Hell Bent

by William G. Tapply

  After she left, Anna said, “So I never did learn what Gus was up to over there, and when he got back, he wasn’t answering my calls, and eventually I decided just to leave him alone for a while and try to make a living. Then when I heard he died, I remembered how enthusiastic he was about the work he was doing over there, and I got to thinking that if the photos were half as good as Gus’s stuff usually was, we’d have a treasure on our hands. So I put out some feelers in the publishing world and got a lot of good response. That’s when I called his wife. She was pretty cagey, but I inferred that she didn’t know anything about the photos, so I didn’t push it. Just tried to make sure she understood how valuable they probably were.”

  “Book title,” I said. “The Last Photos of Gus Shaw, Media Hero.”

  Anna sipped her drink and looked at me over the rim of her glass. Those flat eyes were brown flecked with green. “You’re more cynical than me,” she said. “Nobody is thinking like that. Gus’s images will stand on their own, I’m positive. I’ve got a reputable foreign correspondent from the Monitor interested in writing text for a picture book, sight unseen. Vanity Fair will guarantee at least a four-page spread. PBS has interest in a special about Gus and his work.”

  “All that?” I said.

  She nodded. “Gus was a genius. People are beginning to realize that now that he’s gone.” She shrugged. “Anyway, without the images, it’s all academic.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I might have an idea.”

  She arched her eyebrows.

  “It’s a long shot,” I said.

  “Better than no shot.” She drained her drink and looked around. “I could use another one of these. Where’s our friggin’ waitress?”

  That evening Henry and I had just finished supper—a baked potato with a heated can of Hormel chili, a microwaved package of broccoli florets, and a slice of American cheese on top of it for me, and a bowl of Alpo and kibbles for him—and I was debating whether to spend an hour plowing through the paperwork Julie had stuffed into my briefcase or see what was on TV, when the phone rang.

  When I answered, a man’s voice said, “This the lawyer?”

  I heard male voices and other noises in the background—a television blaring music and laughter, the scrape of tables and chairs on a wood floor, the clank of bottles and glasses and silverware. It sounded like a busy bar. “Yes,” I said. “I’m a lawyer. Who’s this?”

  “Pedro. Pedro Accardo. Remember?” His voice echoed a little, as if he were cupping his hand around the receiver.

  “I’m sorry. No.”

  “Pete? Gus call me Pete. Everyone else call me Pedro. Gus introduce us.”

  Then I remembered the Hispanic-looking guy who had been with Gus the time I met him at the Sleepy Hollow Café in Concord. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. I remember you. What’s up?”

  “Need to talk to you. Quick.”

  “About what?”

  “Gus. What happen to him.”

  “Gus killed himself,” I said.

  “No, man.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “He …” His voice became a mumble I couldn’t understand.

  “What?” I said. “What do you—”

  “Hang on.” I heard Pedro speak to somebody. Then he said, “You there, Mr. Coyne?”

  “Pedro, listen—”

  “Later, man. Remember John Kinkaid and eleven, eleven, eleven, okay?”

  “Yes, okay,” I said. “But tell me about—”

  “Gotta go now.”

  “God damn it,” I said. “Just wait a minute. Do you know anything about Gus’s photos? And who the hell is John Kinkaid?”

  “No, no, man,” he said. His voice went low and conspiratorial. “Can’t talk here. Call you later, okay?”

  I blew out a breath. “Okay, sure,” I said. “Or I could meet you. We can do it right now. You name the place.”

  “I gotta find another phone, man. You—”

  A loud male voice interrupted, and I heard the words “phone sex,” and then Pedro said, “Chinga tu madre, man,” and then came some cackling laughter.

  I waited with the phone pressed against my ear, and a minute later Pedro said, “No good here. Call you tonight, midnight.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be—”

  But he was gone.

  I looked at the screen on my telephone. It read UNKNOWN CALLER with no return number, which meant it was either a cell phone or a pay phone or a blocked caller ID. I guessed a public pay phone judging by the voices and clatter in the background.

  I figured Pedro Accardo was in Gus Shaw’s support group, and Phil Trapelo—the older guy who called himself the Sarge—had given out my business cards at their Tuesday meeting, as I’d asked him to do, and now Pedro was calling me. Maybe he’d called from the VFW hall in Burlington.

  He implied that he didn’t think Gus had killed himself.

  Or maybe he knew he didn’t. Maybe he even knew who did kill Gus.

  John Kinkaid was the name he mentioned. Maybe Pedro meant that John Kinkaid was Gus’s murderer.

  It was a name that meant nothing to me.

  I went into my office, sat at my desk, pulled a yellow legal pad and a felt-tip pen close to my right elbow, and Googled “John Kinkaid” on my computer.

  I was instantly overwhelmed.

  I found dozens and dozens of John Kinkaids, living and dead. In addition to the college athletes, real estate brokers, gravestone carvers, minor poets, local politicians, honor roll students, and poker champions, and besides the recently born, recently married, recently arrested, recently promoted, recently honored, and recently retired, and besides all those whose ordinary deaths were reported in routine obituaries, the cancers and heart attacks, the “sudden” deaths and “long illnesses,” there were, more interestingly, the bosun’s mate who died trying to save his captain when their troop transport ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic in 1918, the all-star third baseman from the Negro Leagues who was murdered in 1947, the anti-war Vietnam vet who was obliterated in his own terrorist explosion at the University of Massachusetts in 1971, and the sixties rock ‘n’ roller who died alone on his sailboat from a heroin overdose in 1984.

  Mr. Google did not identify a single contemporary John Kinkaid who had come home from Iraq, or who had reason to want to steal photographs, or who suffered from PTSD, or who seemed to have any connection whatsoever to Gus Shaw.

  But there were dozens and dozens of John Kinkaids out there in the world who could confirm their own existence by looking themselves up on the Internet, and for all I knew, any one of them could’ve been the John Kinkaid that Pedro Accardo mentioned on the telephone.

  It was also possible that this particular John Kinkaid was too insignificant even to exist on the Internet.

  Pedro also said “eleven, eleven, eleven.” Maybe it was a code, or the combination of a safe, or a street address, or an identification number, or a math formula, but the only thing that occurred to me was the date. The cease-fire that ended the fighting between Germany and the Allies in the First World War was signed at 11:00 A.M. on November 11, 1918—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Thereafter, November 11 was known and celebrated as Armistice Day. After World War II the United States Congress, with the concurrence of President Eisenhower, expanded the holiday to honor all veterans and renamed it Veterans Day.

  The forthcoming Veterans Day was a little more than a week away. So why would Pedro Accardo mention it in connection with the enigmatic John Kinkaid and with Gus Shaw’s death?

  One of the countless men named John Kinkaid had served in World War I, although he’d been dead for about ninety years.

  I shook my head. My brain swirled with information overload. The Internet was a bottomless ocean of information, and I felt myself sinking and drowning and disappearing in it.

  I got up from my desk, went to the kitchen, found a bottle of Long Trail ale in the refrigerator. Henry was right at my heels. I found a church key and popped the top o
ff the bottle, and Henry and I stepped out onto the back deck. It was a brittle night. My breath came in visible puffs. I took a long swig of ale and gazed up at the sky.

  Once again I failed to identify Gus Shaw’s constellations. There were a billion stars up there whirling and rotating, expanding and contracting, exploding and imploding. But I saw no Elvis, no Snoopy, no Green Ripper. It was just a random chaos of stars. Many of them hadn’t existed for eons, but their light was still traveling through space. Others had been born centuries earlier, but their light, zipping through the universe, had not yet reached earth.

  Gus Shaw made order out of all that chaos, and Alex, his adoring sister, accepted it. I couldn’t see what they saw. Maybe if you believed in order you could recognize Gus’s constellations, and if you didn’t, you’d never see them. If that was the case, I was doomed.

  I toyed with comparisons between the universe of stars and space up there and the universe of the new Information Age as brought to you by the Internet. You could swim around in both space and cyberspace for an eternity and never end up anyplace. It was all meaningless confusion. Orderliness and sequence and cause-effect relationships were arbitrary man-made constructs. If you wanted order and logic, you had to fabricate your own.

  “Existential muck and mire,” I said to Henry. “We’re born, we live, we die. That’s about it, pal.”

  He looked up at me and wagged his tail.

  I glanced at my watch. It was a few minutes after ten. Pedro said he’d call me again at midnight. Then maybe I’d get some answers.

  “Come on,” I said to Henry. “Let’s see if there’s something to watch on TV. It’s cold out here.”

  The phone rang around eleven. I snatched it up before the first ring ended and said, “Yes? Hello?”

  I heard a throaty chuckle. “I love your eagerness.” It was Alex.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

  “Whoops. I guess you were expecting somebody else. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “I was,” I said. “But I’m not disappointed. I like hearing your voice. I’m smiling.”

  “Bullshit you’re smiling. But thanks for saying so. Who were you expecting?” She hesitated. “Oh. Evie, huh?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m definitely not expecting Evie to call. I don’t expect she’ll ever call.”

  “It must be hard for you,” said Alex. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “I’m over Evie. I’m glad you’re around.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m a confusion for you. I know that. Bad timing.”

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” I said. “You can analyze it forever, and it still comes down to how you feel.”

  “I know how I feel,” she said softly.

  “Me, too,” I said. “But that’s what I meant. I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Fair enough,” said Alex. “Show, don’t tell, right? All you can do on a telephone is tell. But tomorrow’s Friday. Then I’ll see you.”

  “Showtime,” I said. “Around seven?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  “Uh, Brady?”

  “Yes?”

  “So who were you expecting to call you if it wasn’t Evie?”

  “Just business,” I said. “Some guy looking for a lawyer.”

  I watched the eleven o’clock news, let Henry out, put the morning coffee together, let Henry in, and we went upstairs.

  I set my cell phone ringer on “loud” and put it on the table next to my ear. I picked up the bedside house phone extension and made sure it had a dial tone.

  It was ten minutes before midnight. I was ready for Pedro Accardo’s call.

  I adjusted my pillows and picked up my tattered copy of Moby-Dick. I let it fall open, as I always did before bed, at a random page. Melville’s classic was, of course, the archetypical fishing story, never mind that a whale is a mammal, not a fish. It was also tedious and overwrought and the ultimate sleeping potion for occasional insomniacs such as I.

  The book opened to a chapter entitled “Chowder.” I read these words:

  Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old topmast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too!

  Ishmael’s sense of ominous foreboding and Melville’s blatant foreshadowing gave me a shiver.

  I closed the book. I didn’t need any more of that crap tonight.

  I put the book on the bedside table and checked the clock. Two minutes before midnight.

  I readjusted the pillows behind my neck.

  Henry was curled up beside me where Evie used to sleep. I scratched his ribs.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think about Alex. Tomorrow, maybe, we’d sleep here, in my bedroom, in Evie’s and my king-sized bed—now my bed, no longer Evie’s—not in the narrow daybed downstairs in my office. Symbolically, that would be a big step. Never mind more comfortable.

  I thought about the smooth firm skin on the insides of Alex’s thighs, the smell of her hair right after a shower, the taste of her mouth, the “um-mm-hmm” sound she made in her throat that told me that I was doing something that felt good.

  I was pleased to notice that I was not confusing Alex with Evie.

  I rolled onto my side and checked the clock. The little hand and the big hand were aligned and pointing straight up. Midnight.

  Time to call, Pedro.

  The phone didn’t ring.

  Fifteen minutes later, it still hadn’t rung.

  I turned off the light, laced my fingers behind my neck, stared up into the darkness.

  After a while I went to sleep.

  I woke up suddenly and all at once. Dim gray light was creeping in around the curtains that covered my bedroom windows.

  I looked at the clock.

  It was ten after six in the morning.

  I checked both my house phone and my cell phone for messages. It was possible, although unlikely, that I’d slept through Pedro Accardo’s call.

  No messages. No missed calls.

  Pedro had not called.

  SEVENTEEN

  Before I left for the office that morning, I Googled Pedro Accardo’s name, and when that didn’t yield anything useful I scoured all of my Boston and Greater Boston phone books for a listing in his name. I found one in Dorchester, one in Somerville, and two in Lawrence, and called all four of them. None was the Pedro who’d called to tell me that he didn’t think Gus Shaw had killed himself.

  Of course, the Pedro who’d called me had used a pay phone, which might mean he didn’t have a private line.

  I used a break between client meetings that morning to call Phil Trapelo. When his voice mail came on and invited me to leave a message, I said, “Sarge, it’s Brady Coyne. Remember? I met you at the VFW hall the other night and we talked about Gus Shaw? I was wondering if you might tell me how I can get in touch with a member of your group named Pedro Accardo. Also wondering if the name John Kinkaid might mean something to you.” I recited my phone numbers, then said, “Please give me a call. This is quite important.”

  The only other person I could think of who might know something about Pedro was Claudia Shaw. I tried her home number and let it ring for a dozen times. No answer, no voice mail, no answering machine.

  I remembered that Claudia was an accountant for a firm in Lexington. I tried Alex’s cell phone, and when she answered, I said, “Hey. It’s me.”

  “Hey,
yourself,” she said. “This is nice.” She hesitated. “Oh. You’re not gonna …”

  “I’m not calling off our evening,” I said. “Nothing like that. Looking forward to it. I just wondered if you had Claudia’s work number. I need to ask her something.”

  “You sound rushed,” she said.

  “I’m between clients.”

  “Anything I can help you with?”

  “Just Claudia’s number.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Hang on a sec.”

  A minute later she came back on the line and gave me a telephone number. “It goes directly to her desk. Bypasses the switchboard.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “This has something to do with Gus, huh?”

  “I’ve really got to go now,” I said. “See you at seven, okay?”

  “I’ll take care of dinner,” she said. “My turn.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Claudia did, indeed, answer her own phone, and when I mentioned Pedro Accardo’s name, she said, “Pete, you mean?”

  “That’s him,” I said. “You know him?”

  “Before we, um, before Gus moved out, Pete came over to the house a few times. He seemed like a nice man. Very polite to me, sweet to the girls. He and Gus would huddle in Gus’s den or out in the garage as if they had big secrets. He was in Gus’s group, I think.”

  “Any idea what they talked about?”

  “No,” said Claudia. “Gus always seemed a little calmer after he talked with Pete. I figured they just sort of counseled each other.” She hesitated. “Why are you asking about Pete?”

  “He called me last night,” I said. “Our conversation was interrupted and he said he’d call back, but he never did. I’d like to reach him. I was hoping you might have his number.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess you could look it up.”

  “Tried that,” I said. “Oh, well. Let me run another name by you. John Kinkaid ring a bell?”

  Claudia was quiet for a moment, then said, “No. I can’t place it. It sounds like a name I should recognize, but … no. Sorry.”

  “Maybe somebody Gus might’ve mentioned? Someone from his group? Somebody he knew in Iraq?”