Void in Hearts

by William G. Tapply

  “Who’s there?” she said. “Who’re you, anyhow?”

  “Mrs. Hayden?”

  As my eyes adjusted I detected first her shape and gradually her features. She was leaning on a long-handled shovel. Beside her was a wheelbarrow. Her brown hair was cut very short on the sides and the back. She wore a red beret, blue jeans tucked into calf-high boots, several layers of sweaters, and leather work gloves.

  She was tall and lanky and awkward-looking. Large eyes widely spaced, crooked nose, expressive mouth.

  She was frowning at me. “I’m Brenda Hayden, yes.”

  “My name is Coyne,” I said. I took a step toward her and then, as I noticed her grip tighten on her shovel, I stopped. “I’m a lawyer. An associate of Lester Katz.”

  She came toward me, her head cocked to one side in inquiry. “Who?”

  “Brady Coyne,” I said. I took out my wallet and removed a business card. I held it toward her as if it were a peace offering.

  “No, I mean the other name.”

  “Oh. Lester Katz. You know Les Katz.”

  She stood in front of me and absentmindedly took the card from me. She didn’t look at it. “I don’t know anybody named Les Katz.”

  I tried to remember Les’s description of Hayden’s wife. He’d told me she had spectacular blond hair and an equally spectacular body. He’d likened her to Farrah Fawcett. This Brenda Hayden was the antithesis of Farrah Fawcett.

  I was confused. “I’m looking for Derek Hayden’s wife. Maybe—”

  “I’m Derek Hayden’s wife. Do you know something…?”

  She stopped and looked down at my card. Then she looked up again. Her eyes were dark. In the dimly lit barn they seemed to be all black pupils. I read sadness and confusion in them.

  “The Derek Hayden who works for American Investments?” I said.

  She smiled and nodded. “Oh, so you’re here on business, then. Well, Derek isn’t here now.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not here on that kind of business. I’m looking for your husband. I was at his office yesterday. They said they haven’t seen him for over a week. So I thought…”

  I let my voice trail away to the implied question. Brenda Hayden studied me for a minute. Then she said, “Come on inside. We’ll have coffee. We can talk.”

  I followed her into the big modern kitchen in the back of the farmhouse. It was dominated by a big maple hutch, which displayed a collection of antique pewter. A cold woodstove hunkered in the corner. I sat at the oval table and she poured two mugs of coffee. Then she sat down across from me.

  “You’re an attorney,” she said. “What do you want with Derek? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not sure. I need to talk to him, that’s all. I was hoping he’d be here. Can you tell me how to reach him?”

  “What does this have to do with what’s-his-name—Les Katz?”

  “Just that you hired Les to follow your husband, and Les was my friend.”

  She frowned. “And why did I hire Les Katz to follow my husband?”

  “You thought he was having an affair, evidently.”

  She peered at me over the rim of her coffee mug. She seemed faintly amused. “That,” she said after a long moment, “is a crock.”

  “A crock?”

  “I hired nobody to follow Derek. I do not suspect him of having an affair. If I did, I wouldn’t hire someone to follow him. I’d ask him. I’d have every confidence that he’d tell me the truth.” Her eyes began to brim. “Aw, shit,” she mumbled.

  “Mrs. Hayden—”

  She snorted and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I haven’t seen Derek in ten days. What the hell is going on, anyway?”

  “That’s what I want to find out,” I said softly.

  “Why? What’s your connection?”

  I hesitated before answering. “It’s all very speculative,” I finally said. “I’d rather not get into it.”

  “You afraid you’ll upset poor weak little old me?”

  I smiled. “No, that’s really not it. I just don’t have very many facts to speculate with yet.”

  “What has he done, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “Disappeared, it would seem.”

  “Since when is that a crime?”

  “I didn’t say it was a crime.”

  She smiled. “No, you didn’t say it. Look, Mr. Coyne. I am frankly at my wits’ end. Derek left for work a week ago Tuesday. Like he always does. He called me from the office, said he’d be tied up all evening. That’s not unusual. Sometimes he spends the night in town. It’s a long commute, and if he works too late he misses the train. So when he didn’t come home, I didn’t think much of it. But when he didn’t call the next day, I called his office. That was on Thursday. Melanie—that’s his secretary—she said he hadn’t come in. And we haven’t seen him since. Or heard from him.” She made an exploding gesture with her hands. “Poof. Just like that. Disappeared.”

  “Have you notified the police?”

  She flapped her hands, a gesture of frustration or confusion. “No. I—I expect to hear from him. I keep thinking today, tonight…”

  “Maybe you should,” I said quietly.

  She peered at me solemnly and nodded. “Yes. I suppose you’re right. He’s a missing person, I guess.”

  “You say he drove to work,” I said after an awkward silence.

  “He drives to the Alewife MBTA stop. Leaves his car there and takes the subway to Park Street and walks to the office from there. I assume that’s what he did that day.”

  “Tuesday, that was.”

  “Yes.”

  The Tuesday before the early Wednesday morning when Les Katz was struck down by a hit-and-run driver, whom I assumed was Derek Hayden. “What kind of car does your husband drive?”

  “An Audi 5000. He got it just a couple of months ago. His pride and joy. Twice a week at the car wash. Changes the oil about as often as he brushes his teeth. He spent over four thousand dollars on a stereo system for it, complete with a CD player. He’s earned it. He works hard. He makes a lot of money. He even got a dumb vanity plate for it.”

  “What’s it say?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “It says TARZ. That’s what his buddies used to call him. It’s short for Tarzan, I think, which had something to do with his aggressive way of playing basketball. Listen. I hope you can find my husband, Mr. Coyne, and I don’t really care why you’re looking for him. He has been acting strange, and the only thing I know about that is that it is not a reflection of our marriage. We are in good shape. I know that.”

  “How do you mean, strange?”

  “Nervous. More late hours. More trips. I assumed it was just business pressures. He wasn’t sleeping very well. He’d get up in the middle of the night and when I’d wake up and go downstairs, I’d find him sitting in the living room, no lights on, no TV or radio or anything. Just sitting there. I’d ask him what was the matter, and he’d pull me into his lap and hug me and not say anything. I mean, if he was having an affair…”

  “Assuming he wasn’t,” I said.

  “Assuming he wasn’t, then I just don’t know. Business, I suppose. Maybe Arthur could tell you.”

  “Concannon?”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  “I met him. He didn’t seem very forthcoming.”

  “He’s been very kind to me. He’s as upset about this as I am, although I imagine it’s more for business reasons. I’ve talked with him several times. He keeps asking me if I’ve heard from Derek.”

  “What about friends, relatives, anybody who might be in touch with your husband?”

  She nodded. “Everybody I could think of I talked to. Trying not to upset anybody, you understand. Sort of indirect. But nobody seems to know anything.”

  I sat back and sighed. “Strange,” I said.

  She nodded. “Want more coffee?”

  I shook my head. “No, thanks. Look, Mrs. Hayden—”

  “Why don’t you call m
e Brenda. I mean, I’ve shared all these deep, dark secrets with you.”

  “Fine. And I’m Brady, then.”

  She combed a wisp of hair away from her forehead with her fingers. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know. Call me if you hear from Derek. Or have him call me.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  “Otherwise…”

  “The girls are very confused. I don’t know what to tell them.”

  “The truth, I guess.”

  She nodded. “Yes. That’s what I’ve done. They remain confused.”

  “How old are your daughters?”

  “Eleven and eight. Their father dotes on them. Bought them a pony. They seem to miss him very much. They’re spending the weekend with their grandparents. As for me, to tell you the truth, I’m almost getting used to it. Isn’t that odd? It’s not even been two weeks, and I’m getting into this pattern. Except at night, I just do my chores, live my life, and don’t think too much about old Tarz. It gets lonely at night.”

  I pushed myself away from the table and stood up. Brenda rose and came around the table. We walked to the door. “You should report him missing,” I said.

  She nodded. “I guess you’re right. It just makes it seem—ominous, I guess.”

  I opened the door. “You’ll call me?”

  “Yes. And you call me, too, okay?”

  “If I learn anything,” I said.

  “Please.”

  I climbed into my car and pointed it at the city. As I drove, I tried to figure out what I had learned. Les Katz had been hired by Hayden’s wife to follow him. Les described the wife as a blond Farrah Fawcett look-alike. Then Les was run down and killed, and Hayden disappeared.

  Hayden’s wife denied hiring Les. And she looked nothing like Les’s description of her.

  It was all very confusing. I slid a Sibelius symphony into the tape deck as I drove and decided not to try to ponder what was, for the time being, imponderable.

  Route 2 heading east from Harvard circles a rotary in Concord at the prison that, when I was growing up, we called the Concord Reformatory but now has been upgraded to a Massachusetts Correctional Institution. Through several traffic lights, a sharp right angle up a hill through Lincoln, over Route 128, and then a long, wide stretch of eight-lane highway to Cambridge. From the top of the hill in Belmont, the city of Boston lay spread out before me, sharp and clear in the smogless January air. I saw the Prudential and the John Hancock and the lesser spires, steeples, towers, and smokestacks, and I was able to locate with precision where my office building stood in Copley Square. It was a place to go on this Saturday when there was nowhere to cast for trout or swat around a Maxfli. In my searching for Derek Hayden, I had neglected my deskwork, which would surely put Julie into a foul mood, since she tended to take that stuff very seriously. I’d clean up my desk and earn myself a peck on the cheek Monday morning when she came to work.

  As Route 2 funneled toward the complex intersection at the Arlington-Cambridge line, the great new concrete MBTA station loomed, a uniquely anomalous mixture of formlessness and function. The Alewife station, where Derek Hayden habitually parked his new Audi 5000.

  Why not? I thought. I turned in, took my ticket from the machine, and began my tour of the parking garage. Slots were at a premium, even on a non-commuter Saturday. I looked for an Audi 5000, license plate TARZ—color unknown, thanks to my stupid failure to ask.

  It turned out to be dark metallic blue. It was on the fourth level. I found a slot nearby, parked my BMW, and strode over to Derek Hayden’s pride and joy.

  I circled it slowly, bending to examine the right front bumper and fender that, as I reconstructed Les Katz’s fatal collision, had to have been the point of impact. I found no dent, no scratch, no broken headlight, no evidence of recent repair or touch-up.

  Brenda told me that Derek kept his automobile spotlessly clean. But this one was coated with a uniform film of fine gray dust. It had been sitting there for some time. Ten days? I didn’t know how to judge that.

  I went back and sat in my own car. Slowly but inexorably my nicely wrought scenario was coming unraveled. Derek Hayden’s wife didn’t hire Les Katz. Hayden didn’t run over Les, at least not in his own car. Nor did he flee with his lady friend, again, at least not in his beloved Audi.

  Okay. Brenda Hayden might have lied to me. Why shouldn’t she lie to a stranger? And Les I knew to be a satyr and prone to exaggeration to the point of outright mendacity. It would have been entirely in character for him to describe Brenda Hayden in wildly distorted terms on the mistaken assumption that it would impress me. And Hayden could have run down Les with somebody else’s car. The girlfriend’s, perhaps. And hers could have been the one they then used to flee in, leaving the Audi behind. That would serve as a neat diversion when it was eventually found.

  I started up my BMW and followed the exit signs out of the parking garage.

  The most likely scenario, I realized as I joined the solid stream of shopping traffic in the Fresh Pond bottleneck, was much simpler and therefore more elegant. Les Katz had been run over by a drunk who didn’t know him. Derek Hayden had nothing to do with it. A random event, nothing more. Most of them are. That was the way the world basically turned.

  The question that continued to nag was this one: What had happened to Derek Hayden?

  10

  I SKIPPED LUNCH AND spent Saturday afternoon at my desk. I was working on a tricky separation agreement involving the division of a priceless collection of Indian artifacts the couple had accumulated during the twenty-two years of their marriage. Neither party wanted to split it. Neither would agree to selling it, either to a third party or to each other. Neither would consider a trade-off allowing the other to keep the whole thing.

  My job was to get the whole thing for the husband. I talked to the wife’s lawyer. His job was to get the whole thing for her. We agreed that we needed to do something creative, so we made a date to get all the parties together to try once again to hammer it out. We speculated on how F. Lee Bailey would have handled it. We concluded that one of our clients would have to murder the other for us to achieve a breakthrough.

  It was nearly five when I finally got home. I was building a bourbon old-fashioned when the phone rang. It was Becca Katz.

  “I haven’t heard from you for a long time,” she said. It was neither a complaint nor an accusation, the way she said it. Nevertheless, I felt a sharp wince of guilt, as I had consciously been avoiding her since the evening we ended up in the bed she had previously shared with Les.

  “I’ve been awfully busy,” I said. It sounded lame. “Anyhow, there’s been nothing much to report.” That was an outright lie. “Well,” I amended, “until just today, that is.”

  “What have you learned?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s complicated. Perhaps when I can sort it all out…”

  “Brady, I’ve gathered together some of Les’s things. I was hoping…”

  Her voice trailed off. I knew what I was supposed to say. “I’ll drop by sometime,” I said breezily. “Nothing that demands immediate attention, I trust.”

  She was silent for so long that I began to feel uncomfortable. “Becca, look,” I said.

  Her voice was soft. “Didn’t it mean anything to you?”

  “It was—unexpected, I guess,” I said carefully. “I don’t normally, ah, jump into bed with bereaved widow ladies. It meant something, yes. It’s just that—”

  “You’re feeling guilty.”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “You don’t know what it meant to me, then. We never talked about it. You think it commits you.”

  “Becca—”

  “You’re worried that you took advantage of me, my grief, my—the fact that with Les—that I was vulnerable and didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Something like that, maybe.”

  “Well, it’s all kind of true. It was unlike me. To do that. To let that happen. To want it to happen.
But listen. I have no regrets. It was—it was therapeutic, okay? It helped me to start healing. I mean, death is hard. You want to affirm something, to feel something profound and good. Am I making too much of this? You don’t have to tell me I’m the love of your life. That’s not what I’m after.”

  “A momentary stay against confusion,” I said, quoting Frost.

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “It was the same for me, Becca. An affirmation. It wasn’t something that you did to me, or vice versa. It happened because we wanted it to. You just have to know that I’m not really available. I don’t mean to you. I mean generally, to anybody. It’s the way I am. It’s taken me a long time to learn that about myself. It makes me cautious.”

  “I know that. You didn’t fool me. That was part of it. You were—you are safe that way.”

  I lit a cigarette and sipped my old-fashioned. “Therefore, what?” I said.

  “Therefore,” she said promptly, “I have four lamb chops and an appetite for only two of them.”

  “There’s a problem.”

  I heard her laugh softly. “You’ve got to forgive me. I’m not very good at this. Of course you’re busy. It’s Saturday night. Sometime when you have a chance, though, please drop by and pick up Les’s stuff.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say, Becca.”

  “Oh?”

  “What I was going to say was that I like my lamb chops rare. Nothing irritates me more than overdone chops. I am very particular about rare lamb chops.”

  “Boy, you really know how to put the pressure on a woman, Brady Coyne.”

  “It’ll take me an hour, at least.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  I took my glass into the bathroom, stripped down, showered, shaved, and got dressed. I found myself humming a tune from My Fair Lady. Something about how regrettable it is that women can’t be more like men. Most of the words eluded my memory.

  I arrived at Becca’s place a little before seven. I rang the doorbell and waited, clutching the claret that the guy at the liquor store promised me was “spunky.” I tried to imagine how Becca would look. I realized that I had trouble picturing her, this woman I had bedded a little more than a week earlier. I was able to see her eyes. The rest was a blur. And the eyes appeared to be crying.