Hell Bent

by William G. Tapply

  Horowitz shrugged again. “I must’ve slept through that history lesson.”

  “Well,” said Greeley, “I can assure you, John Kinkaid was wide-awake.” He turned to me. “Mr. Coyne, I wonder if we can impose on your good nature a bit more this morning.”

  I shrugged. “It’s Sunday. I have no plans.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” he said, “if you’d come to our field office with me and consult with our computer-imaging expert. I’d like to be able to have a dead-on picture of John Kinkaid circulating ASAP.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever I can do.”

  “Great,” said Greeley. “Thanks.” He turned to Horowitz. “The other celebration they do on the Lexington village green every year happens at 11:00 A.M. on the November Monday closest to the eleventh, when they officially celebrate Veterans Day. That’s a week from tomorrow. We haven’t got that much time.”

  TWENTY

  When we went out the front door of my house, a big black van was parked at the curb puffing clouds of exhaust into the chilly November air. Greeley got in front beside the driver, whom he introduced as Agent Neal, and immediately started talking on his cell phone. Horowitz and I climbed in the back.

  The Boston field office of the FBI was housed at One Center Plaza, a big curved government office building just on the other side of Beacon Hill from my house. We probably could’ve gotten there faster by walking over the hill than Agent Neal managed by negotiating the one-way streets and obeying the traffic lights in the FBI van.

  Greeley ushered Horowitz and me through a metal detector in the lobby, onto an elevator, up half a dozen floors, and into a small windowless room that held two rectangular metal tables, some leather-padded wooden chairs, and several computers and other high-tech equipment. A young guy—midtwenties, I guessed—wearing a dark blue suit and a tightly knotted tie sat at one of the computers.

  Greeley told me his name was Eric. Eric looked up and nodded at me but did not offer his hand or say hello, so I didn’t, either.

  “We want you to work with Eric,” said Greeley. He gestured at an empty chair in front of Eric’s computer.

  I took the seat next to Eric and looked on his monitor. It displayed the computer-altered version of Phil Trapelo’s face derived from John Kinkaid’s face at age twenty. It was the same image Greeley had showed me at my kitchen table.

  “We created this image from a photo of this guy when he was about thirty-five years younger,” said Eric. “You know what he really looks like, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re the only person we’ve got who’s actually seen him in the present time. We want to create a dead-on image of him to work with. So take a look at this and tell me what you think. Okay?”

  I nodded. “Sure. Okay.” I studied the computer-generated image for a minute, then said, “It’s not bad, but the hair’s all wrong, for one thing. And Trapelo’s eyebrows are way bushier than that. His ears stick out a little more, and his nose is bigger and not quite so hooked. Also, his chin—”

  “Slow down,” said Eric. “This is good. Let’s start with the hair and work our way down.”

  While Greeley and Horowitz watched over our shoulders, I suggested tweaks and refinements, and Eric did his magic with his mouse, and the lines and shapes on the computer monitor began to resemble the man I knew as Philip Trapelo, right down to his liquid brown eyes and his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

  I sat back in my chair. “That’s it,” I said. I looked up and nodded at Greeley. “That’s exactly him. That’s Phil Trapelo. It could be his photo.”

  Then, as abruptly as I’d been invited, I was thanked and dismissed. Horowitz stayed up there on the sixth floor, but Greeley rode the elevator down with me and walked with me out to the curb, where the black van was waiting with Agent Neal behind the wheel.

  When we shook hands, Greeley said, “This has been a huge help. Again, many thanks. We may be calling on you again in the next week or so. Please be available.”

  “I’ll either be home or at my office,” I said. “In any case, I’ll have my cell phone with me.”

  He nodded. “I don’t mean to belabor the obvious,” he said, “but I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that you say nothing of any of this to anybody.”

  “I understand.”

  “Not your spouse, not—”

  “I don’t have a spouse,” I said.

  He nodded. “I’m sorry.” He opened the back door of the van for me.

  “I’d just as soon walk home,” I said. “I live right over the hill.”

  He looked at me for a minute, then shrugged. “Just be careful, okay?”

  That afternoon Henry and I shared a bowl of popcorn and watched the Patriots clobber the Jets. When the game ended, I called Alex’s room at the Best Western hotel in Concord. When she didn’t answer, I tried her cell phone.

  She answered on the third ring. “I’m trying to get through one day uninterrupted,” she said. “Was that you who just rang my room phone?”

  “That was I,” I said.

  “I’m actually quite busy.”

  “Sorry. Tell me when you can you talk. I’ll call you back.”

  She blew out a sigh. “What’s up, Brady?”

  “I’ve got Gus’s photos.”

  She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “That’s what you were doing last night?”

  “I went looking for them, and I found them. Yes. Now I need to turn them over to you.”

  “I’m fairly angry with you, you know.”

  “I gathered that you were, yes. You left some clues. Like the fact that you weren’t there when I got home.”

  “Regardless of what you were up to,” she said, “there was just too much of that old déjà vu to it. Do you understand?”

  “I yam what I yam, I guess.”

  “And what you are,” she said, “as history has demonstrated, doesn’t always mesh that well with what I yam.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I think it’s way more complicated than that.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “You mean, like, sex and things.”

  “Lots of things,” I said. “Including sex. Interesting that you’d mention that particular one.”

  She laughed softly. “It’s just that when we’re together,” she said, “as great as it can be, I absolutely know that sooner or later you’re going to do something that profoundly pisses me off.” She was quiet for a moment. “You found Gus’s photos, though, huh?”

  “I got lucky, yes.”

  “Claudia will be thrilled.” She paused. “I’m thrilled.”

  “I want to give them to you,” I said. “They belong to you. To Gus’s heirs, I mean. You’re the one who should give them to Claudia.”

  “That would mean we’d have to see each other again.”

  “I could mail them, I suppose. I’m a bit reluctant to let them out of my sight, though.”

  “You feel like buying me dinner?”

  “That’s more like it,” I said. “Boston or Concord?”

  “Definitely Concord,” she said. “I do not intend to spend another night in your girlfriend’s bed.”

  “Papa Razzi, seven o’clock,” I said. “Don’t be late.”

  “I might stand you up,” she said. “You never know.”

  “For the record,” I said, “it’s my bed.”

  I walked into Papa Razzi a few minutes after seven. Alex was at the bar sipping what looked like an old-fashioned. She was wearing tight-fitting blue jeans and cowboy boots and a rugby jersey with pale-blue stripes. Her hair glowed as if it had been recently washed. All in all, she could’ve easily passed for a very pretty college coed.

  I took the stool beside her. She leaned to me and turned her cheek, which I kissed, chastely. I put the envelope holding the CDs on the bartop.

  She put her hand on the envelope. “Gus’s photos?”

  I nodded.

  She smiled. “I don’t know what to say.” />
  I shrugged.

  “Shouldn’t you give them to Claudia yourself?” she said. “You’re her lawyer now, right?”

  “You’re Gus’s sister,” I said. “It’s about family.”

  Alex nodded. “How did you ever find them?”

  “I just kept poking around,” I said, “and after a while, there they were.”

  She picked up the envelope. “Did you look at them?”

  “A few, randomly,” I said, “just to be sure they were what I thought they were. There are hundreds of images on those CDs. Those that I looked at are extraordinary. I had lunch with Gus’s agent the other day. She says there’s a lot of interest in them.”

  Alex tucked the envelope into her big shoulder bag. Then she leaned toward me. I met her halfway, and she kissed my mouth. “Thanks,” she said softly. “I’m kinda sorry I skipped out on you last night. Maybe if you’d told me what you were doing …”

  “My fault,” I said. “I don’t blame you.”

  At that moment, the hostess came over and said that our table was ready.

  We followed her to our table, which turned out to be a booth. Alex asked for another bourbon old-fashioned, and I told the waitress that an old-fashioned sounded good to me, too.

  “You were right about Gus,” I said after the waitress left. “He was murdered.”

  Alex blinked at me. “Who? Why?”

  “I can’t tell you any details. I’m sorry.”

  Alex looked at me. “Why the hell not? He was my brother.”

  “The FBI is involved. They, um, they made me promise to say nothing. There’s still an ongoing investigation. I probably shouldn’t have told you that.”

  She shook her head slowly, and I couldn’t tell whether she didn’t believe me or was just expressing her dismay.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Maybe someday you’ll share what you know with me,” she said.

  “I will as soon as I can,” I said. “I promise.”

  An hour or so later we were sipping after-dinner coffee when Alex reached over and touched my arm. “I wanted you to know that I’ve changed my mind about getting an apartment in the South End,” she said.

  “So where are you looking?”

  She shook her head. “Nowhere. A few more days at the hotel, and then I’ll be heading home. I’ve got just a little more research to do on this book. Then I’ll be ready to start writing. I write best right there in my own house in Garrison, Maine. I know that about myself.”

  “Well, sweetheart,” I said, “it’s been fun having you around.”

  “Fun?” she said. “Jesus.”

  “I was going for world-weary and ironic,” I said. “Say, Bogey at the end of Casablanca.”

  Alex rolled her eyes. “The scary thing is, I got it. I expected it, even. What does that tell you?” She looked up. Our waitress was slipping the leather folder containing our bill next to my elbow.

  I paid the bill and helped Alex shrug on her jacket, and we walked out of the restaurant into a star-filled November night.

  The Best Western hotel was right next door to the Papa Razzi restaurant, separated only by two back-to-back parking areas. Both establishments had once been part of the ubiquitous Howard Johnson’s chain—restaurants featuring fried-clam rolls and fifty-two flavors of ice cream, havens for the hungry traveler, and motor courts for those who needed an affordable bed. No matter which Howard Johnson’s you stopped at, from Bangor to New Haven, you knew exactly what you were getting. In his day—the 1950s and ‘60s, the early years of the Automobile Era—Howard Johnson, if there ever actually was such a person, set the standard for the traveling family.

  The present occupants of those two buildings certainly were upgrades, but I kind of missed the familiar orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s restaurants and motor inns.

  Alex put her arm through mine, and we walked over to her hotel. We stopped under the overhang by the front doors. She put both arms around my chest and looked up at me. “This is the time when the girl asks the guy if he’d like to come up to her room for a nightcap.”

  “Do you have the ingredients in your room with which to construct an actual nightcap?” I said.

  She smiled and shook her head.

  “Then I guess the guy would have to decline.”

  She nodded, then went up on tiptoes and kissed my jaw. “I guess I’ll have to find a different way to thank you for everything you’ve done for me.”

  “You don’t need to thank me.”

  She nodded. “You’ll come visit me in Maine sometime?”

  “Sure. I’d like that.”

  “I’ve got a lot of firewood that needs to be split. You enjoy doing that. You could bring Henry. He’d love the woods.”

  “He definitely would,” I said. I kissed the top of her head, then stepped away from her. “We’ll be in touch, right?”

  “Of course. I don’t know about you, though, but I’ve got some things to sort out first.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Me, too.”

  Alex touched my arm, then turned and went into the hotel. I watched her pass through the two sets of glass doors and enter the lobby. She didn’t turn and look back at me.

  After supper the next evening I was just settling in for some Monday Night Football when the phone rang.

  “It’s Mary Epping,” she said when I answered. “I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

  “No bother,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “It’s just so exciting,” she said, “I had to share. Doug said, ‘Oh, leave poor Brady alone.’ But I thought you’d want to know.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “Just watch the ten o’clock news on Channel Nine. That’s the Manchester station.”

  “I will,” I said. “No hints?”

  She laughed. “You’ll see.”

  At ten o’clock I began toggling back and forth between the football game and the Channel Nine news, and about twenty minutes later Molly Burke’s pretty young face appeared. She was saying, “… and after the break, we have a modern-day David and Goliath story that’s unfolding right here in downtown Nashua. Whatever happened to ‘The customer is always right’? Mary and Douglas Epping have their own answer. Stay tuned.”

  After four or five automobile commercials, Molly’s voice-over came back. “This is Molly Burke. I’m here in Nashua to talk with a pair of retired folks from over the border in Massachusetts named Mary and Douglas Epping.” As she spoke, the camera panned across what looked like a row of grimy old brick warehouses. An assortment of trucks and vans were parked haphazardly against the buildings, where a sidewalk should have been. I spotted a couple of Dumpsters. Overhead, the sky was sooty. The potholed roadway sloped away to a chain-link fence and the silvery ribbon of what I assumed was the Merrimack River.

  The camera then zoomed in on Molly. Doug and Mary were standing on either side of her. They were wearing ski parkas over their sweatsuits, and on their shoulders they were holding cardboard signs tacked onto wooden stakes as if they were rifles.

  Molly held the microphone to Mary. “Mrs. Epping, what are you two folks doing here on such a dreary November day?”

  “We’re picketing them,” said Mary.

  The camera followed her arm as she pointed at one of the brick buildings, then zoomed in on the sign in the window that read AA MOVERS, INC.

  “Picketing,” said Molly. “You mean walking up and down the street with your signs?”

  “That’s right,” said Mary.

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “This is our fifth day. We started last Tuesday. We took the weekend off.”

  Molly smiled. “I can’t blame you.” She turned to Doug. “Mr. Epping,” she said, “what do you hope to accomplish?”

  “We want to be acknowledged,” he said.

  “Acknowledged?” said Molly. “That’s all?”

  “We have a dispute with those people,” said Doug, “and they’re just
ignoring us. But if they think we’re going to give up and go away, they’re wrong. We’re retired folks. We’ve got the time and we’ve got the commitment, and we’re here for the long haul.”

  “You’re not going away,” said Molly.

  “Not until they acknowledge us.”

  “You’ll be here tomorrow?”

  “Ten o’clock till four or five,” Doug said. “Depending on how nasty the weather is. We don’t want to catch pneumonia, you know?”

  The camera went in close on Molly’s face. She looked directly at us viewers. “I don’t know about you folks,” she said, “but I’ve been ignored and mistreated by businesses and bureaucracies a few times myself, and I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t been very aggressive in standing up for my rights. If you ask me, we need more people like Doug and Mary Epping to remind us of the kind of country we’re supposed to be living in. We’ve got to speak up for ourselves. Why not try some good old American picketing? I bet the Eppings wouldn’t mind some company.”

  She gave both Doug and Mary a chance to say, “We’d love some company” and “The more the merrier.”

  Then: “This is Molly Burke reporting from Outlook Drive in Nashua. Now back to you, Ted and Ellen.”

  I hit the remote and returned to my football game. I realized that I was grinning like a fool.

  Around three o’clock on Friday afternoon, Julie ushered Roger Horowitz into my office. He plopped into the client chair across my desk from me and, as usual, didn’t offer to shake hands or initiate small talk. “They’re gonna pick you up at your front door at seven on Monday morning,” he said. “Wanna be sure you’ll be there.”

  “Monday being Veterans Day,” I said. “A state holiday. Although it doesn’t fall on the eleventh this year.”

  “Hardly ever does, actually,” Horowitz said.

  “Who’s they, and why, and why should I?” I said.

  “They is all of us, us staties, and Greeley and his Feebs, plus various local agencies, and why is to maybe avert a terrorist event, and you should because you’re a good citizen and anyway, I’m giving you no choice one way of the other.” He glowered at me. “That’s probably more than I’m supposed to tell you, so no more questions.”