A Fine Line

by William G. Tapply

  The place appeared to be deserted. I let down the hammer on my revolver and put it back into my pocket.

  “You there, Mr. Coyne?”

  “I’m standing in the kitchen.”

  “Close the door.”

  When I turned to close the door behind me, I saw that a poster was tacked on its inside. I’d seen that poster before. It was a childish drawing of an owl with the big red letters S O L F under it.

  “Is this Conrad Henshall’s apartment?” I said into the phone. “Are you Henshall?”

  “I could be anybody, couldn’t I?” he said. “Look on the table, Mr. Coyne. Tell me what you see.”

  I went over and looked. “I see a videotape. Also a sugar bowl and salt and pepper shakers.”

  “Guess what we’re interested in?”

  “I’d guess the tape,” I said, “but maybe there’s a prize in the sugar bowl.”

  “Pick up the tape,” he said, “and take it through the doorway in front of you. You’ll see a television set. It’s very important that you do exactly what I tell you, Mr. Coyne. Are you with me?”

  “I’m with you.” I went into the other room. “I see the TV.”

  “Please play the tape. Then you’ll receive your next instructions. Isn’t this fun?”

  Don’t lose your temper, J.W. had said. Don’t give in to him. He’s toying with you, like a fish on a hook. Don’t let him wear you down.

  I took a deep breath. “I’ve had more fun, I’ve had less fun,” I said. “This is mainly annoying.”

  “It gets better,” he said. “Play the tape. Keep me on the line.”

  I was in a tiny living room, maybe twelve by twelve. One sooty window looked across the alley to someone else’s sooty window. The television sat on a table against one wall, and across from it was an overstuffed chair with a wooden coffee table in front of it.

  I put the phone on the table, went over to the TV, turned it on, slid the tape into the VCR, hit the “play” button, and sat in the chair to watch.

  There was a minute of fuzz. Then the owl image appeared on the screen. Then it switched to a picture of the front page of the Boston Globe sports section. The headline read, “Manny Helps Sox Over Tigers, 8–3.” The subhead said, “Sox open homestand on high note.”

  The date was Saturday, June 27. That was today’s date. I guessed it was the bulldog edition, the one that hits the streets at about three in the morning.

  As I looked, the camera slowly pulled back until I could see that somebody was holding up the newspaper. It kept pulling back until the person’s face was revealed.

  It was Ethan Duffy. His eyes were covered with a strip of duct tape, but it was unmistakably Ethan.

  I caught just a glimpse of the bare wall behind him before the red letters S O L F filled the screen.

  Then the fuzz returned.

  The entire show lasted no more than two minutes.

  I picked up the phone. “You’ve got Ethan?”

  “As you see, Mr. Coyne.”

  “What do you want?”

  “All in good time. I want you to stop the tape and rewind it. Do it now.”

  When I hit the stop button, a Roadrunner cartoon appeared on the television screen. The tape took about ten seconds to rewind. “Now what?” I said.

  “Hit the record button.”

  “To erase the tape.”

  “Naturally.”

  I did what he said. “It’s recording Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner,” I told him.

  “Appropriate, don’t you think?”

  “Beep-beep,” I said. “Tell me what you want with me. I’ll cooperate. Let Ethan go.”

  “Be patient, Mr. Coyne. I’ll contact you when the time comes. Now it’s time for you to go home. I don’t need to remind you that if any officers of the law come snooping around Vintage Vinyl this weekend, you will have young Mr. Duffy’s fate on your conscience.”

  “If you’ll just—”

  But he was gone.

  I shoved the phone into my pants pocket and made a quick survey of the apartment. A tiny bedroom with a single window looking out on the alley held a single bed and a chest of drawers. The blankets on the bed were thrown back, as if it had been slept in. The drawers were empty.

  In the bathroom there was a half-empty tube of toothpaste on the side of the sink and a bath towel draped over the shower rod. I sniffed the towel. It was dry and smelled faintly sour.

  I went out to the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. A cardboard carton of orange juice, a couple of apples, a hunk of cheddar cheese, some leftover pizza wrapped in aluminum foil. The juice had not gone bad, and neither the cheese nor the pizza had grown mold.

  Somebody had been staying here recently.

  Ethan Duffy, I assumed.

  He wasn’t here any longer. He was somewhere else, and he had duct tape over his eyes.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When I walked into my apartment, I found Evie and Henry sitting out on my balcony watching the boat traffic on the harbor. I lifted Evie’s hair and kissed the back of her neck, then sat in the aluminum folding chair beside her.

  “Did you give Henry some breakfast?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And we took a long walk. Now tell me where you’ve been, what’s going on.”

  “Ethan’s been kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  I nodded.

  She grabbed my arm. “Oh, Brady. What happened?”

  I told her.

  “Duct tape over his eyes?” she said when I finished.

  I nodded.

  “But that’s good, isn’t it?” she said. “Doesn’t that mean the kidnapper doesn’t want Ethan to see his face? That he’s going to let him go?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It might mean that. It might just be to keep him under control.”

  “And you haven’t figured out who this person is?”

  I shook my head. “I thought it might be Conrad Henshall, the guy who owns the record shop. If so, he’s got a lot of balls, sending me to the apartment right over the shop. But I can’t recognize the voice. Maybe it’s nobody I know. Maybe it’s just some SOLF crackpot. Or maybe it’s got nothing to do with SOLF.”

  “But why? Why kidnap that boy? And why drag you into it this way?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I shook my head.

  “You can’t—”

  “I know,” I said. “J.W. said I should listen to my heart. Now both my heart and my head are telling me I should call Horowitz.”

  “It’s about time.”

  “If I do this wrong,” I said, “Ethan’s doomed.”

  “What’s this person want out of you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s just enjoying his game. Maybe when he gets sick of it, or when he thinks he’s won, he’ll kill Ethan.”

  “Call your friend Horowitz,” said Evie. “He’ll know what to do.”

  I went inside, got my portable telephone from the bedroom, took it to the sofa, and dialed Horowitz’s cell phone.

  He answered with his usual grumpy, “What?”

  “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Murders. Fires. Spotted owls. Kidnapping.”

  “Huh? Kidnapping?”

  “Ethan Duffy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Trust me, he’s kidnapped.”

  “Okay. I’ll call Randall, we’ll get together at One Central Plaza in an hour. I’ll send a car around for you.”

  “No good,” I said. “I’m being, um, monitored. This has got to be just me and you.”

  “Christ, Coyne, I can’t do that. I’m supposed to—”

  I hung up on him, put the phone on the coffee table, lit a cigarette, and waited.

  Five minutes later he called me back. “Okay, you got my attention. How do you want to play it?”

  “No FBI. Not until you and I agree that they can safely be brou
ght into it.”

  “Yeah, okay. I knew you were gonna say that. So I lose my job. Fuck it. What’s going on?”

  “Yesterday morning my dog barks at the door,” I said. “I open it. On the floor there’s a big padded envelope with my name on it. I bring it inside and open it. There’s a cellular phone inside. Then it rings. It’s that same guy.”

  “The one who called you about those fires? He’s got the Duffy kid?”

  “Yes. He tells me to carry this phone with me all the time. Says it used to be Walt Duffy’s, which means he’s the one who killed Walt and has been calling to tell me about the fires he’s going to set. He keeps calling me on it, telling me what he wants me to do. Yanking me around. Bastard’s having fun with it. I’m pretty sure he’s following me around. He seems to know where I am, what I’m doing, all the time. So this morning—”

  “Okay, Coyne. That’s enough.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Lemme think.”

  I shut up.

  Horowitz was silent for a minute. Then he said, “How about a ball game this afternoon? The state cops have season tickets at Fenway. Four boxes right by the Red Sox dugout. Nice seats. Detroit’s in town.”

  “Can you get us into those seats?”

  “Lemme get back to you,” he said, and then he hung up on me.

  He called back about an hour later. “Section seventeen,” he said, “row three, seats one through four. First pitch at one-oh-five. Wakefield’s on the hill. There’ll be two tickets waiting for you at the window. Bring Evie. I’m bringing my wife.”

  “I better not see Randall or Elliot there,” I said, “or Mendoza or Keeler, either.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Horowitz. “But I wouldn’t worry about being seen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Game’s sold out. Standing room only. Your friend can’t get in.”

  “That’s no consolation,” I said. “This guy seems to be everywhere, know everything. We’ve still got to be careful.”

  “Oh, I’ll be careful,” he said. “You’re the amateur. You’re the one I worry about. Bring your cell phone with you.”

  Evie and I decided to walk to Kenmore Square, take advantage of the damn San Diego weather while it lasted. We left my apartment a little after noon. When I told Henry he couldn’t come to the ball game with us because we didn’t have an extra ticket, he climbed up on the sofa, closed his eyes, and pretended to ignore us.

  I carried the cell phone in my pants pocket. I left my .38 home.

  We had just walked through the Public Garden and crossed Arlington Street when the phone beeped. I fished it out. “I’m here,” I said.

  “Where are you going?” said the voice.

  “Red Sox game.”

  “Nice day for it,” he said, and disconnected.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “Sonofabitch is around here somewhere,” I muttered.

  “He wanted to know where we were going?”

  “Yes.”

  “He thought you’d be home waiting for him to call,” she said, “all worried and frightened. Instead, you’re going to a ball game with your girlfriend. You’ve got him off balance.”

  “You think that’s a good thing?”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  The streets and sidewalks around Kenmore Square were jammed with Red Sox fans descending on Fenway from all over New England. Men with pushcarts hawked boiled hot dogs and roasted unshelled peanuts and Italian sausages and Red Sox memorabilia at prices that were, they claimed, half of what you’d pay inside the park. There were whispering scalpers, too, with tickets you could buy for twice their face value.

  I bought official Red Sox caps for Evie and me. We’d need the visors. The afternoon sun would be in our faces sitting on the first-base side. Evie wanted peanuts, so I bought us each a bag. We’d get our beers inside.

  Just a happy couple at the old ball game on a picturebook New England Saturday afternoon in June. That was us.

  I picked up the tickets Horowitz had left at the window, and as Evie and I waited inside to pass through the turnstile, I slipped the cell phone to her. “Tuck it into your bag,” I said. “If it beeps, give it to me.”

  I was about ten years old the first time I walked up the runway and got my first look inside Fenway Park. It was like the first time I saw the Grand Canyon. It gave me the shivers. The grass was as lush as an emerald carpet, mown in a geometric crisscross pattern and shimmering in the summer sunshine. The foul lines were absolutely white and perfectly straight, and the infield dirt was golden orange. And out there was the Green Monster, and the old-fashioned scoreboard where they posted the numbers by hand, and the flagpole in center field, and the bullpens in front of the bleachers in right, and Pesky’s Pole in the corner. Legendary places, storybook places. The Babe had won a World Series for the Red Sox here, and Ted Williams, who’d done everything else, hadn’t.

  When Evie and I walked up the ramp, I got the shivers all over again.

  We stepped out into the sunshine. An usher asked for our tickets and led us down to our seats. Horowitz was sitting on the aisle with his wife, Alyse, beside him. The usher spoke to them, and they stood up to let Evie and me sidestep past them.

  I went in first. Evie sat beside Alyse, putting as much distance as possible between Horowitz and me.

  I decided to assume that the guy with the voice had bought himself a scalped ticket. I imagined that he had binoculars, and wherever he was in the ballpark, he had his eye on me.

  Whether it was true or not, it was how I intended to play it with Horowitz.

  I leaned my head to Evie and said, “That’s Mrs. Horowitz beside you. Her name is Alyse. Say hi to her as if she were some stranger. Tell her to tell Roger that we should assume we’re being watched.”

  While Evie spoke to Alyse, I said hello to the guy on my right. He had his son with him. It was their first-ever fatherson trip to Fenway, he told me. The boy looked about ten. He had his glove with him, hoping for a foul ball. Reminded me of me, many years ago, with my father.

  The groundskeepers were raking the infield. Some of the players were playing catch in front of the dugout. From where we were sitting next to the field, we could see their faces. They all looked too young to be millionaires.

  “Roger,” I said, keeping my eyes on the field.

  “Talk to me,” said Horowitz.

  “Evie,” I said, “pretend I’m talking to you, okay?”

  She turned to me, smiled, and kissed my cheek. “This is deliciously clandestine,” she said. “If it weren’t so scary, it would be kinda fun.”

  Without once looking at him, I told Horowitz everything that had happened since the arrival of the cell phone. I paused while we stood for the national anthem, then continued after we sat down again.

  “Evie,” said Horowitz when I finished, “slip that damn phone to Alyse, okay?”

  She did it so smoothly that even sitting beside her, I almost missed it.

  At the end of the second inning Horowitz stood and walked up the aisle. He was back five minutes later with two beers. He gave one of them to Alyse.

  “I checked out your phone,” he said. “As I figured, he erased the old messages and the speed-dial numbers and the memory numbers. No bugs, fortunately. It’s clean.”

  “Bugs?” I said.

  “It occurred to me that he could’ve slipped one of those little listening devices into it somewhere. They’re about the size of a dime. Used to be, only the FBI, CIA, those guys had ’em. Now you can get ’em on the Internet, for Christ’s sake. Listen to everything you say whether you’re talking on the phone or not.”

  “Christ,” I muttered. “That would’ve been disastrous.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You should’ve thought of it. Alyse, honey, give this to Evie, huh?”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Alyse hold the phone beside her leg. Evie took it, and it disappeared into her bag.

  Horowitz sat back and sipped his beer.
We watched the game. He didn’t say anything.

  “What now?” I said to him finally.

  “Relax. We’ve got the whole ball game. You’re worried this nutcake is watching us? Pretend you’re having a good time.”

  The Red Sox scored a couple of runs in the sixth inning, and when we stood up to cheer, Horowitz said, “Vintage Vinyl? That’s the name of that place, right? In Central Square?”

  “Yes, but don’t go near it. He’ll know.”

  “I got the picture, Coyne.”

  “No cops dressed like exterminators,” I said. “This guy’s smart.”

  “You called me, remember?” he said. “Now you’ve got to trust my judgment.”

  “If anything happens to Ethan . . .”

  He sat down and drained his cup of Fenway Park beer.

  At the end of the inning, I stood up. “Gotta go pee,” I told Evie. “Want something? They stop selling beer after the seventh inning.”

  “Just a Coke, please,” she said. “Ballpark beer tastes like warm urine.”

  I sidled past Horowitz and started up the aisle. I was hoping he’d follow me and stand beside me at the porcelain trough that passes for a urinal in the Fenway Park men’s rooms so we could talk some more.

  But he didn’t.

  I returned with two Cokes. As I slid past Horowitz, I said, “What else can I tell you?”

  “Nothin’,” he said.

  I sat down and handed a Coke to Evie. I leaned toward her and said, for Horowitz’s benefit, “So now what happens?”

  “Just do what you’ve been doing,” he said. “He calls you, you call me. And don’t say anything about this to anybody, understand?”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody,” he said.

  The Red Sox retired the Tigers in the ninth inning and the game was over, a satisfying one-run victory for the Old Towne Team. Everybody in the ballpark stood up to cheer as the players trotted off the field.

  When Evie and I turned to leave, Horowitz and Alyse were gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  That evening after supper, Evie and I took our coffee out onto the balcony. The sun was setting somewhere behind us, and over the harbor, the light was fading from the sky. The breeze had shifted. Now it was coming in off the water, and it tasted salty and moist. The bell buoy in the channel was clanging hollowly the way it does when the sea kicks up and the air becomes damp and heavy. Out toward the eastern horizon over the airport, dark clouds were boiling and churning and moving toward us.