Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  Julie sits at the receptionist’s desk in my office. When you walk through the doorway, Julie is right there to verify that you’re not selling vacuum cleaners or magazine subscriptions. If you have an appointment with me, she’ll give you a welcoming smile, suggest you have a seat, assure you that Mr. Coyne will be with you shortly, and offer to bring you coffee. All the things that friendly and efficient receptionists do.

  But Julie is way more than the receptionist. She is the spell checker and grammar guardian, the appointment maker and the excuse maker, the timekeeper and the bookkeeper, the ambition and the conscience. She sends out the bills, and she pays the bills. She knows every lawyer and judge and prosecutor in Boston. She remembers their spouses’ and children’s and grandchildren’s and golden retrievers’ names.

  I defer to Julie. In our office, I’m just the lawyer. She’s the CEO and the CFO and the CIO of Brady L. Coyne, Attorney at Law. People sometimes call my practice a one-man business. I correct them. It’s a two-person operation, and I’m the secondary person.

  When I walked in at 9:45 that Tuesday morning in January, stomping snow off my boots and rubbing my hands together, Julie didn’t even look up from her computer. I knew why. I was three-quarters of an hour late, and I hadn’t called with an excuse. Even though, for once, I had a good explanation, I felt a pang of guilt anyway. I could have called, at least.

  Julie had a talent for making me feel guilty.

  I said, “Nasty out there.”

  She continued pecking at her keyboard.

  I hung my coat on the rack beside the door, went over to the coffeepot, and poured myself a mugful.

  Julie continued to ignore me.

  Damned if I was going to grovel, offer excuses, and apologize. I was too upset to play that game this morning.

  So I just took my coffee into my inner office and closed the door behind me.

  I sat at my desk and swiveled my chair around so I could look out my big floor-to-ceiling window at the gray slush on Copley Plaza. I sipped my coffee and thought about the girl in my backyard.

  Five minutes later, as I knew she would, Julie tapped on my door.

  “Come on in,” I called.

  She pushed the door open. “You ready for a refill?” she said.

  I tilted my mug up to my mouth, drained it, then held it out to her.

  She came over, took the mug from my hand, frowned at me, then shrugged and left my office.

  She was back a minute later with two mugs. She handed mine to me, then pulled my leather client chair up to my desk and sat down. She lifted her mug to her mouth. Her eyes questioned me over the rim.

  I sipped my coffee and said nothing.

  After a minute she said, “You didn’t tell me you were going to be late. All I ask is that you call. I was worried. I was thinking, you’re all by yourself. Evie’s not there to take care of you. What if something happened? I mean, what if you fell and hit your head, or had a heart attack, or—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It just didn’t occur to me. Something did happen. It was quite upsetting.”

  She leaned forward. “What’s the matter? What happened, Brady?”

  I told her about how Henry found the girl under the snow in my backyard, how the EMTs came, how she’d been bleeding. I told her I was afraid the girl was dead. I told her how it felt like my fault.

  Julie listened—skeptically at first, but gradually sympathy and tenderness, and then something like fear, spread over her face. I was pretty sure I knew what she was thinking. Julie’s daughter, Megan, was about ten. Before you knew it she’d be a teenager like the girl in my backyard.

  “We’ve got to find out if she’s okay,” said Julie.

  I nodded. “I’d like to. But I don’t know her name. I don’t even know where they took her.”

  She reached across my desk and patted my hand. “I’ll take care of it.” She stood up, then pointed at my coffee mug. “Need a warmup?”

  “I’ll get it,” I said.

  I followed her back to our reception area and refilled my coffee mug. When I turned to head back into my office, Julie said, “Not so fast, buster.”

  “Buster?”

  She smiled and handed me a manila folder. I knew what it contained. My day’s schedule, broken down by the half hour. A list of phone calls to make. The rough drafts of some documents, with Julie’s edits and questions, to revise. The polished drafts of letters and memos to sign. Checks to endorse. Three afternoon appointments with clients.

  I bowed my head. “Thank you, Miz Legree.”

  An hour or so later I was on the phone with Barbara Cooper, the divorce lawyer who was representing Howard Finch’s estranged wife, Anna, when Julie tapped on my door, then opened it. I crooked my finger at her and pointed at my client chair.

  She came in and sat down.

  “She gets the black Labs,” I was saying to Cooper, “and he keeps the boat. Quid pro quo. Each of them gets what they want. They’ve both agreed to it.”

  “Maybe they think they agreed,” she said, “and maybe they think that means something. But you know better. My client neglected to consult with me about it. She doesn’t have any idea how the numbers work. The quid isn’t anywhere near equal to the quo. What’s that boat worth?”

  “What’s a woman’s love for her dogs worth?”

  “Apples and oranges,” she said.

  I found myself smiling. “Exactly.”

  There was a long pause. Then she said, “We’ll have to look at the numbers.”

  “The numbers,” I said.

  “Sure,” Cooper said. “The numbers. It’s all about numbers. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Remind me,” I said. “There’s the mother Lab and there are the two pups. Siblings. A male and a female. Right?”

  “So?”

  “So I see three options,” I said.

  “Three, huh.”

  “One, she gets the dogs, he gets the boat. Which is what they both want.”

  “Okay,” she said. “What else?”

  “Two, sell the dogs and sell the boat, and neither of them gets anything they want, and they split the money.”

  “How it usually works,” she said. “Or?”

  “Or cut the boat in half and cut the three dogs into halves and divvy it all up fifty-fifty.”

  Barbara Cooper actually chuckled. “Why Brady Coyne. You old Solomon, you.”

  Julie was watching me with a bemused smile playing around her mouth. Julie knew Attorney Cooper. Cooper represented wives in divorce proceedings. She was a notoriously relentless defender of her clients’ interests. Behind her back, those of us who represented the husbands shortened her name—Barbara Cooper—to “Barracuda.”

  Cooper and I had had many battles over the years. I respected her enormously. When I opposed her, she tended to bring out the best in me. Sometimes I even found myself liking her.

  “No way he gets the boat for the dogs,” she said. “I know you know better. Let’s talk when you’re ready to get serious.”

  She was right, of course. No judge would buy the boat for the black Labs.

  We agreed to consult with our clients and talk again. I hung up and arched my eyebrows at Julie.

  “You still got it,” she said. “That was pretty good. About cutting the dogs in half.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “It’s stupid and futile, of course. But it’s kinda fun, yanking the Barracuda’s chain. What’s up?”

  “The Suffolk County Medical Center.”

  “That’s where they took the girl?”

  She nodded.

  “How is she?”

  “I talked to the admissions secretary, woman by the name of Lorna. She wouldn’t tell me anything or let me talk to a doctor or a nurse or anybody.”

  “Is she alive, at least?”

  Julie shook her head. “I don’t know. This secretary was quite guarded. I had to lie and dissemble just to get her to divulge that the girl was there.”

  “
I can only imagine,” I said. “I don’t suppose she told you the girl’s name.”

  Julie shook her head. “Maybe they’ll tell you,” she said. “You being an important lawyer and me being a mere secretary.”

  “You,” I said, “are hardly mere. And I strongly suspect you didn’t tell them you were a secretary, mere or otherwise. Who did you pretend to be?”

  Julie smiled. “I guess I was the cop at the scene.”

  “It’s illegal to impersonate a police officer,” I said. “Jeez. You could get us disbarred.”

  “I didn’t exactly impersonate anybody,” she said. “It was the secretary who inferred it.”

  “Still…”

  “Anyway,” she said, “they can’t disbar me. I’m not a lawyer.”

  “Well,” I said, “if she wouldn’t divulge any information to the cop at the scene, she surely won’t divulge any information to some random lawyer.”

  “You’re hardly random,” she said, “any more than I am mere.”

  “True,” I said. “Still…”

  “You can always lie and dissemble,” said Julie.

  “Not me,” I said. “Unlike you, I have my professional ethics to think about. Anyway, next to you, I am a rank novice at lying and dissembling.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I need to know how she is,” I said. “I feel responsible. You should’ve seen her face. She was too young to be huddling in the snow on a January night. She was bleeding, and I didn’t notice it, and maybe if I had…”

  Julie reached across my desk and squeezed my wrist. “I’m sure she’ll be all right.”

  I looked at her. “You are?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not. That was a profoundly stupid thing to say. I have no idea whether she’ll be all right or not. What do you want me to do?”

  “Just hold my calls.”

  I called the Suffolk County Medical Center and managed to get transferred to the Emergency unit, where I was connected to the admissions desk. The woman who answered confessed that her name was Lorna. She didn’t seem particularly impressed with the fact that I knew it.

  I told her in my most official-sounding tone that I was a lawyer, and I needed a medical report on the young woman who’d been brought in around eight o’clock that morning from Beacon Hill.

  She said that the hospital had strict privacy rules and that if I really was a lawyer I’d know that. She said that I could be the mayor himself for all she cared, and she still wasn’t at liberty to tell me anything. She didn’t sound the least bit regretful about it.

  I tried to convince her to bend her rules, but Julie was right. Lorna was unimpressed with my charm and utterly lacked a sense of humor.

  So I called Sergeant Currier at the Joy Street Precinct, the Boston police station that covered Beacon Hill. Currier was a local cop who I’d had some dealings with even before Evie and I moved into our townhouse on Mt. Vernon Street. I figured that since my 911 call had been made from an address in his precinct, and since the emergency wagon had picked up a victim at that same address, Currier might know something about it.

  He didn’t.

  “Saw the call logged in,” he said. “Figured, some homeless person. You know how many homeless people’re being brought to emergency rooms these days, all this cold crappy weather we’re getting?”

  “Lots of young girls being found in backyards on Mt. Vernon Street?” I said.

  “How young?”

  “Fifteen, sixteen maybe?”

  “Runaway, probably. I hate it when that happens.” He paused. “Lemme look into it, Mr. Coyne, okay? I’ll get back to you.”

  “She was in bad shape,” I said. “Maybe dead. She’d been out in the snow for a long time. Turned out she’d been bleeding, too. They took her to the Suffolk County Medical Center.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”

  “I really want to know if she’s okay,” I said. “I’m very concerned about this.”

  “I hear you, Mr. Coyne. Protect and serve. You’ll hear from me, I promise.”

  Three

  I ushered out my last client of the day a little after four that afternoon, and I was standing beside Julie’s desk looking over her shoulder at a document on her computer when the door opened and a woman came stomping into our reception area. She was wearing blue jeans and calf-high leather boots. Her hip-length leather jacket was the same shade of brown as the boots. A shapeless canvas hat with the rim turned down all around shaded her face. A black ponytail hung out behind it. She was carrying a slim attaché case, but I didn’t take her for a lawyer.

  “It’s ugly out there,” she muttered. She took off her hat and slapped it against her leg.

  And that’s when I recognized her. Saundra Mendoza. Even in her high-heeled boots, she barely came up to my shoulder. She had a sturdy gymnast’s body and big flashing black eyes and a happy, uninhibited smile. You’d never know how tough she was by looking at her.

  Saundra Mendoza was a Boston homicide cop.

  “I really didn’t want to see you,” I said to her.

  She gave me a sample of that great smile. “I get that all the time,” she said. “Nobody wants to see me. I hardly ever bring good news.” She looked at Julie and nodded. “Hey.”

  Julie returned her smile.

  “Is this about that girl this morning?” I said.

  Mendoza nodded and jerked her head toward my office. “Can we talk?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Coffee?”

  “Coffee would be great.” She took off her coat and hung it on the coatrack.

  I poured Detective Mendoza a mug of coffee, refilled my own mug, and took them into my office. She followed and closed the door behind her.

  She sat on the sofa in my sitting area. I took the leather chair across from her. I put our mugs on the coffee table between us.

  Mendoza leaned her attaché case against the side of the sofa, picked up her mug, cradled it in both hands, and tilted it to her mouth. She looked at me over the rim with those big chocolate eyes.

  “The girl died, huh?” I said.

  She nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “Who is she? Did you identify her?”

  She shook her head. “No ID on her. It might take a while.”

  I blew out a breath. “I feel terrible.”

  “I understand.” She put her mug on the table, looked up at me, and nodded. “By the time the EMTs got her to the hospital, it was too late. We don’t have an M.E.’s report yet, but there was massive internal bleeding, not to mention a seriously depressed body temperature.”

  “I figure if I’d realized she was bleeding when I first found her…”

  I wanted her to tell me that there was nothing I could’ve done. That the girl was beyond help when I brought her into the house. That I did everything I could. That it wasn’t my fault.

  She shook her head. Her dark eyes were liquid and sympathetic. “I doubt there was anything you could’ve done, Mr. Coyne. She was out in the cold all night. She was probably dead when you found her.”

  “Do they know why she was bleeding?”

  “The ER doc who looked at her figures it was a miscarriage,” said Mendoza. “All that blood, it was leaking from her vagina.”

  “Jesus.” I blew out a breath. “A miscarriage. Or an abortion, huh?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know any more than what I just told you.” She hesitated. “A miscarriage is the same thing as a spontaneous abortion, you know. They’re synonyms.”

  I shrugged. “I was thinking of the nonspontaneous kind of abortion.”

  “Abortions are quite safe, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Not if they’re performed by amateurs.”

  She nodded. “Good point. We’ll see what the M.E. has to say about that.”

  “When?”

  “When?…”

  “When will we have the M.E.’s report?”

  She shook her head. “It depends.”

  “On?
”

  “If there is suspicion of a homicide, or—”

  “Would an amateur abortion qualify as homicide?”

  She nodded. “You bet.” She hesitated. “Until her body is identified, it’s doubtful that the M.E. will make this a priority case.”

  “Since she wasn’t stabbed or strangled or shot or something?”

  “That’s how it works.”

  “It was an unattended death,” I said.

  “Right. It is a Medical Examiner’s case.” She shook her head. “Just not a high-priority one. The M.E.’s office has a lot of cases. Nobody’s clamoring for action on an unidentified teenager, probably a runaway, some street kid who seems to have died of natural causes.”

  “What if I clamored for action?” I said.

  Mendoza smiled.

  “Or you. You could clamor.”

  “I could. It’s not that—”

  “An illegal abortion gone bad is not natural.”

  “True,” she said. “But we don’t know that’s what it was.”

  “She was just a kid,” I said. “A pretty young girl.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know. Don’t get me wrong. I’m with you. I intend to clamor. But you’ve got to understand how it works. Most likely, besides being pretty and young, this little girl was also a runaway. A stray. Probably a shoplifter or a hooker or a crack addict. All those things, maybe. She got pregnant, no place to go, nobody to take care of her, something went wrong, and she died all alone in the snow. All we can really do is check the missing-children files and look for a match.”

  “Run her description through your computers, huh?”

  Mendoza turned to face me. She was smiling and shaking her head. “You watch way too much television, Mr. Coyne. This isn’t CSI, you know. Nowhere is CSI that I know of. Yeah, we got some stuff on our computers. You can get stuff on your computer, too, for that matter. But here in Boston what we’ve mainly got is old-fashioned steel cabinets crammed with files, and more files piled on desks and tables that haven’t gotten put into the cabinets yet. Manila folders with reams of photos of missing people. Babies and teenagers, mothers and fathers, Alzheimer’s victims and Gulf War vets. They run away, they wander off and get lost, they get kidnapped. They might end up in California or Mexico. They might end up dead. They often end up dead, actually. Some of them just stay missing. Some of them show up after a while, surprised that anybody was worried about them, and nobody bothers to report that. And I’m not talking only about Massachusetts. We get missing-persons reports from all over the Northeast. They are so out-of-date and incomplete it’s a joke. If somebody turns up alive, or if their body is found, in, say Vermont, we might never hear about it.”