Hell Bent

by William G. Tapply

  “No.”

  “Touch anything? Move anything?”

  “Touched the doorknobs, inside and out. And the light switch. I didn’t move anything.”

  “And the victim? His name is Shaw?”

  “That’s right. Gus Shaw. Augustine. He’s—he was—my client. I’m a lawyer. I was handling his divorce. I came here with his sister.”

  He looked at his notebook. “That would be Alexandria Shaw?”

  “Alex, yes.” I pointed at the Concord police vehicle. “She’s in that cruiser.”

  “What about her? She okay?”

  “She’s pretty tough,” I said, “but this is bad.”

  “He was getting divorced, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “For some men,” Boyle said, “that would be a reason to celebrate.”

  I shrugged. “Not for Gus, I guess.”

  He nodded. “Okay. We’ll get your story later.” He flipped his notebook shut. “For now, I want you to stay out of the way.” He inclined his head at Officer Guerra. “I’ll catch up with you.”

  Guerra motioned for me to stand up, and I followed him away from the garage to the edge of the clearing.

  A minute or two later Boyle climbed the stairs up to Gus’s apartment. He was followed by three other official people, two men wearing blue jeans and windbreakers and a woman with two cameras strung around her neck.

  I looked over at the cruiser where Alex and the female officer were waiting, but it was dark inside and I couldn’t see them.

  Guerra was not inclined to talk to me, nor did I have anything to say to him. We stood there in the driveway watching the people go up and down the steps to Gus’s apartment and mill around outside. After a while I found a big boulder to sit on. Officer Guerra didn’t seem to notice that I’d moved a few yards away from him.

  A little while later, a man with a flashlight in one hand and a dog on a leash in the other came down the driveway. He stopped beside me. “What’s going on?” he said. “All these vehicles …?”

  I pointed up at the apartment. “A man up there is dead,” I said.

  The dog was a golden retriever. It sniffed my pants legs with great interest.

  The man was wearing a dark fleece jacket and khaki pants. He shook his head. “Dead,” he said. “Oh, dear. Gus, is it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s Gus.”

  “I’m Herb Croyden,” the man said. “I own this property. This is Gracie.” He patted the dog. “Gracie, cut it out. Behave yourself. Sit.”

  Gracie sat.

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “She smells my dog. I have a Brittany.”

  Herb Croyden looked to be somewhere in his fifties. He was a stocky, fit-looking guy with silvery hair and rimless glasses. “So what happened?” he said.

  “Gus apparently shot himself.”

  “Apparently?”

  I shrugged.

  “That poor, tortured soul,” said Croyden.

  “How well did you know him?” I said.

  “Me?” He shrugged. “Not very well, evidently. I know he had his problems, and he always seemed to be in pain, but you never think a man’s going to …”

  I nodded.

  “He liked Gracie, here,” he said. “He’d sometimes take her down to the river and throw sticks for her. She’s a retriever, you know.” He reached down and gave Gracie’s ears a scratch. “She’ll fetch sticks all day, and she loves to swim. The river runs right behind our property, you know. Gracie seemed to give Gus a lot of pleasure. He was very good with her.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this. Beth—that’s my wife—she’ll be devastated.” He touched my arm. “I’ve got to go back to the house and tell her what’s going on. She was quite frightened, hearing those sirens, seeing all these vehicles come up our driveway. She wanted to come with me, but I told her to wait there and Gracie and I would see what the story was.” He cocked his head and looked at me. “I didn’t get your name.”

  I held out my hand to him. “Brady Coyne. I’m Gus’s lawyer.”

  “You found him? His body?”

  I nodded. “Alex and I. Alex is his sister.”

  Herb Croyden shook my hand. “What an awful thing. I don’t know how I’m going to tell Beth.”

  He turned and started to walk away.

  Officer Guerra said, “Hey! You, sir. Hold on, there.”

  Herb stopped. “You talking to me?”

  Guerra shined a flashlight on him. “Who are you, sir?”

  “I live in that house at the end of the driveway,” Herb said. “I’m Mr. Shaw’s landlord.”

  “You better stay here,” said Guerra. “They’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Well,” Herb said, “they can find me at my house. My wife is there waiting for me. She’s frightened and all alone, and I’m going to go back to her now.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Guerra, “but you’ll have to wait here.”

  “Shoot me, then,” said Herb, and he flicked on his flashlight, said, “Come. Heel,” to Gracie, turned, and headed up the driveway toward his house with Gracie heeling nicely.

  Officer Guerra stood there watching the beam of Herb Croyden’s flashlight move away. Then he turned to me and smiled. “Oh, well,” he said.

  “I’m glad you didn’t shoot him,” I said. “He seems like a nice guy.”

  NINE

  I sat there on the cold boulder beside the driveway wishing I’d worn something warmer. A shot of brandy would’ve helped, too. Officer Guerra stood stolidly nearby, doing his job, babysitting me and ignoring me at the same time.

  Now and then camera flashes lit up the window of Gus’s apartment, and various uniformed and plainclothed people went in and out. Others stood around in clusters in the driveway mumbling to each other.

  After a while two men lugged a collapsible gurney up the steep steps to the apartment. A few minutes later they carried it back down, this time with a plastic body bag strapped onto it. They loaded it into the back of an emergency wagon, slammed the doors, and got in. Somebody went to the driver’s side and talked through the window for a minute. Then the wagon rolled down the Croydens’ driveway, no red lights twirling, no sirens sounding, headed, I assumed, for the medical examiner’s office in Boston.

  A minute or two later Detective Boyle came over. He said something to Officer Guerra, who moved away from us, then sat on the boulder beside the one I was perched on. “I sent him for coffee,” said Boyle, jerking his head in the direction of Officer Guerra.

  I nodded. “Great. Thanks.”

  “For me,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Just kidding,” he said. “So I need to know everything, Mr. Coyne.”

  “About Gus?”

  He nodded. “All of it.”

  “You’re not going to take me to the station and challenge me to a game of good-cop bad-cop?”

  “Not tonight. It’s late, I’m tired. Unless you’d rather.”

  “What about Alex?”

  “My partner’s getting her story. If yours and hers don’t match up, you probably know how it works.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “You found the body,” he said. “Tell me about that.”

  “Alex got a call from Gus’s wife,” I said. “Claudia got an e-mail from Gus that worried her, so she—”

  “Worried her why?”

  “It said something like ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”

  “A suicide note, huh?”

  I shrugged. “It could be interpreted that way, I guess.”

  “You don’t think it should be?”

  “Interpreted as a suicide note, you mean?”

  Boyle nodded.

  “I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t’ve thought Gus Shaw would kill himself.”

  Boyle nodded. “So his wife got that e-mail. Then what?”

  “Claudia was worried, of course,” I said. “She tried to call Gus, got no answer, so she called Alex, who was at my house. Alex tried t
o call him, got no answer, so we came here.”

  “You live where?”

  “Boston, Mt. Vernon Street.”

  Boyle scribbled in his notebook. Without looking up, he said, “What’s your relationship with Ms. Shaw?”

  “How is that relevant?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not. Just answer the question.”

  “Alex and I are old friends,” I said. “She’s the one who asked me to handle Gus’s divorce.”

  “So tell me about Gus Shaw,” said Boyle. He flipped to a clean page in his notebook, which was balanced on his knee.

  “I didn’t know Gus that well,” I said. “I only met him a week or so ago. Met with him just twice. He lost his hand in Iraq. He was a photojournalist, a freelancer, and next thing he knew, he couldn’t handle a camera. He was depressed, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. His wife was divorcing him. She’d taken out a restraining order on him.”

  Boyle nodded but said nothing. He made some notes in his notebook, then looked up at me with his eyebrows arched.

  “What?” I said.

  “The man sounds like an ideal candidate for a bullet in the brain,” he said, “but I’m hearing a ‘but’ in your voice.”

  “I guess you are,” I said.

  Right then Officer Guerra came over with a foam cup in each hand. He handed one of them to me. “Black okay?”

  “Thanks, yes,” I said.

  He gave the other one to Boyle, who didn’t bother thanking him, and then wandered away again.

  Boyle peeled off the cap, took a sip, set the cup on the ground beside him, and said, “So what do you want to tell me about that ‘but’?”

  I took the top off my coffee and sipped it. It wasn’t very hot, but it tasted good. “Nothing you could call evidence,” I said. “He told me he felt like he was getting better. He talked about the future. He seemed to accept what was happening with his family. The divorce, I mean.” I waved a hand in the air. “I didn’t come away worried about him. Given everything he’d been through, he seemed okay to me, you know? As if he had things he was looking forward to.”

  “You having no expertise whatsoever in the field of mental health,” said Boyle.

  “You’re certainly right about that,” I said. “Just my gut.”

  “Well,” he said, “it looks like your gut was off base this time.”

  “Not the first time.”

  “People who kill themselves,” said Boyle, “the same as mass murderers and child molesters, you talk to people who knew them, relatives, friends, business associates, whatever, more often than not they say the same thing. You’d never expect it, they say. What a shock. Quiet guy, kept to himself, maybe, but a good neighbor, always waved to you, liked animals. Who knew?”

  I nodded. “If you were to make a list of suicide red flags, I suppose you’d check most of them off for Gus. I sure didn’t see it coming, though. So case closed, or what?”

  “It’s in the hands of the ME,” Boyle said. “Don’t quote me, but, yeah, based on what I saw up there, that would certainly be my prediction. We gotta wait for all the forensics, of course.”

  “You noticed the bullet hole in the ceiling, I assume,” I said.

  Boyle rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I noticed some blood, too, brilliant fucking gumshoe that I am.”

  “So what do you make of it? Shooting a hole in the ceiling, I mean?”

  “I don’t make anything out of it,” he said. “It’s an anomaly. There are always anomalies. If there weren’t any crime-scene anomalies, we’d be suspicious. I speculate that Mr. Shaw fired a practice round into the ceiling, working up his courage, maybe, that’s all.”

  He flipped through some pages in his notebook. I suspected that Boyle used his notebook as a device to make himself appear absentminded and dumb and to put suspects off their guard.

  Or maybe he really was absentminded and dumb. I hadn’t decided yet.

  After a minute of frowning at his notes, he looked up at me. “So you said that you and Ms. Shaw came here together?”

  “We already talked about that,” I said.

  He smiled. “Let’s talk about it again.”

  I shrugged. “Alex and I were at my house. Claudia—Gus’s wife—she called Alex on her cell, said she got that disturbing e-mail from Gus and couldn’t reach him on the phone. We tried calling him, got no answer, so we came here to check it out.”

  “What did the e-mail say again?”

  “It was something like ‘I’m sorry,’ and, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ You can get it from Claudia.”

  “Claudia being the wife of the deceased, you said.”

  I nodded.

  “Sounded like a man about to kill himself,” said Boyle. “That e-mail.”

  “Now, in retrospect, it sure does,” I said.

  Boyle nodded, wrote something into his notebook, then snapped it shut and stuck it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Okay, I guess I’m done with you for now,” he said. “As soon as my partner’s finished talking to Ms. Shaw, you’re both free to go. Might need to ask you some more questions in a day or two. Don’t leave the country.”

  “Will you keep us posted?” I said.

  He shrugged. “As soon as the ME comes up with his verdict, I’ll make sure someone lets you know. You being the deceased’s lawyer. Wait here.” With that, he stood up, turned, and stalked over to the Concord PD cruiser where his partner was questioning Alex.

  I sipped my lukewarm coffee, and a few minutes later Alex climbed out of the cruiser and came over to where I was sitting.

  I stood up and opened my arms.

  She pressed her forehead against my chest. She kept her arms at her sides.

  I hugged her. “You okay?”

  “Not hardly,” she said. “Can we get out of here now?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Where to?”

  “Anywhere but here.”

  We went over to my car. Aside from the Concord PD cruiser and Detective Boyle’s unmarked Crown Vic, ours was the last vehicle in what had looked like a Fenway Park parking lot an hour earlier.

  Boyle and his partner, a young African American man, were talking with the two uniformed Concord cops. As I backed my car out of its slot, the four of them turned, looked at us for a minute, then resumed their conversation.

  I drove down the driveway. Near the end was Herb Croyden’s house, a big white eighteenth-century center-chimney colonial bracketed by a pair of maple trees that were probably saplings in 1775 when the Shot Heard ‘Round the World was fired. It was after one in the morning, but it looked like every light in the house was blazing.

  When I turned onto Monument Street heading toward Concord center, Alex said, “You mind dropping me off at my hotel? It’s just around the corner.”

  “I could take you to Alewife so you could fetch your car,” I said. “We go right past it.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “I don’t care.”

  The lights glowed amber on the front porch of the Colonial Inn, and a floodlight lit the steeple of the white church that perched on the edge of the common. Otherwise the streets and sidewalks of Thoreau’s and Emerson’s old hometown were dark and deserted.

  “Listen,” I said to Alex as I drove past the library. “Why don’t you stay at my house tonight?”

  “You think that’s a good idea?” she said.

  “It’s no night to be alone.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “What about …?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  I felt her fingers touch the back of my neck. “Thank you,” she said softly. “I accept.”

  I left my car in the Residents Only slot in front of my house on Mt. Vernon Street. When Alex and I went in, Henry was waiting in the foyer with his stubby tail all awag. Alex scootched down so he could lick her face for a minute.

  I got two bottles of Samuel Adams lager from the refrigerator, and the three of us went out to the patio in back
. Alex and I sat side by side in the wooden Adirondack chairs. Henry squirted on all the azaleas and rhododendrons, marking his territory, then came over and lay down beside me.

  An easterly breeze had blown away the rain clouds from earlier in the evening, and now the sky glittered with a billion stars.

  We said nothing for a long time. It was a comfortable silence. I’d spent a lot of time with Alex Shaw. The two of us had always been comfortable with silences.

  Then Alex said, “There’s Elvis. See him?”

  “Huh? Elvis?”

  “You can see his guitar.” She was pointing up at the stars. “And over there’s Snoopy, with his two ears hanging down.”

  I found myself smiling in the darkness. “Elvis and Snoopy constellations?”

  “Yes. And look there. That’s the Green Ripper, with his long scythe.”

  “You mean the Grim Reaper?”

  “No,” she said. “The Green Ripper. That was Gus’s name for the Grim Reaper. He’s tilted on his side this time of year. See?” Alex was pointing toward the eastern horizon.

  I looked where she was pointing, but I couldn’t make out the starry outline of the Green Ripper, anymore than I was able to see Snoopy or Elvis in the stars. But it didn’t seem important just then whether I could see what Gus had been able to see, so all I said was “Oh, yeah. Sure enough.”

  “When I was little,” she said, “our family used to rent a cottage on the Cape in the summer, and on a clear night Gussie and I would go out on the back lawn and he’d sit me on his lap and show me his own personal constellations. I’d be in my little nightie, all warm and safe on my brother’s lap, and he’d tell me about the stars. He used to say, Why shouldn’t we have our own constellations? We shouldn’t have to go along with the Greeks and Romans. Maybe they saw a bear or a hunter or somebody sitting in a chair, he’d say, but I see Marilyn Monroe. Who’s to tell me I’m wrong?” Alex reached over and took my hand. “That’s how Gussie saw the world. Without preconceptions. You couldn’t tell him anything. He rejected all conventional wisdom and received opinion. He questioned everything. He had to see it and make sense of it for himself. It’s why he was a good photographer, I think. He could see Marilyn Monroe in the stars.”

  I squeezed her hand. “I’m really sorry,” I said.