Dead Meat

by William G. Tapply

  I flipped through the rest of the paper, sipping my coffee, listening to the storm rage outside, and resenting the promise I had made to Tom Baron. I did not relish playing detective, even just for a day.

  I solved the chess problem and had just begun to study the daily bridge hand when Sylvie staggered out of the bedroom. She had pulled on one of my T-shirts. It was big for her, but not by much.

  I cocked my head and regarded her. “Fetching,” I said.

  She yawned and stretched. The T-shirt rode up. More fetching yet. “I smelled coffee,” she mumbled.

  She poured herself a mugful and sat down across from me. She propped up her chin with the palms of both hands.

  “Isn’t that cold?” I said.

  “What?”

  “The vinyl of the chair where you’re sitting?”

  Sylvie giggled. I got up and poured myself a second mug of coffee. When I returned she was reading the article on Alice Sylvester’s death.

  “You will solve this crime, no?” she said.

  “Probably not,” I answered, setting fire to my first cigarette of the day. “That’s not my job. But I will see if I can track down Buddy Baron.”

  “That may be the same thing.”

  “Maybe. I doubt it. Wouldn’t you like to put some clothes on?”

  “First I will drink my coffee. Then you and I will have a shower. Then I will get dressed.”

  “You will drink your coffee while I take my own shower,” I said.

  “Brady is a poop.”

  “This is true.”

  After I showered, shaved, and dressed, I went back to the kitchen. Sylvie was at the stove, tending an omelette. I sat at the table to watch her cook. I thought of Julia Child and the famous chefs of Chicago and New Orleans and the other public television cooking series. I had my own idea for a can’t-miss series: The Great Bareass Cooks of America.

  Sylvie would be a star.

  After we finished eating, I knotted my tie and retrieved my raincoat from behind the sofa. It was a bit rumpled, but what the hell. It was going to get rained on anyway.

  Sylvie followed me to the door. “When will I see you?” she said.

  “I’ll call when I can. Don’t you dare straighten things out before you leave. The last time you did that, I lost my sneakers.”

  “I put them in the closet.”

  “They belong in the living room. Under chairs. Who’d ever think to look in the closet?”

  I arrived at Tom Baron’s house in Windsor Harbor a little after eight. Tom and Joanie built their place on a high bluff overlooking the Atlantic, where the ninth fairway of Tom’s father’s golf course used to be. It’s a long, low, rambling place, with lots of glass and fieldstone and cedar sheathing. You could putt on the rolling sweep of lawn.

  Joanie answered the door wearing a floor-length burgundy robe made of some kind of clinging silky material. She had done her hair and her face. Her brittle smile looked as if it might shatter.

  “Brady,” she said. “Please come in. Tom’s gone already. Some sort of breakfast thing in Greenfield. He left something for you.”

  I stepped into the foyer and Joanie helped me out of my wet raincoat. She ushered me into her kitchen, part of a big open area that included the dining room and one of the living rooms, walled in on three sides by floor-to-ceiling glass. The view of the ocean was spectacular.

  She sat me at the kitchen table and poured two cups of coffee. Then she produced a bottle of brandy. “Little snort?” she said.

  I shook my head. “Don’t need it.”

  “I do,” she mumbled, dumping a healthy slug into her cup.

  “No word from Buddy, then.”

  She sipped her coffee and gazed out at the storm-chopped sea. “No. Nothing. Brady, I’m so grateful that you’re going to help.”

  “I told Tom that this isn’t my line. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You’d think he’d at least call his mother.”

  I shrugged.

  “Unless,” she continued, “something’s happened to him.” She peered up at me hopefully.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” I answered automatically.

  Joanie sighed. “Let me get what Tom left for you.”

  She got up and swished into the other room. It didn’t look as if she was wearing anything under her robe.

  She was back in a minute and slid an envelope onto the table. I ripped it open.

  Brady:

  Only names I can come up with—

  Dr. Larsen, principal at W. H. High School. Knew Buddy pretty well, also Alice and others. Gil Speer, computer guy at the school. Only teacher Buddy liked. Or vice versa. Bob Pritchard, Buddy’s boss at Computer City. Middle-aged hippie type. Knows the scene, I think. Mr. and Mrs. Sylvester, Alice’s parents, who probably won’t want to talk to you and I wouldn’t even try.

  Good luck. Call me tonight.

  T.B.

  I folded the note and tucked it into my shirt pocket. To Joanie I said, “Didn’t Buddy have any friends?”

  She touched her hair with her hand. “Boys he went to school with. They’re all off to college now. With all his trouble, he’s been avoiding them anyway. When he wasn’t working or home, he was with Alice.” She hesitated. Her voice shifted gears. “He was—he had become quite reclusive, Brady. A loner. He was depressed. It was natural, I guess. We tried to get him to therapy. It was recommended. Even Tom saw the need for it. But Buddy refused. He said he was all right, that he could work things out for himself. But I don’t know.”

  I reached across the table and touched Joanie’s hand. “What are you saying?”

  Her eyes brimmed. “I guess I’m saying that I don’t know what Buddy might do. Might have done. He’s a stranger to me. Tom thinks he knows his son, but he doesn’t. Buddy’s been through a lot. He’s fragile. You don’t want to touch him, because you think he might crack. Do you understand?”

  I nodded slowly. “Joanie, do you think Buddy could have hurt Alice?”

  She flinched when I said it, but she met my eyes and nodded. “In the sense that I don’t know what he’s capable of anymore, I guess I think so. He was wound real tight. He could have snapped. Then…”

  “Joanie,” I said after an awkward moment, “what else do you think he could have done?”

  She sighed deeply and took a big gulp of brandy-laced coffee. “As you know, he had a drug problem. I mean, sure, he got caught selling it. But his problem was using it. Marijuana. LSD. Cocaine. Whatever he could find, I guess. He did rehabilitation, as the court ordered. Afterwards he went to those meetings. Every single night. But there was a black part of Buddy where he wouldn’t let me in. Maybe he let Alice in there, I don’t know. But not me and not Tom. He spent a lot of time in his room. Not listening to that awful music, not reading. Just lying there, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes he seemed on the verge of talking about it. But then he’d pull back. There was no anger, none of those overt behaviors you might expect. That we were told to expect from him. But no joy, either. Just this awful, passive blackness. To answer your question, I think he was capable of hurting himself more than hurting somebody else. That’s what worries me. And if he did hurt Alice…”

  She didn’t need to finish. I sat there, smoking a cigarette and sipping my coffee while Joanie Baron composed herself.

  After a few minutes she looked up at me and made her mouth smile. It was not particularly convincing, but I pretended it was. I stubbed out my cigarette and stood up.

  “I best get on with my sleuthing,” I said lightly.

  Joanie followed me to the door, retrieved my raincoat, and held it for me. As I turned to open the door, she put a hand on my arm. “I really appreciate this, Brady,” she said.

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Joanie.”

  “Just the same, thanks.” She reached up on tiptoe to kiss me. As she did, she leaned her body against mine, confirming my observation that the sheer robe was all she had on. I moved my mouth away from hers, giving her my
cheek to kiss. She stood back from me, an odd smile on her face.

  “You don’t wanna comfort the grieving mother?” she said.

  “Cut it out,” I said harshly.

  “Yeah. Shit. Dumb old broad. I’m sorry.”

  “C’mon, Joanie. Buddy’s okay.”

  She pushed me toward the door. “Go. Before I do something stupid.”

  I went.

  My first stop was not on the list Tom Baron gave me. I pulled into the lot beside the Windsor Harbor police headquarters and skipped over the puddles to the door. A different cop was behind the glass wall. I asked for the chief and gave him my name, and he got on the intercom. A minute later Harry Cusick came out.

  He grinned at me and extended his hand. “I thought I might be seeing you again,” he said.

  “I just wanted you to know that I’m going to be around town today, and to ask you to keep me informed on the Buddy Baron situation.”

  “Gonna play a little cops and robbers, huh?”

  I smiled and shrugged. “You might call it that.”

  “We’re just a small-town police force, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “But we’re pretty good at what we do.”

  “I have no doubt,” I said. “I don’t really expect to accomplish anything, to tell you the truth. Maybe it’ll make Tom and Joanie Baron feel a little better.” I shrugged apologetically.

  “It’s a funny thing about lawyers,” said Cusick. “They’re always telling the cops how to do their job. But when you take a look at who screws things up, more times than not it’s the lawyers.”

  “Readily granted. I’ll try to stay out of your way.”

  “That,” he said, “is more than I have any right to expect. Look, why not check in with me in the afternoon. We can compare notes.”

  “You’re willing to do that?”

  “Sure. We’re all after the same thing here, aren’t we?”

  “Probably not. But we’re in the same ballpark. If you can tell me how to find—” I pulled out Tom’s note and scanned it “—ah, Computer City, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Bob Pritchard has neither seen nor heard from Buddy Baron,” said Cusick.

  I nodded. “Sure. You’ve been there already.”

  “Of course.”

  He gave me the directions and I jogged through the rain to my car.

  Computer City occupied a corner of a recently refurbished brick building in what passed for downtown Windsor Harbor.

  The walls of the large room were lined with multitiered desks, on which were displayed several different models of home computers. Chairs in front of each one invited the potential customer to sit and peck at the keyboard. One of the chairs was occupied by a bearded young man, who glanced up at me.

  “You don’t wanna buy a computer,” he declared.

  “That is one helluva sales pitch,” I said.

  He grinned. “Gets ’em every time.”

  “I’m looking for Bob Pritchard.”

  “How come?”

  “I want to talk about Buddy Baron.”

  “See?”

  “Huh?”

  “I was right. You don’t want to buy a computer. I can tell instantly who’s a customer and who’s getting in out of the rain. Save myself a lot of time that way. I’m Pritchard. Pull up a chair.”

  I did. I glanced at the screen of the computer monitor. It was covered with columns and rows of figures. He hit a few keys, and the columns and rows moved. “Spread sheet,” he said. “You wanna keep your books up to date, just get one of these suckers. Everything on one little disk. No more file cabinets full of documents, no big ledgers, drawers crammed with scraps of paper. Neat and tidy.”

  “I’m getting in out of the rain, remember? I’ve got a computer in my office. My secretary is a whiz at it. I don’t know diddly about it, myself. Don’t really want to.”

  He nodded. “Lot of people, they get a certain age, they don’t like to deal with new technology. It scares them. Makes them feel old, outmoded.” He cocked his eyebrows at me.

  I shrugged. “You’re probably a better salesman than I thought at first.”

  He grinned. “So who’re you?”

  “My name’s Coyne. Brady Coyne. I’m Tom Baron’s attorney.”

  He nodded. “Ah.”

  “I understand Buddy has missed work.”

  “He was out yesterday. Hasn’t showed up today yet, either, as you can see.”

  “And he didn’t call?”

  “Nope.”

  “Has he ever done this before? Not come to work, not called in?”

  “Nope.”

  “Am I boring you?”

  “Nope.” He smiled again. “The police asked all these questions already.”

  “Can you think of any questions they should’ve asked that they didn’t?”

  “Now that,” said Pritchard, “is a good question. The cops did not ask me that question. And the answer is, yes, there are a few questions I’d expect someone to ask.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, had Buddy really kicked cocaine.”

  “Has he?”

  “Yes. I’m sure of it. And I should know.”

  “You’ve been there,” I said.

  “Yes. I’ve been there and back.”

  “Is that why you hired Buddy?”

  Pritchard made a wry face. “No. I didn’t know that when I hired him. If I had known that, I would have thought twice. Bad risk. Drug addicts are always bad risks. No, I hired Buddy because Tom Baron asked me to, and you don’t say no to Tom Baron too easily in this town. Not that he twisted my arm. Still, you like to get along with old Tom. Anyway, when Buddy found out what I’d been through, he started to open up to me. We talked about it a lot. He’s a surprisingly strong kid. Tough-minded, I mean. He messed up, but he cares about himself. He’s been straight for a long time. More than a year clean. A long time for an addict. He’s been through the worst times. There is a time, you know, and it comes about nine months after rehab, when you don’t think you can take it any longer, when you feel like giving up. People go one of three ways then.”

  “What ways?”

  “You either go back to the drugs or you push through it. Those who push through it, many of them, they get pretty mystical about it. They go up on the mountain. They see burning bushes. The skies open up. They hear voices.”

  “They get born again, you mean?”

  “All kinds of born again. Born again Christian, born again Buddhist, born again Existentialist, for God’s sake. Same thing happened to me, in a way.”

  Pritchard grinned at me, and I returned his smile a bit uncomfortably.

  “Yep,” he said. “A born again cynic. That’s me. It’s a theology that works good for me.”

  I nodded. “That’s two. You said there were three ways someone could go. What’s the third?”

  Pritchard scratched his beard. “The third way is, you kill yourself.”

  “Buddy…?”

  Pritchard shook his head. “Not Buddy. I don’t think so.”

  “He’s been missing for about thirty-six hours now.”

  “Something might’ve happened to him. But he didn’t kill himself.”

  “The police mentioned to me that when Buddy was arrested, he refused to cooperate with them. Has he—?”

  “No. I didn’t ask, and he didn’t say. I don’t know who supplied him. It’s not a question I would ever ask.”

  “Do you have any thoughts?”

  He ran his forefinger over his mustache. “Specifically, no. But I’ll tell you this, and it’s no secret. It had to be local. Somebody in this town. And I’ll tell you something else, if you promise not to press me for details.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It’s this. Whoever was supplying Buddy is still in business.”

  “Selling coke to kids?”

  “Crack, now,” he said. “Cocaine for smoking. Evil stuff. Addictive as hell. Someone’s wholesaling crack to kids, so they can retail it to their friends.”<
br />
  “Mr. Pritchard,” I said. “A teenage girl was killed night before last. A teenage boy is missing. If there’s something you know…”

  He held up his hand. “There isn’t. Believe me. I just know the scene in general. I know what’s going on. If I knew who it was, I would tell the cops. I’d tell them in a minute. No problem. But I don’t. All I know is, Buddy isn’t involved in it.”

  I nodded. “Any other questions I should’ve asked?”

  “One.”

  “What?”

  “Would Buddy kill Alice Sylvester?”

  “How would you answer that, if I’d had the wit to ask it?”

  “I’d say no. But I’d say he might’ve had reason to be pissed off at her.”

  “Then I’d ask what that reason was.”

  “And I’d tell you that she wasn’t the Miss America candidate that everyone is making her out to be. And, no, I would not elaborate on that.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Slandering the dead?”

  He shrugged.

  “There’s one other question that occurs to me,” I said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Can you think of anybody who’d want to hurt Buddy?”

  “Sure.”

  “Will you tell me who?”

  “I don’t know who. But if you can find the person who set him up in business two years ago, you’d have a good candidate.”

  I nodded. “I suppose I would.”

  “Assuming,” he said, “that something happened to Buddy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which,” he said, “isn’t a bad assumption.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said.

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