A Fine Line

by William G. Tapply

  I nodded.

  Ben looked up. Our waiter put our drinks in front of us and asked us if we were ready to order.

  Ben glanced at his watch and nodded. “I’ve only got about an hour. Gotta get back to the office.”

  “On a Friday night?” I said.

  He shrugged. “You do business when you can. I got a guy coming in at eight.”

  I ordered the 14-ounce Porterhouse with a baked potato, hold the sour cream, and Ben had a Greek salad. I’d forgotten that he was a vegetarian.

  After the waiter left, Ben said, “That accident out at Quabbin changed Duffy. It pretty much destroyed his life.”

  I nodded.

  “The man goes everywhere, does everything,” he said. “Then the next thing you know, he’s paralyzed, can’t leave his house. And now he falls down and dies in his own backyard?” He shook his head. “Life is full of ironies, isn’t it?”

  Walt had been murdered, of course. But Detective Mendoza had forbidden me to tell anybody.

  When our food came, I told Ben that I’d have to get Walt’s collection appraised in order to settle his estate and was wondering if he’d do it. Ben, with no false modesty, reminded me that he’d traveled all over the country to appraise estates, that he was considered an expert on books, manuscripts and artwork pertaining to nature and wildlife in general and birds in particular, and that it would take him at least a week, so I should give him ample notice.

  I told him that until Ethan showed up, there was nothing much to do, but I’d keep in touch with him.

  After we finished eating, Ben looked at his watch and said, “I hate to eat and run, but . . .”

  “No coffee? No dessert?”

  “I’ve really got to get back.”

  He took out his wallet, but I held up my hand. “I got it. I’ll charge it against Walt’s account.”

  “Well, okay. I guess he can spare it now.”

  I held out my hand to Ben. “We’ll be in touch,” I said.

  He shook my hand, then turned and shambled out of the restaurant.

  I had a slab of lemon meringue pie and a cup of coffee, then walked home through the city.

  When I got there, I watched the end of the ball game, then the news, which did not report on Walt’s death. That left me feeling vaguely sad.

  After the news, I went to bed and called Evie. We exchanged stories about our days and tried to talk dirty, but my heart wasn’t in it, which Evie instantly picked up on. She said she loved me anyway.

  I read a chapter of Moby Dick, turned out the light, and smoked the day’s last cigarette in the dark.

  I had to admit it. My place had been feeling empty lately. But without Henry sleeping on the floor beside me, it felt even emptier.

  NINE

  The ringing of the phone dragged me out of a deep black sleep. Ethan, I thought. I fumbled around in the dark, found the receiver on the table beside my bed, put it to my ear, and said, “Ethan? Is that you?”

  A growly, muffled male voice said something that sounded like, “Boomer pierce ever.”

  “Huh?” I said. “Who’s this?”

  There was a hesitation. Then a click. Then nothing.

  I sighed and put the phone back. The alarm clock on my bedside table read 3:50. The darkest hour. If it wasn’t a dog waking me up, it was some crank phone call mumbling nonsense in my ear.

  I lay there and smoked a cigarette in the dark. Two days had passed since Walt Duffy was murdered, and I still hadn’t heard from Ethan. What the hell was going on?

  I was sipping my coffee out on my balcony overlooking the harbor at eight o’clock the next morning, watching the gulls and terns wheeling over the water and the Saturday-morning fishing and pleasure craft cutting white wakes through it when I remembered that phone call, which, in turn, reminded me of the hangups I’d found on my voicemail the night before.

  I went inside, picked up the telephone, and dialed star-69.

  The mechanical voice said, “The number you are trying to call cannot be reached by this method.”

  Oh, well. Some drunk on a cell phone, probably. He’d mumbled his words. They made no sense. He—or she, maybe—had sounded like he was talking through a wet sock.

  I refilled my coffee mug and went back out to the balcony. The day had dawned cloudy and still. The air tasted salty and felt damp on my face. It smelled like rain. I thought about bagging my plan to go trout fishing and spending a quiet Saturday at home. I could catch up on all the weekend paperwork Julie had stuffed into my briefcase, watch the ball game, maybe start that new Nick Lyons book and take a nap while I waited for Evie to show up. If Henry were here, we’d go for a few walks. Maybe I’d try to teach him something new. He wasn’t that old.

  The truth was, Walt Duffy’s murder and Ethan’s disappearance felt, somehow, like my responsibility. A day of fishing struck me as frivolous. It seemed as if I should do something more useful with my time than wading in a trout stream.

  In the end, of course, I decided I better go fishing. The gods don’t give a man a completely empty Saturday in June very often, and to squander it would surely offend them.

  I got to the Squannacook a little before eleven. The river more or less followed Route 119 in Townsend, but there were several stretches where it bent away from the road. These were places that most fishermen considered too inaccessible to bother with. They were the places I liked, for that very reason.

  I parked in a little pull-off on a side road near the state forest. As I’d hoped, no other cars were parked there. I quickly tugged on my waders and strung up my rod. Then I set off through the woods, guided by the gurgling sound of water flowing around rocks and over gravel.

  When I reached the riverbank, I sat on a log, lit a cigarette, and watched the currents glide past me.

  Pocket water. This section of the stream was studded with boulders, and it ran quick and relatively shallow. Up close, a discerning angler such as I could identify the little eddies and holes and slicks and riffles—the pockets where trout liked to lurk.

  A few yellowish mayflies fluttered over the water. Mosquitoes and blackflies, too. I rubbed some insect repellent on my arms, face and neck.

  I sat there looking for feeding fish. In that quick-moving, broken water, the rings of their rises dissipated instantly. You needed to see the splash or the trout’s little nose when it poked through the surface.

  I forced myself to stay seated for the length of time it took me to finish my cigarette, even though I spotted two or three spurty little rises against the far bank. Then I tied on a bushy white-winged dry fly, stepped into the water, and began casting. I picked my targets—the little chute between two boulders where the current quickened, the riffly place that spilled into deeper water, the slick, shadowy, slow-moving current under the hemlocks against the bank . . . and almost instantly my mind was absolutely focused on studying the water, locating my targets, dropping my fly onto them, and watching it bob along on the currents, and all thoughts of Walt Duffy’s murder, of Ethan’s disappearance, of Henry and Ben Frye, of Julie and Evie, of my sons and my ex-wife and my old girlfriends, of my clients and my cases, of taxes and mortgages, of debtors and creditors, of friends and relatives living and dead, of the time and the season and the year, of hunger and thirst, of age and illness—all of those earthly preoccupations were entirely gone.

  I was fishing.

  Non-fishing friends sometimes tell me, “Oh, I’d like to try fly-fishing sometime. It looks like fun. I just don’t think I have the patience for it.”

  In fact, patience is no virtue for the serious angler. Concentration, intensity, focus, imagination. That’s what fly-fishing for stream trout requires. But I don’t tell my friends that. I just nod and say, “Oh, yes. You’ve got to have plenty of patience.” There are too damn many fishermen cluttering up the prettiest parts of the world already.

  Sometime toward the end of the afternoon a misty rain began to filter down, and a short time later small olive-colored mayflies appe
ared on the water, and trout began to sip them. I tied on the right fly, as the fish quickly told me, and for an hour or so I caught and released trout more or less continually. They weren’t particularly large, and I knew that most of them had been born in a cement trough at a state fish hatchery, but still, they were trout and they demanded a fly that looked and behaved like the real ones they’d decided to eat, and by the time the hatch petered out I felt happy and triumphant and replete.

  I’d fished my way a couple of miles upstream when I decided it was time to quit. It was a long wet walk through the woods back to my car, and by the time I got there it was nearly dark and the misty rain had turned into a drizzle.

  My mind was still full of trout and mayflies and those subtle sippy little strikes that had made my fly disappear in a bubble, and it wasn’t until I was in my car with the windshield wipers going that I started looking forward to seeing Evie.

  I hoped her day with her friend at the Arboretum hadn’t been ruined by the rain.

  And then my mind turned to Walt and Ethan, and I felt guilty for not thinking about them while I’d been fishing.

  By the time I got back to the city, a steady rain was falling, and my apartment was dark and empty and altogether gloomy. Nine o’clock, and no Evie. Not even a dog to greet me at the door.

  I checked my answering machine. No messages, from Ethan or from Evie or from one of my sons or from some mumbling drunk. No messages from anybody.

  I shucked off my wet clothes, took a long steamy shower, and pulled on a clean T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and just about the time I’d settled myself on the sofa with a glass of Rebel Yell in one hand and the TV remote in the other, I heard a key scratching in the door.

  I got there in time to help Evie slip off her raincoat. She bent her head forward and pulled her hair to the side so I could kiss the back of her neck. That, she’d taught me, was a special place. Then she turned in my arms, pressed against me, kissed me hard on the mouth, and grabbed my hand. She led me directly to the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and reached out to unbuckle my belt.

  I started to protest that I’d just gotten dressed, but I figured that would not deter her.

  Sometime later I got up, found my drink where I’d left it on the coffee table and brought it back to the bedroom, and Evie and I passed it back and forth and exchanged stories of our days. I thought mine had been a lot more eventful than hers. She hadn’t caught a single trout all day.

  I, on the other hand, hadn’t gotten twenty percent off a new Coach shoulder bag at some shop on Newbury Street.

  We talked for a long time, lying there on our backs with our heads on our bunched-up pillows. When we both started yawning, I got up, loaded up the electric coffeemaker, and turned off the lights. By the time I got back to the bedroom, Evie was asleep.

  I woke up abruptly with the panicky certainty that Evie was gone.

  I found her out on the balcony. She had pulled on one of my old sweatshirts and was bent forward with her forearms braced on the railing. She had my binoculars pressed against her eyes aiming toward Logan Airport on the other side of the harbor.

  I saw instantly what she was looking at. A big fire was blazing over there on the edge of the water in East Boston.

  I leaned on the railing beside her.

  “I heard a kind of thumping noise,” she said softly. “It woke me up. Here. Have a look.” She handed me the binoculars.

  Across the misty water I saw the blue and red lights of firetrucks and police cars flashing around the edges of the fire. On the harbor, fireboats were shooting high arching spouts of water at the flames.

  “One of those old warehouses, probably,” I said. “Or maybe a fuel storage depot. Those big LNG tankers offload over there.”

  I went inside, found my cigarettes, and brought them out to the balcony. It had stopped raining, but the air was moist and a layer of fog lay over the harbor, so that the fire and the lights looked blurry half a mile away.

  “I hate fires,” said Evie softly. “Ever since . . .”

  “I know,” said. “Me, too.”

  We watched the fire burn for quite a while. When we went back to bed, it was still blazing over there across the harbor.

  I woke up early and slipped out of bed without disturbing Evie. I plugged in the coffee machine, then turned on the little television on the kitchen counter.

  I had to scan several channels before I found some early Sunday-morning news, and I had to wait nearly to the end before they mentioned the fire. The warehouse, they reported, was owned by some big French conglomerate called Beau Marc Industries. It was located on Pier Seven on the Boston Harbor in East Boston. They were estimating the damage at two million dollars, and they had not ruled out arson.

  It took a couple of minutes for it to sink in.

  Beau Marc. Pier Seven.

  Boomer pierce ever.

  Jesus!

  That phone call that had awakened me in the dark hours of Saturday morning. He was predicting that fire. He was telling me about it. That it was going to happen.

  Who the hell would do that?

  Then I thought: Why me?

  When Evie woke up, I was sipping my second cup of coffee out on the balcony and scanning the site of the fire through my binoculars. She poured herself a mugful, brought it out, and sat beside me. She was wearing one of my T-shirts and a pair of my sweatpants. They fit her quite nicely, except the pants were a little long for her.

  “What do you see?” she said.

  “Not much. I’m going to go over, take a look. Want to come?”

  “Why?”

  “Why would you want to come with me?”

  “Why would you want to go?” she said.

  I told her about the phone call and the news report.

  “That’s way spooky, Brady,” said Evie.

  I nodded.

  “Would you mind if I didn’t go with you?” she said. “I really hate fires. They’re too depressing. I’d rather just curl up with the Sunday paper.”

  I kissed her forehead. “I don’t want you to be depressed. I won’t be long.”

  It took about fifteen minutes in the sparse Sunday-morning traffic to zip through the Callahan tunnel and wend my way through the streets of East Boston to the side street that led down to the water. On this side of the harbor, the air was thick and the sky dark. Particles of white ash accumulated on the hood of my car.

  I parked a block from a couple of fire engines, got out of my car, and walked toward the standing brick walls and the blackened piles of rubble that had been a warehouse the previous day. Curls of smoke still rose here and there from charred rafters, and the smell of burnt rubber hung heavy and acrid in the damp air.

  The entire area was circled by crime-scene tape.

  I stood there a respectful distance from what was left of the building. A little clot of elderly men wearing baggy pants and cardigan sweaters came along and stood next to me. They weren’t saying much. Just looking. I wondered what they were thinking about this big fire in their neighborhood.

  After a few minutes, a fireman with wet sooty smudges on his face came trudging toward us, heading for the parked vehicles. His eyes were red, and he was looking at the ground. I guessed he’d been up all night.

  “Excuse me,” I said to him after he ducked under the tape.

  He looked at me and blinked.

  “I was wondering who’s in charge here,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I might have some helpful information.”

  “Helpful how?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “Look. I live across the harbor. I saw the fire last night.”

  “You saw something you think is helpful?”

  “If it would be easier, you could have somebody call me,” I said. “I know you guys are busy.”

  The fireman squinted at me for a minute, then nodded. “Man in charge is Lieutenant Keeler. He’s the PD arson investigator. You should talk to him.”

  “C
an you point him out to me?”

  “Wait here,” he said. He turned, ducked under the tape, and headed back to the standing walls with the empty windows and the piles of brick and blackened wood that had once been the Beau Marc warehouse.

  A few minutes later, the fireman reappeared. With him was a tall rangy man wearing a yellow hardhat, a blue T-shirt, blue jeans, and rubber boots. The letters BPD were stenciled on the hardhat. He had a clipboard in one hand, and a cell phone was clipped to his belt. The fireman pointed to me, and the tall guy nodded and came toward me.

  “I’m Lieutenant Keeler,” he said. He took off his hardhat and wiped his forehead with his wrist. He had close-cropped red hair. His eyes and face were red, too. He looked about forty. “You got something for us?” he said.

  I told him about the phone call I’d received around four A.M. on Saturday morning, and how I lived directly across the harbor from the warehouse.

  “You didn’t recognize the voice, huh?” he said.

  “No.”

  “You thought it was just some crank call?”

  I shrugged. “He sounded drunk. His voice was muffled. I figured it was a wrong number.”

  “But he said Beau Marc Industries? Pier Seven?”

  “I didn’t recognize those words when he said them,” I said. “But when I heard them on the news this morning, I realized that’s what he said.”

  “When did you say this was?”

  “Friday night. Early Saturday morning, actually.”

  Keeler shook his head. “What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I mean,” he said, “why you? Who’d call you about a fire he was going to set the next night, right where you’d be sure to see it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This was an arson fire, then?”

  He nodded. “And it sounds like you talked to the arsonist. So why would he want to tell you about it, have you see it?”

  “The only thing I can think of . . .” I shook my head. “It makes no sense. I don’t see how there could be any connection.”

  “What?” said Keeler. “Connection with what?”