business,” he said.
I clicked his glass and sipped my drink.
“Well,” he said, “let’s have it, then.”
I removed the manila envelope from my briefcase and handed it to him. He opened it and removed all the papers. He glanced through them, frowned up at me, shuffled through the papers again. Then he carefully put his glass down on the bar and said softly, “What the fuck is this, Coyne?”
“Pretty self-evident, isn’t it?”
“Photocopies? All photocopies? And this… this fucking document?” He waved the copies of the three pages I had typed and signed and Pops had witnessed and Zerk had notarized. The copies, of course, had no signatures on them. “What the Christ is this?”
“You can read it at your leisure,” I said. “I think I got it all down. Not, of course, in the same detail as Daniel McCloud’s manuscript. But enough, I think. I signed the originals, and my signatures have been witnessed and notarized. The photographs—you see I’ve photocopied them for you, just to verify for you that I have them—they’re with the document, as is an assortment of corroborating stuff, copies of which you have there. The originals of everything are in a safe place, where they will remain.”
I took another sip of my drink, then lit a cigarette.
“Unless something happens to you,” said Varney in a low voice.
“Oh, right,” I said. “In that case, the newspapers get everything.”
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Coyne.”
“The way I see it, this is less dangerous than all the alternatives I could think of Look at it this way. It protects both of us. It’s in your interest to make sure nothing happens to me. And it’s in my interest to make sure nobody hears a word about any of this.” I tapped my fingers on the papers on the bar. “Tit for tat. Good deal all around, huh?”
Varney stared at me for a long moment. Then he smiled. “I guess we understand each other.”
“I hope so.”
“We’re not that different, you and I,” he said.
“I’m not flattered.”
He shrugged and smiled again. “We think the same way.” He gathered up the papers and slid them into the envelope. “One thing still puzzles me,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Sweeney couldn’t come up with any copies of McCloud’s book.”
“Not for lack of trying,” I said, remembering how the little office in back of Daniel’s shop had been tossed.
“Now that we’ve got this—this stalemate between us, I was wondering…”
“I don’t think there is a copy,” I said. “Sweeney got the original for you. There’s nothing among Daniel’s things. I don’t have one. Al Coleman’s wife doesn’t have one.”
“Let us both hope nobody has one,” he said.
“Which reminds me,” I said. “If anything should happen to Cammie Russell or Bonnie Coleman, the deal changes.”
“And if a copy of that manuscript turns up in the wrong hands, Mr. Coyne, the deal’s emphatically off.”
“I think we both understand the deal, then,” I said.
He nodded. “We do. And it’s a good deal all around. You want another drink?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
28
ON THE LAST SUNDAY in January I drove out to Wilson Falls. Cammie and I held hands and walked along the shoreline of the Connecticut. The muddy banks were frozen solid. The bays and edges of the river were iced over, but out in the middle open water marked the main channel.
Snow had fallen, melted, and fallen again through the halting progression of the New England winter. The landscape was all white, daubed here and there in ocher, sepia, burnt sienna. Tree skeletons poked up through the snow, stark black, and splashes of dark green marked groves of evergreens. Chickadees and nuthatches flitted among the leafless bushes.
It was one of those transparent winter days when the sun shines so bright and ricochets so hard off the ice and water and snow that it seems to slice through the air, and even wearing sunglasses I had to squint the pain out of my eyes. The sun carried no warmth. Just light. Cammie and I wore ski parkas and wool hats and gloves. We walked slowly, picking our way over the logjams and boulders along the rim of the river. Cammie talked about Daniel. She missed him, but she was healing. She didn’t ask me any difficult questions, for which I was grateful. It saved me the trouble of lying to her.
I pointed out the place where Daniel first took me fishing. It seemed like a very long time ago. A little farther along, we stopped for a moment at the spot where Sergeant Richard Oakley shot Brian Sweeney.
Both places looked different under the ice.
We walked until the shadows grew long and the sun began to settle behind the low hills across the river. Then we turned back.
Cammie made hot chocolate. We played our favorite Jimmy Reed tape. Outside, darkness fell fast. We sat in rocking chairs by the woodstove, sipping our cocoa and staring at our stockinged feet.
“Have you talked with Terri?” said Cammie.
“Not for a long time. I think as soon as we decide we can be friends without being lovers, we will talk.”
“It’s good to be friends.”
“Yes.”
“Better, sometimes.”
“Yes.” I reached my hand to her.
She grasped it and squeezed it and held on. We continued to study our feet. “I’ve decided to leave, Brady.”
I sipped my cocoa and said nothing.
“Vinnie and Roscoe are taking over Daniel’s shop. With Brian gone, it’s theirs free and clear. They want to buy all this from me.” She waved her free hand around. “We’re working out the details.”
“What will you do?”
She gave my hand a squeeze and then let go. “I’m going home,” she said. “I’ve got some money now. I’ll buy my mother a proper house, buil
d myself a little studio. I want to paint the mountains. In the mornings, with that wonderful early light, there’s a mist that comes off them. I think I can capture that.”
“It sounds good, Cammie.”
“Now, without Daniel, that’s where I should be. It’s where I belong.”
I found myself nodding. I turned to look at Cammie. She was smiling softly at me, and I could see the question in her eyes.
Where do you belong? they were asking.
But Cammie did not ask me that question.
I was glad she didn’t, because I couldn’t have answered it.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Brady Coyne Mysteries
Foreword
ON MAY 5, 1994, Congressman Douglas Applegate (D-Ohio) voted aye, and by the margin of that single vote the United States House of Representatives passed a bill banning the manufacture and sale of nineteen specified semiautomatic assault guns.
The battle to control paramilitary weapons such as the Uzi and the AK-47 had been waged for years in American governments at all levels. Before Congressman Applegate voted “aye,” the gun lobby had won every skirmish.
My own education in the politics of gun control came two years before the passage of the House bill. It began on a quiet Sunday evening in May when my boyhood chum Wally Kinnick called me from Logan Airport, and I have to believe that the events that ensued in Massachusetts in 1992 helped to inform the debate in the United States Congress in 1994 and contributed to Douglas Applegate’s historic “aye” vote.
Brady L. Coyne
Boston, Massachusetts
December 1994
MAN WITH ASSAULT GUN SLAYS WIFE AT LIBRARY
by
Alexandria Shaw
Globe Staff
HARLOW—THE SILENCE OF the public library in this little central Massachusetts community was shattered by gunshots on Wednesday afternoon. Maureen Burton, 32, a part-time librarian, was pronounced dead at the scene. Two others are in intensive care at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
According to eyewitnesses, David Burton, 37, an unemployed electrician and the estranged husband of the librarian, entered the building at approximately 3:45 in the afternoon carrying an AK-47, commonly known as a “paramilitary assault weapon.” Witnesses report that Burton approached the desk where Mrs. Burton was seated, shouted, “I’ve had it!” and opened fire.
Snake Eater Page 20
