Past Tense

by William G. Tapply

  He shrugged. “Why don’t you go clean out the cottage? When you get back, I’m sure someone’ll be happy to help you find a rental.”

  “What about Evie?”

  “You can wait here for her.”

  They’d had me for more than three hours. And they still weren’t done with Evie.

  I hoped she was doing all right.

  I hoped they hadn’t caught her in a lie.

  A young Brewster patrolman drove me back to the cottage. A pair of sawhorses sat in the driveway at the turnoff. A cruiser was parked there, and an officer sat behind the wheel with the door open. When we pulled up, the officer got out and moved one of the sawhorses. We drove down the driveway. Two unmarked sedans were stopped near the place where Larry’s body had lain. There was a long string of yellow crime-scene tape around the area. A man with two cameras hanging from his neck and another in his hand waved us around it.

  My chaperon followed me through the cottage while I packed up Evie’s and my stuff. He watched me closely and didn’t offer to help me lug it to his cruiser. I told him I had some things that I needed in my car. He said I’d have to leave them.

  Then he drove me back to the station.

  They were still questioning Evie.

  The receptionist at the front desk scribbled down the number for a local Ford dealer, told me they rented cars, and pointed to a pay phone on the wall. My friendly Ford salesman told me he could hold a Taurus sedan for me. Sixty-eight bucks a day, which was robbery, but I agreed to it and recited my credit-card number to him.

  I got two bags of peanuts and a Coke from a vending machine, sat in the waiting room, and waited. Police officers came and went. None of them looked at me.

  Poor Evie. I figured they were grilling her. Maybe she’d asked for a lawyer, and they were holding off their interrogation until he arrived.

  I couldn’t serve as her attorney. I was a witness in their investigation.

  Maybe they’d arrested her.

  That niggle of doubt came back. Actually, it had never quite left me. Maybe Evie had done it. The more Vanderweigh had questioned me, the more I’d realized that I had no idea whether she had done it or not.

  Means? A knife from the kitchen of our cottage.

  Motive? Larry Scott had made her life miserable.

  Opportunity? No witness could say where she’d been or what she’d done for the hour or so after she’d left the cottage in the morning.

  I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to invent scenarios in which Evie came jogging back to the cottage and found Larry Scott standing in the driveway blocking her way, begging to talk with her. I tried not to visualize Evie going up to him and stabbing him twice in the stomach.

  But it was hard not to.

  It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon when Evie came into the waiting room. She glanced around, saw me, and shook her head. She looked dazed and pale and frightened.

  I stood up, went to her, and put my arms around her. She laid her forehead on my chest but did not return my hug.

  I kissed her forehead. “You all right?” I whispered into her hair.

  “No,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “Not your fault. Can we get out of here?”

  “You’re free to go?”

  “For now. They think I did it.”

  “They think I did it too,” I said. “But we didn’t. They’ll figure it out.”

  She looked up at me. “Will they?”

  “Of course they will.”

  The same officer who’d driven me to the cottage took us to the Ford place, and pretty soon we were in a new-smelling Taurus driving west on Route 6A, heading back to Boston.

  I started to say something about my old vow never to visit the Cape in the summer. But when I glanced at Evie beside me, I recognized that jut of her chin and hunch of her shoulders, and I decided she was in no mood for stupid jokes.

  FOUR

  It was early afternoon on that sunny Saturday in August, and westbound Cape Cod traffic on 6A was stop-and-go. More stop than go. There were frequent turnoffs and stoplights all along 6A, not to mention antique shops and used-book stores and nurseries and coffee shops and views of the marsh and the bay—all of which any dyed-in-the-wool Summer Person was obliged at least to slow down for.

  Evie rode silently beside me. She’d found some classical music on the radio of our rented Taurus, and she slouched back in her seat with her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap. I didn’t think she was sleeping. I figured she just didn’t feel like talking.

  We put Brewster behind us, and as we passed through Dennis I said, “How about something to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said without opening her eyes. “I just want to go home. Get something for yourself if you want.”

  I decided the couple of mugs of cop coffee, two bags of peanuts, and the Coke would last me. I wasn’t very hungry either.

  When we got to the Sagamore Bridge, which spans the canal that separates Cape Cod from the mainland, I pointed to the big sign. Desperate? Call the Samaritans, it read. Probably intended for folks who were tempted to leap off the bridge, although I’ve always suspected that the Samaritans got a lot of business from desperate weekend drivers stuck in the traffic.

  “Shall we give ’em a call?” I said to Evie.

  She opened her eyes and glanced at the sign. “I’m not desperate,” she said. “I’m not in a very good mood, either. Don’t make jokes, please.”

  I shrugged. Under the circumstances, I figured she was entitled to any mood she wanted.

  Once we got over the bridge and were heading back home on Route 3, the traffic thinned out and we zipped along. I made a few conversational forays, all of which Evie either tartly rebuffed or ignored entirely, and we pulled up in front of her townhouse in Concord at a little after four-thirty without having talked about our experiences at the Brewster police station.

  I wanted to know what they’d asked her, what she’d said, how they’d treated her, and I was disappointed and a little hurt that she didn’t want to tell me or to hear about what I’d been through.

  But I knew Evie better than to push it. That’s how she was. I’d experienced her dark withdrawals before. Evie liked to think things through on her own before she talked about them. Eventually she’d get a handle on it. Then we’d talk.

  I got out of the car, opened the trunk, took out her duffel bag and her backpack, and started to lug them to her door.

  “I’ve got them,” she said.

  “I’ll carry them for you,” I said. “They’re heavy.”

  She touched my arm. “I said, I’ll take them.”

  I shrugged and handed the bags to her. “I assume that means I’m dismissed?”

  She nodded. “I need to be alone.”

  “It’s Saturday,” I said. “Maybe our weekend on the Cape got ruined, but we always—”

  “I’ve spent enough time today with people who think I murdered somebody,” she said. Then she turned and trudged up to her door.

  “I don’t think you murdered anybody,” I called to her.

  “Yes you do,” she said without turning around.

  I stood there and watched Evie unlock her door and drag her bags inside. Then I turned, got into my car, and headed home to my solitary apartment on the waterfront in Boston.

  I’ve been renting the same condominium unit on Lewis Wharf on the Boston Inner Harbor ever since I split from Gloria eleven years ago. My landlord keeps threatening to put the place on the market, and if he ever does, I suppose I’ll have to decide either to buy it or to move to something permanent.

  My place has one big bedroom, where I sleep, and a smaller one, where I store things. There are cardboard boxes in there that I haven’t opened in eleven years.

  The living room, dining room, and kitchen are one big room. It has floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that open onto a narrow iron balcony overlooking the harbor. Across the water lie East Bos
ton and Logan Airport. Way off to the left sits the old Charlestown Navy Yard, and beyond it looms the Mystic River Bridge. The nighttime view from my balcony features traffic lights and city lights and airplane lights and the lights of the ferries and barges and tankers and fishing boats and pleasure craft that chug around the harbor at all hours. I can spit over the railing and hit the ocean six stories down. On a damp night, I can hear a friendly bell buoy clanging in slow, comforting rhythm. The harbor smells are strongest on a foggy night—salt air and seaweed, dead fish and diesel fumes.

  I know my neighbors in the building only well enough to nod to in the elevator that runs up from the parking garage in the basement.

  I furnished my place with discarded stuff from the house Gloria and I used to share in Wellesley, and in eleven years I haven’t replaced any of it.

  I can walk to my office in Copley Square, and I usually do. Even in the winter, coming home is a pleasant stroll up Newbury Street, across the Public Garden and the Boston Common, and through the financial district and Quincy Market. I can walk to Chinatown and the North End and the Fleet Center and Fenway Park and the New England Aquarium from my place. Skeeter’s Infield, which serves a hundred varieties of beer and the best burgers in the city, lies halfway between my office and Lewis Wharf.

  I moved there in a hurry when Gloria and I agreed we couldn’t live together for another day, and at the time I figured it was a stopgap until I found something that suited me, or until Gloria and I decided we needed to be together after all.

  After eleven years, it still felt temporary. Eleven years, and I was still waiting to see where my life was headed.

  “Simplify, simplify,” Thoreau said. He moved to a one-room cabin in the woods on Walden Pond to get away from people and figure things out, and I guess I was doing the same thing.

  It had taken Thoreau only a couple of years. For me, it had been over a decade and I hadn’t made much progress.

  I got home around five-thirty. I dropped my duffel bag on the bed, got a Coke from the refrigerator, and went out onto the balcony. I lit a cigarette, leaned my forearms on the railing, and gazed at the water.

  I wondered what Evie was doing.

  She believed that I thought she had killed Larry Scott. I had to fight the urge to call her and try to convince her that I knew her better than that.

  Actually, she was half-right. I wasn’t sure what I thought.

  Evie had powerful intuition. She always seemed to know what I was thinking—sometimes even better than I did.

  When she was ready to talk, she’d call me.

  I finished my cigarette, flipped it over the railing, and went back inside. I turned on my old black-and-white television for company, found a ball game, then went into the bedroom. I unzipped my duffel bag, turned it upside down on the bed, and started putting my weekend stuff away.

  On the bottom of the pile I found the little carved quail I’d bought in Provincetown for Evie. When I’d collected our things from the cottage under the watchful eye of the Brewster police officer, in my haste I must have stuck the little bird into my bag instead of hers.

  I held it in my hand and looked at it. The artist had not painted it. Instead, he’d used the grain of the wood to suggest the texture of the feathers. It looked so real that I wanted to stroke those feathers with my fingertip.

  I suspected that I’d slipped the little wooden bird into my bag with some subconscious intent. A hostage, maybe, against the easily imagined possibility that Evie would go into one of her withdrawals—as, in fact, she had done. An excuse to call her. I’ve got your quail, honey. Why don’t I just bring it over, and while I’m there, we can have a drink.

  Nope. She’d call me when she was ready, and she’d be ready quicker if I respected her distance.

  She didn’t call that night, or all day Sunday or Monday, either, and finally, when I was ready for bed on Monday night, I took a deep breath and dialed her number.

  Her machine answered. “It’s Evie. I can’t come to the phone right now, but your call is important to me, so please leave a message and I’ll get back to you, I promise.”

  I did not leave a message. I had a feeling that if I did, she’d break her promise.

  On Tuesday I called my old friend Roger Horowitz, who was a state police homicide detective. When he picked up the phone, the first thing he said to me was, “I can’t talk to you.”

  “There was a homicide in Brewster,” I said.

  “Why do you think I can’t talk to you?”

  “Am I a suspect?”

  “Read my lips, Coyne.”

  “Roger,” I said, “you know me. I didn’t kill anybody. You know Evie, too. Are your colleagues making any progress on this thing?”

  “If you don’t want to chat about the Red Sox or something,” he said, “then I’m hanging up.”

  “Okay,” I said. “’Bye.”

  State police detective Neil Vanderweigh called me at the office on Wednesday afternoon. “We’re done with your car,” he said. “You can come get it whenever you want.”

  “That was quick,” I said. “I expected to be driving this clunky Taurus for a month.”

  “We aim to please,” he said.

  Another midsummer trek to the Cape, I was thinking. But I wanted my BMW back. And I definitely wanted to talk with Vanderweigh. I checked my calendar, saw nothing that couldn’t be moved around, and said, “How’s tomorrow?”

  “Good. The sooner the better. Tell me what time you’ll be here, and I’ll bring your car, meet you at that Ford place where you got your rental.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you,” I said.

  “Not really. We’ve got to talk.”

  “Yes, we do,” I said. “You’re required to tell me if I’m an official suspect, you know.”

  “I’m aware of my obligations,” he said. He cleared his throat. “You have killed two men. Shot ’em both at pointblank range with that thirty-eight you keep in your office safe. That’s a lot of dead guys for a mild-mannered lawyer who devotes his life to helping rich people guard their money.”

  “That’s my job, not my life,” I said. “Anyway, both of those guys were—”

  “I know,” he said quickly. “They were bad guys.” He hesitated. “You were protecting a woman in jeopardy both times.”

  He let that thought linger there. I didn’t know if Larry Scott was really a bad guy, but Evie certainly had seemed to be a woman in jeopardy.

  I said nothing.

  After a minute, Vanderweigh chuckled. “Look, Mr. Coyne. I’m just trying to solve a murder here, and I could use some help, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Good. I’d like to get this murder solved too. I’ll be there around noontime.”

  My rented Taurus had no sunroof, no CD player, no leather seats, no clutch, no stick shift. It was no fun, and I couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

  And so a week to the day after Evie and I had driven to the Cape for our fateful encounter with Larry Scott—fatal, for him—I found myself driving down there again. This time I was alone on Route 3 with only my thoughts for company, and instead of dwelling on how much I hated Cape Cod in the summer, I thought about Evie.

  We had not spoken since I’d dropped her off at her door on Saturday afternoon, and I missed her. This was a long silence, even for her, and it caused me again to wonder what had really happened that morning when she was out jogging.

  I tried to think: If Evie really had knifed Larry Scott that morning, would she have told me? We’d been friends for almost a year and lovers for several months. One of the things I’d learned about her was that she was absolutely direct. If she didn’t want to talk about something, she said so. If she did talk about it, she said exactly what she felt. There had been many times in the year I’d known her when the easiest, kindest thing for her to do would have been to lie, and she never did.

  On the other hand there were many things she refused to talk about, including virtually her entire life up to the time we’
d met. If I asked her casual questions about her childhood or her family or her old lovers or previous jobs, she’d accuse me of idle curiosity, as if that was unworthy of me. She always said her past life was irrelevant, that now was what counted, and up until a week ago, I’d pretty much agreed with her. I didn’t talk about my past much, either, and Evie had expressed no idle curiosity about it whatsoever.

  I loved the Evie I knew, not the Evie who’d existed before that. Whatever had happened before I met her was relevant only insofar as it had made her the person she had become.

  Now it seemed Larry Scott had contributed mightily to the person she’d become, and it made me understand that we are all a sum of our experiences, for better or worse, whether we like it or not.

  Maybe she had lied to me. Maybe she had expected to encounter Scott there in our driveway that morning. Maybe she had taken a knife from the kitchen. If she had, and if she’d killed him with it, it would give state police detective Neil Vanderweigh a good argument for malice aforethought. Intent and premeditation. Not just murder, but murder in the first degree.

  How well did I really know Evie?

  That was the question.

  I figured Vanderweigh planned to try some misdirection on me. A pleasant lunch, some casual conversation. He’d already shown me his inquisitor side. Now he’d probably try to show me what a nice guy he was.

  I assumed he still suspected both of us, either as alternate suspects or as a team.

  Objectively, we were both damn good suspects.

  Well, it didn’t matter. Vanderweigh could think whatever he wanted, and he could pick my brain to his heart’s content. I wasn’t hiding anything, so telling the truth would be easy.

  I arrived at the Ford place in Brewster a few minutes before noon, and just about the time they finished checking the Taurus for dents and scratches and verified that I’d topped off the gas tank, my green BMW pulled into the lot and Detective Neil Vanderweigh got out. He was wearing a Red Sox cap, and without his bald head showing, I didn’t recognize him at first. He came inside, saw me signing papers with the salesman, lifted his hand and nodded, and went back outside.