One-Way Ticket

by William G. Tapply

  She looked at him. “You think we should decide what’s right by majority rule?”

  He smiled. “Hard to believe we stayed married that long.”

  Teresa smiled back at him. It was a sweet smile that struck me as poisonous. “I’ll go along with Mrs. Lancaster,” she said. “And you and Jessica. If we’re going to vote, it might as well be unanimous.”

  Dalt looked at her for a minute, then turned to me. “It’s decided, then. So now what?”

  “I guess that’s it for now,” I said. “Go home. Try to get some sleep. Let’s see what happens. We’ll stay in touch. Keep your cell phones with you. Any thoughts or conjectures or questions or brainstorms, let me know. I’ll do the same.”

  “Like what?” Dalt said.

  “Like,” I said, “see if you can think of anybody besides Paulie Russo who might have kidnapped your son, for one thing.”

  He nodded. “What are you going to do?”

  “Me?” I said. “I’ll wait and ponder, just like you. I’ll hope that somebody calls. As soon as you leave my house, I’m going to try to make up for a sleepless night.”

  “Right,” he said. “We should all leave and let Brady get to bed. He was up all night trying to help us.”

  We exchanged cell phone numbers. Then we all moved over to the door. Jess and Teresa both hugged me. Adrienne gave me a bony handshake. Dalt shook my hand, too.

  Henry and I went out onto the porch and watched them drive away, Teresa alone in her Nissan Murano and the three Lancasters in Adrienne’s big Chrysler.

  Nineteen

  AFTER THE CHRYSLER’S TAILLIGHTS blinked out of sight up the hill, I sat on the steps beside Henry. The streetlights on Mt. Vernon Street had come on. Where they shone through the trees, they cast wavering shadows on the street and sidewalks. “I think that was a mistake,” I said to him. “What do you think?”

  He cocked his head and looked at me. I was familiar with that look. He was wondering about food.

  “Thanks for your input,” I said.

  It was another pleasant June evening, and Henry and I sat there savoring the sweet-smelling breeze. I realized that I’d been so intensely involved in the Robert Lancaster situation that Evie had scarcely entered my mind all day.

  But now thoughts of Evie came swarming. How weird it felt coming home to an empty house, sleeping in an empty bed, having nobody except Henry to talk to. How alien and unpleasant living alone had become for me even after just a few days, since I began sharing my life with Evie.

  Tomorrow she would know her father’s fate. I guessed it was harder for her now, not knowing, than it would be after tomorrow.

  I assumed that Ed Banyon’s fate would determine Evie’s fate, and mine, too. I tried to focus on her and what she was going through, and not on the hole in my own life that she’d left behind.

  Get over it, Coyne, I told myself. It’s not about you.

  I hoped she’d call tonight. It would be okay if she woke me up. It would be fine.

  I gave Henry’s ears a scratch. “Well,” I said to him, “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for bed.”

  He sort of shrugged, then stood up and pressed his nose against the door.

  I had my hand on the knob when a voice from behind me said, “Mr. Coyne.”

  I turned around. A man was standing on the sidewalk at the end of my front walk. He wore sunglasses and a green Celtics sweatshirt with the hood over his head. Black jeans, sneakers.

  Beside me, Henry growled deep in his throat.

  I touched the top of his head. “Sit,” I told him.

  Henry sat. I couldn’t make him stop growling, though.

  “What do you want?” I said to the man.

  He held out his hands. He was presenting a rectangular cardboard box as if he were one of the three kings of Orient. It looked like a shoe box, and I suspected it did not contain gold, frankincense, or myrrh.

  “This is for you,” the guy said.

  “What is it?” I said. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  He bent over and put the box down on the brick pathway leading up to my house. Then he turned and started to walk away.

  “Hey,” I yelled. “Wait a minute.”

  He stopped and looked at me from the darkness of the hood that shadowed his face.

  “Come back here,” I said. “Take the top off that box for me.”

  He seemed to think about it for a minute. Then he came back to the shoe box, leaned over, and took the top off. He held it up for me to see. “Okay?” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I was happy that the box hadn’t exploded, spewing shrapnel around our neighborhood and killing me and Henry. I figured the guy would have refused to take the top off if that’s what was going to happen. “Now,” I said, “tell me who I should send a thank-you note to for this gift.”

  He fitted the top back onto the box, straightened up, and laughed. Then he turned and walked down the sidewalk in the direction of Charles Street.

  Henry bounced off the front steps and started toward the shoe box. A growl rumbled in his chest. He moved stiff-legged like a bird dog that had smelled a pheasant hiding in the grass. Henry was, of course, a bird dog. On the other hand, I was pretty sure a pheasant was not hiding in that box.

  “Stay,” I told him.

  He stopped. But he kept growling.

  I went to where the box sat on my brick sidewalk. It looked inoffensive. Just a buff-colored shoe box. I used the side of my foot to push it up my front walk to the bottom of the porch steps. Henry remained standing where I’d told him to stay. His growl had turned into a whine.

  Under the bright porch light I saw a Nike swoosh logo on the side of the box. I also saw a dark blotch on the bottom corner. A bloodstain, it looked like.

  I snapped my fingers at Henry. “Get in the house,” I said.

  He stood up and came toward me. He stopped at the box, put his nose close to it, and growled.

  “In the house,” I told him again.

  He came up the steps, and we went inside.

  I found my cell phone on the kitchen table and two dish towels in a drawer. I told Henry he had to stay inside, then went out to the front porch. I used the towels like oven mitts to lift the top off the Nike shoe box.

  At first all I saw was a plastic zip-top storage bag. There were some wet rust-colored stains on the inside of the plastic.

  Old blood.

  I bent closer to see what was in the bag. It took me a minute to identify what I was looking at. It was a squarish slab of gray skin with some bloody flesh attached to it—part of a man’s upper lip with some bristly black hairs sticking out of it and a section of his cheek with a big pink mole on it.

  I swallowed back a sudden spasm of nausea.

  Hello, Mole-face Louie.

  I put the top back onto the box, still handling it with the dish towels.

  Then I sat on the front step. I took a few deep breaths to settle my stomach and slow down my heartbeat.

  Paulie had used a knife, or maybe heavy shears, to cut out this piece of the man who’d given me that kidney punch. I wondered whether he’d killed Louie first or afterward.

  Probably not Paulie himself. Probably one of his goons. Now that I thought about it, the man in the Celtics sweatshirt had looked and sounded familiar.

  I poked out Roger Horowitz’s cell number on my own. I figured that without a big hunk of his face, Louie would have a hard time staying alive, so I probably had evidence of a homicide in the Nike shoe box.

  It rang four times before he answered. “Jesus Christ, Coyne,” he snarled. “This better be good.”

  “It’s not good,” I said.

  “It’s eight-thirty on a Wednesday night,” he said. “I only got home half an hour ago. Alyse and I just sat down to eat. We haven’t eaten together all week. She made a nice pot roast. Carrots, potatoes, onions, biscuits, gravy. Alyse makes the world’s best gravy.” He blew out an exasperated breath. “So what the hell h
ave you got that you’re calling me on my business cell rather than my home phone, which I wouldn’t’ve answered, that’s more important than my wife’s gravy?”

  “That’s exactly why I didn’t call your home phone,” I said. “Because I figured you wouldn’t answer. And I’m sorry about the gravy. What I’ve got is a man’s face.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Last time I looked you did.”

  “It’s in a shoe box,” I said. “Somebody else’s face. Not mine.”

  He said nothing for a minute. Then he said, “Okay. I’ll bite. Whose face?”

  “One of Paulie Russo’s thugs. They called him Louie.”

  “And you have this Louie’s face in a shoe box… why?”

  “Please come and take it away,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. He sounded as if he had stopped listening to me. “Christ,” he muttered, and then I heard him say, “Keep it warm in the oven, honey. I gotta go… Well, don’t be mad at me. You can blame your pal Brady.” Then he said, “Hey, Coyne? You still there?”

  “I’m here, Roger.”

  “I suppose you got your fingerprints all over that box.”

  “No. I handled it with dish towels.”

  “Henry slobbered on it, though, I bet.”

  “He did not. I told him not to.”

  “Right,” he said. “Good dog. Okay. Sit tight. Don’t let the fuckin’ box out of your sight.” And he disconnected, as he usually did, without saying good-bye.

  I told Henry to sit still and guard the box while I went inside for a can of Coke. Then the two of us sat on the front steps and waited.

  Less than fifteen minutes later a dark sedan with a portable red-and-blue light flashing on its dashboard pulled to a stop in front of my house, and a short woman with a long black braid stepped out. It was Lt. Saundra Mendoza, a Boston homicide cop. Mendoza and I were old friends.

  She came up the path to where I was sitting on my front steps. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and dirty sneakers. She had a big leather bag slung over her shoulder. “Horowitz called me,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Jurisdiction,” she added.

  “Right.”

  In Massachusetts, the city of Boston has its own homicide department. For the rest of the Commonwealth, the state police have jurisdiction over homicides. In the case of Louie with the mole on his face, or what we had of him, and assuming he hadn’t survived his face-lift, it was uncertain where he’d been killed and where his face had been lopped off and where the rest of his body might turn up, In cases like this, the city and state cops worked, usually reluctantly, together.

  Mendoza looked down at the shoe box. “Looks innocent enough,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Except for the bloodstain.”

  She nodded and sat beside me. “You looked inside?”

  “It’s a bloody hunk of face.”

  “Ha,” she said. “What a world, huh?”

  “What a world, indeed,” I said. “We going to wait for Horowitz?”

  “Only way to do it,” she said.

  “I got some coffee.”

  She jerked her head at the can of Coke I was holding. “I’d rather have one of those.”

  I went inside, fetched a Coke for Saundra Mendoza, and brought it out to her.

  We sat on the front steps sipping our Cokes. We talked about the Red Sox. I understood that she didn’t want to have any conversation about the face in the shoe box until Horowitz arrived. That was all right by me. It gave me a chance to figure out what I could and couldn’t tell them.

  Twenty

  ROGER HOROWITZ PULLED UP to the curb on Mt. Vernon Street about twenty minutes later. He got out of his car, gave the door a hard, angry slam, and as he walked toward Mendoza and me, he snapped latex gloves onto his fingers.

  He stood there on the pathway looking down at the box, “You opened it, you said?” he said to me.

  “Yes. With a dish towel.”

  “And it didn’t blow up, huh?”

  “It’s not a bomb.”

  “Yeah,” he grumbled. “Sometimes, Boston, Baghdad, you can’t tell the fucking difference. Faces in shoe boxes. Christ, anyway.” He bent down and picked up the box. “Let’s go inside.”

  We went into the kitchen. Henry, who’d been sulking on the living-room sofa, scrambled down and followed us.

  I spread an old newspaper on the kitchen table, and Horowitz put the box on it and lifted off the top with his gloved fingers. He and Mendoza peered inside.

  I looked the other way.

  After a minute, Horowitz put the top back onto the box. “You got another Coke?” he said.

  I went to the refrigerator and took out a Coke for him.

  He sat at the kitchen table. Mendoza and I sat, too.

  Horowitz looked at Mendoza with his eyebrows arched.

  “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll interrupt.”

  They both fished out notebooks.

  “Okay, Coyne,” said Horowitz. “What can you tell us?”

  “Henry and I were sitting on the front steps this evening,” I said, “sometime around eight, eight-fifteen, and this man came walking up the street. He was carrying that box. He was wearing dark jeans, dark glasses, and a hooded green sweatshirt with the word ‘Celtics’ on it. The hood was pulled over his head and I couldn’t see his face. He was maybe five-eight or -nine. Heavy build, but not fat. He spoke my name. I think I recognized him, but I wouldn’t want to swear to it. He put that box down at the end of my front walk. I asked him to take off the top, and he did. Then he walked away. That’s what happened.”

  “You said you recognized the guy?” said Horowitz.

  I nodded. “I’m pretty sure he’s one of Paulie Russo’s goons. Like Louie here. Or what’s left of him.”

  “Names?”

  I shook my head. “I once heard Louie called by name, though I suppose it might not be his real name. I recognize this piece of face because of that big mole there beside where his nose used to be. The other guy, I have no idea.”

  “Could you pick him out of a lineup or ID him from a mug shot, do you think?”

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t see his face.”

  “So, okay,” said Horowitz. “The big question—”

  “I can’t say much,” I said.

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “Can’t. Ethically.”

  “Which,” he said, “in my book, means won’t. We most likely got a murder here, Coyne, in case you hadn’t figured that out. You’re obligated—”

  “I understand all my obligations,” I said. “I’ve told you what I know about the apparent murder of this guy with the mole on his face.”

  Horowitz glowered at me. “You know more than that.”

  I shook my head. “No, I really don’t.”

  He sighed. “At least you must have some idea why Paulie Russo had Louie’s face delivered to you in a shoe box.”

  “I think it’s his way of apologizing.”

  Horowitz snorted. “Apologizing? Russo? To you?”

  I nodded. “Louie’s the one who gave me that kidney punch the other day. Hurt like hell.”

  Horowitz turned to Mendoza. “Quincy Market. Coyne fell down, made a big scene. Bystander, figuring he’d had a heart attack or something, summoned an officer. Coyne didn’t say anything about Paulie Russo to her.”

  Mendoza looked at me with her eyebrows raised.

  I shrugged.

  “Louie did that, huh?” Horowitz said.

  I nodded.

  “And for that, by way of saying he’s sorry, Russo has the guy killed? That what you’re saying?”

  I shrugged. “Basically, yes. That’s how I interpret it.”

  “Basically,” he repeated.

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Come on, Coyne. Help us out here.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Well, so far it makes no sense.”

  “There are things
I can’t tell you,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Things between you and some damn client. Confidential things. Like why you got yourself kidney-punched in the first place. That privilege bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit.”

  He waved his hand in the air. “Tell us what you can, willya?”

  “I thought Russo was, um, responsible for something that might have happened to one of my clients, and—”

  “What client?” said Horowitz.

  “—and in connection with that, one of his thugs, the guy with the mole on his face—Louie—gave me that kidney punch. Subsequently I confronted Russo. He said he didn’t order Louie to hurt me, apologized for it, and said he wasn’t responsible for this, um, other thing. I made it clear I didn’t believe him. He said something like ‘How can I convince you?’ So I think this”—I pointed my chin at the shoe box—“is his way of trying to convince me.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Horowitz.

  “Of course it is,” I said. “Paulie Russo isn’t exactly the world’s sanest human being.”

  “You gotta tell us about this other thing with your client,” he said.

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t. At least not now. Not yet. Stop pushing me.”

  “You’ve got information about a crime,” he said. “You’re withholding it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Horowitz glowered at me.

  “Did it occur to you,” said Saundra Mendoza, “that this—this piece of a man’s body—might be something other than an apology?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a warning.”

  I looked at her. “The Godfather? That horse’s bloody head in the rich guy’s bed?”

  She shrugged. “Or a dead fish wrapped in newspaper.”

  “I’ll have to think about that,” I said.

  Horowitz leaned across the table toward me. “It sounds to me like you’ve got yourself into some deep shit,” he said. “You really don’t want to be involved with Paulie Russo.”

  “I’m not involved with him.”

  “That ain’t what it sounds like.”

  “I wish I could turn it all over to you,” I said. “But I can’t.”

  “We can get a subpoena,” he said, “haul you in, and if you refuse to talk, we can prosecute you for withholding information relevant to a police investigation of a felony.”