Outwitting Trolls

by William G. Tapply

  “Sure,” I said. “You, too.” I shut my phone and slipped it into my pants pocket.

  Neither of us had said “I love you.”

  The white-haired guy walked up to the open cruiser door and spoke to the uniformed officer. Then he bent down, poked his head in, and said, “Shove over, Mr. Coyne.”

  I slid over, and he got in beside me. He held out his hand. “Wexler,” he said. “Homicide, New Hampshire state cops.”

  I gripped his hand. “Coyne,” I said. “Lawyer, Massachusetts bar.”

  He smiled quickly. “Who were you talking to?”

  “On my phone? Just now?”

  “Yes.”

  “My, um, just a friend.”

  “You tell him what’s going on here?”

  “It was a woman,” I said, “and no. I know better than to do that.”

  “That’s your vehicle?” He pointed at my green BMW, which I’d parked directly in front of the house. It was now surrounded by other vehicles.

  “Yes, it’s mine,” I said.

  “Just so you know,” he said, “I’ve talked with your buddy Detective Horowitz. He filled me in. I understand that you’re a lawyer with a client who’s involved in a homicide case in Massachusetts and there are things you probably won’t be able to talk about.”

  “I’m glad he told you that,” I said.

  Wexler took a leather-bound notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. He opened it on his leg. He had a ballpoint pen in his hand. “So tell me what you can tell me,” he said. “Like, for example, how come you happened to be here to find Mr. Nichols’s body.”

  “Wayne called me,” I said, “asked me to come up. Said he had something he wanted to show me.”

  “Show you what?”

  I shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “I didn’t actually talk with him,” I said. “He left me a phone message.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last night. On my home phone. That’s in Boston. He just said he had something he thought I’d be interested in, and I should come up the next day, which was today, sometime after seven. I got here a little after seven.”

  “Not till seven? Did he say why then?”

  “He just said he had things to do before that.”

  “You didn’t call him back, ask what it was all about?”

  “He said not to in his message,” I said. “Wayne’s not big on returning calls. I figured if I tried, he wouldn’t pick up and it would just annoy him. So, no, I didn’t.”

  “Is that message still in your voice mail?”

  “No,” I said. “I always erase voice mail messages after I listen to them.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  “To keep things neat,” I said. “I don’t like junk piling up. When I lived in the suburbs, I loaded all of the week’s trash in the family station wagon and went to the dump every Saturday morning. I took the dog, and afterward we went to a bagel place.”

  “Every Saturday?”

  “Every single one.”

  “A ritual.”

  I shrugged. “I like getting rid of junk.”

  “Like old voice mails.”

  “Exactly.”

  Wexler smiled and glanced out the window. Then he turned back to me and said, “Any idea what our victim wanted to show you? You must’ve thought about what it was?”

  “I did think about it,” I said, “but nothing occurred to me.”

  “What time did you say you got here?”

  I shrugged. “About a quarter, twenty past seven, I think. I didn’t check the time.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before I got here?”

  Wexler nodded.

  “I was on the road. It takes a little over two hours to get here from my house, which is where I was before that.”

  “You were in Boston,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. My, um, girlfriend was there. And my dog.”

  “Your girlfriend being the one you were just talking to on your cell phone?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “She lives in Maine. She left a little before I did. She called to tell me she got home all right.”

  “This afternoon, before you were on the road? Where were you then?”

  “Look,” I said. “What time do you need my alibi for?”

  He smiled. “Between one and five this afternoon ought to take care of it, according to the ME.”

  “Well, that’s easy,” I said. “We rented a canoe at the South Bridge Boathouse in Concord—Concord, Massachusetts, that is, not your state capital. That was around noontime. We turned it in around four. Paid with a credit card. Talk to them. They should have those times on their paperwork. They rent the canoes by the hour.”

  Wexler wrote something into his notebook, then looked up at me. “What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

  At that moment my cell phone buzzed in my pants pocket. I decided to let it go. If it was important, they’d leave a message.

  “My girlfriend’s name is Alexandria Shaw,” I said. “She lives in Garrison, Maine. She’s a writer.”

  He wrote that into his notebook, too. “Okay, good,” he said. “We’ll check it out.” He stuck his pen in his shirt pocket but kept the notebook open on his leg. “So when you got here, Mr. Coyne, you went right into the house?”

  “I rang the bell and knocked on the doors. The back door was unlocked, so when nobody answered my knock, I went in.”

  “That’s when you saw the body?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you called it in?”

  “Not right away.”

  “No,” Wexler said. “you didn’t. You didn’t make the call until seven fifty three. You were in there for about half an hour before you called it in.”

  “I looked around first,” I said. “After I saw that Wayne was dead, I went through the whole house.”

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked. “You’re a lawyer. You know time is of the essence. You should’ve called it in immediately.”

  “I was thinking,” I said, “that another few minutes wouldn’t make any difference to Wayne. I was thinking that he’d wanted to show me something that might’ve had a bearing on…on my case, not to mention on what happened to him, and I wondered what it was, and I thought I might know it if I saw it. So I decided to look around.”

  “A few minutes makes a difference to us.”

  “I know,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about you.”

  He shrugged. “So did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you see it? What you were looking for? What Mr. Nichols wanted to show you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “What did you touch and move when you were in the house?”

  “The only thing I touched was some light switches,” I said. “I used a handkerchief. I didn’t move anything. Oh, and Sparky.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sparky the cat. I patted her.”

  He grunted a humorless laugh. “The cat. That’s it?”

  “I didn’t disturb your crime scene,” I said. “I know how to behave in a crime scene.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s what Horowitz said.” Detective Wexler blew out a breath. “You went down to the cellar?”

  I nodded. “I saw that the office down there had been tossed.”

  “I bet you figure that whoever shot Nichols was looking for whatever it was he wanted to show you.”

  “That occurred to me,” I said.

  “Looks like they took his laptop,” said Wexler. “We didn’t find a cell phone on his person or anywhere in the house, either. He didn’t have a landline.”

  Wexler had been half turned on the backseat of the cruiser to face me while he talked with me. Now he leaned back against the seat and tilted up his face so that he was looking at the roof of the cruiser. “I doubt if this has g
ot anything to do with your case, Mr. Coyne.”

  “You don’t think so?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “We’re not discounting anything at this point, of course—but we’ve had our eye on Wayne Nichols for a long time, waiting for something like this to happen.”

  “Waiting for someone to shoot him?”

  “Shoot, stab, strangle, club. Guys like him, sooner or later something happens to them.”

  “Guys like him,” I said.

  “Small-timers,” he said. “Marginal players who think they can mix it up with the big-timers. You know what he was into, don’t you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Drugs,” Wexler said. “He supplied the college kids. Wayne Nichols was crawling around down there at the very bottom of the food chain. He owned the little corner grocery, you might say. He worked the longest hours, took the most risks, had the thinnest profit margin, and reaped the fewest rewards.”

  “So you’re saying that what happened to him, getting shot and killed, it was business.”

  “His business,” he said. “Retailing drugs to college kids. Yes. That’s what it looks like.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “A little of this, a little of that. Whatever the kids wanted. Weed, coke, pills, acid.”

  “Ketamine?”

  He turned his head and looked at me. “What do you know about ketamine?”

  “Ask Horowitz,” I said.

  He smiled. “Sure. I will.” He took his pen out of his pocket, clicked the button, and wrote something in his notebook.

  “Whatever it was that Wayne wanted to show me,” I said. “You think it was related to his, um, his business?”

  “I don’t know. What else could it be?”

  “Something related to my case,” I said. “That’s what I assumed. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if it was something else?” Wexler asked. “What if it was his, um, business?”

  “Why would he want to bring me into that?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “Because I’m a lawyer, I suppose.” I hesitated. “Because his business was connected to my case. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Wexler shrugged. “We’re coordinating with Detective Horowitz. Which reminds me. You are not to talk to your client about this until after we have.”

  “That’s harsh,” I said. “You know who my client is?”

  He nodded. “Our vic’s mother. Getting it from the cops is a lousy way to hear your son is dead, I know, but it can’t be helped.”

  “I should be with her when she hears about it, at least.”

  “She needs her lawyer for this?”

  “She needs her friend,” I said. “Anybody would.”

  Wexler glanced at his wristwatch. “Well,” he said, “it’s probably too late anyway. When I talked to him, Horowitz said he and his partner were on their way, and that was, oh, an hour ago.” He turned on the seat so that he was facing me. “Is there anything I should know that you haven’t told me, Mr. Coyne?”

  “I don’t think so. Not that I can talk about, anyway.”

  “Your case.”

  “Yes. My case. My client. I’m not going to talk about it with you.”

  “Because it might be connected to this case?”

  “Because I don’t talk about my clients,” I said.

  “Horowitz can fill me in,” he said. “He doesn’t have client confidentiality to worry about.”

  I shrugged.

  Wexler handed me a business card. “If you think of anything.”

  I stuck his card in my shirt pocket without looking at it.

  “You got one for me?” he asked.

  I took out my wallet and handed him one of my cards.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You’re free to go.”

  “You’re done with me?”

  He smiled. “You sound disappointed.”

  “Not hardly,” I said.

  “You’re not a suspect,” Wexler said, “if that’s what you were thinking. I assume your alibi will check out, and we’ve already got plenty of suspects. Horowitz said not to waste our time with you.”

  “Well,” I said, “good. Guess I’ll go home, hug my dog.”

  Twenty-three

  Detective Wexler got out of the cruiser, spoke to the officer who’d been babysitting me, ducked under the crime-scene tape, and headed across the brown lawn to Wayne’s house. I got out, too. I nodded to the uniformed cop who was still leaning against the side of the cruiser, and he nodded to me. Then I climbed into my car, got it started, and eased around the vehicles that surrounded it. Once I’d driven out of Wayne’s cul-de-sac, I remembered that my cell phone had buzzed while I was talking with Wexler, so I pulled over to the side of the road, fished out my phone, and saw that I had a message.

  It was from Horowitz. “Mrs. Nichols ain’t home,” he said. “I need to talk with her. Any idea how I can get ahold of her? Call me.”

  I rang Horowitz’s number. He didn’t say, “Hello,” like a normal person, when he answered. Not Horowitz. What he said was “Where the hell is your client, Coyne?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I can give you her cell phone number.”

  “Gimme,” he said.

  “You’re going to tell her that her son got murdered this afternoon, huh?”

  “Benetti’s with me. I’m gonna make her do it.”

  “You planning on treating her like a suspect?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Should I?”

  “You better not,” I said. “Not without her lawyer present.”

  “Thanks for telling me my job,” he said. “What’s her number?”

  I recited Sharon’s cell number to him.

  He repeated it back to me, and when I said, “That’s right,” he disconnected. No “Thank you,” no “Good-bye.” Typical.

  I pulled away from the curb, drove back to downtown Websterville, and turned onto the two-lane highway heading east.

  I stopped at a convenience store cum gas station a few miles outside of town, where I filled my tank and got a foam cup of surprisingly good coffee, and I’d been driving through the Sunday evening darkness for about an hour and a half, and had just crossed the state line into Massachusetts, when my phone vibrated. It was Sharon.

  “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” she said when I answered. I heard the tears in her voice.

  “I’m sorry” was all I could think of to say.

  “You know what happened,” she said.

  “Wayne?”

  “Yes. My son.”

  “I do know,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Marcia and Roger were terribly nice,” she said. “They came to tell me personally. They just left a minute ago.”

  It’s “Marcia and Roger” now, I thought. Telling a mother that her son had been murdered was a little different from interrogating her. The yin and the yang of the police officer’s job.

  “Are you at home?” I asked.

  “I’m still here at the hospital,” she said.

  “Huh?” I said. “What hospital?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sharon said. “I don’t know why I thought you knew. It’s the Burbank Hospital in Fitchburg. Ellen and I have been here since, oh, around five o’clock. Charles—Ken’s father—he was admitted to the ICU this afternoon. He’s in a coma. They don’t know whether he’ll come out of it or not. They think it’s his aneurysm. The facility where he’s living called Ellen, and she called me, and I met her here. So we sat with Charles, and then the officers called, and they came here, and they told us about…about what happened to Wayne, and…oh, Brady. This is the worst thing. I’m a mess.”

  “Why did they call Ellen?”

  Sharon hesitated. “Well, I guess, now that Ken’s gone, Ellen would be Charles’s next of kin. He has no brothers or sisters. She’s his eldest grandchild.”


  “Are you going to be there for a while?” I asked.

  “Here at the hospital, you mean?”

  “Yes. When are you leaving?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’re going to stay here with Charles. It’s—he’s in pretty bad shape. He might not make it through the night.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  I was heading southeast toward Boston on Route 3. I’d just passed a sign that said that Route 495 was two miles ahead of me. I pictured the map in my head—495 south to Route 2, west to Fitchburg where I’d come to a capital H sign on the highway. “I can be there in about an hour,” I said.

  “You’ll come here?”

  “Sure. For a little while, anyway. Hold your hand, if you’d like.”

  “That would be lovely,” she said. “I’m…I’m touched, Brady.”

  “Ellen’s there with you, you said?”

  “She is,” Sharon said. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

  “She knows about Wayne, then.”

  “She was here when Roger and Marcia told us. We’ve been crying together.”

  “Where will I find you?”

  “I guess we’ll be in the ICU with Charles,” she said. “You’ll have to ring the bell.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll find you. I’m on my way.”

  The visitors’ parking area at the Burbank Hospital in Fitchburg was bathed in a weird bluish light from halogen lamps on tall metal poles. The lot was virtually empty, with just a few vehicles scattered here and there. It was after midnight on this Sunday night, and visiting hours had ended a long time ago.

  I followed the sign to the main entrance and went in, half expecting somebody to stop me, but the white-haired woman who was sitting at the round desk in the lobby talking on the telephone didn’t even look up when I pushed through the glass door. I went to the bank of elevators, where a directory indicated that the ICU was on the third floor.

  When I stepped out of the elevator on the third floor, I found myself in an open square area with closed doors on the walls and a corridor heading east and west.

  One of the doors had INTENSIVE CARE printed on it. Beside the door was a doorbell. RING FOR A NURSE, read a little sign above the bell.

  I rang the bell, and after a while, the door opened, and a gray-haired woman in a white jacket looked out at me. “Yes?” she asked.