Vulgar Boatman

by William G. Tapply

  “Sparing me the technical words. Thank you.”

  He nodded without smiling. “You get the picture. This was vicious. Whoever did it was trying to kill her, and didn’t stop until he had.”

  “During intercourse, do you think?”

  He shook his head. “Probably not. She was fully dressed when we found her body. She was even wearing panty hose under her jeans. Her clothing wasn’t torn. Nothing inside out or backwards. No, I’d say she dressed herself afterwards. Doubtful if the murderer would dress her again after killing her. Not typical, anyway, though there are all different kinds of nuts around. You figure, if a guy was careful enough to get her all dressed again, logically he would have tried to hide the body. But Alice Sylvester was found on the grass right beside the parking lot. As if she’d been dumped out of a car. We looked for a rock or something her head could’ve been banged against. There would’ve been a lot of blood. We didn’t find anything. I figure she was killed inside the car and then rolled out onto the ground. We find the right car, we’ll find blood inside of it.”

  I sighed. “This is not a heartwarming tale.”

  “There’s more,” said the chief. “I mentioned, I think, that the M.E. found traces of cocaine in her blood. This report—” he shook the paper he was holding “—says that there were also traces of coke in her lungs. Congested mucous membranes. Inflamed trachea.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

  “Crack,” I said.

  He smiled thinly. “You are really up to date, Counselor. Right. Cocaine that is smoked. Possibly free-base, but most likely crack. This stuff is starting to find its way up here from New York. A little shocking for this sleepy little seaside community.” He grimaced at his own cynicism. “You figure Roxbury, Dorchester, Lawrence, Lowell—”

  “Actually,” I interrupted, “you figure Wellesley, Winchester, Concord. What I hear, this is upper-class dope. Sexy. Prestigious.”

  “Cocaine, yes,” said Cusick. “Crack, not necessarily. It’s cheap, for one thing. And just deadly as hell. In any case, Windsor Harbor is not exactly your hub of the drug underground. But if nice high school girls like Alice Sylvester are getting ahold of crack, we’ve got more of a problem than one murder.”

  “Windsor Harbor is a seaport,” I suggested.

  “A very minor seaport, Mr. Coyne. A few sport fishing craft, lots of sailboats and runabouts. Nothing commercial.”

  “You don’t need anything commercial to haul this stuff.”

  He nodded. “I’ve thought of that, believe me. Matter of fact, I talked with a guy at the Coast Guard this morning. Guess what he said?”

  “He said it’s a long coastline.”

  “That,” said Cusick, nodding, “was the essence of it. Of course, if we can come up with any good leads, they’d be delighted to seize a vessel on the high seas for us.”

  “And accept full credit.”

  “Sure. Anyhow, that’s all conjecture. Point is, the girl was smoking this stuff, had sex with two guys, and then got herself strangled to death. And I need all the help I can get.”

  “Well, I’ll cooperate, don’t worry about that. I really find it hard to believe that Buddy Baron…” I let my voice trail off. Harry Cusick regarded me benignly. “Not that I knew him that well,” I added.

  The chief stood up dismissively. “You just never know,” he said gently.

  We shook hands and I left. I played Vivaldi on my tape deck on the way back to Boston. I had my seasons mixed up. It seemed like the dark pit of a dead, frozen winter, with the cold rain angling out of a black sky, and the slick roads littered with fading leaves, and young people getting murdered in a nice little town like Windsor Harbor, Massachusetts. I was eager to get back to the sanity of my law office.

  I nosed my BMW into my reserved space in the parking garage and took the elevator up to my office. Julie, my secretary, was working at the computer keyboard, listening through earphones to a tape I had dictated for her. I still missed the cheerful clack, clatter, and ding of the old typewriter. She looked up at me, crossed her eyes by way of greeting, and said, “Well, look who’s here,” without missing a beat at the keyboard. “Be with you,” she added, and returned her attention to the tape.

  I poured myself a mug of coffee and took it into my office. A place for rational analysis. Legal theory. Precedents, hoary old Latin terms, statutes and torts and contracts, all the good stuff that was evolved to enable attorneys to maintain an abstracted distance from the human pain and inequity the law is supposed to mediate. In one corner of my office, I have two shoulder-high file cabinets crammed with abstractions. Two shelves of weighty tomes full of more abstractions. Thousands of little legal pigeonholes, each with its unique shape, into which real flesh-and-blood people are supposed to be fitted.

  The fit never seems perfect.

  Those volumes and file cabinets are full of laws. But they’re not the law. That’s why they put people into offices like mine, along with the files and the books. Laws are like automobiles: They need lawyers to make them go.

  Julie scratched on my door with her fingernails.

  “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” I said.

  She came in and stood in front of me, looking slim and Irish and gorgeous as usual. She carried a sheaf of papers in her hand.

  “Care to discuss business, or do you want to bag the rest of the day?” she said.

  “What I want to do and what I’ve got to do are two different things.”

  “Fishing trip got rained out, huh?”

  “Yes, but that’s not it.”

  “Something heavier than getting rained out of a fishing trip? Want to talk about it?”

  “Yes. But not now. Come in. Sit down. Fill me in.”

  Julie took the chair beside my desk. Up close, I could see the spatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the last vestiges of her summer tan.

  She took the top sheet of paper from her pile and looked at it. “Mr. Paradise called. Three times. You have to call him back.”

  “My kind of law,” I said. “He’s got a new invention, no doubt. Frank Paradise is my favorite client. He never calls me for anything bad. He’s always excited when he calls. Frank is a helluva guy. What else?”

  “Doctor Adams. He left a message, and I quote: ‘The blues are going bananas off Plum Island. Interested?’ ” Julie frowned. “This must have something to do with fishing.”

  “Right,” I said. “Bluefish. Doc wants to go fishing.”

  She sighed. “Sometimes I feel more like a social secretary than a legal one. Mr. McDevitt wants to play golf. He told me he thinks he’s cured his slice. In vast and totally incomprehensible detail. He used the word ‘pronate’ several times. Mentioned his ‘V’s’ often, too, and where they should be properly aimed.”

  “His grip,” I said. “Charlie is messing with his grip again.”

  Julie shrugged. “I just take the messages. But he was very agitated. He said, and I’m quoting again now because he made me write it down, he said, ‘It’s a matter of great urgency that we convene on Friday.’ That’s the end of the quote.”

  “He said ‘convene’?”

  “Of course. I am very precise about such things.”

  “Of course you are. Friday, huh. How’s my calendar look?”

  “You always keep it clear on Friday afternoons. Golf, fishing, Hungarian ladies…”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Charlie’s afraid he’ll forget his new grip. Okay. Anything else?”

  “I took the liberty of making a ten-thirty for you tomorrow. Mr. and Mrs. Fallon. A referral from Doctor Segrue.”

  “Divorce?”

  “Au contraire,” said Julie, smiling. “They want to have a child.”

  “I’m not a sex therapist.”

  “A classic understatement,” said Julie, rolling her eyes. “Somehow I didn’t get the impression that they were looking for that. Mrs. Fallon was understandably reluctant to discuss it with me. But, frankly, my dear, I am curious as hell, so after y
ou see them…”

  I reached over and patted her arm. “You will hear all, I promise.”

  She grinned. “Okay. And that’s it. I took care of everything else.”

  “I must say, it’s a pleasure working for you,” I said. “Now leave, so I can do what you’ve assigned to me.”

  “I know you’ll call Doctor Adams and Mr. McDevitt. But don’t forget Mr. Paradise. He did sound anxious.”

  “I’ll call him first,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said.

  Well, she knows me too well. I called Doc Adams. I got his assistant, the delectable Susan Petri, who told me that Doc was conferring with a patient at the hospital. I told her to have him call me at home later in the evening. Then I phoned Charlie McDevitt’s secretary, Shirley, and told her to confirm with Charlie our Friday golf date. She told me Charlie had cured his slice. I figured we’d read all about it in the papers, the way Charlie was spreading his joyous news.

  Frank Paradise lives in Brewster on Cape Cod. He owns an old farmhouse with two centuries’ worth of ells and dormers, a big barn converted to a workshop, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a tennis court with a clay surface, a sailboat, a forty-eight-foot tuna-rigged boat, and a pair of hostile Dobermans.

  Frank made a lot of money designing jet engines after the war, and since then he has devoted himself to his lucrative hobby of inventing things. Most of the stuff he dreams up I don’t understand—computer innards, electronic doodads about the size of a B-B pellet, and elegant little gizmos that make space ships fly and weapons kill.

  Once in a while, though, he comes up with something I can appreciate. For example, he concocted a super-strong instant-drying glue that bonds anything to anything else, but rubs right off human skin as slick as rubber cement. He sold the patent to a big drug company. Almost at the same time, he came up with another glue that bonds only human skin. He was negotiating the sale of that stuff with the CIA.

  Frank sends me off to Washington about twice a year to conduct patent searches. I usually enjoy the trips, unless Frank happens to have invented something in August. There’s a political science professor at Georgetown who insists that the restaurants in D.C. are better than those in Boston, and always likes to try to make her point. She also knows the Smithsonian inside out and enjoys showing off her expertise.

  Frank answered the phone on the first ring. Judging by the static, I figured he was out in his barn. I said hello a couple times, and he yelled back, “Hang on. Gonna change phones.” When he came back on, he sounded better. “This one’s got my own receiver in it,” he said. “The guys who make commercial cordless phones don’t know beans about insulating. This salt air raises hell with ’em.”

  “What’s up, Frank?”

  “Brady, listen to me. I’m going batshit down here. Outta my mind. Somebody hijacked my boat.”

  “Hijacked?”

  “Hijacked, whatever. They stole it, for chrissake. Woke up this morning and she’s gone from her mooring.”

  “Sounds like she broke loose in the storm.”

  “Brady, I got this rig for mooring her—made it myself—”

  “Okay, Frank. I believe you. She’s hijacked. Did you tell the cops?”

  “Yes I called the cops. And I called the Coast Guard and the insurance guy, too. She’s a sweet little boat, Brady.”

  “This is the sailboat, right?”

  “No. The Egg Harbor.”

  Frank’s “sweet little boat,” I happened to know, was worth about a quarter of a million dollars. Frank had the teak varnished, the twin diesels overhauled, the brass polished, and the hull caulked and painted every winter. It came equipped with loran and sonar and every other piece of electronic gear imaginable. Frank and I had landed an eight-hundred-pound bluefin tuna off the tip of Provincetown in that boat back in eighty-three, not to mention the tons of bluefish and occasional striped bass we had hauled onto her decks from Casco Bay to Long Island Sound.

  A sweet boat.

  “I am saddened at your news,” I told him truthfully. “But I don’t know what you want me to do about it.”

  “I keep telling you about pirates. Now maybe you’ll believe me.”

  “You were talking about guys swiping your ideas, not your property.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Frank, seriously, what do you want me to do?”

  “Hell. Find my boat.”

  “I said seriously.”

  “Okay. Seriously? Seriously, if she doesn’t turn up, there’ll be insurance adjusters who’ll want to screw me. If she does turn up, her hull all stove in, all that lovely stuff stripped off her, same thing. Mainly, I want her back, and I want to know that the Coast Guard is doing its thing.

  “I’ll make a call,” I said. “And try to relax, Frank. It’s only a boat.”

  “Like hell it’s only a boat.”

  “I know, I know.”

  I finally hung up with Frank. I don’t think he felt any better, but I did keep my promise to call the Coast Guard. I was shunted from the commander’s office to the legal office to the search and emergencies group to intelligence and law enforcement before I found someone who would talk with me. He said they had the particulars on Frank’s Egg Harbor and would keep an eye out for her. I supposed that was all they could do.

  It occurred to me that twice in the same day the Coast Guard had entered into my conversations—first with Harry Cusick, in speculating about cocaine traffic on the North Shore, and then with Frank Paradise.

  Maybe I’m unusual, but whole months go by when I don’t even think about the Coast Guard. I suppose that means they’re doing a good job at whatever it is they do. If they didn’t come up with Frank Paradise’s Egg Harbor, I suspected I’d be giving the Coast Guard more thought.

  I got back to my apartment a little after six. Except for the dishes that had been cleared and stacked in the washer, and my bed, which had been made, it was as if Sylvie had never been there. There are times when living alone is downright lonely, and none more so than coming home to a neatly made bed in an empty apartment.

  I climbed into my jeans and sweatshirt and slid a frozen pizza into the oven. I sloshed some Jack Daniel’s into a glass, dropped in three or four ice cubes, and settled down in front of the television to catch the evening news.

  The weatherman was cautiously predicting clearing and cooler—he didn’t seem too certain as to when this weather would actually arrive—when the phone rang. I hoisted myself off the sofa and padded in stockinged feet into the kitchen to answer it.

  “Mr. Coyne?” said a voice I didn’t recognize.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Buddy Baron. I heard you wanted to talk to me.”

  Six

  “BUDDY,” I SAID. “WHERE the hell have you been?”

  “Around.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m in town.”

  “Here? In Boston?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, tell me where and I’ll come and get you. We’ve got to talk.”

  “No, I’ll come to your place. Is that okay? Are you busy?”

  “I just put a pizza in the oven. I’ll throw together a salad. You can join me.”

  “Yum, yum,” he said. “All right. I’ll be right over. And Mr. Coyne?”

  “What?”

  “I know they want to arrest me. I hope you don’t plan to play games with me.”

  “No games, Buddy. We’ll talk. I’ll have to take you to the police.”

  “That’s what I figured. Okay. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Have you talked to your parents?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “They’re worried about you.”

  “You mean they’re worried about scandal. I don’t want to talk to them.”

  “I intend to, then.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Tell them I’m all right.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Sure. I’m fine. Never better.�
�

  After I hung up with Buddy, I called Tom Baron’s house. Joanie answered. Her voice was soft and slurry. She had been taking brandy in her morning coffee. I supposed it was martini time, now.

  “It’s Brady,” I said. “I just talked to Buddy. He’s okay.”

  “He’s not okay,” she said. “They want to arrest him. They think… Brady, it was nice to see you this morning. You should have stayed longer.”

  “Listen to me, Joanie. I’m going to bring Buddy to the police, do you understand? Is Tom there?”

  “Tom’s on the road. On the road again. Dum dum. Hit the road, Jack. He’s, let’s see. Springfield, I think. Yes. If today’s Thursday Tom’s in Springfield. Whatever today is. Meeting with bigwigs. Plotting and planning. Him and Eddy Curry. They wanna figure out what to do with a son who’s gonna get arrested for murder. What they’re gonna do with the campaign, I mean. Why doesn’t Buddy call his mother, huh?”

  “Joanie, take it easy, will you? Just listen to me. When Tom gets in, tell him I’ve found Buddy. Okay?”

  “Tom’s getting in late. It’s just me in my big old house, my son and my husband gone, sitting here in the dark in my nightgown waiting to get tired. Lonely, Brady. You ever get lonely?”

  “Sometimes, yes. Look. I’m going to hang up now. You understand that Buddy is all right?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “Thank you. I understand.”

  “Take it easy on the booze.”

  “Sure. Excellent advice. I’ll just sip. Ladylike sips. I’ll be sleepy pretty soon.”

  “Good night, Joanie,” I said, and hung up.

  I was tearing a head of lettuce into a wooden bowl when the buzzer rang. It was the new night man, a skinny Puerto Rican man in his mid-twenties named Hector, telling me I had a visitor. I told him to send Buddy up, and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door.

  Buddy was wearing gray corduroys and a blue sweatshirt, the same outfit he had been wearing the night of Alice Sylvester’s murder. He hadn’t shaved since then, either, I judged. He had his mother’s soft, undefined facial features and his father’s lanky frame.