Void in Hearts

by William G. Tapply

  He liked to tell what he considered jokes. They typically bore on theological themes. They mostly took the form of riddles. They tended to embarrass the listener, especially since Des had a short repertoire and a poor memory of whom he had run through it with.

  For example: Q—Who was the fastest runner in the Bible? A—Adam. He was first in the human race.

  Or: Q—How do you make holy water? A—You boil the hell out of it.

  Knee-slappers. But it was hard not to love the man, dumb jokes and all.

  I went to hear him preach a few times after I began to work with him and realized that I liked him very much. I found his theology more liberal, if anything, than my own, and strangely at odds with his personal ethic. He was, he told me, a Deist, a believer in a concept he said was popularized by Benjamin Franklin, and which postulated a universe like a clock—wound up by a God who then sat back bemusedly to wait for it to wind down. He took the Unitarian postulate—which denied the divinity of the Trinity—and pushed it to the edge of atheism. He advocated good works not, as the Calvinists would have had it, as a hedge against damnation, but as the moral obligation of a civilized human being. Theology had nothing to do with it. But it was the essence of religion.

  I found Des Winter’s homilies provocative and disturbing right up to his last one on Easter Sunday of 1982.

  “I doubt if Jesus of Nazareth appeared on that day,” he said. “I do not doubt that some people wanted him to do it so desperately that they were willing to imagine it. If he did, it would be a miracle. It’s dangerous to live for miracles. It makes us lazy and immoral.”

  Although Desmond Winter practiced what he preached as well as any man I ever knew, he never was able to suspend his belief that Connie would one day return to him, even though he freely admitted it would be a miracle.

  I am proud to say that I didn’t learn Des owned a thirty-eight-foot Bertram named Constance, which he moored at a marina in Newburyport and from which he loved to troll for striped bass and bluefish, until after I had agreed to take him on as a client. Constance was a gorgeous craft, with a flying bridge and outriggers and berths for six and twin Cummins diesels, and I fear I could easily have compromised the rigorous standards I held for admitting new clients to my roster had Des told me about her earlier.

  Des was an agreeable companion on a fishing boat. He loved and respected the sea and the fish we chased. He taught me how to recognize the distinctive odor of a school of rampaging blues, and he was as happy as I was to switch over to a fly rod when we got into them and to release all but the one or two we might want for the table.

  On those long lazy cruises in the mouth of the Merrimack and around Plum Island when the fish weren’t biting, I’d go forward to where Des was navigating with beers for both of us (for as otherwise rigidly upright as Des Winter was, he liked booze and handled it with gentility). He was more relaxed out on Constance, and while his repertoire of jokes didn’t change, he seemed to appreciate mine.

  But I often caught him staring unfocused out at the horizon, and I knew what he was looking for. Connie. It was as if he expected her one day to rise from the sea, much as Jesus was said to have risen from the dead.

  I’d nudge him and hand him a chilled can, and he’d shake himself and grin. “I was thinking about her,” he’d say. “Wondering where she is, what she’s doing. Hoping she’s happy.”

  And I’d squint into the distance. There was nothing to say.

  Sometimes he’d talk about his kids, and while he didn’t complain—it was not in his nature to complain—he often mused on how they might have turned out had their mother been there to help raise them. Des regarded himself as inept at parenting, and blamed himself—never the wayward Connie—for his offspring’s shortcomings.

  Kat, who he said had been a happy laughing child, overnight became a solemn, brooding young woman, given to long angry silences that seemed unprovoked and arbitrary to the people around her. She studied hard, almost defiantly, as if she had to prove herself worthy of the love of a mother who had abandoned her. She was a college student when I first met her. She regarded me suspiciously and resisted my mild efforts to crack her defenses. At first I found her disturbingly introverted, a young woman with a grudge against the world. It took a long time for us to become friends.

  When she graduated, she got a job with a small advertising firm in Newburyport. She found a condominium near the waterfront and moved out of Des’s big old house. Within three years she had her name on the company letterhead.

  Kat had a face that would have been considered beautiful had she chosen to smile more often—a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose, reddish blond hair cut short and efficient, a wide mouth, large green eyes. She was tall like Des and almost too thin.

  She wore tailored suits to work, and blue jeans and men’s shirts otherwise. I thought she looked much better in jeans.

  Her business partner divorced his wife to marry Kat. It lasted less than a year. Des asked me to handle her divorce. Kat Winter then sold out her share of the business to the heartbroken young man and set up her own competing agency, and I handled the mechanics of it.

  For a long time she refused to call me anything except Mr. Coyne. I called her Miz Winter.

  One March afternoon when I was in Newburyport to deliver some papers to her, I casually suggested supper at the Grog, a local restaurant featuring Cajun-style blackened fish that brought tears to my eyes. Kat, in her tweed suit, peered over her reading glasses at me and gifted me with one of her rare smiles. “Why, Mr. Coyne,” she said. “Are you asking me for a date?”

  “No way,” I replied promptly. “You are not a fun person. You are a client. And, may I add, a client whom I would not have taken on had I not been asked to by your father. I simply thought that we have a great deal to discuss if you really want to incorporate, and that I am getting hungry. Ergo, we can kill two birds with the same rock. If you eat supper with me, I can write off the whole thing, which will take the sting out of it.”

  She snatched her glasses from her face. Her green eyes glittered. She said, “Well, damn you…” And then she paused, cocked her head, and grinned. “Yes, damn you. Okay. Strictly business, of course. I mean, if you don’t want to fool around.”

  “I don’t fool around with my clients,” I said primly.

  “Oh, I’ll bet.”

  “They’re mostly too old.”

  Kat and I didn’t fool around at all. But we lingered at the Grog late that night. She drank stingers and I sipped Harvey’s Bristol Cream and we talked about Des, and somewhere along the way I began to call her Kat and she called me Brady.

  Her condo was a half mile from the restaurant. A cold breeze was coming off the waterfront and funneling down the street at us, so that we had to angle our bodies into it to keep our balance as we walked. After we had walked a block, Kat grabbed onto my arm. A block later she shifted her arm around my waist, and she leaned against me, burying her face against the side of my shoulder. It was natural that I would throw my arm around her.

  When we got to her door, she turned, standing one step higher than I. “Want to come in and thaw out? I can make coffee.”

  I shook my head. “Not a good idea.”

  She smiled. “You don’t have to think of me as a client, you know. You’re off the clock now.”

  “I am fully aware of all that.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you are.”

  She tilted her head and brought her mouth against mine. It was a dry, tentative kiss, and I pulled away from it before it could evolve into something different. “Nothing wrong with being friends,” I said.

  She shrugged. “However you want it.”

  “Otherwise…”

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  After that night we usually planned our business meetings so that we could eat together afterwards. I found her intelligent and knowledgeable. She never mentioned her mother, and I never asked about her. I had the feeling that she had dug a d
eep hole into her soul, buried all feelings about Connie there, and piled layers of self-control over it.

  Des’s son, Marc, was a year older than Kat, a dark, unpredictable, handsome young man. He was twenty-one when I first began to work with Des. When Connie Winter disappeared with Kat, Marc quit high school and fled to Augusta, Maine, where he pumped gas. Soon after Kat returned to Newburyport, Marc wandered back to the big house on High Street. After Kat left for college, Des and Marc continued to live there. They were both private, unyielding men, and they got along awkwardly. They seemed to baffle each other. Marc tended bar at one of the local watering holes, repaired marine engines, and spent a lot of time aboard Constance. He kept the engines tuned and the brass polished and conducted much of his social life aboard her. He talked about getting his skipper’s license so he could take out charters, but he never seemed to get around to it.

  The summer he turned twenty-five Marc married the daughter of a history professor from Duke, who made the mistake of docking in Newburyport on a summer family jaunt. Marc took his new bride and several of their friends on an extended cruise up the coast by way of a honeymoon. On their return home when they tied up in Newburyport they were boarded by a contingent of state and local police, Coast Guard, and DEA agents, who held Marc and his crew at gunpoint while they searched Constance.

  They found a brick of cocaine the size of a one-pound box of Fanny Farmer chocolates wrapped in watertight plastic in the bilge. It was the first place the agents looked.

  Des called me, and I got Xerxes Garrett to handle Marc’s case. The others got their own lawyers and went to trial together. All of them, including his bride, claimed ignorance and pointed their collective finger at Marc. The prosecuting attorney produced a witness who was prepared to testify that Marc had approached him with an offer to set up a pipeline from Portsmouth to Fall River. Zerk plea-bargained away all but six months of relatively easy time at MCI Shirley for Marc.

  When Marc went inside, his wife returned to Virginia. Her father, the professor, got the nuptial bond annulled.

  After the trial and the appeal, Zerk told me, “I kinda like the dude. No bullshit about him. Told me he was set up. I told him we had no proof of that, we’d lose in court with all those witnesses fingering him. He understood right away. Told me to do what I could. Which is what I did. He thanked me afterward. Told me I was smart for a nigger. I told him he better learn how to talk to dusky-hued folks quick before he went inside, got his rectum reamed. He kinda grinned and called me sir. Good kid. Fucked up, though.”

  Des used to say, by way of apology for Marc, “What can you expect? He was the one Connie left behind.”

  I visited Marc at Shirley once. They gave us a cubicle furnished with a table bolted to the floor and wooden chairs. A guard stood inside the door watching us.

  “You look good,” I told him.

  “Doing some lifting. Not a hell of a lot else.”

  “Write to your father.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “It’s a suggestion.”

  He shrugged. “Not much to say.”

  “Tell him you’re all right, that’s all.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  He gazed past me toward the guard. “I figured it out,” he told me after a moment. “Took me a long time.”

  “Figured out what?”

  “Who stashed the coke on Constance.”

  “You’re telling me you didn’t.”

  “That’s what I told Garrett, and I think he believed me. The fact that I let him plea-bargain don’t mean I did it.”

  “Who, then?”

  “The fuckin’ professor. Bowen. Debbie’s old man.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Process of elimination. I didn’t. Debbie didn’t. None of the others would’ve. He hated me, hated me and Debbie being married. She wouldn’t listen to him, so he showed her what kind of a person I was.” He laughed ironically. “Thing was, I gave up all that stuff for her. Promised I’d live clean, get a real job. I loved her, see, Brady.” He narrowed his eyes and shrugged in the unmistakably characteristic manner of one who has learned how to survive in prison. “There’s a lesson somewhere. I ain’t all that well educated. But I’m figuring it out.”

  “Don’t make too much of it, Marc,” I told him. “Professor Bowen is one man—even if you’re right about him.”

  “I got plenty of time to work on it,” he said.

  When Marc got out of prison, he returned to live with Des. He couldn’t get his bartending job back, so he hung around the marina doing odd jobs and complaining that no one would hire a guy who’d done time. He finally landed a job as a bouncer at one of the strip joints that are scattered along Route 1 north of Boston, the suburban equivalent of the combat zone. That’s where he met Maggie.

  Marc married her the summer before she died. I met her only once, that same summer. Des and I had planned to take Constance on a bluefish hunt around Plum Island. When I joined him at the marina where She was moored, I found Marc there, along with a slender girl wearing cutoff blue jeans and the top to a bikini.

  “Ah, Brady Coyne, this is Maggie,” said Marc. “My wife,” he added, grinning at the young woman as if it were a private joke.

  She had a great cascade of coal black hair, very large eyes the color of hot fudge, and an infectious smile. She was standing next to Marc on the dock, one arm draped possessively over his shoulder. She was nearly his height, close to six feet, and looked to be about his age. They could have been twins with their deep tans and dark flashing smiles. “Nice to meetcha,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind us messin’ up your fishing.”

  I assured her that nobody messed up my fishing except perverse fish.

  Marc took the wheel and steered us out into the estuary where the Merrimack met the ocean. Des and I trolled Rebels while Maggie sat next to Marc. It was a still, hot day, and Marc couldn’t put us onto the blues. Des and I drank beer and stared at the sea. He had the faraway look on his face that told me he was thinking about Connie. I didn’t intrude.

  After a while I went forward to sit on the bulkhead to catch a breeze. A few minutes later Maggie joined me. She squatted beside me and shucked off her shorts, which briefly startled me until I saw that she had the bottom to her bikini underneath.

  “So you’re a lawyer, huh?” she said.

  “Yes. A lawyer.”

  “I’m a dancer,” she offered.

  “Mm.”

  “Did a lot of ballet when I was a kid. I got too big for that, though. Went through a fat stage when I was about twelve. Gotta keep working on my weight. Lot of people, they don’t think the kind of dancing I do is really, you know, dancing.”

  I sipped my beer and watched a ruckus of gulls circle off toward the beach.

  “Okay, so I’m a stripper,” she persisted. She put her hand on my arm. I turned to look at her. Her eyes were earnest. “You probably think—”

  “I don’t judge people, Maggie.”

  She smiled. “Everybody judges strippers, Mr. Coyne. I don’t wanna make it more than it is, see. We take off our clothes, and the guys, they get their jollies. But there’s kind of an art to it. I mean, you gotta look right, sure. But there are girls, they got great bods, and if they can’t dance, the guys, they get bored. I mean, anyone can stand there and flop their boobs around, pretend to hump someone. When I do it, I don’t think about what the guys are thinkin’. I think about the music, moving to it, trying to be graceful and pretty and sexy.”

  I shrugged.

  “Look,” she said. “I mean, I’ve got small breasts, actually, compared to most of ’em. But I’ve got great legs and a good ass and I know how to dance. The guys like me. They always give me a good hand. They don’t say dirty things to me, like they do to some of the girls. At least, not usually. Anyhow, I quit dancing. I just did it for the money. Now Marc’s takin’ care of me. How old are you, anyhow?”

  I told her. She cocked her head at me. “Jeez, I would’
ve said two, three years older’n that.”

  “Most people think I look younger than I am,” I said, feigning hurt feelings.

  “Aw, jeez, I’m sorry. Things like that, they just come out of my mouth. I’m kinda stupid that way. It must be exciting, being a lawyer. You rich?”

  “Moderately rich. Not very exciting. Lots of paperwork.”

  “I hate paperwork. Did lousy at school.”

  And she went on that way, her mind skipping disconnectedly from thought to thought, things coming out of her mouth in a random fashion that I found both disconcerting and charming.

  Before the day ended, I decided that I liked her. And later Des confided in me, with some perplexity, that he liked her, too. “You’d never know she had been a, ah, performer, Brady. Quiet, well-mannered, considerate of her old father-in-law, and a dutiful wife. Reminds me a bit of Connie, actually. That same ingenuous, unpretentious quality. A little girl, really. That stage that completely passed over Kat.”

  Now Maggie had been killed, and Marc was being held, and I wondered if it was possible that Marc was not guilty.

  I recalled one other thing Des had said that day on the boat with Marc and Maggie when the bluefish didn’t bite. “I wish,” Des said of Marc’s new bride, “that my son treated her better.”

  So I tooled through the summer night, remembering the dead stripper and singing about Good Vibrations with my Beach Boys tape.

  The vibrations I was feeling were decidedly not good.

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