Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  “It sounds hopeless,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, we do what we can, we really do,” she said. “I want to know about this girl as much as you do. I’m just trying to be straight with you.”

  “So what can you do, then?”

  “We’ll circulate her picture among the precincts, see if anybody recognizes her or can match her up with a photo or a description. We’ll check the FBI databases. If she ran away, or however she disappeared, if it was fairly recently, say a week or two, chances are pretty good that we’ll identify her. The longer she’s been gone, the worse the odds get.”

  I looked out my office window. A foggy kind of gray darkness had settled over the city. There were orange haloes around the lamps that lit the plaza. They reflected in the slushy puddles and glowed on the piles of dirty old snow.

  When I turned back, I saw that Lt. Mendoza was frowning at me. “You’re really upset about this, aren’t you?” she said.

  I nodded. “I am. It feels personal. My dog found her. I carried her into my living room. I couldn’t tell whether she was alive or dead. I can’t think of her as some statistic. The place where I found her in the snow, there was a bloodstain. I should have noticed it, figured it out.”

  “You did all right, Mr. Coyne. Don’t blame yourself.”

  I shrugged.

  “So have you thought about why she picked your backyard to…”

  “To die in, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve thought about it,” I said. “I don’t know. I assume it was just that my gate was open so she wandered in.”

  “Random, you think.”

  I nodded. “I guess so.”

  She reached down for her attaché case, set it on her lap, and opened it. She took out a plastic evidence bag and put it on the coffee table in front of me.

  I bent to look at it. It contained a small sheet of square notepaper. Printed in childlike block letters on it in dim but readable pencil were the words: “77 Mt. Vernon St.”

  I looked up at Mendoza. “Why didn’t you show this to me before?”

  “I wanted to hear what you had to say first.”

  “You suspect me of something?”

  “I suspect everybody of everything.”

  I frowned at her.

  She smiled quickly. “Relax.”

  I touched the plastic bag with the scrap of paper in it. “Where’d you get this?”

  “It was in the girl’s pocket.”

  “It’s my address.”

  “Yes.”

  “So she didn’t just end up in my backyard randomly,” I said. “It was her actual destination.”

  “So it would appear. It would appear that she was looking for you. She went to Mt. Vernon, climbed up your hill, found your place, number seventy-seven, walked around to your back alley, opened the gate, went into your backyard—”

  “And died,” I said.

  Mendoza nodded. “And died. Yes.”

  “She didn’t knock on my door or anything,” I said. “I might not have heard her, but my dog would’ve. He would’ve barked at the door. I’d’ve heard him bark.”

  Mendoza gave me a soft smile. “Sure,” she said.

  “I don’t know why she had my address,” I said. “I’m positive I don’t know her.”

  “Suppose you met her, say, four or five years ago.”

  “You’re thinking, she was a child then, a young woman now, and she’d look a lot different.”

  She nodded.

  “I guess it’s possible,” I said, “but I don’t think so. Ever since this morning I’ve been trying to think of people I know with young teenage daughters, or people I used to know who had daughters who’d be about this girl’s age now. I’ll keep thinking, but…”

  Mendoza picked up the evidence bag with the note in it, slid it back into her attaché case, and took out a manila envelope. She opened the envelope, took out a photograph, and put it on the coffee table. She turned it around and pushed it toward me with her forefinger.

  It was a five-by-eight color shot of the girl. Her face and bare shoulders. Her skin was grayish. Her lips were blue. Her hair was limp and dull. Her eyes were closed. She looked absolutely still, utterly lifeless.

  There was no question that she was dead.

  I looked up at Saundra Mendoza. “Yes, that’s her,” I said. I pushed the photo back to her.

  She pushed it back to me. “Keep it. Maybe it’ll jog your memory.”

  I looked at the photo again. “She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

  Mendoza nodded. “Yes, she was.” She glanced at her wristwatch, then pushed herself to her feet. “I’ve got to get going.” She held out her hand. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Coyne.”

  I took her hand. Her grip was firm. “I should thank you,” I said, “for keeping me informed. I half expected never to hear anything more about it.”

  She smiled. “Sergeant Currier said you were pretty upset.”

  “I was, yes. Still am. Now you tell me she had my address in her pocket.” I shook my head. “I’m more upset, now that it seems I should know her.”

  “Believe it or not,” she said, “I understand. We cops sometimes actually care about our cases, too”

  Four

  I walked Lt. Saundra Mendoza out to the reception area and helped her on with her coat.

  She twisted her hat onto her head. “Thanks for all your help,” she said.

  “Will you keep me posted?”

  “No promises, Mr. Coyne. You, on the other hand…”

  “I know,” I said.

  “If you go poking around…”

  “You can’t expect me not to.”

  “I could order you not to.”

  “But?…”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Never mind. Try to stay out of trouble, that’s all.”

  After Saundra Mendoza left, I went into my office, retrieved the morgue portrait of the dead girl, took it back to our reception area, and laid it on Julie’s desk. “This is her,” I said. “The girl in my garden.”

  “She,” said Julie.

  “Huh?”

  “This is she. Not, this is her.” Julie stared down at the photo. She touched it with her fingertips and traced the outline of the girl’s face. When she looked up at me, I saw that her eyes were glittery. “I’m thinking of her parents,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “They don’t even know.”

  “She was pregnant,” I told her. “She had a miscarriage or something. Massive internal bleeding. She bled to death in my backyard.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  I shrugged. “I’m going to try to figure out who she is and why she ended up in my backyard. She had a piece of paper with my address on it.”

  Julie’s head snapped up. “Really?”

  I nodded. “I can’t figure that out. I’m sure I don’t know her.” I tapped the photo. “Make some color copies of this for me, would you?”

  By the time I left the office and headed home, whatever cruddy mixture of precipitation that had been falling during the day had changed over to soft fluffy snow. Already a thin layer of glistening virgin white powder covered the mounds of old plowed and shoveled snow along the sidewalks. The flakes were as big as nickels, and they drifted weightlessly in the air, in no hurry to reach the ground, and for the first time since the arrival of the new year, the city looked clean and pure and kind of pretty.

  Louise was standing on the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston outside the Public Library, as she always was around five o’clock when the offices were letting out. Louise was a gray-haired African-American woman who wore a hand-lettered cardboard sign around her neck that read: “Homeless and Hungry.” She held an extra-large Starbucks coffee cup in her hand, and she jiggled it rhythmically so you could hear the quarters clanking in it.

  I put a five-dollar bill in her cup, as I always did.

  “Bless you, Mr. Coyne,” Louise said. “You’re a gentleman.”
>
  “Is it ever going to stop snowing?”

  “The Lord has his ways,” she said. “It’s not for us to question them.”

  “You’re absolutely right.” I reached into my jacket pocket and took out one of the copies of the girl’s photo that Julie had made. I showed it to Louise. “Do you recognize her?”

  Louise took the photo. She was wearing red mittens. She squinted at it, then shrugged. “Nope.”

  “I think she’s a runaway,” I said.

  “A street kid, you think?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. She died.”

  She shook her head. “Lordy lord.”

  “I’m very anxious to know who she is.”

  “You want me to ask around?”

  “I’d appreciate it,” I said.

  Louise took another look at the photo, then tucked it into a pocket inside the bulky parka she wore and resumed jiggling her cup, which was her way of suggesting that I move on so somebody else could give her some money.

  There were three more homeless people working their regular spots along Boylston and Newbury Streets on my way home. Two of them—Montana John and Big Tony—were Vietnam vets. John was black and Tony was white, and both had snarly beards and empty eyes. The other was a middle-aged Hispanic woman on crutches, named Clara. I gave money to all of them whenever I saw them, and this time I also gave them a copy of the girl’s photo. None of them seemed to recognize her, but they all agreed to keep the photo and ask around.

  I didn’t have much faith that these poor souls, sick and disturbed and preoccupied with survival, would be much help, but I didn’t know what else to do. It was something, anyway.

  At the end of Newbury Street I took one of the diagonal paths across the Public Garden. Then I crossed Beacon onto Charles Street and climbed halfway up Mt. Vernon to the townhouse Evie and I shared. All along the way were young girls and boys—college kids, I supposed—laughing and throwing snowballs and wrestling and hugging each other. They seemed to be bursting with innocence and energy and boundless possibilities, and seeing them alongside the homeless folks was dramatic and ironic.

  I thought of the girl in my garden and was filled with sadness.

  Henry was sitting inside the doorway with his head tilted and his ears cocked expectantly, trying to make me believe that he’d been sitting there all day waiting for me.

  He followed me through the house to the kitchen. I turned on the floodlights and let him out into the back garden. The day’s two inches of snow covered the footprints Henry and I had left in the morning, and it fuzzed over the place where the girl had been lying next to the brick wall. It looked as if nothing had happened.

  I stood there in the kitchen, and through the window over the sink I watched Henry go about his business. He gave the place where he’d found the girl a cursory snuffle, that was all. The new snow had covered the old dark blood stain, and apparently whatever scent Henry had found there in the morning was gone.

  After a few minutes, he climbed up onto the back stoop and gave himself a shake.

  I opened the door, let him in, made him his dinner, and then went into my home office. I checked my phone for messages and my computer for e-mails and found none of either of any importance.

  I thought about calling Evie. The house felt empty without her, and I was missing her. I wanted to tell her about finding the girl, how I couldn’t help feeling responsible. Guilty, even.

  Evie would understand. She wouldn’t tell me I was being ridiculous.

  But in Arizona it was only a little after four in the afternoon. Evie would still be conferring. I’d have to wait.

  I went upstairs to our bedroom and changed into a pair of blue jeans and a flannel shirt.

  Evie had only been gone for two days, and already the place seemed haunted by her absence.

  Back downstairs, I took out the girl’s morgue photo and propped it up against my desk lamp. I looked at it for a minute, then turned to my computer and Googled “missing children.” I found dozens of databases and thousands of other entries—books, articles, Web sites, blogs.

  I clicked on some of the databases. In one of them I found a way to enter information on a missing child. It asked for name and date missing (I left those categories blank), state (Massachusetts), height (5'0" to 5'4"), weight (95–115 pounds), age (13–16), sex (female), race (white), hair (blond), eyes (blue). I hit “enter” and came up with…no hits. I found this hard to believe, and concluded that many missing children were never entered in this particular database.

  I tried it again, entering “all” instead of “Massachusetts,” and found photos of half a dozen girls. None looked like my girl.

  Other sites showed photos of missing children. None resembled the girl I’d found in the snow.

  I stuck to it for more than an hour before I quit. If I were a more dogged person, I could have plowed through all of the sites. It would’ve taken me all night, at least, but I could have done it.

  I figured the police had more expertise and more resources and better databases. I certainly hoped so.

  It occurred to me that a lot of missing people are never officially reported missing, and many of those who are reported do not get entered into computer databases. It also occurred to me that my dead girl might not have been missing at all.

  Without Evie around, I’d been opening cans and frying hot dogs and cooking frozen things in the microwave and making sandwiches and generally regressing to my bachelor eating habits.

  This evening, I needed to get out of the house.

  So I walked down the hill, across the Common, and along State Street to Skeeter’s Infield. Back when I was renting the apartment on Lewis Wharf, before I moved into the townhouse on Beacon Hill with Evie, Skeeter’s was halfway home from my office in Copley Square, and I used to stop there a couple times a week for a beer and the best cheeseburger in town. Since I moved, Skeeter’s was no longer on my way home. I hadn’t been there very often lately, and I missed it.

  Skeeter Cronin had been a backup infielder, a spare part for seven or eight major league teams. His last team was the Red Sox, and Skeeter instantly became a kind of cult hero among Sox fans. He would do anything to win. He didn’t mind turning his ass into an inside pitch to get on base. If a catcher blocked the plate, Skeeter, all 155 pounds of him, would barrel into him to knock the ball loose. He dove into the stands for foul balls and rolled into second basemen to break up double plays. His uniform was always dirty. Red Sox fans loved that.

  When he finally, inevitably, blew out his knee, Skeeter bought a dumpy little bar at the end of an alley down in the financial district, fixed it up with leather booths and dark woodwork and several giant television sets, stocked it with about a hundred kinds of beer with an emphasis on New England microbrews, and created a menu offering five or six really good bar meals for reasonable prices.

  He was no absentee owner. From noon to midnight seven days a week you’d generally find Skeeter himself behind the bar. His old Red Sox buddies liked to hang out there, and so did the new generation of Sox players when they were in town, and now and then they brought some of their friends from visiting teams. Celtics and Bruins and Patriots players showed up, too, and they all mingled comfortably with the State Street crowd—the bankers and lawyers and secretaries and account executives and reporters and hookers who worked in the neighborhood.

  Skeeter had one rule, which he strictly enforced: Famous athletes are people, so don’t gawk at them. There were logical corollaries to the rule. Don’t start arguments with the celebrities. Don’t ask them for autographs. Don’t sit at their booth unless you’re invited. Don’t offer to buy them a beer.

  I hung up my coat on the rack inside the door and found an empty stool at the end of the bar. The guy on the stool beside me was fat and bald and wearing a gray suit, clearly not a celebrated Boston athlete. He nodded at me, then turned back to his conversation with the woman on the other side of him.

  SportsCenter was playing on both TVs o
ver the bar.

  Skeeter was down the other end. When he saw me, he grinned and came over. “Hey, Mr. Coyne. Long time. You get married, you forget your friends, huh?”

  “I’m not actually married, Skeets,” I said. “Just, um, cohabiting.”

  “Same thing, ain’t it?”

  I nodded. “It’s pretty much the same thing, I guess.”

  “So how’s Miz Banyon?”

  “She’s great,” I said. “Except she’s in Phoenix.”

  Skeeter smiled. “Great for her, anyway. You ready for a brew?”

  “Long Trail Double Bag, if you’ve got it.”

  “Course I got it,” he said. He reached into a big cooler and came up with a brown bottle. He popped the cap, slid the ale in front of me, and gave me a frosted mug. “You gonna want something to eat?”

  I ordered a cheeseburger, medium rare, with a slice of Bermuda onion and a side of home fries, and Skeeter went off to deliver my order to his cook.

  I took one of the copies that Julie had made of the dead girl’s photo out of my jacket pocket, put it on the bar in front of me, and looked at it.

  Who are you? Who gave you my address? Why did you pick my backyard to die in?

  “What happened to her?”

  I turned. The bald guy on the barstool next to mine was frowning at the photograph.

  “She died,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Jesus. Just a kid, isn’t she?”

  I nodded. “Just a kid.”

  “She’s not?…”

  “I don’t know who she is,” I said. “She was—I found her—her body—in my backyard this morning.”

  “Oh, man.”

  I nodded.