Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  At 2:57, the same number. This time Julie noted: “Accused me of not delivering her message. Tried to question her and she hung up.”

  At 3:41, again the same number. “Sounds somewhat stressed,” Julie wrote. “You better call her.”

  I took the list out to her desk. “What can you tell me about this call?” I said, pointing at the number.

  She shrugged. “Not much more than I wrote down. She insisted on talking to you. Wouldn’t tell me her name, wouldn’t say what she wanted. She’s never called us before. Sounded…young. Not a child, exactly. A young adult. I didn’t recognize her voice. She called those three times, and each time she sounded more anxious than the previous one.”

  “How did you know she was using a cell phone?”

  “It came from the same number, but there were different background noises each call. The first time, it was from inside a restaurant. The second time she was outdoors. I heard traffic. Next time, no background sounds at all. Different places, same phone each time.” Julie shrugged.

  I smiled. “You’re brilliant.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  I went back into my office and called the number.

  After two rings, a female voice said, “Hello,” making it three syllables. Her tone suggested she was trying to sound outgoing and friendly and having a hard time carrying it off. In the background, I heard muffled voices and the clink and clatter of glass-ware and crockery.

  “It’s Brady Coyne,” I said. “You’ve been trying to reach me?”

  “Oh, jeez,” she said. “I’m glad it’s you.”

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “Huh? Oh, sorry. It’s Misty. Remember me?”

  I remembered. Black hair. Red beret. Slash of lipstick to match. Short skirt, fake fur jacket. A few nights earlier I’d given her sixty dollars and my business card.

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s up? Everything okay?”

  “You’re a lawyer, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I can talk to you without…”

  “If you were my client, it would be confidential.”

  “Can I be your client?”

  “Misty,” I said, “is everything all right?”

  “Not really, no. I—hang on a minute.”

  I had the sense that she’d covered her phone. When she came back on, her voice was soft and guarded. “I have some information.”

  “About what?”

  “Remember that van?”

  “The one with the bear logo.”

  “Yes. Well, not the van. The guy in the van. He…it’s about Kayla. I’m—look. I can’t…not on the phone.”

  “Tell me where you are,” I said, “and I’ll be there.”

  “I can be your client?”

  “It’ll cost you a dollar to retain me.”

  “Then you can’t tell anybody what I say?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, but basically, yes. Anything you tell me will be privileged. I can’t tell anybody unless you give me permission.”

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Me? In my office.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Copley Square. Where are you?”

  “You don’t want to come all the way down here. I’ll meet you halfway.”

  “Chinatown, right?” I said. “Didn’t you tell me you liked to hang in Chinatown?”

  “Right,” she said. “Beach Street. Look, there’s a Dunkin’ on the corner. Boylston and Tremont? You know where I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s meet there,” she said. “At the Dunkin’. You say when.”

  I looked at my watch. It was few minutes after five. I’d have to ransom my car from the parking garage across the plaza from my office, negotiate the traffic to my regular garage at the far end of Charles Street, then from there walk the length of Charles and diagonally across the Common to the Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Six,” I said. “I’ll be there around six. Whoever gets there first, grab a table.”

  “Six,” Misty said. “Good.” She paused. “Hey?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’ll tell you then.” She hesitated a moment. “I’m kinda worried about Kayla, that’s all.”

  By the time I bumper-to-bumpered my way to my slot in the parking garage near the end of Charles Street, it was ten minutes of six. It’s a brisk fifteen-minute hike from the garage to the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Boylston and Tremont, so it was about five past six when I walked through the door.

  Seven or eight people were lined up at the counter ordering their coffees. This time on a Tuesday night, most of them would be to-go orders, a coffee or a cappucino or a hot chocolate for the walk to the T station or the parking garage.

  Misty wasn’t in the line. I looked around at the tables, and she wasn’t sitting at any of them.

  This time I was a little late, but I had tried to be on time. I always try to be on time. Some people are constitutionally unable to be where they say they’ll be at the time they agree to be there. I supposed Misty was one of them. It was no more than a ten-or fifteen-minute walk even from the Atlantic Avenue end of Beach Street in Chinatown to this Dunkin’. Or maybe, streetwise girl that she seemed to be, she was lurking outside somewhere, waiting to see me come in before making her own appearance.

  I got a medium black coffee, house blend, and took it to a table-for-two near the window. I draped my topcoat over the back of my chair, popped the top off the cardboard coffee cup, took a sip, and watched the people and the traffic go by on the other side of the window.

  I’d had the foresight to copy Misty’s cell-phone number into the little notebook I always carry in the inside pocket of my jacket. After sitting there for about ten minutes, I tried to call it from my own cell phone. It rang five or six times. Then her breathy recorded voice said, “It’s Misty. Please leave a message.”

  I said, “It’s Brady Coyne, and it’s, um, twenty after six, and I’m here, at the Dunkin’. Where are you?”

  I tried to rationalize the bad vibes I was beginning to feel, but it wasn’t going well. Misty had said she was worried. She’d sounded nervous. Maybe frightened. She had information about the man who drove the van with the bear logo—the man who might have been looking for Dana the night I saw the van.

  Now she’d connected the man in the van and her friend Kayla. She said she was worried about Kayla.

  I told myself I shouldn’t worry about Misty, but it didn’t work.

  Six-thirty came and went. No Misty. No phone call.

  Okay. I’d give her until seven. If she hadn’t made an appearance by then, or at least called, I was going home.

  As the minutes ticked away, the vibes got worse.

  At ten of seven I called her cell number again, and again her voice mail answered, inviting me to leave a message.

  I said, “It’s Brady again. Now it’s ten of seven. I’m still here at Dunkin’. I’ll wait another fifteen minutes. If you can’t make it, give me a call, okay? Or you can call me at home.” I gave her the number. Then I said, “You got me worried. I hope everything’s okay. Let me know, please.”

  I snapped my phone shut and shoved it into my pocket. I noticed that for the moment there was no line at the counter, so I went up and got myself another cup of coffee.

  If she hadn’t shown up by the time I finished the coffee, I decided, I’d leave.

  Come on, Misty. Where the hell are you?

  I nursed that cup of coffee until seven-twenty. We’d agreed to meet at six.

  She wasn’t coming.

  I tried her cell number again. When her message came on, I told her I was going home and she could call me any time to reschedule our meeting. I said I’d meet her any time, any place.

  Then I stood up, put on my topcoat, and walked outside onto the Boylston Street sidewalk.

  I waited for a gap in the one-way traffic, then trotted across Boylston. I stopped there a
t the head of the diagonal pathway that would take me across the Common to my home on Beacon Hill. There were a lot of Tuesday-evening folks milling around, crowding the sidewalks, heading for the restaurants and the theaters and the MBTA stations.

  I looked all around, studied each of the faces.

  Misty’s was not among them.

  I tried calling Misty’s cell phone when I got home. I tried again after dinner, and a couple of times after that. I kept getting her voice mail.

  It was around midnight when I went up to the bedroom. Evie had gone up an hour earlier, and now she was mounded under the blankets. The lights were off, and she was breathing rhythmically.

  I slid in beside her and lay there on my back looking up at the streetlight shadows flickering on the ceiling.

  After a few minutes, she sighed and rolled onto her side. Her hand slithered under my T-shirt and rested lightly my chest. “What’s up?” she whispered.

  I turned to her and kissed her forehead. “Nothing, babe. Go back to sleep.”

  “You’re worried about that girl, huh?”

  “I am, yes.”

  “She was probably just trying to get some money out of you.”

  “That’s not what it sounded like. She sounded worried. Scared, maybe.”

  “She’s a streetwalker, Brady.”

  “She’s not what you’d expect.”

  “The hooker with a heart of gold?”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “But she’s smart and interesting. I think she’s the kind of kid, she’ll save her money and stay off drugs, and in a few years she’ll quit the business and go to college.”

  “How well do you know her, anyway?”

  “Not well at all. You’re right.”

  Evie snuggled against me and buried her face against my shoulder. “You are such a lovely idealist.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are too,” she said. “It’s really quite endearing.” She pushed me onto my back, slid her long bare leg over mine, and then she was straddling me.

  I watched her lift her arms and peel off her nightgown. Her skin was silvery in the ambient light from the streetlights outside. I touched her naked breasts, and she shivered. She bent to me so that her hair curtained our faces, and she kissed me deeply.

  I moved my hands down her back, over her hips, then back up along her spine.

  She reached down and put me into her.

  I held her hips as we moved together. Then she took in a sharp breath, and I felt all of her muscles harden, and then mine did, too.

  She sprawled on top of me while we got our breathing under control. We dozed that way for a while.

  Sometime later, she kissed my cheek, whispered, “I love you,” slid off me, and laid her cheek on my shoulder.

  I had my arm around her, and she kept her bare leg hooked possessively over mine as she went to sleep.

  Fourteen

  The next morning, Wednesday, instead of climbing into my lawyer suit and heading for the office, I stayed home. At five after nine, when I knew she’d be at her desk checking the morning’s e-mails, I called Julie.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Still home. I don’t have any appointments this morning, right?”

  “So?”

  “There’s something I’ve got to do,” I said. “I’ll be in after lunch. Do you have a copy of yesterday’s phone log in front of you?”

  “Right here in my computer. Hang on…okay. I’m looking at it now.”

  “The young woman who called three times, wouldn’t leave her name?”

  “Yes,” said Julie. “What about her?”

  “What time was the first call she made?”

  “Ten-thirty-five in the morning.”

  “And it was from indoors, you told me, right?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “She was inside a restaurant. Restaurant sounds are quite distinctive.”

  “Tell me what you remember about those sounds.”

  “Muffled voices. I couldn’t distinguish any words. Plates and cups and saucers clinking together. Um, music, too. In the background. Soft music. It was barely audible.”

  “What kind of music?”

  Julie was silent for a minute. Then she said, “Plucked strings. And a flute. Minimalist music in a minor key. Sort of spooky. Haunting, you know?” She paused. “Asian. It was that Asian, New-Agey type of music that goes on and on, no beginning, middle, or end. They play that kind of music at the spa where I get my nails done. It’s supposed to be soothing.”

  After I hung up with Julie, I tried Misty’s cell phone. Got her voice mail. Declined to leave another message.

  I left the house a little after nine-thirty. It was one of those mythic January-thaw days that come along once every three or four years in Boston, and when it does, it’s usually in February. For a day or two, the sun blazes out of a cloudless blue sky and the temperature soars into the fifties. Snowpiles shrink, sending miniature trout streams flooding down the sides of hilly streets, and the world, as e.e. cummings observed, is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

  It’s a cruel illusion, of course. Cold fronts and northeasters and ice storms inevitably come surging in behind January thaws.

  There were no goat-footed balloonmen whistling far and wee on the Common, nor did I notice any on Boylston Street after I crossed Tremont at the Dunkin’ Donuts where I’d waited for Misty the previous evening. I turned right onto Washington, then took a left onto Beach Street—and suddenly, as they say, I was in a whole nother world.

  Boston’s Chinatown is compressed into ten or a dozen irregular city blocks between the Common and the waterfront. It’s a rough rectangle bounded by Washington, Boylston, Purchase, and Kneeland streets. Part of one block is taken up by the Registry of Motor Vehicles building, and it’s partly bordered on the Kneeland Street side by the New England Medical Center.

  Chinatown is all about food. There are close to fifty restaurants, mostly Chinese but a scattering of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Japanese, and Korean. There are markets with plucked chickens hanging in the windows and fresh fish laid out on ice, bakeries, greengrocers, fast-food noodle and rice shops, dim sum and sushi, Chinese delis.

  There are herbal-medicine shops and book shops and souvenir shops, too, and massage parlors and acupuncture parlors and palm-reading parlors.

  But mostly, Chinatown is about food.

  I strolled slowly down Beach Street with my jacket open and my face turned up to the warm sun, savoring the January thaw. Beach Street was where Misty said she and her two friends—Kayla and Zooey—hung out.

  I was looking for a restaurant that would be open at 10:35 in the morning. That’s when Misty had called yesterday. That eliminated the majority of them. Most of the restaurants, according to the little signs hanging in the windows or on the doors, served lunch and dinner and opened at eleven o’clock or eleven-thirty.

  I crossed back and forth, methodically checking out all the Beach Street restaurants. I went into every one that I found open at that hour. The first thing I did was listen for New-Agey, Asian music. Plucked strings and a flute. Minimalist, in a minor key.

  Whenever I went into a restaurant and heard that kind of music, I found a hostess and did my best to ask her about three young women, one of whom was probably Asian, who liked to hang out there.

  At the first four or five places, the hostesses had barely-serviceable English. But they indicated that they understood my question, and they denied knowing the girls.

  I realized that they could have been lying, thinking they were protecting the three girls. I tried to explain that I was their friend, that I was worried that they might be in trouble. I showed them my business card, told them I was a lawyer, said that they’d asked me to help them.

  The hostesses looked at me with solemn black eyes and shook their heads. Very sorry.

  The sixth or seventh open restaurant I tried was in sight of the Chinatown Gate near the end of Beach Street. Underneath the Chine
se characters on the restaurant’s sign were the English words: Happy Family. Translated literally from the Chinese, I assumed.

  When I stepped inside, I noticed the soft music coming from speakers. Plucked strings and woodwinds. It sounded like a forest stream bubbling over smooth stones with a soft breeze sifting through hemlocks. It was unmistakably Asian, haunting and comforting at the same time.

  The hostess of Happy Family was an Asian woman whose age was impossible to guess. Her black hair was long, straight, and shiny, her skin unwrinkled, her body slender, her teeth white. But there was something old and worn-out in her eyes, and her voice, when she spoke, rasped with a lifetime of cigarettes and disappointments.

  She told me her name was Bonnie. She spoke flawless English, if you consider an East Boston accent flawless…which I do.

  She asked if I wanted a table.

  I told her I just wanted to ask her some questions.

  Her eyes slid away from mine. “What kind of questions?” she said.

  “I wonder if you know three young women,” I said. “Misty, Zooey, and Kayla are their names. Or at least those are their, um, professional names. Pretty girls, maybe twenty? One’s a brunette, one’s blond, and one’s Asian.”

  “Who are you?” she said.

  I said I was a lawyer and gave her one of my cards.

  She looked at it, then she looked up at me and nodded. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m worried that one of these girls—or maybe all three of them—might be in trouble.”

  Bonnie looked at me for a long moment, measuring me, it seemed, with her dark eyes. Then she nodded. “What about some tea?”

  I smiled. “Sure. Tea would be nice.”

  She gestured toward a table by the front window. The place was entirely empty of patrons.

  I sat down. She disappeared.

  She was back a minute later with a teapot and a platter of little pastries. She poured some tea for each of us in little cups without handles, then sat across from me.

  I took a sip. It tasted smoky. I told Bonnie I liked it. Then I asked her what she could tell me about Misty, Zooey, and Kayla.