Outwitting Trolls

by William G. Tapply

  “When was that?”

  “Back when Ken and I were still married. Are you going to tell the police about him?”

  “Probably ought to make sure it’s the right guy first,” I said. “I’m glad you remembered.”

  “Me, too.” She stood up. “I’ve really got to get going. I’m supposed to be at the shop this afternoon.”

  “Will you be all right?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. This—what we just did, the fact that those detectives really seem to think I did it, that they’re trying to make a case against me—I don’t think it’s sunk in. Like the night I found Ken’s body. I thought I was fine. I felt calm, in control, but pretty soon, wham, I was a basket case.”

  “Call Tally,” I said.

  “I already thought of that.”

  Nineteen

  I walked Sharon out through our reception area to the door, where we exchanged hugs. After she left, I went to Julie’s desk. “I’d like to talk to a man named Sean Clements,” I said. “He might be a history professor at BU or BC.”

  “Might?” Julie asked.

  “That was a few years ago,” I said. “Best I can do.”

  “BU or BC?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I went into my office and fooled around with some paperwork, but my mind kept wandering back to Marcia Benetti’s interrogation of Sharon, and Sharon’s responses, and when I tried to be objective about it, it was hard not to take her seriously as a suspect. She had the means and the opportunity to murder Ken right from the beginning. She could easily have picked up a steak knife from one of the room-service trays in the corridor, and she was, of course, there in Ken’s room around the time he was stabbed.

  Now Horowitz and Benetti had come up with a motive. Ken’s insurance money, nearly two million dollars, plus the fact that he was evidently planning to cash it in. That would make killing him a matter of both greed and urgency.

  So instead of whacking away at my pile of paperwork, I sat there playing with scenarios and hypotheses, and after fifteen or twenty minutes, my console buzzed. I picked up the phone and said, “Yes?” and Julie said, “I’ve got Professor Sean Clements of the Emerson College history faculty on line two.”

  “Emerson, huh?”

  “Tracked him down,” said Julie.

  “You’re amazing,” I said.

  “And don’t you forget it.”

  I hit the blinking button on the phone console and said, “Professor Clements?”

  A deep voice with just the hint of a British accent said, “That’s right. You’re an attorney?”

  “I am,” I said. “Brady Coyne is my name.”

  “What does an attorney want with me?”

  “I want to buy you a drink.”

  “Why should I have a drink with you?” he asked.

  “I’d rather talk about it face-to-face,” I said.

  “Am I in some kind of trouble?”

  “Nothing to worry about. Meet me at Remington’s at three o’clock. You know Remington’s, don’t you?”

  “I’m not meeting some random lawyer anywhere, no matter who’s buying, if I don’t know what his agenda is.”

  “I’m not that random,” I said. “It’s about Ken Nichols.”

  “Who?”

  “Ken Nichols. The vet.”

  “I don’t know any Ken Nichols.”

  While I was talking with Professor Sean Clements, I had googled Emerson College on my desktop computer and clicked my way to the faculty directory. I found Professor Sean Clements’s name listed there, along with the courses he taught. Twentieth-Century American History Survey. The History of American Labor. The Utopians. The Great Awakening.

  I clicked on his name, and his picture popped up on my screen. He had a broad forehead and a neatly trimmed beard, flecked with gray. He was the guy.

  “You don’t know Ken Nichols?” I asked him.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “How about last Friday night. At the Beverly Suites Hotel in Natick.”

  “I don’t like your tone, sir,” he said. “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You don’t want to talk with me, I’ll just give your name to Detective Horowitz. He’s with the state police homicide division.”

  “Homicide,” said Clements softly.

  “Why are you lying to me?” I asked. “I saw you there. You saw me.”

  He blew a breath into the telephone. “Remington’s at three, you said?”

  “Know where it is?”

  “I do,” he said. “It’s right around the corner. I’m supposed to be holding office hours until four, but I can slip out early. Okay. Three o’clock at Remington’s, then.” He paused. “You called me Clem.”

  “Isn’t that what people call you?”

  “Not since college,” he said.

  Friday turned out to be another glorious late-April day, and I was glad I’d walked to the office that morning, because now I could walk down Boylston Street from my office in Copley Square to Remington’s, which was across from the Common almost to the corner of Tremont Street.

  The afternoon sun was warm on the back of my neck, and the easterly breeze coming in off the ocean was soft and tasted of brine and seaweed. I was in no hurry, so I crossed over to Commonwealth Avenue, where robins were plucking worms from the squares of lawn in front of the brownstone apartment buildings. Daffodils and pansies blossomed in the sun, and beagles and terriers tugged old folks around on leashes, and kids wearing T-shirts and baggy shorts scooted along the sidewalks on their skateboards.

  Ah, spring. Its arrival always erased the bleak leftovers of a grim winter. It was April, and the world was mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful, and when I listened hard, I imagined I could hear a goat-footed balloonman whistling far and wee.

  I reminded myself again to call J. W. Jackson and Doc Adams and Charlie McDevitt and get some fishing plans etched in stone. Springtime in New England, the best time of year in the best part of the world to enjoy it, had a habit of slipping through my fingers before I’d had the chance to properly savor it. The best way to avoid that was to make plans with friends.

  I cut diagonally across the Common and walked into Remington’s about ten after three. Professor Sean Clements—he was, indeed, the same fiftyish man with the dark, neatly trimmed beard and the high forehead whom Ken Nichols had called Clem that night in the Beverly Suites Hotel on Route 9 in Natick—was sitting at a table in the corner with a glass of draft beer in front of him.

  I went over and sat down across from him.

  He looked at me, frowned for a moment. “I remember you,” he said. “You were with Ken at the hotel.”

  “So were you. Why did you lie to me?”

  “I heard what happened. I didn’t want to be involved.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “It had nothing to do with me.”

  At that moment, a waiter came to the table. “Can I get you something, sir?” he asked me.

  I pointed at Clements’s beer glass. “One of those.”

  “Michelob draft?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  The waiter left. I looked at Clements. “So did you kill Ken Nichols?”

  “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  “You were there. I saw you.”

  “I was there the night before it happened,” he said. “I wasn’t there on Saturday night. That’s when it happened, according to the news reports.”

  “Where were you Saturday night?”

  “I was at a faculty party at the home of my department chair in Wenham,” he said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it is my business. Sounds like you’ve got yourself a really neat alibi.”

  Professor Sean Clements shrugged. I wondered if his alibi would hold up.

  “I’m going to have to give your name to the police,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Must you?�
�

  “I’m an officer of the court,” I said.

  “Whatever the fuck that means.”

  The waiter came back and put a glass of beer on a coaster in front of me. I picked it up and took a sip.

  I wiped the foam off my upper lip with the back of my wrist. “You and Ken seemed to be having some, um, conflict,” I said to Clements. “You made a pistol with your hand and shot him with your forefinger.”

  “Yeah,” said Clements. “Bang, bang. Sonofabitch owed me money.”

  “You shot him with your forefinger,” I said, “and next thing you know, somebody murders him.”

  “Stabbed, I heard,” said Clements. “Not shot.”

  I smiled. “How much did he owe you?”

  “Hundred thousand. That was about ten years ago. Add some interest to that. Not that I was ever going to see a penny of it.”

  “What was the loan for?”

  “To start up an animal clinic in Maryland. This was around the time of his divorce. He tapped a lot of his friends, I understand.”

  “Who else?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t really know. It’s what Ken said. When I told him he owed me money and I wanted it back, he said something like ‘You and a lot of other people.’”

  “A hundred grand is a significant amount of money,” I said.

  “To me it is,” Clements said, “and I wanted it back. He was evasive. Said he was working on it.”

  “You didn’t kill him, though, huh?”

  “Felt like it,” he said.

  “Somebody beat you to it.”

  “You had to take numbers,” he said, “get in line.” He picked up his beer glass and drained it. “He claimed he was going to be coming into some money very soon, and he’d be able to clean up all his debts. His father was dying, he said. It could happen any day. His father was very rich, he said, and he, Ken, was his only heir.” He looked at me. “Now that he’s dead—Ken, I mean—will I be able to recoup my money from his father’s estate, do you think?”

  “You better get yourself a lawyer,” I said.

  Sean Clements and I shook hands on the sidewalk outside Remington’s. He headed toward Tremont Street, and I walked across the Common. On the way, I called Roger Horowitz on my cell phone.

  When his voice mail picked up, I said, “The guy named Clem that I saw at the hotel, middle-aged man with the beard and the big forehead? He’s a history professor at Emerson College name of Sean Clements. Lied to me about being there at first. Admitted that Ken Nichols owed him money. Says he’s got an alibi for Saturday night. Have a nice weekend.”

  I picked up two takeout orders each of pad Thai and tom kha goong, the soup with prawns that Alex liked, at my favorite little Thai restaurant on Charles Street, and two bottles of a nice pinot verde from the wine store next door. Then I climbed the hill to my house on Mt. Vernon Street. Alex’s battered Subaru with its ski rack and Maine plates was parked in the RESIDENTS ONLY slot in front of my house. She had her own key. She’d be inside waiting for me. That made me smile.

  I climbed the steps onto my front porch, put down my bags, unlocked the door, held it open with my hip, picked up the bags, and shouldered my way inside.

  “I’m home, kids,” I called. I waited a minute, then yelled, “Hello?”

  Henry did not come bounding into the living room to lick my face, nor did Alex appear with her arms opened wide for a hug. My voice echoed in the emptiness of a house where nobody was home.

  I lugged the take-out bags into the kitchen and set them on the table. When I looked out through the back window, I saw Alex sprawled in an Adirondack chair with her legs splayed out in front of her and her arms folded over her chest and her head slumped on her shoulder. She was wearing an orange dress of some kind of silky material. Its hem was hiked halfway up her thighs, as if she’d been sunning her legs. A pair of sandals lay on the brick patio where she’d apparently shucked them off. Her bare feet were small and elegant, with orange nail polish that matched her dress.

  A beer bottle sat on the arm of her chair. Henry lay on his side on the patio beside her. Both of them appeared to be sound asleep.

  I put our dinner and wine into the refrigerator, then went upstairs and changed into a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt.

  Back downstairs, I snagged two bottles of Samuel Adams lager from the refrigerator and took them out back.

  Henry lifted his head, blinked at me, and wagged his stubby tail a couple of times. I gave his belly a rub, and he kind of smiled, then laid his head back down, sighed, and closed his eyes.

  I sat in a chair facing Alex. She hadn’t stirred. I sipped my bottle of beer and watched her sleep. Her pink tongue licked her lips, and then her eyes opened and looked directly at me.

  “Mm,” she murmured. “You’re home. Hi.”

  “Hi yourself,” I said. “Sorry if I woke you up.”

  “Oh, I was sort of half awake,” she said. She sat forward and held out her arms. “Gimme a hug.”

  I got out of my chair and hugged her, and I gave her a kiss on the mouth, too, which threatened to evolve into something more before she put her hand on my chest and pulled back. “Sweet,” she said.

  I sat down again. “How hungry are you?” I asked.

  “You talkin’ about food?”

  I smiled. “Not necessarily.”

  Her glasses sat on the arm of the chair. She picked them up and fitted them onto her face and looked at me. “Ah, that’s better,” she said. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

  “None other.”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “Three weeks,” I said, “but who’s counting.”

  “Three weeks is too long,” she said. “It makes me feel…shy. You know what I mean?”

  “It’s like we need to get to know each other all over again,” I said.

  “You feel that way?”

  “Sure I do,” I said. “For me, the shy boy battles with the dirty old man. Hard to say which might win.”

  She smiled.

  “Hey, we’ve got all weekend,” I said. “No agenda, no obligations, no deadlines, no rush. Let’s just relax, go with the flow.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to…”

  “I know,” I said. “I brought you a fresh beer.” I handed the bottle to her.

  “Thank you, dear man,” she said. She held up her bottle. “Here’s to our flow.”

  I clicked her bottle with mine, and we both drank to our flow.

  When I woke up on Saturday morning, Alex’s side of the bed was unoccupied, and Henry was not curled up on his braided rug.

  The salty damp smell of fresh spring rain seeped in through the open bedroom window. I looked outside. The leaves on the maples that lined the street glistened wetly. Gray clouds were skidding across the sky, and patches of blue appeared here and there. An April rainstorm had come and gone in the night, and it promised to turn into another nice day.

  I had a quick shower, got dressed, and stumbled downstairs. Henry was waiting at the foot of the stairs. I bent down and rubbed his ears, and then he followed me to the front door, where the thin Saturday Globe was waiting on the porch.

  In the kitchen, Alex was sitting at the table with her chin on her fists and a coffee mug by her elbow. She was frowning at her laptop computer, which was opened in front of her. “I fed Henry,” she said without looking up. “Made coffee.”

  I poured myself a mugful, went over to the table, lifted the hair away from the back of her neck, and gave her a nuzzle.

  “Umm,” she said. “Nice. Cut it out.”

  I sat across from her. “You’re working?” I asked.

  “Sorry. Yep. Gotta.”

  “Your novel?”

  She mumbled something that sounded like “Doo-wah-diddy-doo.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “Don’t wanna talk about it now,” she said.

  “How long?”

  She blew out a breath, turned, and looked at me. Her glasses were
perched down at the tip of her nose, where she wore them when she was working at her computer. Behind them, her eyes were magnified and looked quite fierce. “I’ll be at it a long time if you don’t leave me alone,” she said. “Okay?”

  “You got it,” I said. “So why don’t you take your computer into my office, or up to the bedroom, where you can have some privacy?”

  “Humph,” she said. She poked at her glasses with her fore-finger. Otherwise, she did not move. I assumed that she hadn’t registered what I said. Sometimes her powers of concentration were inhuman.

  I toasted an English muffin, spread peanut butter on it, poured myself a glass of orange juice, clicked my tongue at Henry, and took muffin, juice, coffee, and newspaper out back.

  I sat at the picnic table, ate my breakfast, and read the Globe, beginning, as I always did, with the sports section, where good news was quite common and the worst possible news was a loss for the home team or an injury to one of the players or a salary dispute, which was the kind of bad news that wouldn’t cost me any sleep. The political and economic and international news was invariably bad, and since there wasn’t much I could do about it, it always felt a little masochistic to read about it, which I nevertheless always did.

  After a while, Alex came out. She had her mug and the coffeepot with her. She refilled my mug, put the pot on the table, and sat across from me.

  “You done?” I asked.

  “Not done, exactly,” she said. “I’m never done. I can’t get away from my story. My brain whirls and bounces day and night. Anyway, I’ve shut down the writing machine for the day.”

  “How’s it going?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea. I’m trying not to judge it. That comes later. Now it’s all about getting the story out.” She took a sip of coffee and looked at me over the rim of her mug. “Sorry about last night,” she said.

  I shrugged. “You don’t need to be sorry.”

  “I thought I wanted to…”

  I waved my hand. “I doubt if talking about it will do any good.”

  “That’s a funny thing for a lawyer to say.”

  “What do you mean?”