Cutter's Run

by William G. Tapply

  I leaned my hands on the roof and bent down to his window. “My son Billy got his ear pierced when he was about your age.”

  “Yeah?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. That was four or five years ago. Some girl talked him into it. He wore a little diamond stud in it for a while. Then he let the hole grow back in.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  I smiled. “I don’t know. Billy’s had lots of girls.”

  Paris touched his ear. “My old man thinks earrings are faggy.”

  “That why you got them?”

  He cocked his head, then grinned. “Nah. Some girl talked me into it.”

  “The hair, too?”

  “See,” he said, “I know the hair looks dumb. I did that for my old man. I actually kinda like the earrings.”

  Paris turned the key in the ignition. The Rabbit coughed and sputtered for a minute before the engine caught. He shifted into reverse and I stood back.

  But he didn’t back down the driveway. Instead, he leaned his head out the window. “Uh, Mr. Coyne,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “You got a son, huh?”

  “Two sons, actually.”

  He looked down toward his lap for a moment, then turned back to me. “Suppose one of your sons, um, got a girl… you know?”

  “Pregnant?”

  “Yeah. I mean when he was in high school.”

  I looked at Paris for a moment, and I remembered worrying about Joey, who’d had the same girlfriend throughout high school. He and Debbie had always seemed to have an unnaturally mature relationship for teenage kids. I assumed they’d been intimate, though I never asked directly. I’d ventured a few suggestions about AIDS and pregnancy, and Joey had always laughed. He knew all about that stuff.

  And Billy, my older, had had dozens of girlfriends. Billy liked the pretty girls. The sexier the better. He’d gone out with seniors when he was a sophomore, and I’d worried about him, too.

  The fact was, I never stopped worrying about my boys. Getting their girlfriends pregnant was always one of those worries.

  I leaned against the side of Paris’s car. “You know what the options are,” I said.

  He nodded. “She says it’s too late for an abortion.”

  “What about putting the child up for adoption?”

  He shook his head. “She wants to keep it.”

  “What does your father say?”

  “He doesn’t know.” He let out a long breath. “Can I tell you something, Mr. Coyne?”

  “Of course.”

  “When she—Weezie, my girl—when she told me, I was, like, proud. I mean, my old man treats me like a baby, like I got no brain, like he knows everything. So I’m thinking, hey, I’m a man. I guess I’m a man if I can… you know? And Weezie’s like, okay, we get married and I get a job and she cooks and takes care of the baby, you know, and it’s like we’re grown up and we don’t have to live with our parents, and at first it sounds good to me. I can work for my old man, we can rent a trailer and save up for maybe a house.”

  He looked up at me, and then he looked away. But I saw the glitter in his eyes. “The truth is, Mr. Coyne, I don’t love Weezie and she don’t love me. And I don’t want to quit school, and I don’t want to be a fuckin’ plumber’s helper. I was always thinkin’ of college. Learning something. Getting out of Garrison.” He turned away from me and brushed the back of his hand across his eyes. “I don’t know what to do,” he mumbled.

  “You and Weezie have to tell your parents,” I said.

  “My old man’ll kill me. I know that.”

  “You might be surprised,” I said. “Any man who would insist that his boy own up to vandalizing someone’s property has the makings of a good father. What about her parents?”

  Paris smiled and shook his head. “She’s only got a mother. I think Weezie’s mom got knocked up herself. She’s—Mrs. Palmer, I mean—she has a lot of men coming around. ‘Guests,’ she calls them. It pisses Weezie off, how these guys come to their trailer and drink beer and spend the night and then never show up again. But you know what, Mr. Coyne?”

  I shook my head.

  “I think Weezie wants to be just like her mother,” he said. “And it scares the shit out of me.”

  “Tell your father,” I said. “Tell him what you’ve told me. Expect him to be upset. Be patient with him. Let him get over it. You and Weezie can’t handle this all by yourselves.”

  “He’ll kill me, I’m telling you.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  Paris looked at me for a minute. Then he nodded. “Thanks, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “Your sons are lucky.” He backed out of the driveway, poked his arm out the window and waved, and headed down the road. I could hear the roar of his rusted-out muffler for a long time before it finally faded in the distance.

  CHAPTER 28

  IT WAS A FEW minutes after four in the afternoon. I went inside and checked Alex’s answering machine. Its red light glowed steadily. Skip Churchill had not returned my call.

  I took the portable phone to the kitchen table. Skip’s number rang three times before his machine clicked in. “You’ve reached Churchill Accounting Associates,” came Skip’s voice. “Our office hours are nine to five Monday through Friday. Please leave a message and we’ll get right back to you.”

  After the beep, I said, “It’s four and today’s Wednesday, so where the hell are you? It’s Brady, and if you’re sitting there smirking at your goddam machine while I’m—”

  There was a click and a few seconds of buzzing feedback, and then Skip’s actual unrecorded voice said, “Okay, okay. I’m here. If I answered the phone every time it rang I’d never do any certified public accounting, you know? Listen, I got that file, and I’ll take a look at it as soon as—”

  “Do it now,” I said. “Didn’t you get my message?”

  “Sure,” said Skip, “and I know you said you were in a hurry. Hell, in this business everybody’s in a hurry, Brady. Gimme a break.”

  “If I told you it was a matter of life and death…”

  “I’d accuse you of flaunting clichés. Come on. This is a spreadsheet, for God’s sake. What could be more boring? Hell, I’m an accountant, and even I have trouble getting a hard-on over a spreadsheet.”

  “Skip,” I said, “trust me on this, okay? I really want to know what’s on it, and I really do need it pronto.”

  He sighed. “Maybe you’d better tell me what it’s all about.”

  “Actually, I think it’d be better if I didn’t. I want to know what catches your trained and expert eye, if anything. I’ll pay you for your time, of course.”

  “Screw that. I know you didn’t bill me for half the time you spent on my divorce.”

  “Don’t you dare ever mention that to Julie,” I said. “She obsesses on billable hours. She’d kill me.”

  He laughed. “Okay. Give me an hour. I’ll get back to you.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “I’ve got some things to do. How long will you be there?”

  “My home is my office. You know that. I’ll be here all night. I’m always here. Just start talking to the machine. I’ll pick up.”

  I got a Coke from the refrigerator, then returned to the kitchen table and pecked out Charlie McDevitt’s number. Charlie is my old law school roommate. We were best friends then, and now, more than twenty years later, we still are. Charlie’s the one man on earth I absolutely trust. Back at Yale, when I aspired to argue civil liberties cases before the Supreme Court, Charlie dreamed of sitting on that Court. He used to say that he’d have to recuse himself from any case I brought to him. The only thing he holds in higher regard than the law is loyalty.

  I feel the same about him.

  I, of course, ended up in Boston negotiating divorces and writing wills, and rarely do I argue anything before any court. I spend most of my time with clients and other lawyers, and if I do my job right,
I submit a fait accompli to a judge, who affirms it with grateful alacrity.

  Charlie’s been a prosecutor for the Department of Justice for his entire career. He works out of the JFK Building at Government Center in Boston, a twenty-minute stroll from my office in Copley Square. He never has admitted it, but I suspect that he asked for the Boston assignment so that he and I would be close enough to play golf and fish for trout together now and then.

  When we reminisce about our law-student dreams, Charlie just laughs. “What the hell did we know?” he says. “Yale was a fountain of knowledge—and we were there to drink.”

  After I negotiated my way through the federal government’s automated answering maze and pecked in Charlie’s four-digit extension number, Shirley, his secretary, answered the phone.

  Shirley is plump and white-haired, a grandmother about a dozen times. She’s a dead ringer for the woman whose face appears on the package of a popular brand of frozen pastries.

  “It’s Brady, darlin’,” I said. “And how have you been feeling this summer?”

  She said her neuralgia was no better, but no worse, thank the Lord, then mentioned several people by their first names, on the false assumption that I remembered which were her children and which were the nieces and nephews and all their respective spouses and children. “Jerry’s Becky, don’t you know, is expecting again, bless her soul, and Kelly and Randy are back together, thank the Lord. It was breakin’ poor Lloyd’s heart, it was, Mr. Coyne, and if it weren’t for little Abigail comin’ back home after that terrible time she had…”

  What I loved about Shirley was that she gave me undeserved credit for keeping track of them all and remembering. She never failed to ask after my two boys, and if I skimped with the details, she insisted that I elaborate.

  When she finally connected me to Charlie, he said, “So what can you do for me today?”

  “Buy you a bowl of Marie’s minestrone,” I said. “With a platter of those deep-fried calamari you love on the side.”

  “Oh, oh. What is it this time?”

  “I need information on a company based in Portland, Maine, called SynGen, Inc.,” I told him. “And anything you can find out about its board of directors.” I gave him the three names that Ellen Sanderson had given me and summarized the events of the past couple of weeks in Garrison, Maine.

  When I finished, Charlie was chuckling. “You’re doing it again, Coyne,” he said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Snooping.”

  “I told you, I’m a sheriff’s deputy. This is my job.”

  “Oh, boy,” said Charlie. “That sheriff must not have heard of Grabel’s Law.”

  “Who in hell is Grabel?”

  “Grabel had a law of mathematics named after him. Grabel’s Law states that two is not equal to three, even for very high values of two.”

  “You mean, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”

  “Exactly. And you can’t make a lawman out of a lawyer.” He gave a big phony sigh. “But, of course, I will see what I can learn about SynGen, Inc., and these guys Stasio, Passman, and Tate. I will breach several government security systems to ferret out this information, and I will get back to you.”

  “When?”

  “Huh?”

  “When will you get back to me?”

  “Don’t push me, Coyne. Marie’s calamari isn’t that good.”

  “The mention of it makes you drool and you know it,” I said. “This is urgent, Charlie. Climb into that monster mainframe of yours. We’ve got one and probably two murders up here, and both of them were people I liked. Not to mention a poisoned dog and swastikas.”

  “Swastikas, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “Okay. Give me a couple of hours. But remember something, okay?”

  “What’s that?”

  “He who dies with the most toys is still dead. And that’s the truth.”

  After I hung up with Charlie I got into my Wrangler and drove to the Garrison Veterinary Hospital and Kennels.

  Three people, one dog, and two cages that might’ve held cats sat in the waiting room. Betsy slouched in the swivel chair behind the counter, talking on the telephone and admiring her fingernails. I put my elbows on the counter and leaned forward, looking at her, trying to catch her eye.

  She glanced up without any hint that she remembered me, then returned her attention to her nails.

  I cleared my throat loudly, and she turned her head my way again. “I need to see Dr. Spear,” I said.

  She covered the receiver with her hand, rolled her eyes, and waved her hand at the waiting area. “Have a seat,” she said. “There’s people ahead of you.”

  Then she swiveled around, turning her back on me. I reached over the counter, unhooked the gate, walked through, and opened the door that led to the back.

  “Hey,” said Betsy. “You can’t go in there.”

  I ignored her and kept going. I found myself in a small examining room with a waist-high stainless-steel table and glass-fronted cabinets that held bottles and bandages and swabs and a variety of other medical supplies. The room was empty, so I pushed through the door on the other side, which opened onto a narrow green-tiled corridor. As I stood there looking around, a door opened on my right and Dr. Spear appeared.

  She was peeling latex gloves off her fingers. When she saw me, she cocked her head, frowned for an instant, then smiled. “Did Betsy send you back here?” she said.

  “No. She told me to wait my turn.”

  Dr. Spear nodded. “Betsy loves animals, but she’s not much good with people. Come on.”

  I followed her into an office barely large enough to hold a small metal desk and a couple of wooden chairs. Bookshelves crammed with serious-looking volumes lined the wall on the left, and the opposite wall was hung with framed diplomas and a large calendar that pictured a litter of irresistibly cute kittens all tangled together in a basket.

  The back wall was dominated by a large window that overlooked the side parking lot and, beyond that, a meadow that sloped away to a second-growth hardwood forest.

  Dr. Spear slumped behind the desk and gestured at one of the chairs.

  I sat down. “Doctor …”

  “Oh, call me Laura, Mr. Coyne. Please.” She removed her glasses, laid them on the desk, pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “I understand Ms. Gillespie is still missing.”

  I nodded.

  “I heard about those swastikas,” she said. She shook her head. “It all goes together, doesn’t it? With her poisoned dog, I mean.”

  I shrugged. “I believe it does.”

  “The sheriff was by the other day. He talked to Betsy. I guess it’s important who picked up the puppy.” She shook her head. “I blew it.”

  “You didn’t know,” I said. “I have a question for you.”

  She nodded.

  “You’ve lived around here for a long time, right?”

  She smiled. “All my life, except for college.”

  “You know Cutter’s Run?”

  “Sure. There used to be a tannery there.”

  “I went fishing there yesterday,” I said. “Didn’t catch a thing. And I felt a little woozy afterward. I figure the water’s still got old chemicals in it, and maybe runoff from the orchards, you know, chemical fertilizers, the insecticides they spray on the trees, and—”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking that little puppy drank from the stream and that’s what poisoned him. It’s possible, of course, but I doubt it. Not the way that poison acted. He died so fast. I think he got into something undiluted and powerful and—and unusual.” She smiled at me. “Dogs can drink almost anything, you know. Stuff that would make us vomit for a week doesn’t even faze them.”

  I shrugged. “It was just a thought. Nothing lives there, and—”

  “You didn’t catch anything, so you think noth
ing lives there?” She smiled.

  “It seemed dead,” I said lamely.

  “I don’t think they stock it,” she said. “It warms up too much in the summer for trout.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry…”

  “I apologize,” I said. “You’re busy. Thanks for your time.”

  “I wish I could be of more help.”

  As we walked back into the waiting room, she said, “Did you hear about Noah Hollingsworth?”

  “I heard he died.”

  “A nice man,” she said. “I treated his horse. He gave me a basket of apples every fall.”

  CHAPTER 29

  WHEN I WALKED INTO Leon’s store, Pauline was sitting on the stool behind the counter with her arms folded over her chest and two deep vertical creases carved into the middle of her forehead. She watched me suspiciously over the tops of her wire-rimmed glasses as I approached her, and before I could say anything, she reached under the counter and slapped two newspapers onto the counter. “We run out,” she said, her voice dripping with accusation. “Leon insisted we hold ’em for you, even though we had to turn down folks who come in askin’ for one. I say first come, first served. But Leon says you always come for your paper. Well, you wasn’t in yesterday, so I told him he’s full of it. Anyways, here’s your papers. The news ain’t very new anymore.”

  I smiled. “Thank you for holding them, Mrs. Staples. I do appreciate it.” I handed her a dollar bill, and she slipped it into the cash register.

  I folded the newspapers and tucked them under my arm. “Is Leon around?” I said.

  She snapped her chin toward the back of the store. “S’pose to be countin’ stock. Probly sneakin’ in a nap.”

  “Mind if I speak to him?”

  “Help yourself,” she said with a shrug.

  “Thanks.” I started for the stockroom out back.

  “Excitement up at Hollingsworth’s this mornin’, Mr. Coyne,” said Pauline. “Hear they carted old Noah away.”

  I stopped and turned around. Pauline Staples was frowning and nodding. “Hear the first person Miss Fancy Pants called was you, Mr. Coyne,” she said. “Hear it wasn’t no accident, neither, what happened to Noah.”